by Clea Simon
The clerk did not respond, and the two sat there in silence for a moment. Finally, he spoke. ‘I can check their provenance again,’ he said. ‘Although, of course, we did confirm the paperwork when they came here, and everything seemed to be in order. Would that help?’
‘I guess so,’ Dulcie felt like she should be more reassured. ‘I mean, I know that their authorship is speculative, and it might always be.’
‘Now that’s not true.’ Griddlehaus seemed to have a little verve back. ‘I have a good feeling about those papers, Ms Schwartz. And about your work here.’
‘Thanks.’ Dulcie tried to take heart. ‘It’s probably nothing.’
He got up, as if the matter were resolved, and started toward the archives. ‘What on earth caused you to question them, Ms Schwartz?’ He paused. ‘I mean, if Professor Showalter is so confident in them, then what would raise an alarm for you?’
‘Professor Showalter?’ Of course. The little clerk knew Showalter’s name from the provenance.
‘Yes, she came by this morning to check them out herself,’ said Griddlehaus, his voice carrying as he went through to the archives. ‘One of the few who bothered.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
How could I have been so deceived? Was the fair face, the voice so gentle-born, that Compelling? Would that I had known what Evil lay behind the gracious form! I would have brought myself, nay, not Here unto this Wasteland, to be Storm-toss’d and all but Broken upon the Rocks, but to another Kinder soul, for Kinder souls must still exist … Yet know you of my sorrow and my Shame, which brought me hence at great Expense and no little Effort, so that I am as Bereft as any Moon-mad sprite, toss’d upon the wilds of Nature, unsure e’en of my night’s peace. Uneasy must I rest and wait, guilty only of the Sin of Trust, where such a Gift unwisely bestow’d was …
Dulcie stared at that document in front of her, and the document might as well have been staring back. Fifteen minutes had passed, at least, since Griddlehaus had brought the stained and faded letter out to the reading area, ten since Dulcie had placed it carefully on the table in front of her. And although she had carefully followed the usual regimen of handling the delicate and aged paper – gloves barely touching the protective casing – she might as well have taken out the sports section of the daily Globe. Or no, she corrected herself as she tried to focus for the umpteenth time. The newspaper would have had some social value. It would have given her something to share with Chris.
‘The Sin of Trust …’ Or maybe it wouldn’t have. As much as she wanted to dispel her suspicions, she had to admit her boyfriend had been acting strangely. She was, she knew, reading too much into this letter. The events it chronicled happened more than two hundred years before. What mattered was the text’s relevance to her research, not what it might imply about her own life. She needed to forget her own problems, at least for a little while. She needed to focus.
As it was, she was sitting and staring, her brain a jumble of conflicting thoughts. What had actually happened to poor Marco Tesla? Who might have wanted to hurt him, or his erstwhile girlfriend Stella Roebuck? And why would Renée Showalter have lied to her about her whereabouts this morning?
Beneath all of these, Dulcie could sense a little niggling fear – something about Chris and what he’d been doing, or, really, what he might be hiding. But she couldn’t deal with that. Not right now, not when he undoubtedly had an explanation. But Showalter – that one hurt. If the academic had simply wanted to check out the papers, couldn’t she have asked Dulcie? Dulcie could have done it for her – or at least enjoyed her company. In truth, she had fantasized about bringing her new mentor to her old home. Making the introduction between Griddlehaus and the professor was the kind of connection she dreamed of and now that was not to be. Worse than that was the feeling that the academic had been avoiding her. And maybe, although Dulcie told herself she just might be imagining this, Showalter had something bigger – and more deadly – to hide.
‘Ms Schwartz?’ She looked up, startled to find Griddlehaus standing over her, worry creasing his face. ‘May I ask if there’s a problem?’
‘No, I’m okay. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just a bit distracted today.’
‘The conference, of course.’ The little clerk turned away. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘It’s nice you asked.’ Dulcie was honestly touched. Despite their deepening friendship, she recognized the mousy man’s reticence to touch on anything more personal than a preference for a certain kind of gum eraser. ‘I appreciate it.’
‘Oh. Well.’ She had gone too far. He was blushing. But as she turned back to the page before her, determined to get something done before it was time to leave, the shy clerk cleared his throat.
‘Mr Griddlehaus,’ she spoke as softly as she could, as if he were, in fact, the small rodent he sometimes resembled. ‘Is there something you would like to say?’
‘Well.’ He examined his hands, as if surprised to find them empty, and then blinked up at her. ‘I’m not sure how, exactly, to phrase this.’
Dulcie smiled in what she hoped was an encouraging manner. ‘Yes?’
‘This Professor Showalter.’ He was again addressing his hands. ‘You would like to work with her, am I correct?’
‘You are.’ Dulcie found herself taking care with her voice. There was no need to air her latest concerns, not when Griddlehaus was already having trouble speaking.
‘So, you must find her honorable.’ He stopped.
‘Honorable?’ She was confused.
‘Honorable. An honest academic. An honest person.’ His eyes, wide behind those glasses, stared at her intently.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then perhaps you might answer a question for me.’ He paused and she realized he was waiting for confirmation. She nodded. ‘I’m wondering, Ms Schwartz, why a scholar, especially one whom you hold in such high esteem, would have tried to disguise her identity when another scholar came to visit.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
That was it. Dulcie gave up. Although she couldn’t come up with a credible explanation for the visiting scholar’s strange behavior, she did manage to get more details from Griddlehaus before she left.
As she walked back to the Science Center, Dulcie mulled over what he’d said. What the little clerk had told her didn’t help make things clear and was, she’d had to agree, strange. In brief, he’d said that Renée Showalter had come in and asked to see the papers that she had been instrumental in obtaining for the Mildon. Griddlehaus, thanks to Dulcie, was very aware of her part in the donation, and he had been quite thrilled to seat her in Dulcie’s regular place and to bring out the papers in their protective box for her to peruse.
Dulcie had almost interrupted him, then, to ask what reason she had given for dropping by. But perhaps her own warning to Dulcie was explanation enough. As for what she had said about the airport? Well, Dulcie was willing to forgive that as a well-intentioned deceit. Clearly, Showalter had been worried about the material. Perhaps she wanted to check it out herself, to clear up the mystery. But what had happened next just muddied the waters more.
As Griddlehaus had explained, the visiting professor had gone through one box of papers. ‘Rather quickly,’ he said later, although his slight sniff of disapproval may have been influenced by what had happened next. At any rate, he had gone back into the archive, looking both to replace the original box and to retrieve the next in the series, when he had heard a noise.
He looked up to find Showalter behind him. ‘Ms Showalter!’ he had exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Schwartz,’ he had added, sotto voce. ‘In my confusion, I forgot that she is of course a full professor at her own institution. At any rate, I was startled to see her there behind me, in what is clearly labeled as an area not open to the public. And then …’ He paused and swallowed. Dulcie watched his eyes close and reopen like a frog’s. ‘And then she shushed me, Ms Schwartz. She shushed me! In my own archive!’
‘You
probably startled her, as well.’ It was the best she could come up with.
‘Hmph.’ He sniffed. ‘Perhaps I would have thought so if she hadn’t nearly refused to leave. It was only when I’d finally managed to back her into the reading room that I discovered the reason for her trespass.’
Dulcie had waited. Griddlehaus did have a sense of drama.
‘Another one of your visiting scholars, a tall gentleman, had been waiting by the entrance. And I had not been there, and so he had walked away.’
That, Dulcie had realized, was the real cause of Griddlehaus’s pique. For him, dereliction of duty was unheard of. Indeed, he had been presented with a dilemma. Although he had seen the other guest walking away down the hall, he had been loath to run after him. ‘Not once I’d seen what erratic behavior Professor Showalter was capable of.’ Although he had called after the departing visitor – ‘in a reasonable tone, for a library’ – he had failed to catch his attention. Instead, he had been forced to see the tall man enter the elevator and take it up, presumably to the ground floor and the library’s exit.
‘I felt simply horrible, Ms Schwartz,’ he concluded. ‘And as I was standing there, wondering if perhaps I could send someone after him, she left.’ He leaned over, his voice dropping even more. ‘I confess, I went over the materials she’d been looking at. But I am happy to inform you that despite her erratic behavior, nothing seemed to be amiss. Only, well, she was clearly hiding. And I’d like to know why, Ms Schwartz. That is, if you can tell me.’
She hadn’t been able to, and now she just found herself dreading her return to the Science Center. This conference, she was realizing, was becoming just as terrible as Martin Thorpe had feared.
‘Hey, kiddo!’ She looked up. Trista was jogging to catch up with her. ‘You heading to the snake pit?’
‘Why do you call it that?’ Dulcie heard the sharpness in her own tone – and saw her friend’s reaction. ‘Sorry, this whole thing …’
‘Tell me about it.’ Trista fell into step with her, matching her longer stride to her friend’s. ‘So you must have heard the scuttlebutt on poor old Tesla, right?’
‘I heard something.’ Dulcie was wary. ‘I don’t know if it’s true.’
‘From the horse’s mouth.’ Trista raised her right hand, as if taking an oath.
‘Really?’ Dulcie knew her friend had admired the dead academic – or, to be honest, had found him attractive. She didn’t know they had been confidants.
Trista nodded. ‘I guess I shouldn’t say anything about it. I mean, what’s the point now in ruining his reputation?’
‘No, you have to.’ Dulcie grabbed her friend’s hand. ‘Don’t you see? The police still think it might be murder.’
Trista stopped short. ‘Wait? Murder? Dulcie, are you sure?’
The question caught her short. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘The detective in charge was asking me questions about who Tesla had been with at the party – and who he might have had a beef with.’ She paused, trying to remember his exact words. ‘He implied that he’d been pushed.’
‘Well, yeah.’ Trista’s calm was not what Dulcie had expected.
‘You knew this? But you just said …’
‘Pushed emotionally.’ Trista emphasized the last word. ‘He was near the breaking point. His work had been stolen. He was fighting with his girlfriend. She was going to leave him …’
‘Stella?’
Trista nodded. ‘Yeah, at least I think she was his girlfriend.’ She turned toward Dulcie. ‘I’ll tell you, Dulcie. Some of these senior fellows? They’re worse than freshmen at a mixer. I mean, what is up with that professor of yours?’
Dulcie opened her mouth to defend Showalter. But all she could think of was what Griddlehaus had told her. Renée Showalter had hidden from Paul Barnes, the man she was supposedly involved with. The man who had all but accused her of stealing Marco Tesla’s work. ‘I don’t know, Tris,’ she said instead. It was the best she could do.
THIRTY-NINE
By the time they got back to the Science Center, the world – or at least their particular segment of it – had convened. Dulcie could see Raleigh and Lloyd, and figured that the rest of her department was lost in the milling crowd. Between her colleagues and the visiting scholars, and a bunch of undergrads who looked like they had shown up hoping for free food, the lobby was thronged with more people than Dulcie had expected. And if this had the welcome consequence of warming the space, it also raised the volume to way above study levels.
‘Well, this is cool.’ Trista yelled above the noise. ‘You think you’ll get a crowd like this for your talk?’
‘I wish,’ Dulcie replied, swallowing hard. She didn’t really, and the thought of speaking before a crowd this large was more than a little intimidating.
Trista must have picked up on some of that, because she draped her arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘You’ll do great. You’ll see,’ she said, her voice barely audible in Dulcie’s ear. ‘Once you get into your paper, the audience won’t matter. And it’ll be fantastic preparation for when you have to defend your thesis.’
‘Great.’ Dulcie knew she was speaking too softly to be heard. The fact that she was facing the floor didn’t help either. She knew Trista meant well, but the pairing of this crowd and her eventual defense did nothing to make either less frightening.
‘Oh, come on, Dulce.’ Trista might not have heard her response, but she had certainly intuited it. ‘It won’t be that bad.’
Before she could think of a response, Dulcie heard her name being called and turned to see, deep in the crowd, an arm waving.
‘Yo!’ For a moment, the crowd parted, and she could see Mina, on the far side of what did indeed look like a caterer’s folding table.
‘Wait there!’ Dulcie called back, before the undergrad was swallowed up by the crowd. She liked to think that people would make way for Mina if they saw her cane, but it would be easier for her to make her way through the mob, especially if that mob was intent on little cubes of pimento cheese. ‘It’s Mina,’ she yelled up at Trista. ‘She and I need to talk.’
‘Go.’ Trista waved her off. ‘Just watch out for the cheese ball. I swear they recycle it from party to party.’
With those words of wisdom, Dulcie began to make her way through the crowd.
‘Hey.’ It hadn’t been far, but she felt slightly breathless by the time she got to Mina.
‘This is crazy.’ Mina was looking around, wide-eyed. ‘Are all the conferences like this?’
‘I think they’re all pretty crazy, but this is the first one I’ve been to,’ Dulcie admitted. ‘We haven’t hosted the ELLA since I’ve been here, and I’ve never had a paper to present before. Which reminds me,’ she leaned in to make sure Mina could hear her as she lowered her voice, ‘I haven’t been able to talk to Professor Showalter yet. In fact, I’m a little worried—’
‘There she is!’ Mina probably hadn’t heard her, Dulcie decided. As it was, the undergrad was waving frantically again. Looking up, Dulcie could see the tall redhead near the edge of the crowd. ‘I’m sorry, Dulcie. What were you saying?’
‘Never mind.’ Dulcie looked over at Showalter. The visiting scholar had seen them and was making her way through the crowd. If Dulcie had hoped to grab a private moment with Showalter before the conference opener, she’d have to act fast. ‘Let’s try to grab her.’
Despite her cane, Mina proved adroit at working through the crowd, and Dulcie ended up following her as they made their way out to where the professor waited.
‘Professor!’ Mina yelled up at her. ‘I wanted to thank you for all your help.’
‘It’s nothing.’ The red-haired academic smiled at her. Dulcie found herself hanging back. There was so much she wanted to ask about, and so little privacy in which to do it.
‘We didn’t get to meet,’ she said now, as much to Mina as to Showalter, before checking her watch. ‘And I’m supposed to be helping Thorpe get ready. But I’ve got maybe fifteen mi
nutes. Do you think we can talk?’
‘Of course.’ Showalter, the tallest of the three, looked around. ‘I don’t think they’re letting people into the auditorium yet, but the corner over there looks relatively quiet.’
They used up at least two of her free minutes getting through the outer edges of the crowd. The free cheese was proving to be a stronger than usual draw. But finally the three found themselves over by the auditorium’s back doors. Closed, they made a little alcove, where Dulcie could actually hear herself think.
‘Professor Showalter,’ she began. ‘I was just over at the Mildon …’
‘Oh, I don’t want to be rude,’ Mina interrupted. ‘But since our time is limited, could we talk about the paper?’
‘Why, yes.’ With a glance at Dulcie, Showalter turned toward Mina. ‘I was beginning to tell Dulcie earlier that I was wondering about using the genealogical material.’
Mina’s face fell, and Dulcie’s heart went out to her. ‘Of course,’ Mina said, her enthusiasm a little forced. ‘Dulcie’s paper should focus on the literary interpretation of the newly discovered work. As an undergrad, it was an honor for me to even be involved—’
‘No, it’s not that,’ the professor interrupted. ‘Your work is solid. Quite good, in fact.’
Mina only looked more confused, and Dulcie broke in. ‘The professor told me this morning that she had doubts about the other material,’ she explained as quickly as she could. ‘There may be some problems with the papers from the Philadelphia bequest. In fact,’ she paused, wondering if Showalter would step in, ‘I believe she was checking them out today. Perhaps to see if they could be verified?’
The professor didn’t say anything for a moment, but from the way she looked at Dulcie, Dulcie knew she’d hit home. ‘Yes, yes, they looked good,’ she said finally.
Mina looked from one to the other. Dulcie ignored her. ‘Professor, can you tell me why you—’ She didn’t want to say ‘lied’. ‘Why you said you couldn’t meet me this morning?’