A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  I winced as he yanked me up, but was made more uncomfortable by the reminder of my violence toward him the night before. “Michael, I’m sorry about—”

  “Pish,” he said airily, “I’ve always wanted to start a rumor. I’ve originated three different stories about how I got hurt, and I’m dying to follow the paths of each one.”

  “I honestly don’t go around popping people in the eye—” I insisted he listen to my apology. “I’m sure it’s just the stress—” I again debated whether to tell him about my sessions with Nolan; maybe it would assuage his ego. Maybe it would warn him against thinking I was an easy target. Just in case.

  “At least I know why I got hurt and that it was an accident,” he broke in impatiently, and suddenly my window of opportunity had slammed shut. “Unlike some around here.”

  We moved outside, standing under the pines with the rest of the staff. There wasn’t even the usual joking about missing the math test, the alarm problem wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was funny at all.

  Michael made the most of the opportunity and lit up a cigarette immediately. “Ahhhh. God, that’s good.” He took a long drag, his eyes glazed over with pleasure, then blinked, coming back to the real world: the respite was temporary. “So that was a hell of a racket you made this morning. Got a couple Sumo wrestlers in your room?”

  When I didn’t answer he said, “I moved my desk in front of my door, too. It’s probably a good idea under the circumstances.”

  “The lock is broken, and I just didn’t want to disturb you again. In case I decided to take another midnight walk.”

  “Ah. Very considerate,” Michael said tonelessly.

  I could tell his attention was not on our conversation. He was watching Sasha intently.

  “You know,” he continued, “the first thing I saw when I woke up was Sasha leaning over you.” He lit a second cigarette from the first, then pinched out the old cigarette just above the glowing ember with a quick thumb and forefinger, flicking the butt away. “Just saying it sounds crazy, like an implication, but it’s the truth. In fact, I’m starting to scare myself, thinking about what’s been going on around here. But Sasha?” He shuffled uncertainly as he watched her across the road.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said, and it was the truth. “Sasha doesn’t really radiate the sense of being that cold-blooded, if you know what I mean. She’d have to be awful bold to try something like that in front of you, or me, for that matter. And why would she do it at all?”

  I didn’t realize how long I’d paused in thought. Michael said, “Well, I didn’t do it. I believe you when you say you were pulled, but Sasha was the only person I saw near you. After the fact, admittedly.” He was still watching Sasha as she spoke with one of the interns.

  I couldn’t stand to think too closely about what he was suggesting, even though I knew I ought to. I flipped the ice pack, putting the cooler side on my lump. “All I know is that if this bump gets any larger, I’m going to have to give it a name.”

  “You know, I think you ought to be more worried than you are!” he said in exasperation. “If there’s a connection between Faith’s death and Jack’s, then you could be next. You were the last one to see Faith and Jack and according to our lovely detective, he left you a note saying he knew something. If I were you, I’d consider getting out of here, pronto, diary or not.”

  Before I could think of an answer, Michael’s expression suddenly dulled as Harry joined us. “Harry, you’ve got to help me out here.”

  Although he was still dressed with impeccable care, Harry had dark lines under his eyes and a careworn look on his face. “How’s that, Michael?” he asked obligingly. But his quick smile vanished when he saw my ice pack. “Emma, what’s wrong?”

  “She fell,” Michael said brusquely. “I’ve been having no luck locating the papers I need. Could you give Sasha a hand looking for them?”

  His patience obviously strained, lips compressed, Harry said, “I’ll look into it right away, Michael.”

  Michael watched everyone filing back, then turned to me. “Think about what I said,” he said emphatically, then walked back toward the library.

  Harry stared, puzzled, after him.

  “What was that? Michael seems somewhat…preoccupied.”

  “He thinks I should leave.” I flipped the ice pack again, but realized that all the cold had gone out of it. “He thinks it’s dangerous here.”

  “We’d be happy to let you come back, finish up another time,” he started, reluctantly. “You know, that might even be best, everything is very disorganized at present and heaven knows, there’s a lot going on around here just now.”

  “Thanks Harry,” I said absently, watching Michael out front through the window. He jumped up and pulled at an oak branch, shaking melted ice onto a couple of young interns, who giggled playfully. “I think I need to work on Madam Chandler’s code, though, and I need the original copy of the journal for that, I think. I can’t just leave it. It’s not just the story, it’s not just the work that is going to help me when I go back to work on the site, it’s as though if I stick with it long enough, it’s going to help me make a connection that’s going to give me some fundamental understanding of how I work. How I think…” I shrugged.

  Harry stared at me quizzically, and I knew I’d lost him.

  “Well, that’s just what I tell people,” I joked. “It’s really just because this way I get to read diaries and no one will call me nosy.”

  “It’s a powerful fascination that these little bits of paper, leather, and thread hold for us,” Harry said. “Literally captivating.”

  The man was such a diplomat, I thought. “It really is. Sasha called it service”—at the mention of her name, I saw Harry’s face light up—“I call it a vocation. Funny how we all look at it in those terms.”

  “It’s a sickness, isn’t it?” Harry asked, laughing. “Sasha and I, well, we’re lucky to be able to work with the things we do. But you won’t believe the lengths to which some people will go. People have been murdered over rare books, over-generous donors have committed suicide after realizing they couldn’t bear separation from their collections. Some collectors, faced with starvation, were recorded as spending their last penny on a rare book instead of food. There’s no end to the stories of extreme bibliomania.”

  “Come on,” I said, disbelieving.

  “I’m serious. A former monk in nineteenth-century Spain was thwarted in his attempt to acquire a rare book; shortly thereafter, his successful competitor was found dead in his burnt-out book shop. This happened a few times, and when the ex-monk was finally arrested for the murders, he was more distraught that a book he had stolen was not unique than the fact that he was going to be executed.”

  “You’re joking, right?” I asked. “That’s, like, an extraordinary example, right?”

  “Oh no. Far from it. What about Petrarch? He devoted his life to rescuing the lost classics and wrote letters to the authors whose works he’d recovered, even though they’d been dead for hundreds of years,” Harry said. “And the librarian of Cosimo III—no one knows his name—eschewed a private apartment, choosing rather to sleep in a hammock slung between bookcases in the great library over which he presided in the seventeenth century. He lived ‘on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow was a folio,’ and died looking like a beggar in spite of his high status, but left his own thirty thousand books to the people of Florence.”

  “No one’s that nutty,” I muttered. “I love books just as much as the next person, but—”

  “Of course,” Harry said. “We manage to keep our loves in check. But the market for rare and antique books is thriving. Did you get a look at the catalog for the Armstrong collection?”

  My mind flew back to my first day, and the conversation between Michael and Harry. “No. Never got the chance.”

  “Everyone knew the bidding would be hot, but no one expected that the sale would bring in the millions it did. One copy of Champla
in’s Voyages went for close to $400,000.”

  I let out a low whistle. “I wouldn’t mind owning that one myself.”

  Harry laughed. “Well, I can’t get the book for you, but we’ve got a copy of that catalog around here somewhere. I’ll get Sasha to track it down for you. And if you think that’s something, the black market is even more busy these days. You read about it constantly and it gets worse and worse. Just last month, two valuable nineteenth-century manuscripts were stolen from the rare book room at Van Helst Library. You should ask Michael, he was down there in Philly at the time. I bet he’d know more of the story.”

  “Michael’s seen a lot of excitement lately.” A split second later I thought more closely about what I had just said.

  “I suppose we all have,” Harry said tactfully. “Lately. Just Michael’s bad luck that he’s been in the wrong places at the wrong times.”

  Suddenly a deafening rumble started.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Harry shouted over the din, and I followed him over to where the workers were finishing one section of the foundation repointing and starting to open another with a ditch witch, one of those small machines used to excavate narrow ditches. All around were scattered the tools of their trade, including trowels, crowbars, and a dirty wheelbarrow filled with water for the cement. Over the noise, I heard the end of a hollered-out, extremely bawdy joke, and immediately thought of the gravediggers from Hamlet.

  I saw one of the men in work clothes say something as they noticed us. The other one stood up and brushed off his hands, and put on a cap marked “Martini Brothers, Contractors,” preparatory to doing business. With a signal from him, the other man turned off the machine and the sudden silence overwhelmed us.

  He started with his hands in the air in a gesture of forestallment before we could say a word. “Look, before you start again, Mr. Saunders,” came a voice that would have been well at home in the Bronx. “I keep telling you, it’s not us. It’s your electrician or your alarm service. We are not tripping your alarm.” Apparently this was Frankie Martini himself, if the embroidery on his shirt pocket was any indication.

  “Isn’t it at least possible that your work is disrupting things?” Harry asked, obviously frustrated. “None of this started until you started.”

  “Just our bad luck,” muttered Martini brother number two. His shirt was embroidered JOEY M.

  “It does not have anything to do with us,” said Frankie firmly. He turned to me and explained courteously. “See, when you’ve been using one of these things as long as I have, you can feel everything. Rocks, roots. You know what you’re hitting. And something like the PVC pipe that those new alarm systems go through, it vibrates different. We’d never in a million years cut through one of those.”

  I peered over into the narrow trench to have a look at the soil out of habit, looking for artifacts that might have been churned up. Frankie Martini nudged Joey Martini.

  “Looks like you got a girlfriend over there, brother. Takin’ an interest in your work.”

  I caught myself—not everyone feels compelled to investigate every hole in the ground they encounter. This was just another old habit, like analyzing the assemblages in my neighbors’ recycling bins. “No, sorry. I’m just looking to see if there’s anything interesting in there; I’m an archaeologist.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The Martini Brothers exchanged the patented half nod, curled lip, and raised eyebrows that denote discovery of the unusual.

  “Archaeologist, huh?” Joey said. “I bet you could tell me where to find some good arrowheads around here? I like to dig them up with my kid.”

  “Well, you know,” I started wearily, “you’re really not supposed to do that…”

  Joey Martini looked offended. “Why not? My kid loves them, got a whole roomful of them. We go looking every weekend in the summer. I’m a good father,” he added irrelevantly.

  I thought about trying to explain about context and preservation laws and realized that this guy wasn’t going to stop no matter what I said. “Sure you are, but you’ll put me out of a job.”

  “Oh, I get it. Better not tell you what I found last week, then?” Nudges and guffaws followed. “Not for nothin’. That was a beauty.”

  Harry stared at us impatiently, then turned to Frankie. “Perhaps you could just take it a little easier, guys?”

  “Oh, sure, whatever you say, Mr. Saunders. I’m just saying. But for you, we’ll be extra careful.” The reply wasn’t convincing; Frankie Martini went back to adding more water from a bucket into the cement bin. He reached over and hit a switch, the racket from the ditch digger conveniently obliterating whatever caustic comment brother Joey might have made under his breath.

  We walked away and Harry just shook his head.

  “You know, they’re right, Harry,” I said when we were well out of earshot.

  He looked at me.

  “It’s got to be either the electrical or the alarm system itself. It shouldn’t be so sensitive, certainly if they’re not actually cutting through it.”

  All at once, the weight of his work was apparent on his face: Harry looked frazzled, overworked, and underpaid. “I’m not being an ogre, Emma, I just want those guys to be careful, that’s all. It’s an expensive system and we’re trying to expand it. And I can’t afford these problems right now, not with everything Whitlow is dumping on us. None of us can. His new plans—”

  “I know, Harry, but I’ve done some work with alarms before and what they’re doing shouldn’t bother it.”

  He stopped strolling. “What do you know about alarms?”

  “Oh, not so much about the theory behind them,” I said, “but I’ve done some contract work with alarm companies, watching out that the installation doesn’t disturb any important archaeological sites, that sort of thing. Those systems are smart. They don’t go off for no reason. And those guys who do the actual excavation, they really get a feel for what’s in the ground. They may not be able to keep their pants buckled up around their waists or their shirts tucked in, but I’ve known some who can tell when they’re hitting waterlogged wood or even a piece of bone with a backhoe. If they work with archaeologists long enough on these projects, they get to be real artists.”

  Harry looked at me thoughtfully. “Well, that’s helpful. I’m not really the one in charge of this, Constantino is, of course, but I’ll ask him to check with the alarm company again, see if they should try testing something else.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably a good idea,” I agreed. “It may not be what you think.” I made a move to reenter the library but Harry stopped me, led us away from the door again.

  “Emma, I need to tell you something.” He looked very troubled.

  “What’s that, Harry? Oh, not something about the letters!” I told him about my situation with the abrupt ending of the diary.

  “No, it’s not about them, but it is about a letter. Mr. Whitlow received a letter today and he’s very troubled about it.” He paused significantly, waiting for me to catch on.

  I shook my head. “And?”

  “It was a letter from your husband, complaining about a problem with Mr. Constantino. It was disturbing to think that such a thing could…” he trailed off delicately.

  It all came back to me now. Brian had written the letter and overnighted it. When he decided to act, he acted fast. “Good, it should be disturbing! Constantino’s behavior was offensive, and it shouldn’t be tolerated.”

  “I agree,” he said quickly, “but that’s not what he’s concerned about. He views you as a troublemaker now, after your other complaints.”

  “What other complaints?” I didn’t think of myself as being high maintenance. In fact, I rather prided myself on being a trouper, when you got right down to it.

  “About Gary Conner, for starters, and your behavior over Dr. Morgan’s death. They see you as a problem. Not that I agree, and I’ve been arguing on your behalf. But I just wanted to let you know, you’ve put a cat among the pigeons.”
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  “Yeah, well, if they think I’m a problem now, wait until they, what I look like when I’m trying to be a pain,” I said, but then I turned serious. “Honestly, though, everything that Brian wrote or I said was true.”

  Harry shrugged helplessly. “They see it as you being overly sensitive to necessary security procedures. Perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to leave things—just for now, I mean—and let things cool down a bit.”

  “Look, if they’re disturbed by the truth, then there’s never going to be a good time for me here,” I said, scratching the back of my neck; I touched the bump by accident and flinched. I sighed; none of this was Harry’s fault. “Shall I have a talk with them, do you think that would help?”

  “No, I shouldn’t,” he replied. “Let’s not fan the flames. Director Whitlow isn’t favorably disposed to explanation, so it’s probably better not to bring it up at all. I just wanted to let you know.” He adjusted his tie imperceptibly, looking tired. “I’ve got to get back and try to find those manuscripts.”

  I watched him walk back inside.

  Maybe I was the only one who believed me, but I knew that I hadn’t just fallen off the stepladder. I had been pulled, and hard—it was no accident. Maybe I was wrong imagining that everything going on was connected with Faith’s death—I still didn’t know what that was connected to. But Harry’s comments raised another disturbing idea: Was it possible that Constantino had pulled me off the stool, either in retribution or to scare me off?

  My gaze traveled over to where the two workmen were repairing the foundation. They didn’t seem put out by my distressing morning, I thought ruefully, then immediately remembered the line from Hamlet, “the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” They were just doing their work, they didn’t need to embroil themselves in the mess at Shrewsbury. But by that logic, I did, I thought. And I realized that it was time for more than just sticking it out and offering my observations to Detective Kobrinski; I had to start looking around in earnest. She was right, she just didn’t have the access necessary to make any sense of what might be going on here. I was at the heart of things and I thought, as she was so fond of saying, “Let’s start at the beginning.”