“You’re not going to believe what I found,” Lauren said as she gathered up a fistful of pages. “It’s the most—” She glanced over at Gabe and the words caught in her throat.
Gabe’s face was set in harsh, hard lines. “Where did you get these?” he growled in a raspy whisper.
Lauren stared at him, at the anger gathering on his face, at his fingers crumpling the pages in his hands.
“I thought you’d cut off all contact with Deborah.”
“I, ah, I …” Lauren began, but stopped in confusion. “How did you know I got these from Deborah?”
Gabe didn’t say anything as he struggled to control himself. His angry expression was replaced by stony calmness, but a tinge of anxiety remained in his eyes. “I told you,” he finally said, dropping his gaze and smoothing out the pages he had crumpled, “I’ve read their ridiculous chronicle.”
“You knew she plagiarized your book?”
Gabe pulled the rest of the pages from Lauren’s hand. He shrugged. “What do I care what a bunch of crazies write?” But his gaze shifted uneasily around the stacks.
Lauren looked up at her lover, his handsome face in shadow, his broad shoulders throwing a wide swath of darkness over her, and rocked back on her heels. What if she had the scenario all wrong? What if it wasn’t Deborah who had plagiarized Gabe’s work? What if it was Gabe who had stolen from Deborah?
“You never wanted me to read the chronicle,” Lauren said, her voice barely a whisper. “You did everything to keep me from it.” As she heard her own words, another much more terrible thought blazed through her mind. Although plagiarism was one of the worst violations that could be committed within the academic community, it was a theft of mere words and ideas, a crime against the profession. It wasn’t kidnapping—or murder.
“I told you,” Gabe said, coming toward her. “. I don’t think the chronicle has any place in historical analysis. I didn’t want your first major work to be contaminated by inappropriate data.”
Lauren heard Deborah’s words in her ears. “We never read history … male-biased, patriarchal conjecture … by old white men who weren’t there …”
Suddenly, Lauren saw it all. Deborah had never read Gabe’s book; it had been published after their divorce, after she had discontinued her academic studies. If Deborah had copied the chronicle from Gabe, she would never have given it to Lauren or Jackie. They were Gabe’s student and colleague, and Deborah would have known they’d have read A New Social History. Only someone who had never read A New Social History would have done such a thing. Someone who had let her husband read her own writings, never guessing he would steal them.
As Lauren watched Gabe stuff Deborah’s pages into his coat pocket, she knew she was right.
He reached out to take her in his arms. “I just didn’t want you to be laughed at.”
Lauren swatted his arms away as her last conversation with Jackie replayed in her mind. “I’ve found something big.… Not what you think,” Jackie had said. “I was reading this section on religion in Colonial life …. It posits a much more reduced role for theology than I’ve ever seen before … It’s pre-Phipps.…”
Jackie must have discovered Gabe’s plagiarism. And Jackie had died within hours of that discovery.…
Had Gabe murdered Jackie to silence her? Lauren’s mind raced so fast she could barely keep up. Had Gabe been trying to keep her from also discovering the plagiarism? By wooing her? By scaring her away from Deborah with poppets and Bellarmine urns? She looked up at Gabe in horror. Was he responsible for Drew’s kidnapping?
“Lauren,” Gabe began, his charismatic smile in place, “you can’t possibly think—”
She backed slowly away. Had she made love with the man who had kidnapped her son? The man who had killed her best friend? Lauren was hit by a revulsion so powerful that for a moment she thought she would be sick. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t be near him. She turned and ran.
She ran back into the stacks, away from Gabe, but stupidly also away from the exit. She threw a look over her shoulder and saw he was following her.
“Lauren,” Gabe cried. “Wait! Stop!”
But Lauren wasn’t about to stop. She took a sharp turn and then another. Her nightmare was coming true, but instead of Oliver Osborne behind her, it was Gabe. The great Gabe Phipps. The man with whom she had been eating and sleeping and laughing. She heard his footfalls thundering through the empty stacks. He was gaining on her. Horror roared through her as she skidded into the rotunda. Slipping on the flagstone, she righted herself and raced up the stairs.
“Lauren!” he called, only a few steps behind her. His voice was loud enough to attract the attention of a group of students heading down into the stacks. They craned their necks in fascination at the sight of the eminent Gabe Phipps running through the library.
“It’s not what you think!”
Lauren didn’t want to hear it. Her heart pounding and her breath coming in gasps, she took the stairs two at a time. Elbowing her way through the clusters of people on the main floor, she flew out the door. She heard him behind her on the sidewalk, but it sounded as if the distance between them had lengthened. She turned and saw that Gabe had stopped, that he was sitting on a stone bench in front of the library, his head in his hands.
Lauren kept going. She burst through the doors of the student union and, without conscious thought, got in line for lunch. The room was chaotic and noisy and smelled of turkey gravy. Just the place she needed; she would lose herself in the anonymity of the crowded cafeteria and try to figure out what to do.
She set her tray down in the center of a long table, a group of Asian students on one side and a couple of youngish professors on the other. Lauren sat quickly and stirred her yogurt; she slopped the thick mixture over the sides of the container and all over her tray. When she tried to wipe it up, the napkin slipped from her shaking fingers and fell to the floor. She looked around self-consciously, but no one was the least bit interested in her. From the conversations at the table, she quickly ascertained that the Asians were in the botany department and the professors in English. She sighed, feeling relatively safe caught between the academic conversations, safe enough to confront what frightened her most.
Maybe it was as Gabe had said. Maybe she was jumping to some pretty outrageous conclusions. Just because Gabe had stolen some words—and, she had to admit, some theories and insights—from the chronicle, that didn’t mean he was guilty of kidnapping and murder. Lauren looked around the crowded room full of academicians and overachieving students, a room full of towering intelligence and towering egos. A man of Gabe’s stature might do anything to maintain his reputation—murder, kidnapping, pretending a love he didn’t feel.
She had always known Gabe was a great performer. She saw him charming America on TV, charming Nat on the phone, charming her in his bedroom. Could the whole thing have been an act? “I just want to start this relationship being honest,” he had told her. “Everything out in the open.” Could he have killed her best friend and terrorized her son and then held her in his arms and told her how much he cared for her? Lauren felt dirty, violated, used.
She remembered Dan’s suspicions about Gabe. Dan had pointed out that Gabe’s interest in Lauren had coincided closely with Jackie’s death. And Gabe had always been adamant in discouraging her involvement with Deborah and the chronicle. Gabe knew about poppets and Bellarmine urns. He could have gotten the key to her apartment off the wall in Jackie’s kitchen, broken in, burned the candles, taken Herman.…
Lauren stood and dropped her uneaten lunch into the trash. She knew what she had to do.
Lauren slowly made her way to Sibley Auditorium. As she entered, she heard Gabe’s voice pumping through the sound system. She couldn’t believe how normal he sounded. He was even cracking jokes. The standing-room-only crowd roared with approval. The TV minicams whirled. She used the telephone in the lobby.
Steve Conway answered on the first ring. He was mostly silent t
hrough her recital of the story, interrupting only to clarify a few points. When she finished he asked, “Did you ever hear of a company called SFE Realty?”
“No,” she said impatiently. “But I’m really concerned that—”
“How about Brattle Enterprises or P&P Associates?” he interrupted.
“What do these companies have to do with anything?” she demanded, annoyed by his lack of interest in what she was telling him.
“I’m still trying to untangle the web of ownership,” Steve said, “but it looks like P&P is the holding company that controls the property at 57 Anderson Street—that’s where we think Drew was held.”
“But what about everything I’ve been telling you?”
“The fax is coming through now. I’ll meet you at the auditorium in five.”
“I could be all wrong,” Lauren started to say. “I’m not at all—”
“We’ll talk about it when I see you.”
Lauren paced the anteroom. She picked up a conference program and flipped through the pages, trying to keep from feeling the full brunt of all she had learned and surmised, trying not to focus on what might happen next. Her gaze drifted to the title of Gabe’s keynote address: “The Place for Morality in Historical Analysis.” She snorted in derision.
Steve arrived, accompanied by a uniformed officer. A cruiser pulled up on the sidewalk, and Steve told her there was another circling the perimeter of the building. “Before we go in, I want to let you in on the plan,” he said. “If our suspicions are correct, Phipps is a very dangerous man and we must approach him as such. But if he’s innocent, he’s a very famous man who has done nothing wrong. So we’re going to take it carefully, quietly.”
Lauren nodded. Her throat felt as dry as sandpaper. She wasn’t at all sure she could speak. “Phipps is a very dangerous man.…”
“The only fact we have at the moment is that Phipps is the owner of the building Drew was held in. That’s it—and it’s not much. Everything else is conjecture. If we don’t handle this situation very carefully, we could end up with nothing.” He waved to the policeman behind him. “After the big man finishes his speech, Greenho here and I will go up and talk to him real nice.”
“But—” Lauren began.
“No second guessing.” The lieutenant shook his head. “I’ve seen guys like this before—if you catch them off guard, there’s a chance they’ll crumble right at your feet. So you stay in the back,” he told Lauren. “Out of sight. And one of my men will be around to get you when it’s all over.”
Lauren was numb as she watched the two policemen disappear through a side doorway, her thoughts swirling in a wild kaleidoscope of images: Gabe smiling at her over lunch at Rialto; Gabe touching her wineglass and toasting Rebeka Hibbens; Gabe staring at her naked body in wonder, telling her how beautiful she was. Then she saw Drew, running to her with tears streaming down his face after his kidnapping. She felt his skinny arms clutching at her, her own holding him as if she would never let go. Lauren’s heart felt like a fist of cold stone in her chest. She turned and entered the auditorium.
She did as Steve had instructed, standing along the back wall with the undergraduates who had been unable to afford the price of the conference, but who were unofficially allowed in to hear the words of the great Dr. Phipps as long as they didn’t take up a seat. Although she could barely make out his face from this distance, Gabe’s towering, familiar voice gave him a nearness that unnerved her.
“It is our job as historians,” Gabe was saying, “to keep the moral values of our time from inadvertently coloring our analysis of another epoch. And yet, in order to truly appreciate that other epoch, we must understand the code of mores that underlies the fabric of their world, that gives meaning to their culture …”
Lauren inched forward, driven, despite Steve’s admonition, to get a closer look at Gabe. To see from the expression on his face if he too recognized the irony of his discussion on morality in light of what he knew she had discovered. But as she drew closer to the stage, she saw a Gabe Phipps who was as calm as ever. He stood at the podium, confident and in control, acting like any man who thought himself the greatest living historian would act before an assemblage of his adoring peers: wise, witty, and regal.
A flame of white hot anger gusted to life within Lauren. How could he? How dare he? Her hands trembled with rage. She grasped them together to still their shaking.
“And so, I leave you with this thought,” Gabe was concluding. “To know the code of ethics of an epoch—to know what to them was irrefutably right and reprehensibly wrong—is to know that epoch.” He paused to let the brilliance of his statement filter through the crowd. Then he gave a wise nod and added simply, “Thank you.”
The applause was thunderous. It swelled and filled the huge auditorium until Lauren felt no more sound was possible. Gabe dropped his eyes, as if embarrassed at the emotion he had evoked both within himself and his audience. Then he raised his head and looked out over the adoring throng, acknowledging their homage with a slight self-deprecating smile.
When Gabe held his hands out for silence, mimicking a gesture Lauren had seen the Pope use to still a crowd gathered below his Vatican window, her fury was overtaken by disgust. Suddenly, she didn’t care about Steve Conway’s plan to go carefully and quietly. Her fear of public speaking vanished as her desire to humiliate Gabe before his peers grew. More than anything, she wanted to take his huge overblown ego and dash it to bits before the people whose opinions he most respected.
Lauren stepped into the open aisle and called into the silence Gabe had commanded, “Aren’t there some things that are always considered ‘reprehensibly wrong,’ Dr. Phipps? No matter what the historical epoch?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Steve Conway move to the edge of the stage curtain. He shot her a furious look. But Lauren couldn’t stop herself from adding, “Aren’t there some universals—some moral absolutes? Say, for example, rules against plagiarism? kidnapping? murder?”
Channel 7’s minicam turned its lens from her to Gabe.
Gabe smiled benevolently, but she was close enough to see the cold glint in his eye. “While one might make the argument that all societies find murder repugnant,” he said evenly, “one must also look to the various forms of murder that exist. Is an executioner hired by the state guilty of a moral wrong? Or a soldier killing the enemy of his country?”
Enraged by his smooth segue, Lauren stared at Gabe, her eyes full of hatred. He was smiling out into the audience, but she knew him well enough to detect the fear hovering beneath his composure.
“You’re arguing semantics,” she called up to the stage, “and I’m asking a question of moral commonality. I’m asking how all societies—all human beings—feel about someone who selfishly takes another life just to protect his own reputation.”
“That, ah, that’s a very interesting question, young lady,” Gabe said, his self-confidence wavering. “Of course there are some moral absolutes. And, ah, the one you suggest is as good an example as any.”
“And do you subscribe to that absolute, Dr. Phipps?” she demanded. “Do you hold yourself to the same moral standards as everyone else in America? Or have you put yourself above the code? Have you done things that people in this room would find reprehensible?”
Gabe shrugged his shoulders and shook his head sadly at the audience. “Of late, this young woman has shown up at every one of my public functions. I’m not sure what her problem is, but it appears from her vague and persistent accusations that there might be some mental instability involved.” He smiled at Lauren with great compassion. “I think it’s best if you go now, dear.”
Lauren was struck speechless by Gabe’s blatant lies and was only dimly aware of shuffling behind her. Suddenly, hands grabbed at her. They held her arms and her shoulders. Adrenaline burst through her and, with a mighty shove, she wrenched free of her captors.
“That’s your method, isn’t it?” she shouted at Gabe. “Whenever anyone threatens you, you
declare them insane.” More hands came at her, and once again she batted them away. “Are you planning to commit me to a locked ward, just like your wife? Do you think that will protect you from what you’ve done?”
The knuckles of Gabe’s fingers were white as he gripped the podium. “Are you accusing me of something?” His voice roared through the sound system. “Something of which you have proof? This bizarre scenario you’ve concocted in your own mind has a lot more to do with your craziness than does any so-called guilt on my part.”
Lauren was acutely aware of the silence of the hall, of the musty odor of damp wool and too many bodies pressed close together, of the whirl of the minicam. She flicked the last of the hands from her shoulders and looked straight into the camera. “They aren’t just my accusations.” She pointed at Steve Conway and Sergeant Greenho, who had taken a few steps onto the stage as she was speaking. “There are two gentlemen here who have some questions for you.”
As the audience sucked in its collective breath, the policemen walked up to the podium. Steve Conway took Gabe’s arm and led him to the back of the stage.
Lauren leaned up against the wall and closed her eyes.
Twenty-Nine
LAUREN RETRIEVED HER BACKPACK AND COAT FROM where she had left them in the library and went to the police station. The building was undergoing renovation, so she had to follow hand-lettered signs and wend her way through a maze of broken concrete and yellow tape to a rear door. She entered directly into a large room that was a tumult of activity. Phones rang from almost every desk. A group of policeman sat in a corner drinking coffee and laughing uproariously. An enraged citizen berated a resigned-looking policewoman for her inability to find the thieves who had broken into his apartment. A man in a sport jacket and tie kicked a soda machine and, when no can rolled out, kicked it again and walked away.
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