Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  Dad had a small black book he kept on his bedside table, Words of a Glowworm (Punch, 1978), which he turned to at night, when he was tired and craved something sweet the way some women craved dark chocolate. It was a book of the most powerful quotations in the world. I knew most of them. "History is a set of lies generally agreed upon," Napoleon said. "Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way/' said General George Patton. "On stage I make love to twenty-five thousand people and then I go home alone/' moaned Janis Joplin, bleary of eye and disheveled of hair. "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company," said Mark Twain.

  I stared at Milton. He couldn't look at me, but pressed against the trunk of that tree, as if he wished it would eat him. " 'We are all worms/ " I said carefully, " 'but I do believe I am a glowworm.' "

  "What?" asked Jade.

  I turned and began to walk away.

  "What was that?"

  "That's what you call taking a moment."

  "Did you see her? She's totally possessed."

  "Find an exorcist!" Charles shouted, and laughed, a sound like poured gold coins, and the trees bore the sound up with their perfect acoustics and made it float in the air.

  When I reached the parking lot, I encountered Mr. Moats walking to his car with textbooks under his arm. He looked startled when he saw me coming out of the trees, as if he thought I was the ghost of El Greco.

  "Blue van Meer?" he called out uncertainly, but I didn't smile or speak to him.

  I'd already started to run.

  30

  The Nocturnal Conspiracy

  I t was one of the biggest scandals of Life, to learn the crudest thing someone could say to you was that you were a terrible kisser.

  One would think it'd be worse to be a Traitor, Hypocrite, Bitch, Whore or any other foul person, worse even to be a Way-out-there, a Welcome Mat, a Was-Girl, a Weasel. I suspect one would even fare better with "bad in bed," because everyone has an off day, a day when his/her mind hitchhikes on each and every thought that cruises by, and even champion racehorses such as Couldn't Be Happier, who won both the Derby and the Preakness in 1971, could suddenly come in dead last, as he did at the Belmont Stakes. But to be a terrible kisser—to be tuna—was the worst of all, because it meant you were without passion, and to be without passion, well, you might as well be dead.

  I walked home (4.1 miles), replaying that humiliating remark again and again in my head (in slo-mo, so I could mentally draw agonizing little circles around my every instance of fumbling, holding, intentional grounding and personal foul). In my room, I broke down into one of those headachy weeps one would think would be reserved for the death of a family member, for terminal illness, the end of the world. I cried into my clammy pillowcase for over an hour, the darkness swelling in the room, the night slinking up and crouching in the windows. Our house, the elaborate, empty 24 Armor Street, seemed to wait for me, wait like bats for darkness, an orchestra for a conductor, waiting for me to calm myself, to proceed.

  Stuffy of head and crimson of eye, I rolled off my bed, wandered downstairs, played the message from Dad about dinner with Arnie Sanderson, removed from the fridge the Stonerose Bakery chocolate cake Dad had brought home the other day (part of the Van Meer Brighten Up Blue Initiative) and grabbing a fork, carried it up to my room.

  "We're tucking you in tonight with breaking news," sang the imaginary Cherry Jeffries of my head. "It took not the police force, not the National Guard, Park Rangers, K-9, the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, not preachers, clairvoyants, palm readers, dream catchers, superheroes, Martians, not even a trip to Lourdes, but simply a brave, local area teen to solve the murder of Hannah Louise Schneider, age forty-four, whose death had been erroneously declared a suicide by the Sluder County Sheriff's Department just last week. A gifted senior at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, Miss Blue van Meer, who happens to have an I.Q. that will knock your pants off, 175, flew in the face of adversity from teachers, students, and fathers alike when she deciphered a range of nearly imperceptible clues leading her to the woman's killer, now in police custody and awaiting trial. Dubbed the Schoolgirl Sam Spade, Miss Van Meer has not only been a regular on the talk-show circuit, from Oprah and Leno to the Today show and The View, also gracing the cover of this month's RollingStone, but she's also been invited to the White House to dine with the President who, despite her tender age of sixteen, asked her to serve as a U.S. Ambassador on a thirty-two-country Goodwill Tour promoting peace and world freedom. All of this prior to her matriculation at Harvard this fall. Christ. Isn't that something else, Norvel? Norvel?"

  "Oh. Uh, yes." "It just goes to show you that this world isn't falling apart too bad. Because there are real heroes out there and dreams really do come true."

  I had no choice but to do what Chief Inspector Curry did when facing a dead end in one of his investigations, as he did on p. 512 of Conceit of a Unicorn (Lavelle, 1901), when "every door remains bolted and every casement firmly latched, concealing the wickedness at which we, my esteemed Horace, may only fitfully turn our discouraged minds to, much as the lean mongrel wandering our city of slate and stone, poking through rubbish, fraught for a careless scrap of mutton dropped by an unwary merchant or solicitor on his journey home. Yet, there is hope! For remember, my dear lad, the starving dog misses naught! When in doubt, return to the victim! He will light your way."

  I pulled out a neon pink five-by-seven note card and wrote out a list of Hannah's friends, the few names I knew. There was the late Smoke Harvey

  and his family who lived in Findley, West Virginia, and the man from the animal shelter, Richard Something, who lived on the llama farm, and Eva Brewster, Doc, the other men from Cottonwood (though I wasn't sure one could classify them as friends, more acquaintances).

  All things considered, it was a paltry list.

  Nevertheless, I decided to begin, somewhat confidently, with the top, a member of the Harvey family. I hurried down to Dad's study, switching on his laptop and typing Smoke's name into the People Search on Worldquest.

  There was no record of him. There were, however, fifty-nine other Harveys, also a record of one Ada Harvey in Findley registered on one of the advertising links, www.noneofyourbusiness.com. Ada, I remembered, was one of Smoke's daughters; Hannah had mentioned her during the dinner at Hyacinth Terrace. (I remembered, because her name was one of Dad's most beloved books, Nabokov's Ada or Ardor [1969].) If I paid just $89.99 *° m e Web site, I could not only obtain Ada's home telephone number, but her address, birthday, background check, public record report, National Criminal Record Search, as well as a satellite photo. I ran upstairs into Dad's bedroom and took one of his extra MasterCards out of his bedside table drawer. I decided to pay the $8.00 for her phone number.

  I returned to my room. I wrote out a list of detailed questions on three other five-by-seven note cards, each neatly labeled at the top, CASE NOTES. After I'd reviewed the questions three, maybe four times, I slipped downstairs to the library, uncapped Dad's fifteen-year-old George T. Stagg bourbon, took a swig straight from the bottle (I wasn't yet completely at ease with shamus work, not yet, and what detective didn't dip the bill?) and returned to my room, taking a few moments to collect myself. " 'Youse got to picture the steel bed the stiff is on an' make that your manner, broads,' " Sergeant Detective Buddy Mills demanded of his relatively bashful all-male police force in The Last Hatchet Job (Nubbs, 1958).

  I dialed the number. A woman answered on the third ring.

  "Hello?"

  "May I please speak to Ada Harvey?"

  "This is she. Who's callin' please?"

  It was one of those scary, antebellum, I-do-declare Southern voices, purdy, feisty and preternaturally elderly (all wrinkle and quiver no matter the age of the person).

  "Um, hello, my name is Blue van Meer and I— "

  "Thank you very much, but I'm not interested—" "I'm not a telemarketer—"

  "No, thank you, much obliged— "

  "I'm a friend of Hannah Schneider's."

  The
re was a sharp gasp, as if I'd stuck her in the arm with a hypodermic needle. She was silent. Then she hung up.

  Puzzled, I pressed Redial. She picked up instantly—I could hear a television, a soap opera repeat, a woman, "Blaine," then, "How could you?" — and Ada Harvey slammed down the receiver, hard, without a word. On my fourth attempt, it rang fifteen times before the operator recording came on informing me my party was unavailable. I waited ten minutes, ate a few bites of chocolate cake and tried a fifth time. She answered on the first ring.

  "The nerve—you don't stop I'm goin' to call the authorities—"

  "I'm not a friend of Hannah Schneider's."

  "No? Well, who the heck are you then?"

  "I'm a stude —I'm an investigator," I amended hastily. "I'm a private investigator employed"—my eyes veered onto my bookshelf, landing between The Anonymous (Felm, 2001) and Party of the Third Degree (Grono, 1995) — "by an anonymous third-degree party. I was hoping you could help me by answering a few questions. It should only take five minutes."

  "You're a private investigator?" she repeated.

  "Yes."

  "Then the Lord wears pantaloons and saddle shoes—how old are you? You sound no bigger than a minute."

  Dad said one could dig up a great deal about a person from his/her phone voice and from the sound of hers, she was in her early forties and wore brown leather flats with tiny tassels on them, tassels like miniature brooms sweeping the tops of her feet.

  "I'm sixteen," I admitted.

  "And you said you work for who?"

  It wasn't a good idea to keep lying; as Dad said: "Sweet, your every thought walks through your voice holding a giant billboard advertisement."

  "Myself. I'm a student at St. Gallway, where Hannah taught. I-I'm sorry I lied before but I was afraid you'd hang up again and I"—frantically, I stared down at my CASE NOTES—"you're my only lead. I happened to meet your father, the night he died. He seemed to be a fascinating person. I'm sorry about what happened."

  It was a detestable thing to do, to drag people's deceased family members into it, in order to get what one wants—any mention of Dad dead, I'd

  doubtlessly sing like a magpie—but it was my only hope; it was obvious Ada was on the fence between hearing me out and hanging up and leaving the phone off the hook.

  "Because," I went on shakily, "your father and the rest of your family were, at one time, friends with Hannah, I was hoping—" "Friends?" She spit out the word like it was rancid avocado. "We were not friends with that woman." "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought—" "You thought wrong." If before her voice had been miniatured and poodled, now it was rottweilered. She didn't go on. She was what was commonly called in the gumshoe world, "one helluva cemented dame." I swallowed. "So, then, uh, Ms. Harvey—" "My name is Ada Rose Harvey Lowell." "Ms. Lowell. You weren't acquainted with Hannah Schneider at all?" Again, she didn't say anything. A car commercial was assaulting her living room. Hurriedly, I scribbled "None?" in my CASE NOTES under question #4, "What is the nature of your relationship with Hannah Schneider?" I was just about to move on to #5, "Were you aware of her scheduled camping trip?" when she sighed and spoke, her voice stark.

  "You don't know what she was," Ada said.

  Now it was my turn to stay silent, because it was one of those dramatic comments that come up halfway into a sci-fi action movie, when one character is about to inform the other character what they're dealing with is not "of this earth." Still, my heart began to clang in my chest like a voodoo funeral march in N'awlins.

  "What do you know?" she asked with a note of impatience. "Anything?" "I know she was a teacher," I tried quietly. This elicited an acerbic, "Heh." "I know your father, Smoke, was a retired financier and—" "My father was an investigative journalist" she corrected (see "Southern

  Pride," Moon Pies and Tarnation, Wyatt, 2001). "He was a banker for thirty-eight years before he was able to retire and pursue his first loves. Writin'. And true crime."

  "He wrote a book, didn't he? A-a mystery?" "The Doloroso Treason was not a mystery. It was 'bout the illegal aliens and the Texas border and the corruption and drug smugglin' that goes on."

  (She callously squashed the word aliens; it became Aileens.) "It was a huge success. They gave him a key to the city." She sniffed. "What else?"

  "I-I know your father drowned at Hannah's house."

  She gasped again; this time it sounded like I'd slapped her across the face in front of a hundred guests at a toffee pull. "My father did not"—her voice was trembly and shrill, the scrape of Lee Press-On Nails down pantyhose —"I— Do you have any idea who my father was?"

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"

  "He was hit by a tractor-trailer when he was four riding his tricycle. Broke his back serving in Korea. Got trapped in a car that went over Feather Bridge and then went out the window like they do in the movies. He'd been bit twice—once by a Doberman, another time a Tennessee rattler, and almost had a shark attack off the coast of Way Paw We, Indonesia, only he'd watched a special on the Nature Channel and remembered to punch it straight in the nose, which is what they tell you to do when one's comin' at you only most people don't have the guts to do it. Smoke did. And now you're tryin' to tell me his medication mixed with a little Jack was going to finish him off? Makes me sick. He'd been takin' it for six months and it had no effect, period. That man could be shot in the head six times and he'd go right on—you mark my words."

  To my horror, her voice tore a hole on "words"—a sizable hole by the sound of things. I wasn't positive, but I think she was crying too, an awful held-back hiccuping sound that faded into the mumbles and elevator music of the soap opera, so you couldn't tell the difference between her drama and the one on television. It was very possible she'd just said, "Travis, I'm not gonna lie and say I don't have feelings for you"—not the woman on the TV, and it was also possible the woman on the TV, not Ada, was crying over her dead father.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just kind of, confused—"

  "I didn't put it all together 'til later," she sniffled.

  I waited—enough time for her to stitch together, however crudely, the hole in her voice. "You didn't put what. . . together?" She cleared her throat. "Do you know who The Nightwatchmen are?" she asked. " 'Course you don't. . . don't even know your own name, probably—"

  "I do, actually. My father's a political science professor."

  She was surprised—or maybe relieved. "Oh?"

  "They were radicals," I said. "But apart from an incident or two in the early seventies, no one's sure if they actually existed. They're more a-a beautiful idea, fighting against greed—than something real." I was paraphrasing bits of "A Quick History of the American Revolutionary" (see Van Meer,Federal Forum, Vol. 23, Issue 9,1990).

  "An incident or two," Ada repeated. "Exactly. So then you know about Gracey."

  "He was the founder. But he's dead, isn't he?"

  "Other than one other person," Ada said slowly, "George Gracey is the only known member. And he's still wanted by the FBI. In '70 ... no, '71, he killed a West Virginia Senator, put a pipe bomb in his car. A year later, he blew up a building in Texas. Four people died. He was caught on tape so they made a sketch of him, but then he dropped off the face of the earth. In the eighties there was an explosion in a townhouse in England. Homemade bombs. People had heard he was livin' there, so they assumed he was dead. There was too much damage to recover the teeth on the bodies found. That's how they identify, you know. Teeth records."

  She paused, swallowing.

  "The Senator killed was Senator Michael McCullough, Dubs's uncle on his mother's side, my great uncle. And it happened over in Meade, twenty minutes from Findley. Dubs said it all the time when we were growin' up: Til fly to the ends of the earth to bring that sonuvabitch to trial.' When Dubs drowned, everyone believed the police. They said he'd had too much to drink and it was an accident. I refused to believe it. I stayed up all night goin' through his notes even though Archie cussed me out, said I was crazy. But
then I saw how it all went together. I showed Archie and Cal too. And she knew of course. She knew we were on to her. We'd called the FBI. That's why she hanged herself. It was death or prison."

  I was bewildered. "I don't understand—"

  "The Nocturnal Conspiracy" Ada said softly.

  Trying to follow this woman's logic was like trying to watch an electron orbit a nucleus with the naked eye. "What's The Nocturnal Conspiracy?" "His next book. The one he was writing on George Gracey. That's what he was going to call it and it was going to be a bestseller. Smoke tracked him down, see. Last May. He found him on a fantasy island called Paxos, livin' high off the hog."

  She drew a shaky breath. "You don't know what it felt like, when the police called and told us our father, the one we'd just seen two days before at Chrysanthemum's baptism, was gone. Snatched from us. We hadn't heard the name Hannah Schneider in all our lives. At first, we thought she was the loud divorcée the Rider's Club had trouble nominatin' for treasurer, but that was Hannah Smithers. Then we think, maybe she was Gretchen Peterson's cousin who Dubs took to the Marquis Polo Fundraiser, but that's Lizzie Sheldon. So"—by this point, Ada had ripped out most of her punctuation, some of her pauses, too; her words stampeded into the receiver—"after two days of this, Cal takes a look at the picture I asked the police to get for us and what do you know? He says he remembers her talkin' to Dubs at the Handy Pantry way back in June, when they were coming back from Auto Show 4000—this is a month after Dubs got back from Paxos. So Cal says, yeah, Dubs went inside the Handy Pantry to get gum and this same woman shimmied up to him. Cal has a photographic memory. 'It was her,' he said. Tall. Dark hair. A face shaped like one of those Valentine chocolate boxes and Valentine's was Dubs' favorite holiday. She asked for directions to Charleston and I guess they stayed talkin' for so long, Cal had to get out of the car to go get him. And that was it. When we went through Dubs' things, we found her number in his address book. Phone records showed he called her at least once or twice a week. She knew how to play it, see. After my mother, there's never been anyone special—I-I still talk about him in the present. Archie says I have to stop that."