by Sara Davis
“Oh,” I said. “No, thank you. I’m not interested.”
The caller did not respond, and I thought to myself that I should hang up immediately, but some misplaced sense of decorum made me stay on the line, waiting.
“Hang on,” said the caller. “I’m not selling anything. Don’t you recognize my voice?”
And strangely enough, I did. Or I thought I did. I had not had that sense to begin with, but now that she mentioned it, on second thought, yes, there was something familiar about her voice.
“I do,” I said. My mind, still half asleep, was having difficulty putting everything in the correct order. Without my glasses, the view from the window was a blurred grayish green.
“I do recognize your voice, somehow, and yet I’m having some trouble placing you … Who is this?”
“Who I am is not important,” she said. “I have some information you need.”
For a second I had been fooled into thinking the voice sounded familiar, but in the end it was just a telemarketer, employing a needlessly complicated scheme aimed at confusing people who were not yet fully awake.
“No, thank you,” I said. “There isn’t any information I need.”
Again I thought, why not just hang up now, and be done with it? But this was an ability I did not have. And never would have, come to think of it. I was not assertive. Surely the Swedish detective in my novel, for all his faults, would have hung up the phone long ago.
“Are you sure about that?” said the woman mildly. Really, I thought, these people were unbelievably dogged. Then she said, “It’s about your father.”
I must have misheard, was my first thought. When you have a hammer, I thought, everything looks like a nail. And yet when I spoke again I felt a dryness in my throat that had not been there before.
“I’m sorry,” I was finally able to say, swallowing for moisture. “What did you say?”
“You heard me correctly,” said the woman. “Meet me in the Arboretum at noon today and I will give you the information you need.”
“In the Arboretum…” I trailed off. “But how will I recognize you?”
If I’d had to guess merely from her voice I would have said my caller was anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age, and American—there could be dozens of women meeting that description in the Arboretum at any given time.
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t worry about that.”
There was the shadow of a chuckle in her voice. “You’ll recognize me. We’ve met before.”
13
It was not accurate, I saw at once, when at five minutes before noon I crossed the road and entered the Arboretum, to say that there could have been dozens of American women from thirty to fifty years of age there at any given time. As far as I could see, there were no women in the grove of trees except one, and she was watching over a group of school-age children who were hitting the ground with sticks at the base of a low-spreading oak. This woman did not seem right at all: she was too young, she was dressed in hiking clothing, accompanied by a male counterpart, and did not so much as glance in my direction as I passed by. She was not my mysterious caller, I was sure of it. And not only were there no other women in the Arboretum, there was no one else of any gender in my line of sight.
And yet, I thought, as I surveyed the horizon line of mature trees against the blue sky, it was true that the nature of a grove of trees is such that it is not really possible to see all its angles at once. I would walk around for a while, I decided, before abandoning the enterprise altogether, and for the second time that day I thought of the Swedish policeman in the novel I was reading, and how he might have handled the situation. It seemed unlikely that he would have found himself in exactly this predicament, I thought, as I set off on a dirt path that curved away from campus. I could not pinpoint exactly how, though I had the general sense that he would have found it undignified to traipse around the Arboretum in search of an anonymous female caller. The weather, for one thing, I thought a moment later, as I felt the back of my neck grow moist with perspiration, was all wrong. The Swedish detective, who was perpetually strapping on his overcoat, whose car thermometer was routinely dropping five, now ten, now fifteen degrees below zero—surely he would have been at a loss here, under these preternaturally blue skies, in this balmy breeze, on which wafted the slightly mentholated fragrance of eucalyptus.
A fat, speckled squirrel was watching me from a drainage ditch. It was a little surprising, I thought, as I stopped to return his beady stare, that I had never been compelled to walk in the Arboretum before. Really, it was very pleasant. Beside me a stand of green foxtails waved ever so slightly, and in the distance there was a shallow pond from the depths of which tall grasses emerged like the heads of spears. And there—I stopped. Because next to the shallow pond was a bench, and on the bench was, I was almost certain, the woman who had telephoned me early that morning, purporting to have news of my father. She seemed to be, as I had suspected, Caucasian and middle-aged, and beyond that I could not say anything more, because she was sitting with her back to me and wearing a wide-brimmed, cream-colored hat that completely obscured the back of her head.
Or, I thought, as I quickly covered the distance between the path and the bench, it was not news of my father that she’d claimed to have, exactly, but—what were the words she’d used?—information I needed about him.
“Excuse me,” I said, as I approached the bench. There was a slightly hysterical note in my voice, I noticed at once with some displeasure. I did my best to tamp it down.
“Excuse me,” I said again, in a lower register. I wiped a sudden moisture from my palms on the legs of my pants.
Just when I thought that the woman seemed strangely immobile, like she hadn’t heard me at all, I saw her right hand dart out and pat the bench beside her.
“Come and sit down,” I heard her say. It was the same voice I’d heard on the telephone that day: slow, calm, and now uncannily disembodied behind that large white hat. Gingerly, I walked around the side of the bench and sat down beside her. For no particular reason I kept my eyes staring straight ahead, as though I were seating myself next to a large and dangerous animal unfond of eye contact. I saw before me the little pond, and the dirt path beyond it. A very old eucalyptus was directly in our view, its bark peeling off in long strips.
I became aware that the woman beside me on the bench was wearing perfume, and in the same moment I knew that it was not the first time that I had smelled this particular perfume. I turned to look at her—and a curious sensation passed through my body, as though all the blood in my veins had been momentarily replaced with ice water, and then just as quickly restored.
Sitting beside me on the bench was the guest lecturer. The very same guest lecturer whom I’d accompanied to the Old Mission Hotel on Thursday of the previous week. The lavender suit jacket was gone now, and in its place was a cream-colored linen suit. On her feet, she was wearing a pair of sandals that appeared to be made of straw.
“You see?” she said. “I told you you’d recognize me.”
“Yes,” I said.
A silence passed in which she seemed to be waiting for me to speak. “I’m sorry,” I said eventually. “I’m not sure I understand.”
The guest lecturer smiled indifferently and gave her hat a slight adjustment. Evidently, if she planned to explain anything, she was not prepared to do it yet.
“I was under the impression that your flight home was on Friday evening.”
It was not what I had wanted to say at all, it missed the point entirely, and yet, it did not seem to matter very much in the end, because the guest lecturer showed no signs that she was going to answer. Instead, she merely sat and regarded me with a slightly smug expression.
It occurred to me just then that it might be helpful to remember what the guest lecturer’s real name was, although now, conveniently, any inkling of it had completely vanished from my mind. I had known it at one point, I was sure of that. Carol? I thought. Alicia?
“But that name is not important now,” she went on.
I swallowed, and nodded.
“Listen,” said the guest lecturer, with an air that suggested that the preliminary portion of the conversation was now coming to a close. “I’m here to help you.”
I nodded again.
“But I don’t have very much time. You’re going to have to listen very carefully to what I have to say. Can you do that?”
I had the fleeting thought that this guest lecturer, although physically identical to the one I’d met before, had an entirely different manner.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.”
“Good,” she said. She adjusted the crease of her linen pants.
“I understand,” she said, “that you are in the midst of an investigation into your father’s death.”
I nodded, temporarily unable to speak. To hear one’s secret projects spoken aloud by someone else—I was deeply moved. But there was no time to think of that now, because the guest lecturer had already begun to speak again.
“That’s good,” she said. “It’s admirable.”
She went on: “It has come to my attention that you attempted to make inquiries at the Old Mission Hotel, concerning whether or not your father had been a guest there.”
She turned to look at me with her eyebrows raised.
“That’s right,” I said hoarsely.
“That was also good,” she said. “You’re on the right track.”
I heard myself whisper faintly, “On the right track?”
“Yes,” said the guest lecturer. “But here’s the thing,” she said, and her voice took on a new, more serious note. “That isn’t the right name.”
“Not the right name?” I repeated. I was having trouble keeping everything straight.
“No,” said the guest lecturer, and now she was the picture of seriousness. “You need to ask about a different name.”
I swallowed.
“Are you saying,” I said, feeling a little feverish, “that my father stayed at the hotel under an alias?”
It had not occurred to me, and yet it was so simple. Of course, when people want to cover their tracks, they use false names.
The guest lecturer gave me a withering look. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
At this juncture in the meeting she lifted her wrist to look at a small silver watch—had she worn it the night we’d met? It did not look familiar—and frowned.
I wanted to tell her to wait, that I didn’t yet understand what she was saying, but before I could do so I was interrupted by the sight of something that struck me as odd.
From her left wrist to her left elbow stretched a long, thin scar—when she’d raised her arm to look at her watch, the sleeve of her jacket had fallen down, exposing it. This was no trick of the light; I could see the seam of tissue clearly, a slightly raised, shiny white scar.
“This is the information you need,” said the guest lecturer, interrupting my thoughts. She produced a folded piece of notepaper, which she held out for me to take. This particular size and shape of notepaper were at this point very familiar to me.
The questions I had—how did she come by that scar? what was her interest in my investigation?—began to tumble into one another; I had so many that in the end they seemed to cancel each other out. I noticed that sitting on the bench on the other side of the guest lecturer was a handbag made of the same straw-like material as her shoes.
I looked down at the folded piece of paper in my hand.
“Will I see you again?” I said, and then I thought, Well, that strikes the wrong tone, how needlessly romantic and strained.
The guest lecturer thought a moment, her head cocked to one side. She gave me a long, appraising look that seemed to end in disappointment.
“Yes,” she said finally. “I expect you will.”
I did my best to look pleased.
“It’s possible,” she went on, “that you might be able to accomplish everything on your own, but…” She shrugged slowly. “My guess is that yes, we will meet again.”
I nodded. I had, of course, not the faintest idea what she was talking about.
With that the guest lecturer brushed off the legs of her pants, picked up her straw handbag, and stood up from the bench, steadying her hat with one hand as she rose. The sharp vertical creases that had been ironed into each of her pant legs fell into place, like the prows of two identical ships.
“Wait,” I said, with a sudden flash of inspiration. “Do you know who MC is? MC, Saturday, ten a.m.?”
The guest lecturer looked down at me, a stern expression on her face.
“It’s not a person,” she said. “It’s a place.”
She seemed to be on the verge of leaving.
“Wait,” I said again. “Can you tell me anything else?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
I nodded dumbly.
“Well,” she said. “It’s been a pleasure.” Her tone suggested that the opposite was true. “Now you’ll have to excuse me.”
I would have liked to turn and watch her go—how had she arrived? was one question I had. On foot? By car? But to do so seemed somehow unbecoming, so instead I kept my eyes trained on the shallow pond in front of me, and I listened for the brisk crunch of each footstep on the path until I heard them no more. Cautiously, I turned my head. She was gone.
14
I walked back to my office, tracing a roughly diagonal line across campus. By the time I’d reached the front door of my building I was incredibly thirsty and could feel a scrim of dried perspiration on the back of my neck. I had already, of course, read what was written on the piece of folded paper that the guest lecturer had given me—it was the first thing I had done while still sitting on the bench, following her departure.
My suspicion had been correct—it was a piece of stationery from the Old Mission Hotel. That, in and of itself, however, was unremarkable, I told myself, because that was where the guest lecturer had stayed; I’d seen her in her hotel room with my own eyes! No doubt the explanation was simply that it had been the most convenient piece of notepaper at her disposal. I shook my head. The fact that the guest lecturer had written her note to me on the hotel stationery with which I’d recently become so intimately familiar was the least remarkable development in the whole series of recent events.
Considerably less remarkable, for example, than the scar on her arm. It had not escaped my notice that it was a scar the shape and orientation of which I had seen before, on the real estate agent’s arm at my father’s open house. A coincidence, surely, but what were the odds? A connection between the two women seemed unlikely at best.
Then I came to what was written on the piece of paper—a name, just as she’d promised: Daniel Shriver—a name with absolutely no significance for me. Nor, to my knowledge, was it connected in any way to my father. Though it was true that I was far from having a complete list of his contacts. And when people used aliases to check into hotel rooms (something I had no experience with myself) did they necessarily use names of personal significance? Surely sometimes it was more convenient to invent one out of thin air, or to pluck one at random from a newspaper or a film. Daniel Shriver—it could be someone, or no one at all.
I took the elevator up to the second floor and went to the break room for a glass of water, then sat down at the round plastic table to catch my breath. Someone had left a red-and-yellow box of candy on the table, and absentmindedly I pulled it toward me. A note taped to the lid of the box read simply, Enjoy! —PP. My whirring thoughts stuttered and went still. PP, I thought. Professor Pindar. So he was back, I thought unhappily. I had pushed the box away from me and now I brought it close again, because I wanted to give i
t another look. Dulce de Tamarindo, it said in big yellow letters. I opened the box—inside it was filled with petite red sugar-covered patties, each in its own frilly paper cup.
Of course, I thought, he has been in Mexico on vacation, and this is evidently some kind of local food he has retrieved. Nothing to be concerned about, I told myself. My mind flitted unhelpfully to the events of the other night, and I realized I would have to be more specific with myself, because so many of my nights had recently been notable—I tightened my grip here on my train of thought—the night I meant was Thursday night—the night of the dinner with the guest lecturer, and with my colleagues.
But, I told myself, and I could feel my pulse quickening, there was nothing wrong with driving an intoxicated woman to her hotel, and what was more, it was not so remarkable that anyone would feel the need to mention it to Professor Pindar. I took a swallow of water, although it seemed to have no effect on my suddenly parched throat. Well, well, I thought, grimacing, perhaps the lady doth protest too much.
15
The sun was sparkling on the reservoir as I drove home over the bridge, all the while pretending in my mind a cordial conversation. Yes, hello, this is—I pulled the piece of paper from my pocket and spread it flat against the steering wheel—Daniel Shriver. Yes, hello, this is Daniel Shriver; I’m calling about a bag I may have left in your hotel. I’m afraid I can’t say for certain, sometime in the last six months or so; I travel frequently.
My mind skipped several steps ahead. This conversation—the actual future one, not the imagined one I was having in the privacy of my own vehicle—seemed suddenly pressing; who knew how long this facility with words would last? I had a vision of myself pulling over at the gas station to use the pay phone, because this was an investigation, I was sure of it. No minute wasted, no stone unturned. All my life I had hung back, stewing ineffectually, and here, finally, was my chance to act.
Now I had come to the end of the water and up through the thicket of pines on the ridge. The sunlight, filtered through their tall canopy, took on a sickly, greenish cast. Suddenly and unaccountably I was deflated; a gust of despair moved through me. Did anything I had just thought or said make any sense at all?