Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“I ran into one of your classmates when I was on a job last night. She dropped something valuable, but I don’t know her name.”

“What does she look like?”

“Long dark braid, kind of narrow face.”

Celine offered to take the found item with her to school and post a notice on their in-house WebBoard, but I told her the girl probably wouldn’t want the circumstances of her loss publicized. When I finished the seniors and moved on to the juniors, I saw my Juliet almost at once. Her eyes were serious despite the half smile the photographer had coaxed from her, and tendrils from her French braid were spiraling around her soft cheeks, as if she’d been too impatient to comb her hair just for a picture. Catherine Bayard, who loved Sarah McLachlan’s music, whose favorite sport was lacrosse and who hoped to be a journalist when she grew up. She probably would be: Bayard and publishing, the two words go together in Chicago like Capone and crime.

I didn’t linger on Catherine’s face-I didn’t want Celine alerting her at school the next day. Instead, I shrugged as if giving up the search as a bad job. Celine eyed me narrowly. Girls who work advanced calculus problems find adults like me tiresomely easy to solve. She knew I’d spotted someone, but maybe she couldn’t tell who it was.

Before giving the book back, I looked at the faculty section. The director was a woman named Wendy Milford, who had the strong expression principals put on to make you think their young charges don’t terrify them.

I asked Celine to point out her field hockey coach, and memorized the names of a math and history teacher. You never know.

I closed the book and handed it to her with money for my soup. Three dollars for two bowls-you wouldn’t find that in 923 or Mauve, or whatever trendy name you’d see on whatever bistro ultimately muscled La Llorona out of business.

I stopped in my office on my way home. Tessa had left for the day and the building was dark. It was also dankly cold. Tessa mainly wrestles large pieces of steel into towering constructions, work which makes her sweat enough to keep the furnace at sixty. I turned up my thermostat and sat bundled in my coat while I brought my system up.

Calvin Bayard, one of the heroes of my youth. I’d developed a huge crush on him when he addressed my Con Law class at the University of Chicago. With his magnetic smile, his easy command of First Amendment issues, his ready wit in answering hostile questions, he’d seemed in a different world than my professors.

After his lecture, I’d gone to the library to read his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had made me glow with pride. Illinois’s own Congressman Walker Bushnell, who’d been a leading member of the House Un-American Activities committee, had hounded Bayard for most of 1954 and 1955. But Bayard’s testimony made Bushnell sound like a small-minded voyeur. He had walked away from the hearings without ratting out his friends, and without facing prison time. And despite the fact that many of his writers were blacklisted, Bayard Publishing had grown throughout the fifties and sixties.

My law school had been a conservative place. A number of students had written angry letters to the dean about being subjected to one more liberal, but I’d been so enthusiastic I’d even applied for an internship at the Bayard Foundation on South Dearborn. I only got to see the great man twice that summer-in company with a few dozen other people. I hadn’t made the final cut for a permanent job, which hurt deeply at the time. I’d ended up with my third choice, the Public Defender’s office.

After all this time, I didn’t remember a lot of details about Bayard Publishing itself. I knew Calvin Bayard had been the person who moved it from a religious publishing house to doing secular books-the kind of books that got him in trouble with Congress. And there was some business about his supporting civil rights groups which HUAC perceived as Communist fronts. I pulled up Lexis-Nexis and scanned the company’s history. It had been founded by Calvin’s great-grandparents-evangelical Congregationalists who’d come west in the 1840s from Andover, Massachusetts, to start a Bible-and-tract publishing house.

Calvin had taken over the company in 1936, a boy wonder, twentythree years old. He’d published their first nonreligious novel in 1938, Tale of Two Countries by Armand Pelletier, who’d died in poverty in 1978, after years of blacklisting kept him out of print. That wasn’t in the Nexis report-it was just one of those things I remembered.

I counted on my fingers: Calvin Bayard must be around ninety now. If Catherine Bayard was part of that family, she would likely be a granddaughter.

I turned to Nexis’s personal search section. Calvin and Renee Genier Bayard had five addresses, including one on Coverdale Lane in New Solway. Of course. I’d read about Mrs. Edwards Bayard in the article about the gala opening of Larchmont Hall: she’d been the one with a mind above clothes. So last night Catherine had slipped through the woods between 17 Coverdale Lane and Larchmont Hall, and had k.iown exactly how to find her way back in the dark.

I copied down the address, and another one on Banks Street along Chicago’s Gold Coast. The family also maintained residences in London, New York and Hong Kong. I wrote those down, too, although if Catherine had fled that far, I couldn’t afford to go after her. The record included everyone who made their home at 17 Coverdale Lane. There seemed to be a staff of seven in residence. I added their names to my list and looked more closely at the Bayard family.

Renee was twenty-some years younger than Calvin. They’d married in 1957, right after his triumphal downing of Bushnell. They had one son, a man with three last names: Edwards Genier Bayard, born in fifty-eight, living in Washington.

I rubbed my sore eyes. Why was Edwards in D.C. while his daughter Catherine was here? And if Catherine had a mother, why wasn’t she in the file? The screen offered no answers. I returned to the company reports.

Bayard Publishing was still closely held. It didn’t approach the size of AOL Time Warner or Random House in the book world, but it wasn’t that far behind them either. Besides the publishing house that made up its core business, it held a thirty percent share in an online company, an audio label called “New Lion,” a bunch of magazines and a part interest in Drummond Paper.

I leaned forward, as if I could dive into the files in front of me. Drummond Paper had been started by Geraldine Graham’s grandfather. I guess it wasn’t surprising that the Bayards owned part of it-the neighbors up and down Coverdale Lane probably did little deals together all the time. While Mrs. Edwards Bayard attended the opening of Larchmont in her mauve bombazine, her husband probably discussed business with Mr. Matthew Graham in his “masculine sanctum,” as the 1903 society writer put it. It only made me uneasy because I kept finding places where the people from New Solway connected: Who knew whom? Who did what to or with whom?

I was closing the screen when I noticed Margent and Margent.Onlinethe magazine paying Morrell to hunt around Afghanistan for stories. I had a moment’s fantasy of calling Calvin Bayard: look after Morrell-in fact, bring Morrell home, and I won’t rat out your granddaughter. I shut my swollen eyes, the conversation and its aftermaths rolling through my imagination. Morrell home, in my arms-then never speaking to me again after he found out what I’d done.

I sat up and left Nexis to check my messages, including my log from the answering service. Among the litter of e-mails was one from Morrell. I put it aside to open last-dessert for doing my chores.

My phone message log took up two computer screens. I closed my eyes again, ready to turn my back on the whole caboodle, but, if I did that, the total would only be worse in the morning.