Джон Краули - New Haven Noir

“I’m sorry, but that file is unavailable,” she said.

I felt a little frisson at the word, as though I’d touched an electric wire. “Unavailable?” I said. “Because it’s restricted, or because someone else is using it?”

“Someone else is using it,” she said.

I nodded and asked for another file.

Later that afternoon I was in the ladies’ room, inside a stall, when I heard the big outer door swish open. Someone came inside and began using a cell phone.

“It’s me,” she said, her voice casual and intimate. “Just checking in.” I’d never heard her voice but I recognized it at once.

There was a pause.

“No, I’m here,” said the Wolverine. “I’ve just found some amazing stuff.” She said amazing as if it were edible.

Another pause.

“I know you do,” she said. “But it’s not like that. It’s just amazing.” Then her voice turned guarded: “I can’t talk here. I’ll tell you tonight.”

The days were getting shorter, and it was dark now when I walked back through the streets to the car. I used different lots, but wherever I parked it seemed that I had to pass one of those forbidding secret societies with their closed, enigmatic facades. On High Street I saw what looked like a rose-brown stone tomb, two small but massive buildings linked by a tall doorway. There was no sign there, and no street number, no information, no words. It was utterly closed to the world. Every time I passed by, it reminded me that there were secrets I couldn’t learn.

What were those secrets? What had the Wolverine found out?

I drove up to the town of Cornwall, which is a tiny, sleepy village up in the northwestern hills. Its claim to fame is a wooden bridge, which doesn’t really make it famous. I went to the town hall, the historical society, the library, and the only restaurant in town, The Wandering Moose. The Moose knew nothing about her, and the historical society was closed, but at the town hall I learned that the Ricks family had bought their house in the twenties, around the time Alison was born. At the library a gray-haired woman wearing blue-rimmed glasses told me where to find the place.

“No one’s left in that family,” she said. “She was an only child. Her parents died years ago. They were summer people, not locals. The house is closed up now. I don’t know who owns it. She came back for a while in the summers, during the sixties and seventies, but when she moved to London she stopped.”

“And was she popular here?” I asked. “Did people like her? Did you know her?”

The woman looked at me. “People liked her,” she said, shutting her mouth like a purse with a snap. She’d been friendly before, but now something had changed.

“Did you know her?” I repeated.

The woman nodded frugally.

“After she left?”

The woman said, “I went to see her in London once.”

But that’s all she would say. She shook her head at all my other questions.

“Closing time,” she told me finally.

I drove out to see the house, up a long open hill with hayfields on either side. It was a white farmhouse, set on the edge of a stone retaining wall. I got out and walked around, but it was closed and locked. The shutters were crooked, and the lawn was tall grass. I looked out over the view that Alison Ricks had grown up with and wondered why she hadn’t come back. What had happened in London?

I was working my way through the letters. I’d finished with Naples, and moved to New York. The letters between her and Coleman had stopped because they were then living in the same city. She wrote to another friend from college, though, and there were some letters to her editor. They were fun to read. Ricks was smart and engaging. She seemed to be part of a big group of friends that did everything together. She talked about what she did and who she saw, but she said nothing about her love life, which was a little odd for a lively woman in her twenties. I wondered if she were gay, and concealing it.

I’d already begun writing the book at night, and by Christmas I’d done the first few chapters. They weren’t genius — they certainly weren’t Alison Ricks — but they weren’t bad. I sent them to Jake and he called.

“They’re good,” he said, “I like them.” I had the feeling he hadn’t actually read them.

“What do you hear about Wareham?” I asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said, which reminded me that at any moment he might find that her book was about to come out. “Have you made any discoveries? Any secrets?”

“There’s some great correspondence,” I said. “She writes a great letter.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “That’ll win you the Pulitzer.”

“I think she might have been gay,” I said.

Jake sighed. “Not a shocker. Would have been a shocker in the sixties, but not now.”

“I know. But there’s something going on.” I told him about Wareham walking into the staff room. And searching through the files online I’d found there was some material that was restricted, not to be seen until twenty-five years after her death. It was only referred to by file numbers: Alison Ricks, Files X–XIV were not available.

“I don’t know how she gets into that room,” I said. “They don’t give me any hint of it.”

“Maybe she got special access through her editor,” Jake said. “Didn’t he go to Yale?” He thinks everything is determined by where you went to college. He’s sort of right, but not the way he thinks.

“That wouldn’t do it,” I said. “It would be some other way. I think she’s been buttering someone up, but who? Some big donor, maybe.”

“Ask the staff,” Jake said. “Butter them up.” Then he changed the subject: “I did hear something about London.”

“What?”

“Some rumor about the woman she lived with.”

“What woman?”

“That’s all I know,” he said. I could hear him shrug.

The next day the Wolverine was at her desk again. She sat hunched down over her laptop as if she were about to pick it apart and eat it. She was wearing her rodent expression, squinting at the letters, ticking at her computer. Which ones was she looking at? And what had she been doing with that young man heading for the staff room?

I was buddies by now with Chelsea, and one day I asked her about the forbidden files.

She nodded pleasantly. “That’s right. Not available.”

“Is there any chance of just seeing them?” I asked. “Not taking notes, just reading them?”

Chelsea shook her head. “Absolutely not. They aren’t even kept with the other files, so they can never be taken out by accident.”

I raised my eyebrows. “By accident! Does that ever happen?”

“It has,” she said, frowning. “It won’t with these. They’re kept in the staff office.”

I nodded.

“But I’ve seen other researchers go into that room,” I said.

“Not to look at the files,” Chelsea told me. “It would be for some administrative thing. Like checking the chronology of the listings.”

“Could I do that?” I asked. “Check the chronology?” I had no idea what that meant, which was so obvious that Chelsea didn’t answer, only frowned and shook her head.

What was in the sealed files? I tried to deduce the content from their place among the rest, but there didn’t seem to be a chronological gap.

At lunchtime each day the Wolverine would fold up her laptop and speed off, as though she were meeting someone. Of course we didn’t speak to each other in the research room, where the only sound was the quiet clack of keyboards, and we also didn’t speak to each other anywhere else. When we met in the hall we nodded as we passed.

One day she was there with another woman. This one was also short, but blond, with that slick streaked-hair-gold-earrings-fuck-you look, like she’s too good to bother letting you cross her retina. The two of them sat side by side at the table. The Wolverine was showing her things, and talking quietly. The next day the new woman appeared alone. I saw her at lunchtime, walking up and down outside, talking on her cell phone, and I realized, with a horrid thrill, that she was a hired assistant. I wondered again how much the Wolverine had gotten for an advance.