Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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 to the 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.”

There 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. “ Any thing?”

“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 in vest igative jour nalist,” 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?”