Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

As planned, she presented the nice breakfast, her son shuffled up to the table, sipped some fresh orange juice, took a few forkfuls of French toast, and announced that thanks but he wasn’t really very hungry, at which point Mary Peg banged a teaspoon against a glass in a good imitation of a fire alarm. He jerked and stared.

“Okay, spill it, Buster!” she said, fixing him with her eyes, these being the color of gas flame and, just now, about as hot.

“What?”

“What, he says. You’ve been doing a scene from The Night of the Living Dead for nearly two weeks. You didn’t think I noticed? You’re a wreck.”

“It’s nothing, Ma…”

“It’s something. It’s that girl, what’s-her-name, Carol.”

“Carolyn.” Followed by a great sigh.

“Her. Now, you know I never pry into the personal lives of my children…”

“Ha.”

“Don’t be fresh, Albert!” And in a milder tone, “Seriously, I’m starting to worry about you. You’ve broken up with girls before but you never acted all weird like this.”

“It’s not a breakup, Ma. It’s not…I don’t know what it is. That’s the problem. I mean basically we had one date, very nice, but then she…I guess she sort of vanished.”

Mary Peg sipped coffee and waited, and in a few minutes the whole confused story came out, the convoluted tale of Rolly, and the manuscript, and Bulstrode. Her husband had described any number of interrogations to her, for he was not among the majority of police detectives who thought their spouses too tender to listen to cop stories; nor was she. This was how it was done, she knew, a sympathetic ear, an encouraging word. She was disturbed to learn that her son had abetted what an unsympathetic person might regard as a felony, nor did she like anything of what she heard about Ms. Rolly. But she declined comment; and now her son arrived at the period subsequent to their first date: he had not of course filled in the moister details, but she had the experience and imagination to provide these herself.

“Well, like I said, we had a nice time and I was feeling pretty good. I went to work the next day expecting to find her in the shop, but she wasn’t there. I asked Glaser and he said she’d called and said she had to go out of town for a couple of days. I thought that was a little peculiar, I mean I thought we had something going, that she would’ve called me , but like I said, she was a strange bird. So I was, you know, cool about it. Anyway, the day comes when she’s supposed to come back and no Carolyn. Mr. Glaser calls her-the phone’s disconnected, so now we’re a little freaked and I told him I’d go by after work and see what was up. And when I got to her street there was a big dump truck parked outside and a wrecking crew was all over her building. They were just finishing up for the day, but I could see they had set up one of those chutes that wreckers use to slide debris and stuff down to the Dumpster and it was stuck in her window on the top floor. I talked to the crew chief and he didn’t know anything. He’d gotten a call from the building management that they needed a rush job, the building had to be gutted down to the brick shell and made ready for renovation. I got the name of the management company from him but he wouldn’t let me go into the building. Like I told you, Carolyn had built all this furniture out of pallet boards, beautiful work, and there it was, all smashed up, her worktable and everything. It was like seeing her corpse.”

Crosetti seemed to shiver. He pushed French toast around with his fork.

“In any case, I couldn’t do anything there, and I was, like, totally stunned. I started to walk away and I noticed that the street and the sidewalk were strewn with scraps of paper. It was a windy day and I guess some of the lighter stuff had blown off the truck, or the wind had picked it up between the chute and the pile of trash in the truck. So like an idiot I went down the street bent over picking up stuff, thinking to myself, Oh, she’ll want this, this photograph, this postcard, whatever; stupid really, because she would’ve taken whatever she wanted.”

He took out his wallet and showed her a folded postcard, a folded photograph.

“Pathetic, right? Carrying this stuff around? It’s like magical thinking, if I hold on to something of hers, there’s still a connection, she hasn’t totally vanished…” He placed the items back in his wallet and looked so forlorn that Mary Peg had to control an atavistic urge to take him on her lap and kiss his brow. Instead she said, “What about these famous volumes? You think she took those?”

“I hope so. I didn’t see them. For all I know they were at the bottom of the truck. That’d be ironic, like the gold dust in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre .”

That last made Mary Peg feel a little better; if he was making movie references, he couldn’t be that far gone. She said, “You called the building manager, of course.”

“Of course. I even went up to their offices. Able Real Estate Management, up near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. A receptionist who knew zip and a boss who was never in. When I finally got him on the phone, he said he didn’t know any Carolyn Rolly, and that the top floor had never been rented out as a residence, that it wasn’t certified for human occupancy in any case, which was why they were gutting the building. I asked him who owned the building and he said that was confidential. A consortium, he said. Then I called Professor Bulstrode, and the departmental secretary said he’d left for England the previous day and they weren’t sure when he’d be back. Visiting professors were more or less free to go where they pleased when they had no classes to meet and he didn’t. It was the summer. She wouldn’t give me his number in Oxford.”

He gave her a look so bleak that it zapped a little shock of pain through her heart. “I don’t know what to do, Ma. I think something happened to her. And somehow I think it’s my fault.”

“Well, that’s just nonsense. The only thing you did wrong was to go along with this scheme of hers. Look, I know you were fond of this girl, but why isn’t it likely that she simply absconded with her ill-gotten gains?”

“Ill-gotten gains? Ma, it’s not like she knocked over a liquor store. She was a bookbinder. She was fixing a beautiful set of books that their owner had given up for scrap. Glaser wouldn’t suffer a penny of loss-he only wanted the money he would’ve gotten from the sale of the prints…”

“Which he didn’t get, don’t forget.”

“Hey I’m not making excuses, but if she was a crook, she was a certain kind of crook. There was stuff she wouldn’t do, and bugging out like this and not giving Glaser what he had coming were in that zone. I mean, she was in the middle of a project that she really wanted to do, and…you didn’t see her place, but she’d created this whole little world in this crummy loft in Red Hook, I mean she’d built it with her own hands, it was her work space, and work was all she had. She never would’ve just ditched it.”

“I don’t know, darling: she seems like a very unpredictable young woman and almost…can I say ‘unstable’? I mean according to her she’s been horribly abused. And you said she was some kind of fugitive-maybe that caught up with her? You’re shaking your head.”

“No, and I’m not sure about the fugitive part either. I did a massive search on the Internet. You’d think an incident like a guy named Lloyd keeping a girl named Carolyn Rolly locked up for ten years as a sex toy would have generated some hits, but I came up blank. I called the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Wichita Eagle a couple of other Kansas papers, and got zilch: nobody had ever heard of the case. Okay, she could’ve changed her name but still…so I called Patty.”