Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

Crosetti said, “My name’s Al. Look, Emmett, would you like to help me out with something?”

The boy hesitated, then nodded. Crosetti took an enhanced printout of Carolyn Rolly’s photograph from his back pocket, and unfolded it for the boy.

“Do you know who these women are?”

The boy studied the photograph, his eyes wide. “That’s my mom and my aunt Emily. She used to live with us but she died.”

“ This is your mother?” Crosetti asked with his finger on the younger Rolly.

“Uh-huh. She run off. He locked her in the cellar but she got out. She got out at night and in the morning she wasn’t there. Where did she go, mister?”

“I wish I knew, Emmett, I really do,” said Crosetti absently. His mind had been set whirling by the boy’s appearance and this confirmation of his guess, and his belly churned with tension. To his shame, what he was thinking of was the single night he had spent with Rolly and what she had done and what he imagined she had felt, and whether she had done the same for her husband, that brutal man, in the bedroom of this crummy little house. A powerful urge seized him, to get away from this place and also (although this would be more difficult) to vacate the place in his heart occupied by the person he knew as Carolyn Rolly. He was sorry for the children, stuck with this father, but there was nothing he could do about that. Another blot on Carolyn’s record.

He started to walk away and the boy called out to him, “Did you know her? My mom?”

“No,” said Crosetti, “not really.”

He got into his car and drove off. The boy ran forward a few steps, with the photograph flapping in his hands, and then stopped and was lost in the dust of the road.

Crosetti found a McDonald’s and had a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. He finished the junk and was about to order more but checked at the counter. He ate when he was upset, he knew, and if he didn’t watch it he was going to look like Orson Welles, without that person’s early achievement to balance out the flab. He tried to calm himself, an effort hampered by the fact that he’d somehow lost his MapQuest driving directions and made a couple of wrong turns on the way back.

When he was on the right interstate at last, he composed in his head the script of the film Carolyn Rolly ; not a bad title, and he could probably use it without a release because Mrs. Olerud had probably fabricated her name too. Okay: brutal childhood, use that, the girl-in-the-cellar angle, although maybe the uncle’s serial rape business was a little too X-rated. Let’s make Uncle Lloyd a religious fanatic who wanted to keep his niece from the corruption of the world. He dies or she escapes and there she is at seventeen, say, knowing nothing, having had zero contact with mass culture, a little homage to Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser there. There’s some local celebrity around the weird case, and let’s say the cop who found her falls in love with Carolyn, he falls for her purity, her innocence, and marries her, which she goes along with because she’s all alone, she knows nothing about how the world works, and they set up house. He’s a control freak, a cop after all, Crosetti knew guys like that on the cops, but she submits, and that’s the first act.

Then we show her life, she has the kids and then she starts taking them to the local library, where she meets the wise librarian and the librarian turns her on to art and culture and it lights her up, and then there’s a traveling exhibit of fine books that the librarian gets her to go to without her husband’s knowledge, maybe they go to Chicago (they would shoot it in Toronto, of course), and she realizes she wants to make books, she wants books all around her, but what can she do, she’s got two kids, she’s trapped, but she decides to apply for a bookbinding course by mail and her husband finds out and beats her up, and after that it gets worse and worse, and he locks her in the cellar just like her uncle did, and she escapes and that’s the second act. Then in the third act she goes to New York and…no, you couldn’t do that, the male lead has to come in earlier, you’d have to show the backstory in flashback, the humble clerk who maybe has a past of his own, he’s an ex-cop maybe, and they get together and fall in love and she disappears and…

Why does she disappear? Crosetti didn’t know, and he found he could not generate a fictional reason that would hold water either. Was she kidnapped? No, too melodramatic. Did she see an opportunity to get enough money so that she could get the kids away from the bad dad? That made more sense. She’d run off with Bulstrode in pursuit of the Shakespeare manuscript. There was a clue in the Bracegirdle letter, Bulstrode had found it, and they were off to England to where X marked the spot. Hundreds of millions, Fanny had said. That had to be it, and the next thing was for the hero to work out the clue himself and find where they’d gone and confront them there in England, you could fake that in Canada too, right, and there’d have to be a subplot, someone else looking for it, and the cruel dad cop also in there somewhere and they’d all come together in the old castle, in the dark, grabbing the briefcase with the manuscript in it away from one another, with plenty of business about false briefcases, a little reference to the Maltese Falcon , of course, and the only last-act problem would be the hero and Rolly, would he save her, would she save him, would they get out with the treasure, or would it be lost? Or maybe the cruel dad would get killed and she’d give up the treasure to be with the hero and the kids…

He didn’t know how he’d end it, but the more he thought about it, about the intersection between fiction and the real, the more he thought that he had to get some advantage over Bulstrode, the Shakespeare expert, and the best way to do that was to crack the cipher, because with all his expertise, that was one thing Bulstrode did not have. So besides having to learn a lot more about Shakespeare, he had to decipher and read Bracegirdle’s spy letters. Such were Crosetti’s thoughts during the long drive back to the city, peppered by the usual fantasies: he confronts the angry husband, they fight, Crosetti wins; he finds Carolyn again, he acts wry, cool, sophisticated, he has understood all her plottings and forgives; he earns a fortune via the manuscript and explodes upon the cinematic world with a film that owes nothing to commercial demands yet touches the hearts of audiences everywhere, obviating the necessity for a long apprenticeship, cheap student films, playing gofer to some Hollywood asshole…

He arrived back in Queens at around eight on Saturday evening, fell immediately into bed, slept for twelve hours straight, and awoke vibrating with more energy than he’d felt in a long time and frustrated because it was Sunday and he would have to wait before getting started. He went to mass with his mother therefore, which pleased her a good deal, and afterward she made him a colossal breakfast, which he consumed with gratitude, thinking of the scrawny kids in that house and being frankly grateful for his family, although he knew it was totally uncool to have such thoughts. While he ate he told his mother something of what he had learned.

“So it was all lies,” she observed.

“Not necessarily,” said Crosetti, who was still a little entranced with the fictional version he had concocted. “She was obviously on the lam from a bad situation. Parts of it could have been true. She changed the location and some of the details, but this guy actually locked her in a cellar, according to the kid. She could have been abused as a child and fallen into an abusive situation.”

“But she’s married, which she didn’t bother to mention, and she ran out on her kids. I’m sorry, Allie, but that doesn’t speak well for her. She could have gone to the authorities.”