A Fugitive Truth (18 page)

I pushed on recklessly. “What kind of history?”

“We just knew each other, conferences and such. The random contacts of our mutual field, poor bastard. You can’t tell me you don’t know how small the academic world is—you meet someone by chance, and they seem to pop back into your life for real shortly after that.” Michael was clearly getting impatient. “But what do you care? What are you, the emotional hall monitor?”

“No. And for the record, I’m not a ghoul either,” I said. “It’s just something I do. An extension of my work. It only seems fair, that’s all; someone ought to care, want to get at the truth. But whatever the reason I feel compelled to…peer and poke, at least I feel like I’m doing something useful. And that helps.”

Michael sat up and tossed the soggy, limp plastic bag in the sink. “I suppose that’s better than some avenging angel complex, but it doesn’t comfort me much.”

I slammed my glass down. “Then why don’t you leave?”

“Gots to pay the bills, sweetheart. There’s the eternal and various spousals to support and last time I checked, food and books cost money. Here, they’ll feed me and let me at the books for a whole six weeks. It’s the closest thing to patronage this side of the Renaissance, and it’s keeping me out of the cold and wet until my next stop in New Haven.”

I took a sip of my whiskey. “Sabbatical year?”

He laughed hollowly. “I’m supposed to be regenerating, reinvigorating myself, but it’s really just a peripatetic prison sentence with half pay. I’ve got three more lined up between now and August, and then it’s back to the salt mines and the full pittance.”

“Oh?”

“Just got done at Philadelphia, next New Haven, then Berkeley.”

“Oh.” Something about Philadelphia rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why it seemed significant.

“So I haven’t really got a choice,” Michael explained loftily. He was definitely one of those jerks who got off on complaining about being broke and an academic, like it ennobled him somehow. “What’s your excuse? Why don’t you leave?”

“I can’t. I’m…I’m helping Detective Kobrinski.”

A wet, rude noise came from the other side of the table. “Yeah, right. I’ll try again. Why not leave?”

“I…I can’t.” I shrugged helplessly. “The diary, Margaret—”

He gave a short humorless laugh and swung himself up from his reclined position. “I see. Well, it looks like we’re both stuck here, whatever the result. It would be nice if we’re both alive at the end of it all.”

“Michael, cut the attitude, would you?” I put my glass in the sink, trying not to let him get my goat, but it had already been got.

“It might be attitude, but it’s mine and it’s honest.” He got up, took the soggy bag from the sink, and slammed it into the wastebasket. The violence of his gesture startled me.

“I think things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better,” he said, “and frankly, I’m going to be keeping my head down. I suggest you do the same. ’Night, ’night, Auntie. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“Holy shit!” Late the next morning in the library I read the paragraph a third time to make certain I hadn’t made a mistake. I hadn’t. “Holy—”

“What is it?” Sasha came over to my carrel. “Are you okay, Emma?”

“I’m fine, but Madam Chandler sure isn’t!” I gestured to the diary. “Sasha, you have to read this! When I came in this morning, I found that the rest of the diary was in code from where I left off. I didn’t even bother trying to transcribe it all, just skipped to the next bit of English. This is the last entry and it’s a lulu!”

Sasha leaned over and read out loud while I paced back and forth behind her, practically reciting along with her, the words had so seared themselves into my memory:

She looked up in shock. “But we know that she lived until much later than this date, 1723. We
know
she didn’t die the next day!”

“Right, but we don’t know how she escaped being hanged!” I said excitedly. “It’s like missing the climax of a serial, where you’ve left off with the heroine hanging off a cliff, and the next time you see it, she’s fine, but you don’t know how she got out of that impossible situation.” I got up and paced three steps. “Damn! How soon will those letters be done?”

“They’re being dried now, I can have them for you tomorrow. But the trial transcript in the records should be here today.” She checked her watch. “Any minute, in fact, if the librarian at Amherst sent the book out last night. I’ll go check the mailroom for you.”

“Thanks! I don’t think I can stand not knowing a minute longer.”

“What you really need is to crack that code,” Sasha pointed out. “Have you tried that yet?”

“I’ve been too afraid to try,” I admitted. “I haven’t the faintest idea of where to start. I’m no cryptographer.”

“Well, Margaret Chandler probably wasn’t a cryptographer on top of everything else,” Sasha said reasonably. “It can’t have been too hard, just enough to keep the maid from peeking, I suppose.”

I looked at her in amazement. “You’re absolutely right, Sasha. And if I can’t figure it out, I’ll find someone who can.”

“This is so exciting!” Sasha exclaimed. “This is
just
what it’s all about! There’s never any money, there’s never enough resources, but every once in a while, this service, this slaving away really pays off!” Her eyes were shining with a thrill I hadn’t seen in her before.

I cocked my head. “Service?”

“You know, Emma, I’m sure you do.” Sasha poked me in the arm playfully. “It’s like religious orders, isn’t it? It must be the same for you? Oh, I sound like a nut!”

I shook my head. “No, you’re right, you just use a different word. I think of it as vocation, but it really is the same thing.”

She continued. “There are days when you wonder, why do these wretched, old tatters of paper run my life? It’s just leftover scraps from vanished lives, right? And they seem to control your every waking thought, all of your movements, even how you breathe, sometimes, with the fragile stuff. Your whole life. But then something comes along, a clue or sometimes even the solution to a puzzle, and it sets you on fire!”

I looked at Sasha, never realizing that kind of passion was hidden inside her. It’s just a fluke, a flaw, maybe a wish of this society that trains us to believe that the pretty people must also be shallow. “The next thing we have to do is try to locate other volumes of the diary, if they exist. What’s the first step?” Then I caught myself. “I’m sorry, I’m acting like you’re just here to help me.”

But I needn’t have worried. Sasha turned a blinding smile on me. “Oh, don’t be silly. That’s exactly why I’m here. And this is one of the good days! Aside from poor Dr. Miner, that is—but, you know, he just wasn’t doing too well, was he? His drinking and all. It was bound to catch up with him, wasn’t it?”

As per Detective Kobrinski’s request, Jack’s death was being treated as an accident. I still thought Sasha was taking it remarkably casually.

She continued, nearly prattling. “And these things always happen in threes, don’t they?”

I must have shown a little surprise, because she backtracked hastily. “I’m sorry, that’s really more with movie stars, isn’t it? Famous people seem to die in batches of three. I guess it’s taking a while to hit me, that’s all. Look, I’ll run to check whether the mail’s come in, then we can start checking out other possible repositories for the other volumes, if they’ve survived. You have a look at that code!” She did a little bob, dancing, trying to restrain her excitement. “So exciting!” she practically squealed and left me alone in the room.

I looked at the diary again, although I had looked at it a thousand times already, trying to find some clue as to the code. I looked at the first line of the code that was present and tried a simple substitution, 1 for A, et cetera. When that didn’t work, I reversed the alphabet instead, but that made an even worse mess than before.

Then I thought about trying the old method of working backward from the small words,
the
,
it
, or
to
, that might give enough of the letters to the big words to start sorting them out by the context and arrangement of the letters. No luck there either; the spacing between numbers was just too even.

And with that, I’d exhausted my entire repertoire of code-cracking knowledge. I’d have to call Brian; he was the one obsessed with crosswords and puzzles of that ilk. Hell, he made a living trying to convert the code of natural drugs into synthetic ones, he was bound to have an idea.

“We’re in luck!” Sasha returned with a large Federal Express box in her hands. “Oops, we’ll want the biographical dictionary as well, won’t we? I’m sorry.” She laughed. “I’m not really co-opting your project, I’m so excited I just can’t help myself!”

With an ease that I would have thought impossible, she took the Fed Ex box in one hand, and reached over her head to single-handedly grab the dictionary off the shelf. Both items were about the same size, nearly a foot square and four inches across the spine.

I watched the tendons stand out in Sasha’s wrist and fingers as she carried the books over to me. “Whoa, look at you! Those must weigh a ton!”

Sasha looked up, surprised, then realized what I was talking about. “Oh, these. You get used to it, things go faster if you don’t have to use two hands on every single book—but we always use two hands on the rare stuff, of course! You should have seen me the first week, though—I was a mess. But now I can reach nearly an octave on the piano and I can whip my little brother arm-wrestling whenever I go home to visit.” She swung both massive tomes down in front of me with easy grace.

I picked up the Fed Ex box; it weighed five pounds, easy.

“All it takes is practice,” she insisted. “By the way, when are you planning to do your talk?”

I stopped breaking into the box long enough to look at her. “Talk?”

“You know. All of the Fellows are supposed to do a presentation while they’re here. Nothing big, but we invite the members of the Library and staff to come hear. I have to print up the notices and I thought, some time the beginning of next week?”

I’d completely forgotten about this obligation and didn’t spare any thought to it now. I just wanted to find the record of Margaret Chandler’s trial. “Fine, whenever you like.”

“You got a title in mind?”

I didn’t, but I came up with one quickly to get back to the transcript. “Yeah. How about, ‘At the Intersection of Emotional Reality and Historical Fact: The Chandler Family, Public Records, and Private Lives?’”

When Sasha made an ill-concealed face of alarm, I hastily amended, “No, that’s a bit much, isn’t it? Not bad for a conference paper, though. How about we chop it after the colon and add archaeology: ‘Historical Archaeology and the Chandler Family: Public Records and Private Lives.’”

She looked vastly relieved by that suggestion, but a voice came from behind me. “Still sounds a bit of a drag, Emma. Don’t you know the rule? You gotta have sex or death in the title to be a real draw.”

Sasha giggled and straightened her skirt.

I just rolled my eyes and turned to him. “Morning, Michael. My, where’d you ever get that fine-looking mouse?”

I should have known it wouldn’t have fazed him. “Got it wrestling with my conscience, Auntie. Tell her, Sasha, you never go wrong looking for sex or death in anything.”

“He’s right, Dr. Fielding—”

Suddenly I was Dr. Fielding again, and not Emma as I had been all morning. Michael Glasscock hadn’t been married four times already for no reason.

“—we got one of our biggest audiences ever for Dr. Glasscock’s presentation.”

“Okay, now I have to ask. What was the title of
your
paper, Mikey?”

Michael couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself. “‘The Erotic Tension Beneath Transcendentalist Philosophy: Work, Sex, and Thought in Utopian Communities.’ It was nothing, really. Dumbed it down a bit, but kept all the juice.”

I snorted. “Nothing, indeed! How’d you pull that one off?”

“Simple.” He smirked. “I took a lesson from my Lit Crit colleagues and veered slightly from the history of philosophy to the venerable topic of who slept with whom in the American Transcendentalist movement. Never fails. Of course, afterwards I felt like a two-dollar whore who makes change, but that’s life in the Ivory Cat House, isn’t it, Emma? A long, downward spiral of cheapening compromise in the name of survival.”

Sasha giggled again, but there didn’t seem to be anything humorous in either Michael’s face or words, though his tone was careless as usual. I thought about Harry’s words, “an alien detachment,” and found them appropriate.

“I think I’ll stick with my title,” I said. “Usually ‘archaeology’ is enough to get people interested.”