A Fugitive Truth (19 page)

Michael slunk over to a carrel, flopped into a chair, and for all intents and purposes, promptly went to sleep. I opened the book hurriedly, a copy of the original handwritten text, and flipped to the date of the trial, and read it with growing disappointment. All there was, was a brief entry saying that the records were sealed, written out in a cramped clerk’s hand. I tried not to look as heartbroken as I felt as I explained what I’d found to Sasha.

She took it more philosophically than I and headed back to her desk. “That’s the way of it, isn’t it? Some days you hit the mother lode, most days you pan out. Not your fault, right? There’s a copy of Blackstone’s
Commentaries
on the top shelf of the reference section, over by the door, if you think that will help.” She jerked her head toward a big wooden bookcase just opposite the door and went to the back to sort through the rest of the mail. “Though it was published a little later than this trial, it may help explain some of the terms,” she called.

I sighed and dragged one of the antique wooden stepladders over to the shelf she indicated and climbed up to the top. Out of the corner of my eye, I could just make out a quick movement as I stretched to get the large black volume. I was so engrossed in trying to balance on top of the steps and flipping to the entry for “murder” that I didn’t realize someone had grabbed my shirt and yanked sharply backward until it was too late. I had already started to fall off the steps.

“E
MMA!
” I
T TOOK ME A SECOND TO RECOGNIZE
Sasha’s voice
.

I opened my eyes and found myself on the floor of the library. Sasha and Michael were staring at me, a halo of books and overhead lights behind them both.

“Oh, man. I fell, I guess. Knocked me silly.”

“You must have overbalanced,” Sasha said. “Oh, don’t!” she cried, reaching out for me as I tried to sit up. “Your head!”

“I’m fine,” I said, but it wasn’t until she said that that I noticed a sharp pain right at the back of my skull. I touched it gingerly and felt a lump. Looking at my hand, I was relieved to see no blood, and I pulled myself up the rest of the way, leaning against a carrel.

“You okay?” Michael was strangely unsure of what to do with himself and kept twisting the tail of his overcoat. “You want some ice or something?”

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

“There’s an ice pack in the guard’s office,” Sasha suggested. Michael all but ran out of the room.

I tentatively felt for the bump again.

“I heard you yell and found you on the floor,” Sasha said. “I couldn’t figure out what you were doing.” She flinched, watching me explore my scalp. “Take it slow now.”

Michael returned shortly with the ice pack. “Sorry, they didn’t have any Tater Bites.” His nervousness was almost palpable.

I took the pack and applied it, wincing as the cold hit the hot lump. Then I noticed the copy of Blackwell’s
Commentaries
on the floor next to me, the heavy cover splayed open and the pages folded underneath the weight of the book. Its violent sprawl brought the memory back with a rush.

“I didn’t fall. I was pulled.” Amazement crossed their faces. “Somebody pulled me backwards!” I looked at both of them. “And
neither
of you saw anything?”

“Emma, you couldn’t have been pulled,” Sasha protested. “There was no one here but us. Are you
sure
that’s what happened? Maybe you got caught on something or missed a step. Your head hit the carrel there.”

“No, I definitely felt…I saw a movement behind me, out of the corner of my eye, and then felt myself being pulled backwards. I’m sure about that. Michael?”

He shook his head slowly, looking to Sasha for confirmation. “I was almost asleep—I’ve had a couple of late nights in a row. I didn’t see or hear anything until Sasha shouted. She was already beside you by the time I woke up enough to figure out what was going on.” He backed away and leaned against the bookshelves, watching us, troubled.

I scanned both their faces but couldn’t see anything but confusion and concern. It didn’t reassure me in the least: I knew what I knew. What bothered me was that I was actually starting to suspect both of them.

“Would you like a glass of—?”

Sasha’s offer was interrupted by the blare of the alarm and the piercing wail went straight through my already fragile head. “Oh, damn it all! I thought they finally found the problem with that thing! Let’s go everyone.” She began to go through the evacuation procedure and went to check on the rest of the floor.

Surprised by the sudden noise, Michael said something much less innocuous than “damn,” then gave me a hand up. “It’s definitely a bad time to be a Shrewsbury Fellow. This time two days ago, there were three of us alive. Now even the two of us are looking a lot worse than we did last night.”

I winced as he yanked me up, but was made more uncomfortable by the reminder of my violence toward him the night before. “Michael, I’m sorry about—”

“Pish,” he said airily, “I’ve always wanted to start a rumor. I’ve originated three different stories about how I got hurt, and I’m dying to follow the paths of each one.”

“I honestly don’t go around popping people in the eye—” I insisted he listen to my apology. “I’m sure it’s just the stress—” I again debated whether to tell him about my sessions with Nolan; maybe it would assuage his ego. Maybe it would warn him against thinking I was an easy target. Just in case.

“At least I know why I got hurt and that it was an accident,” he broke in impatiently, and suddenly my window of opportunity had slammed shut. “Unlike some around here.”

We moved outside, standing under the pines with the rest of the staff. There wasn’t even the usual joking about missing the math test, the alarm problem wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was funny at all.

Michael made the most of the opportunity and lit up a cigarette immediately. “Ahhhh. God, that’s good.” He took a long drag, his eyes glazed over with pleasure, then blinked, coming back to the real world: the respite was temporary. “So that was a hell of a racket you made this morning. Got a couple Sumo wrestlers in your room?”

When I didn’t answer he said, “I moved my desk in front of my door, too. It’s probably a good idea under the circumstances.”

“The lock is broken, and I just didn’t want to disturb you again. In case I decided to take another midnight walk.”

“Ah. Very considerate,” Michael said tonelessly.

I could tell his attention was not on our conversation. He was watching Sasha intently.

“You know,” he continued, “the first thing I saw when I woke up was Sasha leaning over you.” He lit a second cigarette from the first, then pinched out the old cigarette just above the glowing ember with a quick thumb and forefinger, flicking the butt away. “Just saying it sounds crazy, like an implication, but it’s the truth. In fact, I’m starting to scare myself, thinking about what’s been going on around here. But Sasha?” He shuffled uncertainly as he watched her across the road.

“I don’t know what to think,” I said, and it was the truth. “Sasha doesn’t really radiate the sense of being that cold-blooded, if you know what I mean. She’d have to be awful bold to try something like that in front of you, or me, for that matter. And why would she do it at all?”

I didn’t realize how long I’d paused in thought. Michael said, “Well, I didn’t do it. I believe you when you say you were pulled, but Sasha was the only person I saw near you. After the fact, admittedly.” He was still watching Sasha as she spoke with one of the interns.

I couldn’t stand to think too closely about what he was suggesting, even though I knew I ought to. I flipped the ice pack, putting the cooler side on my lump. “All I know is that if this bump gets any larger, I’m going to have to give it a name.”

“You know, I think you ought to be more worried than you are!” he said in exasperation. “If there’s a connection between Faith’s death and Jack’s, then you could be next. You were the last one to see Faith
and
Jack and according to our lovely detective, he left you a note saying he knew something. If I were you, I’d consider getting out of here, pronto, diary or not.”

Before I could think of an answer, Michael’s expression suddenly dulled as Harry joined us. “Harry, you’ve got to help me out here.”

Although he was still dressed with impeccable care, Harry had dark lines under his eyes and a careworn look on his face. “How’s that, Michael?” he asked obligingly. But his quick smile vanished when he saw my ice pack. “Emma, what’s wrong?”

“She fell,” Michael said brusquely. “I’ve been having no luck locating the papers I need. Could you give Sasha a hand looking for them?”

His patience obviously strained, lips compressed, Harry said, “I’ll look into it right away, Michael.”

Michael watched everyone filing back, then turned to me. “Think about what I said,” he said emphatically, then walked back toward the library.

Harry stared, puzzled, after him.

“What was that? Michael seems somewhat…preoccupied.”

“He thinks I should leave.” I flipped the ice pack again, but realized that all the cold had gone out of it. “He thinks it’s dangerous here.”

“We’d be happy to let you come back, finish up another time,” he started, reluctantly. “You know, that might even be best, everything is very disorganized at present and heaven knows, there’s a lot going on around here just now.”

“Thanks Harry,” I said absently, watching Michael out front through the window. He jumped up and pulled at an oak branch, shaking melted ice onto a couple of young interns, who giggled playfully. “I think I need to work on Madam Chandler’s code, though, and I need the original copy of the journal for that, I think. I can’t just leave it. It’s not just the story, it’s not just the work that is going to help me when I go back to work on the site, it’s as though if I stick with it long enough, it’s going to help me make a connection that’s going to give me some fundamental understanding of how I work. How I think…” I shrugged.

Harry stared at me quizzically, and I knew I’d lost him.

“Well, that’s just what I tell people,” I joked. “It’s really just because this way I get to read diaries and no one will call me nosy.”

“It’s a powerful fascination that these little bits of paper, leather, and thread hold for us,” Harry said. “Literally captivating.”

The man was such a diplomat, I thought. “It really is. Sasha called it service”—at the mention of her name, I saw Harry’s face light up—“I call it a vocation. Funny how we all look at it in those terms.”

“It’s a sickness, isn’t it?” Harry asked, laughing. “Sasha and I, well, we’re lucky to be able to work with the things we do. But you won’t believe the lengths to which some people will go. People have been murdered over rare books, over-generous donors have committed suicide after realizing they couldn’t bear separation from their collections. Some collectors, faced with starvation, were recorded as spending their last penny on a rare book instead of food. There’s no end to the stories of extreme bibliomania.”

“Come on,” I said, disbelieving.

“I’m serious. A former monk in nineteenth-century Spain was thwarted in his attempt to acquire a rare book; shortly thereafter, his successful competitor was found dead in his burnt-out book shop. This happened a few times, and when the ex-monk was finally arrested for the murders, he was more distraught that a book he had stolen was not unique than the fact that he was going to be executed.”

“You’re joking, right?” I asked. “That’s, like, an extraordinary example, right?”

“Oh no. Far from it. What about Petrarch? He devoted his life to rescuing the lost classics and wrote letters to the authors whose works he’d recovered, even though they’d been dead for hundreds of years,” Harry said. “And the librarian of Cosimo III—no one knows his name—eschewed a private apartment, choosing rather to sleep in a hammock slung between bookcases in the great library over which he presided in the seventeenth century. He lived ‘on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow was a folio,’ and died looking like a beggar in spite of his high status, but left his own thirty thousand books to the people of Florence.”

“No one’s that nutty,” I muttered. “I love books just as much as the next person, but—”

“Of course,” Harry said. “
We
manage to keep our loves in check. But the market for rare and antique books is thriving. Did you get a look at the catalog for the Armstrong collection?”

My mind flew back to my first day, and the conversation between Michael and Harry. “No. Never got the chance.”

“Everyone knew the bidding would be hot, but no one expected that the sale would bring in the millions it did. One copy of Champlain’s
Voyages
went for close to $400,000.”

I let out a low whistle. “I wouldn’t mind owning that one myself.”

Harry laughed. “Well, I can’t get the book for you, but we’ve got a copy of that catalog around here somewhere. I’ll get Sasha to track it down for you. And if you think that’s something, the black market is even more busy these days. You read about it constantly and it gets worse and worse. Just last month, two valuable nineteenth-century manuscripts were stolen from the rare book room at Van Helst Library. You should ask Michael, he was down there in Philly at the time. I bet he’d know more of the story.”

“Michael’s seen a lot of excitement lately.” A split second later I thought more closely about what I had just said.

“I suppose we all have,” Harry said tactfully. “Lately. Just Michael’s bad luck that he’s been in the wrong places at the wrong times.”

Suddenly a deafening rumble started.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Harry shouted over the din, and I followed him over to where the workers were finishing one section of the foundation repointing and starting to open another with a ditch witch, one of those small machines used to excavate narrow ditches. All around were scattered the tools of their trade, including trowels, crowbars, and a dirty wheelbarrow filled with water for the cement. Over the noise, I heard the end of a hollered-out, extremely bawdy joke, and immediately thought of the gravediggers from Hamlet.

I saw one of the men in work clothes say something as they noticed us. The other one stood up and brushed off his hands, and put on a cap marked “Martini Brothers, Contractors,” preparatory to doing business. With a signal from him, the other man turned off the machine and the sudden silence overwhelmed us.

He started with his hands in the air in a gesture of forestallment before we could say a word. “Look, before you start again, Mr. Saunders,” came a voice that would have been well at home in the Bronx. “I keep telling you, it’s not us. It’s your electrician or your alarm service.
We
are not tripping your alarm.” Apparently this was Frankie Martini himself, if the embroidery on his shirt pocket was any indication.

“Isn’t it at least
possible
that your work is disrupting things?” Harry asked, obviously frustrated. “None of this started until you started.”

“Just our bad luck,” muttered Martini brother number two. His shirt was embroidered
JOEY M
.

“It does not have anything to do with us,” said Frankie firmly. He turned to me and explained courteously. “See, when you’ve been using one of these things as long as I have, you can feel everything. Rocks, roots. You know what you’re hitting. And something like the PVC pipe that those new alarm systems go through, it vibrates different. We’d never in a million years cut through one of those.”

I peered over into the narrow trench to have a look at the soil out of habit, looking for artifacts that might have been churned up. Frankie Martini nudged Joey Martini.