Breakdown (13 page)

“
L
EYDON?
L
EYDON, IF YOU’RE HERE, COME OUT!
I
T’S ME,
V
IC.
Come out and let’s talk.”

I was standing in the doorway to the old library at the Divinity School. The narrow mullioned windows were so clogged with ivy that even on a bright summer evening, the room was too dark for me to see anything. I ran my hand along the walls, fumbling for a light switch, but finally had to dig a small flashlight from my briefcase.

I shone it around the room, looking for the switches, or for some sign of Leydon. I kept calling her name, but when I finally managed to turn on the lights I didn’t see any sign of her.

The old library had vanished as well. The angels still soared overhead, which meant I was in the right room, but the library tables had disappeared, along with the old biblical-studies journals. I’d thought—hoped—I might find Leydon hiding in the stacks, but those were gone as well. The walls had been replastered and painted a bright white.

It was like one of those movies where the villains drug the heroine and try to pretend that the strange house in the country where she wakes up is really her home. I imagined Leydon arriving here in her hyper, anxious condition. She was so worried she was being followed that she wouldn’t even announce herself by name on the phone and I hadn’t been able to call her because the same fears had made her block her own number. If she’d come up to this sterile, empty room, she probably thought I’d abandoned her.

In a corner of my mind, one I didn’t like to visit, I could see her as I’d found her twenty-five years ago: under her kitchen table, hugging herself, as she rocked back on her heels, weeping soundlessly. She’d been up for three days and I’d been looking for her—we were presenting a case together in moot court and I had tried to condense the hundreds of pages she’d spewed out into a document acceptable to the judges. I’d finally let myself into her apartment and found her.

I tried to think where she might have gone today when she didn’t see me in the reading room. If she’d been calm enough to think, perhaps she would have gone to the coffee shop in the basement—our study sessions often started there. She might feel safe in the basement.

On my way down, I looked in all the rooms on each floor. Study rooms, classrooms, junk storage rooms. I looked behind doors and under desks but saw nothing more alarming than empty coffee cups and chip bags.

One fourth-floor room was hung with framed ivory miniatures that depicted lives of the early saints. They looked ancient, as if some early divinity professor had found them in a cave and then abandoned them here to be forgotten for another millennium or two. I wondered idly what they’d fetch on eBay, but I was a good responsible citizen these days, not the hooligan I’d been when Boom-Boom and I were Arielle and Kira’s age. I left the miniatures alone and headed for the stairs.

My high-heeled sandals clattered loudly on the stone steps and set up a crashing echo in the open stairwell. I was exhausted and my feet hurt from running around after Petra and her girls. I was meanly hoping Leydon had given up and gone home: I could imagine a long cold drink, something with mint and lime and fizz, and the chance to soak my feet in a bucket of cold water.

I stopped at the third-floor landing to call Leydon’s name. I ducked down to look underneath the stairs but didn’t check the seminar rooms. At the second floor, I shouted her name again. I was startled when a woman opened a door at the end of the hall and stuck her head out.

“You looking for someone?”

It couldn’t be Leydon, my flickering first thought, unless she’d been transformed from a slender red-gold sylph to a heavy-set gray-haired earth goddess.

I apologized for disturbing the woman. “I thought the building was empty. I used to be a student here and I’m trying to hook up with an old friend.”

The woman looked me up and down, deciding whether to trust me. “Is your friend on the nervous side?”

“The far side of nervous. Have you seen her? Slim, fair, a bit shorter than me. I’m V. I. Warshawski, by the way, if she asked for me by name.”

“She was sitting on the stairs, sobbing. I thought maybe someone had died, but when I asked her it turned out she was crying over the reading room in the old library—she was horribly upset because we’d turned it into a conference room. That happened years ago, but she was so distraught she could hardly take in the information. As soon as I told her I was the associate dean she started shouting that I was worse than the Taliban who destroyed the giant Buddhas, that only a heathen and a Philistine would turn a beautiful library into a conference center. You’re not her caseworker, are you?”

“Just an old friend,” I repeated, depressed. “I’m going to see if she went to the coffee shop.”

“It closes at four in the summer. You might check the chapels, Bond, or Rockefeller. She wanted to know where else on campus angels soared and I suggested those two places to her.” She hesitated. “I did wonder if I should call campus security. I can still do it if you think—well, do you think she might be a danger to herself?”

I scrunched up my mouth—I didn’t know what Leydon might do. “I haven’t seen her for a while, so I don’t know how shaky she is these days. If I don’t find her at either of the chapels, I’ll call the cops myself.”

I ran down the rest of the steps and jogged through the portico connecting the divinity school to its chapel. Bond Chapel was dark, too, with narrow stained-glass windows that flashed jagged prisms onto the walls. I went up the single aisle to the altar, shining my flash underneath the communion table and into the corners. The only person I found was a homeless man, asleep in one of the pews. My light woke him; he backed away from me in alarm, muttering curses.

I left Bond and moved as fast as I could on my sore feet to Fifty-Ninth Street, past the president’s house, to Rockefeller Chapel, whose carillon tower dominates the neighborhood. The tower is almost twenty stories high, and I wasn’t sure they locked the stairwell.

I pulled open one of the heavy doors and entered into silence and twilight. I stood at the entrance to the nave, involuntarily hugging my arms across my chest: the stones seemed so cold, so ominous, that I felt chilled, despite the heat outside.

The building is the size of a cathedral. The arched stained-glass windows didn’t let in much of the late-day sun, and the lamps hanging from the vaulted ceiling were so remote they might as well not have been switched on.

I strained my ears for any sound, a sob, a laugh, but heard nothing. “Leydon! Leydon?”

My voice bounced around the walls and gave me back a mocking echo. I started up the central aisle toward the chancel, my shoes setting up what sounded like a drumroll. Too big, too loud. If Leydon were in here she’d surely hear me, but if she were feeling abandoned, depressed, she might not be able to respond. Leydon crouched under the kitchen table—the image kept popping into my mind. I pulled the pencil flash from my bag again, shining it under the pews as I searched.

I found her lying facedown near the chancel steps. Her red-gold hair glinted under my flashlight. I knelt next to her, smoothing it back from her forehead.

“Leydon, I’m sorry I was late. Was that too much for you to bear? Did you decide a nip or two of Jim Beam would carry you while you waited for me?”

I kept my voice soft, a loving croon, despite the words. I’d learned long ago how cruel it was to add my criticism to the demons already attacking her.

I put an arm under her to turn her over. That was when I realized something worse than drunkenness was going on. Her left arm flopped against me at an inhuman angle. She must have tripped on the chancel steps, then hit her head as she fell, knocked herself out. I put my fingers on her neck, praying for a pulse. I hoped I was feeling one, but my hands were cold, they were shaking, I couldn’t feel anything.

“Fessa! Idiota!”
I snapped under my breath. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get an ambulance here, now, on the double.”

I removed my arm from beneath her as gently as I could and called 911. “Inside the chapel,” I said, fighting for calm.

The dispatcher took the details, told me not to move her, but to keep her warm if I could. I ran across the chancel, looking for something to wrap around her, an altar cloth, an abandoned sweater, anything. In a box behind the organ console I found a stack of yoga mats and blankets, and grabbed one of those.

The ambulance crew arrived an hour, or maybe only a minute, later—in a crisis all time spent waiting for help feels like eternity. When I heard the front doors opening, I stood and called out, waving my flashlight as a beacon.

The two techs, a man and a woman, trotted up the central aisle. They were carrying a portable gurney and neck-stabilizing gear. They had industrial flashlights that they placed close to Leydon so they could see what they were doing.

As they knelt and started bracing her neck, the man asked how it had happened.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I found her like this. I thought she tripped on the chancel steps.”

He shook his head. “The cops will tell us for sure, but I’m feeling breaks in her arms that didn’t come from tripping and falling.” He gently probed her sides. “She has broken ribs, too.”

He and his partner slid her onto the gurney and stood in a quick, fluid motion.

“We can’t wait for the police,” the woman said. “You’ll have to talk to them. There’s an outside chance—”

Her words disappeared under the rumble of the gurney wheels on the stone floor. I followed them to the ambulance and kissed Leydon as they loaded her into it. An outside chance, that was better than no chance at all.

Back inside the chapel, I lay on the front pew to wait for the police. I’d been running for hours, ever since I got Petra’s alarm. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t take in another thought. If the police didn’t arrive soon, I’d fall asleep with any homeless people who sought shelter here.

Above me I saw the railing around a small gallery where overflow visitors could sit during Convocation. If Leydon had gotten her injuries in falling from a height, that was probably where she’d been.

I forced myself to get up. On cement-laden legs, I walked behind the organ console to the gallery stairs. The gallery railing was only about thigh-high on me. If Leydon had stood there, working herself into a frenzy, she could easily have fallen over.

I looked around, wondering where she’d dropped her handbag. Leydon always used to carry an Hermès bag—it was one of those odd vestiges of her conservative upbringing, always carrying a handbag, almost always from Hermès, although every now and then she ventured into Chanel territory. Perhaps she’d had it over her arm when she fell. I tried to imagine the physics of the fall, the arc, where the bag would have landed.

My toes were cramping from all the pressure I’d put on them this afternoon. As I bent to massage them, I saw a piece of paper under the pew, written over in heavy black ink.

When I pulled it out, I recognized Leydon’s round, urgent scrawl, the way she wrote when she was cycling high.
I saw him on the catafalque,
she’d written over and over.

I was tucking the paper into my own bag when the door underneath the gallery opened. Thinking it might be the police, I hurried back down the stairs, but it was a trio of tourists, two women and a man.

They looked at me in consternation, which wasn’t surprising—I was barefoot and disheveled.

“You are rehearsing for a play?” one of the women asked.

“This is real life, I’m afraid.”

“We thought we heard you shouting,” the other woman said. “When we were coming earlier to look at the organ.”

“You were in the chapel? What did you see?” I stepped closer in my urgency, and they backed away in alarm.

“We saw nothing,” the man said. “We heard you and decided we must come back later.”

“It wasn’t me you heard. A friend of mine—did you see her—she fell—the police are on their way—if you saw anything, heard anything—”

“The police?” the man said. “No, we can tell the police nothing.”

He said something in German to the women, and they nodded. “We cannot stay for the police, we can miss our flight, or who knows what. They can put us in prison, perhaps.”

“But if you saw what happened—”

“But we did
not
see,” the second woman said. “We wanted to inspect the organ, which is famous: my husband is also an organist. And now there is no time. I am sorry about your friend, but we must leave.”

I was close to screaming with frustration.

“Please—”

The two women seized the man’s arms and hurried back to the western door. I followed and thrust one of my cards into the man’s shirt pocket. “If you remember anything that my friend said, please call me.”

13.

A LONG PITCH

W
HEN THE POLICE SHOWED,
I
TOLD THEM THE LITTLE
I
knew—how I arrived late for my meeting with Leydon and found her spread-eagled across the chancel steps. Evidence technicians showed up and took photos in a desultory way, looking at the gallery, making little notes of angles and tangents.

“Were you a close friend?” one of the cops asked.

Close at one time, not any longer. “We hadn’t seen each other for a year or so,” I said.

“Do you know her frame of mind? Was she suicidal?”

“When she spoke to me this morning, she sounded very alert, very alive,” I said.

There was a commotion in the back of the chapel. We all turned to squint at the narthex and in a second or two a man in a well-cut summer suit burst up the aisle.

“Sewall!” I was astonished to see Leydon’s older brother.

“Victoria Warshawski? I might have guessed!”

“Guessed what?” The officer and I spoke almost in unison.

“My sister stole my car, and I got some report that she had ended up here at Rockefeller. You’re the police? You came in response to my report?”