Jericho's Fall (17 page)

Which meant somebody had told them.

(iii)

Back at the desk, Miss Kelly was filling out requisition forms. Reading upside down, Beck realized that she was asking the selectmen for money to buy more books. In the current climate, she suspected, the selectmen would have other priorities.

“May I ask you something else?”

“Of course,” said the librarian, not looking up.

“Did Jericho—did Mr. Ainsley check out any other books? You would have records, right?”

The librarian was already shaking her head. Not in denial. In refusal. “You know, Miss DeForde, after 9/11, the government adopted all these rules about libraries keeping track of their readers. The library association has been adamant in opposing the rules. We’re not supposed to cooperate with inquiries like—well, like yours.”

“I’m not the government.”

“The principle isn’t anti-government. It’s pro-privacy” She crossed her arms, prepared to do battle.

“The difference is, I’m trying to help him.”

“A principle isn’t a principle if it respects such differences as that.” Miss Kelly waited, perhaps to see if her visitor would write this down. “I don’t doubt your sincerity, but you are asking questions that it would be unethical for me to answer.”

“I don’t think he’d mind if you talked to me.”

Miss Kelly nodded toward her desk. “There’s the phone, Miss DeForde. Why don’t you call Stone Heights and we’ll ask?” Beck was
growing annoyed, but the librarian turned out not to be finished. “I appreciate what you’re saying. I do. But you have to understand my position. There are lots of ways for a librarian to get in trouble these days. I have a good job here. A job I’d like to keep. I had lots of trouble being accepted here. And Mr. Ainsley—well, he’s sick, but he helped. He was on my side when other people weren’t.”

Beck could hardly mistake the message: without Jericho’s patronage, Miss Kelly’s thin supporting ledge might crumble. So she hunted around for a question the librarian might answer without getting tangled in her ethics.

And found one. She was thinking about Jericho’s games with the folder, and wondered whether the library, too, might be a false trail— what Dak called a wisp. Perhaps Miss Kelly herself was neither his helper nor the witness who had told the strangers where to look. Perhaps she was but a diversion from a deeper truth.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask you to divulge any confidences.” Miss Kelly smiled her disbelief. “Let me ask something that has to be public knowledge. The times that Jericho came in here, did he ever speak to anyone? Someone else from town?” She considered how to frame the idea. “Maybe someone who was here as often as he was?”

Miss Kelly was no fool. Dark eyes narrowed as she got the point. But if Beck had imagined that the librarian would again take refuge in the rules of her trade, she was mistaken.

“You’re thinking that Mr. Ainsley used my library”—Beck noticed the pronoun—“for some kind of meetings.”

“It’s possible.”

Miss Kelly pondered. “Is this related to—well, the work he did before? The national security? All that?” A puzzled frown. “Forgive me, Miss DeForde. I respected the man, but not his politics. I never really approved of the kind of positions he took.” She pointed. “We have all six of his books, of course. Several copies. I’ve read them. I have to be honest: they frighten me. With all the troubles we have in the world, I think things would be worse if he’d been whispering all these ideas into the ears of the last couple of Presidents. I hope you’re not offended.”

At last, a chink in the armor. “I’m not offended, Miss Kelly. I don’t like his ideas, either.”

“Mr. Ainsley likes to talk about Richard Nixon. Maybe you know that. He says Nixon was a scoundrel, but he pulled off the greatest intelligence coup of the twentieth century.”

“China,” said Beck, who had forgotten how Jericho would go on about the subject. Not only that Nixon went to China, but that he managed to fool the world. Nobody knew the old Cold Warrior was heading to China. All the negotiations were conducted in secret. And then, suddenly, the Soviet Union faced an unexpected alliance of its two greatest ideological enemies. Secrecy plus reordering the world: Jericho’s twin passions. Nixon obstructed justice and was driven from office, but Jericho Ainsley, who at the time of Watergate had been a young Agency case officer, remained devoted to him.

“I would argue with him,” the librarian was saying. “I didn’t understand how he could admire a man of Nixon’s—views. And he would tell me how FDR lied about whether he planned to send American boys to fight in Europe, and Lincoln lied in the run-up to the Civil War—he seemed to think that lying in the national interest was something to be proud of. The bigger the lie, the more successfully the wool was pulled over the eyes of the American public, the greater Mr. Ainsley’s admiration for the liar.”

Beck remembered this, too, how Jericho would teach, even in the classroom, that lying was neither right nor wrong; that truth was not a virtue; that all that mattered about words was what they accomplished.

“Don’t get me wrong, Miss DeForde. I’m not saying we don’t have real enemies in the world. I just don’t happen to think lying for your country or blowing up every bad guy to Kingdom Come creates new friends. I think it creates new enemies.” She was getting wound up. “Are you saying he was using my library for secret meetings? Is that what you mean?
Here?
This is a citadel of knowledge. A sacred space. Books are the repository of ideas. They represent reason, argument, the interplay of—” She saw the visitor’s eyebrows arch and made herself
stop. “I’m sorry, Miss DeForde. I’m afraid my passions on this subject run high.”

Again Beck knew not to press. “I’m not saying he was up to no good in your library, Miss Kelly. I honestly don’t know what he was up to. I’m trying to find out.”

“And that’s why you want to know if he met anyone regularly?”

“Yes.”

A slow nod. “Well, I suppose there might have been one.”

“May I ask who?”

“You may.” That ghostly smile again. “A man named Brian Navarro.”

“Where would I find him?”

“He’s a lawyer. There are only two in town. His office is on Main Street.”

Miss Kelly walked Beck to the door and, unexpectedly, hugged her. “I should clarify what I said before. About why I needed this job. About why I’m indebted to Mr. Ainsley.”

“You don’t have to—”

“But I do. Because we have more in common than you might think. I told you that I lost my job at a foundation. I didn’t tell you why.” The girlish look was back as the librarian stared at her feet. “The head of the foundation resigned. Very quietly handled. The foundation was reimbursing him for a New York apartment. Turned out that he was overbilling for it, and using it as a kind of love nest besides. He used it for trysts with one of his co-workers, and—well, he resigned, and I got fired.”

“I had no idea.”

A grim smile. “In a scandal involving a great man’s marriage, nobody ever asks what happened to the other woman. But there’s one thing you know as well as I do. After the dust settles, she discovers that there’s a scarlet letter on her résumé. And it can’t ever be erased.”

Beck nodded and mumbled something indistinct, uncomfortable with the librarian’s assertion of a commonality between them. Then she realized that there was a question Miss Kelly had not addressed.

“How long have you been the librarian?”

“I moved up here about six months ago.”

From what Dak had said, Jericho’s madness—and his threats— began well before that. “Did Jericho use the library before you arrived?”

Miss Kelly nodded. “That’s what I’m given to understand. He was in and out of here all the time, just like now.”

“Where’s the old librarian? Your predecessor. Can I talk to her?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That wouldn’t be possible. Miss Waller died last year. That’s why there was an opening.”

“Died?”

“A traffic accident. She went off the road into one of these gorges.” A pained expression. “Very tragic.”

CHAPTER 15
The Classmate

(i)

Brian Navarro’s office was in a stucco townhouse on Main Street. He had the entire second floor, but the receptionist said he was out for the day. Rebecca made an appointment for the following morning. She gave a false name and a false story, but only, she told herself, because she did not want word spreading around town; or back to Jericho.

Although why she cared what he knew, she could not precisely say.

With half an hour to kill before Audrey would return to pick her up at Corinda’s, Beck decided to have a cup of coffee and a sandwich. In the late afternoon, the place was nearly empty, so she was able to grab a booth by the front window. Zeelie, the talkative waitress of the night before, was not on duty, and Beck immediately forgot the name of whoever was.

The coffee was cold.

Rebecca sat there, puzzling, as she watched what there was of life passing by. When she had lived out here with Jericho, the town had possessed a thriving factory that manufactured machine tools, and another that specialized in printer’s inks. Now both were shuttered. There were still jobs, mostly in light industry, an hour or more away. Closer to home, there was retail, but not much tourism. Efforts to build a ski resort had come a cropper. But the town hung on, and had recently been discovered by some among the smart set, who were
building their
Schlösser
on the nearby mountainsides. She wondered what would be left when the smart set moved on.

The point was, as Miss Kelly had indicated, Jericho Ainsley’s presence in town was a big deal.

A town like this, that many strangers—you get my meaning
.

Beck, pondering, stirred her coffee, and engaged in what Jericho used to call doing her sums.

Fact: Jericho had something he had threatened to disclose, and, whatever it was, people were frightened.

Fact: at the same time, nobody dared harm him, or any of his family, a protective umbrella that evidently covered even Rebecca herself.

Fact: Dak said Jericho had to be working with someone in town.

Fact: it was Jericho who had established the library, and then brought in Miss Kelly as librarian.

Conclusion: Jericho was working with Miss Kelly.

Supposition: if so, then Miss Kelly was in terrible danger. After all, she could not plausibly be considered a member of Jericho’s family.

Yet, having worked her way to this point, Beck could almost see his face, not as it was now but as she remembered from the seminar room at Princeton, and, later, the bedroom, the mocking smile proposing that she had done her sums wrong.

Fine. What had she messed up? Well, for one thing, Miss Kelly was a little obvious. She was practically the only person in town who was neither white nor Latin, and therefore stood out like a sore thumb. Hiding in plain sight was one thing; but imagining Jericho meeting secretly with the librarian bordered on the absurd. Besides, according to Miss Kelly, she and Jericho had not met until last year. Hardly the best qualification for a trusted assistant.

Fine again. Suppose, therefore, that Miss Kelly was telling the truth about everything. Suppose Jericho had met her last year, then brought her up the mountain only because he felt sorry for her, and also because he wanted to strike a blow for—well, for whatever cause he had in mind that week. Miss Kelly said the only person she remembered
spending much time with Jericho as he hunted through the library was Brian Navarro, but what if—

“Now, this is a lucky break.”

Rebecca looked up in surprise, but she knew the voice even before she spotted the red mop of hair and fiery matching beard.

“Mr. Clark.”

“Please. Call me Lewiston.” Without being invited, he slid into the booth across from her. “I was hoping to get the chance to talk to you—”

“I have no interest in talking to you, Mr. Clark.”

“Why not? I’m a nice guy.” An infectious smile. “Besides, we’re classmates.”

“I never graduated, as I’m sure you know perfectly well.”

“I do know. Still, I thought it would be nice to catch up.”

“Catch up? We didn’t even know each other.”

“Not sober.” He saw her consternation. The waitress brought Beck her grilled-chicken sandwich and, without asking, put a burger in front of Lewiston Clark. He waited until she had gone. “We got drunk together on Newman’s Day freshman year. There were five or six of us. You don’t remember?”

“No.” But she did. Hazily. Her big breakout from Jacqueline, Miss Goody Two-Shoes allowing her wicked roommates to tempt her into joining the Princeton tradition of downing twenty-four beers in twenty-four hours on the twenty-fourth of April. Before then, she had never attempted more than the occasional glass of wine with dinner.

“Don’t worry,” he said, grinning. He took a largish bite, chewed while she blushed. “You weren’t one of the girls who wound up— Well, never mind what they did. You were so sweet and innocent. You weren’t a sloppy drunk. You didn’t start swearing or kissing strangers or dancing on the tables. You just got quiet and a little sad. I don’t think you made it past eight beers. You fell asleep. You were really cute.” He stopped laughing. “And if anybody had told us that night that mousy little Becky DeForde was the one who would smash Jericho Ainsley’s marriage to bits a year later—”

“I think I get the picture.”

“Not that you weren’t good-looking. As a matter of fact, some of the guys had these little bets going—”

“I said I get it, Mr. Clark. Please, leave me alone.”

But some men are encouraged rather than deterred by firmness. “I can see you’re not that helpless little nobody any more, but I don’t think Jericho is any less obsessed with you now than he was then. I think he wanted you
because
you were sweet. He wanted you
because
you were innocent.” Clark’s next bite seemed almost angry: a man with scores to settle. “He’s a corrupter, Beck. That’s what he does. He messes with people the way he used to mess with countries. If he drew you back in after all these years, it’s because he wants one last shot at corrupting you. So, the way I see it, if I keep an eye on you, I’ll figure out what he’s up to.”