The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (21 page)

I went back to the Hotel Virginia. In the dining area, the breakfast tables were pushed to the wall and Joke was practicing some incredible contortions on a mat on the floor.

“Come on down, Cassandra. Let me teach you a few tricks.”

Some tricks I’m never too old for, but I didn’t think that was what Joke had in mind. Fortunately Eloise wafted in at that moment with a pot of tea and cups on a tray. She looked as benevolent and tousled as she usually did, as if she’d just awoken from a long and particularly pleasant nap, but I knew that she’d been up since five, dealing with breakfasts and check-outs, supervising the cleaning of the rooms, dealing with reservations, shopping, and welcoming new guests.

I asked Eloise if she knew Anja.

“Not well, but yes. I’ve found absolutely incredible books on her shelves and the prices are reasonable. It’s too bad the shop doesn’t do better. Recently she told me she might have to close it if things didn’t improve.”

As we had our tea, I told her, as briefly as I could, about Abby selling her aunt’s correspondence, the love letters between Amanda Lowe and the woman who’d won the Pulitzer and had often been mentioned in connection with the Nobel.

“But she’s not a…well!”

We looked at each other and shook our heads.

“I don’t understand this constant preoccupation with who is and who isn’t,” complained Joke from a position resembling a tangled phone cord. “Who the hell cares?”

“Only literary scholars, dear Joke,” said Eloise. “They love to pry open closets. More fodder for dissertations.”

For myself, I’d often found it a bittersweet pleasure to read biographies of famous men and women who had spent so much of their life’s energy keeping their love affairs with members of the same sex quiet. They were entitled to their privacy, but we who are openly gay also have, if not a right, then a great longing and need not to feel as lonely as we have sometimes.

“But who did Anja sell the papers to, I wonder?” asked Eloise. “A private collector? A university? Some special collection? And why did Abby choose Anja?”

“I imagine she thought going through Anja would be more discreet than using her contacts in London. Anja said what they were doing wasn’t on the up and up, but there’s nothing illegal about selling manuscripts.”

“And so far it’s not illegal to out famous people.”

“So it must have had something to do with the estate. Abby wasn’t supposed to sell anything in the flat perhaps, including old letters.”

“I still have academic friends,” Eloise. “I’ll see what I can find out. I wonder,” she stopped as she was getting up and looked at me. “Could there be something more to all this than a hit-and-run?”

“You’re not thinking there’s something suspicious about Abby’s death, are you?”

But Eloise was already out the door. From the floor, Joke said, “I would say that’s exactly what Eloise is thinking. And maybe you should be too.”

The next morning I took an early train to Brussels, which gave me plenty of time to consider what I’d gotten myself into. Had my friend been murdered by her lover Rachel? Why? And what was Anja’s involvement? Why had she assumed that something had happened to Abby? To whom was Anja selling the correspondence, and for how much? What had happened to that money?

I got off at the Gare Midi and had a look around. Although the streets surrounding it were a bit grimy, the station itself had been renovated inside and had plenty of passengers. Someone must have seen something. I went back outside and talked to the taxi drivers. I asked them if they’d heard about the hit-and-run the previous week.

“Oh yes,” they remembered it (“
Horrible.
”); that is, they’d heard about it; well, none of them had actually witnessed it. But Paul had, and he had an afternoon shift today. If I came back around two or three, I could surely talk with him.

“You’re from the insurance, aren’t you?” said one cabby wisely, and I didn’t dissuade him.

Next I went to the local police station and was shuffled around to various desks until the inspector in charge of the case turned up and led me into his office. I introduced myself this time as an American journalist, which flummoxed him slightly.

“I assure you, Madame,” he said, “that we have done everything in our power to locate the driver and the car. But it was twilight, the worst time for identifying anything, and it was raining hard and the license plate was covered with mud.” He paused. “This woman was important in America?”

“
Très importante
,” I said, and thought, To her friends.

When I arrived at the apartment off the Avenue Louise around noon, I found Thomas, Abby’s older brother, there. In early years Abby had talked about him sarcastically; in later years not much at all. I couldn’t remember what he did for a living, only that when they’d been growing up he’d called Abby Butt-Face. And there was something about their father’s business being a problem between them. I couldn’t recall the details, only that Abby, much like I had, had left home at an early age when it came out she was a lesbian.

He didn’t look at all like Abby. He was about fifty and plump, with a bald head fringed with seaweed-black hair and sarcastic furrows on either side of his bitten-in lips.

He hardly acknowledged me as Rachel let me in, but continued circumnavigating the room with a long list that was presumably the inventory from the security box. Occasionally he would bark a question at Rachel, but mostly he ignored her, much as if she’d been the charwoman.

Rachel appeared groggy and anxious at the same time, as if whatever pills she’d taken to sleep had dulled her wits without bringing her rest. She was still in her bathrobe.

“How did it go in Amsterdam?” she asked eagerly, but in a low voice. “Did you find the bookshop? Did you find what Abby might have been buying?”

“A woman called Anja runs it. I had a drink and a chat with her. Did Abby ever mention her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But clearly she went to Amsterdam about a half a dozen times over the past year. Didn’t you ask her what she was doing there, who she was seeing?”

“I just thought she was restless, just like I was. In Amsterdam she could talk English, feel freer than here.”

“But you didn’t go with her?”

“No. She…didn’t want me to come.”

“Just like she didn’t want you to come to London?”

“No,” Rachel whispered.

She looked pretty miserable. But I hardened my heart against her, remembering, the inspector’s words, “It was twilight; it was raining. The car had mud on its license plate.”

“Where was Abby returning from that night she was at the train station?”

Rachel jumped.

“Or was she going off somewhere?” I continued casually.

“She was…going to Amsterdam.”

“In the evening?”

But Rachel had composed herself. “Why shouldn’t she go in the evening? Anyway, you know as well as I do that she kept her life…”

“Private?”

“Secret,” said Rachel. “I didn’t ask. She didn’t offer information.”

Except to Anja, I thought. Abby seemed to have told Anja everything. Rachel and I had been whispering in a corner of the apartment, and both of us started when Thomas said, “Is this the Louis 16th chair?”

Rachel nodded to him and muttered, “He doesn’t have a clue, the greedy philistine.”

I said casually, “So did Abby’s aunt specify that not only could the flat not be sold, but none of the articles in it? Is that why Abby resorted to selling the correspondence? It probably wasn’t listed on any inventory.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did Abby know you couldn’t inherit? Obviously
you
didn’t.”

“Cassandra, I asked you to go to Amsterdam and meet with someone at this Antikvaariat Sophie. And you come back giving me the third degree.”

“And that’s another thing. Why did you make me go to Amsterdam when you were going there yourself? Did you just want her out of the bookstore so you could get in and look for something?”

Rachel was silent. I took out the envelope still filled with money and handed it back to her. “This is nothing I want to be involved in.”

Thomas was wandering near the bookshelves. “Those aren’t your aunt’s books,” Rachel told him sharply, coming over to him. “They were your sister’s.”

“Everything of my sister’s is mine now,” he reminded her.

“Well, there’s nothing valuable on those shelves.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

We watched him scan the titles, pull down a few of the more expensively-bound books, and look at them. He obviously had no idea that a book in worn paper covers, but signed by Virginia Woolf, was many times more valuable than a leather-bound reprint of a Jane Austen novel. I could see myself that Abby’s collection was sadly diminished.

Rachel walked back across the room to where I stood near the door. “Insufferable man,” she muttered.

“When exactly did he arrive?”

“This morning.”

“There’s no chance he could have come a few days ago?”

“Why would he have…” Rachel stopped and looked at me. “You don’t think…” A stain of red came surging up from her chest and into her face. “Abby was murdered?”

I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to go in this direction with Thomas still in the room, even though we were both whispering. “It’s possible.”

“Then you think her brother…or even I…or this woman Anja? But why?”

“Love and money, the two usual motives.”

“You think I might have run over the woman I loved and left her lying in the street?”

“If you were jealous enough. Or desperate enough about money.”

“Okay, that’s enough. Get out. I thought you were a friend; I thought you would help. But now I see you’re out to punish me for some reason. You can leave.”

“I didn’t say it was you,” I tried to explain, but she had opened the door and practically pushed me out. “You admit you were jealous of Anja,” I said, as the door closed firmly behind me.

I could have gone to the police station with my suspicions, but I hesitated. I didn’t have enough facts, and Rachel’s expression of total horror showed she really was surprised to find herself accused. I needed to know more. As I made my way back to the train station, I remembered an evening the three of us had spent in London a few years before. We’d dined well and drunk moderately and laughed enormously, and I’d gone away not so much envious as satisfied: Abby was happy with Rachel.

Things could change. Anja said that Abby wasn’t a one-woman woman, which to me was a fairly clear indication that they’d been involved. I wondered who the lover in London was. I tried to see it from Abby’s perspective, as I sat on a bus travelling through a gray mist that made it seem much later than early afternoon. She had moved to Brussels because of the flat, and in order to satisfy Rachel’s desire for a better standard of living than they’d had in London. But neither of them was happy there. They didn’t have friends; they didn’t have community. Abby began to wander. Rachel was lonely. There were arguments. Each blamed the other. Rachel suspected affairs, and probably she was right.

But then why didn’t Abby leave her? Why did she sell off her book collection and try to sell her aunt’s letters, if not to continue to stay in Brussels and support Abby?

I tried hard to recall our last conversation. It had been about a month ago, in bleakest January. Abby had been casual, as usual. “Hi, I’m in town. Meet me for a cappuccino at the usual spot, all right?”

As I had walked up Coptic Street, I saw her just emerging from the bookstore where she used to work. I caught up with her there. To my surprise, she’d seemed a little embarrassed. “Just visiting Peter,” she hastened to say, as if that wasn’t exactly what I would have assumed.

She had seemed very glad to see me, and we’d spent an hour catching up. She wanted to know all about my recent travels, and I amused her with stories of Luisa Montiflores and her boundless ego. Abby and I had rarely talked about anything very important to us except in a slantwise, jocular fashion, but this time, she’d seemed especially anxious to keep the conversation off herself. When I asked how Brussels was, she shrugged. “It’s gloomy in winter, but then every place is. We’re doing a lot of reading.” And then she’d changed the subject. I’d tried to drag it back—“How long do you plan to be there?”—and that was when she’d made her remark about privacy and secrets. It wasn’t really any of my business, she let me know.

I got off at the station and asked for the cabby Paul, but he had just taken off with a fare. I went into the Gare Midi and found a bank of phones. First I called London.

“Peter? This is Cassandra Reilly. You may not remember me, but I was a friend of Abby’s.” I told him, as gently as I could, that she had been killed.

“But I just saw her recently,” he said. “Just last month. I can’t believe it. Not Abby.”

“She worked for you for donkey’s years, it seems.”

“And I’ve missed her badly since she left for Brussels. Couldn’t understand why she wanted to go there and once there, since she was so unhappy, why she didn’t return.”

“She told you she was unhappy?”

“Oh well, you know Abby. She never told anyone the total truth, only the version that suited her at the moment. But of course that’s what made her such a good book buyer. If someone brought in a load of books, imagining they were valuable—and of course sometimes they would be valuable—Abby would never let on. She knew such a vast amount, but then she would, wouldn’t she? Raised in the trade.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well of course you knew,” Peter sounded surprised. “Her father had Lowe’s Antiquarian Bookstore, that excellent shop on the West Side in Manhattan. People still remember it—the marvelous selection, the old wooden shelves up to the ceiling, the books in the glass cabinets, beautiful books. Abby grew up in the shop. But when her father died suddenly, her brother was the one to take it over. I don’t know the reason why. I suppose because he was the boy and she was still too young.”

I was remembering a very early conversation with Abby. “The business went to my brother, even though he didn’t love it. He was just greedy and thought it would make him rich. But he doesn’t know anything.” But I had not remembered that it was a bookstore. Perhaps she hadn’t told me.