The Truth of All Things (15 page)

Grabbing two random books off a nearby shelf, Helen hurried toward the special-collections room. From there she heard the voice of the head librarian in the same area where she had seen the intruder two nights earlier. Helen strode across to the reference desk and glanced down at the registry. The last signature was that of Perceval Grey. She repeated the name twice under her breath as she sat down at the desk and waited.

A short while later, Grey appeared and walked past with only the quickest glance at Helen. She collected her coat and bag from the third floor while giving a hasty, jumbled excuse to Mr. Meserve. After hurrying back downstairs, she dashed out the front door and caught sight of Perceval Grey moving east. She followed behind as he entered the busy square where Free Street angled in to meet the juncture of High and
Congress. Helen hurried in and out of shadows cast by the tall spires of Plymouth Congregational, First Universalist, and then the Free Street Baptist Church, all of which sat in a cluster, looming over the congested intersection.

A bit farther on, Grey stopped for a moment and glanced about. Helen feigned interest in the sidewalk displays of the Congress Fish Market. After one of the Portland Railroad’s horse cars rumbled past, moving down the rails in the middle of the stone-paved street, Helen continued her pursuit. The powerful scent of the day’s catch gave way to the sweet smell of sugar from the massive Hudson’s candy works across the street.

Grey turned in to a doorway just ahead. Helen slowed her pace as she passed the entrance. Gilded letters arching across the upper limits of the large plate-glass window announced the Western Union Telegraph Co. She did her best to glance casually into the branch office and watched Grey take a pad from the man at the first of three telegraph windows. Grey dashed out his message. After only two lines, he snapped the tip of the pencil, and the clerk handed him a new one.

An idea sprang into Helen’s mind, and she felt a devious smile creeping across her face. She watched Grey hand the pad back to the man along with the payment. Helen took several steps back in the direction she’d come and made an earnest effort to study the pastries on display in the window of Calderwood Brothers bakery. Grey exited and continued along Congress Street. Helen took several steps after him, then stopped in her tracks, unsure of whether to abandon her plan for the telegraph office. To her great relief, Grey went only another block before crossing Monument Square and heading into the four-story Preble House, one of Portland’s finest hotels.

Helen hurried into the telegraph office and approached the clerk who had served Grey, cutting off a man heading for that same window. She made a show of apologizing breathlessly before turning to the clerk. “I beg your pardon, but my employer was just here, Mr. Perceval Grey. He was in such a rush he thinks he may have accidentally sent his telegraph to the wrong party. Could you please check for me? Was it directed for a Mr. Charles Andrews?”

“Just a moment, ma’am, I’ll check.” As the clerk turned away to retrieve Grey’s message, Helen reached through the service window for the pad of paper and quietly tore off the top sheet.

The clerk returned to the window. “No, ma’am, sent to a Mr. Walter McCutcheon.”

“Oh, thank heavens. He’ll be so relieved. That could have been quite embarrassing.” She gave a broad smile of relief, and the clerk nodded at her. With the sheet of paper tucked into her handbag, she hurried back onto the sidewalk. Helen made her way down the block, under the stately elms that lined the front of the Preble House. She had to walk just past where Grey had entered, one door farther down to the ladies’ entrance to the hotel.

Inside, she circled around to the main lobby, looking over the bustle of guests, porters, and the lunchtime crowd mingling near the doors of the hotel restaurant. She focused on taller men in dark suits, but it was no use; Grey had disappeared. She stood for a moment planning her next step. As she prepared to head for the front desk, a loud squeak from the door to a public telephone booth drew her attention. She was startled to recognize Grey’s sharp features as he exited from the cramped space. Helen took a roundabout route to the booth, allowing Grey time to exit the hotel. She pressed the call button twice, turned the lever and latched it before picking up the receiver. When the operator came on, Helen read the four numbers printed below the phone.

“Requested number?” asked the tinny voice through the receiver.

“Could you please place the last call again?”

Helen waited anxiously until the operator came back on the line. “Yes, ma’am. It will be just a minute while we ring through to the Harvard switchboard.”

Helen hung up the receiver and glanced out the glass of the phone booth. Through the large front windows, she could still see Perceval Grey lingering on the sidewalk. She guessed he was waiting for the next horse car. Helen stared at the receiver, willing it to ring. Eventually her mental efforts were rewarded with a loud clanging. She snatched the receiver off its hook.

“Hello.”

“Go ahead, sir,” said the operator.

“Professor Newell Scribner speaking.”

Helen suddenly realized that she had not thought of what to say if her plan to reconnect Grey’s call actually succeeded. She managed nothing better than a few confused stammers along the lines of an apology before hanging up. She fumbled her way out of the booth’s folding door and scanned the windows for any sign of Grey. He was gone. Helen strode to the exit, where the white-gloved attendant in his gray coat with burnished brass buttons held the door for her.

The commotion of Monument Square washed over her. The scene was not as active as it had been when the area had been accurately titled Market Square. While most of the stalls and vendors had vanished since the square was reconfigured a year prior and the massive war monument erected, the space was still home to all manner of commercial endeavors. She scanned the square to see if Grey was heading into any of the businesses. Apart from the Preble House, the square was also home to the grand United States Hotel, as well as dozens of restaurants, halls, shops, and offices for such disparate enterprises as the
Evening Express
newspaper and the Portland Theatre, as well as the Portland Plasterers’ Union, the Phoenix Crayon Company, and the Imperial Banjo, Guitar and Mandolin Club. But for sheer motion, none could compare with the offices of the Portland Rail Road Company as well as its streetcar depot. The ebb and flow of activity surrounding that hub of the city’s horse rail lines caused pedestrians to alternately stroll or dash to safety across the triangular square and the various streets that emptied into the plaza.

All this movement, like a series of massive brick-fronted anthills, was set under the watchful gaze of a towering bronze Athena-like figure.
Our Lady of Victories
stood atop an ornate twenty-foot-tall pedestal bearing bronze reliefs of Civil War sailors and soldiers and this inscription:
TO HER SONS WHO DIED FOR THE UNION
. Helen stared up at the helmeted and laurel-crowned goddess, so sure and regal in her contemplative gaze.
If you’re so wise
, she thought,
then tell me where he’s gone
. As if by divine intervention, a horse car pulled past her. At the rear, in plain view, stood Perceval Grey.

Helen hailed a hansom cab and followed Grey the length of Congress Street past City Hall, Lincoln Park, and the Eastern Cemetery. Per her instructions, the driver momentarily delayed the pursuit of the trolley car when it stopped at the base of Munjoy Hill. A second horse was hitched to haul the car up the steady quarter-mile slope. She kept her eyes locked on Grey as people hurried aboard and settled themselves. After a minute the car lurched forward on its slow ascent. Helen let her mind wander, and her eyes landed on the Portland Observatory ahead on the right. The brown wooden tower was domed and octagonal, giving it the appearance of a hilltop lighthouse. The observatory was actually a maritime signal tower, built eighty-five years earlier, when Munjoy Hill was nothing more than an empty cow pasture.

As the car approached the summit, it slowed in preparation for detaching one of the draft horses. Grey dismounted at the base of the observatory. A man waited for him at the bottom of the staircase leading to the second-floor entrance. Helen stared for several seconds before realizing she knew the man. Her carriage pulled close, and he glanced in her direction. Helen whipped her head around to avoid making eye contact with Deputy Archie Lean.

L
ean waited at the bottom of the wooden staircase leading to the front door of the observatory. At his left was a large fenced-in yard. To his right, at the peak of the hill, was the Fire Department Engine No. 2. “So just what is it you wanted to see?”

Grey pointed past Lean, his finger angled into the air. Lean looked up, his eyes following the line of the structure’s octagonal sides. The tower slanted inward, starting from a base diameter of thirty-two feet and narrowing to less than half that six stories up at the observation deck. The observatory was capped by a white, canvas-covered dome
that was topped with a metal ball. It was a striking building, visible from most of the city and all of Portland Harbor.

Grey was already on the stairs, and Lean took the steps two at a time to catch up. The front door was a full story above the street, since the bottom level of the observatory held 120 tons of rubble that served as ballast for the structure. The building’s plan, designed by a sea captain, had allowed it to stand firm against a dozen hurricanes and countless winter northeasters. The first floor was a large, empty octagonal room with exposed beams, including the eight colossal white pine support timbers that ran the entire height of the tower. A circular staircase hugged the outside wall. Each side held several narrow windows on alternating levels, so that every floor had enough daylight to allow people to see the way along the stairs.

The next-to-last floor housed large shelves that stored the various flags and pennants used on the observatory’s three flagpoles to relay messages to the waterfront and signal the approach of specific vessels so owners and dockhands could prepare for the arrivals. The two men moved up the last of the 102 steps from the street to the top of the tower. The stairs were capped with a trapdoor that formed part of a small raised platform inside the top level, called the lantern. Inside, they were greeted by the young man on duty, who informed them that all visible ships had already been signaled. At the sight of Lean’s badge, the young man gladly agreed to give them a few minutes’ privacy by stretching his legs and going down to the market across the street.

The lantern was a window-encased room eight feet across. Immediately to the side of the trapdoor was the narrow exit out to the open-air walkway that encircled the lantern. A painted black bench ran along the remainder of the interior wall. Hanging from an iron rod in the center of the ceiling was a London-made, five-foot-long achromatic refracting telescope. The scope could swivel 360 degrees from Casco Bay to the White Mountains of New Hampshire seventy miles to the west. On clear days the telescope’s sixty-five-times magnification was enough to spot ships as far as thirty miles out. Closer to home, the
city’s rooftops were spread out below, interrupted by occasional spaces of green growth and a maze of narrow, twisting streets intersecting at irregular angles, like a web of paving stones spun by a gigantic, crazed spider.

“My father used to bring me up here when I was a boy,” Lean said as he caught his breath. “He thought it was a nice little mix of navigation, history, and geography. Of course, the old man could never resist a bit of the fanciful.”

“So that’s where you get it,” Grey replied.

“He’d always comment on the number of steeples and tell me of the old English folktale about how when a young boy and his sister climb a hilltop searching for lost sheep but instead see seven church spires in the setting sun, then would King Arthur rise again to save England once more.”

“Touching. Of course, I prefer the tale of the grown man with an annoying habit of waxing poetic about childhood fables when he should be concentrating on a murder inquiry. Father never mentioned anything along those lines, did he? No?”

Lean grinned. “Doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid.” He stepped up to the telescope eyepiece and turned his sights on the immediate harbor. There was Portland Head Light, commissioned 101 years earlier by George Washington, jutting out at the edge of Cape Elizabeth, near the main harbor entrance. Halfway Rock Light was close to that, a stone tower lighthouse on a short stretch of exposed ledge rising out of the bay. Standing more than two hundred feet above sea level, Lean could see the dozens of islands in Casco Bay and all the channels and passages.

“Certainly is a whole new perspective,” he said as he stepped away from the telescope. “Quite a magnificent tool. This scope, and Polaris to steer by. That’s all you would need.”

“North’s that way.” Grey pointed a bit to Lean’s left.

“Are you sure?”

Grey motioned upward, where a compass rose was painted on the ceiling.