The Unseen World (24 page)

She sidled, next, into his office, which felt like the most illicit place to go. She had never been specifically forbidden from entering it—certainly she had spent a great deal of time inside it, whenever David asked her in—but her many years of hovering at its threshold without an invitation to come inside had served to make it feel off-limits. She rarely went into it alone.

It was a small office, a former pantry, stuffy in the summertime even with the window open. There were built-in bookshelves on either side of the room, nice-looking dark-wood bookshelves; but years of stacking books first vertically and then horizontally had rendered them unusable as a library. Only some of the spines were visible. There were a few odd pieces of art on the wall: two small framed prints of Leonardo da Vinci drawings (Ada had the feeling David had acquired them from a yard sale, or something equally eccentric); a little landscape that included a country lane.

The computer itself was clear of any debris, and everything that was out on the desk was stacked precisely, at right angles. David was neither neat nor messy; he disliked clutter, and had a mortal fear of the sort of knickknacks that Liston collected and kept on her desk and in her home. He did not like framed photographs. He did not like unnecessary objects. But his places of work were overrun with stacks: piles of papers and books and letters and bills, many of which were obsolete or had already been attended to.

Ada had never fixed, or hired someone else to fix, the computer in David's office, which he'd
crashed while working at it in the months following his retirement. When she turned it on, it still displayed the sad Mac face that David had chuckled at, its
X
'd-out eyes cartoonish and silly. Its hard drive disk was still stuck inside it. Whatever information it contained—some of it, perhaps, revealing—would be contained until the next time it was successfully started.

She turned in a full circle, took in a deep breath. She did not know where to start. The cream-colored filing cabinet caught her eye. Though she had never seen David use it, she put her hand out and tried the top drawer. It caught hard against her grip: locked. A tiny lock sat next to it tauntingly: no key in sight.

She went down into the basement and approached David's workbench. Above it, in a somber row, hung the strange and helmetlike objects he had been working on for years. Some resembled goggles; some resembled masks. They looked at her jarringly now. She did not like to see them. She grabbed a crowbar that hung below them on a peg, which she had seen David use only once before. He had levered open the door to the small shed in their backyard when he had lost the key to a padlock.

Now, returning upstairs, she tucked its hooked head up beneath the highest drawer in the filing cabinet and angled down as hard as she could. She used all of her insubstantial weight to push against the lock. But the only result was the bending of the metal—a bucktoothed look to the top drawer, a slight indentation in the one below it. Breathing heavily, her hands sore, she finally gave up, and dropped the crowbar on the floor.

At last Ada turned to the nearest stack of paper on David's desk. She lifted one leaf from the top. It was a letter from a collection agency, demanding that the electricity bill be paid. Below it was a photocopy of a journal article on language acquisition in children. Below that, an invoice for work that had been done on the roof of the house perhaps two years ago.

Quickly, she worked her way down the pile, until she reached a
layer (she had begun to think of the pile as an accumulation of strata, and herself as a geologist) that consisted of perhaps two dozen tickets and receipts. She picked each one up and examined it. Mainly they were meaningless, evidence of items purchased at the local pharmacy or grocery store, one the stub of a ticket to a movie that they had seen together, perhaps a year ago. But one item caught her eye: it was the stub of a train ticket dated August 11, 1984, from Boston to Washington, D.C. On the back of it was scribbled one name,
George
, and an address.

She lifted the ticket up, pondered it for a moment. When had David last been to Washington? The two of them had gone together several times when Ada had been younger; but never this recently. George was his friend from childhood, an artist, who now lived there; she had met him perhaps twice that she could recall.

Suddenly she realized the significance of the date: it was the day David had first gone missing. The first time she had spent the night at Liston's. She recalled it exactly: recalled the police report that served as evidence of the necessity of intervention by the DCF. The way that David had studied it sadly.

He had told her, and Liston, and the police, that he'd gone to New York.

Had the disease already overtaken his brain by then? Could it have been a mistake? Or had he been lying intentionally, covering something up?

Slowly, she put the ticket down again, on the top of the pile, and then changed her mind: she tucked it into her pocket. Next, she picked up the
For Ada
disk that thus far she had been leaving at David's house. Better to keep them both out of the hands of others, she thought.

She carried these two items with her for the rest of the day, searching for a place she might keep them safe. She found a giant, ancient dictionary, four hundred pages in length, in Liston's basement. It looked unused and unsuspicious. Into its pages she inserted the
For Ada
disk and the train ticket, and then she closed it with a
satisfying clap. After some further exploration, she decided she would put it on the top shelf of the closet in her bedroom at Liston's house, so high that she could not see it without craning her neck. She had to climb onto a chair to reach it. She would keep the documents together there, tucked safely inside the dictionary—along with any other evidence she could find.

O
ne thing David
had
done, according to Liston, was create a will; but with parts of his identity in question, and with Ada's maternity in question, it was not a valid legal document, according to the lawyer Liston had spoken with. Already there were problems with St. Andrew's, with the payments that settled his bill each month. Upon his death, the distribution of his worldly goods would come into serious question. Though Liston had tried to be subtle in her investigation, careful not to spread rumors at the Bit without due cause, in the days following her talk with Ada she called every member of the lab, one after another, to ask them what they knew. And everyone professed to know nothing.

“Oh my God,” Hayato said, softly, on the phone—Ada was eavesdropping, of course—“was he pathological? I don't understand.” And it was all Ada could do to prevent herself from crying out at him and Liston both in rage.

In the evening, after work, Ron Loughner sometimes came over and met with Liston, and Liston carefully invited Ada to join them. She accepted, but only, she told herself, to keep track of what was being said about David. The first time, Loughner asked her to draw her family tree as well as she could, naming those relatives whose names she could remember. She told him what she could about what David had told her, recalling the conversations she had had with him
prior to his move to St. Andrew's—the old Finnish ancestors, the governor of Massachusetts, the Amory family. She told him that David's mother and father were Isabelle and John Fairfax Sibelius, and that his father went by Fairfax as his first name. She told him that David had had no siblings and no cousins his own age. She told Loughner what David had told her: that both of his parents were dead, and that a family called Ellis had purchased their home. She told him, roughly, where their home had been.

“Thank you, Ada,” said Ron Loughner. “This will be very helpful.”

Ada nodded formally. She felt traitorous and low. But she viewed Loughner as an unwelcome but necessary ally in her quest to learn the truth.

One evening, Ada, from upstairs, heard the familiar sound of Liston lifting the telephone receiver in the kitchen, and she ran to the hallway.

By the time Ada had joined the call, as quietly as she could, it took her a few moments to determine who was on the other end.

“It's so very good to hear from you,” a voice was saying. “Of course I remember.” There was a slurring, monotone quality in the person's speech, as if from disease; whoever it was sounded very old, and had a lovely, refined Brahmin accent. His voice was familiar to Ada. It rang a bell someplace deep in her memory.

Liston explained why she was calling. “I'm sorry to be the one to inform you,” she said. “I was shocked myself. But I'm wondering if you can recall anything about his hiring, what you knew.”

Of course: it was Robert Pearse, President Pearse, David's former friend and ally, before his dreaded successor McCarren came along. It had been President Pearse who'd hired David permanently out of the Bit's graduate school many decades before. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's several years prior; Ada recalled David, concerned, sadly telling her the news. It had caused a serious change in Pearse's speech, but beneath it Ada recognized, with a surge of warmth, the
voice of the man who had once been their friend. He had always kept a stash of Mars bars in his desk. He had given Ada one each time he saw her.

There was a pause on the other end.

“Do you recall anything odd about his paperwork or references?” asked Liston, trying again.

“I recall nothing of the sort,” he said. “My goodness, Diana. I'm having trouble understanding you.”

“I know,” said Liston quickly. “It's possible that this might be a misunderstanding. But we're having some legal trouble now, you know, about guardianship for Ada.” She was speaking formally, unnaturally. She did not sound like herself. She had always been flustered around Pearse: Ada could sense it from the time she was very young. There was something about him, Liston had confessed once to David, that reminded her of a priest.

“That poor
child
,” said Pearse, and Ada imagined him in his large and gracious study—she and David had been to his home once, a stately row house on Beacon Hill—shaking his head.

“He came here in—let's see—must have been 1951 or '2,” continued Pearse. “He was a standout graduate student here. Integral to the building of the GOPAC under Maurice Steiner. Furthermore, I recall speaking with his undergraduate thesis advisor at Caltech personally. Donald Powell. Unfortunately, I believe he's since died.”

“Okay,” said Liston, nervously.

“That will be true of most of the faculty who once taught him, I suppose,” said Pearse. “My goodness, he's been here at the Bit for nigh on thirty-five years.”

“Caltech says they have no record of him,” said Liston.

“A mistake, I'm afraid,” said Pearse, the volume of his voice increasing unexpectedly. “How ridiculous. Powell was a friend of mine. I can tell you with certainty that David Sibelius was his protégé as an undergraduate. A sort of genius, I think. And I know the two remained in touch for some time.”

In that moment Ada loved President Pearse nearly as much as David. Relief and gratefulness surged through her. Was it possible, she wondered, that it was all a misunderstanding?

“Furthermore, I knew his people,” said Pearse. “The Sibeliuses, out of New York. I know their relationship with David was strained, but I can't imagine why they would have said he was missing when they knew very well he was here at the Bit.”

Pearse told Liston, at last, that he had to go. He wished her luck, told her to contact him again with any other questions. “Though I would say, Diana,” he said, “that this is not worth investigating further. It seems like a matter of shoddy record-keeping, if it is anything at all.” His voice betrayed his tiredness, elided vowels and consonants like a skipping record. His energy was flagging. He breathed in and out with effort.

Ada waited until Liston had hung up and then, slowly, quietly, she hung up her extension. She had been justifying her spying by imagining—perhaps correctly—that Liston knew that she was doing it. Or even if she didn't, Ada told herself, she had every right to know. She released the breath she had been holding.

And then she heard a noise behind her, and turned to see Gregory Liston, looking at her frankly, quite still.

Ada crossed her arms defensively, waiting for him to accuse her of what she had, in fact, been doing. But he only looked at her. She returned his gaze defiantly.

He lacked his older brother's ease and gracefulness. He was in every way William's physical opposite: dark-haired and dark-complexioned where William was fair; thin and slight in the places where William had acquired a grown-up solidity. He was short for his age, shorter than Ada; when she saw him next to his peers at Queen of Angels, he looked younger and smaller than they did. His usually lowered head contributed to Ada's impression that he was somehow in a constant state of sinking toward the earth. There was something about him that reminded her of a creature from a myth, a faun, an elf. He had dark
eyes with dark shadows beneath them, as if he did not sleep, and his ears protruded slightly. He had sharp elbows that stuck out beneath the plain white T-shirts he usually wore when not in his school uniform. He scratched one of them now thoughtfully.

“I was trying to make a call,” Ada said finally, “but your mother was using the phone.”

Gregory shrugged.

Then he said, “I heard your dad might have lied about a lot of things,” and for the first time in Ada's life she understood why punches were thrown, and she even went so far as to ball her fist into a tight little knot at her side.

He looked momentarily alarmed—perhaps more at the sight of her face, which had crumpled, than because of any threat that she posed.

“You don't know that,” Ada said. It was all she could think of to say.

“It's probably true, though,” said Gregory. “Odds are.”