New England White (51 page)

CHAPTER 57

AGAIN THE LIBRARIAN

(I)

T
HIS TIME
J
ULIA STRODE CONFIDENTLY
into the workroom of the archives, clutching the photocopies of Kellen’s search requests. The new me, she kept saying to herself, even as something inside her trembled at the thought of further rejection. This is the new me. She had chosen late afternoon because morning was busier, and selected Mrs. Bethe rather than Roderick Rutherford as her target because Mrs. Bethe had been known every now and then to attempt a smile.

But not today.

“These citations do
not
match the Joule papers,” Mrs. Bethe explained, near breathless with wonder that anyone could think otherwise. “These items are all in
other
collections.”

“I know that.”

She handed the sheets back. “Then please write the names of the proper collections on the indicated line. The rules require—”

“Yes, Mrs. Bethe, I know what the rules require. But since you have the numbers, isn’t finding the documents just a matter of going to the indicated shelf and cubbyhole and taking them down? I mean, there’s no practical impediment, is there?”

Mrs. Bethe wore small-bore glasses, pearls, and a twin set. She had assisted in the archives for a quarter century, and saw no distinction between disagreement and insolence. “Wait here,” she said, and scooped up the search requests, providing Julia a moment of glorious hope. Then she dashed it, marching across the small room into the chief archivist’s office.

Oh, great.

A moment later, Roderick Rutherford emerged and, rubbing his hands against each other as if he had been handling something dusty, crossed to her side as Mrs. Bethe returned to her hutch.

“Now, what can we do for you today, Dean Carlyle?”

“You can show me the files on this sheet.” She passed over the page on which she had copied the folio and volume numbers. The librarian studied it briefly, eyebrows knitting, prim mouth working as if voicing them.

“May I ask why you want them?”

“Isn’t it enough that I want them?”

“Oh, no, my dear Dean Carlyle, not at all. The archives are open only to scholars with a bona fide interest in materials available in our collection.” He handed the page back to her. “I cannot permit you to examine any of these files without a legitimate academic reason.”

Not again! “What counts as an academic reason, Mr. Rutherford?”

“Say you were writing a book or article that required you to—”

“All right. I am.”

“You are what, Dean Carlyle?”

“Writing an article. An article about what happened to Gina Joule thirty-odd years ago. There. Now I have a scholarly purpose.”

Rod Rutherford smiled rarely. Now that he was offering one, Julia knew why, and hoped he would not soon do it again. The smile was narrow and presumptuous, touching no other part of his face, which remained locked against her: the sort of bright, crazy smile we expect on the face of a little boy pulling the wings off a live butterfly for fun. Or a teenaged girl burning her father’s midnight-blue Mercedes on the Town Green on the anniversary of Gina Joule’s death.

“Alas, Dean Carlyle, the only difficulty is that I don’t believe you.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I believe, Dean Carlyle, that you are lying to me.” Calmly. “There is no such article.”

“Lying!
You’re
accusing
me
of lying!”

The outburst stunned Mrs. Bethe, who was packing up her desk: that is to say, she cocked her head vaguely in the direction of the long work table, as if listening to distant music she was not sure she remembered. Without ever quite looking their way, she crossed to the heavy vault door guarding the archives, spun the lock, and set the alarm. Then she went out.

“That is correct, Dean Carlyle. I am accusing you of lying. Of course, ordinarily it would not be my business. But because I do not believe you have a bona fide scholarly purpose, I cannot comply with your request.” Spreading his hands. “It is perfectly evident that you are still seeking to discover what documents, if any, Professor Zant might have examined. The pertinent rules forbid me to share that information. I believe I told you this already.”

“Yes, you did, Mr. Rutherford. Rule 22-C, I believe you mentioned. Adopted by the faculty senate in 1973, after the Buckley Amendment.”

“Correct, Dean Carlyle.”

“The only trouble is, the Buckley Amendment didn’t pass Congress until 1974. I looked it up. You told me to pay close attention to the rules, so I did.”

The brows crinkled delicately. “Perhaps I made a mistake.”

“I don’t think so. You don’t make that kind of mistake. Not unless you do it on purpose.” From her shoulder bag she drew the university rulebook. She found the page she wanted. “And there’s something else. Here’s Rule 22. It has nothing to do with privacy, does it? It’s about the two types of committees of the faculty, standing and ad hoc.” Tapping the pertinent section. “And it only goes up to Part B.”

“How distressing.” His long pale hands made their washing motion again. “How terribly distressing.”

Julia half smiled. “You’re good, Mr. Rutherford. You’re very good. I never would have guessed your whole story was a façade. But, as I said, you don’t make that kind of mistake. You gave me that false information for a reason. I would like to know why.”

He shook his head. “Alas, I cannot violate confidentiality. Whatever the pertinent rule number might be, I am unable to tell you whether Professor Zant was ever here, or what files he looked at.”

“Just tell me why you made up that story about the rule.”

“The rules, Dean Carlyle, exist for the benefit of the entire community. Of every one of us.”

“I just—”

“And our families.”

“Our families?”

He ignored her surprise. “And you have brought me no authorization? A subpoena, something like that?”

“No, I—”

Oh!

The straight man. Rod. Straight. Was it possible?

“Wait here,” she said, in the most commanding voice she could muster. “Wait right here.”

“Oh, dear me.” A glance at his watch. “How the day does fly by. Five-thirty already. Time to lock up for the night.”

“Five minutes,” she said, and, without lingering for his answer, hurried back to her office. She opened her bag and pulled out the broken mirror from Luma’s Gifts. Two minutes later, she was standing in front of him again.

“What am I to do with this, Dean Carlyle?” murmured the librarian, frowning down at the mirror she had laid on his blotter. “What is it, precisely?”

“You know what it is.” So she hoped. “It’s my authorization.”

“That seems rather unlikely.”

“Somewhere you have the other half. You’re supposed to see if they fit together. Then you’re supposed to give me what I want.”

He shook his head, refusing to take the proffered item. “If indeed I were in possession of the other half, as you call it, I would hardly need time for study to see, as you put it, if they fit together. It would be obvious at a glance.”

“Are you saying—”

“It is half past five, Dean Carlyle. The archives are now closed.”

“Mr. Rutherford, you can’t just—”

“I am afraid I must.” He was on his feet, thin and imposing. “Sadly, Dean Carlyle, I am unable to be of further assistance in this matter. The rules about closing time are unambiguous.”

“You can’t just walk out on this conversation!”

“Incorrect, Dean Carlyle.” Tugging on the heavy parka that emphasized rather than concealed his scrawniness. “I can do exactly that.”

He pulled on his hat, turned off all the lights except the one directly above the table where they had been sitting, and walked out the door.

She stood, astonished.

The lock cycled. The red light came on.

The alarm was active. And Julia Carlyle was alone, locked inside the archives.

(II)

H
ER FIRST INSTINCT SAID ACCIDENT
. Rod Rutherford, flustered by her demands, had followed his end-of-the-day routine, walking out the door precisely at half past five because he always did, except on Sunday, when he rested. But that was absurd. Surely a part of his daily routine was checking the archives to make sure nobody was hiding out to disturb the perfection of the preservation of knowledge.

So she swung the other way. He had left her on purpose.

Either way, the response was obvious. She banged on the heavy double doors leading to the stairs and called his name, then called for anybody—but of course nobody could hear her, because this entire end of the library would be deserted once the archives shut down.

Oh, great.

There would be no climbing out the window this time either. The bars had been repaired. She had already checked.

She clutched the reassuring techiness of her cell phone, only to discover, when she flipped it open, that down here in the basement, surrounded by metal beams and concrete, no signal was available. There was a phone on the archivist’s desk but the handset was fastened down by a lock of a design popular in her own student days, when unpaid calls presented a significant budgetary problem, and Julia possessed no key. A glance out the door told her that Mrs. Bethe’s phone was similarly secured.

Oh, this is great, Julia. Just great. The archivist has locked you in. Now all you have to do is sit down and wait for the Eggameese to come and gobble you up. Or for a bullet in your own stupid head.

She forced a calm on herself.

There had to be a reason for this.

First hypothesis: Roderick Rutherford was involved up to his manicured fingertips in the search for Kellen’s surplus. Kellen was dead. Boris Gibbs was dead. Bruce Vallely had tried to warn her that if she kept this up she might wind up dead, too. So perhaps the Eggameese really was lurking out there, and she was next on the list.

She shivered and, back on her feet, banged on the door again, shouting. She already knew she could not be heard, but she could not bear not trying.

When she was all panicked out, she sat down again.

Second hypothesis: Nobody was waiting to kill her. Therefore, Roderick Rutherford had a method to his madness. Tomorrow morning, whoever opened up the archives first would find her, and she would have the librarian’s job, and maybe see him in prison, too. Therefore, he expected her not to turn him in.

Why not?

She had an idea. Maybe they were on the same side. She walked over to the vault door and gave it a shove. The lights blinked angrily. All right, she needed the pass code to get in. An alarm on the outer door, a combination for the inner door, and only Roderick Rutherford and his assistant possessed both. Those were the rules, to prevent theft of—

The rules.

The rules?

What had he said to her? Rule 22-C. The nonexistent rule.

The panel had numbers and letters. She pushed 2, 2, C, then shoved the door.

Blinking red lights.

Okay, so that was a bad guess. But the archivist had lied about the year the rule was adopted as well as its number.

She tried 2, 2, C, 1, 9, 7, 3.

No result.

What else had he said?

It was adopted after five months of debate.

She entered 2, 2, C, 5. No. Then 2, 2, C, 1, 9, 7, 3, 5. No. She tried one permutation after another of the same letters and numbers, because standing here and punching possible combinations into the lock was at least moderately saner than hunching in the corner screaming her head off.

And then she had it.

Five months meant five numbers and letters in the combination.

She punched 2, 2, C, 7, 3. The light turned green. A metallic click, wet and heavy in the chilly silence. She pulled the handle, and the massive door swung easily in her grasp.

CHAPTER 58

AUTOMATIC LEVELING

(I)

T
HE LIGHTS WERE OFF,
but she had armed herself with a flashlight from the librarian’s desk. The windows in this part of the building were barred, too, and they gave on the parking lot, so, if she switched on the overheads, her chances of being spotted were not insignificant. She swung the beam through the darkness. It glittered off glass display cases holding valuable books and holograph documents, a touch she found amusing, given that nobody was allowed here. The elevator stood at the back of this weird little museum, an ordinary-looking door with a diamond-shaped glass window and a worn brass panel with one cracked plastic button and two lights:
IN USE
and
NOT IN USE
. The
NOT IN USE
light glowed faintly. One entered the elevator by opening the door manually, grabbing a handle, and sliding the gate aside. A silly system, hopelessly antiquated, but Claire Alvarez had not yet raised the money for the renovation. Closing all these contraptions behind her, Julia hesitated just a few seconds before pressing the button for the second sub-basement, where, according to Suzanne de Broglie, nobody ever went. Somewhere high up in the stacks, a motor whooshed and groaned. As the elevator creaked into motion, she thought she heard another sound, out in the workroom, but nobody could be there. The alarm would have sounded. She looked around the narrow elevator car. In her own student days, this part of the library had been part of the main stacks, accessible to anyone with a university identification. She remembered riding this same elevator to this same basement on another winter night, probably more nervous then than now, chasing down the great Lemaster Carlyle, eight years her senior, who had said he would be working late.

After due deliberation, and a screaming argument with Tessa, she had decided to allow him to seduce her. Always impulsive, she had acted at once, and if he was in the library, well, then, the library would have to do—

Pay attention to business, she ordered herself sternly, for that was a thousand lifetimes ago. She licked her lips. The elevator was very slow. A peeling red-and-white sticker at eye level warned the unwary:
THIS CAR IS NOT CAPABLE OF AUTOMATIC LEVELING. EXERCISE EXTREME CAUTION WHEN EXITING
. Great. If I were the kind of person who exercised extreme caution, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Clutching her briefcase with both hands to try to make them stop shaking, Julia Carlyle rode downward, watching the floors creak by on the other side of the gate, and experienced for an awful instant the illusion that the elevator was bearing her downward to Hell, full penalty for her sins, and that she would never see her family again. And then she thought, although this, too, must be her imagination at work, that the sound she had heard just before the elevator began its descent was the double door upstairs rattling open.

The Eggameese was coming for her, no question.

No. It wasn’t. Only Rod Rutherford and Mrs. Bethe had keys. Rutherford had locked her in, and Mrs. Bethe would hardly come back to let her out. Therefore, nobody was upstairs. So stop it, Julia. Pay attention to business.

Red warning sticker or no, Julia stumbled as she stepped off the elevator. Everything went tumbling. Picking up her briefcase and the scattered photocopies, she noticed that the floor of the car was almost two inches lower than the floor of the subbasement.
NOT CAPABLE OF AUTOMATIC LEVELING
, indeed.

She closed the gate behind her and stepped out into the lowest level of the library stacks. A long time since last time. She paused, scenting the air, listening to currents, before deciding that she was alone.

She walked along the rows of battleship-gray shelves, her steps ringing on the metal plates of the floor, scarcely noticing the aged books and old pamphlets, the neatly stacked folios of sermons and reports and letters and diaries and minutes that constituted a remarkable history of religion in New England. She did not look at the items on the shelves. She looked at the letters and numbers. This was right. She knew it was. Down here, in the underbelly of the divinity school, was where Kellen had hidden the missing pieces of his surplus. Covered by a code only Julia would understand, hidden in places only Julia could go. Unable to lure her out of her world during his life, the economist had ensured her presence in his world after his death.

There were moments when she thought his goal was not justice but spite.

“A little bit self-centered, Jules,” she said, scaring herself with the accuracy of her imitation of her husband’s gently correcting tone. “Not everything is about you.”

“
Kellen
was about me,” she answered him, words she would never speak to Lemaster’s face. “Except when he wasn’t,” she admitted.

She was close. The numbers were starting to catch up with the forms in her hand. Dust was everywhere. There had been a time when the collection was in constant use, when scholars and students thought there was wisdom to be gained from reading the words of the great thinkers of the past, in the actual texts in which the words were laid down: on the printed page, not the computer screen. Nowadays nobody seemed to care about places like this any more—nobody but a handful of traditionalists like her husband, people who like to hold the reflections of earlier generations solidly in their hands, as a reminder, perhaps, that the edifice of morality and reason they have spent their lives building is less transitory than those who zip through ideas with mouse and keyboard might imagine. Solidity implies time: nothing that lasts is ever built quickly.

“Showtime,” Julia said.

She had arrived at the first of Kellen’s locations, a dusty corner of the collection of eighteenth-century sermons. She matched the letter and number and pulled from the blue folder a dozen tightly handwritten pages, ink faded, penned by an obscure—

A sound, in the shadows ahead of her.

Instinctively she swung the beam into the aisle, but saw nothing.

It was a bump. Julia was sure of it. The bump of a book falling from a shelf, as if, for example, knocked by a carelessly placed human hand. Not on this level, she decided. One floor up.

Somebody else was in here.

But when she shut off the flashlight and listened hard, there was only darkness and silence.

Enough of this flashlight shit.

She fumbled along the wall for a light switch, flicked it, then jumped back at the quick whooshing sound of a motor kicking to life.

Her heart rate and breathing returned to something close to normal as she realized that it was just the sound of the clankety elevator, summoned to some higher level of the stacks.

Nothing to do with her.

Except that the stacks were closed, the archives door was alarmed, and nobody was supposed to be in here but her.

All right. All right. Maybe the elevator was programmed to go back upstairs automatically. The motor stopped. The sliding manual door did not clank open: she would have heard it all the way down here.

She was alone.

Back to work.

Tucked inside an obscure sermon by an even more obscure eighteenth-century preacher, she found a trim white envelope like the one Kellen had taped beneath the piano. Wedged into an early draft of a forgotten monograph on Aristotle’s concept of God by an unimportant religion scholar of a hundred years ago, she found another. And, snuggling puckishly inside the program from the annual student satirical show from the Kepler class of 1953, the year Kellen was born, she found a third.

She had just stuffed the third envelope into her bag when she looked up sharply at a footfall on the metal stairs.

“You must leave here at once,” murmured Roderick Ryan Rutherford, ghostly face, twisted into a mask of disapproval, floating above her in the darkened stacks. “Surely, Dean Carlyle, you realize you are not permitted in the stacks unescorted. Such conduct is absolutely against the rules.”

So was grabbing the archivist and kissing him on the cheek, but she did it anyway.

(II)

S
HE WOULD NEVER KNOW WHY
, Julia told herself, hurrying along the empty corridor toward her office. That Rod Rutherford had helped Kellen with his project was plain. He had transmitted the clues on her first visit, and then, when she returned with the authorization in hand, he had pretended to refuse her but left her inside the archives to go into the stacks. After a decent interval, he had returned to let her out again, and, although he refused absolutely to allow her to take the documents with her, he waited while she ran the photocopier—although he insisted on charging the copies to her university account. Her questions he politely but firmly refused to answer, citing confidentiality. When she departed, he was still inside, perhaps fussing around the stacks, putting everything back where it belonged.

Why had he helped Kellen? Rod’s mother had been the Kepler librarian, first woman ever in that post, and he had helped out during the summers, developing his own interest in the field. He was too young to have courted Gina Joule, but not too young to have known her. Perhaps the Rutherfords and the Joules had been close. Perhaps the connection was more attenuated—or more obvious.

She would never know, and Mr. Rutherford would never tell her. Confidentiality. Loyalty. Secrets. Lies. Was the entire world run this way, or was this some special New England collegiate thing? For, other than her brief sojourn in Manhattan, when she had learned the names of perhaps two of her neighbors, she had never really lived anywhere else.

Perhaps partaking moderately of the archivist’s paranoia, she locked both the outer and inner doors of her office suite, then sat down at her desk with only the reading lamp for company, and examined her finds.

The envelopes were conveniently numbered 1, 2, and 3 in Kellen’s sloping hand, so she started with the first, which happened also to be the thickest. A series of letters from Merrill Joule to his wife, who had taken herself off to Europe after Gina’s death. She read, and quickly became engrossed.

April 4, 1973

Dearest Anna,

I hope that this note finds you well, and that you and Margaret are continuing to profit from your holiday abroad. Nothing has changed here. President Nixon continues to duck and weave but I think he will shortly go down. At the university, the weather has lately been too cold for any demonstrations against the war, but with the arrival of spring I imagine we shall again see our share. Here in the Landing, matters are settling, and in the direction you predicted. I salute your wisdom. Justice, I beg you to remember, comes in many forms. All our lives you and I have marched for a vision of justice that is distributive rather than retributive. Can we abandon that now, simply because a member of our family has died? The enemy is a bad system, not bad people. Eduard is right. Our task is not to seek further punishment but to improve the world to the best of our abilities. What is happening at that church is a good example. The important thing is to move on….

That church: Miss Terry’s? The justice
in many forms
proposed that they had—what?—forgone vengeance in return for something better?

Julia had no way of knowing how many letters had passed between the two before the next one Kellen culled from wherever he found them. But the tone had decidedly changed. Gone was the reassuring, almost condescending lord and master of the household, who barely acknowledged his wife’s grief, or his own; in its place was a man given to sudden panic.

October 12, 1973

Dearest Anna
,

I have only a moment to pen this note. I am sitting in Ken
Steinberg’s office, and, yes, I know what you think of lawyers, but Ken is practically family, and, to be frank, I need his advice. The situation is changed. I am being watched. Yes, every paranoid believes this. But you know me, darling. I am not given to hyperbole. I am being watched. I feel their dark eyes on me even when I cannot see them. I sense their breath, passing nearby. They have done their part. They have pointed everyone in the wrong direction. They have obscured what should be obvious. I have given my word that I accept their vision of justice, and yet they do not believe I am going to keep my side of the bargain. I do not think they are able to break into the United States mails. Yet. But I urge you to beware. I believe you should extend your sojourn in Europe until I signal you that it is safe to return….

Julia read the key sentences again.
They have pointed everyone in the wrong direction.
Manufacturing evidence? Manufacturing alibis?
I am being watched.
She shuddered.
I sense their breath, passing nearby.

“I know exactly how you feel,” she told the air.

The third letter was dated nearly five months later. Vanessa had written in her paper that Anna Joule took an extended European tour after Gina died. Evidently, Anna had taken her husband’s advice.

March 7, 1974

Dearest Anna,

Destroy this letter once you have read it. I am afraid it is coming apart. Nixon’s fortunes appear to be ours. Covering up is impossible. There is always an informer. Always. Again your wisdom was correct. Better to pursue the truth. I wish I had listened. Yet all is not lost. Unlike Nixon, we have options. Our friends have not deserted us. And here our lifelong struggle for justice stands us I think rather in good stead. We are good people, you and I. We are not monsters. We have made errors, but errors are not the same as evil, are they? Miscalculation need not pave the way to Hell—not if we have done the best we could with what we were given. We have done our best to ensure that our beloved daughter did not die in vain. If we are wrong, at least we have erred on the side of charity.

To place the letters in context, she opened the second envelope, which turned out to be more pages from the diary of the constable:

Neither of the college boys’ alibis check out, but we’re not to pursue it. Besides, with all this money floating around I can’t trust anybody. Not even my own people. Not even myself.