The Word Exchange (49 page)

I waited for a cloud cover of Dutch tourists. Then, heart trying to escape my chest, I darted as quickly as I could down a narrow alley, St. Helen’s Passage, worrying even as I did that it was a dead end. But I soon emerged, and kept running through the courtyard on the other side—right to the door of a pub.

Its ceilings were so low that a tall man would have to stoop to enter;
PLEASE MIND YOUR HEAD
, a sign warned. I hurried inside and up to the shiny wooden bar. Trying to catch my breath, I asked the bartender if he could give directions to the Bath Place Hotel. He studied me silently.
Hoisted a bottle of Pimm’s. Pointing its metal spigot to the right, he said, “You walk about fifty feet that way.”

Reluctantly, Henry agreed to let me switch rooms. Change my name in the registry. Tell anyone who asked that I’d checked out. But he didn’t like it and made me pay forward through Sunday, with more or less the dregs of my money. When we’d settled, I asked for help placing a few calls. “To where?” he asked, suspicious. “The U.S.?”

When I didn’t deny it, he flat-out refused, so I placed the calls from my cell in the room, trying not to think of the cost. I had a terrible time getting through. It took half a dozen dials just to get the old phone that my mother had installed out on Long Island to ring. And when a voice eventually answered, it was a man’s.

Alarmed, I said my mother’s name. There was a long, excruciating silence. But finally I heard Vera say, “Hello?”

Shaky with relief, I asked her how she was. And there was another very long pause. “I’m fine,” she said at last, a strange hauntedness to her voice.

“What’s going on?” I asked, gripped by worry. It soon grew; our whole conversation was a maze. When I wanted to know why she was so quiet, she answered, “It’s nice to hear from you.” When I said, “Mom, are you okay? Do you feel safe?” she replied, “The weather’s been lovely here, too.” I bit my nails till the quicks bled, a habit I’d kicked when I was twelve.

“You’re really scaring me, Mom,” I said. “Who’s there with you? Is it Laird?”

“I couldn’t agree more,” she said, laughing. As if what I’d said were a joke.

We both fell silent. I peered through the dust-smoked window to the dark cobbles outside. I was terrified.

“If you’re in trouble,” I said, “if you need help, say ‘let’s get together.’ And if you’re all right, tell me you’re busy.”

She didn’t say anything at all.

“Mom?” I rasped. If she needed me, how would I even help? “Are you there? Say something,” I pleaded.

“I’d really …” she said softly. But trailed off.

“Mom?” I said. “Mom?” My voice started to rise.

Then she said, “I wish I could,” and laughed again. “I’m just so busy right now.”

I let out a quivery breath. “Are you sure?” I asked, still on edge. But when she purled, “I’m afraid so,” she sounded normal and calm.

I asked again, and her reply was the same. I exhaled. Whispered, “Thank God.” Steadying my voice, I said, “I haven’t found Doug yet. But I will, soon.” Then, as if I were the mom, I begged, “Please be careful.” Tried not to cry. “I love you,” I said. “We both do.”

And after a moment she said, “I’d love that, too. I’d love that so much.”

Tears spilled from my eyes. I bit my lip. Then I heard a dial tone.

I laid my cheek on the cold window and thought of something she’d said when I’d finished school. “I’m your mother. You’re always in my thoughts,” she’d promised. “I’m only ever as far as I am from yours.” But that night I wasn’t sure. She felt very, very far away.

When I’d pulled myself together, I called Dr. Thwaite. But I wasn’t really expecting him to answer, and when he did, it threw me a bit. Rudely, without saying hello, I asked if someone could go check on Vera. After a moment he said he’d try, but he couldn’t promise anything. He sounded very odd, like an out-of-tune guitar. And I could tell that something was profoundly wrong.

The light outside was thin, the sky roky and gray. Nervously I asked what was happening. And after a silence, Phineas coughed. Confessed that things in New York weren’t “going very well.” When I asked what that meant, he offered, dazed, “They’re saying more than three thousand in the city dead. The curfew starts at sundown now, which is four-thirty p.m.” And then he said something else: “I’m starting to lose varsin.”

The slip snagged on my ear like a loose thread. Threatened to unravel everything.

“Are you all right?” I asked, the question sounding flat. I knew the answer.

Even so, when he said, “No, I’m not,” I was shocked. The man I thought I knew would never say that.

I waited in shaken silence for him to explain.

When he spoke, his voice was dry as wind. What he said was, “He’s dead.”

“What?” I said, out of breath, hoping I’d misheard. “He’s what? He’s—”

“Dead.”

A tide of ice sluiced through me. “Who?” I said, a pack of faces shuffling through my mind: Doug, Vernon, Max. Bart. Absurdly, as if to blot them out, I blurted, “Canon?”

“Oh, well, yes, jend,” Phineas replied.

“What?”
I said. “But he was
fine
.” As if his recent health were relevant. My voice was trembling as I said, “I’m so sorry.” The ghost of the dog’s wet nose nudged my thigh.

Phineas sighed. A sound like falling sand. Said one strangled word: “Poison.”

Stunned, I stared at the wall. Watched a dusty cobweb dance in the fading light. “But who would
do
that?” I asked. Sick to my stomach.

“It was the same poison,” he said, sounding exhausted, “that the coroner found in the body of John Lee.”

I realized then, with a shudder, that he wasn’t silencing me. He was speaking openly. He didn’t care anymore who might be listening. “Phineas,” I said. I felt as if I’d swallowed a ball of fiberglass. “What happened? What did they … Did they … do something to you?”

“Not exactly,” he croaked, in a terrible attempt at a laugh.

That’s when it dawned on me that Canon hadn’t been who he’d meant.

“Who else died?” I asked softly, suddenly hot and cold at once. White pricks of light wriggled in my vision. I didn’t want to know what he’d say.

And he was silent for a long time. I thought he might have hung up quietly. But then, as if it were nothing, he said, “Nadya.”

I couldn’t speak at first. I saw Victoria’s lovely starlet’s face. All the portraits of her overtaking Phineas’s study. The one whose glass I’d shattered, of her hiding in a veil of hair. But he’d said “he,” I wanted to protest. (It didn’t matter; he’d also said “varsin.”) Finally I whispered again, “I’m so sorry.” A sob curled in my throat.

“She was helping in a sick bay. And on her way home there was some sort of violent incident,” he said. So coldly that I shivered. Then, haltingly, he continued. “She wanted to help. There was a time, years ago, zay—she really suffered. And she said silence was the loneliest place she’d ever lived. But it didn’t have to happen. If they wanted to hurt me …”

His voice disintegrated. I wanted to ask what he meant. But I was afraid to make things more painful. I was also afraid to confirm that he
was sick. I felt numb. Mute with sadness. And abruptly, into my silence, Phineas said, “I’ve got to go.”

“No. Wait,” I said. “Phineas—”

But I heard a dull click. Shivering in shock, I wrapped myself in the duvet, which smelled faintly of cigarettes and tea. I missed Bart right then with a savage pang. I thought of the man I’d seen at JFK who’d broken my heart by laughing. Pictured Bart’s long, sad Buster Keaton face and lanky frame stretched out under his Dictionary desk. On my hardwood floor, asleep in his clothes. I remembered the night of Thanksgiving, when he’d stood up for me in a way Max never had. Heard in my mind’s ear the sound of my fist pounding his door ten days earlier. The last day he and I had spoken.

I wanted so badly to talk to him again right then. But when I dialed his number, the phone just rang and rang. And, spent by sadness, without meaning to, I fell asleep.

I may have dreamed of the Aleph. Because when I woke, with weak afternoon light pooling on my face, my first thought was of its big, awkward screen. After reading Doug’s letter, which had hinted at the clues it held, I’d searched it and the Dictionary again. But it was like combing a beach for a few specific shells. I hadn’t found anything. I’d woken with a new thought, though, and a dangerous hope that it might help me find Doug.

Still drunk on sleep, I unburied the Aleph from my bag and quickly flicked to Doug’s entry. And my heart swelled: there he was, roguishly smiling, surprised by his own good fortune. Next I looked up Dodgson, but saw only a cryptic cross-reference that my stubborn mind refused to decode. As I started to click back through to it, though, my eye hitched on something else: dic•tio•nary \’dik-sh
Ə
-, ner-ē\
n
:
a hiding place.

I had the strong, preternatural sense that Doug was leaning through the pages, trying to whisper a secret. I just couldn’t quite hear it.

Feeling vivified and alert, I went downstairs. Found Henry addressing an envelope, something I hadn’t seen done in years. He said it was a letter for his older sister, who lived alone on a Cotswolds farm. And with a warm wave of inspiration, I asked if he knew which part of Oxford had the postal code OX1 IDP.

Henry thought it over for a moment. Then he said, “Christ Church, I believe.”

Christ Church. The same place Bill had named when he’d mentioned C. L. Dodgson.

So I wrapped my hair and face in a scarf, put on my dark glasses, borrowed an umbrella for the rain that had started, and very carefully made my way down to the college.

When I got close to the gate, I hurried up to it, skin tingling.

And for a moment I felt dazed. Because on the sign that said “Welcome to Christ Church and St. Aldate’s” there was an illustration. Of my double. That other, Wonderland Alice, in her blue dress and white pinafore. She was peeling back a diaphanous curtain. And the text to the right of her read: “Charles Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was an undergraduate and then a mathematics don at Christ Church, where he befriended Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean.” I suddenly had a very strong feeling that I knew why Doug had given me that name. And I entered through the gate, the wobbling world odd and distant.

The college buildings were forbidding: huge walls of stone the color of old snow, festooned with shriveled strings of ivy. Muddy brown meadows dotted with a few sleepy-eyed cows. The curving River Isis, its water the hard gray of stone. For nearly twenty minutes, as dusk began to gather its dark arms around, I stumbled on uneven gravel and quaggy ground, getting dirty and discouraged. Feeling crazy. Finally I decided to turn around and started to stagger back the way I’d come. That, of course, is when I caught sight of the building.

It seemed completely out of place in the solemn, stolid quiet of those fields and old estates. But it would have looked incongruous almost anywhere. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was hidden, barely visible behind a grove of trees and a high stone wall, like the enclosure around the
OED
. From where I stood, I could just make out the top of it, which jutted up like the vast hull of a ship.

It seemed to be made of dark glass and metal, very wide and tall, maybe eight stories high. Squinting, I saw it was divided in half, its two sides appearing to undulate strangely toward each other to meet in a deep, vertical groove that ran straight down the building’s center. As I started walking slowly closer, I noticed brisk rows of horizontal windows, shining with glass more reflective than in the rest of the building.
They stood out sharply, in a way that reminded me of something: type on a printed page.

All at once I saw it: the building was shaped like an enormous open book. A dictionary, maybe. And I decided, with the thrill of intuition, or insanity—a dizzying feeling, like inverse déjà vu—that Doug was inside. I remembered back to the night he’d disappeared, when I’d tried to find him in the Aleph. He wasn’t there: he’d vanished from both building and book. But when I’d looked again, the next day, his entry was back. And the uncanny logic that came to me then, on the Christ Church grounds, was that he’d reappeared in the Aleph when he’d arrived here. That he’d migrated back into a dictionary—not ours but this one.

I was drawn inexorably forward, like smoke through a crack. But I approached cautiously, trying not to be seen. And as I neared the wall, I saw an entrance: a narrow arch on the north side. But the reason I managed to spot it was that a man was stationed beside it. Dressed all in black.

As I peered out from behind the trunk of a large oak, I tried to see if it was the same man who’d been following me. I didn’t think so—this man seemed taller, thicker through the chest. From a distance, though, I couldn’t be sure. But as I studied the wall, I saw something else: a small tree, very close to it. And I decided to return after dark.

Henry claimed that the hotel didn’t have a flashlight he could lend me, so I borrowed one from the pub next door. In a low voice, I asked the bartender what he knew about the glass building at Christ Church. He just shook his head. “Not much,” he said.

By then night had fallen.

The sign at the gate warned that Christ Church closed at 9:30. That was fine. I didn’t plan to stay late. You know what they say, though—or did—about best-laid plans. Mice.

Men.

I quietly made my way through the thick blue dark and back to the wall guarding the building. Clamping the flashlight in my teeth, I wrestled into the young tree, accidentally snapping a few lower branches. Anxiously looked around. But nothing happened, I didn’t hear a noise, and slowly I began to climb. Shaking. Getting hatched with cuts and scrapes. When I’d ascended above the wall, I very carefully stepped on top of it. Dropped the light on the other side. Then jumped a long
way down to the hard ground below, twisting my ankle. As I stood, I felt a bright burst of pain but managed not to call out. I steadied myself against the cold stone. Took a breath.

That’s when they grabbed me, put a gag in my mouth, and placed a bag over my head. From their voices, I knew there were at least two of them. One said,
“Keep silent.”
And the other said, “She’s going in the hole for a long time.”