A Fugitive Truth (5 page)

I could barely keep from shrieking with glee! I had hoped that the journal would not be just a chronicle of the weather and the Sunday sermon’s text, but this sort of detail was an unbelievable wealth of information. Servant troubles, household tasks, opinions—and oh, what opinions!—feelings, gassy preachers and their cure! Oooh, what a book this was! What a book mine would be!

Slow down, Emma! I chided myself. This is only the first paragraph; what will you do if the rest isn’t as detailed as this? I flipped carefully through the pages, and every entry seemed to be at least a paragraph long. Although most people tended to use the words
diary
and
journal
interchangeably these days, this was a true journal, filled not only with facts but the thoughts of the writer. In other words, the mother lode.

I needed to formulate a plan. Do I read the whole thing first, get a feel for what’s in store? Or take each entry apart as I get to it, analyze it without being influenced by what I knew was to come? This was like finding Tut’s tomb as far as I was concerned, a window on another world, and I wanted to make sure that I would get every bit out of it that I could. Perhaps it
would
be wiser to transcribe it as I went…I set the book down carefully to consider.

My decision took less than a heartbeat. I would
definitely
read it through first. Although I would take notes as ideas came to me, I needed to begin my engagement with Margaret Chandler, learn who she was, react to her as a person, before I began to dissect and analyze her world. Wonderful woman, tell me how you lived! Surrender all your secrets! Prejudices, prayers, the cost of cloth, neighborly disputes, dinner menus—!

A small cough from Sasha alerted me that my enthusiasm had animated me: unwittingly, I had left my seat and was doing a little victory dance in front of the desk.

Ah, but it can’t be the first time she’s seen such behavior, not in a place like this! I nodded an unfelt apology, resumed my seat, and got down to the engrossing task of reading someone else’s diary.

The only reason I stopped two hours later was because I was in desperate need of a biology break. I found that Sasha also was in the ladies’ room.

“Any luck with the missing manuscripts?” I asked, as I finished drying my hands.

“No, but Harry’s on it,” she said. “He’ll get it sorted out, I’m sure, I’m just jumpy right now, about everything, it seems. There’s so much going on—what with the way that Mr. Whitlow is reorganizing the structure of the library this year—adding more administrators all the time—and keeping up with the collections management, and all. I can’t afford to even think about losing this job; you know how it goes: last hired, first fired. And it always seems that there’s money for administrators, but never any for librarians. It’s tough.”

“Especially with the economy the way it is,” I agreed.

“Tell me about it.” Sasha dug out an orange stick and cleaned under her nails, quickly and efficiently. “And what with the alarm systems and all, well, you can see why I’d be worried about the state of the collections, especially the things we can’t locate—”

And perhaps that is the reason the security staff is acting like a bunch of angry apes, I thought.

“—but we’ll sort it out. Harry and me.” Sasha smiled without explaining anything more, gave me a little wave, and went back to work.

Although I would have bet heavily against it, I was hungrier than I imagined possible when dinnertime came later on that evening. I would have stayed in the library all night if Sasha hadn’t come by to chase me out at the five o’clock closing time, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t bothered to eat lunch. The Chandler journal was so engrossing that the hours flew by, but my questions also mounted. As with the first entry in the journal, others that came after it were detailed, and they also sometimes contained a series of numbers. In some cases, the numbers appeared in the middle of the text. I finally decided that the numbers did not represent dates or verses from the Bible—none of the numbers went higher than the mid-twenties—but were possibly part of some sort of code, perhaps alphabetical. I made a few halfhearted attempts to play around with the numbers, but got nowhere with them. So I simply resolved to keep my eyes open for more clues and continued to read.

Although I enjoy eating, I am by all accounts, and especially Brian’s, a miserable cook, preferring to dump my dinner out of one or more cans rather than going to a lot of trouble to create something really tasty. So it was with some surprise that I found, while making my dinner, that I was in fact the gourmet of the house. I figured beans and rice would at least get some vegetables and low-fat carbos into me and wouldn’t take more than a few minutes away from work. My housemates, however, had even more efficient solutions to the evening meal than me. Although I saw him eat an orange during the early news, Jack’s dinner consisted solely of three or four trips to his Cutty cabinet throughout the early evening. Each time he nearly filled his lowball glass. He had dessert in the form of an individual serving of banana pudding in a plastic container after trip number three and
Wheel of Fortune
.

Michael, on the other hand, took a more traditional route and dumped a frozen burrito into the microwave. He was still wearing his overcoat, which I’d noticed he’d never bothered to remove during his day’s tenure at the library, and which seemed to remain with him as a form of security blanket. Bored with watching his burrito spin surreally around on the carousel, Michael hopped up onto the counter to watch me mince some garlic with the wide-eyed curiosity and excitement that children have for fireworks or parades.

“Hey, Julia Child. I think there’s some spices or something over there,” he said, jerking his head to a cabinet near the sink. “I saw some little cans or jars.”

After I determined that the little jars were full of roach powder and sink cleanser, I got some cumin and chili powder from my little store of groceries I’d brought with me, at Brian’s suggestion, and dumped it into the cooking beans.

“So where’s, ah, Faith, tonight?” I asked. I wanted to ask Michael, with his seeming inclination to share more of his thoughts and opinions than anyone really wanted, about whatever it was that Sasha was alluding to this morning. It occurred to me that Sasha had made a lot of allusions to things I was curious about. But my gambit to get Michael to speak up worked even better than I thought.

“Ice Queen’s still off freezing someone’s soul in Boston. She’ll be away for a couple more nights, then she’s all ours again. Just don’t leave the bathroom a mess when you’re in there before her, or you’ll wish your parents had never met.”

I frowned and dumped my cooked rice into a bowl and then scraped the beans out on top of that. “Oh?”

Michael was the epitome of archness. “How discreet you are, Dr. Fielding. Why don’t you just come out and ask?”

“Okay.” I took my bowl over to the kitchen table and began to eat. Around bites I said, “So. Why do you call her the Ice Queen? How do you freeze a soul? Is it just that she’s crabby in the morning, or that she’s a highly functioning but dangerous psychotic? What makes you think I couldn’t take her with one hand tied behind my back? Why would you think that anyone appreciates seeing a messy bathroom in a communal living situation? And how come—”

Even though it was abundantly clear that I was kidding, Michael sternly held up one hand: Elvis wasn’t coming onstage until the audience was properly hushed, Maestro wasn’t about to begin the symphony until all attention was focused on him. “It’s just my pet name for Faith. I suppose she’s no worse than your common or garden variety touch-me-not, sanguivorous neurotic that the ivory tower seems to incubate by the thousands, but on the minus side, she’s got more armor than a cockroach hiding in a safe deposit box, a tongue like sulfuric acid, and the same benevolent tolerance for ordinary humanity as a pissed-off Gila monster. Unless you have something that she wants, and then, watch out. She changes like a chameleon.”

I swallowed.

Michael finished off his assessment of Faith. “Apart from that, she’s sort of cute. Hasn’t published much lately, though.”

The microwave bell
dinged
, and Michael hopped down and scooped out the burrito onto a paper towel. He went off to watch the news with Jack before I could ask him any more.

After dinner I was on my way to my room when the phone rang. I picked up the extension in the second-floor sitting area.

“Hello?”

“May I speak with Emma Fielding please?” An oily, faintly familiar voice oozed over the line.

“Speaking.”

“Professor Fielding. This is Ron Belcher,” the caller announced, pleased with himself.

“Dean Belcher, what a surprise.” I was very careful not to say what a pleasure it was; his manner had the same effect on me as biting into sandy butter.

It should have been nothing at all. I don’t recall much of the specific conversation, only that he was calling to let me know that the last of my letters of support had been received and that I would still be responsible for the classes that my colleagues and graduate students were covering during my brief leave. Again, these were reminders that no one working for tenure needed to be given, especially not someone as type-A as I am.

It was the last two things he said, after twenty minutes of listening to himself talk, that put me into shock.

The first was that he’d been having a look at my tenure portfolio, and—confidentially speaking, of course—he was almost convinced that it might just be enough. Almost.

The other thing was his mentioning that he’d been good friends with the Shrewsbury Foundation’s director, Evert Whitlow, when they’d been at prep school together. He asked me to give Ev his best regards.

I didn’t even get a chance to ask what he’d meant about my portfolio before he hung up. I think I’d remembered to tell him, in the slender openings he’d left for my part of the conversation, that I was having lunch with Mr. Whitlow later in the week. I think that I’d been able to form complete sentences, even while I was on autopilot, the bulk of my brain trying to come to grips with the fact that he’d called me up to cast doubts on my tenure hopes. I hung up automatically, hoping that I’d made inoffensive and polite noises in all the right places. But at some point during the conversation, my eyes had closed so tightly that I was seeing stars and my fists were clenched so hard that the nails bit into the meat of my palms.

He’d called me up to play with me. The dean was twitching the bait, reminding me that my continued presence at Caldwell College in Maine was on the line, just as I’d gotten away from those worries for the moment to submerge myself in my own work, real research for a change. Until now I’d thought of him as a balding, second-rate Dickensian villain, a pain that came with the territory. But I knew from my experiences with him over the past several years, that his call wasn’t just insensitivity, wasn’t just social maladroitness, he was genuinely screwing with my head, now that he was in a real position to do so.

Congratulations, Dean Belcher. You’ve just been promoted to sadist, first class.

I looked down and realized that I’d wrapped the phone cord around my hands and was pulling so hard that I’d managed to straighten some of the curls out. I unwound the cord from my hands carefully, noticing how I’d managed to cut off the circulation in them without even thinking about it: The ends of my fingers were red and cold and there was a deep, white groove where the cord had bitten into my flesh. My hands were trembling, and I tasted bile at the back of my throat, the way I do when I’ve been hit too many times at my Krav Maga class and I’m ready to tear the lungs out of my instructor Nolan’s chest if he’d only let me get close enough to do it. I knew from experience that it was a bad place to be, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

I let go of the last of the cord and turned around to go to my room. I nearly ran into Jack, who suddenly appeared on the stairs, just about eye-level with my fists. He stumbled backward and would have fallen, had I not steadied him by grabbing his shirt.

“Oh, my God! What is this?” Jack said. “I thought it would be quiet out here.” He had been wearing his headphones and must have been scared to death to see me appear suddenly.

I flushed at being caught acting so. “I’m sorry, Jack! I…don’t know what came over me. Yes, I do, it was my dean. I apologize.”

“Hmmph.” An opportunity presented itself and a sly look crossed his face. “Well, no harm done. Perhaps you would care to join me in a drop of something to calm the nerves?”

I was about to decline, but I felt so guilty about having scared him that I agreed. “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

As Jack went off chattering and humming to himself, Michael slouched up the stairs, still dressed in his overcoat. I was beginning to believe that he’d been born in a tiny London Fog.

“Care to join us, Michael?” Jack had returned and was very excited to have company in what was clearly his favorite pastime. He’d brought out a bottle of cheap cherry brandy.

Michael eyed the bottle askance. “Thanks, I won’t. But I will watch you and Emma enjoy it.” A blank expression crossed his face. “I’d have thought you could make it up the stairs without tossing back another shot.”

“Oh, Michael!” All atwitter with the unexpected attention, Jack explained the reason for the impromptu party in the sitting room.