Brown-Eyed Girl (19 page)

Sally and Hawk and Delice nodded thoughtfully. Delice took a sip of whiskey, cocked her head, pursed her lips, considered, and said, “Yep. I'd fire you for that.” She poured Brit more wine.

“On the other hand,” Sally put in, “I would be surprised to hear you ask her to service a customer.”

“We are not that kind of establishment,” Delice announced solemnly.

“And all these years I'd kept hoping,” Hawk lamented.

“I suppose now you'll be reduced to doing something more in line with your abilities, like running the Pentagon or the ACLU,” Delice said.

“Brit is very capable,” Sally explained to Hawk, “but what she's said to be best at is underachieving.”

Brit grunted something unintelligible.

“Well, I sure could use some help around here,” Delice began.

“Ohhhhh no,” Brit interrupted. “I've told you a million times, Aunt Delice, I have no intention of being the next Langham woman to run the Wrangler. I've slung my last chicken-fried steak,” she vowed.

“Not waitressing. I wouldn't want you cussing out the clientele. I mean, I could use somebody in the office, getting me organized, working on the books, that kind of thing. Things seem to be getting kind of hectic and complicated around here,” said Delice, and then realizing she didn't want to give away too much control, added, “just part-time, of course.”

“Are you good at getting people organized, Brittany?” Hawk asked.

“Let's put it this way,” Delice answered for her niece. “All those years Dickie was, er, indisposed, this little girl ran that household like a sergeant major. I'd go over there and find her sitting in Mary's kitchen making out daily and weekly schedules, grocery lists, and chore charts for everybody from Mary to Josh. If it was Thursday, you knew that Ashley was supposed to do the laundry, Josh had to take out the trash, Brit had to make breakfast and pack everybody's lunch, and Mary had to pick up Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way home from work. Or whatever. It was all on a chart on the wall. They made spaghetti or stew or chili every Sunday, depending on what was on special at the grocery store, because Brit comparison-shopped the Wednesday ads.”

Brit blushed. “It was no big deal. After Mom gave up on vegetarianism, it got a lot easier.”

“So let me ask you something else, Brittany,” Hawk said, evidently pursuing some thread of his own. “How are you at keeping secrets?”

“Omigod!” Delice goggled, grabbing her head and jangling her jewelry. “One time when she was at Laramie High, Brit and Ashley sneaked out at night, and when they were climbing up the porch to get back in their bedroom the window, Brit fell. She'd broken a bone in her foot, but she was so worried about what Mary would do to her that she didn't tell her for three weeks!”

Hawk nodded. “How are you with secrets that don't involve physical pain?”

Brit looked at him scornfully. “Depends on whether it's, like, a serious secret or a stupid one.”

“Good answer.” He smiled.

Sally was beginning to see what he was driving at. She had been obsessive about protecting her own exclusive right to look at those papers, but she did, she admitted, need help. She continued foolishly to believe, against forty-five years of experience, that sometimes you ought to take a risk and trust someone. And, she admitted, she could see a little of her own smart-ass, at-loose-ends younger self in Brittany Langham. Professor Clara McIntyre would have wanted it that way; for some reason, she was sure Meg Dunwoodie would have wanted it, too. She hoped to hell Maude would approve, but she had the feeling that would be okay as well.

“You know, Brit,” she said, “I am in dire need of somebody to help me work on those papers in Meg Dunwoodie's basement. Somebody extremely well-organized, smart, totally honest, not full of crap, and absolutely able to keep a secret until I tell them it's okay to talk. Somebody who'd be willing to do endless shit-work filing in a boring basement, drink as much excellent coffee as necessary, and work for, oh, let's say ten dollars an hour. And you'll have to quit smoking again.”

“It's a dirty job,” Hawk picked up, “but somebody has to do it.”

“Or otherwise,” Sally said, moaning, “I'm liable to go completely insane.”

Brit had, of course, heard the treasure rumors, as well as the legend that the Dunwoodie house was haunted. She didn't buy any of it. But she was looking for something to do while she figured out what it was she wanted to do next. She had a long-ago memory of being a toddler and being taken to Washington Park on a summer evening to hear Sally and some other woman sing beautiful harmonies. The sound of their voices had enchanted her, and had stuck in her mind, though she had no idea what songs they'd sung. “I could think about it,” she allowed.

“Of course,” Delice added, “the vow of silence would be suspended when it came to your devoted auntie.”

Brit and Sally exchanged a look. “Crammit, Auntie,” said Brit.

“Good answer,” said Sally, vastly relieved.

Chapter 20
Night and Day

December's days grew short and dark, and Sally sank further into her subterranean journey into Meg Dunwoodie's world. But for all the dusky chill outside, the gray watery light that slipped in through the barred basement windows, the banging of the furnace going on and off, Sally had begun to imagine herself in a universe full of color and light, excitement and danger.

Hiring Brittany Langham had turned out to be the best leap of faith she'd ever made. Brit was a wizard. She'd come to work at eight Monday morning, taken one look at the boxes, the files, and the loose papers, and realized that what Sally thought of as crackerjack order was about as tidy and efficient as your average fraternity house. She'd seen instantly a way to streamline and refine the whole system, and within two days had wrapped her head around pretty much everything Sally had done so far. The two of them had worked out a plan of attack—Sally would look each document over first, make a few classifying notes on a Post-it, and then leave the cataloging and record-keeping and filing to Brit. Within a week, they'd gone through half the basement. Naturally, they'd found nothing that vaguely resembled the famous treasure map, so that at least was a relief. While Brit took meticulous care putting the whole collection in order, Sally was ready to dig deep.

Had she been a methodical gentlewoman and scholar, she would have approached Meg's life chronologically— the way it happened. You weren't supposed to assume that anything in history
had
to happen. You shouldn't pluck out any incident of a life that unfolded in the accidental and bumpy domain of time, and treat it as crucial or, God forbid, destined. Conversely, she could pay attention to the present, and start out by trying to find out what she could about Mac Dunwoodie's inconvenient and probably nonexistent treasure. That would surely be a reasonable, practical course, given the publicity. Any sensible person would surely want to find out why this Shane Parker was willing to get violent about what was in those papers. But Sally knew by now that she was not methodical, practical, or reasonable by nature. Neither had she ever fancied herself a gentlewoman. She did claim to be a scholar, but she had always gotten to the point of sitting down to write history books by playing hunches and going with her gut. And her gut said: Paris.

So while Brit worked the collection, Sally began to go slowly through the material that dealt with the years between 1928 and 1940, when Margaret Dunwoodie had worked as a foreign correspondent headquartered in Paris. She'd held two jobs, working first for the
Toronto Star,
then for Reuters. The clipping books were incredible. Meg covered everything from the cabaret scene to the Spanish Civil War. She'd been in Munich for Jesse Owens's great victory, in Barcelona when it was a workers' city. She'd covered bicycle races and political rallies, had written vividly about art exhibits on the Left Bank and climbing trips to the Swiss Alps.

Sally was thrilled that Meg had bothered to save some telegrams from her editors, detailing not only some of her assignments , but also suggesting something of how she felt about them. The editor who dispatched her to London to cover the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936 had wired: Go immediately to London for Duke and Wally STOP Don't care if you think FLUFF STOP. A 1936 telegram, sent to Munich, read, “Brilliant stuff STOP BE CAREFUL STOP.”

Sally opened a photo album, and was mesmerized. Here was a picture of Meg in a sharp tailored suit and snappy fedora, drinking an aperitif at a sidewalk café with a beautiful dark-haired woman and a dark, handsome man. The women were laughing; the man was looking at Meg with a small, serious smile. And here was the picture Sally knew she'd find: Meg at the typewriter, cigarette dangling, fingers flying. Another, a head-and-shoulders shot that had clearly taken her unawares, sitting exhausted in a chair, her head thrown back, eyes closed, her throat achingly exposed. Then Meg in an evening gown and fur wrap, standing outside a theater with a group of elegantly dressed men and women. The dark-haired man and woman were there, and was that Cole Porter? All the men, except the one who might be the famous composer, were staring frankly at Meg. She had been a stunning young woman.

As Sally turned the pages, she realized that more and more of the pictures had been taken outdoors, in breathtaking settings. Meg, in trousers, sitting in a glade by a stream, drinking out of a tin mug. Sweatered and knickered on skis amid enormous glacial mountains. Rosycheeked and grinning ear to ear in a mountain meadow. Sally turned another page.

And there he was.

She knew it the minute she saw him, standing then and forever in that same high meadow. Hatless, sleeves rolled up above his elbows, sinewy arms, a rucksack stretched across his broad shoulders. He stood at a slight angle to the camera, loose-limbed and relaxed, with his hands on his hips. But his eyes took the lens straight on. There was so much intelligence, intensity, and sensitivity in those eyes that Sally was nearly knocked flat, even now, how old would he be now? He was looking at whoever took the picture with the kind of quiet joy Sally associated with the discovery of love. Jesus.

As if to confirm her assumption, the next shot was the two of them together. They were a matched pair. Meg was tall, but he was taller. She was strong, and so was he. Her hair, long and wavy, was pulled back in a ponytail. His, straight and combed back, was as blond as hers. Sally could not, of course, tell the color of his eyes from a black-and-white photograph, but they made Meg's blue ones look dark. Blue, or light green, and very clear. Sally's lungs felt tight. In this picture, they stood close together, looking at each other as if they were alone in the world.

Sally leafed through the rest of the album in a wonderstruck daze. There were dozens of photos of Meg and the man, in Paris and out—at restaurants and nightclubs, at prizefights and the racetrack, fishing, hiking, skiing, looking through binoculars. Squatting to examine rocks. One page of pictures that really stopped her. Hands on a piano keyboard, in different positions. And then the photographer pulled back to reveal the beautiful man, eyes closed, laying passionate fingers on the instrument.

This had to be Ernst Malthus. Brush of the key.

The hell with method.

Saying nothing to Brit, who was slogging through Meg's unbelievably disorderly financial papers (now
those
were fascinating!), Sally went to the correspondence files and dug out the folders labeled malthus, ernst. The letters, notes, postcards, and telegrams were in chronological order, dating from 1929 to 1939. There was a short formal note on the top of the stack, dated June 23, 1929, which began,

Cole? Play his song? Sally went to the file labeled blum—musical evenings and found the program she'd seen before, for a Tuesday night in June, 1929. The printed card announced solo piano selections by Brahms, Chopin, Satie. Just below the last, Meg had written in ink, porter, ‘night and day.' The featured artist was Malthus.

He had written frequently but by no means exclusively from Berlin, where, it seemed, he lived and worked. He travelled quite a bit—to France and the Low Countries, to Switzerland and England, and sometimes to South Africa. He said he thought it ironic that he'd become a geologist out of love for wild, remote places, and had ended up in the diamond trade, in the filthy provinces of cities and mines. (Mmm, Sally thought. Where had she heard that before?) He would, he wrote, have to take such beauty as he could find, and in her he always found it. Sally thought of Crawford Green looking at Maria, of the way Hawk looked at her, sometimes, when he thought she wasn't noticing. She stared briefly into middle space, then shifted her eyes back to the Malthus file.

Meg had not stayed “Dear Miss Dunwoodie” for long. Soon she was “My dear Margaret.” By 1931, she was “Darling Greta.” And even “My own.” He wrote about all kinds of things in clear, vivid, graceful Euro-English. Places and people and music; what he'd been reading and thinking; what a river looked like, how it had been made. And he wrote about his yearning. Sally felt like a voyeur, kept reading.

There were love letters such as she had never seen. The man wrote about touching his lover's body as if he were composing music, the pitch, the pressure, the tone, the timbre. Ernst had seen a story of Meg's in the
Times of London,
a review for Reuters of a retrospective exhibition of plant photographs by Karl Blossveldt: He wondered if she thought all modern art must necessarily concern itself with the tension and intimacy between nature and machines, or whether aesthetic beauty was enough? The photographs, he conceded, were beautiful, and they reminded him of his Greta—prickly, finely textured, stark and irresistable. They made his fingers tingle. He wrote to her in Spain, from Paris, to say that the weather was wretched and so was he, there, without her. In a letter from a fishing camp in the Pyrenees, he explained how sitting by a fastrunning brook reminded him of the way he could make her breath catch somewhere near her heart. He dipped his hand in the water and felt himself inside her.

Sally was undone, captivated by his eloquence and his sexiness and his intellectual range and his desire. His remarkable body, his fascinating face. His hands. But there was a dissonant note in his spellbinding melodies. If you could judge from his letters, his pictures, his music, he was a man to admire, maybe adore. But he was a German, a man of some influence, coming and going as he pleased, in and out of Nazi Germany. And of the many things he wrote so clearly and knowingly about, politics was conspicuously absent. He obviously followed her work, often commented on stories he'd found interesting, challenged her analyses, suggested ideas for new pieces. But he never, ever mentioned the serious stories she'd done—the profile of the Spanish Republican soldier, the interview with the British fascist Nancy Mitford, the report on antiSemitic violence in France. If they spoke of such things, they didn't commit their thoughts to paper.

Still, how could he write anything revealing or personal from Germany? Sally sorted the letters again, by postmark, and realized that he didn't. Although he'd written often from Berlin and Dresden, he'd sent chiefly postcards, jottings about concerts and scientific lectures and parties, about remarkable gemstones he'd come across in the course of business. Things the Gestapo wouldn't find too fascinating. He'd sent the love letters from other places. It was a perilous game.

Music and science and the diamond trade, at least internationally, were still domains in which a good Aryan boy like Ernst was liable to find himself in the company of Jews. Paul Blum was a banker with international connections; Giselle Blum was a painter with a growing reputation. It looked, in fact, like Ernst was almost flaunting his relations with the Blums—the letters from places outside Germany conveyed warm greetings to his good friend Paul, and to
chere
Giselle. By the early thirties, Sally knew, German Jews had begun to leave the Fatherland. Some had established themselves in Paris, undoubtedly circulated in Meg Dunwoodie's set. Meg was herself an American who made no secret of her friendships or her left political leanings. The Nazis kept very close tabs on German citizens' contacts with foreigners, and Ernst Malthus made no secret of his cosmopolitan connections. The Gestapo must have been watching him very closely, probably Meg, too.

Meg, too.

What the hell was Meg up to?

She put the Malthus correspondence back in chronological order. After 1937, Ernst appeared to have been spending less and less time in Germany. More and more in Paris and Antwerp, London and Capetown. After August, 1939, there were no more letters.

Who was Ernst Malthus? Why did the Nazis give him so much room?

No more letters. After
those
letters. Meg had lived on, more than half a century after those letters. Had gone back to Wyoming, never married, taught school, been angry and brilliant, written poetry. Sally had a million questions, and hardly any answers.

But she couldn't help zeroing in on one pivotal moment among years of moments. Ernst Malthus's letters to Meg Dunwoodie had stopped, as far as she knew now, in 1939, before the invasion of Poland, before the fall of France. Before Europe exploded. But it did explode. What the hell had happened to him?

Sally didn't even hear Brit leave at five. The file in her lap held everything they'd found that Ernst Malthus had written to Meg Dunwoodie, and Sally read it again, slowly. Looked at the photographs, again and again. His eyes. She couldn't have explained why she found them so compelling, and wouldn't. It seemed a shameful secret somehow, like something that would hurt Hawk if she told him. She took a step back from herself, into the historian part of her. The historian, the competent adult spoke to the sentimental self that sat on the floor of Meg Dunwoodie's basement, half in love with Ernst Malthus. “You're right,” said the grown-up Sally to the quivering sap. “This is a hell of a story. There's something there. Something critical to Meg's life. You need to understand. Watch yourself.”

She pulled out the files labeled
BLUM, GISELLE—CORRESPONDENCE
and
BLUM, PAUL—CORRESPONDENCE
. Aside from short notes observing the proprieties (thanks, invitations), Giselle's file consisted almost entirely of letters, in French (shit!), sent from a seaside villa in Nice to Meg in Paris, every summer between 1929 and 1940. Of course Giselle would have no reason to write when they were both in Paris, and Sally assumed Meg's assignments to other places usually happened on such short notice, and lasted a short enough time, that none but the most devoted correspondents would write.