Fanatics (3 page)

She paused and looked at her hands folded in her lap. It was the first time since I’d met her that she seemed to soften, even to search for words. But then she looked up, her composure restored.

“That is the first fact that is pertinent to your decision. The second is this: I am the executrix of the late Professor Corbizzi’s last will and testament. I now own this estate and most of its contents, but nevertheless I require an inventory of Professor Corbizzi’s effects, for legal reasons. A person in my position must conduct matters transparently, so as to satisfy relations who may or may not benefit from the late professor’s will. A certain university is also a beneficiary of a number of items. The objects in the rest of the house I can deal with myself, but to note all the contents of the library is too daunting a challenge even for me. Besides, I … do not wish to be in the library. At all. The late professor seldom permitted it, and in any case I am not … comfortable there.

“This brings me to the third and last item apposite to this discussion, and one that relates directly to your skills and experience. The fire—it was small and easily brought under control—occurred in the library. The authorities concluded that the fireplace was the source, and that the professor, felled by the seizure that ended his life, somehow dislodged a burning log, which then rolled onto the carpet, setting it alight. There is damage to the fireplace mantel, which is of wood, and perhaps the bookshelves on one side, as well as the floor. I trust I have been clear so far?”

“Yes,” I answered, my mind darting about, chasing dozens of questions flushed by her story. “Very clear.”

“I now come to my proposal. In exchange for the three-year lease on the coach house, I require you to complete two tasks. You will repair all damage done by the fire, and you will make the necessary inventory of the library’s contents. You may, within reason, take as long as you deem necessary. I shall provide you with an electronic key to the gate, and you may come and go as you wish. I am always here. I never leave the estate.”

The impulsive angel on my right shoulder whispered, “One dollar! Go for it! Now, before she changes her mind! This is a sweet deal!” The logical angel on my left shoulder cautioned, “Maybe this is too good to be true. Remember? The Corbizzis? Strings? Tell her you need a day or so to think about it. Don’t rush into something you might regret.”

Mrs. Stoppini saved me from being pummelled half to death by two imaginary and opinionated spirits. “I should think you’ll want a day or two to think it over,” she suggested.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Fine. Shall we say two days from today? You may telephone at any time. In the meantime, perhaps you’d care to examine the library?”

I followed the wiry black form of Mrs. Stoppini as she glided along panelled halls, this time to the east wing of the house. Our feet whispered on the oriental rug that covered the central part of the dark hardwood floor. She stopped before a beautifully carved double pocket door sporting a set of brass lion’s-head knobs—smaller versions of the ones on the front door. Mrs. Stoppini rolled the doors open.

Stepping back and to the side she said, “Please enter. I shall be in the kitchen.”

“But—”

“I don’t go in there,” she reminded me.

I heard the doors closing behind me.

T
HE LIBRARY WASN’T
in
the east wing of the house, it
was
the east wing—a spacious room full of light, with a view of the lake through wide corner windows, a stone fireplace, antique rugs arranged on the hardwood floor among trestle tables and leather club chairs, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on every wall. I could easily imagine that it had once been a comfortable, restful place where a scholar might spend the day reading for pleasure, doing research, or writing a thesis.

But it didn’t seem that way now. Dozens of books lay scattered on the floor at the end of the room, as if someone had frantically yanked them off the shelves and flung them to the ground. A dark oblong on the hardwood floor indicated that a rug had once lain in front of the hearth between two chairs. One of the chairs lay on its back. Charred wood and blistered varnish scarred the wooden mantel, and tongues of soot streaked the wall and ceiling above the fireplace.

Mrs. Stoppini had said that Professor Corbizzi had suffered some sort of deadly seizure, and the appearance of the room told me it must have been violent. He had probably knocked the heavy chair over when he fell, and when his body hit the rug, the tremor caused a log to roll off the hearth, starting the fire. I shuddered, picturing an old man lying
amid smoke and flames, helpless, unable to save himself. I hoped he was dead before the fire got to him.

The professor must have hurled the books to the floor before he fell. Why? What had sparked the kind of rage that made a scholar throw his books around and wreck his own room? Had his anger brought on the fit that killed him? Or had it been panic rather than fury? Had he been searching desperately for something before the seizure came?

The atmosphere of the place was oppressive and vaguely threatening, despite the sunlight streaming through the windows. The heavy air stank from the damp ash and charred logs in the fireplace. The odour of smoke clung to the window curtains. Against my will, I imagined the professor sprawled before the hearth, dying as the rug smouldered around him. Were his sudden attack and the damage to the library the causes of the uneasiness that seeped into me like cold water? Why was I weighed down by the impression that the room didn’t want me there?

Unconsciously, I shrank back. Then I swallowed, took a deep breath, and reminded myself that I was there for a reason. I had work to do.

I took a slow tour of the room, moving instinctively away from the fireplace and toward the windows on the south side. To the right of the door was an escritoire with an ancient, clunky-looking black Underwood typewriter on top, along with a small brass lamp and an old-fashioned straight pen and inkwell. A chair was tucked under the desk, and a low filing cabinet stood to one side. There was no computer or printer, not even a telephone.

Trestle tables had been placed along the south and east walls, leaving room to walk between them and the bookshelves.
Set into the northeast corner, where most of the displaced books lay scattered on the floor around a square oak table lying on its side, was an alcove with a small cupboard built into the shelves.

I was anxious to get out of there, but I forced myself to calm down and think. I returned to the fireplace and sat in the upright club chair. Mrs. Stoppini had described two jobs—inventory and repair—as part of the deal. The first would be mostly a catalogue of the books in the room—the contents of the escritoire and cupboard shouldn’t take more than a day. I counted the volumes on one shelf, then multiplied by the number of shelves, which, not including the alcove, were pretty much the same length throughout the room. Well over four thousand books—a huge, time-consuming, and phenomenally boring job. But possibly simple, depending on how much detail Mrs. Stoppini wanted catalogued. A list of titles, or titles with authors’ names, was easiest because these were printed on the books’ spines. I wouldn’t have to take the books down from the shelves.

But if Mrs. Stoppini required copyright date, publisher, and edition—the kind of information Dad noted carefully whenever he found an old volume that might be worth something—then every single book would have to be examined. A forever job. I’d be as old as Mrs. Stoppini, and probably just as eccentric, before I finished. I made a mental note to find out exactly what she needed before I committed myself. It seemed strange that an academic wouldn’t keep a catalogue of his own books, though. Maybe I’d find one somewhere and knock off one of Mrs. Stoppini’s tasks right away.

Feeling more optimistic, I got up and examined the shelves to the left and right of the mantel, looking for signs
of heat damage. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was intruding into something that had nothing to do with me, and that I was being watched. I forced myself to concentrate.

The shelves seemed unharmed, but they’d need to be cleared to make sure. The mantel itself was a fussy, old-fashioned design in thickly varnished oak, finished in red mahogany. A little railing, about four centimetres high, with tiny urn-shaped balusters, skirted the outside edge of the shelf. The panels down each side of the fireplace opening had small decorative shelves also bordered by little dowel fences. The mantel was not only charred from the heat of the fire but also warped beyond hope. So, another question for Mrs. Stoppini: replicate the mantel or replace it with a simpler design?

Conscious of the resentment that seemed to seep from every corner of the silent library, I left the room without looking back.

U
NLIKE
R
APHAELLA
, I had always been a two-brained personality. I had a sort of divided and contradictory way of looking at the world. One part of me was scientific and logical, with a love of gadgets and gizmos. The other I didn’t know how to describe—spiritual? intuitive? Raphaella called the first one “techno-mode,” and until getting to know her I saw things from that perspective most of the time. She brought out the other side of me, the part that realized some of the best things about my life, like love, exhilaration, friendship, couldn’t be measured or explained and weren’t always predictable. Both of us had learned from experience that spirits and what we called “presences”—the remains of minds or souls who came before us—existed all around us,
and that Raphaella had been born with a gift that allowed her to sense them much more deeply than I could. I wasn’t New Age, or whatever it was called. I wasn’t about to change my name to Prairie Sunburst or something. But the threatening undercurrent in the dead professor’s library was as strong—and as real—as the chaos of scattered books and the stink of smoke, and I knew there was no way I could ignore it.

“H
OUSEKEEPER
AND
COMPANION
, she said?”

“Yup. Her very words.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm indeed, as Mrs. Stoppini would put it.”

“Of course, companion could mean a number of things,” Raphaella mused.

“My theory is that they lived common-law because one of them was legally tied to someone else.”

“But why describe yourself as a housekeeper if you’re partners?”

“Who knows?”

As I set up the rice steamer, chopped vegetables, and arranged spices at the counter in our kitchen, I filled Raphaella in on the offer Mrs. Stoppini had made me earlier that day. Raphaella was sitting at the table with a cup of green tea, watching me work.

I crushed a green and a red chili, a couple of cloves of garlic, some black peppercorns, and a bit of shredded ginger, and put them in a small bowl. In another dish I piled the vegetables—snow peas, whole baby corn, diced red bell pepper, and chopped spring onion. Rice noodles were soaking in a bath of warm water beside a platter of raw shrimp, shelled and de-veined. I hauled a big iron wok out of the cupboard beside the sink and set it on the stove.

“Are you going to accept?” Raphaella asked.

A polished copper ankh hung from her neck on a leather thong. As usual—and, I sometimes thought, only to tempt me—she wore her hair long, caught at the back of her neck with a sterling silver brooch. She was wearing black denims, leather sandals, and a canary yellow T-shirt depicting a street sign in crimson across the curvy front.

The lame T-shirt joke reminded me of our high school days, when Raphaella’s transfer from Park Street Collegiate to my school came with a bundle of unflattering rumours—the tastiest one being that she was a witch. Little did the rumourmongers know, I thought.

“That’s what I need to discuss with you,” I replied, leaning against the counter. “I told her I wanted to think about it, even though I was tempted to snatch the opportunity on the spot.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit … surprising,” Raphaella commented. “Almost too good to be true. You wonder, What’s the catch?”

“Marco warned me there’d be one, but I’d like to accept anyway.”

“But?”

“Well, it all
sounds
straightforward enough.”

Mrs. Stoppini had replied to my two questions very clearly. Yes, the new mantel should be an exact copy of the old one, and yes, some of the books required full notification, but not the majority.

“The woodworking will take time,” I continued. “I can replicate the mantel and refinish the floor in front of the hearth. There may be damage to the bookcases that I didn’t notice. But cataloguing all those books … I’ll never get through it.”

“Ow!” Raphaella smirked, hands over her ears.

“What’s the matter?”

“The loud clang from the hint you just dropped.”

“It might be fun, you and I working together.”

“Hmm.”

“And we could take breaks, go for a swim, smooch.”

“Hmm.”

“But I guess, with
MOO
and all … And your mother will want you to work in the store as much as you can.”

Mrs. Skye owned and operated the Demeter Natural Food and Medicinal Herbs Shop on Peter Street. She didn’t like me.

“Don’t lay the guilt on too thick,” Raphaella said. “How many books did you say?”

“Four thousand, minimum. Maybe five.”

“And how many are to be fully catalogued?”

“Fewer than a quarter, I’d guess.”

“Hmm.”

“That’s your third ‘Hmm.’ ”

“It might be interesting.”

“That isn’t the first word that springs to mind,” I admitted.

“Working with you, I mean.”

“Oh. Well, definitely.”

I had been careful to describe the mansion, the eccentric Mrs. Stoppini, and what little I had learned about the tragically dead Professor Corbizzi in a way that I hoped would intrigue Raphaella. But I hadn’t mentioned the uncomfortable, oppressive atmosphere of the library or
how
the prof had died.

“I’ll talk it over with Mother,” Raphaella said. “Maybe I can work away at the books in my spare time.”