The Fury of Rachel Monette (11 page)

The smaller envelope contained a yellowed piece of paper, partly torn. She unfolded it. There were two short typewritten paragraphs, but Rachel couldn't read them because they were in German. Only the letterhead, a single swastika, required no translation.

The two sheets of paper made up a letter handwritten in French on history department stationery. It began “Mon père,” and was signed “Daniel.” The neat even lettering was Dan's and the date on the letter was February 18, six days before he died.

French had been her major in college, and she had retained more than enough to translate the letter in her head. A word or two gave her trouble, but with the help of a Larousse dictionary she arrived at a fairly accurate English rendering. She copied it onto a note pad. It read:

Mon père,

How strange it is for me to write those words. How can I call someone father whom I last saw as a child? And yet I can honestly say that for the last few years at least I have borne you no resentment whatsoever. That has not always been the case: as a boy I felt that you had rejected me, and tried very hard to understand why; I even supposed for a while that you had blamed me for mother's death—I had myself convinced that I had been on the bridge with the two of you and even less likely had somehow caused mother to lose her balance. Thank God Aunt Angela straightened me out on that!

As I say, I have finished with all those childhood difficulties. I owe my good luck in this to two sources of strength, one from outside and one from within.

The first is my wife Rachel. (I wrote you shortly after our marriage, if you recall. Perhaps you didn't receive the letter.) She has taught me what loving someone is all about. At one time that phrase would have seemed like gibberish to me, and it may to you, but I assure you it is not. From Rachel I know that love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone. And we have no doubts. In case you form the impression she is an ultra-serious type, let me tell you it took me a long time to discover the seriousness in her. (She and her father have a routine that is priceless!)

Anyway, I'm rambling, the way my students do. We also have a five-year-old boy. He's a delight. He wants to be an ice hockey player.

Secondly I mentioned an inner source of strength. My work of course. For a number of years I have been narrowing in on the behavior of German-occupied countries during the Second World War. I suppose it has the same sort of fascination for me that the character of Macbeth has for students of drama. The book, which you must know about ($17.95 over here, I don't know what that is in francs these days), is a culmination of the years I have spent in the field. Although Rachel thinks it's my obsession, I really want now to get on with something else; the publication made me feel like a fat person who has lost a lot of weight.

The book has unleashed bundles of correspondence from France, some of it quite nasty. It happens that I have received one letter with which you might be able to help me. Not a letter at all, really—it's a document that seems to pertain to North Africa. I know you were there during the war and you may have come across information that might help to explain it. I will make a copy of it in the morning when the secretary arrives, and enclose it with this letter.

Incidentally, I hope you read German. If not, any student with a few years of German can translate it for you without difficulty. There is no hurry on this, but I find it rather intriguing. Perhaps there is an obvious explanation that I don't see.

Hoping that you are in good health, I remain,

Your son,

Daniel

Rachel read the letter three times. She didn't cry; she had finished with that on Angela's shoulder. But she felt deep shame at the thoughts she had allowed herself to have at the bank and in the car.

At the same time she was more convinced than before that the Dan she had known was not precisely congruent with the Dan that was. The thought still made her uneasy, but it also awakened her curiosity, a curiosity related to the one that she felt for the subjects of her documentaries, but far more urgent, and darker. She wondered why he had not sent the letter, and thought of sending it herself, in the hope it would console his father. But there was also the risk it would further upset him. It was unfair to take that risk when someone else would suffer.

Rachel got up from the table and heated coffee on the stove. When it was ready, she poured some into a large mug and read the letter again. Dan had left a legacy of problems. The big ones of course were his murder and the kidnapping of Adam, a kidnapping, she realized, that he knew was going to happen before he died. So she took a fresh sheet of paper from the note pad and wrote at the top, “How did D. know about kidnp.?” And underneath that she wrote, “Has Joyce made this conn.?”

Then came the difficulties raised by the yellowed German paragraphs. There was nothing to suggest that these smaller problems in any way related to the two big ones, so she wrote her questions on a separate sheet of paper: “What intrigued D. about doc.? Who sent doc.? Did D. know who sent doc.? Why safety dep. b.? When s.d.b.? (letter pstmkd. Jan. 10).”

Rachel had little hope that the answers would lead her to Adam. Yet she thought that they were answers she was capable of finding. And Dan had sought them too. He had considered it necessary to rent a safety-deposit box. She was following his footsteps, she realized, and it gave her a cold-blooded feeling she had never experienced.

She picked up the telephone and dialed Andy Monteith's number. He lived in a student residence. The girl who answered yelled that she would try to find Andy. She put the phone down on something that made little burping noises from time to time. In the background Rachel could hear the sounds of five thousand drunks having fun. She remembered that it was Friday, but she hadn't thought they began so early.

“Hello,” Andy shouted.

“Hello, Andy,” Rachel said. “How's your German?”

“Not bad. Why?”

“I've got something I'd like you to translate. It's very short and it should be no trouble for someone with a few years of German.”

“What? I can't hear a word you're saying.”

Rachel repeated what she had said in a louder voice.

“Okay,” Andy said. “What is it, by the way?”

“If I knew what it was we wouldn't be yelling at each other like this.” She thought Andy laughed, but she couldn't be sure. There was a lot of laughing going on. “It's something of Dan's,” she added.

“Drop it off at my carrel,” he told her. “Three ninety-one. I should be there by nine.”

“How can you think of studying when you've had so much to drink already?”

“Study? I'm going there to drink in peace.” He hung up and the party was over.

Rachel looked at her watch: six-thirty. The bank closed at six, but someone might still be there. She dialed the number and let it ring. It rang twenty times. On the twenty-first someone picked it up.

“Yes?” said a voice that meant anything but.

She recognized the thin dry tone of Kettleby. “Mr. Kettleby. I'm so glad I caught you. It's Rachel Monette. I wonder if you can tell me when my husband began renting that safety-deposit box?”

“He didn't rent it, Mrs. Monette. That service is free to all holders of your husband's bank credit card.”

“When he started using it then.”

She had allowed too much impatience to enter her voice and she guessed he was trying to imagine what marital bombshell she had discovered in the box.

“There's no one here now. Perhaps if you'd call on …”

“Please, Mr. Kettleby.”

“Very well.” His footsteps clicked away on the stone floor, and she heard nothing but the stillness of the empty bank. And very far away tiny voices that made her think of the cartoon characters Adam liked to watch on Saturday morning television. The footsteps came clicking back out of the silence.

“Mrs. Monette?”

“Yes.”

“Our records show that your husband signed for the safety-deposit box on the fifteenth of January of this year.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Kettleby.”

“You're welcome,” he answered, in a puzzled voice.

Rachel picked up a pen and ran a stroke through “When s.d.b.? (letter pstmkd. Jan. 10)” on the questions sheet. The information wasn't surprising; it had been easy to find, but she felt better than she had in three weeks and two days.

Rachel placed her notes, the document, and Dan's letter to his father in her briefcase and carried it out to the car. A fine drizzle hung in the air; it was hard to say whether it was going up or down. It didn't bother Mrs. Candy's gardener, busy replanting a rose bush under the darkening sky. He looked up as Rachel drove away.

The library was deserted except for a student librarian with corn-colored hair gathered in uneven pigtails. She stood behind the long wooden counter chewing gum. Rachel broke her rhythm by asking to use the copier.

“Copying facilities close at six o'clock,” the girl said, pushing the gum into her cheek.

“But there's the Xerox machine right behind you.”

The girl didn't bother to deny it. She just put her gum back in action. The little popping sounds she made with it did her talking for her.

Rachel opened her briefcase and took out the document.

“I only want to make one copy,” she said reasonably. They looked at each other for a while. Finally the girl held out her hand.

“I'd prefer to copy it myself,” Rachel said. “It's not in good condition.”

Rachel could see that the mere thought was causing alarm. Boldly she pushed open the waist-high swinging door that divided the counter in two, entered librarian territory, and marched on the machine. It was a master stroke. The enemy sued for peace.

“It'll cost you a dime.”

Rachel dug two nickels out of her pocket and dropped them in the girl's hand. She made her copy and departed in modest triumph.

She climbed the broad marble staircase to the top floor of the library where most of the space was used for senior and graduate student carrels. The doors to the little cubicles were set closely together along both sides of long corridors. The students had named it the Ant Colony. From somewhere in its depths Rachel heard frantic typing, punctuated by low groans. She found three ninety-one and slipped the copy of the document under the door.

When she descended to the main floor she saw pigtails in urgent conference with a fat gray-haired woman wearing half-spectacles. They watched Rachel out of the corners of their eyes. All the signs indicated they were girding their loins. She left before they were ready to do battle.

She spent the evening in the study, searching through Dan's files for anything that would explain his interest in the document. She found information on Bosnian politics, a series of letters from a nitpicking professor in Australia and classroom notes going back to the tenth grade. She was relieved when Andy finally telephoned. She heard restrained excitement in his voice.

“Rachel? I think I'm making some sense out of this thing.”

“What does it say?”

“I'm not sure yet. I've got to find an atlas and a few other books first. Why don't you come by in an hour?”

“Okay.”

“And by the way, what did you do to Mrs. Mallow?”

“Who?”

“The chief librarian. A fat old lady. I asked her if she'd seen a tall dark-haired woman and she almost bit my head off.”

“It must be the way you said it.”

Rachel went into the kitchen to fix dinner the way Garth liked it. An inch of kibble at the bottom of the bowl, canned dog food in the middle, and an attractive topping of fried eggs and cottage cheese. She opened the front door and called him. In a minute or two he bounded out of the darkness, gave her face an extravagant lick and trotted into the kitchen.

Before she drove to the library Rachel wrote a note to herself: “Talk to Ed Joyce first thing in the morning. Call Trimble, FBI.” Garth was savoring the last morsels in his bowl so she left him behind. She took her briefcase from the kitchen table and left the house.

11

Rachel opened the heavy oak door of the library. Across the large entrance hall Mrs. Mallow and the pigtailed girl were drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups. Rachel's presence turned them to stone. Before they were transubstantiated back to flesh and blood Rachel had turned and gone up the marble stairs.

The long corridor on the top floor was very quiet. The groaning typist had given up for the night, or forever. Most of the ceiling lights had been turned off, probably by an automatic timing device, Rachel thought. One in every five burned dully. They bracketed the shadows between like blurred parentheses.

The door to three ninety-one was closed. Rachel knocked softly. There was no response. Dan had often said that the carrels were ideal for sleeping.

“Andy?” she called.

She opened the door. It was almost completely dark in the windowless room. With her hands Rachel felt along the walls until she found the switch. She turned it on.

Andy sat at the gray metal desk in the corner with his head resting in his arms. Like bedposts on either side of him were a typewriter with a little notebook balanced on the carriage and a pile of books which included a large atlas.

“Andy?” She nudged his shoulder. His head lolled to one side. His eyes were open wide. They bulged. A broken vessel in one had turned the white bright red. His face, so bloated that the skin looked ready to burst, was a deeper crimson. Two sluggish red trickles ran out of his snubbed nose, over his upper lip and onto his protruding tongue. All this was caused by a guitar string wound so tightly around his neck that it almost disappeared in the flesh. Andy was dead.