True Grey (14 page)

‘I
may be messy,' Dulcie said to herself as she unpacked her bag. ‘But I am not
sloppy
.'

It was with a great sense of relief that Dulcie unloaded her bag on to the molded desk top of her library carrel. Three floors down in the Widener stacks, with its strangely plastic surface and uncomfortable chair, this little study nook was known territory. Her space, she thought as she smoothed out the pads.
Her
bag,
her
notes,
her
carrel – every iteration of the possessive gave her a little sense of herself back. ‘It's not that I'm a control freak,' Dulcie explained to her pencil, as she lined it up next to the new rollerball pen she'd splurged on only a week before. ‘It's just that I work better when I feel grounded.'

As she settled into that strangely formed chair, Dulcie waited for the slap. She knew she was stretching the truth a bit. However, when no swipe came – no hint of claws – she thought maybe her exaggeration had been forgiven. Besides, a cat should understand: after the last few days, maybe she was allowed to feel a little territorial.

‘Is that it, Mr Grey?' She looked up over the edge of her carrel, but nothing appeared. ‘Or maybe it's that I'm finally getting back to my thesis?' The low whirring of the venting system seemed to grow a little louder, almost purr-like, and so she got to work.

The first thing, Dulcie decided, opening her laptop, was to transcribe these notes. She'd made them a week or so earlier, after finding that printed page. She'd recognized the style right away. Known it for the missing work, but at the time she'd only filed the notes, knowing that the prize – something with attribution or written in the author's own hand – was still ahead.

Now, looking at her own cramped handwriting and the soft lead of the pencil, she knew she'd be lucky to get through half of these. ‘Murder must oil,' she read. ‘
Be
oiled?' She squinted at the line, which had been made even more incomprehensible by the smudging of the lead. ‘Most foul,' she decided finally. It wasn't what she remembered, but it was the only sensible possibility.

‘Ded head?' She'd underlined this. ‘Like, the Grateful Dead?' The paper didn't respond, and Dulcie realized she was muttering. Thoughts of the hippy demigods had Dulcie thinking of her mother. Lucy had done her best, Dulcie knew. Essentially a single mother, once Dulcie's father had taken off on his ‘spirit quest', Lucy had tried to reconcile her own spiritual needs with the practicalities of raising a growing child. She'd made a home for them, of sorts, in the commune, and although she never seemed to understand her daughter's intellectual curiosity, she hadn't tried to stem it either. Instead, she'd passed along the small library she had somehow retained from her own, more staid upbringing – most notably a beaten-up Riverside Shakespeare. And she'd gotten Dulcie a library card for whenever one of their small group went into town.

The only thing she had been adamant about was Dulcie's preference for using her right hand. ‘You can't be my daughter and be so left-brained,' Lucy had scolded more than once. ‘You have the maven's blood in you. It's just not possible.'

Try as she might, however, from the first days of non-petroleum-byproduct based crumbly crayons onward, Dulcie simply couldn't form the shapes she wanted unless she used her right hand. And now, she thought as she perused another incomprehensible line, she clearly didn't do much better with her preferred hand, either.

Lucy and her opinions. Sometimes, Dulcie realized, her mother seemed determined to change reality simply by force of will. Like her refusal to see that Dulcie's hair was, essentially, brown. Yes, it turned coppery in summer, sunlight bringing out the red highlights. It would never, however, be the brilliant red-gold of Lucy's own hair, a color she said had passed straight through the maternal line ever since, well, the days of the goddess, if Lucy were to be believed.

‘Maybe that's why I dream of the author as a brunette,' Dulcie thought to herself. ‘And the victim as – ah! A redhead!' That was the detail that had been changed before the book's publication. ‘
Those red-gold locks, besmirch'd by life's gore.
' She struggled to recall the rest. ‘
Drenched in life's ichor, he lay broken on the rug . . .
'

But she had only found the manuscript on Saturday, and the victim in the typeset scene wasn't a redhead – his hair was described as black as a raven's wing, as she recalled. So why in her dream, that recurring nightmare, did the victim always have red hair? Long before she had read the handwritten fragment, Dulcie had ‘seen' her author writing that scene – coming up with a gory description about blood darkening in red-gold hair.

Sometimes, Dulcie thought, our subconscious can be so obvious. Granted, she didn't know the full story, but she suspected that she herself had made the switch, maybe because of some lingering anger toward Lucy – and all the grief she had given her only child. Well, a nightmare image was a harmless outlet for emotions, Dulcie decided. In truth, her mother had done her best, and for someone who was so intent on shedding her past life, it was really rather touching that she had tried to will her genetic inheritance on her daughter.

There was more though – all this talk about the maternal line had obscured the obvious. The victim wasn't even a woman.

This was interesting for several reasons, and Dulcie started flipping through pages to find more. In
The Ravages
, male characters had been largely peripheral. There'd been the standard mad monk, as well as an avaricious nobleman and a young knight, who had been pure at heart and, honestly, a bit of a milksop in Dulcie's reckoning. But the main drama had been between two women. Hermetria and Demetria had been cooped up together in Hermetria's ruined castle. Their dialogues, which went on for pages, had basically outlined the arguments for and against women's rights as they stood in the late 1700s.

Had the author started writing from a male perspective? No, Dulcie thought back. There was nothing to indicate that the point of view of the scene was from a man. She looked through her pages, unable to believe she hadn't made a note of this. She was sure – almost sure – that in the nightmare text, the one she could see over the author's shoulder, the onlooker had been a woman. Was there something about ‘
skirts edged in blood, darken'ng the very lace
'?

Yes, she found it. ‘
I stepped back with a gasp, my skirts already edged in blood . . .
' Then more about the blood, about how the color changed. It was almost as if the narrator had watched the man die.

A wave of dizziness swept over Dulcie. This was a little too real, a little too reminiscent of the scene she had walked in on yesterday. She lowered her head to the plastic desktop. That spoke well of her author, she told herself. That woman could sure write a murder scene. It was almost as if she had been there herself.

Had she?

‘Excuse me.' A voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Are you OK?'

‘What?' Dulcie hadn't realized her eyes were closed, but she sat up and smiled automatically. The woman in front of her was familiar. She definitely looked concerned, and Dulcie struggled to place her. Dark eyes, chocolate skin – for some reason, she thought of Chris. ‘Darlene!' She smiled in earnest now. ‘I'm Dulcie, Chris Sorenson's girlfriend?'

‘Oh, yeah.' The girl leaned on the edge of the cubicle. ‘I think we met at the open house?' Dulcie nodded: The computer science open house was a new idea and a good one, giving some of the university's most isolated students a chance to mingle with their colleagues' non-applied science friends. She and Darlene hadn't met that night, but it was a convenient excuse. Dulcie wouldn't have to explain that she'd witnessed the fight with Rafe. Which, all things considered, was just as well.

‘What brings you to the bowels of the beast?' Dulcie asked. ‘I don't think Chris has ever been down here.'

‘Oh, it's for Rafe.' She ducked her head, her natural color insufficient to hide the blush that crept up into her cheeks. ‘My boyfriend.'

‘He's exiled you to the depths?' As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Dulcie wished them back. That argument had sounded serious, and Dulcie had only been guessing that they'd made up.

Darlene, however, was smiling. ‘Nah, I offered to help out. He's working on a paper. Something that could be really big, but, well, he's been tied up. There's been a lot of stuff going on.'

‘I know.' Dulcie stopped her with a raised hand. ‘I was there.' Better to be honest than for this young woman, Chris's colleague, to think she'd been hiding something.

‘You were?' Darlene leaned in. ‘I hear it was pretty horrible.'

Dulcie nodded, a lump rising in her throat. ‘It was.' She swallowed hard. ‘Have there been –' she paused, unsure of how to phrase her question – ‘any developments?'

Darlene smiled. ‘Just now. And it's good news!' She was smiling broadly, and Dulcie felt the relief wash over her. It had been an accident, just as she'd thought. A tragic case of unstable statuary.

But Darlene was still talking. ‘They found a page,' she said, and although for a moment, Dulcie wondered if she'd wandered into some Elizabethan farce, she quickly realized the other student had misunderstood her – and vice versa. ‘You know,' Darlene was blinking at her. ‘A page of the stolen manuscript?'

‘Ah.' Dulcie digested this. ‘So they're definitely saying it was stolen now?'

Darlene shrugged. ‘I gather that's what they're thinking. It was stuck in a rain gutter. The latest theory, at least according to Rafe, is that whoever killed her threw the manuscript out the window to retrieve later. Only a page got ripped off on those old slates. The police are keeping Rafe busy, going through everything that shows who might have been there that day. He's not getting any of his own work done at all.'

It all seemed extremely curious to Dulcie. Chris was fond of telling her that nobody knew what was going on in a relationship besides the people in it. Still, having your girlfriend do your research was iffy at best. ‘So, you're helping him?' It was a leading question. She knew it, and mentally she apologized to Chris.

The other girl nodded eagerly. ‘I feel like I'm on a treasure hunt. I mean, I never get to come in here.'

‘It is pretty cool.' Dulcie felt herself warming to the girl. Maybe they should all go out sometime. That is, if she and Chris weren't covering each other's shifts. ‘What's Rafe working on, anyway?'

Darlene looked around. It was such a stagey move, Dulcie almost laughed. Then she realized the other student was serious. ‘I'm not supposed to talk about it.'

‘Fair enough.' Dulcie felt an itching in her hands, almost a prickling. Claws, it had to be. Both Chris and Mr Grey would want her to mind her own business. ‘I won't ask.'

But she wasn't imagining it. She couldn't be. The way the other woman leaned against the cubicle wall, she clearly wanted to talk. To tell someone. Dulcie was, after all, only human. With a silent apology to both her boyfriend and her guardian feline, she took the bait. ‘Unless you want to tell me?'

She was right. Darlene's face lit up in a smile, and she crouched down to be closer to the seated Dulcie. ‘He's found something,' she said in a dramatic whisper. ‘It has to do with attribution.'

‘Attribution?' Dulcie heard herself asking. ‘Was the work . . . misattributed?'

‘Something like that,' the other girl said. ‘It was marked as anonymous. Author unknown. But Rafe, he's pretty sure he has proof that somebody famous wrote it.'

Dulcie could feel her heart pound. This was too close to be coincidence. She had to keep going. ‘And you're down here, on C level. So it's got to be pre nineteenth-century British or American?'

The other woman shrugged. ‘Yeah, kinda. But it's no good. I'm helpless down here. I can't find anything he asked me about.'

How could she resist? ‘Do you want some help?'

Darlene shook her head. ‘He'd figure out that I told someone. I'm probably in the wrong place anyway. Thanks, though!'

Dulcie felt like a heel. She smiled up at the other woman as she stood and walked away. She hadn't offered to be helpful. She had offered because only too late had she remembered what Rafe's specialty was and why he had been one of the creators of the English 10 syllabus. For so long, Dulcie had thought of the ocean as a great divide. Now, however, it seemed eminently cross-able. Rafe Hutchins had published his thesis on serialized fiction in post-colonial America. The book he was looking at could easily be the one Dulcie was looking for, too.

She had to find it – or at least find the proof that it existed. If Melinda had uncovered something . . .

Dulcie stopped, caught up short in the middle of her thought. Rafe was busy. He'd sent his unassuming girlfriend off to do his errands. If that was all that had happened, Dulcie would be happy. She'd even be content to battle with him over that lost work.

Darlene had looked so engaged, she'd undoubtedly said more than she should. Clearly, it hadn't occurred to Rafe's girlfriend that her tutor boyfriend might be busy with something other than helping the police voluntarily or overseeing the cleaning up of the visiting scholar's suite. That the police might be holding her boyfriend for any other reason. Or that he might have sent her off to research something that he had read in that manuscript, before he tossed it off the roof.

‘D
ulcie, I love you, but don't you think you're grasping at straws?' Driven by hunger, as well as the need to confer with Chris, Dulcie had ducked back out of the library and called her beau. She hadn't woken him, at least that's what he said, and so, standing in the shelter of the Yard's brick wall, she laid out her theory. ‘I mean, do you really think Rafe killed Melinda Harquist for her manuscript?'