“Not that I know of. Is something missing?”
“Everything that was personal.”
Rosalie followed me down the hall and peeked around the corner. Her face became troubled. “It wasn’t like this last Monday. I had to take some photocopying in, and it looked the way it always did. The police were in here last night, but I can’t imagine they’d remove anything.”
“They wouldn’t,” I said. Then I closed the door, locked it, and handed Rosalie the key. “Maybe Livia will know something about it.”
But when we got back to the main office, there wasn’t a soul in sight.
I started for the stairs. Then, haunted by the absence of Ariel in that room that had once teemed with her life, I doubled back and rapped on a door that was seldom rapped on any more.
It had been two years since I’d been in Kevin Coyle’s office. His frequent assaults on mine made reciprocal visits unnecessary, but a quick glance around the room assured me that all was as it had always been. His floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were jammed with thick books made from cheap paper. Their covers were dense with Cyrillic lettering and maps splattered in blood. The politics of Eastern Europe had a painful history of exsanguination. The brown overstuffed reading chair was still in its place by the window, and the illegal hotplate upon which Kevin made coffee and toasted sandwiches was still in plain view. But that day, as always, the most prominent feature of Kevin’s office was the four games of Risk he had set up on the dining-room table with the sawed-off legs that dominated the room.
In the good days, students, mostly male but some female, would spend hours in Kevin’s office, playing Risk, talking politics, eating toasted sandwiches and drinking Kevin’s execrable coffee. It had been a long time since students had ventured through that door, but Kevin had left everything at the ready – waiting for the Restoration.
“You’re like Miss Havisham,” I said.
“You think I don’t know whom you’re talking about,” he grunted, “but I do. Miss Havisham was that loony old broad in Great Expectations who got jilted at the altar and kept everything just as it had been on the day of her wedding. You’ll note I’m not wearing a wedding gown and there’s no mouldering wedding cake in sight. You’ll also note that I’m not insane. On the contrary, I’m a sane man in an insane world. May I offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Did you make it within the last two days?”
“Within the hour,” he said. “I’m turning over a new leaf.”
“Then I’ll take a chance. Kevin, I need some help.”
He brought me the coffee in an orange and brown striped mug whose earth tones were as faded as the earth-friendly activism of the seventies. The coffee was surprisingly good, and I told him so.
“I’ve learned the secret,” he said mysteriously.
“Kevin, I’d love to sit here and talk coffee with you, but I need some information. As the one department member who’s here day and night, do you have any idea who cleared out Ariel’s office?”
He couldn’t suppress the triumph in his eyes. “She and I did.”
“When?”
“A week ago Tuesday. It was around eight-thirty at night. I was here, working on my appeal, and I heard noises coming from down the hall. I went over to investigate. I was listening at the door when I heard a crash. I didn’t wait to be invited in. Ariel was on the floor. She’d been standing on her chair getting down the books from the top shelf of her bookcase when she slipped. She was all right, just shaken up a bit. She told me she’d been packing up her things, which was a fairly obvious statement since there were boxes all over the place. I asked if she needed some help getting the boxes downstairs to her car. She said she did.” He lowered his voice. “I have a private dolly on loan from the library.”
“That’s obliging of them,” I said.
“It would be if they knew I had it,” he agreed. “At any rate, it took us two trips to get everything into her truck, but we made it. Of course, I was curious about what she was up to, so when we loaded the last box on, I asked her, in a jocular way, whether it was moving day. She said no, she was just simplifying because she didn’t know what lay ahead.”
“Did she seem frightened?”
“Not frightened, just tense and resolute. Before she got in her car, she kissed me.” Remembering, Kevin touched his cheek. “Then she said, ‘People were wrong about you. That’s the next battle, and I’m not looking forward to it.’ ” Kevin’s face darkened. “Until that moment, it was a wonderful evening, but I pushed it too far. That’s a flaw of mine. Have you noticed?” He glared at me, waiting for a response.
I let him glare. Finally, hating silence, he continued. “That’s when Ariel and I had the exchange that Ann Vogel and her friends are getting such mileage from.”
“What exactly was the exchange?”
“It was obvious Ariel had learned something, so I pressed her to tell what she knew. She said she couldn’t until she’d talked to someone else first. Of course, I was certain the person she had to speak to was a member of the odious group of women. So I said, ‘Stay away from those harpies or you’ll be sorry.’ All I meant was that she’d lose the ground she’d gained, but I must have shouted because apparently I was overheard. Unfortunately, no one overheard her response.”
“Which was…?”
“Which was, ‘I already am sorry.’ ”
“Did you tell the police this?”
“Of course. They wrote it down very carefully. I’m sure the report has already been consigned to the shredder. Isn’t that how the authorities process all statements from middle-class white men over fifty?”
“Can it, Kevin. Let’s keep the focus on Ariel. Did she tell you anything more about why she was clearing out her office?”
“Just that she was separating what she needed from what she didn’t need.”
“That was it?”
“That was it.”
I finished my coffee and stood up. “I’m glad you were there,” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m a human being, Joanne. That brings certain obligations.”
As I walked down the corridor to my office, I had to admit I was spooked. Why had Ariel cleaned out her office four weeks before her class was over, and what had she meant by “the next battle”? Something else was troubling. Despite his promise to call me, I hadn’t heard from Howard Dowhanuik. That mystery, at least, appeared to have a solution within my reach, but when I got back to my office and dialled Howard’s apartment, there was no answer. I checked my machine at home. There were two messages: the first was from Marie Cousin thanking me in advance for being a parent-helper the next week when Taylor’s class visited the Legislature; the second was from Howard telling me he was worried about Charlie, and he’d be in touch.
The day stretched ahead. I could do what a sensible woman would do: shop for groceries, pack, get ready for the long weekend; or I could see if Charlie would talk to me. Ed Mariani had told me once that the first lesson a journalist learns is that everyone wants to tell their story. Something in my bones told me that a man as obsessed as Charlie had been would want to tell his. Luckily, I had a credible excuse for paying him a visit. If I was going to teach Ariel’s class on Tuesday, I’d need her copy of the text. I went back to the main office and flipped through Rosalie’s Rolodex.
Ariel’s address was a surprise: 2778 Manitoba Street was downtown, in a neighbourhood in which, depending on your bent, you could get cured by a Chinese herbalist, saved at a Romanian Catholic Church, or beaten to a pulp if you chose to hang around after dark. The city’s core was an unlikely choice for two young people with good incomes and privileged backgrounds, and as I drove past businesses that promised to cash cheques, no questions asked, and second-hand furniture stores with year-round sidewalk sales, I began to wonder if I had ever known Ariel at all.
The house she and Charlie had shared was a thirties bungalow with a fresh coat of paint the colour of Devonshire cream, dark green louvred shutters, lace curtains, and wicker hanging baskets filled with scarlet double impatiens. Nestled between a pawnshop with barred windows and an adult video store, the perky innocence of number 2778 came as a sweet shock, like discovering Donna Reed in a Quentin Tarantino movie.