And I wasn’t up to it.
My idea of a fun Friday night is an easy chair by the fire with Xenophon’s Anabasis (circa 400 b.c.e.) and a snifter of Courvoisier.
Linette was the cheerful sparkplug that kept our relationship fresh and active. Drama Club, poetry nights at Barnes & Noble, faculty mixers. Most of our friends were really Linette’s friends. She reveled in people and talk and laughter. And I enjoyed them simply because she did.
But the truth is, I never needed the company of other people much. Linette was my only need. The warm sun at the center of my universe.
How could I hope to sum up her life, her very essence, with a few brief words in a funeral-home chapel? For people I scarcely knew.
It would have been a snap for Linette. She was a poet, a wizard with words. Her verses could flash past like quicksilver or whisper your deepest secrets aloud, in a crowded coffeehouse, soul to soul.
“Scratch a librarian, you’ll find a poet working a day job,” she’d say.
Which gave me an idea. Her poetry. Perhaps I could open her eulogy with one of her poems. Something light and airy and funny. A verse that would evoke her character more clearly than any clumsy words of mine.
I collected a handful of workbooks from her desk, carried them into my study, and began scanning through them, panning for a nugget.
I found a few appropriate verses in the first book but continued on, lost in her language. I had a prescription for painkillers from the hospital, but the relief I really needed was here, at my desk in this quiet room, surrounded by books, savoring the verses of the woman I loved. Hearing her voice echo in every line.
As the afternoon faded, I switched on the desk lamp but kept on reading. With a growing sense of unease that had nothing to do with the gathering dusk.
Halfway through the second workbook, I stopped. And carefully closed the book. Unable to read one more word. Shaken to my core.
I’d found more truth than I’d been looking for. A bitter reality, shimmering just beneath the surface of her poetry. Shrouded in metaphor and allusion. But real, nonetheless. Beyond any doubt.
Linette had been having an affair.
If I’d been shattered by the accident and her death, I was far beyond that now. The hardwood floors of our apartment seemed suddenly insubstantial, as though I might fall through them, tumbling down and down to the fiery core at the center of the earth. To burn.
And I wanted to. To vanish. Cease to be. Anything to ease the searing agony in my heart.
I must have switched off the lamp, because the room was dark when I heard the noise. Someone rapping at the front door. I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
The rapping grew more insistent and I heard someone calling my name. When the doorknob rattled, I thought they’d go away.
Until a woman in black eased open the door to my study.
“Professor Frazier? Are you all right?”
“No. Not even close, Sergeant Kovacs. How did you get in here?”
She shrugged, stepping into my room, glancing around. “Picked the lock. The security system in these apartments is lousy.”
“I’ll complain to the landlord. What do you want?”
“Why didn’t you answer my knock?”
“I don’t want company.”
“Sorry about that, but you’re not the only victim involved here. Like it or not, I have more questions and I need to show you something. Do you mind?”
Without waiting for a reply, she unsnapped a laptop computer, placed it on my desk, and switched it on. “We pulled this from a surveillance camera at the intersection. It covers the crossroads and the state highway east and west.” Grainy black-and-white images jumped across the screen, the movements herky-jerky from the stop-time photographs.
“I deleted the frames that showed what happened to your car, you wouldn’t want to see them... There. That’s the guy that hit you.” She pointed to a massive gravel truck lumbering east in the right-hand lane. Just before it faded off the screen, the truck jerked to a halt and the driver leapt out. Black T-shirt and jeans, baseball cap pulled low over his face. I leaned in, scanning the image intently.
“Do you recognize him?”
“His own mother couldn’t recognize him from this. Don’t you have anything clearer?”
“Afraid not. Big Brother’s watching, but only at busy intersections. Look again.”
She looped the images, rerunning them in step time, over and over. I stared at them till I thought my eyes would melt. “What’s that mark on his upper arm?”
“A tattoo, I think. Possibly a scar. Can’t see enough of it to tell. Why?”
For a moment, a faint flicker hovered around the outer edge of my memory...
Then vanished. “Sorry, Sergeant, I just can’t see his face clearly enough to identify him.”
“That’s because he never shows it. Notice how he raises his arm to shield his face as he exits the truck? Maybe that’s not a coincidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe he’s familiar with the intersection. He could have covered his face to avoid the surveillance camera. Look, he creams your car, then abandons the truck roughly a quarter-mile down the road at the edge of camera range. And just disappears. No one reported seeing him walking or trying to hitch a ride after the accident.”
“Then where did he go?”
“We don’t know. It’s possible he had a vehicle parked further on, but nobody noticed one. I think it’s more likely that he ducked into the woods along the roadside. Twenty yards into the trees, a jogging path runs parallel to the highway for almost half a mile. A trail that circles directly back to the university campus.”
I was staring at her. “You don’t believe he’s a drunk or a joyrider, do you?”
“I don’t know what he is,” she said flatly. “I was hoping you might be able to help.”
“I don’t know either! I already told you that.”
“Okay then, let me tell you what we do know. For openers, nobody steals county gravel trucks. They have zero resale value, too easy to trace. Second, that truck is a serious piece of machinery, difficult to handle. But this driver plowed into you in heavy traffic, peeled off, then had to swerve twice to avoid other cars before bailing out. I doubt a drunk or a joyrider could manage all that. So I think it’s at least possible you were rammed deliberately. The question is, why would anyone do a thing like that to you?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“No? You haven’t flunked anybody lately? Maybe booted ‘em out of class?”
“I teach history, Sergeant. I have trouble enough generating curiosity, let alone violence.”
“History is violence, Professor, preserved in the amber of the written word.”
I stared at her, surprised. “That’s quite good, Sergeant. Sun Tzu, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea, I read a lot. So, no disgruntled students? Can you think of anyone else who’d want to harm you? Or Miss Rogers? Anyone at all?”
I hesitated, reading her face. A good face, actually, fine-boned, squared-off, and direct. Serious eyes, gray and unreadable as winter ice.
“I... think Linette may have been having an affair.”
“You just think so? Do you have any idea who the man is?”
“No. But you don’t seem very surprised, Sergeant. You already knew?”
Kovacs nodded. “A few of her friends hinted as much. They claimed not to know who the man was, either. I gather your girlfriend was... discreet about it. How did you find out?
“I just... she wrote about it in her poetry. But only in metaphor. She doesn’t mention his name. Calls him Apian.”
“Ape — what?”
“Apian.” I spelled it. “A bee. A busy man, I suppose, a take-charge type. My opposite.”