“Go on, admit it. I was irresistible. You were head over heels. Obsessed. Besotted.”
“You don’t even know what besotted means,” Mom scoffed, laughing, as Dad came back into the kitchen.
“Yes, I do,” he said, taking her in his arms, bending her backwards, and planting a noisy kiss on her mouth. “See?” he said to me over his shoulder. “She still can’t leave me alone.”
I threw down my dishtowel and left the kitchen. “No wonder I’m immature for my age,” I said.
Whatever my father claimed when he and Mom were horsing around, the grin on his beaming face in the wedding photo on the mantel told a different story. He couldn’t believe that the young woman holding his arm had agreed to have him.
They were different people-Mom was a journalist whose drive and ambition had made her well known, and had landed her in a few dangerous situations. She would go anywhere to chase down a story. Her favourite drink was adrenaline. Dad was a part-time music teacher-he played flute-and a store owner, and his calm familiar life in the town where he was born was adventurous enough for him. He was, in my mother’s words, an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud, which was why he operated an antique store, preferred the golden oldies station on the radio, and drove a 1966 Chevy pickup truck he had restored himself. Mom had once had dreams that I would go off to university and be a scholar and hold a pen rather than a chisel or screwdriver, but Dad had quietly backed my wish to finish high school and learn cabinetry and furniture design.
But they were as tightly meshed as the strands in a suspension bridge cable, and they made all their big decisions together. Which is why I sat down with them in the living room on the same day I talked to Mrs. Stoppini. I explained what I wanted to do and asked for their support.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be the worst investment in the world, eh, Annie?” Dad allowed, waggling his eyebrows.
Mom suggested that our family lawyer look over the contract before I signed it, and Dad offered an interest-free loan to get me up and running. We talked about my plans, and I noticed they kept exchanging smiles.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” my mother replied.
“We’re proud of you,” my father said. “She just won’t admit it.”
Four
I
WITHIN A COUPLE OF WEEKS the workshop was operational. I had installed a layout table, a drafting board, racks for my tools, and, along the walls, benches equipped with vises. The table, band, and radial arm saws and a power planer were situated on the floor with lots of working room around them. There was also a lathe, only three years old, that I had bought from Norbert for a song. I ordered the wood for the mantel, along with a supply of lumber and specialty woods I’d need to have on hand for occasional work. The vacuum-and-exhaust system would be installed in a day or so.
Meanwhile, I hung sheets over the library shelves, rolled up the rugs, and threw dropcloths over the furniture. I took down the ruined mantel and gingerly carried the pieces out to the shop. Then I power-sanded the burned patches on the library floor. The damage hadn’t gone deep, so the sanding took only a couple of hours. It left slight indentations, but not enough to notice, especially if Mrs. Stoppini covered the area in front of the hearth with a new rug.
I spent some time in the paint-and-wallpaper store on Colborne Street discussing the available colours of wood stains with Rachel Pierce, an old high school friend, and comparing colour samples with the digital photo I had taken of the library floor. I left with paint for the wall above the fireplace, half a dozen small tins of stain, a can of urethane, and a few brushes. I figured I would mix the stain right in the library to get the colour match perfect.
When the floor and wall were done and dry, Mrs. Stoppini inspected the job from the hallway outside the library door and pronounced my work “most satisfactory.” I concluded that she was pleased, and that those two words were the highest praise I was going to get.
Because soft surfaces absorb smoke much more than wood or leather, the curtains and rugs stank of stale carbon and ash. No one else was permitted in the library except me and Raphaella, so with the work on the floor done, Mrs. Stoppini had me pull down the drapes, remove the rugs, and haul everything to the front door, where a company she had engaged would pick it all up and take it away to be cleaned. I then washed the windows and set about dusting the bookshelves.
All this going to and fro, into and out of the library-careful to follow Mrs. Stoppini’s strict instructions and close the doors firmly each time I entered or left-didn’t alter my reaction to a room that should have felt homey and inviting. After all, there were the books, the worn, comfortable chairs, the warmth of natural wood and of wool rugs-all bathed by the light streaming in through the big windows. What more was needed to help me relax?
But each time I drew open the double doors and stepped into that silent room I felt something, like the change in air pressure that comes immediately before a storm. Or like a background hum, as if the room was faintly breathing.
I assured myself it was all in my head. But then I had told myself the very same thing in the past, when I had been stranded in a pioneer church during a blizzard and haunted by the frantic, ghostly voices of some men on their way to a murder.
I put much of my uneasiness down to the professor’s awful death. At the same time, I had a niggling feeling there was more to it than that. Did all this explain the eccentric behaviour of the crow-like Mrs. Stoppini? She felt the library’s strangeness, too. I was certain she did. That was why she refused to enter the room. It was more than grief that I saw in her eyes. It was fear.
II
I FOUND MOM at her desk in her study the next morning, her hair still wet from the shower. She took a run most mornings, summer or winter, before she began her day, and put in a couple of hours’ work before lunch. The sun was bright in the window behind her, highlighting the red and pink petunias in the window box.
Except for the tiny crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, Mom looked young for her age. She was slender and small-boned, easily taken for a frail person-until the fierce energy in her eyes hinted at her iron will. Her determination was one of the ingredients that made her a national-class journalist-and sometimes got her into trouble. Her face glowed with the brightest intelligence of anyone I knew, except Raphaella. Her eyes sparkled with wit and creativeness, and if you paid attention they told you a lot about what she was thinking.
And once in a while, just for a second, they’d lose their focus. At those times I knew she was flashing back to the day about a year before when she had been on assignment in East Timor, reporting on the brutal events of a dirty war in which one side employed so-called militias-gangs of rapists and murderers who used religion as a battering ram. Mom was abducted by a gang of young Islamist men with guns and medieval ideas about women who didn’t “know their place.” Enraged by a female who had the nerve to be a reporter, they had thrown her into the back of a truck, beaten her, and threatened her with death for hours before dumping her in the dust by the side of a road. She had come home cut and bruised and in a kind of otherworldly shock that kept her numb for weeks.
This morning, she was clicking away on the computer keyboard. I didn’t ask what she was working on. She wouldn’t tell me until it was almost complete, but it would be either an article for a print or online magazine or an entry on her blog.
She looked up.
“Off to work?” she asked.
I nodded, then said, “Have you ever heard of a Professor Corbizzi? Lived near here?”
Mom was also a magician when it came to research. “Lived? Past tense? Doesn’t ring a bell. A professor, you say?”