Sometimes I really want to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
There are words that I cannot reclaim. They are buried beneath overlayings of ink that press beyond their roots, almost through to the other side of the page; they remain unrevealed by the most fervent scratching of my fingernails. There are pages that have been carefully sliced away with razors, their erstwhile existence betrayed only by the twins of leaf from which they have been severed. But these muted words speak almost as volubly as her cryptic mutterings. They speak of something that even her usually sufficient literary obfuscations could not serve to hide.
I finish my coffee quickly. I am not tired, but I must ensure my wakefulness. Close reading is not to be the only aspect of my investigation. Through the window I see the snow falling to cover our backyard. His teeth were white as snow. It has fallen like this all through the night and morning. But the morning grows old, and I have agreed to meet Our Heroine at the Elite Café in less than an hour. Shirley met with her often after returning from Denmark. Supposedly for the purpose of mutual literary critique. My hope, however, is that Shirley shared details with her that could only be shared with another woman. I shall see.
The park came into view at the end of the road as Connie led the way. A grove of birch cluttered the close edge, rising white and brown out of the ground like extensions of the dirty snow, but between the trunks sledders could be seen slogging up and sliding down the slope of the far end. Garm wasn’t evident anywhere in the area.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“This was where I saw him, down there, running right across the valley trough. I couldn’t even offer a guess of where he’s got to. It suddenly occurs to me, though… Do you suppose that the fire could have had anything to do with Shirley’s death? Perhaps the killer torched the library?”
“Now’s not the time, Connie.”
I held onto my father’s arm as we descended into the park’s bowl.
“I know this place,” he said as we approached the bottom. I should have taken him back to the house.
“That looks like the spot where I saw him.” Constance pointed to a vague trail of disturbed snow leading from near where we stood up to the edge of park that bordered downtown.
“Item,” she said, waving her hand in the air in front of her. “Not-so-famed pup of the Bean-Ymirson clan gone missing just days after death of close family friend. Is there a connection? If not, why does Our Heroine seem so much more preoccupied with finding said canine than with the brutal murder of—”
“Something can still be done about Garm, Connie. I can find him. I can’t save Shirley.”
“I’m not talking about saving her. I’m talking about showing some emotion over the death of your friend. Remember the lesson of QE2 and the death of Di. Public befuddled over Our Heroine’s apparent lack of concern.”
“I don’t care about the public, Connie. And you’d better not quote me on that. But I’m just not a public person, all right?” Sledders were beginning to notice us, now, which belied my statement just a bit.
“It seems to me that you just don’t know how to mourn her,” Connie said. “Faced with a meaningful death after a lifetime of conveniently forgettable corpses, Our Heroine—”
“Enough already. I haven’t forgotten a single one of the people who’ve died in my life.”
She was looking down at the ground, now. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that your mom—”
“Let’s just drop it, ” I sighed. “Garm’s not here. But I’m worrying about this too much. He’ll probably just find his own way home, anyway.”
“The same old plan,” she muttered. “Just let him run free for a bit and maybe he’ll come back to you. And that theory has worked quite well in the past, hasn’t it?”
“What?” I asked, sincerely unsure of what she’d said.
“I assure you, I’m only trying to—Is your father all right?”
“What does my father have to do with it?”
“Well, he’s lying face-down in the snow behind you, there. I can’t say what that has to do with your personal problems regarding Prescott and/or promiscuity, but it seems, to me, a pressing issue for him.”
“Oh, God,” I said, turning around. “Pa, why are you doing this?”
He murmured something into the snow that I couldn’t comprehend.
“We have to get him indoors,” I told Connie.
“We’re going to help you up, Mr. Ymirson.” She said it as if she were speaking to a child. “If that’s all right with you, that is. You’re going to have to work with us on this, though, as you’re still a rather well-built man and I doubt that we two mere females could lift you on our own. Are you ready?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I do not object.”
We pulled him to his feet and each took an arm.
Constance looked across my father’s back at me and gave a resigned sigh. “Of course I know that this is all confidential. I’m surprised that you would even suggest otherwise. You know I’ve always put our friendship before my professional interests.”
“I just want you to promise me you won’t print any of this. I want you to say it.”
“Not a whit of what I’ve seen nor even what you’ve said shall see print, I promise. Now let’s get your father home.”
The only anomaly we were able to find in the store proper rested between an early printing of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and a first edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear.[29] In a store devoted to rare and antiquarian books there glistened brightly out of place a shiny, new paperback copy of Magnus Valison’s The Case of the Consternated Cossacks. Lacking age, scarcity, and value, there was no reason that it should have taken space on any shelf of this store. Furthermore, we ourselves were featured as characters therein. We thus hypothesized that this book might provide us some clue as to what precise connection Our Heroine had to the librarian, Hubert Jorgen—and, more significantly, what connection he might have to the missing manuscript of Shirley MacGuffin.
Mr. Pacheco had read the book upon its initial release, and a brief perusal was enough to reacquaint him with its major themes and leitmotifs. The plot concerned restaurateurs, Refurserkir, Surt’s hatred for imperialism in general and Denmark in particular, forgery, memory: cultural and personal, and the usual attempts of the Bean-Ymirson clan to bring everything to a tidy and just resolution. What relevance this had to the death of Shirley MacGuffin or to her Hamlet project, we could not yet guess with any certainty. The forgery theme was evocative, however. Jorgen was an expert on the subject. Perhaps someone wished to pass Ms. MacGuffin’s approximation of Kyd off as the real thing. Or, conversely, perhaps someone wished to ensure that none would ever have the chance of mistaking it for the real thing.
Yet these were only hypotheses, and more information was required before we could either validate or refute them. Certain pages of the book we had found were dog-eared, and an almost illegible word was scrawled on the book’s title page. Perhaps “Amleth.” It did not appear to be Magnus Valison’s signature, at least, and so we tentatively assumed it to be the name of the volume’s previous owner. We resolved to study this in greater detail when time permitted, however. For the moment, Mr. Wible slipped the book into a plastic bag and stowed it safely in his leather satchel.
A final tour of the shop floor revealed no further anomalies, and in the interest of utilizing our time to its fullest value—the deepest mysteries being most often secreted in the innermost chambers—we decided to remove our search to the back room. The key was kept, predictably enough, in a drawer beneath the store’s cash register, and a piece of plastic molded in the shape of an Arctic fox was attached to the keychain. The connection between this animal and the Refurserkir did not escape our attention, and the memory of our first encounter with those furtive beings was full in our minds as we opened the door and entered the darkness beyond.
29
Considering Hubert Jorgen’s status as the most ingenious library scientist of modern times, all facets of his organizational style should have been recorded in detail. Though horizontally the book may have been found between the two volumes mentioned, perhaps more relevant information might have been revealed if the investigators had taken note of the fact that the book’s vertical neighbors were, say, Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Peters. Not that I have any way of knowing. As it is, one can only speculate what valuable data was lost in their clumsy account.