A box of letters lay invitingly open on the mantel next to an ugly rusted candelabrum, but all that it had contained was correspondence from ex-students and colleagues at other universities. A pad of paper sat on the desk—with a good rubbing pencil handy beside it—but a careful glance-over revealed no indentations worth trying to bring out in relief. Apparently Our Heroine knew enough to remove pages from the pad before recording her thoughts.
Yet there had to be something in this room that I wasn’t supposed to see. Surely it was just a matter of looking in the right place. “Perhaps I should try to open the desk after all,” I thought.
As I started to push myself up off the couch, however, my hand felt something hard between the cushions. Glancing down at the crack, I saw Our Heroine’s planner wedged within. Well, here was something. Settling back down onto the cushion, then, I opened the little booklet up, keen to see what secrets lay hidden between its ebon plastic covers. Oh, dear.
The empty, unplanned days ahead suggested that her social life was far less active than her recent spate of men had led me to believe. The only engagements slated beyond the date of Shirley’s death were some doctor’s appointments for her dad and a meeting with Blaise Duplain that had occurred this morning at the Elite Café; otherwise it seemed that her next few months were completely free. I flipped back a few pages to see if her past was as depressing as her future.
She’d taken a day-trip into the City about a week and a half ago, though she hadn’t recorded her specific motivation. Probably just clothes shopping. A few days after that, however, she’d had dinner with Shirley MacGuffin. This added some weight to my assumptions that she was somehow involving herself in investigation of the murder. Their appointment had most likely been some sort of girls’ night out, I imagined, though I hadn’t been invited. Probably one of their exclusive little “literary critiquing” sessions. But even more compelling than these appointments themselves was the “Notes” section that faced the planner’s calendrical portion. Across from her dinner date, Our Heroine had jotted down some thoughts, and one paragraph in particular caught my eye:
“Our mutual ‘literary critique’ is going better than I expected, though Shirley’s upset that someone apparently ‘broke into her house’ and stole one of her early drafts. It was just a word-for-word translation, though, so it’s not like she can’t just go look it up in a library. About my thing, though, Shirley thinks that the bit about the rusty ‘candelabra (cadabra)’ is a bit heavy-handed. Coming from her… She suggests that if I’m going to keep the passage at all, I should at least tuck it away in some hidden corner of the text where the reader will have to search it out. Make it a ‘secret passage.’”
I placed the planner back between the cushions whence I had plucked it. “Secret passage, eh?” I couldn’t help but mumble to myself. I stood up and walked back over to the mantel. The candelabrum atop it was rather rusty. Surely it couldn’t be so simple.
The exterior of the temple had been so ornate, I kept expecting something similar from the interior, even after the disappointment of the Thing Room; I guess that’s why the stark beauty of the steam pool caught me so off guard, just glowing there in the darkness with patches of ormolu in and all around it.
“So,” she said, switching off the flashlight. “In relation to all else you’ve seen in Vanaheim, how would you appraise this particular locale?”
“I thought ormolu lichen didn’t grow in here,” I said.
“You do realize that Vanaheim is the only place on Earth where ormolu lichen does grow, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know; it’s just something my guide told me. That the Temple of the Refurserkir was cursed to eternal darkness by the troll who built it, and that that’s the reason no lichen grows in here. Except now you show me this room, and it turns out that lichen does grow in here.”
“I see. And you believe in trolls?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Shall we immerse ourselves, then?”
“Is that allowed? I mean, don’t you think this is probably a sacred pool or something?”
“In all likelihood. Which might explain why the lichen grows in here, if your story has any element of truth to it… I suppose we’d have to ask someone, were we to desire surety on the matter. But I’m of the opinion that we should just let the Refurserkir have their secrets about such things. Some questions are better left unanswered.”
“Um, okay,” I replied. “But don’t you think it’s probably too sacred to swim in, then? Or, I mean, as long as we’re not sure, shouldn’t we err on the side of sacredness?”
She turned up one corner of her mouth in this little half smile. “Well, the fact remains that the Refurserkir have let me use this pool in the past. Based on this precedent, I don’t imagine that they’ll be overly upset if they find me using it again, Q.E.D. Thus, I, at least, am going in.”
She unbuckled her belt[32] and whipped it free of her pantloops in one quick motion.
I felt kind of dumbfounded, and that was a weird feeling for me, because I pretty much always know what to say. “I don’t have a bathing suit,” I told her. She was hopping on one foot now to remove the shoe from the other foot.
“Well, I presume that you’re at least wearing some manner of underclothing. Aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but… I just don’t understand what this is all about. I mean, I thought a walk would… Well, you know, my guides are probably wondering where I am, and—”
“Bathing is a hallowed act among the Vanatru. Frey’s father was the god of baths or something. Don’t you want to make sure you get the complete Vanaheimic experience?”
She undid the bottom button of her shirt and started working her way upward.
“No, it’s just… I mean, I hardly know you, and—”
She stopped with two buttons left to go. “I’m not on the verge of seducing you, if that’s what you’re trying to imply. I’m simply suggesting that you and I should relax in a steam pool together. And, perhaps—while immersing ourselves—we can converse a bit.”
“I see…” I just stood there for a second, trying to think of the right way to put it. I didn’t want to offend her. “Um… I still think that sounds, perhaps, a bit too intimate.”
“Look,” she said. Stern face now. No more messing around, I took it. “Get this straight. Allow me to phrase it in plain language. I’m not trying to be ‘intimate’ with you at all, okay? I’m married.” She held up her left hand to display a ring of white gold. “I do not aim to cheat on my husband. I love him, and I have never had any intention of betraying him. I do not wish to have sex with you, I don’t wish to kiss you, nor do I so much as wish to hold your hand. I simply wish you to get into the steam pool with me and sit there for a while.”
I looked at her for a second and didn’t say anything at all. Then I sat down on the ground and unlaced my boots.
“All right,” I said. “I guess it’s not really that big a deal.”
The house of Hubert Jorgen, as opposed to his shop, was rather large. We did not know the range of income typical of a person in the profession of dealing in rare and antiquarian books, but our intuition told us that it was substantially lower than that which would afford one a home of this size, design, and location. It was possible, of course, that the net monetary influx of his shop was not Jorgen’s sole source of capital, though we were unaware of any other.