“Forget it. Just tell me what happened.”
“All right. From the beginning, then… Hmm. I was sitting in the study, typing up my notes, musing over the best way to phrase a particularly poignant clause. But then my contemplation was suddenly disrupted by a far off ringing… It was the doorbell, I realized, and so I—”
“Let me see your notes.”
“Excuse me?”
“You say you were typing them up, so I want to see what you typed. Is that it?” A thick sheaf of papers was protruding from her purse upon the couch.
“No!” Connie leapt in front of me before I could even begin to move couchward; she snatched up the purse and clutched it tightly to her chest. I didn’t recognize the papers at the time, but perhaps that was for the best.
“I promise to let you preview any article before I publish it,” she sputtered, “but I just have a complex about allowing people to see drafts of my work before I’ve had a chance to revise. I didn’t actually get very much typed, anyway; it takes me some time just to get the gears turning, you see, and—”
“Never mind.” I let myself collapse into the armchair by the coffee table, and Connie took the couch. “So, the doorbell rang…”
“Yes.” She allowed herself to exhale. “So. On the other side of the door stood a man… He was probably in his early sixties, his face centered around an improbably big and bulbous nose… He claimed that he was here to see you. I assumed that he was expected. Lorenz, I believe he said his name was.”
“And where is he now?”
“That’s another thing I don’t know, I’m afraid. But if you’d just stop interrupting me, I’d get to that.”
“Fine. Go on.”
“Okay. So, perhaps naively, I invited this man with the protuberant proboscis into your house. He seemed interested in speaking to your father—who had recently awoken and whom I was having a great deal of trouble in getting back to bed—so I showed him into the living room, here, and then went myself into the kitchen to put some water on for tea… Oh, I think I ruined one of your pots, by the way.”
“That’s really the least of my worries right now, Connie.”
“Right. Of course. Well, I’d just started the water when—out of nowhere—I had to go to the bathroom. I’ll spare you the juicy details. But, while I was in medias res, I heard the ringing of the telephone. Well, what exactly could I do in such a unfortunate situation? I hastened to finish up as quickly as I could, but before I was even in a state to think about pulling paper off the roll to properly wipe, the sound had ceased. I swear it wasn’t more than two or three rings… Still, it was a relief, to me, at any rate. Since I’d missed it, I assumed that I could return to a more leisurely pace of things with regard to my toiletries… Of course, hardly a minute later, I heard the phone’s clamorous ring again—and this led me to believe that whatever the matter was must be rather urgent—so I redoubled my bowel-evacuating efforts, and—”
“I thought you said you’d spare me the details.”
“Yes, sorry. Well, I’m quite sure that I would have caught this second call in time, but when finally I flushed, I arose to find myself locked in. Trapped! The door mysteriously jammed, as I’ve already explained… And I could have sworn that I heard the answering machine pick the call up this time, but—as you can see for yourself—there are no new messages. I’m assuming that Lorenz fellow must have deleted it, though I have no idea why he’d do such a thing.”
“And you couldn’t hear who it was?”
“Well, actually… if I had to guess, I’d say it was Blaise Duplain. It did sound like his voice. But I couldn’t swear to it. By this point the kettle was whistling rather fiercely, and I was having difficulty discerning even the sound of my own breath over its infernal howl.”
“All right, fine. So then what happened?”
“Well, there isn’t much left to tell, is there? I spent the next fifteen minutes or so banging on the bathroom door and otherwise attempting to extricate myself, but neither your father nor your large-nosed friend came to my aid… And it was only about fifteen minutes prior to your own arrival that I finally managed to get the knob off. So—”
“I see. And they were both just gone when you got out?”
“Exactly.”
“I think I need to be alone now, Connie.”
“I can help you.”
“Yes, you can help me by leaving now.”
After about half a minute of silence, she stood up. She didn’t say anything, just stared at me for a second, sadly, then threw her purse over her shoulder and tromped toward the mudroom.
“I just want you to know,” she said as she slipped into her shoes, “that though I may screw things up from time to time, I am on your side. I didn’t mean to lose your dad.”
“Just go,” I told her.
So she left, and my house was abruptly empty. I got up and glanced out the front window, but by the time I reached it she was already in the darkness, out of sight. Nighttime. Yet there were still a couple more hours to pass before I was supposed to be at Hrothgar’s. In the quiet, in my empty house, I couldn’t think of any way to occupy all that time.
Hours, with nothing to do but think, and things were beginning to come together, unbidden, in my mind. Lorenz must have left with my father. But why? And why was he invited to this get-together at Hrothgar’s? He certainly hadn’t seemed to know Shirley. Who else was supposed to be there? What had Leshio said? Angus, Leshio, Lorenz… “Mutt” Sanders? The former two both had an interest in Shirley’s literary career. Which brought things back to Hamlet. And Hubert. One partial solution did occur to me, though I couldn’t be certain of it; I wanted to believe I was just being paranoid. But then—if my partial solution was right—I’d be needing all the paranoia I could get. I tried not to think about it.
I did not want this, any of this—to be involved in it. I did not want to have anything to do with it. I did not want it, but now I had it anyway. What stone had I moved, like the famous Icelander, and across what road? And what could I do to put it back?
Never mind. Now, it was time to change. It was time to garb myself in nicer clothes and prepare for the night to come.
ICELANDER
CLUEDO
CHAPTER ONE
I arrived at Hrothgar’s Mead Hall well before eight o’clock, weary of waiting around at home after a day of achieving nothing. I wanted to get a few drinks down before anyone else showed up. Outside, the snowfall had finally ceased.[39]
Hrothgar’s was huge, as was everything in it. A central pillar carved from a single massive trunk of ash, banquet tables running the length of the floor. The bar itself was about twelve yards long, polished rosewood, and there was a tap for each foot of it. Despite such length, every stool was filled; the locals made a point of arriving early on Bean Day to assert their proprietary claim.
The high wooden walls of the place were hung with chalk drawings that depicted the logos of the various available beers. This month’s guest brew was St. George’s Winter Ale, and its logo showed the eponymous saint lounging beneath an apple tree while some sort of dew—presumably Winter Ale—dripped from the fruit and into his yawning mouth. In the background, a white-clad damsel was battling a dragon; she used a hairbrush instead of a sword.
I found myself a place at the bar-end of one of the banquet tables, next to the stage, and draped my jacket around the ladderbacked chair. Despite how busy it was in here, a waitress appeared at my side almost immediately. Though she was tall, skinny, and blond—and therefore difficult to distinguish from any other waitress who had ever worked at Hrothgar’s—I thought that she might be new. She patted all of her pockets before locating the pencil behind her ear.
39
Compare the initial lines of Valison’s