An Uncollected Death

by Meg Wolfe

back into the present, and she realized it was almost dark. Who could it be? She couldn’t remember if there was a peep hole in the door or not, but at least there was a chain across it, so she decided to answer it, and was relieved to see it was Simon.

  He held up a thumb drive. “Got a copy of everything for you.”

  She remembered he was bringing her the pictures and videos of Olivia’s house. “Thanks! I’m about to make some tea—would you like to join me?”

  “Yes, actually, a cuppa sounds good.”

  As he came in, there was a whiff from the pizza joint across the street.

  “That’s the one bad thing about living here,” she said, pointing to it before closing the door. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to resist eating pizza all the time.”

  “Why resist?” He smiled and followed her up the stairs.

  “Unhealthy and expensive.” Charlotte was terribly aware of Simon’s closeness behind her, and wondered what would happen if she suddenly stopped on the stairs. Would he put his arms around her again, and then maybe leave them there a bit? Oh, snap out of it! Her mind was getting as bad as a chick flick, and she was far too old for such nonsense.

  But even without the staged cuddle, Charlotte was glad Simon was staying for tea, and that she had a bit of milk on hand for the way he took it. He leaned against the end of the cabinets to listen as she brought him up to date about the content of the notebooks, her near-certainty that Seamus O’Dair was Donovan’s real father, and Olivia’s reason for hiding the notebooks the way she did.

  Simon was impressed. “Bloody hell! To think of Donovan as the offspring of someone like O’Dair! I know from you and Helene that he has a temper, but he comes across as gormless.”

  “I think that’s an act,” countered Charlotte. “I always get the feeling that he’s holding a lot in, like what he really knows about what happened to his mother and Wesley Warren. I imagine he feels he needs to play his cards carefully, and right now he can’t make a move without Mitchell and Toley Banks knowing about it.”

  “That might be, but then that makes him a very good actor.” Simon took his mug of tea over to the table to look over the notebooks, and received another surprise when Shamus jumped up and walked across to meet him. “I didn’t know you had a cat.”

  “I didn’t either, until about twenty-four hours ago. That’s Shamus.”

  Simon stroked the cat’s back and was rewarded with Shamus flopping down on the table and rolling on his back to have his tummy rubbed. “Seamus, as in O’Dair?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I prefer to think of him as Shamus, as in private investigator.” She sat down on the sofa and enjoyed watching Simon and the cat get on like a house afire.

  “You’re a bit of a shamus, yourself, on this project. Ow!” He pulled his hand back from the cat, who was getting carried away, like cats often do. Simon joined her at the other end of the sofa. “What’s your next step?”

  “I’m going to keep reading, to get whatever facts I can out of the notebooks, and then go over the ledgers to see if anything stands out. We’re all pretty sure that the copy of Least Objects that Donovan accidentally sold was his grandmother’s. She died in ‘67, when he was nine. Now, I think it is a fair assumption that Olivia did not read it until she received those boxes of her mother’s books.”

  “She could have gotten if from the library, I would think,” said Simon.

  “Sure, she could have, but think of it from her point of view, and given the kind of man Ronson was. If she went and checked out that book from the library, that would indicate a particular interest in that book or author, not something she would want to draw attention to. Ronson was the sort that would have asked her about it, and she’d be forced to lie. But if it was just one of a whole bunch of books that was given to her by her mother, then it would have looked like she was just sampling something from it. More random, and less likely to require an answer as to why she chose it.”

  “So you’re saying she didn’t read it when it first came out, but like nine or ten years later?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Probably around the time he won the Nobel.”

  They sat musing this in silence.

  She continued to speculate. “So many of Olivia’s actions seem sudden. She suddenly goes to Paris, suddenly comes back, suddenly goes back again, suddenly reappears with a baby and the last kind of man you’d expect her to marry, and suddenly disappears from the literary scene.”

  “Would have been hard work, being her.” Simon shook his head sadly.

  “She went into everything with great passion, a sort of all or nothing person, not the sort who would stay friends with an ex, for instance.”

  “Not even if they had a child together.”

  “Not even,” she agreed. “So who’s the father? An incredibly well-regarded writer, a hero of the Resistance, and someone she’s had a crush on since she was a teenager—she first met him ‘way back in 1936. But for whatever reason—they had a bad argument before she realized she was pregnant, she caught him with another woman, he was secretly married, or he was just using her or treating her like a convenient groupie—she is upset enough to careen away from him and into the arms of Major Ronson Targman.”

  “But she was a writer, herself.” Simon sipped more of his tea. “The falling-out might have been professional.”

  Charlotte told him that Olivia’s last known project was co-writing a New Wave screenplay. “There’s a lot of evidence that it was one that O’Dair went on to finish on his own.”

  “Maybe he criticized her work, and that would have cut her as badly, if not worse, than catching him with someone else.”

  Charlotte nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly! And in typically melodramatic fashion, she would have burned everything she ever wrote, flung herself into despair, and renounce the literary life forever and ever.”

  “Sounds like bad fiction,” he laughed.

  “That means that it might have really happened that way, since they say that the truth is stranger.”

  He looked at her as if in challenge. “Well, then, Detective Anthony, how do you explain the notebooks? What made her start writing again?”

  Her eyes locked on his. “The pattern will tend to repeat itself. There is one more notebook in that house, the very first one, and we don’t know when she started writing it. I’m guessing it will be 1968. She’s finally read O’Dair’s most important novel, and has to face the fact that she cut off her nose to spite her face when she gave up her writing career like she did. Then he goes and gets the Nobel. It puts her in one of her reactionary tizzies. Only this time, she can’t write openly. But she writes.”

  “Possibly,” he said, as he considered the idea. “But here’s one for you. What’s all this got to do with Olivia’s death?”

  Charlotte sighed. Simon was right. The great reveal about why Olivia did and didn’t write, and Donovan’s true parentage, seemed to have nothing to do with the mystery of what happened to her in the end.

  “The pawn shop is a common denominator in all of this,” said Simon. “You’re right, I think, that the entire mystery is connected to a book or books, and your idea of a personal connection between Olivia and Seamus O’Dair is also compelling. Ronson is dead, and now Olivia, so the great secret about Donovan’s parentage is no longer valuable. Yet we know that people connected to Warren Brothers are still intensely interested in something that’s in Olivia’s house. I say a visit to the pawn shop is in order, to just see what we can see, maybe spot something there that we know was in her house not too long ago.”

  “I was there about a week and half ago,” said Charlotte, and she explained about pawning her jewelry and silverware. “It has trains and books, and you can tell that Bosley and Wesley combined their hobby shop stock with the pawn shop’s.”

  Simon rose as if he was preparing to leave. “How about we go there tomorrow—I’m free in the morning—on the pretext of getting your things back?”

  “I�
��d love to, but I won’t have enough money to redeem them until after the sale.”

  “Ah. Well, don’t write it off yet. Take a look at the video, and some of the ledgers. We’ll talk tomorrow. Thank you for the tea, it was spot on.”

  Charlotte saw him out the door, and locked up, the scent of pizza again wafting into the foyer. Her stomach growled, and she wondered if she should have ordered one, just once, and invited Simon to stay. Too late now. Besides, she really needed to get back onto the job.

  Simon was right about looking through the ledgers. Charlotte began, as planned, with the most recent one, which covered the time before Ronson’s death before abruptly stopping, which she speculated was when Ronson had hurt Olivia’s arm. There were many entries of items sold, particularly of baseball cards—none as valuable as the ones sold for Donovan’s car loan, but there were other entries, such as several thousand dollars for “sterling silver.” Charlotte looked up silver prices for that date online, and saw that it coincided with an unusual spike. Clearly, the Targmans had kept an eye on fluctuating values, which implied they collected what they did as an investment. This was evidently quite common in the seventies.

  This would tie in with Charlotte’s own impressions of Olivia. She was not someone who did “cute,” or “precious,” despite the number of her collections which could be described as such. Not long ago there was a fad for small stuffed