An Uncollected Death

by Meg Wolfe

over to the ladder, and began to carry it back to the coal chute. Simon came forward to help her set it up. She pointed at it, and said to the others, “This, obviously, is a ladder.” Then she climbed the ladder, and pointed at the duct with the green board. “And this is the remains of a coal chute.” She pulled off the green board, took out the book, and handed it down to Simon. “Here’s the book, Une Mort non Perçus, An Uncollected Death, a first edition of the original French version of Least Objects.”

  Simon’s look of amazement was worth the price of admission. “You found it!”

  Helene shared her excitement. “We found it right before Donnie and Mitchell and those other men got here. It was right there on the bookshelves in the living room this entire time.”

  Barnes chuckled. “So this is what they were looking for? This book?”

  “Yes, detective,” Helene affirmed. “This very rare and costly book.” Then she looked up at Charlotte. “So it was Chutes and Ladders, after all? Was the notebook in there?”

  “I think so.” She started to feel around the inside of the chute. “It was Donovan who told me what this was. When he was thrown down here, they locked the door. Donovan said there was a possible way out, but it’s too small.” She explained how Donovan was punished as a child by being locked in the basement. “Olivia would have had to use the ladder to hide the notebook in it. I think she wrote Snakes and Ladders as the clue because that was what she had always called the game.” Her hand finally felt paper and pages, and she pulled out the notebooks. “There’s two of them.” She brought them down.

  The larger one was, indeed, the first notebook Olivia had written, and was dated 1968—and there was no clue on the inside of the front cover. It was, at long last, the first volume of the series.

  “You were right, Charlotte,” said Helene, looking at the first page. “She started writing again after O’Dair won the Nobel. But what is the other notebook?”

  The smaller notebook was a student’s composition book, and the handwriting was a young person’s, as well. On the first page, the title read, “A Story,” and underneath was written, “by Donovan Targman.”

  “How sweet!” said Helene. “How like a mother to have kept something like that, something she had in common with her child.”

  Barnes made motions to leave. “Well, everyone, I need to get to the hospital to check on Mr. Targman,” he said. “It looks like you have found everything you wanted, and then some. And I don’t think you will be bothered by Toley Banks, Mitchell Bennett, or the mysterious Doc anymore. They will have the book thrown at them—as it were—for every felony they committed today alone.”

  “What a relief!” said Helene. “I want to get out of this basement and go see Donnie, too, if someone will lend me an arm?”

  “Allow me, Mrs. Dalmier,” said Barnes, who was downright courtly in his assistance.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  Twenty-Five

  Saturday, September 28th, through Sunday, September 29th

   

  Shamus hopped up on the bed, brought his face close to hers to sniff for a few seconds, then curled up against her tummy. Charlotte was neither awake nor sound asleep, just conscious enough to wrap her arm around the cat and hold him a little closer, as Ellis used to do with her stuffed bunny rabbit. Shamus purred, a soothing noise that did, finally, send her into a deeper sleep for a little while.

  It was raining again, and the particular way it sounded here was starting to become familiar. Charlotte had lowered the upper sash of one of the windows, to take advantage of the warm front, and the rain-intensified autumn scents finally overcame the new-paint smell. Dawn was breaking. Shamus had moved out from under her arm, but was still close by. She hadn’t bothered to put the folding screens back in place, and could see the whole apartment from where she lay.

  Her sense of smell and touch were still in place, maybe even taste, but she still felt numb, exhausted. Shamus opened an eye, then yawned and stretched. She stretched too, but it only emphasized the aches and pains of her exhausted body, especially in her bruised knees and neck. The rain quieted as the daylight grew. Charlotte could see more and more of the apartment, but part of her didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to embrace being in a new space, or the idea that this was her home now, with its bare walls without art, with its scruffy masculine sofa and not her butter soft sleek one. She wanted the comfort of the old and familiar, of Ellis in her room down the hall, of an entire lake to view from the deck, of a place in the working world, knowing what she was going to do next for the magazines, of scheduling meetings and video conferences, of going shopping, of planning vacations, of Lake Parkerton before the steel mill closed and the economy went bust, all the old familiar things and ways, even the annoying parts.

  Shamus hopped down and a few seconds later Charlotte could hear him crunching on the kibble in his bowl. She rubbed the light coating of black cat hair that he left on the duvet, and rolled it into a clump. Wendy hadn’t brought over a brush. Maybe Larry had one. I’m becoming a cat lady—living alone and becoming a cat lady. Maybe I’ll have ten cats by the end of the year—

  Oh, snap out of it. Get up, put on a pot of coffee, have a shower and breakfast.

   

   

  Charlotte leaned back in her office chair and propped her feet on the work table, ankles crossed. This, she thought, was the moment she’d been waiting for, to be able to sit down and read Olivia’s first notebook, the one she hoped would explain the whole sad saga. The big red mug was full of coffee, the cat’s litterbox was clean and his food and water bowls were topped up. The computer was fired up and online, ready for notes and research. Shamus hopped into the basket she brought for him and placed close by on the table. He settled himself in and watched her.

  It all began with my first return to Paris after the war. Aunt Sasha Bernadin was a Resistance martyr, and Aunt Henri was keeping the bookstore and press on as best she could, with the well-earned good will of the literati of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Henri was so full of sadness, pride, regret, and reflected glory, and she would keep taking my face in her hands, and tell me how much I looked like a dark-haired version of my dear aunt. Indeed, as I walked through the store and their apartment, and walked through the mix of the familiar and the devastated in the neighborhood, I felt myself taking on my aunt’s very soul. Or was it her soul taking possession of mine?

  As the weeks went by, I felt I had become Sasha and stopped being Olivia. Night after night I would sit by the small fire with Henri, and listen to the stories that Sasha had told her, of the quiet ways in which messages were sent and scenes playacted, of the atrocities she’d witnessed first-hand. At what point did the words no longer matter, at what point was the story told only in Henri’s eyes? It was as if Sasha had transmitted what she’d seen into Henri’s eyes, and Henri in turn was transmitting them into mine. I could see, I swear I could see, what Sasha had seen, I could feel what she felt, I knew every sensation of every step she’d taken, from delivering a loaf of bread with a message baked inside, to swiping a German uniform for a refugee.

  I knew every moment, and I knew what it felt like to face the firing squad, in a line with a dozen others from my team, and to be thrown into a pit before I was even dead. And I knew what it felt like to be glad that at least Henri would know what had happened to me, that I wasn’t whisked away in the dark, never to be heard from again, an anonymous naked body on a pile of others in a gas chamber.

  The bookstore was part of Sasha’s cover—and she never, not once, hid anything in any of the books she carried. Instead, she would be given a complex series of numbers to memorize by those in charge, which she would relay in person to the recipient of the books. The numbers represented the
page and word position in a book of each word of the message. She deliberately never looked for the messages, in case she was ever questioned or tortured. Twice she was held and questioned, and twice she was let go—she was able to convince them that she did not know any messages. She likely would never have been caught, but for the traitor on her team, who was executed with them.

  Then followed many short stories of different ways in which Sasha served as a courier, and then later as a saboteur, mixed in with the periods of waiting and emotional pain that Henri endured. Olivia’s immersion into her aunt’s persona was only reinforced by Henri’s love and grief. Olivia was aware of what was happening, but welcomed it, seeing it as her way of honoring her aunt, and of fulfilling her own thwarted desire to stay in France and fight, instead of being coddled in New York. The first result of this immersion was the book of poems that Charlotte and Simon found: Faux Silence. It brought her encouraging reviews. But the literary scene in Paris was no longer the same one she fondly recalled from before the war. With Henriette’s encouragement, Olivia returned to New York to advance her writing career and to be part of the vanguard in Greenwich Village. She took a staff position at The New Yorker magazine, and wrote another book of poems, this time in English: My Enemy, My Mercy, which garnered solid critical acclaim.

  While she loved the Village jazz scene, she soon tired of what she considered the “Beatnik