Code Grey

by Clea Simon

  He hesitated for a moment, then continued. ‘I believe I can manage an inventory, by myself. If I’m questioned, I can explain my actions as a filing update or, perhaps, a logistical check.’ Dulcie nodded, even though she didn’t exactly follow. What he said next, however, made perfect sense. ‘But you, Ms Schwartz, can’t come anywhere near the Mildon. Not until we figure out exactly what is going on. Because the second question – perhaps the bigger one, if I dare be so bold – is why that fragment was taken. And why, while we’re on the subject, it was returned.’

  If Dulcie’s burger tasted bland before, it turned to sawdust now. Only concern that word might get back to the motherly proprietor kept her from leaving the rest on the plate.

  ‘Is it possible the thieves weren’t sure what they were after?’ Out of habit, she dragged a French fry through the pooled hot sauce. ‘I mean, maybe they grabbed the wrong item and then had to get rid of it?’

  ‘It is possible.’ Griddlehaus wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘Maybe the first question we should seek to answer is why it was planted on you?’

  THIRTY-TWO

  The two parted ways soon after, although Griddlehaus wrote Dulcie’s cell number in a small notebook first. ‘I will call if I discover anything,’ he’d promised, tucking the notebook into his jacket pocket.

  Somehow, Dulcie couldn’t imagine the stately librarian using anything quite so modern as a telephone, but she trusted him. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had any choice.

  He had headed back toward the Mildon, doing his best to look nonchalant even as the March gusts buffeted him. She stood on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what to do next. The apartment made sense. She had promised Esmé that morning that she would not be out too late, and in truth she could easily spend the afternoon working on her chapter at the kitchen table. Even without Chris, the presence of the cat – as well as the late afternoon sun – would make the room a welcoming alternative to the library, if not quite as free from distraction.

  Yes, she decided. She would head home. That way, when she and Chris spoke that evening, she’d have more to report than simply the morning’s unpleasantness. Besides, she told herself, as she turned toward Central Square, this wind was not going to let up. Better to be indoors before the faint sun set.

  Dulcie was walking by Holyoke Center when the next gust hit, whistling through the covered arcade like a demon. ‘Ow,’ she heard a passing pedestrian grunt, and in a moment Dulcie made a similar protest. All the salt and sand that had made the roads passable through the long winter now seemed airborne, scouring any exposed skin. She paused, waiting for the wind to die down, but it didn’t, instead picking up speed and – it seemed – additional fuel.

  As a particularly rough batch of grit hit her cheek and raked across it, rather like the claws of an aggrieved feline, Dulcie turned her head and winced. In any other circumstance, she would call out to Mr Grey, only he had always been much too gentle for this kind of punishment. Find me, he had said. But wasn’t she more likely to find her old friend back in the apartment?

  Another buffet of wind made her close her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw the entrance to the health services before her. Inside the glass doors, she could see the lobby, full of light and warmth, and she recalled her earlier plans. Jeremy had spent the winter out here, apparently. He had survived worse than this. At the very least, she could give him a little company.

  ‘Hello, Jeremy.’ Dulcie had made a point of striding purposefully, and nobody had tried to stop her as she made her way to his third-floor room. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  Another nurse, or perhaps an orderly, was standing on the other side of the curtained bed. ‘No worries,’ he said, making a note on a chart. ‘I just thought I’d sneak in here while things were quiet and check in on our Mr Mumbleigh.’

  ‘I can come back.’ Dulcie motioned toward the door.

  ‘No, please.’ The orderly was already walking by her. ‘I only needed a few minutes to check everything out, but I’m done now. Please, take a seat. He became agitated when the police came by earlier, but he seems to respond to his friends.’

  ‘The police?’ Dulcie felt her temper rise. ‘They can’t think of questioning the poor man while he’s in this condition.’

  ‘No, no.’ The orderly’s voice was calming. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything if I wasn’t clear. It wasn’t that kind of visit. One of the top brass – a Lieutenant Wardley – came by, but he simply wanted to check on the patient.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Dulcie watched the orderly leave and then turned to the still, silent man on the bed. ‘I guess you’re Mr Popular.’ Maybe the orderly had been exaggerating. Dulcie doubted anyone had been in since Griddlehaus’s early-morning visit, but perhaps that had coincided with the white-coated professional’s last set of rounds.

  Jeremy lay still.

  ‘Maybe your earlier visit tired you out,’ said Dulcie, as much to fill the silence as to elicit an answer. ‘Though you certainly gave Mr Griddlehaus something to think about.’

  She paused. No, the name of the librarian hadn’t done anything, and only the ticking of the radiator answered her back. She stood and removed her coat. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Jeremy,’ she said, as she folded it over her lap and sat back down. ‘It’s so bitter out, maybe it’s just as well you’re back in here. It’s not fit weather for man or beast.’

  ‘Cat.’

  She stopped. Had he said something?

  ‘Jeremy?’ She leaned in closer. ‘Did you say “cat?”’

  ‘Cat.’ His face was so still, she would not have believed it, were it not that she had seen his pale, chapped lips form the one syllable. But although she waited for a full minute more, they did not move again.

  ‘Do you like cats, Jeremy?’ She would try to engage him. ‘I have a cat, Esmé. She’s a tuxedo cat, black and white. She’s really talkative.’

  The man in the bed didn’t take the hint, so Dulcie kept on.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t mean a real cat,’ she suggested. ‘I was thinking I wanted to ask you about the printer’s mark. You know, the silver cat that was found in the book binding?’

  There – his lips were moving – though whether because of talk of the cat or books was anybody’s guess.

  ‘Jeremy, do you want to talk about books? About the printer’s mark, the silver cat, maybe?’ Dulcie leaned in, hoping to hear something, but although those dry lips were moving, she could make out no sound.

  ‘Hang on.’ Dulcie went to the door, which the orderly had left ajar, and peeked out. The floor seemed quiet. Off to her left, she could see the attendant she had greeted when she came in. Somewhere to her right, a machine beeped softly and then stopped. Neither the orderly nor anyone else was in sight.

  ‘Jeremy, I’m back.’ She didn’t dare close the door, but she kept her eye on it as she resumed her seat. ‘I wanted to ask you about something you said. Something about “a cat in the stacks.”’ His lips moved again, but still she could make out nothing. ‘Mr Griddlehaus – your friend Thomas? – he thinks that you were referring to the printer’s mark, but I wasn’t sure. Jeremy, is there some secret you want to tell us? Something about the book that you were holding when you were injured, perhaps?’

  ‘Cat.’ There, she heard that quite clearly and held her breath hoping for more. ‘Cat in the stacks.’

  ‘It’s not a real cat, is it, Jeremy?’ Dulcie couldn’t help but think of that shadow she had seen. ‘I mean, if anything, that was a rat.’ Unless, she thought to herself, it was a sign from Mr Grey …

  ‘Rat …’ Jeremy’s tongue darted out but failed to dampen those lips.

  ‘A rat?’ Dulcie didn’t know what he was trying to say.

  ‘Not rat.’ His voice was barely a whisper, and she put her ear up to his mouth. ‘Secret,’ he said. ‘Can’t tell. Secret.’

  Another pause, and Dulcie racked her brain for what the prone man could be talking about. ‘Are you talking about the Tower Room, Jeremy?’ Dulci
e thought back to what Griddlehaus had told her. ‘The storage room beneath the clock?’

  ‘Storage …’ The tongue again, and a faint movement of the head. Was Jeremy nodding, or was he seeing something – maybe someone – a scene from long ago. ‘Storage room.’

  It was no use. The man on the bed was too out of it. He was merely parroting back everything she said, mixed with a few phrases he’d picked up along the way. Maybe Griddlehaus had gotten some sense out of him. Maybe Jeremy had been more awake earlier in the day. It was getting on now, and he had been seriously injured. He’d be better in the morning. Maybe he’d be fully conscious. Or maybe, Dulcie thought with a sinking feeling, the once-great scholar on the bed before her was never going to make sense again.

  ‘Well, I should get going, Jeremy.’ She grabbed her coat and started to stand. On a whim, she reached out to touch his pale face, brushing back the too-long bangs that had fallen over his pale brow. ‘I hope you feel better in the morning.’

  ‘Morning,’ he said, as if to confirm her suspicions. ‘Can’t take the secret. Find the cat … the cat in the stacks.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Esmé was waiting when Dulcie got home and greeted her with a sharp ‘mew.’

  ‘What?’ Dulcie asked, as she shed her coat. ‘I’m early today. It’s not even dark out yet.’ As the cat rubbed against her ankles, Dulcie continued. ‘And it’s certainly not dinner time.’

  Whether her pet understood or had simply completed her affectionate greeting, Dulcie would never know. The little jellicle chose that moment to dart off into the living room as if in pursuit of some small rodent that only she could see.

  ‘Enjoy, Esmé.’ Dulcie watched her pet go with regret. ‘I’ve got to get to work.’

  Settling into a kitchen chair, she opened her laptop and stared at the screen before her. The question of authorship. She managed that one sentence and wondered how to proceed.

  What she wanted to do, of course, was talk about the pages – the ones that had been salvaged during the re-binding. Her return to the Mildon with Griddlehaus had been supposed to help with that, identifying the book from which they had been taken. That quest had been interrupted, but Dulcie thought she might still be able to make something out of Griddlehaus’s discovery in the ledger.

  The question of authorship might appear to be further obscured by the discovery of certain pages, she wrote. However, a closer examination of these pages, and in particular, where they were found, allows us to home in on the date and location of their creation. Because they were used as binding material in a later Gothic novel, He Could Not Tell Her, dating roughly from the 1830s, we may safely assume that not only were the works first written before that date but that they or their author may have fallen out of favor by that time, which would have allowed the use of these original manuscript pages to be valued primarily for the quality of their paper.

  Dulcie stopped herself. This was a leap. For all she knew, the author herself could have disposed of these papers. They may have been a rough draft, or otherwise deemed unnecessary once the work was published. They may have been disposed of by accident, or …

  No, this way madness lies. ‘Here be dragons,’ she muttered, and closed her eyes. If only her thesis had a map, even one in which the uncharted territories were marked in some way …

  ‘Dulcie … ’ She started in her seat, opening her eyes to see that her laptop screen had gone dark. ‘Don’t you know how to navigate?’

  The voice, gently teasing, sounded like it was from behind her left ear. She knew better than to turn around, however, and sat staring, first at the screen and then up at the kitchen window, with its square of sky and tree tops.

  ‘Mr Grey,’ she addressed the dark branches, waving in the wind. ‘It’s not that I don’t know how to research, but I keep getting shut out.’ She paused, but heard no response. ‘First, my office is closed. Then my carrel and the Mildon. I’m running out of resources,’ she concluded.

  ‘Resources?’ The way he rolled the ‘r’ could have been a purr. It also, Dulcie thought, could have been a growl. A warning.

  ‘Well, books.’ Dulcie wasn’t sure what she had done wrong. ‘And documents. Source material. You know.’

  The low rumble reminded Dulcie of the few times her late, great pet had gotten angry, the way his velvety ears would flatten against his skull and his snarl revealed his glistening fangs. This had only happened on two occasions, once when a guest, a rather oafish colleague of Suze’s, had trod on his long grey plume of a tail. Once when an intruder had been trying to break in – Dulcie and Suze had found marks on their door lock in the morning. In each case, the growl had been defensive, Dulcie thought, and prompted by either a criminal or at least an unfortunate human action.

  A human action. ‘Mr Grey, what are you trying to tell me?’

  The low rumble could have been the wind, rattling the window. Dulcie thought of those marks, of how scared she and Suze had been. Scratch marks, like some beast had tried to get into their home. Marks like …

  ‘Is this about the printer’s mark, Mr Grey?’ She was growing more confused. ‘But I don’t have access to those papers any more. All I have are …’

  She stopped herself. A human action. Her own work, for starters. For while she may be temporarily cut off from the primary source material, she still had years of her own research – and she had friends, human sources, on whom she could always rely.

  ‘Chris? You wouldn’t believe what happened.’ Three hours later, and Dulcie was bursting with news. ‘I think I’ve had a breakthrough. And, yes, I’ve been writing.’

  ‘I miss you, too, sweetie.’ Her boyfriend was laughing. ‘And how was your day?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Dulcie had to chuckle, too. ‘It’s just – so much has happened today.’

  ‘Then by all means.’ Dulcie could visualize her boyfriend making a broad gesture, his long arms encouraging her to begin. ‘Tell!’

  ‘Well, to start with, my pages – the new ones? – they all came from the book that was found on Jeremy Mumbleigh. Yes, I know,’ she cut Chris off before he could ask about the sequence of events. ‘That book had been re-bound. My pages were part of the original binding. They were filler, and after the conservators found them, they were sent to the Mildon, where they ended up in the stray pages file.’ That wasn’t the formal name for the Mildon repository for unacknowledged and previously uncataloged materials, but Chris would know what she meant. ‘At any rate, my pages – the new ones, that is …’

  ‘Are you still there?’ She had been talking several minutes, without hearing a peep. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, perhaps a bit belatedly. ‘I can go on about this stuff, I know.’

  ‘No, no,’ Chris protested. ‘I love it. You’re so enthusiastic about your work, and that’s just great to hear. I mean, I don’t really understand it, I’ll admit that. But it’s so clear that you love your work. Or, no, I know.’ He stopped her before she could protest – there were limits to work, even for her. ‘You love me and you love Esmé, I know that. And you love your mom.’ He paused, but she couldn’t argue with that one. ‘But you really value this writer. You’re like a treasure hunter, uncovering golden nuggets in piles of paper.’

  ‘Well, it is treasure,’ she began. ‘Not like …’

  She broke off, the import of her own words hitting home. Everybody had assumed that the thieves had been after something rare and showy. The Islington Bible or, more accurately, its jewel-encrusted cover. When that had been recovered, everyone had assumed that the robbery had been interrupted. That the thieves had been thwarted.

  But what if the Islington hadn’t been the goal?

  Could the thieves have been after the pages in the Mildon after all?

  ‘Dulcie, are you there?’ Chris’s voice brought her back to the present. ‘Did I say something?’

  ‘No – or, well, yes.’ Dulcie wasn’t sure how to explain. ‘You gave me an idea, saying that about buried treasure. Chris – I told you ab
out the latest break-in, right? At the Mildon?’

  ‘Uh huh.’ He was with her. ‘I read something online about how they think that the thieves were using the excavations to get into the library. About how they were probably counting on staffing being lower, what with the students being on break.’

  Dulcie interrupted him, she was so excited. ‘What if the thieves were really after my pages – the ones in the Mildon? I mean, they’ve been lost for years. First, they were hidden in the binding of a book. Then they were uncataloged and unknown. It wasn’t until I started publishing about them that anyone—’

  ‘Dulcie, wait.’ Chris interrupted her. ‘Please, sweetie, listen to yourself. I know you value these pages. I love that about you. But I didn’t mean for you to take me literally. Why would someone who isn’t a scholar, someone who doesn’t know these works, want to steal them?’

  ‘Because …’ She started to answer, and then fell silent. The truth was that she had no answer to give.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Step by step, each footfall placed with a care, she did hazard her way through the dark Shadows of the ill-illumined hall. No light, for e’en the softest Lamp might betray her stealthy passage. No faithless candle nor ill-betoken’d Lantern would dare disclose her progress. Silent as the Fog itself, which like the deep gloom shrouded the castle in its enveloping embrace, she made her way onward. Only this short Journey, made long by care and caution, did she venture, for at her sojourn’s end would she find all Seclusion and Secrets still.

  Try as she might, Dulcie could not burrow deep enough into the blankets. The insistent ringing of her phone seemed determined to wake her.