The Stolen Blue

by Judith Van GIeson

  “What do we do now?” Rachel asked.

  “Wait and see if we hear from them again,” Claire said. “What else can we do?”

  “I have to get back to the university,” said Rachel. “If the seller does show up, find a way to keep ’em here and call me.”

  “Will do,” said John.

  Rachel pulled her hair out of the bun, shook the powder out, hooked the backpack over her shoulders, and dropped about thirty years.

  “You doing anything for lunch?” John asked Claire once Rachel had left.

  “No.”

  “I can’t leave the store, but I’ll treat if you’ll go over to Woody’s and get some sandwiches.”

  Claire came back with two turkey and green chile on rye. John left a message at the counter to call him if anyone showed up. They went to the conference room, shut the door, and ate their lunch. Claire had been thinking about the books while she waited in the bathroom, finding The History of the Blue to be conspicuous by its absence from the e-mail list. She could understand why a thief would hold onto the folio, but why keep the history?

  “It’s not worth selling,” John said when she mentioned it.

  “How would a thief know that? It was in a box marked valuable books.”

  “A thief might not, but a book dealer would,” said John.

  Claire thought of John and Rachel as terriers holding tight to the bones of their suspects. John was convinced the thief was a dealer. Rachel was equally convinced it was a librarian. Claire was open to the possibility that it was someone else, although the other prospects were also unpleasing to contemplate. “Where is your copy?” she asked John.

  “On the Southwest shelf.”

  Claire finished her sandwich and went to the Southwest section to look. The space where deWitt’s History of the Blue should have been was empty. The adjacent books tilted to one side as if they were trying to fill a void. John followed Claire and peered over her shoulder.

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  “So it is,” he agreed.

  “Are you sure you didn’t sell it?”

  “Pretty sure.” said John. He went to his office, checked the inventory on the computer, and found the history listed as being in stock. The publisher was High Plains Press in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

  “It could have been stolen.” Claire said. This was a store, after all, whose security system consisted of a couple of mirrors mounted on the wall.

  “Or sold by someone who forgot to enter it on the computer.” John shrugged.

  “If it turns up, will you let me know?”

  “Sure,” said John.

  ******

  Claire had left herself the option of taking the entire day off, but she had work to do and returned to her office, where she found a voice-mail message saying that Rachel had called.

  Rachel surprised her by actually answering her phone. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too. We kept an eye on the library’s parking lot and noticed that three of your coworkers were absent at the time set for the sting.”

  “Who?”

  “Harrison Hough, Ruth O’Connor, and Gail Benton. We didn’t have the resources to follow them, so all we know is that none of them showed up at Page One, Too. You might be able to do a little investigating of your own to find out where they went.”

  “I’ll try,” Claire said. But first she logged onto her computer, looked up the call number for the library’s copy of The History of the Blue, and discovered it had been shelved in the tower. On her way she passed Harrison’s office and poked her head in the door.

  “How was the Songs of the Cowboys?” he asked her.

  “Not good. It smelled moldy and had water stains. The red of the cover had bled onto the pages. Overall, it was in very poor condition.” Some renegade part of her relished embellishing her lie.

  “Pity. That’s a book I’d like to add to our collection.”

  “How was your day?”

  “Fine. I went to a Friends of the Library luncheon.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Ruth came along. She’s good at dealing with the friends.” Harrison looked down at the papers on his desk, indicating that Claire’s allotted time was over.

  ******

  While she waited for the elevator to the tower, Claire recalled what she’d heard about the series of thefts that took place here several years ago. The thief, a notorious con artist, brought the books out on the dumbwaiter and handed them to his wife, who hid them under her dress pretending to be pregnant. The library responded by sealing off the dumbwaiter and making it impossible to use the elevator without punching in a security code. The tower was now limited to books from the center’s collection and, in theory anyway, could only be accessed by people who worked here. If a student wanted a book, a librarian had to retrieve it.

  The thief was imaginative and skilled at manufacturing artifacts, such as Billy the Kid’s belt buckle or the tablets the Phoenicians left behind when they sailed up the Rio Grande. Even more remarkable was the fact that he persuaded people to buy them. When the FBI raided his house, it was filled with skulls and pots the con artist had either created or dug up. It took an archaeologist and forensic anthropologist to tell the difference. The con artist served a short prison sentence, then became a used-car salesman, where Claire suspected he was applying his imagination and skills to another dubious purpose.

  She punched in her code, the elevator arrived, and she rode it to the fifth floor. Claire found the tower to be an ambivalent place, but it made some of her coworkers so uncomfortable they refused to go there. From the outside it was inspiring, a nice counterpoint to the squat library, but inside it could be ominous. When the wind blew, it whistled through cracks in the windows. Lights were known to flicker and dim. As soon as the electricity went on in one part of the building, it went off in another. It was rare to run into anyone in the tower, and Claire had a sense of apprehension whenever she did. The windows looking out over the campus reminded her of the sniper who fired on students at the University of Texas or the bell tower Kim Novak jumped from in Vertigo. She was always prepared for something strange to happen in the tower, although nothing ever had.

  She circled the fifth floor quickly and saw that no one was there, but someone had been. A pile of papers that had been assembled by a pack rat or a librarian sat on a table in a carrel. As Claire walked through the stacks, following call numbers to the spot where The History of the Blue was supposed to be, she heard the elevator creaking its way up the shaft. The tower was designed for storage, not comfort. There were no interior walls, and the space was broken up only by metal bookshelves. The floors were thin. Sound reverberated throughout the tower, and often it was impossible to tell exactly where the sound was coming from. Footsteps might be above or below. In this environment, sounds provoked strange associations. The creaking elevator made Claire think of a student who had been decapitated by an elevator in another UNM building. She listened to the door slide open and shut, causing the lights to flicker as it did. From the sound of it, she couldn’t tell whether the elevator had stopped at her floor or another, and she waited for footsteps to reveal whether she was sharing this floor with someone else. When she heard nothing, she called out, “Hello?” The only answer was the elevator rumbling back down the shaft.

  She peered around the corner, saw no one by the elevator door, and resumed her search for The History of the Blue. Possibly somebody had pressed the number for a particular floor, had been diverted, and had gotten off the elevator before it began its ascent. As Claire walked down the aisle between the shelves, she heard the sound of footsteps echoing her own. When she walked, other feet walked. When she stopped, they stopped. When she turned, they turned. For a minute she had the sensation a ghost had stepped out of one of the history books that surrounded her. “You’re being ridiculous,” she said to herself, but when she continued walking, she heard the footsteps again. There
might be someone on the floor above, following her in an attempt to ascertain what she was looking for or to intimidate. She could also be hearing her own footsteps echoing somewhere else in the building.

  Claire reached the place where the history should have been shelved, but not wanting to reveal her purpose, she walked by it without stopping, glancing at the spot only long enough to see a hole in the sequence of numbers. Stolen? she wondered, or—the bane of libraries—mis-shelved? It would have been easy enough for a librarian to have taken it or moved it. Harder, but not impossible, for someone else. She continued walking through the stacks, stopping a few minutes later in front of another book and listening as she took it from the shelf. She waited, heard nothing, then walked back to the elevator. Had there been any footsteps, she wondered? Or had the sound been the result of an overactive imagination and a stressful day? Claire pressed the elevator button, drumming her fingers against the wall while she waited for it to reach her floor. The lights flickered when the door opened. In the dimness inside the elevator, the shadow she saw was her own.

  Chapter Nine

  CLAIRE WORKED LATE THAT NIGHT, hunched over her computer while one by one her coworkers passed by on their way home. When she was sure everyone had left, she walked down the hall to Gail’s office. The lights were off, and the computer screen was dark. If Gail had turned the computer off, Claire wouldn’t have been able to log onto it without a password. It was possible the screen was programmed to shut off after a period of inactivity as Claire’s was. She put her hand on the mouse and slid it across the pad. The screen lit up with the Windows icons illuminating the dirty mugs, the scattered papers, the mess that was Gail’s desk. Claire found the place where Gail kept track of her appointments. For today, Thursday, at noon, Gail had entered, “Doctor’s appointment. Ask about P.” She skimmed through the next couple of days and saw that on Friday Gail had scheduled a lunch with Claire’s predecessor, Irina. She logged out of the computer and left Gail’s office. She might have discovered more by checking other dates, but she didn’t want to linger and take the risk of getting caught or to invade Gail’s privacy any more than she had to.

  Driving home along Tramway she wondered if P could be Percocet, a large white pill like the one she’d seen Gail swallowing and a painkiller Claire had taken once following surgery. She remembered the feeling of lying in bed and letting the drug turn her muscles to silk. It was a smooth, elegant feeling, too smooth to be good for you, and when the prescription ran out, Claire didn’t renew it. Percocet was addictive and being on it could explain Gail’s erratic behavior.

  When Claire got home, she cooked herself a Poor Melissa pasta dinner and went to bed early. In the middle of the night, she had an erotic dream involving, of all people, her ex-husband. She woke up feeling sated but annoyed with him for having invaded her sleep. How long would it be, she wondered, before she was free of Evan? Light from a streetlamp silhouetted the bare branches of a neighbor’s elm tree against her wall, turning them into a map of meandering rivers and roads. Wanting to escape from thoughts of Evan, Claire let her mind take a less familiar journey into the labyrinth of the criminal mind, a place that intrigued her more than she ever would have expected. She’d been surprised by how easily and well she had lied. She suspected the rush it induced could become as addictive as a drug. The key to continuing the behavior but avoiding the addiction was self-control and moderation—indulging rarely and only when necessary.

  She replayed the events of the day. Although she’d been hoping for resolution at Page One, Too, all she’d gotten were a few weak leads. Was the fact that Harrison and Ruth had an engagement proof that neither was the thief or merely an indication that their plans had changed? Had Gail really had a doctor’s appointment? Or was that entry a lie and P the detail that gave it credence? Could she have been headed for Page One, Too, and gotten spooked at the last minute? Why was she having lunch with Irina? Where was Irina living, and what was she doing? Did the missing copies of The History of the Blue signify anything? Shelving was not an exact science. Claire knew she could have chosen another book at random and had the same outcome. She wondered if Irina still had access to the tower. Could she or Gail or anyone else have shadowed her from another floor as she walked through the stacks? As Claire fell back asleep, her thoughts lead to I-25, the road to Las Vegas and High Plains Press.

  The next day she called Lola Falter several times. When she didn’t get an answer, she tried her friend, Madelyn, at the U of A.

  “How’s the book quest going?” Madelyn asked. “I haven’t heard anything about them here.”

  “Someone offered to sell most of the missing books to John Harlan at Page One, Too, anonymously over the Internet,” Claire replied. “We arranged a sting operation with a university policewoman, but the seller never showed up.”

  “Would you bring those books to John Harlan, if you were the thief?”

  “No, but Rachel, the policewoman, tells me it’s hard to underestimate the intelligence of the average thief.”

  “This may not be your average thief.”

  “True. Whoever it is didn’t offer John the Austin/Adams folio.”

  “I’d be looking on the art market for the prints.”

  “The History of the Blue that was in my box wasn’t offered, either.”

  “Do you care about about that book? It’s not worth anything.”

  “It’s missing from John’s shelves and from the stacks here, which is strange. Maybe somebody wants it for its content rather than the size of its first printing or its collectibility.”

  “Value a book for its content? Now, that would be rare.”

  “It was printed by High Plains Press in Las Vegas. I’ve been calling Lola Falter there, but not getting any answer or an answering machine, either.”

  “Lola’s pretty old. She closed the press down years ago, but as far as I know, she still lives in Las Vegas. Do you want me to see if I can locate our copy of the history?”

  “Please.”

  Madelyn called back later. “The online catalog said to check the shelf, but it wasn’t there. As you know, it’s not unusual for books to disappear. There are people who consider libraries to be payment optional bookstores.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Say hello to Lola when you find her.”

  “Will do.”

  ******

  The Eliot Porter photos had been matted, framed, and stacked in the tower waiting to be hung in the exhibition room. Whenever she had a free moment, Claire looked through them, savoring their beauty and taking pride in her part in the exhibit. Harrison had agreed to have a punch and chips reception at the opening. While Claire was making up the invitation list, the idea occurred to her to invite Irina. She didn’t know if Irina would consider returning to the center or even if she was still in town, but Claire was curious about her predecessor. She’d been wanting to broach the subject of Irina with Gail, and this gave her the opportunity.

  She walked down the hall to Gail’s office with the address list in her hand, and found Gail working on her computer. “I was wondering if you knew how to reach Irina.” Claire said.

  “Why do you want to get in touch with her?”

  “I was thinking of inviting her to the Eliot Porter reception.”

  Gail laughed. “She won’t come.”

  “Why not?”

  “She hates the library. After all she contributed to this place, she was denied tenure. How would that make you feel?”

  “Not good. Does she ever come back?”

  “Not if she can help it.”

  “What’s she doing? Is she still in Albuquerque? Did she find another job?”

  “Another job in Albuquerque?” Gail raised a pair of dubious eyebrows. They both knew this was a one-university town. “She’s still here, but she is looking elsewhere.”

  “What is she doing in the meantime?”

  “Writing a novel.”

  In Claire’s mind that was a one-way t
icket to poverty.

  ******

  She woke up Saturday morning feeling the lure of the open highway. She’d been spending too much time indoors staring at a computer screen. She tried Lola Falter once again and got a busy signal, but when she called back fifteen minutes later, there was no answer. Claire decided to go to Las Vegas to see if she could find Lola. It was a hundred-and-twenty-mile drive, which would be a long, tense trip on either coast, but was a pleasant experience here on a section of I-25 that had a lot of distant blue mountains and a minimum of large trucks. She could give her Chevy free rein and let it reach a cruising speed of eighty miles an hour.

  Las Vegas was a town that was always on the verge of being discovered, but had never crossed the line. For years Claire had been hearing that it would be the next Santa Fe, but it was still the old Las Vegas and she admired it for that. It was a town that had sprung up along the railroad, full of charming Victorian houses, a sleepy plaza, and a couple of rambling hotels. Every year or so one art gallery opened and another one closed. Claire wondered why it had never developed as an art colony; it had the location, it had the beauty. But it also had a fierce wind that spun dust devils down the street, that rattled your windows and your brain, making it impossible to think. It could be hard to create with the wind blowing grit through your head.

  Claire stopped at the ice-cream parlor on Main Street for lunch. It was a building she loved, with a high tin ceiling and gingerbread balcony that would be a great place to store books. She had a BLT on white toast and an ice-cream soda. Then she went looking for Lola Falter.

  Lola lived in a tiny Victorian house that had a peaked roof covered with cedar shakes. It had once been painted lavender, but had faded to the color of old lingerie. A sign that read HIGH PLAINS PRESS in purple letters flapped in the breeze. High Plains had occasionally published a collection of poetry or a regional novel, but mostly it was a vanity press. Although authors paid Lola to publish their books, she put her heart in it. Sometimes the content was obscure, but High Plains Press books were always beautiful to look at and a pleasure to hold.