by Sharon Potts
She returned to the main article on Stormdrain and clicked on the link to the explosion at the brownstone. Her mother had said she’d been injured when she was walking by, but hadn’t provided any details.
Aubrey read on. Also known as April Fool, the explosion had taken place on April 1, 1970 in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood not far from Columbia University.
The explosion resulted from the premature detonation of a bomb being assembled by members of Stormdrain, which set off other explosives and reduced the brownstone to burning rubble. The bombs, according to Stormdrain member Steve Robinson, had been intended to be used to blow up the Lexington Avenue Armory.
Three Columbia University students had been killed on impact—Michael Shernovsky, Gary Cohen, and Gertrude Morgenstern. A fourth, Linda Wilsen, had escaped from the wreckage with third-degree burns and was hospitalized. A five-year-old child, Martin Smith, playing in front of the brownstone at the time of the explosion, was rescued from the scene, but died before he reached the hospital.
Damn. A child had died. This was something she hadn’t known before. The little boy’s parents might have held her parents accountable for his death if they believed Mama or Dad had had some connection to the explosion.
She returned to the article.
Over several days, a search of the rubble uncovered a “bomb factory” with several unexploded eight-stick packages of dynamite with fuses attached, six pipe bombs, remnants of Molotov cocktails, and timing devices.
All that, in addition to the makeshift bombs that had detonated in the explosion. The crime scene was gory, and it took a week to identify the three students. Gertrude Morgenstern was believed to have been holding the bomb when it exploded and suffered the greatest impact.
She was identified by her remains found at the site, including the tip of a finger, a scorched braid of hair, crushed wire-rim glasses, and shreds of clothing including a wooden clog shoe.
Aubrey sat back in her desk chair. Her father had said the people who died in the explosion had been their friends. She thought of her mother sitting in front of the fireplace this morning going through a box with photos in it. Just some old friends.
Aubrey went across the hall to her mother’s room and closed the door after her. She opened the drawers in the dresser and bureau and sifted through the clothes. No box. She checked in shoe boxes and containers on the shelves of the closet. Nothing. She pulled out her mother’s luggage and unzipped each piece. There was an old blue suitcase that didn’t have wheels. Aubrey set it on the floor and opened the snap-down locks. The suitcase was filled with old clothes—worn jeans and tie-dyed shirts and peasant blouses, harem-style pants and a halter top—and a small box covered with neon peace symbols.
She pushed the suitcase back into the closet and returned to her own room with the box. If Smolleck came upstairs, she didn’t want to have to explain to him why she was snooping around her mother’s bedroom.
She put the box on her desk and opened it. Inside were folded papers and a handful of photos. On top were the photos Mama had shown her earlier of her father alone, and the one of both her parents. The papers were an assortment of class schedules, grade reports, and commendations from Barnard College for Diana Hartfeld.
Nothing culpable.
She opened a tiny envelope, the kind that usually accompanied a delivered floral arrangement. The envelope was yellowed with age. In it was a small note card. Although it was a little different from his handwriting these days, she recognized her father’s strong script, each letter pressed hard into the paper, revealing a high level of confidence, even back in college.
D-Our love is stronger than the pain. Love, L-
Her mother’s ringtone.
The song was clearly special to both of them. She put the card back in its envelope and examined the rest of the photos. Young men at a party. Her father was in a couple of them, the white scarf covering his hair. The men had longish hair and sideburns. Several wore beards. One of the skinny men with mutton-chop sideburns resembled the photo of Jeffrey Schwartz, but his face was turned away from the camera, so she couldn’t be certain it was he. She turned the photos over. No dates. No one identified.
She came to the photo of three women she had looked at with her mother. On the back, written in her mother’s neat script, was: With Linda and Gertrude at antiwar demonstration, Oct. 15, 1969.
Linda Wilsen and Gertrude Morgenstern? Probably. Gertrude wasn’t exactly a common name.
Both women had been in the brownstone explosion. Linda had suffered severe burns, and Gertrude had died.
Aubrey looked again at the three young, happy women in the photo.
And Mama?
What exactly had she been doing by the brownstone that day?
CHAPTER 34
There was something about grand buildings with their soaring ceilings and hushed echoes that made Diana’s chest contract. Even the Miami-Dade Library with its Spanish-style architecture, terra-cotta tiled floors, and arched hallways reminded her of that other library, that other time. She darted into the cool, dark building from the too-hot, too-bright courtyard, bought a five-dollar guest card so she could use a computer, and then found a remote cubby.
“To stop murder, we have to kill.” Gertrude’s war chant. Her prophecy.
Now there was more death, and once again, Diana was to blame. But she wasn’t going to think about Jonathan now. She just couldn’t.
She logged on to the library computer and searched for articles about April Fool that had appeared shortly after the brownstone explosion.
Although she was unable to log in to the New York Times without a subscription and didn’t want to create a trail to her whereabouts, she found references to a few articles on recent blogs. She read through them, but they all contained the same information. The explosion at the brownstone had been an accident.
Three Stormdrain members had died—Michael Shernovsky, Gary Cohen, and Gertrude Morgenstern. They had been assembling a bomb intended to be used to blow up the Lexington Avenue Armory. A fourth Stormdrain member, Linda Wilsen, escaped the explosion with third-degree burns.
Nothing more. No speculation. No uncertainty. The explosion had been an accident.
She entered “April Fool, Columbia Low Library” in the search engine. Dozens of hits, but only one that included both references. A human-interest story published in 2000. The journalist had interviewed several former Columbia students who had been attending the university in April 1970. She didn’t recognize their names, and none of the interviewees claimed to have been involved with Stormdrain. She read the article, stopping at the line she’d been hoping to find.
Radicals from Stormdrain were making bombs to destroy property. There’d been rumors that Columbia’s Low Library was a target, but it was never confirmed.
Never confirmed.
The brightness from the computer screen made her head hurt. She closed her eyes and listened to the hushed noises around her—footfalls and whispers.
Di walked through the Rotunda at Columbia’s Low Library, hearing her own footfalls echo in the massive domed room, along with whispers from prospective freshmen and their parents admiring the neoclassical architecture and busts of Greek gods and goddesses.
She’d been taking notes for her art-history class, pretty sure there would be questions about Columbia’s own art legacy on the exam, but now she had only a few hours to prepare for her calculus exam before she needed to leave to meet Lawrence.
She hurried down the broad steps of the library, past the bronze statue of Alma Mater with her raised arms and scepter, and wondered fleetingly whether that was going to be on the art exam, too. Mostly she was thinking about later. Lawrence was taking her to dinner at a restaurant he’d discovered down in the Village, then over to the Fillmore East to hear the Grateful Dead.
She unlocked the door to her dorm room, relieved Gertrude wasn’t there. She didn’t want to have to tell her roommate about her plans with Lawrence and listen to
her sarcasm.
They each had a desk, but Gertrude was as bad with personal boundaries in their dorm room as she was in her sex life. Papers and open books that hadn’t been there that morning were piled on Di’s desk. Disgusted, Di gathered up the books. Chemistry, she noted. Gertrude wasn’t taking chemistry.
A large piece of paper with blue diagrams was open on the desk. An architectural drawing. But Gertrude wasn’t taking architecture.
Di examined the blueprint. Printed at the top of the page was “LOW LIBRARY,” where she had just been. There was a diagram of each floor, including the basement. Notes had been written on the paper in black ink in a confident hand.
Administrative center. President’s office.
Career Day, 4/3, Rotunda. Fortune 100 Corps. Several hundred students expected.
On the diagram of the basement, several points had been marked with a red X. Di matched the location of the Xs to the floor above. The Rotunda, where major events were often held.
Including the upcoming Career Fair in a few days.
Dear God.
The door opened behind her. Gertrude came in, carrying several books. She frowned. “You said you’d be gone all afternoon.”
“What is this?” Di held up the blueprint.
“What does it look like?” Gertrude dumped the books on her bed.
“Like a plan to blow up Low Library.”
“We’re planning to blow the armory,” Gertrude said. “You know that.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
Gertrude shrugged. “An intellectual exercise.”
“You’re planning to kill innocent people, aren’t you?”
“Innocent?” Gertrude said. The pupils in her eyes seemed to throb, like they always did when she was angry. “You don’t mean the big corporations that are financing the war machine, do you?” She stepped closer. “Or the bourgeois students who want to go work for them? Are those the innocents you mean?”
Di could smell her breath—cigarettes and something minty. Gertrude took the blueprint from Di and folded it on the creases.
“Who knows about this?” Di asked.
“Just a couple of the anointed. They’re helping me build the bombs. Real whoppers.”
“I think you’ve gone crazy, Gertrude.”
“Bring the war home, baby.”
Di shook her head. “No, Gertrude. The point was to end the war. Not start a new one.”
Gertrude laughed. “You really are a Pollyanna.”
“Well, you’re no Che Guevara.” Di brushed past her to the door.
“Hey, Pollyanna.”
Di turned to face her from the doorway.
“I was right about you,” Gertrude said. “You don’t have what it takes to change the world.”
Di felt a flash of rage. “Is that so, Gertrude?” she said. “That just goes to show how little you really know about me.”
Diana opened her eyes and faced the glaring computer screen. She checked the throwaway phone she had picked up before coming to the library so she could call Aubrey when she was ready. It was after three o’clock.
She knew what she had to do. It was the only way to finally make peace with herself.
She left the cool, dark library and stepped back outside into the sharp, harsh sunlight.
She would make her peace, and then she would tell Aubrey.
She prayed her daughter would understand.
CHAPTER 35
Aubrey put her mother’s box in a drawer of her desk. If there was a connection between Ethan’s kidnapping and either her mother or father, she was at a loss as to how to find it. She hoped her mother was having more success, whatever it was she was doing.
She checked the time. Just after three.
With Jonathan dead, the Tuesday midnight deadline no longer applied, but Ethan had been missing for forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours away from his mom and dad. She didn’t want to think about how terrified he must be. She needed to try something else.
Her laptop was synced with her iPhone and contained all her photos. She went to the album she had set up for Ethan, hoping there was some clue in the photo that had caught her attention in her mother’s office. Ethan at his grandfather’s apartment making an ugly face while an old woman watched him. As she had told Smolleck, something about the woman was familiar.
She scrolled through Ethan’s baby pictures, photos of him learning how to walk, then the recent ones of him, until she came to the selfie he had taken with the old woman in the background. She checked to see whether the woman was in any other photos. She wasn’t. She “snipped” out the woman’s face and enlarged it. The woman’s hair was short, gray, and curly. She had blue eyes that were a little out of focus, and a long chin. Her lips reminded Aubrey of a 1920s film star, the upper one thin and bowed, the lower full and pouty. Aubrey enlarged the photo further. Above her bowed lip was a small beauty mark. That’s when she noticed what wasn’t in the photo. Wrinkles. The woman wasn’t old. She had the skin of someone around forty. She could have been prematurely gray, or had had a facelift, or maybe something else was going on here.
Aubrey studied the frown on the woman’s face as she looked at Ethan. It was the expression that was familiar, but what did it remind her of?
Something recent.
She went to her e-mails, opened the one from Smolleck with the photos from the carnival, and found the photo of the woman in sunglasses staring in Ethan’s direction. There it was. The same frown.
She “snipped” out the face of the woman at the carnival and put it next to the face of the gray-haired woman. Same bowed lips and prominent chin. Just above the upper lip, in the exact same place, was a tiny mole.
This must be the same woman.
She was about to call Smolleck when a disturbing thought stopped her.
The gray-haired woman had been at her father’s apartment. What had she been doing there, and what was her father’s involvement? Instead of Smolleck, she called her father’s cell phone, impatient as it rang and he didn’t pick up.
“Aubrey?” he said, answering on the fifth ring. He sounded breathless.
“Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”
“At the time-share.”
“I have to ask you something,” she said.
“What is it?”
“There was a woman with gray hair at your house when Ethan visited you a couple of weeks ago. Who was she?”
Through the phone, she could hear the sound of things being moved around. Drawers opening and closing. What was he looking for? “Dad? Do you know who the woman was?”
“Woman? Oh, you must mean the babysitter.” He paused. “Why are you asking about her?”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Let me think. She told Ethan to call her Miss Alice. She seemed very nice, and Ethan liked her. What’s going on?”
“Where did she come from?”
“Some babysitting service. Star made the arrangements.”
“Is Star there? Can you ask her?”
“She isn’t here.” His voice sounded strange.
“Tell me what you know about the babysitter.”
She listened to him breathe and wondered whether he was trying to come up with a story.
“I remember it was last minute,” he said finally. “I don’t like going off without Ethan when he visits, but Star hadn’t known he was coming. She surprised me with tickets to a concert. She said we didn’t have to go, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. She said she’d find a trustworthy babysitter. A grown-up, not some kid.”
Through the phone, she heard a zipper open. Then another. As though he were going through their suitcases.
“Was that the only time Alice watched him?” she asked.
“She came the next night, too. Like I said, Ethan seemed to like her. I didn’t think there was a problem. Is there a problem?”
“She looks like a woman who was in one of the photos at the carnival watching Ethan.”
“What are you saying? You think the woman we hired to babysit Ethan kidnapped him? That’s ridicu—” He stopped abruptly.
She heard a rustling, like her father was shaking out a large piece of paper, maybe a sheet of newspaper. “What the hell,” he said.
“What’s the matter? Did you find something?”
His breathing was all wrong, like he couldn’t quite catch it. “What is it, Dad?”
“Nothing,” he said. There was a muted shuffling noise, as though he were folding the paper.
Then she heard a woman’s voice in the background. “Larry, are you here?”
“I’ve gotta go,” he said, and before she could say another word, he had disconnected from the call.
She stared at the phone in her hand, wondering what the hell that was all about.
CHAPTER 36
Her father was behaving strangely, but at least Aubrey had gotten some information from him. Now she had something to work with.
Starting with Star. She had hired the babysitter, which meant that she might have something to do with the kidnapping.
But what about Dad? Was he involved? He had seemed genuinely surprised when Aubrey asked about the babysitter, so for now, she’d stay with the assumption he wasn’t.
But that created a troublesome possibility. What if her father mentioned to Star that Aubrey was interested in the babysitter? Would he be putting himself in danger? But her father had seemed so preoccupied by whatever it was he had found, it seemed unlikely he would bring it up. Besides, it was possible Star had nothing to do with the kidnapping and that the babysitter had been working independently or for someone else.
