“She was…going to Amsterdam.”
“In the evening?”
But Rachel had composed herself. “Why shouldn’t she go in the evening? Anyway, you know as well as I do that she kept her life…”
“Private?”
“Secret,” said Rachel. “I didn’t ask. She didn’t offer information.”
Except to Anja, I thought. Abby seemed to have told Anja everything. Rachel and I had been whispering in a corner of the apartment, and both of us started when Thomas said, “Is this the Louis 16th chair?”
Rachel nodded to him and muttered, “He doesn’t have a clue, the greedy philistine.”
I said casually, “So did Abby’s aunt specify that not only could the flat not be sold, but none of the articles in it? Is that why Abby resorted to selling the correspondence? It probably wasn’t listed on any inventory.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did Abby know you couldn’t inherit? Obviously you didn’t.”
“Cassandra, I asked you to go to Amsterdam and meet with someone at this Antikvaariat Sophie. And you come back giving me the third degree.”
“And that’s another thing. Why did you make me go to Amsterdam when you were going there yourself? Did you just want her out of the bookstore so you could get in and look for something?”
Rachel was silent. I took out the envelope still filled with money and handed it back to her. “This is nothing I want to be involved in.”
Thomas was wandering near the bookshelves. “Those aren’t your aunt’s books,” Rachel told him sharply, coming over to him. “They were your sister’s.”
“Everything of my sister’s is mine now,” he reminded her.
“Well, there’s nothing valuable on those shelves.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
We watched him scan the titles, pull down a few of the more expensively-bound books, and look at them. He obviously had no idea that a book in worn paper covers, but signed by Virginia Woolf, was many times more valuable than a leather-bound reprint of a Jane Austen novel. I could see myself that Abby’s collection was sadly diminished.
Rachel walked back across the room to where I stood near the door. “Insufferable man,” she muttered.
“When exactly did he arrive?”
“This morning.”
“There’s no chance he could have come a few days ago?”
“Why would he have…” Rachel stopped and looked at me. “You don’t think…” A stain of red came surging up from her chest and into her face. “Abby was murdered?”
I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to go in this direction with Thomas still in the room, even though we were both whispering. “It’s possible.”
“Then you think her brother…or even I…or this woman Anja? But why?”
“Love and money, the two usual motives.”
“You think I might have run over the woman I loved and left her lying in the street?”
“If you were jealous enough. Or desperate enough about money.”
“Okay, that’s enough. Get out. I thought you were a friend; I thought you would help. But now I see you’re out to punish me for some reason. You can leave.”
“I didn’t say it was you,” I tried to explain, but she had opened the door and practically pushed me out. “You admit you were jealous of Anja,” I said, as the door closed firmly behind me.
I could have gone to the police station with my suspicions, but I hesitated. I didn’t have enough facts, and Rachel’s expression of total horror showed she really was surprised to find herself accused. I needed to know more. As I made my way back to the train station, I remembered an evening the three of us had spent in London a few years before. We’d dined well and drunk moderately and laughed enormously, and I’d gone away not so much envious as satisfied: Abby was happy with Rachel.
Things could change. Anja said that Abby wasn’t a one-woman woman, which to me was a fairly clear indication that they’d been involved. I wondered who the lover in London was. I tried to see it from Abby’s perspective, as I sat on a bus travelling through a gray mist that made it seem much later than early afternoon. She had moved to Brussels because of the flat, and in order to satisfy Rachel’s desire for a better standard of living than they’d had in London. But neither of them was happy there. They didn’t have friends; they didn’t have community. Abby began to wander. Rachel was lonely. There were arguments. Each blamed the other. Rachel suspected affairs, and probably she was right.
But then why didn’t Abby leave her? Why did she sell off her book collection and try to sell her aunt’s letters, if not to continue to stay in Brussels and support Abby?
I tried hard to recall our last conversation. It had been about a month ago, in bleakest January. Abby had been casual, as usual. “Hi, I’m in town. Meet me for a cappuccino at the usual spot, all right?”
As I had walked up Coptic Street, I saw her just emerging from the bookstore where she used to work. I caught up with her there. To my surprise, she’d seemed a little embarrassed. “Just visiting Peter,” she hastened to say, as if that wasn’t exactly what I would have assumed.
She had seemed very glad to see me, and we’d spent an hour catching up. She wanted to know all about my recent travels, and I amused her with stories of Luisa Montiflores and her boundless ego. Abby and I had rarely talked about anything very important to us except in a slantwise, jocular fashion, but this time, she’d seemed especially anxious to keep the conversation off herself. When I asked how Brussels was, she shrugged. “It’s gloomy in winter, but then every place is. We’re doing a lot of reading.” And then she’d changed the subject. I’d tried to drag it back—“How long do you plan to be there?”—and that was when she’d made her remark about privacy and secrets. It wasn’t really any of my business, she let me know.
I got off at the station and asked for the cabby Paul, but he had just taken off with a fare. I went into the Gare Midi and found a bank of phones. First I called London.
“Peter? This is Cassandra Reilly. You may not remember me, but I was a friend of Abby’s.” I told him, as gently as I could, that she had been killed.
“But I just saw her recently,” he said. “Just last month. I can’t believe it. Not Abby.”
“She worked for you for donkey’s years, it seems.”
“And I’ve missed her badly since she left for Brussels. Couldn’t understand why she wanted to go there and once there, since she was so unhappy, why she didn’t return.”
“She told you she was unhappy?”
“Oh well, you know Abby. She never told anyone the total truth, only the version that suited her at the moment. But of course that’s what made her such a good book buyer. If someone brought in a load of books, imagining they were valuable—and of course sometimes they would be valuable—Abby would never let on. She knew such a vast amount, but then she would, wouldn’t she? Raised in the trade.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well of course you knew,” Peter sounded surprised. “Her father had Lowe’s Antiquarian Bookstore, that excellent shop on the West Side in Manhattan. People still remember it—the marvelous selection, the old wooden shelves up to the ceiling, the books in the glass cabinets, beautiful books. Abby grew up in the shop. But when her father died suddenly, her brother was the one to take it over. I don’t know the reason why. I suppose because he was the boy and she was still too young.”
I was remembering a very early conversation with Abby. “The business went to my brother, even though he didn’t love it. He was just greedy and thought it would make him rich. But he doesn’t know anything.” But I had not remembered that it was a bookstore. Perhaps she hadn’t told me.
“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to,” I said. “But is there any possibility that she was selling you titles from her collection?”
“I’m afraid so, yes,” he said. “I hated to see her do it, but she said she couldn’t really manage ot
herwise. She said she hoped that something was going to come through soon though.”
I thanked him, hung up, and called Anja.
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation,” I told her. “And it’s occurred to me to ask which university you were selling the letters to.”
“I’m afraid I can’t really tell you that.”
“But Abby is dead now. Whatever agreement you made with her can’t be valid. Is the sale still in progress? Did you receive the money? How much was it and what happened to it?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, Cassandra,” she said a little nervously. “But I’d prefer to wait a little. Things are still in progress with the university, and I’d rather not queer the negotiations, so to speak. Besides, it’s a little unclear to me at the moment what right you have exactly to ask all these questions. If you’re working with Rachel, I must say that I have some reservations.”
She had put it very diplomatically, but I understood that she was not going to tell me much more. Perhaps she was regretting that she’d revealed me so much already.
“You suspect Rachel?” I finally said.
“Just ask her what she took from my desk yesterday. See what she says,” said Anja and rang off.
As I walked past the ticket office, I had the strong urge just to get on the first train back to London. I could sleep on the ferry from Ostend. I was sick of this whole business and not sure why I was getting more deeply involved. But I kept walking and when I got back to the taxi stand, Paul was there.
Fifteen minutes later I was back on a bus going in the direction of the Avenue Louise. I hadn’t found out much from the cabby, but I’d found out a few things. Paul was from the former Yugoslavia and didn’t speak much French. He hadn’t given me the clear answer that I wished.
“A gray Fiat, very hard to see,” he said. “New one, not old. Very much mud on the license plate.”
“But how could the mud stay stuck?” I asked. “It was raining.”
“Brown mud,” he said.
“You’re sure it was a gray Fiat?” I was not sure if Rachel and Abby owned a car, but I supposed Rachel could have rented one. “Did you see the license plate? Was it from Brussels?”
“Too much mud,” he said.
Thomas was gone when I buzzed Rachel from downstairs. She let me in, and seemed subdued. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”
Somehow she had pulled herself together, had combed her hair and put on a sweater and pants. She had been crying.
She gestured me to a chair and went to make tea. Now that I was getting more familiar with the apartment, I could see that it was not as posh as I’d first imagined. There were definitely antiques, but the wallpaper was spotted and old, the carpets stained. It had a kind of musty smell, too, which probably came from the velvet, slightly moth-eaten drapes.
“I called Peter at Abby’s old bookshop,” I said when Rachel came back. “He told me that Abby was selling off her collection.”
“I could have told you that. We were desperately poor. Abby’s books were the only thing of value.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think it was important. The books were sold; the money was used up. What I was trying to find out was how Abby had used the money, whether she had bought anything valuable that wouldn’t be in the inventory.”
“She didn’t buy anything. She sold something to this woman at the Antikvaariat Sophie.”
Rachel nodded. “You mentioned some correspondence. As if I knew about it. I didn’t, actually.”
I explained what it was.
Rachel thought for a moment and then said, “I guess I’m not surprised that Abby didn’t tell me about the letters. She probably knew that I wouldn’t approve of making money off a youthful love affair. I believe that people should come out when they’re ready. Which means that some people are never going to come out, if they can help it.”
She went on, “Look, I know that Abby always liked to put it about that she bowled me over and that I left my husband for her. And that’s partly true. He gave me an ultimatum and I had to accept it. He’d accommodated himself to my other women lovers, but Abby was more threatening.”
“Other lovers?”
“My husband knew I’d experimented, as he called it. In fact, I’d been sleeping with women a long time before I met Abby. But it’s true that Abby meant enough to me to leave the life I’d had. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have a work permit in London, so I was reduced to doing under-the-table freelance editing, while I waited to get legal status there.”
“You were an editor?”
“I’d done editing in New York, yes.”
I bit my lip. I had gotten the impression early on that Rachel had had no skills, that Abby had had to support her.
“Then her aunt died. Abby raved about the apartment, said that Brussels was a fascinating city, that it would be a great base to explore Europe from. You know how impetuous and persuasive she could be. I was reluctant. After all, I was finally starting to feel at home in London after five years. But I said yes. It was only when I got here that Abby told me that we had to live in the flat and not sell anything in it. She was trying to work something out with her brother. Meanwhile, we sat here driving each other slowly crazy.”
She had used that phrase about Thomas before. “What exactly was she trying to work out?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Rachel stumbled. “I understood that he got some money from the estate. I don’t know how much. But perhaps she was hoping to work out an agreement with him about some of the valuables here. Perhaps that she could give them to him in exchange for cash. Or that she could sell them and he would take half. I don’t know.”
“Do you have his address here?”
“Just the hotel name.”
“I’d like to ask him some questions.”
Rachel shuddered. “It was so creepy, him crawling around looking at everything. He told me that I’d have to be out of here by the end of the week. I hardly know where I’m going to go. Probably back to London. I don’t really know anyone here.”
“It must have been lonely,” I said.
“Abby and I handled it differently. I started learning French, and reading a lot and visiting the museums and the churches. It was really harder for Abby. She hated to think she’d made a mistake in all this. She didn’t want to talk about it. But every once in a while she would just get on the train and leave. I figured out what she was doing with her books at some point, that that was why she was going to London. But then she started going to Amsterdam all the time. That I couldn’t quite understand.”
“But you thought she was having an affair?”
“Was she? With this woman Anja?”
“I don’t know, honestly.”
“But you think so.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“I think so too.”
“Is that why you followed me to Amsterdam yesterday?”
“I still don’t know how you know that,” said Rachel, slowly. “But yes, I did. After you left, I suddenly felt quite wild and had to do something. I took your same train, and followed you to the shop. I saw you talking with Anja. I saw you both leave for the cafe.”
“You broke in then. What were you looking for?”
“Some letter, some sign.”
“Anja said you took something off her desk.”
“I did. It was a note from Abby to Anja.”
“Can I see it?”
She went over to the secretary and fetched it. It was short, typed letter.
Dear Anja,
“No, I don’t want to talk on the phone. I’d rather see you. The usual place, on Tuesday evening.”
“The usual place—was that in Amsterdam or here?”
“Tuesday was the day Abby was killed,” said Rachel slowly. “On her way to the train station.”
It was late afternoon when I arrived back in Amsterdam, a day much like the day before, only darker
and wetter. I called Eloise from the Central Station.
Eloise had talked with friends in the States. It was true. A buzz had gone around for years that this particular famous woman novelist, who had reached her seventies denying every innuendo, had had lesbian relationships in her youth. But there had never been any proof, and certainly nothing written. There still wasn’t.
“Maybe this woman killed Abby,” Eloise said.
“It’s not that much of a stigma.”
“Well, maybe to her it is.”
“I think I need to talk to Anja again.”
“The shop will be closed now. Do you want her address? I went to a party once at her house. It’s right near the shop, also on Keizersgracht.”
I thanked her and hung up, and made my way by tram and foot to the shop, just to check. The CLOSED sign hung in the window. I walked back across the canal to a cafe and sagged into a chair inside. I was suddenly aware of just how exhausted I was from my back-and-forth trip to Brussels in one day. I hadn’t eaten lunch. Hadn’t really found out much either. I’d tried calling Thomas at the hotel, but there was no answer. I asked when he had checked in and they told me just the night before. I asked, as casually as I could, if he was out in his gray Fiat and was told, politely but firmly, that Monsieur had no car. I don’t know if I really suspected him. Other than an apartment-full of moldering antiques, what could be in it for him? Still I wanted to talk with him. I could imagine Abby selling first her books, and then the correspondence, to get money. I could imagine her dealing with Anja. I could imagine Anja dealing with a collector or university. I could even believe, though it was difficult, that Rachel knew nothing about this. But I could not imagine why Abby had had to die.
Perhaps I was just making up a big story about the whole thing. Perhaps it was my way of not facing the fact that Abby had been careless, had not been looking, and had died for no reason at all in a hit-and-run accident.
Accidents happen all the time. I ordered a sandwich, and while I waited, I stared out the steamy window at the passing cars. In central Amsterdam there weren’t many cars, but they still drove as if they were larger and more important than anything around. It was twilight; it was raining, exactly the same conditions that had existed a few days before at the Gare Midi. I could barely see anything; would not, in fact, have seen the car stop and park in front of the Antikvaariat Sophie if the person who got out had not been wearing complete white. In the gloom she shone.
The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Page 17
