by Clea Simon
Lucy and her opinions. Sometimes, Dulcie realized, her mother seemed determined to change reality simply by force of will. Like her refusal to see that Dulcie’s hair was, essentially, brown. Yes, it turned coppery in summer, sunlight bringing out the red highlights. It would never, however, be the brilliant red-gold of Lucy’s own hair, a color she said had passed straight through the maternal line ever since, well, the days of the goddess, if Lucy were to be believed.
‘Maybe that’s why I dream of the author as a brunette,’ Dulcie thought to herself. ‘And the victim as – ah! A redhead!’ That was the detail that had been changed before the book’s publication. ‘Those red-gold locks, besmirch’d by life’s gore.’ She struggled to recall the rest. ‘Drenched in life’s ichor, he lay broken on the rug . . .’
But she had only found the manuscript on Saturday, and the victim in the typeset scene wasn’t a redhead – his hair was described as black as a raven’s wing, as she recalled. So why in her dream, that recurring nightmare, did the victim always have red hair? Long before she had read the handwritten fragment, Dulcie had ‘seen’ her author writing that scene – coming up with a gory description about blood darkening in red-gold hair.
Sometimes, Dulcie thought, our subconscious can be so obvious. Granted, she didn’t know the full story, but she suspected that she herself had made the switch, maybe because of some lingering anger toward Lucy – and all the grief she had given her only child. Well, a nightmare image was a harmless outlet for emotions, Dulcie decided. In truth, her mother had done her best, and for someone who was so intent on shedding her past life, it was really rather touching that she had tried to will her genetic inheritance on her daughter.
There was more though – all this talk about the maternal line had obscured the obvious. The victim wasn’t even a woman.
This was interesting for several reasons, and Dulcie started flipping through pages to find more. In The Ravages, male characters had been largely peripheral. There’d been the standard mad monk, as well as an avaricious nobleman and a young knight, who had been pure at heart and, honestly, a bit of a milksop in Dulcie’s reckoning. But the main drama had been between two women. Hermetria and Demetria had been cooped up together in Hermetria’s ruined castle. Their dialogues, which went on for pages, had basically outlined the arguments for and against women’s rights as they stood in the late 1700s.
Had the author started writing from a male perspective? No, Dulcie thought back. There was nothing to indicate that the point of view of the scene was from a man. She looked through her pages, unable to believe she hadn’t made a note of this. She was sure – almost sure – that in the nightmare text, the one she could see over the author’s shoulder, the onlooker had been a woman. Was there something about ‘skirts edged in blood, darken’ng the very lace’?
Yes, she found it. ‘I stepped back with a gasp, my skirts already edged in blood . . .’ Then more about the blood, about how the color changed. It was almost as if the narrator had watched the man die.
A wave of dizziness swept over Dulcie. This was a little too real, a little too reminiscent of the scene she had walked in on yesterday. She lowered her head to the plastic desktop. That spoke well of her author, she told herself. That woman could sure write a murder scene. It was almost as if she had been there herself.
Had she?
‘Excuse me.’ A voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Are you OK?’
‘What?’ Dulcie hadn’t realized her eyes were closed, but she sat up and smiled automatically. The woman in front of her was familiar. She definitely looked concerned, and Dulcie struggled to place her. Dark eyes, chocolate skin – for some reason, she thought of Chris. ‘Darlene!’ She smiled in earnest now. ‘I’m Dulcie, Chris Sorenson’s girlfriend?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ The girl leaned on the edge of the cubicle. ‘I think we met at the open house?’ Dulcie nodded: The computer science open house was a new idea and a good one, giving some of the university’s most isolated students a chance to mingle with their colleagues’ non-applied science friends. She and Darlene hadn’t met that night, but it was a convenient excuse. Dulcie wouldn’t have to explain that she’d witnessed the fight with Rafe. Which, all things considered, was just as well.
‘What brings you to the bowels of the beast?’ Dulcie asked. ‘I don’t think Chris has ever been down here.’
‘Oh, it’s for Rafe.’ She ducked her head, her natural color insufficient to hide the blush that crept up into her cheeks. ‘My boyfriend.’
‘He’s exiled you to the depths?’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Dulcie wished them back. That argument had sounded serious, and Dulcie had only been guessing that they’d made up.
Darlene, however, was smiling. ‘Nah, I offered to help out. He’s working on a paper. Something that could be really big, but, well, he’s been tied up. There’s been a lot of stuff going on.’
‘I know.’ Dulcie stopped her with a raised hand. ‘I was there.’ Better to be honest than for this young woman, Chris’s colleague, to think she’d been hiding something.
‘You were?’ Darlene leaned in. ‘I hear it was pretty horrible.’
Dulcie nodded, a lump rising in her throat. ‘It was.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Have there been –’ she paused, unsure of how to phrase her question – ‘any developments?’
Darlene smiled. ‘Just now. And it’s good news!’ She was smiling broadly, and Dulcie felt the relief wash over her. It had been an accident, just as she’d thought. A tragic case of unstable statuary.
But Darlene was still talking. ‘They found a page,’ she said, and although for a moment, Dulcie wondered if she’d wandered into some Elizabethan farce, she quickly realized the other student had misunderstood her – and vice versa. ‘You know,’ Darlene was blinking at her. ‘A page of the stolen manuscript?’
‘Ah.’ Dulcie digested this. ‘So they’re definitely saying it was stolen now?’
Darlene shrugged. ‘I gather that’s what they’re thinking. It was stuck in a rain gutter. The latest theory, at least according to Rafe, is that whoever killed her threw the manuscript out the window to retrieve later. Only a page got ripped off on those old slates. The police are keeping Rafe busy, going through everything that shows who might have been there that day. He’s not getting any of his own work done at all.’
It all seemed extremely curious to Dulcie. Chris was fond of telling her that nobody knew what was going on in a relationship besides the people in it. Still, having your girlfriend do your research was iffy at best. ‘So, you’re helping him?’ It was a leading question. She knew it, and mentally she apologized to Chris.
The other girl nodded eagerly. ‘I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt. I mean, I never get to come in here.’
‘It is pretty cool.’ Dulcie felt herself warming to the girl. Maybe they should all go out sometime. That is, if she and Chris weren’t covering each other’s shifts. ‘What’s Rafe working on, anyway?’
Darlene looked around. It was such a stagey move, Dulcie almost laughed. Then she realized the other student was serious. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about it.’
‘Fair enough.’ Dulcie felt an itching in her hands, almost a prickling. Claws, it had to be. Both Chris and Mr Grey would want her to mind her own business. ‘I won’t ask.’
But she wasn’t imagining it. She couldn’t be. The way the other woman leaned against the cubicle wall, she clearly wanted to talk. To tell someone. Dulcie was, after all, only human. With a silent apology to both her boyfriend and her guardian feline, she took the bait. ‘Unless you want to tell me?’
She was right. Darlene’s face lit up in a smile, and she crouched down to be closer to the seated Dulcie. ‘He’s found something,’ she said in a dramatic whisper. ‘It has to do with attribution.’
‘Attribution?’ Dulcie heard herself asking. ‘Was the work . . . misattributed?’
‘Something like that,’ the other girl said. ‘It was marked as anonymous. Author unknown. But Rafe,
he’s pretty sure he has proof that somebody famous wrote it.’
Dulcie could feel her heart pound. This was too close to be coincidence. She had to keep going. ‘And you’re down here, on C level. So it’s got to be pre nineteenth-century British or American?’
The other woman shrugged. ‘Yeah, kinda. But it’s no good. I’m helpless down here. I can’t find anything he asked me about.’
How could she resist? ‘Do you want some help?’
Darlene shook her head. ‘He’d figure out that I told someone. I’m probably in the wrong place anyway. Thanks, though!’
Dulcie felt like a heel. She smiled up at the other woman as she stood and walked away. She hadn’t offered to be helpful. She had offered because only too late had she remembered what Rafe’s specialty was and why he had been one of the creators of the English 10 syllabus. For so long, Dulcie had thought of the ocean as a great divide. Now, however, it seemed eminently cross-able. Rafe Hutchins had published his thesis on serialized fiction in post-colonial America. The book he was looking at could easily be the one Dulcie was looking for, too.
She had to find it – or at least find the proof that it existed. If Melinda had uncovered something . . .
Dulcie stopped, caught up short in the middle of her thought. Rafe was busy. He’d sent his unassuming girlfriend off to do his errands. If that was all that had happened, Dulcie would be happy. She’d even be content to battle with him over that lost work.
Darlene had looked so engaged, she’d undoubtedly said more than she should. Clearly, it hadn’t occurred to Rafe’s girlfriend that her tutor boyfriend might be busy with something other than helping the police voluntarily or overseeing the cleaning up of the visiting scholar’s suite. That the police might be holding her boyfriend for any other reason. Or that he might have sent her off to research something that he had read in that manuscript, before he tossed it off the roof.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘Dulcie, I love you, but don’t you think you’re grasping at straws?’ Driven by hunger, as well as the need to confer with Chris, Dulcie had ducked back out of the library and called her beau. She hadn’t woken him, at least that’s what he said, and so, standing in the shelter of the Yard’s brick wall, she laid out her theory. ‘I mean, do you really think Rafe killed Melinda Harquist for her manuscript?’
‘I don’t understand why anyone would. But if someone did, then why not him?’ Leaning in toward the red brick, she lowered her voice as she outlined her reasoning. ‘The senior tutor position goes with the postdoc, but it’s not tenured. He’s got to find something. And this could be big. Could be a breakthrough!’
The silence on the other end of the line could have been disheartening. Dulcie, however, knew that Chris was eating. Eating and thinking. ‘I don’t know, Dulce.’ She could hear him crunching. ‘Along those lines, people could say you did it.’
‘That’s just it! People have been saying that, Chris. Only I know I didn’t – and I think the cops believe me. Besides, the evidence shows that she’d been dead at least a little while before I got there. And who else would have done it?’
‘I don’t know.’ More crunching. ‘Do we even know that it was murder?’
‘That’s what Darlene said.’ As she named the senior tutor’s girlfriend, Dulcie realized that she hadn’t told Chris the most important part. She filled him in on the argument she had witnessed. ‘Something was going on. I’m sure of it. Darlene was jealous. Why would she have been jealous unless Rafe had been spending time with Melinda? Talking with her? Maybe even . . .’ Dulcie paused as a couple passed by and turned to stare. In her excitement, she’d been talking louder and louder. Now she dropped her voice to a near whisper. ‘Maybe he was arguing with her. Maybe she caught him reading her manuscript. Maybe that’s what they fought about.’
‘Dulcie, I know you’ve had a really rough couple of days . . .’ He paused and she could hear liquid – coffee – pouring. ‘But are you sure you’re reading all this correctly?’
Dulcie paused before answering. Mr Grey had hinted at something similar – only he’d been talking about the manuscript. ‘I’m not sure of the details, Chris,’ she acknowledged finally. ‘I do know there’s something going on. For starters, the original manuscript of that book – the lost novel – it’s here. It’s in the Mildon, at least enough of it to make an identification, and I think we were both on its trail, too.’ She stopped. Chris was her boyfriend. She trusted him, and he knew about her nightmares. Should she tell him about the other connection – between the dream scenario and what she had stumbled upon? No, until she could sort out fact from fiction, she would leave it at that. She already had enough of a motive. ‘A newly discovered novel would be a prize worth, well, fighting for if not . . . Anyway, I think I can get to the bottom of all of this.’
‘If anyone can, Dulcie,’ he slurped, ‘it’s you.’
Dulcie was so happy, she wasn’t even tempted to correct her boyfriend’s tortured phrasing, and instead went off in search of her own lunch.
The counter at Lala’s was crowded, and as she waited for someone to finish, Dulcie scanned the crowd. Between word of mouth and the succulent aroma of spice that escaped whenever the door opened, it didn’t take long before the eatery made devotees of each new class of students. Sure enough, two familiar faces were sharing a table over in the back. Thalia and – could it be? – the handsome Andrew. Brains and beauty. And both from her English 10 section. Dulcie ducked her head and considered leaving – but only briefly.
‘Dulcie!’ It was Lala herself. The owner-chef had emerged from the kitchen and was gesturing with both hands as if landing a plane. A big woman, with heavy black brows that could have made her look threatening were it not for her proportionately sized smile, she nodded as she gestured, reassuring Dulcie of her intentions. Drawn as much by that nod as by those large hands, Dulcie made her way over through the frankly envious crowd. ‘You sit.’
A stool suddenly appeared, brought out by one of the many similarly beetle-browed young men – sons, nephews, perhaps – who staffed Lala’s kitchen. A damp white rag swept over it once and the young man was gone, back into the kitchen. Lala pointed. Dulcie sat.
‘You need to eat something.’ Coming from Lala like that, the pronouncement was more command than question, but Dulcie nodded anyway as the big woman turned and disappeared back into the kitchen. She had been a regular long enough to have a passing acquaintance with the proprietress. She had never merited such special treatment, though. It was, she thought as she waited for Lala to return, a little intimidating.
Although she could feel eyes on her, Dulcie refused to turn around. Instead, she buried her face in the menu that she already knew by heart. It was yanked from her hands a moment later, as a bowl of steaming, mud-colored liquid was shoved before her.
‘Lentil soup.’ Dulcie was about to protest. Lala knew her order: the three-bean burger special, with lots of hot sauce. But one look at those dark eyes stopped her, and instead she reached meekly for a spoon.
‘Oh, good.’ Despite its unprepossessing color, the soup was thick and rich, reminding Dulcie that she hadn’t eaten a real meal since yesterday’s breakfast. ‘Thank you,’ she said, looking up. Lala, however, had disappeared.
‘Now you can have.’ As soon as she’d put the spoon down, a plate appeared, this time with the familiar burger. ‘Here.’ Lala turned to retrieve a squeeze bottle of sauce from the station behind her.
‘Wait!’ Dulcie called before her benefactor could disappear again. ‘Thank you, Lala. Really. But why are you feeding me like this?’
One eyebrow rose in a question.
‘I mean, it’s fantastic. You know I love your cooking.’
A nod. Dulcie had passed muster. ‘Working here, I hear things.’ Lala crossed her heavy arms across her substantial bust. ‘I know you are in trouble.’
‘What did you hear?’ Dulcie started to ask, as a commotion broke out in the kitchen. Lala spun around and slammed through the
door, cutting off the sight of what looked like shooting flames. When no screams issued forth, Dulcie picked up the burger. Lala would come back in her own time. There was no point in letting her efforts get cold. She took a bite, closing her eyes to fully savor the juice and spice.
‘Wow, I didn’t know you were such a big shot.’
Dulcie turned, suddenly aware of the hot sauce in the corners of her mouth. Andrew Geisner stood behind her stool. Thalia was nowhere to be seen.
‘I’m not,’ she managed to say, mouth still full. ‘Bad day.’ She swallowed and desperately stretched for the napkin dispenser. ‘Sorry.’
‘No problem.’ With his longer grasp, he reached over her, grabbing a handful of paper napkins to hand her. ‘I heard what happened.’
She swabbed her face. ‘Is everyone talking about it?’ She looked around again for Thalia. Maybe it had been a working lunch.
He was shaking his head, his sun-bleached hair falling across his face. ‘I don’t think so. Not yet. I think they’re trying to keep it quiet. Bad publicity for the visiting scholar program.’
She nodded and reached for the water. ‘To say the least. But you heard?’
‘I have a work-study job in the dean’s office.’ He shrugged, surfer-cool. ‘Keeps me busy.’
‘I bet.’ She didn’t want to ask a student to leak information. It was wrong on so many levels. Still, he had brought it up. ‘Dean Haitner?’
He nodded. ‘They’re going nuts. As you can imagine. I mean, on top of the whole thing being horrible, you know the dean had personally invited her.’
‘I know they were close.’ She remembered him yelling, his bereaved cries.
Andrew seemed less impressed. ‘She wrote him last spring, and they’ve been talking a lot,’ he said. ‘He gets enthusiastic.’ He shrugged, his usual blasé self, dismissing the topic, and then leaned in close. ‘You know about the manuscript?’
