The archivist, p.64
The Archivist, page 64
“I know what the evening glass is. I used to surf with her.” He slipped into a sorrowing nostalgia. “A long time ago.”
Emily glanced at her phone, noticed it was late, and stood abruptly. It was a bad habit of hers; she had never learned how to gracefully exit awkward interactions. “I should go.” She reached out her hand. “Thank you for your time.”
Nathan took her hand and then rose as if her hand had provided him a current of power.
“I’ll let you know if I find out anything more,” Emily said.
“I don’t want to know any more about the affair.”
Emily spoke to the floor. “I’m sorry to have dredged this up.”
Nathan shrugged glumly. “Whatever you can fill in . . .” he broke off, his words hobbled by emotions and fading memories.
Emily waited a moment and then met his eyes. “Do you think she drowned accidentally?”
Nathan nodded somberly. “The waves were supposedly breaking overhead that night, according to the police. But they weren’t.”
“So, you don’t think she killed herself?”
“No way,” he said, as if he didn’t want to believe it. “She wanted that child.” He drew a hand and covered his mouth. “And, fucked up as this might sound, I did too. Even if it wasn’t mine,” he stammered through a fresh rash of tears.
“Do you have a card?” Emily asked.
From his back pocket he produced a leather billfold and removed a business card from it. “Call or email me anytime?”
“So, you obviously spoke with Detective Taggart of SDPD?”
Nathan nodded. “I think he suspected I killed her because of the affair.”
“But you were away on business?”
Nathan kept nodding. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t suspect me of hiring a hit man or something far-fetched like that. He dropped it, though.”
Emily gestured to his laptop screen. “Did he know about any of this?”
“No. God, no. I didn’t need to arouse his suspicions any more than they were already.”
Emily considered his words for an ambivalent moment and then placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nathan. What I know of Nadia, she seemed like a remarkable woman.”
Nathan nodded solemnly. “She was. Despite everything, we had a good marriage. With the child coming and the move to Portland it might have all been a different story.”
Emily blinked wordlessly at his remark.
Night had taken possession of the sky when Emily walked outside into the serenity of the peopleless neighborhood and slid into the smoothness of her Mini. She started her car, still processing the revelations gleaned from Nathan. Her mind was aswirl now.
Emily concentrated with squinted eyes on the three wide lanes of overlit empty freeway, hypnotized by their desolation. She closed her eyes “to block out their horrible symmetry,” as Nadia had lyricized in her memoir. The same empty freeways Nadia drove around in circles at night when she couldn’t tolerate being home and it was impossible and too dangerous to rendezvous with Raymond. The freeways connected her to the loci of her dispiriting affairs, syringed out her despair in droplets of warm blood. Emily now had tangible proof of it in Nathan’s many maps charting the peregrinations of Nadia’s love affair with Raymond and her tortured ending. She began to worry that maybe she shouldn’t have returned the Moleskines to Raymond, that perhaps she should have followed Nadia’s instructions to keep the imposed restrictions on them. But who would ever find them in the Annex, given the labyrinthine journey Emily had embarked on to get to them? And if they did, if it was someone who didn’t know what they were, what would happen to them? Helena wanted them in her possession to protect them from the catastrophic consequences should they come to Elizabeth’s attention, but maybe she also thought about how valuable they would be, especially if Raymond were to be awarded the Nobel. Nick Peterson at Scribner’s would clamor for them and beseech Raymond to publish his unfinished, most recent, work. There was money to be looted in those scandalous, love-sheared pages. If researchers got wind that there existed an unfinished Raymond West, especially a work this personal, a soul-baring work revealing, unapologetically and uninhibitedly, who he was, they would descend on Memorial Library and the West Papers and turn his archive into a modern-day gold rush.
Starving, Emily swung by the Del Mar Plaza to pick up some groceries at the local natural foods store, but it was closed. 9:05 p.m.? Closed? Shit. Silhouettes of tall date palms fanned out on the asphalt of the empty parking lot like an omen in some film noir movie as she swung her car out and coasted down a deserted Del Mar Heights Road back to her apartment.
Emily didn’t know if she had a sixth sense about things—even though her mother once suspected she did—but when she stepped out of her Mini in the carport, something felt peculiar. The air seemed to tremble. She tentatively opened the door that led from the carport into her complex. The dead palm fronds rested portentously quiet on the eave. Emily heard no sound of thundering waves, as if Nature had shut the spigot off on the swell and turned the Pacific into a lake. The stillness of everything disconcerted her. Suddenly she heard the plaintive meowing of a cat. Emily squinted in the dark. She spotted Onyx, wandering out on the concrete veranda, confused and frightened, head bent skyward, meowing louder and louder now that he heard Emily. He bolted toward her when he saw her. Emily squatted to receive him, but her antennae had sprung. Instinctively, she picked up a quivering Onyx, whispering to him, “What are you doing outside, huh, little guy?” She took one step at a time toward her unit, as if picking a path over broken glass.
When she reached her apartment, she gasped when she saw the sliding glass door to her unit flung wide open. Clutching her mouth, Emily, struck dumb by the sight of the open door, reared back against the wrought iron railing and gaped inside, tensed with consternation. All the lights were on, burning brightly. She cocked an ear and listened but heard nothing. In her purse, without looking, she closed her hand over her phone, held it up and weaponized it with the threat of dialing 911 to report an as yet unseen intruder.
“If there’s anyone in here, I’m calling the police!” Emily spoke loudly to her open apartment. No response. She steeled herself and then crossed the threshold into her apartment prudently, a footfall at a time, as if the floor were booby-trapped. The first thing she noticed was that all her belongings on the coffee table had been swept to the sisal carpet as if pitched there by an angry, hurried arm. “Hello?” Emily said in a sharpened voice. “I’m calling the cops, motherfucker.” She set Onyx on the couch, but deliberately left the door open in case she had to make a run for it. Hearing nothing, she ventured into the kitchen, still debating whether to call 911, thinking through the ramifications.
Braving the unexplored areas of the small apartment, she cautiously approached the bedroom. She shrieked when she saw in horror all her clothes had been ripped from their hangers and scoured from their still-flung-open drawers and piled into a heap on the bed. The bedcovers had been ripped from the mattress, the pillows hurled to the walls. All the closet doors were swung wide open. An invader’s anger had met her apartment in a ransacking fury.
Convinced whoever had trashed her apartment was long gone, Emily returned to the living room, closed the sliding glass door and locked it shut, scared, trembling, filled with dread. The violation of her private space was the panic that assaulted her and had seized hold of her. Hyperventilating now, she plopped on the couch and texted Joel. “I was broken into. Can you come?”
Emily waited. She got no immediate reply. She debated calling 911 again, but she was wary of the kinds of questions they might ask her. Impatient, she dialed Joel.
“Did you get my text?”
“No,” he said. “Notifications turned off. What’s up?”
“My apartment was broken into.”
“What! Are you okay? What’s your address? I’ll come right away.”
Emily said she was fine, a little rattled. She gave him her address and he hung up, assuring her he was already out the door.
Her heart racing, Emily waited impatiently for Joel, stroking a still-confused Onyx. Thank God she had taken her laptop to work. The thumb drive with the Nadia/Raymond emails, the memoir, the photos! She thrust her hand into her purse and sighed with relief when her desperate, groping fingers felt its familiar hard, plastic shape. Tense with anxiety and fear, she battled the helplessness of her aloneness.
Suddenly something dawned on Emily.
She stood slowly from the couch, her eyes riveted on the reversible whiteboard timeline of the Nadia/Raymond affair she had meticulously recreated. She moved stealthily toward it as if approaching an injured, potentially dangerous, animal. The names of the dramatis personae were facing her: Nadia, Raymond, Elizabeth, Helena, Verlander, Joel, Black Moleskines (!) . . . She couldn’t remember if that was how she had last left it. She was almost certain the timeline trajectory was the last side of it she had seen. Had pictures been taken of it?
Knuckles rapped on the sliding glass door and she threw a hand to her violently palpitating heart. She hurriedly flipped the whiteboard over so its incriminating timeline was obscured from view. The rapping knuckles sounded louder. Emily crossed the room to the door and opened it to the concerned face of Joel. They came together in a mutually empathetic hug.
“I was broken into,” Emily gasped into Joel’s ear. “Door was fucking wide open.”
They disengaged from their hug and Joel backed away from Emily to survey the damage. His eyes swept the living room. “Anything missing?” Joel, in rumpled black T-shirt and jeans, asked worriedly.
“No, I don’t think so.” She opened her arm to the disorder every room in her apartment bore the evidence of. “But as you can see, they trashed it.”
Emily directed Joel into the bedroom. She stood aside as he absorbed the tableau of the out-turned drawers, the hurled clothes, the violently twisted bedsheets.
“Trashed it pretty good,” Joel said in a calming undertone that contrasted with his eyes of genuine alarm. “Obviously, whoever did it was looking for something.” He turned to her with inquiring eyes. Emily shrugged. Joel regarded her skeptically with frequent backward glances as they drifted back out into the living room. “What do you think they were they looking for?”
Emily cast her head toward Joel. “I don’t know.”
Joel looked at her with disbelieving eyes. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he muttered. “Do you have a beer or something?”
“Yeah.” Emily circled into the kitchen and retrieved an ale from the otherwise barren refrigerator, uncapped it, and brought it out to the living room where Joel was examining the busted lock. She handed him the beer as he turned to her from his crouched position.
“Looks like they popped this open with a crowbar or something. It’s not a very secure lock.” He glanced up at the top section of the frame. “And the deadbolt can only be locked from inside. Stupid.” He opened and closed the sliding glass door, measuring its width. “We need to get a security pole in that sliding door track so there’s no way anyone can get in.”
Emily nodded. It felt reassuring to have Joel there. Glad she had called him instead of the police, she wanted to hug him again to see if she could bleed the rest of the fear and disquiet out of her, but found herself saying, “What do you mean?”
“Do you have a broom?”
“I think so. Just a minute.” Emily went into the bedroom and rummaged around in the clothes closet. She had seen a broom somewhere and then remembered it was in the HVAC closet in the hall between the bedroom and the bathroom.
She brought the broom out to the living room and presented it to Joel. To her trepidation she found him standing motionless next to the whiteboard staring fixedly at it—the side she had turned away from the wall—with an expression of shock.
“What are you doing!” Emily half shrieked, standing the broom at her side.
“What is all this?”
Emily combed a hand through her tangled hair. “It’s a timeline of their affair.”
Confusion disorganized Joel’s face. “What? Why?”
“I’m just trying to assemble it into some semblance of order, to make sense of it all,” she replied unconvincingly.
“Make sense of all what?”
“The trajectory that led to her death,” Emily replied defensively.
Joel exhaled a deep sigh. He turned back to the whiteboard. Alerted to something, he leveled his eyes at Emily in a look of mounting apprehension. “What’s this? Moleskines? The Archivist?”
Emily cast her eyes down at the floor.
“Huh?” Joel implored more accusatorily.
“It was a book they were collaborating on.”
“What!” Joel said, his mouth frozen open.
“Nadia and Raymond were collaborating on a book tentatively titled The Archivist. It was written in longhand. In Moleskines. Twelve in total.”
At a loss for words, Joel finally stammered, “How did you know about this . . . collaboration?”
Emily tilted her head at Joel, as if to say, Come on, we’re archivists. “It’s practically all they wrote about to each other in the correspondence I found in the dark archives.”
Joel sucked in his breath. “And you found the . . . the . . . Moleskines of this book in the Annex? Is that what you were looking for?”
Emily raised her head, nodding yes to both questions shamefacedly.
“Did you read it?”
Emily nodded guilty. “It’s extremely . . . personal. Graphic. And brilliant. And emotionally powerful.”
“Okay, okay! Don’t tell me any more.” Joel shot one last look at the whiteboard, then charged across the room and plopped down heavily on the couch. His beer bottle thunked on the bamboo coffee table. He brought his hands to his face and cradled it wearily. “And what is my name doing up there?”
“I’m sorry.” Emily pulled down the sleeve of her shirt over her hand and smeared Joel/Annex into illegibility.
“What if someone from the library saw this and took a picture?”
“Who?” Emily asked. “I don’t socialize with any of them.”
“Didn’t you go out with Chloe on a double date and bring her boyfriend’s friend back here?”
Emily’s mouth fell agape. “She told you that?”
“That’s not important. I don’t give a shit.” He dropped his hands from his face. “Emily, who do you think broke in and trashed your apartment?”
They were both thinking the same thing. “They were looking for the Moleskines.” Emily said matter-of-factly.
“Fuck, Emily.” Joel nodded his head up and down, up and down. But something was still bewildering him. “But what were these Moleskines doing in the Annex?”
“The project was abandoned,” Emily said without elaborating.
“Why?”
Emily regarded Joel portentously. “I know things you don’t want to know.”
“Evidently,” he said furiously. “Obviously they didn’t find them here, did they?”
“No,” admitted Emily.
“Where are they then?”
“They’re safe,” replied Emily.
“They’re safe. Uh-huh.” Joel puffed out a cheek and shook his head. “You realize if someone found them and turned them in to Helena, we would both be so royally fucked it wouldn’t be funny. I wanted to help you, Emily, I really did, but I didn’t realize you were taking it this far, this deep.” Joel closed his eyes to shut out the world he feared imploding in on him.
“I didn’t know where it was going to take me,” Emily said in a pleading tone.
“But when you did, you couldn’t stop, could you?” Joel’s eyes were wide with seething accusation.
“No. I couldn’t stop.” Emily bent forward at the waist. “And I’m not going to!”
“You’re fucking crazy, little girl.”
“All I did was plow through the data.”
Joel barked a derisive laugh. “All you did was plow through the data.” He shook his head dismissively.
“I didn’t know I was going to find what I found,” Emily protested. “I only wanted to know the truth of Nadia’s death. And the more I learned, the murkier and more suspicious it became. It’s like one of those matryoshka dolls . . .”
“Matryoshka what?”
“Russian nesting dolls,” Emily elucidated. “You pull one out and there’s another one inside. Only this got bigger, not smaller, the more I peeled it away.”
Shaking his head, Joel reached for his beer bottle, took a long pull, and polished it off, then straightened to his feet and came forward to Emily. “Let me see the broom.”
Emily handed him the broom. Joel disappeared into the kitchen with it. “You have nothing to worry about,” she reassured him. She heard drawers opening and closing and then a rasping sound. She followed the noise into the kitchen.
Joel had found a serrated knife and was sawing the bristle head off the broom, balancing it on the kitchen counter for support. When he had successfully lopped it off, he wordlessly returned to the living room and tested its length in the sliding glass door track. Emily approached him from behind. He twisted his neck and looked up at her.
“Put it in like this at night.” He demonstrated, lodging the sawed-off pole at a forty-five-degree angle and securing it against the door jamb.
“Okay,” said Emily. “Thanks.”
Joel straightened from his squatting position in a twisting motion, drifted a few steps, and slumped back down on the couch. He picked up his bottle of beer, realized it was empty and set it back down. His eyes strayed over to the whiteboard and zeroed in on it again with renewed consternation. He pointed his forefinger in the whiteboard’s direction. “Do you want to talk about that, Emily?”
Emily eased down on the opposite end of the couch. “I’d rather not involve you, Joel.”
