The Woman in the Library Read online

  I received my tenth rejection letter for the opus yesterday. It feels like something which should be marked. Perhaps I shall buy a cake. This one said my writing was elegant but that they felt I was working in the wrong genre…which I suppose is an indirect way of saying they want my protagonist to be a vampire and the climax to involve an alien invasion…and not the kind with which our President seems preoccupied!

  I know the repeated rejections are a rite of passage, Hannah, but, honestly, it hurts. I don’t know if I’m strong enough for this business. It must be wonderful to be at that stage where you’ve paid your dues, where you know that whatever you write now, it will at least be seriously considered. This stage just feels like a ritual humiliation.

  Yours somewhat despondently,

  Leo

  Chapter Two

  I’m still a little in awe every time I step into the chequerboard foyer of Carrington Square. It’s one of those Victorian brownstones for which Back Bay is famous—a magnificent gabled exterior, renovated to perfection within. My one-bedroom apartment looks out over an internal courtyard featuring landscaped gardens and cast-iron fountains. It’s beautifully furnished and decorated—an address usually beyond the means of a humble writer. In the sitting room, on either side of the marble fireplace, are built-in bookcases in which are stored the works of each of the previous Sinclair scholarship winners who were writers in residence here. The collection is both inspiring and terrifying. Wonderful novels in almost every genre, crafted in the year during which the writer lived in this apartment. In the fifty or so years the scholarship has been running, the apartment has no doubt been refurbished and redecorated several times, but these bookcases remain untouched, sacrosanct. The heart and purpose of this place—sometimes I fancy I can hear it beating.

  Perhaps it was the bookcases that stilled my pen in the beginning. I had thought that the words would come easily here. A time and place to write—a dream bolstered by the endorsement of the award. And yet I’d felt unworthy, uncertain. I’d choked, and in the first month I’d deleted more than I wrote. But not today.

  Today I return from the library exhilarated. We had lingered in the Map Room for hours, Cain, Whit, Marigold, and I. It was bizarre, four strangers who seemed to recognize each other, like we’d been friends before in a life forgotten. We talked about all manner of things, laughed about most of it, and poked fun at each other without restraint. It felt like being at home, and I breathed out completely for the first time since I stepped on that flight from Sydney.

  Cain is a published writer—his first book was reviewed by the New York Times. He doesn’t tell me that last bit; I google him on the way home. The Washington Post called him one of America’s most promising young novelists, and his first book was something of a sensation. Marigold is in fact studying psychology at Harvard, and Whit is failing law. The failing part doesn’t seem to bother him. It is the only way, apparently, that he can avoid being absorbed into the family firm.

  And so my attention is initially elsewhere when Leo Johnson crosses my path on the stairs.

  “Freddie! Hello.”

  Leo is also a writer in residence at Carrington Square. He’s from Alabama originally, though I think he went to Harvard at some point. He holds a fellowship which seems to be the American equivalent of the Sinclair, and occupies an apartment a few doors away from mine. “How was the library?” he asks. He speaks with a gentle Southern pace that invites you to slow down and chat a while. “Get much work done?”

  “How did you know I was at the library?”

  “Oh, I saw you at the Map Room.” He pushes his glasses back up against the bridge of his nose. “I dropped into the BPL to pick up a book I’d reserved, and then I needed coffee. I just happened to see you there. I waved, but I’m guessing you didn’t see me.”

  “Of course I didn’t, or I would have asked you to join us.” Leo is the closest thing I have to a colleague. I tell him about the scream.

  He laughs. “I expect it was some nutcase, or a club initiation of one sort or another. A number of the Harvard clubs are co-ed now.”

  I raise my brow, uncertain what that has to do with it.

  “It seems like the kind of prank that would be conceived in the brain of an adolescent male,” he explains. “But, of course, a woman would be required to execute it.”

  I smile. “You don’t think women might have planned it?”

  “I don’t think a woman would have found it that funny… A man, however, would be delighted with his extraordinary wit.”

  “Remember that you said that, not me.” I glance up the stairs. “Would you like to come in for a coffee?”

  Leo shakes his head. “No, ma’am. There’s a story-cooking gleam in your eyes. I’ll leave you alone to write. Let’s compare notes in the next couple of days.”

  I agree, relieved. I do feel an urgency to write. And I like Leo even more for the fact that he understands.

  I open my laptop as soon as I get into the apartment, slipping off my shoes and nesting into the couch. I begin typing, using the monikers Handsome Man, Heroic Chin, and Freud Girl. They appear on my page like a rubbing taken from life, shape and dimension created with words. I’ll give them real names later; for now I don’t want to stem the ideas by trying to work out what to call them.

  I dwell on the scream. It, too, has a place in this story. The four of us had talked about it at length. How could something like that be unexplained? Someone must have screamed, someone must have had a reason to. Whit brought up spiders again. I think he must have some kind of phobia.

  We had all agreed to meet at the BPL tomorrow. Actually, Cain and I had agreed to meet, to form a writers’ group of sorts. Marigold and Whit had decided that any group should include them, regardless of its purpose.

  “We can be sounding boards,” Marigold insisted.

  “And inspiration,” Whit added. And so it was arranged.

  It is exciting to have plans, people to meet.

  I turn on the television, initially for background noise. I’m working, so it’s only sound. A murmur that connects me to the real world as I create one of my own, an anchor barely noticed. Until I hear the words “Boston Public Library today.”

  I look up. A reporter talking to a camera. “…the body of a young woman was discovered by cleaning staff in the Boston Public Library.”

  I close the laptop and turn up the volume, leaning forward towards the television. A body. My God, the scream! The reporter tells me nothing more of any use. I switch to another station, but the report is much the same. The body is not identified beyond being that of a young woman.

  My phone rings. It’s Marigold. “The news! Did you see the news?”

  “Yes.”

  “That scream!” Marigold sounds more excited than frightened. “That must have been her.”

  “I wonder why they didn’t find her then.”

  “Maybe whoever killed her hid the body?”

  I smile. “They didn’t say anything about murder, Marigold. She might have screamed because she fell down the stairs.”

  “If she’d fallen down the stairs, someone would have found her straight away.”

  That was true. “Do you think they’ll close the library tomorrow?”

  “Maybe the room she was found in, but surely not the whole library.” Marigold’s voice drops into a part whisper. “It must have been close to Bates Hall.”

  “I did think that too.”

  “We might have passed him on the way out—the killer, I mean.”

  I laugh, though it’s possible of course. “If this were a book, we would have bumped into him at the very least.”

  “So we’re still meeting tomorrow?”

  I don’t hesitate. The cleaner employed by the Sinclair Fellowship comes on Tuesdays, and I prefer to avoid the feeling that I’m in the way, or lazy or unclean, that is part a
nd parcel of having someone clean up after you as an adult. “I’ll be there. We’ll at least find out if the library is closing for any period of time.”

  We talk for a while longer about other things. Marigold has a paper due on juvenile maternal separation anxiety, which she calls “mommy’s boys and the women who create them.” I’m laughing aloud by the time we arrange a place to meet in case we are not allowed into the BPL.

  But when the call is over, my mind returns to the scream, the fact that I’d heard it. I’d heard someone die, and however it occurred, I was in no doubt she had been in terror. The fact seems to have a weight of its own, and I feel that weight in the pit of my stomach.

  The news reports are now labelling the incident a murder. I’m not sure if they have more information or if it is simply an inevitable evolution of sensationalism.

  Turning up the television, I return to work, guilty that whatever I feel about this poor woman, it does not curtail or slow the words. They are coming quickly, swirling into sentences that are strong and rhythmic, that surprise me with their clarity. It feels a little indecent to write so well in the wake of tragedy. But I do. The story of strangers bonded by a scream.

  ***

  Dear Hannah,

  Well played, my friend, well played! The Sinclair Fellowship is a terrific idea. You can place Winifred in Back Bay without burdening her with vast wealth. And she can be Australian.

  And you put me in the story! With a Southern accent and my own fellowship. I am overwhelmed! You forgot to mention that Leo was tall and devastatingly attractive, but I suppose that’s a given. Not only that, you’ve introduced a sneaky 4th option into your declaration that the perpetrator was present when Freddie had coffee in the Map Room. Was that your intention?

  With respect to your first question, yes, I believe Bates Hall would be open the next day. Clearly the murder did not occur there but in one of the surrounding rooms or halls. There are plenty to choose from—I’ve listed a few suggestions below.

  With some of these you might need to consider the volume of the scream. If it was loud enough to be heard within Bates Hall, then it really would have to have occurred in one of the adjoining rooms. I will be intrigued to read how you are going to explain why a search revealed nothing.

  I did duck over to the BPL to see if I could spot anything of use. There are some vents that could possibly carry sound from a room farther away, but you would really need some sort of engineering or maintenance plan of the building to be sure. I’m a little wary of asking in case they decide I’m up to no good, but if I get a chance, I’ll see what I can find out.

  And now the other subject of your email… God, Hannah, thank you. I really did not expect you to offer to take my manuscript to your agent. I’m embarrassed that you might think that I was fishing for that. I assure you I wasn’t. And though I’m too proud to accept your help, I’m too desperate to turn it down.

  So, my manuscript is attached with the last of my dignity. Bear in mind that if you think it’s terrible and never pass it on, I’ll never know. And I’ll never ask because there must be a way for our friendship to survive my lack of talent. I’m expressing this badly…which I suppose does not bode well for my manuscript, but I am grateful and touched that you would want to help me.

  Anyway, I look forward to your next chapter, and I shall see if I can find anything that might be useful in placing your dead body in an appropriate place.

  Again, with my thanks and admiration,

  Leo

  Chapter Three

  I spot Cain in the Newsfeed Café just inside the Johnson Building, where we’d arranged to meet, and wave. He smiles when he sees me, and I am reminded that he is very handsome. He’s buying coffee and signals madly to see if I want one. I nod, and when I reach him he hands me a macchiato.

  “No sugar, right?”

  I am impressed he remembered.

  We find a table at which to sip coffee and wait for Marigold and Whit. And, of course, we talk about the body found the night before.

  “Where do you think they found her?” I ask. I don’t really know the library that well. I’ve only been using it for a few days.

  “That’s what I can’t figure out,” he says. “We heard her scream, so she had to be in one of the rooms around Bates Hall…but they were searched.”

  “Unless the scream had nothing, in fact, to do with the body.”

  He frowns. “True. The scream might have been what the crime writers call”—he pauses for effect—“a red herring.”

  I smile. “Still, a heck of a coincidence.”

  “They do occur in reality, even if they are a bad plot device.” Cain rises and excuses himself as he notices a newspaper left on the next table. He returns with the Boston Globe and sits beside me holding the paper between us. The account of the body in the public library is plastered across the front page. We pore over it, shoulder to shoulder, sipping coffee while we read.

  We learn that the body was found in Chavannes Gallery, which was being prepared for an event the next day. That the woman’s name was Caroline Palfrey. The name means little to an Australian like me, of course, but Cain mutters, “Brahmin.”

  “As in the cow?” I ask, a little confused.

  “As in the social class.” He explains that the Palfreys are from a long line of Brahmins, members of Boston’s traditional upper echelons.

  “They’re rich?”

  “It’s more than wealth,” he says. “The Brahmins were integral to the East Coast establishment. They’re a culture unto themselves. Surely Australians have their equivalent—old family names that are prestigious because they declare themselves to be so?”

  I smile, remembering Margaret Winslow, from the board of directors of the Sinclair Fellowship, who was so proud of being a sixth-generation Australian. In the country of the oldest living civilisation in the world, some sixty thousand years of indigenous history, six generations had seemed a pallid boast. And yet she made it, waxing lyrical about the property near Wagga Wagga that her great-great-great-grandfather had claimed in the mid-nineteenth century, the country he’d cleared and cultivated. Country that belonged to the Wiradjuri.

  “Probably,” I reply. “But I don’t move in those circles.”

  “I believe that’s the point of those circles.”

  “Does it say what was going to take place in the Chavannes Gallery?” I ask as I scour the article myself for the answer.

  “Not really.” He points to the relevant sentence. “She was found by a cleaner, so the gallery would probably have been otherwise empty.”

  “I wonder if Marigold or Whit knew her.”

  “Speak of devils,” Cain says as they walk into the Newsfeed. He waves.

  Marigold sees him, grabs Whit, and drags him towards us. Her eyes are bright and her cheeks flushed. She glances at the paper. “So you’ve seen it?”

  “Yes, did you know—”

  “No. But Whit did.”

  “I didn’t really know her,” Whit protests. “She worked on the Rag.”

  “The Rag?”

  “It’s a local tabloid.” Whit shrugs. “Arts coverage mostly, with an occasional feature on something or other. I wrote a piece for them when I was a freshman…came across Caroline then.”

  “You write?” I ask, surprised that he hadn’t mentioned that before.

  “I tried my hand at a lot of stuff when I was an undergraduate…and it was just an article about football. I wouldn’t call it literature.”

  Still, the connection, however tenuous, makes it all a little more real. I look at Whit and I imagine that he’s not as blasé as he appears. “Did you hear anything about what happened?”

  He shrugs. “Rumors about ex-boyfriends. Some guy who couldn’t let go.”

  “Who?” Marigold asks. “Do you know his name? Is he a student? Where—”

&n
bsp; “Steady on, Sherlock.” Whit stems the deluge of questions. “What do you think I am?”

  “Well, I thought—”

  “That I might go interrogate people at the vigil, so you can rush in and make a citizen’s arrest?”

  I laugh. Marigold rolls her eyes.

  Whit and Marigold decide against coffee. Cain and I finish ours, and we all head into the library only to find that Bates Hall—in fact the entire second floor—is closed. A security guard stationed at the base of the stairs maintains the cordon. The Map Room Tea Lounge is full, occupied by those turned out of Bates Hall, as well as reporters and the odd policeman; and Cain and I have, in any case, already had coffee.

  “Did they discover another body?” Whit takes a step or two towards the stairs. The guard tells us in no uncertain terms to move on.

  “Looks like today’s a bust,” I groan.

  “But we were going to compare notes on our books today,” Marigold protests.

  I meet Cain’s eye. Were we?

  “You and Whit aren’t writing books,” he reminds her.

  “You’ve inspired us to start,” she says, smiling.

  I can’t help but return it. The look on Whit’s face fails to appear particularly inspired.

  There’s something all-American about Marigold’s smile, wide and quick and optimistic. You can imagine the Stars and Stripes fluttering behind her when she smiles, almost smell the apple pie. Whit’s is similar. Cain’s smile is different. It’s slower, a little wry, and reveals less of his teeth. But they all smile while they talk—that’s the difference, I think, that’s what makes it American. Australians don’t seem to be able to smile and talk at the same time—unless we’re lying, of course. And then the smile is involuntary, a tell of deceit.