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.