“I miss you, too, Gogo. But I can’t come with you this afternoon. Some of us have a real job, you know.”
“Then come tonight to Daddy’s place. Please? We’re having dinner together. I want you to be there, Vivs. I asked Daddy. He said it was a wonderful idea. He wants you there, too.” A bit of the old lost koala to the eyes, a bit of plaintive quiver to the voice.
Dinner with Lightfoot. The chest quaked. Did he know something? He couldn’t confront me with his own daughter right there, could he?
I could proclaim I was already engaged this evening. But what had Paul said this morning, as we rushed down the stairs together, all tardy-faced and laughing? He couldn’t get away until midnight. He’d meet me at my place. So. I couldn’t say I wasn’t free.
Unless I lied.
I couldn’t lie to Gogo. I know, I know. Everyone says that once you involve yourself in the Big Lie, the little lies line up behind like ducklings, until they just paddle effortlessly out of your mouth, one by one, sometimes two at a time. Not the case with me. Instead, since I began playing alley cats with Doctor Paul, I knew an unstoppable compulsion to accord myself with scrupulous honesty everywhere else. As if that could somehow atone.
I squeezed her hand. “I can make it. What time?”
“Seven o’clock sharp.” She popped off my desk and gave me a sticky pink kiss. “Don’t be late!”
? ? ?
BACK IN THE STACKS. I loved the stacks. They suited my newfound need to hide myself in obscurity, among people who no longer existed. The truth was, though, I’d reached a bit of a dead end, as I told Tibby when he walked in without warning through the Furniture Repository door at—I checked my watch—one o’clock in the afternoon.
“Miss Schuyler. How is your research progressing?”
I looked up the patrician line of his nose. “The truth is, I’ve reached a bit of a dead end.”
“It happens.”
“Would you like to sit down?”
“No. I came to tell you that you’re wanted downstairs. Miss Brown’s fortieth anniversary party. Everyone’s required to attend.”
“Miss Brown?”
“Our receptionist, Miss Schuyler. Miss Brown? Miss Agatha Brown?”
“Oh! Agatha! Forty years, is it?” I whistled. “Certainly, a party’s in order. Knees up, I say.”
“Indeed.”
I leaned back in my chair and crossed the shapely legs. “And you haven’t got better things to do than to come and fetch me personally?”
“I’m the only one with a key.”
“Now, now, Mr. Tibbs. I can tell when a man wants to have a private word with me.” I motioned to the other chair, which, in fairness to Tibby, might or might not remain intact under the weight of human hindquarters. “Do sit.”
His professorial vest squeezed out a sigh. He sat. “You’ve exceeded your three weeks. As I’m sure you’re aware.”
“It’s been a little rougher seas than I imagined at the outset.”
“Where are you now?”
“Well.” I looked down at the letters before me, the stack of biographies, the folder from the Metropolitan archives marked BERLIN 1914. “I have Violet’s letters home. There aren’t many, and they’re all to her sister Christina, who evidently wasn’t privy to her innermost thoughts, if you know what I mean. I know she met this Lionel Richardson in May of 1914, and he stayed with them at their summer villa in Wittenberg, along with Jane and her son. It seems the whole crowd from the institute joined them at the end. Einstein, even. Einstein!”
“All this, with war in the air? Wouldn’t that be aiding and abetting the enemy?”
“Walter seems to have been the cosmopolitan sort. And anyway, the war took everyone by surprise. As you know. But I suspect Violet and Lionel began their affair there in Wittenberg, because here”—I pointed to the next-to-last letter—“Violet stops mentioning him at all. And then, poof, there’s nothing, not a single letter, except for this.” I picked up the final missive, a postcard, and handed it to Tibby.
“‘Having a lovely excursion. All well. Will write more soon. Violet.’” He looked up. “I see what you mean.”
“But look at the date on the postmark. July twenty-sixth. That’s before Walter was supposedly murdered in their flat in Berlin. So obviously they, the two of them, the three of them, Lionel and Walter and Violet, they all left Wittenberg for some reason. The question is why. Possibly because the political situation was worsening, but from all I’ve read, the final declaration of war came as a shock. It wasn’t until the mobilization order went out that people, the man on the street I mean, believed they were actually going to fight. I suppose the shrinks would call it denial. Everyone thought that civilization would prevail.”
Tibby took his reading glasses out of his pocket and squinted. “I can’t read the name of the town on the postmark.”
“Neither can I. It’s too smudged. But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s not Berlin.”