Liesl had suggested installing a phone line once, years ago. They’d never gotten around to it. Miriam’s front-page picture had been lining hamster cages for days now, and Liesl was back in the basement, not exactly hiding.
The only way to reach her was to walk, stack by stack, through the repository until you caught a glimpse of something human. She heard the door click, heard Francis’s throat clear, and wondered if he would stand in place and summon her like a dog. He didn’t. She heard his dragging feet, step by step until they were in sight of each other’s tired eyes. She would learn later that he had been in possession of the bad news for nearly twenty minutes by the time he spotted her in the appraiser’s area. He could have just yelled her name and gotten it over with, but she was grateful he decided that she and the news deserved more respect.
She knew it as soon as she saw his basset hound eyes. She knew that Christopher was alive. She knew that the building wasn’t on fire. She knew that Miriam’s body had been found.
There’s this myth that dogs go away to be alone when it’s time for them to die so that they can spare the pack the sadness of their death. It isn’t true. If a dog goes into hiding when it becomes ill, it does so to avoid becoming a target for other animals when it can’t protect itself. A dying dog doesn’t hide out of compassion. It does so out of fear.
Liesl had been prepared for bad news. The bad news had been coming and coming and coming. No reason to think it would suddenly get better. That wasn’t the way of the world. When a bad thing happens, it is usually the signal that more bad things are about to happen. Earthquakes have aftershocks and all that. In early September, Liesl had been working on a book about gardening, in her house with her husband, getting ready to retire. Nothing good had happened since. Still, when Francis gave her the news, she was worried she would fall down from the shock of it. She took his arm and then let go of it and sat alone on the dusty concrete floor.
Liesl wanted to work on her book. She didn’t know what to do with any of this situation. The dying man, the dead woman, the criminal working somewhere close to her. She wanted to go and tell Garber that she was leaving, going home to work on her book of flowers.
She wished she didn’t need Francis’s comfort to bear the news. She wished she wasn’t glad that Francis was there. He took her hand and pulled her up off the floor. This was practical, not romantic. They were old, and sitting on a concrete floor could lead to days of aches. Liesl and Francis and the whole library staff had braced for a death for weeks, but not for Miriam’s death. Preparation for one did not mean they were prepared for the other. Francis took her to some shelving stools. They might have been the same stools that the two had sat on in weeks past.
Liesl shuddered and pressed her hands together to keep them from shaking. The news made her think of the time Miriam had spontaneously recited the Dickinson poem, made her think of a woman full of poetry, a woman moved to recite by the sight of a rich yellow hue, and it made her wonder if the thoughtful poet could be the same soul as the self-slaughterer. The news made her think of Miriam at the new-faculty reception. Begging for attention and, it seemed, finally begging for help.
Liesl had never known anyone who had taken their own life. Francis had. This history did not lend him additional perspective. It was just a fact about him. Because they were not young, they had dealt with a lot of death, but Liesl did not know if a suicide should be treated like any other death. Usually she would bring a lasagna from the Harbord Bakery. She wondered if it was appropriate to bring Vivek a lasagna. She didn’t ask Francis. Men never knew the answers to these sorts of things.
After about thirty minutes, they went upstairs. Liesl gathered the staff who were working that day. They sat in the reading room that wasn’t really a reading room, and in that beautiful space, in that cathedral of books, she told them Miriam was dead. Francis stood at the back of the room and nodded with encouragement. Liesl was not encouraged. One of their own was dead, and one of them was a thief.
***
Miriam had been discovered by a couple of teenagers who went to the woods to get high. They had stolen the pot from an elder brother’s T-shirt drawer. This information came tumbling out of one of the boys without prompting from the police. Minor crimes were not crimes at all when there was a body under discussion. The woods weren’t really wild forest; that scarcely exists close to a city anymore. Rather, in the trees ninety minutes from the campus was a campground. The type of place where teenagers in packs or families with small children congregate on long weekends. With flattened patches of dirt to pitch a tent and poles with water and electricity at the far end of each campsite so one can be in nature but not forgo a cell phone charger or a French press. In high summer the place was not like the woods at all; it rang with music and laughter, the sounds of beer cans being cracked open and the smell of marshmallows charring over a fire.
Come Labor Day, the crowds disappeared. The type of person who goes camping in the cold is not the type of person who comes to such a place. There was a park ranger stationed by the gate, but the teen boys, and presumably Miriam, knew that there were ways to sneak in. The boys had been driving a twenty-seven-year-old aquamarine Dodge Shadow that made a high whistling sound as it ran, so they ditched it by the gate and decided they would get high on foot. They were nervous. Scared of what the sensation would be like, scared they would get caught. Neither had ever done drugs, not even marijuana, before. They were good kids.
The park had been well cleaned at the end of the season, but there were still clues to be found. A fire pit containing the charred spine of a John Grisham novel. The outlines in the grass of so many tents and coolers and cars. If they hadn’t been so nervous about the weed, the boys probably wouldn’t have walked so far into the campsite, and if they hadn’t been so nervous about being caught, they probably wouldn’t have been looking so closely for other signs of life.
They were teenagers. They didn’t read the newspaper. If they had, they might have known to be on the lookout for a navy Toyota sedan. In their whispered conversation, they were sure that there were people having sex in the back seat of the car, and they were delighted that they might get to see the act in person.
Miriam had been dead for a long time when the boys snuck over to her car to peek at her. The pills she had taken had caused her to vomit bile and foam all over herself, all over her maroon blouse, but that had long since dried and crusted over. The boys were not looking at her blouse. Law & Order had not prepared them for what her skin would look like. Miriam was blue and black and bloated, and the contours of her nose and mouth were only discernible from the white mold that grew around them. The car doors were closed. The boys did not try to open them, which was a mercy because as much as they were unprepared for the sight, they might not have survived the smell. Like all teenagers they had cell phones, but they were too far from a tower to get any signal, so they wept and shook and tried to call for help but eventually had to stagger all the way back to the Dodge Shadow and drive to the main road before they could call their parents and then the police. They never did smoke the weed.
A police officer who was among the first on the scene found the baggie in the mud. He wasn’t sure if it had belonged to the victim, so he entered it into evidence. The coroner later confirmed that Miriam had been dead for several weeks, likely since the first day she had failed to come to work. The police found no evidence of the books in her car or in her apartment.
If there was solace to be found, it was that Miriam never knew that she stood accused of the thefts.
Forty Years Earlier