“LEYDON? LEYDON, IF YOU’RE HERE, COME OUT! IT’S ME, VIC. Come out and let’s talk.”
I was standing in the doorway to the old library at the Divinity School. The narrow mullioned windows were so clogged with ivy that even on a bright summer evening, the room was too dark for me to see anything. I ran my hand along the walls, fumbling for a light switch, but finally had to dig a small flashlight from my briefcase.
I shone it around the room, looking for the switches, or for some sign of Leydon. I kept calling her name, but when I finally managed to turn on the lights I didn’t see any sign of her.
The old library had vanished as well. The angels still soared overhead, which meant I was in the right room, but the library tables had disappeared, along with the old biblical-studies journals. I’d thought—hoped—I might find Leydon hiding in the stacks, but those were gone as well. The walls had been replastered and painted a bright white.
It was like one of those movies where the villains drug the heroine and try to pretend that the strange house in the country where she wakes up is really her home. I imagined Leydon arriving here in her hyper, anxious condition. She was so worried she was being followed that she wouldn’t even announce herself by name on the phone and I hadn’t been able to call her because the same fears had made her block her own number. If she’d come up to this sterile, empty room, she probably thought I’d abandoned her.
In a corner of my mind, one I didn’t like to visit, I could see her as I’d found her twenty-five years ago: under her kitchen table, hugging herself, as she rocked back on her heels, weeping soundlessly. She’d been up for three days and I’d been looking for her—we were presenting a case together in moot court and I had tried to condense the hundreds of pages she’d spewed out into a document acceptable to the judges. I’d finally let myself into her apartment and found her.
I tried to think where she might have gone today when she didn’t see me in the reading room. If she’d been calm enough to think, perhaps she would have gone to the coffee shop in the basement—our study sessions often started there. She might feel safe in the basement.
On my way down, I looked in all the rooms on each floor. Study rooms, classrooms, junk storage rooms. I looked behind doors and under desks but saw nothing more alarming than empty coffee cups and chip bags.
One fourth-floor room was hung with framed ivory miniatures that depicted lives of the early saints. They looked ancient, as if some early divinity professor had found them in a cave and then abandoned them here to be forgotten for another millennium or two. I wondered idly what they’d fetch on eBay, but I was a good responsible citizen these days, not the hooligan I’d been when Boom-Boom and I were Arielle and Kira’s age. I left the miniatures alone and headed for the stairs.
My high-heeled sandals clattered loudly on the stone steps and set up a crashing echo in the open stairwell. I was exhausted and my feet hurt from running around after Petra and her girls. I was meanly hoping Leydon had given up and gone home: I could imagine a long cold drink, something with mint and lime and fizz, and the chance to soak my feet in a bucket of cold water.
I stopped at the third-floor landing to call Leydon’s name. I ducked down to look underneath the stairs but didn’t check the seminar rooms. At the second floor, I shouted her name again. I was startled when a woman opened a door at the end of the hall and stuck her head out.
“You looking for someone?”
It couldn’t be Leydon, my flickering first thought, unless she’d been transformed from a slender red-gold sylph to a heavy-set gray-haired earth goddess.
I apologized for disturbing the woman. “I thought the building was empty. I used to be a student here and I’m trying to hook up with an old friend.”
The woman looked me up and down, deciding whether to trust me. “Is your friend on the nervous side?”
“The far side of nervous. Have you seen her? Slim, fair, a bit shorter than me. I’m V. I. Warshawski, by the way, if she asked for me by name.”
“She was sitting on the stairs, sobbing. I thought maybe someone had died, but when I asked her it turned out she was crying over the reading room in the old library—she was horribly upset because we’d turned it into a conference room. That happened years ago, but she was so distraught she could hardly take in the information. As soon as I told her I was the associate dean she started shouting that I was worse than the Taliban who destroyed the giant Buddhas, that only a heathen and a Philistine would turn a beautiful library into a conference center. You’re not her caseworker, are you?”