“A snake in the grass.”
“Of course, I confronted him, but he denied everything. Said she took off in the wrong direction and he never saw her again. The police questioned him as well, but there wasn’t any evidence. No … body. Not a trace.”
“I am sorry for your troubles, Theo. Gossip can be difficult to strangle. Perhaps you remember when you first joined the faculty, all the stories about that student, that boy who made such astonishing accusations. A more benighted time, it’s true, but still I understand how quickly rumors spread and what a strain you are under.”
Grateful for an ally, Theo confessed. “I feel bombarded by suspicious looks, whispers behind my back. All the more hurtful, given the truth. I miss her horribly.”
Slipping a finger behind his eyeglass lens, Mitchell wiped a tear. “I’ll spread the word, if you like, to have the professors and the staff put a stop to this mindless speculation among the students. They can be reasoned with.”
“I’m grateful. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your looking out for me.”
Mitchell nodded but appeared to be reluctant to take his leave.
Theo stole a glance at the framed wedding picture next to his computer, vaguely concerned that he might betray Kay by speaking directly of her. “Excuse me for not knowing, but are you married, Dr. Mitchell?”
“Heavens, no, never,” he said. “But I have been in love, and I can only imagine what hell you’ve been going through.”
They regarded each other for a moment before Mitchell hoisted himself by the arms of the chair, and clutching the back of the rail, he hesitated. “But your work is proving adequate distraction? I understand you are commissioned to make a translation.”
Theo stood to be on an equal plane with his colleague. He thought of his morning’s jaunt to Central America and the difficulties of translation. “Do you know the photographer Eadweard Muybridge?”
The name did not immediately register, and Mitchell shook his head. With some excitement, Theo rummaged through the books stacked at the elbow of his desk, procuring at last his treasured copy of Animals in Motion, the dust jacket tattered at the edges. He gave it to Mitchell with the delicacy of handing over a roll of papyrus. With a childlike curiosity, Mitchell leafed through the book, raising an eyebrow at the pacing lion and the kicking mule.
“I see your man Muybridge is an Aristotelian. Come with me.”
They walked down the quiet corridor of the old stables that had been converted to offices and small classrooms. As he passed each open door, Theo could not resist the urge to peek inside, catching a few teachers busy at their lectures, Frau Morgenschweis’s famous seminar on Faust, and in the empty spaces the blaze of October leaves framed by windows. Mitchell’s office was crammed with books and papers, cheap posters on the walls, and reproduction busts of the great minds of antiquity staring down from the shelves like gods. Despite the clutter, Mitchell knew precisely where to find the book he had in mind.
“De Motu Animalium,” he said. “Among his many interests, Aristotle was a zoologist of sorts. On the Motion of Animals. Feel free to borrow it. A bit peculiar in spots. Science has not been kind to some of his ideas, but he is to be praised for the vigor of his speculation. Your Muybridge animals illustrate one of Aristotle’s points. He says that the motion of animals can be compared to automata, puppets, wound up and released. Your pictures catch them in midair, at a precise instant. What is a photograph other than the quest to stop time? To hold that one moment before the eye and plant it in memory? So that we do not forget.”
*
For a moment, Kay could fly. Lifted from the ground, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, the carton of puppets spun in the air, rocking them in their cardboard tombs. No? cried out softly, and Nix chuckled. As suddenly as it had launched, the box descended, landing with a soft thud. The pent-up air let out a gasp when a knife punctured the packing tape seal, and when the flaps popped open, the temperature inside dropped a few degrees in an instant and took Kay’s breath.
“We’ll need the Sisters,” one of the giants said. “And the new girl beneath them.”