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Thursday, October 20th, midday
Tea would sort things out, a cup of tea at the desk in her office, her sanctuary. The apartment was quiet. Donovan was in the bookstore, and Ellis was at practice with Helene. The kettle began to rattle as the water came to a boil. She zeroed in on the sound of the water pouring into the red mug, her muffled steps on the runner in the hall, the slight whoosh of her office chair as she sat down. Shamus was already on the desk, paws tucked in, softly purring. They both stared out the window that overlooked the alley. But she could only see the chaos in her own head.
She wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept the possibility that Jeffers killed himself. Barnes wanted to use the possibility of suicide to open an investigation based on a questionable cause of death, but he also made it clear that he couldn’t rule it out.
That last afternoon with Jeffers haunted her. The look in his eyes when he told her how he felt—the hope, the tenderness, the genuine affection—and the split second of lost chances that she saw in them before he looked away—played again and again, breaking her heart and mortifying her with guilt. In all the years she had known him, it was there, that simpatico, that “connection,” as he put it. But he had never acted on it, nor had she ever led him on.
Didn’t she? There was only that one time things nearly got out of hand, just that once, so very long ago—and he was the one who stopped it.
She refused to believe that he was so smitten that her rejection of him would send him into suicidal despair. As Margaret said, the man was a rock.
Yet the very fact that he had expressed such feelings for her the other day was in and of itself surprising. At the time it happened, she thought it was from an overabundance of excitement about his work—not unlike what had happened between them many years earlier. Yet this time around it was even more surprising because he knew that she was attached to someone else. Not to mention that they were both considerably older.
Think. What had changed, and when? What tipped him from privately feeling what he did for her, possibly for decades, to suddenly putting those feelings out there in the open, with no encouragement from her, and knowing she was engaged to Donovan?
She thought back to the day that Tread Rose came to interview him. While Jeffers was never exactly laconic, he was known to encapsulate an idea or an opinion in a few choice words. But that certainly wasn’t the case when Tread arrived. Jeffers practically babbled for the first few minutes, and then he grabbed her hand in excitement when Tread said that he was short-listed for the grant. But friends do that in moments of extreme excitement, don’t they? Like when a team scores a goal, and a win might be in sight—
Jefferson really wanted that grant. He not only wanted the financial freedom to take time off to pursue his thesis and turn it into a book, he also wanted the prestige that came from winning the grant. It would have been the culmination of his career. Of course, he would be nervous—at sixty-six, his professional time was running out.
By the time the mummy arrived, Jeffers had calmed down, and actually seemed more like his old self. He wasn’t excitable again until he discovered the poem in the mummy’s book that had the same title as the O’Dair novel that he was using to prove his theory. Again, this was because of its potential for his work and his grant application. He was also a bit excited at meeting Selim and the chance to talk more about the Order of Seth.
In the afternoon, when she went to talk to him about what he discovered in Adeen’s book, he was so caught up in his excitement that he spoke rapidly, in jargon, and at great length, as if she could follow what he was saying and why it was important—and then half an hour later he professed his feelings for her in the hopes that she was willing to throw over Donovan for a life of the mind with him.
He even asked for a kiss. And that last look, of knowing that she had once found him as attractive as he found her, which she tried so hard to pretend hadn’t happened.
Damn him for it! Why did he have to cross those boundaries, to stir up something best left alone? She didn’t deny the connection, no, but she wasn’t in love with him and avoided overt flirtation out of self-respect, and respect for Jefferson himself—you don’t lead people on.
What part of engaged to be married did Jefferson not get?
And bringing back that memory of the one time they did get carried away—yes, the kisses she could almost get lost in—he held out temptation on a platter. It would have been so easy, to take a moment to feel that young again—
No, it wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been easy at all.
But did he sense something in her, no matter how much she denied it to herself, some sign that all he’d have to do was tell her that he was, at long last, ready and willing?
She even tried to make excuses for him, that he was so caught up in his work and the success of an idea that he overstepped personal boundaries—and then saw, yet again, that split second of loss in his eyes when she turned him down.
The last time she spoke to Jefferson was at Margaret’s party. Had he perhaps been drinking a little too much, to the extent that he gave himself away to Donovan? Yet he showed no hard feelings toward her whatsoever, gently complimented her appearance, and said how grown up Ellis was. He was more or less back to his old self: steady and, well, sober. Then Margaret threw herself at him. It had to have been embarrassing, especially since Margaret revealed that she knew that he had proposed a collaboration with Charlotte—it meant that she likely also heard the more intimate proposal, and then Charlotte turning him down. Would Margaret knowing this cause him to crash emotionally?
No. Jeffers might have been embarrassed—for a moment—but he wouldn’t have cared what Margaret did with that information, because her infatuation with him was a long-running departmental joke.
The following day, he did not appear at the conference. She did not see him until the afternoon, during the O’Dairicon, standing in the window with his coffee cup, apparently just having finished another interview with Tread Rose. He raised his mug to her in greeting, but did not come down to talk or gesture for her to come up. And she remembered how she felt both relieved and disappointed, and how he looked a little sad, too.
Then there was the night of the bonfire itself. The light to his office was on, and when he came out of Bishop Hall, he was still wearing the same sweater and jeans he had on when she saw him standing in the window earlier that day. He had probably been working, non-stop. Yet somehow Margaret had persuaded him to leave off and to come and lead the parade around the bonfire before effigies. She had even managed to get him dressed up in a toga and a wreath of autumn leaves. And he seemed strangely relaxed, too relaxed, loose-limbed, occasionally stumbling, not really dancing so much as shuffling and bouncing, drunk, and far beyond the point of caring about anything much at all.
Then he sat on the throne after reciting a brief poem—the poem at the opening of the mummy’s book—and lighting the effigies. He just sat there, drinking beers, slumping down more and more, even while talking to Tread Rose, the man who held the fate of the grant in his hands.
This was not a man who was ever known to escape into either alcohol or drugs. He was a rock, he kept his professional relationships from becoming too personal, he wouldn’t—
Well, it wasn’t impossible that he could drink himself stupid if everything was going wrong.
Something had happened to take Jefferson from self-conscious nervousness on the day Tread arrived to drunk and dissipated carelessness three days later.
Something, then, went wrong with his work—had he discovered his theory was worthless or misconstrued? It made a certain amount of sense at the time he explained it to her, but it was complex, so something along those lines going wrong seemed plausible.
Anything other than his being in love with her.
Please, anything but.
Shamus turned his head in the direction of the living room and kitchen. Charlotte soon heard the familiar sounds of Donovan in the kitchen, and then coming down the hall.
“There you are.”
She tilted back in her chair and smiled as he came in, then sighed as he began to rub her shoulders. His touch brought her back home, and she relaxed by the second.
“Penny for ‘em?”
She looked straight up, which made his face upside down. “Trying to wrap my mind around Jeffers. Barnes is thinking it might be murder—or even suicide.”
The massage stopped, and Donovan came around to face her, leaning on the edge of the desk.
He looked as concerned and confused as she felt, so she explained about finding the bottle of OxyContin and how Jefferson appeared to be drunk or impaired in the hours before his death.
“I thought you said he was excited about the grant and the mummy’s book.”
“That’s just it. He was. Yet something happened between the time he told me about his findings and the bonfire. I mean, if you were up for a prestigious grant, would you be as drunk and out of it as he was in front of Tread Rose?”
He shook his head. “No way. Even if I learned I’d lost. I’d want to save face, save what’s left of my dignity. Apply again next year.”
“Exactly. Jeffers wasn’t a robot, but he had always had self-discipline, a solid professional streak, you know?”
“Not all over the place like Margaret, you mean?”
She chuckled. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“Does his dying change things for the conference?”
She shrugged. “Margaret has announced that she has a copy of his original paper and is going to present it as scheduled.”
“That’s right after yours, isn’t it?”
“Yep. But something about it worries me. I know that after reading the mummy’s book, he had come up with what he thought was an even better idea for both his talk and the grant proposal. But his notes for it seem to be missing. Barnes is taking Jeffers’ computer to see if there’s anything on the hard drive. It’s the missing stuff that keeps murder a possibility.”
Donovan thought about it for a moment. “Is it your problem, though?”
“How do you mean?”
“Are you concerned because Barnes has asked for your help, or because you want to get Jefferson’s last ideas out there?”
I’m doing this to prove he didn’t kill himself over me.
“Both, I guess. Even Tread Rose wants Jeffers’ ideas to survive. But I can’t believe it’s suicide. Someone’s been messing with his office, and we can’t find anything. Even his thumb drive is missing. I’m also pretty sure someone was in his office after he died, because the light was on last night, but turned off when Barnes and I went in there this morning.”
“Maybe he wrote the paper by hand?”
“Possibly. When he was telling me about his newest ideas, he was referring to notes on a yellow legal pad. But the only such pad on his desk was a syllabus he was working on for next semester. Maybe I ought to go back there and have another look for it.”
“What would you do with it if you find it, though? I mean, there really isn’t much time to make a lot of changes to his original talk, is there?”
“Not really, no. But maybe it could be, um, summarized as an afterword. Something, you know, to make certain that he would get credit for having first come up with it. Seems like the least I could do, and I think Margaret would be open to it if I can find it in time.”
Donovan looked skeptical. “I’d watch out for her. I’ve only just talked to her at her party, but I can tell you that she’s the kind of person who will take credit for anything and everything given half a chance.”
“She was in love with him, though.”
He laughed. “Margaret’s in love with her own drama.”
* * *
WHEN CHARLOTTE WORKED “with” Barnes, she more often than not worked alone. Despite the trust and respect that had developed between them, he was first and foremost a State Police detective, and she wasn’t his sidekick.
Thus, she returned to Jefferson’s office, this time alone, and this time with a better sense of what she was looking for.
The yellow legal pad was still on Jefferson’s desk, but as she lifted the pages, she saw the syllabus that he had been working on had abruptly turned into notes that referenced Adeen’s poetry. These were the notes that Jefferson made right before his death, the notes from which he read to her that last afternoon in his office.
And they were hard to read. Hastily scrawled, as if his hand could not keep up with the speed of his ideas.
Sentences were truncated, the meaning of which was significant to him, but which meant little to her, at least at first glance. She would have to sit down with strong coffee and go over them line by line with what she remembered his telling her, showing her how the different versions of —
There was a sharp knock on the door and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was Tread Rose.
“Can I help you, Tread?”
“I just stopped by to see if there was anything I could do to help Margaret, and I saw the light on in here.”
Margaret. He was on a first-name basis with her now.
“Thanks, but no. I just came to collect some things for Detective Barnes.”
“Anything more about Professor Jefferson?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. All we can do is wait and to proceed with the conference.”
“Margaret is giving the professor’s talk, isn’t she?”
“Yes, that’s the plan.” She meant to sound neutral, but failed.
He picked up on it, too. “Is there something wrong?”
“Well, the thesis of Jeffers’ original paper is interesting, and I’m flattered that he was inspired by my work with Olivia Bernadin’s notebooks, but—”
“But you don’t think his latest idea was right?”
“It could be right. But what do I know? Maybe it makes perfect sense in terms of semiotics.”
“Right. Need help with that?” He nodded to the pile of papers and publications on which the yellow pad rested.
“No, thanks. I need to go over my own talk with Margaret, what I should say about Jeffers, you know.”
“I understand. I’m very sorry for your loss. He was a nice guy.”
“Thanks. I knew him for a long time.”
The sound of sharp but familiar footsteps approaching made him turn, then move aside as Margaret entered.
Margaret sighed at the sight of Charlotte. “You again! How did you get in here?”
Charlotte blurted the first thing that came into mind. “Jefferson gave me a key.”
Margaret’s lips went tight and pale. “What is it, now?”
Tread, however, spoke first. “Ms. Anthony doesn’t think the professor’s latest ideas are the correct ones.”
Margaret’s eyes instantly bulged with outrage. “How can you say that? You wouldn’t know enough.”
Charlotte counted slowly to five. “I did not actually say that, Tread.” She turned to face Margaret. “Once Jeffers received the scans of Adeen’s book, he felt he had more to base his theory on than ever. He was obsessed with his discovery and was trying to revise his paper in time to present it on Saturday. You know this. It’s why he skipped out on most of the presentations and hands-on stuff at the conference.” She then turned to Tread. “And he also wanted to revise his application for the grant. He was positive his updated theory was bulletproof.”
“Well, it’s true that Aubrey dropped the ball a bit with the conference,” Margaret admitted. “But of course I understood why. The ideas must come first.”
Tread nodded. “He told me about it, too. At the last interview I had with him.”
Margaret was surprised.
Charlotte remembered that she had seen Tread leaving Bishop Hall during the O’Dairicon. “Were you able to follow it?”
Tread looked rueful. “Some. I have to admit a lot of it went over my head.” He gestured for emphasis.
“Don’t feel bad. The problem I had when he told me about it—probably the day before you talked to him, when his ideas were raw and not completely fleshed out—is that much of what he said at first was in terms of linguistics and semiotics. He did, however, show me some examples based on scans of original texts. That part—that I understood. Somewhat.” She turned to Margaret. “So I’m trying to find everything he had shown me in order to see if it is possible for someone to give that updated paper for him.”
Margaret, for once, looked mollified.
Tread, however, looked more anxious, and nodded to the stack of papers on the desk. “Is that what that is, the sample texts?”
Charlotte shook her head. “No. I can’t find them. I’ve only got the rough notes, which are pretty much indecipherable.”
Margaret held out her hand. “Let me be the judge of that.”
She took the legal pad from Charlotte and looked over the pages of relevant notes. Then she looked over the office, her eyes becoming watery, and her features sad and fatigued. “I can’t concentrate in here. Let’s go to my office.”
Margaret’s office was lined with bookcases, and large enough for a meeting table and chairs, as befit her various department administrative roles over the years. They decided to pool their resources—Charlotte recollected the texts and examples Jefferson used; Tread provided the recording of his interview with Jefferson in which they covered the revised ideas; Margaret provided the copy of the original talk, plus the most comprehensive understanding of O’Dair and O’Dair scholarship.
The recording brought a lump to Charlotte’s throat. Jefferson still sounded as excited as he did the afternoon he told her about his new ideas. Margaret, too, was affected, but seemed to steel herself harder against the emotional impact, channeling her grief into a sort of heroic determination: there was a conference to run, and a mission to present Jefferson’s work. Nothing was going to get in the way of that.
Charlotte used Margaret’s computer to type out Jefferson’s notes, while Tread used his own laptop to transcribe the interview. Margaret was on the phone, part of the time with the Corton Inn staff and the volunteers for the conference, and part of the time with the university officials, explaining the need to access Jefferson’s email via their servers, and specifically emails from the Trinity Library with attached documents. When they found it and sent it on, she went to the main department office and printed out copies of everything, along with the transcribed interview and the transcribed notes.
This took nearly three hours, by which time they were all exhausted and hungry.
“Thank you for your help with this,” said Margaret. “I’m going to take it home with me and see if I can cobble together something that will be suitable for the presentation. Obviously, I can’t write it in Aubrey’s distinctive style, but perhaps I can still do his ideas justice.” Then she closed the door on Charlotte and Tread, leaving them standing alone in the hall.
Tread walked with Charlotte down the stairs and to their cars. “What do you think? Will Margaret be able to make sense of it?”
Charlotte shrugged. Her brain was tired, her back hurting from sitting in uncomfortable chairs. Or perhaps the pain was from suppressing her irritation at every other thing Margaret said for far too many hours.
“It’s Margaret’s problem now. I’m going home to my family and a nice big glass of merlot. I’ve got a talk of my own to worry about, and I know that a large part of the audience will think that I don’t have any business being there.”
She reached Donovan’s Audi, and rummaged in her purse for the keys. Ellis had again borrowed the Jeep to practice with Helene and then go to rehearsal with the orchestra.
Tread held open the car door as she got in behind the wheel. “But the professor thought you had every right, didn’t he?”
She smiled, remembering Jeffers’ many encouragements. “Yeah, Tread. Yeah, he did. Good night.”