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Friday, October 21st
Charlotte stood in the cavernous lobby of the Corton Inn, in front of one of the large windows overlooking the university campus. The tall upsweep of red brick, glass, concrete and metal culminated in a massive Dale Chihuly sculpture that hung from the apex, the entire effect dwarfing the hundred-plus conference attendees who were milling about during the mid-morning break. Most of the people seemed (pretended) to be living up to the space, rather than being diminished by it: getting coffee (looking busy), exchanging views (pontificating), and meeting new people (networking).
Charlotte, too, wore her name tag and helped herself to a coffee, but the only reason she was there at all was to offer Margaret help with the conference. She didn’t kid herself that her motives were altruistic. No offer of help or actual help provided would ever change Margaret’s attitude toward her, nor was it likely Margaret would even consider it as help. Rather, she tried to redirect her own increasing anxiety about Jefferson’s death by finding some way to be useful. Plus, Barnes still wanted her to keep her eyes and ears open at the conference.
She scanned the crowd, looking for Margaret. Nearby, a pair of attendees around forty or so were talking animatedly as they walked and sipped their coffees, pointing out the windows at different things, waddling in tandem like a pair of geese. Just as they were about to walk past her, the women looked at Charlotte with neutrally pleasant expressions, and, not recognizing her, looked down in unison at her name tag.
One of them suddenly stopped and spoke. “You’re giving the keynote talk, aren’t you?”
Charlotte confirmed it and they introduced themselves. She saw from their tags that they were from a state university.
“I’ve heard so much about your book, but haven’t read it yet,” said Laura, the short brunette. “Quite controversial, isn’t it?”
“It appears to be, yes, but that was never the intention,” said Charlotte.
The blonder of the two, Nina, tilted up her head. “Then what was the intention? Surely you had some idea of what would happen by publishing those notebooks.”
“I was hired by Olivia Bernadin as an editor. The notebooks are what they are, and O’Dair scholars can make of it what they will.”
“Do you teach here at Corton?”
“No. I’m a freelance editor.”
“Oh,” said the brunette, “so you have no institutional affiliation? How unusual for a keynote speaker!” She and the blonde looked at one another as if they had never heard of anything so absurd.
Before she could either retort or leave, Selim approached with his own coffee. He looked well-rested, and especially handsome in a crisp white open-collared shirt. “Good morning, Charlotte!” He turned to the others and seemed to recognize the brunette. “Laura, good panel yesterday. I see you have met Ms. Anthony.” He shook the blonde’s proffered hand. “Selim Fanous.”
“Nina Merideth.” She peered at his name tag. “Cambridge? You’ve come a long way!”
“I am at the Sorbonne at the moment, for my research.”
“How do you know one another?” The blonde looked back and forth at Charlotte and Selim.
Charlotte expected Selim to answer it literally, through his connection to Ellis and Shelley, but he seemed to pick up on Nina’s tone.
“We just met a few days ago. I am an admirer of her work with the Bernadin notebooks.”
“Ah, well, then, where do you come down on it?” She then pointed at Charlotte. “She doesn’t appear to have an opinion about her own work.”
Charlotte bristled.
Selim, however, didn’t miss a beat. “Refreshing, is it not? Such a novel concept, allowing a writer’s work to speak for itself, rather than twisting it for the purpose of gaining tenure.”
The two geese-women pretended to laugh, but they knew they’d been put down.
Laura placed a hand on Nina’s arm. “Look, there’s Andrew! We must say hello.” They murmured nice-to-meet-yous and good-lucks and scuttled away.
“Thank you, Selim,” said Charlotte. “They were getting on my nerves.”
“If it is any consolation, at Laura’s talk yesterday, her fellow panelists truly looked as if they did not want to be there.”
“I tried to get out of doing this talk once I realized how controversial the book turned out to be, but it was too late. I know I don’t belong here.”
Selim looked at her in concern. “I could not disagree more. You belong here more than they do,” he gestured toward the rest of the people, “because you have contributed something truly new. That does not happen very often.”
“But I’m just an editor, not a scholar.”
He laughed, surprising her. “All we ever read of most authors’ works is what is left after the editors have had their say!”
Once again Charlotte could see why Ellis liked him so much.
Her phone rang. It was Barnes. She didn’t want to end the conversation with Selim just yet, so she didn’t either move or look away as she answered it.
“Yes, Detective?”
“Just touching base. Still waiting on the autopsy and toxicology. But my contact at Homeland Security said that it was apparently the professor’s research on the Order of Seth that triggered the flags. Didn’t Professor Milligan say the group was no longer in existence?”
“She did. It seems to be the general consensus.”
“I’m going to keep digging, maybe check with Interpol. Any progress with the professor’s notes?”
“Well, Tread Rose and I were helping Margaret make sense of them yesterday, and I believe she is going to tackle a rewrite of Jefferson’s paper on her own.”
“Oh.” Barnes didn’t say anything for a few moments. “I thought he wanted you to be his collaborator.”
“He did, but I, um—his work was in linguistics, and way outside of my expertise.”
“Understood. Still, though, keep an eye on things, will you? Would still like to know what happened to his thumb drive.”
“Will do, Detective.”
During the call, she caught the look of surprise on Selim’s face when he realized who she was talking to, and was prepared to explain when she rang off.
“That was the detective investigating the mummy.”
“It sounds like you are working with him!”
She laughed. “Yes, I am, in a way. We’ve worked together on a few cases in the past.”
His eyebrows were raised as he nodded thoughtfully. “Impressive. Did I hear Tread Rose’s name?”
Charlotte immediately recollected the way he glared whenever Tread was turning on the charm to Ellis.
“You did. Not one of your favorite people, is he?”
“He is—tiresome.”
“Jealous?”
She expected him to look either embarrassed, annoyed, angry, or dismissive. Instead, he looked at her with genuine surprise. “Should I be?”
Something in her made her push. “But are you?”
There it was—the underlying anger as his expression tautened and his eyes shone dark. “I want to reassure you, Ms. Anthony, that as much as I admire your daughter, I have no intention of taking a child bride.”
Charlotte’s face immediately burned with embarrassment. “That’s not what I meant, Selim! Not at all. And I apologize if anything I’ve ever said suggested such a thing.”
It was his turn to look ashamed, and he raised both hands to his forehead, even the one with the coffee cup. “No, no, it is my fault! Of course you are not suggesting it! I do not know what has gotten into me. I sincerely apologize, Charlotte, for jumping to ridiculous conclusions. Can you forgive me?”
“Yes, I can and I do. It’s all right, Selim. I’m the mom.”
“I do care for—about Ellis, but enough to know that she needs the freedom to come of age on her own terms. I am not at all certain, however, that someone like Tread would see it that way.”
“I understand.” She thought for a moment. “You’re right, though, that he seems a little in over his head.”
She went on to explain how she and Tread were assisting Margaret with Jefferson’s revised paper, hoping that this change in subject would further smooth things out between them. She felt intuitively that Selim had Ellis’ best interests at heart, even as she was fully aware that a great many men would throw caution to the wind if a young woman seemed willing. Nonetheless, if something should happen between him and her daughter, it would be better to have him as a friend than an enemy.
“So, in a way,” she concluded, “Tread is not the best candidate for assessing a project based on semiotics. On the other hand, very few from a grant organization would be.”
Selim slowly nodded his understanding, then brightened. “I have done some advance-level studies in semiotics, myself. If you should need any help, do not hesitate to ask.”
“I might take you up on that. I’ll see what Margaret has in mind, first.”
“So, let me see if I have followed this correctly,” said Selim. “Professor Jefferson read your transcriptions of Olivia Bernadin’s notebooks, and he spotted something in the way both she and O’Dair used language, that suggested an encoded, secret text in O’Dair’s work.”
“So far, so good,” said Charlotte. “But then the mummy arrived—”
“—Yes, the mummy of his first wife, Adeen O’Dair, and it was holding a book she herself had written. The professor read this book with his theory in mind, and he saw even stronger evidence of a code. Furthermore, he actually managed to decipher enough of this encoded correspondence to suggest that quite a bit of it concerns something like the Order of Seth.”
Charlotte nodded. “And that’s pretty much where it left off. I know that Jeffers wanted to try to apply it to O’Dair’s later work, but he was still trying to nail down the key to the code.”
“So, um, what did Tread Rose make of all of this?”
“He seemed very interested, and very open to it. In fact, he seemed to really appreciate what Jeffers was trying to do, how it could help students when they read Least Objects and the later novels. He admitted to struggling with it in school.”
“I noted that he was still hanging around, even though the grant applicant is dead. I admit that I thought it was because of Ellis.”
His expression was more self-deprecating than embarrassed. Good. The awkwardness was past.
“He has actually offered Margaret his help several times, and has said that he feels he has a personal stake in the project, which is why he hasn’t returned home.”
“Right, right. It is a shame, though, about the professor’s death—did he have a bad heart?”
“Not that anyone knows about. The detective is still waiting on the autopsy report.”
“There is doubt?”
She nodded. “Some. Between the mummy’s mysterious provenance, its disappearance from the State Police lab, Jefferson’s death in the middle of the bonfire collapse, and then a couple of things missing from his office the morning after, there are just too many coincidences for Detective Barnes’ liking. There’s some other stuff, too, that has his antenna up.” She didn’t want to say anything about the Homeland Security alert.
Selim nodded slowly again, taking it all in, then frowned. “What went missing from his office? His research?”
“We think some of it might be. His thumb drive is missing. I found the notes he’d written by hand, but not the printouts of the original editions of the works he used for working out the code. His revised talk itself was probably on that thumb drive, ready to take downstairs to the department printer.”
“Interesting. If someone stole the research, that could mean they want to pass it off as their own. Not likely to be Tread Rose.”
Both Barnes and Donovan thought Tread’s presence at the conference was suspect, but Selim had just provided one reason why Tread wasn’t responsible for Jefferson’s death. That still left Margaret.
“The only person in the department who could know enough or care enough about that research would be Margaret—but she’s doing what she can on his behalf.”
Selim shrugged. “Then it might be someone else at the conference.”
“Who?”
His eyes narrowed in mock conspiracy. “Maybe I can find out?”
“If you do, I’d love to know.”
It was time for the next set of presentations and panels, and they parted, agreeing to touch base later.
Charlotte finally spotted Margaret, who was looking over papers in a notebook.
“Um, hi. Are we meeting up again this afternoon?”
Margaret’s brow furrowed as she looked up. The dark circles under her eyes looked like they’d been there for a while. “Meeting up for what?”
“Well, to take up where we left off yesterday, sorting out Jeffers’ notes—”
Margaret looked back down at the papers in her folder. “I’ve taken care of it.”
“Oh. Well, then, is there anything I can help with, with the conference or w—”
“—I said, I’ve taken care of it.”
“Margaret, I’m only trying to help out, not push my weight around.”
Now Margaret looked exactly as she did twenty-eight years ago: eyes cold, lips thin with contempt.
“I cannot conceive of any way in which you could help me with this conference, other than to show up and give your scheduled paper. It was Aubrey’s idea to invite you, despite my own objections. Most of the people attending are working on a level for which you have neither the qualifications nor the aptitude. After all, you didn’t even recognize what your own work contained. It took Aubrey Jefferson to do that.”
Margaret was even ruder than Charlotte expected, and it left her speechless.
Margaret seemed satisfied with that effect. “Frankly, Charlotte, I would prefer it if you would just—piss off.” She flipped her fingers in a “go-away” motion, then turned and joined a group talking to a professor from Stanford.
Charlotte somehow kept her fury under control. She calmly turned and left the Corton Inn, calmly walked to her car, and drove off calmly and carefully, even as her hands were shaking. When she reached the first stop sign with no other cars or people in sight, she pounded the steering wheel and spewed every invective she’d ever heard in her entire life. And made up several more. It helped.
And then she made a left turn, heading back to the campus and Bishop Hall.
Selim’s pep talk and Barnes’ confidence in her helped to put things back into perspective. When people are rude and nasty, it pays to consider the source, consider the motivation.
In the case of the two women professors who were condescending toward her, it was job security—they had invested in their educations and managed to get jobs with a good school, and did not want some undereducated and underqualified upstart to make them look bad, particularly if their own work on Seamus O’Dair was conventional or pedestrian. She might not have intended to turn O’Dair scholarship on its head, but that is how it happened—and professional jealousy was not going to ease up just because she was innocent.
Margaret had never been nice to her or even so much as superficially cordial toward her. If she was now downright hostile, might it also be some sort of professional jealousy? Did she want to avoid having to share the credit for finishing Jeffers’ revised paper? It would make sense. Margaret did like the limelight, after all.
After she parked and locked the Audi, Charlotte selected Jack’s skeleton key. Under normal circumstances, she would have felt guilty about going into someone’s office uninvited, but her anger was still high, and she was thoroughly fed up with not being able to get her hands on what she wanted. That thumb drive was either stolen—or Jefferson had hidden it somewhere.
She started with Jefferson’s office, this time not turning on any lights. Once again, nothing seemed to have changed since she was last there—the papers on the desk were exactly as she’d left them, his grubby yellow bottle of mustard was off to the right where one had always been since her student days, his chair was turned slightly out of the way.
She slipped on a fresh pair of the gloves Barnes had given her, then sat down in Jefferson’s chair, swiveling to look at his desk setup as he would have seen it.
Of course, it looked a great deal different because the computer monitor and keyboard weren’t there, but in a way, that was an advantage, allowing an unobstructed view of the other items that could possibly hold or hide a thumb drive. Her heart suddenly beat faster as she realized she was looking at the most obvious thing, the old glass ashtray full of fresh pipe tobacco. It did not appear to have been disturbed. She leaned forward and carefully brushed back the tobacco to expose the bottom of the ashtray, but nothing was hidden there. She checked the rack that held his old pipes, now slightly dusty. The center support was substantial and had a small cap of sorts on the top. She tried to see if it unscrewed, but discovered that it was loose enough to pry off.
Again, she felt excitement—and again, disappointment. It wasn’t hollow, and thus held nothing.
She checked the base of his desk lamp, the undersides of the drawers, the insides of old books, even the various parts of the office chair itself, in case any plastic parts snapped off, but it was solidly made. She leaned far to the right to check the gap between the desk and the wall beneath the window. The chair slid more quickly than she expected, and she accidentally knocked over the plastic mustard bottle. Its fall sounded like gunfire in the silent room. Get a grip!
There was nothing within reach between the desk and the wall. She set the bottle upright, and realized it felt empty.
And realized, staring at it, that that brand of mustard hadn’t had that label design for over a decade.
Now her heartbeat really stepped up, and her hand trembled as she carefully unscrewed the cap.
Nothing.
But it was squeaky clean inside, unlike the outside. And it was probably where he usually squirreled away the thumb drive, in a nasty-looking bottle a student wouldn’t be in a hurry to touch.
It doesn’t cut the mustard.
It was one of his favorite phrases.
She texted it to Barnes, suggesting it as a password for Jefferson’s computer.
As she got ready to leave the office, she could hear students and professors coming and going for mid-morning office hours and appointments. Would anyone notice her leaving? She could use the same excuse she used with Margaret herself, that Barnes had asked for her help on the case.
As Barnes said: act like you’re supposed to be here. She took a deep breath and did just that.
Nobody noticed. She walked down the hall toward the staircase, but paused by the closed door of Margaret’s office.
Margaret wasn’t likely to be around for at least half an hour, and if she did show up, why, then she would lie, without feeling the slightest bit of guilt, and say that the door was open. The woman had it coming.
She wanted a chance to look over Margaret’s private domain without being observed, without having to be on guard. Maybe she would finally have an answer to the questions that had bugged her since her student days: Why does she hate me so much? What on earth did I ever do to her in the first place that caused her to give me all this grief over all these years?
Charlotte calmly and quickly let herself in.
The first thing she did was to wake up Margaret’s computer. The desktop view came on, skipping the home screen and password. The folder icon for the conference opened to reveal nothing unusual. It simply contained everything anyone attending would have received, except for the list of attendees that Barnes had already showed her, and various written agreements between the university, the English department, and the Corton Inn.
Margaret’s desk, unlike Jefferson’s, contained stacks of printed student papers—and she had her own printer. One stack of papers showed that she still graded by hand, in red felt-tip pen. Charlotte vaguely recalled Jack saying some time ago that all papers were now submitted as Word documents. If a prof wanted to read and grade them in print, they could, but they still had to have digital versions on file—and graded digitally, as well. She found the printer icon, and clicked until she got the printing job queue: Margaret had recently printed out several Word documents—and upon opening the most recent one, Charlotte saw immediately that it was Jefferson’s revised paper. The opening paragraph referenced Adeen’s book and the Order of Seth. But as she read on, it became less polished, choppier, and there were placeholders where examples were supposed to go, giving the name of the work, edition, and page numbers. But there was only a fragment of a conclusion. From what she could tell by a quick read, it was further along than it had been the day he so excitedly told her about his findings, but it was still a draft, unfinished.
Charlotte felt a surge of anger, that was part jealousy, part protectiveness toward Jefferson. Margaret had lied by omission about not having his most recent work. Why? And how did she get it?
Jefferson had said nothing about giving it to Margaret—and it was highly unlikely that he would have given it to her in draft form.
Charlotte then went to the emails, searching for any from Jefferson. There was one, from a month earlier, and the attachment was the original version of Jefferson’s talk, the same one she had received as an email attachment from him herself. So he had not sent Margaret his updated paper, at least not via email.
Charlotte returned the computer to its home screen, and considered what it all meant. Or at least she tried, but she was even angrier than she was when she first came in—she could not suppress the gut-level conviction that Margaret was up to no good. Were those crocodile tears for Jefferson the night of the bonfire, or in his office yesterday afternoon? Was she grasping at Jefferson’s work because it was a way to be close to him—or because she had plans to do something else with it? Charlotte looked over the room with disgust, as if it were Margaret herself.
Unlike Jefferson’s office, Margaret’s had several photos and framed documents on the walls, none of which were recent, by at least ten years. There were more on the bookshelves, along with the usual gift-shop caps, mugs, and knick-knacks with the logos of various universities and colleges. There were several department group photos, and Jack and Jefferson were in some of them. But Margaret was the highlight of every photo—holding an award, laughing wildly, acting as hostess, or otherwise “on stage.” Why no recent ones?
Even older were the ones that ranged from her childhood on, most of which were stage productions she’d starred in, graduation photos, and one of her father, who was evidently a judge. None were of her mother.
She pulled open the center drawer of the desk: nothing unusual there, save perhaps more pens and pencils than would usually be found in a desk these days, especially given the Corton U mug full of them on top of a stack of academic journals. Other drawers held various files dating back several years, including one that said “O’Dair.”
She pulled out this folder, and the first item, written on the letterhead of the well-regarded Journal of O’Dair Studies, was a rejection of Margaret’s article on O’Dair and Magic Symbolism. Below it was another letter from the same institution, dated three years earlier, rejecting her proposal for an article on O’Dair’s use of astrology. And below that were at least a dozen more rejections for those and similar proposed articles from the JOS and various other academic and literary publications.
So Margaret was very much into the mystic side of O’Dair scholarship—and hadn’t said a word. It tied in with her deeply emotional reaction to the mummy and to its connection to O’Dair’s death—and now Jefferson’s death. Charlotte could understand why Margaret hadn’t made more of it. It was a controversial facet of his work, and unless she successfully made a case for it with an established academic publication, Margaret’s opinion was worth no more than Charlotte’s—and possibly even less.
Margaret had set her sights on being a scholar—and failed.
She looked at the other file folders in the drawer, and there were dozens on different esoteric topics, ranging from aether to Zoroaster. One in the middle immediately caught her eye: Order of Seth.
It was full of photocopied pages from old books, clippings from magazine articles and notebooks, even an old newspaper ad. Many made use of traditional mystical symbols such as eyes, pyramids, gold, and suns. There were encyclopedia entries, and sections from the writings of Madame Blavatsky, AE, and—here Charlotte felt goosebumps of alarm—Malik Amarna. Also known as Malik Kopff.
She got out her phone and began snapping pictures of the entire contents of the folder, with the intent to look into it back in her own office. But as she went through them, she realized something important about Margaret’s files: none of the contents were recent. Was it because everything was done online now?
Another check of various folders, this time on the computer, showed nothing comparable. She again looked around the room, at the contents, the pictures—
—and then Charlotte realized that at least ten or fifteen years ago, Margaret Milligan had given up. Or, as Jeffers would have put it, she knew that she didn’t “cut the mustard.”
The floor creaked loudly from a heavy-set person walking by in the hall, startling Charlotte into checking the time on the wall clock. She’d overstayed at by least twenty minutes. Time to get out of there, before Margaret came back.