The Book of Air and Shadows

Oxford, a very nice room that Professor March had kindly arranged for him. It had a triple bay window giving on the garden, these windows being black with the night and also the source of the noise that had separated him from dreamland. Another rattle of pebbles hit the glass. He checked his watch: two-thirty in the morning.
    Rising, he pulled on his jeans, went to the window, opened it, and got a faceful of gravel. He cursed and leaned out the window and spied a dark figure on the lawn below, stooping to retrieve another handful of pebbles from the path.
    “Who the hell is that?” he demanded in the sort of loud whisper one uses when not wanting to wake a sleeping house.
    The person below stood and announced in the same style, “It’s Carolyn.”
    “Carolyn
Rolly
?”
    “No, Crosetti, some
other
Carolyn. Get down here and let me in!”
    He stared below at the white, raised, familiar face for a long moment and then shut the window, pulled on a shirt and sneakers, left the room, ran back and got his key just before the door swung shut, dashed through the short hallway, flew down the stairs and through the lounge to the garden door. He opened it, and there she was, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans, soaked through, her dark hair plastered in strings on either side of her face.
    She pushed past him into the lounge.
    “Christ, I’m freezing,” she said, and she seemed to be: in the dim red light of the emergency exit lamp her lips looked dark blue. She glanced at the bar. “Can you get me a drink?”
    “This is closed and locked up. But I have a bottle in my room.”
    He did too, a fifth of Balvenie purchased in the duty-free for his mother. When they were in the room, he turned on the hot water in the bath, handed her his old plaid bathrobe, and told her to take her wet clothes off. He poured a couple of generous shots into the hotel water glasses while she changed in the bathroom, and when she emerged, in the robe with a towel around her hair, handed her one of them.
    She gulped it down, coughed, and sighed, while he stared at her face. She met his eye. “What?” she said.
    “What? Carolyn, it’s the second of December, no, the third now, and you’ve been missing since, I don’t know, the end of August. Bulstrode is dead, did you know that? Someone killed him. And his lawyer shot two guys in my mom’s living room and gangsters tried to kidnap me and…oh, Christ, I can’t begin to…Carolyn, where the
hell
have you been and what the
hell
have you been up to?”
    “Don’t yell at me!” she said in a strained voice. “Please, can I just sit down and be quiet for a minute?”
    He gestured to an armchair by the window and she sat on this and he sat on the bed facing her. She looked ridiculously small and young now, although there were smudges under her eyes and their blue seemed dulled, like tarnished metal.
    She finished her whiskey in silence and held out her glass for a refill.
    “No,” said Crosetti. “The story first.”
    “From what point? My birth?”
    “No, you can start with your marriage to H. Olerud of 161 Tower Road, Braddock, Pee-Ay.”
    A sharp intake of breath and he saw those familiar bars of rose bloom on her cheekbones. Rolly had less control of the blush than he would have supposed necessary for such an accomplished liar.
    “You know about that?” she asked.
    “Yeah. I actually went out there, to the house. I had a nice conversation with Emmett.”
    At this her eyes widened and she clutched her mouth. “Oh, God, you
saw
him? How is he?”
    “Reasonably healthy, a little skinny maybe. He seems like a bright kid. I saw the girl too, also healthy, the bit I saw of her. Their father seems like a pretty violent guy.”
    “You could say that. Harlan is fairly free with his hands.”
    “I saw. How did you come to hook up with him? He seems a lot older than you.”
    “He was my brother-in-law. My mom died when I was thirteen, and my sister Emily took me in. She was four years older than me and he was six years older than her.”
    “What about your father?”
    She uttered a short derisive laugh. “Whoever he was. Mom was a small-town waitress and barmaid and she supplemented her income by cultivating guys. Pay the rent this month and you get all the ass you can handle. She was what they call a trucker’s friend. One of them shot her and the guy she was with at the time. I guess he thought it was true romance. I came home from middle school one day and the cops were