The Book of Air and Shadows

volumes? You think she took those?”
    “I hope so. I didn’t see them. For all I know they were at the bottom of the truck. That’d be ironic, like the gold dust in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.”
    That last made Mary Peg feel a little better; if he was making movie references, he couldn’t be that far gone. She said, “You called the building manager, of course.”
    “Of course. I even went up to their offices. Able Real Estate Management, up near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. A receptionist who knew zip and a boss who was never in. When I finally got him on the phone, he said he didn’t know any Carolyn Rolly, and that the top floor had never been rented out as a residence, that it wasn’t certified for human occupancy in any case, which was why they were gutting the building. I asked him who owned the building and he said that was confidential. A consortium, he said. Then I called Professor Bulstrode, and the departmental secretary said he’d left for England the previous day and they weren’t sure when he’d be back. Visiting professors were more or less free to go where they pleased when they had no classes to meet and he didn’t. It was the summer. She wouldn’t give me his number in Oxford.”
    He gave her a look so bleak that it zapped a little shock of pain through her heart. “I don’t know what to do, Ma. I think something happened to her. And somehow I think it’s my fault.”
    “Well, that’s just nonsense. The only thing you did wrong was to go along with this scheme of hers. Look, I know you were fond of this girl, but why isn’t it likely that she simply absconded with her ill-gotten gains?”
    “Ill-gotten gains? Ma, it’s not like she knocked over a liquor store. She was a bookbinder. She was fixing a beautiful set of books that their owner had given up for scrap. Glaser wouldn’t suffer a penny of loss-he only wanted the money he would’ve gotten from the sale of the prints…”
    “Which he didn’t get, don’t forget.”
    “Hey I’m not making excuses, but if she was a crook, she was a certain kind of crook. There was stuff she wouldn’t do, and bugging out like this and not giving Glaser what he had coming were in that zone. I mean, she was in the middle of a project that she really wanted to do, and…you didn’t see her place, but she’d created this whole little world in this crummy loft in Red Hook, I mean she’d built it with her own hands, it was her work space, and work was all she had. She never would’ve just ditched it.”
    “I don’t know, darling: she seems like a very unpredictable young woman and almost…can I say ‘unstable’? I mean according to her she’s been horribly abused. And you said she was some kind of fugitive-maybe that caught up with her? You’re shaking your head.”
    “No, and I’m not sure about the fugitive part either. I did a massive search on the Internet. You’d think an incident like a guy named Lloyd keeping a girl named Carolyn Rolly locked up for ten years as a sex toy would have generated some hits, but I came up blank. I called the
Kansas City Star
and the
Topeka Capital-Journal
and the
Wichita Eagle
a couple of other Kansas papers, and got zilch: nobody had ever heard of the case. Okay, she could’ve changed her name but still…so I called Patty.”
    Mary Peg noted that her son’s face showed a tinge of embarrassment at this admission, as well it should have, she thought. Patrica Crosetti Dolan, the second eldest girl, had followed her dad into the New York City Police Department and risen to detective third grade. Members of the NYPD are not supposed to do little investigative tasks for their families, but many do anyway; Mary Peg had occasionally availed herself of her daughter’s connections in this way while doing research, had taken substantial flak off her son on the subject as a result, and now ha-ha!
    She refrained from gloating, however, satisfying herself with a simple but freighted “Oh?”
    “Yeah, I asked her to do a records check, whether she was a fugitive or not.”
    “And…”
    “She didn’t show up, not as Carolyn Rolly anyway.”
    “You mean she lied? About the uncle and about being a fugitive?”
    “I guess. What else could it be? And that’s what sort of knocked the stuffing out of me. Because…I mean I really liked this woman. It was chemical; you know, you and Dad always talked about the first time you saw each other when you were working behind the desk at the Rego Park