Death Du Jour (21 page)

Fares for the steamboat. Stagecoach service to Ontario. Notices of removal. Not many folks moving that week.

Finally I found it. Births, Marriages, Deaths. In this city on the seventeenth, Mrs. David Mackay, a son. Mrs. Marie-Claire Bisset, a daughter. No mention of Eugénie Nicolet and her baby.

I noted the position of the birth notices within each paper, and fast-forwarded through the next several weeks, going right to that section. Nothing. I checked every paper on the reel. Through the end of 1846 there was no notice of Élisabeth’s birth.

I tried the other English papers. Same story. No mention of Eugénie Nicolet. No birth of Élisabeth. I shifted to the French press. Still nothing.

By ten o’clock my eyes were throbbing and pain had spread throughout my back and shoulders. I leaned back, stretched, and rubbed my temples. Now what?

Across the room someone at another machine hit the rewind knob. Good idea. Good as anything. I’ll go backward. Élisabeth was born in January. Let’s check the period when the little sperm and egg were introducing themselves to each other.

I got the boxes and wound a film through the spools. April 1845. Same ads. Same notices of removal. Same passenger lists. English press. French press.

By the time I got to
La Presse
my eyes would hardly focus. I looked at my watch. Eleven-thirty. Twenty minutes more.

I rested my chin on my fist and hit rewind. When the film stopped I was in March. I was advancing manually, stopping here and there to scan down the middle of the screen, when I spotted the Bélanger name.

I sat up and brought the article into focus. It was
brief. Eugénie Bélanger was off to Paris. The noted singer and wife of Alain Nicolet would be traveling with a company of twelve and would return after the season. Except for some verbiage saying how much she’d be missed, that was it.

So Eugénie had left town. When had she returned? Where was she in April? Did Alain go with her? Did he join her there? I looked at my watch. Shit.

I checked my wallet, dug into the bottom of my purse, then printed as many pages as my coins would allow. I rewound and returned the films and hurried across campus to Birks Hall.

Jeannotte’s door was closed and locked, so I found the department office. The secretary dragged her eyes from her computer screen long enough to assure me that the journals would be delivered safely. I attached a note of thanks and left.

Walking back to the condo, my mind was still on history. I imagined the grand old homes I was passing as they’d been a century ago. What had the occupants seen when they looked out across Sherbrooke? Not the Musée des Beaux-Arts or the Ritz-Carlton. Not the latest offerings of Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, and the atelier of Versace.

I wondered if they would have liked such trendy neighbors. Surely the boutiques were more uplifting than the smallpox hospital that had reopened not far from their backyards.

At home I checked the answering machine, afraid that I’d missed Harry’s call. Nothing. I quickly made a sandwich, then drove to the lab to sign reports. When I left I placed a note on LaManche’s desk reminding him of my date of return. As a rule I spend most of April in Charlotte, with the understanding that I’d return to
Montreal immediately for court appearances or urgent matters. Come May and the end of spring semester, I’m back for the summer.

Home again, I spent an hour packing and organizing work materials. While I am not exactly a light traveler, clothes are not the problem. After years of commuting between countries, I’ve found it’s easier to keep two sets of everything. I have the world’s largest suitcase on wheels, and I load it with books, files, journals, manuscripts, lecture notes, and anything else on which I’m working. This trip it held several pounds of Xerox copies.

At three-thirty I took a taxi to the airport. Harry had not called.

*   *   *

I live in perhaps the most unique apartment in Charlotte. Mine is the smallest unit in a complex known as Sharon Hall, a two-and-a-half-acre property situated in Myers Park. Deeds don’t record the original function of the little structure, and today, for lack of a better label, the residents call it the Coach House Annex, or just the Annex.

The main house at Sharon Hall was built in 1913 as home for a local timber magnate. On the death of his wife in 1954, the 7,500-square-foot Georgian was donated to Queens College. The buildings housed the college’s music department until the mid-eighties, when the property was sold and the mansion and coach house were converted to condos. At that time wings and annexes with an additional ten town houses were added, all conforming to the style of the original home. Old brick from a courtyard wall was incorporated into the new buildings, and windows, moldings, and hardwood floors were made as similar to the 1913 style as possible.

In the early sixties a gazebo was built next to the
Annex, and the tiny building served as a sort of summer kitchen. It eventually fell into disuse, then served as a storage shed for the next two decades. In 1993 a NationsBank executive bought the Annex and converted it into the world’s smallest town house, incorporating the gazebo as part of the main living area. He was transferred just as my deteriorating marital situation sent me into the market for alternative living arrangements. I have a little over eight hundred square feet on two floors and, though cramped, I love it.

The only sound in the town house was the slow, steady ticking of my schoolhouse clock. Pete had been there. How like him to wind it for me. I called Birdie’s name, but he didn’t appear. I hung my jacket in the hall closet and muscled the suitcase up the narrow staircase to my bedroom.

“Bird?”

No answering meow and no furry white face appearing around a corner.

Downstairs, I found a note on the kitchen table. Pete still had Birdie, but he was going to Denver on Wednesday for a day or two, and wanted the cat picked up no later than tomorrow. The answering machine was blinking like a hazard light, and appropriately so, I thought.

I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. I really didn’t want to go back out.

I dialed Pete’s number. My number for so many years. I could picture the phone on the kitchen wall, the V-shaped nick in the right-side casing. We’d had good times in that house, especially in that kitchen, with its walk-in fireplace and huge old pine table. Guests always drifted to that room, no matter where I tried to steer them.

The machine came on and Pete’s voice asked for a
short message. I left one. I tried Harry. Same routine, my voice.

I played my own messages. Pete. My department chair. Two students. A friend inviting me to a party the previous Tuesday. My mother-in-law. Two hang-ups. My best friend, Ann. No land mines. Always a relief when the series of monologues runs its course without describing catastrophies concluded or in the making.

I’d zapped and eaten a frozen pizza, and was almost finished unpacking when the phone rang.

“Good trip?”

“Not bad. Same old.”

“Bird says he’s bringing suit.”

“For?”

“Abandonment.”

“He may have a case. Will you represent him?”

“If he can come up with the retainer.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“A deposition. Same old.”

“Could I get Birdie tomorrow? I’ve been up since six and I’m really exhausted.”

“I understand Harry paid you a visit.”

“That’s not it,” I snapped. My sister had always been a source of friction with Pete.

“Hey, hey. Ease down. How is she?”

“She’s terrific.”

“Tomorrow is fine. What time?”

“It’s my first day back, so I know I won’t get away until late. Probably six or seven.”

“No problem. Come after seven and I’ll feed you.”

“I—”

“For Birdie. He needs to see that we’re still friends. I think he feels it’s all his fault.”

“Right.”

“You don’t want him in veterinary therapy.”

I smiled. Pete.

“O.K. But I’ll bring something.”

“Fine with me.”

*   *   *

The next day was even more hectic than I’d anticipated. I was up by six, on campus by seven-thirty. By nine I’d checked my e-mail, sorted my snail mail, and reviewed my lecture notes.

I handed back exams in both my classes, so I had to extend office hours well beyond the normal time. Some students wanted to discuss their grades, others needed clemency for missing the test. Relatives always die during exams, and all manner of personal crises incapacitate the test takers. This midterm had been no exception.

At four I attended a College Course and Curriculum Committee meeting where we spent ninety minutes discussing whether the philosophy department could change the name of an upper-level course on Thomas Aquinas. I returned to my office to find my phone light blinking. Two messages.

Another student with a dead aunt. A taped message from campus security warning of break-ins in the Physical Sciences Building.

Next I turned to collecting diagrams, calipers, casts, and a list of materials I planned to have my assistant lay out for a lab exercise the next day. Then I spent an hour in the lab assuring that the specimens I’d chosen were appropriate.

At six I locked all the cabinets and the outer lab door. The corridors of the Colvard Building were deserted and quiet, but when I turned the corner toward my office I was surprised to see a young woman leaning against my doorway.

“Can I help you?”

She jumped at the sound of my voice.

“I—No. Sorry. I knocked.” She spoke without turning, making it hard to see her face. “I have the wrong office.” With that she bolted around the corner beyond my office and disappeared.

I suddenly recalled the message about break-ins.

Chill, Brennan. She was probably just listening to see if someone was inside.

I turned the handle and the door opened. Damn. I was sure I’d locked it. Or had I? My arms were so full I had pulled the door closed with my foot. Maybe the latch hadn’t caught.

I did a quick inventory of the room. Nothing looked disturbed. I pulled my purse from the bottom file drawer and checked. Money. Keys. Passport. Credit cards. Everything worth taking was there.

Maybe she
had
been at the wrong place. Maybe she’d looked in, realized her mistake, and was leaving. I hadn’t actually seen her open the door.

Whatever.

I packed my briefcase, turned the key and tested the lock, then headed for the parking deck.

*   *   *

Charlotte is as different from Montreal as Boston is from Bombay. A city suffering from multiple personality disorder, it is at once the graceful Old South and also the country’s second-largest financial center. It is home to the Charlotte Motor Speedway and to NationsBank and First Union, to Opera Carolina and Coyote Joe’s. It is churches on every corner, with a few titty bars around the corner. Country clubs and barbecue joints, crowded expressways and quiet cul-de-sacs. Billy Graham grew up on a dairy farm where a shopping center now stands,
and Jim Bakker had his start in a local church and his finish in a federal courthouse. Charlotte is the place where mandatory busing to achieve racial balance in public schools began, and the home of numerous private academies, some with a religious orientation, others entirely secular.

Charlotte was a segregated city going into the 1960s, but then an extraordinary group of black and white leaders began to work to integrate restaurants, public lodging, recreation, and transportation. When Judge James B. McMillan handed down the mandatory busing order in 1969, there were no riots. The judge took a lot of personal heat, but his order stood, and the city complied.

I have always lived in the southeast part of town. Dillworth. Myers Park. Eastover. Foxcroft. Though a long way from the university, these neighborhoods are the oldest and prettiest, labyrinths of winding streets lined with stately homes and large lawns canopied by huge elms and willow oaks older than the pyramids. Most of Charlotte’s streets, like most of Charlotte’s people, are pleasant and graceful.

I cracked the car window and breathed in the late March evening. It had been one of those transitional days, not quite spring but no longer winter, when you slip your jacket on and off at least a dozen times. Already the crocuses were pushing through the earth, and soon the air would be lush with the smell of dogwoods, redbuds, and azaleas. Forget Paris. In spring, Charlotte is the most beautiful city on the planet.

I have several choices of routes going home from campus. Tonight I decided to take the highway, so I used the back exit to Harris Boulevard. Highways I-85 and I-77 were moving well, so in fifteen minutes I had cut through uptown and was heading southeast on
Providence Road. I stopped at the Pasta and Provisions Company for spaghetti, Caesar salad, and garlic bread, and shortly after seven I was ringing Pete’s doorbell.

He answered wearing faded jeans and a yellow and blue rugby shirt, open at the neck. His hair stuck up as though he’d just combed it with his fingers. He looked good. Pete always looks good.

“Why didn’t you use your key?”

Why didn’t I?

“And find a blonde in spandex in the den?”

“Is she here now?” he said, whipping around as if seriously searching.

“You wish. Here, boil water.” I held out the pasta.

As Pete took the bag, Birdie made his appearance, stretching first one hind leg, then the other, then sitting with all four feet in a neat square. His eyes locked onto my face, but he did not approach.

“Hey, Bird. Did you miss me?”

The cat didn’t move.

“You’re right. He’s pissed,” I said.

I threw my purse onto the couch and followed Pete to the kitchen. The chairs on each end of the table were filled with stacks of mail, most unopened. The same was true of the buggy seat beneath the window and the wooden shelf below the phone. I said nothing. It was no longer my problem.

We passed a pleasant hour eating spaghetti and discussing Katy and other family. I told him his mother had called complaining of neglect. He said he’d represent her and Birdie in a package deal. I told him to call her. He said he would.