The Fury of Rachel Monette (13 page)

Sweet was a stomachful of cotton candy, Rachel thought. “Very,” she said.

“Of course I think it's a bit young for her now that she's gone away to graduate school, but she doesn't want to change it. Kids are funny sometimes.”

Adam's room appeared suddenly in Rachel's mind. She saw it clearly—the woolly sheep on his duvet, the big yellow trucks, his drawings of hockey players on the walls. It was gone. All of it. She sat up quickly, sloshing water on the floor. Ethel hadn't played it safe enough.

“Ethel. Where is my briefcase?”

“Why, I think Tom put it in the front hall closet when Mr. Joyce brought you here last night.”

“And some notes. I had some notes on a few sheets of paper.”

Ethel looked at her gently. “Yes, you did. You wouldn't let go of them. I took them out of your hand when you fell asleep. They're on the desk in Amy's room.”

Rachel didn't recall a desk. Neither did she remember seeing her clothes. She asked Ethel about them.

“Oh, I threw them in the garbage. No amount of washing would get them clean again.”

“But I've no other clothes,” Rachel said, thinking of the closets and chests of drawers that had been full of them.

“Don't worry, dear. Amy's about your height, and she leaves plenty of things here. She hasn't got your figure of course, but they should do for now. Take what you need.” Ethel went to make breakfast.

Her clothes were beyond cleaning, but her body and hair were not. When she had done she sent a black stream swirling down the drain.

A dainty desk sat in front of the window in Amy's room. It looked like a pretty imitation of the sort of desk every little princess just had to have in the days of some Louis or other. Wrapped in a thick red bath towel Rachel sat down on the matching chair. The chair emitted a shocked creak, outraged that anyone dared take such liberties.

The dirty papers lay on the desk. They smelled of last night. She unfolded them. There were three sheets, the first the copy of the document she had given Andy, the second his translation, and the third had a few notes in his handwriting. She read the translation:

January 18 1942

To: Lieutenant Hans Kopple (der Leutnant)

From: Headquarters, 90th Light Infantry Division

Subject: Transfer

This is your notification of immediate transfer to

Camp Siegfried ten kilometers SW of Mhamid. Requisition

supplies necessary from the quartermaster of C Company and

proceed at once. On arrival report to commanding officer.

Duties at Camp Siegfried: Supervision and maintenance of

security. You are to detach from your company and take with

you the following men:

Corporal Joachim Shreyer

Private Victor Reinhardt

Private Max Feldbrill

Your destination is secret.

On the third sheet of paper Andy had written:

90th Light Inf.—Rommel. Where Rommel: 18/1/42?

Fr. surrender June 22 1940

Allied landings N. Afr. Nov. 8 1942

Vichy?

P. 137

Rachel reread the translation and Andy's notes several times. She looked at the swastika and the German words. Kopple, Shreyer, Reinhardt, Feldbrill. And Rommel. Rommel's name she knew although she would have failed the simplest quiz about him. The other names were meaningless. The men were probably all dead by now. But a conviction grew inside her that those orders, written before she was born, had somehow not died with them.

An unformed thought was hiding somewhere in her mind and she couldn't quite flush it into the open. After a minute or two she gave up trying. It will come, people said. Or sometimes they said, if you can't think of it it musn't be very important. That was how folk wisdom dealt with the problem. Rachel squeezed into a pair of jeans she found in the closet, pulled on a purple and gold football sweater, number twenty-two, and went down to breakfast.

“Not that awful thing,” Ethel said. She had a big breakfast ready. Pancakes with maple syrup, scrambled eggs and bacon, hot coffee. Rachel remembered that her last meal had been the morning before. She ate ravenously. Ethel ate ravenously too, although she never missed her three squares a day.

When nothing was left but a few scraps, Ethel said, “Mr. Joyce asked if you'd call him when you felt up to a visit. He wants to come over. And your insurance agent called this morning. He said there's nothing to worry about.”

“I'll call Joyce later,” Rachel said.

She sat back and sipped her coffee.

As if her brain had been holding the unformed thought as a hostage for food, it now released the memory of the atlas sitting on the desk in carrel three ninety-one. Rachel stood up quickly, startling Ethel, who was reaching for a piece of bacon that had fallen off her plate. Her hand jumped back into her lap as if she had been caught shoplifting.

“Where's my car?” Rachel asked.

“I think Tom parked it in the laneway, but oughtn't you to take it easy, Rachel? I can drive you if you really have to go somewhere.” But Rachel was already on her way out the door. Ethel retrieved the piece of bacon and offered it up to her mouth.

The shortest route to the library led past her house. Rachel barely slowed down as she went by. Smoke rose in the air from a soggy ruined pile that separated the front yard from the back. The lawn had been turned into a muddy battlefield by the water from the hoses and the boots of the firemen.

Rachel hurried through the library doors. There was no sign of Mrs. Mallow or the pigtailed girl. She ran up the stairs, and along the corridor, now brightly lit, to the carrel. She hesitated outside the door. Down the hall the door of another carrel opened and a pasty-faced student peered out like a pearl diver coming up for air. He saw Rachel.

“It's okay, you can use it,” he said. “They've got it all cleaned up.”

Rachel went in. The events of the night had made no lasting impression on the room. The books remained on the desk. Someone had repiled them more neatly.

Rachel opened the atlas to page 137. It showed a map of Morocco, green at the top, brown and wrinkled in the center, and flat yellow at the bottom. Deep in the yellow, near the crosshatched line resembling barbed wire that marked the Algerian border, a circle had been penciled around an isolated word written in very small letters. Rachel lowered her head to the page and read it. Mhamid, it said.

The Dawkins's house stood behind a line of spruce trees about a mile out of town. They had designed it themselves. The trees made it hard to count all the levels into which it had been split, but they didn't hide the two wooden footmen flanking the path. They had silly red smiles on their black faces and they were getting ready to bow. When Rachel arrived she found Ed Joyce sitting on the steps between them wearing his blue uniform. He had a foil packet of potato chips in his big hand and was tossing crumbled bits of them at a squirrel on the grass. The squirrel faced him on its haunches, forepaws raised to its face like a fighter, and didn't move a muscle. The four of them had a nice act going but Joyce dropped out when Rachel walked up the path. He got to his feet. The squirrel ran up one of the spruce trees and jumped onto the roof.

“You look like you've just gone fifteen rounds with the champ,” Joyce said watching her closely. Rachel thought she heard a new respect in his tone.

“Nothing's broken.”

“Glad to hear it,” Joyce said. “I'm real sorry about your dog. I know how it feels. I lost mine a few months ago. A God-damned kid ran him over. We were going to retire down to Florida next month.” Joyce rolled the potato chip packet into a ball and put it in his pocket. “What was your dog's name again?”

“Garth.”

“Garth,” Joyce repeated. “Mine was Wally.” He stared down at one of the footmen but he wasn't getting any sympathy from that quarter. The footman went on sharing a private joke with his buddy. Rachel didn't know the joke but she was sure they were laughing at the Dawkinses. Maybe it had something to do with their taste.

Ed Joyce took a long deep breath and let it out with a sigh.

“Mind if we sit out here for a while?” he said. “It's a nice day.”

They sat together on the steps. The squirrel ran back down the tree and glared at them from a safe distance.

“I went down to the morgue in North Adams to have a look at the body this morning,” Joyce said. “What was left. It won't be easy to identify. There's nothing to take prints of.”

“What about Mrs. Candy?”

“Oh, we've gone into all that.” He removed the potato chips from his pocket and threw a few more at the squirrel. It kept glaring. “She says the guy came to her door a couple of weeks ago. Said he was a graduate student from a university in Munich, working his way across the states. Hoped to write a book about it, he said. He asked her if he could work on her lawn. For a buck an hour. Well, Mrs. Candy has a regular gardener, but the price was right. She said okay.”

“Did she find out his name?”

“He gave her a name all right. Gurt Weiss, she thinks it was.” Joyce spelled it for her. “I called Trimble in Boston and he telexed the name to the university in Munich. But I'm not expecting much. He had no reason to give her his real name, and a lot of reasons not to.” Joyce made clicking sounds in his mouth to encourage the squirrel.

“Was he staying at Mrs. Candy's?”

“No. He rented a room on Water Street. We searched the room last night. Nothing there that would identify him. Some clothes. A cheap suitcase. And his tool box.” He shook his head. “That was some tool box.”

“He tapped my phone with it, didn't he?” Rachel said.

Joyce turned sharply. “How did you know that?”

“I didn't know, really. I guessed.”

“That's a hell of a guess.” He looked at her thoughtfully.

“I wonder where his passport is,” Rachel said. “It's hard to imagine something like that being completely destroyed in the fire.”

“It could have been.”

“Even so, why would he risk carrying it with him on a night when he's out murdering and burning houses. You're sure it wasn't in his room?”

“Yes,” said Joyce. “We even looked under the mattress.”

She looked at his face to see if he was making a joke, and decided he was. “If it wasn't in his room and it didn't burn in the fire—let's just say for now it didn't—where is it?”

Joyce rubbed his jaw and pushed it to one side, holding it there with his mouth open. He was watching a big squirrel with a bushy tail that had appeared on the far side of the road. It suddenly dashed across and went straight for the potato chips. The other squirrel stopped glaring and began running around in little circles. The big squirrel chased it away and went back to the potato chips.

“I don't know,” Joyce answered finally. “It could be buried in Mrs. Candy's backyard, or stuck in a locker in the bus terminal in North Adams. It doesn't matter much now.”

“Of course it does,” Rachel said, raising her voice slightly. “Did you ever think that maybe there is no passport?”

Joyce threw a potato chip to the big squirrel. It got its paws on it and shoved it in its mouth. “I don't see what you're getting at.”

“Just that perhaps he wasn't German after all.”

Joyce shook his head. “He was German all right. Both Mrs. Candy and the landlord on Water Street say he had a distinct German accent. He had to, really. It explains the whole case.”

“How?” Rachel said quickly.

“The guy was obviously some sort of pro-Nazi, a fanatic. Your husband's book comes out, and makes a big splash in Europe. This guy is already unbalanced, and something in the book pushes him over the edge.”

“But the book's not about Germany. It's about France.”

“Not entirely,” Joyce said. “Chapters eight and nine relate changes in the behavior of the Vichy government to events in Germany.”

“You've read it?” Rachel asked in surprise.

A hurt look rose to the surface of his gray eyes. It reminded her of the tension that always existed between town and gown. Like a fault in the earth it divided the community.

“I'm sorry,” Rachel said. “I didn't mean that the way it sounded.”

Joyce went on as if she hadn't spoken. “Another fact to remember is that on the dust jackets of the German editions it said that your husband was planning a book on resistance movements within Germany during the war.”

“It wasn't definite,” Rachel said.

“That wouldn't matter to our boy. The way I figure it he started thinking about putting an end to all this research. And remember, he's a bit weird—when he finds out that the author of all this has a Jewish wife, and that would have been easy, there were many articles on him in the German papers—he gets the idea of using this rabbi disguise.”

“But that can't be right,” Rachel said. “Miss Partridge said he was a tall man.”

“Remember how short Miss Partridge is,” Joyce replied patiently. “And she was upset. And the guy, although short, was very broad. She formed the false impression that he was tall. Witnesses do that kind of thing all the time.”

“What about the insurance salesman?”

“Who?”

“The one who saw a tall man struggling with a small boy in the field.”

“He was too far away to be reliable, Mrs. Monette.”

“He was close enough to see that they were struggling,” Rachel said, and suddenly felt close to tears. Joyce sat quietly for a minute and then resumed.

“So he flies over and does what he does. But he doesn't finish the job.” He cleared his throat. “I think he meant to kill you from the very beginning.”

“Why?”

“You're Jewish. He was a Nazi,” Joyce said simply. “When things got quieter around here he came back. Listening in on you and the Monteith boy he probably thought you were continuing your husband's work. He killed the Monteith boy, and the rest you know.”