What Has Become Of You Part 17

She kept watch outside Jay for nearly an hour. Even though the students seemed to be soaking up the warming April weather, there was just enough of a chill to drive Vera indoors; she made a mental note to borrow a sweatshirt from Elliott the next time she made such an outing. She went into Butler Library and signed up for a guest pa.s.s before climbing the familiar winding staircase with the wrought-iron railing. She walked all around the circulation area, looking at the students typing away at computer terminals; the look she gave some of them was too obvious, too searching, for some stared back at her, frowning.

There was a tired-looking girl at the circulation desk, probably a student worker, and Vera considered showing her the newspaper but decided against it; she looked so unreceptive. Instead she walked past the desk to the elevator leading to the book stacks, and on her way there she pa.s.sed what appeared to be a custodian. His face seemed friendly and relaxed as he wheeled his mop and bucket along. Vera flagged him down, and when he stopped, she showed him the picture of Jensen Willard, speaking to him in a combination of English, pidgin Spanish, and pantomime.

The custodian nodded his head, pointing to the photograph. "In stacks," he said.

"In stacks? Really?"

"In stacks," he said, sounding surer of himself.

"What floor of the stacks? Dnde? Do you remember?"

But now he was shaking his head. "No se," he said, leading his mop and bucket away.

Vera tried not to let her hopes get ahead of her. Before getting into the elevator, she reviewed the map showing what collections were housed on each floor. She selected the one where the literature collections were kept-her old favorite haunt, and a good bet for where Jensen might retreat.

The library stacks were dark and forbidding; each row of bookshelves had timed lights that went on and off, so one could be standing in a lit area looking at a book and abruptly find oneself in pitch darkness. A few students worked at small tables, squinting at the work in front of them and looking tortured. She walked up and down each row, glancing down the rows of shelves on either side of her. In the collection of Restoration literature, she saw a small-boned girl with a cap of dark hair sitting cross-legged on the floor, her head bowed over a book; as Vera came closer, the girl looked up. She was an Indian girl wearing heavy cat-eye makeup. Not Jensen Willard.

Vera continued her way past the literature stacks. The somber lighting and the acrid smell of old books made her feel reverent-a kind of piety most people feel when they enter a temple in a moment of conversion or tread lightly on cemetery grounds. Then a potent reminder of present-day reality hit her, for she saw that she was nearing the end of the Modern American Literature section of the stacks. The marker at the end of the stacks indicated that the books on this shelf included authors whose surnames began with letters RE through SA.

Salinger, Vera thought, looking down at the bottom shelf closest to her feet. It seems I can't get rid of you. And there, just as if she had summoned it into being, was the serial killer copy of The Catcher in the Rye, perched on the bottom shelf atop the other books, with a second book jammed underneath it, spine out. Seeing the t.i.tle of the book on the bottom, Vera stooped to close her fingers around it: the paperback edition of The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. Shelved out of order.

Not so unusual to see these two books together, Vera rationalized. Probably a lot of English majors read those books back-to-back, since Esther Greenwood was touted as a female Holden Caulfield when The Bell Jar first came out.

Vera was about to place the book under her arm, intending to shelve it in its proper location among the P's, when she saw what looked like something wedged between its pages. Slipping it out, she found a glossy black-and-white photo of young J. D. Salinger dressed in a herringbone tweed jacket, his hair smoothed back with pomade and his generous mouth twisted into a cynical half smile. It was the front of the sort of postcard one finds in university bookstores, alongside ironic T-shirts with original covers of The Fountainhead and To Kill a Mockingbird printed on their fronts. The sort of postcard students taped to their dormitory walls, calling it art.

Vera turned the postcard over, expecting it to be blank. But near the bottom of its clean, white surface was a familiar, faint, black-inked handwriting-the same handwriting she'd seen on the card that brought her to New York.

Looks like we just missed each other Guess I don't feel like talking yet Oh well, back to ME I suppose Vera was sure that this message was meant for her. It wasn't hard to imagine Jensen Willard standing in this exact spot, pairing The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye as she slipped this postcard inside the cover of the former. The odds of Vera finding the books were slim, but for Jensen, it was no longer about the odds, Vera was beginning to realize; it was about the game itself.

Vera wished she hadn't touched the books and the postcard-wouldn't this be considered contaminating evidence?-but now it was too late. She needed to take these items home with her regardless, for any and all might contain Jensen's prints. She turned each book's pages until she found the hidden tattle tape meant to set off the library alarms; removing these, she slipped the two books into her bag, intending to offer them to Detective Ferreira later. He could excuse her thievery, she hoped, in this instance.

She felt a clarity of mind that she had not felt in a while-the clarity of knowing one is on the right track. There was no doubt that Jensen was continuing to reach out to her for reasons yet unknown, patiently teasing her out like a snake charmer wooing a cobra out of a basket. But if Vera had just missed her, as the note said, then what chance did she have of finding the girl? And what did "back to ME" mean? It sounded like the t.i.tle of a bad 1970s song about female empowerment.

Or was it an abbreviation? ME is the abbreviation for Maine, Vera thought. Back to Maine, maybe? But that had to be a red herring. Jensen was probably still around somewhere, and wherever she was, Bret could not be far behind-Bret, who knew more than he was saying.

Leaving the library before she could be caught with stolen goods, she stopped by Jay Hall again and eyed the students going in and out of its doors. She imagined that Bret Folger would be easy to spot-an emaciated, six-foot-five, reddish-haired white boy would be noticeable on campus. She remembered Jensen writing that Bret had taken two consecutive cla.s.ses with Dr. Rose, the famed Spenserian scholar; she wished she knew of a way to find out which of Dr. Rose's cla.s.ses he was enrolled in now and when it met.

She fished out her phone and gave Elliott a quick call; there was no answer, and she left a message on his voicemail. "I need you to look up something on the Internet for me," she said. "Can you look up Dr. Louis Rose at Columbia? You should be able to find an office phone number for him. I'm not going to be home till later, but I'd like to have this number as soon as possible."

Crossing Broadway, she walked down Riverside Drive, slowing down in front of the Salinger family's old apartment-the building where J. D. Salinger himself had been born, just two doors away from Dr. Rose's place. She guessed Dr. Rose lived two doors south, as that was building was nicer and grander-looking than the one to the north. Standing before its door buzzers, she saw that ROSE, L. was taped next to the fourth buzzer from the bottom. Vera traced the shape of the upraised b.u.t.ton but did not press it.

She went back to the Salinger apartment building and stood there for a while, looking up at all the windows, trying to imagine which unit the Salinger family had lived in-mother, Miriam; father, Sol; older sister, Doris; and the new baby, Jerome David-and then tried to picture the people who lived there now. New York apartments had such high turnover that history mattered little. History didn't stick. Jensen had written as much in her journal: Even the special things in New York seem to blend in with everything else. Yet that lack of specialness, Vera supposed, was just what made the city special, in its own paradoxical way. There was room for everyone-for the ambitious, for the hopeful, for the defeated-even, she supposed, for the depraved.

"Did you call old Lou Rose?" Elliott asked Vera later.

They were sitting at his round table in the corner of the living room, eating what Elliott called the "school cafeteria version" of shepherd's pie-he had had a lot of leftover hamburger from the night before, as it turned out. To Vera, the heavily salted slop tasted like heaven. Around her mouthful of potatoes and corn, she said, "No. I chickened out because I didn't want to bother him."

"This is not what I would call impressive detective work," Elliott said.

"But I haven't told you everything yet. Not only did I feel like Jensen was in the Butler Library, but I could sense her there. And just when I was sure I was going to find her, I found this instead." She pushed back from the table and returned to show him her purloined library copy of The Bell Jar.

"What does that prove?"

"I found it stuffed right underneath The Catcher in the Rye on the library shelf. And Jensen Willard specifically mentioned in a journal entry that she liked The Bell Jar better than The Catcher in the Rye. Circ.u.mstantial, sure, but now look at the back of the card I found inside it. She mentioned in another journal that she used to leave notes in library books all the time."

"That's a pretty generic message," Elliott said, pushing his gla.s.ses up on his nose to look at the Salinger postcard more closely. "It isn't addressed to anyone, and it could be for anyone. 'Looks like we just missed each other' could be a message between a couple of libidinous kids who'd planned a s.e.xy a.s.signation in the stacks."

"But it isn't-that's the thing. You just don't understand," Vera said, "and I'm afraid it's all too complicated for me to explain right now."

Vera's phone buzzed from inside her purse. She checked the number of the incoming call and saw that it was her mother-her third attempt to call since Vera had left for New York. She had no doubt that her mother had gotten wind of some of the most recent stories appearing in the Dorset Journal and was in a panic trying to reach her, but she couldn't bear to talk to her just yet-not until she had better news to report. She waited until her phone trilled, letting her know that yet another message had been recorded, before sighing and saying, "I suppose I've got to bite the bullet and find out what my mother has to say for herself."

"While you check your messages," Elliott said, getting up with his plate sc.r.a.ped clean, "maybe I'll give you some privacy and mosey onto the Internet and see what else they're saying about Big Vee Lundy in the Dorset newspapers. Maybe they're going with the idea that you've kidnapped Jensen Willard and made her your personal s.e.x slave."

"You're extremely unfunny. And don't you dare call me Big Vee Lundy." Vera pushed the phone b.u.t.tons to retrieve her voicemail while Elliott got on his computer; his line about "giving her some privacy" had been facetious, for his computer was only a few feet from where she was sitting. She listened to the first of her mother's messages, which started off shrilly: "Marvita came over today to show me the paper, and your name's in it, honey. What is that about? It says you walked that missing girl home before she disappeared? Call your mother right away." The second message started off with an exhortation, the pitch of her mother's voice even higher this time. "Vera! Call your mother! This is an order. I'm worried sick. Where are you? Marvita says that . . ."

Vera deleted the message before finishing it and decided to leave the remaining one unlistened to, for now. She knew it wasn't fair to prolong her mother's anxiety, but if she told her she was in New York City, she would become apoplectic.

"No interesting news on the Internet," Elliott said. "How is your mother?"

"In hysterics," Vera said. "Tomorrow I think I'm going to go back to Columbia again. I was really hoping to run into Bret without having to reach out to one of his professors. I think the poetry cla.s.ses mostly meet in Philosophy Hall, so I'm hoping maybe Louis Rose will have his cla.s.s there. I might go to the Metropolitan Museum and to Central Park, too, if I have time for all that."

"Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you. d.a.m.n it, I just got emailed some work myself. New blog entry for a junk food site . . . a comparative look at cheese puffs this time. Considering the amount of concentration and intellectual prowess this is going to require, I'm going to have to ask you to amuse yourself for a while. Here's a thought: Did Ivan Schlosser break out of a jail to start killing a fresh crop of prep.u.b.escent girls, the most recent being Jensen Willard? Maybe that's a new chapter you could look into."

"Ivan Schlosser is dead," Vera said.

"That's too bad," Elliott said, already starting to type. "Imagine the scads of money you could make if you could pin it to him somehow."

In Columbia's Philosophy Hall the next day, Vera walked into the lounge on the first floor of the building and found that students were serving high tea, a precious Ivy League custom she had sometimes seen at Princeton; she backed out of the large room with the alacrity of someone who had accidentally walked into a stranger's house. She went up and down the steep, winding, Gothic stairwell in Philosophy Hall and tiptoed past the cla.s.srooms on each level, but the cla.s.ses in progress were all taught behind closed doors.

Columbia University has tens of thousands of students, she told herself. Admit it. You aren't going to just run into Bret unless you somehow make it happen. This was a discouraging thought, but not an insurmountable one.

After spending another hour in the Avery Library, where the school's collections of art books were kept, Vera began the long, southeasterly walk to the Metropolitan Museum. She ignored the suggested admission price and gave the woman at the front desk two rumpled dollar bills, receiving a withering look in return, and went off to look at some of the exhibits.

What would Jensen Willard want to see if she were here? The Old Masters? The modern works-excluding those that were too modern? Charlotte Corday's revenge in The Death of Marat, maybe? No, that wasn't at the Met. That painting was somewhere in Belgium, if Vera remembered correctly.

Just as she always had on previous visits, Vera walked aimlessly from exhibit to exhibit until she grew tired. She found a cushioned bench in a quiet room of j.a.panese art, next to a rock outfitted with an unseen mechanical device that gurgled as though water were bubbling inside it. The rock relaxed her in a way nothing else had over the past few days. She sat and listened to it until a security guard approached her and asked her if she was all right, which she took as her cue to leave. She had been in the museum for close to two hours and had seen nothing that had made her think of Jensen Willard particularly.

Descending the stairs of the Met, Vera's phone buzzed from inside her purse. Expecting to see her mother's number, she saw instead that the incoming call was from Elliott. And Elliott, she knew, despised phones-using them only when necessary, and even then with obvious displeasure.

"Vee?" his voice said. "Where are you right now?"

"The Met. Why?"

"What? I can't hear you. Oh, for Chrissakes."

The line went dead, and Vera zipped the phone back in its compartment, rolling her eyes. Brusqueness was part of Elliott's nature, but hanging up on her, she thought, was taking things to the extreme.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and she was too close to Central Park to have a good excuse for avoiding it. She remembered that Holden Caulfield, too, had not had a very charitable view of the park: "It made you depressed, and every once in a while, for no reason, you got goose flesh while you walked," he'd said of it.

Where might Jensen go in Central Park? There was the carousel near the zoo, of course-the carousel Phoebe Caulfield had ridden near the very end of The Catcher in the Rye, though Vera knew that Phoebe's particular carousel was no more; it had been destroyed in 1950 and was later replaced. Walking through the park, she noticed a sign saying that the carousel was closed for renovation. Typical, she thought. So much for Phoebe going around and around, nearly moving her brother to tears because she looked so nice.

The lagoon near Central Park South was an area Vera didn't mind. Growing up in Maine around so much water made her partial to lagoons. Besides, she had always felt a secret happiness, watching ducks' antics; ducks in New York were not so different from ducks in Maine, she thought as she settled down on a rock near the water, not minding if her skirt got a little dirty. Same sleek heads, same b.u.mbling walks. Sometimes the ducks commingled with Canada geese, gliding along the water or hunching along the sh.o.r.e. As she watched one duck, presumably male, waddling intently after another duck, she remembered reading somewhere that during mating season, female ducks sometimes hid in the tall gra.s.s to avoid being chased by amorous males. But it wasn't mating season, was it?

"Stupid ducks," Vera murmured, not without affection, and she wondered if Holden Caulfield felt the same way about them-forgetting, just for a second, that Holden Caulfield was not a real boy.

The phone in her purse buzzed again, making Vera jump. She checked her phone and saw that Elliott was having another go of it. "Why did you cut me off last time?" she asked sharply.

"I didn't cut you off. My battery was dying. Vera, where are you-the Met still?"

"No, Central Park. I'm over by the lake."

"Watching the ducks la Holden Caulfield?"

"You got it."

"Those d.a.m.ned ducks. You know what's funny about that? Holden Caulfield wonders where the ducks go in the winter. But the ducks never go anywhere, have you noticed? Even in the winter they're always right there."

"Interesting observation. This is what you called to tell me?"

"No, sorry, I wanted to check in with you about something. I've got to go out tonight, but I've got to figure out a way to leave you my extra set of keys."

"Can't you leave them under the doormat or something?"

"My dear old sausage, you must be joking. You've been living out of the city too long."

"If you aren't leaving for a while, I'll just come back to your neck of the woods then."

"Any interesting finds?"

"Not a one."

"Well, when you get back to the apartment, you ought to have a gander at the online edition of your local Maine paper. Seems like there's some intrigue back in Dorset that you're missing out on."

"Is it-is it another body?" Vera asked, her heart dropping.

"Nothing quite that intriguing, but I'll let you find out for yourself."

Replacing her phone, Vera shook her head ruefully. Knowing Elliott's perverse sense of humor, she would not have been at all surprised to find the "intrigue" he'd spoken of in Dorset was a headline about a rash of henhouse break-ins, or the Sportsman's Club hosting a youth fishing derby. But perhaps there really was something to it, after all. Standing up and brushing the loose gra.s.ses off her rump, she thought, What if it's Jensen? If it isn't a body, then what if it's Jensen they've found, alive and well? All at once she felt it imperative to get back to Elliott's quickly.

When Vera arrived at the apartment, Elliott was there pacing in the living room. "That didn't take long. What did you do, fly?" he asked, pressing the keys in her hand.

"I ran part of the way. Are you leaving already?"

"My friend Juliet wants to eat at this little Vietnamese place downtown before we go to the movies. Three train transfers to get there."

"Aw," Vera said. "A movie date, with popcorn and holding hands? That's adorable."

"Juliet is an out-and-proud lesbian, thank you very much. Speaking of adorable, don't forget to look at the latest news back in your hometown. It's about your young swain, Ritchie Ouelette-he of the soul patch, the two teeth, and the 'Born to Lose' tattoo."

"He doesn't have a-" Vera began, and then stopped, seeing that Elliott was teasing her. "I'll be sure to check it out," she said. "Enjoy your night on the town."

When Elliott was gone, Vera made sure to watch him from the apartment window until he had disappeared down the street; if he came back having forgotten something, she did not want him to find her at his computer, overeager to see whatever news report it was that he'd alluded to.

As the day's edition of the Dorset Journal loaded on the screen, Vera scooted the wheeled desk chair closer to the monitor, her features bunched together in concentration as she began to read. The story was no joke, she quickly saw-no joke at all.

New Suspect in Galvez Killing Bombsh.e.l.l evidence recently presented in the Angela Galvez murder has exonerated current suspect Ritchie Ouelette and implicated another party. This surprise discovery turns the investigation upside down. "Because the new suspect is a minor, we are not revealing any names at this time," Officer Gerard Babineau told the Journal. When asked if this recent development will lead police to refocus their investigation of the death of Sufia Ahmed, Babineau said that the Dorset Police Department cannot comment.

Vera kept reading, her eyes darting between the text and the accompanying photograph of Ritchie Ouelette being escorted down the steps outside the county jail, looking as unsteady and bewildered as though he'd just been hatched to the outside world.

New information provided by Ritchie Ouelette, who has been in police custody for more than five months, plus the cooperation of a second party, has led to a second confession in the case. "We have every reason to believe this new confession is credible, and that it cancels out the first one," Babineau said.

The suspect is a minor, Vera thought. Was the suspect also the second party, the bringer of the credible new confession?

The suspect is a minor. Bret Folger is a minor. Jensen is a minor, Vera thought. Her palms were clammy with excitement, but she knew there was no point getting ahead of herself. Much as she wanted to hop a bus back to Maine straight away, much as she wished she could call Paul or Amy Nimitz at the center to find out more about what was going on, she was persona non grata in Dorset now, and her work in New York, despite what she had told Elliott earlier, was far from finished.

If the suspect was Bret himself, then he was no longer in New York City. She could no longer waste any time waiting to ascertain his exact whereabouts. These whereabouts needed to be determined, and fast. Taking a deep breath, she found the number for Dr. Louis Rose that she had saved in her phone's address book.

Chapter Twelve.

As she was preparing to punch in Dr. Rose's phone number, Vera sat on the edge of the lumpy sofa bed and rehea.r.s.ed what she might say into the Spenserian scholar's answering machine-something about needing urgently to reach his pupil Bret Folger-and was thrown for a loop when an actual human voice answered the phone, a voice that sounded vaguely English and vaguely perturbed.

"Dr. Rose? I'm sorry to bother you. My name is Vera Lundy. I'm Jensen Willard's teacher-Jensen is your student Bret Folger's girlfriend, and I believe you may have met her once. I need to get in touch with Bret about something concerning her."

"Bret Folger's girlfriend?" The old professor sounded more puzzled now than annoyed. "I don't remember a girlfriend."

"She came to your apartment, and you took a photograph? Sometime this past fall, I think?"

"Oh, Jen-seen. You mean Grendel."

"Grendel?"

"That's the name I gave her when I met her," he said-loftily but not unkindly. "'An unhappy being who has long lived in the land of monsters.' Is she all right?"

"I don't know," Vera said. She hadn't expected the professor to speak to her this way, to say these kinds of things.