“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 Library and he used to come in for books. You just knew? It was like that.”

“Yeah, but, honey, that was mutual. I didn’t pack my bags and split after the first date.”

“I thought it was mutual too. I thought this was going to be it. And if it wasn’t, I mean if it was all something I cooked up in my head, then, well, where am I? I must be crazy.”

“Please, you are not any kind of maniac, take my word for it. I would be the first one to tell you if you were going off the rails. As I would expect you to do for me when senile dementia rears its ugly head.” She clapped her hands briskly, as if to demonstrate how very far off lay that event, and said, “Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this?”

“We?”

“Of course. Now, clearly, everything revolves around this Professor Bulstrode. What do we know about him?”

“Ma, what’re you talking about? What does Bulstrode have to do with Carolyn disappearing? He bought the papers, he split. End of story. Although I did run a search on him and he’s sort of a black sheep.” Here Crosetti explained about the famous quarto fraud, which, as it happens, she recalled.

“Oh, that guy,” she exclaimed. “Well, the plot thickens, doesn’t it? Now, the very first thing we have to do is get Fanny in on this, just like you should’ve done originally.” He stared at her blankly and she went on. “Albert, you don’t imagine that Bulstrode gave you the real translation of that thing! Of course he lied. You said your gut was telling you that you were getting rooked, and you wouldn’t have sold it to him if that woman hadn’t turned on the waterworks and told you those whoppers. They were in it together.”

“That’s impossible, Ma…”

“It’s the only explanation. She played you like a fish. I’m sorry, honey, but the fact is, we sometimes fall in love with unsuitable people, which is why Cupid carries a bow and arrows and not a clipboard with a stack of personality tests. I certainly did when I was a kid, and not just once.”

“For example,” said Crosetti with interest. His mother’s supposedly wild past was a subject of fascination to all her children, but one she only mentioned in the form of admonitory hints like this one. Her answer when questioned was invariably, as now, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She added, “In any case, my boy, I’ll call Fanny right now and set it up. You can see her after work on Monday.”

Against which Crosetti had no compelling argument. Thus at six that day he presented himself with the papers in their mailing tube at the manuscript department of the New York Public Library. He found Fanny Doubrowicz at her desk. She was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, with a pleasantly ugly pug face and bright mahogany eyes, deep sunk behind thick round spectacles; her coarse gray hair was drawn back in a librarian’s bun, stuck with the canonical yellow pencil. She had come over as an orphan from Poland after the war and had been a librarian for over fifty years, most of them at the NYPL, specializing in manuscripts for the last twenty or so. Crosetti had known Aunt Fanny for his whole life and considered her the wisest person within his circle of aquaintance, although when complimented upon her encyclopedic brain, she always laughed and said, “Darling [or dolling], I know nothing [nozhing] but I know where to find everything.” When he was a child he and his sisters had tried to think of facts that would be impossible for Aunt Fanny to discover (how many bottles of Coke got sold in Ashtabula in 1928?), but she always defeated them and provided remarkable stories of how the information had been obtained.