They’d planted those chrysanthemums together, an idea of Liesl’s to extend the feeling of summer with a fall bloom. She usually smiled when she saw those flowers and thought of that hot afternoon when, after hours of work in the garden, she’d gone inside to find a streak of dirt across her left cheek, and John had confessed it had been there all day, but he’d found it so fetching that he hadn’t wanted to tell her for fear she’d wipe it off.
Liesl had tried Garber’s direct line again as she walked home; she had the crisp tones of his outgoing voicemail message memorized and was reciting it to herself over the flowers when John opened the front door and called out to her.
“Wine?” John said. “I have a Riesling chilling.”
Liesl pulled her hand back from the flower petals.
“I’m not sure I should.”
“Oh? Are you well?” He walked out in his stocking feet to join her on the front walk, his big frame casting a John-shaped shadow over Liesl and the chrysanthemums in the slanting late-afternoon light.
“Heavy day at work.”
“All the more reason for the Riesling,” John said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and leading her into the house.
“The misplaced Plantin,” Liesl said, throwing down her purse where she stood. “I’m beginning to think it was stolen. I’m going to have to call the police in tomorrow.”
“The police? Lord. Is that what the administration recommended?”
“It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “Rather than bury my head in the sand.”
Liesl followed John into the cool kitchen and didn’t protest again as he poured her that glass of Riesling. She had wanted to keep her head clear, but he seemed to be doing so well that she didn’t want to disrupt the equilibrium by being argumentative, by disrupting the picture he’d painted of the two of them, sharing slow drinks and gossip as night fell outside their kitchen window.
“Shouldn’t it be up to administration when to involve the police, darling?”
John wasn’t tangled enough in the details of the case to recognize the flicker across Liesl’s face when he asked her that question, but her desire to avoid argument evaporated immediately.
“Not you too. They don’t know or care about the collection. I do.”
“I know it,” John said. “But they know and care plenty about the university’s reputation.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “A reputation that will be damaged if it gets out that we failed to alert police to a major theft.”
“It’s not your call to make, my dear.”
“Have your decades spent in the workforce convinced you of that?”
She regretted it as soon as she said it. Later that evening, when things had cooled down, she went up to his studio where he was working late and offered her apologies. He put his cool palm on her hot cheek and forgave her. Of course he forgave her. She went to bed before he did, knowing for certain that she would contact the police the next day, no matter what anyone said.
6
One of the pink-faced young men approached Liesl and shook her hand with vigor. He was waving a croissant closer to the library’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio than she would have liked, but she didn’t snatch it from him and she didn’t steer him away. She nodded. She introduced herself. She answered his questions. He was from the English department. Young men from the English department always treated Liesl like she was their mother. That is, when they noticed her at all. Young men from the English department were often the favorite great-grandsons of oil barons. She looked up at the rows and rows of books above her. There were buildings on campus that were architecturally more impressive than this library, but there was nothing as beautiful. Christopher once said that he wished the building were less beautiful, that people would take it more seriously if it were. Liesl disagreed. She had never been beautiful. She knew that a lack of aesthetic appeal was no way to get yourself taken seriously.
The new young English professor, his head on a swivel, stopped pretending to listen to the woman who reminded him of his mother. President Garber walked into the library reading room. Liesl stopped pretending to act as though the young English professor were listening to her. She broke off midsentence to approach Garber. Before she could get there, before she could walk fifteen feet across the room, she was interrupted by a familiar man. A familiar man who had bags under his eyes and who needed a shave.
“Vivek,” said Liesl. “Miriam didn’t tell me I would see you here.”