“Can I have your student card?” Max asked. His hands weren’t shaking; his fists weren’t clenched. He had done this before. He noted the young man’s details, directed him to his papers. They stayed quiet until he was through the door.
“Where does Vivek think she is?” Max said.
“Nowhere good,” she said. “He asked her for a divorce.”
“Goodness. When?”
The graduate student—buzz-cut brown hair, Labrador grin—came back out front. He had only brought a pen to take notes. He didn’t know the rules. He’d been sent out to the reference area in search of a pencil. Liesl opened the top drawer of the desk and rooted around for a sharpened pencil. She handed it to him, and instead of looking grateful, he looked amused. He likely hadn’t used a pencil since grade school. No matter. He trotted back into the reading room, tail wagging as he went.
She unclenched her fists and smoothed the messages. Impossible to know how much she should tell Max, how much she should trust him. In the end, trust didn’t matter. It was a grim morning. She needed to talk to someone, and Max was there.
The reading room door swung open again. The graduate student came back out into the reference area, holding up the pencil, its tip snapped. She motioned to the pencil sharpener.
Liesl and Max watched him make his way over, insert the pencil into the old steel sharpener bolted to the long desk, and begin to turn the hand crank. It roared. He smiled to himself, the graduate student, at the noise he was making.
Finally, they were alone.
“He said that Miriam was mentally ill,” Liesl said. Vivek had not asked her to keep it a secret.
“Depression, or something else?” Max asked. “My father was a depressive. Terrible thing.”
“Could you tell?” she said. “The way that Vivek described it, I should have been able to tell.”
“In hindsight, I guess,” Max said. “But a depressive can be like an alcoholic. Masters of disguise.”
“He said there’s no way she could be the thief. That she wasn’t functional enough to do something like that. But she was functional enough to fake being well?”
“Not the same,” Max said. “And she wasn’t faking being well. If we were paying attention, we’d have seen it.”
“She got her work done. She functioned enough to get her work done.”
He straightened his tie. He was almost totally Max again.
“If you still suspect her, then go ahead and suspect her. You read the paper; you’re not the only one.”
“She stopped joining us in the staff room when we would stop for tea. I shouldn’t have let her do that. It was obvious she was ill, wasn’t it?”
“Quite obvious. But it’s an ugly thing, mental illness. No one will fault you for not asking.”
“Having a suspect would be a comfort.”
“Liesl. Try and show a little sense. You have a suspect. It’s not the same suspect who has an unflattering photo on the front page of today’s newspaper, but if we are playing Sherlock Holmes, then there is some bloody suspicious behavior you seem desperate to ignore.”
“What suspect?” Liesl said. The phone was ringing again. “Ignore it.”
“Don’t act as though we haven’t had this conversation before, as if I haven’t brought this up before. When you act this way, it makes me feel as though I’m grasping at something, as if I’m seeing something that isn’t there. But I’m not. I know suspicious behavior. And insisting, against all good judgment, that the police should not be called when it is clear that a crime has been committed. That is suspicious behavior.”
“You mean Francis.”
“Of course I mean Francis. Of course I mean Christopher’s protégé who even Christopher must have suspected of some sort of wrongdoing. Why do you think you were promoted to Christopher’s deputy when you and Francis have both been here for so long? Christopher must have suspected something shifty. He’s just not awake to point a finger.”
“Because I was better. I was promoted over Francis because I’m better than him at schedules and budgets and tax fillings and all the things that the leader of this place has to do but Christopher didn’t want to bother with. Can you not believe that?”
“How many languages do you speak then,” Max said. “More than he does?”
“There’s more to it,” Liesl said.
“Your education then. Better than his?”