“Who’s ‘they’?”
“My boss, Mark.”
It was clear by her tone that she didn’t like this Mark — her presence here, I could see now, was an act of rebellion against him. I chuckled gently, as though to suggest that we all knew a Mark or two, and that it was right to stick it to them.
“Why didn’t he want me to know?” I asked.
Andrea turned to face me, a sour look on her face. “Beats me what his problem is,” she said. Her voice, freed from the constraints of the workplace, was very different from the one she used on the phone — casual, and a bit crass. “I asked why it was blacked out on the abstract, and he looked at me like I ought to just keep my little mouth shut and mind my own business. He just said, ‘Mr. Loesch doesn’t need to know that.’ So now I was curious, right? So I asked him why you didn’t need to know. And he said, ‘I’m sure he’s well aware that the land used to belong to Avery Stiles.’ And when I kept looking at him, he said, ‘I don’t know what Eric Loesch thinks he’s doing out there, and I don’t want to be involved in it.’ And that’s all he would say.”
“Interesting.”
It was she who remained silent now, gazing at me with annoyed anticipation. “So you don’t know who this guy is?” she said, finally.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“And you’re not doing something weird out there?”
“No,” I answered, though I was unsure what, in Andrea’s view, would constitute weirdness. “Tell me something, Andrea,” I went on. “Did it seem to you that your boss knew something about me? That he had some prior knowledge about my life?”
She thought about it a moment. “I guess so.”
“But you don’t know what, exactly?”
A note of anxiety had begun to creep into her voice. “What,” she said. “Are you some kind of crazed killer?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say crazed,” I joked.
Andrea, however, didn’t find it funny, and her face betrayed a moment of real fear before she shifted, quite deftly, to her previous sour expression. “So can I go now?” she asked, feigning nonchalance. “Honestly, that’s all I know about this.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “You were good to come. Thank you, Andrea.”
She wasted no time rolling up her window and driving away.
I allowed my car to idle while I considered her words. Her employer must have remembered the drama my family experienced when I was a young man, or perhaps he had heard something — doubtless something incorrect — about the more recent events I had been involved in. Either way, his suspicion of me was unjust, and his desire to distance himself puzzling. This was not the first time I had been unjustly accused, however, and it was unlikely to be the last. I decided to put this affront behind me, and see what more I could learn about the “weirdo” whose name Andrea had uncovered.
I drove to the Gerrysburg Public Library and parked in the lot beside it. I remembered the library well — when I was a boy, it had also housed a museum of local history, which had eventually been eliminated to make room for more books. The parking lot had been expanded at some point in the past, but the asphalt was cracked and patched now, with bits of it scattered around, heaved up by winter.
Inside, the library was much as I had remembered it, except that the card catalog was gone, replaced by a bank of computers. This transition had clearly taken place some time ago, however, because the computers were old, and two of the four bore handwritten placards readingOUT OF ORDER. There were also a pair of newer computers, above which hung a sign markedINTERNET. A dirty-looking man sat at one, playing video chess; at the other a teenage mother typed furiously while her baby slept in a nearby stroller.
I strode up to the circulation desk, where an old woman was using the telephone. She appeared to be calling patrons who had books on hold. I waited patiently for her to finish her conversation, and when she did, she looked up with an inquiring expression. She appeared energetic for her age — which I estimated to be about seventy — and her gaze was bright and clear.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I’m trying to find out information about a particular local resident, whom I’m told lived here in the 1960s.”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” the old woman said. “Perhaps I know this person.”
“He was a psychologist named Avery Stiles.”
The old woman’s expression didn’t change, but her focus seemed to deepen, as if she had ceased looking at my face, and was now trying to see what lay behind it. “I see,” she said. “I do think I remember such a person. A bit of a radical, maybe? I seem to remember some trouble.”
“I’m told he taught at the college.”
“That may be so. Have you tried an internet search?”
When I said I hadn’t, the librarian suggested I go wait for a computer to free up. Meanwhile, she would do a bit of low-tech sleuthing for me. I thanked her, then walked over to the computer area. A lone wooden chair appeared to have been designated the internet-waiting seat. Beside it stood an easel, and propped up on it, a hand-lettered list of rules. 30 MINUTES PER PERSON, read one. SILENCE MUST BE OBSERVED. NO OBJECTIONABLE INTERNET CONTENT.
I waited several minutes before the teen mother noticed me. She had been typing furiously, working on what appeared to be an e-mail, and peered furtively over her shoulder. Her expression was grim, her complexion wan and blotchy. On her cheek was a brown patch of the sort commonly associated with addiction to certain illegal drugs. I offered up a small smile, which the girl rebuffed, or perhaps didn’t see.
A few minutes later, the girl closed the browser, got up, and grabbed the handles of the stroller. She stalked past me, her lips moving. I took her seat and reopened the browser.
Avery Stiles psychology, I typed into the search box. A list of hits scrolled down the screen. Most of these appeared to be false matches — someone named Avery, someone named Stiles, a mention of psychology somewhere nearby. But a few did indeed seem to be the Avery Stiles I was looking for. These were mostly class lists — archived information about graduates of various schools. Stiles evidently had attended the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his doctorate in 1958. Another entry had him as an assistant professor at SUNY Milan the following year. Still another referred to “the sad story of Dr. Avery Stiles.”
I clicked on this one and brought up the entire article. It was part of a recent paper written by a sociologist, a woman named Lydia Bulgakov, also of the local SUNY. The paper seemed to be a study of academia itself as a social system, and the various ways that students and professors could find themselves marginalized within it. The section that mentioned Avery Stiles was near the end, and was something of a summary; “the sad story of Avery Stiles” was alluded to casually, and without explanation, as if the reader was expected know what story Professor Bulgakov was referring to. There was no other such reference in the paper.
I was about to navigate back to my search results when I sensed someone’s gaze, and I turned to find the chess-playing man leaning over, reading the screen of my computer. He was tall and thin, perhaps sixty years old, and wore enormous square-framed eyeglasses with thick lenses. Mostly bald, he nevertheless had let his gray hair grow quite long, and it hung around his head in a fringe. He appeared quite mad.
“Hello,” I said.
He turned to me, squinting. His mouth hung open, and his eyes, magnified by the glasses, looked wounded, affronted, though not by me.
The man was certainly harmless; nevertheless, I found his gaze to be disturbing, and a strange unease spread over my body. I felt weak and slightly sick to my stomach. I asked the man if I could help him with something, and his only response was to turn abruptly back to his chess game.