What could she want?
In the living room, whiskey in hand, I pondered the question. Working it out, I realized it had been five years since we'd last met. That had been in France, just around the time I'd left television. I'd been fairly hard up? somehow she'd known? and she'd offered me the use of her place near Sancerre while I finished my first book. This was typical of our contacts over the years. You couldn't say that we were now "just friends," for the original relationship had been too complicated and intense, and its ending too mysterious, to permit anything so neutral. Yet she did keep in touch, almost protectively perhaps she felt a shade guilty. I wondered, in fact, if that wasn't all she now wanted, just a word to know how I was keeping.
Except the telegram had said "urgent"? not a word you'd normally associate with her. When I'd first met her, in New York, she was studying the cello at Juilliard and one of her instructors had complained that she had a "lazy bow": which, in certain moods, was just what she was like, a soft note lazily drifting through a summer's afternoon. Since her father had money, she'd never worked, and so far as I knew she still lived alone? if she'd turned me down, I at least had the comfort of knowing she'd never accepted another. Maybe, because of that, she'd grown a trifle eccentric over the years, but she'd always had the calm, cool confidence of the rich and wasn't easily flustered. There was nothing "urgent" in her life whatsoever?in fact, the only time I'd seen her truly afraid was the one night when she'd tried to tell me why she'd decided not to go through with our engagement? but, almost twenty years later, that could hardly be the cause of her anxiety. What the hell. I put down the bourbon and picked up the phone.
She answered on the first ring as though she'd been sitting there waiting. And she was obviously very upset.
"Robert? Robert, thank God it's you."
"I'm sorry. I only got back this minute. Western Union just called."
"I've been phoning you? I phoned every day last week. I sent another telegram Wednesday?"
"I was in New York. What's the matter?"
She took a breath. "I'm sorry. I'm all right. It's my father. He's disappeared? I know it sounds insane, but he's vanished. He just went off no one's seen him."
I'd never met her father, but I knew he was important to her. In fact, I'd sometimes suspected that her refusing me had some connection with him, for her change of mind had taken place after she'd flown up to Toronto to see him to tell him the happy news, as I'd thought at the time.
"When did this happen?"
"Ten days ago. A week ago Saturday."
"You've told the police?"
"Yes. They? they were worried he might have been kidnapped, but there hasn't been a ransom note and now they say he's just gone off on his own and will turn up when he feels like it."
"Well? they're probably right. It's upsetting?"
"No. They're not right. He'd never go off without telling me." Her voice had exploded with anger the intensity of it was startling but then she caught herself and added, "Robert, I'm sorry to trouble you with this?"
"No, no. Of course not."
"Maybe I shouldn't have called."
"Of course you should have called. I'm just trying to think. What can I do?"
She hesitated. "There's one thing. I'm afraid. I'm afraid he's killed himself. I know all the reasons why you'll say he hasn't the police have already given them to me but I'm still afraid?"
Suicide. On this day, of all days, it wasn't a question I could easily dismiss. "Why do you think that?"
"I'd rather not say. Not on the phone."
"But you do have a reason? Something specific?"
"Yes."
"Have you told the police about it?"
"They don't think it means anything. That's why I called you. I need someone who can find things out for me. Someone who knows how to ask questions?"
"May, I'm not a policeman. I want?"
"But you're a journalist, Robert. You can get things out of bureaucrats."
I paused. Once upon a time I had been a journalist, but I'm not any longer. And I hate getting things out of bureaucrats. "What sort of things?"
"It's personal. I'd rather not say. Not till you get here."
"So you want me to come to Toronto?"
"Yes. I know you must be busy? but it won't take very long. I'm sure it won't take very long."
She was right; I was busy. The past two weeks had been a holiday, more or less, and I was anxious to get back to work. She said, "And of course I'll pay your way?"
"Don't be silly." I thought for a moment longer, but there really wasn't much choice. She was clearly upset, and even if I couldn't help her and I was certain I couldn't. I could at least hold her hand till her father showed up. "You're sure you can't tell me anything more?"
I heard her sigh. "You know I'm adopted?"
"Yes. I remember."
Remember: I could sense her falter as I said the word, as if she was uncertain about how much she could rely on the past we hadn't quite shared. But then she went on, "It has something to do with that. That's what I'd want you to find out about."
"All right."
"You'll come?"
"Of course. I can probably be there tomorrow."
A breath, all relief, fluttered down the line. "Thank you, Robert. Bless you. I'll meet you at the airport."
"No, no. That'll only get complicated. Just give me your address and I'll try to make it by early afternoon. And you try to relax."
So she told me where she lived, we said goodbye and hung up? and right away I knew that something was wrong.
It was an odd sensation. Strong. Definite. And yet unaccountable. For a moment, I thought it was just the call itself?a strange summons, under strange circumstances: fears about the suicide of a father on precisely this day. And given our past connection, any conversation was bound to be awkward.
But such feelings could hardly be the cause of the intense unease that now swept across me. May's request, by any standards, had been unusual, and if I'd had the faintest idea of where it was going to take me, I would have felt foreboding. But in fact that wasn't at all what I felt. It was a more particular sensation as if I was being watched, as if someone else was with me in the house? and then thinking this. I knew what it was.
On the phone, May had said she'd sent me two telegrams: the one I'd received today, but another last Wednesday when I'd been in New York. It hadn't been in my mail, I was certain, and now I checked again to be sure. It wasn't. Carefully, I played my arrival back through my mind. As I'd come in, I'd had a bag of groceries in each hand. To work the lock, I'd balanced one on my knee. And then I'd kicked the door shut behind me and gone straight through to the kitchen. From there the sequence was perfectly clear I'd carried my coffee into the living room, tidied up for a moment, and slumped down on the sofa. And that's when I'd discovered my mail: a great pile, two weeks' worth, scattered all over the coffee table? instead of lying in the hall, under the mail slot, where it ought to have been.
3
My father's grave? May's call? the little mystery of my mail? By the next morning, these seemed merely a coincidence, hardly worth troubling about. Besides, I was fully occupied with the mechanics of my departure, for Charlottesville isn't the easiest town to get out of. There's a local airport, but in the end it was simpler to drive to Washington, leave my car with a friend, and fly out of Dulles. This made me much later than I'd intended: it was after three as the 727 slid down from the bright fall sky and deposited me at Toronto International.
Like most Americans, I don't know Canada at all it's where the winter comes from and I hadn't been there in years, so the city struck me as a great deal bigger, richer, and noisier than I remembered. But I was still in North America; it was built out of concrete and neon, hype and nerve. On the radio, the helicopter "traffic eye" described the traffic jam we were caught in, from the front seat the cabbie explained why he preferred Orlando to St. Petersburg for his winter vacation, and beside me discarded and already starting to fade the Toronto Sun's "sunshine girl" burst innocently forth from her bikini. Looking out the window, I watched the cars, people, and money roll by.