“Inside. Individual letters. Whole words have been cut out of the magazines. Perhaps it’s some game Mrs. Loveson plays. You know, preschool activity, or something. Some kind of therapy. Do you think so? If it’s some kind of therapy for her, I shouldn’t throw these magazines away.”
“My, my,” Flynn said.
“I can’t get Mrs. Loveson to say anything about them. This morning she keeps going on about how to cook a goose.”
“Absolutely, Grover, do not throw those magazines away. Not on your life. Don’t even touch them or rearrange their order.”
“So I’m right. This is some kind of therapy for her?”
“Have you heard from Mrs. McElroy yet?”
“No.”
“Keep those magazines,” Flynn said. “I want to see them.”
Flynn sat at his desk and thought a moment.
He looked at Cocky. “I’m glad to see you have put your insignias back on your uniform.”
“I’m fully reinstated.”
“Yes, you are. I’m rather hoping you’ll accompany me to the Policepersons’ Ball this evening.”
“I hope not,” said Cocky. “I don’t dance as well as I used to, you know.”
“Who does? Tonight, I’ll need you as a witness while I may be committing a crime. I expect to break and enter.”
“Okay.”
“In fact, you can wait in the car, while I stop in on the ball, if you’d prefer. It’s a little later on in the evening that I’ll need you.”
“Establishing an alibi for yourself, are you?”
“That may be, depending on how things work out. More to the point, I hope to establish the whereabouts of someone else, during my commission of the crime.”
Flynn put on his overcoat near his office door. “In the meantime, please see if you can find for me a woman named Enid McElroy. Mrs. McElroy. She’s between forty-five and fifty years old, I should guess. She works as housekeeper, baby-sitter for Professor and Mrs. Loveson. And I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you about her.”
“Will do.”
“I’ll call you from the hospital.”
“Thank you for calling the Boston Police Department,” Cocky said into the phone. “How may we help you this fine day?”
At the pay phone just off the lobby of Mt. Auburn Hospital, Flynn laughed.
“I knew it was you,” Cocky said.
“Anything on Enid McElroy?”
“Yes. The only Enid McElroy within a hundred miles of Boston is an eleven-year-old girl in Concord, New Hampshire. She has leukemia.”
“That’s the only one?”
“The only one I can find.”
“No driver’s license, car registration, credit cards, bank accounts, social security, telephone?”
“None of the above.”
“I know our Enid M. drives a car.”
“Not one registered to her in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, or Rhode Island. And not with a driver’s license granted by any of those states.”
“How very interesting.”
“I would say your Mrs. McElroy doesn’t exist, Frank.”
“Indications are very strong, old man, that indeed she does not. Many thanks.”
“Anytime you want me not to find someone, Inspector, don’t hesitate to call.”
“I’m glad to see you looking so much better this morning.” Flynn drew a chair up to Loveson’s bedside. “Richard stayed overnight with Mrs. Loveson.”
“I know. He called me last night, so I shouldn’t worry.”
“How do you actually feel?”
Loveson stared at the blank television screen. “All I can see in my mind’s eye is my office torn apart. All those books and manuscripts destroyed. I wouldn’t have slept a wink last night, if they hadn’t given me pills.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Without all those papers, I just can’t go on.”
“You’re still Dr. Louis Loveson.”
“Am I? Is a plumber still a plumber without his wrench? I’ve been forced into retirement. Finally.”
“I need to talk to you.” Flynn watched Loveson’s face. “You have a daughter.”
Loveson said nothing.
“Let me see if I have this right. When she was a little girl you and Mrs. Loveson took your daughter on one of your research trips, to Alexandria, Egypt. One day you took your daughter with you when you left the hotel. You left your wife at the hotel. In the street, you were attacked by men. They took your daughter from you. Wrested her from you, in fact. They threw you against a wall. While you were lying in the road, they kicked you, possibly stomped on your head. They fractured your skull.”
Loveson asked, “How do you know this?”
“Mrs. Loveson told me.”
“How is that possible?”
Flynn said, “I listen.”
Then Flynn asked, “What was your daughter’s name?”
“Clara. She was twelve years old.”
“You never saw her again?”
“I assumed she was forced into some form of slavery. I did the best I could. I worked, or tried to work, through the American Embassy with the Egyptian police, even Interpol. I did the best I could, considering I was immobile with a fractured skull. In all the time I was in the hospital, the authorities came up with exactly nothing.”
“And Mrs. Loveson?”
“Couldn’t bear it, of course. The event deranged her. After a few days, the people from the embassy told me they had to hospitalize her, too. She wasn’t eating, sleeping, taking care of herself in any way, even her bodily functions. She had had a complete mental breakdown. By the time I was ready to be released from the hospital, the only thing I could do was arrange to bring Callie back to New York by ship. She’s been in and out of mental hospitals ever since. All her memories date from before that incident, before Clara was taken from us.” Loveson sipped water through a glass straw. “Callie denies we ever had a daughter, that there ever was a Clara. In a way, she’s been happier than I have been, I suppose. All these years I have had to work hard to distract myself from thoughts, horrid thoughts, about the life Clara must be living. I had my work, of course.”
“I’m so sorry.” Flynn gave Loveson time to collect himself as much as possible. “Isn’t it amazing the quiet tragedies we all seem to suffer? It’s a wonder we all don’t try to be nicer to each other.”
“Seven years later, when Callie was again hospitalized, when I had a sabbatical, I returned to Egypt to see if I could find Clara, find out anything about what happened to her. I spent almost a year there. I searched throughout the whole Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran . . . I discovered nothing. She had been a pretty little thing. You may be surprised to know there were many such girls. And boys. Kidnapped from Europe, somewhere . . . I could do nothing for them.”
“In your office, I found all those notes threatening you.”
“I had them in a folder, in my locked filing cabinet.”
“Why did you deny receiving them?”
“I guess I’m a little crazy, too.” Loveson smoothed the light blanket on either side of him. “The notes were so childish. Cutouts from magazines. I knew they weren’t from my colleagues. For one thing, they were not literate. Whoever was sending them to me was a person whose personal development had been arrested.”
“Yes.”
“Crazy of me, all these decades later. Some hopes never die.” Loveson’s eyes were wet. “I had the crazy notion they somehow might have been from Clara . . .”
Flynn said, “I think they were.”
Loveson looked sharply at him.
“Tell me, how did you happen to hire Mrs. McElroy?”
“We needed someone. I was able to bring Callie home from the hospital again about three months ago. Perhaps I should leave her in the hospital permanently. I just like to have her with me, when it is possible. I, too, like to think of our lives before . . . the incident. Mrs. McElroy just showed up at the door, the first day we were home. A Saturday. Offered to work for us. What did you say about those notes possibly being from Clara?”
“You did not ask Mrs. McElroy for references?”
“She said the people at the hospital suggested she come work for us.”
“You believed her.”
“How otherwise would she have known about us? That we needed her.”
“Professor Loveson, there is no Mrs. Enid McElroy.”
Loveson’s look was incredulous. “You mean I dreamed her? I’m not that crazy.”
“We can find no record of her existence.”
“You mean . . .”
Flynn waited without saying a word.
After a long time staring at the wall, Loveson said, “I’ve always thought how angry Clara must be at me, for not having been able to protect her. I was never very big. Never athletic. Those hoodlums left me unconscious on the road. I only became conscious in the hospital. How angry she must be that I was never able to find her. She wouldn’t even know that I looked.” After another long moment, Loveson looked at Flynn. “You think Mrs. McElroy is Clara, don’t you?”
“She drives a small blue car, illegally, I guess. The magazines at your apartment have words and letters cut out of them. I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to match them with the notes you received. Surely, your wife wasn’t cutting out those notes and sending them to you.”
“Surely not.”
“The day before yesterday, while Gro—Richard was with you, you could not find your keys after Mrs. McElroy left. You didn’t find them on your bureau, where you usually left them, until after Mrs. McElroy returned, the next morning.”
Loveson said, “She used my keys to wreck my office and everything in it.”
“Except the notes she herself sent you.”
“What a horrible woman.”
“What other motive could Mrs. McElroy have, if she is not Clara?”
“The poor, poor woman. She came to wreak her revenge on me. After the horrible life she must have led. Who can blame her?”
“She never gave you a chance to explain.”
“Oh, explanations would have done no good. She still thinks with the mind of a child. Her daddy couldn’t protect her. Her daddy didn’t find her, rescue her from all that terrible experience which was her growing up, her life. I can’t blame her.”
“She surely wasn’t there to clean your apartment. Or cook. Or take very good care of Mrs. Loveson.”
“She was there to destroy me. Where is she now? Did she show up this morning?”
“No. I don’t think she will. I think she’s gone. I strongly doubt we’ll see her again. Or that she will continue to be a threat to you. I think she’s done what she came to do. Besides all that, I think she thinks I am wise to her. When I asked her yesterday afternoon about her having been in Egypt, she flew out the door like a rat who found a snake in his nest.”
“Are you looking for her?”
“Not yet.”
“Inspector Flynn, may I ask you not to look for Mrs. McElroy?”
“I don’t know with what we could charge her, anyway. We can’t prove she tried to hit you with a car. Other people, I’m sure, janitors must have a key to your office. It wouldn’t be hard to violate that lock. Sending you childish, threatening notes . . .”
“I never thought I’d ask this: Inspector Flynn, please do not look for Clara.”
“All right.”
“Obviously it’s too late. There’s nothing Callie and I can do for her now. She found us. Expressed her hatred for me as well as she could. Tried to destroy me. Perhaps believes she did. Let that be the end of it.”
“As you wish.”
After standing, Flynn lifted his light chair back against the wall. “Regarding that nonsense on the Net earlier this week—and, I might add, those supposedly witty, insulting telephone calls you’ve been getting—I’m quite sure all that will stop, too.”
“Don Carver was the ringleader?”
“Why do you suspect Carver?”
“He doesn’t see the real need for ideas. He thinks they’re just playthings, one no better than another. He’ll learn.”
“Yes,” Flynn agreed. “He’ll learn.”
NINETEEN
After parking the car, Flynn noticed double parked in the street outside the Old Records Building on Craigie Lane a large, dark, very clean sedan trying not to look like a limousine.
The car’s driver, having all the appearances of a retired policeman, was trying not to look like a chauffeur.
“Ah,” Flynn said to himself. “Cocky must have ordered in pizza.”
He found Cocky sitting in the chess alcove of his office with the President of Harvard University.
“Inspector Flynn!” The President rose to shake hands. “I’m so glad you arrive before I have to leave.”
“Mr. President.”
“I mentioned wanting to see your office.” Hands on his hips, the President looked at the ancient, scarred wood floors, wood walls, the fireplace, high-beamed ceiling, the great arched window behind Flynn’s desk overlooking Boston Harbor. “It’s much nicer than my personal workroom. Bigger. Has more character.”
“What it has in size it lacks in housekeeping,” Flynn said.
“I had more trouble getting into your office than I did getting into Harvard. My driver had to vouch for me. Having retired policemen as drivers has proven eminently useful. Lieutenant Concannon gave me a cup of herb tea. Sleepy Time, was it?”