The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(12)

“You saw it after it arrived?” Her voice was flat as she said it.

“Christopher is a brilliant man. He raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the thing. You couldn’t have handled the shipping?”

She ignored the question, pushed the implication that she was good for FedEx paperwork and little else into storage, to be examined later.

“I need to know,” she said, “what happened after it arrived here.”

“We all have our responsibilities here. You failed at yours,” Max said.

“There are hundreds of thousands of volumes here,” Francis said. “If it was shelved in error somehow, the volumes separated, mixed in with the general collection…”

“Then we will find it, in time,” Liesl said.

“At what cost to our reputation?” Max asked, so agitated that he ran the risk of a wrinkle in his button-down.

The room fell back into silence. Liesl thought of the volumes that had been scattered around Christopher’s office, thought if the Plantin volumes could have been among them, but she didn’t say anything. From the other side of the door she could hear the rumble of book trucks, the grind of the pencil sharpener, bursts of footsteps as they crossed from carpet to tile. She didn’t have instructions or actions or a way forward. She’d hoped one of them might have volunteered an idea, might have been good for more than panic. But no. She thanked them and ended the meeting with instructions to prepare for the next day’s reception for new university faculty and to keep their eyes peeled for the Plantin. Dan and his combat boots were waiting for Liesl at the door to the reading room.

“You had a call,” he said.

“You could have just left it at my desk.” He followed her as she walked to her office.

“It was a Rhonda Washington.” Dan said. “She said she called your office line first before calling the main line.” Liesl nodded, her face neutral. She took the message slip from Dan. “She said it was important to speak with you and wanted to make sure you got the message. Everything all right at the landowner’s meeting?”

“Everything’s great.”

“Well I’m back to the fields then.”

***

They didn’t find the Plantin that first day. Eventually Liesl had to go home. She had emailed President Garber early in the day, asking him to call her. Her muscles were exhausted from bracing for the impact of his reply all day. He never called. When she got home, she threw her purse on the floor by the front door, inadvertently hitting a stack of canvases with it. She stood, sweating from the walk in the mid-September heat that didn’t show any sign of waning, not moving to see if she had done any damage.

“The woman warrior,” John called from the kitchen. He sounded good. She should have been relieved. “Get you a drink?”

“Mind if we eat out tonight?” She was all of a sudden feeling claustrophobic just being indoors. “You haven’t cooked, have you?”

“Nothing that won’t keep,” he said. His beard, his blue eyes, and all the rest of him appeared in the hallway to greet her.

“Noodles then?” she said.

“It’s a bit hot for noodles, but if that’s what you want.” If he noticed her purse resting against his canvases, he didn’t flinch.

“It’s what I want,” she said.

“You all right? You seem tense. Even for someone with a tense new job,” John said, jogging to catch up with her after he’d paused to lock their front door.

“Fine. Fine, fine,” Liesl said.

“No one fine has ever answered the question that way,” he said as they walked. “You don’t have to tell me, but you know I have to ask.”

“We’ve had an incident,” said Liesl. “I’m a bit over my head.”

Their favorite noodle shop was on the corner of their street. They hadn’t closed their patio yet for the season, so Liesl sat at an outdoor table.

“The great outdoors,” John said. “These backless stools are for a younger man.” He might have been asking for a move to a seat better suited to his large and aging frame, but Liesl pretended not to notice, to read it as an observation and not an ask so she could mark a win in her column for the day.

“We’ve lost the Plantin Bible.”

“The book that Christopher was fundraising for while you were away? What do you mean you lost it? It’s hardly a set of house keys, is it?”

“Why does everyone immediately go to that metaphor? It’s a multivolume set, not just a book.”

“Was it stolen then? Imagine walking around with half a million dollars in your backpack. Good God, Liesl, I’m so sorry.”

The idea of theft had hardly crossed her mind, and now that it had, she didn’t like it in there. She pulled a strand of gray hair toward her lips and chewed on it while she waited for John to settle on his stool.

“No,” she said, pushing the hair away from her mouth. “It wasn’t stolen. We’ve misplaced it somehow.”

“Come on, my girl. Imagine misplacing half a million dollars.” He signaled to the server.

“Christopher didn’t put it in the safe, and I accidentally had it shelved in an effort to tidy up. I think.”

“Have you not called the police then?”