The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(17)

“It’s all right, really. I’m halfway done.”

Liesl didn’t answer, but she didn’t return the clipboard either. Refusing to be put off, she took the pencil that Miriam had tucked into the top of the board and crouched down beside the skid of file boxes.

“It’s not always like that, you know,” Miriam said. She didn’t crouch down next to Liesl, not yet, but she had uncrossed her arms and her forehead was less severe. In remembering, Liesl remembered the forehead. When the crosshatch on the forehead faded, she knew she’d made progress. “When there’s only a couple of women.” Miriam stopped and chewed on her upper lip and thought about how to phrase the next part. “Someone told me once that you shouldn’t trust them, the women you work with.”

The statement was so odd that Liesl didn’t question it. But she had disproved it by sitting there on the floor with Miriam and helping to inventory the Italian’s papers in half the time it would have taken Miriam herself.

Miriam never got less odd, but she became a fraction less closed off over the years, thanks in part to Vivek, who insisted on accepting Liesl’s invitations and who brought out a humor in his wife that was often absent when he wasn’t at hand. This Miriam, though, poised in front of a dark computer, was so much like the Miriam in the basement all those years ago, clutching her clipboard and refusing to come to dinner.

“Does Miriam seem all right to you?” Liesl asked Francis.

“Garber still doesn’t know?” Francis turned his back to Miriam. Liesl knit her hands. She wasn’t holding a book, but she wanted to be. She wanted something to grasp, something to hold her steady.

“I don’t think we can wait any longer,” she said.

“Wait for what? Garber? I agree.”

“Wait to involve the police.” Liesl wondered who at the Toronto Police Service to even call. It wasn’t as though she could dial 911 to report a missing book.

“Are you out of your bloody mind?” Francis took her shoulder and sat her down at his own desk. “You’d go to the police before Garber?”

“I’ve been trying to go to Garber, but too much time is passing.”

“The thing has been misplaced.”

“And if it hasn’t?” she asked. She thumbed through the papers on his desk. An expense report from an annual conference in Boston that he should have filed a month ago. They had first met at that very conference years ago, Liesl and Francis had, and they’d reencountered each other there every year, getting acquainted over too many post-lecture whiskeys, ages before Francis had come to work at the library.

“Liesl.”

“Well,” she said. “We have to consider the possibility.”

“You can consider whatever you like. But if you involve the police before the university president? That’ll be the end of you.”

“For doing my job?”

“Your job? Your job is to manage this library. The people and the collection.” Francis’s voice had a slight rise to it that she didn’t want on display for the rest of the staff.

Liesl glanced again at Miriam, then grabbed the expense report off the desk and pulled Francis back toward her office.

“Reporting a theft is part of that responsibility,” she said as they walked.

“You think you’ll be reporting to the police?” He put his palm on her doorjamb and shook his head. “What you’re really doing is reporting to the donors. There’s no way to keep it quiet once you start with police sniffing around.”

“Why are the donors everyone’s primary concern?”

“Don’t be daft.” She looked for humor in his familiar brown eyes but saw only censure.

“I’ll remind you that you’re speaking to a colleague.” She went to her desk, waiting for him to follow. She wanted to be out of the hallway, away from other ears. “Not a friend from the pub.”

“Apologies.”

“Obviously I understand the importance of the donors,” Liesl said. “But not at the expense of everything else.”

“The donors enable everything else. I’m begging you not to go ahead with this.”

“What if I tell Garber and he asks why I haven’t gone to the police yet?”

“That won’t happen,” Francis said. “It’s all a moot point anyway because we’ll find the volumes before it comes to it.”

“Because we’ve had such good luck up until this point?” She threw the expense report on her desk, onto a pile of other things that needed her overstretched attention.

“It’ll start now,” Francis said. The anxiety of the day had him running his hands over his slicked-back hair so often that he’d loosened whatever pomade kept it in place and it was beginning to flop boyishly onto his face.

“You lose half a million dollars, you go to the police. How is this even a question?”

“Liesl,” Francis said, sitting in one of the chairs in front of her desk. “You have to listen to me. You know I’m on your side here. Just wait to talk to Garber.”

“Why does it matter to you so much?”

Her instinct was to go over and smooth the hair back out of his face, but of course she was trying to emulate Christopher, and Christopher would never do such a thing.