All the Beautiful Lies(40)
The desk, painted a robin’s-egg blue, was practically child sized compared to the monstrosity in Bill’s office. On top of it was Alice’s laptop computer, closed, and cool to the touch. She had a short stack of mail that hadn’t been opened. Harry riffled through the envelopes, nothing immediately catching his eye. There were credit card applications, what looked like a bill from Macy’s, an alumni letter addressed to William Ackerson from Columbia University.
Harry pulled open the only drawer. He expected it to be as neat and organized as the desk, but inside was a jumbled mess of papers, photographs, a half-filled perfume bottle, a box of thank-you cards. The house made one of its sounds, a wall settling somewhere, and Harry jumped. What would happen if Alice returned home early and found him looking through her things? He cocked his head and listened. The house was quiet again. He told himself that he’d just quickly look through the items in the desk, see if there was a letter from a private investigator, anything that would suggest she had information about his father’s affair.
Harry sat down on the chair, painted the same color as the desk. He carefully slid the drawer all the way out. Most of what he found was paid bills, bank statements, an insurance policy for the station wagon. There were no letters from a private investigator. He did find an expired passport that had been issued when Alice was just nineteen years old. He’d never seen a picture of his stepmother when she’d been young. She was makeup-free, her skin as pale as it was now, but her eyes seemed even larger in her face, her face a little bit rounder. She was beautiful, and Harry wondered what she’d been like as a teenager. It was somehow impossible to imagine her any different than she was now. He stared at the picture for a long time, and she seemed to stare back, telling him nothing.
He flipped through the passport to see where she’d been, and a photograph fell out. It was a picture of a young Alice standing with a man Harry didn’t recognize on a cobblestone street, a stone building behind them with the word Funiculaire in metal letters on its side. Both Alice and the man were wearing long, heavy coats. The photographer had focused more on the building behind them, the rail tracks leading up a steep slope, and less on Alice and the man, both a little blurry. Even so, it was clear that the man was quite a bit older than Alice. His arm was draped possessively over Alice’s slim shoulders. Her father, probably. Harry tried to remember if he knew anything about Alice’s family, but all he could recall was his own father telling him that Alice’s parents were dead, and that she wasn’t close to anyone in her extended family.
Bill hadn’t talked too much about Alice, except for the time he said she reminded him of Maine. For some reason, that description had stuck. Harry heard a noise coming from the front of the house. He quickly returned the passport to where he’d found it, shoved the drawer shut, and went to look. The mailman had pushed the mail through the front door’s slot. Harry picked up an envelope from a bank and a Nordstrom catalogue, and brought them to the kitchen counter. He considered a second cup of coffee but decided he was already jumpy enough. He drank a glass of orange juice instead, flipping through the catalogue, barely seeing the pictures. Then he checked his phone. Nothing from Grace, not that he was expecting something.
He didn’t go back to Alice’s office, going instead to his father’s, and sitting at the desk on the leather chair. He stared at the framed print on the wall, an original signed illustration by Robert E. McGinnis of a girl in a short white dress sitting on top of a roulette table. It had been done for a book cover, Harry knew, but he couldn’t remember which one. Something from the 1960s. Harry swiveled in the chair, looking at all his father’s books, wondering what would become of them now. He began to think about all the words his father had read, all the plots he’d absorbed, and how they were all gone, but then he stopped himself. Instead, he picked through a stack of books on the desk. At the top was one of his father’s moleskin notebooks. He’d always had one going, filling at least two notebooks a year. In a sense, they were his diaries, but instead of filling them with activities and day-to-day recollections, they were filled with lists of books he was trying to acquire, and lists of books he already had. There was also page after page of favorite quotes, plus his current ever-changing lists of top tens. Ten best Signet paperback covers. Ten best standalone Christies. Ten best crime novels published before 1945. Harry had flipped through his father’s notebooks before. There was never anything personal, not even a shopping list. But, in a way, it was as personal as a diary. It mapped his interior world.
Harry flipped to the last entry, which came midway through the notebook. It was a quote, centered on the page:
“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
As was sometimes the case with quotes his father wrote down, it wasn’t attributed to anyone, probably because his father knew who said it, and these books were only for his father. Harry read the words several times, haunted by them. Maybe it was just some line from a song that his father liked, but it also sounded like a premonition of death.
Harry punched the line into his smartphone, and got an instant hit. It was from a song by Bob Dylan called “Not Dark Yet.” He wasn’t surprised. Dylan was his father’s favorite musician—there wasn’t even a distant second, except maybe Frank Sinatra. Bill had spent as much time obsessing over Dylan’s lyrics as he did actually listening to his music. His notebooks were filled with Dylan quotes, and sometimes he’d transcribe entire songs.