be installed in a day or so.
Meanwhile, I hung sheets over the library shelves, rolled up the rugs, and threw dropcloths over the furniture. I took down the ruined mantel and gingerly carried the pieces out to the shop. Then I power-sanded the burned patches on the library floor. The damage hadn’t gone deep, so the sanding took only a couple of hours. It left slight indentations, but not enough to notice, especially if Mrs. Stoppini covered the area in front of the hearth with a new rug.
I spent some time in the paint-and-wallpaper store on Colborne Street discussing the available colours of wood stains with Rachel Pierce, an old high school friend, and comparing colour samples with the digital photo I had taken of the library floor. I left with paint for the wall above the fireplace, half a dozen small tins of stain, a can of urethane, and a few brushes. I figured I would mix the stain right in the library to get the colour match perfect.
When the floor and wall were done and dry, Mrs. Stoppini inspected the job from the hallway outside the library door and pronounced my work “most satisfactory.” I concluded that she was pleased, and that those two words were the highest praise I was going to get.
Because soft surfaces absorb smoke much more than wood or leather, the curtains and rugs stank of stale carbon and ash. No one else was permitted in the library except me and Raphaella, so with the work on the floor done, Mrs. Stoppini had me pull down the drapes, remove the rugs, and haul everything to the front door, where a company she had engaged would pick it all up and take it away to be cleaned. I then washed the windows and set about dusting the bookshelves.
All this going to and fro, into and out of the library-careful to follow Mrs. Stoppini’s strict instructions and close the doors firmly each time I entered or left-didn’t alter my reaction to a room that should have felt homey and inviting. After all, there were the books, the worn, comfortable chairs, the warmth of natural wood and of wool rugs-all bathed by the light streaming in through the big windows. What more was needed to help me relax?
But each time I drew open the double doors and stepped into that silent room I felt something, like the change in air pressure that comes immediately before a storm. Or like a background hum, as if the room was faintly breathing.
I assured myself it was all in my head. But then I had told myself the very same thing in the past, when I had been stranded in a pioneer church during a blizzard and haunted by the frantic, ghostly voices of some men on their way to a murder.
I put much of my uneasiness down to the professor’s awful death. At the same time, I had a niggling feeling there was more to it than that. Did all this explain the eccentric behaviour of the crow-like Mrs. Stoppini? She felt the library’s strangeness, too. I was certain she did. That was why she refused to enter the room. It was more than grief that I saw in her eyes. It was fear.
II
I FOUND MOM at her desk in her study the next morning, her hair still wet from the shower. She took a run most mornings, summer or winter, before she began her day, and put in a couple of hours’ work before lunch. The sun was bright in the window behind her, highlighting the red and pink petunias in the window box.
Except for the tiny crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, Mom looked young for her age. She was slender and small-boned, easily taken for a frail person-until the fierce energy in her eyes hinted at her iron will. Her determination was one of the ingredients that made her a national-class journalist-and sometimes got her into trouble. Her face glowed with the brightest intelligence of anyone I knew, except Raphaella. Her eyes sparkled with wit and creativeness, and if you paid attention they told you a lot about what she was thinking.
And once in a while, just for a second, they’d lose their focus. At those times I knew she was flashing back to the day about a year before when she had been on assignment in East Timor, reporting on the brutal events of a dirty war in which one side employed so-called militias-gangs of rapists and murderers who used religion as a battering ram. Mom was abducted by a gang of young Islamist men with guns and medieval ideas about women who didn’t “know their place.” Enraged by a female who had the nerve to be a reporter, they had thrown her into the back of a truck, beaten her, and threatened her with death for hours before dumping her in the dust by the side of a road. She had come home cut and bruised and in a kind of otherworldly shock that kept her numb for weeks.
This morning, she was clicking away on the computer keyboard. I didn’t ask what she was working on. She wouldn’t tell me until it was almost complete, but it would be either an article for a print or online magazine or an entry on her blog.
She looked up.
“Off to work?” she asked.
I nodded, then said, “Have you ever heard of a Professor Corbizzi? Lived near here?”
Mom was also a magician when it came to research. “Lived? Past tense? Doesn’t ring a bell. A professor, you say?”
I nodded again. Her fingers blurred over the keyboard.
“Eduardo Corbizzi?”
“I don’t know his first name.”
“There’s someone here. Wrote a few books. Died recently. It just says he lived somewhere near Orillia.”
“Must be him. There can’t be more than one professor in the area with an unusual name like that. What are the books about?”
“The Italian Renaissance, all out of print. Wait a minute. That’s where your new shop is-that estate up the lake.”
“Right.”
“It’s his library you’re working on. Might be interesting.”
“It already is,” I replied. “Anyway, see you later.”
“ ’Kay,” she replied, her hands already in motion, her eyes on the screen.
III
IT WAS A SULTRY MORNING, the heavy air already sweltering when I got to the Corbizzi gate and activated the remote I kept clipped to the inside of the fairing on my motorcycle. I drove up the lane, grateful for the cool shade of the woods, and parked under the birches by the workshop.
I saw Mrs. Stoppini’s mannequin-like shape in the kitchen window as she worked at the sink, probably washing her breakfast dishes. I waved, but she didn’t seem to notice. I let myself in the side door of the shop and hung my helmet and leather jacket on a hook by the door. Then I flipped on the overhead fans, wound the windows open, and put on my apron, mentally rehearsing my plans for the day.
I clamped one of the new mantel’s side panels into the bench vise and began to plane the edges. As usual, I got lost in the work, and when my cell rang I was surprised to hear Mrs. Stoppini announce, without so much as a hello, “I shall be serving a light lunch on the patio in thirty-five minutes.”
Even under the patio umbrella the air was sticky and oppressive. The lake gave off a brassy glare under the relentless sun, and the flowers in Mrs. Stoppini’s gardens drooped as if they had given up the fight hours ago. For the first time I noticed that there was no dock on the shore, which probably meant that the late professor was not a boater. It also meant that no one could conveniently visit the estate from the water.
Mrs. Stoppini had prepared panini-Italian sandwich rolls-of prosciutto, cheese, and lettuce and arranged them on a platter beside a bowl of olives. When we had made our deal and signed our contract, she hadn’t said anything about providing tea and coffee and lunch. But I wasn’t going to bring it up.
“I would customarily offer a good Chianti at lunch,” she said, looking cool despite her long-sleeved black housedress, “but as you are using machinery I thought mineral water might be best.”
“Good thinking,” I said, helping myself to a sandwich.
