The atmosphere of the place was oppressive and vaguely threatening, despite the sunlight streaming through the windows. The heavy air stank from the damp ash and charred logs in the fireplace. The odour of smoke clung to the window curtains. Against my will, I imagined the professor sprawled before the hearth, dying as the rug smouldered around him. Were his sudden attack and the damage to the library the causes of the uneasiness that seeped into me like cold water? Why was I weighed down by the impression that the room didn’t want me there?
Unconsciously, I shrank back. Then I swallowed, took a deep breath, and reminded myself that I was there for a reason. I had work to do.
I took a slow tour of the room, moving instinctively away from the fireplace and toward the windows on the south side. To the right of the door was an escritoire with an ancient, clunky-looking black Underwood typewriter on top, along with a small brass lamp and an old-fashioned straight pen and inkwell. A chair was tucked under the desk, and a low filing cabinet stood to one side. There was no computer or printer, not even a telephone.
Trestle tables had been placed along the south and east walls, leaving room to walk between them and the bookshelves. Set into the northeast corner, where most of the displaced books lay scattered on the floor around a square oak table lying on its side, was an alcove with a small cupboard built into the shelves.
I was anxious to get out of there, but I forced myself to calm down and think. I returned to the fireplace and sat in the upright club chair. Mrs. Stoppini had described two jobs-inventory and repair-as part of the deal. The first would be mostly a catalogue of the books in the room-the contents of the escritoire and cupboard shouldn’t take more than a day. I counted the volumes on one shelf, then multiplied by the number of shelves, which, not including the alcove, were pretty much the same length throughout the room. Well over four thousand books-a huge, time- consuming, and phenomenally boring job. But possibly simple, depending on how much detail Mrs. Stoppini wanted catalogued. A list of titles, or titles with authors’ names, was easiest because these were printed on the books’ spines. I wouldn’t have to take the books down from the shelves.
But if Mrs. Stoppini required copyright date, publisher, and edition-the kind of information Dad noted carefully whenever he found an old volume that might be worth something-then every single book would have to be examined. A forever job. I’d be as old as Mrs. Stoppini, and probably just as eccentric, before I finished. I made a mental note to find out exactly what she needed before I committed myself. It seemed strange that an academic wouldn’t keep a catalogue of his own books, though. Maybe I’d find one somewhere and knock off one of Mrs. Stoppini’s tasks right away.
Feeling more optimistic, I got up and examined the shelves to the left and right of the mantel, looking for signs of heat damage. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was intruding into something that had nothing to do with me, and that I was being watched. I forced myself to concentrate.
The shelves seemed unharmed, but they’d need to be cleared to make sure. The mantel itself was a fussy, old- fashioned design in thickly varnished oak, finished in red mahogany. A little railing, about four centimetres high, with tiny urn-shaped balusters, skirted the outside edge of the shelf. The panels down each side of the fireplace opening had small decorative shelves also bordered by little dowel fences. The mantel was not only charred from the heat of the fire but also warped beyond hope. So, another question for Mrs. Stoppini: replicate the mantel or replace it with a simpler design?
Conscious of the resentment that seemed to seep from every corner of the silent library, I left the room without looking back.
UNLIKE RAPHAELLA, I had always been a two-brained personality. I had a sort of divided and contradictory way of looking at the world. One part of me was scientific and logical, with a love of gadgets and gizmos. The other I didn’t know how to describe-spiritual? intuitive? Raphaella called the first one “techno-mode,” and until getting to know her I saw things from that perspective most of the time. She brought out the other side of me, the part that realized some of the best things about my life, like love, exhilaration, friendship, couldn’t be measured or explained and weren’t always predictable. Both of us had learned from experience that spirits and what we called “presences”-the remains of minds or souls who came before us-existed all around us, and that Raphaella had been born with a gift that allowed her to sense them much more deeply than I could. I wasn’t New Age, or whatever it was called. I wasn’t about to change my name to Prairie Sunburst or something. But the threatening undercurrent in the dead professor’s library was as strong-and as real-as the chaos of scattered books and the stink of smoke, and I knew there was no way I could ignore it.
Three
I
“HOUSEKEEPER
“Yup. Her very words.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm indeed, as Mrs. Stoppini would put it.”
“Of course, companion could mean a number of things,” Raphaella mused.
“My theory is that they lived common-law because one of them was legally tied to someone else.”
“But why describe yourself as a housekeeper if you’re partners?”
“Who knows?”
As I set up the rice steamer, chopped vegetables, and arranged spices at the counter in our kitchen, I filled Raphaella in on the offer Mrs. Stoppini had made me earlier that day. Raphaella was sitting at the table with a cup of green tea, watching me work.
I crushed a green and a red chili, a couple of cloves of garlic, some black peppercorns, and a bit of shredded ginger, and put them in a small bowl. In another dish I piled the vegetables-snow peas, whole baby corn, diced red bell pepper, and chopped spring onion. Rice noodles were soaking in a bath of warm water beside a platter of raw shrimp, shelled and de-veined. I hauled a big iron wok out of the cupboard beside the sink and set it on the stove.
“Are you going to accept?” Raphaella asked.
A polished copper ankh hung from her neck on a leather thong. As usual-and, I sometimes thought, only to tempt me-she wore her hair long, caught at the back of her neck with a sterling silver brooch. She was wearing black denims, leather sandals, and a canary yellow T-shirt depicting a street sign in crimson across the curvy front.
WITCHES’ PARKING ONLY ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOAD
The lame T-shirt joke reminded me of our high school days, when Raphaella’s transfer from Park Street Collegiate to my school came with a bundle of unflattering rumours-the tastiest one being that she was a witch. Little did the rumourmongers know, I thought.
“That’s what I need to discuss with you,” I replied, leaning against the counter. “I told her I wanted to think about it, even though I was tempted to snatch the opportunity on the spot.”
“Yeah, it’s a bit… surprising,” Raphaella commented. “Almost too good to be true. You wonder, What’s the catch?”
“Marco warned me there’d be one, but I’d like to accept anyway.”
“But?”
“Well, it all
Mrs. Stoppini had replied to my two questions very clearly. Yes, the new mantel should be an exact copy of the old one, and yes, some of the books required full notification, but not the majority.
“The woodworking will take time,” I continued. “I can replicate the mantel and refinish the floor in front of the hearth. There may be damage to the bookcases that I didn’t notice. But cataloguing all those books… I’ll never get
