Snapping off his light, Felder moved on, into the shadow of the far side of the bow window. Once again he waited, looking around and listening carefully. But there was nothing.
He realized his heart was pounding painfully in his chest. If he didn’t do this now, he’d lose his nerve. Turning resolutely back to the final casement, he slipped the screwdriver into the thin space between the window edge and the frame, then applied gentle pressure. The gap widened with a squeak of protest. Felder stopped, took the lubricating oil from his pocket, applied it to the rusty hinges, tried the screwdriver again. Now the window moved silently. In a moment the gap was large enough for him to insert his fingers. Gently—gently—he pulled the window wide.
He put the oil and screwdriver back into his pocket. All remained still. Summoning his courage, he placed his hands on both sides of the window frame and raised his foot onto the sill, preparing to pull himself in. Then he hesitated. For a moment, he saw himself as if from a distance. It suddenly seemed ridiculous, even preposterous, what he was doing. A thought flashed through his head:
The library was almost as chilly as the night outside. Shielding the flashlight, Felder swept it briefly around the room, taking in the positions of the various pieces of furniture. It wouldn’t do for him to tumble over a chair. The space was decorated similarly to the front parlor: prudish high-backed chairs, a few low tables covered with lace cloths on which were set various pieces of display china and pewter. The room was dusty, as if it had not been used in a long time. The walls on both sides were covered floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, set behind cases of leaded glass.
He glanced around again, memorizing the location of the furnishings. Then, snapping off the light, he walked as quickly and as quietly as he dared across the room to the pocket doors. Here he stopped, placing his ear to the doors and listening intently.
Nothing.
Heart beating still faster, he turned back to face the library. He had no idea where to start. The shelves were stuffed with thousands of books, leather storage boxes, bundles of ancient manuscripts tied in decaying ribbons, and other material. The prospect of spending hours searching, fearing discovery at any moment, was intolerable.
He braced himself with thoughts of Constance. Then, turning to his left, he crept over to where the wall of bookshelves seemed to start, next to the pocket doors. Hooding his flashlight again, he snapped it on, long enough to see a row of tall, leather-bound books staring back at him, their ribbed spines glowing faintly in the light. They were the works of Henry Adams, in four volumes.
He walked a little way down the wall of shelving, then paused and flicked the light on again, briefly. On the shelf in front of him sat maybe half a dozen small wooden boxes of intricate workmanship, beautifully dovetailed and varnished. Paper labels were fixed to each, curling away slightly from the wood as the old glue dried. A note had been handwritten on each box in faded ink:
The Bierstadt correspondence. The goal of the Harvard delegation that had made a futile pilgrimage here. No doubt worth a fortune…
Felder turned off the light and took a quick step back from the shelves. Was that a noise?
He stood, motionless, for a long moment, listening intently. But there was nothing. He turned and glanced toward the pocket doors. There was no light shining beneath them.
Nevertheless, he took a few anxious steps toward the relative safety of the open window.
He paused again to listen for a good sixty seconds before returning his attention to the shelves. He raised his flashlight, again partially covering it with his hand, and briefly directed the shielded beam to the shelves in front of him. A huge, folio-size volume sat on the shelf at eye level, surrounded by smaller sets of books with matching gilt spines. It was Goethe’s
Felder jerked so violently he almost dropped the flashlight. Was he just hearing things in his extreme agitation? Or had that not been a footstep, a tread on the carpeting in the hall outside the library, a tread almost as stealthy as a cat’s?
He glanced nervously toward the pocket doors. Still no light shone beneath them—all was black as pitch. He swallowed, then turned back to the shelving, preparing to take another look.
And then, something—he did not know what, exactly—prompted him to turn around again, move directly to the open window, slip out of it to the ground, and close it silently behind him, thanking God he had thought to bring the oil.
He stood there in the black of night, trembling slightly. As his heart rate subsided, he began to feel sheepish. It was just his imagination playing tricks on him. There had been no noise; there had been no light. If he let himself fall victim to every fit of the jitters, he’d never find that portfolio. He turned back toward the window. He’d let himself back in, get a better sense of the layout of the books…
Abruptly, the pocket doors to the library were thrown back. The violence with which they opened was just as terrible as the silence with which they moved. Felder shrank away from the window in dread. He could see a huge figure standing in the doorway, framed against the faintest of light from the hallway beyond. It was a man, clothed in a strange, shapeless garment. A long, curved wooden club was grasped in one hand, its cruelly carven length terminating in a croquet-ball-size sphere.
Felder stood in the darkness outside the library window, staring through the glass, rooted to the spot with terror. The manservant looked carefully around the room, his bald and dimly shining head moving with the slow deliberation of a great beast, taking in every square inch of the room. And then he closed the pocket doors again, swiftly and silently. The house fell still once again—leaving Felder’s heart pounding furiously in his chest.
Recovering his wits, Felder retreated to the gatehouse as quickly as he dared. But even before the awful tingle of fear had completely faded, he sensed something else—a spark of hope. Because he had just realized something.
Adams. Bierstadt. Goethe. The books in the Wintour library were arranged in alphabetical order.
CONSTANCE GREENE SAT QUITE STILL IN THE PANELED fastness of Room 027, located on the first basement level of the Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Room 027 had once been the site of the hospital’s Water Treatment room, a curative therapy instituted by Bradford Tuke, one of Mount Mercy’s earliest alienists. While the cleats for the manacles had long ago been removed from the walls, the perceptible dip in the carpeting in the room’s center revealed where the large floor drain—now filled with cement—was located.
The room was now normally used for private psychiatric sessions between doctors and low-threat-level inmates. It was comfortably furnished. Still, while the chairs and tables were not bolted to the floor, there was a distinct lack of either sharp or blunt objects. The door was not locked, but a brace of guards was stationed directly outside.
The only other occupant of the room was Special Agent Pendergast. He was pacing slowly back and forth, his step uncertain, his face extremely pale.
Constance watched him for a while, and then her gaze fell to the stacks of police reports, grainy black-and- white stills from security video cameras, forensic analyses, and DNA reports that were neatly arranged on the desk before her. She had read and taken in everything, her mind retaining all the details in their enormous complexity. The information had then been subjected to a meditative practice known as
During the state of
After several minutes, she looked back at Pendergast, still pacing slowly across the floor.
