The Ghost Manuscript Read online

  Carys watched his face as he examined his young self. The seconds ticked by as she waited for the explosion, but it didn’t come. She reached back into her purse and drew out JJ’s business card and slid that across the table. Plourde’s eyes flickered over to it, but he didn’t pick it up.

  “JJ will be happy to hear that you now believe a donation to a museum is the most discreet way to handle the collection,” she said.

  Plourde opened his mouth again, but only air escaped. She stood up, reached across his desk for the phone, spun it around, and dialed the numbers on JJ’s card. She heard the other end ring twice, and JJ picked up. She handed the phone to Plourde. His body seemed to come to attention, but his eyes were still glazed.

  “Hello, this is…uh…George Plourde from Sothington’s,” he said, looking up at Carys. “I’d like to talk to you about the…uh…the collection.”

  By the time the message was delivered and JJ released from his private-sale contract with Sothington’s, blood was beginning to return to Plourde’s cheeks.

  “You can’t do this,” he said through clenched teeth. “My record was expunged. I went through a program. This isn’t even supposed to be publicly available. Where did you get this?” His voice rose ominously, and he stood up, his fist wrapped around the paper. “Where did you get this?”

  “I have a Magic Rolodex, too,” she said.

  “Ms. Jones, you don’t know who you’re fucking with,” he seethed. The veins on his forehead pulsed.

  “If you tell a soul about Harper’s condition, or try to get me fired, everyone in this company, and your wife, is going to get a copy of that,” she said. “I’m assuming you’ve never told her. She’s Harvard Club, right?”

  Plourde’s cheeks went bright crimson, and he began to pant.

  “Yeah, I thought so,” she said. She stood up and turned to go, then looked back at him. “I’ll finish the Harper appraisal. They’ll still need it for the donation. Don’t assign anything else to me until I’m done. I don’t know how long it will be. I’ll check back into the office a couple of times a week.”

  Carys turned and walked out of his office. As she approached the elevator, she heard Plourde’s phone ringing the distinctive “Rule, Britannia,” which meant his boss in London was calling. He did not pick it up.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Radio blaring, Carys bashed out the drum solo to “Flirtin’ With Disaster” on her steering wheel as she sped down Route 9. Plymouth State College, 1999. Her first rock concert. Molly Hatchet was on a nostalgia tour, but it was all new to Carys. The Williams College rower she was sleeping with had taken her to the show in New Hampshire, and they did shots of tequila in the car in the parking lot. The band went onstage while she was in the bathroom discovering why she’d never drink tequila again. She was on her knees, staring into a toilet full of vomit, when the bass line of this song started pounding through the bathroom walls into her gut. Some sort of fiery energy slid up through her body, and she was instantly sober. She ran out of the bathroom, straight into the beat and the lights and the crowd and the consuming wash of sound. For a moment, everything else melted away. It was one of three times in her life she’d been so vacantly happy. Today was the fourth.

  She drove up the driveway to Adeona too fast, and sent stones spinning as she braked by the front door. When she’d called Annie and told her about her meeting with Plourde—with dramatic flourishes, which she felt she’d earned—Annie laughed so hard, she didn’t make any sound. Just occasionally gasping for air.

  At the front door, Carys gripped the hideous, Plourde-like gargoyle door-knocker by its beard and banged it against its metallic face three times.

  Nicola opened the door.

  “Good morning,” said Carys. She smiled and brushed past her into the foyer.

  “You’re in a fine mood,” said Nicola.

  “Have you spoken to JJ today?” asked Carys.

  “No. Is something wrong?”

  “Quite the contrary. Sothington’s has released him from his private-sale contract. I’d like to talk to him about some candidates for a donation.”

  Nicola grasped her throat with one hand.

  “How…” said Nicola.

  “Not important. It’s done, and we can start making arrangements.”

  Nicola grabbed her and hugged her.

  “Oh, sweet child! You can’t imagine what this means to us…to Mr. Harper,” she said. She held on tight. Carys wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. She finally raised one and patted Nicola on the back.

  Nicola released her grasp.

  “I’m so glad,” she said.

  “I’m glad, too,” said Carys, pulling back from the embrace. “This is the right thing to do for the collection. I’ll still need to appraise it for a donation and for tax purposes. I hope JJ will allow me to work on that.”

  “I’m sure he will,” said Nicola. She turned and moved quickly toward the kitchen.

  Carys unlocked the library door and set to her methodical reckoning of the room’s contents. She’d been back at her work for about half an hour when Nicola came into the library.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Nicola said.

  “No problem,” said Carys, not turning from the desk and her notes. “Come on in.”

  There was a moment of silence behind her. Then Nicola said quietly, “I need to tell you something.”

  Carys turned around to face her. Nicola looked different, more present. She was standing differently; her shoulders were back, and her gaze was straight and strong. She looked taller. It was unnerving.

  “There’s a manuscript here,” said Nicola. “A palimpsest, actually, that isn’t in the catalog.”

  “That’s not a problem. That’s why I’m here. To make sure we catch anything that’s been omitted.”

  “It’s been omitted from the catalog on purpose,” said Nicola. “Mr. Harper left it out. You won’t find it in his catalog, or any catalog.”

  “It’s got to be in a catalog somewhere. How old is it?”

  There was silence. Carys pushed the chair out and turned fully around to face Nicola.

  “Around AD 550,” Nicola said. “It’s been carbon-dated to within thirty years.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Carys. “If there is a palimpsest from AD 550, it’s in a catalog somewhere.”

  “Mr. Harper has made sure that it’s completely off the grid,” said Nicola.

  “Why are you telling me about it, then? How do you even know about it? You’re the house—”

  “The housekeeper?” said Nicola. “You really aren’t very observant are you, my dear? Head stuck in those books too long.”

  Nicola moved toward her and sat on the settee. Carys just stared at her.

  “I work for Mr. Harper. On the library. I’m not his housekeeper. Well, I pretend to be to keep JJ at bay. There are some things he doesn’t need to know.”

  Carys furrowed her brow. Her head started to ache slightly.

  “Your focus, your dedication to these manuscripts, is why we are telling you about this,” said Nicola.

  “We?” she asked.

  “Mr. Harper and I. We needed to be sure we could trust you before we showed the manuscript to you,” said Nicola. “When Mr. Harper was hospitalized, the doctors were convinced it was a permanent condition. No one knew what was wrong with him. After six months, JJ decided to sell Adeona and the books with it. I don’t blame him. This house is too much for him right now. He’s dealing with his father’s illness. John is his last parent, and he’s scared. We both are. And he has no conception of how priceless this collection is. Eventually, John realized there was nothing he could do to stop it, so he told JJ to call Sothington’s to do the appraisal. John knew you would be the one they’d send. We thought we could make a donation, establish a Harper Library at a college somewhere, endow a
fund to maintain it, so we’d still have access to the books. We thought we’d have more time to deal with this. And we would have a chance to see whether you were worthy.”

  Carys felt cold. “Deal with what? Worthy of what?” she asked. Nicola didn’t appear to hear her.

  “We never anticipated Plourde would blackmail JJ into doing a private sale, but as it turned out, that was a fortunate little piece of business, wasn’t it?” said Nicola.

  Carys’s slackened jaw drew a smile from Nicola.

  “Yes, JJ told me about the blackmail,” said Nicola. “I don’t know how you got your boss to back off. But now we know this collection is as precious to you as it is to us.”

  “Nicola, what are you talking about?”

  “It might be best if you heard about the palimpsest directly from Mr. Harper,” said Nicola.

  Carys’s throat closed up. She coughed to regain her voice.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Surely he’s too ill for visitors if JJ was planning on selling the house and everything in it.”

  “He’s not ill, Carys,” said Nicola. “He’s had some sort of psychotic break. But I suspect you already knew that. Didn’t you?”

  Carys didn’t speak.

  “Of course you did,” said Nicola. “He’s at Waggoner, under the name of James Weldon, in the Webster House. I’ll call them and tell them to put you on the visitor list.”

  “I…can’t,” mumbled Carys.

  “This manuscript has been off the grid since the sixth century,” said Nicola. “Isn’t it worth just a few minutes of your time to find out why?”

  Hospitals were Carys’s vision of hell. She’d spent too much time in them as a teenager. Three weeks. Solid. She ate, did her homework, and slept in the chair next to her comatose mother watching her suicide attempt succeed in slow motion. The smell of antiseptic, the beeping, the dripping liquids, the needles, the bandaged wrists seeping dots of blood, the yelps from down the hall, the way her mother’s hands felt cold all the time, the aftertaste of chemicals when Carys kissed her cheek.

  “I really can’t,” she whispered.

  “But you can. Haven’t you always wanted to meet the man who amassed this?” asked Nicola, gazing up at the bookshelves above them.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  The perfectly manicured, rolling green lawns of Waggoner Psychiatric Hospital looked like a college campus, complete with a soundtrack of murmuring leaves. Groups of buttercups huddled here and there across the lawn like wandering patients. It was beautiful—but still a loony bin.

  Carys parked in front of the Webster House, a square, brick, two-story Federalist-style building with a white wooden porch and white trim. This was where the very wealthy and the very private came to have their very embarrassing psychiatric problems addressed discreetly. She turned off her car and sat for a moment tapping her finger on the steering wheel, willing her legs to move.

  After five minutes, she grew disgusted with herself. She punched her thigh, heaved the car door open, grabbed her purse, and walked briskly up the steps and through the front door before she had time to reconsider. The nurse at the reception desk looked up as she entered.

  “I’m here to see John Har…James Weldon. I’m here to see James Weldon,” she said. “My name is Carys Jones. He’s expecting me.”

  The nurse looked her up and down. Without a word, she picked up the phone, dialed a single digit, and spoke in inaudible tones to the person on the other end.

  “Take a seat over there,” the nurse ordered. Carys obeyed.

  The reception area looked like an expensive hotel lobby. Antique chairs and end tables, which she figured to be mid-nineteenth-century, filled it. Portraits of the hospital’s founders, one by John Singer Sargent, lined the walls. A large oak buffet table with two candlestick lamps was placed against the wall across from the reception desk. She sat in one of the wingback chairs that flanked it. A few moments later, a man in a suit walked briskly into the reception area and approached the nurse. The nurse nodded at Carys. She rose.

  “May I please see some identification?” said the man. His face was hard.

  “Oh, of course,” Carys said. She reached into her purse, extracted her license, and handed it over. The man read it and seemed to relax a little.

  “I’m Doctor Frankel.”

  “I was told he was expecting my visit.”

  “Yes, I know. Carys Jones. I just need to make sure that you know what you are going to be dealing with,” said Frankel.

  “I don’t. Not at all. I have no idea what is wrong with him. If you feel that he’s not ready for visitors, I’m more than happy to come back at another time.” She pulled her purse onto her shoulder.

  “I think a visit may be very helpful, actually,” Frankel said. “If you want to follow me, I’ll take you to his room.”

  She stood where she was, looking at him.

  “Are you okay, Ms. Jones?”

  “What is wrong with him?” she asked.

  “He’s having hallucinations, and he’s exhibiting some sporadic manic episodes,” said Frankel. “Nothing dangerous, but it can be disconcerting. Can you handle that?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “There’s no danger. But we’ll have someone with you just in case.”

  Frankel motioned for Carys to follow him. They went through a door at the back of the reception area into a long, softly lit corridor. It was carpeted with a discreet gold and beige block-patterned wool rug. A chair rail ran the length of the hall at hip height. The wall above the rail was covered in a gold-print wallpaper, and there were gold candle wall sconces between each of the doors that led—Carys assumed, because of the locks on the outside—to the patients’ rooms.

  He stopped at a door at the end of the hall. The corner unit, of course. He unlocked the door and led her into an apartment that was far nicer than her own. There were floor-to-ceiling windows with light-green silk curtains on two walls of the living room, which had a velvet couch, a coffee table, and two reading chairs.

  “Wait here a moment,” he said. He stepped out of the foyer into the main living room, passed a dining table against a far wall, and knocked on a slightly opened door on the other side, which she assumed was a bedroom.

  “Mr. Harper,” he said quietly. “Your visitor is here.”

  Carys strained to hear the response.

  “She came,” a frail voice said. “I didn’t think she would.

  She’s shy.”

  “I can see that,” Frankel said quietly. “So be nice to her.” He came out of the room and motioned for Carys. She moved her leaden feet slowly toward the opened door.

  “We’ll need to notify Mr. Harper’s son that you came by,” Frankel said. “He’s next of kin.”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  John Harper was sitting uncomfortably in a chair in front of an enormous desk between the bedroom’s two large windows. His white hair was unwashed, and he was wearing a gray sweatsuit. Behind him was a king-size, mahogany four-poster bed—a bed she had dreamed of having when she was a little girl—its duvet smooth and clean, its pillows covered with matching shams.

  “I’ll have Elizabeth wait in the foyer, Ms. Jones,” said Frankel. “If you need anything, just call.”

  She turned to see a small blonde woman in a light-blue uniform by the door. The woman wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “They’re afraid I’ll attack you,” said Harper quietly. He stood slowly, gripping the desk on his way up. He was taller and more muscular than she thought he’d be. An older version of his son.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person,” said Harper. A trace of his Brooklyn childhood remained in his accent. He moved toward her unsteadily. She smelled his dirty hair as he approached. “Forgive my appearance. The medications they have me on are kicking my…uh…butt.”
<
br />   He extended a slightly tremoring hand. She swallowed the spit that was accumulating uncomfortably in her mouth. She shook his hand. It was cold.

  “Sir, your collection is…I can’t even find the words,” said Carys. “I’m honored to have been a small part of it.”

  “Have a seat,” he said, motioning out of the bedroom to the living area.

  “Elizabeth,” he said as they approached the couch. “Wait outside.”

  “Mr. Harper, Doctor Frankel asked me to stay in the room,” said the woman.

  Harper seemed to shrink.

  “Had twenty-five thousand people working for me once,” he muttered. With great effort, Harper sat on the couch and motioned for Carys to sit next to him. She obeyed. She could smell his stale breath.

  “The walls have ears,” said Harper quietly.

  He may be nuts, but he got that right, she thought. Who here ratted him out to Plourde? She eyed the nurse warily.

  Harper smoothed his sweatpants. Then he sharply turned his head toward the bedroom door, saw something, pursed his lips in exasperation, shook his head “no,” and looked back to Carys.

  “Are you alright, sir?” she asked, tensed to run if necessary.

  “Fine. Just…distractions,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “I’m here about the manuscript, Mr. Harper,” she said. “How is it possible that it’s not in any catalog? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s been on quite a journey,” he said, then turned to face her fully and leaned in. His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. “You must not tell. Anyone.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Thank you for stopping the sale of the collection,” said Harper.

  “I’m pleased I could help,” she said. “At least now it’ll be kept intact. And you’ll be able to access it at whatever museum or library gets it.”