Fanatics (5 page)

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.

I
FOUND
M
OM
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.

I
T 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.

She sat down opposite me, straight-backed and rigid, and proceeded to demolish a panino. I popped an olive into
my mouth, savouring the saltiness, and watched an Albacore far out on the water by Chiefs Island, desperately searching for a snatch of wind.

“If I may say, Mr. Havelock, you seem an admirably quiet and serious young man.”

I felt myself blush.

“Not like those uncivilized creatures whose animal noises and whoops one hears from the city park when the wind is in an unfavourable direction.”

“Raphaella says I’m steady. And reliable. I think she means dull.”

Something happened to Mrs. Stoppini’s face. I realized she was smiling. Sort of.

“I shall look forward to meeting this Miss Skye of yours.”

“I don’t think she’d like the ‘of yours’ part.”

“Indeed.”

“Do you mind if I ask something?” I said, changing the subject. “Professor Corbizzi—he was a university teacher?”

“He was an eminent historian and author of several books. He held a chair at Ponte Santa Trinita University in Renaissance studies in our native Florence, and his specialty was the San Marco church and monastery. I take it you have not had an opportunity to examine his library.”

“Too busy,” I said.

“Indeed. Well, he was, some years ago, offered a post at the University of Toronto, and after a few years he retired to this place. I fear he was not happy at Toronto. His work was … a trifle unorthodox.”

“Oh.”

There was something unusual in the way she talked about the man who had been her companion. Raphaella
and I assumed that meant they were a couple and had been for years. Yet she seemed impersonal when she spoke of him. “He was not happy,” “he retired,” “his work was unorthodox.” Strange, I thought as I munched on the last olive in the bowl.

“He continued his work here, but I am not aware of its exact nature. He did not share it with me.”

I got the message. Don’t enquire any further. I drank down the remains of my water and stood.

“Well, thanks for the lunch,” I said. “Time to get back to work.”

D
URING THE AFTERNOON
, thunder grumbled on and off in the darkening northwest sky. I wondered if I should pack it in and head home before the rain came. Riding a motorcycle with a face full of windblown water was no fun. But I put it off, intent on what I was doing, and didn’t clue in to the weather again until I heard a handful of rain spatter against the window above the bench. I opened one of the garage doors, allowing a gust of cool air to swirl inside, carrying sticks and dust with it. I pushed the bike inside and ran the door back down, hoping that if there was a thunder-shower, it would be short.

I sat for a while, safe and dry behind the glass, and watched the drama in the sky above the lake, where thick
purple clouds roiled over the whitecaps. Here and there bars of sunlight shot through like yellow spotlights, illuminating the emerald green water. But soon the lowering sky formed a dark ceiling. Lightning flashed and crackled. Thunder boomed like artillery. The wind came like a series of punches, bending the tall spruce between me and the water like blades of grass and lifting the skirts of the willows along the shore. Small branches spun past the window. The patio chairs tipped and rolled across the grass. The umbrella, folded and tied, rattled in its mooring, rocketed into the air, touched down briefly in a sea of irises, and somersaulted toward the lake and out of sight.

A roar like an approaching train announced the downpour, and huge raindrops slammed the concrete apron outside the shop like tiny bombs. Puddles appeared almost instantly. Distorted by the curtain of rain running down the kitchen window, Mrs. Stoppini’s tall form appeared. My cellphone rang.

“Are you quite all right?” she asked anxiously.

“Snug as a bug, Mrs. Stoppini.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “It’ll probably blow by in few minutes.”

“I hate storms,” she said, and hung up.

The uproar moved on after less than an hour of heavenly mayhem. The violent gusts of wind gave way to a steady breeze. The rain stopped and the sun came out, drawing steam from the apron and the patio, and setting alight the droplets that hung from every leaf. I went back to work, but by suppertime, when I had planned to quit, a sullen downpour had set in.

Mrs. Stoppini offered me supper and a guest room for
the night, “in view of the weather,” and when I saw the doleful look on her face I remembered her saying earlier in the day that she hated storms—which meant they scared her. I called home and let my parents know. After supper—pasta with garlic, butter, fresh Parmesan cheese, and asparagus—I put in another hour’s work, then called it a day.

“Let me show you your room,” Mrs. Stoppini said when I came back into the house holding an umbrella against the rain. She went ahead of me up a wide staircase that gave onto a carpeted landing, turned left, and led me down a wainscotted corridor, past a few doors to the east wing, floating like a wraith ahead of me, her leather lace-ups tapping the floorboards. How does she
do
that? I wondered.

She pushed open a door and gestured toward a large tiled bathroom. Then she showed me into a spacious bedroom with its own fireplace and easy chairs, as well as a four-poster bed with what looked like antique end tables. A bulky dresser took up most of the wall opposite a huge bay window that looked out over the lake. There was no
TV
, no radio, no clock in the room.

“I trust you will be comfortable here,” she said, flipping the light switch beside the door. “There are candles and matches in one of the end tables. Electrical storms often cause power outages here. You will find towels and a bathrobe in the lavatory.”

With that, she turned on her heel and left the room, saying “Have a pleasant evening” over her shoulder.

I drew back the window curtains to reveal a view of the side yard and the lake spreading beyond a row of willows, then sat down on the cushioned seat. Darkness flowed across the grounds and rose up the trunks of the trees. The rain
hissed in the big blue spruce to the left of the window and gurgled in the gutter over my head. Thunder boomed out over the lake, and lightning flickered. Another cell was moving in. I switched on the crystal lamp that stood on the night table nearest the window and pulled open the drawer to find a half-dozen candles, a box of wooden matches, and a saucer-shaped brass candle holder.

I looked around the room for something to read but had no luck. Then I remembered I was directly above a huge library. I made my way along the dim corridor and down the stairs. At the bottom I noticed the faint smell of smoke. Old, stale smoke. Strange, I thought. The library had been completely cleaned.

The ground floor was sunk in shadow. I considered returning to my room for a candle rather than blundering around looking for light switches, then changed my mind. The notion of visiting that gloomy library with a storm brewing overhead to make a creepy place that much creepier didn’t sit well with me.

I climbed back up the stairs The faint sound of weeping floated from the west wing, where Mrs. Stoppini’s room was. I crept down the corridor toward her door, cringing at every creak underfoot.

“How could you leave me? How could you?” I heard, followed by pitiful sobs muffled by the door.

I had been so involved in my own projects—setting up the shop, solving the various problems that came with making a replica of the mantel—I had forgotten that Mrs. Stoppini’s life companion had suddenly been snatched away from her. I told myself as I turned toward my room that I would try to be more sensitive in my dealings with her.

I took a long shower, towelled off, and pulled on the blue hooded bathrobe I found neatly folded with the towels Mrs. Stoppini had left for me. By the time I closed the bedroom door behind me the sky was black. A brilliant blue-white flash momentarily lit up the spruce branches outside the window, then the thunderclap whacked the house, shaking the glass.

The lights went out.

With thunder banging and crashing on the roof, I felt my way to the bedside table, lit one of the candles, and carried it to the dresser top, the highest flat surface in the room. I crawled under the duvet and settled into a soft mattress. The candle flame reflected by the dresser mirror gave off a comforting yellow glow. I thought about calling Raphaella, then remembered that the power outage would have killed the cell network. She was probably in her room, looking out into the dark. I imagined her profile in her window, sporadically lit by the lightning. I wondered if she was thinking about me.