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Still Wednesday, September 25th
Charlotte read for hours, without realizing it was for hours, going faster as she became accustomed to Olivia’s handwriting, and as things made more and more sense. She felt compelled to keep going, all for the desire to know: what happened next?
The oldest notebook in her possession began in 1969. Olivia’s mood was dark and extreme; she was suffering anew from a deep sense of betrayal and guilt that she thought she had gotten past. As far as Charlotte could tell, it was a mix of attack, apology, resentment, and guilt. Passages seemed to be written as if to Ronson, with references to “your son,” and “I told him he could have his father’s book—why ever not?”
I know who it is you write about so cruelly, who you put through all the horrors of banishment, but I have taken, I really did take, the things you wanted most, just like you stole mine. You will never have them! I will kill him before you can have him, just like you killed me. How I wish I had not seen this, how I wish I had never met you....
Her eyes did not reflect the pictures that she saw in her mind, but they still told stories that broke my heart. Why couldn’t I tell those stories for her? I never meant any harm....
Something had happened prior to 1969 that triggered Olivia’s need to write again, after at least ten years of silence. She gave Helene a quick call to firm up some dates in Olivia’s life as best as possible, then made notes of her own.
Olivia spent the war years as a college student in Manhattan. She returned to Paris as soon as she could, around 1947, and wrote and published a book of poetry by 1948. She came back to New York after Aunt Henri died and the bookstore was sold, which was around 1952. She frequented jazz clubs and kept writing and publishing, before suddenly returning to Paris in ‘56. She sent a postcard to Helene to say she was in love with another writer, and writing plays. Then nobody hears from her until she suddenly reappears back home with Ronson and baby Donovan, in early 1959.
Something shattered Olivia between 1956 and 1959, something which caused her to stop writing and, essentially, disappear from the literary scene. Back then, having a baby out of wedlock stopped a lot of women in their tracks. Donovan was the spitting image of Seamus O’Dair, and she now had proof that Olivia had known him.
Charlotte looked up some entries on O’Dair. He was, indeed, living and working in Paris in a twenty-five year stretch from 1936 to 1961. He was also commended for his role in the French Resistance. As the professor said on Courtney at Corton, O’Dair and a group of other writers who had been in the Resistance got together and restored an old theater which they themselves had sabotaged while it was being used by the Nazis. There, they staged the unorthodox and experimental plays O’Dair came to be known for, and launched the careers of several New Wave actors, screenwriters, and directors.
In a side note, the theater once again burned down, during the 1968 student riots, but was not rebuilt. It was also the year O’Dair was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, along with Yasunari Kawabata.
It was a good fit. Would O’Dair have rejected Olivia if she was pregnant with his child? Or would she have told him? Either way, what would have happened if Olivia found herself pregnant, but, for whatever reason, could not involve Seamus O’Dair? A marriage of convenience was not far-fetched, if done early enough. Strict, controlling Ronson did not seem a likely candidate for marrying a woman for her convenience. Given Olivia’s secrecy about her writing, Charlotte thought it was a good bet that she let Ronson think that Donovan was his child. The things revealed in the notebooks, then, had to remain secret, hidden from both Donovan and Ronson.
Charlotte felt confident that she now had Olivia’s motivation for hiding the notebooks the way she did, in and among things that both Ronson and Donovan knew about—but didn’t concern themselves with. And if O’Dair was Donovan’s father, then the passages Charlotte first thought were written as if to Ronson were actually addressed to O’Dair—and made more sense. “I told him he could have his father’s book” could well have meant she gave Donovan the copy of Least Objects she had inherited from her mother. A nine- or ten-year old boy of the time would have played with model trains and turn a book into a homemade prop, especially back in those days.
As she continued reading, Charlotte picked up the rhythm of Olivia’s shifts between her life at the time of writing and the story of her life leading up to why things were as they were at the time of writing, past and present, present and past, back and forth. The furious anger ran through the first two notebooks Charlotte had, the ones that began in 1969 and 1970, respectively. There were more passages that only made sense if O’Dair was Donovan’s father, such as how she explained to Ronson that her grandparents were from Scotland, and that’s why Donovan’s hair was red. One passage said she kept Donovan in a buzz cut so he wouldn’t look so much like his father. Ronson was a military man, and very likely in a permanent buzz cut, so it only made sense if Donovan’s stiff auburn hair was inherited from O’Dair.
There were an increasing number of passages about the tediousness of the trips Ronson would make to track down baseball cards. He did, however, encourage her to start a collection of something of her own. Olivia had nothing but contempt for “collected junk,” and out of spite went to extremes with it, forming not one, but dozens of collections. Yet Ronson never complained. He complained about everything else, she wrote, but never about the one thing any sane man would have raised objections to. She suspected that he saw their collections as their children, and had more interest in them than in Donovan, which made her very uneasy.
Then there was a gap, with the next book beginning in 1976. That was the year Donovan graduated from high school, and Olivia wrote about her disappointment that he rejected college, even as she felt spiteful glee that he didn’t go into the military as Ronson wanted, all which corresponded with what Donovan himself said about his life at home. He liked to read and write as a child, until Ronson shamed him for not liking sports, after which he avoided both. Many sections sounded similar to things Olivia had written in the previous notebooks, like a retelling of scenes or incidents, but each time altered in some way, with a few words changed, or a shift in their emphasis. With the end of the Vietnam War, Ronson was home more often—and they went on more forays to shops and auctions for their collections. Olivia’s attitudes to the collections seemed to shift when some things suddenly skyrocketed in value. She was both fascinated and repelled by what she called “the American desire to turn mediocrity into a legacy.”
A knock on the door brought Charlotte back into the present, and she realized it was almost dark. Who could it be? She couldn’t remember if there was a peep hole in the door or not, but at least there was a chain across it, so she decided to answer it, and was relieved to see it was Simon.
He held up a thumb drive. “Got a copy of everything for you.”
She remembered he was bringing her the pictures and videos of Olivia’s house. “Thanks! I’m about to make some tea—would you like to join me?”
“Yes, actually, a cuppa sounds good.”
As he came in, there was a whiff from the pizza joint across the street.
“That’s the one bad thing about living here,” she said, pointing to it before closing the door. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to resist eating pizza all the time.”
“Why resist?” He smiled and followed her up the stairs.
“Unhealthy and expensive.” Charlotte was terribly aware of Simon’s closeness behind her, and wondered what would happen if she suddenly stopped on the stairs. Would he put his arms around her again, and then maybe leave them there a bit? Oh, snap out of it! Her mind was getting as bad as a chick flick, and she was far too old for such nonsense.
But even without the staged cuddle, Charlotte was glad Simon was staying for tea, and that she had a bit of milk on hand for the way he took it. He leaned against the end of the cabinets to listen as she brought him up to date about the content of the notebooks, her near-certainty that Seamus O’Dair was Donovan’s real father, and Olivia’s reason for hiding the notebooks the way she did.
Simon was impressed. “Bloody hell! To think of Donovan as the offspring of someone like O’Dair! I know from you and Helene that he has a temper, but he comes across as gormless.”
“I think that’s an act,” countered Charlotte. “I always get the feeling that he’s holding a lot in, like what he really knows about what happened to his mother and Wesley Warren. I imagine he feels he needs to play his cards carefully, and right now he can’t make a move without Mitchell and Toley Banks knowing about it.”
“That might be, but then that makes him a very good actor.” Simon took his mug of tea over to the table to look over the notebooks, and received another surprise when Shamus jumped up and walked across to meet him. “I didn’t know you had a cat.”
“I didn’t either, until about twenty-four hours ago. That’s Shamus.”
Simon stroked the cat’s back and was rewarded with Shamus flopping down on the table and rolling on his back to have his tummy rubbed. “Seamus, as in O’Dair?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I prefer to think of him as Shamus, as in private investigator.” She sat down on the sofa and enjoyed watching Simon and the cat get on like a house afire.
“You’re a bit of a shamus, yourself, on this project. Ow!” He pulled his hand back from the cat, who was getting carried away, like cats often do. Simon joined her at the other end of the sofa. “What’s your next step?”
“I’m going to keep reading, to get whatever facts I can out of the notebooks, and then go over the ledgers to see if anything stands out. We’re all pretty sure that the copy of Least Objects that Donovan accidentally sold was his grandmother’s. She died in ‘67, when he was nine. Now, I think it is a fair assumption that Olivia did not read it until she received those boxes of her mother’s books.”
“She could have gotten if from the library, I would think,” said Simon.
“Sure, she could have, but think of it from her point of view, and given the kind of man Ronson was. If she went and checked out that book from the library, that would indicate a particular interest in that book or author, not something she would want to draw attention to. Ronson was the sort that would have asked her about it, and she’d be forced to lie. But if it was just one of a whole bunch of books that was given to her by her mother, then it would have looked like she was just sampling something from it. More random, and less likely to require an answer as to why she chose it.”
“So you’re saying she didn’t read it when it first came out, but like nine or ten years later?”
Charlotte nodded. “Probably around the time he won the Nobel.”
They sat musing this in silence.
She continued to speculate. “So many of Olivia’s actions seem sudden. She suddenly goes to Paris, suddenly comes back, suddenly goes back again, suddenly reappears with a baby and the last kind of man you’d expect her to marry, and suddenly disappears from the literary scene.”
“Would have been hard work, being her.” Simon shook his head sadly.
“She went into everything with great passion, a sort of all or nothing person, not the sort who would stay friends with an ex, for instance.”
“Not even if they had a child together.”
“Not even,” she agreed. “So who’s the father? An incredibly well-regarded writer, a hero of the Resistance, and someone she’s had a crush on since she was a teenager—she first met him ‘way back in 1936. But for whatever reason—they had a bad argument before she realized she was pregnant, she caught him with another woman, he was secretly married, or he was just using her or treating her like a convenient groupie—she is upset enough to careen away from him and into the arms of Major Ronson Targman.”
“But she was a writer, herself.” Simon sipped more of his tea. “The falling-out might have been professional.”
Charlotte told him that Olivia’s last known project was co-writing a New Wave screenplay. “There’s a lot of evidence that it was one that O’Dair went on to finish on his own.”
“Maybe he criticized her work, and that would have cut her as badly, if not worse, than catching him with someone else.”
Charlotte nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly! And in typically melodramatic fashion, she would have burned everything she ever wrote, flung herself into despair, and renounce the literary life forever and ever.”
“Sounds like bad fiction,” he laughed.
“That means that it might have really happened that way, since they say that the truth is stranger.”
He looked at her as if in challenge. “Well, then, Detective Anthony, how do you explain the notebooks? What made her start writing again?”
Her eyes locked on his. “The pattern will tend to repeat itself. There is one more notebook in that house, the very first one, and we don’t know when she started writing it. I’m guessing it will be 1968. She’s finally read O’Dair’s most important novel, and has to face the fact that she cut off her nose to spite her face when she gave up her writing career like she did. Then he goes and gets the Nobel. It puts her in one of her reactionary tizzies. Only this time, she can’t write openly. But she writes.”
“Possibly,” he said, as he considered the idea. “But here’s one for you. What’s all this got to do with Olivia’s death?”
Charlotte sighed. Simon was right. The great reveal about why Olivia did and didn’t write, and Donovan’s true parentage, seemed to have nothing to do with the mystery of what happened to her in the end.
“The pawn shop is a common denominator in all of this,” said Simon. “You’re right, I think, that the entire mystery is connected to a book or books, and your idea of a personal connection between Olivia and Seamus O’Dair is also compelling. Ronson is dead, and now Olivia, so the great secret about Donovan’s parentage is no longer valuable. Yet we know that people connected to Warren Brothers are still intensely interested in something that’s in Olivia’s house. I say a visit to the pawn shop is in order, to just see what we can see, maybe spot something there that we know was in her house not too long ago.”
“I was there about a week and half ago,” said Charlotte, and she explained about pawning her jewelry and silverware. “It has trains and books, and you can tell that Bosley and Wesley combined their hobby shop stock with the pawn shop’s.”
Simon rose as if he was preparing to leave. “How about we go there tomorrow—I’m free in the morning—on the pretext of getting your things back?”
“I’d love to, but I won’t have enough money to redeem them until after the sale.”
“Ah. Well, don’t write it off yet. Take a look at the video, and some of the ledgers. We’ll talk tomorrow. Thank you for the tea, it was spot on.”
Charlotte saw him out the door, and locked up, the scent of pizza again wafting into the foyer. Her stomach growled, and she wondered if she should have ordered one, just once, and invited Simon to stay. Too late now. Besides, she really needed to get back onto the job.
Simon was right about looking through the ledgers. Charlotte began, as planned, with the most recent one, which covered the time before Ronson’s death before abruptly stopping, which she speculated was when Ronson had hurt Olivia’s arm. There were many entries of items sold, particularly of baseball cards—none as valuable as the ones sold for Donovan’s car loan, but there were other entries, such as several thousand dollars for “sterling silver.” Charlotte looked up silver prices for that date online, and saw that it coincided with an unusual spike. Clearly, the Targmans had kept an eye on fluctuating values, which implied they collected what they did as an investment. This was evidently quite common in the seventies.
This would tie in with Charlotte’s own impressions of Olivia. She was not someone who did “cute,” or “precious,” despite the number of her collections which could be described as such. Not long ago there was a fad for small stuffed animals, which were bought and sold for strangely inflated prices for a number of years before petering out as the market became saturated. She checked the ledgers for that time period. There they were: three lots of the stuffed toys sold for thousands of dollars, and two individual ones that sold for several hundred dollars each. The Targmans had unloaded their stuffed toy collection before the market for them crashed.
Other items did not seem to do as well, and in fact some, such as Hummel figurines, were entered as sold for far less in the last two ledgers than they did in the earlier ones. Because the ledgers stopped before Ronson’s death, there was no way to tell for certain if Olivia had continued to sell off valuable collectibles in the past several years, or which ones were still valuable. Perhaps Detective Barnes could find out if Wesley Warren left any record of why he was going to visit Olivia that fateful night. Maybe whatever it was he was looking for—and didn’t get—was what everyone else was looking for? Yet nothing suggested itself. Charlotte made notes of what she found, in the event that she and Simon would find something of Olivia’s for sale at the pawn shop.
Shamus suddenly reappeared, and Charlotte realized she hadn’t even noticed when he’d left. The big cat leaped up onto the table, rubbed his chin on the corner of her laptop monitor, then sprawled out on his side and began to give himself a wash. The night was chilly and windy, with a bit of a draft coming through the north-facing windows. She grabbed the throw off the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders, and cobbled together something to eat while she sat and considered the entire Olivia problem.
Was there any connection between Olivia’s hidden notebooks and whatever it was Donovan, Mitchell, the Warren Brothers, and Toley Banks were looking for? She was stumped. Then the thumb drive Simon brought over caught her eye, and she decided to take a look at it. If she could identify anything that was missing, they would know what to look for at the pawn shop, assuming Donovan took things to convert to quick cash, or someone else just plain stole them and the shop was fencing them.
She had already seen the early pictures, the ones that showed Olivia prostrate on her living room floor. Then came pictures Simon took of each room on the same day, followed by the still shots taken on the day he made the first valuation video, and then the video itself. Some things were immediately evident—missing vases and serving pieces from the dining room, and a bit of thinning out on a couple of shelves in the curio cabinets.
She made more notes and closed the video file, thinking that was everything, when she spied another file on the drive: “charmove.” Curious, she opened it.
There were dozens of still shots, all taken on the day she moved. Shots of the house at Lake Parkerton, clowning around with Diane, Hannah’s painting hanging above the fireplace, Ellis’ piano, other works of art, her neighbors Ernie and Lorraine, Martin and Josh, and several of herself talking with Diane, standing alone on the deck with her red coffee mug, and getting into the Jeep for the drive to Elm Grove. There were actually quite a few shots of her that captured the mixed mood of that morning, looking forward and backward at the same time.
There were several pictures of the drive to Elm Grove, including Bosley Warren’s billboard. At the apartment, there were funny pictures of her furniture being unloaded and brought up, quick snapshots. More refined ones came later, no doubt after Simon himself was done helping with the move. One shot caught her pensive mood, when she felt anxious about things getting out of her control, the mood she tried so hard to hide from others. Her favorite was a shot of herself and Helene watching the video Ellis had sent. Helene’s expression revealed her love for Ellis, something Charlotte hadn’t seen before.
But Simon had noticed.