“I see.”
The unspoken accusation hung in the air. Marlene, who’d left all of a sudden, had been one of the last people to handle it.
“Shall I reach out to Marlene?” asked Sadie.
“No. I’ll make that call.” Dr. Hooper cleared his throat. “In the meantime, I’ll ask the head librarians to keep an eye out for it. Do not tell anyone else.”
Claude nodded his assent.
Sadie did not. “If we do discover it’s gone, it might be smart to enlist the press. If it is a theft, the more publicity, the better the chance that bookshop owners and other experts will spot it.”
“That’s not a good idea for two reasons,” said Dr. Hooper. “If the thief knows we know, he’s less likely to try to sell it out in the open. Also, the fewer donors who know of the theft, the better—no one wants to invest in an insecure institution. So let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We must find it quietly. In the meantime, I’ll have the lock in the cage changed today. Was there anything else amiss?”
“Not that we could see. Everything else was intact.”
“This is a terrible loss, if it has indeed been stolen.”
At least Sadie had some good news to share. She fanned out the old newsletters on Dr. Hooper’s desk with a flourish. “I do have some good news, though. I found the earliest examples of the work of Laura Lyons, right here under our very noses. It turns out she wrote a column about life in the library for the staff newsletter.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Dr. Hooper never swore, which meant she’d thoroughly impressed him. “This is marvelous. Well done, Sadie.”
“So we can include these in the exhibit?”
“Certainly. But let’s not stop here. I’d still like to see something in her own hand. We are one of the top literary collections in one of the top libraries in the world. If there’s something out there, we should have it. We need this. Especially with the Woolf diary gone missing.”
It wasn’t enough. Of course it wasn’t enough. “I’ll reach out to her estate, and let you know as soon as I hear back.”
“Good, good.”
As she and Claude walked away, they heard Dr. Hooper barking orders to his secretary to get Marlene on the phone. Sadie hoped they’d soon find an answer. The diary had been sent off to a restorer, perhaps, and Marlene had forgotten to mention it. Although that seemed far-fetched.
When she got back to her desk, her phone was ringing.
“Sadie, it’s Lonnie.”
Her desk was piled with papers, and she still had to contact the executor to Laura Lyons’s estate. Now was not a good time for a brother-sister talk.
But before she could reply, he rushed ahead.
“It’s Mom. She’s died. She’s gone.”
CHAPTER SIX
New York City, 1993
The day after Pearl’s death, a few of her friends stopped by Lonnie’s town house to pay their respects and seemed to be in no hurry to leave, so Sadie ordered Chinese takeout, waiting for it to be delivered as the ladies talked among themselves around the kitchen table about canasta and hip replacements. As soon as the food came, Sadie grabbed one of the plastic containers and motioned for Valentina to join her at the dining room table, where they slurped up sesame noodles, while back in the kitchen LuAnn and Lonnie patiently answered the ladies’ questions about final arrangements.
It was nice to have LuAnn back, the rudder to their family ship. When Sadie first met LuAnn, she’d been intimidated by Lonnie’s elegant new girlfriend, but LuAnn never failed to draw Sadie out, asking about her job, or her favorite books, and then, once Valentina was born, they’d shared the intimate joy of loving the little creature before them. LuAnn always looked glamorous, even today, pairing jeans with a bright silk scarf, a tennis bracelet glistening on one wrist. Once Lonnie and LuAnn had married and taken over the family residence, his new wife had accessorized Pearl’s leftover furniture with the same panache, adding bright pillows in the living room and hanging French movie posters on the walls.
Sadie put down her chopsticks. The peanut sauce suddenly tasted like glue and she couldn’t eat another bite. “Valentina, I’m sorry I was short with you yesterday, when we were playing the game.”
“What do you mean?” asked Valentina.
“I got upset when the game didn’t buzz, and was a little short with everyone. I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t remember. You’re silly, Aunt Sadie.”
Relief flushed through her. She’d been feeling terrible about sullying Valentina’s last moments with her grandmother, when in fact Valentina hadn’t even registered it. Funny what kids noticed and what they didn’t.
As Sadie waited for Valentina to finish up, she inspected the display of silver-framed photos of the family on the wall: her mother sitting on a park bench, holding baby Valentina in her lap and smiling broadly; LuAnn and Lonnie on their wedding day; Sadie and Lonnie standing stiffly in front of a Christmas tree, next to their mother. Sadie’s awkward stage had come and never left, unfortunately. She still had the same thick eyebrows and too-small mouth. She stepped closer to the photo and studied it carefully, noticing that on top of all that, one of her eyes was slightly larger than the other, making her look loopy. She glanced in the mirror to check. Still loopy-looking.
Before, when she was married, there had been a wedding photo of her and Phillip on the wall, one of her favorite shots of herself. She was smiling up at her new husband in profile—she’d always liked the curve of her nose from that angle, and her hair had been perfect that day, falling down her back in waves. Too bad she couldn’t have just cut Phillip out. Although he had looked rather sweet in it as well, a shy smile on his face, blushing as if he’d landed a princess. They had loved each other, once.
Sadie moved in closer to the one photo of their grandmother, taken in London before the war. She was standing by a rosebush, with a faint smile on her face. Laura Lyons didn’t seem like the jolliest of types. Her eyes were guarded, suspicious. The photo would have been taken around the time Virginia Woolf started writing her diaries. Maybe they’d bumped into each other, had tea together. Why had one woman saved her diaries for future generations, while the other demanded all her personal effects be destroyed after her death?
The missing diary. Where on earth could it be?
Sadie caught herself. She should be mourning the death of her mother, but instead the missing diary weighed more heavily. Or was she focusing on work to avoid dealing with the most recent family tragedy? If her mother were alive, she’d have been in the kitchen baking scones or some kind of fruit-filled pastry as a balm to their pain. The realization that she wasn’t here to do that smashed into Sadie’s solar plexus with a thud. She let out a sound that was half coughing, half choking, and suddenly it was as if a hole had opened up in her chest, leaving a void where her heart would be.