Today there was a man working at the welcome center inside the front gate. He didn’t recognize my picture of Styles. “People don’t have to stop in here,” he told me, looking suspiciously at me. “Anyone can come in as long as the gate’s open, at least until closing time.” He cocked his head. “Anything wrong?”
“He’s looking for something.” I showed him an image of the symbol. “Ever seen that here?”
He leaned in. “I don’t think so. But we’ve got thousands of people here.” He looked over my shoulder out the window. “Lots of tombstones.”
“Thanks.” He’d been reading a book—an actual book, with a cover and pages and everything—when I came in. I left him to it.
I headed toward the north side of the cemetery, where I’d found David. I had no idea what kind of car Styles drove, but the grounds weren’t exactly crawling with mourners’ vehicles. I passed one funeral in progress, and spotted an elderly man placing flowers on a grave. A young man rode a riding mower over the grass in the distance.
With yesterday’s map in hand, I started my search at the spot where I’d found David. The stone for Mary Atkins stood silently in the ground. A quick internet search on my phone came up with nothing that seemed relevant to Styles or the symbol.
So I started circling, clockwise. The clouds above were gray and the ground was soft as I walked, looking for Styles and/or the symbol that was so important to him. The few mourners I saw either glanced nervously in my direction or ignored me as if I were an unwanted ghost, but I found no sign of Quentin Styles or the circle with two lines through it.
After an hour I was thinking about going home. I was at least two miles from the Atkins tomb in every direction, and I’d started straightening out the flowers people had left and brushing dirt off the ground markers. Too many young people, a lot of families buried together, the occasional lone grave that looked as if no one had visited it in 50 years. It was getting depressing. But I was in a graveyard, after all.
I kept at it. Madame Olivya had said I was stubborn, and I wanted to prove her right. But after I another half hour I was getting hungry and I needed a bathroom if I didn’t want to defile the sacred ground. I started looking around, trying to figure out which direction my car was waiting and wondering how long it would take me to get back to it. I turned around, looking for the road.
Then I found the symbol.
It wasn’t on a tombstone, but carved into the thick trunk of a tall, old oak tree. The drawing in the book had been wrong somehow—or maybe the tombstone got repaired and the symbol somehow got carved into the tree? I didn’t know. But it was here, in front of me.
I took several pictures on my phone, then circled around the tree. Now what? No sign of Styles. Had he been here and left? Or was he wandering somewhere nearby? Or was I just completely mistaken about what he was up to? My moment of triumph at finding the symbol faded as I realized I was as lost as before. Clueless, which is bad for a detective.
I stood around for a few minutes, hoping Styles would appear from behind a tombstone. When he didn’t, I used my phone to pinpoint the exact location of the tree. Then, after a few more minutes, I started the hike back to my car.
My phone buzzed just as I reached it. Unknown number. I was tired, my feet hurt, and I still needed the bathroom, more urgently now, so I let it go to voicemail and made my way back to the front gate. I stopped inside the building to use the restroom, then checked my voicemail.
“Mr. Jurgen? It’s Hallie. Could you call me? David says he remembers something.”
Okay. I went back to the car and called the number.
“Oh, Mr. Jurgen. Yeah, it’s Hallie, I called you. David had a seizure and they’re giving him a scan right now, but he wanted me to tell you that—it’s hard to explain, but he figured out some of what Professor Styles was saying. Like he could suddenly understand the language or something. I don’t really know—" She stopped to catch her breath.
“Is he okay? Did somebody call his father?”
“I don’t know. I mean, yes, they called his father, he’s not here yet. He came out of the seizure and they took him for the scan, but he managed to tell me about it, that he remembered some of it. He didn’t have time to tell me anything. They were taking him away.”
I checked the time. It was 2:15 and I was hungry, but they probably had a cafeteria at the hospital if I started to feel faint. “I’ll be right there.”
We hung up. I texted Rachel. Day is officially out of control. Back to U of C Hospital. I started the car.
David was sitting up and eating chocolate pudding, the remains of a turkey sandwich sitting on a plate in the corner of the tray next to a cup of ice water. “Where’s your father?” I asked.
“He’s coming,” Hallie said. She was drinking a can of Coke. “But David really wanted to talk to you.”
“What happened?”
“I had a—a seizure, I guess.” David sipped water from a straw. “It didn’t hurt or anything, it just felt—weird. Then they gave me a scan, and I don’t know what they found. But I feel fine now. Better.” He finished his pudding.
“What about Professor Styles?”
“Yeah.” Another straw slurp. “It’s like I just suddenly figured it out, you know? At least some of it, some of what Quentin was saying. Like ‘Did you find the passage?’ And ‘Did you see the domination?’ I don’t know what he meant, what it means, but he said ‘domination,’ I can understand it now. It’s—weird.”
Very. “I found the symbol. It’s not on a tombstone, it’s on a tree. A couple of miles from where I found you.”
“Oh, good.” David leaned forward, as if he was ready to jump out of the bed and go looking for it. But Hallie put a hand on his arm, and he sank back down. “I mean, that’s great, but—what does it mean?”
“What happened?” Beckerman came through the door. “David? What’s going on? Are you okay?”
‘Dad—” David forced himself to sit forward again. “I’m fine, I guess. They haven’t come in and told me what happened on the scan. I was just telling Mr. Jurgen about what Quen—what Professor Styles said to me—"
“Where is he? Have you found him?” He swung to me, his eyes hard.
I shook my head. “Not yet. I was at the cemetery where I found David, looking for him. I did find the symbol he’s obsessed with, but no trace of Styles.”
“What are you doing here, then?” He obviously thought I wasn’t doing the job he was paying me for.
“David remembered what the professor told him,” Hallie said. “He thought—he wanted to tell him.”
“Will that help?” Beckerman was skeptical.
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.” I looked around the room for ideas. “I don’t have a lot of leads. I suppose I could talk to his colleagues, ask them some questions—”
“No!” David shook his head. “You’ll get him in trouble. They’ll start talking, there’ll be rumors—”
“David, for God’s sake!” Beckerman slapped the edge of the table holding his lunch tray, almost knocking his water over. “This guy is nothing but trouble. He’s got you running around in graveyards looking for drawings that don’t mean anything, and now you’re sick and having seizures! I don’t care what happens to him, I just want you to start focusing on college again. If that means—”
He stopped. Beckerman looked at me, then at Hallie. “You seem like a nice girl. Woman. Whatever. Thank you for being here. I just want—David, I don’t want to run your life, I just want to see you grow up and be able to take care of yourself. After your mother . . .” He groaned quietly. “I’m sorry. I just want you to be all right.”
The room was silent. Beckerman and his father didn’t look at each other, and Hallie didn’t seem to know who to look at.
A nurse peeked his head through the door, hesitating. “I can come back.”
“No, come on in.” Beckerman waved a hand. “I’m David’s father.” He patted his son’s shoulder, then looked at me. “Go ask around the other profs. Just to find out where he might be. Do it—discreetly. I don’t necessarily want to get him in trouble, I just want to know what he’s up to.”
David sighed. “Thanks.”
I nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”
So I went back to the big building where Styles had his office and started knocking on doors, or peeking inside them when they were open.
The professors were suspicious of me, naturally. They probably thought I was on some witch hunt for scandal, and that anything they shared would end up making them all look like sexual predators or undercover Marxists or secret anti-Semites or all three. So they didn’t tell me much, and a few refused to even talk to me.
“Quentin is fine,” said Ingrid Hoffman, a professor of Medieval history in her 50s with a windowless office. “He’s extremely intelligent, and his research is solid. I’ve never been to his house or socialized with him at all.” She shook her head, as if the question was ridiculous.
“Is it odd that he’s just canceled his office hours and classes for the day?”
“We all have emergencies sometimes.” She gestured toward a stack of papers. “I’m about to have one if I don’t finish these reports today.”
I left her. When I’d talked to all the teachers I went to the office, where the administrative assistant gave me an icy look when I asked about Styles’s emergency. “I can’t share details about our staff’s personal issues.”
“Is this unusual? Is he generally reliable?”
“We’ve had no complaints. That’s all I can say.” She tilted her head. “Is there a problem we should know about? If there is, you should go to—”
“No problem.” I smiled. “Thanks for your help.”
Time to admit defeat, at least for now. It was 4:30 and I hadn’t had lunch, so I found a vending machine and bought a wrapped sandwich. I was just starting to text Rachel that I was heading home when she called. “Wow, you really are psychic,” I said.
“Are you okay? There’s this fire down there somewhere and I wanted to make sure you weren’t in the middle of it. It’s your turn to make dinner.”
I looked out the window for smoke. “Where?”
“It’s south of the Midway. They didn’t say the street. You aren’t doing anything stupid, are you?”
“No stupider than usual.” South of the—Styles’s house? “Wait a minute. Okay, I might be late again.”
“Of course.” She wasn’t mad. More like amused. “We’ve got to have a conversation about dinners. It was one thing when I was home all day—”
“Right, right. Order whatever you want. I love you. I’ll call you later.” I hung up.
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