“I still need to see it.”
“You’re always by the book, aren’t you, Minnie? Dot your i’s and cross your t’s.”
She detested nicknames. She was Minerva, not Minnie or Min or Nini or any other variation. He was smiling, probably thinking it was cute to butcher her name, but she returned his smile with a serious stare. She didn’t need Conrad thinking summer break would soften her.
She held out her hand. He spoke under his breath and went back into the bedroom. He came back and finally gave her the permission slip for summer residency.
“You can’t have overnight guests during the summer,” she reminded him. “And please don’t park at the front, the parking lot is—”
“I know where the parking lot is, Minnie.”
“Minerva,” she said coolly, the chill of autumn in her voice even with the heat of the summer gently baking the dorm. “Can I look at your room?”
“Be my guest,” he said, bowing and pointing in that direction.
Conrad’s room was a jumble of clothes, tangled bedsheets, and assorted soda cans piled by the window, but there was no damage to the walls or floor and all the furniture was accounted for.
He signed on the appropriate lines and Minerva continued her inspections. By the time she was done signing everyone out of the dorms, it was four. Minerva closed the front door of the dorm and headed to her apartment.
Ledge House was three stories high, with dorm rooms on the second and third floors. The kitchen had been modernized, with a refrigerator, a microwave, and a double sink. But the rest of the ground floor remained much as it had been when the building had functioned as the summer home of nineteenth-century Boston socialites.
The large parlor with its plush couches, floral wallpaper, velvet curtains, and seascapes evoked the Victorian era, even with the large TV above the nonfunctioning fireplace, which the girls in the dorm mostly used to watchThe Real World.The dining room still had the long mahogany table where fine suppers had been organized, although nowadays it was more likely to serve as the spot for a pizza night. The billiards room had been converted into a study lounge, but the dusty, ornate chandelier remained above the grand staircase.
The resident director’s “apartment” was made up of several interconnecting rooms, the first of which had once been Ledge House’s library. There were bookcases crammed with forgotten leather-bound volumes, as well as a multitude of stuffed birds—two ducks, two doves, several startled canaries—perched on the walls. A walnut birdcage housed a taxidermied owl. The fireplace in this room was still functional, and although the rugs were not original to the house, they had an old-fashioned look that matched the rest of the room. The library had two couches and a large leather chair. This was where Minerva held her meetings with her resident assistants, and the cabinets she used to file her paperwork were discreetly tucked in a corner.
Hideo thought the dead birds were creepy, like something out ofPsycho,but Minerva liked them. She had names for each ofthem—Poe, Stoker, Shelley. Nana Alba loved birds. She’d kept canaries and doves. A parrot had often perched on her shoulder, talking merrily. In her old age Nana Alba would forget that the bird had died and speak to it, offering it a peanut and smiling placidly.
The library with its collection of stuffed birds connected to a hallway with built-in shelves, which Minerva used to store linens and supplies. Then came her bedroom. This was a very large room, not quite as big as the library, but still substantial. There was no closet; instead she had a wardrobe and a dresser, neither original to the house. By the look of them, this was furniture from the seventies, from around the time the college had gone coed, though several dorms, including Ledge House, remainedsingle-sex. The bed was even more recent, large and comfortable, and her desk and chair were duplicates of the ones that the undergrads had in their rooms.
Minerva had been told she could hang new paintings in her bedroom, and she’d purchased a beautiful map of Cape Cod at an antique shop in Newburyport. Yet she’d never hung it. It remained resting against a wall in its frame, half hidden behind her laundry basket. Atop the dresser sat pictures of her family: Nana Alba rendered in sepia tones in her youth, then her mother, then Minerva with her hair in braids next to Nana Alba, and then the three of them together. Plus snapshots of a few friends from back home, whom she hadn’t spoken to in ages, and of her more recent acquaintances.
The bedroom had two doors, one of which led to a small bathroom, the other to a room, more a nook than anything else, with a table and a couple of chairs. There was a sink, a microwave, and an electric kettle, but no stove. Hideo had gifted her a rice cooker, but if she wanted a real meal, she needed to use the dorm’s kitchen. This mini kitchen had a door to the back porch and then there were steps that led to a beach, which was not like the beaches she’d visited in Mexico—all warm, soft sand. Barberry bushes delimited this beach, and it was more rocky than sandy.
Minerva grabbed her computer, made herself a cup of coffee, and sat in the kitchen, eyeing her laptop and her copy ofThe Vanishingyet not touching them. She did not know where this listlessness came from. It attacked her in waves, drowning her. She’d once asked Nana Alba how she’d survived a war, suffered through the years of meager crops and too many hungry mouths.
You simply live through it,she’d said. Minerva was not sure she could ever imitate the stubborn certainty in Nana Alba’s voice. Perhaps Minerva was made of a softer substance.
By the time Hideo showed up, Minerva had not even turned on her laptop. He unzipped his backpack and took out a comic book tucked in a clear plastic sleeve. It had a scared-looking man on the cover.
“It’s Shigeru Mizuki’s adaptation ofThe Dunwich Horror,” he said. “I have a collector in Peabody that wants it. I thought I’d let you take a peek before I drop it off.”
“Will you look at that,” Minerva said.
Hideo was also an English student. They’d met during resident director orientation when he’d pointed at her beige trench coat and said she looked like a private investigator from an old movie, and she in turn said he looked like Freddy Krueger with the striped sweater he was wearing.
They’d bonded because of Minerva’s interest in Weird fiction and horror authors, though Hideo was a Henry James aficionado writing a thesis on his ghost stories, not really a Lovecraft groupie. Aside from working as a resident director, he sold an eclectic mix of manga, movies, and Japanese pop culture artifacts, which his cousin shipped him from Osaka.
“You working?” he asked, and grabbed the beat-up paperback that sat on the table. It was a reprint copy with bad artwork and had no collector’s value. Her first edition ofThe Vanishingwas in the bedroom. She also had two copies of Tremblay’sWicked Waysand Other Stories,one of which she’d thoroughly marked with annotations and Post-its.
“Trying to. But there’s no getting around it, I need to look at Beatrice Tremblay’s diary and her private letters. Right now, what I have is what’s in the college’s archive, and that’s just roughs of manuscripts, correspondence with her agent, business stuff.”
“I thought you’d located some letters to Lovecraft at Brown?”
“Yeah. Two letters. One of them excitedly discusses ice cream flavors. Lovecraft rarely kept the letters of those who wrote to him, so I guess I’m lucky there are two, even if one of them waxes poetic on coffee-flavored ice cream.”
It was actually Lovecraft who had first guided Minerva toward Beatrice Tremblay, though she’d long since grown more interested in her than in the man from Providence. Lovecraft had been an avid letter writer, which was a boon to history. He corresponded with all the Weird writers of the era: Clark Ashton Smith, RobertE. Howard, even a young Robert Bloch.
Despite rumors that Lovecraft was deathly afraid of women, the man was xenophobic but not gynophobic. Therefore, he also maintained a healthy correspondence with professional and amateur women writers of all types. Gossip indicated he had once been infatuated with the poet Winifred Virginia Jackson, who dated the African American poet William Stanley Braithwaite—she could imagine the shock on Lovecraft’s face upon hearing about such a rival. Well, if he had been a rival. A lot of Lovecraft lore was mutated hearsay.
