Page 35 of The Paradox Club

“Tess has always been precise.”

“This goes beyond precise. You know psychology isn’t your strong suit, Harry. You might need to trust me on this one.”

“Fine, when we get home, I’ll take her to see someone. But in the meantime—I want to do this. We need to do this.”

Tess found the part of the conversation that concerned herself the least interesting. She arranged the Legos and sharpened the pencils because if she didn’t, something bad would happen. Not because she had some disorder with initials. But the fact that Harry and Vivian planned to do something Marie had begged them not to do stunned Tess. She trusted no two people in the world more than Harry and Vivian. But now, her father and her aunt were going to…she had heard the word affair and, at twelve, Tess had enough of a handle on the concept of marital infidelity that she had a good idea what Harry and Vivian were talking about doing. One of her classmates had divorced parents and a father who lived with another woman. Is that what Harry had planned? Would Tess be shuttling back and forth between her house and some apartment where Harry and Vivian lived together and slept in the same bed together? As much as she loved Vivian, the prospect was horrifying. Her legs had started to go numb, but the information she had gleaned was worth the discomfort of the cramped space behind the couch from which she eavesdropped.

She peeked out of her hiding place long enough to see the silhouettes of Harry and Vivian sitting motionless in the dying light of the fire, then crept back to her room to write integers backward from one thousand to one, just like the voices told her to. Vivian did not come to bed that night.

THE PHILCO 70

There is an unmistakable smell that emanates from the glowing glass vacuum tubes of a vintage radio like the Philco Model 70 Baby Grand Cathedral tabletop model that sat in front of Tess. The aroma is warm and metallic and oddly comforting, at least to someone who, like Tess, associated it with her last days of happiness. That final summer her father had insisted on lugging this old radio to the lake, where it became their only link to the outside world aside from the rarely used landline. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, Tess would sneak out of her bedroom and turn on the set, waiting patiently for the tubes to warm up and the voices to whisper to her from the beyond. Her father always tuned the radio to a station whose format was in keeping with the 1933 set—big band music; reruns of classic radio mystery shows; and Tess’s favorite program, Classical Music Through the Night. Tess paid no attention to the infrequent news updates. Though she had a wide-ranging knowledge of science, she knew so little of current events that they would have meant nothing to her if she had listened.

Plagued by insomnia after deciphering the mysterious message from Harry, Tess lay in bed thinking of Vivian’s story about Ravel’s piano and the Clara Schumann music. Bits of classical music ran through her head, but she could identify none of them as Schumann. Finally, around five a.m., Tess gave up on sleep, crawled out of bed, and pulled on the robe and slippers that had waited for her in the closet ever since she left for college. She thought perhaps the ogre story might relax her the way it had when Harry told it on summer nights at the lake. She hadn’t revisited the story since high school, but she knew where it waited for her. She tiptoed up the steep stairs to the attic, careful to avoid the squeaky board on the fourth step as she had on many a summer night as a teenager. In those days, Tess had fixed up one end of the attic as a sort of hideaway—an old stuffed sofa, a few bookshelves made from boards and bricks, and a broken coffee table duct taped together and holding a few candles melted nearly to the stub. Here she would sit and read on quiet afternoons or retreat from insomnia in the dead of night.

A small round window above the couch let in enough moonlight that Tess didn’t bother with turning on the single bulb that dangled from above. As she picked her way across the dim space, she swept cobwebs out of her path and ducked under Vivian’s puffy pink prom dress that hung from one of the rafters. Vivian had tried to interest Tess in wearing this monstrosity, but Tess had pointed out that 1) it was no longer 1982, and 2) she had no intention of going to her school’s prom.

As Tess reached for the Bankers Box that both served as a side table and held her scores of versions of the ogre story, she noticed a strange gothic silhouette peering out from the shadows. For a moment, she ignored it, pulling the top off the Bankers Box and inhaling the familiar smell of manila file folders and erasable bond typing paper. Then a memory clicked into place, and she realized that the silhouette was the old radio from the lake house. Tess had assumed it had been destroyed the night Harry died—it certainly hadn’t been in the attic during all those hours she had spent here as a teenager. Apparently, Vivian had moved it up here sometime in the past few years, along with her prom dress and who knew what else.

Tess put the top back on the box of stories and lifted the radio out of the shadows. She had never picked it up before—only Harry had been allowed to touch it—and she was surprised how heavy it was. She had to lean back as she carried it down the stairs to keep from falling forward. She set it on the floor by her bed and plugged it in, then snuggled under the covers. As she waited for the set to warm up, staring at the picture of herself and Harry in swimsuits she had placed on the bedside table, she had an irrational fantasy that the room would soon fill with the music of Clara Schumann, which would lull her to sleep. Soon enough, the familiar smell of the warm tubes permeated the air, and she began to hear voices—but these voices she liked to hear. They took her right back to evenings on the lake, listening to the radio while Harry and Vivian nodded knowingly at each other.

The radio seemed to be pulling in the same station Tess remembered from her childhood. She listened to the end of a big band show that purported to be coming live from the Excelsior Room (though obviously it had been taped decades ago). A classic radio mystery followed, and Tess felt the sound of voices telling a story begin to relax the tension she had been carrying in her shoulders.

Both the detective and the narrator were women—surprisingly forward-looking for the 1930s, thought Tess as she let the narrator’s tinny voice wash over her.

“The eye patch was the first thing everybody looked at when they met Alison, and she liked that just fine. It meant while they were staring at the eye patch, she could look at everything else, and what she saw now convinced her of two things. Susan Jenkins had not murdered Jacob Roberts at his home in the Hollywood Hills two nights ago, but she might hang for it nonetheless.” The signal would sometimes fade in and out, as would Tess’s attention, so she had only a rough idea of the case as it unfolded, but certain lines did jump out.

“She could go for a guy like him, if she went for guys at all.” Tess wondered if this was a vintage show after all. Did they have lesbians in 1930s radio mysteries? Later the detective had a long conversation with her wife, and Tess became convinced that this was a modern production, done in the style of an old-fashioned radio play. They had reproduced the patterns of speech and the sound effects and the slightly slapdash nature of the whole production perfectly.

The voices on the radio didn’t soothe her the way Vivian’s stories did or the way she suspected the music of Clara Schumann would, but they helped. Still, she felt restless, so she climbed out of bed and looked for something to organize. In her closet she found a mountain of old New Yorkers, and she set to work putting them in order as the mystery on the radio continued. At first, she arranged the magazines by publication date, but she soon realized that many weeks were missing, so that wouldn’t work. She needed a classification system that left no gaps and decided on alphabetical order of the first word on page twenty-two—she liked the contradictory nature of a system both totally random and highly specific. She began to reorganize the magazines, just as the mystery show was giving way to a show in which a host named Juan Ramirez interviewed a British movie star named Reginald Leach. Tess had never heard of Leach, or of any of the movies they discussed—but she had never been much of a pop culture enthusiast, so this was hardly surprising. She had made some significant progress arranging the magazines in stacks on the floor of her room and between that and the radio, she felt almost human when the news came on.

“The White Star Liner R.M.S. Titanic arrived in New York today after its two hundredth transatlantic crossing. Governor Franklin Roosevelt strode down the gangplank with a smile on his face, home from his visit with Chancellor Hitler.”

Tess had never been enthusiastic about studying history—preferring the precision of physics and calculus—but even she knew that report was teeming with inaccuracies, things she might never have noticed at age twelve, that summer when the news on the radio was so often mere background noise to games of canasta or Yahtzee. The report moved quickly through stories about local and state politics and an unsolved murder, all of which meant nothing to Tess, before reaching the feature segment, a profile and life story of what the newscaster called “the biggest star in the world,” Reginald Leach. Again. Who the hell is Reginald Leach? thought Tess. Is this whole station some sort of fictional construct—like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast? By the time she had checked IMDb on her iPad, finding no listing for Reginald Leach, the station had moved on to Classical Music Through the Night, odd as it was now after six a.m.

Tess turned the volume down low and tried to remember what she had heard on this radio as a child. Had it been wildly inconsistent with reality? She probably wouldn’t have thought twice about a female detective, and she might not have even noticed that the female detective had a wife—Tess always just wanted to solve the crime. But had she listened to news reports of repeat voyages of the Titanic and of Franklin Roosevelt walking without assistance without realizing the inconsistencies? It was certainly possible. She turned the radio around and stared into the open back where the tubes glowed orange. Was this really a radio? Or was it something else?

She crawled back into bed and lay awake listening to the sounds of Classical Music Through the Night, hoping for a piece by Clara Schumann that never came. Every time she thought she recognized the opening of a piece, the music would morph into something unfamiliar. Surely that passage didn’t belong in Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, and she was almost certain some of the notes were not quite right in the spring movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And who was the great Italian Romantic composer Maria de Sala? Tess had taken a music survey course during her first semester of college and she was certain that name had never come up.

She finally turned the radio off, and as she drifted into sleep, Tess thought that between Harry’s hidden message and his old radio, there was some very weird shit going on. But Tess’s focus on that weird shit had somehow calmed the voices in her head and had, for the first time in weeks, distracted her from her depression. There was a mystery to solve, maybe two, and Tess, who grew up reading Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, loved a good mystery.

TESS AND HARRY ON THE DOCK

“Did you finish your mystery book?” asked Harry, nodding at the Agatha Christie paperback on the dock.

“I did,” said Tess. “Do you want to know who did it?”

“Don’t spoil the surprise for me.”

“Are you going to read it?”

“Probably not.”

“You don’t like mysteries, do you?”

“On the contrary, I have dedicated my life to mysteries.”

“But I never seen you read anything but science books.”