“Oh dear,” Miriam said.
“My understanding is that each of you saw the Plantin after it arrived here.”
“What are you accusing us of?” Max asked.
“Of seeing the Plantin after it arrived here. Of being able to help find where it was mislaid.”
Max was a small man who got his thinning hair cut every Friday afternoon, and he had never come to work without his pressed white shirt buttoned to the chin. At a library where not much interesting ever happened, there was gossip any time Max opted for a sweater vest instead of a sport coat. Liesl tried to sound open-minded when leveling the question at Max, but there was no softening him; he was all angles.
“She’s right that we all saw it, and she’s right that we might be able to help,” Miriam said.
Miriam had her arms crossed and her legs crossed and her voice was just above a whisper. She looked in Liesl’s eyes while the men, who had both risen from their chairs, were pacing around the room. As the only two women at the library, Liesl and Miriam had often found themselves bound together, and Liesl appreciated her support now. She just wished that support wasn’t quite so hushed.
“You managed shipping and receiving, didn’t you, Miriam?” Liesl asked.
“Well, yes,” she said. “But only because Christopher asked me to.”
“Why would he have asked you?” Francis asked. Against the September heat he’d left the top three buttons of his shirt open, which was really too many buttons. With his hands on his hips, the dark fabric stretched and showed quite a lot of chest.
“Liesl was away, I guess?” Miriam said. “I handle all the shipping for my own division, so I know the paperwork.”
“So you just did the paperwork?” Francis said.
“That’s enough, Francis. No one has asked you to conduct an interrogation,” Liesl said.
Francis was still standing and Miriam was still sitting, and Liesl felt like she was losing control of the situation. She turned the attention off Miriam.
“When did you see it, Francis? Had it been placed in the safe yet?”
“The Plantin isn’t a set of house keys,” Max muttered. “You don’t just mislay a priceless religious artifact.”
“I’m trying to think of the simplest solutions first, Max.”
“No, I mean you shouldn’t have mislaid it.”
“It was meant to be in the safe before I ever arrived.” He wasn’t looking at her; he was running a thumb over the razor’s-edge crease ironed into his trousers. “I would like to take a systematic approach and understand where the book went in the building after it arrived. I’d like your help doing so.”
“Well,” Max said. “I’d like a leader who shows some regard for the sanctity of that book and the reputation of this library.”
Liesl looked to Francis. Over the years they had joked about Max’s self-importance, his irrationality. She waited for Francis to jump to her defense, to acknowledge that Max was being irrational now. He didn’t.
“You always handle shipping,” Max said. “For an acquisition this significant, our most significant in maybe a decade? You couldn’t have come back for one day to handle shipping?”
“You saw it after it arrived?” Her voice was flat as she said it.
“Christopher is a brilliant man. He raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the thing. You couldn’t have handled the shipping?”
She ignored the question, pushed the implication that she was good for FedEx paperwork and little else into storage, to be examined later.
“I need to know,” she said, “what happened after it arrived here.”
“We all have our responsibilities here. You failed at yours,” Max said.
“There are hundreds of thousands of volumes here,” Francis said. “If it was shelved in error somehow, the volumes separated, mixed in with the general collection…”
“Then we will find it, in time,” Liesl said.
“At what cost to our reputation?” Max asked, so agitated that he ran the risk of a wrinkle in his button-down.
The room fell back into silence. Liesl thought of the volumes that had been scattered around Christopher’s office, thought if the Plantin volumes could have been among them, but she didn’t say anything. From the other side of the door she could hear the rumble of book trucks, the grind of the pencil sharpener, bursts of footsteps as they crossed from carpet to tile. She didn’t have instructions or actions or a way forward. She’d hoped one of them might have volunteered an idea, might have been good for more than panic. But no. She thanked them and ended the meeting with instructions to prepare for the next day’s reception for new university faculty and to keep their eyes peeled for the Plantin. Dan and his combat boots were waiting for Liesl at the door to the reading room.
“You had a call,” he said.
“You could have just left it at my desk.” He followed her as she walked to her office.
“It was a Rhonda Washington.” Dan said. “She said she called your office line first before calling the main line.” Liesl nodded, her face neutral. She took the message slip from Dan. “She said it was important to speak with you and wanted to make sure you got the message. Everything all right at the landowner’s meeting?”
“Everything’s great.”
“Well I’m back to the fields then.”
***
They didn’t find the Plantin that first day. Eventually Liesl had to go home. She had emailed President Garber early in the day, asking him to call her. Her muscles were exhausted from bracing for the impact of his reply all day. He never called. When she got home, she threw her purse on the floor by the front door, inadvertently hitting a stack of canvases with it. She stood, sweating from the walk in the mid-September heat that didn’t show any sign of waning, not moving to see if she had done any damage.
“The woman warrior,” John called from the kitchen. He sounded good. She should have been relieved. “Get you a drink?”
“Mind if we eat out tonight?” She was all of a sudden feeling claustrophobic just being indoors. “You haven’t cooked, have you?”
“Nothing that won’t keep,” he said. His beard, his blue eyes, and all the rest of him appeared in the hallway to greet her.
“Noodles then?” she said.
“It’s a bit hot for noodles, but if that’s what you want.” If he noticed her purse resting against his canvases, he didn’t flinch.
“It’s what I want,” she said.
“You all right? You seem tense. Even for someone with a tense new job,” John said, jogging to catch up with her after he’d paused to lock their front door.
“Fine. Fine, fine,” Liesl said.
“No one fine has ever answered the question that way,” he said as they walked. “You don’t have to tell me, but you know I have to ask.”
“We’ve had an incident,” said Liesl. “I’m a bit over my head.”
Their favorite noodle shop was on the corner of their street. They hadn’t closed their patio yet for the season, so Liesl sat at an outdoor table.
“The great outdoors,” John said. “These backless stools are for a younger man.” He might have been asking for a move to a seat better suited to his large and aging frame, but Liesl pretended not to notice, to read it as an observation and not an ask so she could mark a win in her column for the day.
“We’ve lost the Plantin Bible.”
“The book that Christopher was fundraising for while you were away? What do you mean you lost it? It’s hardly a set of house keys, is it?”
“Why does everyone immediately go to that metaphor? It’s a multivolume set, not just a book.”
“Was it stolen then? Imagine walking around with half a million dollars in your backpack. Good God, Liesl, I’m so sorry.”
The idea of theft had hardly crossed her mind, and now that it had, she didn’t like it in there. She pulled a strand of gray hair toward her lips and chewed on it while she waited for John to settle on his stool.
“No,” she said, pushing the hair away from her mouth. “It wasn’t stolen. We’ve misplaced it somehow.”