The Archivist: A Novel

by Rex Pickett

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

When archivist Nadia Fontaine is found dead of an apparent drowning, Emily Snow is hired by Regents University to finish the job she started - to organize and process the papers of Raymond West, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been short-listed for the Nobel.

Emily’s job comes with its inherent pressures. West’s wife, Elizabeth, is an heiress who’s about to donate $25 million to the Memorial Library - an eight-story architectural marvel that is the crown jewel of the university. The inaugural event in just a few months will be a gala for the who’s who of San Diego to celebrate the unveiling of the Raymond West Collection and the financial gift that made it all possible.

As Emily sets to work on the West papers, it begins to dawn on her that several items have gone missing from the collection. To trace their whereabouts, she gains unsupervised access to the highly restricted “dark archives", in which she opens a Pandora’s box of erotically and intellectually charged correspondence between Raymond West and the late Nadia Fontaine. Through their archived emails, Emily goes back a year in time and relives the tragic trajectory of their passionate love affair. Did Nadia really drown accidentally, as the police report concluded, or could it have been suicide, or, even worse, murder? Compelled to complete the collection and find the truth, Emily unwittingly morphs into an adult Nancy Drew and a one-woman archivist crusader on a mission to right the historical record.

Twisting slowly like a tourniquet, The Archivist turns into a suspenseful murder mystery with multiple and intersecting layers. Not just a whodunit, it is also a profound meditation on love, privacy, and the ethics of destroying or preserving materials of a highly personal nature.

 

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Release date: November 9, 2021

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Sample

CHAPTER 1

A Hard Rain’s Got to Fall

8/3/18

All alone. Blissfully. I’m driving down the coast to San Diego to start a new job at Regents University. I’ll be working as a project archivist on the Raymond West Collection, West being a celebrated writer whose work I’m vaguely familiar with.

The coast of California is beautiful, but the state is on fire!

Emily Snow was twenty-seven years old. She drove a three-year-old Mini Cooper S, shaded blue, her favorite color. She loved shifting the gears. Senna, the legendary Brazilian Formula One racer, who died tragically, was one of her heroes. She thought about him. She thought about many things as she drove down the coast of California, after a too brief sojourn in San Francisco and a stint as a cataloger at the Pacific Film Archive, to her new assignment in San Diego as a true archivist in manuscript processing. Prior to Pacific Film Archive, she had worked as a project archivist at the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, immersed in its incredible collections of famous authors like Ian McEwan, Anne Sexton, and Nobel laureates Kazuo Ishiguro and Gabriel García Márquez, part of whose collection she had been privileged to work on. An archivist’s dream. She adored Austin for its countercultural irreverence, but it was a city she was glad to say goodbye to when things went sour with a young musician by night / tech guy by day named Louis. Emily, no stranger to exploratory relationships, believed in fidelity, commitment. Now, her only commitment was to herself, and the uncertain life that unfolded before her. Like the ocean that stretched dark and white-capped blue to a milky pink horizon whose setting sun seemed to have touched off fires on the far side of the world. A sense of liberation suffused her. She had no ties to the past. All she wanted was to somehow make a difference on this planet going to hell.

Hell. California was on fire. Years of drought had laid a thick carpet of tinder. A superbloom had arisen out of a winter of unseasonably heavy rains. All it took were the Diablo winds in the north and the infamous Santa Anas of the east to galvanize the pyromaniacs into action and rip the power lines from their moorings and set the state ablaze. Fires had galloped west through Napa and Sonoma, hurtled surreally in the middle of the night over six lanes of asphalt and torched neighborhoods in Santa Rosa. Winds clocked at over sixty miles per hour drove currents of ash down the coast and caused many of the terrified inhabitants of San Francisco to don masks. The skies to the east were tarnished a brownish red color, as if some malignant force in the heavens had unleashed a virulent poison upon its planet.

Emily was driving away from the blackened ruins of one fire into the rotating cyclonic maw of another that was now burning through the Santa Barbara hillsides when her cell rang.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, finger-wrestling with her earbuds, not wanting to get cited for her third cell violation in the past year. “How are you?”

“Are you in San Diego yet?” Her voice had the querulous intonation of a mother worried for an only daughter.

“No, not yet,”—she glanced out the window at the dark-blue ocean on the stunning Big Sur Drive—“but I’m making my way down the coast now.”

“That’s good. How are you feeling?” her mother asked.

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“I’m okay, Em. It’s not fun in here,” she replied, referring to the assisted-living facility she had moved to after suffering a cracked hip.

“I’m going to get you out to San Diego, Mom.”

“Oh, I hope so,” she said in a hopeful, higher octave. “Are you nervous?”

“About the new job?”

“Being all alone.”

“No, I prefer it. For now.”

Their conversation ground to an awkward halt. Emily was afraid to offer more, as if it would continue to deepen a line of questioning that she found uncomfortable. A private woman, she didn’t like to have to hide her true self, but she wasn’t fond of exposing it either. Maybe that’s what had happened with Louis. She wouldn’t let him in. She wouldn’t let him in all the way. She longed for intensity, but only if it would be reciprocated. She feared he would take that big step inside and consume her like the fires ravaging the desiccated California forests. And in consuming her, he would colonize a part of her that she hoped never to cede. “What happened with Louis, dear?” was exactly the question she didn’t want to have to address. There was no confabulating it away.

“I’ll let you know when I get there, Mom.”

“Drive safely.”

Emily clicked her phone to the magnetized car mount. Absently, she played with a music app and tapped around until she located a station that played ’80s rock. OMD, the Cure . . . From a decade before she was born, but the finest in pop music in her opinion, when music still had soul. The skies were darkening now, bleeding crimson. The charnel odor of ash stung her nostrils with the twin traces of death and rebirth. She had recently read an apocalyptic book titled The Sixth Extinction and believed that this is what the planet would look like when rats the size of Labradors, the author doomfully theorized, roamed the earth seeking the last vestiges of humankind. She wondered if the fires could climb over the hills and burn all the cars on Coast Highway 1 and leave nothing but a swath of gray all the way to the ocean, where the waves relentlessly battered the rocky shoreline. The sublime beauty and the horror that was California. Emily Katherine Snow, a girl raised in a small town in Massachusetts, who dreamed expansively when she was young, but now would be remembered by few if the fires incinerated her.

Emily was still floating in the same cloud of fatalism when she wheeled into the parking lot of a marine-themed restaurant in Morro Bay, a tourist town at the southern end of the Big Sur drive that boasted a wharf and a gigantic rock that jutted out of the shoreline like a granitic pustule.

She perused the laminated menu that a young waiter offered her. Debating a cold craft beer, she worried that it would make her sleepy during the stretch of miles facing her ahead.

“Fires are something, aren’t they?” the waiter remarked.

Emily smiled without showing her teeth and nodded, not looking to attract men.

“They’re saying they could make it all the way to Morro Bay.”

“Morro Bay?”

“Where you’re sitting.” He smiled, exposing a mouth of brilliant white.

“Oh. I’ve been on the road.” She looked off, not wanting to encourage him, if encouragement is what he had in mind. Emily wished she could read men better. She knew she was attractive to them, even if she deliberately wore off-putting black brow-line glasses and styled her chestnut-brown hair in a short, ragged, unkempt shag, as if she had cut it herself with a pair of scissors and a pocket mirror. As if, if you thought about it, she were an escapee from a lunatic asylum. She wore a poker-faced countenance and a mannish fashion statement of fleece vests over button-upshirts that made you question whether she was brilliant or crazy. Or both. She aspired to the misimpression. It was another way to armor herself.

“What’s that you’re reading?” he inquired, reaching to turn the book so he could make out its title. She let him. “Raymond West. Lessons in Reality.” He turned the book back so that it faced her again. “Never heard of him.”

“It won the Pulitzer. And some other prominent literary awards.”

“Ah. Got to check him out someday.”

As he walked away, Emily followed his retreating figure with wary eyes, her antennae vibrating. Men were the furthest thing from her mind.

Even though the restaurant was perched at the edge of a vast ocean, she was served an uninspired meal of overcooked fish and limp vegetables. She ate ravenously, her nose buried in Lessons in Reality. West’s prose melted on the page. She could never write like that.

The Santa Ana winds had kicked up when she left the restaurant. She unfolded the collar to her fleece jacket so that it protected her neck as she walked back to her car. A tumbleweed hurtled across the street, reminding Emily of a scene out of a Sergio Leone film where a triad of desperate men faced off with drawn guns in a clichéd Mexican standoff. Overhead, gulls seeking cover cawed invisibly from the now dark and desolate wharf gloomily spangled with fog-blurredlights.

Back in her car, Emily realized she was facing another five brutal freeway hours before she got to Del Mar, an unincorporated beach hamlet north of San Diego where the apartment the library helped her secure was waiting. She reset her Google Maps app and turned the engine over on her car.

The wind buffeted her Mini as the route headed inland. Through the windshield, the fires raged in the foothills to the east of the 101 freeway, growing closer with the high-velocity easterly winds. Even though the fires were in the distance, they were advancing apocalyptically now, slanting and leaping, racing raggedly across the low-elevation mountains like an unapologetic force. Leaping like dragons’ tongues, Emily almost said out loud to herself, recalling a lyrical phrase from a short story she had recently listened to on a podcast. “Love goes where it will; the arrow can only follow,” she mouthed from some distant star in her literary memory. The fires, to her, seemed analogous to that unpredictable and uncontainable life force.

Raymond West’s Pulitzer winner was also an audiobook, and she was listening to it now as the conflagrations lit up her driver’s-side window. West had elected to narrate his own words. His voice had, Emily thought, a slight accent, but she couldn’t place it. It was a gravelly, modulated voice—a man who was no stranger to smoke and drink, she thought. Or was she inflecting his voice with her imagination? She tried to marry his voice to the author’s photo on the dust jacket, to paint an image of the man in three-dimensionality. With his shoulder-length hair, angular face, and rascally smile, he reminded her of the playwright Sam Shepard circa the late seventies.

In an adrenalized, coffee-fueled daze, she blasted through Santa Barbara, where the fires incandesced the night sky with infernos of violent orange. In contrast, West’s voice drawled on, enunciating every word, bringing the dialogue to life with a thespian’s flair. Lessons in Realitywas deep, emotional, and soul baring, charting in hypnotic prose the interior landscape of a young man who yearned for experience but who was suicidally beset by fear of failure.

Los Angeles was looming below her now, dotted with pinpoints of lights that stretched to seeming infinity. The coffee had grown cold in her thermos. Her cell hadn’t rung. Louis had texted her when she was at the restaurant, and she had impetuously decided to place a block on all his future texts. She had an image of her hand carving the air and creating a tabula rasa, starting over from a blank page. West’s sonorous voice kept her awake. She marveled at his grasp of language. At times she shuddered in cringe-worthy respect at how personal he could be. The passages where he described the main character’s various romances, his many—often self-destructive—amorous encounters. Hearing their accounting in his own voice, she felt an eerie sense of heightened closeness to him, as if he were narrating directly to her and no one else. Her absorption grew and helped the miles fly past.

Emily paused the audiobook and drank in Greater Los Angeles in all its blazing neon ugliness. The ten-lane freeway was bounded by garishly lit car dealerships, furniture warehouses, cheerless stucco apartment complexes, franchise restaurants, commercial office compounds with their mirrored fenestration and sepulchral cinderblock architecture. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could work, let alone live, here. Emily briefly dated an LA screenwriter she met online. They traded emails and texts for weeks, and then, maddened with desire and almost ready to profess her undying love, she flew out to meet him. Within minutes the magic dissipated. He had said he worked in television, but that turned out to be a fiction when Emily pinned him down to specifics. Her impression of the entertainment business from this intense young man named Vince was that it was a world of desperate carapace-shelled pseudoartists who viciously competed in the concrete-and-glass megalopolis of a sun-drenched hell, cannibalizing one another for connections and an ephemeral moment in the spotlight. As much as Emily loved movies and some select TV shows—mostly British sketch comedies of the past—the people who created them seemed born like vermin to battle its cruel hierarchy to success. Women in particular, she gleaned from Vince, braved an even harsher truth in Hollywood, and always had. Like LA, not for her. She’d felt ashamed that she had let her imagination run riot with this wannabe screenwriter, booked a hotel room in Venice Beach, bivouacked miserably for two days after the magic had evaporated, and flew back to Austin and the emollience of Harry Ransom’s vast library, content to be an archivist.

For a gleeful moment, Emily fatalistically fantasized about the fires burning through LA and torching it to the ground. There, Hollywood, take that!

At an off-ramp gas station, the howling Santa Ana winds whipped Emily’s hair until it smarted her cheeks. She was reminded of a novella by Raymond Chandler titled Red Wind. Its premise was how the Santa Anas elicit the worst in the inhabitants of Los Angeles. The hot, dry winds—like the Föhn winds of Germany, which drive people to madness and suicide—activate the darkest impulses in the deepest recesses of the psyches of some Southern Californians and make them manifest in the most depraved way. Chandler, she reasoned, as she tried to fight off drowsiness, presaged the wave of pyromaniacs who crawled out of the weed-fissured cracks when the winds howled out of the canyons hot and ferocious.

From West LA to San Clemente, the drive was an alienating blur of one car dealership and corporate office edifice after another, a neon emblem of what late-stage capitalist America had devolved to. Long Beach, with its oil refineries scaffolded in webs of lights, loomed like something out of one of those dystopian movies that were fashionable of late, and which Emily loathed. No doubt they used Long Beach for locations for the worst the planet had to offer, Emily chuckled to herself. It resembled a lost civilization in ruin, one whose people had long since abandoned it for more Edenic lands, taking their plundered oil riches with them.

From Long Beach to San Clemente, cinderblock-hideous corporate headquarters gave way to more cheerless housing for people who could only afford to live close to the deafening freeway, the aortic lifeline to everything that epitomized Southern California. Emily’s own feelings of loneliness—the boyfriend who cheated on her; her mother recovering from her hip fracture and all alone in assisted living in Massachusetts; no siblings; no friends other than Professor Mark Erickson from UT Austin, who had mentored her—was mirrored in this depopulated world of stark desolation. She wondered if she would one day find someone who got her for who she was, who would take the time—unlike Louis, unlike the narcissistic screenwriter—to get to know her deep down, in her soul. Maybe that’s why she had chosen the archival profession. It demanded of one, Emily cynically thought, a kind of solitariness that would prove a bulwark to the inevitable disappointment of intimate relationships.

Blackness rushed up at her from the ocean when she sped past San Clemente. Stars feebly twinkled in the night sky. Known as the Camp Pendleton drive, it was an untrammeled twenty-mile stretch of freeway owned by the federal government and controlled by the military. It was the only section of the freeway that prevented Los Angeles and San Diego from becoming one uninterrupted, overdeveloped coastline. San Diegans in particular, someone had told her, prayed it would never be commercialized; they reveled xenophobically in this lacuna between them and evil Los Angeles to the north. To Emily, the blackness that yawned at her was a welcome reprieve from nearly two hundred miles of soul-destroying freeway “scenery” she had carved her way through, hands hooked tight on the steering wheel, head bent forward, foot moving from the accelerator to the brake and back again as the traffic thickened and thinned with frustrating regularity.

Following the electronic voice of Google Maps, she bent off at the Del Mar Heights exit twenty miles north of San Diego and angled west. She coasted down a steep hill until she came to the Coast Highway. As she waited at the red light, she noticed there were no cars. The emptiness was welcoming. She had to execute a U-turn to get to the condo complex where she had rented a place for three months—the time the university had allotted her to finish up the Raymond West Collection.

Emily pulled into her designated spot, switched off the engine, and climbed out of her Mini Cooper, her ears buzzing from the long drive as if she had conch shells over them. She inhaled deeply—the air smelled of ash mixed with the brine of the nearby ocean and a beach heaped, she imagined, with decaying kelp. Fires had broken out in nearby Temecula, northeast of San Diego, but she didn’t fear them here, where the surf pounded the cliffs and vast subdivisions separated her from the infernal madness.

Emily wrestled a bag out of the back seat and opened the unlocked door to her building. She found herself on the third of four floors of an eighteen-unit complex contoured like a horseshoe and facing the black void of the ocean. The quiet was so pronounced that she could distinctly make out the placid sighing of breaking waves. A half moon, bathed in amber, hung suspended in the night sky, the eye of some mythological animal. A peace pervaded Emily as she found her unit, number 11. The exhausting drive, the heavy feeling of loneliness and uncertainty, briefly vacated her. She had a job, she reminded herself. An apartment by the beach. While California burned and half the planet ravened for food, Emily had found an oasis of serenity.

Squatting down, she felt for the keys the landlord had left under the mat, relieved when her fingers closed around them. She opened the sliding glass door to her unit and turned sideways with the bulk of her bag to enter. Something alive brushed the inside of her left calf. Her heart raced. She groped for the light switch and snapped it on. An overhead light flickered to a pale blue. She dropped her bag and searched, terrified, for the animal that had darted in between her legs. Fearing a raccoon, she tiptoed around the small, sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment as if it were booby-trapped. Raccoons scared her. One had bit her when she was young, and she had been obligated to endure a painful series of rabies injections.

She switched on the kitchen light. In the corner she noticed a black, furry object withdrawing into itself, its iridescent emerald eyes glowing around a pair of black pupils that drilled into Emily’s heart. Emily bent down to the cowering animal, calmed when she recognized it was a cat. He recoiled at Emily’s tentative touch.

“Here, kitty; here, kitty,” she whispered. She extended a hand and scratched the top of the cat’s head and petted her. Him? Yes, a him, she quickly determined. His fur was thick and satiny. He wore no collar, but possibly was microchipped for identification because he didn’t act like a feral. Without protestation, Emily scooped him up and walked him outside, set him down gently, and slid the door shut. The meowing began immediately, at first plaintive, then more gutturally animalistic, beckoning her to let him back in. Until it faded into the pounding surf with a plangency that played at her emotions.

Emily plopped down on the black Naugahyde couch. She raked a hand through her hair and combed it off her face. It felt greasy and unwashed from the drive. She threw her feet up on the oblong coffee table and took in her short-term rental. Off the living room was a small dining area with a table and four chairs. Around a wall must have been the kitchen, but she was too tired to get up and check it out. A large-screen TV reflected her looking at it blankly. White walls flowed down to a white-tiled floor, half of it covered with a brown sisal rug. On one wall hung an expressionist Air France poster of Chile, a country as far away as Emily’s imagination could transit. The long drive had narcotized her. She felt dead to the world. Until . . .

The black cat meowed again. His silhouette could be glimpsed behind the shroud of the white venetian blind. Emily had to chuckle at the blatancy of the premonitory symbolism of a black cat greeting her arrival in a new city, with a new job. She didn’t subscribe to superstitions. What did she believe in, she wondered, all twenty-seven years of her, all alone, hunkered down for the next three months in a city where she was an outsider?