“Hmm?” Her back was to me, as she scrambled what looked like vast quantities of eggs.
“The studio I’m in—who was in there before me?”
The housekeeper paused for a fraction of an instant, then resumed whisking. “Can’t rightly say,” she said. Her tone was unexpectedly cool.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…” I started to wave my hands apologetically, realized that she couldn’t see me, and let them drop into my lap. “I thought you’d been here when it was occupied.”
Mrs. Kent shrugged, then slid eggs onto a plate and put itdown in front of me and turned back to her cooking. I got the distinct impression that I was intruding on her work, bolted my eggs and coffee, and slipped away.
It took me three tries to find the library, since I had forgotten to ask Mrs. Kent for directions and I didn’t want to bother her again. I wandered the hallway near Halder’s rooms, hoping that I wasn’t about to open the door to his bedroom. Fortunately, after a locked door and a linen closet, I pushed open the third door and stepped into a large room lined with floor-to-ceiling cabinets, each with dozens of shallow drawers. I recognized the style immediately and laughed at myself for thinking that a library would be full of books.
This was a library of insects. Extremely shallow drawers at the top of each cabinet gave way to slightly deeper ones lower down, though none were deeper than the width of my palm. Each drawer had a small label in the corner. I pulled a drawer out at random, revealed dozens of brown and green beetles pinned to cork under a sheet of glass. FamilyScarabaeidae, subfamilyCetoniinae, genusCotinis, a large label informed me helpfully. Some of the beetles had cream-colored stripes around the base of their shells, others had subtle brown stripes across their backs. All of them shimmered as I tilted the drawer lightly, the green glittering brightly, then dulling back down depending on the angle.
I slid the drawer back in. The label in the corner readSC-C.S for Scarab, C for Cetoniinae, C for Cotinis?I selected another drawer, this one labeledLL-Land tugged it partway out, then laughed with delight.Stag beetles.I always loved stag beetles. Our giant native variety likes damp, decomposing wood, which is also what many of our native orchids like, so I had encountered them numerous times while out with Father. The male stag beetles look terrifying, with their huge mandibles like nutcrackers, but their actual bite is more like a pinch—startling if you aren’t expecting it, but thoroughly underwhelming giventheir fierce appearance. (Mind you, I’ve known people like that too.)
I turned slowly in a circle. There were a good thirty cabinets surrounding a large central table with books stacked upon it. I spared a sympathetic thought for Jackson’s back, lugging all that furniture into place, but mostly what I felt was glee.
I spent a happy hour pulling out drawers and inspecting the contents. The collection was mostly of American insects, so I recognized many old friends (and occasionally old enemies). Beetles, weevils, dragonflies, damselflies… crane flies, with their legs mostly detached and scattered on the floor of the tray… Not all of the collection was in terribly good repair, alas, nor were the labels as thorough as one might wish. One drawer, marked simplyL, held dozens of loose, translucent envelopes that slid and slithered across one another as the drawer moved. Each one contained a single dried butterfly. A few of the envelopes had scrawled writing on the outside—I recognized Halder’s cramped handwriting—but the majority were blank.
Collected, and then he told himself he’d organize them later, I bet.Every naturalist I’ve ever known had done it at one time or another, and then discovered their memory was not so good as they thought, and they no longer had any idea under what circumstances it had been collected. The good ones learned. The other ones… well, possibly they papered their butterflies and shoved them in a drawer to deal with later.
Still, it wasn’t my place to judge Halder’s collection methods. I had a job to do. I consulted the first name on my list of illustrations.Cochliomyia hominivorax. Now let me see, that’d be… err… something-something, dash C.
Um.
It occurred to me that what I really, really needed was an index.
The next hour was much less happy than the first. There wasn’t an index. What had initially looked like a promising stackof books turned out to be the collected periodicals of a journal calledThe American Entomologist.I flipped through and found that it was very much not the sort of publication that would (to take an examplecompletelyat random) tell a layperson what the metathorax was.
I sat back with a groan. Halder probably hadn’t bothered to index it because he knew where everything was. He only needed the shorthand labels to make things easier. Probably one cabinet was flies and one was ants and one was beetles and… well, no, probably more than one had to be beetles. There are alotof beetles in the world.
And honestly, that sort of loose organization would have worked fine for me,ifI had any idea what sort of insect I was looking for in the first place. But what was aCochliomyia hominivorax? Was it a beetle or a butterfly, an ant or an antlion? I had no more idea of that than of where a metathorax went.
No, if I wanted to find the damn thing, I was either going to have to ask Halder, or start pulling out drawers.
I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and started pulling out drawers.
Two hours later—some of which was spent finding a stepladder so that I could reach the collections at the top of the cabinets—I locatedC. hominivoraxin a narrow tray labeledDC-C. I pulled out the drawer, stared into it, then closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool wood of the cabinet, not sure whether to laugh or cry.
They lookedexactlylike houseflies. The only reason I knew they weren’t is because houseflies areMusca domestica, and the only reason I knew that was because Father used to feed them to his Venus flytraps, andevery single time, he would announce, “Musca domesticafor your enjoyment, ladies.” (Possibly this tells you something about my father.)
I sighed heavily and descended the ladder, clutching my tray of not-actually-houseflies. I set it on the table and stared at them. There were larvae in there as well, larger than the adults as often seems to happen. They were lined up neatly along the bottom, preserved in tiny glass bottles, small to large. The largest of the larvae were most of an inch long and had an odd spiral ridge that ran their entire length. It was like looking at a small, fleshy screw.
“Delightful,” I muttered. Well, that was tomorrow’s problem. At the moment, I had a fly to paint.
The study table included a magnifying glass. I fetched my sketchbook and my pencils and my tiny plein air watercolor palette, and set to work. After a time, I selected one specific specimen, lifted it carefully from the tray, and examined it under the magnifying glass. Except for a distinct blue tinge, it still looked like a housefly to me. I wished I had better light, but Halder had been very clear that removing specimens from the library was a sin tantamount to murder.
There is a certain intimacy to examining a study specimen. You are studying parts much more closely than the animal presumably ever did on its own. Eventually you start to assign a certain amount of personality to them. (Well, I do, anyway. Other people may not.)
Hominivorax… hominivorax…“I shall call you Rex,” I told the specimen.
“Pleased to be working with you, Miss Wilson,” I answered for him, in a high buzzy voice. “I look forward to a fruitful collaboration.”
(Look, if you can’t amuse yourself by making the specimens talk, you’re in the wrong field.)
“So do I, Rex.” I sketched out the arrangement of his legs. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what your metathorax is?”
“I’ll never tell!” Rex squeaked.
