And If Thou Wilt, Forget

Nicolò Tomas Elmo di Angelo may have gone peacefully to his rest in a place where no harm could come to him and no fears touch him, but that did not mean his funeral was easy on his only remaining legitimate grandson, especially the parts where he had to deal with his family. Tim had never really talked about his parents except as incidental to stories about his brother, and passing references to them not speaking much lately, but Gerry had gathered the hazy idea that they’d had a decent if not especially warm relationship. He’d been sorely mistaken. Unable to complain about Tim’s or Gerry’s presence at the vigil when Don Filippo greeted them both warmly and sympathetically before leading them to a place of honor (“it is where the good sir would have wished you sit”), Luisa Stoker had nevertheless made several cutting, indirect remarks that had made Gerry almost wish she had been claimed by one of the Fourteen so he could at least pretend to justify taking her out. Tim’s father, whose name was also Nick, had been far less subtle in his refusal to speak to his son until just before they’d left, when he’d hissed something at him and stormed off.

It had taken most of the train trip home to persuade Tim to finally tell him what he’d said, and when he’d repeated the words, Gerry had privately decided not to bother pretending finding an excuse to justify that particular murder.

If he’d thought Tim was having a hard time of it before, it seemed like it was even worse now. He was still trying to dig at the Unknowing and getting nowhere fast, and the tension between him and Jon was apparently getting more and more. The night before, Tim had actually floated the idea of going to Elias to lodge an official complaint. He’d very quickly backpedaled and enumerated all the reasons it would be the epitome of stupidity, but still, that he’d truly considered it even for a second was worrying. Add on the fact that his nightmares were coming more frequently, and Gerry was desperately casting about for something he could do to help. And not with the work, either. They were both already doing everything they could about the Unknowing, at least for right now. There was something nagging at Gerry, something Gertrude had told him once, but he could not for the life of him remember what it was.

No, what Gerry wanted was to help Tim. Not just take his mind off everything, but actually make a difference. Something that didn’t have to do with the Fourteen. He’d have liked to give Tim his grandfather back, or Gertrude, or both, but necromancy was a bit outside his powers.

It was as he was staring at his face in the mirror while he massaged dye into his hair, trying to see traces of what he remembered of his father in himself, that what he could do hit him like a lorry. Tim didn’t have any pictures of his grandfather—they’d had other things on their mind both times they’d visited Messina, and his mother had taken possession of all the family papers—but maybe being able to look at him would help. And he loved Gerry’s artwork, so he always avowed. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

The problem was that he didn’t do portraits. He’d always been one for more abstract art, landscapes and shapes that suggested a whole and the like. He was going to need practice. And more importantly, he was going to need reference pictures. The last thing he wanted was to rely on his own shaky memory of someone he’d seen all of twice.

The easiest solution to both of those, he decided, was the London Public Library.

Art books weren’t difficult to find. While Gerry had always been slightly proud of being self-taught, he wanted this one to be perfect, so he wasn’t too proud to take instructions. There were plenty of tomes on portrait and figure drawing, nestled between techniques, cartooning, and still life drawing. Gerry selected a couple that looked promising before turning his attention to his second problem.

And it was a problem, he realized. There hadn’t been a computer anywhere on the property either time they’d visited; Signore di Angelo hadn’t been particularly famous, his wine was not well known, and there probably weren’t many if any news articles about him. Finding pictures of him was going to be a challenge.

Gerry liked a challenge as much as the next guy, but he suspected this one might be beyond him. Luckily, the “next guy” was a research librarian, and if Gerry had learned anything from his travels with Tim, it was that posing a challenging question to a research librarian was like giving a zoo lion a pumpkin stuffed with meat. He didn’t have Tim’s unenviable charisma, but in this case, maybe he wouldn’t need it.

He found a research librarian and managed a shy smile. “Hi…I have kind of an odd question. I’m trying to do research for a Christmas present for my partner, and I need to know how to look into somebody who isn’t famous and maybe doesn’t have a digital footprint.”

The librarian’s eyes lit up, which told Gerry he’d hit exactly the right note. “Oh! Actually—and I know this is going to sound weird if you aren’t actually looking into a relative of yours—but what you want is Genealogy. Go up there and talk to Steve, he’ll sort you out in a jiffy.”

Gerry thanked her, headed upstairs to the massive oak-paneled halls of the Genealogy department, and located the promised Steve. Steve turned out to be an elderly man with a sparse ring of white hair so crabbed and hunched over he didn’t look like he was capable of moving at anything faster than a slow shuffle, but when Gerry repeated his request he, too, lit up. He gripped Gerry’s arm with a surprising strength that belied his years and led—more accurately dragged—him over to the bank of computers and microfiche machines so fast his feet practically left the ground. The ensuing lecture and demonstration was remarkably thorough and extremely technical, but nevertheless, Gerry was pretty sure he could follow it.

“Thank you,” he said when the man finished. “You’ve been very helpful. Do your machines cover international research as well? Only my partner’s family is from Italy originally, and—”

“Ah, then you’ll want to use this machine over here.” Steve pointed a gnarled finger; it was so hooked with arthritis that it was either indicating the machine at the very end or the one right next to Gerry, depending on whether you followed the general thrust of the arm or the actual fingertip. “But if I were you, boyo, I’d start with something domestic. Get the hang of the research mechanics before you try to go international. Why not look up your partner, eh?”

Gerry smiled up at Steve. “Good idea. Thank you.”

Steve turned towards the door as someone else came in, then turned back to Gerry with a smile. “My pleasure. You let me know if you have any questions.” He patted Gerry’s shoulder, then scuttled away in the direction of the new visitor to Genealogy.

Left to his own devices, Gerry turned back to the computer. Green text on a black screen waited for him, along with a blinking solid block for a cursor. This was an old system, but apparently it worked. And Gerry had to admit, he was impressed. According to Steve, the computer held a catalog with every single name that had ever been mentioned in any record in the library’s collection, along with the index of how to reference it. Once he had those numbers, all he had to do was bring them over to the cupboard on the far wall, and the reference librarian stationed there would pull the requested microfilm reels for him or point him to the correct archival shelves.

Gertrude would have loved this. Or possibly hated it. It would have made things easier to find in the Archives, anyway. Tim probably would feel the same.

Gerry typed TIMOTHY STOKER into the search bar, then selected options—must contain both words, do not have to be in order, date range May 1982 to present. Just before he clicked SEARCH, however, he paused. The steady blink, blink, blink of the cursor drew his attention, causing him to think. After all…who would know?

He went back to the main search bar, deleted Tim’s name, and wrote JONATHAN SIMS instead.

Quite a few more results popped up than Gerry had expected. After a moment’s scrolling, he started noticing a trend, backed up the search, and added a filter to eliminate “FOOTBALL” and “FC” from the results, then tried again. This time the results were more reasonable—still more than he’d expected, but at least reasonable.

Dutifully, Gerry copied down the list of references, then took it up to the cupboard. The young woman sat behind it took his list, read it, and disappeared into the back. She was gone a surprisingly short amount of time before she returned with a carefully partitioned tray laden with a couple dozen microfiche reels.

“Just bring it back when you’re done,” she told him, handing it over.

“Thanks,” Gerry said. He reclaimed his list, then took the whole kit and kaboodle over to the machines.

After a moment’s thought, he selected the one tucked in the corner.

He looked over the microfilm cases. Below the reference codes he’d written down were more details, mostly the name of the publication plus the dates. It was clear they fell into three separate categories: church records, newspapers, and university publications. It was also clear, based on where those publications were from and the dates that crossed over, that there were still probably two people with the same name.

This was good, he told himself, it was good. Nicolò di Angelo likely wasn’t that uncommon of a name, and this would help him practice how to narrow those down, especially since he didn’t read Italian. This was just an exercise. Nothing nefarious.

It wasn’t like they had a murder confession on here or anything.

The latest one in the tray was probably one he could eliminate, since it seemed to contain newspaper records for the summer of 2014; still, Gerry loaded it into the machine and threaded it through. If nothing else, he could use it to narrow down the details on the other Jonathan Sims. Sure enough, once he scanned the machine to the location indicated—which took a while—he discovered an interview with a band who had performed at Edinburgh Fringe, one of whom was listed as formerly known as Jonathan Sims before, apparently, changing his name to that of his stage name. It did, however, give enough of a biography of the man that Gerry could pick out several more files he’d pulled that he deemed likely to be for the singer and not the academic.

The next one back, chronologically, ran from March of 2010 to March of 2011 and declared itself to be from the Bournemouth Daily Echo, which didn’t really help narrow it down. After Gerry pulled the correct location up, though, he realized he had struck gold.

It was an obituary, a very well-written one. As opposed to the other obits on the page, which took up no more than five lines and rarely listed anything beyond church affiliation, number of grandchildren, and cursory funeral details, this one ran for nearly an entire column on its own and went into details about the woman’s life, work, activities, and hardships, and concluded with the hopeful supposition that she was reunited with all those she has loved and lost in a land far kinder than this. To most people, it would have been a glowing tribute to a well-loved member of the community, but to Gerry, who’d penned and then discarded a similar “tribute” to his mother, it bore all the hallmarks of someone both keen to put a degree to some use and afraid that the subject of the missive would not be one to let such a trivial thing as death stop her from exacting retribution on a portrait she deemed unflattering or incomplete.

The name at the top was Mabel Agatha Sims, and it listed as one of her surviving relatives her grandson, Jonathan, currently of London. None of the other names listed matched the ones in the article about the musician.

Gerry reread the obituary more slowly and jotted a few notes down in his sketchbook, then rewound the microfiche and put it back in the case. Armed with what he knew, he skipped over a couple of the less likely sources and pulled a few more. There were quite a few more reels from the Daily Echo, one of which had two entries, plus a couple of university publications that seemed to tally. There were only two church record books, both from roughly the same time, neither of which were from Bournemouth, so he’d have to look into both…no, wait, Tim had described what they’d done for Jon’s birthday the previous year, hadn’t he? Yes, he’d been talking about the recorder turning itself on and how he’d worried he hadn’t been able to play it off as intentional…when had that been? October sometime. Well, one of the reels ended in June of 1988, so it had to be the other one. Gerry picked it up and fed it into the machine.

After what seemed like forever, he finally reached the appropriate page. The handwriting was unnecessarily ornate and a bit difficult to read, but once he zoomed in, he was able to find the record of christening for one Jonathan Sims, parents Thomas and Roxana. Bingo.

Triumphant, Gerry went back to the Daily Echo. Other than the one he had previously pulled, they seemed to fall one right after the other, and he pulled up the oldest one. The first location he was directed to startled him, as it was another obituary, this one for…Jonathan Sims. After a moment’s shock, however, his eyes fell on the words survived by his loving wife of forty-seven years, Mabel (Abernathy) and realized it was for Jon’s grandfather, Jonathan Andrew Sims, for whom he’d evidently been named. Gerry pursed his lips, jotted down that information, and skimmed the rest. Seven children, good grief—only one son, Thomas, then listed as living in Bristol with his wife Roxana, who seemed to be the youngest. The others appeared to be scattered across the globe, save the only unmarried sister, who apparently also lived in Bristol.

So Jon had a huge, sprawling family. Which made him a bit of an odd choice for an Archivist, and certainly lent credence to Tim’s theory that he’d chosen himself for the position rather than being chosen. Gerry skipped the film onward, looking for the next location. It somehow didn’t surprise him to find that it was a birth announcement, nor that it had been placed, not by Jon’s parents, but by his grandmother. It did confirm he’d been named for the grandfather he’d never met, though, although he’d been given his father’s first name as a middle name. Gerry looked for any more relevant information, found none, and went on to the next reel.

According to the case, it was twenty years older than the first one he had pulled—March of 1991 to March of 1992—putting it around the time Jon would have been two or three. The entry he was after was somewhere around the middle of the reel and, when he found it, gave him a twinge of sympathy. It was another obituary, this one for Thomas Andrew Sims. Jon’s father. He’d evidently died due to an accidental fall—no further details on that—leaving behind his wife, son, mother, sisters, brothers-in-law, their children—few enough that they could be named in the obituary, which was interesting—and “countless” friends. Gerry realized he was probably going to have to look through the Bristol papers from around that time to see if he could find out more about this “accidental fall”. It could be nothing, or it could be everything.

Actually—wait. Gerry looked back at the tray and…yes, there was a reel for the Bristol Port of Call, which evidently hadn’t run long, since it implied it held the entirety of the paper’s run. It had, however, run from 1989 to 1994, which must also have meant it was a shorter paper or not put out daily. Gerry threaded it into the machine, checked it against his list, and went looking.

He found Thomas Sims’ obituary, which was much the same as the one in the Daily Echo, save that it spelled his wife’s name Rukhsana and at least made mention of three sisters-in-law and their husbands, which evidently necessitated lumping the children together as “seventeen nieces and nephews”. Then he scanned backwards slowly until he hit the paper that had come out the day after his listed date of death. There—right on the front page page. Tragedy at Balloon Festival. Gerry leaned in closer to see better.

The facts were clear. Thomas Sims, age thirty-seven, an employee at Cameron Balloons and an apparently experienced pilot, had been performing a stunt that, according to the article, he had performed dozens of times: walking around on top of an inflated hot air balloon. He had apparently been properly tethered and anchored, and should have been fine…but somehow he had fallen, and somehow the line had failed. Some reports said they had seen another figure on top of the balloon, but the staff swore that only Thomas had been up top, as it was a controlled demonstration. He had, apparently, died on impact. Gerry winced sympathetically at the next to last line: According to reports, Sims’ wife, who witnessed the fall, collapsed from grief and was admitted to the hospital overnight for observation.

He skipped ahead to the next mention of Jon’s name, hoping that it would be more details about the fall. It was not. Something cold settled in Gerry’s stomach as he read the few poignant lines: Rukhsana Fatima Sims, age thirty, was reunited with her beloved husband…

The obituary didn’t give details of her death, although Gerry could imagine several possibilities, but still. It also only mentioned Jon as surviving her, which could have meant the person who wrote the obituary didn’t know her family or could have meant they were all gone. Either way, it put the first obituary into better perspective. Obviously Jon had been raised by his father’s mother after both his own parents died, far too young. God only knew what the other articles were about.

It didn’t take long to figure out. Every single mention of Jon’s name from the Daily Echo was in an obituary, as one by one his father’s sisters seemed to die off—in Nice, in Sydney, in Athens, in Melbourne, in Manaus. The sixth unmarried sister didn’t have an obituary, but Gerry noticed that she went from being listed as Eleanor Sims of Bristol in her father’s and brother’s obituaries to Eleanor Sims, currently of no known address in her sister Margaret’s obituary to quietly being mentioned neither among the survivors nor the predecessors by the time her sister Susan passed on in 2005. They all seemed perfectly normal and natural, but still, it was a bit suspicious that Mabel managed to outlive every single one of her children.

The academic journals turned out to be research articles from a third Jonathan Sims, this one not only a doctor but an American, but there was an article tucked into the middle of a university newspaper from 2009 headlined Student Spotlight: Jonathan Sims. It was published as an interview rather than a narrative article, and the tone of the answers told Gerry that the reporter—the byline read Geo. Barker—had had a job getting any sort of response out of him at all, certainly not enough to flesh out into an essay of any kind. One exchange in particular caught his eye:

G.B.: Did you have many siblings?
J.S.: No.
G.B.: Cousins then. Any relatives your own age you were close to?
J.S.: No. … I have cousins, I believe. Older than I am. I’ve simply never met them. Or at least I don’t remember them. I was quite young the last time I saw any of them.
G.B.: You never had a family reunion?
J.S.: None of my relatives lived close by.
G.B.: How far are we talking?
J.S.: The nearest of my father’s sisters lived in the south of France, and she died when I was seven or eight, I think. Grandmother and I didn’t go to the funeral. Aunt Bertha converted to Catholicism after her marriage and Grandmother was a loyal [member of the Church of England].
G.B.: How many other sisters did your father have?
J.S.: Five. None of them lived in England. Well, Aunt Eleanor did at one time, but we lost touch with her. I believe she’s considered lost at sea. The others all died, Aunt Harriet just this last year.
G.B.: And none of them ever came to visit you?
J.S.: No, never.
G.B.: What about your mother’s family?
J.S.: I don’t know anything about them. Grandmother never spoke about them.

As man on the spot reporters went, Geo. Barker did a fairly good job, but Gerry wished they had done a hair more research for this spotlight than just interviewing their subject. Still, it was at least a little helpful.

Gerry finished scribbling down some notes, unwound the reel, turned off the machine, and went to return the tray to the cupboard before setting up at the international machine to do the research he’d really come for.

Shockingly, it worked. He knew a bit more about Tim’s late grandfather than he had about Jonathan Sims, so even though he spanned a longer period of time, he was able to narrow down the results much more quickly and find a few pictures. He paid to print them, returned the reels once more, thanked both the young woman behind the counter and Steve on the way out, and quit the library. It was dark, which surprised him.

Scarcely had he set foot on the top step when his mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. Quickly, he fished it out and answered without looking at the screen, which meant he didn’t know who was calling—custom ring tones really only helped if you had the volume up. “Delano.”

“Gerry? Are you okay?” Tim’s voice crackled with anxiety. “Where are you?”

“Went to the library, why?”

As if in response to his query, a nearby church bell began tolling the hour. Tim took a deep breath. “It’s six o’clock. I just got home…look, I’m going to take Rowlf for a run, he seems like he’s been cooped up for a while. We can talk when you get here, all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be home soon.” Gerry winced. “Sorry, Tim, I didn’t realize how late I would be. Must’ve got really deep in the research…I’ll explain when I get home. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” Tim ended the call without further ado.

Deciding the extra expense was one he could well afford, especially when weighed against his partner’s peace of mind, Gerry hailed a cab. He made a quick stop at the curry stop they preferred and still made it back to the flat before Tim. A few minutes later, just as he was finishing setting the table, Rowlf came trotting in for his post-walk drink. Gerry set down the things in his hands and turned around to see Tim, looking tired, coming in behind him.

“I’m sorry,” Gerry said immediately. He crossed over and pulled Tim into a hug. “If I’d realized how long I would be gone, I would have at least left a note. Or sent you a text or something.”

“It’s fine. I’m sorry I panicked.” Tim clung to Gerry tightly. “It’s been a hell of a few weeks. You ever get the feeling someone you care about is in danger?”

“Not half so often as you do.”

“Yeah, I know,” Tim said with a sigh. “I’ve been living with that feeling for weeks. Just low grade, just sort of simmering in the back of my mind, you know? Like a general hum in the atmosphere, constant but not enough to really be outright alarming. Sometimes I’ll get these waves of it being a little worse, but most of the time it’s just the constant knowledge that someone is in trouble. And then I came home and found you gone and…I freaked out a little. I’m sorry. I’m working on it.”

“You don’t have to. I get it.” Gerry kissed the top of Tim’s head gently. “C’mon. I picked up dinner on the way home. Let’s eat and I can tell you what I found.”

Tim took a deep breath, straightened, and pulled out his chair. “Please tell me it’s about the Unknowing.”

Gerry winced. “No, I…I did some research on Jon.”

At that, Tim’s attention focused on Gerry with laser precision. “And what did you find?”

Over curry and rice, Gerry laid out all the details he’d found about Jon’s family history, plus the little he’d learned about his academic history. He slid the page he’d torn from his sketchbook towards Tim. “I made a few notes. In case you want to look behind me and see if you can find more.”

“Maybe. We’ve got a bit more access at the Institute than you would have at the London Public Library.” Tim ran his gaze down the list before returning it to Gerry. “So far, it seems to me like there are three possibilities here. Either something claimed Jon from a young age and he used it to eliminate his entire family for some reason, something marked him out from a young age and eliminated his family to isolate him as much as possible so he’d be primed for a claim when he was old enough to be of use to it, or he’s got the world’s worst luck.”

“Bets?”

“I don’t know if I can be objective enough about it to place a stake on any one of them,” Tim admitted with a sigh. “Frith in a tree.”

“You’ve got to quit saying shit like that, it’s getting into my vocabulary too,” Gerry grumbled. It did, at least, coax a small smile out of Tim. “Anyway, you’ve at least got something to go off of in figuring out if he’s the sort of person to have murdered Gertrude, right?”

“Depends on what marked or claimed him, I guess.” Tim set the notes aside. “What made you decide to look into this, anyway?”

“Sort of an impulse,” Gerry said. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise just yet. “Do you have any ideas about where to look for more on the Unknowing? I’m not sure I can get anything at the public library that you can’t at the Institute at this point, either.”

Something was nagging at the back of Gerry’s mind, something he was sure was important, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of what it was. He decided not to say anything to Tim yet, though. Not until he had a better idea. He didn’t want to give him any kind of false hope…or false despair. There was enough of the real stuff going around for that.