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Overview
Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by kind, gentle scholars. Instead, the center is home to a nest of supremely cranky academics.
When one of them is bludgeoned to death, Jeremy Cook—the institute’s premier scholar and this novel’s socially clueless hero—becomes the prime suspect. To clear his name, Cook resolves to solve the case, even if it means taking time off from his hobby of teaching imaginary words to the Institute’s tiny “subjects.”
While gleefully skewering academia, the author—a professor of linguistics himself—also provides a spectacularly ingenious puzzle and, in the words of Publishers Weekly, “a first-rate thriller.”
“The dialogue is crisp and witty, and the plot as unusual and engaging as any from the Golden Age of the classic detective story.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“An engaging oddball of a hero.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Mystery stories that have a really original solution to a crime are very rare, but Dr. Carkeet has found one . . . a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work.” —The New York Times Book Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781590205464 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Series: | Jeremy Cook Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 927,012 |
| File size: | 710 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"JUST WHAT DO YOU DO with these babies, anyway?" Cook paused at the open door of Wach's office when he heard this question, just out of sight of the two men who were talking inside. He smiled as he listened for the reply. This was exactly the kind of question that made his boss rise to his full, contemptible glory.
"I'm certainly not unwilling to answer that question." Cook could imagine the quick, empty smile. "A number of complex variables intersect in any serious attempt to establish a direction of inquiry, a program thrust, a, an, ah, Jeremy, there you are." Cook had stepped forward. It was too painful to go on listening in helpless silence. "I want you to meet the good reporter from New York, who is writing for ... for ...?"
"For nobody in particular. I'm doing this freelance. Philpot."
This last was directed to Cook, and it must have been a name, but how much of one? As with Chinese names, one didn't know right off where to put the "Mr."
"Jeremy Cook," he said, shaking hands with the rather short man.
"Call me Henry."
Cook was glad to have that little question cleared up. Wach said, "Jeremy here knows all there is to know about this place. And about some other things too, right, Jeremy?" He chuckled coldly. "If you'll be so good as to take Mr. Philpot to the nursery, Jeremy, and to the gym, and some of the other units, and introduce him around — let him meet Woeps and Stiph and Milke and the others — and just have a good time, you two, then later we'll all have lunch together." He looked down at his desk and cleared his throat.
Cook looked at him. Wach was best behind that desk, alone, free of human contact. Why did he pretend to be friendly? The place would run just as well, or better, if he gave it up. And why was he giving these directions? Hadn't he already taken up the preceding afternoon preparing him for this visitor, outlining in unnecessary detail the tour that would most favorably impress Philpot? Wach's superfluous instructions made sense, though, in light of Wach Rule Six: appear to be spontaneous except where the appearance of deliberation is called for.
Cook nodded. "Fine, Walter. We'll be back at twelve." He looked at the freelancing Philpot. "Would you like some coffee? I know I would, and Walter here never has any in his office."
"Never touch the stuff," said Wach, almost shouting.
"I'd love some," said Philpot.
"I've got a pot brewing in my office. We can talk there for a while before I show you around."
Wach yelled out something falsely jovial as Cook led Philpot through the small outer office used by Wach's secretary, who was in her accustomed position — filing her nails, a telephone pressed by one shoulder into her hair. She was fairly new to the place. Cook's final opinion of her after two months was that she was too dumb to have a consistent personality.
"Oh, I hate him all right, but for a different reason," she said into the phone as Cook and Philpot passed her desk. Cook swallowed hard. Her comment disturbed him almost as much as the one he had overheard in the elevator that morning. Two young mothers were delivering their children for the day and were talking on the ground floor as they waited for the elevator. When Cook walked up, they fell silent and remained so as the three of them rode up in the elevator. Just as they reached the seventh floor, one whispered: "That's what happens to people when they live alone for too long." All that morning, as he tried to work in his office, images of deviant solitary behavior danced in his head.
"I can't get a handle on that guy," Philpot said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
Cook blinked. "Yeah. He's like that. He's not important, though. He just runs the place."
"That's partly right," Cook said to Philpot. He sipped his coffee and put his feet on his desk. "We're concerned with language acquisition in the earliest stages, up to age five. We combine daycare with close observation, audiotaping, video-taping, and some simple experiments. The kids — I think there are about seventy-five now — range from six months to five years in age. They receive the typical care that any child receives in a daycare center. The only difference is that there are seven linguists here lurking in the halls and in the playrooms and beside the changing tables and under the cribs, listening for verb suffixes and glottalization and such things. It's a strange place — none exactly like it in the country. But after you've been here awhile it seems normal enough."
"Why here? Why southern Indiana?"
"It is a bit out of the way. The Wabash Institute was originally a center for primate studies. The old buildings are in back of me on the other side of the little river down there, which is called the Baby Wabash, by the way. It feeds into the larger, better-known one." He gestured to the window behind him, which opened out to a road seven stories below and, beyond it, a narrow river, a field, and a few wooden buildings. "Part of what they did was study language acquisition in chimps, using ASL — American Sign Language, used by the deaf — and that grew and became what they mainly did. At the same time, on this side of the river, a sizeable daycare center developed out of a defunct boys' reformatory, serving a variety of folks — Otis Elevator ten miles to the north, Busby Baptist College six miles to the east, and the town of Kinsey just to the south. There was nothing like the number of kids here now, but there were enough to suggest to the primate people — among them Wach, who was second in command — that the daycare part of it could be secondary and the language study part primary, and then the place would be one big lab for research on language acquisition in different species.
"Grant money poured in. This was in the sixties, when the Department of Defense for reasons mysterious to me showed hot interest in linguistics. The reformatory was further remodeled, and the Wabash Institute began to take its present form. Since then the primate center has virtually folded. There are still two or three people over there, but they've got just a few chimps and they confine themselves to studying how red their fannies get and things like that. We've taken over the language area completely." He paused. "It's nice how the movement of language across the river parallels the course of evolution. In fact people here call the wooden footbridge over it Scopes Bridge."
Philpot laughed. "I can use that."
"But you aren't writing anything down."
"No. I don't need to. It'll come back to me tonight in my room. What do you do, exactly?"
Cook squirmed slightly in his seat. When he was asked this by neighbors or by townies in Kinsey, the answers he heard himself give were sheepish and apologetic. What could he say? That he was the "resident genius"? That was what his friend Ed had once called him. Cook had his own research, but he liked to help others too. He could see the virtue of imaginative projects and make them better, and he could spy unpromising work well in advance and discourage it at the outset. Every publication coming out of the Institute since he had joined the staff five years earlier had thanked him by name. But it was hard to hang a simple job description on his work. There were slack days and hours when he sat nearly idle, or just read, matched by hectic days of inspired labor. Maybe it was like freelance writing in that respect.
"My job is a bit like freelance writing," he said to Philpot, and as he went on to describe it he realized with one part of his mind that he had just practiced Wach Rule Fourteen, even though the situation didn't call for it: before you manipulate people or lie to them, point out how similar you are to them. He had been around Wach too long. "It varies a lot from day to day. I'm somewhat unfit for specialization, and I say that unboastfully since I consider it a limitation of sorts."
"What are you working on now?"
"Something that doesn't really have my boss's blessing, but I try to keep him ignorant of it. I'm studying what I call 'idiophenomena. ' These are linguistic devices that children develop on their own, with no basis in the adult model. They can range from simple utterances with fixed meanings, like a toddler's buh for 'I want the toy duck,' to highly original intonation contours."
Philpot frowned and fingered a pen in his shirt pocket as if to withdraw it, but then he just scratched his chin.
"Parents miss a lot of this. They tend to view language acquisition as a straightforward process of gradual accretion highlighted by comical blunders. But a lot more than that goes on. You have to be able to distance yourself from the steady drivel that comes out of children's mouths to find the rules, and that's the main point of the Wabash Institute. What we do is what a good many linguists have done with their own children — observe them and tape them and analyze the result — only we do it better. From what I've heard, it's hard for a person to be both parent and naturalist at the same time. You can ask Ed Woeps about that." Cook nodded to his left. "A colleague with a sixteen-month-old son here at Wabash. I've observed Ed's son, at least linguistically, much more than he has. It was his son, by the way, who actually used buh in the way I indicated."
"Do you have any children of your own here?"
"No," said Cook. "I'm not married."
"Can you tell me about the other linguists here?"
"Let's go meet them," said Cook. "Words would not do them justice."
As the two men stood up a strange and loud laugh was easily heard from the office to Cook's right. Because no other sound preceded the laughter, it was as if they were being watched by a silent eavesdropper who found the sight of Homo sapiens rising out of a chair hilarious. But Cook knew better. It was only Orffmann. Orffmann liked to laugh, especially when he was alone. Cook would often be working at his desk with his door closed and his mind engaged, when peals of Orffmann's mirth would crash around him. Many a noble, science-advancing thought had thereby been assassinated. Philpot was frowning uneasily at the wall, but Orffmann was one of those that Wach had left off Philpot's visiting list, and Cook figured the less said about him the better.
The same for Aaskhugh, who, standing as he was just outside the door of Cook's office as he and Philpot stepped into the hall, was less avoidable.
"Who's your friend, Jay?" said Aaskhugh, looking at Cook and then at Philpot. Cook performed the introductions, though he was irrationally tempted to lie. Aaskhugh was unique in having this effect on Cook, not a regular liar and in fact normally a very bad one. It was Aaskhugh's attitude toward information that did it. He traded in it. He collected it and dispensed it, without hesitation or discrimination. His fund of knowledge was great, and to keep it that way he asked questions, forever reminding Cook of the unfortunate fact of life that people were out there ready to think about you if you gave them the chance.
Over the years Cook had developed two evasion tactics. One served most handily when he felt mentally dull, say, after drinking or before his morning coffee: he would ask Aaskhugh a question first. Of course, this brought a great deal of useless information into his brain and made him mentally duller still. The second tactic was more challenging: Cook would raise a general philosophical point, one having no direct connection with his or anyone's life, and he would hold to it with maniacal fervor, always being careful not to let his personality slip through. This ploy guaranteed that, short of resorting to hypnosis, Aaskhugh would never learn anything about Cook beyond what he could squeeze from others, and also that Aaskhugh would never be able to charge Cook publicly with being dull — in the sense of being not talkative, at least.
"How long are you going to be here?" Aaskhugh said to Philpot.
Philpot answered, saying several days, perhaps a week. Where was he staying? Philpot named a motel just outside of Kinsey. Whom was the article for? Philpot explained. What had he written that Aaskhugh might have read? Philpot named some pieces, looking to Cook imploringly.
Cook roused himself and broke in with tactic one. "Adam, perhaps you could tell us what you're doing here. Mr. Philpot might be interested."
By "here" Cook meant the observation window facing into a playroom directly across the hall from Cook's office door. But Aaskhugh looked at Cook as if he had said something very silly indeed. "I'm not doing anything here, Jay."
Cook frowned. "But you were standing right outside my door. Weren't you?"
"No, no, no, Jay. I was passing by your door. Passing by." Aaskhugh's tone implied that Cook would never understand anything until he mastered his prepositions. "See?" By way of demonstration, he began slowly walking away from Cook and Philpot, looking back over his shoulder with a foolish grin. The curve of the hall finally took him out of their view. Cook turned to Philpot, who stared down the hall in wonder.
"Why does he call you 'Jay'? Isn't your name Jeremy?"
Cook smiled. This was the second thing wrong with Aaskhugh. Or maybe the third. It was hard to keep track. Shunning stale custom, Aaskhugh often ignored the names optimistically given people by their parents in favor of his own inventions. Cook was "Jay" to him. Now and then Ed Woeps was "Daisy" for reasons neither Cook nor Woeps understood. Wach's secretary, Mary — in Cook's mind simply Mary the Secretary — was "Mary, Mary," and Wach's name, which was pronounced like "watch" by its bearer and everyone else at Wabash, occasionally became more Germanic in Aaskhugh's "Wachtmeister." Cook looked forward to the day when he retaliated and rechristened Aaskhugh, perhaps, since the man's first name was Adam, giving him "A" for "Jay," or maybe even "Fucking A."
Cook explained all of this to Philpot as best he could. Then, seeking an antidote to Aaskhugh, he said, "Let me introduce you to Ed," and directed Philpot to Woeps's office next door. Woeps was by far the sanest person on the staff. Though fifteen years his senior, he was the only male friend Cook had. Their having offices next to each other helped, for Cook believed that two people could never become good friends unless they were in daily contact. Of course rollicking Orffmann on the other side proved this was not a sufficient condition.
Woeps was on the phone. Cook heard him say, "Is it bad?" and he suspected his friend was talking to his wife about yet another domestic calamity. Woeps's only serious fault — and it could hardly be called a fault — was his Odyssean attraction for bad luck.
Cook mouthed, "I'll be back." Woeps nodded distractedly and Cook closed the door. "He's busy at the moment," he explained to Philpot, who was still looking wonderingly up the hall.
"I don't understand the shape of this building," said the writer. "And where's the men's bathroom?"
"I'll explain as I show you." He pointed up the hall in the direction Aaskhugh had gone and they began walking. "This building is a circle, in case you didn't notice."
"I'm beginning to."
"It's a seven-story cylinder, actually. It was built for the harder core of the boys in the reformatory. Around the edges of the circle were the cells, expanded and remodeled into offices for us, with the bars removed from the windows. Except in the bathroom, for some reason — you'll see them. Then, working inward to the center of the circle, there is this hall, formerly the catwalk outside the cells. Then there's a central core to our left divided into playrooms, an eating area, a little gymnasium, and so on. The hall goes all the way around it, almost. Wach's office gets in the way. He had it built in such a way that it extends from his window clear to the central core, so the hall ends at each of his walls. We just passed Orffmann's office on the right. You'll meet him later, of course. Here's Miss Pristam's office. She's out of town. Stairs and elevator." He gestured to the right. "There's another wing there, on a tangent with our building, but it's not used now. Neither are the lower floors of the building, except for part of the floor immediately below, where Sally Good's office is. She's the head teacher who runs the daycare side of things. I'll take you down there later. And here is Arthur Stiph's office."
"Whose?"
"Sorry. I'm used to lowering my voice around him. Maybe you'll see why." Cook peeked into the half-open door of Stiph's office and saw what he expected. At a desk in the middle of an office cluttered well beyond the limits of tasteful eccentricity sat Arthur Stiph.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Double Negative"
by .
Copyright © 2010 David Carkeet.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
Praise for Double Negative
"The dialogue is crisp and witty, and the plot as unusual and engaging as any from the Golden Age of the classic detective story."-St. Louis Post- Dispatch
"Thoroughly enjoyable. . . A murder mystery told with a very personal kind of light-hearted charm."-New York Times Book Review
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