The Back Door of Midnight ds-5

by Элизабет Чандлер

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should stay with me,” he said. “We have an extra room next to Erika’s. You will be safe with me.”

  “Thank you, but I really like being with Aunt Iris.”

  “Are you aware of the degree to which Iris suffers from mental illness?”

  “I’ve never seen her medical records, but I have some idea.”

  “Over the years she has been in and out of hospitals. As you may or may not know, your mother’s life with Iris and William was extremely difficult.”

  “It would have been more difficult without them,” I replied, feeling the need to defend them. “It would have been hard for my mother to keep me and continue with school.”

  “She had options.”

  “She did? Like what?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You mean there were other people she could have lived with.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What was Joanna like?” I asked.

  He stared at the flickering candle. It took him a long time to answer. “Bright, imaginative, beautiful. . She was a young woman with big dreams. I had just purchased my first store — I’m a pharmacist by training — and hired her to work part-time behind the counter. Joanna was hoping to attend medical school, but after she became pregnant, she thought nursing a more practical choice. She was a healer by nature, intuitive about people.”

  “She was psychic,” I said.

  He went on as if he hadn’t heard me, his narrow fingers tracing a pattern on the tabletop. “She was so innocent, so full of life. I watched her fall in love.” His eyes rose to meet mine. “When a young woman falls in love, she looks a certain way, has a certain light in her face. She becomes irresistible.”

  I folded my arms and sat as far back as I could.

  “You move like your mother,” he said.

  I unfolded my arms, as if I could undo that observation.

  “You have the same eyes and hair. Joanna often wore red.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She loved reds and pinks,” he continued. “Of course, everyone told her she should wear green or blue. She wore red defiantly.”

  I smiled. “Then we share that — defiance.”

  “You should try those colors, perhaps just a pretty pink or red scarf. She loved to wear scarves. She loved anything that floated.”

  I was glad Mrs. Gill wasn’t around to hear the tone in his voice. “Are you my father?”

  “God above! No.”

  “It seemed a reasonable thing to ask.”

  “Joanna wouldn’t tell me or anyone else who your father was. He lived on the West Coast, traveled for work, and spent a lot of time on the East Coast — I know that much. He was married and didn’t tell her, not until she got pregnant.”

  “Then left her high and dry — nice of him.”

  “She had options,” he replied.

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “I offered to marry her and accept you as my child.”

  “Oh!”

  I tried to imagine it, living with this man in a manse on the river, wearing designer clothes, carrying the most expensive phone, driving a car that people envied. . I thought about it and decided that, if the choice had been mine, I would have preferred Joanna to shack up with Mom in our Baltimore town house. “Okay, I see now. Joanna said no.”

  “William said no!”

  “But it was her choice, wasn’t it?”

  “Precisely,” he said, not understanding what I meant.

  It seemed to me that if my mother had been anything like me — if she had been the kind to wear red defiantly — she would not have let Uncle Will dictate that decision. Maybe Mr. Gill just couldn’t admit she had rejected him.

  He talked as if he were still in love with her. Her rejection must have hurt him deeply and made him angry. Erika had just turned seventeen, meaning she was eleven months younger than I. My mother had said no, and Elliot Gill had married someone else soon after.

  “If Joanna had married me, she would be alive today.”

  I glanced up. “Excuse me?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “She wouldn’t have been living in that wretched house when the place was robbed.”

  There was a long silence between us. How angry was he? I wondered. Aloud I asked, “What do you think Uncle Will wanted to tell me about my mother?”

  “I have no idea. We weren’t on speaking terms.” His hands were tightly clasped. The tips of his fingers twitched, then he said in a gentler tone, “I suppose he wanted to tell you what she was like. . I would very much like to see you with your hair up. You should wear a scarf—”

  “I don’t have any scarves.”

  “I’ll buy you one.”

  I’d heard enough and started sliding out of the booth. As I was standing up, a woman with Erika’s hair and eyes, and Erika’s unfriendly expression, walked toward us.

  “Elliot,” she said, “we are waiting for you.”

  “My love, this is Anna O’Neill.”

  She ignored me. “Erika wants to open her gifts.”

  “Of course.” He rose to his feet, gesturing for me to join them.

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” I said, and headed toward the ladies’ room. Before I had gotten to its door, they disappeared, and I left the restaurant.

  sixteen

  ON THE OTHER side of the bridge, Scarborough Road became a country road with no streetlamps. When leaving the restaurant, I hadn’t thought about the fact that walking home at 10:45 at night meant finding my way down an overgrown driveway without the aid of headlights. At the entrance to the drive, the moon silvered the edges of the high grass and weeds, making it bright enough to see. But when I reached the trees, their dense foliage suffocated the light, and the humidity and darkness closed in around me.

  As I walked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was hidden in the trees, watching me.

  I heard a rustling sound, like a person brushing against leaves, and I stopped, turning my head slightly. The sound had come from somewhere ahead of me and to the right.

  Reluctant to go on, I looked over my shoulder, but I was already too far down the driveway — I couldn’t discern a clearing either behind or ahead of me. I took two more steps. Again I heard the sound, this time directly to the right.

  Cats, I told myself. The cats are out hunting. Sweat trickled down my neck. I moved quickly, hoping to get past whatever it was.

  Reaching the front door, I found it unlocked as usual. I hurried inside, closed the door, and leaned back against it.

  Then it occurred to me: Someone else could have done the same — the house was no safer than the woods. I felt for the wall switch, flicked on the hall light, and glanced around.

  “Is that you?” Aunt Iris called from upstairs.

  I let out my breath in relief. “Yes. It’s Anna. I’m home from the party. Sorry I woke you up.”

  “You didn’t.” She sounded as if she were standing directly above me, in the hall outside her bedroom. “I just got home myself.”

  “Aunt Iris, would you mind if I locked the door tonight?”

  “The front door? Not at all, as long as you keep the kitchen door open.”

  “I meant all the doors.”

  “No, don’t do that,” she called down. “I lost my key.”

  “Well, how about if we lock the house just during the night?”

  “No, I lost my key.”

  I sighed. “Okay. Remind me to look for it tomorrow.”

  “Five years ago,” she said.

  I told myself that it didn’t really matter. It was impossible to make the house secure; the old screens and windows could be worked open by a child. I checked the charge on my cell phone, then climbed the steps to the second floor. I heard my aunt scurry into her bedroom and shut the door, as if afraid I’d catch a glimpse of her.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, reaching the hall.

  “Yes,” she called from behind her
door.

  I walked toward her room. “Can I get you something before I go to bed?”

  “No. No, I’m perfectly well.”

  “May I open your door?”

  “Please don’t.”

  I hesitated.

  “I just need a little rest,” she said.

  I gave in. Everyone needs privacy. Besides, with no mirror left to break, she might launch a missile at me. “Okay.

  Good night.”

  When I reached my room, I turned on the fan, snatched up my nightshirt, and headed back down the hall to the bathroom. A long, lukewarm shower cooled me. I was rubbing my hair dry when I heard the phone ringing downstairs. It hadn’t rung since I had been there, and it sounded loud and foreboding.

  “If it’s William,” Aunt Iris called from her bedroom, “I can’t speak to him now.”

  That made me laugh, and I ran downstairs to get it.

  “Hello?”

  “You’re home.”

  Zack.

  “I’m home,” I said stiffly.

  “You left without telling me.”

  “I thought it was pretty obvious.”

  “You were rude.”

  “Really!” I said. “Well, let me tell you what I think is rude.

  It’s using a girl. It’s acting like you want to be friends when all you want is information. It’s going along with another girl’s plan, because you can fake it with anyone.”

  There was a long silence. “How do you know that?” he asked at last.

  “I just do,” I said, and hung up.

  Anger is better than fear, I told myself as I climbed the steps again. But it was anger and hurt that I felt. I combed out my hair, yanking on a knot. Get over it, Anna.

  It was a relief to return to my little corner in the attic, where I had once felt so safe. Then I saw the books.

  At first I didn’t know what bothered me about them. They were on the floor next to my bed, where I had left them the other night. I stretched out as I had when reading and reached down to them, resting my fingers on the top of the pile. The angle was wrong; it would have been awkward for me to set the books down that way. But it would have been quite natural if I had stood facing the bed. Had someone picked them up, looked at them, then carelessly put them back?

  I glanced around the room, then walked over to my bureau. When I opened the top drawer, everything in it looked the same. Still, my fingertips tingled, as if they sensed the touch of hands other than mine. So Aunt Iris got a little curious, I told myself. I had peeked in her room; why shouldn’t she look in mine?

  As logical as that was, I couldn’t sleep until I checked the rooms below. Not wanting to disturb my aunt, I crossed the attic to the stairs that led down to Uncle Will’s den. As soon as I turned on his desk lamp, I saw that someone had been there. I knew I had closed the drawers tightly, not wanting Aunt Iris to know I had been snooping. Someone else had been careless or rushed. I checked behind the books where I had hidden my mother’s client book. It was still there. I hurried upstairs and unzipped the front pocket of my suitcase. The cell phone was missing. My evidence against Erika and her friends was gone. I checked the large pocket again: so was Uncle Will’s letter to the police and the article about my mother’s death. Why?

  If Aunt Iris had been the one searching, she might have found the phone and realized it was the one she had picked up at the fire site. She had buried it the first time and may have wanted to do it again, for whatever crazy reason. But why would she take the letter and article? Maybe she thought she could keep me from asking questions and opening old wounds. Or maybe she didn’t have time to look at the contents and, seeing that the envelope was from Uncle Will and addressed to the state police, imagined that Uncle Will was “reporting” her to them. Her broken mirror had proven just how paranoid she was.

  There was another possibility. Everyone who had seen me at Erika’s party would have counted on me staying at the restaurant for several hours. I hadn’t seen the stalker at dinner. Had I made him nervous enough to check out my things? If the stalker was one of the kids who’d harassed Uncle Will, he might have seen the state police address on the missing envelope and assumed the contents implicated him.

  My skin crept at the memory of walking down the dark driveway and hearing something — someone — moving through the trees. I turned out the light, then went from window to window, peering out of all six windows of the attic and those in my mother’s room as well. The words I had heard the night of the fire floated back to me: Anna, be careful.

  Careful of what, Uncle Will? Careful of whom?

  Next morning, with the sun back up, I was ready to take on everybody. I ate breakfast quickly, listening for my aunt’s footsteps. Her bedroom door had been closed when I got up and her car was parked outside, so I assumed she was home. After breakfast I went upstairs to check on her.

  “Aunt Iris?” I called, knocking softly on the door. I called a second time, more loudly, and finally banged hard. I heard movement within the room, a creaking of floorboards. It sounded as if she had been standing at the door the entire time I was knocking.

  “It’s Anna. Would you open the door, please?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I’m going to work. Before I leave, I’d like to see you.”

  She didn’t reply. Last night I had respected her privacy, but I didn’t think it smart to let her isolate herself for this amount of time, especially since someone other than she may have been searching the house.

  “I am going to open your door,” I warned her.

  “You can try, but it’s locked.”

  I did, and it was. “Aunt Iris, when I got home last night, it looked as if someone had searched my room and Uncle Will’s study.”

  She didn’t make a sound. It frustrated me that, unable to see her face, I couldn’t tell if this was news to her. “Was anyone else here last night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “There was a cell phone in my room, in my suitcase. It’s gone.”

  “It wasn’t yours,” she said.

  “Where is it now?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “There was a newspaper article about my mother’s death and a draft of a letter to the police, asking for information about it. Did you take them?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Somebody did,” I said.

  “I’m glad they’re gone. William was being foolish.”

  So she knew about the documents. “I want them back.”

  “The past is the past. I tried to tell William that. He wouldn’t listen to me. We can do nothing about the past.”

  “We can understand it!”

  I strode down the hall to the room with the blue-flowered wallpaper. It was time for me to face the contents of the mahogany bureau, to learn whatever I could from the bits and pieces left behind by my mother.

  I entered the room and, after a moment of hesitation, slid open the small top drawer of the bureau. Combs, hair fasteners, and several pairs of earrings — simple, inexpensive ones, like the kind I would buy — lay with a note written in my uncle’s hand: These are for Anna. I liked the necklace next to them, a chain with a pendant. I touched it gently, then held it up to the window light, admiring its clear golden drop — amber, I thought. I fastened it around my neck and felt the way it rested against my chest, as if it belonged to and had been waiting for me.

  I opened the next drawer and found underwear, ordinary stuff. In the next were T-shirts. I held them up to me, wondering if my mother and I were the same size; we were.

  In the next drawer I discovered jeans. Straightening up, I held them against me. Yup.

  I opened the last drawer. It was filled with scarves — red, pink, purple — some plain, some with geometric shapes. I picked up a filmy pink one and draped it around my neck.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall, and I turned quickly to see Aunt Iris standing in the doorway. She cocked her head to one side, studying me, then stepped i
nto the room.

  “You would look so much better, Joanna, with your hair out of your face.”

  Anna, I was about to say, then caught myself. Maybe, if I pretended to be Joanna, she would talk as if we were in the past and tell me things I needed to know. I opened the top drawer again, picked up a comb and an elastic band, and pulled my hair up on my head.

  “Better, much better,” she said, “but don’t let it hang like a horse’s tail.”

  I twisted my hair into a bun and pinned it in place, feeling a little creepy, knowing that this was what Mr. Gill had wanted me to do.

  She nodded approvingly.

  I tried to think of something to talk about that would seem natural coming from Joanna. “I have appointments with two clients today.”

  She sighed. “We have plenty of money. You should focus on your studies.”

  “But you have clients,” I argued.

  “Mine can be trusted,” she replied. “It’s yours that bite.”

  I laughed, trying to be agreeable. “I like helping people, the same way you like helping animals.”

  “You must be careful whom you help,” she said. “Forget about Mick.”

  “Mick?” I asked.

  “Let go of the past. It’s over now. Nothing can be done.”

  “Mick?” I repeated.

  Her eyes sparked. “Stop pretending, Joanna! I know what you’re up to!”

  I wondered if Mick were my father. “You mean my. . my lover,” I said tentatively.

  She looked stunned. “Your lover?”

  “Well, who else’s?” I replied, frustrated.

  My aunt shook her head. “You should have married Elliot Gill when you had the chance. He would have provided for you and Anna.”

  “Because he is Anna’s father,” I responded, not trusting what Mr. Gill had told me last night.

  My aunt took a step back. “He is? That’s not what you told me.”

  I played with my scarf, afraid that if I said much more, she would realize I wasn’t Joanna.

  “You said he was from California,” Aunt Iris went on. “You said he lied about himself, gave you a false name, and never told you he was married.”

  Their stories matched. “That’s right,” I replied. “I was joking about Elliot. But I can’t stop thinking about Mick,” I added, hoping she would explain why she wanted Joanna to forget him.