Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  I fixed my favorite childhood lunch, one I’d often prepared for myself and the twins when Mom was taking one of her long naps: slices of Oscar Mayer braunschweiger, which my father had kept stocked in the refrigerator at all times, and a bag of Sterzing’s potato chips. I carried my lunch into the study and set it down on Granddad’s desk, hoping to distract myself from thinking about the trust by working on the Arrowood profile for the holiday tour. I wanted to get it out of the way. I tied the heavy drapes back as far as they would go, to let in more light, and turned on my laptop.

  It would be easy, I thought, to write about Arrowood. I knew most of the stories from memory—Nana would go on about family history in lengthy letters, before her arthritis made it too difficult to write, and every time she called on the phone—and now I also had access to all of her papers, including the documentation she’d used to get Arrowood on the National Register of Historic Places. She had kept it all in a box in Granddad’s desk, and it was still there, nestled in the deep bottom drawer.

  There were several articles detailing Arrowood’s involvement in the Underground Railroad, all of which I had read before. The only new information I found among Nana’s handwritten notes was the brief mention of a secret room in the basement that concealed the fleeing slaves who had sought temporary refuge at Arrowood. I’d never heard anyone talk about a hidden room, and I’d never found any hint of one while exploring the dirt-floored basement as a child. Most likely, it had been torn out at some point over the years as pipes and wiring were installed and updated beneath the house, the foundation repaired, the boiler replaced.

  I sorted through pages of photocopied portraits of my relatives, many taken on Arrowood’s front lawn. I had never understood my father’s eagerness to sell the house. He was always too busy looking for the next big thing to see what he already had; he was the worst kind of gambler, never able to quit when he was ahead.

  My dad came to visit me at college only once. He was passing through on his way to a sales convention, characteristically vague about what exactly he was selling. We ate gristly sirloins at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town, and he insisted that I drink a beer with him, scoffing when I reminded him that I was underage. He wore a cowboy hat and pointy-toed boots that looked like a disguise on him, though it was possible that that was who he’d become, someone who listened to country music and knew how to saddle a horse. I didn’t ask, and he offered no explanation. I nursed my warm beer as he rambled on about a new boat he’d been eyeing, one I doubted he could afford. As far as I knew, he didn’t live anywhere near the water.

  He stopped talking and looked up at me, his bloodshot eyes turning wistful. Remember the Ruby Slipper? he asked, his voice gravelly from the skinny cigars he’d started smoking when he left my mother. I loved that boat. Even your mom liked it, and didn’t much make her happy. His face had changed in the time since I’d last seen him, the skin loosened and sagging like a rubber mask. I wanted him to remove it, this ill-fitting façade of cigars and wrinkles and cowboy clothes, to reveal the father I remembered, the man who’d held me on his lap and let me steer the boat down the river.

  Why did you marry her? I asked.

  He cocked his head to the side and squinted, chewing a mouthful of steak. We rarely talked about my mother, and I didn’t know whether he would answer. I wondered if they had once loved each other, or if he’d married her for her looks. She’d been wispy and delicate at twenty-three, with pale Scandinavian hair and skin that was so striking that people automatically assumed she was beautiful. Only upon close examination would someone realize that her features were actually quite plain.

  She was working as a secretary at Sheller-Globe when she met my dad, and desperate to move out of the Sister House. According to Aunt Alice, my mother wasn’t one to accept her station in life. She ran around with the well-to-do girls in high school and wanted all the same things they had: designer jeans, spring break trips to Fort Lauderdale, a car of her own. In the years after we left Arrowood, when my mother chased certain pills with a coffee mug full of Merlot, her tongue would limber up and she’d tell me about meeting my father for the first time, at a drive-in showing of Sixteen Candles. Eddie was tall and charismatic and drove a new Pontiac Firebird, and he had big plans for himself, which somehow overshadowed the fact that he was thirty-one years old, questionably self-employed, and still living with his parents at Arrowood. She saw him as her ticket to all the places she’d ever wanted to go. He had broken off a previous engagement to the Lee County Corn Queen, which made my mother nervous and overly indulgent, not wanting to do anything to scare him away.

  She believed in me more than anyone else ever did, Dad replied, the words muffled in his napkin as he wiped his mouth.

  They had married for selfish reasons, each wanting what the other could offer, though I supposed that was true of most people. It made sense—more sense than falling in love—and it had been enough for them, for a while. Maybe she held out hope that he would live up to everything he represented to her, and maybe he relied on her belief in him in order to believe in himself. I wondered if he’d waited to leave her until he’d depleted the last of her faith in him, and she had nothing left to give.

  It wasn’t fair, though, to cast my mother as a victim. I had taken care of myself for a long time, to spare her the burden, because I thought that she was fragile and weak. However, after watching her start her new life with Gary, it seemed that she had spent those years selfishly hibernating, conserving her strength, waiting to emerge like a frilly butterfly when another man with big plans came along.

  I dug deeper into the box and pulled out a plastic sleeve containing sketches of the house. Beneath the exterior renderings were diagrams of the interior. House plans. The paper was brittle and discolored, but there was no date, so I couldn’t tell whether they were the original plans. There was a second set done on a sort of tissue paper that crumbled at the edges when I touched it. Each layer detailed one floor of the house, so that stacked on top of each other as the pages were, you could see which rooms above lay on top of which rooms below. I checked the basement level, careful not to tear the paper, but didn’t find anything to indicate a hidden partition. Of course, that wasn’t likely something one would document on a house plan, especially if the room was intended to be part of the Underground Railroad.

  I started typing up notes for the profile. Late in the afternoon, I was startled into awareness by the sound of running water, and couldn’t tell if I’d been sleeping or merely daydreaming. My laptop screen had gone black.

  I uncurled myself from the chair and stepped out into the front hall to listen, the floorboards cool against my bare feet. The sound seemed to be coming from above, like someone had left a faucet running upstairs, and my first thought was that the bathroom pipes Heaney had fixed were still having issues. I ran up to check the tub, but it was dry.

  I stepped back out into the hall and paused at the third-floor stairwell. There was no real bathroom on the uppermost level, only a defunct, closet-size powder room with a marble sink and a toilet that looked like it belonged in a museum. Before Nana and Granddad moved out and Mom and Dad took over the master suite, my parents’ bedroom had been up there. Mom told me she had hated sleeping in that room, with its fussy toile wallpaper, the same room where Arden Blythe Arrowood, age ten, had died of pneumonia nearly a hundred years before.

  It didn’t seem likely that I would have heard the powder room sink running from all the way downstairs, though it was possible that what I’d initially heard was the water running through the pipes in the wall. I wiped the remnants of a sagging cobweb away from the entry and leaned into the stairwell. I could definitely hear something.

  The stairs were steep, the treads too small for normal-size feet, and I nearly fell when something tickled my arm, letting go of the railing in my hurry to brush off a tiny spider. The third floor was dim and claustrophobic compared to the rest of the house, with low ceilings and burgundy wallpaper and narrow windo
ws set into the sides of the mansard roof. Dust was clotted everywhere, along the trim, on top of the doorknobs. It looked like someone had shaken out a down pillow. There were three closed doors on either side of the hall, and at the very end, the powder room door, which was ajar.

  Once Mom and Dad had moved into Nana and Granddad’s old room, the entire third floor had been devoted to storage. Hardly anything that crossed Arrowood’s threshold had ever been thrown away. There were rooms full of holiday decorations and tarnished silver serving trays, baby carriages and bicycles, the remnants of various china sets, old-fashioned rug beaters, vintage General Electric fans with exposed blades that could sever your fingers. One room held all of Nana’s coats and furs and winter clothes, things she hadn’t needed in Florida but couldn’t bear to give away, because that meant admitting that she would spend no more winters at Arrowood, that she would never again see the river freeze over. The room next to Nana’s contained all the remaining possessions of my dad’s two older brothers, my uncles who were killed in Vietnam. Nana was the only one who had ever gone in there.

  The hinges shrieked when I pushed the powder room door all the way open to step inside. Dust shimmered in the weak light that filtered down from above, the ancient skylight held in place with narrow strips of trim and crumbling caulk, the glass clouded with years of grime. The marble sink was stained with rust where a thin stream of water flowed into the basin. I twisted the handle as hard as I could and it slowed to a steady drip.

  It was a relief to find the source of the problem and to see that it was nothing serious. I would have to tell Heaney about the sink, and the skylight as well, which looked in danger of collapsing. It was understandable that he might have neglected the tiny room; like the others on this floor, it was crammed with boxes. They were stacked on the tiled marble floor and on top of the toilet. They appeared to be the remains of Granddad’s medical practice. There were financial records and patient files, and propped between the wall and the toilet, a large framed photograph of the building that had once housed his office, a building that had since been torn down.

  I flicked through the tabs in a box of patient records, starting with the A’s, and quickly came to my mother’s name: Arrowood, Sheila. I wondered why Granddad had kept all this paperwork instead of shredding it, but I wasn’t terribly surprised. He wasn’t one for discarding things. I picked up the box, careful to support the spongy underside, and took it with me.

  Back downstairs, I fixed myself a bowl of SpaghettiOs with oyster crackers for dinner and took the box into the study, where I opened my mother’s file and spread the pages out on the desk. It was appalling, the number of medications Granddad had prescribed for her, but my mother seemed to have a complaint that fit each one. I had to look up the drugs I’d never heard of. First there was Prozac for depression and Xanax for anxiety. Trazodone to supplement the Prozac and help her sleep. Percocet for lingering C-section pain after the twins were born. She suffered from postpartum depression and a strained back. Zoloft. Valium. Klonopin for insomnia. Wellbutrin when the Zoloft wasn’t working. It was clear that some of the drugs were not meant to be taken long-term, though that hadn’t stopped her, and considering how much wine I remembered her drinking in her coffee mug back then, it seemed a small miracle that she had been able to function as well as she did.

  —

  I went upstairs not long after dinner and sat in bed with Grammy’s scrapbook, the one she started when the twins were taken. She had given it to me my last summer at the Sister House. In addition to keeping a meticulous archive of newspaper clippings and information related to the twins’ disappearance, she had written cards for them on their birthdays and holidays, checked in with the police station on a regular basis, and prayed for them daily without fail. She had never lost faith that the twins would be found alive.

  According to the first newspaper clipping, from the Daily Gate City, Violet Ann and Tabitha Grace Arrowood, identical twins, age twenty-one months, were abducted by a man in a gold sedan from the front yard of 635 Grand Avenue at approximately four P.M. on September 3, 1994. Their sister, Arden Arrowood, age eight, was the sole witness, though a neighbor confirmed the sighting of a vehicle of similar description just prior to the incident. Police and volunteers searched for the vehicle and the children with no luck.

  From the newspapers, I learned where my sisters had not been found: in the corn and soybean fields of Lee County; in the Des Moines River or the Mississippi; in a pumpkin patch near the river bottoms; in the city dump; in a ravine at the edge of town; in the pond at Rand Park; in the factories along Highway 61; in any of the barges or docks or trains or rail yards. They were not in the cemeteries, the woods, the hunting cabins or duck blinds, or any of the boats, stores, homes, garages, or cars that were searched, including our own. Then Singer was located, and after an exhaustive search of his property and a lengthy investigation, he too was eventually added to the list of dead ends.

  There were a few other persons of interest over the years, each a case of unsubstantiated jailhouse bragging, and a false confession that made the news before being discredited. Grammy kept a record of all related possibilities, no matter how remote. In 1999, the desiccated body of a child was reportedly found stuffed in a trunk in the attic of a Fort Madison home. It was quickly determined to be a hoax. Human bones were discovered along the Des Moines River in 2001 after a spring flood, but testing concluded that they were Native American and had probably been there for decades. There were sightings of the twins reported across the United States and in a few foreign countries, but nothing came of any of them. The television show Unsolved Mysteries approached my parents about doing a segment on the kidnapping, but Mom and Dad didn’t want to participate. It was too painful, they said. It would be overly sensationalized for ratings, and likely wouldn’t amount to anything.

  Out of all the reported sightings, one had seemed especially promising. An elderly woman in eastern Nebraska saw two little blond girls wandering barefoot through a cornfield in the spring of 1997. They were holding hands, wearing pink nightgowns that were too small for them and too thin for the weather. The girls looked to be about five years old, as the twins would have been at the time. Officers searched the area and discovered an abandoned farmhouse in the woods beyond the field. Inside the house, a family of five was found huddled together, hiding in an upstairs closet. There were three children: one dark-haired boy and the two little girls that the elderly woman had seen. The family had left a commune in Missouri, and they were wandering. The parents claimed that the girls were not identical twins, but rather “Irish twins” who were close in age and looked very much alike. However, they could not produce birth certificates for the children, who had supposedly been born on the commune and had never visited a doctor or hospital or been enrolled in school. The girls resembled Violet and Tabitha, or rather, age-progressed images of the girls as they might look at five years old, and DNA tests were performed to see if they were the missing Arrowood twins. They were not.

  I’d found a lengthy thread on Midwest Mysteries where people speculated about my sisters’ demise. Not everyone was convinced that Singer had taken them. Some people thought maybe they were alive and well, snatched by someone desperate to have children. Others suggested that they were being held captive and might one day escape, like kidnapping survivors Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart. Quite a few theories centered around their potential value on the black market: Where might fair-haired, fair-skinned identical twins fetch the highest price? Most people, though, assumed that Violet and Tabitha had been killed, their bodies dumped in the Mississippi soon after they were taken. It was the theory that made the most sense.

  Would I have been able to discern a moment when my sisters ceased to exist? Was it possible that they were murdered minutes after touching my hand, and I didn’t feel a thing, didn’t sense that loss of connection? Dead or alive, they were gone, had been gone far longer than they had been with me.

  I closed the scrapboo
k and placed it in the rolltop desk. Outside my window, in the darkness, pinpoints of light marked the dam and the power plant downriver. The crab apple tree in the backyard wavered in the wind. I left my room and moved slowly, noiselessly down the hall, though there was no need to be quiet; I was alone in the house. I opened the door to the twins’ room and stepped inside, the humidity condensing on my skin. Moisture trickled down the windowpanes, dripping over the sills and splattering onto the floor. I lay down next to the cribs, shutting my eyes and taking myself back to the fever dream I’d had the day the twins disappeared, the one where they were home safe and everything was fine. I let the false sense of relief seep through me, thawing, temporarily, the frozen space inside. I felt something trail lightly across my face, delicate as a thread, and as I lifted my hand to brush it away, a soft exhalation of breath warmed my ear, a wordless whisper. My heart seized up and my eyes snapped open, searching the darkness. There was nothing there.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  The phone was ringing, and I thought maybe it was Josh, that I had overslept and missed our meeting. He had mentioned that he’d be in town to restock his books at the Miller House Museum gift shop, and asked if he could stop by to talk. I had suggested that we meet at the lock and dam instead, not quite sure about the idea of bringing him into the house. In my groggy state, I swiped around in the sheets trying to find my phone and inadvertently knocked it off the bed. It clattered onto the wood floor, and I realized the ringing wasn’t coming from my cell, it was coming from the house phone. It had been ringing every few days, the number always unknown, sometimes no message, other times a man’s voice—Arden, are you there?—with a brief interlude of staticky silence before the beep. Since the caller wasn’t saying anything creepy or threatening, I mostly ignored the calls, figuring whoever it was would eventually give up.