Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  I rolled onto my stomach and dangled my arms between the bed and the wall to fish out my phone, flinching when my fingers unexpectedly encountered something soft and fuzzy, though I quickly realized it was only a dust bunny, one of many. I got down on the floor to get a better reach, and as I slid my phone through the carpet of dust under the bed, an envelope slid out with it.

  I recognized the handwriting right away. My own. It was one of the many letters I’d sent to the twins at Arrowood, this one postmarked 1996. The envelope flap was open, though I couldn’t tell whether someone had carefully opened it or if the glue holding it together had simply dissolved over time. I pulled out the sheet of blue-lined notebook paper and unfolded it, dust gritting my fingers.

  Dear Violet and Tabitha, I have read A Little Princess three times now. It is my favorite book.

  I would have been ten at the time, living in a drafty Illinois farmhouse among the wheat fields, imagining myself as Sara Crewe, the privileged schoolgirl forced into terrible circumstances when her doting father dies. My father was still alive then, of course, and though he hadn’t ever doted on me, our former life at Arrowood had been idyllic in comparison. The letter went on to explain that Dad was now gone most of the time, trying to work himself to the top of a promising pyramid scheme after taking a Dale Carnegie course called How to Win Friends and Influence People. Our kitchen cabinets were packed with useless, unsold products—shake mixes and dietary supplements and homeopathic remedies and freeze-dried meals. The point, Dad explained, wasn’t to sell the products, but to recruit people under you to sell them. Even if they failed, you’d still make money, because they had to buy their way into the pyramid. The pipes in the rented farmhouse had frozen and burst that winter, and we had moved again.

  I squeezed half under the bed and used the light on my phone to search for more envelopes, but didn’t find any. If this letter had made it to Arrowood, maybe the others were somewhere in the house as well, though I wasn’t sure why this one had ended up in my room, under my bed. I stuck the letter in my rolltop desk and hurried to get ready to meet Josh.

  —

  He was waiting for me on the concrete overlook. “We got lucky,” he said. “There’s a barge coming.” Watching barges pass through the locks was a popular local pastime, especially for kids. Grammy and I had done it all the time. Three young boys pressed their faces to the chain-link fence, their mom sitting on a bench behind them. The oldest wanted to know how long the boat was, how wide, how many containers, and she told him it wasn’t close enough yet to tell.

  “How was the Miller House?” I asked.

  “Good,” he said. “They were all sold out of my book on the Mark family massacre. Are you familiar with that case?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “A farmer, Leslie Mark, his wife, Jorjean, and their two kids, who were only one and five years old, were shot to death up near Cedar Falls in 1975. Leslie’s older brother, Jerry, was convicted on some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence, and he’s in prison in Fort Madison. The story made a lot of sense, the way the prosecutors pieced it together. Jerry was angry that his little brother had inherited the family farm. He lied to police about some key things that incriminated him. But there were no witnesses, and the methods for analyzing the physical evidence could all be disputed today. A while back, DNA testing proved that cigarettes found at the scene weren’t his. That wasn’t enough to overturn his conviction, though. Without definitive proof, we’re left with a story. If the story makes sense, we believe it.”

  Like my story. Singer. All the pieces had fit.

  The boys along the fence pumped their arms, hoping for the captain to blow the horn, but the towboat was still too far back to see them. Look up there, the mom said, pointing to the underside of the elevated bridge that carried traffic across the river to Illinois. See the birds? Do you know what kind they are? She wasn’t talking to me, but I couldn’t help looking. A colony of mud nests clung to the bridge like giant barnacles. Cliff swallows.

  “Anyway,” Josh continued, “I’ve been going over the timeline from the day the twins disappeared, and I wanted to run a few things by you.”

  “Sure.”

  “You thought it was around four when Singer’s car drove away. That matches up pretty closely with your mother’s call to the police. But now we know he was there around one. That’s a three-hour difference. For argument’s sake, let’s assume Singer didn’t come back again at four, that you only saw his car at one, when he took the pictures. Do you remember what happened between the time you saw Singer and the actual time of the disappearance?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember a gap. I remember it the way I remember it, them being gone after he drove away.”

  “Do you remember at what point your dad came home, what time it might have been?”

  “I’m not sure. I was sick, and I hadn’t slept much the night before. I think I might have fallen asleep for a while, or maybe that was later on, at the Sister House—part of the day is blurred together and always has been.”

  The barge, now penned in, began to lower, gradually, as the water drained out of the lock to match the level downstream. The boys rattled the fence, trying to get the attention of a crewman at the front of the towboat. Three containers across, the boys’ mother said. Five long. How many does that make? The boys ignored her.

  “I’ve been looking into your dad a bit, you know, just checking out every angle. I realize you might have been too young to pay attention to this sort of thing, but do you remember him having trouble with anyone? I know he was involved in some questionable business dealings. Maybe there were conflicts related to fraudulent investments or gambling? Someone he owed money to?”

  “I wasn’t really aware of him having any enemies back then. He was good at talking people into things, convincing them to invest in whatever worthless idea he was pitching, and eventually they’d realize he was the only one coming out ahead. I never saw anybody mad at him, though. It wasn’t until later on, after we moved, that he started having problems. He was gambling too much. Couldn’t rely on his family name anymore to get him out of trouble.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Josh said. “I haven’t found evidence that anyone in town hated him enough to want to hurt his kids. The consensus seemed to be that the good tempered the bad. Even when he pissed people off, they still sort of liked him. One of the receptionists from your grandfather’s practice called him a ‘charming asshole,’ and she was smiling when she said it.”

  I paused, watching the mother on the bench watch her boys. “What about Julia Ferris? I assume you know they were together that day?”

  “They were each other’s alibis.”

  “And more.”

  The captain finally blew the horn, a low mournful wail. The two older boys rattled the fence and cheered and the younger one started bawling.

  “An affair isn’t a crime. Or a motive, as far as I can tell,” Josh said. “Not in this case.”

  “You’ve already thought this through.”

  “Yeah,” he said, chewing his lip. “There has to be a reason, a believable one. Why would Julia want to take the girls? The affair itself isn’t enough. There’d have to be something more going on, and I haven’t found anything.” A daddy longlegs crawled up onto the bench between us, and Josh picked the spider up by one leg and dropped it on the ground. “Oh, something else—you remember how I was looking into the Brubaker house across the street? Trying to find out who had access to the place while it was being worked on?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turns out Dick Heaney was on the list. He was doing some plaster work.”

  “Heaney? Does it mean anything that he was on the list? Was he over there that day?”

  “He had an alibi,” Josh said. “He said he was visiting his father at the nursing home.”

  “Okay. So that rules him out, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “I
can’t verify it because his father’s no longer living, and the nursing home doesn’t keep visitors logs from that far back. But I’m almost certain someone would have checked the log back then. It was noted that he’d done some work for your grandparents way back when he was a teenager, but he hadn’t had any contact with the family in years by the time of the twins’ disappearance. Nothing to make him a person of interest.”

  “So I shouldn’t be worried?”

  “I don’t think there’s any reason to be.”

  The lower lock gates opened, releasing the barge, and it lumbered downstream, slowly gaining momentum. The three boys held on to the fence, pressing their faces against the chain link, and I let my eyes unfocus, waiting for that dizzy, disconcerting feeling that I was the one moving, while the barge and the river and the rest of the world stood still.

  —

  Even though Josh didn’t think there was any reason to be suspicious of Heaney, I decided not to call him about the leaking faucet on the third floor. It wasn’t bad enough that it would make a difference on the water bill.

  Without work or classes or a schedule, the days were muddling together, distinguished mainly by the meals I ate: Hostess powdered doughnuts for breakfast; Slim Jims for lunch; Sonic—which was growing on me more than I cared to admit—for a late, deep-fried dinner. I ate out on the terrace, or on the sofa in the drawing room, or while hovering over the sink, uncomfortable sitting alone at the cherrywood table in the dining room, staring at eleven empty seats.

  Most mornings I didn’t bother changing out of my nightgown. I’d grown used to the stale air in the house, the amphibious stickiness of my skin. Hours would disappear while I wandered through the rooms, wiping dust out of grooves in the walnut molding and clearing away the delicate spiderwebs that seemed to regenerate in the window frames each night. I listened to the house, training my ears to identify all its secret sounds. Floorboards settling, chimneys sighing, branches scraping the glass of an upstairs window like a long-nailed witch trying to get in. Occasionally, somewhere in the walls, a faint metronome tick like water dripping. Sometimes I listened so hard to nothing that the silence itself grew into a deafening static.

  I kept thinking Ben would call me, and then I finally realized that I had his number but he didn’t have mine. I texted to see if he wanted to hang out or grab dinner. I’m busy this week, he replied, but let’s plan for next Saturday. It’s your favorite of all the agricultural-themed festivals! He followed up with a string of emoji: jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, bats. It was a joke between us. Surrounded by farmland as we were, every festival revolved around a harvest: grapes, watermelon, sweet corn, apples. Any excuse to set up a beer tent and rickety carnival rides. The pumpkin festival, though, was arguably the best. It’s a date, I typed. Moments after clicking Send, I had texter’s remorse. Should I have phrased it differently? I wasn’t sure that it was a date in the technical sense—not that I didn’t want it to be.

  Before Ben mentioned the festival, I hadn’t even noticed October’s arrival. The Arrowood profile was due the first of November, and I decided that I would give myself a deadline, to finish it in one week. I had read in a self-help book that if you completed a simple task and crossed it off your to-do list, it would give you the confidence to attempt more difficult tasks. Maybe, if I could finish the profile, I’d be motivated to work on something much harder: making a life for myself here. I’d expected that everything would somehow fall into place now that I was home, but so far living at Arrowood wasn’t much different from those last dreadful months in Colorado, spending too much time on my own.

  I knew it shouldn’t take long to write a brief history, but I was having the opposite problem that I’d had with my thesis. There was too much to say; I couldn’t distill it down to one page. I wanted to explain on paper what it had once meant to be an Arrowood in Keokuk, before the name had become synonymous with tragedy and an empty house. I could almost hear Dr. Endicott chastising me for making it too personal.

  By the time Heaney rang the doorbell the following Saturday, I had written dozens of pages about the Arrowoods and forced myself to complete several drafts of the one-page version, none of which captured what I was trying to say. I hadn’t left the house or seen another human being all week, and maybe for that reason, I didn’t mind seeing Heaney on the porch, bearing a wooden crate.

  “Morning,” he said, smiling too broadly, his pale lips stretching over his teeth. “I brought you something.” He set the box down and knelt to pick through the netted bags piled inside. “Flower bulbs. Got some tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, crocuses, snowdrops.” He stood up and brushed off his hands. “I was thinking how this place doesn’t have much in the way of flowers anymore. I thought we could start getting it back to how it used to be.”

  We did have flowers before, ones that had been there my entire life and probably other lifetimes as well. Annabelle hydrangeas with softball-size clusters of white blooms bordering the porch; lilac bushes and pink peonies and bearded irises around the sides of the house; orange daylilies clustered at the iron fence out back, along with tall yellow cannas that had died after Nana and Granddad moved and no one bothered to dig them up for the winter. The lack of flowers wasn’t something I would have expected Heaney to notice or remedy.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’ll go ahead and start planting,” he said. “It’s a perfect day for it. And I thought maybe if you’re not busy, you might like to help.”

  I hoped that Heaney was better with flowers than I was. I had never planted anything that survived. In grade school, when we grew marigolds in old milk cartons for science class, mine were the first to die.

  Heaney fetched me a pair of gardening gloves from his truck and told me where I could find two small trowels stored in the laundry room. I dug holes in the empty flower bed by the porch and dropped the bulbs in, pointy side up like he showed me, without paying attention to what went where. I noticed that Heaney was planting his in orderly rows, grouping the hyacinths and crocuses in the front so they wouldn’t be hidden among the taller flowers. He hummed under his breath while he worked, a tuneless, white-noise sound, like a refrigerator running.

  When we had finished planting the bulbs, we shook out our gloves and Heaney pushed up his sleeves. As he did so, I noticed that he wore a wristwatch very similar to the one my father used to wear, a stainless steel Rolex that Nana and Granddad had given him for his high school graduation.

  “My dad used to have a watch like that.”

  Heaney looked at me, his forehead wrinkling up. After a moment, he unclasped the watch and handed it to me. Like my dad’s watch, it was a Rolex.

  “Turn it over,” he said.

  I flipped the watch over in my palm and saw my father’s initials engraved on the back: ELA. Edward Louis Arrowood. “How did you get this?”

  “Your dad showed up here a while back. He wanted to come in the house, and I’m sorry to say, but I wouldn’t let him. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be here, and I didn’t know what might happen if he got inside. He made some threats, but once he saw it wouldn’t do any good, he broke down. Said he needed money and begged me to buy his watch. I felt bad for him.”

  I brushed my thumb over my father’s initials. I wondered what it had been like for him, to show up and not be allowed inside—if he had blamed Heaney, or Granddad, or if he blamed himself for leaving Arrowood in the first place.

  “Keep it,” Heaney said. “It should be yours.”

  “I can’t,” I said, handing it back. “You paid for it. I’m sure it was expensive.”

  Heaney shook his head, trying to refuse it, but I pressed it into his hand. “I didn’t give him anywhere near what it’s worth,” Heaney said. “Probably about the same as he’d get at the pawnshop.”

  “Did he say what he needed the money for?”

  “No.” Heaney sat down on the porch steps and I joined him. “I didn’t ask.”

  “You knew him, though, right? From high school? Wasn’t i
t hard not to let him into his own house?”

  Heaney groaned, looking up into the branches of the mimosa tree. The frilly pink blossoms that adorned it in the summer were gone, replaced by clusters of ugly brown seedpods.

  “Was it hard? It was and it wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He laughed ruefully. “I don’t know that you need to hear about it. I don’t want to speak poorly of your father.”

  “I know how he was,” I said. “It’s not like you’re going to ruin him for me.”

  “How about this. I’ll tell you, if you let me give you the watch. Please.”

  He held it out, and I let him slip it onto my wrist. It slid halfway up my forearm, the metal warm from being cupped in his hand. I knew I would take it off the moment he left.

  “I used to work for your grandparents a long time ago,” he said. “Starting back when I was in high school. Did you know that?”

  I shook my head, though Josh had mentioned it.

  “I did all sorts of errands, odd jobs. Your granddad was a good man. He and my dad were in Rotary Club together, old friends. My dad was severely disabled in an accident while he was working down at the lock and dam, and Dr. Arrowood took me under his wing after that, giving me a job, encouraging me to stay in school when I wanted to drop out. He told me I was a hard worker, that I had potential. He even helped me get started in community college, though I never did finish. I spent quite a bit of time over here, and your granddad thought it might be good if Eddie and I got to be friends. I made bad grades but liked to work, and Eddie was lazy but smart. Maybe together, we might even each other out. It didn’t happen, though.