Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Margie had said Dorothy was born in 1933. Rebecca got the appropriate transparencies from the gum-chewing girl behind the counter while Jan hauled an orange plastic chair into a corner. She plunked the children down behind it and opened a sack of toys. “Okay,” she said. “Imagine the chair is concertina wire. Do not pass.” Brian and Mandy began to fight over a G.I.Joe figure.

  Rebecca settled herself at a reader and started plugging in plastic sheets. Names and numbers crawled like neon insects across the screen. “Well,” she said when Jan appeared in her peripheral vision, “that didn’t take long. Dorothy Anne, born to Samuel Norton and Ruth Kordelewski.”

  “Okay,” said Jan. “On to Plan B.”

  “Katherine Gemmell Brown’s death certificate? Yeah, well— she was born in 1901. She’s probably long gone.” Rebecca flicked the switch on the viewer and the screen went out. A tiny bulb in the back of her mind went on. She swung around in the chair. “What was it Margie said about Dorothy that time? That she’d had a quickie marriage and divorce back in her flaming youth days?”

  Jan’s brows shot up her forehead. “You think she might have… ”

  “Married Katie’s son!” Rubbing her hands in anticipation, Rebecca turned in her transparencies and claimed some new ones. “1952. It had to have been. They got married, couldn’t live on love, Katie tried to hit up James for a handout for them!”

  Jan scooted in Rebecca’s chair. “And Louise never knew about it!”

  “Why should she? She didn’t overhear the entire conversation between Katherine and James. And the marriage was just a flash in the pan, here in Columbus beyond the range of the Putnam gossip radar. It didn’t work, he left, Dorothy married Chuck Garst and settled down.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Jan said. “I’ll check some of the death records while you go through the marriage licenses.”

  The lurid green letters unreeled before her. Nothing. Rebecca blinked, her eyes hurting, and turned around with a frustrated sigh. Jan was feeding her children animal crackers and paper cartons of juice. “Any luck?”

  Jan mopped at a small mouth. “If she died, she did it somewhere else. How about you?”

  “If Dorothy got married, she did it somewhere else.”

  “It was just a rumor,” Jan returned. “You know how rumors are.”

  “Yes, I do… . “Another mental bulb flared. Rebecca leaped up, did a modest approximation of a grand jete, and distracted the attendant from her bubble gum by asking for the birth certificates for 1953. “Rumors,” she explained to Jan. “How better to handle rumors of pregnancy than to claim a marriage? If Katie was at Dun Iain with Dorothy in 1952, and Dorothy was pregnant, the baby might’ve come in early 1953.”

  “All right!” Jan’s wicked grin was tempered with caution. “But that doesn’t explain why Katie butted in. Maybe her son was the father, yes, but then, why didn’t she get him to marry Dorothy?”

  “Let’s make a leap of faith and assume Katherine was actually telling the truth. She met Dorothy in church. An unwanted pregnancy would sure drive me to prayer. Maybe Katie had had some kind of born-again experience and was trying to make up for her past greediness by helping poor little Dorothy. They were both from Putnam, after all. Maybe that letter from James, about shaming the memory of her parents, brought her to her senses. That’s why he never heard from her again after helping her kids and Dorothy, too.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Jan, and Rebecca turned back to the reader.

  She realized she was whistling “The Trooper and the Maid” under her breath as the blotches of print unfurled. “Bonnie lassie I’ll lie near you now, bonnie lassie I’ll lie near you— something, something, in the morning I’ll no leave you.” Yeah, that’s what they always say.

  “There it is!” Rebecca exclaimed, and bit her lip, hoping she hadn’t disturbed anyone else in the room. Then her thought exploded, emotional shrapnel searing bloody tracks in her mind. “Jan! Oh my God, oh Jan!”

  “What is it? I thought you found it.”

  “I found it all right.” Rebecca’s trembling finger indicated the words on the screen. “Look.”

  Dorothy Norton, Ronald Adler. Male child. Eric. March 27, 1953.

  “Adler?” said Jan. “Hey, there’s got to be lots of people in the world named Adler.”

  “Eric Adler? My— our— Eric Adler is thirty-five years old. It’s him.” Rebecca’s voice thinned and twanged like a rubber band.

  “Lord,” Jan croaked, “Of all the things I thought we might find, this sure as heck wasn’t one of them.”

  The lines of print on the screen blurred and ran. Rebecca closed her eyes and opened them again, but the accusing name was still there. The letters were fuzzy, especially the “R” of Ronald and the “th” of Dorothy; “Norton” looked rather like “Horton”. It was only a copy of an old birth certificate, after all. The original had been typed on some clerk’s long-suffering typewriter, and the transfer to microfiche hadn’t helped. Only “Eric” was crisp, hand printed in ink after someone— Dorothy? his adoptive parents?— had given him that name.

  Jan looked at the screen, brow furrowed. “Eric’s named Adler, though. Maybe Dorothy was married to Ronald, and Eric was taken into a foster home rather than adopted. Maybe his father’s family took him in. Did he ever tell you what happened to the people he called his parents?”

  “Some kind of accident, I gather. It’s not the type of thing you ask.” Rebecca’s lips were so numb it was hard to speak.

  “Looking for your roots has become fashionable,” Jan went breathlessly on. “Maybe he grew up under the name of his adoptive parents and then took ‘Adler’ after he found out who his father really was.”

  Rebecca flicked off the screen, but the name still danced in front of her eyes, little smeary letters wriggling like bacteria. “He knows Dorothy is his mother.”

  “Him not knowing would be stretching coincidence to absurdity. But I can see why he never told you, or anyone else for that matter.”

  “Pearls before swine? No, someone who’s worked as hard as Eric to smooth his rough edges would never claim a relationship with a small-town slob like Dorothy. But he knows. So does she. No wonder she’s so partial to him.”

  For a moment the women were silent. The fiche machines hummed only slightly less shrilly than the fluorescent lights. Car horns honked outside. Mandy and Brian’s voices ricocheted off the hard floor. More than one patron of the room sent dirty looks first at them and then at Jan.

  “What about Katherine?” Jan said, sidling hurriedly toward her offspring. “Or do you even think she’s important any more?”

  “How the hell do I know?” Rebecca stood up, her knees and back locking themselves upright. “Sorry. Let’s get out of here.”

  Either the day’s bright sunshine had become as smudged as the old records, she thought, or the smoke of her burning assumptions clouded her vision. On the outskirts of Columbus Jan turned into a Shoney’s. They found a booth in the corner, ordered kid meals for the children and coffee and club sandwiches for themselves. Brian painted his plate with catsup, using a french fry as a brush. Mandy peeled the pickles from her hamburger.

  Rebecca took a bite of her sandwich, chewed until it was the size of a baseball, then tried to wash it down with a gulp of coffee. Choking, she shoved the plate away. “And Michael said, way back when, that Eric was up to something. Did I listen to him? No.”

  Jan raked her friend with an acute gaze, and for a moment Rebecca was afraid she was going to say something about Michael. But she said, “Is Dorothy blackmailing Eric into fencing the missing items for her?”

  “The envelope from Sotheby’s? I’d wondered how someone with Dorothy’s limited background could sell something like the mazer.”

  “Or is Eric masterminding the whole scheme?” Jan went on.

  Rebecca rubbed her temples, rearranging rather than soothing the pain. “But it’s not a lucrative enough scheme to be worth the penalties. So petty, an item here, an
item there. You don’t buy Volvos with that. You don’t risk disbarment. Only Dorothy would think such small amounts were worthwhile.”

  “Maybe he’s just covering up for her, trying to get matters straightened out before anyone finds out. He must’ve been appalled to look up his long-lost mother only to find she’s up to her perm in embezzlement. How’d that go over with Benjamin Birkenhead?”

  Rebecca snorted. “Real well.”

  “You see? Come on, eat, it’ll make you feel better.” Jan followed her own advice by wrestling a piece of bacon from the edge of her sandwich.

  Rebecca picked up her sandwich again. She nibbled at a piece of turkey, got that down, tried a bigger bite.

  After a time Jan said, slowly and carefully into the depths of her cup, “Eric had access to the house without romancing you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But the shine’s already gone off that relationship, hasn’t it?”

  “That obvious, huh?” Without waiting for Jan to reply, Rebecca went on, “I know there’s something beneath that glossy surface. But I’m beginning to wonder if he’s spent so many years hiding it he’s lost it himself. Such slickness is a kind of dishonesty, I think.”

  “I think so, too. But that was what you wanted, once. What do you want now?”

  “The truth.” Rebecca smiled wanly at her friend, motioned to the waitress, and grabbed the check.

  On the way back to Putnam she listened only halfheartedly to the prattle of the children and to Jan’s remarks on the landscape and the weather. Her thoughts crawled as painfully as wounded soldiers across the no man’s land of her mind. And I thought this was going to be such an easy job. Instead of the Erskine letter I find assorted ghosts, a punk, and an alcholic housekeeper, a slick lawyer, a teddy bear of a sheriff and a porcupine of a historian with a tartan chip on his shoulder and sensibilities deeper than any heart of space.

  Jan dropped Rebecca off in a parking area deserted except for the Toyota and the Nova. The two cars were facing different directions, giving each other the cold fender. “You going to be all right?” she called. “I’m just at the end of the phone line.”

  “I’m okay. Thank you for putting up with all of this.” Rebecca walked into Dun Iain. She stood in the entry as the ashes of the past drifted like snow around her, piled up in the corners, made ridges and banks in the corridors, muffled all footsteps, living and dead… .

  The silence was shattered by Michael galloping onto the landing. “It’s you.”

  “Who else? Dorothy and Phil aren’t due again until tomorrow.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “James has been trampin’ up and doon the bluidy stairs all bluidy mornin’.”

  “Even the ghosts are getting nervous,” Rebecca said, frowning.

  “Warren says he’s right pleased tae have the box back again, we must’ve overlooked it, thank you very much. If we really insist we can take it into the lab in Putnam, but why bother?”

  “Great.”

  Michael started to go, caught himself and came back. “Did you find anything in the Records place?”

  “We found that Dorothy isn’t related to Katherine Gemmell,” Rebecca answered, not looking at him.

  “Ah. I see. Well then.” He went back upstairs.

  Rebecca found Darnley asleep in a patch of sunlight on her bed. She sat down and stroked his soft fur. “No,” she said, “I can’t tell anyone else about Eric until I’ve talked to him. It just wouldn’t be fair. If Michael has some things to work out alone, then so do I.”

  Darnley regarded her with skeptical yellow eyes, as though asking just what truth she really wanted.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The sky had an ominous tint. It was still blue, but it was no longer deep; it arched above Dun Iain like a lid. The icy wind left a metallic tang in the back of Rebecca’s throat.

  She hurried past Dorothy’s and Phil’s cars into the house. Her first stop was her bathroom, where she scrubbed black ink from her fingertips. The Putnam police had looked at her with thinly veiled amusement when she’d marched in, handed over the jeweled casket, and asked them to dust it for fingerprints; Warren had never told them she was coming. After they’d taken her prints they pointed out with the patient reasonableness reserved for children and the mentally impaired that they’d need prints from everyone else at Dun Iain as well. Maybe they’d get back to her on Monday. Maybe later in the week. She’d barely made it outside before she blushed with rage and embarrassment.

  There, her fingertips were pink again. Rebecca got her notebook from her room and glanced up the stairs. Michael must be on the sixth floor, doing more than his share of the work. From the sound of water running and the odor of furniture polish she deduced Dorothy was on the fifth floor. Phil was banging the plumbing on the fourth floor, the pipes reverberating like gongs.

  Her mouth tight, her shoulders stiff, Rebecca went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tea from the still warm pot, and placed the telephone and the phone book on the table. She sharpened her pencil, opened a fresh page in her notebook, and made the easiest call first. “Hi, Jan!”

  “How’re you doing?” Jan responded.

  “I haven’t committed hari kari with my nail scissors yet. The mood I’m in I’m much more likely to commit the Dun Iain nail scissor massacre.”

  “Spare the cat, at least. What can I do for you?”

  “Tell me if you know whether Eric is doing any legal work for Louise.”

  “No, she’s got somebody else. Why?”

  “Just wondering if he had some influence over what she told us the other day. Grasping at straws, I’m afraid.”

  “If I see any answers on sale at the Big Bear I’ll get some, okay?”

  Rebecca laughed. “Thanks, Jan. Check with you later.”

  The next number was that of the Ohio Historical Society. She wended her way through three different extensions until she ascertained that the diaries and scrapbooks had indeed arrived safely. She wrote, “OHS okay”.

  Michael strolled into the kitchen, warmed up the teapot with hot water from the kettle, refilled his mug, and strolled out again. From the corner of her eye Rebecca registered his inquisitive glance. He was just like a cat, auburn whiskers always at the alert.

  Rebecca dialed Information, wrote down a number, and dialed again. A voice answered, “Sotheby’s New York.”

  Again Rebecca persisted through several extensions until she found someone who either knew what he was talking about or cared what she was asking. “19th c. Edinburgh silver work,” repeated the male voice. “Is that the piece that was recently stolen from some place in Ohio?”

  “That’s where I’m calling from,” said Rebecca. “I’d like to know if anyone’s offered the mazer for sale through you.”

  “Oh! You must be from the insurance company.” Rebecca didn’t enlighten him. The voice went on, “Since we’ve been notified that the piece was stolen, we would, of course, let you know if it came in. There’re collectors who could’ve been contacted privately, but I’m not at liberty to divulge their names.”

  “Of course not,” said Rebecca through her teeth. “Thank you anyway.” Her pencil jerking with disappointment she wrote, “Sotheby’s? Collectors???”

  She poured herself more tea and checked her watch. Barely past noon. Eric was coming at five. Her chest bubbled like ginger ale— let’s get it over with, the accusations, the explanations, the cold hard looks. Her heart was a lead weight suspended amid the bubbles— no, let it go, don’t confront him.

  Don’t confront him? No way. Her own whiskers were twitching like mad. She dialed again. “Benjamin Birkenhead, please. Rebecca Reid at Dun Iain.”

  The receiver emitted insipid music and she held it away from her head. Then Ben’s voice boomed, “Miss Reid?” so loudly she hardly needed to move it closer. “What can I do for you, honey?”

  Reminding herself to keep her voice sweetly breathless, Rebecca asked him her rehearsed question: her nephew Joey
was just out of law school, and Eric always said how much he enjoyed working for such a prestigious firm. “How did he get his position with you?”

  Just as she’d guessed. Punch the right buttons and Ben would respond like a candy machine depositing a Snickers bar. “Why, honey, Eric called us to see if there was an opening. He had such glowing references from the firm in Los Angeles where he’d interned we told him to come for an interview.”

  “At his own expense?”

  “Sure thing. Nice to see a young buck with such enthusiasm. He even agreed to a clerk’s salary to begin with, just to work for us. Of course we’ve raised his salary since then. He does good work, and makes such a fine appearance for the firm.”

  You give him every job associated with a woman, right? Rebecca asked silently. She wondered just how far Eric was in debt, raise or no raise.

  “If your nephew would like an interview,” continued Ben, “I’ll have my secretary set one up. You come with him. There’s a little place near here that serves a real businessman’s lunch, two martinis and a bloody T-Bone.”

  Rebecca gagged. “Why thank you. How kind. I’ll write and tell him. I know he’ll be very grateful.” Even if thoroughly bewildered; her nephew Joey was only ten years old.

  Birkenhead hung up. With the receiver still at her ear Rebecca gulped tea, washing away the sour taste of her own lies. There was a fine distinction between lying and simply not telling the truth, but she wasn’t up to fine distinctions. She was infected with Dun Iain’s virus of dishonesty.

  A distinct click broke the silence in the receiver. Someone had just hung up the fourth floor extension.

  Rebecca threw down the phone, catapulted out of her chair and raced up the stairs. She almost collided with Dorothy between the third and fourth floors. The housekeeper’s pale, dull eyes barely registered Rebecca’s suspicious glance.

  Phil was disassembling the sink in the fourth floor bathroom. Michael was scrutinizing a Raeburn portrait in the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors, one of Elspeth’s crystal bottles in his hand. Rebecca turned his curious look with a glazed grin, spun, and thundered back down to the kitchen. Could’ve been any of them. Great.