by Sara Rosett
Mitch hissed, “Come on. Let her sleep.”
I reluctantly followed him out of the room and closed the door gently. “What was she talking about? She’s sorry she hurt Grandpa Franklin?”
“Nothing. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
Mitch’s phone buzzed and he reached to answer it. We’d had a little competition going for a while, with each of us setting the ringtones on the other’s cell phone with the cheesiest, most embarrassing songs we could find, but when “MMMBop” by Hanson rang out at full blast during Mitch’s staff meeting, well, that was the end of that game. His phone has been set to vibrate ever since.
Mitch answered and mouthed to me, “It’s Dad.”
I nodded and moved around the room, absentmindedly looking at pictures and giving the bird a wide berth. I stopped to examine several small, round metal objects with ornate crests, mounted in a shadow box hanging on the wall near the bird cage. Most were a coppery color and had ornate engravings. Several had an eagle with its wings spread and a crest in the middle. Another, smaller one had a banner with writing entwined with three pillars. A slip of paper under each coin had a date from the 1850s and a location written in calligraphy. They were Civil War buttons, I realized. The shadow box was part of a grouping of framed black-and-white photos, some even faded to brown. The clothes, dark suits for men and Gibson Girl sleeves and long skirts for the women, indicated the photos were from the early 1900s. I wondered if they were Avery relatives.
Mitch joined me as he put his phone away. “They’re finished at the house. Dad’s going to board up the window and then head back home.”
“Look at these buttons. They’re from the Civil War,” I said.
“Mom did say that Aunt Christine was treasure hunting with her new boyfriend. I called Aunt Gwen and asked her to come stay with Aunt Christine. As soon as she gets here, we’ll go back to Grandpa Franklin’s house, pick up Aunt Christine’s car, and drive it back over here.”
I turned to Mitch, who’d shifted to stand in front of the bird cage, and asked, “So what happened inside Grandpa Franklin’s house?” The drive to Aunt Christine’s house had been so short that I hadn’t had time to ask him about it.
The bird made whistling noises as Mitch said, “They said it’s routine. Because Aunt Christine called nine-one-one about the break-in, they had to come out and investigate. But there’s nothing to worry about. It’s all cleared up now, I’m sure.”
I tilted my head and studied him. “But there must have been some reason to call in the detectives and the crime scene unit. They must have found something . . .” I paced over to the wide front window that looked out over the wishing well, the drive, and the bank of spruce and pine trees that sheltered the house from the road. “Why did she say she didn’t mean to?” I asked, turning back to him. “And she said she hurt him. Why would she say that?”
The bird hopped onto a perch and twisted its head in a move that, if a human attempted it it would have resulted in a trip to the emergency room. “I don’t know,” Mitch said. “Let her get some rest and she’ll be fine.” Mitch leaned down and said in a soft voice, “You’re a nice bird. Can you talk, little fellow?”
The bird screwed its neck in the other direction, shifted around on the perch, and squawked at Mitch.
I raised my eyebrows and braced my hands on my hips. “Mitch, what is going on?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s going on.” Mitch murmured something to the bird and it danced along the perch. “Aunt Christine has been up for too long and doesn’t know what she’s saying. She was so worn out, she could hardly stand up.”
We’d been married long enough that I could tell Mitch was . . . well, not exactly hiding something . . . more like avoiding the topic.
“Mitch, tell me what’s going on. I know you’re not that interested in birds. Talk to me. Tell me what happened at Grandpa Franklin’s.”
Mitch straightened up and gazed at me intently for a moment, his brown eyes serious. “I’ll tell you what happened, but you have to promise you won’t blow it out of proportion and overreact.”
I frowned as his words stung. “Me? Overreact?”
“Yes, you.”
“I don’t overreact—”
“There was the time we realized that we’d both given Nathan a dose of Tylenol before bed. And what about when you found out the little girl in Livvy’s class had been teasing her about her hair?”
“Mitch! You were worried about those things, too. You’re the one who called poison control,” I shot back, but I could see a hint of a smile in his expression.
“And you’re the one who wanted to confront the mom at Back to School Night.” He was smiling now as he said, “That would have been bad, you have to admit.”
“Yeah, she probably would have punched me.” That mom—I later learned the teachers referred to her as The Mom From Hell—had quite a reputation at school. She’d intentionally run into the other person’s car when she got cut off in the carpool line, and she’d thrown a stapler at a student teacher. “Or at least taken a swing at me with that suitcase of a purse she carries.”
This was just like Mitch, using humor to diffuse my irritation. I shook my head at him. “Okay, you’ve made your point. I do overreact, occasionally,” I allowed, “but I won’t now.” I perched on the flowery seat cushion of a wicker chair beside the couch, where Mitch had dropped down. I noticed the bird was gnawing at a string of blocks hanging inside the cage. There was a bell on the end of the toy that jangled in the silence as Mitch gathered his thoughts.
“Aunt Christine was talking like that at Grandpa Franklin’s house, wasn’t she?” I said slowly. “All that about being sorry and she didn’t mean to . . . do something. And you—and your dad, I bet—bundled her out of there as fast as you could before that really sharp detective could pick up on it.”
Mitch shifted forward to the edge of the soft couch, which seemed to be swallowing him. He rearranged a few of the frothy lace throw pillows behind his back, then said, “When I went in the house, Dad and Aunt Christine were at the table in the kitchen. The detective was with them, taking notes, asking questions. Aunt Christine seemed okay. A little shell-shocked, maybe, but she was answering the questions. Anyway, I went over and sat down. The detective—what was her name?—Kal-something?” Mitch pulled a business card out of his back pocket. “Kalra. Detective Kalra. She was taking Aunt Christine through what happened.”
Mitch paused and I raised my eyebrows. “What did she say? I still haven’t heard all the details.”
“Aunt Christine said she went to check on Grandpa Franklin after the storm died down, sometime after midnight. When she got there, he was unresponsive and she called nine-one-one. She didn’t look around the house, so she doesn’t know if the window in the back bedroom was broken before they went to the hospital, or after.”
“The window was broken?” I asked. “Aunt Nanette said it was open.”
Mitch adjusted a lace pillow under his elbow as he said, “Well, it’s definitely broken. Glass and water all over the floor. I saw it.”
“If there’s water everywhere, that would mean it was broken before Aunt Christine got there. It would have happened sometime during the storm.”
“No, Dad said it rained again early this morning, too. So it could have happened after the ambulance took them to the hospital. Anyway, Detective Kalra was focused on Dad, asking him about Grandpa Franklin and if they’d ever had any problems with vandalism before. That’s when I noticed Aunt Christine wasn’t at the table. She was wandering around the living room. She stopped in front of Grandpa Franklin’s chair and stared at it for at least a minute and then she started mumbling. I don’t know what happened to her—she just lost it.”
“So looking at Grandpa Franklin’s chair upset her?” The bird let out a loud screech and rocked from side to side. “He spent most of his day in that chair, right?” I spoke louder as the bird continued to squawk. “Maybe that’s when it hit her. That he was gone
.”
“Could be,” Mitch agreed, raising his voice over the bird’s squawks and whistles.
“But that doesn’t explain why she’s talking about being sorry—” I broke off. “What is wrong with that bird? He’s going to wake up Aunt Christine. Should we cover him up? I don’t see a cover.”
Mitch extracted himself from the couch. “Here, we can use my jacket.” As I stood up, a movement through the front window caught my eye. The sun was going down quickly, casting long shadows across the driveway. In the fading light, a man was walking toward the house.
“Hey, do you know him?” I asked, because I didn’t recognize the man, but there were plenty of relatives that I’d only met once or twice and they wouldn’t look familiar to me.
“No,” Mitch said. We could hear the man’s footsteps as he came up the steps and across the porch.
The bird was now fluttering its wings and screeching double-time. The doorknob below the dead bolt moved slightly as someone twisted it, then we could faintly hear the rattle of keys.
“He’s coming inside,” I said, and realized I was whispering.
Mitch struggled to get his jacket off, which was hung up on one of his rolled-up sleeves. He finally yanked his arm out of the sleeve. I grabbed the other side and helped him strip it off. “What should we do?” I asked. The bird was flittering around the cage, shrieking at full volume. The knob shook as a key was inserted. The small lock in the center twisted.
“I don’t know, but since Aunt Christine thought someone broke into Grandpa Franklin’s house, this doesn’t feel right to me,” Mitch said, glancing around. Was he looking for something to defend us with, a weapon? Unless we were going to pelt the man with ruffled pillows, we were out of luck. I reached in my pocket for my cell phone, but realized it was in my purse, which I’d dropped on the snack bar when we walked inside. Mitch picked up a floor lamp. “Phone,” I hissed to Mitch. “Give me your phone.”
He pulled his phone out of the carrier clipped to his belt and tossed it to me, then yanked the lamp’s cord out of the plug and advanced on the door as the dead bolt swung from horizontal to vertical. I was already punching numbers and backing toward Aunt Christine’s door when the front door opened and Mitch raised the lamp.
A small man in his late fifties opened the door. “Christy—,” he called out, then stopped with one foot inside and one foot outside the door as soon as he saw Mitch. The man had a washed-out quality about him and looked like he’d fit right in with the folks in the turn-of-the-century photos on the wall. Maybe it was his clothes, a white long-sleeved shirt, brown tie, and brown dress pants, or maybe it was the way his sparse gray hair was parted and pressed down to his skull. I’m not sure why I had that impression, but with his monochrome clothes, round glasses, and thin, receding hairline, he didn’t look threatening at all.
Mitch must have felt the same way because he set the lamp down and said, “Can I help you?”
As if he found floor-lamp-wielding men every time he opened a door, the man said, “You must be Mitch. I recognize you from the pictures of the family reunion. I’m Roy Martin, a friend of Christine’s.” He stepped inside, closed the door, and extended his hand to Mitch. “So good to meet you.” It wasn’t just Roy’s soft, rolling drawl that indicated he was a Southerner. His manners and his instant friendliness marked him as being from the South, too. The bird continued to flap and squawk, but not as frantically as before. “Calm down, Einstein. I’ll talk to you in a minute,” Roy called, and the bird stopped making noise and rocked back and forth on its perch.
Roy walked over to me. “You must be Ellie. Christine says your children are delightful,” he said as he shook my hand.
“Oh, well, thank you,” I said, surprised that Aunt Christine had been able to sort out which kids had belonged to us at the reunion. Roy glanced back at the kitchen and then to the closed bedroom door. “Is Christine here? I came as soon as I heard.”
“She is, but she’s sleeping. She was up all night,” I said, not sure if Roy knew only about Grandpa Franklin’s death or if he knew about the police investigation as well.
“Poor thing. She’s probably done in. I can stay here, if you folks have something you need to do.”
Before I could reply, the bedroom door opened. Aunt Christine looked bleary-eyed and slightly confused. Her hair was flattened to her scalp on one side and she had a crease across one cheek from sleep. “I heard voices,” she said, then saw Roy, and her face crumpled into tears.
Roy opened his arms. “Darlin’, I’m so sorry.”
She flew across the room to him and he closed his arms tightly around her.
I glanced at Mitch with raised eyebrows.
“Looks like Aunt Gwen doesn’t need to come over. I’ll give her a call.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to get to her car?” I asked as we pulled way from Aunt Christine’s house.
“Dad said it shouldn’t be a problem,” Mitch said as he followed the curve of the road. The van’s headlights cut into the night and lit up the trees and undergrowth lining the side of the road. We’d left Aunt Christine and Roy a few moments after they’d embraced. I wasn’t actually sure they were aware we’d left. We were on our way to pick up Aunt Christine’s car and bring it back to her. We’d left Roy and Aunt Christine sitting on the couch. With his arm around her shoulders, she had been recounting the events of the day while daubing at her eyes with a tissue. She’d been speaking in full, coherent sentences and I felt okay about leaving her.
“What did you think of Roy? He’s not at all what I expected.”
“How did you picture him?” Mitch asked. In the light from the dashboard, I could see a slight grin on his face. “George Clooney, only older?”
“No,” I laughed. “It’s just the way everyone described him . . . I guess I was picturing someone kind of like Ricardo Montalban. Someone suave and debonair and . . . I don’t know . . . with more hair.” I hadn’t realized I’d formed any sort of idea of what Aunt Christine’s beau would look like, but when I’d seen him, I’d realized how different my imagined picture was compared to reality.
Mitch laughed and said, “Well, it’s obvious that Aunt Christine has fallen for him, hair or no hair.”
“He seems to feel the same way about her. And he has a key! I wonder if anyone else in the family knows how close they are.”
Mitch shrugged. “No clue,” he said as we turned onto the gravel drive. It was a good thing he was driving because I would have missed the turn in the darkness. Mitch slowed at the curve in the driveway, but this time it was empty of extra cars. He parked in front of the garage.
“Where’s the yellow tape? Wouldn’t they leave that up?” I asked as I twisted around to check each side of the house. As my eyes adjusted to the blackness around the house, I could see it was all gone. “It’s kind of weird,” I said, scanning the empty yard, driveway, and porch. “A few hours ago, this place was crawling with people and now it’s deserted.”
“I guess the police are done. It must have been the storm that broke the window,” Mitch said as he opened his car door. “Let me check and see if Aunt Christine’s car is in the garage.”
I climbed out and followed him, flicking through the keys on Aunt Christine’s key ring, looking to see if there was anything that looked like a key to the side door of the garage, in case the car was in there. I glanced around the gloomy yard. There was no moonlight because the clouds still hung thick and heavy across the sky. With the porch light off and all the windows in the house dark, the yard was a sea of deep blackness. It felt late and I wanted to get back to the kids and see how their swim went and if they were tired. They were probably starving by now if they’d been swimming. Everything that had happened during this crazy day couldn’t override the mom schedule in my head. Baths, bedtimes, meals, and even snack times were ingrained in my schedule.
I picked up my pace, so we could drop off her car and get back to Mitch’s parents’ house. As we approached the garage, I
said, “I thought he used it for storage. Last time I talked to your mom on the phone, she said something about how they needed to clean out Grandpa Franklin’s garage this spring and have a huge sale to get rid of all the extra stuff he had in there.”
Mitch peered into one of the small windows on the side. “No, not in here. Man, cleaning that thing out is going to be a job.”
“It’s probably around on the other side of the house. There’s a cleared area over there by the kitchen door.” We turned and retraced our steps and Mitch said, “Let me have the keys. If the screen is unlocked, I’m going to turn on the porch light so it won’t be pitch black.”
I handed them over and quickly followed him up the steps. There was no way I was hanging around the yard by myself. The porch swing creaked on its hinges. There was a flicker of movement on the edge of the porch. I squinted in the dimness and I could just make out the faint outline of a fat yellow tabby cat as it sprung lightly off the porch railing. It padded across the driveway and disappeared into the night. “Must be a stray,” Mitch said. “Grandpa Franklin didn’t have a cat.” He opened the screen and braced it against his shoulder as he tried a few keys. He found the right key, opened the door, and flicked on the porch light.
A shriek sounded from inside the house.
Ellie Avery’s Tips for Preserving Family Treasures
As you make your game plan for organizing family memorabilia, two important things to consider are:
• Accessibility—how often will you need or want to access the material? If you’re putting away a selection of papers and certificates that you plan to hand off to your children when they leave home, you probably won’t need to get to the items more than a few times a year. Store them in an out-of-the-way place like a high closet shelf. On the other hand, if you’re tracing your family tree, you probably want your genealogical records within easy reach.
