Vultures at Twilight

by Charles Atkins

  ‘Don’t you think the family will want those?’ Ada asked, breaking into my funk as she flipped through a box of photos and albums.

  ‘I asked each of the sons,’ Tolliver said, overhearing her. ‘None of them wanted them.’ He joined us at the dining-room table that gave us unobstructed views of the living room and kitchen. ‘That’s the saddest thing, when boxes of photographs come up at auction. Unless they’re true antiques, or of somebody famous, no one wants them. I wouldn’t say anything if you just kept them aside. There might be someone in the family, down the line, who’d like them. Maybe a grandchild.’

  ‘You think I should?’ Ada asked.

  ‘Your call,’ Tolliver said, ‘but I can tell you that if I take them and they don’t sell; they’ll wind up in the dumpster.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Some people,’ he continued as he sat, ‘just leave them in the boxes for years.’ He seemed lost as he looked out over the living room that was rapidly being dismantled.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked, noting the circles under his eyes.

  ‘Been better. As long as I keep moving, things will eventually quiet down. At least, that’s my theory.’

  Without looking at him, and in a voice that only the three of us could hear, Ada spoke. ‘You have to mourn. That can’t be boxed up and put away.’

  He looked at her. ‘Funny you should say that.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘I agree. But the bit about boxing it up; you don’t know how true that can be. People sometimes try to do just that, box it up and put it away.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, keeping my voice near a whisper, ‘are we talking literally?’

  ‘I do a lot of estates,’ he continued. ‘It’s common to find boxes from other estates that have never been opened. Usually, it’s like those pictures over there, or letters. Personal things that the heirs never got around to open.’

  ‘Sounds like unfinished business,’ Ada remarked. ‘How can you get on with things if you never take care of the present?’

  ‘That’s what I used to tell him,’ Tolliver said.

  ‘You’re talking about Philip,’ I commented, picturing Tolliver’s handsome, blond-haired partner.

  ‘Yes, he was bad about unfinished business.’

  ‘It’s hard,’ Ada said, ‘losing someone who’s so much a part of your daily life. It’s not just that it’s someone you love; it’s like losing a limb you didn’t know you had. When Harry got sick, and when he died, there were so many things I missed that I hadn’t expected. Some of them make me feel pretty shabby, but they matter.’ She shot Tolliver a crooked smile. ‘He drove and I never learned how. He knew how to talk to my son-in-law and that I’ve never figured out. But the worst thing, and the thing I still miss, is at night. I miss him in the bedroom and I’m not talking sex.’

  ‘I couldn’t go near the bed for a year after Bradley died,’ I added, my heart pounding. ‘Of course, I think a lot of that was just . . .’ I could feel my throat close; the tears not far away.

  Ada explained: ‘Lillian woke up to find Bradley . . . dead.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I mean, I knew that when he died it had been sudden. How awful for you.’

  I let the feelings pass, as they did, leaving me with a pit in my stomach.

  ‘I miss Philip,’ he said simply. ‘No matter how busy I am, I can’t help but think about what happened to him. I can’t focus on anything else. Why would someone do that to him? How could anyone hate him so much?’

  ‘With Bradley, I can’t help but think that if I’d woken up, I’d have been able to save him, or get help.’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘I can’t sleep. I have to force myself to eat. Part of me would just like to pack it up and go away. It doesn’t matter where. But then who would run the business? We have forty-two employees; it’s not like I can just up and leave. It’s such a mess right now.’

  ‘It gets better,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ada agreed, taking Tolliver’s hand. ‘Over time, it eases. It’s just getting through today, forcing yourself to take care of business. You can’t run from these things, they catch up with you.’

  ‘I’m not so certain about that,’ he said. ‘I think the last few months of Philip’s life were pretty miserable because of that.’

  ‘Dear,’ said Ada, ‘can I ask what you mean by that?’

  ‘You’re the second person who’s asked me that.’

  ‘Who was the first?’ I wondered.

  ‘That detective working on the murders.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I had my lawyer step in to hold her off.’

  ‘Was that a good idea?’ Ada whispered.

  ‘Probably not,’ he admitted. ‘I just wasn’t ready to go into certain things.’

  ‘And now?’ Ada gently prodded.

  ‘I could do it, but I don’t see how it would help. And there’s no way I can do it without becoming worked up. The thought of breaking down in front of Kevin Simpson and that woman doesn’t really motivate me.’

  Ada squeezed his hand. ‘This is none of my business, but it might help to tell someone. To get through the worst of it, like a rehearsal before meeting with the detective, I’d be happy to listen . . . and I know how to keep a secret.’

  ‘My lawyer would have a cow.’

  I chuckled. ‘Yes, but that’s lawyers. I agree with Ada, if you want someone to talk to . . .’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ he said, ‘but I’m not so certain it’s that big a thing. For the last three months of Philip’s life he was depressed. And it all stemmed from those damn boxes.’

  ‘Boxes?’ Ada prompted.

  ‘From his sister.’

  Suddenly, I accessed a chunk of information that Ada wouldn’t know; small-town stuff. It had been years since I’d thought about Wendy Conroy, Philip’s younger sister, and a patient of my husband’s. For good, bad or indifferent, Bradley would occasionally talk about patients and Wendy was one who he had spent sleepless nights worrying about. ‘She died a long time ago,’ I said, feeding Ada some basic facts.

  ‘Ten years ago,’ Tolliver went on, staring straight ahead. ‘She killed herself.’

  ‘How terrible,’ Ada said.

  ‘It was. It tore Philip apart. He loved his sister and was probably the only one who could talk to her at that point.’

  ‘You lost me,’ Ada said. ‘There was something wrong with her?’

  ‘Wendy had a lot of problems. For the last few years of her life she lived in a mental hospital. We had tried having her come live with us, but every so often something would set her off and she’d go missing. Once, I was showing an armoire to customers and when I opened the door she was inside, curled up in a ball and sucking her thumb. That stuff didn’t bother us so much, but when she’d go wandering and be missing for days, Philip would go crazy. Either we’d find her by some stream or she’d come back covered with dirt and bruises. We couldn’t take care of her. We’d find her medicine hidden all over the shop and the house. She’d either refuse to take it or else spit it out when Philip wasn’t looking. We had to send her back. It was a horrible scene. She screamed at Philip and me and called us “Nazis”.’

  ‘It must have been awful,’ I said. ‘I remember Wendy; she was a beautiful girl.’

  ‘She was. I often wondered if that didn’t make her problems worse. We’d go for meetings at the mental hospital and the psychiatrists and the psychologists were always asking Philip about childhood trauma. Had she been abused? Molested? That kind of stuff.’

  ‘What about her parents?’ Ada asked. ‘It sounds like you and Philip pretty much took care of her.’

  ‘That’s a whole other story. Philip’s parents decided that having one child who was gay and another who was crazy were reasons enough to get out of town. It’s tragic if you think about it; both of their children are dead and they’re still alive living in Boca.’

  I held my tongue, as I had known the Conroys. Ellen
Conroy would bring Wendy in to see Bradley on almost a weekly basis. It wasn’t long before Bradley understood that the girl’s problem was psychiatric and he had referred her to a specialist. But Ellen Conroy could not accept that assessment and kept bringing Wendy back, hoping that there was something else that Bradley could find that might account for the girl’s mood swings and strange behaviors. Wendy was fourteen or fifteen when the problems had begun. I remembered her vividly, the beautiful girl with straight blonde hair, dark lashes and blue-green eyes, like her brother’s.

  ‘I must be missing something,’ Ada said. ‘Didn’t you say that Wendy died ten years ago?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then why was Philip more depressed about it now? It seems like after all those years, things might have gotten better.’

  ‘They had. But it’s just what you said, that if you put something away and don’t think about it; it’s just putting off the inevitable.’

  She looked at him. ‘Philip put something away?’

  ‘Literally. Wendy was a writer. She was always scribbling and drawing in journals. We had assumed it was part of her therapy, but after time, it was the only thing that would ground her. If she started to go off, or would wake up screaming, Philip would have her write in her notebook. Occasionally, she’d show us a poem; she even published a few. Once, right before we had to send her back to the hospital, I caught a look at a couple pages of her journal. The sheets were covered with tiny letters, and over and over she had written the same thing.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It was gibberish, completely insane. She hadn’t slept or eaten for days and was having religious fantasies, like she was a saint. I think the pages were some sort of incantation. Anyway, about a month after Wendy’s suicide, we got four boxes delivered from the hospital. Three of them were filled with journals, dozens of them. At the time, I wanted Philip to throw them out; he couldn’t. So we stuck them in one of the upstairs rooms and that was that.’

  ‘Did he read them?’ Ada asked

  ‘Not then. But a few months back we decided to work on the upstairs of the main house, and he found the boxes. Suddenly, going through them became some sort of mission. At first, I thought it was healthy, finally give him a chance to put Wendy’s ghost to rest. But the more he read, the worse it got. He became obsessed. He’d sit up at night, reading page after page of that nonsense. It changed him.’

  While we’d been talking, careful to keep our voices low, Evie’s condo had been stripped bare.

  ‘Mr Jacobs.’ The foreman came over to us. ‘Do you want these chairs to go?’

  ‘Everything,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Ada, Lil, thanks.’ And he walked back to where the Hassam painting had been tidily crated into a custom plywood box. He examined the joinery and gently rocked it from side to side. ‘Good, this goes in my car.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  How did this happen? I wondered as I approached the two cardboard cartons that had been delivered to my doorstep. What was Ada thinking?

  ‘I can’t do it, Lil,’ Tolliver had said over the phone after we’d finished Evie’s cleanout. Ada and I had been having tea in my kitchen, reminiscing about our friend, and, of course, speculating about the murders. Not to leave her out, I’d put the phone on speaker. ‘I can’t look at them. I know I have to do something with them,’ he’d explained. ‘But if I gave them to the police without knowing what was in them, it might just be a horrible waste of their time. What am I supposed to tell them? My husband read these and got depressed, and maybe that has something to do with why he was murdered. They’ll think I’m nuts. They already think I did it. I keep waiting for them to come and lock me up.’ He’d sighed. ‘I feel trapped. I can’t just throw them out. Someone has to go through them.’ Before he asked, I could feel it coming. ‘Would you do it for me?’

  And before I could stop her, Ada had agreed. Of course, now she was conveniently out of the house with Aaron on some shopping expedition just as the boxes arrived and I was getting out of the shower. In the spirit of fairness, I threw on a wrap-around dress, and, still in slippers, let myself into her condo and had the delivery guy from Tolliver’s shop leave one of the three cartons in her foyer.

  The boxes were heavy and crisscrossed with clear packing tape and silver duct tape that had been used and peeled back. I got a serrated knife from the kitchen and sawed through the layers.

  ‘Oh my.’ So many spiral-bound notebooks, like the ones I’d buy for my daughters each year before the start of school; different sizes and colors, the work of a lifetime. Where to start? It was overwhelming. And not that I believed in ghosts, but there was something eerie about this stack of writings from a girl who had gone insane and committed suicide. The scent of death lingered. I know it was just my imagination, but sitting there, I had a foreboding, that maybe I should have called Mattie or Hank and had them taken away. ‘You promised,’ I reminded myself. More accurately, Ada had promised. Still . . .

  I pulled out two of the books and settled back in my blue-and-white upholstered wing chair. I switched on the lamp and flipped open a red notebook. On the inside cover, she had written her name and what I took to be a room number. The first entry was dated June 15, 1998.

  Fresh book, fresh life. Nice . . . sweet. I should be nice and sweet. The road to freedom is nice and sweet. Wendy, a nice and sweet name, pity the girl can’t follow. Like follow the leader. Maybe if I let my name lead, and I followed all would be well. In a world without pills, in a world without doctors. Come for your medicine, nice, sweet girl. Take your pills in a world without thrills. Come Wendy Wendy Wendy. Come Wendy Wendy Wendy.

  Roar my faithful nurse. ‘Med time. Med time.’ Meet her at the station, it’s in my contract. Show more enthusiasm, swallow pills, become sweet and nice, nice and sweet, like good and plenty, I’d be good to eat.

  Well, fresh book, new book, sweet book. I must take my meds. Good meds sweet meds, sugar-coated pills, yummy yummy yummy. Screaming in my tummy.

  I calculated her age in 1998, somewhere in her mid twenties. Within two years she would be dead. I wondered if there was significance to this being on the top. Was this one that Philip had read? I turned the pages.

  June 30, 1998

  They gave me privileges in my prison without crime. When can I leave, Dr Kluft, Dr Kluft? He smiles; I’m doing better, better every day. Now that I take my pills, I have privileges and wander grounds, beneath watchful eyes. I feel their eyes, heavy through my back as I sit and write. Eyes that search me out and strip me naked. I face the shallow pond, with its fake waterfall that fools the frogs. How deep is the pond, enough for Ophelia to float away? I think not. My privileges do not extend that far. The eyes would pull me back and tie me down. Strap me to the bed. Tie me down, tie me down.

  My tongue like dust. It’s the pills. It’s the pills. Haven’t shit in four days. It’s the pills. It’s the pills. I squint to see the frogs. It’s the pills. It’s the pills. But without them, they won’t let me feel the grass or see the frogs, or, dare I hope, leave.

  Come Philip, sweet brother. I will be good this time. I will be good. I promise. I will sit in my room, that overlooks the Nillewaug. I will not move. I will not worry you or Tolliver. I will do as I am told, I will take my pills and never shit again. I will squint at the frogs and do as I am told. I will not be sweet Ophelia Plath floating in the pond; it’s probably too shallow anyway.

  I wondered if anyone had read these while she was alive. Had they been part of some therapy? Had she read them to her doctor? In the end, she did drown, perhaps at the very pond she’d sat beside.

  I turned pages, focusing on the small careful writing that even in its symmetry betrayed a fine drug-induced tremor, like someone with Parkinson’s. She wrote daily, many of the entries an accounting of the groups and the therapies that she had attended. Some like poems and many spoke of death; her death. Occasionally, she dropped little hints of what had happened in her family, but vague and off-center.r />
  July 22, 1998

  I find a tree and I sit down.

  I follow ants as they merry round.

  I speak to the man with gray threaded beard

  I call to brother, bent and weird.

  I call to mother with tears in her voice

  I touch father who left no choice.

  I sit with ants as they merry round

  I dream of Freedom dug deep in the ground.

  I wonder if dirt will tickle my toes, stick in my hair?

  Clog my nose?

  Will it take the pills that swirl in my blood?

  Will it fly me to heaven when the doctor is done?

  The phone rang, and I was startled. I checked the caller ID, and picked up.

  ‘Ada?’

  ‘Lil? I’ve found something. At least I think I have.’ Her voice was tentative.

  ‘You’re looking at the journals?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you come home.’

  ‘We got back an hour ago. The poor girl.’

  ‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘I just started. What did you find?’

  ‘Come over, or better yet, why don’t I bring it there.’