Gone But Knot Forgotten

by Mary Marks

  Carl pulled on the rope, the hatch opened, and the ladder glided downward. He switched on his flashlight. “I’ll go up first.”

  The wooden rungs squeaked and gave a little under his heavy brown work boots as he slowly climbed into the dark space above. I caught the occasional beam of his flashlight sweeping around. Then a switch clicked on above us and light spilled out of the opening. “You can come up now.”

  My adrenaline surged as I ascended the ladder. Would we finally find the Declaration Quilt up there? Did Harriet have to climb a ladder every time she wanted a piece of good jewelry? Why not just install an easily reachable wall safe? On the other hand, Delia claimed Harriet never wore bling, so maybe the inconvenience of retrieving her jewelry from the attic became an issue only on rare occasions.

  My head cleared the opening and I looked around, my eyes even with the floor. Plywood covered the joists to make a crude deck. Above me, thick blankets of pink insulation covered the walls and sharply slanted ceiling. I climbed the rest of the way into the attic. Rain tapped against four dormer windows projecting from narrow alcoves on the front wall of the house.

  In the middle of the large, unfinished space a chimney column rose two floors from the living room and penetrated the roof. Carl stood next to the only other objects in the room—two HVAC systems sitting twenty feet away. I walked toward the units. Pipes, wires, and ducting snaked out in several directions. Stacks of unused filters lay nearby.

  Carl trained his flashlight on the structures and bent forward to examine them. “There are two separate environmental systems up here. One is large capacity. The other’s considerably smaller.”

  Lucy scrambled up behind me and walked the perimeter of the space, thrusting her neck forward and adjusting the lenses on her night-vision goggles. There were no false walls to obscure the framing of the outer walls. After two minutes she gave up. “I don’t get it. Where is everything?”

  I walked toward Carl and sighed. “Obviously not here. This isn’t a secret room. It’s just a plain old attic housing plain old heating and air.”

  Lucy crossed her arms. “Well, that just takes the cake. If Harriet’s secret room isn’t in the attic, where can it be?”

  “Maybe there is no secret room,” said Carl.

  A metal tag affixed to the smaller unit caught my eye. “Oh, there’s a secret room, all right. Here’s a label from Safe-T-Construction. The ducting leads downward to the lower part of the house. If only we could trace the lines attached to this unit, we’d find the room.”

  Lucy followed the aluminum tube, which led from the small HVAC to the studs in the back wall and disappeared downward through the insulation. “The room’s gotta be in the part of the house facing the backyard.”

  Carl scratched the back of his head. “I’ve spent a lot of time on the first floor, and I’m pretty familiar with the spaces. I don’t see where a room could be concealed.”

  I moved toward the ladder. “We should measure it, anyway. Don’t forget the tape.”

  We started in the library. Lucy and Carl stretched the tape and called out the dimensions while I drew a map of the first floor. We ended up in the family room, where Carl worked the numbers several times on the calculator app of his iPhone. “I don’t see any discrepancies. Every space seems to be accounted for.”

  As we headed back toward the library, I said, “We’ve got to be missing something.” When we reached the foyer, I stopped. “The stairs! What about the space underneath the stairs?”

  Carl looked at my drawing. “According to this, the stairway is four feet wide by twenty feet long. The area underneath is much smaller if you allow for the angle of the stairs and the framing of the walls. You probably won’t find a room big enough to hold all those missing things. Especially not one with environmental controls.”

  I ran my fingers over the dark paneling on the wall on the stairwell. “It’s the only place left to look.”

  The three of us poked and prodded and banged and pushed every inch of the foyer walls. We even tried turning the balusters on the staircase. Nothing moved. The wall remained as solid as a week-old bagel.

  I folded up my drawing and shoved it in my pocket. “I’m stumped. There’s nothing more we can do here today. We’re just going to have to wait for those blueprints. We might as well go home.” I wanted to be in my nice warm house, jump into my flannel jammies, and get cozy.

  Thirty minutes later I dropped Lucy off at her house. Then I ran into Trader Joe’s for some yogurt and a can of soup for dinner. Back home I changed clothes and sat on my sofa. Bumper jumped up on the blue and white quilt covering my lap and demanded to be scratched. Arthur rested his chin on my knee and gazed up at me. I looked into his brown eyes, so patient and intelligent, and wondered what humans ever did to deserve such devotion.

  I relaxed into the cushions, closed my eyes, and practiced my yoga breathing. All the disruption and stress from disposing of Harriet’s estate wouldn’t last forever. A time would come when I could return to the comfortable rhythm of my life without all the extra worry. Simple and predictable. Breathe in, breathe out. No complications. No marriage.

  I found the phone number of the estate agent Kessler recommended on a paper in my purse. I arranged to meet Susan Daniels at Harriet’s house in the morning to discuss the sale of her property. Then I called my daughter. I missed my little girl and wanted to hear more about her new romance with the MIT professor. Hopefully some bright Jewish boy from a nice family. Maybe even another Mark Zuckerberg. Uncle Isaac would be pleased.

  “Things are going great, Mom. He’s brilliant and funny. We like a lot of the same things and we have the same sense of humor. Plus, he’s incredibly hot. All his female students and half the female faculty are in love with him.”

  Alarms went off in my head. Would this gorgeous man, desired by so many women, remain faithful to my Quincy? “With so many admirers, why do you think he chose you?”

  She laughed. “Mom, he says he loves everything about me. But I think my red hair and freckles first attracted him. Red curly hair is a rare sight in his home country.”

  Home country? My stomach dropped.

  People only say “home country” if it’s an exotic location like Bhutan or Abu Dhabi—places where Jews aren’t usually found. If they got married, where would they end up living? Would the children be raised Jewish? My heart sank as I imagined Quincy being swept away to a foreign land with no redheads, no freckles, and no bar mitzvahs. I swallowed my panic. “Where’s he from? What’s his name?”

  “Naveen Sharma. He came from Mumbai to study theoretical physics at MIT. He never left. Now he’s a US citizen and a full professor at twenty-nine. Pretty impressive, wouldn’t you say?” India produced some of the most brilliant technological and mathematical minds of the modern age. One of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems came from India.

  “Very impressive, honey.” I swallowed. “Just how serious are you two?”

  Quincy cleared her throat and remained silent just long enough for me to start hyperventilating. “We’ve decided to move in together.”

  Oh no!

  “Naveen’s parents are flying to Boston in six weeks to meet all of us—you and Dad and Uncle Isaac, if he can make the trip.”

  Quincy might marry a non-Jew. How was I going to break the news to Uncle Isaac? Marriage was hard enough. Successful cross-cultural marriages were even more challenging. Did Naveen Sharma’s parents have the same misgivings I did? Was that why they weren’t wasting any time checking out my daughter and her family?

  I tried to keep my voice casual. “It sounds like you’re contemplating more than just moving in together. Introducing the parents usually means everyone’s going to be planning a wedding.” I held my breath, waiting for her to answer.

  “Don’t be afraid, Mom. You’ll love Naveen when you meet him.”

  I stared out the window at the rain, which now beat a hard staccato against my living-room window. I thought about the tablecloth my bubbie cr
ocheted for Passover as a young bride and how pleased she’d be if one day Quincy covered her table with it for a family Seder. “Is he religious?”

  “No, but he’s very spiritual. I really like that about him.”

  Okay, so maybe he’ll convert. “Of course I’ll come to Boston to meet his parents. I just can’t guarantee how Uncle Isaac will react. . . .”

  “I know, Mom. So, I’m counting on you to smooth the way before his parents arrive.”

  Great. Quincy just handed me one more thing to fix. Could my life get any more complicated?

  CHAPTER 24

  I loaded the dog in the car Sunday morning and stopped for two lattes and a couple of fresh donuts on my way to Brentwood. The weather had cleared and Carl had parked his Harley in Harriet’s driveway. He met us at the door and ruffled Arthur’s fur. As I handed Carl one of the cups of coffee, the donut bag fell out of my hand and landed on the floor. A round glazed buttermilk rolled across the foyer and stopped next to the stairway. Arthur ran over and scarfed it down before I had a chance to stop him.

  Carl snorted. “Once a cop, always a cop.”

  We sat in the library. I looked at the remaining donut wistfully, broke it in half, and virtuously handed a piece to Carl.

  Motes of dust danced in a shaft of sunlight warming the top of the yellow oak table. A book sat facedown next to Carl’s computer, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. By the fraying on the paperback cover, this book must have been a favorite of his. I pointed to the well-worn volume. “I’ve never read that.”

  “Every time I read this, I pick up something new.” He scooted his chair closer to the table and opened the book to a dog-eared page. “Like this morning, I came across this passage:

  “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

  “And that means . . . ?”

  “Sometimes we’re so sure we know what we’re looking for, we become blind to new possibilities—and we miss out.”

  Carl had a point. I needed to be open to the unexpected to prove Harriet didn’t kill her husband. Who else besides the people I’d already considered might have a motive for Nathan’s murder? Since Abernathy helped Harriet get her husband declared legally dead, he probably knew a lot about their marriage.

  I shifted in my seat and looked at the handsome young man sitting next to me. Carl Lindgren was a complex guy. He loved motorcycles and fast cars, yet he treated with tenderness Birdie, an arthritic woman in her seventies whom he’d adopted as his grandmother. He owned a successful software business, yet he volunteered to be a mere security guard to help me out. Because of his work, he probably had top security clearance with the government, yet he carried a gun and hung out with bikers.

  Carl, a technological genius, earned a degree from Caltech, one of the top two science universities in the country. The other was MIT, where Quincy’s boyfriend taught. Would Carl know of him?

  “What do you know about theoretical physics?”

  “What part? Quantum? Cosmology? String? Particles?”

  “Never mind. I have no idea what you just said. Have you heard of a professor at MIT by the name of Naveen Sharma?”

  “Yeah, Dr. Sharma’s only the world’s smartest string theorist. He made his chops early. PhD by twenty-two. I heard rumors he was up for a Nobel last year. Why do you ask?”

  Okay, so at least I could tell Uncle Isaac they’d have really smart children. “He’s a friend of my daughter, Quincy.”

  Carl whistled. “Awesome. I’d like to meet him sometime.”

  Harriet’s doorbell rang at precisely ten.

  Carl looked out the window. “You expecting someone?”

  “An estate manager. She’s going to give me an estimate on selling everything in the house.”

  “You mean like a garage sale?”

  I laughed. “Yes. A very fancy one. I’ll get the door.” Carl followed me to the foyer.

  Arthur snuffled around the floor, near the stairway. “Forget it, pal. Your owner would be upset if he knew I allowed you to eat a whole donut this morning.”

  I opened the front door to a very pretty young woman.

  Susan Daniels parted her perfectly straight blond hair on the side, letting it hang over one eye. She offered me a dazzling smile and a slender hand with a French manicure. “I’m happy to meet you, Mrs. Rose.”

  I opened the door wider. “You came highly recommended by Julian Kessler. Please come in.”

  She stepped into the foyer on long, elegant legs and black stiletto heels. Carl cleared his throat behind me. I turned to look at him, and he gestured with his head toward the stunning young woman.

  “Susan Daniels, this is Carl Lindgren. He’s part of a private security team guarding this house.”

  “Hi.” She smiled, then began to scan the house with an expert’s gaze.

  Carl darted his eyes back and forth, sending me a clear message. I’d screwed up.

  “Of course Carl’s just doing me a huge favor.” I scrambled for words. “In real life he runs a successful company developing software for the SEC.”

  Carl nodded encouragement in the background.

  “If in the coming days you see a yellow Corvette parked in front, you’ll know Carl’s here.”

  He ran his fingers through his sandy hair and smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “Pleasure to meet you. Believe me.”

  Susan looked down and her cheeks colored.

  The dog still snuffled around the floor as if someone had smeared a pot roast there.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Arthur.” I clucked my tongue. “Give up. There are no more donuts.” I turned to the others. “Let’s sit in the living room and you can explain the process to me.”

  Susan sat on the green leather sofa and crossed her legs. Her slender skirt rode up her thigh. Carl switched to mouth breathing.

  “Well, technically”—she folded her hands in her lap—“an estate manager is like a chief of staff or head butler. I’m an Estate Liquidation Specialist. My company oversees the appraisal and sale of personal property, typically after the death of an individual.”

  Carl fixed his eyes on hers and flashed an engaging smile. “Fascinating.”

  At his point he’d find dust fascinating if she said she swept porches for a living. Susan smiled back.

  I handed her a copy of the insurance rider. “Mrs. Oliver owned some very valuable items. They’ve already been appraised.”

  “Even if you have appraisals, we’ll want to update them as these items may have increased in value.” She scanned the list. “Why are some of them circled?”

  Carl tented his fingers. “They were stolen.”

  Susan looked up sharply. “What did you say the name of this family was?”

  “Oliver,” he said.

  Her forehead furrowed in concern. “Is this the house where they discovered the body buried in the backyard last week?”

  “Yes.” I let out my breath. “Does that make a difference?”

  “It will probably make a big difference. Didn’t they say the wife was also murdered recently? Is this her estate? I mean, are we safe to even be here?” Her eyes widened as she looked from Carl to me.

  Carl puffed his chest out a little. “Don’t worry. As long as I’m here, you’ll be safe.”

  Oh, for pity’s sake. “The circled items wouldn’t be for sale, anyway. With the exception of a few specific objects, I’m anxious to liquidate everything else remaining in this house.”

  Susan let out her breath. “Okay. I’d like to do a walkthrough and take pictures and notes as we go.” She took an iPhone out of her bag. “When we’re through, I’ll give you a rough estimate.”

  Carl insisted on accompanying us, lagging just behind.

  After an hour, we ended up back in the living room.

  Susan typed something on her iPhone. “The household furnishings can be tagged and sold at an estate sale. We probably won’t gross more than a hu
ndred thousand. My company takes thirty-five percent.”

  Did I hear her correctly? “Thirty-five thousand seems a little steep. The proceeds from the estate are going toward building a wing at Children’s Hospital. Can’t you give me a better price?”

  Susan hesitated. “Thirty-five percent is the industry standard. We incur a lot of expense because of all the preparation, staffing, overhead, and insurance.” She looked at the ceiling and bit her lip. “I can reduce the fee to twenty-five percent since the money’s going to such a good cause.” She smiled. “This is my own business, so I can be flexible.”

  “I really appreciate it.” I liked her. Susan Daniels possessed a generous spirit to match her generous smile.

  Susan consulted the insurance rider. “The really valuable things listed here should go to our auction house. Competitive bidding results in the best price. According to the last appraisals, they should bring in a minimum of over two million dollars. I’ll give you the same break on the auction fee and only charge you fifteen percent, instead of our usual twenty.”

  “You’re very generous, Susan. How soon can we get started?”

  “I can bring a dozen packers back here tomorrow to start boxing everything. I estimate we’ll be here two days. Meanwhile, I’ll launch an advertising blitz. We’ll be ready for the sale by this weekend.”

  She put her iPhone in her purse. “You should be aware, however, that because of the recent notoriety connected to this house, two things are bound to happen. First, serious buyers might stay away because of the murder. Second, hundreds of lookie-loos will probably show up out of morbid curiosity but not to buy. So I think it’s best to relocate everything you want to sell to our warehouse showroom.”

  “Will the items still be insured once they’re removed from the house?”

  She waved a graceful hand. “Oh, yes, our insurance will cover everything, but I’ll need you to sign off on each individual box.”

  I tapped my lips with my finger. “Okay. Before we get started, I need to clear up one more thing with the attorney.”