“Yes ma’am?”
Cate exhaled. “Nothing. I’ll get the cookies.”
We followed her out to the street.
Cate opened the back door of her car and reached inside to pull a Foodtown bag across the seat toward us. She stood up, blue package in hand. “Would either of you like any water?”
Skwarecki said no and I added, “I’m good, thanks.”
Cate closed the door and handed over the Chips Ahoy.
Skwarecki dove in and Cate watched, brow furrowed.
“Cate,” said Skwarecki through a mouthful of cookie, “something’s bugging you.”
“I just can’t stop thinking about that poor little boy.”
Skwarecki swallowed. “Understandable.”
“The idea that whoever did this is going to get away with causing his death…?” said Cate, her voice trailing off.
Skwarecki took another bite.
I waited until she’d finished chewing. “It’s going to be the mother’s word against the boyfriend’s, isn’t it?”
“Is there any way to tell which of them did this?” asked Cate.
Skwarecki shook her head and folded the top of the bag carefully closed. “With what we have now? No.”
“If we’d found him sooner?” asked Cate.
“There might have been something pointing to one of them, with an autopsy. But even so, best we can hope for now is the pathologist estimating Teddy’s age at the time of a specific fracture, based on the way the bones healed. Maybe that rules out the boyfriend. Maybe not.”
“But there’s no way to tell who broke them in the first place,” I said.
“Madeline,” said Skwarecki, “we may not even be able to establish the cause of death.”
“His rib cage…” I said.
Skwarecki shook her head. “All we know is he didn’t live long enough for those bones to heal. But the ribs might have been broken postmortem.”
“Is there enough evidence to arrest someone?” asked Cate. “The mother, or the boyfriend, or both?”
“Getting there,” said Skwarecki. “I’m waiting on one more thing.”
There was a strange little Star Wars–sounding warble from her general vicinity.
“Beeper,” she said, moving her jacket aside to peer down at her hip. “I have to go back to the station for a bit.”
By the way Cate was gnawing on her bottom lip, we both wanted to grab Skwarecki by her beige-clad shoulders and start screaming “What? What ‘one more thing’?” while shaking her back and forth hard enough to make her eyes rattle.
“Skwarecki,” I said, “ spill.”
The detective gazed down at the sidewalk. “Look, I need to get my tail to the One-Oh-Three. How long’ll you guys be here?”
Cate checked her watch. “Two hours.”
“I told Mrs. Underhill I’d come over,” I said. “But could I hitch a ride with you out to Locust Valley, Cate?”
Cate nodded and Skwarecki wolf-whistled. “Locust Valley. Aren’t we fancy with the schmancy.”
“I need to see a barn about a car,” I said.
It didn’t seem like the appropriate moment to mention that the car was a Porsche, that I needed it to drive to Southampton for the weekend, or what had happened between me and its previous owner before I discovered that he’d willed it to me.
I mean, I felt like Skwarecki was only just starting to like me, and it was, indeed, a very long story.
Skwarecki got into her own car and took off.
“Would you like to come with me, to Mrs. Underhill’s?” I asked Cate.
“That poor woman, Madeline. I don’t know if I could bear it.”
“I’m sorry to ditch you. Will you be okay alone?”
“It’s fine, really,” she said. “I’ve already been here all morning. Please tell Mrs. Underhill how sorry I am, and I’ll see you in a couple of hours, all right?”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to go either.
22
Mrs. Underhill lived in the brick-faced left half of a two-family house on the kind of Archie Bunker block where each residence paired the neighbor’s incongruous architectural whims side by side: Tudor versus Spanish, Flintstones versus Jetsons.
The cars on her street were old but proud: stalwart American models in tired colors, avocado and copper-fleck and harvest gold. Not a Honda in sight, just Big Three sedans and wagons so seventies-huge they seemed more suited to ship channels than parkways.
I slipped between the chrome bumpers of a gold Lincoln and a black Cadillac, thinking they must have required the aid of tugboats to park.
Mrs. Underhill’s bricks were trapped in a loveless marriage with her neighbor’s lumpy swirls of mouthwash-green stucco, but their shared front lawn was trimmed crew-cut neat. At the squeak of the gate latch, both sets of parlor curtains twitched: synchronized vigilance.
I rang the left-hand bell and waited while Mrs. Underhill disengaged what sounded like half a dozen dead bolts. She opened the still-chained door to peer out at me.
“Well hello, young lady,” she said.
Her voice was warm and soft, but I could tell she’d been crying.
“Have I come at a bad time?”
“Not at all, dear,” she said. “Just give me a second to get this chain off.”
It was warm out, but she wore a thin cardigan over her housecoat, buttoned at the neck.
I heard a kettle’s whistle from down the hall behind her. “There’s my tea, ready. Would you like a cup?”
“That would be lovely,” I said, following her into the kitchen.
She padded slowly toward the stove and turned off the burner. Her feet were tiny, shod in little pink slippers with satin bows on them.
Her kitchen floor gleamed, and there wasn’t so much as a fingerprint on the old Wedgewood stove.
The room smelled of lemon Mr. Clean, the baking sheet of cookies set to cool atop a wire rack. Half the alphabet danced across the bottom of her icebox door: colorful plastic magnets scattered at toddler height.
How could a child have been harmed here? How could this place, this woman, have produced someone who’d do that, or even allow it?
She reached into a lower cabinet for a wicker-handled tray, placing it on the countertop. The effort made her breathe hard for a moment, hand pressed over her heart.
“Mrs. Underhill, are you all right?” I asked.
“It’s the emphysema. Terrible thing—don’t you ever mess with those cigarettes.”
“I used to, but I quit.”
“Do your best to stay quit, then,” she said. “You don’t want to get like this when you’re my age. Hard enough to be an old lady when you can breathe.”
She was so tiny, so thin.
“You look pretty good to me,” I said. “A glamorous thirty-nine.”
Mrs. Underhill smiled. “I like a bit of sweet talk. You may just get invited back here.”
“In that case,” I said, “now that I get a better look at you, you can’t possibly be a day over thirty- four.”
She smiled again, patting the tray. “I’ll fix everything up on this, then we can go sit down in the front room.”
I didn’t know how the hell to ask her whether she’d known about the abuse, but whatever Teddy had suffered, the damage couldn’t have been inflicted by those frail, palsied hands.
Would Skwarecki even want me to ask?
This wasn’t some podunk town, and NYPD territory didn’t strike me as any kind of place for amateurs.
While our tea steeped in its rose-adorned pot, she placed a doily on a matching plate before piling it high with warm cookies. “Do you take cream or sugar?”
I said, “No, thank you,” because her hands were already tired enough to make the teacups chatter against their saucers.
“Let me carry that for you, please,” I said. “You just lead the way.”
I followed her into the living room, placing the tray on her coffee table alongside a bowl brimming with cellophane-wrapped
hard candy.
Mrs. Underhill turned on the lamps at either end of her camelback sofa, their frilly-tutu shades perched atop ceramic ballerinas. She sat down slowly on the center cushion, knees creaking a bit.
I didn’t know how to restart the conversation, not wanting to mention what she must have been told by the police this morning.
There was a honey-colored upright piano in the corner with a book of hymns in its music rack and a row of framed photos across the top. I walked over to look at them, still at a loss for something to say.
I touched the first frame, gold-leaf with clusters of grapes at each corner. It held a wedding portrait: Mrs. Underhill in a froth of veil and a square-shouldered white satin dress, hair rolled Andrews Sisters–high above her forehead. She was smiling up at a slender man in uniform, her hand resting gracefully against his left breast pocket, just beneath a row of medal ribbons.
“That’s my Edward,” she said. “One week home from the war.”
“You look wonderful together—so happy.”
“We were happy, for all the years we had. I lost him very young.”
“I’m so sorry.”
The next two portraits were of young women in mortarboards and graduation robes, one hairdo sixties Jackie-Camelot, the next eighties Jheri curl.
Smiling. Full of promise.
“My daughter and granddaughter—Alicia and Angela.”
“Angela is Teddy’s mother?” I wasn’t even sure what tense to use.
“She is. When my Alicia passed, Angela came to live with me.”
The final frame held another color portrait, a chubby little boy grinning as he sat on Santa’s lap.
Teddy, named for Edward.
“Come sit down now,” she said, “before your tea gets cold.”
I perched on the edge of a velvet side chair and reached for my cup.
Mrs. Underhill sat demurely, thin legs crossed at the ankles.
I missed my mother suddenly, knowing she would have brightened the room with pleasing chatter.
Mrs. Underhill lifted her own tea, cup trembling. She took one dainty sip and brought it to rest in her lap again.
I cleared my throat. “Your house is lovely. Have you lived here a long time?”
“Forty years,” she said.
“Did you get to pick out the brick, on the outside?”
“The family before us did. I’ve always liked it, though.”
“I have to admit I like it better than your neighbor’s choice.”
“That green! Can you imagine?”
“Minty fresh,” I said, and she smiled at me.
“That was Gladys, all over—she liked things lively. Her two boys live there now.”
“It must be nice, knowing your neighbors.”
“Sometimes they play their music a mite loud,” she said, “but they keep the yard so neat, and always shovel the walk in winter. They’re fine young men.”
“Did you grow up in Queens?”
“Born and raised. My family has been in New York for a long time.”
“Mine too,” I said.
“Which part of the state?”
“Here on Long Island, a little further out.”
“The way you speak, I wouldn’t have picked you for Queens.”
“I grew up in California, mostly,” I said, “but I was born here. My mother’s family settled in Oyster Bay. My father’s started out in Brooklyn, I think.”
“Edward’s people were from Brooklyn. Well, of course we were cousins, somehow. My grandmother’s maiden name was Underhill, too.”
I looked down into my teacup. “It’s an old name, on Long Island.”
“You’re interested in local history?” she asked.
“My sister and I used to spend part of the summer back here every year. My grandfather loved talking about that kind of thing.”
“So he shared his knowledge with you. That must have been
wonderful.”
Actually, I’d written him off as a snob with a death fetish, fonder of expired relatives than those above ground. But he’d planted a morbid note in me, all the same, one that ramped up to full Bach-gothic fugue when during high school and college my history teachers started outlining our ancestors’ specific exploits.
“Is that what brought you to the cemetery?” asked Mrs. Underhill. “An interest in genealogy?”
I nodded, not wanting to burden her with my guilt over familial Indian massacres, slave-holding, and the possibility that she and I were cousins.
In pondering that, I’d let the conversation coast to a speechless halt again.
“Please, have a cookie,” she said.
I glanced at Teddy’s picture and couldn’t imagine eating anything, but it would’ve been rude to refuse so I picked the smallest one.
“You’re very kind to have invited me here,” I said. “This can’t be an easy time.”
I took a bite of cookie. It was delicious—brown sugar and butter crumbling on my tongue.
Mrs. Underhill looked down at her tea. “The police called me this morning. With the news.”
“Yes ma’am.” The cookie broke in my hand. “Detective Skwarecki told me. I’m so very sorry.”
“It’s better to know. Hard as it is, it’s better I don’t have to wonder anymore.”
I examined my shards of cookie, wishing I could produce words of comfort.
“You’re married, dear?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Any children of your own?”
“Not yet.”
“It changes you, having a child,” she said. “When I married Edward, it was as though he and I shared the same heart. But when you have a child…? A little piece of your heart—the most important part—ventures out into the world.”
“That sounds scary,” I said.
“Yes, but at the same time wonderful.”
Mrs. Underhill’s assertion was belied by her lingering glance down the piano’s row of photos.
“About what happened,” I said. “Mrs. Underhill, I wanted to ask…”
But I couldn’t finish the question. Those picture frames contained three pieces of heart she’d never get back: her husband, her daughter, and Teddy. Skwarecki was even now drawing a bead on the fourth piece, the last: Teddy’s mother, the only living member of Mrs. Underhill’s family.
She looked from the photographs to me. “Yes, dear?”
“I’m sorry.”
I slipped the bits of cookie into my pocket. I didn’t want to offend my hostess, but there was no way I could have swallowed anything else.
I looked into her haunted eyes and then away, afraid I might start crying.
“Miss Dare,” she said, “Madeline…”
“Yes ma’am?”
She raised one quivering hand to her throat. “There’s something I want to ask you. A favor.”
“Please. Anything.”
“I hoped you might tell me anything you can remember about finding Teddy. Anything at all.”
I was quiet, not sure what exactly she wanted to know.
“If it’s too much for you, talking about it…” she said.
“No ma’am. It’s just that I don’t know if I can tell you anything that would be helpful.”
“I don’t mean about the investigation. I just mean how he was, when you found him. I’ve been lying awake so many nights now, worried about him being lost and alone. Scared. Hurt.”
She was sitting up so straight, tears gathering against her lower lashes.
I understood, then, what she wanted.
“He was tucked inside a little thicket,” I said, “resting on a bed of soft leaves, right next to another child’s gravestone.”
She closed her eyes and brought a fist up to her mouth, shoulders hunched forward.
“There was an angel carved into that stone,” I said. “A little cherub with the sweetest face.”
I slipped down out of my chair and moved across the floor toward her, on my knees. “Teddy w
as at peace, Mrs. Underhill. I know he was.”
She lifted her head, tears sliding down her cheeks.
“Thank you,” she said.
I sat down at her feet and gave her a napkin from the tea tray before taking her hand lightly in mine.
We stayed like that for a long time. Everything quiet but for the rasp of her breathing, the echoing tick of her front-hall clock.
“You had a question,” she said at last. “What was it?”
“It wouldn’t be right of me to ask you, not today.”
“Today’s grief will last as long as I do, undiminished. I won’t take it as any unkindness if you speak your mind.”
She wrapped my hand in both of hers.
I dropped my eyes, still trying to find the words.
This woman brought you here. She came to Prospect and found you because she wants this conversation to happen. She wants you to ask what she knew, so she can finally tell someone.
“Mrs. Underhill,” I said, “I want to ask about Teddy.”
Her hands tightened around mine.
“You had to know he was being abused.”
“I knew,” she said.
“Did you try to stop it?”
“Yes,” she said, tears coursing down her tiny face. “I tried so hard.”
She closed her eyes and took in a sharp, shallow breath, all the slender volume her lungs could bear. When she exhaled this wisp of air, her grief shaped it into a threnody of devastation. It was the most pitiable, pain-stricken sound I’d ever heard, and one I hope never to hear again.
“He was just a baby, and he suffered so,” she said.
I wrapped my arms around her fragile torso, feeling her go slack against my chest as she wept.
“God forgive me,” she whispered. “I didn’t try hard enough.”
I stroked her hair, pressing her head gently down onto my shoulder.
Eyes closed, I thought of Pagan, and Mom, and the time I’d cradled a drowned pheasant chick in my hands, warming its down while it died.
* * *
I was standing halfway down Mrs. Underhill’s front three steps, the tin of cookies she’d packed for me tucked under my left arm, my right hand still cradled gently in both of hers.
“I hope you’ll come back,” she said, giving me a peck on the cheek, our height made even by the step between us.
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