‘Good luck!’ she said as I headed toward the door. ‘I hope you find her.’
I smiled. ‘If she’s not at home, I’ll just leave a note. Thank you both, so much.’
As I left the post office, Penny called after me, ‘I hope your car has a good suspension system!’
I found Ruth still in the grocery, paying the cashier for two Eskimo Pies.
‘I’ve found her!’ I whispered in her ear.
‘Oh my God! You are a witch!’
Because the day was still sunny, we decided to eat our ice cream on the front porch while I brought Ruth up to speed on what I’d learned. Eager to get underway, I wolfed down my ice cream so fast I got an excruciating case of sinus freeze. While squeezing the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, I tossed the wrapper in the trash. I practically dragged Ruth, who was still licking ice cream off her fingers, from the porch by the intricate gold hoop dangling from her ear.
‘Look for a dirt road between two fields,’ I instructed my sister ten minutes later as we inched along Deep Point Road following the directions Penny had given me. ‘It’ll be on the left.’
After a short distance, Ruth’s arm shot out across the dashboard. ‘There!’ she said, pointing.
I slowed to a crawl. Two ruts led off the road to our left. After approximately five hundred yards, they disappeared into the trees.
‘Does that count as a road?’ Ruth wondered.
I wasn’t sure, so we drove a bit further. At Deep Water Road, I groaned, executed a three-point turn and headed back in the direction we’d just come, pulling to a stop at the rutted road we’d spotted earlier. ‘I guess that’s it.’
We turned right and bumped along for about half a mile, undergrowth brushing our undercarriage, the trees closing in, dark and dense, all around us. Eventually, the road opened into a clearing.
Perched on a low bank above the creek was an English country cottage built of stone, so English, in fact, that I suspected it had been standing there since 1750, built by one of our founding fathers. Two pairs of windows flanked a central door, all facing away from the water, which was another clue that the cottage hadn’t been built in the twenty-first century, where water views sold at a premium. The road ended at a covered carport, but there was no car in the drive. ‘I guess she’s not home,’ Ruth said. She looked as crestfallen as I felt. ‘Do you suppose we should come back later?’
‘Come on, Ruth,’ I hissed. ‘Moment of truth.’
As we approached the cottage, we could hear a conversation going on inside. ‘She is home,’ I said. ‘Oh, ye of little faith.’
‘Do you think Lilith has company?’ Ruth wondered as we climbed the brick steps that led up to the front door. ‘If so, where are the cars? Are we to assume that everybody walked? Not very likely.’
My sister and I paused on the narrow porch, listening, straining our ears. Men’s voices in heated discussion.
I leaned to one side and peeked through one of the windows, but the curtains were drawn and no light shone through from the room inside. ‘I think she has the TV on,’ I said after a moment, feeling foolish. I tapped Ruth on the arm. ‘Knock, silly.’
There was no answer.
‘Maybe she can’t hear you over the blare of the television.’
Ruth knocked again, harder this time, and as we stood on the doorstep gaping, the front door swung slowly open. ‘Ooops,’ she said.
I pushed against the door with the flat of my hand, but it wouldn’t open more than a few inches. ‘Something’s blocking it from the inside,’ I said, beginning to get worried.
‘Let’s try around back,’ Ruth suggested, and headed off at a trot.
When I caught up with my sister, she was waiting for me by the back door. It stood wide open.
‘She could be in trouble,’ I reasoned. ‘We should probably go in. Agreed?’
When Ruth nodded, I stepped inside.
Lilith’s back door opened on to a narrow passageway which was piled nearly to the ceiling on both sides with cardboard boxes. Fearing an avalanche, we picked our way carefully through the tunnel, expecting it to lead to the kitchen.
It did.
One look at what lay ahead made me stop so suddenly that Ruth crashed into me from behind. ‘Oh my God!’ I said. ‘How can anyone cook in this place?’
Like the hallway we’d just passed through, the kitchen was littered with boxes, some stacked, others leaning haphazardly against one another, their contents spilled, mingling with the contents of the box below. By the light of a single bulb in an overhead fixture designed for six, we could see that every surface – the kitchen counters, the stovetop – was littered with stuff with a capital ‘S.’ A mountain of newspapers, magazines and junk mail in the corner could have hidden a kitchen table, but it would have taken a forklift to tell.
I picked a pile of mail off the top of – what? – a toaster oven? – relieved to see that it was addressed to Lilith Chaloux. In 2006. We were definitely in the right house, I thought with relief, but where was Lilith?
I stepped carefully around a collection of Fiestaware mixing bowls – brand new – nested on the floor. I opened the oven. Inside I found hundreds of frozen food cartons – Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, Amy’s Kitchen, Linda McCartney – washed, folded flat and stacked.
Ruth peered over my shoulder. ‘What the hell is she saving those for?’
‘I’m afraid Lilith’s a hoarder, like those people on reality TV.’ I closed the oven door, wiped my hands on my jeans. ‘How can people live like this?’
‘Oh my God,’ Ruth said, indicating some Styrofoam containers stacked six high that were filled with – she peeked into the one on top – unopened bags of Oreo cookies. Ruth held up a grocery store receipt. ‘Can you believe it? These cookies were purchased on special in 1992.’ She squinted at the receipt. ‘Thirty packages of them.’
Lilith had kept a path clear between the refrigerator and the microwave, and from the microwave to the sink. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to move around the room.
I opened the refrigerator. Aside from a carton of eggs and a half gallon of milk two weeks past its sell-by date, all it contained were a dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot Brut and ten 250g cans of Royal Beluga caviar.
That was a stumper.
I must be Alice, I thought, well and truly trapped on the other side of the looking glass.
At a signal from me, Ruth began to wade through the clutter toward the front of the house, stepping high. ‘This is downright dangerous,’ she complained, side-stepping an old typewriter table that was listing to starboard under the weight of a dot matrix computer printer and maybe a decade’s worth of telephone books. ‘Lilith could be in trouble.’
‘Is anybody here?’ Ruth yelled as she disappeared around the corner.
I hurried, bucking and weaving, to catch up. On the way, I popped into the living room and discovered why the front door refused to budge when we pushed on it. Over time, boxes from QVC and HSN had been stacked, still unopened, around the door. Plastic mailers from L.L. Bean and Lands’ End had been piled on top, adding to the accumulation. At some point, the piles had collapsed, partially blocking the entrance.
To my right, under the window, a sofa and chair were heaped with unopened boxes from Amazon. And if you needed to reach the front door, like in an emergency, you’d have to first clear a path through the forest of light bulbs, toilet paper, paper towels, and batteries still in their plastic shopping bags from Target that were strewn over the carpet. Either that, or hire a guide.
I hurried as fast as I could after Ruth, kicking aside boxes of envelopes, paper clips and three-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks as I went. I was surround by evidence of Lilith’s aborted attempts to tame the chaos – Rubbermaid tubs in all shapes and sizes, nested Tupperware containers (still nested), space bags, desktop organizers – purchased with every good intention for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, from companies that advertised on late-night television that their am
azing products were ‘Not available in stores!’
I found my sister standing in front of the bathroom at the end of the cluttered hall, looking bewildered. Boxes loomed over her dangerously, like the walls of the Grand Canyon. She raised both arms. ‘There’s a bedroom on each side. Nobody’s here,’ she reported, ‘but the TV is sure on.’
The television in the bedroom was cube-like and huge, a model so ancient that I expected it could receive Howdy Doody, I Love Lucy or Bonanza direct. On the screen, though, modern-day Lynx News social commentator Candace Kelly, every Titian hair perfectly contained, was nattering on about some girls who had been turned away from their homecoming dance because the school found their dresses unsuitable. ‘Does everybody watch Lynx News?’ I wondered.
‘Why don’t we turn it off?’ Ruth suggested.
While Ruth floundered around the bedroom looking for the remote, I watched the crawl at the bottom of the screen where I learned that ‘Hiccup girl’ had been charged with murder and L’il Wayne was ready to party after his release from jail; pseudo-news that ran the gamut from ‘What the hell?’ to ‘Who cares?’
‘You’ll need to send out a search party for the remote, I’m afraid.’ Ruth waved an arm, taking in the piles of clothing draped over every available surface, including the bed, some still wearing their price tags. ‘And good luck even reaching the TV. My bet? She leaves it on all the time.’
‘Where the hell does she sleep?’ I wondered, backing out into the hall and pushing open the door to the second bedroom. It, too, was chock-a-block with unopened boxes containing God only knew what. If there was a bed in the room it would take Lewis and Clark, maybe Sacajawea too, to find it.
I bent over, out of habit, to pick up a pair of red leather gloves, still connected at the wrists by a plastic clip, that lay on the carpet at my feet. I held them in my hand for a moment, then tossed them over my shoulder. Even if Ruth and I became overcome by an irresistible urge to pick up, where on earth would we begin?
‘Come on, Ruth. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Where does Lilith paint?’ Ruth wondered aloud, as we ran the gauntlet, winding our way out of Lilith’s pathetic cottage the way we had come.
‘Unless she’s given it up, she probably has a studio somewhere. Perhaps that’s where she is now. The Simon sisters told me she kept a separate studio when she lived in New York.’
Once outside, I breathed deeply, expelling the dark and the dust. Face to the sun, I inhaled the fresh fall air in grateful gulps. To our left, a narrow path led off through the trees. Through the branches, just now beginning to shed their leaves, I could see the late-afternoon sun glittering on the waters of what my map had told me was a little cove off Fishing Creek. ‘We’re so close to finding her,’ I said. ‘I just hate to leave.’
‘Hannah, for all we know, Lilith’s away on vacation, sunning herself on a beach in the south of France. Who knows when she’ll get back.’
‘But the house is unlocked,’ I reasoned.
Ruth snorted. ‘Why lock it? Any self-respecting thief would take one look at that place, throw up his hands and high tail it out of there.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘Maybe that’s Lilith secret plan to clear the place out!’
I laughed. ‘You’re right, of course. I’m going to leave a note. Ask her to call me.’ I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook I keep in the glove compartment to write down important things like the license plate numbers of cars that cut me off in traffic and the vehicle identification numbers of negligent trucks that spew out gravel and pockmark my windshield. On it I wrote: ‘My name is Hannah Ives and I live in Annapolis. I have something that belongs to you. Please call me so that I can arrange to return it.’
I added my telephone number, stuffed the note into a Ziploc bag I had snitched from a box of one hundred on the floor of the kitchen, then tucked the note between the back door and the frame, closing the door securely over it.
‘What now, Nancy Drew?’
‘Now, we go home and wait.’
EIGHTEEN
Three days later, early on a Sunday morning, Lilith called. I was charmed by her voice, Lauren Bacallesque, smooth, low and husky. ‘I got your message,’ she breathed. ‘Can you tell what this is all about?’
‘It’s something best discussed in person,’ I said. ‘Is there a convenient time for me to drive over?’
‘How did you find me?’ she wanted to know.
‘The Simon sisters in New York,’ I said, shading the truth just a little.
‘Oh, yes. Claire and Elspeth. They were very sweet to me. Are they well?’
‘Very.’
‘I don’t suppose Pedro . . . well, no, he wouldn’t still be alive, would he. It’s been . . . well, more years than I care to admit.’
‘Pedro’s moved on to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm in the sky, I’m afraid. They have a German shepherd named Bruno now.’
Lilith laughed out loud, a sound that bubbled out of her, overflowing like sparkling champagne. ‘Who is walking whom, I wonder? Oh, I was so in love with those women.’
I’d never laid eyes on Lilith, but I was falling in love with her, too. ‘When would be convenient for us to meet, Lilith? I’m fairly flexible.’
‘I keep busy with my painting, but otherwise I have very little on my schedule. Is tomorrow good for you? Around two?’
‘That would be perfect,’ I told her.
‘You know where I live,’ she said, ‘but please meet me at my studio. If you carry on past the house about a hundred yards down a little path, you’ll come to it. It’s right on the water.’
No surprise that Lilith didn’t want to meet me at the house. Where would we sit for our conversation? In the bathroom? Lilith on the toilet seat and me on the rim of the tub?
‘Two o’clock tomorrow, then. Your studio,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there,’
I hung up the phone and ran a little victory loop around the house, whooping like a rodeo cowboy.
I called Ruth at once, but she and Hutch had paid in advance for dance studio time and were locked into rehearsals. Paul was tied up teaching, and his sister, Connie, would be spending the afternoon waiting for the plumber to come repair her hot-water heater. My father, always game for adventure, was finishing up the last month of a year-long consulting job in Dubai. When the time came, I’d have to go alone.
What would I wear?
I opened my closet and reached reflexively for my favorite black and white paisley dress. My hand closed around the padded blue silk hanger where the dress normally lived. I pulled the hanger out of the closet. Empty.
Black and white and red all over.
My dress was ruined, I remembered with a pang, discarded, moldering in a landfill, soaked with somebody else’s blood.
I pawed through the remaining garments, trying to find something else to wear. It was too hot for this one, too cold for that. Too long, too short, too small, too big. No, no, no, no! Tears began to stream down my cheeks.
I tossed a perfectly good A-line skirt on the floor, followed by a blouse, a pair of slacks. One dress, then another – no, no, no! I didn’t stop, couldn’t, until I collapsed in the middle of the heap, buried my face in a hand-painted sweatshirt and bawled until my eyelids swelled shut.
Paul found me there an hour later, dry-eyed and gasping, the designer sweatshirt wrapped around my head. ‘I couldn’t find anything to wear,’ I sobbed.
Paul fell to his knees, drew me into his arms, held my head gently against his chest, and rocked me like a baby. Next to the beating of his heart, I felt warm and secure.
‘It’s PTSD,’ he said, stroking my cheek. He touched his lips to my ear and whispered, ‘There are people who can help you with that, Hannah.’
‘It’s, it’s . . .’ I drew a shuddering breath. ‘When I read in the paper about Tashawn Jackson’s funeral, I wanted to go, I really did, even though I probably would have been the only white face in the church. I felt I owed it to him, Paul. But what would I say when his mother asked,
“And who are you?” Do I say, “Your boy took my seat on that train. Now I’m alive and he’s dead?”’
‘Shhh, shhh,’ my husband crooned, gently rocking.
‘I could be dead, Paul, dead! I didn’t live through the surgery and chemo just so I could die before my time on a stupid train! And then I thought, how selfish you are, Hannah. Tashawn had his whole life in front of him, and you’re old. Old!’ I looked up into Paul’s face, touched his cheek, rough against my hand. ‘It should have been me,’ I whimpered. ‘But, oh Paul, I’m so glad it wasn’t me!’
‘I thank God it wasn’t you, too,’ my husband said, stroking my hair.
I slept long and hard that night, awakening an hour after the coffee pot had started its automatic cycle.
Paul had already left for work, but while I slept, he’d thoughtfully picked up all the clothes I’d strewn about the room and hung them back in my closet.
In the end, for my visit with Lilith, I settled on a pair of slim black slacks and a lightweight blue sweater, paired with a matching set of aquamarine earrings. I took some time with my make-up. Why? I couldn’t say. Perhaps I didn’t want to feel frumpy next to a woman who, at least when young, had been a great beauty. Concealer to minimize the dark bags under my eyes. Eyebrows, eyeliner, lipstick and blush. A touch of twilight blue on the lids. If Paul had come into the bathroom that minute, he’d have thought I was cheating on him.
Lilith’s Garfinkel’s bag looked like it had been dragged through a hedge backwards, so before I left the house, I tucked it into a canvas tote.
I retraced the route to Woolford, parked behind Lilith’s Toyota at the end of her drive, and was hauling the tote out of the back seat when Lilith appeared out of the woods, almost like an apparition. She was dressed in pipe-stem blue jeans and a tailored white shirt, unbuttoned, her shirt tails floating gently over a pale-pink scoop-necked tee. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You must be Hannah.’
A Quiet Death Page 11
