The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “As soon as I went into the suite, I knew something was wrong. The room was dark and the wall switch didn’t work. I tried a lamp on the coffee table and it didn’t work either.”

  “The lights were still out when Harry and I went into the suite, but they were working. We turned them on.”

  “I’ve thought about that. Someone could have thrown the circuit breaker for the second floor. Most of the guests were at the party so no one would have noticed. I thought about going for a flashlight, but there was enough light coming through the windows—remember Harry had put in all those floodlights in the garden—to check the paintings.”

  “They were all there?”

  “I think so. I was counting them—just to make sure—when someone hit me from behind and I fell down onto the floor.”

  “So how do you know it wasn’t Joseph who hit you if you didn’t see who it was?”

  “Because the minute I hit the carpet I saw the door to the bedroom open and Joseph came in—no mistaking him with that limp. He saw me on the carpet, but instead of coming toward me he headed for the door. It scared me because I figured whatever—or whoever—he saw behind me had scared him. I tried to turn over to get a look behind me, but someone stepped on the back of my head. Hard. Right where I’d been hit already. I think I started blacking out. I remember, though, a block of light and someone standing in it—bloody thought I was heading down the tunnel of light toward my final reward—but then something exploded and the figure in the light looked like he was flying toward the window. I think I did black out for a minute then, because when I came to the pressure on my head was gone and I was alone in the room. Alone in a room where a couple of million dollars’ worth of paintings had just been stolen and a gun had gone off—I could smell it. It didn’t take too much imagination to see the picture that was taking shape. I ran. Took off down the back staircase and went through the servants’ wing—out the side and down through the woods. I got down to the Agway at the foot of the mountain and called some friends in the city to come pick me up—by morning the story was out and I knew Joseph was dead. I was sorry, Iris, I couldn’t be with you. I know how he loved you.”

  He comes to a stop—winded from just the memory of all that running. I feel breathless too. All the light has seeped out of the sky outside and I can smell the river—a dank, low-tide smell. The uneaten eggs on both our plates have grown cold. I get up and take the plates to the sink.

  “I don’t blame you for not believing me,” he says. “I didn’t really expect you to, but I wanted to tell you. I had to tell you.”

  I turn around, lifting my hands, palms up, like some statue of impartial justice. “Why would someone else shoot Joseph? If you didn’t kill him, who did?”

  “Whoever hit me over the head and took the paintings. When I fell the sound woke Joseph and he came running in.”

  It’s a plausible theory, and I would like more than anything to take it at face value, but I can’t. “But why were you there in the first place? Harry said he didn’t ask you to check on the paintings . . .”

  “Well, no, he didn’t ask me directly, that harebrained niece of his did.”

  “Phoebe?”

  “Yes. I met her in the hall on my way down to the party. Did she fail to mention that to the police?”

  “No, she said she saw you, and that you told her Harry had asked you to check on the paintings.”

  Aidan stares into his cup as if trying to read the tea leaves through the cold, murky liquid and then he shakes his head.

  “You know, I had a feeling she was lying. Something about the way she insisted I turn right around and go back to the suite. When I was unlocking the door I noticed she was still standing in the hall as if checking to make sure I was following her orders.”

  I sit down on the couch beside Aidan and, closing my eyes, picture the second-floor hallway. It was one of my favorite places to play as a child because the landing there was wider and the chandelier was so beautiful to look at . . . and something else . . . because if I waited long enough I might see my mother there.

  “Where was she standing?” I ask Aidan.

  “What? I told you, in the hall . . .”

  “Where in the hall. Down by the elevators?”

  “No, closer. At the next door, I think.”

  “The door to the suite’s bedroom?” I ask.

  Aidan looks up from his tea. “You’re thinking Phoebe let herself into the bedroom side of the suite, waited for me to open the closet door, and hit me over the head? But why?”

  “Because she wanted something out of the locked closet. Remember when she came into the suite and was surprised that there was a closet on that side of the suite?”

  Aidan nods and I notice that a little color has come back into his pale skin. “She spent the rest of that week dogging my steps,” he says. “I thought she was just being a noodge—” I smile at the Yiddish expression—one I’m sure Aidan picked up from my aunt. “—but maybe she was waiting for a chance to get into that closet. Do you think it was the paintings she was after?”

  “No, I think it was my mother’s third book. I think she looked for it the first time she stayed in the suite—that’s why those drawers were broken and the floorboards in the hall closet were loosened.”

  “But what would give her the idea that it was in the suite in the first place?”

  “Her parents stayed in the suite right below it—Sunnyside.” I close my eyes again to picture the landing outside the Sleepy Hollow Suite and I see the image from my dream: a door vibrating to the sound of typing. That’s why I liked to play in that hallway—my mother must have used that suite to type and I got used to hanging outside for a glimpse of her. “Maybe Vera Nix heard my mother typing in there and mentioned it in her journals and it gave Phoebe the idea that the last manuscript was hidden there . . .” I stop midsentence and groan.

  “What is it?”

  “The first line of the selkie story—in a land between the sun and the moon—the Sleepy Hollow Suite is above Sunnyside and one floor below Half Moon. It’s between the sun and the moon. I can’t believe Phoebe figured that out and I didn’t.”

  “But why would Phoebe want your mother’s book so much?”

  “Well, if Vera Nix was afraid there was something in the book that she didn’t want known, Phoebe might also want to protect her mother’s secret. After all, Phoebe’s based her whole career on presenting her mother in a certain light.”

  “But what could Vera Nix have done that was that bad?”

  I notice that Aidan and I have switched roles—that he’s become the interrogator and I’ve become the apologist—trying to make a case for his own innocence. And if I can’t? In the silence that follows I imagine Aidan making his next plan. Where will he go from here? I already know I don’t have the heart to turn him in, but I also know that I can’t help him. I hope for his sake that Detective March was right and that he is well connected. I don’t think I could bear the thought of him being back in prison—or worse. I remember Elspeth McCrory’s lurid headline that I’d read in the Poughkeepsie Journal: “Woman Visiting Inmate at Prison Killed in Train Accident.” I think I have an idea now of how Rose McGlynn must have felt.

  “What did you say?”

  I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud. “I’m sorry, I was just remembering this horrible story about a woman who killed herself after visiting her brother in prison.”

  “Thanks for that cheerful thought. I don’t expect you to kill yourself, Iris, but it’d be nice if you baked a cake once in a while. Maybe I could take your class again . . .”

  “Aidan, wait a minute. There is something that her mother might have done that would be pretty bad. Phoebe mentioned it herself—only to deny it. She said that when John McGlynn—that’s the fellow whose sister killed herself—was on trial he claimed that Vera Nix paid him to steal her own jewelry so they could split the money from selling it. No one believed him, but what if it was true?”

 
“It wouldn’t be the first time some rich person paid for her valuables to be stolen so she could collect on the insurance and split the profits with the thief. If this Vera Nix was hard up for cash . . .”

  “Phoebe said the press made up stories about her using drugs, but Harry said she did have a drug problem. If the stories weren’t made up . . .”

  “She might have been supporting a habit. She might have owed money to people who didn’t take kindly to having their loans reneged on. But if no one believed that John McGlynn fellow at his trial why would Phoebe worry about it coming out now?”

  “My mother worked at the Crown Hotel where the jewelry was stolen from. She knew Rose and John McGlynn. She was traveling with Rose the day she threw herself under that train.”

  Aidan sits up a little straighter and leans toward me, so close I can see the dark smudges under his eyes and feel his breath on my face. “So if your mother knew that Vera Nix set up John McGlynn she might have written about it in her last book.”

  “Still, it’s only a fantasy book. There is this whole story about a piece of jewelry being stolen, and I suppose it could have been based on the Crown jewel robbery—and there is this woman in a green dress like the dress I wore that Phoebe claimed belonged to her mother. Maybe the woman in the story is Vera Nix and we find out in Book Three—The Selkie’s Daughter—that she was behind the robbery, but still it’s a fantasy novel. Who is going to put all that together now?”

  “But that summer Phoebe’s mother came to stay at the hotel. What if your mother confronted Vera Nix with what she knew then?”

  “It still would have been my mother’s word against hers.”

  “Maybe your mother had some way of proving that Vera Nix was involved in the robbery. Who knows—she was a maid at that hotel—maybe she found a letter Vera Nix wrote. Think, Iris, what happened to your mother after that summer?”

  “You know what happened, Aidan. She died in a hotel fire with another man.”

  “You told me they didn’t find the remains of the man in the room where she died. What if she wasn’t meeting a man? What if she was meeting Vera Nix to hand over whatever proof she had?”

  Aidan touches the side of my face and it’s only then I realize how hot my skin is. I feel like I’m burning up. As if the fire that had consumed my mother is consuming me. “Are you saying you think Vera Nix murdered my mother?” It comes out as a whisper, as if I’m afraid the words might ignite in the open air.

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility that Phoebe Nix thinks she did. And she thought Joseph knew where your mother was going that night and who she was going to see . . . what’s wrong?”

  Now instead of feeling hot, I feel cold, as if I had jumped into icy water to douse the fire under my skin. “That day she came into the suite—remember, when you were moving the sky painting? Well, after you went out she asked me if Joseph had told me who my mother was going to see the night she died. I didn’t tell her he had, but I let her think that he would tell me if I really wanted to know. And then at the lecture that night I practically dared her to find the manuscript. If she did kill Joseph, it’s my fault, Aidan, it wasn’t just that he was standing between her and the manuscript—I made her see him as a threat.”

  “We still don’t know that’s what happened, and even if it did, you couldn’t have known that she was crazy enough about her mother’s reputation to kill to preserve it.” He still has his hand against my face. I bow my head so that my forehead rests in the palm of his hand, his flesh cool against my brow. He slides his arm around my shoulders and pulls me closer to him on the couch.

  “I should have known,” I murmur into his neck. “I, of all people, know what it means to be obsessed by a mother who died young. I’m as bad as she is—pursuing my mother’s story until the pursuit got Joseph killed and you wanted for murder—but I can’t stop now. I have to figure out exactly what happened at the Crown in 1949 that could have made someone kill my mother at the Dreamland Hotel in 1973. I think, then, we’ll know who killed Joseph.”

  “It sounds like a lot of work,” he says, stroking the hair away from my face. “Do you want me to go now?”

  I look into his eyes and see that restless look I’ve seen there before, the sense that he’s ready to flee. I move closer and wrap my arms around him, running my hands down his shoulder blades, feeling a vibration under the skin that makes me want to hold him tighter to keep him from flying out of my grasp. It takes me a few minutes to realize that the trembling I felt beneath his skin is coming from me.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Aidan leaves before dawn. He doesn’t tell me where he’s going, but he gives me a phone number where I can leave a message for him and directions to a spot in Inwood Park where he’ll meet me at noon the day after I call.

  “It’s like Tam Lin in the story—telling Margaret to meet him at the well. I should bring some holy water and dirt from Joseph’s garden . . .” My voice trails off, Joseph’s name falling like a shadow between us. He gets up to get dressed, looking out the window where the light is gathering above the river. Then he sits down beside me on the bed and runs his hand in one fluid stroke down the length of my body, from forehead to toes. “If you haven’t made that call in one week I’ll not expect to hear from you and I’ll understand. No hard feelings, Iris.”

  “I’ll make the call, Aidan, as soon as I’ve found out something.”

  After he’s gone I stay in bed waiting until it’s late enough to call the librarian at John Jay College. When I taught there last year I brought my class to the library for a tour of its criminology archives and I’d had a long chat with the librarian about Scandinavian fairy tales.

  “Sure,” Charles Baum tells me, “always happy to help ex-faculty in their research. I’ll leave a pass for you at the desk. If you need any help finding the right case just give a holler.”

  On my way up to John Jay I stop at the dry cleaner and tailor’s on Eighth Avenue where Mr. Nagamora works. He’s not at his sewing machine by the window and I panic for a moment at the thought that something has happened to him over the summer. After all, he’s not a young man. When I ask the girl at the counter, though, she disappears into the racks of hanging garment bags and a few seconds later the thin plastic bags rustle and Mr. Nagamora surfaces from behind them. His face, the moment before he recognizes me, is as smooth as a stone, but then he smiles, revealing a thousand small wrinkles.

  “Professor Greenfeder,” he says, bowing ceremoniously, “my family will want to meet you.” The counter girl reappears, as well as an older woman and a small boy, all disgorged by the rippling plastic bags like bobbins popping up on a still lake, all bowing when introduced to me. The old woman, whom I took at first to be his wife, is his sister, the young woman and boy his niece and grandnephew. Mr. Nagamora takes something out of the pocket of his cardigan—even in the subtropical humidity of the dry cleaner’s he wears the same woolen cardigan—and begins to unfold it. I’m reminded of Joseph unfolding his handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his brow, but it turns out to be several sheets of white paper, which he unfolds and holds up to display the large A on top. It’s Mr. Nagamora’s retelling of “The Crane Wife.” I remember how I hesitated over that A and for once in my life I’m glad of something I did impulsively.

  Finally, when our audience has slipped back into the recesses of the shop I take out the bundle of green silk from my canvas book bag and lay it on the counter between us.

  “Ah,” he says, stroking the fabric gently, reminding me, of all things, of how Aidan touched me before he left this morning. “Beautiful silk.” He folds back the waistband and looks at the label, nodding at the designer’s name. Then he runs his fingers along the seams, as if the stitches were Braille. “Very fine work,” he says. “This belonged to your mother?”

  “Yes,” I agree, because it’s easier than going into the dubious history of the dress, “but I wore it and it got torn.” He’s come to the rip in the swag and the cuts made by the glass when
I knelt beside Joseph. He rolls something between his fingertips and then holds up a tiny splinter of glass balanced between the tips of his fingernails.

  “There was an accident,” I say, embarrassed to hear my voice quiver over the last word. Mr. Nagamora holds up his hand to stop me from going on. It’s the same imperious gesture he used when I tried to interrupt his story, which I’d guessed at the time was an echo of his father—his father, the silk weaver. I notice then what has struck me about Mr. Nagamora since I came in. He carries himself differently than he used to in class. All the slump has gone out of him. I feel sure it’s not the A I gave him, though; it’s telling his father’s story. He’s still telling it.

  “I can fix,” he tells me, and for a moment I forget we’re talking about the dress.

  I nod. “Thank you, Mr. Nagamora.”

  He pats the silk cloth, but I feel as if he’s patting my hand. Then he writes up a ticket and tells me my mother’s dress will be ready Thursday next.

  For the rest of my walk up to John Jay I think about Mr. Nagamora’s altered demeanor—the way telling his father’s story has transformed him. I think too of my other students whose lives have changed since the spring: Mrs. Rivera, who has stayed up at the hotel with Ramon to help in the renovations, Gretchen Lu, who told me she planned to use the prize money from the Folly contest to travel for a year visiting textile mills in different countries (Mark said he planned to use the money as a down payment for a co-op in Hoboken), and Natalie Baehr who’s sold her jewelry to Barney’s. Even Aidan seems to be living out some version of the story he told last spring—caught in a limbo where my belief in him, my ability to see past the guises of enchantment, can save him or not. So many changes to come out of one little writing assignment! And what about my life? What chain of events did I set off when I sent my mother’s selkie story to Phoebe Nix?