A Quiet Death (15 page)

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

T
hree 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.'

Although Lilith was thirty years older than the pictures I carried, I would have known her anywhere. We all should age so gracefully. Her dark hair was laced with threads of silver, but the graying had progressed so evenly that one could easily mistake it for highlighting. Skilful highlighting, too. A dye job you'd pay extra for. She had the same slight frame, and as she approached, she moved with elegant grace. I imagined her as a young girl, practicing that walk while balancing a dictionary on her head.

I held out my hand. ‘I'm delighted to meet you, Lilith.'

Lilith's azure eyes strayed to the tote in my hand, then back to my face without betraying a single ill-mannered sign of curiosity. ‘Before we get down to business,' she said, ‘I'd like to show you my studio.'

After visiting Lilith's house, I was holding my breath, mentally bracing for the studio experience. I followed her down a straight, narrow path to a wooden A-frame structure a hundred yards or so from the creek. Imagine my surprise when she opened a door and led me into a spacious room that pulsed with light and color. White-white walls and pale oak floors seemed to go on forever. A chaise lounge was tucked into a corner by a wall of windows that framed the water view, a colorful crocheted afghan neatly draped over its arm. Next to the chaise, a camera was mounted on a tripod, its lens pointing outside, ready for the next shot.

On an easel in the center of the room stood Lilith's work in progress, a painting of a toy sailboat floating on water amid a sea of fall leaves. Clipped to the easel was a photograph of the same scene. ‘You're still into photorealism, I see.'

With her eyes on the painting, she smiled. ‘It's light that's always interested me, Hannah – how it's reflected, refracted, diffused and distorted by the water.'

Although the work was incomplete, I felt I could reach into the painting, swirl my hand through the leaves and come out wet. ‘What's it called?'

She grinned. ‘Sailboat Twenty-three.'

Finished canvases – still lifes and landscapes – were propped up against the wall to my right, and to my left was a tiny kitchenette with a hotplate, where a teakettle was just starting to scream.

‘I'm making tea,' she told me. ‘Lady Grey. Would you like some?'

‘Yes, thank you. That would be lovely.'

When the tea was ready, she carried the tray outside to a table on a round concrete patio. From the patio, a leaf-strewn lawn sloped gently down to the creek where, at the end of a short dock, a motorboat was tied. Closer to shore, a kayak bobbed.

‘Milk and sugar?'

I shook my head. ‘Do you get out on the water often?' I asked as Lilith stirred milk and sugar into her tea.

‘Every day I can. I find paddling a kayak very relaxing. Nature's chorus sings all around you in a kayak. A motorboat drowns it out. I keep the motorboat in case of emergency, of course.'

‘I know what you mean about motors,' I agreed. ‘My husband and I sail, but only on other people's boats.' We sipped in silence for a while, listening to the susurrus of the wind in the trees.

‘You mentioned you had something that belongs to me,' Lilith said at last.

I pulled the Garfinkel's bag out of my canvas tote and set it on the table between us.

Lilith's eyes widened in genuine surprise. She laid a hand lightly on the bag. ‘Where on earth did you get this?'

‘I'm afraid it comes with some bad news.' I told Lilith about the Metro crash, about the gravely injured man I'd comforted. ‘He told me his name was Skip.'

Lilith exhaled slowly, then looked away, swiping sudden tears away with the back of her hand. ‘That's what they called him in school, because he was always cutting class.'