All the Way Home (51 page)

The entire contents of the house are now in storage—with the exception of the rocking chair where Mother had passed away and gone undiscovered for weeks.

“I don’t think that chair is something you’d want to keep,” Sandra said in one of their many long-distance telephone conversations when the storage arrangements were being made.

Of course not. The corpse would have been crawling with maggots and oozing bodily fluids, staining the brocade upholstery and permeating it with the terrible stench of death.

Presumably, someone—surely not the lovely Sandra—tossed the desecrated rocking chair into a Dumpster, while everything else was transported to the storage facility somewhere in the suburbs.

As for Mother herself . . .

I’d just as soon have had someone toss her into a Dumpster, too.

But of course, the proper thing to do was arrange, also long distance, for a cremation.

“We have a number of packages,” the mortician said over the phone, “depending on how you want to set up visitation hours and—”

“No visitation. I live almost five hundred miles away, and I can’t get up there just yet, and . . . there’s no one else.”

Pause. “There are no other family and friends here in the Buffalo area who might want to—?”

“
No one else.
”

“All right, then.” He went over the details, mentioning that there would be an additional seventy-five-dollar charge for shipment of the ashes.

“Can you just hold on to—”
It? Her?
What was the proper terminology, aside from the profane terms so often used to refer to Mother—though never to her face—back when she was alive?

“The remains?” the undertaker supplied delicately.

“Yes . . . can you hold on to the remains until I can be there in person?”

“When would that be?”

“Sometime this summer. I’m selling the house, so I’ll be coming up there to make the final arrangements for that.”

The undertaker dutifully provided instructions on how to go about retrieving what was left of the dearly departed when the time came.

The time is now here, but of course there will be no trip to the mortuary. Mother’s ashes can sit on a dusty shelf there for all eternity.

As for the contents of this old house . . .

“I’m sure you won’t want to go through it all just yet,” Sandra Lutz said earlier, handing over the rental agreement and a set of keys to the storage unit. “Not when the loss is so fresh. But empty houses are much more appealing to buyers, and this way, at least, we can get the home on the market.”

Yes. The sooner this old place is sold, the better. As for the padlocked compartment filled with a lifetime of family furniture and mementos . . .

Good riddance to all of it.

Well . . . not quite
all
.

Right before she answered her phone, Sandra had taken the Ziploc bag from her leather Dooney & Bourke purse.

“These are some odds and ends I found after the moving company and cleaning service had finished in here. I didn’t want to just throw anything away, so . . . here you go.”

The bag contained just a few small items. A stray key that had been hanging on a nail just inside the basement door, most likely fitting the lock on a long-gone trunk or tool chest. A dusty Mass card from a forgotten cousin’s funeral, found tucked behind a cast-iron radiator in the front parlor. A tarnished, bent silver fork that had been wedged in the space behind the silverware drawer.

And then there was . . .

This
.

The notebook, with a string of black rosary beads wrapped around it twice, as if to seal it closed.

According to Sandra Lutz, the notebook, unlike the other contents of the bag, hadn’t been accidentally overlooked. It was deliberately hidden in one of the old home’s many concealed nooks.

“I stumbled across it last night when I stopped by to double-check the square footage of the master bedroom,” she reported. “I noticed that there was a discrepancy between the measurements I took a few weeks ago and the old listing from the last time the house sold, back in the late seventies.”

“What kind of discrepancy?”

“The room was two feet longer back then. Sure enough, that’s exactly the depth of the secret compartment I found behind a false wall by the bay window. I was wondering whether you even knew it was there, because—”

“The house is full of secret compartments. My father said that it was probably used to hide slaves on the Underground Railroad.”

“That’s the rumor about a lot of houses in this neighborhood because we’re just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, and there was Underground Railroad activity in western New York. But I don’t think this would have been an actual safe house.”

“Why not?”

“Because historical documentation shows that there just weren’t very many of them in Buffalo. Slavery was abolished in New York State years before the Civil War started, so escaped slaves who made it into the city either stayed and lived openly, or they were taken from rural safe houses into the city and directly across the border crossing at Squaw Island.”

She added quickly, as if to soothe any hard feelings from her bombshell that the home hadn’t served some noble historic cause, “I’ve always admired this house though, and wondered what it looked like inside. Did I mention that this is my old stomping grounds? I grew up just a few blocks over, and I just moved back to the neighborhood.”

Yes, Sandra had mentioned that over the phone several times, and in e-mail, too. She has no qualms about sharing that she’s a recent divorcee living alone for the first time in her life.

“I bought a fabulous Arts and Crafts home on Wayside Avenue, just down the street from Sacred Sisters High School,” she prattled on, as if she were revealing the information for the first time, but quickly added, “Not that I went to Sisters, even though it was right in the neighborhood; I went to Nardin instead.”

Ah, Nardin Academy: the most upscale all-girls Catholic high school in western New York. No surprise there.

“Anyway, when I saw that house on Wayside come on the market, I snatched it up. Of course, it isn’t nearly as big or as old as this one, and it doesn’t have any secret compartments, but it does have all the original—”

“The notebook—what were you saying about finding the notebook?”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess I tend to ramble.”

No kidding.

If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a motormouth.

Sandra shrugged. “I was just going to point out that the secret compartment where I found it was different.”

“Different how?”

That was when Sandra’s phone rang. She checked the caller ID, said, “Excuse me, but I have to take this one,” and disappeared down the steps.

Now she’s back.

And now that I’ve seen what’s in that notebook, I really need to know what she meant about “different.”

“Sorry about that,” Sandra says. “I thought that call was only going to take a minute, but I had to go check some paperwork I left in the car. Oh, it’s warm up here, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

The windows are open, but there’s not a breath of cross breeze to diminish the greenhouse effect created by four walls of glass on a ninety-degree July afternoon.

Sandra fans herself with a manila folder, though she doesn’t appear the least bit flushed or winded from the climb.

A perfumed, expertly made-up fortysomething blonde wearing a trim black suit, hose, and high-heeled pumps, she’s probably never broken a sweat outside the gym or had a bad hair day in her life.

When she introduced herself, she pronounced her first name as if it rhymed with Rhonda. Most locals would say it Say-and-ra, the western New York accent stretching it out to three syllables with a couple of distinct flat
a’
s.

“I’m
Sahndra
,” she said as she stepped out of her silver Mercedes in the driveway to shake hands. Heat shimmered off the blacktop, yet her bony fingers were icy, with a firm, businesslike grip. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in person. How was the drive in last night?”

“The drive?”
Oh, so we’re doing the small talk thing. Let’s get it over with.
“It was fine.”

“Did you come alone or bring your family?”

Is she fishing for information or did I tell her I have a family?

Sandra had asked so many questions through their two months of long distance phone calls and e-mails, it was difficult to keep track of what she’d been told—truth, and lies.

“I came alone.”

“It’s about nine hours, isn’t it, from Huntington Station?”

Huntington Station. Not Long Island, not Nassau County, not even just Huntington, but Huntington Station. So damned specific.

“I went to college in the Bronx, at Fordham,” she mentioned, “and my boyfriend back then was from Levittown. A nice Irish boy—Patrick Donnelly . . . ?”

She actually paused, as if to ask,
Do you know him?

Question met with a cursory head shake, she went on, “Well, anyway, I know exactly where you live.”

She has the address, of course. She’s been FedExing paperwork for a couple of months now.

Sandra went on to inquire about the suburban Buffalo hotel she had recommended for this weekend stay, referring to it not as the hotel or the Marriott, but the Marriott Courtyard Inn.

After being assured that the room was satisfactory, she said, “Be sure and tell the front desk manager, if you see her, that I referred you. Her name is Lena.”

“Is she a friend of yours?”

“Oh, I’ve never met her, but she’s a dear friend of a sister of a client.”

And so it became clear early on that Sandra Lutz is the kind of woman who not only tends to ramble on and make dreary small talk, but she also remembers the most mundane details. That characteristic probably serves her very well when it comes to her line of work, but otherwise . . .

Someone really should warn her that sometimes it’s not a good idea to pay so much attention to other people’s lives.

Sometimes, people like—people
need
—to maintain more of a sense of privacy.

“I always try not to take cell phone calls when I’m with a client,” Sandra says breezily now, pocketing her cell phone, “but that was an accepted offer for a house that’s only been on the market for a week. I thought it would be a hard sell, but it looks like this is my client’s lucky day. And mine, too. Let’s hope all this good fortune rubs off on you. Now that we’re finished looking the place over, we can—”

“Wait. When you said the compartment was different, what, exactly, did you mean?”

Sandra’s bright blue eyes seem startled at, then confused by, the abrupt question. “Pardon?”

“When you found the
notebook
behind the
wall
”—
Careful, now. Calm down. Don’t let her see how important this is to you
—“you said the compartment was different.”

“Oh, that’s right. I meant that it wasn’t original to the house. Here, let’s go downstairs and I’ll show you what I mean.”

She leads the way down the steep flight to a noticeably cooler, narrow corridor lined with plain whitewashed walls and closed doors. Behind them are a bathroom with ancient fixtures, a couple of small bedrooms that once housed nineteenth-century servants, and some large storage closets that are nearly the same size as the bedrooms, all tucked above the eaves with pairs of tall, arched dormers poking through the slate mansard roof.

The third floor hasn’t been used in decades, perhaps not even when the previous owners, a childless couple, lived here. The first two floors of the house were plenty large enough for two; large enough even for four.

And then there were three . . .

No. Don’t think about that.

Just find out where the notebook was hidden, and how much Sandra Lutz knows about what’s written in it
.

Down they go, descending another steep flight to the second floor.

Here, the hallway is much wider than the one above, with high ceilings, crown moldings, and broad windowed nooks on either end. A dark green floral runner stretches along the hardwood floor and the wallpapered walls are studded with elaborate sconces that were, like most light fixtures throughout the house, converted from gas to electricity after the turn of the last century.

“The same thing was probably done in my house,” Sandra comments as they walk along the hall, “but I’d love to go back to gaslights. Of course, the inspector who looked at it before I got the mortgage approval nearly had a heart attack when I mentioned that. He said the place is a firetrap as it is. Old wiring, you know—the whole thing needs to be upgraded. It’s the same in this house, I’m sure.”