Ashes to Ashes (41 page)

Her watch said 8:30. The windows admitted a fine platinum sunlight, lifting the shadows lurking in staircase and corridor. “Hello,” she said into the receiver outside Michael’s door.

“Rebecca!” said Eric. “Sorry to bother you so early in the morning.”

“You’re not bothering me,” she replied, pleased to hear evidence of a world beyond Dun Iain.

“Just wanted to let you know contact has been made— I’ve found Charlotte Dennison Morris.”

“Who? Oh! Rachel Forbes Dennison’s granddaughter?”

“The very same. In a nursing home in San Francisco. Eighty-five years old and in very poor health. But she has children and grandchildren of her own, someone to pass the proceeds of the estate on to. The unexpected inheritance for them, just like you said that time.”

She’d said that? When? “So Mrs. Morris wants you to sell it?”

“The cost of keeping it up would be ridiculous. And we do have that offer from Bright.”

“What will Bright do with the place?” She paced down the hall, the friendly threadbare carpet muffling her footsteps.

“Make it into a corporate retreat, I imagine. New furniture, exercise equipment, hot tubs. That jazz ensemble on the piper’s gallery.”

Rebecca looked down the stairs, at the golden stone and the quixotic rope banisters. The state of Ohio would use the place as a youth hostel. They couldn’t afford to replace stone and wool with plastic and polyester.

“Rebecca?”

“Sorry. Hard to imagine the place being refitted like that. The historical preservationists… ”

“Have enough to do already. Bright won’t tear the place down, Rebecca. They’ll just scare away the ghosts.”

That wasn’t particularly funny, even though she knew he meant it to be. “Eric,” she said, and then stopped. No, she wouldn’t tell him she was going to be in Columbus today. Jan’s kids didn’t need to lower the tone of whatever exclusive restaurant he frequented for lunch. And Rebecca didn’t want to listen to his smooth, ever-so-slightly condescending comments about her curiosity and initiative. “See you tomorrow night. Thanks for calling.”

“See you then.”

Rebecca went on down to her room, put on some makeup, gathered her coat and purse. The Sorensons’ station wagon came clattering along the drive and she shouted up the staircase, “I’m leaving now.”

“Happy huntin’!” Michael shouted back.

The dark, clean limbs of the trees shone in the morning sun. The dusting of snow was gone, leaving only a fragile rim of ice on the dovecote. Darnley was basking on his stone wall. Rebecca climbed into the car, buckled up, and said “Good morning!” more brightly than she really felt.

The radio was predicting a winter storm on Saturday. “Can we build a snowman?” asked Mandy from the back, where the children were immobilized like papooses in snowsuits and car seats.

“Of course.” Jan turned the car onto the road. “And how are you?” she asked Rebecca.

Rebecca told her.

“You found it in the kitchen cabinet?” Jan exclaimed. “Hadn’t you already looked there?”

“I’d looked everywhere. Someone brought it back, that’s all. Maybe they’re all in it together, Warren, Katie, Dorothy, the Pruitts, the cat. There’re traffic jams of malefactors at night.”

“I must admit,” Jan said, “that at first I thought you were being a bit paranoid. But you’re not being paranoid when someone’s really out to get you.”

The countryside sparkled as if it had been varnished, brown fields transformed into bronze, gray houses into silver. The sky was a deep cobalt blue, implying unplumbed depths of light. The last time I came this way, Rebecca thought, Eric was playing “Music from the Hearts of Space.”

The brightness of the day made even the city look attractive. They passed the Ohio Historical Society on the outskirts of town and Rebecca waved at the diaries. Jan actually found a parking place not too far from the Bureau of Records. Soon they were in a long room beneath fluorescent lights which glanced off nondescript linoleum, desks, and microfiche readers.

Margie had said Dorothy was born in 1933. Rebecca got the appropriate transparencies from the gum-chewing girl behind the counter while Jan hauled an orange plastic chair into a corner. She plunked the children down behind it and opened a sack of toys. “Okay,” she said. “Imagine the chair is concertina wire. Do not pass.” Brian and Mandy began to fight over a G.I.Joe figure.

Rebecca settled herself at a reader and started plugging in plastic sheets. Names and numbers crawled like neon insects across the screen. “Well,” she said when Jan appeared in her peripheral vision, “that didn’t take long. Dorothy Anne, born to Samuel Norton and Ruth Kordelewski.”

“Okay,” said Jan. “On to Plan B.”

“Katherine Gemmell Brown’s death certificate? Yeah, well— she was born in 1901. She’s probably long gone.” Rebecca flicked the switch on the viewer and the screen went out. A tiny bulb in the back of her mind went on. She swung around in the chair. “What was it Margie said about Dorothy that time? That she’d had a quickie marriage and divorce back in her flaming youth days?”

Jan’s brows shot up her forehead. “You think she might have… ”

“Married Katie’s son!” Rubbing her hands in anticipation, Rebecca turned in her transparencies and claimed some new ones. “1952. It had to have been. They got married, couldn’t live on love, Katie tried to hit up James for a handout for them!”

Jan scooted in Rebecca’s chair. “And Louise never knew about it!”

“Why should she? She didn’t overhear the entire conversation between Katherine and James. And the marriage was just a flash in the pan, here in Columbus beyond the range of the Putnam gossip radar. It didn’t work, he left, Dorothy married Chuck Garst and settled down.”

“It’s worth a try,” Jan said. “I’ll check some of the death records while you go through the marriage licenses.”

The lurid green letters unreeled before her. Nothing. Rebecca blinked, her eyes hurting, and turned around with a frustrated sigh. Jan was feeding her children animal crackers and paper cartons of juice. “Any luck?”

Jan mopped at a small mouth. “If she died, she did it somewhere else. How about you?”

“If Dorothy got married, she did it somewhere else.”

“It was just a rumor,” Jan returned. “You know how rumors are.”

“Yes, I do… . “Another mental bulb flared. Rebecca leaped up, did a modest approximation of a grand jete, and distracted the attendant from her bubble gum by asking for the birth certificates for 1953. “Rumors,” she explained to Jan. “How better to handle rumors of pregnancy than to claim a marriage? If Katie was at Dun Iain with Dorothy in 1952, and Dorothy was pregnant, the baby might’ve come in early 1953.”

“All right!” Jan’s wicked grin was tempered with caution. “But that doesn’t explain why Katie butted in. Maybe her son was the father, yes, but then, why didn’t she get him to marry Dorothy?”

“Let’s make a leap of faith and assume Katherine was actually telling the truth. She met Dorothy in church. An unwanted pregnancy would sure drive me to prayer. Maybe Katie had had some kind of born-again experience and was trying to make up for her past greediness by helping poor little Dorothy. They were both from Putnam, after all. Maybe that letter from James, about shaming the memory of her parents, brought her to her senses. That’s why he never heard from her again after helping her kids and Dorothy, too.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Jan, and Rebecca turned back to the reader.

She realized she was whistling “The Trooper and the Maid” under her breath as the blotches of print unfurled. “Bonnie lassie I’ll lie near you now, bonnie lassie I’ll lie near you— something, something, in the morning I’ll no leave you.” Yeah, that’s what they always say.

“There it is!” Rebecca exclaimed, and bit her lip, hoping she hadn’t disturbed anyone else in the room. Then her thought exploded, emotional shrapnel searing bloody tracks in her mind. “Jan! Oh my God, oh Jan!”

“What is it? I thought you found it.”

“I found it all right.” Rebecca’s trembling finger indicated the words on the screen. “Look.”

Dorothy Norton, Ronald Adler. Male child. Eric. March 27, 1953.

“Adler?” said Jan. “Hey, there’s got to be lots of people in the world named Adler.”

“Eric Adler? My— our— Eric Adler is thirty-five years old. It’s him.” Rebecca’s voice thinned and twanged like a rubber band.

“Lord,” Jan croaked, “Of all the things I thought we might find, this sure as heck wasn’t one of them.”

The lines of print on the screen blurred and ran. Rebecca closed her eyes and opened them again, but the accusing name was still there. The letters were fuzzy, especially the “R” of Ronald and the “th” of Dorothy; “Norton” looked rather like “Horton”. It was only a copy of an old birth certificate, after all. The original had been typed on some clerk’s long-suffering typewriter, and the transfer to microfiche hadn’t helped. Only “Eric” was crisp, hand printed in ink after someone— Dorothy? his adoptive parents?— had given him that name.

Jan looked at the screen, brow furrowed. “Eric’s named Adler, though. Maybe Dorothy
was
married to Ronald, and Eric was taken into a foster home rather than adopted. Maybe his father’s family took him in. Did he ever tell you what happened to the people he called his parents?”

“Some kind of accident, I gather. It’s not the type of thing you ask.” Rebecca’s lips were so numb it was hard to speak.

“Looking for your roots has become fashionable,” Jan went breathlessly on. “Maybe he grew up under the name of his adoptive parents and then took ‘Adler’ after he found out who his father really was.”

Rebecca flicked off the screen, but the name still danced in front of her eyes, little smeary letters wriggling like bacteria. “He knows Dorothy is his mother.”

“Him not knowing would be stretching coincidence to absurdity. But I can see why he never told you, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Pearls before swine? No, someone who’s worked as hard as Eric to smooth his rough edges would never claim a relationship with a small-town slob like Dorothy. But he knows. So does she. No wonder she’s so partial to him.”

For a moment the women were silent. The fiche machines hummed only slightly less shrilly than the fluorescent lights. Car horns honked outside. Mandy and Brian’s voices ricocheted off the hard floor. More than one patron of the room sent dirty looks first at them and then at Jan.

“What about Katherine?” Jan said, sidling hurriedly toward her offspring. “Or do you even think she’s important any more?”

“How the hell do I know?” Rebecca stood up, her knees and back locking themselves upright. “Sorry. Let’s get out of here.”

Either the day’s bright sunshine had become as smudged as the old records, she thought, or the smoke of her burning assumptions clouded her vision. On the outskirts of Columbus Jan turned into a Shoney’s. They found a booth in the corner, ordered kid meals for the children and coffee and club sandwiches for themselves. Brian painted his plate with catsup, using a french fry as a brush. Mandy peeled the pickles from her hamburger.

Rebecca took a bite of her sandwich, chewed until it was the size of a baseball, then tried to wash it down with a gulp of coffee. Choking, she shoved the plate away. “And Michael said, way back when, that Eric was up to something. Did I listen to him? No.”

Jan raked her friend with an acute gaze, and for a moment Rebecca was afraid she was going to say something about Michael. But she said, “Is Dorothy blackmailing Eric into fencing the missing items for her?”

“The envelope from Sotheby’s? I’d wondered how someone with Dorothy’s limited background could sell something like the mazer.”

“Or is Eric masterminding the whole scheme?” Jan went on.

Rebecca rubbed her temples, rearranging rather than soothing the pain. “But it’s not a lucrative enough scheme to be worth the penalties. So petty, an item here, an item there. You don’t buy Volvos with that. You don’t risk disbarment. Only Dorothy would think such small amounts were worthwhile.”

“Maybe he’s just covering up for her, trying to get matters straightened out before anyone finds out. He must’ve been appalled to look up his long-lost mother only to find she’s up to her perm in embezzlement. How’d that go over with Benjamin Birkenhead?”

Rebecca snorted. “Real well.”

“You see? Come on, eat, it’ll make you feel better.” Jan followed her own advice by wrestling a piece of bacon from the edge of her sandwich.

Rebecca picked up her sandwich again. She nibbled at a piece of turkey, got that down, tried a bigger bite.

After a time Jan said, slowly and carefully into the depths of her cup, “Eric had access to the house without romancing you, you know.”

“I know.”

“But the shine’s already gone off that relationship, hasn’t it?”

“That obvious, huh?” Without waiting for Jan to reply, Rebecca went on, “I know there’s something beneath that glossy surface. But I’m beginning to wonder if he’s spent so many years hiding it he’s lost it himself. Such slickness is a kind of dishonesty, I think.”

“I think so, too. But that was what you wanted, once. What do you want now?”

“The truth.” Rebecca smiled wanly at her friend, motioned to the waitress, and grabbed the check.

On the way back to Putnam she listened only halfheartedly to the prattle of the children and to Jan’s remarks on the landscape and the weather. Her thoughts crawled as painfully as wounded soldiers across the no man’s land of her mind. And I thought this was going to be such an easy job. Instead of the Erskine letter I find assorted ghosts, a punk, and an alcholic housekeeper, a slick lawyer, a teddy bear of a sheriff and a porcupine of a historian with a tartan chip on his shoulder and sensibilities deeper than any heart of space.

Jan dropped Rebecca off in a parking area deserted except for the Toyota and the Nova. The two cars were facing different directions, giving each other the cold fender. “You going to be all right?” she called. “I’m just at the end of the phone line.”

“I’m okay. Thank you for putting up with all of this.” Rebecca walked into Dun Iain. She stood in the entry as the ashes of the past drifted like snow around her, piled up in the corners, made ridges and banks in the corridors, muffled all footsteps, living and dead… .