Aurora 04 - The Julius House (13 page)

I hugged Martin, sliding my hands around his waist and up his back.

“Roe,” he said hesitantly.

“Um?”

“Are you mad?”

“Yes. But I’m working on it.”

“Working on it.”

“Yeah. I suppose you didn’t tell me all that before we got married in case I wouldn’t marry you if I knew it. Is that right? Or did you just hope I wouldn’t ever ask? Or did you just think I was desperate or stupid enough not to notice that there were a few holes in your story?”

“Well. . .”

“I’ll give you a clue, Martin. There’s only one correct answer to that.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t marry me if you knew.”

“And that was the correct answer.”

“Good.”

“So now I have to decide how I feel about you wanting me to enter into marriage, a very serious thing, not knowing all the facts about your life. Am I flattered that you were so anxious to keep me that you wouldn’t risk it? Sure.” I traced his spine with my fingernail and felt him shiver. “Am I angry that you treated me like some fifties little woman, the less I knew the better?

You bet.” I dug the fingernail in. He gasped. “Martin, you have to be honest with me. My self-respect—I can’t stand being lied to, no matter how much I love you.”

The next day, the day I was going to have Sally Allison over to lunch, Martin and I had also been invited to dinner at the home of one of Pan-Am Agra’s division chiefs. This man, Bill Anderson, was a new employee, hired by Martin’s boss and sent to Lawrenceton to evaluate and expand the plant’s safety program. So I woke with a certain sense of anticipation. Martin was shaving as I groped past him into the bathroom for a quick stop on my way downstairs to the coffeepot. We were beginning to find our routine.

He liked to be at his desk when the other Pan-Am Agra executives arrived. And Martin always looked spic and span. His clothes were all expensive and he liked his shirts taken to the laundry to be starched, which frankly suited me. I didn’t mind in the least dropping them by or picking them up. I hated ironing worse than anything in the world, and Martin, who could do a competent job of it, didn’t have the time or inclination unless there was an emergency.

Luckily, we both liked noncommunication until coffee had been consumed. He would come downstairs and make his own breakfast and pour his own coffee. By that time I would have finished the front section of the paper, which I had fetched from the end of the driveway. He would read that, then I would hand him the inside sections. Martin was not much interested in team sports, I had noted silently. One-on-one sports, now that was something he checked the scores on.

When Martin had finished the paper and his breakfast, we had a brief conversation about appointments for the day. He went upstairs to brush his teeth. I poured another cup of coffee and worked the crossword puzzle in the newspaper.

He came downstairs, gathered his briefcase, checked with me to make sure we didn’t need to talk about anything else, told me he was going to be out of his office most of the afternoon, and kissed me good-bye. He was gone by seven-thirty, or earlier.

I felt we had made a success of mornings, anyway. So far.

This morning Angel reported about eight-thirty.

“Shelby says,” she began without preamble, “that we need to find out if an aerial search was made, particularly of the fields around the house.”

“Hmmmm,” I said, and made a note on my list. “I’ll remember to ask that at lunch. A local reporter is a friend of mine, and she’s coming over for lunch.”

“You sure have a social life.”

“Oh?”

“You’re always having people over, or you go out, or people call you, seems like.”

“I grew up here. I expect if you were still in the town you were born in, it would be the same.”

“Maybe,” said Angel doubtfully. “I’ve never had that many friends. When I grew up, we lived way out in the swamps. I had my brothers and sisters. What about you?”

“I have a half-brother, but he’s in California. He’s a lot younger than me.”

“Well, except for some Cubans, it was just us out there. We pretty much kept to ourselves.

When I was a teenager, I began to date . . . but even then, I was usually glad to get home. I wasn’t much good at small talk, and if you didn’t talk and drink, they wanted to do the other thing, and I didn’t.”

We smiled at each other for the first time.

Then Angel clammed up, and I realized she would only speak about herself in rationed drips, and I had had my allotment for the day.

We went out into the bright spring air to measure the outside of the house. Then we measured each inside room and drew a detailed map of our house.

“I guess sometime having this will come in handy,” I sighed, a comparison of figures having shown that the walls were only walls and not secret compartments with grisly contents. So much for a hidden closet.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Angel said drily. “The next time someone wants to know how to get to the bathroom, all you have to do is tell him to go forty-one inches from the newel post, due east, then north two feet.”

I stared at her blankly for a second and then suddenly began to laugh.

Maybe our strange association was going to be more fun than either of us had anticipated.

Angel looked down at the plans.

“There was something in the attic,” she said.

“What! What?”

“Nothing, most likely. But you know the chimney comes up from the living room, runs up one end of your bedroom where you have a fireplace, goes through the attic and out the roof.”

“Right.”

“It seemed to me that in the attic there was too much chimney.”

“They might be sealed up in there,” I said breathlessly.

“They might not. But we can see.”

“Who can we call to knock it down?”

“Shoot, I can do it. But you got to think, here, Roe. What if there’s nothing there? What if you’re just knocking down a perfectly good chimney for the hell of it?”

“It’s my chimney.” I crossed my arms on my chest and looked up at her.

“So it is,” she said. “Then let’s go. You go up there and look, and I’ll go to the garage and get a sledgehammer and one or two other things we might need.”

I let down the attic steps and climbed up. In the heat of the little attic, with sunlight coming in through the circular vent at the back of the house, I calmed down. The attic was floored, with the old original floorboards, wide and heavy. They creaked a little as I crossed to look at the chimney. Sure enough, the bricks looked a little different from the bricks downstairs, though I couldn’t say they looked newer. And the chimney was wider.

I remained skeptical. I felt sure the police would have noticed fresh brickwork.

Angel came up the stairs in a moment, the sledgehammer in her hand.

She eyed the bricks. She slid on a pair of clear plastic safety goggles. I stared at her.

“Brick fragments,” she said practically. “You should stand well back, since you don’t have safety glasses.”

I retreated as far as I could, back into an area where I could barely stand, and on Angel’s further advice I turned my back to the action. I heard the thunk as the hammer hit the bricks, and then more and more thunks, until gradually that sound became accompanied by the noises of cracking and falling.

Then Angel was still, and I turned.

She was looking at something in the heap of dislodged bricks and mortar chips.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed.

I felt my skin crawl.

I scuttled over to Angel and stood by her looking down as she was doing.

In the rubble was a small figure wrapped in blankets blackened by smoke and soot.

My hand went up over my mouth.

We stood for the longest moments of my life, staring down at that little bundle.

Then I knelt and with shaking hands began to unwrap the blanket. A tiny white face looked up at me.

I screamed bloody murder.

I think Angel did, too, though she afterward denied it hotly.

“It’s a doll,” she said, kneeling beside me and gripping my shoulders. “It’s a doll, Roe. It’s china.” She shook me, and I believe she thought she was being gentle.

* * *

Later on, after we’d both showered and Angel had called a mason to come repair the chimney, we speculated on how the compartment had gotten sealed up, how the doll had been left inside. I figured that the story of Sarah May Zinsner’s desire for a closet and her husband’s sealing one up out of sheer cussedness had its basis in whatever had happened by the chimney.

We ended up deciding that she’d ordered an extra frame of brickwork for shelving, to store—

who knew what? Maybe she’d intended the shelving for the use of the maid who may have been living in the attic. But that final change had been the straw that had metaphorically broken John L. Zinsner’s back. He’d had the shelves bricked up, and while the mason was working, perhaps one of the daughters of the house had set her wrapped-up “baby” temporarily (she thought) on the shelves. Now I had it, all these years later, and it had scared the hell out of Angel and me.

Somehow, when my mother called while I was slicing strawberries for lunch, I didn’t tell her about my morning’s adventure. She would be horrified that I was looking for the Julius family; also, I didn’t care to relate how deeply upset I’d been when I’d seen that tiny white face.

For once, she didn’t sense that I was less than happy. That was remarkable, since we spoke on the phone or in person almost every day. She was all the family I had, since my father had moved with my stepbrother to California. That was something I had in common, I realized, with the Julius family. They had been nearly as untangled from the southern cobweb of family connections as I was.

“I had a closing this morning,” Mother said. She was as proud of each sale as though it were her first, which I found sort of endearing. When I was in my early teens, when she’d begun to work but before she was independent and very successful, I’d felt each house she sold should be celebrated by a party. Mother seemed just as driven now as she had been after she’d separated from my father and become a needy wage earner; my father had never been too good about sending child support payments.

“Which one?” I asked, to show polite interest.

“The Anderton house,” she said. “Remember, I told you I had it sold last week. I was scared until the last minute that they were going to back out. Some idiot told them about Tonia Lee Greenhouse.” Tonia Lee, a local realtor, had been murdered in the master bedroom. “But it went through.”

“That’ll make Mandy happy. By the way,” the similar names had reminded me, “we’re going to dinner at Bill Anderson’s tonight. You sold them a house, didn’t you? What’s his wife like?”

“Nice enough, not too bright, if I remember correctly. They’re renting, with an option to buy.”

After we said our good-byes, and I returned to my task at the sink, hurrying because the attic escapade had made me late, I tried to imagine what my mother would do in my present predicament—but it was like trying to picture the pope tap dancing.

Sally arrived punctually, in a very expensive outfit that she intended to wear to rags. Sally had been forty-two for a number of years. She was an attractive woman with short permed bronzey hair. She was neither slim nor fat, neither short nor tall.

During the past two or three years, Sally had been close to breaking into the big time with a larger paper, but it just hadn’t happened. She had settled for being the mentor and terror of the young cub reporters who regularly came and went at the
Sentinel
as they learned their trade.

For the first time, Sally gave me a ritual hug. It was a recognition of the big things I’d undergone since last we met, the fact that I was now a respectable married woman, and not only married, but married to a real prize, an attractive plant manager who presumably had an excellent income. This really can all be conveyed in a hug.

“You look great, Roe,” Sally pronounced.

I don’t know why people seem impelled to tell brides that. Is regular sex supposed to make you prettier? A number of acquaintances had told me how great I looked since we’d come back from the honeymoon. Maybe only married sex made you look better.

“Thanks, Sally. Come on in and see the house.”

“I haven’t been in here in years. Not since it happened. Oh, who would have known there were hardwood floors! It looks wonderful!” Sally followed me around, exclaiming appropriately at each point of interest.

As I put lunch on the table, she told me all about her son Perry and the wonderful girl he’d met in his therapy group, and about her husband Paul and the shakiness of their new marriage.

“Surely you can work it out, Sally! You had such high hopes when you married him, and it’s only been a few months!”

“Fourteen,” she said precisely, spearing a strawberry with her fork.

“Oh. Well. Would marriage counseling help, do you think? Aubrey Scott is really good.”

“Maybe,” she said. “We’ll talk about it when Paul gets back from Augusta.”

“So, can you tell me all about the disappearance?” I asked gently, when she’d poked at her dill pickle for a few seconds of recovery.

“Do you have the stories from the
Sentinel
?”

“Yes, the main one. I really want to know what you didn’t put in the paper, or what stuck out in your mind. Were you out here then?”

“Along with a slew of other reporters. Though I did get an exclusive for one day. The disappearance was really hot for a while, until a week had passed with no news. But being the local reporter paid off.”

Sally laid down her fork and opened her briefcase. She extracted a few pages of computer printout from a file folder.