Bellweather Rhapsody (44 page)

“Agatha Christie,” she says. He’s looking at her. She’s very pretty. Her face is bright and open as a little girl’s, though she’s clearly much older than that. “Would you like me to read it to you? Out loud?”

He has a roommate at this hospital, a little mouse of a man whose name is Teddy. Teddy lifts his head and croaks, “Hell yes. Please.”

Despite the fact that these are his sentiments exactly, Hastings resents that his roommate is speaking for him.

So the girl reads him Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. Hastings sits up straighter. In late January he’s allowed to start shaving himself again, and snaps leaves from the aloe plant the girl brought him whenever he nicks his chin. She comes every Sunday; if she can’t come Sunday, she comes Saturday. She reads him P. D. James and Dashiell Hammett. One day, he asks if she’s his daughter.

“No,” she says softly.

“But I do have a daughter, don’t I?” he says. He knows he does. He remembers small shoes, shiny Mary Janes. He remembers a wedding dress, remembers dancing with a young girl in a wedding dress. “I know I do.” He shakes his head. “You aren’t her, though. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, Hastings,” she says.

That night, a man comes to him in a dream. Or maybe it isn’t a dream. It feels very much as though he’s awake, but it’s dark, well past visiting hours, and there’s a funny man, balding, chubby, glasses held together in the middle with a piece of tape, sitting in the chair where the girl normally sits.

“Hi, pal,” says Rome. “Miss me? Just kidding. I’m always here. Say, listen. You know you completely lost your mind for a while there? I mean completely, Hastings. Trust me when I say you don’t want to know.”

But he does want to know.

“Nope, you don’t. Not yet.” Rome looks around the dim room, the old-fashioned hospital beds, the dreary linens and curtains. “So this is what your tax dollars were paying for, back when you were a taxpayer.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“It’s not so great either.”

“The girl makes it better.”

“The girl, the girl, the girl.” Rome rubs his expansive forehead with his thumb. “You know who she is, Hastings? I’ll give you a hint. She isn’t Caroline.”

Caroline
.

“Seen
her
lately?
She’s
your daughter. She’s the girl in the wedding dress,” Rome says, and slaps a palm on each knee. “Well, it’s been a gas. See you.”

Hastings wakes up and the man is gone.

He doesn’t tell the girl when she comes that week, but he does ask her to bring him a notebook, preferably college ruled, the next Sunday. He wants to write some things down, to keep track of the days. She does, and he’s doing his best to transcribe the particulars of his conversations with the man named Rome—he’s had several more since that first one—when he has a sudden, vivid memory of the last time he ever saw his wife.

He was standing behind his concierge desk. She was heading out the door, waving farewell to Caroline. Mother and daughter had been planning in the small ballroom, imagining where the flowers would go, how the tables might be set up for the reception. Now Caroline was staying behind, would get a ride home with Lily. Jess didn’t turn to wave at him. He was sure it wasn’t intentional; she was preoccupied with the wedding. In his final memory of her, she is pushing her way through the revolving lobby door, the strong late-afternoon sun lighting up the chamber like a shining carousel, transforming fingerprints into stars and comets. In ten minutes’ time, the same sun will blind a man in a pickup truck, and when he roars through an intersection, he will T-bone Jess’s two-door coupe.

When he looks up, he hears a quiet rustling in the hallway.

He puts down his pen. Beyond the circle of brightness cast by his book light, the room is dark. It’s late, around the same time that Rome typically comes. The rustling sounds like curtains, like fabric or petticoats.

“Jess?” he whispers.

And then he sees Caroline standing at the door of his room. His Caroline, his daughter, his strange lost little girl, translucent.

She isn’t wearing her wedding dress but he can hear it when she walks, the rustling of layer upon layer of white fabric. She’s in jeans and a green cable-knit sweater he can picture her lifting out of a brightly wrapped box, shedding sheets of tissue paper as she holds it aloft.

“Caroline,” he says.

“Hello.” Her voice is an echo. “Rome told me I should come. That you were lonely.” She sits in the girl’s chair and hugs her own arms. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

Hastings shakes his head. He hasn’t seen Caroline in such a long time. She’s so young. She
was
so young.

They sit in silence.

“Could I have—” He frowns. “Why did you choose to—”

Caroline laughs. It’s a cold dagger in his belly.

“I can’t tell you,” she says. “You won’t ever know.”

“Was there anything
I
. . . could have. Could I have helped?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I told Rome this was a bad idea.”

“Please don’t go,” he says. “Please stay. I don’t know why I even asked those questions. I know I can’t expect you to answer them. I suppose I can’t expect them to have answers.”

“Everyone was leaving. I missed Mom. I missed her so much. I was supposed to be in the car with her.” She lifts her eyes to his. “I could have saved her.”

When Hastings wakes, he discovers he’s written three pages of conversation between himself and his daughter. His daughter who murdered her unfaithful husband, who killed herself in shame and rage, who let her mindless pain and guilt animate her. The girl, his girl, whom he couldn’t save.

The next day, Hastings starts writing something else. Something new. One doesn’t spend a lifetime reading detective stories and not harbor a few fleeting fantasies about becoming an author of them. He has never tried writing like this before, writing fiction. It is fun. He likes how it fills his mind and his days. He’s writing a mystery, of course, and it begins with the horrible discovery of a body hanging in a hotel room. It looks like a suicide, but his detective hero—or heroine, rather; Hastings finds himself writing about a young woman—suspects there is more to the story. His girl detective seems to have existed before Hastings ever thought to put pen to paper, and he finds it is the easiest thing in the world to conjure her. She is tall. Quiet, with bright, shrewd little eyes. She is a librarian. She is constantly being underestimated, which, of course, she is just as constantly using to her advantage.

He works on a first chapter for three weeks before he’s ready to share it with the girl, who does him the honor of reading it slowly and carefully. It’s spring. She asks if he’d like to take a walk with her. He’s left his room occasionally, but this is the first time outside really
feels
like outside. Hastings is freer simply breathing the air. The girl takes his arm. He’s grown unsteady during his time at the state hospital, weaker and unused to movement, but it feels marvelous to have a friend by his side on a bright spring day. They sit in the sun on a small stone bench.

“Hastings,” the girl says, “what do you remember?”

He inhales. “Everything, I think. I remember working at the Bellweather for years and years. My daughter was married there. She died there, on the same day.”

“What else?”

“I remember
you,
” he says.

She hadn’t been expecting that. “Me?” she says. “Who am I?”

“You’re that little girl,” he says, and leans down close. “I am so sorry you saw what you saw.”

She hadn’t been expecting that either.

“They found you in the stairwell,” he says. “And now here you are, all grown up. You dropped your shoes in the hall outside seven-twelve. I remember how shy you were. How you thought squash courts were where we grew the hotel’s vegetables. And how
serious
you looked in that flouncy red dress. I’m sorry to say that I never learned your name.”

She laughs a shaky laugh.

Minnie’s full first name is Ermingard. She’s never talked about it with anyone she didn’t have to, anyone who didn’t already know. Ermingard. Who the hell names their little girl
Ermingard,
other than her Germanic great-grandparents on her mother’s side and her own mother and father? “Minnie” had always been a better alternative (not saying much), but when Hastings asks on that gentle April day, when she steps back and sees herself exactly as she is, Minnie realizes she’s wearing a name two sizes too small. It doesn’t fit. She’s still big physically, sure, but Minnie was the name of a scared little girl, a girl too terrified to grow up, a girl who lost herself in horror stories because they were safer than the real world. It was Ermingard who ran into the street to save a dog. Ermingard who returned to the Bellweather to face her fears. Who visits her fellow survivor every Sunday, a man who remembers her only as that scared little girl.

“Ermingard,” she says. “My name is Ermingard Graves.”

Hastings smiles at her. “What an unusual name.”

“Thanks,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s ever meant it.

It’s been six months since November. Six months, and in all that time Hastings has never given any indication that he remembers her from those four days at the Bellweather. That he remembers what he did. That he shot a woman—a woman who declined to press charges, so it’s unlikely he’ll ever
have
to remember. Though Ermingard will help him, if it comes to that, just as she’ll tell him his beloved hotel is closed, abandoned, the land for sale, but only if he asks. No one from the grounds crew shoveled the roof or the glass dome over the lounge, and as that November Sunday warmed, the dome broke, dumping five feet of dense melting snow into the swimming pool. It would have flooded just the lounge if the pool, old and heavy and out of code, hadn’t cracked.

The Bellweather is dead. Drowned.

She knows all of this because of Alice, who e-mails her at least once a week. Alice is convinced that the second shot Hastings fired that night, the shot that went wild, hit the roof. Broke a pane of glass and started a chain reaction. Ermingard may one day tell Hastings his hotel is closed, but she’ll never tell him he may have struck the fatal blow. Or maybe she will, when he’s strong enough. He might find it poetic. He might be inspired.

“Do you want me to bring you another notebook?” she asks. “You’re almost to the end of that one and your story’s just getting started.”

Hastings shuffles his feet beneath the bench. “Now that you bring it up, dear, would you be so kind as to bring me my old Underwood? It’s in my house somewhere.” He pauses. “Though perhaps it would be easier for you to find a new one.”

“Sure, Hastings,” she says. Her parents have an electric typewriter that they never use, now that they have a computer. They won’t miss it. She could take it with all the rest of her stuff in the move. She and Auggie are renting an apartment in Syracuse so she can work on a degree in library science at the university.

It was Mike’s idea to go to SU, to move—well, Mike thought of it first, but Ermingard made it happen. She talks with her brother all the time now, almost as often as she e-mails with Alice. They talk about everything—their parents, their sister, and their asshole brother-in-law. They talk about what happened when she was little and what happened last November. Mike is the only one in her family who knows the whole story behind her visits to the state hospital, also in Syracuse, every Sunday. Not that she’s keeping it a secret or anything. They know she goes, and they’ve noticed how she’s changed. How she stands straighter. Smiles more often. She isn’t Minnie anymore.

“Ermingard Graves,” Hastings says slowly. He narrows his eyes. “You may have noticed my story is missing a critical element. My detective doesn’t have a name. May I borrow yours?”

For years, Ermingard Graves has existed as barely more than a ghost, a spirit haunting herself. At last she is here in the world, the one girl who survived. But she isn’t alone.

She doesn’t trust her voice, so she nods and takes his hand.

For all the players who made this book possible, I am eternally grateful—starting with my agent, Bonnie Nadell, who is awesome, not least because she introduced me to Andrea Schulz. Thank you, Andrea, for loving this book, for seeing it so clearly, and for being so much fun to work with. My thanks to all the wonderful people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, especially Larry Cooper, Chrissy Kurpeski, Patrick Barry, Michelle Bonanno, and Liz Anderson. I’m indebted to Michael Mercurio and Cathy Weiskel for sneaking me behind the scenes at a Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra rehearsal; Steve Lay, my motorcycle consultant; Ron Clarke, who taught me to fire a handgun on Mother’s Day; and Kate Estrop, Tom Dodson, and the lovely folks of the Boston Writers’ Meetup and at
Printer’s Devil Review.

Thanks are due to my MGH family for their constant support (and to Angie Morey for sharing her symphony tickets), and to my earliest readers, cheerleaders, sanity-keepers, and, it goes without saying, friends: Jason and Karen Clarke, Rob and Karissa Kloss, Steve Himmer and Sage Brousseau, Kevin Fanning, Vanessa Ramos (LitTeamBoston 4-life), Laura Q. Messersmith, Krista Kitowicz, Rose White, Alyssa and Kristin aka the Sisters Osiecki, and my dear BAWs: Manda Betts, Sandra Lau, and Jenna Lay. None of this without you, still.

Dad, for plopping giant headphones over my tender ears, and Mom, for harmonizing with me in the car—for taking me to all those rehearsals and lessons, attending all those concerts and NYSSMA competitions, and raising me to believe music was not only fun but important—I can never thank you both enough (yes, even for making me practice). To all the VanSkivers and Racculias, thank you for filling my life with so many songs.

This book would not exist if I hadn’t been a music nerd in high school, if it hadn’t been for the other bassoonists (McKenzie Field and Tanya Maslak, I’m looking at you), all the bands and pits and orchestras, and all the conductors and teachers, especially Mr. D, in whose excellent company I learned to understand music, and to love it more than I thought possible.