New England White (45 page)

CHAPTER 50

HOUSE OF TOYS

(I)

F
RANK
C
ARRINGTON LIVED
in a pretty but exhausted Victorian not far from the Town Green—the spot where, in the official story, poor DeShaun Moton had picked up Gina Joule the night he supposedly murdered her. Julia stood on the front step. Icicles dangled from aging gutters. A part of her knew she should not be here, especially with Vanessa in tow, but the teenager had refused to wait in the car. Julia was feeling like a bit of a teenaged sneak herself. She had picked her daughter up from Smith’s house, where she had gone, secretly, to borrow the device that now snuggled in her mother’s purse. She could not afford to wait another day, because Old Landing wore a
CLOSED
sign, and Vera Brightwood said Frank was leaving town.

“I just stopped by to see Shirley,” she lied almost before Frank had the door fully open: Mrs. Carrington had taken a bad fall on the ice two days earlier, providing Julia with the necessary excuse. “How’s that ankle?”

“It’s better.” Glancing past her to Vanessa, who stood fidgeting on the walk. “I’ve sent her to her folks in Vermont.” Inclining his head. “I think I might follow her.”

“Why?”

“I warned you, Julia. I told you there are things I shouldn’t talk about. Well, you made me talk about them, and—well, there are people who aren’t too happy with me. Let me put it that way.” He caught her look. “Oh, no, don’t you worry. You’re married to the great Lemaster Carlyle. Nobody can touch you. But everybody can touch me.”

Julia asked if she and Vanessa could come in for a minute anyway, and he told her that he had nothing more to say. Then he let them in anyway, as she had known he would, because she was his best customer, and because he was the sort of man who could be pushed.

“Mind the toys,” he warned, leading them into a low room in the back of the house.

“Toys?”

“Uh-huh.”

They turned out to be toys of war. Model airplanes, tanks, ships, painted soldiers in their neat and—Julia suspected—precisely correct ranks. Dominating them all were the displays, the maps and battlefield dioramas that lay everywhere, their terrains painfully worked to include hills and little green trees and roads and rivers and crisp cards that gave places and dates, alongside little plastic markers to represent armies and navies.

Julia, who loved peace, was aghast.

But she asked anyway, to be polite, and Frank grew increasingly excited as he took them on a tour of the many battles he had never fought but obviously would have handled better than the generals in charge—Thermopylae, First Manassas, Second Manassas, Waterloo, the Bulge, and others that she forgot again a moment after he pointed them out—while Vanessa, who Julia had hoped would impress, stood like furniture, imprisoned by her shyness. He moved figures around on the boards with loving fingers.

“Very impressive,” Julia murmured.

Then the three of them sat around the room drinking Diet Cokes. In the middle of the floor, Frank seemed to be working on his most ambitious project yet, a diorama that took up most of the floor. Paints and bits of card and plastic armies were scattered all over the rug, and Julia envisioned poor Shirley trying to get him to straighten up after himself.

“So, what can I do for you?” he finally said. “Because, I told you, I’m all through talking about Gina Joule.”

Vanessa perked up at the name, then lapsed into her torpor once more.

“I’ve found part of the diary,” said Julia.

“Seriously? Arnie’s diary?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, and almost smiled. “So you should take it to the police. The papers. Get the truth out.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have enough of it to do that. But the part that I have does raise an interesting question.” She glanced at her daughter, who seemed to be dozing. “You told me last month that the day Arnold Huebner announced that the investigation was closed, he went to a meeting. He didn’t make his decision until after the meeting was over. Remember?”

“I remember.” But the haunted look was back in his eyes. He was the best source she had, perhaps the only source left alive, and something had him terrified.

“In the diary, Arnold Huebner says the same thing. That there was a meeting. But he doesn’t say who the meeting was with.” When this did not draw him, Julia went on. “You know, don’t you? You know who he met with.”

“The first selectman. That’s no secret.”

“Who else was there?” Stubborn silence. “In the diary, Arnold Huebner says ‘they’ told him to stop. Not just one person. At least two. So who else told him? Come on, Frank. I’ve read it over ten times. You know what else? Arnold Huebner didn’t write ‘I’ went to the meeting. He wrote ‘we.’ And you were his principal deputy. Not Ralphie Nacchio. You. I think you were at that meeting, Frank. I think you know who ordered Arnold Huebner to drop the case. I think that’s why you’re afraid, but it’s also why you’ve looked for the diary all these years. You admired Arnold Huebner and you watched them make him bend. You want whoever really killed Gina brought to justice. You just didn’t want to risk your family to do it. You needed a proxy. You needed me—”

Vanessa suddenly covered her face, telling Julia that she had gone too far, even before Frank Carrington exploded.

“You have no right! No right!” He was on his feet, the formerly mild visage splotchy with anger and fear. In his hand were the small-bladed, long-handled scissors he used to trim plastic for his toys. He looked ready to stab somebody. Instead, he put the shears away and pointed at the door. “I want you out of here. Right now. Just go, Julia. I mean it.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“I told you I’m not going to talk about it. I haven’t talked about it for thirty years, and I’m not going to start now. No, Julia. No more arguments. You’re too persuasive. Keep your mouth shut and go. Just go.”

Julia protested and cajoled, but Frank escorted his guests to the door, his fury crackling in the air like heat lightning. He said he would be leaving for Norwich, most likely tomorrow, and was never coming back to this horrible town. Silent Vanessa turned her head away, as if offended, or hearing sounds they had missed.

On the doorstep, chill wind nipping, Frank forced a calm into his voice. He was no less angry, but he was in control. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Julia. But I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”

“I understand,” said Julia, defeated. “I’m sorry.”

“Bad times in the Landing. That’s all.”

“I understand,” she said a second time, because she could think of nothing else. She had thought Frank Carrington a pushover, but fear can do amazing things.

Vanessa stood beside her, embarrassed at the failure of their mission, and by her mother’s obvious intimidation. The teen cast about for a way to turn defeat into victory, as the generals she admired always figured out how to do. Suddenly Gina was beside her, first time in ages, signaling urgently for her attention, and Vanessa, after an initial period of trembling resistance—
If you look at those things too long, you’ll turn into one of them!
—turned to listen. Gina got up on her toes and spent half a minute or so whispering in her ear, until Vanessa finally nodded.

“Mr. Carrington? May I use the powder room?”

The former deputy sighed as if to say this always happened in the end, then pushed the door wider, and pointed down the hall. “Second left,” he said.

Vanessa turned to her mother. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“I’ll wait here, honey.”

Worried about her. Naturally. Vanessa said, “How about if you start the car and get the heater going?”

“I’d rather wait.”

“She’ll be fine,” said Frank, annoyed.

“He’s right, Moms. I’ll be fine. I promise. But you have to wait in the car.” She leaned over and kissed her mother on the forehead. “Trust me,” she said softly. “Please.”

(II)

V
ANESSA HURRIED
into the powder room—she really did have to go—and heard the front door slam, and the antiques dealer’s booming voice commanding her to let him know when she was done. She stood in front of the mirror, adjusting her braids, listening to Gina’s further advice, and stoking her courage. You are here, Gina was saying. You might as well find out.

Then she stepped out. “Mr. Carrington?” she called.

Voice from the family room studio again, no trace of welcome. “I assume you can find the front door.”

“I just wanted to ask you one more thing.”

“I have nothing more to say. I’m sorry.”

Vanessa stepped down into the room, where the antiques dealer was brushing blue paint into his diorama as a river took shape, bowing in like a topped V, and another river, already painted, bowed back toward it, and Gina murmured that she could do this one, she could, yes, and she heard Frank Carrington’s voice wanting to know why she was still here, and she looked and looked and raced through the hundreds upon hundreds of maps stored in the amazing memory that no one ever respected because they did not respect what she put in it, and at last a light went on and the student-who-could-have-been whispered from deep inside her,
Volga.

He was growing angry again, and squaring to throw her out, but she kept her eyes down.

“What are you staring at?” he demanded.

Vanessa pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the diorama. “The terrain is wrong.”

“What did you say?”

“It’s too green. There shouldn’t be trees or grass. Most of it was barren.”

His eyes grew wide, fear and fury mixing. “Miss”—had she been male, it might have been “boy”—“I hate to say it, but you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Excuse my French.”

She moved closer, fingers still extended. “This is the Kalmyk Steppe, isn’t it? Due south of Stalingrad.”

“Is that so?”

“This is Operation Blue, summer of 1942, when the Germans are winning. I
loved
that one.” A sliding motion of her hand. “The Fourth Panzers, curling south and then shooting north again, and nobody to protect the Steppe except some sailors rushed in from Siberia or someplace.”

“There were tanks. T-34s.”

“Just sailors. Marines, maybe. No tanks.”

“Barbarossa,” he said, eying her. “Not Blue.”

“No. By summer it was Operation Blue. If Hitler had just gone after the oil fields and not insisted on taking the city, he might have won the war. Thank God he was such a military idiot.”

“How do you know all that?”

Vanessa allowed herself a grin. “I guess I like to read.”

“About war?”

“Yes.”

“Famous battles? All that?”

“Uh-huh.”

Frank Carrington did not really smile—she did not think his facial muscles ran to that—but he did grunt and twist his face in a grimace that might have meant delight at discovering a long-lost relative or dismay at learning that the tests were positive. “Funny hobby for a girl.”

Vanessa nodded. “At school they all think I’m nuts.”

“Funny thing. In the village, they think I’m nuts, too.”

She searched for an appropriate response. Gina, who loved Emily Dickinson, supplied it. “Then there’s a pair of us,” Vanessa recited from Gina’s dictation. “Don’t tell.”

(III)

O
UTSIDE, IN THE
E
SCALADE
, Julia began to grow nervous. How long did it take to use the bathroom? She wondered whether she had been wise to leave Vanessa alone. She worried the problem over in her mind. Usually so decisive, Julia could not figure out whether to ring the bell again or not. The sun passed behind a low winter cloud and took her confidence with it. She shivered and turned the heat up and pressed the button to direct more of it to her legs, even though the cocooning warmth made her drowsy. The familiar dream came, fleeing through winter woods, a fearful night creature nipping at her heels—

A tapping on the window, like claws on a corpse.

Julia started, then shook herself awake. On the passenger’s side of the car, Vanessa stood impatiently, stamping her feet against the cold.

Odd how Julia did not remember locking the doors.

“What were you doing all that time? I was worried about you.”

“We talked.”

“About what?”

“What we went there to talk about.”

“That meeting?”

Vanessa nodded. “But first we talked about Stalingrad.”

Julia’s foot hit the brake, but the Escalade was still in the driveway. “About what?”

“Stalingrad. Worst battle of World War II. Maybe of all time. Ended in the winter of 1943, and probably turned the war.”

“Oh.” A pause while each waited for the other. “Ah, and what did you decide about…Stalingrad?”

The answer was a long time coming, and echoed, sepulchral and distant and touched with tragedy, as if Vanessa was orating at a funeral a long way off. “That the only human lives we really believe are precious are the lives of the people we know well. Everybody is willing to sacrifice other people’s lives.”

Julia, stung, took a few seconds to realize that this was not a slap at her personally. She decided to let it go. “I see,” was her only comment.

“You don’t believe that, do you?” A smirk? No, no, just the usual sardonic innocence by which Vanessa evaluated the world outside her own mind and perceptions. “Or you don’t think you do.”

“I believe every single life is precious,” Julia said quietly, but firmly.

“Even unborn ones?”

Oh, Heaven! Oh, help! Vanessa never asked her mother’s opinion on matters of morality, and Julia, none too certain of her own ethical perceptions, preferred to keep it that way. “I, ah, I’m not entirely convinced that those are lives.”

“Father Freed says they are.”

“People have different opinions on that question,” said Julia, fighting her way out of a conversational corner into which she did not remember backing. “Even different religions have, ah, different opinions. And that’s why, uh, why nobody has the right to, uh, to impose…ah, their view on a disputed issue….” She ran down. She had lost the thread. I tall seemed so clear and obvious, sitting around Kepler lamenting the assault on the most fundamental of all human rights, but, sitting in this too-hot car with her brilliant and inquisitive daughter, Julia found everything muddy and uncertain. She said, voice trembling, “Maybe we should, ah, talk about this another time.”