Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (22 page)

"Mrs. Steele? I called you on Monday. I'm the one who knows Alicia."

I could tell from the cross around her neck and her sweet droopy eyes that this part of the trip would not be in vain. She was a small woman with gray-blond hair, little curls on top. She had a sad face, the kind with a permanent frown, but something about her suggested she wouldn't close the door on me.

"I've come from Missouri," I said. "That's where Alicia is living now."

She was studying me through the screen: my pressed white shirt, my striped tie and khakis. I supposed I wasn't what she had expected.

"Has something happened?" There was concern in her voice.

"Oh, not to worry," I assured her as she led me into her dark-paneled living room. "She's a friend." That was my new tack, since the reporter approach hadn't worked before. I told her I knew Alicia because we were working on a story together, that I had been in Dallas on business and had some extra time.

"What's the story about?"

Without thinking, I told her it was about dogs. "We're both very fond of them."

"Dogs?" She frowned. "Alicia was terrified of dogs."

"Well, she loves them now," I said.

Mrs. Steele leaned back in her armchair. "I always liked them, but not Alicia."

We talked about nothing important, like the heat and her garden and how the actor Larry Hagman had grown up down the road. He was a local boy made good, she was saying, and he stayed close to home, a wonderful son to his mother. She brought me a glass of lemonade and offered me lunch, and though I was starving I told her that I'd already eaten. "Call me Jackie," she said after a while, and later, "Would you like to see Alicia's room?"

It was a two-bedroom house and Alicia's bedroom was in the back, still arranged for a twelve-year-old girl: dolls on the bed, pictures of horses on the wall, a pink vanity in the corner with a hairbrush and comb. I thought of my own bedroom, similarly preserved.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Jackie flipped slowly through a photo album.

"She was a darling little girl, our only child," she said wistfully.

All the pictures of Alicia were from girlhood. She was towheaded, often in a ponytail, the kind of little girl whose socks were always clean. In many of the pictures, she was opening presents or holding a new toy.

"She was a darling. Everybody loved her until..." Her voice trailed off. Her broad brow, the way she held her head, reminded me of Alicia.

"What happened?"

She stood up abruptly, put the album in the closet, and pulled out another, handing it to me.

"This was hers. She left it here."

The first picture was of a boy, a skinny teenager, in a bright orange shirt from the 1970s, his long stringy hair the color of sand. His posture was slightly stooped, and he was standing next to a bunch of beakers in what looked to be a chemistry lab. The pages that followed were more of the same, the boy peering into his vials, sitting in a flimsy chair, pouring chemicals from jar to jar.

Alicia was in only one photo. She stood behind the table where the boy had been, resting her chin in her open hand, gazing into the camera. Her hair was long then, past her shoulders. She looked tired and sullen.

On the following page, the boy was lying on a slab of concrete, curled up like a caterpillar, death white, with red rims around his glazed-over eyes. The pictures, taken up close, were from all angles. There must have been twenty in all, the photo album ending halfway through with a front-on shot taken from the floor.

"What's wrong with him?" I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew.

Jackie Steele sat at the end of the bed, softly crying.

"We started to lose her when she met that boy," she said. "They thought they were Romeo and Juliet."

I had flipped through the pictures with amazing detachment, as if they were casket shots of Billy the Kid or mob figures from the thirties gunned down in the street, as if I were reading about some massacre on another continent, four hundred people with no connection to me, just lines in the newspaper, a grieving mother with her hands upraised. I had turned the pages with a macabre interest, not considering what the pictures might mean.

The story Jackie shared was about a bored, unhappy, gifted boy, the most promising student scientist in the region, who had somehow managed to catch Alicia's eye. He was her first love—she was only fifteen—and everything he said was gospel to her. He was three years older, a vast difference at that age, and he waited around for her, working at the Woolworth's instead of going to college.

Somewhere along the way, the two of them made a suicide pact.

"They felt they were too good for us," Jackie said. "They were too good for Weatherford and too good for the world."

The boy was a crackerjack chemist. He had won scholarships to attend a number of colleges, but on Valentine's Day, 1973, he poured two glasses of poison and drank the first one down.

"What happened to Alicia?"

Jackie was wiping her eyes with the collar of her dress.

"She thought better of it."

After the suicide, Alicia became a town pariah. The boy's parents thought her partially responsible, but no charges were ever pressed. She stayed another few months but dropped out of high school, and by the following June, she was gone.

For a while Jackie managed to keep track of her—she was working as a waitress in Albuquerque, selling Navajo jewelry in Taos; she had a government job in Denver for a time—but as the years went by and the letters were returned, it was clear that her daughter would never come home.

In the spring of 1987, when Howard Steele was dying of lung cancer, Jackie hired a private investigator to find Alicia. He located a phone number for an Alicia Whiting in St. Charles, Missouri, but when he called, the woman at the other end said her parents had been dead for years.

"He was the best private investigator in Texas," Jackie said. "He swore to me that it was her."

By the time I returned the rental car, I had only twenty minutes to catch my plane. By some stroke of luck the right train came first, dropping me off at terminal 4E just as the ticket takers were closing the door.

The plane took what seemed like a tour of the airport. I thought of the boy, those pictures, how they had almost looked familiar. But now the distance was closing fast. They hadn't come from a newspaper. I'd never seen them before. These photos were real, this part of Alicia's past undeniable.

Outside the window, the airport was under expansion, construction everywhere. Atop a long girder, a hundred feet in the air, stood a hardhat. As the jet engines roared, preparing for takeoff, the hardhat was walking toward the end of the beam. And he seemed to be suspended there, standing in the sky, oblivious.

WHEN I TURNED
the key in my apartment door, it was unlocked. I panicked, rushing down to the building manager's office.

"I think someone's robbing me."

"You're kidding," he said.

He handed me the phone so I could call the police.

This part of St. Louis had become dangerous over the past couple of years. We'd had two thefts since I'd been here, one in the summer and one in October. Signs had been posted in the elevators and on the bulletin board about not opening doors for strangers.

"Did you see anyone?" he asked.

"No, but my door was unlocked. They're probably in there now, if they haven't already robbed the place."

"So you haven't been inside the apartment—"

I was dialing 911, telling him, "Those robbers are probably armed. I wasn't about to go in there."

The building manager was confused.

"And you're sure it's not your girlfriend? I let her in there around six o'clock. She said she'd lost her key."

"My girlfriend?" I hung up the phone.

"Yeah, your girlfriend. She's real nice."

"Right," I said. "Would you mind coming up with me, on the off chance that it's not my girlfriend?"

"Sure, I'll come up if you want. But I've been sitting here all day. Nobody got past me."

He followed me up to my apartment, standing behind me while I slowly opened the door and looked in.

"Hello?" I called out. "Anybody here?"

It was quiet inside. I turned the corner from the foyer, stepping cautiously into the living room.

The apartment was full of boxes. They were stacked two high, enough to cover half of the living room. Most were sealed, but a few had sheets and towels, kitchen appliances, knickknacks pouring out. In a daze, I went into the bedroom.

Alicia's clothes were strewn all over, on the bed, tossed over chairs, thrown in with mine in the open drawers of my bureau. I apologized to the building manager for the misunderstanding.

"I know how it is with women," he said. "Give them an inch and they take a mile."

Alone, I sat on the couch, small amidst the boxes. On the coffee table was a note, signed
A.A.W.:
"I took the scanner. Look for me on TV."

I was half asleep on the couch when Margaret called.

"I'm glad it's you," I said, and I meant it.

She told me that she was just calling, no reason, that she was having trouble sleeping at night, that her dreams had become increasingly terrible.

"Arthur's death is haunting me."

I'd been thinking about it too, I told her, even though I never knew him.

She asked me whether I'd made any progress with my research.

"I've just returned from Dallas," I said. "The strangest thing happened there."

I told her how I had gone to Alicia's mother's house, a humble little place outside of Weatherford, how her mother turned out to be a perfectly sweet woman. I said that we'd talked about nothing in particular at first until she began to trust me, showing me Alicia's bedroom and a couple of old photo albums.

"So, she handed me this second album," I said. "I opened it up and started turning pages, and then—you're not going to believe this, but there were pictures in there of a dead person."

I was speaking slowly, making no effort at drama, since drama was hardly necessary. "The dead person was Alicia's first boyfriend."

Margaret gasped.

"Several pictures of him, actually," I added.

I told her what Jackie Steele had said, how it was meant to be a double suicide, how the boyfriend was a bright young chemist who had mixed up some kind of poison, drinking it first with the understanding that Alicia would follow. "They were a couple of hopeless romantics. At least one of them, anyway."

"That's really quite something," Margaret said. "I'm returning to St. Louis tomorrow. We'll talk again soon." Then she hung up.

The intercom buzzed around half past ten.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"A friend," said the voice. It was a woman, but that was all I could tell. The voice was muffled, the sound of someone talking through her hand.

"A friend?" I was trying to sound coy. "Who's that?"

"A visitor," she said. "Come to pay tribute to a noble soul."

I pushed the button to buzz her in and paced the cramped living room, timing her ascent on the elevator to my apartment—doors opening on the first floor, past the second to the third, doors opening again.

I listened for her footsteps at the door, then stepped away, standing by the kitchen counter, where I could watch her come in and look less than surprised. My heart was beating fast. There was a knock at the door. Hadn't the building manager given her a key?

"Just a second." I walked to the door, deliberately slow, and looked through the peephole: outside were my mother and Thea.

"What are you two doing here?"

Part of me wanted to break down in front of them, tell them the truth from Alicia's first phone call, ask them to show me a way out. I was nervous now, not yet for myself, but in the way that a moviegoer gets nervous when the good guy's in trouble.

"What's going on here?" my mother asked, looking around, She picked an apron from one of the boxes and held it out in front of her.

"I wasn't expecting you until Friday," I said, stuffing what I could back into the boxes.

"Well, here we are!" She put down the apron, fixing her eyes on me. "We were hoping to surprise
you,
but it seems
you're
the one with all the surprises."

"Just a minute." I rushed into the bedroom and closed the door, throwing Alicia's clothes into the closet, stuffing her underwear and nightgowns and pantyhose back into my bureau drawers, kicking what was left under the bed.

My mother opened the bedroom door. "What's going on?"

"I thought you were coming in a couple of days," I said. "The place is a mess."

I was holding a pink satin bathrobe behind my back. I sat down on my bed, shoving the bathrobe under a pillow.

"We have this new reporter on staff," I began. "We just brought her in from Texas. She's on the investigative team, looking into ... I think I told you already." I sensed that I was doing very poorly, that my face was turning red. "They asked me if I wouldn't mind storing her things for a few days while she found an apartment. She's a dynamite reporter. It was the least I could do."

My mother was looking around, then headed for the closet. I made an arc for the living room, cutting her off.

"You certainly do put up with a lot." She followed me out of the bedroom. "How do they expect you to live like this?"

I told her it wasn't so bad, that I'd been incredibly busy and hardly ever came home. "This reporter is a major talent and sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the good of the team." I tried to sound enthusiastic.

"And where is she staying, this reporter? Not
here,
I hope."

"Oh no, God no. They've put her up at a hotel. The Adams Mark—down by the river? She shouldn't be there long."

I was tapping on the kitchen counter, shifting back and forth. I was sure I could not have looked more guilty.

"And where were you planning on putting
me?
" my mother asked. "In that park across the street? Where? Out in the hallway?"

I shook my head. "I told you already—I wasn't expecting you until Friday."