Through an open window, p.22
Through an Open Window, page 22
“Now, Mouse,” he began, but she cut him off.
“How I wish Daddy was here!” she exclaimed. “He would’ve contradicted everything that man said, I just know it.” Nick’s silence conveyed a traitorous lack of accord, and Mouse turned to him, her eyes flashing. “Don’t tell me you buy all that horseshit. That man’s just looking to take advantage of Mother. You heard him. I’ve been at loose ends since my wife passed. Please. You hear about these kinds of people. They show up after somebody famous dies and they claim some sort of family rights or something. He could so easily have found out about Daddy. It was in the paper. Hell, all our names were in the paper.”
“But, Minnie,” said Nick, “take a breath and think about this. It’s like Culpepper said. John didn’t come looking for Margaret. She went looking for him.”
“Yes, and they both think a ghost told her to. For God’s sake, Nicky. You don’t believe any of this. You can’t possibly.”
Nick rested his arm on the steering wheel and looked out the car window, frowning. They were parked in front of Epiphanies Bookshop, its windows already decorated for Halloween with copies of classic mysteries and ghost stories strategically displayed alongside the Cinderella pumpkins and limp cheesecloth ghosts. “Well, I don’t believe in ghosts, if that’s what you mean,” he said, measuring his words. “But I don’t think I have to believe in them to understand why your mother might feel like this man is who he says he is. You heard what Culpepper told us, and it all seems pretty plausible to me. Yes, I’ll admit some of this other business is a bit…well, strange. I mean, that house your mother found, turning out to be the same house that he’s lived in for years. I can see where that’s hard for your mother to categorize as a mere coincidence. But weird things happen, I guess. Even if they’ve never happened to us. Mouse, some of the stuff my patients have told me would stretch your imagination till it snapped. More than a few of them have sworn they’ve seen ghosts, too, you know. Especially right before somebody dies. But, Minnie, you need to calm down. This’ll all work itself out.”
Mouse sighed theatrically and closed her eyes. “Nicky, when, in all the years you’ve been alive, has anybody ever calmed down just because you told them to?”
Nick laughed, which only made Mouse a bit madder. “I’m telling you,” she said, “something’s wrong with Mother, and that man is going to be trouble for her. For all of us. You notice, he didn’t mention a ghost until I brought it up.”
“Well, frankly, I don’t blame him for that.”
“He’s some kind of charlatan,” said Mouse, twisting in her seat. “I just know it.” She pointed her finger at Nick. “But if this…this John Dilbeck, or whoever he is, thinks he’s going to just waltz into Mother’s life and try to take Daddy’s place in our family…or, or get his hands on her house, or something like that, he’s got another think coming. I will not let that happen.”
“I don’t think that’s what he’s planning to do at all, Mouse,” said Nick, shaking his head. “From what I could tell of the man, he has no intention of taking your father’s place in anything, and you yourself heard him say he’d never live anywhere but on that little island, so why would he be interested in Margaret’s house?”
“But she’s invited him to stay there! With her! Sleeping in the guest room right down the hall,” said Mouse, glaring at Nick. “A perfect stranger! It’s not safe. And Daddy would never have allowed that, don’t tell me he would have.”
“Mouse, Tom is at the house with them. Believe me, I got a good look at John Dilbeck. Even if Tom’s lost a few pounds since having the flu, I still believe he could take him.”
“Don’t joke about this, Nick Moretti. Don’t you dare joke about this.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Nick, sighing, “I’m not.” He put the key in the ignition. After starting the car, he paused, then turned to look over at Mouse. “Honey, do me a favor,” he said. “Hold out your right hand.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it. For me. Hold your right hand out in front of you, palm facing the dashboard.” Mouse did as she was told, and they both looked at her hand. Her little finger sticking out like her mother’s. Mouse made a fist and pulled it back into her lap.
“His was pretty obvious, too,” said Nick. “You might want to think about that.”
Mouse swallowed hard. “Just take me home,” she said.
The shops on the square were dark now. Most closed early this time of the year. But as their car rolled slowly past Verbena Apothecary, Mouse saw Emlynn had left all the fairy lights on in the window. They lit up her mother’s old dollhouse like memory itself. Mouse closed her eyes as they passed. She didn’t need Nick to tell her she wasn’t handling this well, and most infuriatingly, she seemed to be the only one who wasn’t. Even the normally disdainful Tom had been quietly pliant tonight. Of course, Tommy had been acting out of character for days now.
Why was the prospect of her mother’s lost brother such a threat to her? Mouse had no idea. Her emotions had been strangers to her for months, and now a heavy dose of unfocused anger had been thrown into the mix. It was settling on top of everything else she’d been trying her best to tamp down. If she could’ve jumped out of the car at the next light, Mouse didn’t think she’d ever be able to stop running.
* * *
—
She slipped out of bed as soon as she knew Nick was asleep. Kitty Goldsmith answered on the first ring.
“What’s up?” Kitty said, and Mouse heard the tinkle of ice against glass.
“You’re not asleep yet, are you?”
“Oh, hell no. Pit Bulls and Parolees is on. It’s my new favorite show.”
“Well, good. I won’t keep you but a minute. Listen, Kitty. I seem to remember you told me about having to get somebody’s DNA once. Have I got that right?”
“Oh, yeah. Layla Calloway’s husband. She was a cousin of mine from Pooler. Her best friend had a baby that was the spittin’ image of Layla’s husband, Todd, but he denied it up and down like the asshole he is. I mean, the kid was born with a full head of red hair, just like Todd’s. Dead giveaway. But Todd wouldn’t own up. ’Course DNA don’t lie, and we nailed him that way.”
“How’d you do it? I mean, how’d you get what you needed?”
“Oh, easy peasy. Layla left a house key for me under the dog bowl on the back porch one night when she and Todd had gone out to dinner. So, I just let myself in and stole his toothbrush right out of his bathroom. Then Layla took a present over for that baby one day and snipped a bit of that red hair off the kid’s head while her friend wasn’t lookin’. We sent it all up to some lab and got the results back in two days. Layla’s living in Malibu now.”
“Thanks, Kitty,” whispered Mouse. “I owe you one. Talk to you later.”
Kitty’s voice was still crackling from inside the phone as Mouse pressed the off button and made her way quietly back down the hallway to bed.
23
Lawrie
Bright autumn sunlight sliced through a gap in the curtains, a vertical line of white that remained vivid on the undersides of Lawrie’s eyelids even after he’d turned over, away from the window. Beside him, Emlynn’s breathing was soft and slow, and he couldn’t stretch out his right leg, which told him the dogs were all up on the bed. Raising his head, he saw Eric, Ginger, and Jack snuggled tight against Emlynn, reminding Lawrie immediately of Cerberus himself. Their snores were deep and steady, a sound that on any other morning would have been comforting for Lawrie to hear and would have, no doubt, lulled him right back to sleep. But not today. He let his head drop back down on the pillow. Why, he wondered, was it such a lonely feeling to be the only one awake?
Emlynn sighed in her sleep. It was a delicate little sound, like a child’s, and it only made Lawrie feel worse. He’d snapped at her last night when she switched off the television without asking him if he’d mind. “I might have been watching that, you know,” he said, even though he couldn’t have told her what was on if she’d asked him. “I thought you were reading,” she’d replied, the hurt in her voice clearly perceptible, right below the annoyance. “You’re sitting there with a book open in your lap. Even if you haven’t turned the page in thirty minutes.”
That was the downside of a close relationship, he thought, watching Emlynn as she slept. The other person knows you so well you can’t hide anything. Even lying gets you nowhere. Last night had scrambled several of Lawrie’s assumptions about his family, and this had unsettled him more than he’d like to admit.
Pulling himself up into a sitting position, he looked around at the barely organized chaos that signified a blessed normality. Emlynn’s polka-dot dress draped across a chair, his Nikes kicked under the dresser, soft balls of fur settled into the corners waiting to be vacuumed away, all evidence that nothing of significance had changed. So why did he feel that it had?
Slipping out of bed quietly so as not to wake anyone, he crossed the room, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. He turned on the tap in the sink, splashed two handfuls of cold water onto his face, then stared at himself in the mirror. For the first time in his life, his brother didn’t stare back. Tom’s beard now obscured their resemblance.
Tom had remained strangely silent all through last night’s meeting with John Dilbeck, the man Lawrie supposed he should now refer to as his uncle. Lawrie noticed how quiet Tom had been only later. Of course, Lawrie had been preoccupied with concern for their sister. Sitting right next to Mouse as he’d been, he’d felt anger and doubt radiating off her like gamma rays. It was a wonder the whole left side of his body hadn’t been burned. He’d sat there, anticipating her impending explosion, as tense as a stretched rubber band.
But Lawrie had had no doubt John Dilbeck was who he said he was from the moment the man walked into the room. For one thing, the physical resemblance between him and Margaret was more than distinct, their profiles were exactly the same. And there was something in their voices, as well. He’d heard it clearly, that shared cadence and tone, those similar inflections, qualities you hear only in the voices of people who’ve crawled out of the same gene pool. Couldn’t Mouse hear it? Couldn’t she see?
But he had to hand it to his sister. She’d kept it together most of the evening, right up until the moment Margaret invited John to stay at the house.
“There’s no reason in the world for you to get a hotel,” his mother had said. “We have plenty of room, and so much to talk about, right?” Lawrie had recognized the look on her face, the one that would brook no refusals, the one Mouse should’ve seen. He could’ve told his sister her objection would be overruled.
“Mother,” Mouse had said, standing up. “I’m sure Mr. Dilbeck would be much more comfortable in a hotel. The Mimosa Inn is just down the street and it’s lovely. Besides, nobody likes to stay with strangers.”
Lawrie had then been reminded of a porcupine he’d once observed in a class back in college, that fascinating, slightly scary half second before the creature raises its quills. Most animals know this is the time to back off, but apparently, Mouse wasn’t as adept at reading the signals as he was.
“Mouse,” Margaret had said, standing up too, and leveling a steely gaze at her daughter. “Why are you being so rude?”
Her question had been tantamount to sticking a needle into a balloon. As they watched, all the air seemed to go out of Mouse while at the same time she whirled and spun off out of the room, leaving Nick to pick up her purse and apologize. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s not been herself. I better go take her home.”
Lawrie knew he should be happy for his mother. He should take his cues from the look on her face as she’d sat by John Dilbeck, listening raptly to his story. How could he help but feel happy for her? When she’d invited them all to dinner this coming Saturday, she’d squeezed Lawrie’s arm tight, whispering, “I’ll make pot roast. I know that’s your favorite.” But as he’d watched her walk off with both John and Tom by her side, something had gnawed at his insides, something he couldn’t quite name. He’d chosen not to tell Margaret she was mistaken. Pot roast was Tom’s favorite, not his.
Misjudging the cleft in his chin, Lawrie nicked himself and hissed out a curse to the mirror. Peeved, he placed a tiny bit of Kleenex over the cut and watched the white tissue turn red.
He wondered now if anybody else had taken the time to look John Dilbeck up online, as he had last night after getting back home. Lawrie had not been entirely surprised to learn the man was no mere shrimper, as he’d allowed them all to believe. By the time he retired six years ago, John had owned a fleet of fishing boats that sailed the deep waters of both the Gulf and the Atlantic, all the way from South Carolina to the shores of Galveston Bay. Their unassuming new relative could buy and sell the whole Elliot family a good five times over, at least.
After this discovery, Lawrie had, rather reluctantly, looked up what John Dilbeck had said about Tom. He’d thought at the time that the man must be mistaken—this was Tom, after all—but lo and behold, it was all there if you knew where to look. Lord, Tom had gotten some serious bad press in the industry weeklies. Apparently, it was equivalent to high treason for a commercial developer to take conservation’s side in a real estate deal the way he’d done. From the comments Lawrie had read on the internet, some in Tom’s business believed he’d made a journey to the dark side from which he might never return. This news had kept Lawrie awake most of the night, wondering if he’d ever really known his brother at all.
24
Margaret
The morning sky was beginning to darken, and an insistent cool wind had whipped up out of nowhere, threatening to pierce the old corduroy jacket she wore. Margaret stopped for a moment and buttoned it up. Tom and John were already paces ahead, and she’d lost sight of Jubal not five minutes after he bounded out of the Volvo. She could hear the dog barking excitedly now, somewhere out under the pecan trees. Margaret paused, hesitant to go any farther. Looking around her, she wondered now if she should’ve stayed home.
The paint on the For Sale sign out by the road had already started to peel, broadcasting the fact that qualified buyers were not lining up. She wasn’t surprised. She could see that both the house and the orchard had been relinquished to the vagaries of time long ago. This was no mere fixer-upper. Picking her way through the overgrown grass, she stopped at the bottom of the front porch stairs, squinting up at the once welcoming farmhouse, now rendered mute by the absence of people. The second-floor windows stared down at her like a row of unblinking eyes.
The first floor was dressed for a hurricane that wasn’t forecast. Windows boarded up tight, wood nailed across the front door. Margaret went around the side yard, holding back vines and pushing through branches, making mental notes of all the missing shutters and broken windows, till she reached the back of the house. Here the pecan trees still stood, their wide trunks now crowded with weeds and encircled by tangles of vines.
She could clearly remember how they’d looked on her wedding day, this steadfast army in green and brown, forever posted outside her bedroom window, marching off from the hyacinth garden, all the long way down to that sagging chain-link fence that had been the only barrier between this place and the Elliots’. The old trees still stood in ramrod-straight rows, their glory, though faded, abiding.
To her right, she could see Tom and John up on the back porch, both men standing on tiptoes trying in vain to see past the boards that covered the tall kitchen windows. Margaret didn’t need to see inside. As if they were whispers that only got louder as she acknowledged their presence, it was easy for her to hear those long-ago voices, see right past those boarded-up windows. She closed her eyes to picture it all.
Yes, there was the large metal box fan whirring in the center of the room, its breeze ruffling the aprons Aunt Edith and Ida Mae wore tied around their dresses. It was October, and a layer of hot, salty air had blown in from the coast. It hovered over Wesleyan with no apparent intention of moving. It was hot as July in the kitchen.
A bright blue bandanna was twisted around Aunt Edith’s gray hair, and her face was beet red from the steam rising from pots of boiling corn and pans of fried okra. Margaret saw her take a handkerchief from inside her sleeve and press it against her damp upper lip.
But those old rooms are all empty now, Margaret thought, opening her eyes. And the people she’d loved had all gone. That’s the thing about traveling back into the past. When you arrive, there’s nobody there. Looking over, she saw Tom jumping up and down, still trying to see in the windows. Turning, she walked out underneath the tall trees by herself, down the same row she’d walked on the day that she married, staring up into nothing but green.
Just as it had done on her wedding day, shade fell over her shoulders like water, leaves rippling and twirling in a quickening wind. Family trees, she thought now to herself. Each leaf allied with the others, on branches akin to one another and connected to something deep-rooted and strong. With her head held back, she watched one leaf break away, sailing out on an invisible current, up into the breeze all alone. It seesawed and swayed like a feather, floating and falling in slow motion, till it landed, right into her palm. She heard John’s laughter coming from the back porch, and she smiled.
Last night, Tom had gone to bed not long after carrying John’s suitcase up to the guest room, but Margaret had sat in the den with John till early this morning, telling him all about her life with Ida Mae and Aunt Edith, listening to the story of how he’d grown up on Enoree Island. Most of her stories, John already knew. Lawrence’s letters had apparently been regular.
