Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
Maybe, Rory had thought as she poked through a rack of midriff-baring tops, Molly’s wardrobe can use a big sister’s female influence.
God knew Mom certainly had been useless in that department.
Then again, Rory figured, it wasn’t as if she herself is some fashion expert. She favors cut-offs and T-shirts, just as Molly does.
It was Carleen who’d had a real sense of style. She was always fooling around with a new look, wearing a drastic shade of lipstick, or curling and back-combing her straight, shiny hair until it was ratted and big in true eighties style. She used to try to make Rory over, too, but Rory never found it much fun to be teased and sprayed and plastered with goopy makeup, then forced into clothes that were uncomfortable and unflattering.
Besides, a new outfit isn’t exactly going to ease the pain of Molly’s discovery that she’s Carleen’s illegitimate daughter, or the gut-wrenching knowledge that her best friend might very well have met with a tragic, violent death.
“Well, you shouldn’t just take off like that,” Molly grumbles to her.
“Why? Did something happen around here that I should know about?”
“No, but if something had, no one would have known where to find you.” Molly’s tone is accusatory, but she isn’t looking at Rory. She’s sitting at the table, apparently reading the back of the cereal box as she munches.
“Okay,” Rory says, sitting down across from her. “I’ll make a deal with you. Next time, I’ll tell you where I’m going and where I can be reached. And you do the same. That way, if we need each other, we can get in touch. That’s fair, right?”
Molly shrugs.
“Kevin didn’t call yesterday while I was gone, did he?”
“Kevin?” Molly’s face lights up. “No, why? Were you expecting him to?”
“I just thought he might have gotten in touch by now. Then again, backpacking across Europe with his girlfriend, it’s not like finding a pay phone and making an overseas call is going to be utmost on his mind.”
“No, I guess not.” Molly’s expression is inscrutable
.
“I see that Sister Theodosia is still here,” Rory comments, motioning toward the nearby window overlooking the driveway, where the big black car was still parked when she pulled in last night. “She didn’t mention anything about leaving?”
“I haven’t talked to her. Why’d you bother inviting her here if you’re just so anxious for her to leave?”
“I didn’t invite her. I—”
“What, she just happened to show up after you said you were going to call and ask her to come?”
“No, I did call her. But as soon as I talked to her and realized she’s still the same, I changed my mind about inviting her.”
“Why would you want to invite her in the first place?”
“Because . . . I don’t know. Like I told you before, I thought she could help Mom.”
“How? By praying over her? What did you think she could do? God, Rory, you don’t know anything about anything that’s gone on around here for years.”
Rory is silent, pouring milk into her bowl of cereal. Molly’s right. She hasn’t been here. She doesn’t know. All she has to do, really, is get through the summer, just until Kevin comes back. She doesn’t have to make their lives right again.
She
can’t
do that, anyway.
It’s way more complicated than encouraging Mom to open up to an old friend, or giving Molly a fashion makeover. There are deep-rooted problems here, problems that might never be resolved.
The easiest thing to do is just get through the summer, and leave—go back to living her own life.
But is that the
right
thing to do?
Rory jabs her spoon into the bowl and shovels some cereal into her mouth, her appetite gone
.
M
ichelle hates to use the television as a baby-sitter for Ozzie again this morning, but it’s overcast outside, anyway, and he asked to watch a Berenstain Bears video. Now he’s happily settled in the living room watching Brother Bear and Sister Bear work through some Bear Country crisis, while Michelle, doing her best to avoid her own sense of impending crisis, busies herself upstairs, cleaning the spare room that’s going to be the baby’s nursery.
They won’t be needing it for a few months yet—they’ll keep the baby in a bassinet in their room, as they did with Ozzie, until he’s sleeping through the night. That way, Michelle can pick him right up and do wee-hour feedings without even having to get out of bed.
Lou has already cleaned all the boxes and clutter out of the future nursery, but the room needs a good scrubbing before they even think about painting or carpet. There are cobwebs everywhere, and the hardwood floor is covered in dust bunnies, and the whole place needs to be aired out.
She opens the windows, then drags her big canister vacuum cleaner in from the hall closet. Ozzie absolutely hates when she uses it, covering his ears and crying about the noise the whole time.
It
is
loud, and maybe it’s not such a good idea to use it, with him downstairs alone. She hesitates, holding the hose in one hand and an attachment in the other. If Ozzie called up to her from the living room, she wouldn’t even be able to hear him.
Still, it’ll only take a few minutes to do the dust and cobwebs. And she really wants it taken care of; she’s filled with more energy than she’s had in months, and this is the first chore on the ambitious to-do list she wrote this morning after breakfast.
Besides, what could happen? The doors are locked, and it’s not like Ozzie is running around playing with matches or climbing out windows
.
She knows him well enough to realize that he’ll be in front of the television set, mesmerized, until the video’s closing credits, same as he always is.
She decisively snaps the attachment on the end of the hose, pushes the ON button with her bare foot, and starts vacuuming. God, it’s ear-splitting. She stretches up on her tiptoes to run the attachment along the top of the window, then pokes it into the corner near the ceiling. A fine network of cobwebs, along with a small daddy longlegs, are promptly swallowed up without a trace.
Feeling better already, Michelle continues to work her way around the room, humming to herself, her own voice lost in the roar of the vacuum.
J
ohn Kline puts a fresh cup of coffee on his desk, sits in his chair, and adjusts the framed family photo on his desk, knocked askew by last night’s cleaning crew, as always.
He loves this photo and is glad Nancy insisted that they have it taken at J.C. Penney right before Christmas, even though he’d grumbled about it at the time.
“Come on, John, it’s not like I nag you about this constantly. You haven’t had a picture taken since our wedding day,” she’d pointed out, and it was the truth.
He glances at that particular photo—of himself, fifteen years younger, awkward in his tuxedo and sporting a full head of hair; and Nancy, slender and innocent in that white gown and veil. They’re looking at each other in unabashed adoration.
Things sure have changed, he thinks, glancing at the recent family photo. Still, despite his receding hairline and Nancy’s extra twenty pounds, they’re still looking pretty contented. In this picture, they’re joined by Jason, ducking those dark curls and wearing the embarrassed, forced smile one might expect of an adolescent boy forced to accompany his parents and sister to a shopping mall, wearing—gulp—a suit. Meanwhile, there’s Ashley, blond, pretty in her velvet jumper, and flashing the camera one of those knowing, slightly exasperated expressions so typical of girls who are fifteen-going-on-twenty-one.
Looking at Ashley makes him think, again, of Rebecca Wasner’s parents, and wonder how on earth they can possibly bear not knowing where she is, whether she’s dead or alive. If anything ever happened to Ashley—or Jason—
But it won’t, he reassures himself. Just because one girl happens to be missing doesn’t mean someone’s going to start kidnapping teenaged girls in Lake Charlotte again. No matter what the media is saying.
Needing a distraction, he reaches for the file filled with notes and measurements he made the other night over at Shelly and Lou’s. When he started working on some preliminary sketches late last night, he made a startling discovery
.
It was too late to call them then, and so far, this morning has been too busy.
But now he’d better get in touch with them, before something else comes up. He’s leaving to drive to New York for that conference before dawn tomorrow, and he won’t be back until late Friday night.
He picks up the phone and dials the number, thinking, as he does, that he and Nancy really should invite the Randalls over for a barbecue some Sunday afternoon. They all live right here in town, but, somehow, they seem to get caught up in other things and never make time for each other. He has a brother and sister, and his parents are living in Florida, but Shelly has no family left. Such a shame that Aunt Joy died so young, he thinks, shaking his head.
Shelly was completely devastated by that loss. In fact, she’s never entirely gone back to being her cheerful self.
The other night, she had seemed particularly stressed. In fact, she and Lou both had, he’d noticed at the tension-filled dinner table. Later, Lou had mentioned, as he and John were walking around the upstairs bedrooms while Shelly was ironing downstairs, that she’s been moody lately, imagining things, worried about the baby, who’s in a breech position. He’d said they’d spent all day Sunday at the hospital, enduring tests that had ultimately proven everything normal, aside from the baby’s position.
Lou had also told John about his recent promotion at the law firm, and that he’s in the midst of a difficult case at work, buried in research. Meanwhile, Ozzie’s in the throes of the terrible twos, and they’re trying to remodel the house.
Thinking back, John remembers the early days of his own marriage, when he’d been trying to get his architectural firm off the ground, and Nancy always seemed to be pregnant, or breast-feeding, and nagging him about something or other. He knows how challenging toddlers and infants can be, not to mention the frustration caused by a house that’s falling apart even as you struggle to fix it up. He and Nance had completely gutted their own fixer-upper, bringing babies home to stripped wallpaper and bare beams and gaping holes in plaster.
We’ve come a long way,
he thinks, looking back on that now-distant time of domestic discord.
Shelly and Lou need to know that everyone goes through times like this. We really should get together
.
As the phone rings on the other end, he decides to ask his cousin right now to pick a Sunday so they can mark it on the calendar. If they don’t reserve a day, it’ll never happen. It’ll be Christmas before they see each other again.
Then he remembers the baby. It isn’t due until August, but she probably won’t want to make plans for anything in the meantime. After all, it might come early. Both Ashley and Jason did. And given those early labor pains—and the way she was bustling around the kitchen the other night . . .
The “nesting instinct”—that was what Nancy called it.
There’s a click in his ear, and an answering machine picks up.
Hmm. Maybe she’s in the hospital having the baby right now, he thinks, as he listens to his cousin’s recorded voice.
“Hi, you’ve reached the Randalls. Michelle and Lou can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a message at the sound of the tone, we’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks!”
There’s a beep.
“Shelly, it’s John. Listen, I was going over the measurements I took the other night, and I noticed something very interesting. I’ll be out of town tomorrow, but I’ll be back Friday night. Call me back as soon as you have a minute—
if
you aren’t in the hospital in labor or anything,” he adds with a laugh.
He hangs up the telephone and looks back at the folder, at the rows of numbers he’d jotted down the other night.
Unless he somehow managed to make several mistakes with the tape measure—which is highly unlikely—there’s quite a discrepancy in the dimensions of the inside and outside walls of the Randalls’ home.
He’s pretty sure he knows what that must mean. The place is a classic Victorian, built in the mid-1800’s, when this area of northern New York State was a prime spot on the underground railroad route transporting slaves to Canada. John has seen quite a few houses built in Lake Charlotte during that era that have secret rooms, tunnels, even staircases, usually concealed behind false panels or bookcases.
Unless he’s mistaken, the house at 52 Hayes Street is one of them.
M
olly stands in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of Carleen’s closet door, inspecting her reflection, comparing it to the sheet of photographs in her hand. They’re wallet-sized senior portraits, and only one is missing, leaving an unevenly cut rectangular gap on one corner of the sheet.
Same color hair,
Molly thinks,
but I wish mine was straight, like hers
.