Prospect Street (19 page)

He paused in the middle of folding the sweater over his arm and looked down at her. “Dottie Lee?”

“There are no secrets on Prospect Street.”

His expression changed subtly. His easy smile hadn't quite achieved its usual width. She realized he wasn't happy that she knew his identity.

“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” she pointed out. “Most people are proud of their successes.”

“What successes are we talking about?”

“Scavenger.”

He finished folding the sweater. She took it off his arm to lay it carefully on a coat closet shelf. “I'm not ashamed of it,” he said. “It's just irrelevant. It's what I do, not who I am.”

“I don't know. I bet a large part of Scavenger
is
who you are. How can you spend that much of your life on something and not have it define you, even a little?”

“I like to think of myself as the man on O Street with the house he's putting back together a room at a time.”

She had taken a stroll to 31st and O several weeks before, just to sneak a peek at his house. It was a sprawling, turreted ode to Stick style splendor, painted in maroon, burnished gold and pale gray-blue, with a lot four times as large as her own. Next to its staid Colonial and Federal style neighbors, it was the chorus girl of the block.

She plunged in deeper. “Well, the mystery's solved about why it's taking so long. I've been by to peek, and the house is fabulous. But how many hours a week can you spend on it?”

He was clearly pleased at the compliment. “I'll have more if Scavenger is ever bought out.”

“Wouldn't that be traumatic?”

“Not even slightly. I like starting projects. Next time I'll be careful not to be so successful.”

She was used to the rich and powerful, so she knew better than to fuss. “Come see the kitchen.”

“Where are the kids?”

“Upstairs doing homework.”

“I bought enough for them, too.”

She guided him around boxes. The cabinets had arrived late in the afternoon and now took up the entire living room. She planned to move them, one by one, into the kitchen to finish them. “They probably won't eat. My mother took them down the street for hamburgers before she left this evening.”

“You, too?”

“I stayed home and swept up sawdust in the kitchen.” She stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Voila.” She flipped her hand in introduction.

“A wonderful empty space.”

She turned and discovered he was closer than she'd thought. She nearly bumped his collarbone with her nose. “Can't you see it? Shiny white appliances in place? Cabinets all refinished and gleaming? Bright red countertops and a peninsula that stretches…” She turned around again and gestured. “To there?”

“I can definitely see it.”

She stepped into the room, as empty as an echo chamber. “It's worth all the trouble. It's gorgeous.”

He stood behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “You know what I think? I think you're obnoxiously proud of yourself.”

“And well I should be.”

The weight of his hands was welcome. His pinky fingers massaged the very tops of her arms while his palms pressed and released in a slow, nonthreatening rhythm. She had forgotten how good it felt to be touched casually by a man.

“Did you feel this much pride in the last house you lived in?” The kneading continued.

“All I had to do in that house was choose from samples and nod at the architect. This feels like mine.” She paused, trying to focus on what she was saying. “Oh, and yours, too. After all, you're the one with the vision.”

“Mine?” He laughed and dropped his hands. She felt a stab of regret. “Does this mean I'll get a meal or two out of it?”

“I bet by now you don't even think I
can
cook.”

“Scrambled eggs with somebody you like is as good as a five-course meal.”

She faced him. “You really were the catalyst. I'm so glad you thought of extending the room. Someday I'll build that deck, and we can sit out on it and watch the lights come on over the water.”

“Something to look forward to.”

They stood staring at each other. She suspected Pavel was rarely at a loss for words, and as a child she had learned to fill the many silences of her parents' marriage. Now, oddly, neither of them seemed to know what to say.

“Mom, I…” Remy stepped through the doorway and stopped, staring at Pavel. Faith hadn't heard her coming down the stairs.

Faith recovered. “Pavel brought Thai food for dinner.”

“I don't want any.” Remy glared at him.

“How's school going?” he asked. “Feel like you're settling in?”

“Oh yeah. That'll be the day.” She made a point of dismissing him and turned toward her mother. “I need help with an English paper, but I can see you're too busy.”

“When's the paper due?”

“Tomorrow.”

“And how long have you known about it?”

Remy didn't answer.

“I
am
too busy,” Faith said. “You'll have to finish it by yourself.”

“You never used to be too busy.” Remy eyed Pavel again. “I guess everything's changed.” She stomped out of the room and back up the stairs.

Faith wilted, but Pavel squeezed her shoulder. “Come on, Faith. I'm impressed.”

“By what?”

“By the way you didn't let all that guilt she was slinging weigh you down.”

“She was, wasn't she?” Faith felt a little better that someone else had witnessed it.

“Tons. Megatons. I was shaking in my boots.”

“You're wearing sandals.”

“I was wearing boots when she started. This is all that's left.” He smiled warmly. “She does this often, doesn't she?”

“She's having a bad time.”

“Is it your fault?”

“In her eyes. I didn't hold the most important relationship in her life together.”

“Underneath all that anger, she understands why. She knows it wasn't your doing.”

For a moment Faith couldn't speak. After David's announcement, she had purposely shut herself off from the people who might have helped her. Women she'd known from the children's activities, friends she'd gone to school with. She had been too ashamed of her own failure. She had been afraid she would never pick herself back up again if she sank that low.

Now Pavel's support was particularly sweet.

“Thanks.” Her voice was husky.

“Faith, you need a night out on the town. When was the last time you got away from all this angst and just had fun?”

Fun was a foreign notion. Fun was something you provided for your children, trips to amusement parks and pony rides.

He read the answer in her eyes. “You're going to need converting.”

“What do you do for fun?” She really wanted to know.

“Good food. Good music. Any two-word combination with good at the beginning.”

Good sex. She wasn't sure where that thought had come from, although she suspected that standing this intimately with Pavel had jolted it out of her. For Pavel, having sex was probably like indulging any healthy appetite. Apparently it had never come with strings attached, with bells and whistles and wedding rings.

A night's entertainment. Fun.

“I know you're not divorced yet. And I know you're pretty traditional.” He held up his hand when she started to interrupt. “That's not slander. I'm telling the truth, but I think you're in danger of letting expectations get you down. Who could fault you for enjoying yourself a little after what you've been through? There's no reconciliation in the wings.”

He was almost echoing her mother. “Are you asking me out?”

A smile hovered at the corner of his lips. “Yeah, I think I am. One friend to another.”

“Like a practice date?”

“I wasn't thinking of it quite that way.”

She wasn't sure of the wisdom of accepting. He was funny and kind and, yes, enormously sexy—if you went for teddy bears with bedroom eyes. When he showed up on her doorstep, her day was automatically better. She didn't want a date to spoil all that.

“Tell you what.” She cleared her throat. “Here's the thing. What if we don't have fun? I mean, what if you find out I'm the most boring woman you've ever met? Then you'll stop coming over with takeout food and lists, and Alex will be angry with me.”

“What if I promise ahead of time not to find you boring?”

“I don't think you can.”

“Then what if I promise not to let that stop me? That we'll still be friends afterward, no matter how many times you trip over your own feet or chew with your mouth open.”

That sentence was punctuated by more footsteps on the stairs. Alex appeared. “Pavel, hey!”

“My man.” Pavel held up his palm and Alex slapped it. “Do you eat Thai food?”

“I eat everything. Do you want to see what else I did to the mousetrap?”

“Caught a rat in it?”

“Not yet. But he's hanging around my room. I found a nest of chewed-up newspaper in the corner.”

Faith shuddered. This was the first she'd heard of it.

“You breathe on it and the door falls,” Alex said. “Want to see?”

“Sure.” Pavel turned to Faith. “Well?”

“I'll dish up for you guys while you're gone.”

“That's not what I meant.”

She smiled at him. “Sure. Okay.”

“Friday? I can invite some friends along, and we'll start at my house so you can see the inside. We'll have fun.”

“I'll have to see if I can work out something with the kids.”

“Let me know.” She watched him follow Alex out of the room and wondered what she'd just agreed to.

I
n any family, life can change in a heartbeat. The next morning Faith rose early to make a trip to Wisconsin Avenue for bagels and fresh orange juice. By the time she returned, Remy was playing an hour-long variation of Chopin's “Minute Waltz.”

“I haven't heard you play in years.” Faith closed the door behind her. “I can't believe you remember that.”

“So?” Remy stopped in the middle of a measure and pulled the top down over the keys.

“I always loved to hear you. I was sorry when you stopped taking lessons. So was your teacher. You were her most talented student.”

“I was just killing time.”

Faith knew that one more word from her and Remy would never touch the piano again. “I got cinnamon raisin for you and blueberry for Alex. They're right out of the oven.”

“Mom!” Alex appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Faith wasn't even sure he'd taken the steps. “I got him!”

“Got who?” Then she realized what he meant. “The rat?”

“Lefty! Come see.”

“This is so gross,” Remy said. “This place is a shack.”

Faith was getting very good at not reacting. “Alex, remember, you can't keep him. I warned you.”

“You're going to be surprised. Big-time.”

She followed him upstairs, and Remy trailed behind.

Alex's walls were still covered with fading panels of peasants harvesting wheat and spinning wool, but otherwise his room clearly belonged to a budding young scientist. His computer desk took up one wall. Adjacent to it a table held electronics he had scrounged from neighbors, a fish tank filled with Venus flytraps thriving under a fluorescent bulb, a basic chemistry set, and a trash heap of mismatched cables and batteries. Pavel's trap claimed the opposite corner.

“Look at this.” He stooped beside the trap and, after exchanging grimaces with Remy, Faith did, too.

A white lab rat with eyes as pink as petunias stared back at her.

“Not just any rat,” Alex said. “A
scientist's
rat.”

“What's the big deal?” Remy joined them. “That's the rat I saw. So what?”

Faith got to her feet. “You've led a sheltered life. That's not your garden variety city rat. For that matter, it's not your typical trash dump rat, either. Alex is right. This is the kind they sell at pet stores and use in labs.”

“The kind they do experiments on.” Alex's eyes were as bright as Lefty's were pink.

Faith put her metaphorical foot down. “I hope you're not thinking about using the poor thing that way. Because you can't.”

“Just to run through mazes. Fun stuff. It'll be like an amusement park.” He sensed she was caving in. He pulled a long face. “I've never had a pet of my own, Mom.”

“This is so sick.” Remy abandoned the room. Faith heard her at the end of the hall gathering her things for the long walk to school. After the first week Faith had refused to drive them unless it rained. They were city kids now, and they needed the exercise.

“Let me make a call or two.” Faith ruffled Alex's red curls.

He rolled his eyes. “I can take him to the vet for a checkup or something.”

She was tamping down fantasies about escaped lab rats from Georgetown's medical school, fantasies that included bubonic plague and new strains of the Ebola virus. “Let me see if I can find one of the students who used to live here. I'll ask him if he knows anything about Lefty. Then we'll see.”

He looked hopeful. “Don't do anything until I get home. Promise?”

She saw them off to school and watched as they strolled toward Wisconsin. She wondered what the two sworn enemies discussed every day as they trudged up, then back down, the sloping avenue. They hadn't spent this much time in each other's presence since the summer they'd both contracted chicken pox.

She managed to reach her mother before Lydia left on the day's errands. Lydia, annoyed by the interruption and the news of a rat in her ancestral home, located the number of one of her former tenants. Faith was sure she would be waking the young man but felt no remorse.

By the time she hung up she was certain Lefty posed no threat. One of the roommates had “liberated” him from a psychology lab before Lefty could be sent to that great mouse hole in the sky. Lefty had been given the run of the house. If Alex wanted a rat who could negotiate mazes, he'd gotten the best.

She was tidying up the kitchen—a question these days of simply throwing out the trash—when the telephone rang. Pavel was on the other end.

“We're all set for Friday. Still on?”

“Absolutely.” She sounded a little too eager. Her dating skills had atrophied.

“Why don't you come here first for a tour? I can pick you up.”

“Don't worry about it. I'll walk, but I'd love to see what you're doing.”

“It might sour you on the process.”

She really
did
need a night out when looking at someone else's half-finished restoration sounded like fun. They settled on a time, but Pavel didn't seem inclined to end the conversation. “What do you have planned for today?”

She had told him about Lydia's visit and the revelations about Violet. “I'm going to work on the cabinets this morning. Then I think I'm going to head for the library after lunch and see what I can find out about the garden.” She paused. “Actually, about the house. I think I'm going to do a history for my mother. A thank-you present for letting us move in.”

Pavel was silent for so long she wondered if the connection had been severed. When he spoke, he was clearly feeling his way. “There's a lot of history connected to the house. Are you sure you want to be the one who digs it up?”

“You mean my sister's kidnapping?” She had given this a lot of thought in the night, when she always had more time to think than she wanted. It didn't seem strange to be discussing it with Pavel. In the brief time they'd known each other, they'd moved quickly beyond the usual social conversation.

She tried to explain. “For my whole life, Hope's kidnapping has been a cloud blocking the sun. I don't want to live that way anymore, and I don't think it's good for my mother. I want to put our lives and this house in some kind of perspective.”

She could almost picture Pavel considering. He squinted when something was on his mind, and he usually rubbed his fingertips along one stubbly cheek. Odd that she'd noticed and remembered.

“We all have things in our lives we tiptoe around,” he said. “Sometimes we need someone to lead us right through the middle of them.”

She changed the subject. “What's on your plate today?”

“If I told you, it wouldn't make any sense. It doesn't even make sense to me. Just don't tell our stockholders.”

She was laughing softly when she hung up; and smiling for minutes afterward as she prepared for the morning's manual
labor. She had taken steel wool to the cabinet that would hold her new sink before she realized just how much the simple exchange about the day's plans had warmed her.

 

The Georgetown Regional Library was, like everything else in the neighborhood, stately and imposing. In keeping with the area's fascination with history, the library housed the Peabody Room, a collection of documents relating to local houses, events and historical figures. Faith knew that was the place to begin her search.

Once she'd found her way around and settled at a table, she waited until the librarian was free. She was an African-American woman about Faith's own age, soft-spoken and well versed in the potential and limitations of the collection. Faith explained what she was looking for as succinctly as she could.

“And you said the address was…?” The librarian was too thin, but pretty, with eyes that were a shade darker than hazel and lips that formed a perfect heart.

Faith told her, and watched her perk up with interest.

“That's the Huston house?”

“I'm Faith Huston Bronson,” Faith acknowledged.

“Dorothy Waylins.” The librarian extended her hand, but she was either too tactful or experienced to make a fuss. “We have quite a bit about your house. But the documents that come to mind don't go back that far.”

Faith cut to the chase. “You probably have a lot on my sister's kidnapping.”

“We have an entire scrapbook the staff put together at the time. A driver's license, credit card and solemn oath on the oldest Bible in the collection will give you access.”

Faith gave a perfunctory smile. “Today I'm going further back.”

“Let's see what we can find. We have information on chain of title, assessment records, houses and buildings and the alterations that were done. We also have local maps, plats….” Dorothy shrugged. “You name it, it's here somewhere.”

It all seemed too easy, but Faith could feel her excitement growing. “It looks like I'll be spending some time at that table.”

Dorothy gave a regal nod. “Just let me warn you, this can become an addiction. You and I, we'll know each other pretty well before you're finished.”

 

The next two days followed a pattern. Faith got the children off to school, then worked on the cabinets until her arms felt ripped from their sockets. Afterward she showered and wandered toward the library, stopping at Marvelous Market along the way for something to munch. Although she liked the physical labor, the library portion of each day was her favorite.

By three-thirty on Friday afternoon, Faith had roughed out a simple history of the house. It had been built in 1885 for a man named Jedediah Wheelwright, who was Faith's great-great-grandfather and the husband of Candace.

By Georgetown standards, the row house was a teenager. There had been other buildings on the site before it, the history of which Faith was still trying to track down. But she did know that Jedediah wasn't a rich man. He, like others in the neighborhood, worked on the canal, and purchasing the house, which was inexpensive even by the standards of its day, had probably sent him into an early grave.

Candace supported herself after Jedediah's death by making hats. Faith even found a small advertisement in a newspaper of the day claiming that Wheelwright Millinery was the only shop for “ladies of distinction.”

After Candace's death the house passed to her only child, Violet Atkins, and her husband, James. Violet and James lived there until their deaths several years before granddaughter Lydia and her husband Joe moved in.

Although she had grown up in the house, Millicent, Lydia's mother, never lived there as an adult. She moved away after her marriage to Harold Charles, whose prestigious career with the State Department necessitated stays all over the globe. Millicent died of malaria contracted during a tour in the Congo.
Harold, who was considerably older, died in a fatal car crash two years later.

And finally Lydia took the stage. Rudderless and alone, she fell in love with Joe Huston in the months after her father's death. Faith guessed that the brash politician with all the answers had appealed to a young woman adrift. The lovely debutante with the surname that opened all the right doors in Washington had appealed to a man trying to establish a political future for himself.

Faith felt as if she'd caught a glimpse of the stream that had washed her into the world. Names. Dates. Occupations. Every fact she discovered made her feel more a part of her own history. She wasn't researching a residence so much as the source of that stream. The house was merely a spring that had husbanded and nourished her ancestors.

And she had obviously been at the library too long.

“You look like you're enjoying yourself.”

Faith looked up. An older woman, clad in a navy designer suit that even Lydia wouldn't have found fault with, was standing across the table from her. Her short hair was silver, and every strand was as disciplined as a private in a dictator's army.

“I am.” Faith tried to place the stranger but couldn't.

“I can't imagine why. The books you've been looking through are even worse than the ones they gave me.”

“Are you researching a house? Or a person?”

“House. I'm having my music club for a recital next week, and I know somebody's going to ask more than I know. They always do. This time I want to sound informed.” She grimaced, an expression that was foreign to a face that had been rigidly schooled in wrinkle prevention. “I would much prefer to let someone else do it….” She wandered off.

“Who was that woman?” Faith asked Dorothy when she stopped by a few minutes later. She couldn't shake the thought that she ought to know her.

Dorothy smiled, as if to say that names were off-limits. But she did give a hint. “During the Reagan administration she and Nancy had lunch together whenever they could coordinate their
calendars. She flies out to California at least once a month now to continue the tradition.”

“I doubt she's in the Peabody Room too often.”

“You'd be surprised the number of people like that. They want the facts, not the stacks.”

Faith digested that. She couldn't imagine anyone not finding this look at the past as fascinating as she did.

Dorothy started to leave, but Faith stopped her. The look at her family history had led her to consider the portion that had affected her most deeply.

“You mentioned that you have a scrapbook on my sister's kidnapping?”

“I wondered how long it would take you to ask.”

“I don't have time to go through it today, but I wonder if there are any articles I could copy, just to start?”

“Are you going to be around a little longer?”

Faith looked at her watch. Remy and Alex were due home from school at any moment, but they would be all right for a little while. Technically Remy was old enough to babysit. Faith could try using her cranky cell phone to leave a message.

“Another twenty minutes or so,” she told Dorothy.