I
t was just fifteen blocks from the Hilton, about as far as
Oz is from Kansas. It made me remember myself as a kid,
bouncing around for a year of my life in places not much
better than this. Now I go through these neighborhoods and
the memory of rank and scummy beds hits me like a shot of
bad whiskey. It’s a chilly reminder of what life
hands out to those who slip and can’t climb up again.
The young seem unbothered by the lack of elegance: time,
they believe, will see them through it, and time when
you’re twenty is a thing you’ll never run out
of. You can sleep anywhere when you’re running on
your rims, and you don’t give too much thought to the
dripping tap or the cracked and faded walls or the mice
that come tearing across your landscape. The young endure
and hope, until suddenly they’re forty and time
isn’t what it once was. The old suffer and save their
hopes for the real things in life—a high, dry present
and a quiet place to die.
On the second floor of this environment, at the end of a
long, dim corridor, lived Amy Harper. The floor creaked
with every step and the walls were thin. I could hear
people talking—in one room shouting— as I
walked past the doors and stopped at 218.
Be there, I thought, and I knocked.
She was: I could hear her move inside. Soft footsteps
came at me and a soft voice asked who I was. I said I was a
friend of Eleanor’s.
She opened the door and looked at me through a narrow
crack. I could see a chain looped across the crack, a
little piece of false security she had probably bought and
installed herself. A man like me could break it with one
kick, long before she had time to get the door closed.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“My name’s Janeway, I’m a friend of
Eleanor’s.”
For a moment she didn’t know what to do. I got the
feeling she’d have opened the door if she’d
been there alone. But I could hear a baby crying and I knew
she was thinking about her children.
“Crystal gave me your address,” I said, and
at that she decided to let me in.
It was just what I’d expected—a one-room
crib with a battered couch that pulled out and became a
bed; a table so scarred by old wars and sweating bottles
that you couldn’t tell what color it had been; two
pallets for the children; a kitchenette with a gas stove
and an old refrigerator; a bathroom the size of a telephone
booth. There was one good chair: she had been sitting in
it, reading a paperback. Stephen King, the grand
entertainer of his time. God bless Stephen King when you
couldn’t afford a TV.
She had been nursing the baby: she still held it in the
crook of her arm. Her left breast had soaked through the
faded blouse she wore. She covered it, draping a towel over
her shoulder, excusing herself to put the child in the
pallet next to the other one. “So, hi,” she
said with a cheery smile as she stood and brushed back a
wisp of red hair. Crystal had called her a sweet kid and
the adjective seemed just right. Amy Harper had.the
sweetest face I’d ever seen on a girl. You looked at
her and saw a young woman who wanted to love you.
She couldn’t offer much—a cup of instant
decaf or a diet Coke maybe—but her manners were alive
and well. I let her fix me some coffee, mainly because she
seemed to want to. She went into the kitchenette, stand-up
room for only one, and turned on the gas. “So how is
Eleanor?” she called back across the room. Apparently
they had not been in touch.
“Actually she’s not so good,” I said,
sitting on the chair where she had been. “She seems
to’ve disappeared on us.”
She looked out of the kitchen, her face drawn and
suddenly pale.
“I’m trying to find her.”
“What’re you, some kind of
detective?”
“Some kind of one. Crystal hoped you could help
us.”
“If I could, God, you know I would. I
haven’t got a clue where she might be. Just a minute,
this water’s boiling.”
I heard the sounds of water pouring and the tinkle of a
spoon stirring in the coffee crystals. She came out with
two steaming cups, insisting that I stay in the chair. She
sat on the floor against the wall and looked at me through
the steam rising from her cup.
“I haven’t got a clue,” she said
again.
“When was the last time you saw her, or heard from
her?”
“Haven’t seen her in…must be more than
a month ago.”
“Any mail from her…cards,
letters…anything?”
“No, nothing.”
“I’m looking for one letter in particular.
I’m not sure if it’s had time to be delivered
yet. She may’ve mailed it Friday night.”
“To me, you mean?”
“We don’t know. Crystal thinks that’s
a possibility.”
“Probably come tomorrow then.”
“If it does, would you let me see it?”
“Yeah, sure, if it’ll help; I’ll do
anything I can.”
We sipped our coffee: I could see her running it all
through her mind.
“If she mailed something to me, it probably
wouldn’t come here. I haven’t seen her since I
moved into town. She’d send it out to my
mamma’s place in Snoqualmie.”
“Could we ride out there and see?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll have to take off from
work…my boss is a little touchy about
that…I’ll just tell him I’m taking off.
If he fires me, he fires me.”
“I don’t want you to get fired. Maybe I
could go check the mail for you.”
She shook her head. “No, I want to go too.
You’ve got me worried. Jesus, I hope she didn’t
hurt herself again.”
“Crystal said you were special friends.”
I saw a tremor of feeling ripple through her. “Oh,
yeah. She’s like my soul mate. I don’t
mean…”
I knew what she didn’t mean. She said, “We
were just great together, all through grade school, then
high school. We were inseparable. If I wasn’t
sleeping over there, she was over with my mamma and me.
We’d sit in our rooms and talk about boys, and the
drudgery of life at Mount Success.”
She gave a sad little laugh. “That’s what we
used to call Mt. Si High—Mount Success—because
so many of the people who went there seemed to go nowhere
afterward. They just stayed in that little town forever. I
never understood that, but now I do. Here I am in the big
city and all I want is to get back home.”
“Why don’t you? It’s only twenty-five
miles.”
“It’s a lot farther than that.” She
shrugged. “I had to get out of there. My ex lives
there and he’s bad news. If I went back, he’d
just hassle me.”
“Crystal said you and Eleanor had drifted apart,
then got together again.”
“The drifting was my fault. I married a guy who
was a jerk. Want some more coffee?”
“Sure.”
She got up, poured, came back, sat. “That’s
the first time I ever said that. My husband was a jerk.
There, maybe now I can get rid of it. He was a grade-A
heel.” She laughed. “Hey, it feels better all
the time. Maybe if I call him what he really was,
I’ll be good as new. Wouldn’t be very ladylike,
though.”
I let her talk.
“Ellie tried to tell me what he was like,
that’s why we almost lost it. I didn’t want to
hear that. But the whole time I was married to this fella,
and carrying his children, he was trying to make it with my
best friend. What do you do with a guy like
that?”
“You leave him.”
“Yeah. And here I am, bringing up my children in
this palace. Working in a bar and giving most of my money
to the day-care people. Wonderful, huh? But I’ll get
through it.”
I leaned forward, the coffee cup clasped between my
hands, warming them. “Amy, I don’t have any
doubt of that at all.”
She smiled that sweet smile. I thought of Rosie Drimeld,
the lighthearted heroine of
Cakes and Ale
. Maugham would’ve loved this one.
“The great thing about Ellie, though,” she
said, “is, she never let it bother her. The hard
feelings were all on my side.”
“But you got over it.”
“Yes, thank God. Even an ignoramus sees the light
if it’s shined right in her face.”
“And Crystal said you two got together again and
patched it up.”
“My mamma died. Ellie came to the funeral and we
cried and hugged and it was all over, just like that. Then
I found that stuff of hers…”
She looked away, as if she’d touched on something
she shouldn’t be talking about.
“What stuff?”
“Just some things my mamma had.”
“Things…of Eleanor’s?”
“Not exactly. Just…stuff. Papers in
Mamma’s stuff…it really isn’t
anything.”
I felt a tingle along my backbone. “Tell me about
it.”
“I can’t. I promised.”
I looked straight into her eyes. “Amy, whatever
you tell me, I’ll try not to let it out. That’s
all I can promise you, but this may be
important.”
Her eyes were green: her face radiated hope, her eyes
searched for trust. But she was also a child of this planet
who had begun to learn that you can’t trust
everyone.
“I don’t even know you.”
“Sure you do.”
She laughed at that and I laughed with her.
“You don’t know, do you,” I said,
“about the trouble she got in, down in New
Mexico.”
Her eyes opened wide. No, she didn’t know.
I told her.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I knew it, I knew
it, I just knew something bad was gonna come of this. This
is my fault, I should’ve burned it, I never
should’ve shown it to her.”
“Shown her what?”
“When Mamma died she left me some stuff. God, you
never saw so much stuff. My mother was a pack rat, that
house of hers is just full of stuff, it’s packed to
the rafters. You won’t believe it when we go out
there. I know I’m gonna have to start going through
it, it’s got to be done, but I just can’t face
it yet. I’ve got to soon, though…that house
just has to be cleared out.”
It seemed she had lost her drift in the maze of problems
she had to deal with. She got it back, looked at me, and
said, “There were some papers in Mamma’s
stuff…things I thought Ellie should see.”
I nodded, urging her with body language.
She got up and went to a little end table half-hidden by
the couch. I heard a drawer squeak open and saw her leafing
through some papers. She pulled out a manila envelope, came
over, and got down on one knee beside my chair. She opened
the flap and handed me a photograph.
It was an eight-by-ten black and white. It was Eleanor
in jeans and a sleeveless blouse, taken in the summertime
in good light. She was leaning against the door of an old
frame building, smoking a cigarette and smiling in a sly,
sexy way. “Nice picture,” I said.
But I looked again and in fact it wasn’t a nice
picture. It was her eyes, I thought, and that killer smile.
She looked almost predatory.
“It’s not her,” Amy said.
I turned the picture over. On the bottom, handwritten in
fading ink, was an inscription.
Darryl’s printshop, May 1969
.
I
sn’t that a kick in the head,“ Amy said,
looking around my shoulder. ”Imagine looking at a
mirror image of yourself, in a picture taken the year you
were born. I thought about it for weeks, you know, whether
I should show it to her or not. I knew the minute I saw it
that nothing good would come of it. I felt all along that I
should’ve burned it.“
“Why didn’t you?”
“It didn’t seem like I had the right. It
wasn’t my call to make.”
“What did you do?”
“One day I just showed it to her. She had come out
to Mamma’s to help me get started on going through
things. We putzed around all morning on the first
floor—I didn’t even want to go upstairs where
all this stuff was—and we were sitting in the kitchen
having lunch. It had been on my mind all morning, and I
still didn’t know what to do. Then she looked across
the table at me and said, ‘You’re like the
sister I never had, you’re just so special, and
I’m happier than you’ll ever know that
we’re okay again.’ I felt tears in my eyes and
I knew then that I had to tell her, there was no stopping
it, and the best I could do was put a happy face on
it.”
“How did she take it?”
“I couldn’t tell at first. I was hoping
she’d look up and shrug it off, say something like,
‘Yeah, I never told you, I was adopted,’ and
that would be the end of it. Then we could laugh about it
and let it blow away and I could rest in peace knowing
I’d done right by her. But the longer she sat there,
the worse it got, and I came around the table and took her
hands, and I knew for sure then that it had just knocked
her props out. Her whole world was scrambled, it was like
she couldn’t think straight for a long time, like she
couldn’t get a grip on what she was seeing. I put my
hand on her shoulder and said something stupid about what a
coincidence it was, but we both knew better. There’s
no way.”
“Then what happened?”
“She said she had to go home, she wasn’t
feeling well. And she left.”
“Did you see her again after that?”
“Yeah, she called the next day and asked if she
could come out to the house again and look through the
stuff in the attic. So we did that. I worked downstairs and
she sat all day in that hot attic, going through papers and
old letters.”
“Did she tell you if she found
anything?”
“All I know is, she didn’t
take
anything…just the one picture of this woman. I think
she made some notes though.”
“Were there other pictures?”
“There was a whole roll taken at this same place.
I think Mamma took them; it’s her handwriting on the
back and I know she was doing some photography then. There
were maybe twenty shots of different people.”
“Do you have the other pictures?”
“They’d still be out at the house, up in the
attic.”
“Were they people you knew?”
“Mostly, yeah: there were pictures of Gaston and
Crystal and Archie. God, were they young!”
“What about Darryl and Richard Grayson?”
“I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t know
them if I saw them. I think they were just friends of
Mamma’s, way back then.”
“Do you know if Eleanor ever told Crystal about
this?”
“No, and I wasn’t going to. I felt like
I’d done enough harm.”
“Then it’s possible they still don’t
know.”
“Yeah, sure it is. But we can’t tell them.
The last thing Ellie said to me was not to tell anybody,
especially not Crystal and Gaston. She made me promise I
wouldn’t.”
“It takes courage to break a promise like that.
Sometimes you have to, if the person’s welfare is at
stake.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think. Has anybody else
been up in that attic since your mother died?”
“There was a man who came, just after it
happened.”
“What man?”
“Just a minute, I’m trying to think, he gave
me his name. He said he was an old friend of Mamma’s
who saw the item about her funeral in the
newspaper.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Old…older than Mamma, even. Kinda
frail.”
“What did he want?”
“He said she had promised to help him on something
he was writing…some magazine article. She had some
information he needed to make it work.”
“Why didn’t he get it from her while she was
still alive?”
“He was going to. Her death was pretty sudden. She
was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for supper, when her
heart gave out.”
“So what did you do?”
“About this man, you mean?…I let him look
through the attic. I didn’t think there was anything
special or valuable up there.”
“This was even before Eleanor got up there,
then?”
“Yes, at least two, three weeks before.”
“And you don’t remember this man’s
name?”
“It’s right on my tongue, I’ll think
of it in a minute.”
“Did he take anything out of there?”
“Not that I remember. He did have a big canvas
briefcase with him. I suppose he could’ve put
something in that. I don’t know, maybe I
shouldn’t trust people so much. Do you think he took
something?”
“If you remember his name, I’ll see if I can
find him and ask him.”
She shrugged.
“You said your mother may have shot the picture
herself. Did you ever ask her about her life when she was
young—who her friends were, what they did, stuff like
that?”
“I was a kid. You know how it is, all I ever
thought about then was kid stuff. Now I wish I’d
taken more time with her, but then we were all into boys
and music and makeup. When you’re a kid, your parents
are probably the least exciting people in the universe. And
you never want to learn too much about them, you’re
always afraid they’ll just be human, have the same
failings and hang-ups you’ve got.”
“You said there was other stuff in the
attic…besides the pictures?”
“Tons of stuff…boxes and boxes of records
and papers and letters. It just fills up that
attic.”
“What was the purpose of it? Did she ever tell
you?”
“She always said she was going to write a book
about Mr. Grayson, who had been her friend for
years.”
“Did she tell you how they met?”
“No.”
“What about your father?”
Her brow furrowed: dark clouds gathered behind her eyes.
“What about him?”
“Who was he?”
“Just a man Mamma knew. He wasn’t around
long.”
“Was his name Harper?”
“What’s that got to do with Eleanor? My
father’s been nothing in my life.”
“It’s probably got nothing to do with
anything. It’s just a question a cop asks.”
“My father’s name was Paul Ricketts. I
don’t know whether he’s dead or
alive.”
“Was he there then?”
“When?”
“The year we’re talking
about…1969.”
“He must’ve been, at least for twenty
minutes.” She blushed a little. “I was born
that year.”
“Where’d the name Harper come
from?”
“It was Mamma’s family name. She never
married this man. I really don’t see why you’re
asking me this.”
I backed off. I didn’t want to lose her.
“I’m just trying to find out who was there,
who’s still around, and what they might know. What
about this book your mother was writing?”
“She never wrote a word, never had the time. It
was always tomorrow. ‘Tomorrow I’ll get
started.’ But tomorrow came and guess what?…She
didn’t have the time. She always had to work two jobs
to keep me in shoes and have good food for us to eat. And
then that other Grayson book came out, you know, by that
woman at the
Times
, and that put the kibosh on it. Mamma knew she’d
never write anything after that.”
“But she did keep the material?”
“She never threw away anything in her
life.”
The thought that had been building in my mind now
occurred to her. “Are you thinking maybe Eleanor
found something up there in Mamma’s stuff that caused
her to go to New Mexico and break into that
house?”
“There’s a fair chance of it. That does seem
to be where everything started coming apart for
her.”
“Damn. Makes you want to go out there now and
start looking through it, doesn’t it?”
“If that’s an invitation, I’d love
it.”
She shook her head. “The house is dark,
there’s no power, they turned off the lights three
weeks ago. And I’ll feel a lot better tomorrow
without the kids. I can drop ‘em in day care at
seven-thirty and we can head out then.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I’m as anxious as you are. I’m just
not crazy about having my kids spend the night in a dark
house in the country…you know what I mean?”
“In the morning then.”
But she was my one real link to the past and I hated to
leave her there.
Then I realized I didn’t have to.