“Hello, dear.” Did that sound too cheerful? Was it forced and artificial?
Yes.
“I can have dinner ready in twenty minutes.”
“Fine,” he said, kissing her cheek.
And wasn’t that small act a bit too perfunctory? Did Rouge seem more distracted than usual?
Ellen sensed his pain or something akin to it. A sickness? She felt an impulse, some vestige of the mother she used to be in the days when she had two living children. Her hand was rising to touch his forehead, to test for a fever, when he turned away from her.
He walked into the foyer, and then climbed the grand staircase toward the floors they no longer used. She trailed him as far as the balustrade, and shook her head in disbelief as she watched him on the landing. He was pulling the weather stripping away from Susan’s door.
Gwen Hubble was not quite awake, but fighting her way to a conscious thought. She struggled to rise, then fell back on the cot, exhausted, as though her small body were made of far heavier stuff than a ten-year-old’s flesh and bone. She lay still for a moment, gathering strength to try again. Her eyes focused on the dim illumination of a plastic night-light in the wall plug.
When her mind had cleared a bit, she found it easier to sit up.
There was another tray on the small table by her cot. The last time, it had held a glass of orange juice and an egg.
Not enough food.
Now she was looking at half a cup of cocoa and a tiny roll.
Not enough.
With dull fixation, she stared at the glow of light on the ceramic tiles. The surrounding space was as large as her father’s master bathroom. And the tub in this room was also an antique, with four clawed lion’s paws for feet. The toilet seemed a long way off; the night-light was only a tiny spark of reflection on its porcelain.
The urge to urinate was stronger than hunger. She pushed back the bedding and touched a rough wool surface with her bare feet.
Where were her socks?
On the first day, she had only missed her red parka, and the next morning—this morning?—her shoes were gone. Her hand went to the chain around her neck and closed on the amulet that Sadie Green had given her, a good luck charm with the engraved image of an all-seeing eye. So she still had that. Ah, but her braid had come undone in the night.
Is it night?
She tried to stand too quickly and her head ached. Slowly, she stood up and walked toward the toilet, unsteady on her legs. As she passed close to the door, she tried the knob, not really expecting it to open this time either.
Why is this happening?
That thought was too hard to hold on to, and she let it slide away as she went through the automatic actions of raising the toilet lid, tearing paper sheets from the roller and carefully setting the squares around the rim of the wooden seat, her ingrained protocol for strange bathrooms, and last, the flush.
Now that her eyes had adjusted to the poor light, she could see more detail in the room. There was no mirror above the sink. She hadn’t noticed that the last time. She did remember the massive piece of furniture against the far wall.
An armoire in a bathroom?
The hamper was new to her, wasn’t it? She stared at it now. It was like the pull-out hampers in her own house, built into the wall. But this one had a long chain looping once through its handle and twice around the towel bar mounted next to it. The chain was padlocked.
Why? What’s in the hamper?
The question died away almost as soon as she had formed it.
She was so hungry.
Returning to the narrow cot, she stared down at the tray on the table. This morning when she ate the egg, she had fallen asleep immediately. At least she
thought
the first meal had been in the morning—if she could only rely on the formula of juice and an egg as breakfast food. Now she was looking at the miserly dinner roll and the cocoa. Gwen was starting to form another concept, a connection of food and sleep. But then she drifted on to thoughts of her best friend. Where was Sadie, and
how
was she?
Gwen ate the small roll.
Not enough food.
Her stomach growled. It was work to hold on to a single idea. She stared at the cocoa in her cup. Again, she made the connection of food and sleep.
Food? Or drink?
She walked back to the sink and poured the cocoa down the drain, running water in the basin to clean away the dark splatters.
When Gwen came back to the cot, she was facing the hamper and its padlocked chain. She walked toward it, moving very slowly—so drowsy. It was like having the flu—or her brain might be filled with cotton wadding; the child gave equal weight to both possibilities. She touched the handle of the hamper, then her legs failed her and she was sinking to her knees.
So it was not the cocoa that made her sleep; she had guessed wrong. Her face pressed into the rough wool of a small oval rug. And though she lay sprawled on the floor, there was one moment of fright that came with the sensation of falling, the idea that the tiled surface might not be solid, that the rules of the universe no longer applied to her.
Her eyes closed.
Late on the night of her daughter’s death, all those years ago, Ellen Kendall had opened the door of Rouge’s bedroom and found her small son rolled into a ball studded with auburn cowlicks, tiny fingers and pajama feet. His eyes had snapped open. Uncurling swiftly, he had flung out his arms and legs, a child unfurled, as though opening his breast to make an easy target for whatever had come for him in the dark. Realizing that it was only his frightened mother on the threshold, his face had flooded with disappointment. And Ellen knew her ten-year-old son wanted to die, to go with his sister—into the ground. On the following day, she had placed her surviving child in the care of a psychiatrist, not believing that she could keep Rouge alive by herself. What good had she been to Susan?
And then she had poured herself into a bottle—no meager feat; Ellen had not become a drunk in one day.
Now, years of sobriety later, she stood at Susan’s door and stared at the walls for a moment, mildly startled by what time had done to her daughter’s bedroom. Over the past fifteen years, the once bright wall paint had settled down to a calm pale pink.
Rouge sat tailor-fashion on a dusty braided rug woven with threads of every color, all of them muted now. Ghosty white sheets draped the furniture, and a gray film lay over every inch of the exposed floorboards. He was digging through a large cardboard box of Susan’s personal effects.
Ellen crept silently into the room. Her son paid no attention to her, he was so engrossed in an old yearbook from St. Ursula’s Academy.
Why must he do this to himself—to her?
She wanted to cry, but her voice was surprisingly normal when she spoke to him. “Need some help? Are you looking for something of—”
“I met a woman tonight.” He set one book down and opened a volume for another year. “She knew us when we were nine or ten. But I don’t remember her name. I thought there might be a picture in here.”
Ellen was on guard now, and worried. The
us
and
we
had lingered in Rouge’s sentences for more than a year after his twin’s death. And now the words were back again, like ghosts in his mouth.
“Could you describe the woman, Rouge?”
He selected another volume from the stack of school annuals. All of them dated back to the years before Susan was murdered. “She has wide-set eyes anda—”Suddenly, he slammed one of the books. “She’s not here. She didn’t go to St. Ursula’s.” He pushed the books to one side and raked both hands through his hair.
Ellen knelt down on the rug beside him. “Do you know anything about her people? What her father did for a living—her mother?”
“No.” He threw up his hands, defeated. “She said her family left town when she was in the fifth grade.” And now one fist pounded the floor, and the stack of yearbooks toppled over.
She knew he hadn’t slept since yesterday, but this was more than fatigue. His frustration helped her to gauge how much he’d had to drink. This tone only entered his voice when he wasn’t thinking clearly, when intoxication was an obstacle to an idea. Normally, his mind worked much faster than hers, and better. Perhaps this was why he stopped at Dame’s Tavern every night, to slow down that beautiful fleet brain.
“At least you know she didn’t go to St. Ursula’s. That’s something.” In her younger days as a reporter, she had chased people down without much more information. So the child had moved away when she was a fifth-grader. There was only one public elementary school in town, and there would be group portraits on record. Ah, but wait—she had her own photographs.
Ellen reached out and opened the lower drawer of Susan’s bureau. She rested one hand on her daughter’s scrapbook. “Rouge? This woman you met? Maybe she was in the children’s choir. That was a mix of kids from both schools.” She pulled out the scrapbook and flipped through the pages, looking for the yearly snapshots of the choir field trips.
“The choir—right. She remembered my scar.” Now he was shoulder to shoulder with her. He put out his hand to stop the falling pages at one large photograph. “That one. Was it taken the year I cut my finger?”
“Cut? You almost cut it
off
, Rouge.” She looked down at the three rows of children, kneeling and standing, all holding their ice skates and grinning for the camera. She pointed to the first girl in the front row. “Now that’s Meg Tomlin, the fire chief’s daughter. She moved to Coopers-town when she got married three years ago. And that’s Jenny Adler. You remember her from St. Ursula’s? She graduated from MIT and went to work for a company in Tokyo.”
He was staring at her face—all curiosity now. She understood. Rouge was wondering how a housebound recluse like herself would know of these events in the world outside.
“Well, babe, the family may not own any of the newspapers anymore, but I do read them. You’d be surprised what I know.”
“You still have any of your old sources?”
“Oh, I’m sure I do.” And apparently, all the old friends had turned out for her. There were a number of similarities between her daughter’s kidnapping and the recent theft of two more children from St. Ursula’s, yet there was no mention of Susan in the newspapers or the television coverage. But that protection wouldn’t last if these girls turned up dead on Christmas morning.
Her son was staring at her, momentarily distracted from the scrapbook. “Mom, what do you know about the lieutenant governor?”
“Marsha Hubble? She comes from a long line of politicians, but I’d swear she’s clean. That’s despite proximity to a mobbed-up senator.”
“And the puppet governor?”
“
Alleged
puppet, dear. He’s been trying to unload Hubble for the past year. My theory is that she doesn’t play nicely with major campaign contributors of the cockroach persuasion.”
Rouge bowed his head over the scrapbook, but his eyes were looking inward. Ellen knew she was losing him again. She pointed to a child in the middle row of the photograph. “Look here. This girl has wide-set eyes, but I have no idea who she is. Damn, after all my showboating.”
She turned the photograph over to read the names of all the children. The list, penned in her own hand, was one name short. The child with the wide-set eyes was the only member of the choir she could not account for. “Sorry, Rouge. I can’t remember her.”
“She has a scar. Here.” He ran one finger down his right cheek in a jagged line. “Do you remember any other accidents with kids?”
“No, and something like that would’ve been a standout.” She flipped the page. “Now you’re not in this photo. It was taken after you went off to military school. And there she is again, just behind Susan, see? No scars on her face. So the accident probably happened after she left town.”
She knew her son was drifting away again, sailing off on that familiar sea that fit so neatly in a whiskey glass. Ellen could smell it, almost taste it. But she could hardly lecture Rouge on booze. She had only stopped drinking after the crowning humiliation of her teenage son finding her dead drunk on the bathroom floor. “Rouge? You said she left town when she was in the fifth grade?”
He stared at the page and nodded.
“The schools are closed for Christmas vacation, but you could try the church. Father Domina might have kept the old attendance books. Could be worth a shot.” She ruffled his hair to get his attention. “I could help you. Tomorrow morning?”
“Can’t. I have to work the first shift tomorrow.” Rouge stood up and dusted off his jeans. “They’re putting me on a plainclothes detail.” He was scanning the titles on the small bookshelf by the bed. “What happened to Susan’s diary?”
“The police took it away. I don’t know if they ever returned it or not. We could check the other boxes in the attic if you like?” She turned back to the photograph of the choir. “It’s odd I can’t place this child.”
Or perhaps it wasn’t. Apart from the eyes there was nothing remarkable about the little girl. She was in the middle range of everything—not the smallest or even the most plain.
Rouge pulled a dust sheet away from the desk. A silver bracelet was lying on the faded green blotter. This was Susan’s last birthday gift from her father. Rouge picked it up. “I thought Dad said she lost this?”
Lost
it? Perhaps they should talk more about Susan’s death. What else might he have misunderstood in those days when his father was locked away in the study, when his mother lived in a bottle seven days out of seven. Or maybe the bracelet
had
been lost instead of stolen—and later
found
, not
seized
as evidence.
“Those last few months, your sister was always losing something at choir practice.” And Ellen had found that strange. The children had always been so careful with their possessions. At the time, she had blamed the separation of the twins for the odd changes in her daughter’s behavior.