XXXIV

Mrs. March knocked on the door to Sylvia’s home—a dull, beige structure just off the main road, on a street that ended in a cul-de-sac presided over by a light blue steepled church.

She had just taken off her headscarf and stuffed it into her purse, suspecting it was not something a New York Times reporter would wear on assignment, when Amy Bryant answered. Mrs. March considered it rude to open a front door that wasn’t one’s own, but she supposed Sylvia’s grandmother was too affected by the whole tragic ordeal to muster the strength to answer it herself.

Amy Bryant was sharp-nosed, with a small mouth and chin and hard, beady eyes. No doubt Sylvia had befriended her because she was so plain, Mrs. March reflected. Although she most likely had been the more intelligent of the two, Amy would always have paled in comparison to the beautiful Sylvia, who must have used the discrepancy to her advantage.

“Hello, I’m a reporter with the New York Times. I’m writing a piece on Sylvia Gibbler and I’m hoping I could just ask you some questions. I’d only take a few minutes of your time. I know how hard this must be for you, but you and I have a duty to the public to bring her killers to justice. Sylvia would want that.” Mrs. March fiddled with her purse as she said this, figuring it looked more authentic—a busy Times writer with a busy schedule—if she were searching for a pen.

Amy Bryant held the door open. “Of course, yes. Come in.”

Mrs. March was thrilled at how easy it was to get people to talk once you said you were with the New York Times. Nobody asked to see any proof, not even a business card, at the merest possibility of being featured in a Times article. Would she open the door to herself, just as Amy was doing now? She supposed she would. She pictured herself sitting across from the reporter—also herself—in her living room in New York, offering herself a macaron from a dessert plate.

“Nothing you don’t want to talk about,” she said to Amy as she crossed the threshold of Sylvia Gibbler’s house. “I’m just trying to get as much information as possible. To really write the truth, you know. I want to paint as objective—and truthful—a picture as possible.”

“I understand, ma’am. I’ll try to be as objective as I can—”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that, Miss Bryant, that’s my job. You just focus on telling me what you remember. You’ve been through enough already.” She directed her most sincere, most compassionate gaze at Amy, whose weak chin quivered and beady eyes watered with self-pity upon hearing this.

Mrs. March was led into the living room, which she couldn’t help but eye critically. The house—from what she’d seen of it—was cluttered and mismatched. The curtains were stained, the floors unmopped, doilies yellowed, the air musty. She itched to open the windows.

“Please—” said Amy, motioning toward a particularly haggard-looking couch sheathed in plastic. Mrs. March managed a quick scan before she sat, attempting a surreptitious brush of her hand to swipe away a smattering of crumbs and white animal hairs.

Amy sat in a nearby chair and said, loud enough to wake the dead, “Oh, Babka, come and sit with us.” An old, smiling woman shuffled soundlessly from a shadowy corner of the living room like an apparition.

“This is a reporter, Babka. She came all the way from New York City,” said Amy, almost at a yell. “She wants to talk about Sylvia.”

Mrs. March pulled her notebook and pen from her bag. She clicked the pen repeatedly, watching the point pop in and out, in and out, as Babka continued smiling.

“Sylvia’s parents died when she was little,” explained Amy, “and she lived with her grandmother ever since. Babka is from Poland. She moved to the States when she got married.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” said Mrs. March, and the grandmother’s smile faded into a frown as she cocked her head sideways, offering Mrs. March her left ear—the good ear, presumably.

“Sorry for your loss!” repeated Mrs. March, louder this time.

Babka straightened up as much as her bent frame would allow, and gestured with one hand, as if to thank Mrs. March for her condolences. Mrs. March attempted to smile back.

“Sylvia . . .” began the grandmother—nearly a whole life living in the United States had evidently done nothing to dilute her thick Polish accent—“such a good girl. But . . . life . . . so many things can happen.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, scribbling gobbledygook in her notebook in a pantomime of what she hoped came off as shorthand.

“Life is like this. Tricky, yes, but . . . one must move forward.”

“That’s a very brave way of looking at it,” said Mrs. March, and the old woman closed her eyes, pursed her thin lips, and shook her head, as if in disagreement. Mrs. March wondered if she had misheard her.

“Do you want something to drink?” asked Amy. “Some coffee maybe?”

“Yes, I bring out coffee!” exclaimed Babka, and she set off, surprisingly spry, toward the kitchen.

Mrs. March smiled weakly at Amy as they both sat waiting for Babka’s return.

“Babka is Polish for ‘grandmother,’ ” said Amy, into the silence.

“Ah.”

A small mauve dust ball rolled toward them and came to rest against the leg of a chair.

“She can’t hear very well out of her right ear. She’s very insecure about it.”

Babka returned bearing chipped, coffee-stained mugs and a cheesecake she had made “with own hands,” of which she was obviously very proud. Mrs. March’s heart sank when she came to the grim realization that she was not to be let out of the house without first tasting the homemade cheesecake. Babka served a huge portion and thrust the cracked pink plate at her until Mrs. March took it, along with the tarnished dessert spoon, and, smiling all around, bit into the viscid cheesecake. The tang of room-temperature dairy on her tongue disgusted her. She struggled to suppress images of Babka handling the cream cheese and raw eggs with her papery, liver-spotted hands. But Mrs. March chewed on the cake stoically.

“I mean we got some nationwide attention,” Amy was saying, “but it’s barely been a couple of months since they found her. Her body,” she amended awkwardly, “and it seems like everyone’s already moved on, but we still don’t know who did it. Do you really think this article can bring the attention we need?”

Mrs. March nodded, chewing loudly, breathing through her mouth, cheesecake stuck to her palate. The grandmother had retired to the kitchen again, either uninterested in this interview or unable to hear it or both. Mrs. March was grateful for this—the old woman made her uncomfortable, and her absence meant she wouldn’t have to eat any more cheesecake. “No suspects, then?” she asked around the mound of dessert on her tongue. She would need to swallow it. There was no avoiding it. Meanwhile, Amy was explaining how Sylvia’s boyfriend had been the first suspect, as boyfriends usually were, but that he was ruled out when multiple witnesses placed his whereabouts throughout the night of Sylvia’s disappearance, as well as the days around it. “But honestly,” said Amy, “everybody just assumes it was someone passing through. An outsider.” At this, Mrs. March swallowed her cheesecake.

“Mmm, I see. Was there anything on the body that would suggest it was an outsider?”

“Just the violence and the—the rape,” said Amy. “We don’t have anyone capable of that here. We all know each other.”

“Well, you can never really know anyone,” said Mrs. March. Amy Bryant narrowed her eyes at her, and Mrs. March went on, “So Sylvia didn’t know anyone remotely suspicious? Capable of such violence? Perhaps someone she met in the days preceding her disappearance? Someone from out of town?”

Amy shook her head. “I’ve been thinking back on all the people we met in the weeks before. But I just can’t picture anyone.” She sighed, looking down at the floor. “Sylvia and I, we’d go out sometimes,” she said, quietly. “It was always my idea. We’d meet men, but I really don’t think any of them would do anything like . . .”

The guilt radiating off Amy Bryant, and her not-so-subtle attempt to solicit some kind of absolution from this confession, filled Mrs. March with such pride in her interviewing skills that she began to believe in the possibility of a real article. “We would meet a lot of men,” Amy said in a trembling voice, her eyes watering, “but nothing ever came of it; it was innocent, you have to believe me.”

Mrs. March’s eyes softened in sympathy and she nodded, writing “slut” in her notebook, then, remembering her imaginary oath to journalistic objectivity, added a question mark at the end. “It is so very difficult,” she said, “to form a real picture of the case. To form a picture of Sylvia, just as she truly was.”

There was a small pause before Amy said, timidly, “You can see her room, if you like.”

Mrs. March, feigning initial reluctance, agreed, and asked Amy to accompany her, because that seemed like something a reporter would do to maintain integrity (but really it was so that Amy would continue to reveal more things about her dead friend).

They climbed the worn staircase, following a framed timeline of Sylvia through the years. Composed mostly of yearbook pictures, the series included the first photograph released by the press—the one Mrs. March had found in George’s notebook. Mrs. March imagined George creeping up these very stairs in the dead of night for a lovers’ rendezvous, the creaking of the steps muffled by the pilled lead-gray carpet. Had he traced the raised grain of the banister with his fingers as she was doing now?

Sylvia’s bedroom was unremarkable, yet entering it felt almost spiritual, like stepping into a church. Ethereal light slanted into the room through the window, spotlighting the dust floating above the cedar vanity.

In the sanctum of Sylvia’s bedroom, she strived for archaeological detachment as she observed the modest bed coverlet in hues of blue; the graying white frilly drapes; the peach lipstick on the dresser next to a half-empty bottle of perfume—she noted the name in her notebook, for purchasing later.

The wall nearest the door was covered in newspaper clippings, all featuring loud headlines about Sylvia and her disappearance. Babka, Amy said, had cut them out and pasted them up in the nerve-racking weeks before the grisly discovery of the body, when they still held on to the hope that Sylvia would be found alive. Below them was a childish-looking pine writing desk, littered with coloring books, star-shaped sticky notes, feathered pens, and vials of glitter.

“I suppose Sylvia didn’t keep a diary?” asked Mrs. March, breaking out into an anticipatory sweat at the prospect.

“If she did, nobody ever found one,” said Amy matter-of-factly. Her arms were crossed and she was surveying the bedroom as if she were the keeper of this domain. When her eyes fell upon a small handkerchief folded neatly on a corner of the pine desk, she picked it up slowly, inspecting it, debating what to do with it. Finally, she said, “Look. This was her handkerchief. She always carried it around. It wasn’t on her, though, on the day . . . the day she disappeared.”

Mrs. March took the white handkerchief in her hands. It was bordered in lace and embroidered with Sylvia’s initials. “Did they test the clothes she was wearing? For fingerprints?” she asked.

“Yes, they tested everything, but they didn’t find anything . . . I guess because she’d been lying outside for so long.”

Amy crossed her arms again and turned toward the window, and Mrs. March took advantage of her inattention to slip the handkerchief into her pocket. She dawdled, her eyes hovering over colorful stacks of records and a pink plastic rotary phone, until she stopped short at the bookshelf—an entire row of which was dedicated to George’s books. Her vision momentarily fogged, then sharpened, the “George March” on the spines coming into focus as keen as a whetted blade. She wiped the moisture that had formed above her upper lip. Almost salivating with expectation, she pulled one of the books from the shelf and opened it. It was signed. Authentic. She’d recognize George’s lazy signature anywhere. Swallowing, her throat dry, she pressed her stubby finger against the ink, half expecting it to pulsate, like a poisoned vein. She traced the signature across the page. She conjured up an image of the pair of them meeting at a reading, Sylvia queuing to get her book signed, George stopping in mid-sentence with another fan to look at her over his glasses. The two talking and laughing and flirting, leaving the remaining book buyers feeling snubbed. Maybe Sylvia had left her scarf behind—to stoke his escalating infatuation with her—which he had taken to sniffing, only recently having gotten rid of it to hide evidence of their meeting—or had he? What if it was somewhere in her own house, the dead girl’s scarf? Where would he have hidden it? Stuffed behind some books on a shelf in his study. Or—in a fit of mad hubris—in plain sight on his desk. Maybe Martha had come across it and, mistaking it for one of Mrs. March’s, tucked it away in one of her closet drawers, where it now lived next to her own clothes?

When Amy turned back from the window, Mrs. March was still holding the book in her hands. “Oh, yeah, the George March books,” she said. “Sylvia was a big fan. She had an old copy that belonged to her father, I think? And she loved it. I bet I saw her reading it like a hundred times.” She paused before saying, “She was a really good reader.” She pondered over the sentiment, perhaps needing a little moment to recover from bestowing the compliment. “Then when he got really famous she read somewhere that he summered here or something. I think he has a cabin around here. A lot of people have seen him around town—”

“It’s his editor who has a cabin here,” said Mrs. March, confident that an important New York Times journalist would certainly know this.

“Right, well, anyway, last summer she would wait around in restaurants or whatever, hoping to get a glimpse of him.”

“And did she?” Mrs. March said as the last of her breath seemed to leave her body.

Amy shook her head. “No. She never managed it.”

Mrs. March inhaled greedily. “But this one is signed.” She thrust the book, open to the signature page, at Amy.

“Oh, yeah, that must have been her dad’s, then. She never met George March. Trust me, she would have told me the second it happened. She was obsessed with those books.” Amy explained how she herself never quite cared for them, considering them novels for “old people with nothing to do,” but Mrs. March had stopped listening. She flipped through the book, looking for any type of clue—a handwritten note or a secret code consisting of randomly circled letters—but the only thing in its pages was a pressed and faded flower that crumbled at her touch. She turned to the author photograph on the back flap. It was an old studio portrait of George, which indicated that this edition had been released before Sylvia was born. Not long after, his team convinced him to sit for a new photo because readers were commenting that he looked—in polite terms —“intense.” Indeed, his hunched shoulders, his raised eyebrows, those narrowed eyes peering over his glasses did give off a rather sinister portrait of her husband, who, at least in person, looked nowhere near as menacing. Mrs. March stared into those eyes, made darker in black and white, and wondered whether they were the last thing Sylvia ever saw.

Amy showed Mrs. March a few sketches Sylvia had done. Girly things like ponies and flowers along with a botched portrait of her grandmother, but Mrs. March made sure to appreciate them, while appearing to describe them in great detail in her notebook.

Mrs. March was about to propose they look through other rooms—she thought there might be something especially juicy waiting to be discovered in the bathroom medicine cabinet—when Amy said, “I think you’ve got all you need.”

Downstairs, she thanked Babka and Amy for their time, and told them she was going to make a big push to get the article published, but one could never know, she warned, as her editors were fickle and slaves to passing fancies. She opened the front door—seeing as how nobody had moved to open it for her—when Amy said, “Can I please have the handkerchief back?”

Mrs. March stopped in the doorway. “Oh,” she said, “I left it upstairs.”

“No, it’s in your pocket.”

A stillness descended as Mrs. March looked at Amy—at her stern, unimpressed expression, akin to George Washington’s—and heard herself say, as she took the handkerchief out of her pocket, “You know, it’s funny, I seem to have confused it for my own. I must have left mine upstairs. How absentminded of me.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

Mrs. March straightened her posture, catching her breath. “Johanna,” she said, and put on her sunglasses before walking out the door.

HER FIRST DAY in Gentry had been so fruitful that it was hardly a surprise when the next few days went by without much progress. On the second day she bought a few plastic-wrapped sandwiches and packets of saltines for nibbling when she was peckish, so as not to disturb anything in Edgar’s kitchen. She ate them voraciously, cleaning up the crumbs with a moist fingertip.

She continued to root through cupboards and drawers for clues. She took walks and napped. She trapped a spider under a glass and giggled, imagining what Edgar would make of it.

On the third day she discovered a narrow wooden box hidden under a stack of blankets in the master bedroom closet. It was locked shut with a heavy padlock. Adrenaline surging, she rummaged through the toolbox in the garage and managed to break the lock with a hammer. Instead of a series of illicit letters between Sylvia and George, or Sylvia’s diary, or Sylvia’s fingers, Mrs. March was disappointed to find Edgar’s hunting rifles. She replaced the padlock immediately, buying one just like it at the general store, telling the clerk that her daughter needed one for her bicycle at Harvard.

On her walk back from the store, she came across a doe in a clearing. It was dining on a dead rabbit, the crunch of the rabbit’s bones between the doe’s teeth indistinguishable from the crunching of the snow beneath the boots she had borrowed from the cabin. Snow was falling, collecting on the doe’s back. Cupping a hand against her temple, she continued on her way. The doe, undisturbed, carried on eating.

ON THE fourth day Mrs. March visited Sylvia’s grave. She spotted it easily, as people had left flowers and stuffed animals and letters at her tombstone, all of it decaying. A teddy bear’s eye dangled by a thread from its socket. Mrs. March tried sketching it in her notebook.

That evening she called George and told him she’d be home the following afternoon. “All right,” he said. “How did it go? How’s your mother?”

“Not as well as I’d hoped.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“Yes, well, what can one do but bear it. I’ll see you tomorrow, dear.”

“I’ll be here.”

ON HER last night in Gentry, notebook in her purse, she visited the town pub—a cheap place with wood panels and sticky floors and a couple of battered bowling lanes to one side. Stools topped with ripped vinyl lined the bar. The felt on the pool table was pocked with cigarette burns. The air, palpable and stagnant with the smell of smoke, beer, and bodies, clung to her the instant she stepped inside.

Mrs. March sat alone in a booth wearing her sunglasses and headscarf, sipping from a glass of sour red wine, which the bartender had poured from a two-liter bottle. As he screwed the cap back on, she asked, “Did you ever see that famous writer around town? George March? Did he ever have a drink here?” and his reply—“I don’t read, lady”—had been discouraging. When she then asked him about Sylvia, assuming this to be one of the spots she and Amy had frequented while out prowling for men, the barman didn’t answer her. Instead, he looked beyond her and said, “Why don’t you ask her boyfriend? He’s right there.” She turned to see a young man drinking by himself at a table in the back.

She didn’t dare approach but she did choose a spot facing him. She studied him for a while as she sipped her wine through a straw to avoid placing her lips on the wineglass, which was spotted with fingerprints. The boyfriend sat, sweaty and pale, chin stippled with acne, drinking beer after beer while muttering to himself, until he finally stood up, helping himself along by leaning on tables, and staggered to a small clearing by the bar. He began to sway gently, rocking his body back and forth and knocking his head back—eyes closed, mouth hanging open. At first Mrs. March thought he was having a seizure, until it became clear that he was on a little dance floor of his own making. She stood up, her mouth feeling like a clump of rancid yarn from the wine, and teetered over to him. Still wearing her sunglasses and headscarf, she hugged him. He didn’t seem to notice, nor did he return her embrace. His arms hung limply by his sides, but he didn’t push her away, either—and Mrs. March swayed with him, rocking him like a baby, feeling his warm body against her own. Under the stench of beer he smelled like fabric softener and cereal milk, like a boy who is well cared for by his mother. She envisioned Sylvia hugging him, taking in his scent and listening to his heartbeat through his sweater.

They swung gently from side to side, out of rhythm with the music, until the place emptied out and the bartender announced last call.

NIGHT HAD fallen when the cab pulled up at the Marches’ apartment building. As the evening doorman rushed out from under the green awning to greet her, Mrs. March glanced up at the familiar façade. Home. Tall and imposing in dim winter night, its windows shadowed like hundreds of lidded eyes.

The sixth-floor hallway betrayed nothing unusual as she made her way across the carpeted floor to 606. The brass keys jangled on the key ring as she unlocked the door, entered, and locked it behind her. The apartment was completely dark yet she felt it was expecting her, salivating and alert in its stillness, like a bad oyster. She patted the wall, searching for the light switch, and suddenly a loud exhalation—more like a prolonged gasp—burst out in the darkness. She wanted to open the front door to let in the hallway light but found that she couldn’t move. The breathing continued, a little louder now, almost hissing at her. At the sound of a toilet flushing next door, Mrs. March relaxed, her shoulders dropping—it was just the sound of old pipes. She found the switch on the wall and flicked it quickly, in case she was wrong and could surprise whatever might be lurking there. The empty hallway stared back at her, inscrutable. Where was George? Where was Jonathan?

She poked her head into empty rooms, calling their names into the dark, half expecting them to jump out and scare her. A chilling possibility occurred to her: George was onto her and had fled, abducting Jonathan as leverage. She was flinging open closets when she heard a key turning in the lock and the front door opened behind her, letting in a slight draft and cheerful voices.

“Honey! You’re home,” said George as Mrs. March found herself rushing toward her son, wiping away with one mint green gloved finger a single tear.

“We saw a movie, Mommy!”

She kneeled to receive Jonathan’s little body in hers, and as they hugged, she settled her gaze unwaveringly upon George’s face, and she told him, with her eyes, with her cold, slight grin, that she knew everything. Was it her imagination, or at that moment did something—fear, perhaps, or remorse—stir in George’s eyes?