Mackenzie left me alone. Maybe he hoped I’d take a cyanide tablet and lighten his caseload.
I listened to the end-of-day noises in the outer office. Someone ran the duplicating machine. Someone laughed and dropped a ring of jangling keys.
I spent seven minutes feeling sorry for myself, wishing I could retroactively cancel my decision to stop smoking. If my habit had only persisted one day longer, if I had only inhaled one user-friendly cigarette in the teachers’ lounge on Monday, at alibi time, I wouldn’t be on my way to the gallows. I never realized that not smoking could kill you, too.
But seven minutes of rewriting history is long enough. There were no more sociable noises coming from outside Havermeyer’s stuffy office. Just the occasional taps of Helga Putnam’s typewriter.
Luckily, my eleventh-grade class had completed The Scarlet Letter a few weeks earlier, and Hester Prynne was fresh on my mind. If she could walk the streets wearing her scarlet A, then I could face Igor out there.
Helga eyed me slyly, lowering one eyelid, pursing her lips with distaste for my dastardly deeds, but I held my head high and glided toward the telephone. How inspiring, how useful, the classics could be.
I wasn’t going to wait in the suburbs while Mackenzie shuffled and bumbled around. He didn’t seem too swift, and even with great detectives, there were cases that dragged on forever. This was going to be one of them if Mackenzie kept focusing on me. Meanwhile, I was getting back to my normal life. I dialed Beth’s number.
“I’m staying home tonight,” I told her. “I love you and appreciate all you want to do, but home’s much easier and more convenient.”
Beth made major use of words like “dangerous” and “foolish.” But Beth had always considered anything urban to be blighted.
“Beth, thank you. I know you care, but if nothing else, I have to feed Macavity.”
Back in my deserted classroom, I gathered up a textbook and the pile of sympathy notes I’d take to Liza’s mother. I straightened the window shades, convincing myself I had not been the murderer’s target. My house was no more than an unfortunate setting. I was therefore in no danger.
My room looked in order. I opened my pocketbook to get my car keys—one of my self-defense lessons was always to have keys ready before needed.
And then I saw it.
“Damn!” I’d forgotten the package, the bear, the five-hundred-dollar gift for “honey.” Mackenzie would be thrilled anew to find me withholding evidence.
* * *
Liza’s mother lived in an area that hadn’t yet been declared chic and resold at ten times its original price. The row homes, three white steps up from the sidewalk, were not ornamented with window boxes and shutters in authentic colonial hues, as were those on my street. Instead, turquoise-and-white aluminum awnings hung over front doors, and in a few instances, imitation stone facing was inexplicably plastered over the original brick.
The street was crowded. In my neighborhood, people leave when they reproduce. Our tiny quarters are too small to house several affluent middle-class generations. But here, where the houses were no larger, no such philosophy reigned. I drove carefully, avoiding balls, skates, hockey pucks, and small bodies. I found a space near Mrs. Nichols’s house and rang her doorbell, a bouquet of early tulips and the packet of sympathy notes in my free hand.
The woman who opened the door had an ample figure, but she looked deflated nonetheless.
“Is Mrs. Nichols in? I’m Amanda Pepper and I—”
“Come in, Amanda, come in. I’ve wanted so to meet you.” She made sociable gestures of welcome, leading me toward a long brocaded sofa that filled one wall of the small living room. “So pretty,” she said of the flowers. “Sit down, sit down. So nice to finally meet Liza’s best friend, and—” And then her voice liquefied and I could feel recent events flood back into her consciousness. She looked confused and fumbled for words, shook her head, and hurried into another room with the flowers.
I looked down at my hands, embarrassed again by the “best friend” label.
Mrs. Nichols returned, settling on a stiff, ornate chair next to the television console. The furniture looked plucked in toto from a late-night commercial. The matching brocaded sofa and chairs were draped with crocheted antimacassars, the marble-topped occasional tables, covered with photographs, ashtrays, “conversation pieces,” coasters, and lamp bases that were porcelain ladies-in-waiting from one of the Louis’s courts. Every busy inch was shining, immaculate, and loved.
“I came to say how sorry I am. I brought notes from the class, her students. I wish I knew what else to say.”
“Amanda,” Mrs. Nichols said forcefully, “I know. I understand. I—I feel sorry for you, too.” She sniffed and ran a puffy hand over her eyes. She was a small, plump woman, and hints of Liza’s beauty were still evident inside her puffed features. “I know you had nothing to do with it.” She shook her blue-gray hair. “I told them that.” She pulled a crumpled tissue out of her dress pocket. “I told them.”
“Who?”
“The police. Those detectives. A skinny black man and a big white one. They came last night, to—” her voice dwindled to a whisper—“to…tell me.” She closed her eyes, then blew her nose. “The white one came this morning again. To ask me…things…about…my baby!” She buried her head in her hands, the tissue pressed to her face.
I went over and crouched by her side, holding her arm until the sobbing stopped. When she spoke again, her voice quavered. “It doesn’t make sense. Who would hurt my baby? Do you know? You were so close, the two of you.”
I winced. “I don’t know, Mrs. Nichols. I don’t know.”
“I was so happy when you two became friends, when she started staying with you. I always wanted the best for her. She stayed with good families, rich families, important people, when I worked for them. She lived in their houses, ate their food, wore the same clothing. You couldn’t tell her apart from their children. She belonged there. She always belonged there.”
My legs were cramping, and I stood up. Mrs. Nichols grabbed my hand. “You understand?” she demanded. “You understand?”
I nodded, although I didn’t understand at all.
Her voice became dreamy. “I used to watch the children in the neighborhood, and I could tell, right from the beginning, that Liza didn’t belong here. She was different, special. When she got so wild in high school, it broke my heart. And then, the acting, and wanting to go to New York, and—” she brushed something imaginary away with her hand—“and then, look, it all started happening the right way. Like magic. Like I always dreamed. Engaged to Hayden Cole and…”
Mrs. Nichols was deep, deep inside that old dream of hers. She smiled proudly, and I knew she had momentarily forgotten again. And then she looked around the crowded room as if something had leaped out of a corner, and her face collapsed. She stood up and leaned against the television console. Its top was covered with framed pictures of Liza. Some were ads cut from slick magazines. Some were fuzzy snapshots of a young Liza. Mrs. Nichols touched the silver frame of her daughter’s engagement portrait. “She was beautiful,” she whispered.
“Yes,” I agreed.
She walked over to the sofa, near me. “The police, they asked if anything was bothering her. Why?”
“I think it’s just something they ask in these situations.”
“How could she be troubled? She was marrying Hayden Cole! She was going to be a senator’s wife, maybe something even more someday. She was going to live in a mansion. Is that something to bother a girl? Since the day she was born, since her father ran out on us, I’ve worked every day to get back her real place in life. I gave her speech lessons, dance lessons. I never let her feel she was a little girl whose daddy ran away with a cheap—who didn’t care if we had a cent or a way to live like decent people. It was all for her. For Liza.”
I understood why Liza didn’t find it easy to talk to her mother. The woman had decided how the world worked a long time ago, and how to make it work for her, and she wouldn’t have been interested in any of her daughter’s opposing theories. She cataloged half a dozen more special lessons given her daughter. Modeling, singing, on and on. It reminded me of geisha training.
“Of course, she was high-strung,” Mrs. Nichols said. “Especially lately. But all brides get cold feet. If she’d had any important worries, I would have known. We were very close. You must know that.”
I had a sudden painful realization of how far apart we all stand from one another, how single-minded we all must be in what we want and what we choose to see.
“Mrs. Nichols, you must be exhausted.” And if she wasn’t, I was. “You should be resting. I just wanted to express my sympathy. Is there anything I can do to help you through this?”
“You aren’t leaving?” She looked terrified. “Let me fix you something. Coffee, tea, please?”
So I followed her into the tiny kitchen that was really a side slice of the dining room. It was decorated with the same heavy hand as the living room. The toaster was covered by a gingham rooster with a skirt. The salt-and-pepper shakers were a ceramic angel and devil. Magnets shaped like bananas and pears held a calendar and notes to the refrigerator.
Mrs. Nichols busied herself with the kettle. “It’s so awful. Things go on like normal, as if nothing had happened. The mail comes, a check for a job she did. A phone call. Her answering service. I don’t know what to do with it, I feel bad throwing it away, just like that….” She turned on the water tap and filled the kettle.
There was a small pile of mail on the table, all addressed to Liza, all opened. I had a good theory as to why Liza had her personal mail, or packages, sent to school, not home.
The calendar on the refrigerator was a sad witness to change. The future was all arranged in its small white squares. Tonight, Tuesday, had a notation: Dinner—H—7:00 P.M. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all had “PPH”—Philadelphia Playhouse, I assumed, inked across the bottom of the squares. There were more notes and notices for Liza behind magnetic grapes and plums, chickens and cows: “Special rehearsal, Saturday A.M.,” a list, ripped from a magazine, of “good, moderately priced wines,” and, farthest from the calendar, a longer missive signed “Mom.”
“Liza,” it said, “I’ll be back around 6. Ans. Serv. called—call agency, maybe job Wed.? Also Winnie—call back.”
Winnie? As in a little gold bear? Somebody called Winnie, not “honey”?
“I know I have to throw things away,” Mrs. Nichols said, “but I can’t. It feels too…”
I put cups and placemats on the dining room table. “Mrs. Nichols, who is Winnie?”
She shrugged and seated herself. “A friend. She had so many. I never met most of them. Models, teachers, the Coles’ friends. Why?” But she didn’t really require an answer.
We sat in a tiny dining room heavy with furniture scaled for another setting. The whole house felt squeezed, condensed, as if Mrs. Nichols had stocked up for bigger, better days.
Mrs. Nichols reminisced about the past, her face softening as she spoke about the young Liza.
A clock in the living room went through an elaborate chiming tune, and Mrs. Nichols glanced at her watch. “Oh, my,” she said, “I didn’t realize how long I was talking. I’ll just tidy these,” she said, gathering up our cups. “Mr. Winston will be here soon.”
“Gus?”
Mrs. Nichols nodded.
It was as natural for Gus to pay a condolence call as it was for me. More so. He had dated Liza, and he had worked and acted with her.
Winnie? Nobody had ever called Gus Winston that in my hearing. But it would be like Liza to rename him on her own and think it was cute. Still. A five-hundred-dollar trinket? A love gift?
What was there left between them?
How could I know so many people without knowing anything about them?
* * *
It was dark when i pulled into my parking lot. I walked onto a nearly deserted Walnut Street. A woman shuffled along in a coat over a nightgown. She wore fisherman’s wading boots and carried a bottle in a brown paper bag. A man with a briefcase walked double-time.
I turned the corner toward my street and became truly alone.
Imitation colonial gaslights stand at each end of my authentically colonial street. They throw an antiquated haze over the corners, leaving even nearby cobblestones and hitching posts shadowy suggestions and the middle of the block a dark haze.
I flinched when a breeze knocked a loose shutter, when a spray of pussy willow in a nearby tub swayed.
“Stop it!” a muffled voice cried, and I gasped, until I realized it was only the angry sound of a woman inside one of the houses. Still, the voice triggered echoes in my memory, Liza crying out the same words.
The small of my back tensed. Clutching my house keys, I reassured myself that I was alone and safe, and I turned around to confirm it.
There was nothing near the puddle of light at the corner. Nothing behind me. I turned back.
And saw a shadow shrink and pull into itself.
You’re making it up, Amanda. Hallucinating. There’s nothing but stairways and planters.
The moon moved farther into a cloud bank, and the street became darker, heavier with fluid shadow.
There’s nothing there.
Still, I was afraid to run, afraid to make noise, afraid to alert the nothingness to my fear. I tiptoed silently, clutching my keyring like a talisman.
But something was somewhere.
I could feel it. Could sense it, as if its body heat sent out rays.
I tried not to breathe, listening, waiting for a sound, a lunge.
And then I bolted for my doorway and jammed in the key, barely able to see through a sudden blur of tears. I looked one last time to the right and saw, this time for sure, a tiny arc of light as a cigarette fell to the ground. Then I saw the shadow again change, enlarge, and pull away from the wall.
I didn’t wait to see the form take definite shape.
I threw open the door of my house and ran in, screaming at the top of my lungs.