HE FOUND A stepladder in the basement. He climbed up to the bust of Plato and carefully — oh, so carefully — laid the statuette on its side. He reached into the cold emptiness of Plato’s neck, up into the cavity of his bronze head. There was a little pocket there, made, as far as he could tell, out of paper and glue. There was nothing in the pocket. He hadn’t expected there to be.
When Dec went down to Camelot, the Beetle sat in its customary spot in the driveway and Birdie was asleep on a couch in the living room, Sunny was stretched sideways right across the master bed, and his father was scrunched up in Sunny’s frilly four-poster, presumably driven there by hard little feet. It was as if the storm of the night before had swept the whole family up and distributed them higgledy-piggledy all over the place. But no one had travelled farther than Dec.
Dec made himself breakfast. The sun poured in like honey on his toast and made his orange juice glow like some thing with a current running through it. He made a big pot of coffee. He didn’t drink coffee but he had a feeling others might need it.
He couldn’t explain it, but he felt good. He had found his mother last night. Found her and lost her all in a matter of minutes. Then he had slept deeply and dreamlessly, or so he thought. But leaning against the counter looking out at the crisp yellowness and lush greenness and electric blueness of early June, he wondered if maybe he had been dreaming after all. For he had the strangest feeling, that Lindy had come to him, all played out and not angry any more, and tucked him in one last time. He felt somehow that he had her permission to let her go. After all, she had died a long time ago, really. He had grieved her passing when he was still living in the room with his name on the door. He had built her a boat to carry two when she was not there to sail it any longer. He had missed her and gotten over it.
The smell of coffee wafted through the house, and Birdie stirred from her nest of blankets in the living room. He heard her swear. He heard her fingernails clicking as she scrabbled on the coffee table for something. Her cellphone. He heard her talking to Kerrie, asking if she would open up the salon. By the time she had punched the Off button, Dec was standing in the living-room entranceway with a cup of coffee.
“I figured you might need this,” he said.
She seemed almost shy, pulling a blanket across her, as if he had never seen her in her old cotton nightie.
“Thank you,” she said, avoiding his eyes. A stiff wing of her hair sticking out at a weird angle distracted her, and she cursed again. She grabbed a fistful of it. “This is going to require major surgery,” she said. He was glad to hear her sound like the Birdie he knew. Chewbakka with bedhead. Maybe last night had just been a bad dream. Or maybe he had travelled even farther than he thought. She hefted herself up off the couch. She took the coffee from Dec with a grateful nod.
“Life goes on,” he said.
She drove him to school. She placed a freshly picked spray of lilac in the little vase on the dashboard of the Beetle. She had new country on the stereo. Someone was singing about what you have to do to fix a broken heart.
“You were asking your dad about a missing yearbook,” she said, when they were on the road. “I took it. I was showing Sunny some pictures of her mom and I happened to glance at the stuff kids had written on the autograph pages. There was something of Denny’s I didn’t want Sunny to see.”
Dec understood. One more little mystery cleared up. And now it was his turn.
“I think I know what happened to Dad’s watch,” he said.
Birdie glanced sideways at him with a puzzled look on her face.
“His father’s watch, I mean. The one he wore on D-Day.”
“I know what you’re talking about, Dec. I just have no idea why — of all the things you might have on your mind this morning — you’re thinking about an old watch.”
Dec wasn’t sure he could explain why the watch was important. He only knew that it was, somehow. It explained things that he had no other way of understanding. Who his mother was, who his father was.
“I think Lindy stole that watch and hid it inside Plato’s head,” he said. “There’s a little pocket there, I found it this morning. I think that’s what Denny was after when he fell. She must have told him it was really valuable, or something.”
Birdie still looked a little anxious. “You’ve lost me.”
“It was her idea of a joke,” he said. “She liked to play jokes on Dad. He probably told her that his father’s old watch was the most precious thing he owned. I can see him saying that. And so one day when she was really mad at him, she hid it — hid it where he’d never find it.” He paused, swallowed. “Just to hurt him.”
There, it was out. Dec rolled down the window and took a deep breath of country air. He rolled the windows back up.
“How do you know all that?”
“I don’t. And no one will ever know. It’s totally a guess.”
Birdie shook her head a few times. “I’ve got half a mind to phone up Clare Mahood and tell him your story. You know what that dipstick had the nerve to say at the inquest? He accused your father of killing Runyon in a jealous rage and making it look like an accident. Can you believe anything so nuts?”
“I know,” said Birdie, laughing. “Talk about ridiculous.”
Silence descended on them, leaving them both lost in their own private thoughts. Dec’s thinking was particularly tangled. Plato had turned out to be the key to everything. But not in the way Dec had suspected — or feared. He wished Sunny had never put the idea in his mind that Plato might have been on the hall table instead of in its usual spot. She had been wrong and had helped to set him down a treacherous path. He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to talk any more, except that there was one thing he needed to say. One thing he needed to get out right away before he had any second thoughts, even though they were pulling up in front of the school.
“It would probably be a good idea if you told Dad about Lindy,” he said.
She pulled over to the curb and turned off the radio. “Honesty is always the best policy,” she said. But she said it the way a person might say having a molar pulled out with pliers is a good idea.
“Well, it’d save a lot of hassle, don’t you think?”
She frowned. She had her perfect pencil-thin eyebrows on again, and she raised one of them expressively. “You think?”
“Yes,” said Dec, decisively, looking straight ahead. “Then Dad won’t have to worry about getting an annulment.”