I wanted to think more deeply about Nancy’s extraordinary story, wishing I could get more details from her, in spite of her clear message that there would be none, and figure out how to fit it into my essay for Fitz. And I also couldn’t stop thinking about Sierra.
My motherly instincts toward a youngster were battling with my curiosity and my concern about Louisa. I couldn’t shake the belief she could tell me more even if she didn’t know herself what it might be. Surely she must have stumbled on some of Louisa’s secrets?
At the same time, I had badgered this young girl and probably frightened her. It’s hard to see myself as scary. True, I can be mouthy, but I am a small person with a soft voice. Through Sierra’s eyes, though? I would be an adult, brimming with self-confidence and authority. Maybe. Or maybe I was deluding myself.
Those were all the underground thoughts that rippled through my daytime responsibilities, no matter how much I tried to suppress them.
That night I asked Chris if I ever came off as scary. She gave me a strange look, started to laugh, then stopped. “You can be.” She responded to my disbelief with, “Yes, you can. You come on sort of like, ‘I’m here to take charge, and I’m taking names.’”
Joe came in then and added, not helpfully, “I think you are the scariest woman I know.” He thought it was funny.
“What?”
“I mean it as a compliment.” He hugged me. “My mom liked that song, ‘I am woman, hear me roar.’ Remember?”
“Oh, the Dark Ages. Geezer music.” Chris making fun of both of us. “Actually, it’s popular again these days. So, yes, Mom, you can be scary.” She raised a single eyebrow. “But remember that doesn’t apply to me. I know better.”
Honestly, I was kind of flattered, but it did not help my dilemma. How to make Sierra talk to me without actually bullying her?
The answer that came to me was that I needed to check in again with Louisa, see how she was doing, and maybe ask her a few questions about her helper. A bonus would be if Sierra was there herself. It was a long shot, but it’s not as if I didn’t have plenty of reasons to talk to Louisa anyway.
The first evening with both Chris and Joe out around dinnertime, I made the call, and using my experiences with Leary, asked Louisa if she’d like me to bring over some dinner. She would. She liked everything, and dessert. She would welcome company, too. She would find me some interesting family artifacts to discuss. I deviously mentioned how useful it would be to have Sierra help with serving and cleanup.
Two days later, I arrived at her door, toting heavy shopping bags with baked pasta, meatballs, garlic bread, salad, a bottle of red wine, and a box of assorted cupcakes. Bribery at its most blatant. One of my areas of expertise.
And it paid off, because Sierra answered the door. She didn’t look happy to see me, but I smiled warmly and lifted my bags.
“Dinner for Louisa. Did she tell you?”
“Yes. She said I don’t need to leave her a meal when I leave for my other job.” She did not smile or welcome me, only stepped aside to let me in.
Louisa called from the parlor. “Come right in. We have the little table set up in here. Sierra will serve before she leaves. We are doing much better today. Sierra, how many days has it been since we heard from the police?”
“Two.” She was reaching for the heavy bags.
I thought, they are not done with her, and wondered what they were up to in the meantime. Like investigating the murder from every other angle. Interviewing a few dozen other people. Forensics. Their job, in other words. Really, I knew that.
I greeted Louisa and followed Sierra downstairs to help unpack the bags. The kitchen was a warm room with French doors opening directly into the garden and a tiny old stove, enameled mint green, next to the modern one. I would have liked to explore—was that open space in the back once a large fireplace?—but that was not why I was here now.
As Sierra served salad on Louisa’s dainty flowered china and poured the cheap wine into gold-banded stemware, I helped unwrap the rest of the meal.
“I did not mean to pry the other day.” Yes, I did, but I’d intended more subtlety. “I hope I did not upset you.” That much, at least, was true.
She was silent and unimpressed.
And then she started crying, the wine bottle shaking perilously in her hand. I took the bottle away, moved the wineglasses out of danger, and handed her a paper towel from the roll on the counter.
She sniffled and stopped. “My own family hates my life. They’re all on a straight-and-narrow highway, and I was looking for some detours. Like the scenic route through the woods.” She stretched out her tattooed arms. “I don’t miss them at all. I don’t.” She sighed. “But I appreciate Louisa being like family. Anyone wants to hurt her goes through me.”
“Wait! Are you one of Nancy’s Witness runaways?”
Her look was almost comical. “What? Oh, hell, no. No. I was just dying in small-town USA. Ya know? I was looking for the bright lights. I got to know Nancy when she did a job at the home and I needed more work and she introduced me to Louisa.” She jumped up. “Hey! Louisa’s waiting for dinner, and trust me, she does not like to wait for her food. Here!”
She opened a door in the wall, loaded the plates onto shelves, locked the door, and pushed a button.
“Yeah! A dumbwaiter. Cool, isn’t it? Those old-time dinner parties had acres of china and dozens of courses, so I guess this got it upstairs still hot.” She leaned in to whisper a secret. “She showed me some of those old menus, and I didn’t even know what the food was. Madeira sauce this and supreme that. Turtle soup? Eww.”
Upstairs the plates were waiting for us, and Sierra set them up on the table in the bay window so we could eat and watch the activity on the street.
She was calmer and almost cheerful. I thought the tears had helped ease some burdens. That’s a dynamic I knew from my own teen. She placed the cupcakes where we could see them, and reminded Louisa that there was a thermos of hot coffee on the sideboard.
When she was ready to leave, I walked her to the door to ask a question.
“You work at the Downtown Care Home?”
She nodded. “Night shift, mostly, after I leave here.”
“I remember seeing flyers. I think. Was there a man who disappeared?”
She nodded. “It was so sad. Mostly he was my friend Willow’s patient. He was troubled in his mind. Like, some kind of old breakdown maybe? Nice man when he wasn’t having his visions.” She whispered. “Willow thought he was an old Witness. Some of the things he said. But he wasn’t too coherent.”
“Did they ever find him? Was he all right?”
She shook her head. “They found his body. Near here, actually.” She pointed to the benches across the street and whispered again, “Right out there. I didn’t tell Louisa. He was sitting there, dead as could be. Not attacked or anything, just, like, gone. But I figured it might upset her. Got to run.”
Shaken, I returned to the table to find Louisa had finished her meal and was anxiously eyeing the dessert.
“I couldn’t overcome my mannerly upbringing. It would be rude to start dessert before you. But I was very tempted. Do come and finish eating!”
Scolded, I ate while Louisa watched the street and told me a few stories about grand dinners in the house, using this very china, when she was child. I wanted to record it all, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to put a smartphone on the table with her elegant old silver and china. The garlic bread was incongruous enough, though Louisa didn’t seem to mind. She ate three pieces right down to the crumbs.
I made a joke about the garlic, and she responded, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure it never appeared in my grandmother’s kitchen, but delicious is delicious. Believe me, I don’t want to live on lobster Newburg, and those cupcakes will be as tasty as Baked Alaska. Which Grandmama did serve for parties.” She tapped her sterling silver fork. “I once had three generations’ worth of silver service. Dozens of place settings and all the side pieces, too. Bet you’ve never seen grape scissors.”
“You’d lose that bet! I worked on an exhibit about Gilded Age parties. But where in the world did you keep it all?”
“Up in the rooms that used to be for the maids who polished it! But I sold most of it many years ago to pay for a new furnace, and good riddance, too. When am I ever going to have a banquet for two dozen? I can’t remember the last time it was used. A lifetime ago.”
I gently confronted her about follow-up from the police. “Is it true, what Sierra said, that they are leaving you alone?”
“For now. They seem to be off invading some other person’s privacy.” She held up a hand to stop me questioning further. “And, as we are having a pleasant visit, we do not need to discuss any of this tonight.”
I disagreed.
“You will have to answer their questions eventually. And Louisa? Why won’t you? They will certainly come back.”
“Don’t think so. I have chased them away.” She winked. I was unconvinced, but she put a finger to her lips and then passed me the dessert plate. The subject was closed for now.
I poured the coffee from the insulated carafe, and she invited me into the library, the room behind the parlor.
“I found something the other day that you might like. It turned up while I was looking for something else. If you promise to take very, very good care of it, you may take it home for a short time.”
It was an album stuffed with both photos and keepsakes. I could barely get the excited words out, that I was a historian, worked in a museum, knew how to take care of such items better than she could even imagine.
“It was my grandmother’s. I remember others, but I don’t know where they are.”
She’d bookmarked a few pages, including one showing a banquet table set with the very tableware we had just used. Twenty-four places at a long table, with three wineglasses at each setting and more cutlery pieces than I could count in the photo. There was a menu, too, elegantly handwritten, with seven courses.
As soon as I got home, I would attack this book. I could hardly wait. I would love looking, I do love looking, but more important, maybe some street views would be useful to my research. Or to Sergeant Torres.
“Louisa, did you ever look in here for early photos of your property? It might be useful evidence in your property dispute.”
“Why, no. Does that sound foolish? I’d forgotten it even existed until I stumbled on it yesterday. Grandmama was not keeping legal papers in there, though. That was not her sphere.”
“What was her sphere?”
“Do you need to ask? Fashion. Wait till you see the hats she wore. And giving parties.”
We wrapped the book carefully in layers of plastic and put it in a tote bag. She chuckled. “Grandmama would be appalled to see her album wrapped in garbage bags. Not that she would ever know what garbage bags are. Or garbage, for that matter. She had a staff to take care of those messy details.”
We had a final cup of coffee and admired the streetlights casting their glow.
“So many memories looking out at night. I did see the World Trade Center from right here, you know. And troopships out there when I was a young woman during the war.” She pointed. “See that bench right over there? Someone died there. Not long ago.”
That got my instant attention.
“Sierra thinks I don’t know about it, but I do. I saw the ambulance and the police. Poor crazy old man.” She looked at me and added, “Don’t took so shocked. I used to talk to him sometimes.”
I managed to croak out, “Tell me more.”
“He’d sit there, all quiet and lonely, and disappear, and then come back. He was… He looked like he was homeless. Very shabby. We talked. Sometimes what he said didn’t make any sense at all. Very, ah, apocalyptic would be the word. He would obsess about cleansing and sin. And then sometimes we just had a nice exchange about the weather.”
“But wait. Why didn’t you, or someone, report him? Get him some help?”
“He wasn’t bothering anyone. Didn’t beg. Didn’t live there. Didn’t do a thing but sit on a public bench like anyone else. That’s what it’s there for. And mostly if I offered any help he would turn it down. He took a bottle of water from me once, and an old straw hat one hot day.”
“But I don’t understand. He was the missing man from the home where Sierra works, wasn’t he? There were advertisements about him.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I didn’t know that then. He never answered a single personal question. Never! He’d just babble nonsense if you asked. I didn’t hear about those flyers until it was too late.”
“But why didn’t Sierra? She knew him.”
“Guess she didn’t see him.” She made a dismissive gesture. “He was only there once in a while. Poor old guy.”
She patted the album she had given me. “Now, my own ancestors mostly died right here, upstairs, in their big oak beds, and had grand funerals with big black cars.” She stopped. “In the old days, there were carriages, and the horses had black plumes on their heads.”
“Do you remember those?”
“What? How old do you think I am? Way before my time. But there were pictures. Some even in the newspapers. You know. Stories headed”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“‘Passing of prominent local citizen.’ I have them here somewhere. Now, my dear, it’s time for me to go to bed and you to go home. Do you want to call a car?”
“No need. I’ll take the subway.”
“Keep that book under wraps then, until you are home safely, please.”
Though I was itching to open it up as soon as I had a seat on a subway car, I had made a promise. But I didn’t exactly keep it.
On the train, a woman smiled at me from across the aisle. I did my normal New Yorker five-second assessment. She didn’t seem crazy, hostile, or begging. In fact, she looked respectable, older, quite a bit older than I am, friendly.
Finally, she leaned across. “Don’t I know you? Did we meet at some historical society function? I used to work for Jeremy Kingston at the college.”
My brain kicked in. “Oh, yes, now I remember. I’m sorry; it’s late. We met at…was it the museum exhibit opening? When I worked at the Brooklyn History Museum?”
“Yes, that’s it.” She introduced herself and moved across to join me. “Nice to see you again. What are you up to these days? Still at the history museum?”
I told her what I was doing professionally and then, bursting with excitement, what I was carrying at that moment. I thought she would appreciate it, and she did.
I opened it to show her, grabbing miscellaneous papers as they drifted out from between the pages, and stuffing them back in. From a quick glance, it was a pile of a few catalogs, some letters without envelopes, a magazine. I stuck them back in to return to Louisa later.
I thought the woman would appreciate the photos, and we did a little shared squealing over a few. Her stop came too soon, and I bundled the book up to get ready to hop off at the next stop.
It was late when I got home, and everyone was in bed. I had a quiet hour to look at my loaned treasure. Later I’d make some notes, even catalog the contents if they turned out be useful. Or even better, important. For tonight, I would just browse. There are people who call Vogue or Architectural Digest eye candy, but to me, this was better candy than M&M’s any day. And I do love M&M’s.
I laughed. Louisa was so right about the hats. There were photos of garden parties and tea parties and departures on ocean liners, and everyone wore gigantic hats. Brims were as wide as the wearers’ shoulders. They were covered with explosions of feathers or flowers or ribbons, or all three. A different style involved a crown so wide and puffed out I could not see how it stayed on a head at all.
How did anyone wear one of these on a crowded streetcar? I had a sudden flash of a comic moment like a silent film, a lady in a crowd with a wide hat causing havoc with a Charlie Chaplin look-alike.
And then I thought, silly me, these women did not travel on streetcars. Their private carriages had plenty of hat room. And on journeys, there were hatboxes at the top of the mountain of luggage. I saw them, right there in the photos.
Toward the end of the book, the carriages in the background became mixed with those quaint early automobiles. The clothing styles became a bit sleeker and more tailored, but Louisa’s house looked much the same. It was built to last forever.
I put those loose papers back in the book for now, once again grabbing them when they fell at my feet. I wandered around the first floor ordering my home. And I went from thinking about the house in the photos, to the street in the photos, to the man on the bench across that street, facing that house.
I stopped and sat down, suddenly a little out of breath. Was that my story, the one I needed to write for Fitz? I was past the point of wondering if I should write one at all. He had convinced me. And here it was, the contrast between the beautiful facade of this house, this whole dreamy neighborhood, and real life as it is really lived. The elegant drawing rooms could conceal sad and ugly secrets. Edith Wharton told us that. And a man could die all alone on a lovely bench on a serene street. And a murder could happen next door.