I walked through the door, through the kitchen to the living room with its lovely high beams, and up the stairs. I felt the cool banister beneath my fingertips, every ridge, every curve, every nick . . . I knew exactly where they would be before my fingertips felt them. I turned to the right at the top of the stairs toward my parents’ bedroom. I saw their oak bed ahead of me, the dresser on the right, the chest of drawers on my left. I felt the little decorative knob that I touched and admired every day. I was looking for something. But I couldn’t find it. There was the nightstand clock, the mirror on the dresser, the scents of my father’s cologne and my mother’s face powder. It was a lovely feeling of being back, of knowing what to expect and then seeing it. I half-understood that I was dreaming, but then again, there was a real quality to it all. And then it hit me. What I was looking for wasn’t here.
There was no music.
I was suddenly outside at the front of the house. There was the little black statue of a young boy riding a serpent, with a fountain of water flowing out of the fishy mouth. I ran my hands along the seashell-shaped base and felt the cold water that was collecting, the sound of the fountain bright and clear and familiar. I turned to my right, and there was my tree, overshadowing the sadness, offering its happiness.
My purple maple tree with the one branch reaching out to the left like a leafy giant, kindly holding out his arm to invite me to play. My hands automatically went to that branch, and the smooth, brown bark felt cool, and it was like an old friend. I eagerly pulled myself up onto the branch, followed it along like a balance beam to the main trunk, and climbed my tree like a natural ladder.
High, high up, I found a good foothold and leaned back against the strong, supportive trunk. I looked down and saw my father on a ladder, fixing something near the roofline of the house. I saw my mother in that corner window above the kitchen sink, and she smiled up at me and waved. I took in the brick planter near the road, full of flamboyant purple and pink petunias. Across from me was the tall pine soaring way up over our house while a fresh wind blew its Christmasy scent to me.
This was a gift, I knew. Simultaneously, I was filled with joy and heartbreaking sorrow. The tears from both overcame me, and my head ached with them. They spilled out over my cheeks and dripped onto my hands, which were still tightly clasping my tree.
I woke up.
Then, slowly, slowly, the heartache ebbed . . . a little. I uncurled my body and rubbed my hair out of my face. I wiped the tears that had run down my face. I drew slow, big breaths and filled my lungs and my heart with the cool air of the night.
I never went back to sleep. I wasn’t afraid to go to sleep; The dream hadn’t been a bad one. Just heart-wrenching. In fact, part of me wanted to go back to it; I had so much more to look at and to experience again. I mentally walked through that dream again and again, marveling at the crystal clear details that had come back.
Around six, I finally gave it up and got out of bed. I wasn’t that tired for having been up the past two hours or so. I took a shower and put on my clothes for work: a deep rose–colored dress that had a wonderful cream-color collar that came up high on my neck to hide some of my bandage, but was wide enough to be comfortable. I brushed my hair and let it fall loosely to my shoulders, wanting a soft curtain of protection and comfort.
I went downstairs and was surprised to hear Mr. Kirkland in the kitchen. I went in quietly and took a stool at the kitchen counter. There was already a steaming hot cup of tea in place.
“Heard me up, huh?” I asked quietly.
“I heard the floorboards creak a bit. Did you sleep all right? I didn’t expect you for a couple more hours.”
“I slept all right. Until I had a very vivid dream. It was about our Rochester house. I hadn’t recalled some of those memories in a long, long time.”
He nodded his head, listening intently, sipping his hot coffee.
Aunt Evelyn walked in, still in her fluffy blue robe. She looked quiet, contemplative. “The Rochester house, Lane?” she asked, with a soft smile. She came and sat down next to me, where the other cup of hot tea lay.
“Mm hm. And my maple tree,” I remembered, with a smile. “Gosh, I loved that tree. It was like a friend.”
“That red maple out front?” asked Mr. Kirkland, with a grin. “I remember you climbing that tree to the very top; made your mom very nervous the first few times you did it. But your dad just taught you how to be sure of your footholds, and after a few dozen safe climbs, your mom grew to love the sight of you way up there.”
“You know? I think I need to go back there soon. Through all of the details of this case, I feel like I’ve learned something about our home in Rochester.”
“What’s that, dear?” asked Aunt Evelyn interestedly.
“Well, I caught myself talking about my mom and dad as ‘them’ and ‘their life’ and ‘their home.’ Well, I’m realizing that it was my home, too. My life and my story. I feel like I need to know more, and I think that house might have some answers, if only to help me make those memories more substantial.”
Aunt Evelyn was nodding. “Yes, Lane. I think you’re correct. I do think, however, that we should wait a bit. First of all, your twenty-fourth birthday is in just over a week.” That completely took me off guard. I was usually very on top of my birthday—I love birthdays—but I had completely forgotten it was coming up. “Your parents left some things with their lawyer that were to be given to you on that day. I think it would be wise to see what those things are before we go to Michigan.”
“My twenty-fourth birthday?” I asked incredulously. “I know they were eccentric, but why not twenty or twenty-five? That would make more sense.”
“Well, er . . .” started Evelyn, looking awkward. “They really did mean for it to be for your twenty-fifth birthday. However, there was a built-in caveat that said we could give it to you earlier if, and I quote, ‘there are strenuously extenuating circumstances deeming that Lane should receive it earlier.’ And we think that these past months have indeed been strenuously extenuating circumstances.”
“You could say that again,” I said, with a laugh.
Aunt Evelyn looked at me closely. “You know, Lane, it’s interesting that you said you felt like you were an outsider to your old life. How did you say it? Like you were looking in on something that you wanted to be in the middle of. . . . It reminds me of a friend of mine.”
I smiled knowingly. “ML?”
“Yes, dear,” she said. “I think on your birthday we shall chat a little more about that, too.”
* * *
I sank into my little white chair next to the window in my blue room to read a while, but it was almost impossible to focus. I gave up and headed in to work. I had told Fio that I’d make my own way in today; I liked the idea of having the time to be by myself. I had gotten a new pair of cream high heels with bows on the toes. They looked great with my dark rose dress. The high-strung events of yesterday’s big adventure mixed with the emotional, gut-wrenching feelings from the night, left me wilted and melancholy. But as I walked down the street, seeing the familiar sights of my neighborhood, breathing in the festive city air, and doing something normal and natural like going to work, I began to feel more like myself.
I was one of the first to arrive at the office. I walked in the door and stopped abruptly. I was face-to-face with Roxy. I almost dropped my purse. She looked surprised as well, and the fleeting emotions on both of our faces would have been worthy of a major motion picture had anyone witnessed them.
There had been a lot of drama: the best friend turned enemy, the enemy turned sympathetic victim, and on and on.... What could you say about all that? I looked at her lovely, fair face, her white-blond curls, her perfect figure. I looked at her eyes again. Maybe for the first time. Then my shoulders relaxed, my arms fell to my sides. And I started to laugh appreciably at our situation.
“Come on, Lane, let’s get a cup of coffee,” said Roxy, through a commiserating chuckle. We both surrende
red. We put our stuff down and trooped over to the coffee room together.
We were still the only ones in the office, so after we clinked our coffee mugs in a show of solidarity, I filled her in on the whole story. Valerie had gone back last night to tell Roxy about Eliza being shot. But she deserved to hear all the details of what had been going on the past couple of months. Again, her emotions were all over the place, from stunned to angry to relieved.
After a long drink of her coffee, she asked with a sly squint to her eyes, “So, did anyone see Lizzie’s hat on my dining room table?”
“Aha! I knew it!” I yelled.
I made her jump at my jubilant outburst, but she shook her head, laughing. “I should have known you’d be the one to find my clue. When Lizzie came over that night, she had brought a couple of her thugs to help persuade me to come along. I didn’t know what she was up to, but I couldn’t leave a note or anything to let someone know I was being kidnapped. At the last second, I saw her hat that I had borrowed on the small table by the door. I managed to grab it and throw it onto the kitchen table. I thought . . . well, I hoped someone would recognize that it wasn’t mine and that it was totally out of place.”
I was nodding encouragingly. “It took me a while to figure out that I was seeing a clue, but it finally came to me.”
We just looked at each other for a moment. We were both stuck: me having trouble saying, Sorry I thought you were an evil mastermind, and her unable to say, Thanks for coming to find me when an evil mastermind kidnapped me. We were rescued from the awkwardness as we heard someone come into the office.
“Hi, Peter!” I called out to him gratefully. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I’m looking for Mr. LaGuardia. Is he in yet?”
“No, it’s just us,” I answered. He was agitated, with his legs and arms moving constantly to some unheard rhythm as he paced around the place, searching, in case we were hiding the mayor.
“Can we help you at all?” I asked him sardonically.
“Well . . .” He gave a great pause, weighing something in his mind. “Well, maybe you can. We need to identify the body of Eliza sooner rather than later. I was hoping to get Mr. LaGuardia to the city morgue ASAP.” I stiffened, knowing what was coming.
He sighed apologetically. “Do you think you would be able to do it? I know it’s asking a lot. But . . .” He left the question hanging.
Roxy stepped up behind me and said in a very firm voice, “Yes. Absolutely, we can do it.”
I nodded in agreement.
“All right, ladies. Let’s go.”
We got to the city morgue, none of us feeling particularly chatty. The building was just like any other government building on the outside. The interior looked like a rather dark hospital with unending tiled walls and bleached floors. When we approached the actual room where we would encounter her body, Peter prepped us. Eliza would be under a sheet. The medical examiner would uncover her face and then cover it back up again. We drew big breaths, subconsciously not wanting to breathe in the air of that room.
The medical examiner was there, standing beside the body. He told us this was Louise Franco, aka Lizzie Frederickson, aka Eliza Franco. I felt Roxy stiffen as he said ‘Lizzie.’ He lifted the white sheet, and I saw that beautiful mane of red hair. And that was the first time I felt great pity, seeing something human about her that made me think of the girl, not her actions.
Roxy gasped. “That’s not her.”
I exclaimed, “What?” at the same moment that Peter said, “I knew it!”
I bent closer to her and looked directly at the face. It most certainly was not Eliza.
We all went back up to Pete’s desk without saying a word. We sat in the ugly old chairs he’d pulled over for us, looking at him in listless, dumb shock.
“All right, this is the deal. The police got to the bridge yesterday just as we all did. I was able to radio ahead to get as many men there as possible. Eliza’s body was located just where you told us. The medic pronounced her dead on the scene, and her body was covered in a sheet.
“After debriefing at Evelyn’s last night”—he looked at me pointedly—“I came back here to get started on my paperwork; there’s a lot of it, the case is so damn complicated.” Roxy and I nodded numbly.
“I was putting my notes together when the medical examiner comes up and says that there’s a discrepancy with his notes. I went down with him to the morgue, and he showed me the body. I only ever saw her from a distance, but I knew her hair. Eliza is a natural redhead, and this gal had obviously dyed hair; you could just see the small roots of brown coming in. That’s when I needed to get someone close to her to confirm our suspicions.”
“What on earth could have happened?” I just about yelled in frustration. “I watched her go down, I saw a blood stain on the front of her shirt. It was Fio’s bullet, damn it.”
Pete looked just as frustrated as I felt. He continued, “Well, someone obviously got to the body before it got to the morgue, and put this one in its place. So, either the body was important to someone, for reasons I can’t figure, or”—he paused, looking meaningfully at us—“Eliza is still alive, and someone used this decoy to stall us. In either case, it took someone with cunning and considerable power to pull it off.”
CHAPTER 42
I can’t change the fact that my paintings don’t sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.
—ML
August twentieth rolled around, the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday. The previous week and a half had flown by as the police performed a dedicated search to find Eliza Franco or her body. Nothing turned up.
We visited Morgan a couple of times, but despite her obvious appreciation for me and Aunt Evelyn, I could see that this new life wasn’t taking. And it was with a bit of sadness, but not surprise, that I heard she ran away. Aunt Evelyn was quite distraught, but I told her that Morgan knew how to get hold of us, and I truly believed she would if she got into trouble. She’d been on the streets for so many years, it was going to be hard to turn away from that.
Mr. Kirkland, Aunt Evelyn, and I were sitting in the parlor. I was fairly shaking with questions, curiosity, and surmises. They were laughing as they looked at me sitting perched on the edge of my seat. We were about to finally have that chat about the mysterious ML.
I started to rapid-fire my questions, Fiorello style. “Okay, who is ML? Was there anything more than coincidence behind the painting Danny had stolen? What valuable art do we have in the family that could inspire such an interest in us? Who—”
“Whoa, whoa, Missy!” exclaimed a chuckling Mr. Kirkland. Aunt Evelyn laughed out loud.
She took the floor, and in her businesslike, efficient manner, she brought the room (meaning me) under control. She stood up, and, clasping her hands with all the formal pomp of a professor lecturing at Cambridge, she began an orderly account.
“Lane, dear, we have many answers to your questions, but I’m afraid we don’t have all of them. Don’t worry,” she said, replying to my crestfallen look. “You will be satisfied with what we have to share with you today. No more secrets. You are old enough, responsible enough, and wise enough to handle the rather remarkable truth.”
She piqued my curiosity even further with this statement, and Mr. Kirkland gave a tiny ahem that prodded her along. Enough with building suspense already.
“All right, first of all, do you have the journal with you?”
“Yes, here you go.” I handed her the lavender journal that had become a companion and champion of sorts. ML’s words were somehow soothing to read, as I could identify with so many of his thoughts these past few weeks.
“What were your thoughts as you read this, Lane?”
“Well . . . ML is a man of deep beauty, color, passion, intensity. . . and somewhere in there . . . very tragic, too.” I put my chin in my hand as I pondered ML. “Like you alluded to the other day, it
feels like he’s looking in on something that he wishes he could be a part of, but can’t.”
“Very insightful, Lane. That is exactly why I wanted you to read this journal. He was someone who was trying to put his life together. He felt separate from the life he wanted at times, like you do with your parents, Lane. And his thoughts are just so beautiful. You see, ML was a man I met when I was a young girl in France. I was about eleven. I was visiting my uncle for the summer, and I met some of his patients who were artists. When I first met ML, he was out in a barn I had wanted to explore. He was studying his painting of lilies, and they immediately captured my imagination. From then on, I called him Monsieur Lily. ML.” Her face revealed that she was back in that time, remembering, remembering him.
“I visited him frequently. He was painting nonstop; the quantity of his paintings was absolutely staggering. He would pile them up and stack them in the barn. I thought they were all genius. Of course, like I said, he never sold anything back then. He was the one who inspired my interest in art,” she marveled. “Let me ask you something else, Lane. Do you remember the painting that was stolen out of my studio?”
“Sure, I remember there were a lot of blues and black, and I think there was a moon at the top and a small town in the distance.”
“Right. It was just my attempt at a recreation of the original, with my particular style. Here . . . is the original.”
She uncovered a painting on an easel that stood behind her. I stood up, thinking that I felt like I’d seen it before but couldn’t quite place it. I looked at it closely after shooting Aunt Evelyn a sharp glance.
“I feel like I’ve seen it before. . . .” I said.
“You have, in a few magazine articles. ML gave it to me.”
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