Dover’s Main Street was like so many Main Streets in upstate New York. The roads, lacking white center lines, followed along the hilly terrain, flanked by small wooden houses, roads worn, not so much by traffic, but by time. Concrete cracks wove their way along the roads like snail trails. Some of the cracks were filled in with black tar, some left to deepen and lengthen. The narrow sidewalks, distorted by tree roots, were broken up by T-shaped power-poles with their power lines draped from one pole to the next. The poles were ghostly onlookers of a parade canceled decades ago. The houses were covered by drooping roofs and surrounded by chain-link fences keeping old, arthritic dogs at bay.
Anna Lieberman’s last known address was off Route 22. Anna and David were originally from Dover, yet the farmhouse they’d grown up in and that burned down back in 1982 was located so close to Oniontown that they might as well have been from there. Oniontown is a Hudson Valley hamlet of Dover, not actually a town, but a collection of run-down trailers and dilapidated farms.
When I arrived at Anna’s, the sound of an ax splitting wood echoed down the street. A garbage truck’s diesel engine revved on and off. I passed 126 Waterway Circle slowly, taking in the house and the yard. Anna’s backyard was fenced in by seven-foot-tall sun-bleached poles.
The first word that came to mind was warped. The first of six houses off a cul-de-sac, 126 Waterway Circle appeared unkempt but not uninhabited. The entire neighborhood was dangling lightly off the ledge of being deemed ramshackle. There was a crooked FOR SALE sign posted in front of the neighboring house to the left of Anna’s.
I parked the car on the main road instead of in front of the house, got out, passed her home, and continued down the warped sidewalk. I strained to read the sign in the front yard of 128 and I took out my cell phone. I had only 5 percent of battery life left and I wasn’t going to use it on a call pretending I was interested in a house. I slid the phone back in my purse.
I turned and went up Anna’s pebble walkway, a scraggly, fuzzy mess of stones and weeds cushioning my every step. An old Chevy Caprice with mismatched hubcaps sat under a carport partially covered by a blue tarp. The fence paint was chipped, the posts’ concrete anchors gaped open, releasing the posts from their duty of keeping the fence in an upright position. Some fence sections were standing upright, some leaning, and one was flat on the ground. The overgrown yard was covered in knee-high weeds. Whatever shrubs and bushes there were appeared wilted, their dead leaves cracked and bare roots exposed to the elements.
On the front porch wind chimes dangled from the rafters above abandoned chairs. The chimes clinked a wretched song of despair while the strings holding the metal pipes in place were about to give in to gravity. Some of the missing pipe parts had been replaced by forks, their tines bent about randomly. The drooping black roof was patched with brown shingles.
The porch slumped worse than the roof. Two crates formed a makeshift table, with two folding chairs placed on either side of them. The chairs looked as if they had been stolen from a reception; their chipped gold paint alluding to a wedding ceremony long past.
I took a few deep breaths but couldn’t keep my hands from shaking. My purse was heavy, weighed down by the loaded gun, more a good luck charm than anything else. I had never fired a gun before and the one in Jack’s closet was the first I had ever held in my hand. It was a Taurus 905, a 9 mm, whatever that meant. The gun in my purse was unnerving me, adding to my tension, and the facts I had gathered about its operation started to merge into a ball of yarn; secure engagement, ready to fire disengagement, drop the hammer manually, pull the trigger while lowering the hammer with the thumb. I had spent an entire afternoon online looking up the mechanics and how to fire it, but I had a feeling that if it came down to it, handling it would leave me dumbfounded.
A hollow sound answered when my knuckles rapped the paint-chipped door. I waited what seemed like minutes. Then, like a scene from a Dutch painting, a petite woman stood in the doorframe, in her hands a basket filled with vegetables: carrots with wilted leaves, white bulbous turnips turned purple. There was another green leafy vegetable I couldn’t identify, maybe water spinach or Swiss chard.
I recognized her immediately. Anna Lieberman’s strawberry hair was tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. Some had escaped and made her look disheveled. She looked wholesome holding the fruit-and-vegetable basket, capable of extracting life from the earth’s soil. Her hands were covered in mud, her nails rimmed with dirt. I looked up from the basket and met her eyes.
“Yes?” she asked as she considered me. She was visibly out of breath.
“I don’t mean to intrude, I . . . I don’t know, I have a question.” I swallowed hard and forced my face into a smile. “I . . . I’m sorry to disturb you. You look like you were in the middle of something. I . . .”
She smoothed a strand of hair behind her ears. She then paused as if she had decided there was no use. Her smile exposed white crooked teeth. She put the basket of vegetables on a table in the foyer. The table held a sizable stack of catalogs, the top one a glossy cover of a Greek island, judging by the white houses with blue roofs and the azure ocean in the far background. Threadbare industrial carpet, frayed at the edges, extended over the threshold. She was barefoot.
“I was out back and I wasn’t sure if I heard someone knock. How can I help you?” She looked me up and down.
“I wanted to ask you about the house. The one over there.” I took a step back and pointed at the little white house next door with the FOR SALE sign in the yard.
She looked puzzled, as if she was unaware it was for sale or surprised that someone wanted to buy it.
“I don’t know much about it. Maybe you should call the number on the sign and ask to see it?” She ended the sentence as if it was a question.
“How about the neighborhood, the schools? Is it pretty safe? How about break-ins? Real estate agents never tell you the truth.” I added the last sentence to let her know that I valued her opinion.
“I wouldn’t know about schools around here. I don’t have much contact with the neighbors and I don’t read the local papers.” She kept holding her soiled hands up like a surgeon ready to make the first cut. “I need to wash my hands. Would you like to come in?”
“Thank you so much. Buying a house is a major investment. I just want to make sure I pick the right one.”
She stepped back and I entered Anna Lieberman’s house. The threadbare carpet turned out to be a square piece of leftover outdoor carpeting. The rest of the floor was covered in hardwood planks, creaking underfoot.
The house was old and worn, drafty even on this mild autumn day. Straight ahead was the living room, and another hallway to the left. The kitchen, to the right of the living room, led straight into the backyard. The house smelled of mold and musty carpets, traces of furniture polish and Lysol. There was a frayed couch with lifeless throw pillows and a crooked coffee table. Countless travel magazines with glossy covers lay strewn across the coffee table and the couch. Some cover pages were torn, others had rings from sweating glasses, leaving the pages warped. The rugs crunched like straw underneath my feet. The furniture was mismatched. It was the home of a woman who had furnished a house with hand-me-downs and donations, warped and worn, one owner short of ending up in a dump or a landfill. Yet it was as clean as one could clean an old house. The colors were muted, washed out, except for the shiny travel magazines.
Anna Lieberman led me through the hallway and into the kitchen, where she pointed to a chair by a table. She rapidly pumped the soap dispenser while the water was trickling. The soap was unable to cut through the mud, so she washed her hands twice but still didn’t seem satisfied. As she applied the third round of soap, she asked, “I was just about to put on a kettle. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“I don’t want to impose, really,” I said. “You’re very kind.” I put my hands in my lap and interlaced my fingers to keep them from shak
ing.
“Tea it is.” She opened a cabinet door and pulled out two chipped mugs. She switched on the stove and took two tea bags out of a canister on the counter. She dropped the bags into the mugs and sat across from me on the other side of the kitchen table. Anna Lieberman’s demeanor seemed open and friendly, and I felt a sudden tinge of remorse for misleading her.
“I grew up around here and I’m looking to buy a house in the area,” I said. My inventiveness surprised me. One believable lie after the other slipped off my lips. “Actually, I’m from Poughkeepsie,” I added as I cupped the empty mug, trying again to hide my shaking hands. I had seen a sign by the road and remembered the name of a town just west of Dover. “I really like it here.” My mind was racing. I didn’t want the conversation to stall, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. The silence stretched, became obvious.
Anna jerked ever so slightly when the kettle whistled. She poured boiling water into the mugs, turning it the color of cognac. A fruity aroma drifted toward my nostrils. When the wooden knob of a drawer didn’t budge, she wiggled it left and right and then fiercely yanked at it. The drawer opened and she reached for a spoon while turning toward me.
“Poughkeepsie?” she said and nodded. “That’s not far from here.” She eyed the spoon in her hand, a spoon that seemed small, almost elfin, as if made for a child. New and polished, shiny with a lavender rubber tip, ill-suited somehow.
“About twenty miles west,” I said and tried to ignore the image that burst into my mind of yet another spoon. A spoon—wasn’t it mere days ago that I had held one just like this in my hand?—Mia’s spoon, its lavender rubber tip turning white when food was too hot.
I looked toward the back door, then back at her hand again. Anna now held a regular teaspoon that didn’t resemble the one from earlier at all.
Anna returned the kettle to the stove, and while she searched the cabinet for sugar, I took a closer look around the kitchen. The counters were worn and showed deep scratches and knife marks. The table and chairs were old and chipped from use. The buffet—the glass in the doors was missing—had been repainted. The paint, a buttery yellow with a green tinge to it, had been applied in a thick coat and the wood seams appeared caulked with paint. The linoleum floor tiles had risen around the edges and emitted a crunching sound. The fridge and the stove were ancient.
The kitchen counters were cluttered with empty flowerpots, bags of seeds, cookie jars overfilled with odds and ends. Torn pages with colorful pictures of beaches and resorts covered the counters, flowerpots and soil atop, as if I had interrupted her while she was planting, repotting, and pruning right here in the kitchen.
“You have children?” she asked and ran her finger around the top of the mug.
The question caught me by surprise. As she inspected her hands for cleanliness, I took in her shabby floral blouse and the skirt. The colors were faded, yet the blouse was clean and pressed.
“One. I have just one. A daughter.” How peculiar it felt to speak of Mia as if she were safe at home with her father or a sitter. What was I even doing here? I asked myself. What did I expect to find? Lieberman wasn’t here, his sister seemed to be some meek woman in an old run-down and drafty house, tending to a garden out back. Even more peculiar was the fact that I had no idea how to even steer her in the direction of her brother and my missing child.
As I watched, Anna pulled the tea bag from the steaming mug, never flinching as she squeezed every last bit of hot liquid out of it. She got up and stepped on the foot pedal raising the garbage can lid, dropping the tea bag into the can.
A foul, irritating odor hit my nostrils. The stench was stomach churning, sinister and heavy, permeating my every pore, yet it was sweet, with an undertone of clean in a putrid kind of way, a lemony scent maybe, but not quite as fresh, more chemical, like a potpourri. Like . . . a familiar odor, conjuring images of diapers piling up in the nursery, prompting Jack to shake his head in disapproval.
“Fertilizer,” Anna said as she stepped off the foot pedal, closed the lid, and placed a hand on top of it, as if trying to contain the odor. “Smacks you right in the face, doesn’t it?”
“Smells like dirty diapers,” I replied. I had seen a baby spoon, now I smelled diapers? My anxiety was catching up with me and soon perspiration would begin to soak through my clothes.
“You wanted to know more about the area . . .” Her voice trailed off. She paused every so often and cocked her head as if she were trying to capture a melody coming from the far distance. “Let’s see, there is a small park at the end of . . .” I let her go on and on, and smiled every time she looked up at me.
She was no longer the plain girl with the frizzy hair I had seen in the 1982 newspaper article. Sitting across from her, the differences from the older pictures of her became obvious; her face had lengthened; the bone structure was more refined, almost angelic.
I needed to know where her brother was, needed to know if he was capable of what I believed him capable of, and I wanted to hear the story of the fire, the story about her family, her brother’s story, something, really anything that would explain what he had done. Was this another one of my thoughts going astray, a thought that started out as I wish I could talk to his sister and then ended with me in her kitchen drinking tea?
“You must be doing a lot of gardening,” I said. “Just vegetables or flowers or both?” I looked at the floating tea bag inside my mug and reached for the sugar.
“A little bit of everything,” Anna said and pushed the sugar bowl toward me. Her hand, free from the mud and dirt, seemed malformed, its movement suggestive of arthritic joints. The edges of the inside of her palms were pulled together by scars, affecting muscles and tendons, restricting the movement of her fingers.
“I didn’t mean to bother you, I saw the house for sale as I was driving by, and I want to use some insurance money from my house in Poughkeepsie to buy a home here in Dover.” I kept on going as if in a trance, trying to erase baby spoons and foul smells from my memory. I needed to focus and concentrate. “It’s not a lot of money and I still have to buy furniture and appliances. Everything I owned”—I paused to make it more dramatic—“burned up in a fire. I have nothing left.” I lowered my head, partly to play the role of a victim, partly because I didn’t think I looked sincere telling the tale.
Anna didn’t answer. I looked up to see the impact. Her eyes darkened and my words rested between us like the sugar cubes in the chipped bowl. She stirred her tea, her hands clasping the spoon, her index finger pointing aimlessly about.
I was good. I was surprised how good I was. I never thought that I’d be able to con my way into her house and then dupe my way into her kitchen. It was easy, surprisingly easy. I wanted her to gently descend into the past and reappear with a story. The story of the 1982 fire and her brother, David Lieberman. And then we’d talk about him being a kidnapper.
“A fire? Your house burned down?” Her voice cracked and her body shifted in the chair. Her spoon dropped with a clang back into her mug. “I’m sorry to hear that. Did anybody get hurt?” Her eyes were big, her pupils dark. She hid her hands underneath the table.
“No, it was just an electrical fire, some faulty wiring. I wasn’t home when it happened.”
My next question would be So, you live here alone? Then Do you have family? Then I’d say A brother? Tell me about him, then I need to tell you something, I want you to hear me out. It’s about your brother . . .
Suddenly she cocked her head and got up, as if she’d heard something, as if a sound, undetected by me, was tearing at her. I heard a gentle whimper trail toward me. Almost like a baby’s whimper the moment right before they wake up.
I’d seen, no, I had imagined Anna handling baby spoons, then I’d smelled diapers. There were bags of fertilizer and clearly she was a gardener; I had smelled odors that weren’t there. Now I actually heard a baby whimper. I was afraid of what I was goi
ng to imagine next. I felt hot; sweat started to form on my forehead. In a matter of seconds my body was covered in it, forming freely like condensation.
“I think I better leave,” I said and got up, knees shaking. “I’ll have someone show me the house. You’ve been very kind, thank you for the tea.” I grabbed my purse tighter.
She got up and walked me to the front door.
I reached for the doorknob.
“Wait!” Her voice made me turn around and stop in my tracks. “My name is Anna Lieberman. I didn’t get your name?”
She knew nothing about me—so what did it matter?
“Estelle. Estelle Paradise.”
I turned back toward the door, reaching for the knob again. She stepped past me and stood between me and it, a barricade.
“You’re not looking for a house, Estelle Paradise. Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?” Her eyes were piercing, demanding an answer.
I tried to think of something to say, explain myself, but my mind was blank.
“I’m looking for your brother, David.”
“You’re looking for my brother?” Her eyes flickered as if she was checking her brain for the puzzle pieces she needed to fit together to make sense of everything. I almost felt sorry for her. “Why would you come here asking me about a house and why would you talk about fires when you’re really looking for my brother?” Her voice was soft, almost gentle now. “What is it you want?”
“I’m not here to cause you any trouble, I promise. I have questions.”
She wore a puzzled expression, one I was unable to interpret. Confusion? Fear even?
Anna repeated, “What is it you want?”
Where to start. My baby’s gone, your brother took her. I found Tinker Bell in his apartment and strange newspaper articles.
“I think your brother took my daughter.”
“My brother took your daughter?” She looked around as if to make sure no one was watching us.
I kept looking at her, undeterred. “I need to talk to him. Tell me where he is,” I said.
Remember Mia Page 21