The Dress Shop of Dreams

by Menna Van Praag

  “Well, then,” the lovely boy asked, “who are you lighting your candle for?”

  Etta gave an enigmatic smile while she searched for a name. “My sister,” she said, plucking out the first relative who came to mind, then affected a sad look. “She’s got herself in trouble.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Etta glanced over at him, caught by the sincerity of his words. Suddenly she felt bad. And, for a long time afterward, when she looked back at what happened, Etta wondered if it had all been some sort of karmic retribution for that lie.

  Henry Dixon can’t concentrate. He has an important case he should be working on, he’s quite sure, only he can’t remember what. As he focuses on his computer screen, he glances down at the keyboard and wills his fingers to type something. Anything. But instead he stares until the letters smudge into one another and Henry can’t see his hands anymore. What was it about that woman that lodged her into his head like this? Ever since he chased her down the steps, a highly unprofessional move, she’s taken residence in his mind, dislodging all his other thoughts to make room for questions: Who is she? Where did she come from? What really happened to her parents?

  Henry is interested in Cora’s case, but he’s even more interested in her. Though exactly why, he can’t tell. She’s pretty, certainly, but not in a heart-stopping, head-spinning sort of way. She looks more like a librarian than a film star. And, while she seems nice enough, he didn’t feel the flash of kismet, the spark of soul mates, when they met. So what’s going on? He doesn’t get out enough, that’s it. Since his divorce, Henry hasn’t been on anything approaching a real date. He tells himself it’s because no one wants someone else’s ex-husband, especially not one with shared custody of a five-year-old son. But he knows it’s not that, not really. He’s scared. A detective who’s seen more gruesome things than he’d care to remember is scared of going out on a date. It’s pathetic really. His little boy, Mateo, who believes his dad could win a fight against Superman, would laugh if he knew.

  And then Henry feels it. That itch. The stirring in his soul. The twitch in his fingertips. The one he gets when something doesn’t quite make sense and he needs to understand it. It’s what happens whenever he finds a supposed suicide or accidental death and suspects suspicious circumstances. It’s how he feels when everyone else tells him to drop it, to close a case he knows should remain open. Which must be why he can’t stop thinking about that woman. Because she needs his help.

  Chapter Ten

  Walt shifts in his seat and snatches another glimpse of the clock. Three minutes have passed. He swallows a sigh and starts the sentence again:

  “Her mind did become settled, but it was settled in a gloomy dejection. She felt the loss of Willoughby’s character yet more heavily than she had felt the loss of his heart.”

  Walt takes another breath before reading on. He taps his foot against the desk leg and considers faking convulsions or a coughing fit. Instead, with yet another deep breath, and great reluctance, he reads on. Why the hell does Dylan insist he read this rubbish? All these characters are so silly. Marianne, especially, is too ridiculous. Why can’t she just control herself; why can’t she accept that Willoughby doesn’t want her? Why does she explode with sobs at every opportunity and fling herself about like a lovesick teenager?

  While Walt descends inexorably into the depths of Sense and Sensibility his mental rant against its characters continues, syllables of complaint tapping behind his aching eyeballs, upset tugging inconveniently at his heart. In truth Walt knows why Marianne makes him so angry: her sorrow, her broken soul, her inability to accept that she can’t have the thing she wants most in the world, remind him of himself, of Cora. Which makes him feel guilty again because he knows he shouldn’t be thinking of her. He doesn’t need to, not when he has Milly. So why can’t he stop?

  It’s not during the day so much anymore, he’s okay during the day. But at night, while he reads, he can’t seem to help it. At night he doesn’t just think of Cora, he yearns for her. Walt blames it on these blasted books that his boss insists he read: romances full of unrequited and ill-fated love, stories that bring back his past too sharply, getting him to think about things he shouldn’t. Now Walt wonders what Cora might be doing. Is she asleep? Is she reading in bed? Is she making love to some undeserving suitor? Is she, could she possibly be, listening to him?

  Walt isn’t sure which of the last two options he likes least. Certainly he hates to imagine another man touching Cora. But the idea that she might be listening to him fills Walt with conflicting emotions. Guilt: because he knows Milly listens to him every night without fail, and to hope Cora’s doing the same seems somehow disloyal. Embarrassment: because he’s reading ridiculous romances that Cora, being a sensible scientist only interested in nonfiction, would sniff at. Comfort: because this at least would be a connection between them. Joy: at the feeling of this connection. Which brings him back to guilt again.

  Dylan sits in his office with his eyes closed. He should have been home hours ago, but he can’t help it. Hiring the Night Reader was the best professional decision he ever made (the listening figures are off the charts, it’s the highest-rated hit show among women aged twenty-five to forty-five), but it’s been his personal undoing. Now every night of the week he stays late at work, writing e-mails, composing letters and filing papers until Walt starts to read. Then he switches on his radio, sits back in his chair, closes his eyes and smiles as the words drift into the air:

  “Early in February, within a fortnight from the receipt of Willoughby’s letter, Elinor had the painful office of informing her sister that he was married …”

  Dylan has absolutely, completely and utterly fallen in love with Walt’s voice. Not in the way that women all over Cambridge have. His feelings aren’t remotely sexual; instead he feels like a child again: as if his father (before he got dementia and Dylan became the parent) has tucked him into bed, opened a book and taken him to Wonderland or Narnia or Middle-Earth. He feels small and safe again, wrapped up in a blanket of words, rocked with their rhythm until he falls asleep. As a child, Dylan would look forward to this moment all day. From the moment he woke, he anticipated returning to bed again, for that last hour of the day when he’d be at the center of something magical. Which is exactly how he feels now and has done every day for the past two years, ever since stepping into that shop and hearing Walt’s voice for the first time.

  Before that day Dylan had a perfectly fine life. He wasn’t a recluse or a hermit, quite the opposite. He had plenty of friends and was never shy asking women out for lunch or dinner. Not that, since turning thirty, he’s ever had a relationship that actually involved a woman staying the night, partly due to a fear of commitment but mainly because his septuagenarian father, Ralph, tends to sleepwalk naked. But, aside from bathing, feeding and generally ensuring his dad’s safety, Dylan had always been a vigorous specimen of manhood: thirty-six years old with a full head of dark hair and a long, lean, muscular body with a fairly healthy social life. And now, thanks to Walt, he’s acting like a seventy-five-year-old virgin.

  When his mates ask why he hasn’t been to the pub in months he lies, citing extra work and family obligations. They know about his father and they understand. But there is another lie Dylan tells. It’s a white lie but still more dangerous than all the others, one that could get him into serious trouble. But, just as he’s unable to stop listening to Walt reading, so he’s unable to stop telling this lie.

  Fan letters for the Night Reader had started arriving a few days after Walt began reading. His first book had been one of his own choosing, The Life & Times of Marie Curie. The scientific subject matter was rather dry for Dylan’s taste but, wanting to soothe Walt’s nerves, he allowed it and knew that his new protégé could read the dictionary aloud and listeners would still be entranced. He absolutely underestimated, however, just how entranced they would be. Within a month, Walt was receiving ten letters a day. They arrived in little piles
every morning—scatterings of color and scent among the white gas and electricity bills on the mat. Dylan dutifully boxed them all up and passed them on to Walt in the evening.

  “They’re calling you the ‘Night Reader,’ ” he’d joked one day when Walt had been at the station for a few months. “You should have a hotline. You’d make a mint.”

  Walt had blushed and handed the box back. “I don’t want them,” he said.

  “What am I supposed to do with them, then?” Dylan asked.

  Walt shrugged. “Recycling.”

  “All right.” Dylan had shrugged in return. What did he care, after all? They weren’t his letters. He didn’t know these slightly desperate women. Surely it was no skin off his nose if Walt never read them or wrote replies. Yet, after dropping the box in the wastepaper bin, Dylan couldn’t concentrate. He’d sat at his computer trying to focus on e-mails, advertising packages and office reports. But while he typed the box seemed to grow, expanding until it had filled the bin, until it started emanating a bitter scent that hovered accusingly in the air. Dylan continued to ignore it, holding a handkerchief to his nose for the rest of the morning and typing with one hand. At lunchtime he picked up the bin, ready to take it to the recycling spot on the second floor. Instead he’d found himself lifting the lid off the box and opening the first letter he found.

  Now he reads them every day, these letters of longing, and writes back to each and every one. He writes to them of love, about which he knows almost nothing (having never had a relationship that lasted longer than six months), and desire, about which he knows considerably more. He tells them that he understands how they feel (strangely true) and that he hopes they will find happiness one day (also true). And then comes the lie, when he signs the letters with Walt’s name.

  Writing these replies is how Dylan fills his time between six o’clock, when he finishes work, and ten o’clock, when Walt starts to read. At midnight, when the station shuts down for the night, he goes home and tries to sleep. Although lately he’s kept writing late into the night until he falls asleep on the sofa in his office. Of course, as Dylan hadn’t anticipated, many of the women write back and he now has several correspondences to maintain, in addition to the new letters that arrive every day. He no longer knows why he must respond to them all, only that he must, that he can’t leave any one unanswered. Their words, their sadness and desire, have settled into his heart and soaked into his blood. It has become his duty, his honor, his purpose in life.

  Cora calls the coroner’s number after running out of her parents’ house. It takes her a few hours to gather herself, to stop shaking long enough to press numbers into a phone. The coroner is surprised by Cora’s call and, perhaps unsurprisingly, refuses to discuss anything over the telephone, but suggests Cora come into the office the following afternoon.

  The next call Cora makes is to Etta, whom she owes an update on her progress and reassurance that she hasn’t fallen into the river or stepped in front of a bus. She’s been putting it off, worried to tell her grandmother about the police officer and, most especially, the fire flashback—or whatever it was—that happened at the house. How can she explain it?

  Taking a deep breath, with a shiver into her fingertips, Cora recalls crawling along the carpet, smelling the smoke, her own screaming echoing in her ears.

  “So I understand now,” she says, “what you mean about just knowing something, without having any proof.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Etta says. “I’m glad you’re not being a bloody-minded scientist about this.”

  Yes, things are changing, Cora could say, if she’d been able to explain exactly what and how. “So, why didn’t you ask the police to reopen the case before?”

  “How could I, when I had no evidence?” Etta says softly, and Cora can feel her grandmother’s sorrow seeping into the air and mixing with her own. “And also because I knew, somehow, that only you could solve the secret of their deaths. That, really, it was your mystery to answer, not mine.”

  Cora has an appointment with a coroner. A coroner. She sucks at the word, turning it over with her tongue as if it’s a slice of lemon she doesn’t want to swallow. She sits on a wooden chair outside a wooden door with a panel of frosted glass upon which are engraved the letters

  DR. ALEX ELIOT—FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST

  The hospital corridor is blank, empty, stark. There are no tiles on the floor or bricks on the walls for Cora to count, so her nerves are bubbling up and spilling out into the air. The only saving grace is a clock: a large Victorian-style clock with a circular cream face painted with black Roman numerals. Cora multiplies and divides them at random, picking out prime numbers. But she can’t focus. She’s still unable to quite understand the turn her life has taken. What will she say to the coroner? How does one address such a person? Dr. Eliot? Pleased to meet you, Dr. Eliot. Would you kindly tell me how my parents died? Will you give me a copy of the autopsy report?

  Cora realizes she’s chewing her fingernail and stops. Sits on her hands. She glances up at the frosted-glass panel again, and before she can look away it opens. Dr. Eliot stands in the doorway with narrowed eyes and a thin, polite smile.

  “Cora Carraway?” she asks.

  Cora nods.

  “Come in.”

  Etta visits Fitzbillies several times a week. She doesn’t come because it’s her favorite café in Cambridge, though it’s become so over the years, but because it borders on the edge of a street she’s not allowed to cross, based on an agreement made long ago. Etta comes to remember and to hope. To remember the man she loved and hope that, maybe, just maybe, she might see him again. She arrives early, just as they open, before the students arrive with their laptops or the families with their sticky-fingered children, while the café is still and silent, except for the occasional grinding of the espresso machine.

  Etta goes to Fitzbillies because she isn’t allowed to go to the place she really wants to visit, to the site of first love, the church where she met him. So instead of visiting the church she makes her pilgrimage across town to the café on the corner of Trumpington Street and Downing Street and she takes her mass there: a hot chocolate and Chelsea bun. Then she sits at her pew, the wooden table running the length of the window, closes her eyes and remembers.

  After Etta had lied about her sister, she hadn’t been able to look the man—the handsomest young man she’d ever seen—in the eye. Sensing her discomfort, he had changed the subject as they walked. He spoke of the church, the brickwork, the architecture, but Etta hadn’t really been listening. She had watched his hands hanging by his sides, his fingers long and strong. She imagined slipping her own slight fingers between them; perhaps she could hold his hand and he wouldn’t notice, though he might feel the rub of her tiny diamond ring.

  A jolt of shock had shivered through Etta then. How could she think such things? Sermons returned to her, the voice of the priest in her ear: in thought as in word as in deed. She knew that to think about adultery was as sinful as the act itself. Not that this was adultery, strictly speaking, since she wasn’t married just yet. But she’d never yearned for her fiancé the way she did for this man, this stranger. Not even when she’d first met him. What was happening? She loved Joe. When he’d proposed, she’d been happy. She hadn’t cried, hadn’t wept with joy as many of her friends had, hadn’t had goose bumps or tingles right down to her toes. But that didn’t matter. They simply didn’t have that sort of love. Their relationship was founded on friendship. Which was, Etta’s mother assured her, what mattered most of all. This was what lasted after everything else had gone. So it was all right that when Joe fumbled for her hand in the cinema, she didn’t feel a rush of illicit delight, that when he pecked her cheek after walking Etta home she wasn’t desperate to kiss his lips. Because what they had together—loyalty, kindness and caring—would last for the rest of their lives.

  Etta glanced across at the man. Feeling her gaze, he’d turned to her with a smile, his bright blue eyes shining with it,
and she’d felt a shock of something that shivered all through her body, right down to her fingers and toes. Etta managed to smile back and he kept talking about St. Raphael, the patron saint of this church. For a moment, as they drifted out of the church together, she closed her eyes and imagined his fingers cupping her cheek, sliding up into her hair as he came forward to kiss …

  He caught Etta as she fell, tumbling forward as her foot twisted on a raised paving stone. She held tight to his arms as she pulled herself up, their faces so close that she could feel his breath on her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” Etta whispered. “I—”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “No.” Etta shook her head. “I’m fine, I’m … wonderful.”

  “Good. Me too.” He smiled. “Well, now that I’ve saved your life I think I ought to know your name.”

  “I’m Etta,” she said.

  He had given his in response, but after that Etta just called him the Saint.

  Dr. Eliot doesn’t waste time with pleasantries. She doesn’t offer Cora a cup of tea, a biscuit or a benign comment about the weather. She simply sits, reaches for a file, flips it open, then looks up.

  “You want to know the particulars of your parents’ case, is that correct?”

  Cora nods.

  “Specifically, why it was ruled as an accident?”

  “Yes,” Cora says, thinking this is what it must be like to be summoned into the headmistress’s office in school. Not that she ever was.

  Dr. Eliot flips over a page in the file, then another and another. She leans forward to read a few lines, squinting at the words, then mutters something under her breath. Cora waits.

  “Yes, okay. Well, we carried out an autopsy on both bodies.” Dr. Eliot glances up and Cora wonders if she’s expected to say something. “Our findings were conclusive. We determined that their deaths weren’t accidental, but—”