I dropped the pillow back into place, then began to inspect every square inch of the thin, wall-to-wall carpeting. Pale beige in color, it was the type of floor covering that used to be called indoor/outdoor. Except for the alarm clock, which was still on the floor, and a few stray cat hairs that were clearly Elliot’s, I couldn’t see anything that might lead us to Lillian’s kidnapper. I picked up the clock and set it back on Lillian’s night table.
Next I went over to Lillian’s painted white dresser. I couldn’t help smiling at the framed black-and-white photo of a big fluffy cat that rested just below the mirror. The picture was pale and faded. I wondered if the cat had been a particular favorite of Lillian’s when she was a much younger woman.
Lillian’s jewelry box, a rectangle of brown vinyl, rested in the center of her dresser. I opened it.
The inside had a shallow upper tray that was attached to the cover by two thin ribbons. The bottom portion was about two inches high, and held a jumble of what appeared to be costume jewelry—mostly beaded necklaces and a few of the circle pins that were popular way back when.
Piece by piece, I emptied the bottom section. I set everything down on the dresser. Nothing jumped out at me, but then again, I had no idea what I was looking for. Maybe a hidden slip of paper on which she’d scribbled the name of the murderer?
Right. As if I’d get that lucky.
Even so, I ran my fingers around all the edges, making sure nothing had been tucked into a corner. After that, I moved to the top tray, where the more delicate items were kept—a silver medal of Saint Francis of Assisi, a thin gold choker with a ceramic cat hanging in the middle, a mounted yellow gem on a gold chain—
Wait a minute. I’d seen that one before. Where? The answer swam around the edge of my memory, but I couldn’t seem to reel it in. I removed the chain with the yellow stone and set it aside. Then I returned everything else to the jewelry box and closed it.
Lillian’s dresser drawers were next. Feeling like an interloper, I grabbed the two knobs on either side of the top drawer and pulled it open. I found myself gazing down at Lillian’s undergarments, all neatly folded and stacked. Knowing how old-fashioned Lillian was, I figured she probably called them her unmentionables. I felt around underneath them, just to be sure nothing was hidden there.
The second drawer contained an array of knitted sweaters, each one a different pastel shade. I lifted one out of the drawer. It was a gorgeous off-white cable-knit pullover that looked incredibly complicated to make. Lillian was obviously an accomplished knitter. I folded it and returned it to the drawer, then performed a careful search of the nooks and crannies. I even ran my fingers between each of the sweaters, just in case Lillian had tucked something away there. Finding nothing, I closed the drawer.
The bottom one was next. It stuck, and I had to tug hard to pull it open.
My heart did a little jump in my chest. The drawer contained two cardboard boxes, one slightly larger than the other. Since my knees were still sore, I eased myself onto the floor next to the dresser and stretched out my legs. I was lifting a box out of the drawer when Daniel came in.
“Find anything?”
I shook my head. “Not so far, but I have a feeling this drawer has a lot of Lillian’s personal things. I was just starting to go through it.”
He walked around Lillian’s twin bed and stooped down next to me. I caught the faintest whiff of his aftershave, and the memory of the day we met curled around me.
About two weeks after the cat story broke, I’d stopped by Lillian’s to deliver a bag of cat food, and also to see how she was faring. The trailer was clean, but the strong scent of deodorizer still lingered. When Daniel rang her doorbell, Lillian gripped my arm in a panic. Although he’d called first to let her know he’d be paying her a visit, the prospect of his arrival still terrified her.
I’d stood beside Lillian protectively, and together we answered the door. Daniel stood on the doorstep, little droplets of moisture from the cloudy afternoon’s drizzle dotting his hair. When he smiled, kindness beamed from his eyes. Then he stepped inside the trailer and he smelled so wonderful that I never wanted to stop breathing him in.
“—see this Apple?”
“Sorry, I was thinking of something else.” I stared at the box Daniel had set down on the floor between us. He’d removed the cover to reveal a slew of old photographs.
“These must go way back,” I said, lifting a sepia-toned photograph out of the bunch. The photo was of a young man with hair parted in the middle and a handlebar mustache, dressed in full military garb.
“Is there a date on it?” Daniel asked.
I turned over the photo. “Nineteen twenty-seven. Lillian’s father, maybe?”
Daniel shrugged and dug another handful out of the box. As we fished through more of the photos, I was beginning to feel like a voyeur. But I somehow managed to convince myself that we needed to do this if there was any chance there was something here that might lead us to Lillian.
“I wonder who this is.” I held out a photo of a young man wearing a crisp army uniform.
“Handsome devil,” Daniel said. “Maybe he was an old beau of Lillian’s.”
I turned it over. “No date on it, but my guess would be late forties, early fifties.” I flipped back to the photo and stared at it for several more seconds.
“I think you’re right,” Daniel said, already holding up another photograph. “Look at this one. It’s gotta be Lillian!”
I grinned. “It sure is. Oh, she was lovely.”
Only a few hours earlier, Bernice had told me how beautiful Lillian had been in her youth. But in the crisp black-and-white photo Daniel was holding, she was positively stunning. Standing on the front porch of an old house, she was cradling a big fluffy cat in her arms. I flipped over the photograph. “Snowball and me—nineteen forty-nine, it says. This cat must have been very special to her. There’s another photo of him, or her, on her dresser.”
Is that why Lillian purchased the porcelain cat at the estate sale? Had it reminded her of her beloved Snowball?
“Hey, look at this one,” Daniel said, holding out another one. “Lillian looks about fourteen, doesn’t she?”
In the picture, a teenage Lillian stood beneath a willow tree, her arms looped through the arms of the two women on either side of her. “I’ll bet that’s her mother on the left,” I said. “She looks a lot like Lillian. I wonder if the other one is her aunt.”
“Oh, did she tell you about her aunt Alice?” Daniel smiled. “Apparently she was quite a character.”
“No, but I was chatting with Lillian’s friend Bernice at the nursing home earlier this evening.” I related the story Bernice had told me about Lillian traveling to Pennsylvania to care for her sick aunt.
“Huh,” Daniel said. “Alice would have been pretty young back then. Well, Lillian obviously took good care of her,” he chuckled. “Alice lived till she was ninety-one.”
I shook my head. “Must have been a different aunt, then. The one Bernice told me about died in the fifties.”
It was Daniel’s turn to shake his head. “She only had the one aunt, I’m pretty sure.” He threw up a hand. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. None of this is helping us find Lillian.”
By the time we’d rifled through the entire box, it was close to eleven. I stifled a yawn.
“Let’s quickly get through this last box and then we’ll go,” he said. “I can always swing by tomorrow and look around a little more.”
“I’m starting to feel really guilty for poking through Lillian’s personal things this way.” I looked at Daniel. “Do you think—is it possible Lillian did leave on her own? If she thought her life was in danger, could she have decided to go into hiding?”
“Without Elliot? I don’t think so. You said yourself his food dish was empty when you and Tressa arrived here yesterday.”
He was right. No way would Lillian leave him like that.
Daniel slid the box of photographs back into th
e drawer and lifted out the other box. This one contained a wealth of personal memorabilia.
On the top was a yellowed newspaper clipping, its edges disintegrating from age. I gently removed it from the box. “It’s an obituary,” I said. “Private First Class Anton Polerski, late of Hazleton.” As I read the rest to myself, I felt Daniel reading over my shoulder.
“He died in the Korean War,” I said after I’d finished.
“Usually known as the Korean Conflict,” Daniel said. “The
U.S. never declared war on Korea.” “I know that, Daniel. I was a history major, remember?”
He flushed. “Sorry.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Oh criminy, I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m tired and testy and a terrible pill. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat like that.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Do you think this Polerski guy is the soldier in the photograph?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Something about this particular photo nagged at me, but I was too weary and too distracted to figure out what it was.
“Look, there’s a bunch of old letters in here.” Daniel dug out a handful and handed a batch to me.
The letters, addressed to Lillian, had all been written by Anton. As I began reading through them, my fatigue turned to fascination. Though he was far from eloquent, Anton’s feelings for Lillian had been heartfelt.
“When he left for Korea, they were engaged,” I said quietly.
I read on. As the weeks passed, Anton’s letters grew more desperate, more despairing. Not because he feared he’d never return from Korea, but because Lillian had apparently stopped returning his letters. In a letter dated one day before Valentine’s Day, nineteen fifty-one, he begged Lillian to write to him. Even a postcard from you, sweetheart, would cheer my heart …
Tears stung my eyes. A massive wave of fatigue suddenly crashed over me. “Daniel, why are we doing this? These are Lillian’s private letters. We have no right to read them—they’re certainly not going to help us find her.”
He blew out a sigh. “You’re right, except—. Well look, what do you think about this idea? It’s hypothetical, of course, but what if Lillian was afraid to tell the police who she saw coming out of Lou Marshall’s office that day, so she wrote his name down and hid it somewhere in her house, in the event something really bad were ever to happen to her?”
The same notion had flitted through my mind. Lillian’s credibility had been severely compromised when people learned she’d been living in her tiny trailer with nineteen cats.
“You think she might have been afraid the police wouldn’t believe her?”
“Exactly.” Daniel blew out a sigh. “But you’re right, we really should get going.” He started to put the cover back on the box when I spotted a yellowed, official-looking document jutting out from the stack. I eased it out of the pile.
Yellowed with age, it was Lillian’s birth certificate.
“She was born in nineteen twenty-nine,” I said, “in Nashua, New Hampshire.”
Daniel pointed at the line above that one. “And her given name was Dora Lillian Bilodeau.”
My heart caught in my throat.
Dora.
The same name as Frederic Dwardene’s heartthrob. Were Dora and Lillian one and the same? Had Lillian been the young woman the banker had been so desperately in love with?
She had to be. Otherwise it would simply be too startling a coincidence. And Anton must have been the handsome soldier in the rusty Chevrolet—the one Frederic was so anxious to evict from Lillian’s life!
“Gosh, I’d forgotten that her given name was Dora,” Daniel said.
“You knew?”
He nodded. “I learned a lot about Lillian during those dark days after the cat problem. She was very depressed, and so sad. I tried to get her to talk about what happened, but she wouldn’t. She felt ashamed that the whole town knew about her and the cats. She’s lived in Hazleton all her life, and the ridicule was more than she could bear. So I started asking her questions about her family, her life. That’s when she really opened up and told me about her mom and her aunt, and her work at the sweater factory.” Daniel touched my arm gently. “Is something wrong? You look pale all of a sudden.”
“I … no, it’s nothing. I think we should leave.”
On our way out, I checked Lillian’s coat closet again. The lilac coat still hung there. On a whim, I reached into the pocket where Lillian had slipped the china cat two days ago.
The cat was still there.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
From the journal of Frederic Dwardene, Saturday, December 9, 1950:
I spent an hour this morning waxing the Hudson until it positively shimmered. Freshly shaven, I, too, was looking quite spiffy when I arrived at Dora’s. Her mother, a handsome woman in her forties, answered the door. Her face beamed when she saw me. A good sign, I thought—the mother already approves. (I wondered what her opinion was of Dora’s soldier!) The mother introduced herself as Dora Bilodeau, and for a moment I was perplexed. She must have noticed my expression because she fluttered a hand and said, “Oh dear, I should explain—my daughter was named after me. That’s why we call her by her middle name—Lillian. Otherwise it’s too confusing!”
I was relieved to see that Darby’s truck was gone by the time Daniel delivered me back to the duplex. Aunt Tressa’s bedroom light was on, but the downstairs was dark. No doubt she was either reading in bed or watching the late news.
She probably never realized I’d left, which was just as well. I dreaded telling her that I’d spent the evening with Daniel, even if my mission had been carried out solely on Lillian’s behalf. It was going to raise all sorts of questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.
Better to face it in the morning, fresh from a night’s sleep. Assuming I’d be able to sleep.
Daniel accompanied me to the front door. “Give Tressa my best,” he said. “Tell her if it weren’t so late I’d have stopped in to say hello.”
I nodded, surprised to feel tears fill my eyes. I prayed Daniel couldn’t see them in the dark, but since I’d left the outside light on, I knew he probably did.
“I’ll call Fenton tomorrow,” Daniel said. “He may know more than he’s letting on. In the meantime, is it okay if you and I keep in touch daily until all of this has been resolved?”
“Of course,” I said over the boulder in my throat. Regardless of my history with Daniel, Lillian’s welfare had to come first. Even if the worst had already happened, we both needed to know.
After sputtering out an awkward goodnight, I fled inside. It was only after I’d kicked off my boots and shed my coat that I began to cry.
I cried all the way into the shower, without even knowing why.
A persistent ringing wrenched me out of a dream-filled sleep.
I jerked upright in bed. A baleful look at the clock told me it was twelve thirty-seven. Who was calling me this late?
I snapped on my bedside lamp, fumbled for the portable phone sitting behind it. “Hello?” I mumbled over a huge yawn.
“Bluuuu … blood …”
A river of adrenaline zinged through me. Instantly I was fully awake, and on red alert. “Lillian?”
“Bluuuuu …” the voice said again, and this time I was sure it was Lillian. A very drugged-sounding, very out-of-it Lillian.
But she was alive. Thank the sun and the stars, she was alive!
“Where are you, Lillian? Tell me where to find you!”
The next sound was a sharp disconnect.
“Lillian. Lillian!” I begged her to pick up the phone again, but she was gone.
Stunned, I plunked my phone back in its cradle. Where had she been calling from? Was there some way I could trace her call?
I’d never signed up with the phone company for caller ID, mostly because I couldn’t think of any reason why I would ever need it. Now I was cursing myself.
Wait a minute.
I grabbed the phone again. This time I punched in
star-sixnine. A robotic voice intoned the telephone number from which my last call originated. It was Lillian’s cell phone number.
What had she been trying to tell me? It sounded as if she’d been trying to say blue blood.
Which meant absolutely nothing to me.
What turned my veins to ice was that someone had cut the call short, and I didn’t think that someone was Lillian. Would her captor—and I was now sure there was one—see her as a liability and eliminate her?
For the second time in a six-hour period, I called 9-1-1. A man answered this time, and in a calm tone asked me to state the purpose of my call.
“Look, I know Chief Fenton isn’t there in the middle of the night,” I told him, “but I need to get in touch with him right away. I just got a call from Lillian Bilodeau, and now I’m sure she’s been kidnapped. She tried to tell me something, and it sounded like blue blood but I’m not really sure that’s what she was trying to say and then she got cut off and I—”
“Ma’am, please—”
“—and I’m scared to death whoever has her might hurt her now and—”
“Ma’am,” the dispatcher interrupted, “please state your name.”
“Sorry.” I gave myself a mental slap and sucked in a deep breath. “This is Apple Mariani. I live at One-Eighty-One-B Summer Street, but there’s nothing wrong here. You’ve got to get a hold of Paul Fenton and tell him to call me. You see, he wasn’t really convinced something bad had happened to Lillian, even though he did make a few inquiries, but now I have proof that she’s—”
“Ma’am,” he interrupted, “please listen to me for a moment. I will call Chief Fenton if need be, but first I need you to calmly explain what happened.”
A groan escaped me. Why couldn’t I get through to this guy? Hadn’t he listened to a word I said?
I repeated the story, this time going back to Sunday afternoon, when Aunt Tressa and I first realized Lillian was gone. He listened patiently, then informed me that he was dispatching a patrol car to my location.
“Please don’t send another police car,” I said. “All I want is—”
Some Enchanted Murder Page 13