At the regional high school, where African Americans were less than 2 percent of the student body, Preston’s buddies had mostly been math and computer nerds, but Vanessa hung out with more marginal citizens, as Lemaster in his clever way labeled them. Her activities were eerily eclectic. History Club, coalition for animal rights, trivia bowl team. A strange, conflicted child. Loved hip-hop but sang in the medieval choir. Worked crossword puzzles and anagrams like a demon but suffered from unsuspected misspellings whenever she wrote a paper. Served as vice-president of both Young Republicans and COGS, the Coalition of Gays and Straights. She was a declared and aggressive pacifist but liked to read about war. The shelves in her bedroom sported books on famous battles, as well as plastic models of warplanes and ships built from kits and a collection of yellowing board games from Avalon Hill, unearthed at estate sales and on eBay: Gettysburg, Waterloo, Iwo Jima. Some evenings, she would walk around the house with a volume on some ancient battle in her hands, chanting like a monk from the Middle Ages. Lemaster refused to put up with it, but Julia, when acting alone, could not seem to make her stop. “It makes me happy, Moms,” the teen would insist, knowing how to make her mother bend. Julia only wished that fewer of Vanessa’s chants had the timbre of funeral marches.
At first it had been all right: Vanessa, in October a year ago, had decided to write her paper on the response in the Landing to the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions in the fifties, and began dutifully putting in her time at the public library, the archives of the board of education, and, finally, the Harbor County Historical Society. Then Vanessa announced a change in her topic. No longer did the story about the fifties interest her. Instead, she had grown fascinated by the death of Gina, a loner like herself. Julia, by instinct still a teacher of teens, at once raised an objection: what thesis could she possibly craft around Gina? For Gina’s story was well known. She had disappeared one night after last being seen in the company of a black teenager from the city who, never formally accused of the crime, was coincidentally slain by police just days later, after stealing a car, an event that led to the only race riot in the county’s history. In the meantime, Gina’s body washed up. She had been sexually assaulted, police said, and had fought back.
Vanessa answered that she did not care about the thesis, she cared about poor Gina. She would say no more. The Carlyles fretted. Other AP history students over the years had found themselves enchanted by Gina’s story, but none of them—Lynn Klein warned Julia—had written good papers. Even Preston had taken a brief look, before abandoning the topic for a richer one. Julia consoled herself, and her husband, with the fact that the term paper was not due until March, and if their daughter seemed a little bit lost at sea, she was at least getting an early start on the journey back to safe land. Then Vanessa began to avoid her friends, her grades began to slip, and Lemaster, to whose immigrant sensibility the report card was everything, was ready, as he put it, to take measures.
But Vanessa beat him to it, torching the car on the thirtieth anniversary of Gina’s death, and drawing the family into its current spiral.
“I did it for Gina” was the only explanation she ever offered: to the team of psychiatrists at the university hospital, to her therapist, Vin Brady, to her parents, to her eager classmates, among them That Casey, whose interest in her never ripened beyond casual dating until after the fire.
Vanessa did finally finish the paper, although not until April, the final product every bit as dismal as her parents and her teacher had feared, for she presented little more than a handful of newspaper accounts reporting that Gina had vanished, and that the disappearance remained unsolved. “You need a stronger thesis,” wrote Ms. Klein, “and a larger diversity of evidence.”
Vanessa asked if she could do another draft. Ms. Klein said of course, but made no promises to change her grade. Seven months later, Vanessa was working on it still. Julia kept a copy in her office cabinet, in what she privately called the Vanessa File, along with the photo of Gina Joule that used to grace her daughter’s dresser. Lynn Klein did not know—nobody did, outside the family and Dr. Brady—that now and then Vanessa and Gina sat down for little chats.
(III)
THE HOUSE WAS TWO STORIES HIGH, boxy and blue-shingled, on a sunny side street. Hedges were neatly trimmed, but the faded flower boxes on the front step sat empty. Half a dozen cars jammed the curb, dominated by a wounded truck that sat exhausted in the driveway. The large black dog dozing on the cracked concrete of the walk looked too old to do much guarding. Pretty curtains hung in the windows, and Julia had an instinct that they were homemade. Seth Zant sat on the top step with a Pepsi in his hand, watching Julia squeeze into the last remaining parking spot. She wondered what gift he held in store.
“You made it,” said Seth. “Good.”
“Of course we did.”
He gave Vanessa a long look. “Bet you have to beat the boys off with a stick.”
The teenager colored and dropped her eyes and could not get a syllable out. Julia squeezed her daughter’s frozen hand and answered for her. “We try to be as gentle on them as we can. We only bring out the stick in emergencies.”
Not too funny, but Seth laughed anyway, to tell them both he got the point.
The gathering was the sort that Lemaster handled brilliantly, Julia poorly, and Vanessa not at all, for the teen stayed mostly in the corner next to the punch bowl until one of the endless train of relatives dragged her into the kitchen and pressed her into service refreshing the platters of fried fish and fried chicken and barbecued ribs heaped on the dining room table. Seth Zant also did his share of dragging. Instead of passing along whatever he had invited Julia to collect, he introduced her to various people as “the great love of Kellen’s life” or “the one who got away,” until, unable to bear any more, she begged him to stop. So instead he sat her on the sofa like the guest of honor and let the others take turns sitting beside her and saying pretty much what Seth had, preceding it always with “So, Julia, I hear you were…” Everyone had a Kellen story to share.
A hefty churchwoman named Ellie, who grew up with Kellen and sounded like she might have had a considerable crush on him, described an inquisitive, impatient kid who got into lots of fights, even with children a whole lot bigger than he was, because, Julia, he had such a good heart, always going around looking to protect the weak. He did the Lord’s work, Julia, no matter what mischief he got up to once he went North. Julia nodded politely. An ancient man called Old Tim told how, back in high school, Kellen even faced down a fella with a knife who was bothering a girl at a party. “He was just in high school, Kellen, a skinny little ninth-grader, but he almost killed a man that night, and never lost a minute’s sleep over it.”
Tell her the rest, said Ellie.
Oh, and he also got the girl. That was Kellen, Old Tim explained, while various relatives, Vanessa helping, cleared the dinner dishes and presented the lemon meringue pie and homemade ice cream, which Julia’s better angels failed to persuade her to decline. “That’s why men do most stupid things,” Old Tim said, twinkling. He put aside his empty pie plate and patted his ample gut. “To impress some girl.”
“I think it was brave,” said Ellie, and Julia wondered if she had been the girl. But another part of her remembered other fights Kellen had picked during their year and a half together in Manhattan, usually with bigger men, bars he had been thrown out of, nightclubs that had banned him. She remembered how one particular battle ended with her standing terrified over the gurney in the emergency room at Saint Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital in midtown Manhattan while a tut-tutting Indian doctor used tweezers to pull shards of glass out of his shoulder. Your boyfriend, said the doctor, is a very angry man. One reason Julia recalled that episode so sharply was that she was the one who had hit him with the bottle. “Very brave,” Ellie confirmed, with a warm glow.
Old Tim was unimpressed. “You know what the difference is between brave and stupid? Brave is when you fight because you have to.
Stupid is when you fight because you want to. That was Kellen’s problem right there. He loved to fight.”
Seth was beside her. “Can I borrow you for a minute, honey?” She glanced automatically at the kitchen, where from her vantage point on the sofa she could see Vanessa scrubbing pots under the watchful eyes of the matrons. The teen seemed perfectly content, soothed by the repetitive motion. “She’ll be fine,” said Seth, following her gaze. “This won’t take long.”
Now dressed casually in clean khakis and a stained shirt, Seth led her up a narrow stair to the room above the one-car garage. She knew at once that the room was Kellen’s, not so much from the squeaky-clean nattiness of posters and bed and books, or from the economics and math and science texts lining the walls. No, the way she knew was from the delicate silver hand mirror lying atop the dresser.
“That’s mine,” she blurted, although she had not clapped eyes on it since the final split from Kellen. She rushed across the room and swept it up. “That’s my mirror!”
“Been up here for years,” said Seth, watching her.
“For years?”
“I figured it was a lady’s mirror, not a man’s. But Kellen liked to have it around.”
“He did?” said Julia, face suddenly warm. She picked it up. It was silver and tortoiseshell, intricately filigreed on the handle and the back, manufactured in the late nineteenth century by the famous British maker William Comyns, whose hallmark was embossed on the handle, hidden within the design. Granny Vee had given it to her just months before her death. Julia had cherished it, but left it behind in Kellen’s apartment when Tessa, against Julia’s will, had dragged her physically out of Manhattan to save her from further mistreatment. For a while she had been scared to ask for it back, worried that to speak to Kellen at all would be to tumble back into his bed; and then, when she met Lemaster and grew stronger, she was too embarrassed. The mirror had little value in the antiques market—two or three hundred dollars at most—and until now Julia had assumed that at some point Kellen had tossed it, or sold it, or given it to another woman. “I never knew what happened to it,” she said truthfully.
“He wanted you to have it. He told me lots of times. I didn’t know it was yours to begin with.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
The dam of Julia’s will had held back the tears through the flight and the drive and the service and even the burial, but now they found the fissures and began to flow. Seth Zant, wise enough to say nothing, handed her his handkerchief. She dabbed her eyes. The small window gave on the twilit driveway, where people were packing leftovers into their cars. Laughter, hugs, departures. She blew her nose. She used the mirror to fluff out her hair. She turned it over, rubbed the surface with her fingernail, checking the finish. Kellen had not taken care of the silver, allowing it to tarnish. She glanced at the hallmark. Scratched in several spots, hardly recognizable. In her mind she reduced the value from two or three hundred dollars to between twenty-five and fifty.
Wait.
“Seth?”
“Hmmm?”
“Did Kellen leave…anything else for me?” Knowing it would sound greedy, but needing to know. Mary Mallard had put the idea in her head. Capturing the surplus. Whatever that was.
“Anything like what?”
“Wow, Moms,” said Vanessa from behind her. “Look at you. You were so gorgeous in those days!”
Julia turned. Her daughter stood smiling in the doorway, studying a photo in a plastic frame atop the dresser. Julia had noticed it when she walked in, and ignored it. Now she walked over and, sure enough, there she was, arm in arm with Kellen, strolling along Broadway, which Kellen, like most black men, despised on principle. But he went from time to time for her sake, as, now, Lemaster did. She was wearing a halter top, and high platforms, and absurd little shorts. Had she really dressed that way? She lifted the William Comyns mirror, looked at herself at forty-three, tried to remember what twenty-three had been like.
“No, I mean, sure, okay, you’re gorgeous now, but wow.” Fully in the room now, leaning over to study the image. “This is seriously cool. I love that outfit. I want five just like it.” Chuckling because she was one up. “So, were the two of you like an item or something?”
“Vanessa, honey, I’m not really comfortable talking about—”
“Your mother was the great love of my nephew’s life,” Seth confirmed, unhelpfully. “Always called her the one that got away.”
“That sounds really romantic,” said Vanessa, now at the shelves, pawing through the books as if the bedroom were a library rather than a carefully tended shrine. Outside, a breeze stirred the darkening trees. Winter might be less severe down here, but it was coming. “And so totally cool.”
“It was a…a long time ago.”
“You can have the photo too if you want,” said Seth.
Vanessa said, “Does Daddy know?”
“Of course your father knows,” Julia said, slowly sinking. Whose idea had it been for Vanessa to tag along? Who had invented children anyway?
“I guess you always had a thing for older men, huh?” Vanessa had taken down a calculus text, riffling the pages as if hoping money would fall out.
“Ah, Vanessa, that’s not…uh, an appropriate thing to say.”
“Not that Kellen wasn’t seriously hot. So I can understand it.”
“Vanessa!”
Her daughter was not listening. She had started turning the pages faster, glaring at her own hands because they refused to stop, as would sometimes happen, said Dr. Brady, when she struggled to choke off the trauma within—a trauma that remained unidentified, and whose existence Vanessa denied, although Brady assured them it was there. Julia, the mother in her aroused, forgot her embarrassment and, following the psychiatrist’s instructions, touched Vanessa on the shoulder and told her gently to put the book back on the shelf.
“Let her be,” said Seth Zant. “There’s nothing valuable up here.” Julia started to explain, but he rode right over her. “I mean, the books and the pictures and the mirror are about all they left.”
“They?”
Seth tapped the desk with a fingernail. “Kellen used to come down for a week or two at a time to work. Get away from it all. Had his computer right here, printer, notebooks, I don’t know what all. Anyway, that’s what they took.”
“Who did?”
“Had a little break-in while I was up north claiming the body. Funny, though. Got a fair-sized television downstairs, Sylvia’s jewels, and whatnot. But I guess the dog musta spooked them or something, because they only did this one room, and all they took was Kellen’s work.”
CHAPTER 6
INVENTORY RISK
(I)
LITTLE JEREMY FLEW MET THEM at the airport, because Lemaster, who was supposed to have picked them up, was in New York for a meeting of Empyreals, a minor black social club of which he was a dedicated member. He had called Julia to say that afterward he would probably just take the train to Washington rather than come back, because a friend who held Redskins season tickets had invited him to tomorrow’s game. Julia scarcely bothered to mask her fury and, in her pique, commanded Flew to carry their bags, which, uncomplaining, he did. He chattered all the way to the parking lot, mostly about the weather, but also about how that awful Kwame Kennerly had been on the radio again, bad-mouthing the university, its new president, and the fact that said president lived in Tyler’s Landing. Ignoring this intelligence, Julia snapped out her cell phone to call Wendy Tollefson, at whose house Lemaster had arranged for Jeannie to spend the night: Wendy, who adored Jeannie, being a friend of Julia’s from her teaching days. She had no children of her own, and often stayed at Hunter’s Heights to look after the girls when both adult Carlyles had to be out of town.
Jeannie asked could she please sleep over anyway, they were playing Monopoly.
Flew had brought a Land Rover owned by the university, for greater traction in the snow, and Julia, in her dudgeon, climbed with Vanessa into the
back seat, perhaps to remind him that he was really a glorified chauffeur. She was not mad at Mr. Flew, she was mad at Lemaster, but he was not around to be kicked, so she kicked his aide instead. She hated this side of her personality, wanting to be as warm and informal in everyday life as most people thought she was, but a part of her inheritance from Mona was a need now and then to display her Clannishness—especially around members of what Lemaster’s fraternity, the Empyreals, liked to call members of the paler nation.
“Are you hungry?” said Flew from the front as the car ticked through the snow.
“No,” said Julia.
“Yes,” said Vanessa.
“I have a little something waiting for you at the house, or we could stop on the way if you like. There’s fast food, of course, and there’s also a lovely seafood place—”
“I’ve lived in the county since the early eighties,” Julia interrupted. All the way back to when Kellen nearly killed her. “I know where the restaurants are.”
The little man’s mood was impossible to shake. Friendly blue eyes met hers in the mirror. “Isn’t it amazing, Mrs. Carlyle, how, no matter how much we know about something, we can always learn something new?”
Julia colored, then colored some more, aware of Vanessa’s bemused scrutiny behind supposedly sleeping eyes. Unable to work out a suitable riposte, Julia apologized for her bitchiness, assuring Mr. Flew that he was not to blame even as he assured her he was not offended. She watched the scenery for a while, feeling deserted and lonely, as she often did within the shell of her dutiful marriage. Lemaster preached constantly on the primacy of obligation rather than desire in moral life, and Julia often wondered, but never dared ask, whether he might have in mind his relationship with his wife. Was there something he would rather be doing instead? With someone else? She did not believe he had cheated on her in twenty years of marriage, but one never knew for sure. Her college roommate, Tessa Kenner, had been married briefly to a black man, a historian of some note, who had treated her badly. Tessa, in those days a law professor rather than a television anchor, had forgiven him readily, almost happily, for what she called his peccadilloes, explaining once to Julia, over coffee, that this was simply a need all black males possessed, born of centuries of racial oppression, to liberate themselves from the repressive strictures of bourgeois sexual custom.
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