The words caught in her throat.
“Right now we’re looking for Dorset and we need your help,” I said.
Bea Thatchley stiffened “The girl still hasn’t turned up? You’ve talked to that activist friend of hers?”
“Which friend is that?” I asked. “Activist? In what way?”
“The Briden girl. They run a soup kitchen, of all things, and that monsignor—he should have retired long ago—gives them carte blanche. Can you imagine a ten-year-old doling out soup to the homeless? They get ideas, you know.”
I saw Lorraine perk up, but she said nothing.
I didn’t think that was so bad—matter of fact, it was admirable—but I kept my mouth shut. Would I let the twins do something like that when they were old enough? Of course, I’d be busting my buttons. I made a note to myself to curb all my attitudinals about how others raised their children. I needed to interview April Briden and her parents.
After thanking Bea Thatchley and telling her we’d be in touch if we had more questions, we left.
Outside, pedestrian traffic was heavy as we made our way to where our cars were parked. Although puddles remained from the afternoon storm, the sun had reappeared and was beginning its westward descent. For a second the world was blasted in rose and gold light, shards ricocheting off wet pavement.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“I might be wrong …”
“Not you.”
“No love lost between Bea Thatchley and Cassandra.”
I had to agree with her there.
“I think the woman is struggling financially. It’s hard these days to live in Cobble Hill on a fixed income. I’ll do a little digging to see what I can come up with.”
I looked at her, wondering if Lorraine was feeling a pinch, then rejected the thought. Her clothes were new; she and Frank had just returned from a few weeks in Florida and she still had that golden glow brought on by a winter vacation in the warmth and sun.
She continued. “Her husband died young. If she worked, Bea Thatchley did odd jobs for little pay, not enough to give her a large nest egg, unless of course she and her husband salted it away.”
“Furniture looked old,” I said.
She nodded. “That means nothing. Take a look at my parlor.”
I had, the last time Lorraine had us over for dinner. To my amazement, Lorraine, who lived in a four flat in Carroll Gardens, did her own yard work and house cleaning, and the house had been its usual impeccable self. In the parlor were a new loveseat and couch; she’d had two chairs reupholstered. The contrast was striking: Lorraine was in a different place than Bea Thatchley, and I told her so, saying I’d checked out the new paint job and furniture.
“So I wonder where Bea gets her money. She’d have to have something other than her social or pension in order to live where she does. Do you think Cassandra gives her help?”
She shrugged.
“Could Bea Thatchley be responsible for Dorset’s disappearance?”
“Could Cassandra herself?” she asked.
That stopped me, something I hadn’t considered. “But why would she take her own child?”
“Stranger things have happened. But a more likely scenario, what about Cassandra’s older children?”
I didn’t answer, but stood on the corner, watching Lorraine get into her car. She rolled down the window, telling me she’d put a call into Jane’s boss; she wanted to find out more about the death of Cassandra Thatchley’s second husband, Ronnie Clauson.
In addition, I asked her to interview Greta Clauson and gave her the woman’s address on Cranberry. I told her I was headed to visit the Bridens, and if I could manage it, I’d hit up the monsignor, too.
“Be careful not to gag on his cigar smoke,” Lorraine said, rolling up her window.
April Briden’s Mother
As luck would have it, I found parking on Hicks across from the address Mrs. Hampton had given me for the Briden residence, an imposing townhouse in Cobble Hill. I waited a few minutes and had to ring the doorbell again before a slight woman opened the door. She had a coat draped over one arm and told me I’d just caught her; she was about to do her shopping for the week. I introduced myself and asked if I might speak to April. Looking me up and down, she told me her daughter was out.
“Her friend Dorset Clauson has been missing since early this morning, and I’ve been hired to find her.” I showed her my card.
Mrs. Briden, a slight woman with a few strands of graying hair, made an O with her mouth and, covering it with a bony hand, hunched into herself and backed away, then added as an afterthought, “You’d better come in.” I followed her down a hallway where she ditched her coat and gloves, draping them over the nearest chair. She wore black leggings and, over them, a bright chartreuse sweater. I stared at it, which made my eyes water.
“Your daughter is where?” I asked, watching her pocket my card without reading it.
Frantically the woman brought out her phone and texted her daughter. I waited by her side. Almost instantly, the girl texted back and Mrs. Briden closed her eyes. “Just where she said she’d be, around the corner with a friend. If all children were like my April, the world would be at peace.”
“Dorset’s not with her?”
Mrs. Briden’s thumbs moved over the screen again. She waited before shaking her head, some of her long mouse hair falling out of a loose bun she’d pinned up in the back. She read some more and told me her daughter hadn’t seen Dorset all day. “Someone called this morning looking for her, but April told me Dorset had an appointment.” She brushed back the fallen locks and, holding them, fixed her bun.
“I was the one who called you this morning. She didn’t make the appointment. She was with her mother in the park early this morning. It’s the last time anyone saw her. At least, anyone that we’ve talked to.”
Mrs. Briden nodded, as if she thought Dorset’s going to the park with her mother in the morning wasn’t out of the ordinary. Like an explanation, she threw out, “It’s the only time they have together, you see. Dorset and her mother are close. Closer than …”
The woman didn’t finish her sentence, and I let a couple of beats go by.
“You want me to tell you about what?” she asked. “About their family? Sibling rivalry? All of the innuendoes one picks up? The mystery and the mood in their house? I don’t think I want to do that.”
But she already had. I heard a grandfather clock somewhere chime the hour. “Do you mind if we sit down?”
April Briden’s mother led me into a parlor, a place kissed by kids with mismatched lamps and stick furniture, fingerprints on a glass tabletop, an overturned plant, a few pictures listing to one side on a wall. There was a jacket hanging from a lamp, one sleeve dangling and hitting the table below.
As if reading my mind, she grabbed the jacket and apologized. “Cleaners come this afternoon.”
On one end of the room was a brick fireplace painted the color of the walls and surrounded by bookshelves, and in front of them, an overstuffed couch. I walked over the bare wooden floor to the books and fingered a stack of comics. To give the woman her due, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. And her cleaners were coming that day?
“No one reads books anymore. They’ve all got Kindles. I’ve got to go through those shelves and pitch, but I just don’t have the time. You’d think I would, what with my brood almost grown. Except for April, of course, but she’s no trouble. She’s the late edition, arrived quite by surprise nine years after the triplets were born.”
So April Briden had older siblings who stuck together, a similar family situation to Dorset’s. Maybe that was what first brought Dorset and April together.
I was chewing on what Mrs. Briden had just said when she explained that she and her husband had been gifted—her word—with triplets their first year of marriage, and for the next four years, she could count on one finger the number of nights she’d gotten five or six hours of continuous sleep. I had new admirat
ion for the woman and eyed the couch. If I sank down into it, I thought I’d never get up, the first realization that I was tired although my search for Dorset hadn’t even begun. Instead, I sat on a hard-backed chair across from it and motioned for the woman to take a seat.
She did, curling up on one corner of a winged chair, her upper body stiff like some ancient Egyptian princess. “You say she’s been missing since this morning?” Mrs. Briden asked. Her phone must have buzzed because she wrangled it out of her sweater pocket, looked at the screen, and stowed it again. “One of my triplets. They’re inseparable. She’s the communicator, thank goodness, telling me they’re going to see Collateral Beauty. It’s playing not far from here, but it means a subway ride, and although they’re almost adults, I cringe each time they take it.”
So, a smothering mother. I couldn’t believe it.
Mrs. Briden echoed my thoughts. “Do you think I smother them? I’ll wait before answering. I always do; then they forget about what they wanted to do and come home. They don’t care, not really, as long as they’re together. I don’t know what I’d do if one of them … Of course I know what I’d do—jump off a bridge. Several years ago, one had to have an operation, nothing major, just a growth on his face. They were young—three at the time—and we arranged for an early morning appointment; we grabbed the boy while they were still sleeping and had my mother watch the other two. An hour later she called: his siblings were distraught. Separation anxiety.”
I thought about Carmela and Robbie. Except for their sleep patterns, which were so dissimilar, they were always together.
“You didn’t have a nanny?”
She shook her head, blowing away a strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes. “We don’t have that kind of money. My husband is an accountant. He works long hours and brings home a good wage, but we use every penny, always have. And before you ask, we inherited this house. Pretty soon we’re going to have to move, but I dread it. I don’t know how we’ve lasted this long. We got a tax bill the other day that I didn’t believe.”
I sympathized with her.
Mrs. Briden sighed and, unfolding herself, sank into the couch. “As you can imagine, when the kids are off, I’m on red alert.”
I said nothing.
“But I don’t want you to think I don’t love them. I do. I cherish them. If I can pass on our values, I’d be grateful.”
“Tell me about the soup kitchen.”
“My youngest child, I’m so proud of her. It was April’s idea. And Dorset’s, too. The two of them cooked it up together. Of course I like to think my husband and I had something to do with it. I know April had been thinking of helping the needy for some time, especially after I pointed out that Holy Angels and St. Pat’s had no soup kitchen and someone needed to get to that monsignor before too long. Think of all the starving, homeless children, I told April. Now they all work there since we’ve gotten the triplets involved. Not every night, our soup kitchen is open on the weekends only. And now that we’ve gotten others involved, our turn comes once a month and the whole family works together. It’s a wonderful credit for April, don’t you think, something she can put on top of her résumé.”
“And Dorset works with you?”
She nodded.
“Have you ever noticed any strangers talking to Dorset? Anyone singling her out?”
The woman was silent for a time and I watched crimson flood her face. “Are you implying that someone from our soup kitchen took Dorset? These people aren’t criminals, you know. They are decent men and women who have fallen on hard times. It could happen to any of us. So far we are lucky. We have roofs over our head, heated homes. But life could change like this.” Moving to the edge of her seat and staring at me, she snapped her fingers. “And we’d be out on the street. It wouldn’t take long, you know.”
Mrs. Briden was right. Still, I wasn’t a bad person for asking. Or was I so unconscious of my own prejudice that my question uncovered deep-seated attitudes? The look she gave me told me it was the latter.
“Mrs. Briden, I know what you’re thinking. I’m not condemning the work April and Dorset do at the soup kitchen. I’m grasping at straws here. I don’t have a clue what happened to her and any information, anything at all you can tell me about her and the people she talks to at the soup kitchen would help.”
“Have you ever worked at a soup kitchen? A silly question, I can tell you haven’t. We don’t have time to chat. We are busy from the moment we arrive until we leave. We serve close to a hundred people each night we work. The lines are long and the people stand there so proud, talking to one another, pretending they could have gone anywhere to dine. I’d love to get to know them, to hear their stories, but that’s not my job. My job is to ladle out love. And soup of course.”
I tried a not-so-subtle rewording of my question. “Anyone in particular that Dorset says hello to each time she works?”
Mrs. Briden stared into the room, slowly shaking her head. “Not that I’ve ever seen … except maybe …” She shook her head and more of her hair fell into her face. Curling a clump behind one ear, she said, “You want me to say yes, don’t you? You want me to implicate my fellow less fortunate human beings in her disappearance when it’s obvious what’s happened.”
“Not to me. Tell me.”
“Someone who wants Cassandra’s money has taken her youngest daughter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if …”
I waited for her to finish, but she swallowed the rest of her thought. “Can you give me names?”
“I’m not being paid to investigate, am I?”
I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this woman.
She went on. “I’m sorry Cassandra can’t find her daughter. I cannot imagine her pain, but don’t implicate the people who patronize our soup kitchen. Oh yes, I guess you haven’t heard: we are all brothers and sisters.”
She rose, and I knew that was the end of the conversation.
“You have my card if you think of anything else I should know.”
Her mouth shut, she walked me to the door and closed it quickly before I’d taken one step off her stoop. I hung onto the railing to steady myself as I descended. It had been a while since I’d failed. Oh, plenty of times I’d come away from an interview with nothing, but I’d seldom created such hostility. I stood on the corner for a minute looking up at the Briden home. I’d have to send Lorraine.
Monsignor Finnigin
The cigar smell was overwhelming as the housekeeper, a thin woman with a thick Irish brogue and wearing a pair of those old-fashioned nun shoes several sizes too big for her, showed me into the parlor at Holy Angels and St. Patrick’s rectory, a dark brick monstrosity on one side of the church facing a major thoroughfare in Cobble Hill.
“He’ll be with you in a minute, darlin’. Sure I can’t get you something while you wait—tea, coffee, anything stronger? Himself likes a spot now and then, and the Lord knows it’s well past noon, although an early hour never stopped him. I’m sure he’ll join you, especially if gin was a favorite of yours.”
I shook my head and sat waiting until she disappeared, then walked around examining the furnishings while the eyes of the Madonna, whose picture hung above a righteous brown couch shoved against a wall, followed me around the room. On the far wall was a desk and, above it, shelves containing all kinds of books on saints and rubrics and whatnots, many lives of saints I’d never heard of. In the corner on an end table were well-thumbed copies of something called the Baltimore Catechism. I opened the cover of one and saw it was a 1941 revised edition. I thumbed through several introductory pages and read the first question. “Who made you?”
I closed the book.
The door opened and the rush of smoke enveloping the priest who entered made my eyes water. Thinning hair slicked back and red-faced, the rotund presence in the cassock oiled into the room, swaying slightly and steadying himself with one paw placed on a corner of his carved desk. He thrust himself into a chair, and as he peered at me, I though
t of Noah in his arc, looking out the window and glaring at the animal he’d left behind on some far shore. He folded his hands. “And you are?”
On edge but determined not to spoil this interview the way I had the last, I introduced myself to the prelate and slid my card in his direction. “One of your parishioners, Dorset Clauson, is missing.”
“Do I know her?”
“She is the ten-year-old who volunteers in your soup kitchen.”
“Let’s get this straight, my dear. It is not my soup kitchen. It’s the parish soup kitchen. Not my idea, it was that meddling Briden woman who came up with it, she and her incessant do-good demands. Oh yes, she sent her youngest daughter and a friend to see me. As if two children would disarm me. As if two ten-year-olds could think up the idea. But they did, she swears they did. And they persisted. It is good to see youngsters persist with a dream, wouldn’t you say, so I agreed, reluctantly, I’ll admit. Make no mistake, the parish council backed them up. And so we set it up, Holy Angels and St. Patrick’s, our first soup kitchen. It hasn’t been operating all that long. And now this, a child missing. I could have told them, tried to, but they wouldn’t listen. I guess that’s what that reporter wants to talk to me about, the missing child, Dorset?”
I must have looked a blank because he opened the middle drawer to his desk. I heard the rustle of paper as he rummaged, muttering to himself until he found a business card. “Zizi Carma-Something.”
“Zizi Carmalucci. A reporter with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” I told him.
While he nodded, looking absently at the paper, I imagined Zizi Carmalucci, Denny’s high school flame, the bouncingly endowed belle of Brooklyn’s Fontbonne Hall Academy who claimed to have taken Bay Ridge by storm. She’d even mesmerized Denny until he met me. Probably maintained her hourglass figure. As far as I knew she didn’t have kids. Just wait, they’d want for nothing—with those tits she could feed a village. The reporter turned up wherever there was a story or, more to the truth, wherever she could fabricate one.
Dorset in the Dark: A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Page 10