Look Closely

by Laura Caldwell

  “I used to be from around here.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you know someplace I can get lunch?” I said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in Woodland Dunes.”

  “Sure. I can make a few recommendations.” He looked at the check-in slip a moment longer before he put it back in the box, then turned back to me, his lazy hair falling farther over one eye. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t expected him to ask that, although it wasn’t a totally unappealing thought. “Don’t you have to stay here?”

  “Nah, everyone’s checked in, and Elaine, my housekeeper, she’s like my right hand. She can deal with anything.” He paused a second. “But if you’d rather be alone, I can tell you where to go.” He pulled a map out from under the desk and placed in on the counter.

  Alone. I thought about it a minute. It might be the best thing since I needed to keep looking, to keep pushing in corners until I found out what happened to my mother. Yet I wasn’t sure what my next step was, and it would be helpful to have someone who knew the area.

  Truth was, I was feeling a little rattled. I didn’t want to be alone right now.

  I smiled at Ty. “Let’s go.”

  Ty took me to a diner called Bingham’s, where we could sit in the sun. The restaurant was in the downtown section of town. It still boasted quaint shingled buildings and bricked sidewalks, just as it used to when my family had lived there, but the stores that used to sell hardware, flowers and crafts had been replaced with a designer boutique, a coffee shop and an upscale delicatessen.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the change. Decades had passed since we’d left. During that time, Woodland Dunes and the surrounding towns had morphed into sort of a Midwest version of the Hamptons—a summer enclave for those looking to escape the city. When my parents had originally bought here, they too used the place as a summer retreat, but my mom had fallen in love with it. They had two children then, Dan and Caroline, both of whom adored the space and the freedom they couldn’t get in the city, so my parents made the house near the lake their permanent home. My dad bought an apartment in Chicago for the nights he couldn’t get home during the week.

  My dad had told me this much. He’d always been willing to talk about the early days, about the afternoon he met my mom at University of Chicago, their wedding at the Palmer House, and how they’d moved to Woodland Dunes. But I learned not to ask questions about anything after that. Seeing the pain in my father’s eyes was too difficult. He was the only family I had, and I wasn’t willing to risk losing him, as well. So I learned to push away the wonderings. The letter had brought all those questions back, though, and I didn’t have the power to bury them again.

  We placed our orders, Ty joking with the owner, who gave him two complimentary lemonades.

  Sitting under the red-and-white-striped awning, I bit into my turkey sandwich, suddenly starving. “Good?” I asked Ty, watching him dig into his food.

  “Excellent,” he said between mouthfuls of a broccoli and cheddar omelet. “I love breakfast foods after breakfast. I eat weird stuff first thing in the morning, too, like sushi and pasta.”

  “Cold pizza. That’s a good breakfast.”

  Ty’s fork stopped in midair, and he smiled wide. “Exactly.”

  We talked, and I told him about my job and my life in Manhattan. Ty explained the work he’d done on Long Beach Inn before it opened.

  “How did you know how to do all that stuff?” I asked. I finished the last bit of my sandwich and sank back into my chair.

  “After I got out of college, I came home and worked construction. I was pretty lost during that time. No idea what I wanted to do, but the construction paid off. I learned a hell of a lot. Because of that, I was able to either do the work at the inn myself or find someone fast who knew how.”

  “How do you like living in Woodland Dunes?” I said. “I vaguely remember living here as a kid, but now that I’m in New York, it’s hard for me to imagine.”

  “You know what? I love it here. When I first came home after school, I thought I’d just get my act together and head out again. I didn’t think I’d stay for good, but once I took a breather and looked around, I loved a lot about this town.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, geez,” Ty said, as if there were too many things. “I love the beach, the people, the way everybody knows me and the way anyone would help me if I needed it. I love the crazy summers when the bars are packed and people are crawling all over my place, and I love it when the fall ends too, and it gets quiet. It’s like having the best of both worlds—parties and crowds for five months, R & R the rest of the year.”

  I nodded. I liked the picture he painted. There was never a respite from the teeming people or the noise in Manhattan.

  Ty waved to a woman walking her dog on the other side of the street, then shifted in his chair so he faced me directly. The sun picked up the freckles that dotted his cheekbones. “So you were how old when you lived here?” he said.

  “We left when I was seven. I remember school the most. The playground and Mrs. Howard, my first-grade teacher. I went to Dunes Primary.” It occurred to me that maybe I’d been at the same school as Ty. “Maybe we were there together?”

  “No, I went to St. Bonaventure, or St. Bonnie’s as we called it. Twelve years of Catholic repression for this kid.” Ty glanced down for a second. “I think I remember you, though, or at least hearing about you.”

  “You do?” Despite the sun on my skin, I felt goose bumps prickle the back of my arms.

  Ty watched me. “Your mom died, didn’t she? When you lived here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I remember that. I saw a picture of your family that was taken at the funeral.”

  “Where did you see it?” Maybe it had been in the paper, something I could dig up.

  Ty scratched his jaw, looking a little uncomfortable for the first time since I met him. “I saw it in my dad’s office.”

  “Your dad? Who’s your dad?”

  “He’s the chief of police.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, after a moment spent digesting Ty’s words. My stomach felt slightly ill, but there was a tickle of excitement. “This picture you saw was in the police station?”

  Ty nodded.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know all the details. I was just a kid too, but…” He trailed off.

  “Look, I don’t know much about my mom’s death,” I said. “It’s why I’m here. So please, just tell me what you know.”

  A look of surprise came over Ty’s face, and I realized I might have spoken a little harshly.

  “I’m sorry.” I leaned toward him. “I had a case in Chicago last week. I’m an attorney. But the point is, I came here to see what I could find out about my mother’s death. Anything you could tell me would be a help.”

  “Wow.” Ty shook his head. “That’s tough. But as I said, I don’t know much. What I recall is waiting for my dad in his office at the station. It was a big day for me because he was going to take me to get my uniform and equipment so I could start football. My dad wasn’t the chief then. He was assistant chief. Anyway, I was playing around his desk, and when he came in, I was holding that picture. There was a coffin being moved into the ground, and your family stood around it. You had on a long yellow coat.”

  I nodded. My Easter coat, the one my mom had picked out for me.

  “When my dad saw me with the picture,” Ty continued, “he stopped, pointed to the coffin and said, ‘Do you know what that is?’ I told him there was somebody who was dead in there. He said, ‘That’s right. A dead lady, and I’m going to find out who killed her.’”

  I took a breath. “But they never charged anyone, did they?”

  He shook his head again. “My dad told me sometime later that he’d been wrong, that no one had killed her or meant for her to die.”

  I felt a little gust of relief. If the police had ruled out mur
der, then maybe whoever had sent me the letter was simply mistaken. “Would your dad talk about this?”

  “I think so. I mean, I don’t see why not. He’s fishing this weekend. He won’t be back until tomorrow night. Will you still be around?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I’d been planning on going back to Chicago Sunday night so I could wait for the arbitration decision that should come sometime Monday or Tuesday. But talking to the police might be just what I needed to set my mind straight, and I could follow up on some other questions in the meantime. And then there was Ty with his freckles.

  “Can I keep my room at the hotel?” I asked.

  He made a face like he was thinking hard about it. “For you, I’ll make it happen.”

  “Yeah?” I said, surprised to hear the coy tone of my voice.

  “Definitely.”

  “I’ll be around,” I told him.

  6

  For the third time that day, I pulled into Della’s driveway, still thinking about my lunch with Ty. Over lemonade, I had told him what I knew about my mom’s death, about the letter, and about my visit with Della this morning. I hadn’t meant to spill the whole tale—it was so unlike me—but I was unusually comfortable with him, and once I started talking, it was cathartic to get the story out.

  Ty had asked me if I’d spoken to my brother or sister. They would be obvious places to start, he said. Obvious, yes, but I had no idea where either of them were, a fact that had always gnawed at me, confused me. When I got up the nerve to ask my dad about either of my siblings, he became visibly upset, telling me that they had their own lives now. During college, I went through a period when I longed for companionship, for family, and I made a halfhearted attempt at finding them. I called Information in different cities where I thought they might be. The Internet wasn’t widely used then, but I had a friend who was adept at computers do some digging. Neither of us could find a Caroline or Dan Sutter. And so I eventually gave up.

  Ty thought I should call my father right then and ask him, point-blank, what had happened and where my brother and sister were, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. Old habits weren’t easy to kill, and I still abhorred the idea of distressing my father, of picking at old wounds.

  The last time I raised the issue was shortly after I met Maddy in law school. It was so weird, she had said over and over, that I didn’t know how my mom had died, that I didn’t know what had happened to my brother and sister.

  “I know,” I’d said, irritated that I’d told her to begin with.

  But Maddy’s questions stayed with me, and so I brought up the topic a few weeks later on a Sunday afternoon. I was with my dad on his patio, sipping a glass of cabernet while he grilled steaks for us.

  “Do you ever think about Mom?” I said, apropos of nothing.

  He dropped the grill tongs he was holding. They clattered on the stone patio tiles. He bent over to pick them up, and when he stood, he looked like a confused old man instead of a confident trial lawyer. His face was slack.

  “Of course,” he said quietly, his gaze asking me how I could ask such a question.

  But still I pushed. “Really?” I said. “Do you really?”

  “Yes, Hailey. I think about your mother all the time.” He blinked.

  “Well, you never talk about her. You never talk about when she died.”

  A strange, garbled sound erupted from inside my father’s throat, making me stop my words. I could have sworn he was about to cry, something I had never seen, and I bailed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I stood and took the tongs from him. “Let me do that.”

  And, like an old man, he feebly handed them to me, wiping the grease from his hands on his immaculate khaki pants before he went into the house.

  I had never brought up the issue again. If I could find my own answers, without confronting the parent who raised me on his own, I wanted to do that.

  Which brought me back to Della’s.

  “Sweetie!” Della said when she opened the front door now, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder. “Come in, come in.”

  “Thanks.” I accepted a quick hug. “I hope I’m not bothering you.”

  “Not at all.” Della led me into the kitchen, a large, green-painted room smelling of garlic and crowded with plants, knickknacks and crocheted pot holders. It was the type of warm, homey kitchen I’d always hoped my father and I would have, one that was lived in, that was used to cook for a large family. My dad wasn’t much of a chef, though, and so although our homes were lovely and expensive, the kitchens always had cold tiles and stainless-steel appliances, and I never spent much time there.

  “Martin has poker tonight,” Della said, “but I’m making enchiladas and salsa, so you’re just in time. I’m glad you’re here, because I was worried about you when you left. I hope I didn’t upset you.”

  I leaned against a countertop while Della picked up a carving knife on the butcher-block island. “I was startled, that’s all.”

  Della nodded and began chopping cilantro, sending the scent of it into the air to mix with the garlic. “You all moved away so fast when Leah died. I always wondered if that was the best thing for you kids after losing your mom.”

  “I guess my dad thought it was right.” At least I assumed that’s what my father thought. We had never talked about his rationalization for that first move out of Woodland Dunes and over the ocean to London and Paris or the next to San Francisco, except that my dad said the firm needed him in those particular cities. When I was fourteen, and he told me we were moving again, I put my foot down, telling him this had to be the last move, that I wanted to go to high school in the same place for all four years. So we moved one more time to Long Island, and my father hasn’t left New York since.

  “Oh, I don’t mean to second-guess your father,” Della said. “Part of my thinking was probably because I missed you all so much. Danny was ready to go off to college, but I don’t know that Caroline was quite prepared for boarding school.”

  I stood away from the counter and blurted out the questions I’d returned to ask. “Do you hear from them? Do you know where they are now?”

  Della abruptly stopped dicing cilantro, and it was a moment before she looked up at me. “You don’t talk to your brother and sister?”

  I shook my head, aware of a ticking clock somewhere in the room.

  Della opened her mouth as if to say something, but she paused first. “You don’t keep in touch at all?”

  “I did get a few letters from Caroline when she was in boarding school, but I haven’t seen either of them since my mom died.”

  Della laid the knife on the butcher block and came around to me. “Let’s sit down.” She led me to a polished wood table.

  We both sat, and I leaned forward, ready to listen, to learn anything I could. “Do you know where they are now?”

  Della took the dish towel off her shoulder and slowly rubbed her hands. “I don’t know if your father would want me to talk about this. Shouldn’t you ask him these questions?”

  “Look, Della,” I said. “My dad and I are very, very close, but there’s one thing we don’t talk about, which is the time when my mom died. And I’d really like to find my brother and sister. It’s been way too long for a family not to see each other.”

  Della’s concerned face watched me as I spoke, then she looked down and kept rubbing her hands with the towel. I forced myself to endure the silence even though I didn’t understand it.

  “Wait here,” Della said. She left the room for a minute or so. When she returned, she was carrying two stacks of envelopes, one thin, the other thicker.

  “I used to hear from Caroline regularly, maybe once a year,” she said, placing the larger pile of envelopes before me. “These are most of the letters. A few I misplaced or threw away. I haven’t heard from her for a year or two now. The last place she wrote me from was Portland.”

  I ran my finger over the top envelope made of thin, peach paper. In the left corner was a label t
hat read “Caroline Ramsey” and an address on Northeast Jarrett Street in Portland.

  “So she’s married?” I said, looking up at Della.

  Della nodded. “She sounds very happy. I think there’s even a picture in there.” She placed the other stack before me. There were only four envelopes. “I’ve saved everything I’ve received from Dan, but again it’s been a while. Last I heard he was out in Santa Fe.”

  The top letter was in a plain, white envelope, and just as Della had said, it bore a return address from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  “Can I keep these?” I asked. “Just for a few days, I mean.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s why I brought them out. You can have them.”

  She put her hand on my head, stroking my bangs back, making me remember the way she had done that same thing once when I was a small child. I’d been sick, I remembered, and Della had carried my lunch on a white tray to my room. I hadn’t been able to eat, so she sat on the side of my bed and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

  Odd, I thought, that it should have been Della taking care of me that day and not my mother, but I had the distinct recollection of my mother being absent, of Della coming to get me from school, Della taking my temperature and helping me into cool sheets.

  “You’ve always been so good to our family,” I said.

  “Well, of course. I love you all. I’ve always done what I’ve been asked.”

  “You’ve been wonderful.” I paused. “I do have another question for you. As far as you know, did the police find anything after her death?”

  “No,” Della said, sitting in a chair next to me. “They talked to everyone once or twice, and they decided that whatever happened was an accident, and that’s what I came to believe, too.” She nodded as if to reassure herself. “No one would’ve wanted to hurt your mama. Everyone loved her.”

  “Everyone?” I said, thinking of the letter implying murder, and Ty’s recollection of his father’s words that he was going to “find out who killed her.”

  “Well, sweetie, if you’re thinking about your father, he always loved your mom. Even when they separated and he was living in Chicago, he still loved her.”