by Lee Harris
I followed them back up the stairs, nearly bursting with anticipation. In the center of the hall, Monica pulled a handle in the ceiling, and a flight of stairs floated down. We clambered up them as fast as we could.
The attic resembled my Aunt Meg’s, a warehouse of unused and unusable objects, a collection of articles they couldn’t bear to part with and probably never would, although they were no longer part of anyone’s life.
“Those are my husband’s golf clubs,” Mrs. Thurston said, “and the big umbrella I bought him for his last birthday. I couldn’t ever bring myself to use it.”
Monica was watching her mother with troubled eyes. I imagined her mother keeping all those feelings to herself, not wanting to upset a child any more than the death itself had upset her. Now, with the catalyst of Candy Phillips’s mysterious departure, Mrs. Thurston had unlocked the inner door, dropped the guard of three decades, and let her feelings see the light of day—or at least the meager light of the attic. Maybe it was because I was there, a rational third person whose presence would keep a cap on their emotions.
“It would have kept you dry,” the daughter said softly.
“I know. It was just a time when I would rather get wet.”
We all stood there for a long moment, frozen in our places. Finally Mrs. Thurston picked up the huge black umbrella and handed it to her daughter. “Why don’t you give it to Alan, dear? I’m sure he can use it.”
Monica nodded and took the umbrella, tears in her eyes. She turned away and started looking for Candy Phillips’s duffel bag. A moment later she said, “Here it is.” Her voice was dispirited, as though her father’s death had taken over her being. She lifted something off the floor, brushed it off, and handed it to me.
“Let’s go downstairs,” I said, and we all went down the floating ladder.
It was like opening a time capsule. The first thing I pulled out was a tube of Colgate toothpaste neatly turned up from the used bottom, the color flaking off the tube as I held it.
“When she didn’t come back, I put all her things together,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Her brush and comb and toothbrush and anything else I found up in her room. After I stopped worrying, I remember feeling angry, as though she’d betrayed our affection. I thought she must have run away with her boyfriend and forgotten all about us.”
I reached back in and took out a bra, the elastic crumbling in my hand. It was a size 32B, and the label said Maiden form. The next thing out was her hairbrush. Just holding it gave me a chill. There were strands of ash blond hair in it, lighter than mine but not golden, Candy Phillips’s own hair.
“That’s just what her hair looked like,” Monica said, her voice eerily low. “Everything about her was so natural. God, I can almost feel her in this room.”
I could, too, as though in finding Candy’s possessions, we had finally liberated her soul. There was a toothbrush in the bag, and a comb missing a couple of teeth. I found two pairs of underpants, one nylon and one cotton, both size five. The label on the nylon was gone, but the cotton ones were made by Lollipop. A cylindrical bottle of Ban deodorant with a little liquid still in the bottom was heavier than I expected. It turned out to be made of glass, not plastic. The contents of a small jar of colored cream was baked and cracked. The label said it was for facial eruptions. She had used about half of it before she closed it for the last time. If she owned any other makeup, it must have been in her handbag, which had not been buried with her, and I doubted anyone would ever find it.
There was a pair of short pajamas, one folded light blue T-shirt, and a pair of thick white socks with “Bonnie Doon” still faintly visible on the instep, but there were no stockings, no shoes, no dresses or skirts. She had worn a pair of jeans and had expected to wear them the day she left. Instead, she had died in them.
At the bottom of the bag there was an open box of ten regular Tampax. Perhaps she had carried a couple with her; perhaps she kept them in the duffel just in case, as I did. No one in the room said anything. If anything shows that you’re young, female, and alive, it’s a box of Tampax.
There was no jewelry of any kind in the duffel.
The last thing I pulled out was a copy of the New Yorker for the first week of July. It was opened to a short story Candy had never finished reading.
The contents of the bag lay in front of us on the coffee table. Monica picked up the brush and looked at it gravely.
“She’d be over fifty now, poor thing,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Missed the best part of her life.”
“Do either of you remember any jewelry she might have worn? Rings, bracelets, anything around her neck on a chain?”
“She had a watch,” Mrs. Thurston said. “I don’t remember what it looked like.”
“No bracelets,” Monica said. “I’m sure of that. I would have noticed.”
I pulled my own chain out from inside my blouse. The miraculous medal I was given at birth was on it, along with my mother’s and a cross I received as a child. Both women looked at it.
“She wasn’t much for jewelry,” Mrs. Thurston said. Which didn’t rule out a chain that she might have worn, as I did, under her clothing.
“She had a string of some kind of beads,” Monica said. “She used to wear them sometimes when she taught.” She shrugged. “That’s all I remember.”
I started to put the things back in the bag when I felt something along the bottom. It was a small key chain made of little metal balls with a fastener connecting the two ends, the kind you can pick up in a dime store. Dangling from it was a miniature New York State license plate in black and orange. I held it up.
Monica nearly exploded. “It’s Candy’s license plate! Look, Mom, it’s the little license plate I always loved.” I gave it to her, and she started to cry as she looked at it. “It came in the mail,” she said, “from one of those organizations that asks for money. She sent them a dollar for it. I remember, I remember. Oh, how could anyone have killed her?”
When she gave the key chain back, I repacked the duffel bag. “I’m not sure what to do with this. It’s evidence in a homicide, and I suppose it ought to be turned over to the sheriffs office.”
“He’s such a bag of wind,” Monica said. “Did you see him on TV trying to outplay the coroner?”
I said I had.
“You don’t want him to have it, do you?” her mother said.
“I’d rather wait. I’d hate to see Candy’s death become a political circus.”
“Well, why don’t you leave that bag right here then? I’ll put it back in the attic and we’ll all forget about it. When you’re ready, we can just find it again.”
I thanked her, and she gave me a hug. I left my phone numbers with her and promised she’d hear from me. As we all walked out to my car, I said, “Did you ever know a woman named Beadles who had a daughter named Joanne?”
Mrs. Thurston recognized the name first. “There was a Ginny Beadles who worked in the coffee shop, but that was a long time ago. Didn’t she marry the owner, Monica?”
“She could’ve. But it’s changed hands a lot. You think she married Pop?”
“No, the one before him. It was Mike and Millie’s Place, and Mike and Millie split up.” She laughed. “We’re just full of scandals around here.”
“I don’t suppose you remember Mike’s last name.”
“No. Don’t think I ever knew it. But I knew Ginny Beadles because she worked for a time in the bank, and there was a little sign at her window with her name on it.”
“She left the bank for a waitressing job?”
“I think she had her eye on Mike.” Mrs. Thurston laughed again.
“Did you know her daughter?”
“I don’t think I even knew she had one.”
“Thank you both,” I said. As I drove away I felt it had been more exhausting for them than for me.
17
It was late enough in the afternoon that I could call Mrs. Mulholland’s daughter, Amy Broderick. I found a pay phone at the gas station in the cente
r of town and called her number. She had spoken to her mother and knew who I was.
“Are you down in Studsburg now?” she asked.
“Not too far away. I’ve been talking to people in the area today, and I have some questions about your last teacher there.”
“Miss Phillips?”
“That’s the one.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“She’s been missing for a long time, and I’m trying to find out what happened to her.”
“I don’t know anything that happened after we left Studsburg.”
“It’s the year in Studsburg I’m interested in.”
“Will you still be around tomorrow?”
“Yes, I will.”
“My husband and I have been meaning to drive down and see the town. He’s never been there. Could I meet you at the church tomorrow morning, say eleven?”
“That would be great.”
“I’ll have a surprise for you,” she said. “Look for us about eleven. We’ll be two excited adults and two reluctant kids—if I can get my sixteen-year-old to come along.”
I promised I’d be there.
* * *
The nuns at Sacred Heart couldn’t quite believe it. Last night I hadn’t had the faintest idea whose body had been buried in the church, and this evening I knew with absolute certainty. It had been largely luck, I assured them, a chance call to a woman who had lived there.
“More than chance,” Sister Concepta said. “Someone lied to you, and you were following up on that lie. Now all you have to do is find the killer.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “All I have to do,” I echoed.
“It shouldn’t be too hard. It’s one of those people who lied. And you’re welcome here till you find out which one.”
For that, I assured her, I was very grateful.
I left after breakfast Saturday morning, taking my suitcase with me. I would return Sunday evening after Jack went back to New York, but in the meantime there were several things I wanted to do; more, in fact, than I had time for. My first destination was the post office in the Thurstons’ town. I couldn’t think of any other way of finding out where Candy Phillips had gone to when she left at the end of the school year, and I wanted to know why no one had been concerned when she failed to arrive. I didn’t really have much hope that the post office would keep a forwarding address for thirty years, but I had to start somewhere.
Raised eyebrows and a look more suspicious than quizzical greeted my questions. “Thirty years? We only forward mail a year.”
“I know that, but maybe you have a record somewhere.”
“Miss, this building wasn’t here thirty years ago. And if you want to know the truth, neither was I.”
“Could you point me to an old-timer?”
He stared at me a few seconds before moving away. Then I heard him call, “Anyone know where Tom is?”
Tom materialized eventually, a man probably nearing retirement. I hoped he’d made a career of the post office.
“Tell me what you’re looking for,” he said, “and I’ll see what I can do.”
I told him. He listened. At one point he said, “Thurston, yeah. I know the name. But I don’t remember anything about a forwarding address.”
“Maybe the forwarding card is filed away somewhere. I wouldn’t mind looking through them myself. And I know the month and year.”
“Lotta old stuff got thrown out when we moved into the new building.”
“Is there someplace we could look? Just on the chance that it’s there?”
“Could you tell me why it’s so all-fired important?”
I really couldn’t take him into my confidence, and I have a tough time lying, which has made me rather inventive with the truth. “She’s a very important person to me, and she’s been missing for thirty years. I’ve traced her this far, and right here I’ve reached a dead end. I don’t know where to go from here.” I hoped, if he had any imagination at all, that he would assume I was an illegitimate child trying to trace her mother. Certainly the years were right. I met his eyes.
“Come with me.” He said it abruptly as though he were irritated or, possibly, moved.
We went downstairs to a basement filled with file boxes and cartons.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Tom said.
I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Taking the initiative, I walked over to the nearest carton and looked at the year scrawled on the top. Under it was a carton a couple of years older. I looked at one in a nearby stack. Older still. “Toward that wall,” I said, pointing.
He got into the act, and I helped him jockey the cartons around.
Finally he said, “You sure of the date?”
“Positive.”
“Look in this one.”
The rubber bands that had held the old cards together had long since disintegrated, and everything in the carton was a mess. There was no chronological order or any other order that I could figure out. So I just took it piece by piece, item by item, until I found it.
“It’s here,” I said jubilantly.
“You really got it?”
“I really do.”
The old address was c/o Thurston at their home. The new address was a town in Pennsylvania that I had never heard of. And printed along the bottom of the slip was the message: PLEASE DO NOT DELIVER MAIL TO THE THURSTON ADDRESS. That, I decided, was to prevent the Thurstons from seeing who her mail came from. Her lover must have had a highly recognizable name—or address.
Tom took the card from me and scratched his head. “It’s coming back,” he said. “It was a long time ago. We called her the musical-chairs girl. You know how to play musical chairs?”
“Sort of.”
“The mail came here, we forwarded it; coupla weeks later, it’s back, readdressed by the addressee.”
“You mean when they got it, they sent it back here?”
“That’s what they did. But we had no place to send it here, so we sent it back there again. Musical chairs.”
Tom seemed pretty pleased with himself, and suddenly reluctant to go upstairs and resume work. But I had no more time for chitchat. I was meeting Amy Broderick at St. Mary Immaculate in half an hour.
The sixteen-year-old had not been persuaded to come. The Brodericks were a good-looking couple with a twelve-year-old son playing with a hand-held game. Amy Broderick waved husband and son away when she identified me, and we walked into the church together. She was a small woman wearing pants and boots and carrying a handsome bag over her shoulder. She opened it as soon as we were inside.
“I went over to my mother’s last night for this. My mother is one of those superorganized women who can put her hand on anything in two seconds flat. Look.”
It was a folder with a class picture. Standing in the center of the back row was Candy Phillips. A hand-lettered sign held by the two children in the middle of the front row gave the year and class. There were only two rows, eight smiling, well-scrubbed children about to enter their teens and the legendary decade of the sixties.
“You haven’t changed,” I said.
“Well, I don’t weigh eighty pounds anymore.”
But pretty close, I estimated. “This is really great,” I said.
“If you promise I’ll get it back, I’ll let you have it.”
“You’ll get it back.”
“What do you want to know about Miss Phillips?”
“Anything you remember.”
“I adored her.” She laughed. “That’s the whole story. If anyone was responsible for my wanting to be a teacher, it was Miss Phillips. It wasn’t an easy job. She had three classes and she was replacing someone who’d been there for years, but she eased into it as though she’d been made for us. She was probably the first young teacher Studsburg had had in twenty years. And she was wonderful.”
“Did you ever see her outside of school?”
“Oh, sure. She’d go to the coffee shop in the afternoon sometimes un
til it closed down or do some shopping at the store. We were kind of giggly at that age, but she was always so nice to us. You’d see her little car parked here and there. If it was on Main Street, you knew she was in one of the shops there.”
“The newspaper had an office on Main Street, too, didn’t it?”
“Everything was on Main Street.”
“I know you were young, but children often notice things, even things they aren’t expected to see. Did you ever see her with aman?”
“You mean like a boyfriend?”
“Maybe.”
“Not that I can remember. But I was only eleven. I wasn’t out much at night, except to go to baseball games. She went to those, too. You’d see her car in the lot near the field. You couldn’t miss it. It was an old Volkswagen with two little windows in the back. I bet it’s in a museum now.”
Her husband and son waved as they passed. They had been downstairs, probably to see where the body was found. It struck me that if you drove a distinctive car in a very small town, you couldn’t very well park in front of your lover’s house or everyone would know about it in ten minutes. But if you parked in front of the grocery store and walked down the block to where the newspaper was published, people would assume you were in the grocery store. And if you parked near the baseball field, you could easily slip away to the wooded area that was nearby. I remembered the aerial photograph of the town that Fred Larkin had showed me. He had pointed out the playing field and then moved the pointer just a bit to show me the woods where he had proposed to his wife. It wasn’t a big town, and you could probably walk from one end to the other in less than twenty minutes.
“Do you remember where that baseball field was?” I asked.
“Sure.” I followed as she walked away from the downtown area. “You can’t see anything now that would give you a clue, but it was over that way where it’s pretty flat. We had bleachers and everything. My brother used to play ball there.”
“And wasn’t there a wooded section somewhere near it?”
“That was off to the right. Let’s see. Look at that. I think they’ve left all the tree stumps there.” She pointed, and I saw them for the first time, like a field of piles. “It was very beautiful in the summer, very lush.”