by P J Parrish
“Irish Hills,” Louis said.
“Really? I’ve been there,” Frances said. “My parents took me out there once or twice. Is it still nice?”
No answer from Phillip again.
“We didn’t see much of it,” Louis said finally. “What we did see looked, you know, kind of run-down. An old amusement park, some old motels. All closed right now. Not much to see really.”
Frances was watching Phillip. “I would have liked to go anyway,” she said. “It’s been so cold and I’ve been stuck in this house all week. I’d like a nice drive.”
Phillip set the glass down carefully on the polished dining room table. “I better go get cleaned up,” he said quietly.
Frances’s eyes followed him out of the dining room. They heard the close of the bathroom door. Frances looked at Louis, and he saw something register in the bland prettiness of her round face, a slight tightness around her mouth. She picked up the empty glass, wiping the water ring with her sweater sleeve. She went back into the kitchen.
Louis stayed in the dark dining room. She knew. Wives always knew. Maybe Frances didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew something was. And it occurred to him that Phillip was probably oblivious of all the vibrations his wife was putting out.
Thirty-one years . . . that was how long they had been married now. Moods and quirks had become second nature, as easy to read as a children’s book. If Phillip had been behaving like this for several weeks, Frances would have to be blind not to know something was wrong.
Louis’s mind tripped to Joe, and he let the image of her face come, welcoming it even, as something to dwell on instead of Phillip’s secret. The chemistry born of their working a case together had deepened into something he had never expected. Was it love? He had no idea. Sometimes weeks could go by when he didn’t see her, yet as soon as he did, it was as if she had always been there.
Almost ten months . . . that’s how long he had been with Joe. And then, only on weekends, if they were lucky. But he always knew when something was bothering her. He could hear it in her voice. It would go just a hair huskier, and her speech just a beat slower. He never mentioned to her that he noticed. But he liked being able to tell.
Louis could hear Frances in the kitchen. He had to go in there. He just hoped she wouldn’t ask something he couldn’t answer.
The kitchen was bright after the gloom of the dining room. He went to the sink, poured out the bourbon, and rinsed the glass. He could feel Frances’s eyes on him as he went to the refrigerator and got a Heineken.
“Do you have plans for tomorrow?” Frances asked.
Louis heard the slight edge in her voice. Suddenly he was getting tired of playing word games that skipped along the edges of the truth.
“Not really,” he said, leaning against the counter.
Frances opened the oven and pulled out a pie. The kitchen was filled with the smell of pumpkin. “Will you be here for dinner?” she asked, without looking up.
Louis hesitated. He and Phillip had barely talked on the ride back from the Irish Hills. Phillip had pulled inward and had just sat there, head back, eyes closed. Louis had wanted to ask him questions, questions he needed answers to if he was going to figure out where to go next. But Phillip had deflected all his attempts to talk.
Frances set the pie down on the counter and turned toward Louis, clasping her arms across her chest, holding herself like she was cold.
“Louis, what’s going on?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“With Phillip. What’s wrong?”
Louis struggled to keep his eyes on hers. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Don’t tell me that. Is Phillip sick?”
“What?”
“That’s it, isn’t it? Is it something awful that he can’t tell me? Is that why he asked you to come home?”
Louis almost let out a breath of relief. “No, he’s fine. Please don’t worry about that.”
“Then what is it?”
Louis gave her a shake of his head. “It’s not my place, Frances.”
She turned away, toward the sink, head bowed. Louis heard the sound of running water and when he looked up, Frances was rinsing bowls, her arms pumping. Louis left the kitchen, going out to the den. He paused to switch on a lamp and when he looked up he saw Phillip outside on the back patio.
Louis opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the cold. Phillip was smoking a cigarette, dressed in a clean shirt and an old sweater, his hair wet from his shower.
“Frances thinks you’re sick,” Louis said.
“What?”
“She knows something is bothering you and she told me she thinks you are sick and afraid to tell her.”
“Good God,” Phillip said softly.
Louis looked off into the bare trees of the backyard. He let out a long slow breath that spiraled up into the cold air. “Look, Phil, I appreciate what you’re going through here, but please don’t ask me to lie for you.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Phillip said. “I apologize.”
They were quiet. Phillip took a long drag on his cigarette, then bent down to snuff it out in the pail of sand that Frances always had kept on the patio as her one concession to his habit.
Phillip’s eyes went to the sliding glass door. They could just see Frances’s back in the kitchen from where they stood outside. Phillip reached into his pants pocket and pulled out another cigarette, and Louis knew it was just a ploy to buy them more time outside to talk.
“Tell me more about Claudia. How’d you meet her?” Louis asked, thinking that maybe if Phillip started with the good memories, it would be easier.
Phillip’s Zippo gave his face a sharpness as he lit the cigarette. He stuffed the lighter back in his pocket and drew on the cigarette.
“It was the summer of fifty-one, at a beach party, one of those things with a bonfire and kids passing around a bottle,” Phillip said. “I had a job at this country club over in Saugatuck to make enough to go back to Western. I had never seen her around town before that night on the beach. She was just there, sitting by herself, this little thing wrapped up in this big blue sweater. She had blond hair that smelled like lilacs. She was seventeen. Maybe that should have scared me off, but it didn’t.”
He paused to pick a bit of tobacco off his lip. “When she had to leave that night, I walked her home. Her family had one of those big stone fortress houses on Lake Michigan. We only had a week together. I went back to Western and she went home.”
“That’s the last time you saw her?” Louis asked.
“Oh no, no.” Phillip let out a low, sad laugh. “Turned out we were neighbors of sorts. The DeFoes lived in Grosse Pointe Farms. My folks lived in the less desirable part of the Pointes, a place everybody called the Cabbage Patch. We grew up less than ten miles from each other and a galaxy apart.”
Phillip had gone quiet again. Louis could see the glowing tip of his cigarette as he took another drag. It was a moment before Phillip spoke again.
“We saw each other on weekends,” he said. “She’d sneak out and her brother Rodney would drive her to the park by the lake and I’d pick her up on my motorcycle.”
“What happened?” Louis asked.
Phillip let out a long breath. “Her mother found out and threatened to send Claudia away to school.” He paused. “We decided to elope. It was nuts, crazy . . . she was so young. But I didn’t care. I wanted her.”
Louis was surprised, but he remained quiet.
“We made plans to leave late at night, after her mother was asleep. Rodney was going to bring her.” Phillip took a hard breath. “I waited at the park, but she never showed up.”
Louis waited, shivering in the cold. Phillip didn’t seem to notice.
“The next day I went to her house,” Phillip went on.
“I stood out there, banging on that door, and finally this maid lets me in and tells me to wait.” He paused. “I’ll never forget standing in that goddamn library thinking
Claudia was in that house somewhere that very minute and I couldn’t get to her. So I starting yelling out her name. I was standing in that big foyer at the bottom of that staircase yelling her name and hearing it come back to me in that big empty house.” He took a breath. “The butler or whatever the hell he was came back, then some security guy showed up and threw me out. He followed me down the road until I was past the guardhouse.”
Phillip paused. Louis waited. The words were coming, but like slivers of glass painfully pulled through the prism of Phillip’s memories.
“I kept calling,” Phillip said. “But no one would talk to me. Then, a few months later, Rodney showed up at my door. He told me he was there for my own good, to help me get over her.”
Another pause. It went on so long Louis feared Phillip had shut down. The ash from his cigarette fell to the patio.
“Then Rodney told me Claudia tried to kill herself,” Phillip said. “That’s why I couldn’t see her. She had slit her wrists.”
Phillip looked down at the cigarette butt in his fingers as if suddenly aware of it. He reached down and put it in the sand pail. When he straightened, he went on, his voice steady.
“He said Claudia was sick, that she had always been mentally fragile. He told me—he begged me—to just let her go.”
A light went on inside the house. From the corner of his eye, Louis could see Frances in the dining room, setting the table for dinner.
“What did you do?” Louis asked.
Phillip was silent.
“Phillip? What did you do?”
“I tried to forget her. And I did. I met Frances. And for a long time, I didn’t think about Claudia. Then, a week before Frances and I were going to be married, I drove to Hidden Lake. I wasn’t even sure she was still there. But she was. A nurse took pity on me and let me in to see her.”
Louis glanced toward the dining room. Frances had disappeared. He hoped she wouldn’t come out before Phillip finished.
“It was cold but sunny,” Phillip said. “She was sitting on a sunporch. She was just sitting there, holding this blanket around herself, and she looked up at me. She looked up at me and she didn’t see me.”
Phillip turned and Louis could see his face clearly in the light spilling out from inside. Phillip’s eyes glistened.
“I was scared,” he whispered. “I was never so scared in my life.”
“Phil—”
Phillip ran a hand over his face.
“I gave up,” he said.
“What?”
“I gave up, Louis. I couldn’t face it, any of it. Why she was there, what was happening to her, and that look on her face, like she had been erased. I couldn’t face any of it.” Phillip shook his head slowly and looked away. “I ran away. It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“But you went back,” Louis said.
“Oh yeah, I went back in 1972,” Phillip said. “It was my fortieth birthday. I went back to the hospital and they told me she had died there a year before.”
“That’s when you started tending her grave,” Louis said.
“Not until the summer after,” Phillip said.
“Phil, you were a very young man when all that happened.”
“I ran,” Phillip said. “Don’t you see? I just left her in that goddamn place and ran.” He turned quickly, taking a step away.
Louis looked at Phillip’s back. He let out a long, slow breath. “Phil, you need to tell Frances.”
“I know,” Phillip said without turning.
Louis looked toward the patio doors. He could see Frances standing there, looking out at them. “We need to go in,” he said.
Phillip was looking out over the yard. “What’s next?” he asked.
“What?”
“The next step to finding her remains. What’s next?” Louis thought for a moment. “I can’t go back to the hospital until Monday. Maybe I could try her family.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Phillip said.
“No, I’ll go alone. It’s better that way. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”
Phillip gave him a nod and went inside. Louis sank into a lawn chair. The metal was cold on the back of his legs, and he felt a shiver move through his shoulders. But he didn’t want to go inside.
It wasn’t my finest moment.
He could see her face now. Her dark skin streaked with rain. Her eyes frightened.
I’m pregnant, Louis.
Louis stared out into the dark yard. He could barely make out the shape of an old rusted swing set.
I ran away. From Claudia, Frances, everything. It wasn’t my finest moment.
Louis pushed up from the chair and went back inside.
CHAPTER 6
Nine miles. That’s all it was. Louis had clocked it on the odometer as he drove north from the broken buildings of downtown Detroit to the manicured mansions of Grosse Pointe. Nine short miles from hell to heaven with a quick trip through the purgatory of Phillip’s Cabbage Patch.
It was strange how little he really knew about his foster father. He had been thinking about it almost constantly since his talk with Phillip out on the patio. This was a man who had always seemed so grounded but at the same time so emotionally transparent. Yet now, Louis felt like he barely knew him.
Louis turned the Impala onto Jefferson, cutting down toward the Detroit River, as Phillip had directed him. He had never been to Grosse Pointe before—or the Pointes as some rich snot back at the University of Michigan had once told him it was called. The Pointes—a refuge of privilege and money rimming Lake St. Clair, the place where Detroit’s auto magnates staked their claims and built their castles, where their sons and grand-sons still held sway over their rust-belt kingdoms. The new money had long ago fled to the far suburbs. But in the Pointes, just nine miles from Detroit’s decaying core, the old ways still lingered like the last moments of a fading dream.
His thoughts went back to Phillip. He knew that his family didn’t have much money, that Phillip had worked hard to put himself through college but had never graduated. He guessed that meeting Claudia had interrupted that. Maybe that was why Phillip had been so insistent that Louis graduate from U of M, despite the fact that the Lawrences had made big sacrifices to keep him there.
Louis was on Lakeshore Drive now. He had expected the DeFoes to live in one of the mansions facing Lake St. Clair, but Phillip’s directions were taking him away from the water to some place called Provencal Road. It turned out to be a winding private lane shaded by towering old trees. Louis slowed as he passed a sign with a picture of a person on horseback. He saw another discreet sign for the Country Club of Detroit but didn’t see an entrance. There was a guard shack ahead, but when Louis saw no one inside, he continued on without stopping.
He had seen the homes of the rich before, the gleaming modern manses of the lawyers on Sanibel, the Spanish-style villas lining the Caloosachatchee River back in Fort Myers. But none of it compared to this.
Rambling old Cape Cods sprawling over acres of land. Hulking Tudors hiding behind towering walls of hedges. Aging art deco palaces peering out from behind iron gates. Then, suddenly, there it was, 41 Provencal Road.
It was an old red brick monstrosity with a steep-pitched slate roof and two double chimneys thrusting into the gray sky. Compared to the other homes, it had a gothic aura about it, the bare trees fronting windows of all shapes and sizes, from attic slits to a set of bay windows that stared out like dark eyes inspecting anyone who dared approach.
He pulled up in the half-circle drive and killed the engine. He was miles from the lake now, but a cold wind coming from the west made him pull up the collar of his jacket. At the massive carved wood door, he ignored the small plate that said SERVICE IN REAR and rang the bell.
There was an intercom near the bell and he waited, expecting to hear some servant’s voice. Nothing. He rang again and waited. He was about to give up and leave when the door opened.
It was a man in a yellow sweater and gray slacks. He was t
all and reed thin, in his midfifties, with straight thinning gray hair hanging over a dour face reddened by too much sun or too much time in the shower. Or maybe the bar, Louis thought, seeing the crystal tumbler in the man’s hand.
“Yes?” the man asked. His unfocused eyes were a diluted pale brown, like the liquid in the tumbler. In the man’s subtle raise of his chin, Louis could read the question: What is this black man doing at my door?
“I’m looking for Eloise DeFoe,” Louis said.
The man leaned against the door frame, dangling the glass in his long fingers. “That would be my mother,” he said. “If you’re from Chavat’s, you can just leave the flowers out here.”
He started to shut the door, but Louis thrust out a hand. “My name is Louis Kincaid. I’m an investigator. I need to speak with Mrs. DeFoe, please.”
The man’s eyes took Louis in with one sweeping glance, lingered on his shoes, and came back to his face. “What are you investigating?”
“My business is with Mrs. DeFoe. Is she here?”
The man stared at Louis for a moment, then pushed the door open wider. “Oh, all right, come in, then.”
He sauntered away, leaving Louis to close the door. Louis followed the tinkle of ice cubes through the cold foyer, down a dark paneled hallway, to a room on the left, set off by leaded-glass double doors. The room was lit only by two small table lamps and the soft glow of spotlights arching over the oil paintings, but Louis had a sense of dark paneling, heavy drapes, and plump chairs.
The man in the yellow sweater had faded into a shadowed corner. Louis heard the kiss of ice against glass as a refill was poured. The man came back toward Louis, the old wood floors groaning softly under his slippered feet.
“Wait here,” he said. And he was gone, trailing scotch.
Louis stood in the center of the room. It smelled of furniture polish, must, and smoke from the dead fireplace. It made him remember that time when he was working on the force in Black Pool, Mississippi, and had gone to the funeral home to retrieve some evidence. The owner had made him wait, and Louis had sat there, listening to the weeping of a grandmother’s mourners in the next room, listening and taking in the dusty perfume of the old woman’s dissipating spirit.