“That’s not a crime,” I said.
“Right, but taking Vinni is.” John D’Orfini picked up his coffee but didn’t drink any. “They had friends in Brooklyn,” he said.
“So why did they live in Spring Haven?”
“Rudy had retired from teaching at Columbia University. Maybe they liked the ocean and the beach. We don’t know. There’s a tight German community in Brooklyn. They protect their own.”
I stood up and said, “I have to use the restroom.”
A ray of hope flew inside me, and I wanted to sit with it alone. If Hilda was being protected, I believed Vinni was safe. I washed my hands and threw the drying towel into the wastebasket behind the swinging door and walked back to the table. I picked up my jacket. John D’Orfini stood at the cash register. “Let’s walk some more,” he said when I came up beside him.
“Is this all you have?” I found it hard to believe that he couldn’t have told me this over the phone. “What’s the ‘connection’ you’re talking about? I want names. Who are these people?” I tossed questions at him like a kid throwing darts at one of those boardwalk games where you know you have a slim-to-zero chance at winning.
“These things take time.” We headed north toward Central Park, walking at a faster pace than before. We stayed on Madison Avenue.
“It’s not enough. I want more.” A hundred dollars was a large sum for unanswered prayers. The quiet voice I had used in the café fell away. I picked up speed until I was almost running. John D’Orfini kept up with me. He must have known what was coming, but he said nothing, so I jumped ahead.
“Things are taking too long. This isn’t enough. I don’t give a shit if I have to do it on my own.” I breathed in the air faster and faster. People passed by me in a blur.
“Maddy, don’t get more involved. Let us do our job.” He cleared his throat and brought his hands up to his mouth. Fingers curled around an imaginary microphone by his lips.
I stopped short between Sixty-First and Sixty-Second Streets and turned to face him. For a moment, I didn’t speak. Tears filled my eyes.
“I am involved. I’m Vinni’s mother.” The words came from a place so deep and strong, I hardly recognized my own voice. “Go home,” I said. “Go back to your little town with your safe little desk and your safe little nothing life.” He took a step closer, but I moved away from him, yelling, “Go home!” as I turned and ran.
My heavy boots hit my ankles with every stride, making my skin raw and red.
“Wait a minute.” John D’Orfini grabbed my elbow from behind and slowed me.
I screamed in his face. “You want me to be uninvolved. This is what you want?” People stepped around us on the sidewalk as I shouted.
Is this really why the detective had traveled all the way to the city from Spring Haven? To tell me to back off? Twice, he had mentioned how he’d run into Katherine Mulvey, who owned the religious gift shop in Spring Haven, and how she always asked about the investigation. Maybe he had come to the city to search my face for clues as he told me about the Brooklyn connection. Maybe he felt sorry for me and his pity was what made me see him differently. Whatever it was, he gave me a slight opening and I let loose.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I beat the words on his chest with my fists. John D’Orfini grabbed my arms. “You’re hurting me.” Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I want to help.”
Maybe it was the gentle tone of his voice, but something inside me broke.
AS I CLIMBED the stairs to my apartment, I sank into thinking how the world could get along just fine without me. I continued up the stairs but stopped when I heard an odd sound. I slipped behind the bend of the wall. I stayed still. I watched and listened. Dusk shadowed the hallway from the window high near the ceiling. Particles of dust danced in the lit space. Had it flown up from where Evelyn swept the mat outside her apartment door?
I heard her cry as she swept. Back and forth, harder and harder, as if she intended to rip the heart out of the dust hidden deep inside the mat’s brushed weave, Evelyn swung the broom. I scraped my foot along the edge of the step to make a noise.
Evelyn looked up from the floor. “Maddy dear, you look like part of the wall. What are you doing down there?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” I said, as I stepped closer and noticed the wet on her cheeks.
“It’s nothing.”
Isn’t that what everyone says? It’s nothing.
“Can you come in for a spell?” Evelyn asked, rubbing her fingers back and forth under her nose. Then she fanned them out across both cheeks to rub away the wet.
The light in the hallway to her apartment dimmed in the afternoon. “Don’t you find it dark in here?” I asked, as I followed her into her apartment.
“Makes us appreciate the light all the more,” she said, without turning around.
I walked over to the window. I had come inside to get away from what was outside, but I still yearned for what I could see below—ordinary people with ordinary lives. Was Evelyn sweeping to distract herself from something extraordinary? Was she beating the mat to tamp down something from bubbling up, only to push it further away to a deeper place? Often I found her sweeping or cleaning the top of the kitchen counter over and over, until it shone more brightly than it had the day before. When I asked her why she had five bottles of Windex stored in the cabinet underneath her sink, she simply said, “I like to make things shine.”
“I saw John D’Orfini today,” I said.
“I know. He called me when you ran away and left him at the park. He was worried about you.”
John D’Orfini had talked to Evelyn many times over the past months. He knew I considered her more than a casual friend. In a way, she had become a mother replacement. My mother had died when I was a sophomore in college. She had slipped into her black Cadillac with the cream-colored seats in the closed garage and turned on the gas. The straps of her full-length slip had fallen off her shoulders when my dad found her slumped over the steering wheel.
When he called, I was finishing a container of Chinese vegetables on the bed in my dorm one block from Washington Square Park.
“You need to come home. Your mother died today,” he said.
When I hung up, I called my best friend, Kay. She was on her way to class. Boston College. History of American Politics of the Twentieth Century. A precursor to her political career as assistant US attorney in Manhattan.
“Kay, it’s my mother. She’s . . .” I waited. Then I said it. “Dead.”
A hush lay between us.
“Can you come home? Can you please?” I whispered.
Kay gasped. “Oh, God. Shit. I’m so sorry, Maddy.”
The following summer, as we sat on the floor on the screened porch of her parents’ house, I talked about the garage, the fumes, and my father’s call. Kay listened.
“She was sick,” Kay said. She held a Newport between her second and third fingers. “You know this, right?”
“Yeah.” Then I rolled over and laid my head in her lap and cried. Kay had seen me cry before—like the time in high school when I couldn’t stop scratching my skin when my mother had washed my father’s and my clothes together with the fiberglass curtains from the living room. There were other times—times that revolved around heartaches—from middle school through college. But then I met Steve and I wanted Kay to like him. “You’re lucky. He seems like a good guy,” she said after the first time we went out together in the West Village.
You’d think a friend like this would be a friend forever, but you would be wrong.
I never saw the signs.
I hadn’t thought about why Steve worked late on four consecutive Friday nights into Saturday, showing up at noon, calling behind him, “I’m getting a shower.” Working late was what he did. I thought I got it. I didn’t know that Kay had found someone to sleep with whose socks I kicked out of my way each morning on my way to the bat
hroom.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS HAD passed since Vinni’s disappearance before I saw Kay. She had been following the case, and we had talked briefly twice. But as a friend who betrayed me twelve years after my mother died, Kay knew me better than anyone. That was why she had stayed away and waited for me to call and ask to meet. We hadn’t seen each other in four years.
Kay was someone I had walked to school with since fourth grade and whom I had relied on when I couldn’t figure out what had made my mother crazy. Her one-month affair with Steve ended years of shared cigarettes.
“I need to see you, too,” she said before I hung up.
It was my idea to meet at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“Maddy?”
I looked up and straight into my best friend’s eyes. In four years, no one had taken Kay’s place. She looked the same. What made Kay stand out was her posture. I never knew anyone who could sink into a soft-cushioned couch and not slouch. The first time I saw her in a courtroom, I noticed her shoulders. Tall and erect, Kay pulled her five-foot-seven-inch frame into the room, dropping her shoulder blades into perfect alignment. Her hips had the right amount of sexuality as she walked back and forth in front of a jury. Rifling through a mirage of thoughts, I let them go as quickly as they appeared. I clung to the only one that made sense.
I needed her.
I slid over in the pew and made room. “I’m sorry, Maddy.
I’m so sorry. . . . Please stop hating me. I want to help you. Let me. Please.” Kay faced me and took both my hands in hers. She wore a thick sterling silver band on the index finger of her left hand. Her hair looked the same: black streaked with chestnut, cropped close like a cap. She was a forever kind of beauty. Her skin glowed in the dark of the cathedral. Her voice had always sounded like it came from deep in her throat. Seductive even when she was a teen, when boys looked down and fantasized.
Kay cried. I spoke first.
“You know, I wanted to see you cry. I did. But I don’t want these tears to be for us. We don’t have time. If these tears are for Vinni, I want them and I want you, too. But if they’re for what happened between you and Steve, I swear I can’t take it, Kay. I swear.”
“Maddy, no . . . no . . . no. I don’t want this.”
Confusion pressed against my chest as I shot up to leave the pew. Kay grabbed my wrist with a cool hand and pulled me down.
“Listen to me. I know what I did is unconscionable.”
During our brief phone calls, neither one of us had mentioned Steve.
Kay released her grip on my wrist. She curled her hand around mine. “I know I don’t deserve your friendship. I don’t even deserve to be sitting here talking to you. But I want to help you. I’ve been following the investigation.”
Then she told me.
As assistant US attorney, she had been talking to John D’Orfini since Vinni had first disappeared. Her instincts told her she could follow the case better if she talked to John D’Orfini along with reading the documents the FBI provided. She told him we had been friends since we’d been children living in New Jersey.
“Let me help you,” Kay pleaded. People in the pews around us began to notice. Her voice grew louder as she tightened her grip on my hands. My skin hurt. With a heart worn out from fear, I didn’t have a choice. As tears fell, I nodded and leaned my body against Kay’s. It seemed natural for her to lean against me. Together we created our own pieta.
KAY LATER CONFESSED to me, after several glasses of pinot noir, that the month she had been with Steve had been the most confusing time of her life. After I heard this, I stored it away. We had been talking about the mayoral election, avoiding anything personal, until I couldn’t take it and blurted out, “How did it happen?”
All she said was, “I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to feel something.”
This was unusual for Kay to admit. Ever since I’d known her, she had been the sure one. The one who never fell off her bike.
“Why Steve? Why did it have to be him?”
“I knew you didn’t want him anymore,” she said.
And she was right. Pure Kay.
ELEVEN
I HAD COME DOWNSTAIRS TO EVELYN’S APARTMENT TO learn more about the light-and-shadow technique she was working on. Not that I acknowledged why I had come. She had scribbled a note—“Something to study here. Let me know what you think”—and left it outside my door with a book about the Renaissance artists. As I flipped through the pages, I kept coming across the word chiaroscuro to describe how light and dark implied depth and volume. I stopped at the page discussing “black and pronounced shadows.” Another emphasized the importance of the study of contrast—the value between light and dark—in composition. For a while, the book held my attention.
I knew Evelyn was trying to breathe life back into my existence. I believed she didn’t give a damn whether the book made sense. Light and dark demanded stark choices. Sometimes she spent days upon days shading what she had already painted. I wondered if this was her way of adding possibilities to what caught the eye.
I DIDN’T LIKE John D’Orfini bothering Evelyn.
“He’s worried about you, that’s all. Besides, dear, that’s his job,” Evelyn said. “To ask questions.”
He and the FBI had talked to her many times. If I had been more alive, I might have noticed the slight wrinkle deepen further between Evelyn’s eyebrows when she spoke. I might have realized a sudden thickness had caught in her throat, and I might have caught how her third finger crossed over her fourth on her right hand, sliding it up and down as if she were stroking a child’s cheek. Instead, how I responded had nothing to do with Evelyn or John D’Orfini. “Vinni loved the color blue. She used to tell me she would have a blue garden when she was older. ‘Blue flowers,’ she said. ‘That’s all I want.’”
I was hungry—and Evelyn knew it. Maybe that was why I kept dropping by and watching her. Sometimes she’d stop, step away from the easel, smile at me, and say one word. “There.” How could I not smile back at her?
I WANTED TO know more about Hilda’s connection in Brooklyn, and John D’Orfini wasn’t talking much. We spoke two days after our walk in New York. Both of us were polite. I made the call on Tuesday following a Saturday visit. John D’Orfini gave me one more piece of information. (He had two, but he kept one for himself.) On a slow drive by Hilda and Rudy’s, he had seen a white van parked in front, with EXPRESS KLEANERS painted on both sides. A young man was unloading an armload of clothes bagged in plastic. It was a yearly sweep designed by the owners of the cleaners to deliver items forgotten by customers. John D’Orfini stopped the surprised driver, flashed his badge, and took the clothes back to the station. In Rudy’s trouser back pocket—the one with the buttoned flap—was a receipt for an almond horn, one cherry-filled pastry, two coffees, and four strudels. The top of the receipt gave the name, address, and phone number of the bakery in Brooklyn.
“We’re not sure who we’re dealing with here. You’ve got to sit tight,” said John D’Orfini.
“The name. I want the name of that bakery.”
John D’Orfini let out a deep exhalation but then said, “Mueller’s. A German couple named Hannah and George Mueller own it . . . on Ninth Street at Sixth Avenue.” He hesitated. “Don’t go alone. I’ll take you myself. Maddy?”
I hung up after I heard what I needed. I could be there in less than thirty minutes on the subway.
THE R TRAIN shook from side to side as I sat staring straight ahead. I studied the map above the door listing the stops, looking for Ninth Street. I hadn’t been to Brooklyn in over four years, since I had attended a coworker’s baby’s christening in Brooklyn Heights. Park Slope was supposed to be different, although both boasted diversified neighborhoods with expensive brownstones and hard-to-find parking.
I got off at Ninth Street after asking a teen with a baby face sitting across from me, with three silver rings in his left nostril, if the stop was close to Sixth Avenue.
“Turn left at the top of the s
tairs,” he said, in the voice of an altar boy.
I followed the directions and counted the blocks—two—from the subway station before I turned left down Sixth Avenue. The brownstones in the residential area were old but well kept. Handsome gas lamps stood in front of the brick homes, like guards keeping watch over the residents. I hustled past patches of grass, hanging ivy, and heavy wood doors.
I thought about Hilda. Had she brought Vinni here, less than a hundred miles from the quiet coastal shore town where I thought the world was perfect?
Mueller’s Bakery had a small glass front with its name displayed in ivory-colored letters on a dark green awning. I pushed open the door and stepped out of the way of people leaving with bags filled with fresh scones and macaroon tea cookies. Clean ivory-colored walls set the backdrop for the wooden serving piece standing in the far left corner, open to customers to help themselves to coffee and herbal teas. Scents of almond and melted butter on baked apples hung in the air. How could a place that smelled this good be dangerous?
The light caught my attention as I looked at the muffins in the glass case. I had begun to notice slim strips of light in my life: on the sidewalk, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and up and down the walls of tall buildings pointing toward heaven.
To the right of the front door were two pub tables. Café tables hugged the windows. Mini-crystal chandeliers lent an old-world sophistication. The dark wooden coffee bar stood against the wall with carved fleur-de-lis on the bottom cabinet doors.
Three little girls sat with their father around one of the café tables while I waited in line. The youngest claimed her dad’s lap. As he held a chocolate-frosted doughnut in his hand, the little girl wrapped her fingers around his and bit into the Bavarian cream filling. Some of it spilled onto her dad’s fingers, but he ignored it. The girls looked to be under nine years old. The tallest and, I assumed, the oldest was serious-looking, with a slight scowl held in place between her brows. The middle child—about six—fixed on her chocolate croissant as she tore the bread apart, making little dough figures with the fresh insides. The toddler, not quite two, was the princess of the three. She held her dad’s attention, even while her sisters talked to him. I watched them all with an up-front ache while waiting in line. Two people, both women holding on to tiny hands, stood ahead of me.
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