“What’s ‘Intellux’?”
“It’s one of those professional background-check sites Mrs. Ginsberg told us about in Global Communications class. Companies can pay to look up the dirt on employees before hiring them—property records, criminal history, social media search. This is just the stuff we can see without paying.”
“Wow. Can you try Sidonie Faye?”
It’s a long shot; if her name were on this site, it would’ve turned up in a search. As expected, nothing. “Maybe it just means no companies have done a background check on her in a while.”
I sit on the bed beside her and gobble up what crumbs of info there are. Relatives: Michael Ward, Elizabeth Ward. Married Name: Lillian Eugene. Address history: Fitchburg, MA; Shrewsbury, MA; Worcester, MA.
Worcester is just one town farther than Shrewsbury.
“Look for Lillian Eugene on Facebook, and see if there are any of them in Worcester.”
“One sec . . . okay, ta-da! Here’s one in Worcester. And jeez . . .” She frowns. “She only has thirteen friends. Poor lady.”
I take the iPad. Lillian Eugene’s account looks like the kind a grown-up sets up for the sole purpose of playing Candy Crush. There are regular status updates, totally factual statements like “What a hot day it is today.” “Went to see a movie last night and liked it very much.” And the latest: “Spring-cleaning my classroom. Work on a Sunday morning is not much fun.” She has thirteen friends indeed, and almost no comments. Talk about shouting into the void. None of these friends are Sidonie Anything, or Anybody Faye. I open her photos page to find exactly one picture, her profile, a close-up of her face. Middle-aged, with very short, wispy hair more ashen than blond, and webs of wrinkles in the corners of her colorless gray eyes.
“Is it her?” Jessa plunks a finger down on Lillian Eugene’s face.
“I can’t tell.” I hold the screen closer, searching for a trace of me in her. It’s a hard sell. I look a lot like my dad, who inherited his facial features and dark, straight hair from my Chinese grandmother, then passed a weaker strain on to me. We have the same brown eyes and thin noses and natural frowns. But maybe there’s something in Lillian’s round cheeks and narrow chin, a heart-shaped face, like Mom’s in her picture in A Time to Chill. Like mine. Dad doesn’t have one, for sure. “It could be. I mean, it might.”
“What is she, your aunt?”
“Second cousin.”
“Okay, so send her a message.”
I float my finger over the screen, hesitating. It just doesn’t seem right. In Nancy Drew’s day she had to worry whether suspicious Taylor Sinclair would spot the beam of her flashlight as she followed him through the mysterious Mayan exhibit at the museum. Now I have to worry whether to tip off my second cousin that I’m Facebook-stalking her. “I don’t know.”
“Think about it. My morning breath is distracting me.”
While Jessa goes and washes up in the bathroom and does what she does to pop out looking like America’s Next Top Model, I sit cocooned in her flowered quilt, trying to make her iPad do my bidding. I might be the only kid in the school district who doesn’t know how to use one. A few birthdays ago I complained to Dad, but he just patted me on the head and said, “Suffering helps the soul to grow.”
Flicking clumsily through Lillian’s profile, I bring up her contact info. There’s no phone number. But in the employment section, it lists St. Augustine High in Worcester. I check her status update about spring cleaning and see that it was posted less than an hour ago.
As I’m banging on the bathroom door, Jessa emerges, face dripping and hair piled atop her head with a big claw clip. “Jesus, what?”
“How fast can you be ready to go?”
“Umm . . .” She looks in the mirror, does some mental math. “Half hour?”
“Can you do, like, ten minutes?”
She twists her lips. “I can do seventeen.”
“Sold.”
Jessa keeps her word, and an hour later we’re navigating the uncharming streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, in my Civic, which we rescued from my driveway in a stealth operation. By which I mean we ran through the wind to my house, hopped in, shut the car doors softly, and peeled out of there before Lindy could peek through the curtains.
I’ll have to face her sometime today, but who knows how long it will take Lillian Eugene to clean out her classroom?
“Turn right here, at the gas station.” Jessa points toward a street just past a Sunoco. She sort of knows Worcester; she was carted down by her family a few times a year for Chad’s high school soccer matches against Burncoat High and Claremont Academy. But she’s never seen St. Augustine, a stone megalith that looms over the corner of Elm. Round towers like castle turrets, narrow slots for windows, a big marble statue of a robed saint feeding a deer in the courtyard.
“Oh good.” Jessa frowns as I park in the lot around back. “We’re breaking into Jesus school.”
“We’re not breaking in,” I say, surveying the lot. There’s a little green car across the way, speckled gray with mud and dust. “We’re . . . scoping out.”
“Is that hers, you think?” Jessa nods her chin at the car.
“It’s the only car here.”
“What if she went home?”
“Then we’ll ask whoever it is about her. Obviously they work here.”
“So . . . we scope?”
“We scope.”
The wind whips our hair as we step outside into the weather, growing steadily darker and more miserable. The clouds are a solid gray block above us, low hanging, and the ice in the air burns my nostrils on the inhale. Wednesday’s warm snap has definitely passed. I duck down inside my puffy coat, wishing I hadn’t put on such thin armor; wishing I had a tissue; wishing, most of all, that I could be the kind of detective unfazed by problems so petty as cold legs and a runny nose.
We book it to the grimy car across the lot. Jessa tucks her fingers into her jacket sleeve and reaches to wipe the frost off the passenger side window.
“Wait,” I say. “There might be an alarm.”
“Please, it’s a Saturn SL.” She clears the glass. “I see a cat bobblehead on the dashboard,” she says through chattering teeth. “Does that help?”
“Yes, immensely.” I peek in through the driver side window. Empty except for a coffee thermos in the cup holder and a few Petco bags full of cleaning supplies on the gray cloth seats. I don’t know what I expected to find.
Jessa tugs on the driver side door handle.
“Whoa, felon.”
“Oh, it’s locked anyway. So now what?”
“We wait for someone to come out, I guess?”
We retreat to the Civic and I turn the key so heat leaks out of the vents. While we wait I sneak a look at Jessa, gorgeously flushed in the cold. Her abbreviated prep time hasn’t done her any harm. What would I do with all that beauty if it were mine? What would I worry about if I had perfect skin and expertly shaped nails and a miniature nose and a perfect house and a brilliant mother and a normal father whose only shortcoming was sinking a little too deeply into his boring work stories at the dinner table?
I know Jessa must have her own problems, the most often spoken of being true love. She loves Jeremy, then she loves Levi Cantu, then she loves Mike Wazchowitz, then she’s letting Jeremy unhook her bra in his dorm room at BU and loving him more than anything. Maybe that’s what comes of having the perfect life. You’ve got nothing to do with your time but love everybody just that much.
When I think of it that way, it sounds like a problem I don’t ever want.
An hour later the side exit of St. Augustine swings open and a squat woman wobbles out onto the grassy moat around the school, then into the parking lot, her head so far down in the wind that she’s practically tipped forward.
“Hey, hey!” Jessa, preoccupied with Fruit Ninja after growing bored by our stakeout, has looked up from her phone and elbows me unnecessarily.
“Yeah, I see her.” I shoulder ope
n my door and without a moment’s hesitation call out, “Hi, excuse me, are you Lillian Eugene, by any chance?”
The woman slows, than continues forward. Close up, I can see she’s a small woman, the pom-pom perched on her winter hat no higher than my chin, swaddled in a bulky winter jacket that gives her the figure of the Michelin Man. A scarf is wrapped around the lower half of her face, but her eyes peek out, gray like sky overcast by filmy clouds. They wince suspiciously. “Are you a student?” she mumbles through her scarf. “No students allowed in the lot on Sundays.”
“I’m, um . . .” I feel the panic swell up inside me, until I remember that I’m Miles Faye, and I’m bulletproof. “Do you know a Sidonie Faye?”
The scarf drops, revealing the hard line of her puckered lips. She swipes a stray hair out of her face gracelessly. “Do you?”
I swallow. “I wish.”
EIGHT
Two blocks from St. Augustine, my second cousin lives in a faded brick apartment building gridded with rust-stained balconies. On the inside it’s clean enough, though there are no elevators, the hallways are cold and dim, and a damp locker-room smell seeps up from the tangerine carpet. Lillian Eugene leads the way up five flights of stairs to apartment 54B. Settling her bag on one hip, she jiggles her key in the lock, opens the door a sliver, and sticks a boot inside before threading the rest of her body through. “Come quick, before the babies escape.”
Jessa and I slip into the front hallway, where we’re pinned by the yellow moon eyes of five gigantic gray cats.
“Did my babies miss me? Did they miss me very much?” Lillian coos as the cats rub their faces on her snow boots and melt between her legs. “Was Mama gone forever and ever? Did you miss Mama? You did?” Somehow she makes it to the closet without trampling a tail or a paw.
I’ve forgotten Jessa until she leans in and whispers, “What’s that word that means a vision?”
“What?” I whisper back.
“Like, say I just had a vision of tomorrow’s front page headline, ‘Teenage Girls Fed Poisoned Butterscotches in Worcester Apartment, Beautiful Faces Eaten by Cats.’ What would you call that?”
“A premonition. And stop.” I shrug her off. “Thanks for having me up here . . . Ms. Eugene.”
“Call me Lil. But I can’t talk too long—just popping in to feed the babies, and then I’m running out.” She strips out of her heavy winter coat. Underneath, she’s a sharp, thin woman nearly as colorless as her pets. Her short gray hair is a static halo around her face. She rolls up the sleeves of her shapeless gray sweater and studies me, and it strikes me that Lillian Eugene is not delighted by my presence. “You look like your father,” she says matter-of-factly. Her eyes flick down to my chin, like my mother’s, like Lil’s. She smiles in a strained kind of way.
“Yes, I think so too.”
We sit at the little plastic-topped kitchen table while she prepares the cats’ food. To our left is a window that looks out into a multistory parking garage, and on the sill, a little ceramic planter that must’ve held something green and alive once, but now it’s an empty socket, the soil inside filmed with dust. I squint in the headlights of a car as it parks directly across from us, its front bumper maybe ten feet from our chairs. “So this is a cute place,” Jessa manages.
I shiver, noticing just now how cold it is in Lil’s apartment.
“We get by here. Close to school, and enough room for me and my babies.” She sets five bowls down on the floor and the cats cease their whining, attacking their food as one. Satisfied, Lil backs up against the counter. Jessa and I occupy the only two chairs in the kitchen, one of which Lil dragged in from another room. “So how’d you look me up?” she asks.
“Some old paperwork. Stuff my dad left lying around.”
“He knows you’re here?”
“No one knows.” I keep it vague. I don’t yet have a reason to lie to my long-lost relative, but you never know when a reason will present itself. “You two haven’t talked in a while?”
“What, me and your dad? Jesus, no.” Lil plucks a piece of gray hair off her sweater—hers or her babies’, I can’t tell. “Not in forever. We fell out of touch. I fell out of touch with a lot of people after my divorce. That’s the way it happens.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Should you apologize for hearing someone’s ancient bad news, when by now they must be sick to death after years of hearing “I’m sorry”? “I guess Dad doesn’t really keep in touch with most of Mom’s family.”
“No, he hasn’t had much contact with us since your mama. Not that there’re many of us left.”
I can’t help but deflate a little. I’d hoped Dad and I were sniffing along the exact same trail. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a trail here. No one else can tell me what this woman can; no one else can tell me about her. Except my dad, and where is he? I fiddle with the charms on my borrowed necklace, fold my hands in my lap, crack my knuckles. “Who is left, then?”
“Not Sid’s parents. My parents moved down south for the heat, and they won’t be coming back. Can’t say I blame them.” Lil stoops and with a huff of pain, clumsily lowers her narrow body to the floor to sit among her cats, who drip over her like honey.
“Um, do you want my chair?” Jessa asks, red-faced, stroking her fingers through her hair furiously. “I can wait somewhere else.”
“Oh, no.” Lil shakes her head, smiling down on her pets. “I like it fine right here. What’s good enough for my babies is good enough for me.”
Jessa returns to staring nervously out the window into the parking garage, bouncing her leg under the table and chewing the inside of her lip.
“Is there any more of Mom’s family around here?” I ask, trying to steer us straight. “I’d love to meet them. Dad never really talks about you all. Or, you know, my mom. Do you? Ever talk to her?”
“Sid? Lord, no. Not in years and years.”
“How many? Would you say?”
“I guess five or six. The last time we talked I was still with Robert, but near the end. I remember, because he came down to my reading room in the old place, which he never came into, and said, ‘It’s one of your cousins on the phone for you,’ and I said, ‘I only have the one,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but didn’t she run off?’”
“What did she say to you?”
“She wasn’t saying too much. Sid and me were close once. When we were little in Fitchburg—I lived near the part I guess they don’t call Tar Hill anymore, but they used to. Her mama was my daddy’s sister. We were only kids, no other cousins around. I think there were more of our people out west, more Wards, but we never met them. I don’t know about her daddy’s side. Anyhow, her mom went off when Sid was young, and her daddy passed on when she was in high school, so Sid came and lived with us. Her daddy left a little insurance money for her, so when she graduated she took it and left to . . . what do you call it, study abroad? At a fancy art school in some country over there.”
“Switzerland?” I ask, recalling my bedtime story.
“I think Sweden. Whichever, she left, and I never heard a peep from her. Don’t think she meant to come back, till Siobhan died. That’s your grandmother.”
“How did she die?”
Lil looks up at me and her eyes narrow. “Exposure, I guess. Sleeping outside in the cold. Wouldn’t your daddy know this?”
“I just—I thought I remembered him saying it was her heart.”
She shrugs.
“So, she called you five years ago and said—”
“That she’d just left her job. She was a receptionist for some eye doctor’s office. I don’t know the name of it. Lion? Something like ‘Lion.’ Anyway, she wasn’t there anymore and she needed some money. Wanted to know if me or Robert could wire it to a Western Union in Connecticut. I sent what I could.”
“Where in Connecticut?”
“I don’t remember that.” Lil’s eyes flicker to the clock ticking above the rusted stove. “I know what you’re asking, and I don’t kn
ow where she is . . .”
“Imogene.”
“Right. I can’t tell you where she is. Don’t know who could. It’s been too long, and the family isn’t around anymore. Some moved away, most passed.”
Defeated, I go to the next question on my list. “What was she like when you did know her?”
“She . . . was shy, when we were kids. Okay in school. She was good at art. Drawing. She loved those how-to-draw books. Animals, faces, fantasy stuff. She had one with her all the time. Sometimes we would camp out in one of our little backyards, you know. There wasn’t any forest or anything behind our houses, just a yard. We’d sleep in this old army surplus tent of my father’s, and Sid would spend the whole night drawing, oh, I don’t know, trolls. Or unicorns. She always wanted to be an artist.”
Another difference between us—I can barely draw a stick-gallows in hangman. “I guess that’s why she went to art school.”
“She never finished, though. Whatever she did at the museum, it wasn’t something you needed a degree for, not back then. Now they say you need one to wash dishes.”
Something sinuous wraps around my leg. I look down to discover one of the cats and resist the urge to kick it away. “Why didn’t she finish school?”
“Sid met your daddy. Had you. And then . . .” Lil sighs deeply. “I talked to Sid the night she left you both, you know?”
Jessa is trying to catch my gaze, but I avoid her. She feels sorry for me. Well, she shouldn’t. Because right now it isn’t even me talking to Lil Eugene. It’s Miles Faye, with one goal: to get to the bottom of this mystery and find my dad. I make that the stone truth and harden myself around it. “What did she—Did she tell you why?”
Her lips screw up into a tremulous line. “There was no good why. She was troubled waters. Like her mother. Siobhan was troubled waters too—that’s what my own mama called her. Sid said your daddy would be better off, you would be better off, everyone would be better off. But I don’t think anybody was ever better off for what that girl did.”
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 7