Lindy looks up at me, her eyes sharpening. I now see the veins in them, the swelling in the soft pink corners I’ve been ignoring all this time. “This isn’t the kind of decision we should be putting off. You’re not a little girl, Imogene. You have a crucial role in this family, and I want you to be part of these decisions. I need you with me, and I need you to understand.”
“I know you’re worried.”
“You must be worried too, Immy, even if you won’t admit it.”
On the one hand, I can practically hear my shoulders creak under the weight of everything I know, and everything she doesn’t. She looks so sad, with her swimming eyes. But on the other hand, knowing what Dad is up to when no one else does almost feels like a superpower. And isn’t it? Sherlock Holmes is a morphine and coke addict and depressed as hell. Dirk Gently from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a fat gambler who was once arrested for psychically plagiarizing exam papers. Nero Wolfe from Over My Dead Body drinks like a fish during Prohibition, keeps track of his boozing by stashing the bottle caps in his desk. And Miles Faye: in ten books, he never once had an actual relationship, and every friend of his we hear about is a dead friend. All the great detectives are screwed up somehow, and those are just the men. But they have the truth. They have the big answer. Isn’t that the best power there is?
But I couldn’t tell Lindy the truth if I wanted; I don’t have it yet. So I duck the question. “Even Officer Griffin said he was, like, in control of his faculties. That he knows what he’s doing.”
“You heard that?” She sighs and digs purposefully into her stir-fry.
I stand. Let her think it’s too hard for me to talk about, if it will end this horrible conversation. “I just . . . I just want to go shopping with Jessa tomorrow. Is it okay if I go to bed early?”
“Of course, Immy. Of course. I’ll leave you some cash tonight for an outfit, to start.”
“Thanks.” I give my plate a lazy rinse in the sink, jam it in the dishwasher, and retreat to my room.
Like the rest of the house, my bedroom contains the same stuff it always has. Same twin bed, same sun-washed blinds, same pictures on the hand-me-down desk. Every book I’ve ever read, even the bad ones. I wouldn’t throw away a book any more than I’d toss a pet out on the street, if I’d had any pets since my ill-fated goldfish. Rebecca is currently being used as a coaster.
I flop onto the unmade bed and reach into my book bag, extracting my copy of A Time to Chill, the stone heart, and the stack of photos. All of these I tuck into my nightstand drawer, except for one picture: Mom on the lawn of her childhood home, in front of the forked paper birch, the chain-link fence, the queasy storm sky. On the drive home from the ski slopes, Jessa tried dialing Lil’s number to get an address a couple times, but she never picked up, and she never returned our messages. So no help’s coming from her.
I squint at the small white house behind my mother. An American flag dangles from the lamppost along the front walk, limp and greasy-looking. If there’s a number on the door, I can’t see it.
In the next picture of Mom and Lil, they stand on the lawn of the church, a steeple towering over them with a pale green roof. I pull my own laptop from the desk. Speaking of problems that never crop up in detective stories these days, where’s a genius computer hacker when I need one? The main mystery-solver always has a friend they can go to and say, “Hey, Sullivan, the perp seems to have disappeared by the old town hall.” Then Sullivan sits at the computer, cracks his neck, and with a little pitter-patter on the keyboard, he says “Okay, I’ve accessed the security footage for the past twenty-four hours from the bank across the street, and here he is going into the storm drain behind the Pretzel Shack!” A friend like that could, I don’t know, break into the Fitchburg real estate records and find the Fayes’ and the Wards’ old addresses in a heartbeat.
My Watson is busy eating dinner with her own family up the road. So I’ve got work to do before I get her back tomorrow morning.
THIRTEEN
“Since when are you busy?”
Jessa sighs over the phone. “I know, I know. Sucks, right? I totally forgot. I promised Mom we’d have a girls’ day before this big pediatric conference she’s going to, and this is her only day off all week. She booked us a treatment for two at In Your Facial, that spa in Newton? And she paid ahead of time.”
“Okay, I understand.”
“I’m really, really sorry. Trust me, Im, I’d rather go to Fitchburg with you than get a candlelight couples’ massage with my mother.”
Pressing my free ear against my bedroom door, I can clearly hear Lindy down in the kitchen. Right about now, she’ll be scanning the political section of the morning paper and eating her usual breakfast: one cup Greek yogurt, one hard-boiled egg minus the yolk, two cups basic black coffee. I’ve got ten minutes till she marches upstairs to pack her briefcase, pops her head in my room to say good-bye, and is out the door by eight forty-five. After which, I’d planned to pick up my partner.
Sherlock Holmes was never stymied by Watson’s pedicure appointments. But Jessa has plans with her mom, and I can’t judge her for that. I wouldn’t even know how.
“No, it’s completely okay. Of course you should go. I’ll be fine on my own.”
“Excuse you?” she scoffs. “You may not go to a strange city and knock on strangers’ doors alone. You will so get kidnapped, and I won’t know how to find you without you.”
“I won’t get kidnapped because I’m not a kid.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone says before they get kidnapped. But hey, Chad can totally go with you! He’s not working and he doesn’t have class on Tuesdays.”
“I’m not dragging your brother—”
“Chadwick!” she shouts into the speaker.
I cringe. “Jessa, no!”
“I’m not letting you go if you don’t take someone with you, so who else? Maybe that policewoman? Maybe Lindy?”
A harsh point. But honestly, I’ve sort of gotten used to having someone in the passenger seat, and if nothing else I could use a navigator. So after I shower and scrape my hair into a neat ponytail and, at the last moment, stuff a Ziploc bag of Lucky Charms into my coat pocket, I drive over to the Prices’ house. A miserable-looking Jessa waves at me from their bay window while Chad slides into the frost-fogged car. Slumping down in his jacket with the ski pass permanently affixed to the zipper, he palms back the white-blond jumble of his hair and yawns, rubs his eyes with the heel of one hand. “Cold one, huh?”
So now we’re talking about the weather. I fiddle with the heating vents to delay conversation. Like the coffee Lindy left in the pot Thursday night—bitter to begin with and by Friday morning, toxic—the awkwardness between us is exponentially worse in the daylight. I only make it halfway down Cedar before pulling onto a dead-end side street and throwing the Civic into park. “We know you know something’s going on.”
Carefully, Chad watches a pack of boys in winter jackets and athletic shorts wrestle for a basketball below a hoop at the end of the cul-de-sac. “It’s your secret, Imogene. I’m sorry Jessa opened her mouth. You really don’t need to tell me.”
Untrue. I have to give him something if I want him to look at me the way he used to, and not as a doctor-in-training trying to diagnose the wounded. I breathe deeply. “We’ve been trying to find my dad. But I think—I know—Dad is looking for my mother. My real mom, I mean, who left when I was two years old. So, I am too. It’s . . . complicated.”
“Sounds like it.” He whistles low. “That’s heavy stuff.”
“But thanks to you, we’ve kind of got a lead. Dr. Sorbousek told us that my mother said she was going back home, and we know she’s from Fitchburg originally, so—”
“So that’s where we’re headed. Makes sense. But . . . are you okay?”
There’s that question again. “Always,” I quote my dad with a smile, hoping I sound so much cooler than I feel. Then Chad looks at me, studies me with perfect, s
ea-glass-green eyes and for a heart-pumping second I’m carried away by butterflies—no, bigger. By full-size Victoria crowned pigeons.
“You’re so tough, Imogene Scott.” He not-quite-smiles back. “How did you get to be so tough?”
Later, I’ll come up with a thousand possible retorts. For now, I can only shrug and stare helplessly back until he flashes a dimple and shakes his head.
“So what’s the plan when we get there?”
I perk up—my own strategic genius is a safer topic—and drop the envelope of bills Lindy left for me in his lap. Two hundred bucks! Seems like way too much money for a prom dress, but I’m not complaining. Fitchburg’s more than an hour northwest, and my car is running on fumes and hope.
He flips through the cash, then sits up straighter. “Holy bankroll. Are we opening a meth lab?”
“We’re ‘buying a prom dress,’” I air-quote.
“Oh, well, now I understand why Jessa thought I should come along.”
I throw the car into drive, and once we’re moving forward again, I feel tough. Which is exactly what I want to be. Tough means strong. It means even if you’re sad—or god forbid, lonely—you won’t crumble like a dry granola bar in the bottom of a backpack, destined to spill out over the lap of the first person who fumbles open your foil wrapper. Tough is the opposite of troubled waters.
Calvinistic Congregational is beautiful. Old, ornate, and red-bricked, with a roof the light green color of weather-beaten copper, like the Statue of Liberty. It’s the only building in Fitchburg I could find that matches the one in the photo of Lil and my mom. Chad and I stand on the sidewalk outside and tilt our heads back to examine the steepled clock towers from below.
“That’s a church,” Chad says.
“I agree.” I turn in circles on the concrete. Behind us is Main Street, and beyond that is the Fitchburg Art Museum, which Wikipedia called “one of the most treasured cultural institutions in Central New England.” A pretty high bar, considering the gallery of crayon-colored kids’ placemats above the register at Bingo’s Breakfast in Sugarbrook.
All around the church are businesses, some in old-style brick and brownstone, some in new but not particularly shiny white buildings. There’s something labeled a “Theater Guild,” a thrift store called Odds-N-Ends, a credit union, restaurants. According to Google Maps, the nearest homes lie directly northwest. But we don’t walk straight there.
Shoving our hands into our pockets against the cold—the semi-warmth of last Wednesday at Victory Island has yet to be repeated—we plod a little ways down Circle Street, which crosses over a thin river, and there in front of us lies Crocker Field. The park where my mom and Lil used to stop on their way home from church. It’s huge, ringed by a track and circled by tall trees, with painted lines for all kinds of sports. Probably it’s gotten fancier since Mom was a kid.
“Did you ever play here?” I ask Chad.
“A couple of times in Fitchburg, yeah, but not in this park. Weren’t you at one of the games? When Fitchburg’s midfielder got hurt?”
That’s right, I was. I used to tag along with the Prices to games, because why wouldn’t I watch Chad’s thighs sprint across a soccer field in nylon shorts? But the game Chad’s talking about happened when he was a junior, and he collided with a boy in the center of the field. They went down together with a terrible dry sound I swear you could hear from the bleachers, like the husk being ripped from a corncob. Nobody knew whose body had broken until Chad untangled himself and bounced away, flushed and shaking but fine. The other boy wasn’t; he’d shredded his knee. After that I got this sick, nervous feeling I couldn’t control whenever I went to one of Chad’s matches.
“Huh, I don’t remember that.” I shrug and we keep going, all the way around the field, onto Broad Street and then River Street, which spits us back onto Main a ways up from the church.
“Maybe we should go get the car and drive around for a while?” Chad suggests.
I chew the inside of my lip until I realize it’s Jessa’s nervous habit. “The house has to be close. My mom . . . she could hear the baseball games from the backyard. It must be one of these streets.”
We cut across light traffic on Main Street and head up Chestnut, the first residential street nearest the field, comparing the houses on either side of the road to the photo clutched in my fingers. Their matted brown lawns peek through a dusting of snow that came in the night. Christmas lights still cling to one or two gutters. But I don’t see the house, and Chestnut dead-ends after a block and a half. We backtrack to the cross street, Arlington, and head left in the direction of the field. That takes us to Prospect, where the houses seem entirely too big, thinning out into businesses just a little down the road.
Maybe this won’t work after all. Maybe I won’t recognize the house, or Lil was totally exaggerating when she said she could practically smell the ballpark hot dogs. I pry my phone out of my pocket and try her number again; no answer, and because I was too preoccupied with research to charge it last night, my phone is blinking on its last battery bar. So we’re on our own for now.
There’s a whole web of residential streets here spinning through the trees. On Google Maps it looked totally doable. On the ground, it’s a different story. And what do I expect to find, anyway? Whether the stone in my satchel’s front pocket is my grandmother’s heart or not, she’s dead for certain. Lil said Mom’s father was gone too. And even if Mom did come home, what was left in her childhood house to come back to? Who knows if the people living there can even help me?
Still. I have to start somewhere. And even though Fitchburg is bigger than Sugarbrook, it’s an old town and this is an old neighborhood, and just like in Sugarbrook, neighborhoods love to talk. And if there’s one thing they like to talk about best, it’s their sons and daughters. Where they are now. What they’re doing. Who’s moved to the big city and become a smash success. Who’s been arrested and who got married and who came out of the closet and who died, and all the terrible things that happen to them along the way.
We head in the opposite direction. A few blocks past a cross street, it seems like we’re getting too far from the field, so we turn around and head down Bond, where, three houses in on the left, I grab Chad’s swishy ski jacket. My heart hammers against my ribs.
The little house isn’t white—it’s sort of a bluish purple, not even recently painted, and there’s no flag hanging from the lamppost. But it has the same perfectly square windows, the chimney is in the right place, and though the tree in the yard is taller, it’s definitely the forked white birch from the picture. I hold the photo up to be sure.
Chad double-checks the picture and smiles. “I think we found it.”
I tuck the photo in my jacket pocket and try to crack my knuckles, before remembering I’m wearing puffy gloves. “I guess we should ring the doorbell.”
He peels off his left glove, pulls my right glove off by the tips, and threads his fingers through mine. I don’t even get to soak in the warmth of his skin, his callused palm, before my traitorous hand jerks away of its own free will. It’s out of my control, like a sneeze.
I can feel my cold cheeks warm, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t . . . Sorry.”
He nods. “Come on, tough guy.”
Why? Why is this the moment my imperfect but generally reliable brain misfires?
Whatever the reason, I don’t have time to think about it because we’re moving: up the flagstone walk, up the steps to the miniature porch, toward the door with a little stained-glass bumblebee sticky-cupped to the side window. I reach out my hand, now in control, if shaky, and ring the doorbell.
And realize there’s probably no one home. Because it’s ten thirty on a Tuesday, and we’ve come all this way for nothing, and really, what could these people have told me anyway, since all the Fayes are gone—
The door opens.
“Help you?” asks a man, eyeing us down the long wedge of his nose. Wearing only a Red Sox T-shirt and sweats
over bare feet, he crosses his arms against the wind. Something tells me he’s not a long-lost Faye.
I skim my tongue over my dry lips. “Yeah. Yes. Sorry to bother you, it’s just, I’m doing a school project and I, um, wondered if you might have a minute to help me?”
“Aren’t you guys on break from school?” Scattered in the hallway behind him, I notice kid-colored backpacks, and smallish sneakers with light-up bottoms.
“I know, it sucks, right?” Chad laughs. “Homework over vacation?”
I shrug in a What are you going to do? way.
“I don’t know. I’m just off my night shift. About to head to bed. You’re not selling magazines or anything, are you?”
“No way. And just a second is all I need,” I say gratefully. “One point five seconds at most. See, we’re supposed to do a report on our family history in the area. And my mom, she has this cousin I never met. Sidonie Faye? They haven’t talked in a while, since Sidonie moved away, but Mom said she lived in this house growing up. And she thought Sidonie might’ve moved back into the area. I know it’s a long shot, but I was just wondering if you knew her, if she might’ve come back here, in the past few years?”
“This is a school project?” He lifts a bristly black eyebrow.
“Yep. For social studies—applying big lessons to our little lives, you know? Oh, and I have a picture!” I dig into my bag, pulling out the brochure from the Boston MFA. I flip to the exhibit photo and spread it out for the guy. I notice Chad examining it slyly, then looking at me. For comparison?
The man in the Sox T-shirt shrugs. “Tell you the truth, we just moved in three years ago, and we didn’t buy the house from a Faye. You know who you might ask? Tilly Donahue.” He points to a squat brown house two properties down, its lawn potholed with grassless patches, plastic pinwheels poking up through the gnarly shrubs around the porch. “She’s lived here some fifty years, got her nose in everybody’s business. Let’s say she knows when the mayor takes a squat.”
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