A Quiet Death (17 page)

‘And you?' I asked.

‘Me? I'm a Noo Yawka. That's how I tawk.'

I laughed. ‘No you don't.'

‘A bit surprising I don't, actually, since I studied art at NYU.' Lilith set her teacup down on the table. ‘My mother was American. They tell me I sound like her.' She grimaced. ‘It troubles me sometimes that I can't remember her voice.'

‘I understand completely. Like you, I lost my mother way too soon.' I swallowed the lump in my throat, then quickly changed the subject. I shared news of my visit with the Simon sisters and their irrepressible dog, Bruno, with Lilith and by the time we finished our tea, she was smiling again. It seemed like a good time to go, so I stood up. ‘I'll contact my brother-in-law and get back to you as soon as I know something.'

‘Thank you, Hannah.' Lilith accompanied me back to my car. ‘I'll keep trying to reach Nick, too. Perhaps the lab knows where he is. I think it's time for a little mother-to-son chat.'

I climbed into my car and closed the door behind me. As I turned the key in the ignition, Lilith tapped on my window, so I powered it down. ‘Thank you for returning my letters,' she said, blinking rapidly, fighting back tears.

I patted her hand where it rested on the window frame. ‘Back home where they belong.'

NINETEEN

I
t's a hundred times easier to find a missing accident victim when you know the fellow's name, even if you work for the Chesapeake County police department. Armed with the name Nicholas Ryan Aupry, we'd invited ourselves to dinner at the Ives family farm where Dennis (according to Connie) was enjoying a rare Tuesday afternoon off.

‘Paul, my man!' Dennis greeted us warmly as we hiked up the drive. ‘Come to meet the cows?'

‘Cows? What cows?' I wanted to know.

‘Dexters. Smaller than your average cow. Dual-purpose animals, really. Good for milk or beef.'

‘The cows and I vote for milk!' I called after the boys as they wandered out to the back forty to converse with the livestock.

Carrying the lasagne I'd brought as an offering, I followed Connie into the kitchen. ‘Three-hundred-fifty degrees for about an hour,' I instructed as she slid the casserole dish into the oven. ‘How go the gourds?'

For some time, Connie had been earning a modest income constructing figures out of ornamental gourds she grew in her garden. ‘Come see for yourself,' she said, and led me down the narrow hallway to her workshop where pots of paints and brushes waited, lined up in orderly rows on her workbench. The smell of oil paint and shellac permeated the air, warring with the aroma of cinnamon and cloves from several dozen pomander balls dangling from a clothesline strung across one end of the room. This season's batch of gourds had a Christmas theme – Santa Claus, the elves, his reindeer, and Mrs Santa, too.

I fingered the price tag on Rudolph's ear – $65 – and thought, damn, I'm in the wrong business. Dasher and Dancer were similarly priced. Add Prancer and Vixen and the rest of the team, plus Santa and his sleigh and an assortment of elves, and you'd have a major investment in folk art. ‘I can afford Comet,' I said, fingering the fifty-dollar price tag on the whimsical reindeer, ‘but it'd be a shame to break up the set.'

Connie selected an elf and dabbed a spot of pink on each of his cheeks. ‘Sorry, Han, the whole family's spoken for. They're going to Homestead Gardens for the holidays,' she said, naming an upscale garden center south of Annapolis whose Christmas light display rivaled that of Rockefeller Center. ‘We're part of the decorations.'

Mrs Santa had been assembled from more than a dozen gourds. I moved in to examine her more closely. ‘How do you do it, Connie?' I asked, admiring the way a sleeve had been constructed out of a slice of dried squash.

Connie passed me a gourd that looked like an apple with warts. ‘Her sleeve's from one of these. It's called a bule,' she explained. ‘And I made her skirt from a hollowed out crown of thorns.'

‘Next to you, I have zero talent,' I whined.

‘Do, too. You knit,' she said, pointing at my new sweater with the business end of her paintbrush.

‘That's not talent, it's mechanical. You follow a pattern. Knit, purl.' I set Mrs Santa back down on the worktable next to her chubby hubby. ‘How do you keep all those pieces from falling apart?'

‘I am the Hot Glue Gun Queen of the Western World,' Connie claimed, brandishing her brush like a scepter.

Back in the living room, over cocktails, everybody seemed to be tiptoeing around the Metro crash, so I brought it up myself at the dining table over the barley vegetable soup. ‘You remember that guy I met on the Metro, named Skip?'

Connie's soup spoon paused in mid-air. ‘“Met” isn't the word I'd choose, Hannah. You held the guy's hand and prayed with him while he died. God, I admire your composure. I'd have freaked under the same circumstances.'

‘I did. Freak, that is. But, I'm beginning to think he didn't die.'

‘No kidding!'

‘Using those letters I showed you, I was finally able to track down his mother. She tells me his name is Nicholas Ryan Aupry.'

I passed the basket of rolls to my brother-in-law. ‘I know I'm always asking you for favors, Dennis, but do you think you can find out where they've taken him? It's not for me,' I added quickly. ‘It's for his mother.'

Dennis dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. ‘Excuse me, I'll be right back.' He disappeared into the kitchen where, after a few seconds, I could hear him talking on the phone. Two minutes later, he was back. ‘Stay tuned,' he said, and returned to his soup.

By the time we had finished the lasagne and were helping ourselves to seconds of gingerbread with warm applesauce topping, I had my answer.

Dennis's cell phone buzzed. He took the call in the living room, then returned to the dining table with good news. ‘They took Aupry to P.G. in critical condition, but once he was stabilized, they transferred him to Kernan up in Baltimore.'

‘What's Kernan?' Connie asked.

‘It's the biggest rehabilitation hospital in Maryland,' Dennis explained. ‘They specialize in trauma of all kinds. Brain, spinal cord, multiple fractures, you name it.'

‘His condition?'

‘Upgraded to serious, but they expect him to survive.'

‘Thank you, Dennis.' Relief washed over me in waves.

He saluted me with a spoon. ‘No problem. So, Hannah,' he asked before attacking his dessert once again, ‘what do you plan to do now?'

‘Telephone his mother, of course. That's step number one.'

‘Why hasn't that happened already?' Dennis wondered.

‘I suspect he didn't
want
his mother to know.' I said. ‘They weren't on the best of terms.'

‘What's step number two?' Connie wondered.

‘I'm going to buy some flowers and a Wishes-for-a-Speedy-Recovery balloon and pay Mr Aupry a visit.'

‘Hannah thinks she's found evidence that John Chandler is Aupry's biological father.' Paul tipped his chair back from the table and laced his hands across his chest.

‘Chandler? The
And Your Point Is?
Chandler?' Connie whooped.

‘It's true,' I said. ‘I'm absolutely convinced of it. But I went to see him the other day, and Chandler's not owning up to it.'

Dennis scowled. ‘Why should he? Chandler is your enigmatic Zan? Preposterous!'

‘The information's out there, Dennis. I found it on the Internet. And it's persuasive.'

Paul held his wine glass out for a refill and Dennis obliged. ‘Nicholas Aupry had access to the same basic information you did, Hannah – his mother's letters and the Internet. I wonder if he's reached the same conclusion as you have about Zan?'

‘Only one way to find out, I guess. When I pay a call on the patient, I'll grill him. But Aupry didn't hold the trump card like I did.'

‘Trump card? What trump card?' Connie wanted to know.

‘Elspeth and Claire Simon.' I stole a quick look at my husband. ‘And the clue of the squiggles.'

I left it to Paul to explain about
č
árkas
and
há
č
eks
and went off to the kitchen to telephone Lilith with the good news and brew up another pot of decaf.

Whenever I get within ten miles of Baltimore, I have to drop in on my little sister, or when she finds out, I never hear the end of it. Georgina, the baby of our family, lived with her husband and four kids in the Roland Park section of the city.

When I called to say I was stopping by, Georgina told me that the twins were at soccer practice with their dad, a successful CPA, but that ‘the girls' were at home.

When I let myself in through the kitchen door, I found my niece Julie, now eleven going on thirty, perched on a stool at the kitchen counter playing a game on the family computer. ‘Where's your mom?' I asked, peering at the screen over Julie's shoulder.

‘Doing laundry in the basement.' She manipulated the mouse, and a panel of miniature chairs appeared on the screen, each with a price tag attached. Julie clicked, then dragged an ornate chair into a house she was building on the screen.

‘What are you playing?'

‘The Sims.' She tapped the screen with a chubby index finger. ‘Look, Aunt Hannah, that's you and that's Uncle Paul.'

On the screen, the avatar known as Paul seemed to be preparing a meal in a vast Jacobean-style kitchen, while Hannah swam laps in a backyard swimming pool. Julie clicked her mouse a few times and the swim ladder disappeared from the pool. ‘If I do
that
,' Julie grinned impishly, ‘Hannah will drown! She'll turn into a tombstone in the back yard!'

‘Oh, I hope not!'

‘Just kidding.' Julie giggled, clicked the mouse a few times and restored the ladder.

As I watched, Hannah used the ladder to climb out of the pool. She turned around three times like Diana Prince transforming into Wonder Woman, and emerged wearing a gray business suit. ‘Off to work, now!' Julie ordered as Hannah rode off in a car. Back in the virtual kitchen, Paul was washing his dirty dishes.

‘I've made houses for everybody,' Julie told me. ‘Aunt Ruth has a store in Pleasantville, too.' She looked up, wide-eyed. ‘Wanna play?'

‘Sweetie, a game like that would eat my brain right up. Although it would be nice if your Uncle Paul did the dishes like that.'

Georgina suddenly materialized from the basement carrying a wicker basket heaped with clean laundry. ‘Have you done your homework, Miss?'

Julie looked ceiling-ward, rolled her eyes elaborately, and flounced off to her room. Obviously not.

On the computer screen, Paul and Hannah's life seemed to go on. Hannah returned from work and took a shower. Paul watched TV. Eventually he headed for the exercise equipment Julie had installed for him in the family room and Hannah picked up the telephone to order some pizza. Maybe I should build a cottage and move a Sim named Lilith Chaloux into it; construct a house nearby for John and Dorothea Chandler; add a condo for Skip then click ‘Play,' stand back and wait to see what happens.

‘How's everyone?' I asked Georgina as I helped her fold a king-sized sheet into a compact, origami-like package.

‘Hunky dory. And I'm volunteering as a tour guide at Evergreen House, so that keeps me out of trouble.'

Evergreen House was a Baltimore gem, a magnificent nineteenth-century Gilded Age mansion formerly owned by John Garrett, a B&O railroad tycoon. Its exterior, Georgina told me, had been the inspiration for the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. She oohed and ahhed over the library, the theater and the twenty-three-carat gold-plated bathroom, then segued into the current exhibit called ‘Cheers! The Culture of Drink in Early Maryland,' which must have reminded her of the upcoming holidays because she suddenly switched gears and asked, ‘You're coming to us for Thanksgiving, right?'

‘Well, duh.' I put the towel I had folded on top of the pile.

‘Good. Which reminds me, why are you here today? When you called, you didn't say.'

‘I'm going to visit somebody in the hospital. At Kernan.'

She snapped the wrinkles out of an undershirt, folded it into neat thirds. ‘Anybody I know?'

‘No. It's the guy I was sitting next to when the Metro train crashed.'

Georgina's head shot up. ‘Wow! You found him, then!'

‘Dennis did,' I said, giving my brother-in-law full marks.

‘It's certainly an advantage having a cop in the family, that's what I always say.' Georgina stacked the folded laundry in the basket, picked the basket up, and balanced it on one hip. ‘I'm glad the guy made it. How's he doing, anyway?'

‘As soon as I find out, I'll let you know.'

From Georgina's, it was a quick six-mile drive to the sprawling, multi-acre Kernan Hospital campus just off Windsor Mill Road. I parked in the visitors' lot.

I hadn't been kidding about the flowers and balloons. Before I left Annapolis, I'd popped into the Giant near I97 and made what I thought was a suitable selection – an arrangement called Autumn Daze, and a Mylar ‘Get Well' balloon in a cheerful yellow. I hauled them out of my trunk, locked, then strolled up the sidewalk past a flagpole and into the main entrance of the hospital, with the balloon bobbing gaily overhead.

‘I'm here to visit Nick Aupry,' I told the volunteer at the information desk. ‘I'm his Aunt Hannah, from Iowa. I just got off the plane, and hoo-boy! I don't know why I bother to fly. I could have
walked
here faster than that. I was supposed to be here yesterday,' I rattled on. ‘And Delta Airlines? Don't get me started! You know what they say?' I paused for breath. ‘They say Delta means Don't Expect Luggage to Arrive!' I chuckled. ‘Isn't that good?'