Gone But Knot Forgotten (16 page)

“No, I don't mind. One day she sat with Miss Paulina in the library. I heard a awful scream and came running. Miss Harriet had turned white as a sheet. She shouted, ‘Tell him to go back to hell! Tell him to leave me alone!'”

“I helped Miss Harriet into the kitchen and sat her at the table while I put up some water for a cup of tea. Then I marched into the library and told that purple Paulina—did you know she always wore purple?—I told her to get out and leave Miss Harriet alone or I'd call the police.”

Delia stopped for a moment and stared at the floor. An ice-cream truck rolled slowly down the street playing “Turkey in the Hay” over and over again.

“Miss Harriet shook so hard she could hardly hold her cup and drink her tea. She said, ‘Nathan wants me dead. He wants to punish me. He wants everyone to know.' Then she got a funny look on her face, and asked me, ‘How much did you hear in the library, Delia?' I told her I heard enough to know she shouldn't see Miss Paulina no more. Two days later she called me into the library and sat me down at the table. She hands me a check for three months' wages and a real nice letter of recommendation. I asked her if I did something wrong. She told me, ‘It's got nothing to do with you, Delia. I just need to be alone.' I turned in my key and left. That's the last time I saw her.”

Harriet must have been scared she'd revealed too much when she told Delia that Nathan wanted to punish her and wanted everyone to know. She probably thought she had no other choice. She had to let the housekeeper go to keep her from finding out the truth about Nathan's death and burial.

The terrier moved to sit at Lucy's feet and she reached down to pet the dog. “What's your opinion of Harriet now that her husband's body has been found?” she asked.

The little glass beads in Delia's braids clicked against each other as she wove her head from side to side. “I've worked for crazy, and I've worked for mean. But Miss Harriet was just sad. The poor woman couldn't kill no one. Lord only knows how her husband ended up in the backyard.”

I placed my empty mug on the tray and stood to leave. “One more thing, Delia. You mentioned Henry, Nathan Oliver's brother, came for a visit. Did you ever hear any conversation?”

“They weren't friendly. On his visits I'd serve them coffee and go about my business. He never stayed very long.”

So Delia went to work for Harriet four years ago. After two years, Harriet sent Isabel away and Paulina came into the picture. A year after that, Harriet got rid of both Paulina and Delia. Shortly afterward, Harriet died. I found Delia to be quite credible. I believed her when she said she gave her house key back to Harriet the day she was dismissed. Delia didn't kill Harriet nor did she steal anything from her. I handed her a piece of paper with my name and phone number. “Thank you for your time and the delicious cookies. If you can think of anything else, will you call me?”

“The fat detective said the same thing when he handed me his card. Which one of you am I supposed to call?”

“Call us both. Detective Farkas is trying to solve Harriet's murder. He thinks he's already solved Nathan's murder. As far as the detective's concerned, Harriet killed her husband, which means it's up to me to prove she didn't.”

The beads clicked together again as Delia nodded. “I'll guess I'll call you first.”

C
HAPTER
23

After we left Delia's, Lucy and I picked up burgers and fries at In-N-Out Burger in Westwood. By the time we got to Harriet's house, the sun had disappeared behind dark gray clouds and the air smelled damp. Thunder rolled in the distance. Carl sat at his usual place in the library, working on his computer. A lamp with a green glass shade cast a warm light in the corner of the room. He smiled when I handed him a white bag with the red and yellow In-N-Out logo.

“Awesome. Thanks a lot.”

I unwrapped my “protein-style” hamburger (lettuce leaves instead of a bun). “Anything interesting happen?”

Carl dipped a French fry in ketchup and shoved it in his mouth. “The gardeners came this morning and cleaned up the yard. The hole is gone and the backyard looks normal again. They want to know what kind of flowers to plant.”

Selling a house where two murders had occurred might prove to be difficult. A flower bed would stand out from the rest of the yard as the obvious site of Nathan's grave. Better to extend the lawn over the area to make it disappear. “I'll call Rudy later.”

When we finished eating, Lucy fished out a Stanley retractable tape measure from her green tote bag. “Time to measure the house.” She dug inside again and pulled out a notepad and pencil, which she handed to me. “You can write.”

Carl gathered the trash on the table. “What are you up to?”

I told him about the file from Safe-T-Construction indicating they built a safe room in 2005. “We're going to measure the outside proportions of the house and compare them to the dimensions of the inside. We hope to find a hidden pocket of space where the room could be.”

Carl stood. “Cool. I'll come with you.”

We circled the outside of the house. I recorded the numbers as Lucy and Carl stretched the fifty-foot yellow aluminum tape. When we got to the back of the house, where we'd discovered Nathan's grave, I was relieved to see a neat patch of bare soil ten feet by four feet where the flower bed used to be.

Harriet's Tudor-style home had a rectangular footprint with a bump out for the one-story garage, so calculating the outside dimensions took only ten minutes. Back inside, Lucy extracted two flashlights from her tote bag and handed them to Carl and me. Then she pulled out something that looked like a pair of binoculars attached to head gear and strapped it to her face.

“What in the world?” I stared as she telescoped the lenses about six inches in front of her eyes.

She swung her head toward me. “Night-vision goggles. Ray wears them when he and the boys go to Wyoming to hunt.” Lucy and her husband, Ray, grew up in Moorcroft, Wyoming. Ray returned every year with his five sons during deer season.

“What makes you think you'll need those?”

“To explore dark spaces.”

“But it's still daylight.”

She adjusted the focus on those protruding eyes. “Well, I know. But things look different with these on. Maybe I'll spot something not visible with the naked eye. And anyway, when we find the hidden door, who knows how dark it'll be on the other side?”

Who could argue with Lucy's logic?

Lucy waved her arm like the leader of a SWAT team. “Okay, let's roll.” She strode toward the stairway in her matching green clothes and night-vision goggles, looking like a very tall praying mantis with bright orange hair.

Upstairs we measured every room, closet, bathroom, and hallway. I made a crude map of the second floor and added up the numbers. “I'm sorry, Lucy, but I just don't see any discrepancies between the inside and outside measurements. According to this, there's no hidden pocket of space.

Carl took the drawing and looked at it. “Yeah, I agree. While we were measuring, I kind of kept the numbers in my head. They didn't add up for me either.”

Lucy removed the goggles and her shoulders slumped. “Dang it! I thought for sure we'd find something up here. What about the attic?”

“I already looked. Nothing up there except for the heater.”

“Are you sure? Could there be a false wall up there?”

“Well, I did have a migraine when I looked before, so I didn't really spend much time. I just poked my head up there, took a quick survey, and left. We could always take a closer look.”

We returned to Harriet's closet. Thunder boomed louder as the storm approached. “Up there.” I pointed to the rope hanging from the ceiling.

Carl pulled on the rope, the hatch opened, and the ladder glided downward. He switched on his flashlight. “I'll go up first.”

The wooden rungs squeaked and gave a little under his heavy brown work boots as he slowly climbed into the dark space above. I caught the occasional beam of his flashlight sweeping around. Then a switch clicked on above us and light spilled out of the opening. “You can come up now.”

My adrenaline surged as I ascended the ladder. Would we finally find the Declaration Quilt up there? Did Harriet have to climb a ladder every time she wanted a piece of good jewelry? Why not just install an easily reachable wall safe? On the other hand, Delia claimed Harriet never wore bling, so maybe the inconvenience of retrieving her jewelry from the attic became an issue only on rare occasions.

My head cleared the opening and I looked around, my eyes even with the floor. Plywood covered the joists to make a crude deck. Above me, thick blankets of pink insulation covered the walls and sharply slanted ceiling. I climbed the rest of the way into the attic. Rain tapped against four dormer windows projecting from narrow alcoves on the front wall of the house.

In the middle of the large, unfinished space a chimney column rose two floors from the living room and penetrated the roof. Carl stood next to the only other objects in the room—two HVAC systems sitting twenty feet away. I walked toward the units. Pipes, wires, and ducting snaked out in several directions. Stacks of unused filters lay nearby.

Carl trained his flashlight on the structures and bent forward to examine them. “There are two separate environmental systems up here. One is large capacity. The other's considerably smaller.”

Lucy scrambled up behind me and walked the perimeter of the space, thrusting her neck forward and adjusting the lenses on her night-vision goggles. There were no false walls to obscure the framing of the outer walls. After two minutes she gave up. “I don't get it. Where is everything?”

I walked toward Carl and sighed. “Obviously not here. This isn't a secret room. It's just a plain old attic housing plain old heating and air.”

Lucy crossed her arms. “Well, that just takes the cake. If Harriet's secret room isn't in the attic, where can it be?”

“Maybe there is no secret room,” said Carl.

A metal tag affixed to the smaller unit caught my eye. “Oh, there's a secret room, all right. Here's a label from Safe-T-Construction. The ducting leads downward to the lower part of the house. If only we could trace the lines attached to this unit, we'd find the room.”

Lucy followed the aluminum tube, which led from the small HVAC to the studs in the back wall and disappeared downward through the insulation. “The room's gotta be in the part of the house facing the backyard.”

Carl scratched the back of his head. “I've spent a lot of time on the first floor, and I'm pretty familiar with the spaces. I don't see where a room could be concealed.”

I moved toward the ladder. “We should measure it, anyway. Don't forget the tape.”

We started in the library. Lucy and Carl stretched the tape and called out the dimensions while I drew a map of the first floor. We ended up in the family room, where Carl worked the numbers several times on the calculator app of his iPhone. “I don't see any discrepancies. Every space seems to be accounted for.”

As we headed back toward the library, I said, “We've got to be missing something.” When we reached the foyer, I stopped. “The stairs! What about the space underneath the stairs?”

Carl looked at my drawing. “According to this, the stairway is four feet wide by twenty feet long. The area underneath is much smaller if you allow for the angle of the stairs and the framing of the walls. You probably won't find a room big enough to hold all those missing things. Especially not one with environmental controls.”

I ran my fingers over the dark paneling on the wall on the stairwell. “It's the only place left to look.”

The three of us poked and prodded and banged and pushed every inch of the foyer walls. We even tried turning the balusters on the staircase. Nothing moved. The wall remained as solid as a week-old bagel.

I folded up my drawing and shoved it in my pocket. “I'm stumped. There's nothing more we can do here today. We're just going to have to wait for those blueprints. We might as well go home.” I wanted to be in my nice warm house, jump into my flannel jammies, and get cozy.

Thirty minutes later I dropped Lucy off at her house. Then I ran into Trader Joe's for some yogurt and a can of soup for dinner. Back home I changed clothes and sat on my sofa. Bumper jumped up on the blue and white quilt covering my lap and demanded to be scratched. Arthur rested his chin on my knee and gazed up at me. I looked into his brown eyes, so patient and intelligent, and wondered what humans ever did to deserve such devotion.

I relaxed into the cushions, closed my eyes, and practiced my yoga breathing. All the disruption and stress from disposing of Harriet's estate wouldn't last forever. A time would come when I could return to the comfortable rhythm of my life without all the extra worry. Simple and predictable. Breathe in, breathe out. No complications. No marriage.

I found the phone number of the estate agent Kessler recommended on a paper in my purse. I arranged to meet Susan Daniels at Harriet's house in the morning to discuss the sale of her property. Then I called my daughter. I missed my little girl and wanted to hear more about her new romance with the MIT professor. Hopefully some bright Jewish boy from a nice family. Maybe even another Mark Zuckerberg. Uncle Isaac would be pleased.

“Things are going great, Mom. He's brilliant and funny. We like a lot of the same things and we have the same sense of humor. Plus, he's incredibly hot. All his female students and half the female faculty are in love with him.”

Alarms went off in my head. Would this gorgeous man, desired by so many women, remain faithful to my Quincy? “With so many admirers, why do you think he chose you?”

She laughed. “Mom, he says he loves everything about me. But I think my red hair and freckles first attracted him. Red curly hair is a rare sight in his home country.”

Home country?
My stomach dropped.

People only say “home country” if it's an exotic location like Bhutan or Abu Dhabi—places where Jews aren't usually found. If they got married, where would they end up living? Would the children be raised Jewish? My heart sank as I imagined Quincy being swept away to a foreign land with no redheads, no freckles, and no bar mitzvahs. I swallowed my panic. “Where's he from? What's his name?”

“Naveen Sharma. He came from Mumbai to study theoretical physics at MIT. He never left. Now he's a US citizen and a full professor at twenty-nine. Pretty impressive, wouldn't you say?” India produced some of the most brilliant technological and mathematical minds of the modern age. One of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems came from India.

“Very impressive, honey.” I swallowed. “Just how serious are you two?”

Quincy cleared her throat and remained silent just long enough for me to start hyperventilating. “We've decided to move in together.”

“Naveen's parents are flying to Boston in six weeks to meet all of us—you and Dad and Uncle Isaac, if he can make the trip.”

Quincy might marry a non-Jew. How was I going to break the news to Uncle Isaac? Marriage was hard enough. Successful cross-cultural marriages were even more challenging. Did Naveen Sharma's parents have the same misgivings I did? Was that why they weren't wasting any time checking out my daughter and her family?

I tried to keep my voice casual. “It sounds like you're contemplating more than just moving in together. Introducing the parents usually means everyone's going to be planning a wedding.” I held my breath, waiting for her to answer.

“Don't be afraid, Mom. You'll love Naveen when you meet him.”

I stared out the window at the rain, which now beat a hard staccato against my living-room window. I thought about the tablecloth my bubbie crocheted for Passover as a young bride and how pleased she'd be if one day Quincy covered her table with it for a family Seder. “Is he religious?”

“No, but he's very spiritual. I really like that about him.”

Okay, so maybe he'll convert
. “Of course I'll come to Boston to meet his parents. I just can't guarantee how Uncle Isaac will react. . . .”

“I know, Mom. So, I'm counting on you to smooth the way before his parents arrive.”

Great. Quincy just handed me one more thing to fix. Could my life get any more complicated?