Regarding Anna (10 page)

Minnie led me to the far corner of the room toward a five-foot artificial tree, which she dragged out of the way to reveal an enclosed staircase. I followed her up the stairs.

“My guess is that my bedroom was originally the dining room when this house was first built, and they walled off the stairs when it was converted to a boardinghouse. That’s the only way this staircase makes any sense.”

I followed her to the top of the stairs where it was so dark I could hardly see her. When she opened the door, light came through along with a good whiff of cold stale air.

We entered a bedroom. She twirled around to face me. “So do you get the rumor now?”

“I see two bedrooms connected by a staircase. Are you saying Anna and whoever was in this bedroom were having an affair?”

“According to Mouse-face, they were.”

“So who lived in this room?”

“Don’t know. This room was empty when I bought it.”

“Mouse-face, I mean Henry, didn’t divulge who he was?” I asked.

“No. C’mon, I’ll show you the rest.”

We walked across the hallway to a smaller room.

“Henry lived in this one.”

“Do you know anything about him? Where he went after he left here?”

“No. He left right after Smith died, the same day, in fact. No goodbye. No forwarding address. Didn’t even ask for a refund on the unused rent money.”

We went back into the hallway and into another small room.

“Cross-dresser’s,” she said.

The last room had belonged to Mark Smith, the elderly man who had died there.

“That’s it. Have you seen enough?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll show you the rest of the downstairs,” she said as we descended the staircase. “It’s not much, but it suits me well enough. After all, I’ve been here almost twenty-two years.”

We entered the kitchen where I used her phone to call my mechanic, who said he’d drive to the car and try to get it started. He said he’d call me to let me know if he succeeded.

“I haven’t done anything in here. It’s all original,” she told me.

The kitchen was good-sized, but with the large counter-height island in the middle, we had to walk single file around it. It was an interesting piece of furniture with drawers and cupboard space underneath and a swing-out seat where one could sit and peel potatoes, shuck corn...or something. I had never seen anything like it.

Minnie led me to a small room next to the kitchen where there were baskets of yarn, fabric, and ribbon everywhere. A treadle sewing machine was in the corner.

“I use this as a sewing room, but I have a feeling it may have been a nursery at one time.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because there was pink-and-white-flowered wallpaper in here when I bought it. Looked to me like a baby’s room. Took me weeks to peel the damn stuff off.”

I was sure she didn’t realize how that sounded to me—that “damn stuff” might have been what I had viewed as my world back then.

The closet door was ajar, and I peeked in. My heart raced.

“You mean this wallpaper?”

“Mm-hm. I forgot I didn’t take it down in the closet. Too damn hard to get off.”

After my parents died, I went through all their things and took with me anything I thought was important or of any value. One of the things I threw away was a partial roll of pink-and-white-flowered wallpaper—just like in the closet. At least, I was pretty sure it was the same. I remember wondering why the heck it had been stuffed in the back of the closet my father used for his clothes. I wished I had been able to save everything from that house.

“Are you all right, Gracie?”

“I think I need to sit down.”

We went back to the living room.

“And it wasn’t wallpaper that was hung in any of the rooms in your house?”

“No. I’m thinking it’s connected to the wallpaper here.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would your parents have some of the wallpaper Anna had in the nursery here?”

“I don’t know. It’s one more puzzle piece.”

“Has this been helpful, dear?”

“You have no idea.”

Minnie got up to answer a ringing phone.

“Bob says your car should be fine now. Something about your idle. If you still can’t start it, he said to call him back.”

“Minnie, can we keep in touch?”

“You think I’d spend this much time with you if—”

“Do you think the winterberry bush will make it?”

“I doubt it, but it won’t be because I didn’t try everything to save it.”

Probably best that I didn’t further that thread of conversation—too much opportunity for it going downhill.

NINE

Ties to Mexico

“This is stupid,” he said. “I didn’t see anything.”

The man was not happy to see us at his door on an early Monday morning, especially after I told him he was being called as a witness in a mugging case. I had brought Danny with me to serve him the subpoena, since the address was in a sketchy neighborhood on the West Side.

“Then your testimony won’t take very long,” I explained.

He raised his voice. “You’re taking me from my work, lady. I have a family to feed.”

The reason for being subpoenaed usually didn’t matter—most people were not happy to be served, so I was always ready for a bad reaction.

Danny took a step closer to him. “Just who do you think you’re talking to...sir?”

“Give me the damn paper,” the man said. He signed it and thrust it back to me.

Had Danny not been there, I would have had to have put up with that man’s rant for a lot longer, and then he still might not have signed.

After dropping Danny off at a bus stop, I returned to my office to prepare a list of things to check out at City Hall where I planned to go a little later in the day. But before I knew it, it was noon, and I had six new subpoenas, three skip traces, and another runaway teen. I decided to defer my trip to City Hall.

At six o’clock, I called it a day. Before I went upstairs to my apartment, I grabbed several items from the Attic Finds evidence table thinking maybe something would strike me as important in light of what Minnie had recently told me.

Once upstairs, I ate an overdone Swanson TV dinner, tuned in the radio to a jazz station, and sorted the documents I had found in my parents’ attic into three piles: receipts, bank statements, and contacts.

There were roughly fifty receipts bundled together with a thick rubber band—all related to the house on Belle Plaine Avenue, now Minnie’s house. I sorted them by type and date and ended up with three piles—home improvements, rent, and purchases. The home-improvement receipts went all the way back to 1939, and some of them were so vague it was hard to tell what they were for. Like the one that said “basement build-out” under Description of Work. What did that mean? How did one build out a basement? Weren’t basements built when the house was built? You either had one or you didn’t.

I was even more confused upon noticing that the basement build-out receipt had my parents’ Ferdinand Street address on it and not Anna’s. I fanned through all the receipts—only that one had the Ferdinand address. It was dated July 14, 1943. I had just seen my first birthday.

I moved on to the rent receipts, which were just scraps of paper, but they included dates—for every month in 1942 and January of 1943. Anna died on January 23, 1943. There were no names on the receipts, just initials.

The initials matched the names of the boarders Minnie had given me and supported her statement that they all lived there when she bought the house. This was important—I could trust Minnie’s memory.

The rent receipt dates told me a little something about the boarders. Mark Smith had been punctual and consistent with his payments. Henry Sikes had often been late and inconsistent with his, and Dorian Ross had always been early. I wasn’t sure if that information would ever be useful, but it was interesting.

No receipts for the fourth boarder. Perhaps the boarder with whom Anna was having an affair hadn’t paid any rent? If so, what did that say about Anna?

There were five receipts for purchases over $50, all of which had purchase dates in 1939.

1. $59.95 – RCA floor-model radio-phonograph, model 39-19F
   
2. $79.50 – Maytag electric washer, model 108, porcelain tub
   
3. $1,758.76 – 939 Buick Roadmaster, black with red interior
   
4. $129.35 – 12-piece mahogany bedroom set
   
5. Torn receipt for a combination floor safe – no price information
   

I didn’t think the average middle-class person could have purchased most of these items—whoever had purchased them had money. Two things stood out: the “floor safe” and the washing machine. For some odd reason I remembered one day when I was nine or ten years old, our neighbor Mrs. Hindslip had knocked on our back door presumably to borrow a cup of sugar, but at the time I thought she was just being nosy and wanted to make chitchat with my mother. Mom never talked with any of our neighbors. I told her Mom was in the basement doing laundry. She edged her way closer to the basement door and asked me if the sound that was coming from down there was an automatic washer. I didn’t know, so I told her I’d go down and ask her. When I asked my mother about the washer, she told me to tell Mrs. Hindslip she was busy and I was not to let anyone inside our house again, neighbors included. When I went back upstairs, Mrs. Hindslip was gone.

I never did understand what that was all about. When I asked my mother about it later, she didn’t want to talk about it. That washer broke when I was in high school, and my parents bought another one. I wished I knew if that first one had been a Maytag model 108.

It occurred to me that I might have been going about this all wrong. Maybe I should have been examining things I’d salvaged from my parents’ home for possible ties to Anna Vargas instead of the other way around. I wished I had more of their things. God only knows what happened to them.

I picked up the stack of bank statements, each of which was for the year ending December 1942.

There was no indication of the account numbers or the owner of the accounts, since the tops of the statements had been torn off. I had no idea what that meant, but it made me even more curious about the whole situation.

I spread out the three business cards.

Two names—Tymon Kossak and Essie—with phone numbers had been written on two separate scraps of paper.

If these records had belonged to Anna Vargas—and I was sure they had—then it appeared she had ties to Mexico. Her last name, Vargas, sounded like it could be Mexican. If she was my mother, I might be Mexican, or part Mexican. But then again, Vargas could have been her married name.

I fetched my phone directory and found a Tymon Kossak with an address on the Northwest Side. I was familiar with that part of town, as I had served a couple of subpoenas there. Polish neighborhood. Nice people. The phone number was different from the one written on the scrap of paper, so I wasn’t sure if the address was meaningful.

I didn’t think I had what it took to peruse the phone book for anyone having a first name of Essie, especially considering the likelihood that the name was short for something else. But it occurred to me that the phone books in the late thirties were likely a lot smaller, and the main branch of the Chicago Public Library had old phone books for all the major cities.