Christietown (26 page)

Agatha’s steps quickened as she walked past the offices of the
Times
. She laughed to herself about what the clerk had said to her the other day. How quickly he took back his words. She wasn’t sure if his demurral was a testament to his politesse or to the efficacy of hiding in plain sight. The latter, she decided.

Good day, said a gentleman, tipping his hat.

Good day, she nodded, daring to look him in the face. What did it matter now? Certainly it had been long enough. It was time.

The windows of the Harrogate shops were festooned with Christ
mas decorations. Colored string, candied garlands. She drank in the smell of pine and cloves.

She was homesick. Tired.

In front of the photographer’s studio she stopped and peered at the black-and-white pictures he’d put up. Other people always managed to look so charming in photographs. A little boy in a
sailor suit. A group of friends by the seaside, lined up along the sand. A little girl with dark hair who reminded Agatha of her daughter, Rosalind. How clever he was with the camera—now she glanced up to the hanging sign—this Mr. R. W. Cadgeley.

There were a great number of wedding pictures. Strange, this one of two couples standing side by side. Both of the men were in formal dress, their top hats at their sides. Both of the women were in gowns, carrying sweet peas. The woman on the left was wearing a lighter-hued dress, with some sort of veil spilling off the brim of her hat, but the woman on the right was carrying the larger of the bouquets.

Which one was the bride?

Trick question.

The bride would be the one with the hope shining in her eyes.

Agatha hurried on. It was getting late. One last stop and she’d be finished. The bell on the door tinkled as she entered the small, per
fumed space. The saleswoman ushered her into a private room.

An hour later Agatha emerged with the precious package. At last she’d found it: a smart, two-piece outfit with a wide collar and a striped cloche hat to match. She’d wear it with her fur-trimmed coat, a double strand of pearls around her neck, black gloves, champagne-colored stockings, and sleek black shoes.

She’d look lovely in person, and even better in the photo
graphs.

C
HAPTER
4
3

mnesia saved Agatha Christie’s life.
Only by forgetting who she was—and what she’d done—could she face herself in the mirror.

How well I understood.

I came home, turned on the lights, and took a seat on the living room sofa.

I was waiting for Gambino.

Maybe we could go out for dinner and a movie. It was Saturday night, after all. Romance was in the air. Except that I knew Gambino wasn’t coming home. There’d be a message about a late meeting, a department emergency, a new witness who needed to be interviewed.

I rubbed my hands together. They were as dry as bones.

One way or another, I was going to be alone.

I went into my bedroom and took off my borrowed dress. It had to go back to Bridget’s first thing Monday morning. I shook it out, hung it up, and wrapped it in plastic. Then I pulled on some jeans, washed my face, and went out to the office.

The Secret Adversary
.

I pulled a paperback off my shelf and sat down at the desk.

The Secret Adversary
was Agatha’s second book, written in 1922, just four years before her disappearance.

The Secret Adversary
is about amnesia.

Of course, all mysteries are about forgetting. Clues, sus
pects, motives, opportunities: the author lays them out before you, then tricks you into forgetting what you know. By the end of the book, with the revelation of the guilty party, your memories suddenly come flooding back. How could I have missed that? How did I not notice her? The answer is simple: you knew there’d be no pleasure in remembering too soon.

The Secret Adversary
was the first of the Tommy and Tuppence mysteries.

Thomas (Tommy) Beresford and Prudence (Tuppence) Cowley are two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do any
thing, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused. Tommy has a shock of slicked-back red hair and a pleasantly ugly face. Tuppence, a black bob and uncommonly dainty ankles. Agatha always complained of people assuming they were idealized versions of herself and Archie.

But art doesn’t always imitate life.

It’s often the other way around.

Tommy and Tuppence’s first case was to find the mysterious Jane Finn.

Poor Jane Finn. She had survived the torpedoing and sink
ing of the
Lusitania
only to be given the unwelcome task of guarding an oilskin packet containing top-secret papers cru
cial to the Allied cause. When the bad guys eventually caught up with her (as bad guys inevitably do), they discovered she had substituted blank pages for the vital documents. Fearful of
being tortured until she revealed their true whereabouts, Jane

Finn came upon the idea of losing her memory.

Jane Finn faked a case of amnesia.

If she didn’t know who she was, she didn’t have anything to tell.

If she didn’t know who she was, nothing and no one could hurt her.

“I think I almost hypnotized myself,” she said, explaining her ruse to Tommy and Tuppence. “After a while, I almost forgot that I was really Jane Finn.”

Jane Finn feigned amnesia to protect herself from harm.

Agatha Christie feigned amnesia to protect herself from the knowledge of what she’d done.

But wasn’t it Archie who had done something to her? Wasn’t he the one who had betrayed her?

No.

That wasn’t the way Agatha saw it.

She was a woman of her time, a woman for whom love was paramount, a woman who—despite all her accomplish
ments—had no greater aspiration than that of being some good man’s good wife.

She and Archie divorced. Agatha married again. She and Max Mallowan had a happy life together. They traveled the world, they wrote books—Agatha, mysteries, Max, archaeo
logical treatises. But Archie was always the one.

After her death, her writing case was opened and inside was the wedding ring Archie had given her.

If only she’d been cleverer, she wrote in her autobiography, “if I had known more about my husband, had troubled to know more about him, instead of being content to idealize him and consider him more or less perfect, then perhaps I might
have avoided all this. I must in some way have been inadequate to fill Archie’s life.”

Agatha saw the failure of the marriage as her own. She was furious with herself. She needed to punish herself, mostly for the intensity of her rage. She couldn’t live with her anger, couldn’t bear her dashed hopes.

Amnesia was the perfect vehicle.

She hadn’t so much faked it as willed it into being.

There were so many things she needed to forget:

That she’d run away to hurt him.

That she’d appropriated his lover’s name to spite him.

That she’d carried poison to threaten him.

And that she’d schemed to look beautiful so that when he finally found her, he’d understand what he was giving up. And maybe—if the stars were on her side—he’d change his mind.

Oh, my god.

Liz.

I was coming to the end of the story, when the guilty party is revealed.

And right on cue, my memories were starting to flood back.

C
HAPTER
4
4

unday morning, the sky was dark and angry. Rain had
fallen all night and from the looks of it was going to keep falling all day.

As predicted, I woke up alone.

Gambino had called around midnight, saying he had some
thing to take care of out in Orange and an early meeting down
town in the morning. It made sense for him to stay over at Tico’s.

I held the phone to my chest for a minute, listening to the rain hammering on the roof, the blood roaring in my ears.

Then I got back on the line.

I told him I understood.

We agreed to meet at Wren’s preliminary hearing at five thirty. Gambino knew the judge. She was a decent person, he said. She’d treat Wren fairly. Still, I had my work cut out for me.

I braced myself, then opened my closet door. Half a dozen winter hats, a pair of suede mukluks with rabbit-fur pompoms, and a cheongsam fell at my feet.

A closet like mine is not for the faint of heart.

One good thing: I’d found my eighties fuchsia spike-heeled ankle boots with the barely noticeable scratches.

Also my high-collared Victorian lace blouse, which was back in style, worn with jeans to counteract the Little Bo Peep effect.

Oh, dear, I thought, spying my ice blue satin blazer and matching velvet skirt crumpled in a heap. Would Kim Novak have done that to the suit she was planning to wear at cocktail hour? I think not.

I picked up the woebegone goods and searched in vain for an empty hanger. Hangers were the whole problem. No, the whole problem was the unfortunate confluence between my primitive need to hoard and the puny space I had to work with. I threw the lot on the bed. Focus. My goal here was to remember what I’d been wearing last week when I’d gone over to Lou’s to pay a condolence call.

It was a Sunday. Most people dress down on Sundays. Not me. I remember wondering if I should wear black, and then deciding to go the opposite route. A cherry-red tiered dress with a plum cropped wool jacket and matching plum lace-up boots. Edwardian hippie. Bright and cheerful. The life-affirming qualities of fruit. All of which meant—yes!—that I’d carried my black suede handbag with the purple and brown polka dots. And there it was. I grabbed it from the pile and sat down on my bed to go through its contents.

My wallet, keys, sunglasses, and Advil travel day to day from purse to purse, but the miscellaneous stuff tends to accumulate at the bottom of each one until panic overwhelms me and I dump the collective effluvia onto the floor. Most of it winds up in the trash. But sometimes I find good stuff, like forgotten twenty-dollar bills. Well, once I did.

I sifted through the garbage in the polka-dotted purse— pennies, cash-register receipts, eyedrops, cough drops, crum
pled tissues, stray magazine subscription cards.

Then I found it.

I brandished the piece of paper like it was a winning lottery ticket.

Liz Berman’s to-do list.

Lou had discovered it in the glove compartment of Liz’s car. He couldn’t bear to look at it, so he’d shoved it at me and I’d stuffed it in my purse.

Many moons ago, I was one of those people who make to-do lists. But I was always so depressed at the end of the day when confronted with how little I’d actually accomplished that I’d started cheating. I’d erase items I’d never gotten to. Or add items expressly for the purpose of ex-ing them out: take shower, feed dog, check messages. It was self-defeating, yes.