Nolan Trilogy (35 page)

They’d be married by now. 

She still couldn’t understand why Leah had just taken off.  Had her mother’s disapproval really been so horrible?  Not that Erica could blame Leah’s mother really.  Leah’s mother had been long time friends with Erica’s parents, before Erica’s mother had succumbed to lung cancer, and she imagined the thought of Leah marrying a man the same age as her own mother hadn’t gone over too well. 

All Erica knew was the morning after her father had proposed to Leah, her best friend had gone home to pick up some of her things and she hadn’t come back.  Her father had returned, white-faced and distraught, looking for Leah.  When Erica told him where she’d gone, he’d taken off again searching, but Leah had disappeared, vanished, and no one would tell them where she’d gone. 

Especially Leah’s mother.

Speak of the devil.

Erica saw her out of the corner of her eye, doing a double-take to make sure, but she was out of the car before she could think, bolting across the street.  Thankfully she was wearing saddle shoes and not heels and she caught her in plenty of time.  Patty Wendt had just reached her car when Erica zig-zagged in front of it, standing on the street and blocking the driver’s side door.

“Erica!”  Patty Wendt was a pretty woman still, with the same bone structure as her daughter, tall and thin, dark hair and full lips and big brown eyes that widened in surprise at the sight of the robust blonde standing in front of her.

“Oh, so you do remember my name?” 

Patty’s mouth drew into a thin line.  “Of course I do.  Now get out of my way.” 

“Just… please… please...”  Erica knew she was begging, but she couldn’t very well demand, now could she?  What else was there to do but appeal to her sympathy?  “Tell me where she is.” 

“What does it matter?”  Patty crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at the girl. 

“She’s my best friend! She’s been my best friend since we were this high!”  Erica exploded, her hand down at her side, showing Leah’s mother and the world how little they’d been when they cemented their friendship.  “We went to catechism together, we went to school together, we took our first communion together.  We double-dated on prom night.  We did
everything
together!” 

“Shh!”  Patty glanced around, trying to shush her as Erica grew louder and louder and more pedestrians slowed down, taking notice of their confrontation. 

“You don’t want me to make a scene?”  Erica hissed, hands balled into fists at her side.  “If you don’t want me to make a scene, I suggest you tell me where she is.” 

“Erica!”  It was her father, raising a hand in a wave and heading across the street.

“Tell me,” Erica said through gritted teeth. 

“Move.”  Patty reached around her to grab the door handle, pulling hard.

“I’m not moving until you tell me.”  Erica bumped the car door closed again with her hip.  “I’ll scream bloody murder.  I’ll do it.  Right here in the street.” 

“Rob, control your daughter.”  Patty turned to Erica’s father as he approached, coming around the vehicle to stand with them on the street.

“Erica, come on.”  He took her arm, trying to lead her by the elbow, but she shook him off. 

“No! I want to know where Leah is, and she knows!”  Erica accused her, pointing to Patty like in the movie her father had taken her to last year,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, as if she were fingering her for an alien or a communist spy, screaming her words.  “She knows! She knows!” 

“Stop it!”  Her father grabbed her around the waist, turning her to face him, and snapped, “It doesn’t matter, Erica!” 

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” 

Patty leaned close, so close Erica could smell her perfume and the Juicy Fruit gum on her breath, hissing the words, “Because she doesn’t want to see you again, don’t you understand that?” 

“What?”  Erica whispered, feeling her father’s arms tighten around her, a forced hug, pulling her away from the car door.  “What?” 

“She doesn’t want to have anything to do with you.”  Patty yanked the door to her navy blue Belvedere open, tossing her pocketbook on the passenger side seat and glaring over her shoulder at them.  “
Either
of you. 
Ever again
.” 

“I don’t believe you,” Erica choked as a city bus blazed by, drowning out her words in a fit of exhaust.  It turned the corner as Patty got into her vehicle.

“And if I have anything to say about it, she won’t,” was the last thing Patty Wendt said before slamming her door closed. 

Erica let her father lead her back to their car parked in front of the gallery.  He drove home in silence, both of them lost in thought.  Whatever tenuous bond they’d begun to rebuild during their shopping trip to Hudson’s had been broken again, and Erica went straight to her room when she got home, her father up to his bedroom in the loft, with no Solie there to object.

She had homework for Father Michael’s History of the Catholic Church class, but she didn’t feel like writing her essay on her “favorite Pope” tonight.  Her excitement about meeting “The King”—Elvis Presley himself—had been dampened, not only by her inability to find a suitable, and preferably irresistible new dress, but far more by the fact her best friend wasn’t going to be around to share it with her. 

The things she’d listed to Leah’s mother were just a few of the experiences the girls had shared over the years.  She couldn’t count the number or put a price on the value of the things they’d shared.  Even after what had happened between Erica’s dad and Leah, after they’d gotten involved and fallen in love, even after, Erica hadn’t been able to let go of Leah’s friendship. 

Besides, she knew love when she saw it.  She’d seen it in her father’s eyes when he looked at Leah, had known, somehow, even before they told her.  She remembered the way his face had lit up the night he’d taken them to
The Bronze Door
—one of Detroit’s fanciest, most expensive restaurants—when they had raided Erica’s mother’s old wardrobe and had each worn one of her dresses out for the evening.

That’s it!

Erica bolted down the hallway, away from her father’s room in the loft, going to the other end of the warehouse, where his studio was.  Back there, to the left of her father’s studio proper, in a place serving as their version of a basement or storage, were her mother’s things.  Her father couldn’t bear to part with them when they moved, and so they were here with their camping equipment and skis and things they just didn’t use very often or at all anymore. 

She and Leah had raided her mother’s things looking for clothes.  Her mother had grown up rich and spoiled—that’s what her father used to teasingly say—and her tastes had never changed.  Her dresses alone, from designers like Maggy Rouff, Edward Molyneux and Coco Chanel, were worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.  The straight, pencil-thin designs had leant themselves to Leah’s figure more than hers, but Erica filled out the busts far better. 

Erica leafed through her mother’s things, dresses mixed in with skirts and blouses, in no particular order.  She remembered her wearing many of them—the smart sailor dress she liked to wear to dinner, the white Chanel suit she often wore to church.  Erica looked and looked, not quite sure what she wanted to find, remembering with a smile how she and Leah used to play hide and seek, using this as one of their favorite spots. 

And then she found it—a gorgeous day dress, black chiffon with a fabric belt and a flowing skirt, it was patterned with feminine white daisies.  The label said it was Chanel and Erica remembered her mother wearing it only on one occasion—their first communion.  There were pictures of her in it, both Leah and Erica in their bridal-like white dresses standing in front of her.  And Erica remembered a hat, the sweetest little black pillbox hat with black lace with a white daisy on the side. 

There were hundreds of hatboxes lining the wall beside the wardrobe—literally, hundreds.  Her mother had loved hats.  She looked at the looming stack.  Did she really want to go through all of them?  What if the hat had been lost or given away?  She sighed, reaching for the closest box.  Well, what else did she have to do—besides wash and set her hair, shave her legs, and paint her nails? 

She didn’t know how many she’d gone through—the hatboxes were all stacked beside her in front of the wardrobe so she knew which ones she’d already opened—before her discovery, but it was a lot of them.  Dozens at least—snoods, pillboxes, cloches, French berets and button plate hats—in a myriad of colors. 

It was just another hatbox from Hudson’s, a plain brown square box with a Victorian couple on the top and the slogan,
“75 Years of Looking Ahead.” 
She didn’t even notice the weight of it because it was a bottom box.  Erica lifted the lid, sifting through tissue for a glimpse of black or daisies, and instead found more boxes. 

She recognized them immediately—flat, stacked metal boxes with latches on them.  They were all grey and had a black stripe down the side.  Leah and Erica had found boxes just like these in the secret room under her father’s bed.  She pulled the top one out of the hat box, trying to flip the latch and finding it locked. 

Curiosity killed the cat. 
That’s what Leah always used to say to her, whenever Erica found herself faced with a dilemma like this one, but she couldn’t help herself.  She had to
know
.  That was part of the reason that Leah’s disappearance bothered her so much—aside from the pain of losing her friend.  Not knowing was killing her. 

Erica pulled out the next box, and the next, and the one after that, four of them in all, finding them all locked.  Now what?  She remembered the keys in the desk under her father’s loft.  There were hundreds of them.  She’d spent three days trying them in the padlock after she’d discovered the hidden room under her father’s loft bed.  It was no wonder she hadn’t found it before, considering the floor to ceiling tapestry hiding the door from prying eyes in the first place. 

Finally she’d found the right key, and like Alice down the rabbit hole, she’d discovered a whole new world.  At first she’d just found the darkroom—a
darker
darkroom than the one adjacent to her father’s studio—with the “art” books full of photographs of nude women in provocative poses.  The more she looked, the more she realized her father was taking illicit pictures—the photos hanging on the clothesline above the developing table told her as much.

And then she’d discovered the other room, another hidden door through the darkroom, the one with the projector inside and boxes just like this one containing reels of film.  If the photographs had shocked her, the movies had astounded her.  She was scandalized, horrified, disturbed—and, as always, curious. 

The more she’d watched them, the more she felt compelled to watch more.  And the more she watched, the more curious she became about what she’d seen on film, each titillating sexual act leading to the next even more lascivious act, and the watching soon became doing, and before she knew it, she and Bobby Harris were recreating the things she’d seen on celluloid. 

And of course, she hadn’t been the only one who fell down the rabbit hole, had she?  She’d dragged Leah with her, and it had all dominoed into a heap, ending with Erica paying the price for her initial curiosity, punished with the fact that somehow, in the midst of all the sexual experimentation going on—and she had to admit, there’d been a lot of it—her father and Leah had ended up not only in bed together, but in love with each other.  Enough in love that they were planning to get married. 

Until Leah disappeared. 

So Erica knew, looking at the metal boxes, they must contain film, although probably not of the unwholesome variety.  These were probably home movies from a long time ago, back when they lived in the big house on the river, back when her mother was alive.  Or maybe they pre-dated even those?  Erica considered this, knowing the exact location of their existing home movies on a shelf in their living room. 

And in the end, her curiosity won out again, in spite of her misgivings.  She put the lid on the box, grabbing the dress and abandoning her search for the hat, taking it back to her room.  Instead of risking sneaking into her father’s desk for keys that might or might not unlock the metal cases, she spent an hour with a bobby pin, sitting on her bed and fiddling until, finally, she heard it click.