Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (2 page)

“Hey, man,” Will said. The guy rolled down the window, composure returning to his sleep-rumpled face. He wore a Redskins hat and a good twelve hours’ worth of blond stubble. The kid pulled himself up straighter in his seat—Will could see the fight instinct of a good cop kick in, the flashing awareness of being boxed into the driver’s seat. Will smiled and held up the second cup of coffee. “Thought you could use this.”

For a moment, the kid hesitated—looking at Will, then the cup, then back at Will, obviously trying to work out whether taking the coffee would mean acknowledging that his cover had been blown. In the end, the caffeine was the bigger draw, and the kid reached out the window for the paper cup and said thanks.

Will leaned his elbow against the roof of the car as the kid peeled the lid off his drink. “I guess you drew the short straw.”

“Something like that.”

“How long they gonna keep you sitting out here?”

“Hard to say. Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how long you keep him living in that apartment above your shop.”

A delivery truck drove past them, rattling hard on its shocks. Will glanced toward his building, which he’d bought at a foreclosure sale with his own pennies when he was just twenty-two, back before the street became trendy and the art galleries and vegan restaurants moved in. Like other shops in Carytown, Will’s building was a mid-century house, fit for any middle-class family, that had been reincarnated for retail. At street level, wide bay windows—protected now by a metal grate—were crowned by a gilt sign that said only antiques. On the second floor, an air conditioner hummed and one light was on.

Will drummed his fingers on the roof of the car. “They realize he’s
not
guilty, right?”

“We don’t want no trouble in the neighborhood. That’s all.”

“I suppose you’re gonna tell me the twenty-four/seven surveillance is for his protection?”

“And yours,” the boy said with perfect earnestness. “Some folks ain’t too happy about your putting him up like this.”

Will laughed. “I’m not in danger and you know it. Y’all just want to keep an eye on Arlen, far as I can tell.”

The boy shrugged. “Just following orders.”

“Well, don’t trouble yourself. Arlen’s not gonna cause any disturbance unless people start causing it with him.”

“You never know. Prison’ll change a man. Believe me. I seen it with my own eyes.”

Will patted the roof of the car twice. Already, the hot August sun was blazing, and the black car was little more than an oversized oven.

“Seriously, man,” the boy went on. “Be careful.”

“Arlen’s as good as anybody,” Will said. And yet, the brick wall
of his confidence was weakened in places, because Will really didn’t know Arlen anymore. Nine years ago, Will would have sworn on the family Bible that Arlen was incapable of murder. But now? Will’s faith in Arlen stood on one wobbly leg: a friendship that had been severed when they were just boys.

“Enjoy the coffee,” Will said.

“Hey, pal,” the kid called out as Will crossed the street. “Next time, can you make the coffee
iced
?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

At four thirty in the morning of her first day in Richmond, the time of day when Lauren always felt she made the most sense to herself, she woke and didn’t know where she was. Her alarm hadn’t gone off, and yet her eyes had come open as if they—and not her digital clock—were plugged into an outlet and set for a certain time. She sat up, rubbed her face in the darkness. She listened to her body: in her chest, her heart was opening and closing like a fist, quiet and even, for now.

Maisie’s spare bedroom was half storeroom, half B and B. A stack of neatly labeled Tupperware bins was lined up against the wall. A hand-stitched quilt hung over the back of a rocking chair in the corner, lit softly by streetlight. A round braided rug floated atop a wooden floor that had been layered up by decades of paint—the latest being cornflower blue. Lauren dropped her bare feet off the side of the high bed, her toes skimming the floor.

Four thirty in the morning. If she were at home in her Albany condo, she would stand and get herself ready for her morning workout, taking the elevator to the gym downstairs to hit the treadmill and get her blood moving. Then a four-minute shower, a high-protein shake, and it was off to the office, where the only person she would meet on her way to the sixty-first floor would be
Ted the security guard, whom she chatted with for a few bright moments each day. Ted would worry about her when she didn’t show for work today. She wished she could have warned him.

She stood, feeling lost and meaningless without her usual routines. Out of habit, she plucked the fraying threads of the bracelet on her wrist—a gift from her niece. It clashed with everything she owned, and it always looked out of place with her severe suits and that no-nonsense toughness she’d learned to cultivate at work. But she loved it—just like she loved her niece, just like she loved her whole family . . . her family who did not yet know she was gone.

She eased open the slats of the blinds to see through them: the whole of Monument Avenue was deserted, a lonely streetlamp shining like a spotlight on an empty stage. Richmond was a stranger to her—vaguely menacing in the shadows. When she moved, the boards of the old house creaked.

She turned on her laptop, the light filling the room like the sunrise, and she logged into Maisie’s Internet connection. There were eight e-mails waiting for her about Dautel Pharmaceuticals. She was glad to see them. She climbed back into bed and began to type, eager for the night to be over, eager to get a head start—as if she might beat the day to whatever it had in store and reclaim from fate her lost upper hand.

Richmond was no stranger to ghost stories. Its white-columned verandas and wide streets had been haunted since the first Europeans arrived on Virginia’s tobacco-friendly soil. Churches and whorehouses alike burned to the ground during the Civil War, and from their steaming ashes the stories of hauntings arose: shadows of hanged slaves appearing on brick walls, little girls floating above wooden floorboards, mischievous old beer drinkers loitering for centuries in dark taverns . . . 

Over the years, Richmond had come to embrace its ghostly past. In certain parts of the city, evening brought tour guides in Confederate gray leading groups of camera-toting tourists down alleyways and side streets, people hoping for the thrill of glimpsing ghosts—or perhaps just their own powerful imaginations.

Despite his reluctance to materialize outside Will’s apartment building, Arlen Fieldstone knew that the residents of Carytown whispered about his presence with the same horrified captivation that compelled them to tell ghost stories. The “Infamous Innocent,” the papers were calling him. From his perch on the second story of Will’s shop, Arlen watched the frenzied bustle of Carytown—surveying the daylight mayhem for an opening to rejoin the stream of the world.

When he was in prison, he’d made promises to himself. Many promises. He promised that when he got out, the first thing he would do was go straight to a bar and say, “A round for everyone, on me.” He promised that, as soon as they cut him loose, he would lie down in the grass—any old patch would do—because he missed grass terribly, the smell of it freshly cut, the tickle of it on his skin.

And yet—here he was. No bar. No grass. More ghost than man. He hardly slept. He twitched like the deer that had grazed so nervously in his mother’s yard. His bedroom felt unsafe and overly big—so big that he might as well have been sleeping on a park bench under the sky.

Outside, Carytown partied and shopped till it dropped. Arlen watched. Listened. Once, when the shop was closed and Will had gone home, Arlen walked himself up to the front door and even gripped the hard brass handle. He stood that way for a long time, Richmond calling to him like a siren, beckoning with promises of every kind. His palm sweated. His heart raced. But still, he had not been able to bring himself to turn the handle. He was Richmond’s newest ghost story—trapped by specters of iron bars.

  *  *  *  

Will didn’t get up immediately when the front door to his shop squealed open. The type who visited in the middle of a workday were either semiprofessionals looking for a steal—in which case they could show themselves around—or down-on-their-luck men who wanted to see how much they could get for their mother’s jewelry or an old watch. Either way, there was no sense in standing on formality.

“In here!” he called from his office, which was little more than a room that happened to have a computer in it, along with mountains of copious and sundry collectibles. He whistled a little as he skimmed through an antiques magazine, keeping an eye out for familiar items with the same sense of ease and interest that some other person might feel when stumbling across the face of an old friend in a high school yearbook.

“Hello?”

He stopped reading. The woman’s voice was unfamiliar—a nice, neat, tidy little
hello
. A
hello
appropriate for a massage parlor or bridal boutique. “Yeah. Be with you in one sec.”

He closed the magazine and made his way to the front of the shop, picking a path among haphazard piles of treasure. Over the years his mother and sister had tried a handful of times to come in and “spruce up the place.” Annabelle complained that the shop always smelled like dust and grandmothers, and his mom’s aversion to clutter went back to her housekeeping days. But Will did his best to keep them from meddling too much. True—the place looked dreadful: ripped cardboard boxes, shelves heaped with teacups, steamer trunks full of ancient antimacassars. But to his mind, an antiques shop without a good coating of dust would be like the Statue of Liberty without her fine green patina.

In the rubble and chaos of his collection, the woman standing
in the front of his store was completely out of place—though he could not perfectly put his finger on why.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so. Are you the owner?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, lifting himself onto the countertop and sitting.

The woman was small and boyish, with a neat bob the exact color of the Brazilian cherry chifforobe he’d bought at an estate sale last week. She wore a tan cotton dress that was a little too stiff to be called a sundress—not a frill, bow, or ribbon to be seen among fitted seams. “What can I do you for?”

“The apartment above your store,” she said. Her gaze was calm and level, and her voice smooth. “I can’t figure out how to get to it. Where’s the call box? Or the door?”

He laced his fingers together. There was something familiar about the woman. Had she been in the shop before? Her wide-set eyes and heart-shaped face struck him as throwbacks to the days of speakeasies and ragtime. In some intuitive and murky part of his brain, alarm bells rang.

“Who you looking for, darlin’?”

“It’s
Lauren
. Not even my father calls me
darling
.”

“You’re a Yankee.”

She nodded.

“Well, nobody’s perfect,” he said. He pushed himself hips first off the counter and dusted his hands on his old cargo shorts. “Who you looking for,
Lauren
?”

“I’m trying to find Arlen Fieldstone,” she said.

“You a reporter?”

“No.”

To cover his reaction he walked around to the back of the little counter. Lauren . . . not a reporter . . . looking for Arlen . . . Lauren
Matthews
. Her name was a lead weight. She was older than when
he’d last seen her on television. Her hair was short now, falling no lower than her earlobes, and her bangs were a hard, thick line above her eyebrows. Her skin rode close to the muscles and tendons beneath her dress straps. Her heels looked demonic. He did the math—he and Arlen were twenty when the trial had happened, and she’d been twenty-five. She was thirty-four now.

It was coming back. The television cameras had loved her—a pretty and improbable young redhead in a suit that always seemed too big for her even though the cut was right. Every time Will saw her on the news, reporters surrounding her like she was a rock star, his blood boiled with outrage—outrage that his good friend had been accused of a crime he could never in a thousand years commit. Outrage at the farce of justice. And as if that weren’t enough—Arlen’s fate had resided not in the hands of sagacious and hoary old judges, but with a beautiful and impertinent twenty-something prosecutor who controlled the jury the way a conductor would lead a choir.

Echoes of old hatred welled up. Lauren was obviously no longer a wonder kid, but she’d become a wonder woman. After Arlen’s verdict, Will had followed her career for a little while, furious and fascinated to watch her move on to bigger and better things while Arlen faded into obscurity in his jail cell and Will scraped to get by.

Occasionally, she would pop up as an expert on a nightly news program—looking prim and polished in colors that were too dark for her skin. And a couple years ago she wrote a book about interpreting body language (Will had bought it, read it in one night of fervent focus, then brought it back to the bookstore for a refund). Eventually, he’d lost sight of her—or he’d deliberately looked away—and he realized that maybe he’d been a little more angry at her than she deserved, and a little too obsessed with her in some twisted part of his mind. He supposed it was only natural that the next place she would turn up would be in his store.

Will leaned as casually as he could on the counter and smiled at her. He didn’t want to give away the fact that he’d recognized her despite the long years that had passed since Arlen’s trial. And yet, with his gesture, something about
her
changed—as if she’d heard what he was thinking and knew the moment he’d put two and two together and realized who she was.

“Arlen ain’t here,” he said, and he rubbed his nose with the back of a finger.

She laughed, so quietly he might not have heard it if the traffic hadn’t eased for a moment outside the store. “I happen to know he is here.”

“How’s that?”

“You just told me.”

He crossed his arms. “What makes you say that?”