The Dark House (13 page)

“A friend had it,” Rollins said, referring to the picture of Neely he'd run across.

“Why'd he show it to you?” His mother rearranged the silverware at her place setting.

“She.” He was happy to allude to Marj, especially if she remained unnamed.

“I guess everyone thinks you're the big expert on Neely now,” his mother added dryly, answering her own question.

Rollins ignored the dig. “It was a publicity photograph taken for her first book.”

“I never read it.” His mother smeared some butter on her roll.

“Yes, you did,” Rollins reminded her. He'd given her a copy for Christmas and saw her reading it at the breakfast table over her usual muffins the next morning. “You're thinking of the second one.” That one,
Forced Blossoms
, had caused a stir, at least in the family, for its explicit sexuality. Words like “labia” had appeared several times in the text. “Remember, you said it was too gynecological?”

The old woman laughed gently. “Oh, yes, I suppose I did.” She added: “Now, you're not going to tell me she's turned up somewhere, are you?”

Rollins was struck by her tone of indifference to Neely's fate. “No.”

“I do wonder what will happen to her money.” His mother said this idly, as if it were of no particular consequence. Rollins figured she had financial topics on her mind after the visit to Mr. Grove.

“There isn't that much.” With the help of Al Schecter, who was looking into the case for an insurance company, Rollins had figured Neely was worth about $750,000 at the time of her disappearance, much of it in the form of her Londonderry property.

“Oh, but that was before her grandmother died—your uncle George's mother, Alicia Blanchard.” His mother intensified a little, like a lamp turned up by rheostat. “She was extremely well-off, you know. Extremely.” Rollins' understanding of that side of the family was somewhat dim, but he'd heard that Alicia's husband, Joseph, had started up a telecommunications business on the side while he was a professor at MIT. “After old Joe died, she bought a palazzo in Venice overlooking one of the smaller canals, I forget which. I visited once with your stepfather. She was an artist, you know. Did portraits. Sort of blotchy ones. I never much cared for them, but a couple of them ended up in the Worcester art museum. She probably paid to put them there, knowing her.” Her face showed her disdain for such a maneuver. “She thought Neely's father was a pill.” The dour and portly George Blanchard had gone into commercial real estate in Pittsburgh, although the family had continued to live up here. He'd done extremely well, far better than Jane Rollins' own husband. “But she did admire Neely. Thought it was distinguished to have a poet in the family.”

The waiter interrupted to take their order. After some quick delib
erations, Mrs. Rollins decided on the cod, while her son selected the chicken Caesar. They snapped their menus shut and handed them back.

“Neely's sexual orientation didn't bother her grandmother?” Rollins asked.

“Her what?” Jane Rollins interrupted.

“The fact that she was a lesbian?”

“Oh, that. Heavens, no. That might have been part of her appeal. Alicia was quite a freethinker. Left Neely just about everything, from what I heard. Ellie was
furious
, not that she needed the money, God knows.” Eleanor was his mother's sister, Cornelia's mother. “She thought it was a terrible slap in the face.”

“How much was it?” Rollins hadn't known any of this.

“After the estate taxes, it might have been as high as four or five million. And that was—what? Four years ago, something like that. You know how the stock market has been going. It could be twice that now.”

This was astonishing. “Didn't she know that Neely was…gone?”

“Certainly she knew. She was fascinated by the whole story. Absolutely fascinated. We had quite a lively correspondence about it. But she never cared for Ellie. In-laws can be like that, you'll find. And George was so useless. She had no other children, and only the one grandchild. No, to her, Cornelia was the last great hope. I think she figured this might be some kind of inducement for her to come back.”

“She couldn't come back if she was dead.”

“I never could convince her that she was.”

“You should have sent her my story, then.”

His mother's face fell abruptly. The
Beacon
story had always been a sore point between them. Rollins knew, because she had never once mentioned it to him—although she had given her sister Ellie an earful, filled with terms like “appalling” and “public spectacle,” which Ellie had passed on to Rollins one afternoon over tea.

His mother gazed at him openmouthed for a moment—a most unmotherly sight; she looked like a flounder—before she composed herself. “Oh, that,” she said. “I don't think we need to discuss
that
.” Then,
perhaps realizing that she had raised her voice slightly, she smiled. Her public smile. The one she used to assure anyone who might be watching that she was, as always, enjoying herself immensely.

“I'm sorry you feel that way,” Rollins said bravely, knowing that his words had some fight in them.

Jane Rollins did not respond, but merely glanced at her watch. “Where is that waiter? The service here is so slow.” After a brief, uncomfortable silence, she straightened herself up in her chair, took a small sip of water, and returned to her story of Neely's grandmother as if, Rollins thought, the awkward intervening segment of the conversation had never occurred. “Alicia thought Neely had simply gone off somewhere. She saw her as a great romantic, with all her own—what do you call it? Wanderlust, that's the word. A very stubborn lady, Alicia.”

“So what's become of the money?”

Her face hardened again. “You aren't planning to write any more about this, are you?”

“Mother, please.” It had been a long time since he had felt so provoked by her.

“I'd like some advance warning, that's all.”

“You know I haven't written anything in years.”

“And aren't planning to?”

It was irritating the way she kept pushing at him, trying to control him, even now. Rollins was tempted to jump up from his seat, toss his napkin down on the table, and storm out of the dining room with a few choice words hurled in her direction. But such childishness—which he had never descended to, even as a child—would only have confirmed his mother's opinion of him. Far better to wait, to let the feeling pass, as he knew it eventually would. “No, mother,” he replied finally. “That's all done. No more journalism for me.”

She smiled again. “I can't say that I'm sorry. I never thought it suited you, darling.”

Rollins said nothing. He missed his old job at the
Beacon
, burrowed in his tiny office, gathering his private store of information, then serving it up to the world in small, manageable doses. It seemed so much more meaningful than what he did now at Johnson.

“Do you?” she probed, clearly trying to press her advantage.

“Perhaps not,” he conceded.

His mother gave him a sideways look. “You do surprise me sometimes, you know. Now, Richard, he is what he is. Totally transparent. But, with you, I'm never sure. Sometimes I feel I don't quite know you.”

Rollins was stunned. This observation, so calmly delivered, felt like a knife slicing into him. Her lack of understanding was all his fault; that was the implication. He tried to think of a suitable reply. But nothing came to mind—or, at least, nothing that would improve the situation or bring him some relief. His one consolation was that his mother seemed not to notice his distress. Having delivered herself of her dire pronouncement, she merely adjusted her hair a little.

“I haven't any idea about the money,” she added airily. “It's in her trust, I suppose.”

Rollins knew that Cornelia had such an account overseen by an old-line firm called Hadley and Poor up in Concord, New Hampshire. Schecter had found it, and had had a strained conversation about it with her trust officers, who couldn't have been less helpful. Schecter told Rollins he sensed that they had been caught unawares by news of their client's disappearance, but were trying to conceal that fact. After Schecter contacted them, he heard reports from one of his associates that a man in a gray suit had come out to Cornelia's house to peer in the windows. After considerable back-and-forth, Hadley and Poor finally conceded that there had been no “activity” on Cornelia's account since August 27, 1993, about two weeks before the last day that she was known to be alive.

“So the money's just sitting there?”

“I suppose so. Odd, isn't it?”

“Very.”

“I wouldn't have done it, I'll tell you that. To let all that wonderful money go to waste? It's absurd. But Alicia was extremely eccentric.” Jane Rollins noticed the waiter passing by an adjoining table. “Excuse me,” she called out to get his attention, and, when he came closer, she pointed out that she and her son had been waiting almost a half hour, a slight exaggeration. “I used to receive much better service here.”

The waiter, a graying Pakistani, stiffened. “I can only do what I can do, madam.” He turned on his heel, bound for another table.

“How unfortunate,” Mrs. Rollins said under her breath.

Rollins felt the harshness of the exchange deep in his gut, but his mother merely finished off the last of her bread.

“Your father proposed to me here, you know.”

“Here?” Rollins hadn't known.

“We were sitting right over there.” She pointed to a corner table. “He was at the B-school then.” The Harvard Business School, she meant. “He was so handsome.” She glowed a little at the memory. “And very ambitious, which disturbed my father a little. Your father had great plans to start a company—I forget what, exactly—and make a vast fortune. He talked about it so, so fiercely. He was desperate for success.”

“He never got it, though, did he?”

Mrs. Rollins smoothed out the napkin in her lap. “Not yet. Not so far as I know.” She seemed lost in memory for a moment. “Happiest moment of my life, imagine that. Sitting right there. He got out a ring he'd picked out at Shreve's and had the waiter bring it on a silver tray, right after dessert. It was the most charming thing. Your father could be very gallant when he wanted to be.” She turned to her son with new curiosity. “But now, this woman you mentioned, the one with the photograph, is she a…
close
friend?”

Rollins' matrimonial possibilities were never far from his mother's thoughts. Years back, she used to pester him regularly with questions about whether there were “any young ladies in the picture,” as she once phrased it.

Fortunately, their lunches arrived, interrupting this line of inquiry. Mrs. Rollins gave the waiter a crisp “Thank you” and sliced into her cod while Rollins tried to distract himself with the chicken Caesar. After a few bites, he switched the topic to Richard's career, and the subject of Marj was buried—predictably and, in this case, happily—beneath her enthusiastic recounting of Richard's ascent up the ladder at the bottling company.

Lunch over, they returned to the Town Car, and his mother had
her driver drop Rollins off in the North End. When they pulled up by his door, she took a great interest in the exterior of the Hanover Street apartment building, not that it was, in truth, all that distinctive. But Rollins told her, falsely, that his own apartment was three flights up.

“I'd probably have to carry you,” he said.

“Very well then. Next time, when my hip is better.”

He gave her a peck on the cheek, the first time he'd touched her with any intimacy during the whole visit, and then stepped out onto the street. Once he'd shut the door behind him, his mother pressed the button to roll the window back down a couple of inches. “Let me know if you learn anything about Cornelia.” As the window rose again, Rollins could hear her add: “Poor child. It is a pity.”

 

Rollins stayed in most of the rest of the day, leaving his rooms only once to receive some Chinese food that was delivered to the front door. He kept his shades drawn, as always, but he did occasionally peek down into the courtyard to check for the gaunt man. He almost telephoned Marj to tell her the latest developments, but decided he'd better wait until he felt calmer. It always rattled him to see his mother.

That night, around ten-thirty, Rollins was listening to an intense talk-show discussion of sexual harassment of state employees when he heard a knock on his door.

“Rollins?” came a voice. “It's Tina.”

Rollins switched off the radio. “Just a moment.” Afraid something had happened to Heather, he quickly unlocked the door and swung it open. “Yes?”

Tina was barefoot and wearing a skimpy black dress with a flower pattern. Her forehead was a little moist—from the heat, presumably—dampening some of the dark hair by her temples.

“Hi,” she said shyly.

“Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, it's fine. Heather's asleep, that's all. Finally.”

Rollins waited, expecting something more. He glanced past Tina down the shadowy hall.

“I just wanted to.”—she tugged at her fingers—“no. It's way too late. I've disturbed you. You were probably going to bed.”

Part of him wanted to acknowledge the truth of that statement and close the door. The sensible part, which was usually in the ascendancy. Instead, he said: “Not at all. Perhaps you'd like to come in for a moment.” And he said it quietly, conscious of how far sound could travel in such a small building.

“Would that be all right?”

“Why not?” Rollins opened the door to let her pass. As she did so, her bare arm brushed against his side. It was almost certainly unintended, and yet it made him aware of her presence all the more powerfully. She was in her early thirties, Rollins guessed. A few years older than Marj, at any rate. Slightly taller, too, definitely more filled out, and more knowing, it seemed. “Do you want me to leave the door open?” Rollins asked. “So you can hear Heather?”