Too Quiet in Brooklyn (33 page)

We kissed.

“Guess who’s going to New Jersey with me?” You should have seen his face when I told him.

I might have been crazy, but I owed Nanette Arrowsmith the photo of her son, and I thought it would be good for Lorraine to get out from under her rock.

On the way, the conversation in the car was not exactly scintillating, but Lorraine was interested in the case and kept praising the car and my driving—payback for my kind words about her dinner, I guessed, but Lorraine’s words seemed more genuine than mine. She could teach a course in honesty, and if I thought she was unquestioning, a woman of her age determined by class and neighborhood, I had a surprise waiting for me. I did have the decency to take the BMW instead of the Beretta.

We were on the turnpike, and I’d gotten through the sad story of my life including my father’s disappearance when the phone started ringing. Jane. I pressed the speaker icon and clipped it to the car cradle.

“I thought you’d like to know, Ralph was charged with kidnapping and three counts of murder. First degree.”

I listened to the white noise for a sec, pondering what Jane just told me.

“How can they charge a person when they don’t even know his last name?”

“Whatever, they must be able to.”

“And he was found competent to stand trial? Obviously …”

“If this woman you’re seeing today …”

“James Arrowsmith’s mother, Nanette. And don’t worry, I’m going to ask her if she knows Ralph. A long shot, but she talked about a friend James brought home.”

* * *

“I’m Fina’s friend from Carroll Gardens,” Lorraine said. “I hope you don’t mind I came along for the ride, I’ve never seen New Jersey.”

“Never? Oh, well …” Nanette took a couple of quick breaths and smiled. She was wearing the same heels, but a different print dress, dark roots showing a little more than the first time we’d met a few days ago. She led us through the planked hall to the living room. Lorraine’s head swiveled left, right, telling Nanette what a beautiful home she had. She stopped to admire the vase on the maple table below the mirror. Nanette breathed in and smiled.

“Oh we got that in Cape May fifteen summers ago. Have you been? Too bad, you’d love it, you must go. It’s for families and the Victorian homes and salt water taffy, the ocean, you’ll really love it.”

“That’s a Laura Ashley, isn’t it?” Lorraine asked, pointing to Nanette’s dress and they were off, conversing as though they were old friends. I looked around the living room, waiting for the chance to speak while they’d covered children, families, churches, where they went to high school, what they wore and how the styles had changed. They were starting into recipes for summer before I had a chance to tell Nanette how sorry I was for her loss. I gave her back the photo of her son.

She breathed twice and held it to her heart, and held it out to Lorraine. “My … oldest.”

“Handsome looking boy.” And they were onto sons and how they took different paths until Nanette darted from her seat.

“Where are my manners? I haven’t offered you anything, and I have coffee just brewed.”

She started for the kitchen, Lorraine in tow, while I sat alone in the parlor staring at the matching wingback chairs and the shelves of unread books. I picked up the fading photo of the four of them, trying to feel the quality of their life together in the early years. Nanette’s husband faced the camera while the boys looked at their mother and clung to her.

As I held their picture, I tried to figure out who was the queen of the family. There was always one, Mom told me long ago. We’d play the game, walking down Henry or Atlantic, especially on Sundays when families would be trudging home from church or out shopping. Who was the ruler, she’d ask me. Most often we agreed. Sometimes it was close, a democracy, or perhaps a constitutional monarchy. Pointing to a brood with seven or eight kids, she’d say, “The father’s the queen. See how he holds his head, struts in front while the others follow?” Sometimes the queen was benevolent and sometimes not. Sometimes the ruler was missing altogether—you could tell by how the group lacked direction or seemed baffled. As I gazed at the black and white, I knew Nanette was not the queen.

While we sipped our coffee, I asked my question, the one I’d been building up to. “I remember your telling me of the time Jim came home with a friend. They were sitting right here in the parlor. Maybe the friend was a little younger than your Jim.”

She breathed and nodded.

“Do you recall anything about him? His name? Where he was from?”

She stared out, not seeing us, and took a while before she moved. Slowly she shook her head.

“You said they seemed to be having fun.”

Her face relaxed a bit. “Now I know who you mean. It was a time when Jim was happy. Usually by himself after he came home.” He’d been in prison, she told Lorraine, a mix-up, really, she said. “But this one time he brought a friend, maybe a little younger than Jim.”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Do you remember his name?”

Nanette took several minutes to shake her head, one hand outstretched as if to ward off the question. Or the answer. “No … I … Jim was such a loner. I used to worry about him. He had his friends in high school of course, but after that they seemed to drift apart.”

“Was the friend someone from school?”

She shook her head, twisting her hands. “I don’t think so … I recall asking him where he came from and he said Arthur Avenue. Yes, that’s what he said. He was from Arthur Avenue.” Her cheeks were a bright red and beads of sweat formed above her upper lip. Her breathing was fast, and I was afraid she was going to faint. “I remember asking him if he meant the Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and he told me yes.”

“How strange life is, sometimes.” Lorraine the lifeguard swam out to save a drowning Nanette.

“Isn’t it?” Nanette fanned a hand close to her face. She talked to Lorraine as if I didn’t exist. “Can I show you the house? If you’ve never seen Victorian, you might like it.”

“Do you mind if I sit here and make a call?” I asked.

That would give Lorraine a chance to work on Nanette a little bit. I could hear Lorraine’s voice as their footsteps echoed up the stairs.

The Shore

We walked to the car. “She seemed to close off after you asked her about the friend,” Lorraine said, shaking her head, “so I thought I’d let her do the talking, but it was if she’d used up all her words. She’s holding a lot inside.”

“Did she tell you about her husband?”

“He worked in finance, she told me. She told me he’d been lost when the twin towers collapsed, but there were times she talked about him as if he were still alive.”

We were silent while I drove slowly down the street and turned onto Main crossing the bridge. The blood of my ancestors was kicking in, and a good part of me doubted a lot of what Nanette had told us. But I remembered Mom saying we humans create our own past. Our real truth is like a wave, hard to cast in bronze.

“You saw the boys’ rooms?”

Lorraine nodded. “And Donald goes to Rutgers.”

I looked at my watch, nearly eleven. We stopped and decided to sit by the little lake in town where ducks quacked. Lorraine seemed more interested in Nanette than in New Jersey.

“Thanks, by the way,” I said. “You were able to draw her out.”

“Not really. She has secrets, that one.”

I nodded slowly, trying to let go of Nanette’s past. I still needed to find out Ralph’s last name.

Shifting gears, I flipped through my notes, finding the number I wanted. After entering the digits I counted the rings, my fingers crossed. No answering machine. Why hadn’t I copied down his address?

I was about to hang up when a voice growled in my ear, “Alf.”

I told him who I was and what I wanted and asked for directions to his shop.

“Better hurry along. The FBI said they were picking the car up this morning and they’re late.”

I told Lorraine about the white Plymouth. “Do you mind if we take a ride?”

A few minutes later we pulled into Alf’s Car & Truck. Alf himself came out wearing the same hat and with the same missing teeth. I lowered my window.

He hitched back his hat showing off his hairless head and squinted in at me, scowling until his eye caught Lorraine. He smiled. “Don’t you ever wash this thing? Pretty passenger like that, you want to give her a proper ride.”

What was it with Lorraine?

“Car’s in the back. What you want to do, take pictures?”

“I want to see what’s inside,” I said, snapping on my gloves.

Lorraine shut the door and followed.

“Shoulda thought of that the first time, Missy,” he said, turning and smiling so wide at Lorraine that I thought he was going to walk back and ask her out. Sure enough, I could see him glancing at her ring.

“Don’t worry, I don’t want to take anything,” I said.

“Makes no never mind to me.”

I opened the glove compartment and peered inside at a pile of stuff, candy wrappers, wadded-up napkins and a stack of papers underneath a black paperweight.

Lorraine peered inside. “Oh, dear.” A hand flew to her chest.

“That’s right, Good Looking, that’s a gun,” Alf said. “These are bad, bad people. You don’t want to mess with them.”

Lorraine stared at him.

“I’m not interested in the Glock, that’s someone else’s to fret about,” I said, riffling through the papers. When I found it, I just about kissed it, but decided the Feds wouldn’t know what to do with my lipstick print and contented myself with copying everything down. I took a few photos, checked that they came out all right in the low light, and put everything back just the way I’d found it. I thanked Mr. Alf and Lorraine and I were on our way, but not before I called Jane and left a message.

“His name’s Ralph Hurston. Call me.”

“Are we close to the water?” Lorraine asked. “I’ve heard so much about the Jersey Shore. The storm and all.”

Fine with me. I felt the case winding down and myself reluctant to let it go, so we got back onto 195 and drove east. It was nice and warm. We lowered the windows. All the while Lorraine stared at the scenery like it was a foreign country.

“See how the trees are changing from those huge old things on the farms to pines? And you can see the soil’s becoming sandy as we near the ocean.” I said that last word with a hush in my voice and Lorraine shivered.

When we got to the water, I drove along the shore to Seaside Heights.

“The light’s different here,” Lorraine said.

“Bright and fierce,” I said.

“And the air is so fresh. So this is what it’s like.”

“Not quite. The shore’s supposed to be open next week-end. They’ve cleaned up a lot since Sandy, but we’ll see scars. People are still homeless or with a lot of stuff that still needs to be put back together.”

“Like Nanette?” she asked.

I nodded.

“And like this shore, she’s been battered a lot during her life,” Lorraine said. “But I get the feeling she’s holding back the hurricane with all her might. Soon she won’t have enough strength.”

There was more to Lorraine than I thought.

“Smell the ocean?” I asked.

We walked on the boardwalk and I felt the sun on my back. Lorraine was solemn in the face of all the destruction. I could still see chunks of Hurricane Sandy’s wrath, sand strewn farther than it should be, the remains of houses listing on the edge of the water or being carted away, or being rebuilt. People’s lives had been turned upside down in a few hours.

But the boardwalk and most of the shops and rides and games were open. Not too many people yet, a few surfers, and I smelled salt and hot dogs and watched the Ferris wheel and the waves. We leaned our elbows on the rail and looked at the ocean. Gulls cried overhead.

“Let’s grab a hot dog,” Lorraine said, unable to tear her eyes from the scene. While we waited in a small line, I texted Cookie to see if she’d gotten her voice back and she had, she said, loud and clear. “Too loud,” I could hear her mother say in the background.

We sat on a bench looking at the water. I could feel the ocean breeze kink my curls even more than usual.

Lorraine tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. It popped out again and she took a bite of hot dog. She didn’t move except to chew and shake her head. “Something about that woman. She’s going to explode with all her secrets.”

“You got that feeling, too?”

“Right away.”

I told her what I knew of James Arrowsmith’s past. “Losing her son slowly and her husband quickly.”

She frowned. “Something more, I think, but I don’t know what. I might be reading too much into what she told me when she was showing me the boys’ bedrooms.”

While we were eating, I texted Denny and told him I missed him. I’d never done that before, but there’s always a first. He shot back less than two seconds with, “I love you.” It made me smile, but the elevator in my stomach started going again.

When we were finished, the hot dog was so good, I wanted another. Lorraine wanted a soft cone.

“A bit of Coney Island here, but not very Brooklyn,” she said. “And it’s so much bigger. A whole different feel.”

I was busy biting into my dog, but managed to ask her about her tour of Nanette’s house.

“There were four bedrooms in all,” Lorraine said, “the master bedroom and ‘three for the boys,’ she told me. I didn’t say anything. I thought she had two sons, and there was that family picture in the living room with just the two children.”

Lorraine had eaten most of her ice cream while she explained, so I was getting the story in between the bites. Now she was crunching into the cone.

“Interesting,” I said, and felt my heart speed up like it always does with mysteries. And yet I didn’t want Nanette to be explained. I wanted her to remain a mystery. After all, what right did I have to go digging?

Lorraine continued. “I kept my mouth shut and didn’t look at her, just let her talk. She showed me Jim’s, then Donald’s room with the Rutgers pennant and I asked about the third, because the spread and colors were definitely male. ‘Well, the third is for my other … for a friend.’ She stumbled over her words, I know she did. I didn’t press her—I’d just met the woman, and who was I—but I perked up my ears. She seemed on the cusp of telling me something.”