Water from Stone - a Novel (7 page)

“Is there any family?”

“Like I told you, not that we’ve been able to trace. According to her boss, she showed up several months ago. Her application doesn’t list family and he never heard her mention anyone. The housemate either. Of course, we’ll keep looking. Ideally, we’ll find a warm and loving aunt or grandmother for the baby. Ideally. But, you know how often ideally works out.” Shirley shakes her head and looks out the window.

Mar watches Shirley, and waits, but Shirley won’t look at her. “Why’d you call me?” she finally asks. “Why didn’t you take me off your list?”

Shirley turns from the window and meets Mar’s gaze. “Truth?” she asks.

“Truth.”

Opening the file, Shirley takes out a four-by-six inch photo and slides it across the desk. “She reminds me of you,” Shirley says.

Reluctantly, Mar pulls the photo into her lap and looks down at it. The baby is covered in a hospital blanket and wears a knit cap. Fine, blonde curls spill out around the edge of the hat. Her skin is a translucent white, so pale that Mar imagines she would be able to see the girl’s heart if she pulled the blanket away. Her eyes are the color of the mid-day sky over the Keys. Mar turns the photo over. “She doesn’t look anything like me,” she says and her voice is a whisper.

Instead of answering, Shirley pushes back from her desk and moves around to the second visitor chair. She reaches for the photo, turns it back over. Mar looks away. “But she acts like you,” Shirley says. “She is sad and lost and lonely,” Shirley’s voice trails off.

“Like me,” Mar finishes.

“Like you.”

Mar looks down to the photo. Now she sees it, the frown between the infant’s faint eyebrows, the ingrained acceptance in her eyes, the set of her mouth. Mar recognizes the resemblance. She has seen this look in the mirror every day for four years. “I don’t think I’d be very good for her,” she says.

“Try, Mar. Please.”

Seven

Mar.

Mar startles awake, fear clutching at her throat. Gasping, she curls a fist to her chest, feels her heart beating a wild staccato. “
Shhhhh
,” she tells herself when she realizes she is in her own bedroom. “No sharks here, no sharks, no sharks,” she whispers the mantra that has calmed her on countless other nightmare nights. As she quiets and releases herself again to sleep, a wisp of a thought floats behind her eyelids, knocks on her subconscious and, when that doesn’t wake her, forms itself into a long, thin spike and jabs itself straight into nerve central. Mar jerks awake. “The baby!”

She hurries to the crib that she set up in a corner of her bedroom and looks inside. Elizabeth stares straight up at her, tension pinching her little face, her perfect hands clenched into fists. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I thought you were a shark,” Mar coos as she reaches in to pick her up. “Are you OK? Do you want some milk? Are you wet? What’s wrong, little girl?”

Mar loosens the blanket that swaddles Elizabeth. At the hospital, when Mar went to pick her up, the nurses told her that binding the baby would make her feel safer, more protected. Mar isn’t sure they were right, but what does she know? She has only had the little girl for two days and is still too timid to step away from the regimen set by Those Who Know Better.

Once freed, Mar checks the baby’s diaper. Dry. “Nope, nothing there. So, are you hungry? Do you want to try something to drink? Why don’t we go try something to drink?”

Followed closely by Picasso, Mar carries Elizabeth downstairs to the kitchen and, slipping her hand around the corner until her fingers find the switch, she eases on the lights. There are three rooms in the old house that are Mar’s favorites: her third-floor attic studio, the art gallery on the first floor that she carved out of the living, dining and sitting rooms, and the kitchen. Mar rarely cooks, in fact most days she has to remind herself to eat, but Joaquin had been a talented chef who specialized in Caribbean dishes and this room, so far from home, fills her with him. When she’d first come to Boulder and begun house hunting, she’d found other houses that wouldn’t have required extensive remodeling. There’d even been a loft downtown that would have been perfect for her. But she’d kept coming back to this house. More specifically, to this kitchen. With weathered brick walls, “architectural salvage,” her realtor had said, gleaming appliances, an expansive central island and a walk-in pantry, this would have been Joaquin’s dream kitchen. She’d painted a full size picture of him wearing his chef’s hat and apron, complete with the “Mar-Joaqua’s” logo over his left breast, the name of the restaurant he’d been set to open after their honeymoon, and hung it directly across from the room’s entrance. As the glow of the overhead lights spreads to the depths of the kitchen, Joaquin steps out to her. It is an illusion that never fails to fracture her heart.

The kitchen is cold. Mar adjusts the thermostat and moves to the counter to settle Lizzie in her bouncing chair. The cloth-covered wire frame cradles the baby much as a hammock would and was designed so that her every movement would cause the chair to gently bounce. Except, Elizabeth doesn’t bounce. She barely moves. Other than her eyes, which follow Mar.  “Let’s just strap you in so you don’t fall out,” Mar tells the baby, her voice pitching unnaturally.

“Talk to her,” Shirley had said when Mar called earlier, unnerved by the baby’s scrutiny, panicked by her silence. “Let her get used to you. She’ll loosen up.”

Mar wraps the cloth safety belt across Lizzie and clips it into place. She pushes down on the head of the chair, setting it in motion, before turning to the refrigerator for a small bottle of baby formula. After ten seconds in the microwave, she shakes the bottle and tests the temperature on both wrists and then farther up her arm.

“Here you go, little girl, do you want some milk?” She tickles Elizabeth’s lips with the bottle’s nipple. In response, Lizzie opens her mouth and pulls just once before ejecting the nipple and firmly shutting her lips. Mar runs the backs of her fingers down Lizzie’s cheek. “Can you try? Just a little?” She puts the nipple back to Lizzie’s mouth, but the baby won’t take it. Mar’s shoulders slump as the weight of failure washes over her. Tomorrow, she’ll have to talk to Shirley about finding a better home for the little girl. She is terrified that the baby will starve.

Mar unscrews the nipple and dumps the milk into the dog’s bowl. “She’s a pig, Lizzie. A pig. And you are not helping matters.”

Picasso slurps up the milk, her tail wagging. Mar turns back to the baby. “OK, then, your diaper’s dry, you’re not hungry, it’s two in the morning and you’re wide awake. What is it you want?”

When the baby doesn’t answer, Mar lifts her out of the bounce chair, turns off the heater that has just begun to warm the room, flips off the lights, and trudges back up the stairs.  “Listen, kid,” she says when they reach the second floor, “you’re going to have to work with me on this. I’m not that great at guessing what you want and if you don’t start to eat, they’re going to take you away from me.” She lowers the baby into the crib. Lizzie, looking wide awake, stares back at her.  “I’ll tell you what,” Mar says, reaching again for her, “how’s about you climb into bed with me for a little bit and we’ll watch some TV? Would you like that? Uh-huh. OK, let’s go.”

Eight

Sy.

Sy adjusts the car’s air conditioner to high. Even on that setting, it doesn’t come close to cutting through the humidity that hangs like a wet towel over South Florida. He loosens his shirt one more button and twists his neck to each side until he hears a satisfying crack, “
Aaaah
.” For the tenth time that hour he wonders why people retire to Florida. Just one traffic jam on the turnpike south convinced him that he’ll stay in New York when his time comes to give it all up.

The car in front of him moves and Sy edges up to the toll booth and rolls down his window. “How far to Homestead?”

“About another fifteen miles,” the booth operator takes his money. “You here on vacation?”

“Nah, just lookin’ someone up.”

“New York, huh? I got me a friend in New York sounds just like you. Says it’s really hot up there now. You enjoy some of our fresh air, ya hear?”

Miserable in the heat, Sy slides the window up before mumbling, “Bite me.”

Forty-five minutes later, he pulls off onto the Homestead exit.
Fifteen miles, my ass,
he thinks, glancing at the odometer.
Double that, more like it.

Homestead is a desolate place. There are still signs of the hurricane that roared through almost two decades before. At least, he imagines it was the hurricane. It could just be lousy county maintenance and no one caring enough to keep it up. Ten minutes later, he decides no one cares. Maybe it’s the heat.

The house he is looking for isn’t really a house. It is a double-wide trailer that is located in one of the few trailer communities that withstood Hurricane Andrew. He drives through a light just as it changes from yellow to red and turns into Sunshine Streams Mobile Estates. A guardhouse at the entrance causes him to slow down until he notices it is abandoned. He drives on.

The community is laid out in meandering lanes where lazy curves lull the mind into thinking the place is almost nice. Pretty little flower gardens pay testament to the fact that in retirement you have time to mess around in the dirt. He thinks the lawn police should do something about all the crappy little lawn thingies, though. Funky little gnomes probably coming alive at night, getting into all sorts of trouble, little woodland animals peeing on tires, making bunny love, sprouting a whole new generation of yard junk. As he looks for her number, he wonders what makes trailer people so obsessed with the shit. You never see this kind of crap in front of mansions.  But at least they keep the neighborhood clean. Not like some he’s seen in New York.

Sy has spent the past four months looking for the baby, tracking down every possible lead. He’s pulled strings, has even met up with Shaheen from the Bureau. Nothing. Then, two days ago, a woman who once worked at the hospital where Lindsey died and Mia was kidnapped, returned to work. “I got a divorce,” she told Sy. “I was lucky to get my old job back.” Arlene Thomas, who worked as a cashier in the hospital’s cafeteria, had been the one to tell Sy that the kidnapper had often met another girl for lunch. It took Sy another forty-eight hours to track Elie Burrows to her mother’s home in Florida.

Sy finally spots the trailer he is looking for at the end of a cul-de-sac. He can see between the houses that it backs up to a little pond or a lake. Something wet. Probably primo property around here. He pulls the car over to where the grass meets the street, reaches for his ragged briefcase and heaves his large frame out of the car. The humidity makes him feel soggy and limp.
Ah, shit,
he thinks, and reaches for the handkerchief that isn’t in his pocket where it’s supposed to be. Frustrated, he wipes his forehead on his shirtsleeve and walks to the trailer’s door.

The door is festooned with a plastic Christmas wreath and has little white lights stapled around its frame. They blink. When he touches the bell, a tinny version of “Winter Wonderland” begins to play. Sy rolls his eyes and tries to straighten his sweat-stained shirt.

The woman who opens the door looks to be in her late-seventies, maybe somewhere in the hundreds. Steel-grey roots barely hidden by umber-colored, over-processed, tightly-coiled curls.  Crocodile skin tanned nut-brown by the sun. Soft, loose jowls that sway below her chins when she cocks her head to look at him. He thinks she must approve of what she sees because the smile that reveals perfectly-cast dentures in Cover Girl White goes all the way up to her faded blue eyes.

“Hello there,” says the woman. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Sy. “I’m looking for Mrs. Esther Burrows.”

“Well, then, sir, today’s your lucky day. You found me. What can I do for you?”

Sy fishes a damp business card from his shirt pocket and holds it out to her. She pushes the screen door open and reaches for it. Leaning her bulk against the screen to keep it open, she lifts the glasses that hang from a colorful paper clip chain around her neck and fits them onto her button nose. “I’ve got really good eyesight for far away things,” she explains. “Just can’t see what’s close up in front of my face.”

“I’m Sy Colomanos,” Sy says.

“Well, so you say you are,” she replies, examining the card. “Leastways that’s what it says here. Oh, my, it says you’re a private investigator. Now, what’s that all about? And what do you want from me? Did someone die and leave me money?”

“I’m looking for someone, ma’am, and I thought you could help me.” Sy opens the file he is carrying and takes out a grainy black-and-white photo of a young woman dressed as a hospital candy striper. The photo, taken by a security camera, shows the woman cradling a bulky purse. He hands the photo over to Esther Burrows.

Mrs. Burrows squints down at it. “Well now, that’s not a very good photograph, is it?”

“It was taken by a security camera, ma’am.”

“Yes, I can see that.
Hmmm
. She looks familiar, but I can’t seem to place her.” Mrs. Burrows pushes her glasses farther up her nose and squints harder, her eyes all but disappearing into the crepe-like folds surrounding them. “Why, I saw this picture on
America’s Mystery Crimes
, didn’t I? This girl took that baby, right? The one’s mother died? That show was last month, or maybe in May, wasn’t it?”

“Yes you did, ma’am. But I was wondering if you’d ever seen her before the show. We think she knew your daughter.”

“Elie? This girl’s a friend of Elie’s?” Surprise lights her face.

“Yes, ma’am. At least we think so.”

Esther Burrows looks into Sy’s eyes and he can see her wondering if this conversation is going to cause her pain. Finally, sighing, she pushes the screen door open wider. “You’d best come in. And please stop calling me ma’am. I can’t be much older than you.”

Nine

Sy.

“Elie, my daughter, was a late child. My husband, Earl, he came back from the war in a wheelchair. The doctors said it’d be a miracle if he could ever have kids. Well, sir, a miracle happened and when I was forty-eight years old, Elie was born. Elizabeth Barrett Burrows. I named her after that poet lady. The one whose husband loved her so much?  We thought Burrows was a lot like Browning, kind of sounds the same, you know? Anyway, she was a late baby and a handful from the day she was born. Can I get you more soda?”

Sy shakes his head. Even with the air conditioner rattling away in its window perch, the trailer is hot. The two ice cubes had quickly melted in the glass of Root Beer she’d insisted he take. Now it is lukewarm and watery. Even under the best of conditions, Sy can’t stand the stuff. “No, thank you. You were saying?”

“Yes, well, you can imagine,” Esther peers at him from under her bushy eyebrows, emphasizing her point. “Here I was, almost fifty and with a baby. Plus, a husband in a wheelchair. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you that, even with Earl’s army pension. We lived in Toledo then, or outside of it. I had a job at PPG, cleaning the offices. Here, let me show you.”

Putting her hands on her knees, Esther pushes herself up and moves to a small book shelf filled with photo albums. Tracing a finger over the hand-printed titles on the spines, she chooses one and returns to the sofa. Opening the book, she flips through a few pages, a private smile lifting the edges of her mouth.

“Here,” she says, passing the book over to Sy. “That was our house. We got it after the war. The government used to help people back then.”