Dead Silence Page 11

  Right here, right now, you have everything that matters.

  Chapter Six

  Amelia closes the door after the day’s final client and sits at her desk, longing to take off her shoes. The flats had felt a size too small when she’d pulled them on at home, her feet still swollen from last night’s uptown hike in pumps. Despite two layers of bandages, the leather edges have been digging into her raw blisters. And despite her attempt to focus on her clients, her own past has been jabbing her thoughts all morning.

  Unlike Amelia and Aaron, Calvin and Bettina Crenshaw hadn’t been childless by choice. A full decade after losing an infant son, they’d failed to conceive again. Working five jobs between them to afford the subsidized Harlem apartment, they’d accepted that fertility specialists and adoption were out of the question.

  They’d believed Amelia had been sent by Jesus, the answer to their prayers—because of the ring, Calvin had told her. “It was etched with a C . . . C, for Crenshaw. You were meant to be ours. Who were we to question His gift?”

  But Amelia had questioned him, trying to grasp how they’d managed to pass her off as their own.

  “It was 1968—we had the war, assassinations, protests, riots . . . the whole city was on edge. The whole world. But especially in this neighborhood. We didn’t go out for a long, long time after we found you in May, except to work.”

  “Because you were hiding me.”

  “A lot of folks stayed locked away inside that summer, out of trouble—or what the cops might decide was trouble. Terrible times for the black man back then.” That fall, he’d said, when they’d finally taken the baby outdoors, people had just assumed Bettina had given birth to her. “Back then, folks didn’t ask nosy personal questions like they do now. Pregnancy and childbirth were nobody’s business but the parents’.”

  Only one person in their lives had ever seemed privy to the truth, likely not because Calvin and Bettina had ever shared it. Amelia’s parents had wanted nothing to do with their exotic neighbor Marceline LeBlanc, who’d come from a southern coastal island and had spoken in a thick Gullah accent.

  Amelia opens her laptop. It’s been a long time since she’s scoured the internet for Marceline. She’s not likely to turn up now; she can’t possibly still be alive, but it wouldn’t hurt to try again.

  Amelia opens a search engine.

  One thing is certain—Marceline couldn’t have been Amelia’s birth mother. She’d been an old lady even in 1987. When you’re young, even middle age seems old, but Marceline must have been well past her forties or even fifties when Amelia had known her. More like pushing seventy, or beyond. She’d likely forgotten all about Amelia after she’d left New York, carrying whatever she’d known about Amelia’s past to the grave.

  Before she looks for Marceline, though, she needs to check the bus schedule to Ithaca. In her flurry to pack a weekend suitcase and get out the door, she’d left her phone behind, plugged into the charger on her nightstand. She’ll have to go back to get it before heading to the Port Authority.

  There’s a bus leaving at two twenty.

  She looks at her watch. The renewed search for Marceline will have to wait. She needs time to get uptown and then back down again on aching feet.

  There’s no landline in her office, so she has yet to call Jessie and let her know she’s coming to Ithaca this afternoon. But if there’s anyone in this world who’d welcome unexpected—albeit invited—company with open arms, it’s Jessie.

  She also has to ask Aaron to take care of Clancy in her absence. That request, she suspects, won’t be met with nearly as much enthusiasm.

  Amelia hadn’t consulted him before volunteering to foster the orphaned kitten. He’d been on an extended business trip when Amelia came across Clancy’s plight via social media. He’d been placed in a shelter, developed a respiratory infection, and been listed for euthanasia.

  Struck by instant kinship with the abandoned little soul, she’d taken him home.

  “It’s temporary,” Amelia had promised Aaron. “I couldn’t let them kill him just because he was all alone and sick in that awful place. Just for a few months, until he’s old enough to be placed in a permanent home.”

  “And you’re actually going to let him go?”

  “Of course. That’s what fosters do, Aaron. Jessie said—”

  “I know what fosters do. I’m just not convinced you’re capable of doing it.”

  She’d protested. Two months later, she hates that he might have been right.

  She’ll email Aaron, she decides. A call or text might invite an argument she isn’t in the mood to have.

  A, forgot to tell you to make sure you feed the kitten while I’m gone. Leave him enough food and water when you go to the airport and he should be fine until I get home Sunday night. Love you, A

  After sending it, she writes one to Jessie.

  Hope the offer is still open, because I’m Ithaca-bound! Will text you the arrival time. Xo Mimi

  She hits Send, hoping her friend will see it. Jessie’s never been diligent about checking her email.

  The split second before she closes the laptop, she hears a new message clicking in. Maybe Aaron. Probably spam. It can wait.

  She hurries for the door, anxious to start the weekend and forget about real life for a while.

  The Angler awakens to the distant chiming of the Peace Tower carillon bells on Parliament Hill, across the Rideau Canal. The hour strikes once, twice, three times.

  He stretches his arms and rolls onto his back, opening his eyes. He hadn’t slept through to evening as he’d intended, but his slumber had been blessedly undisturbed. Before turning in, he’d called in sick again, leaving a message for his shift supervisor. Well aware that it probably hadn’t gone over well, he’d turned off his phone.

  He reaches for it on the nightstand and waits for it to power up.

  The small back bedroom is bathed in afternoon light. The smallest of the three rooms on the second floor, it’s the only one that has access to the attic; the only one that holds no unpleasant memories.

  The largest had belonged to his father. Upon inheriting the house, the Angler had planned to claim that room for his own. The smell of sweat and booze had lingered there, though, long after he’d stripped away the personal effects and scrubbed it floor to ceiling with bleach. He’d thought removing the furniture might help, and then he’d torn out the ugly striped wallpaper and brown carpeting. The hardwood floor near where the bed had stood had been stained as if someone had spilled a can of brown paint. It had soaked so deeply into the oak that he couldn’t sand it away.

  He’d moved on to his own childhood bedroom across the hall. There, too, he’d gotten rid of everything, had ripped the light fixtures from the ceiling and walls, had all but gutted the room. Yet still his dead father wafted as palpably as the traces of his own terror. He’d tried, though, to banish him. He’d spackled and sanded walls scarred by hurtled objects. As he’d painted the oak baseboards spattered with his own blood, he could hear his father’s belt cracking.

  In the end, he couldn’t erase the violence, and so he closed the doors on those empty rooms forever. He padlocked both and stashed the keys in a drawer back at the town house, lest he ever find himself tempted to revisit the past.

  The phone buzzes to life and presents him with a series of missed calls, not from his supervisor, but from Cecile. Why is she bothering him when she thinks he’s at work?

  Unless somehow, she knows . . .

  How much can she possibly know?

  He scowls, sits up, and toys with the phone, belatedly wondering whether he’d remembered to clear his history on the desktop computer at home. She has a newer laptop, and never touches it, but what if . . .

  No. Even if she’d come across his search about whether a corpse can bleed, she can’t possibly suspect about Monique and the boy. She has no idea that he even owns this house in the city, inherited upon his father’s death a decade ago, before she’d come into his life. />
  Liberated at last, he’d believed at that time that he might actually be able to live life just like anyone else. Instead of going home alone after his shift, he’d started frequenting pubs and wine bars, hoping to make friends. He’d never had any, unless you counted his school classmates or coworkers—none of whom had ever really known or cared to know him.

  But it wasn’t easy for a man alone to connect with other men. Women were easier—not as potential friends, but as potential mates. Wasn’t that what he wanted? A wife, a family, an ordinary life?

  It would mean quelling the inappropriate urges that had tormented him all his adult life. He’d tried, dating a few age-appropriate women who came on too strong too soon, asked too many questions. They all wanted to know about his past, wanted to see where he lived. He’d claimed that he had several roommates, not uncommon in this area populated by students, immigrants, and artists. Still, they’d persisted.

  Not Cecile. While they were dating, they’d spent their time together at her place, never his. She had expressed no interest in seeing it, nor did she ask questions about his past. Maybe it was her youth or her aloof nature. The details of his past, or even his present, hadn’t seemed to matter to her. She’d been focused only on the future.

  She’d been eager to trade the crime-ridden neighborhood for their suburban town house. They’d bought it at a premium, and the market had plummeted soon after. It’s been a financial burden from the start.

  He’d never considered selling his father’s house, though. Even now, he revels in the triumph of ownership, like a revolutionary who’d overthrown a cruel dictator.

  Besides, it suits his purposes. He no longer curses the solid plaster walls through which no outsider would ever hear a cry for help. He’s grateful for them, and for the thorny shrubs that have overgrown the property borders, keeping would-be visitors at bay. Grateful that there is no curb appeal, nothing eye-catching about the peeling paint and formidable gabled roof that protects not just the secrets of his past, but the present.

  The house is built on a slope, with a steep, deep driveway running downhill along the foundation and curving around back to a single car garage built beneath the house. It enables him to come and go through the basement and load the trunk without witnesses. Anyone on the street who’s ever seen him drive past and given a second glance would have assumed he was alone in the car.

  Thoughts of Monique stir him from his bed. He shoves his phone into his pocket and reaches for the chain dangling from the ceiling before he remembers. A crushing loneliness sweeps over him.

  She isn’t there. She’s been relegated to the past with his other ghosts.

  A sob threatens to escape his throat, and he pulls the damned chain. A panel drops, with a built-in wooden ladder to the attic. It squeaks loudly as he extends it to the floor, rungs creaking beneath his weight as he ascends.

  “Ready or not, here I come,” he calls the way he always did. For a few moments, he can escape the wretched loss. He can pretend he isn’t alone, that she’s still up there, waiting for him.

  Yet the cavernous attic is unmistakably forlorn as he weaves a familiar path around forgotten household relics—a cabinet television, old-fashioned suitcases, boxes of books. Dull light falls through the small round window set in the triangular peak at the front of the house. High overhead, the rafters are strung with cobwebs, corners clumped with sleeping bats; beneath his feet, the dusty floor is littered with mouse droppings and heaps of guano.

  He makes his way toward a wide rack against the far wall, hung with a woman’s clothing.

  His mother’s, he’d suspected when he’d found it up here as a child. Nubby plaid miniskirts, long-lapeled blouses, dresses with bell sleeves—seventies styles popular around the time he’d been born. The colors have faded, and the fabric is filthy and decaying, shredded in spots by rodent teeth.

  He rolls the rack aside, and the handcuffs clatter along the floorboards, one end clamped to the vertical pole, the other small enough—thanks to some considerable searching on his part—to secure a child’s fragile wrist.

  He turns back to the dark wooden plank wall. In the beginning, he’d needed a flashlight and pry bar to find and release the panel. Now he can do it in pitch darkness if necessary, his fingers gravitating to the precise spot, applying just enough counterpressure along the expertly concealed left-hand seam to move the right side forward. Only slightly, not so that anyone who accidentally bumped it might notice. He tucks his fingernails into the slight ridge on the right and gives a tug, freeing the panel. Behind it, there’s a hidden door with a bolt on the outside.

  He slides it and opens the door to a small room with a high ceiling, an identical bull’s-eye window tucked beneath the tall gable. There’s no doorknob or handle on the inside, and never has been as far as he can tell—which has made him wonder about the room’s origin and purpose.

  He’d wanted to believe that the false wall had been there since the house was built in the late nineteenth century. But if you looked hard, and from a certain angle, the wood seemed newer. Most likely, someone had added it later. A previous owner. Likely his own father. He’d been a carpenter. And he’d forbidden his son to enter the attic.

  But once, as a young boy left alone in the house, he’d found his way up here regardless of his father’s rules. Restless, lonely, he wasn’t looking for anything other than adventure, but had found only uninteresting relics, including his mother’s clothing and anything else she might have left behind. He’d had no more interest in snooping the remnants of her existence than he would a complete stranger’s. How could he care about her when she hadn’t cared about him?

  The only noteworthy item on his first visit to the attic had been the circular window, its crisscrossed antique grille making it look like a bull’s-eye. He’d imagined trying to hit it with his slingshot from the ground below but ruled it out after noting that it faced the street. Someone might see him and tell his father. There would have been hell to pay.

  He’d climbed back down the ladder and forgotten about the attic for a few more years.

  Then one miserable summer day, he’d been lying beaten and bruised on the grass in the backyard, watching a crow circling overhead like a vulture on carrion. It had landed on the roof’s peak and cawed, trying to tell him something, he’d later thought. As he stared up at the bird, he’d noticed that there was a bull’s-eye window beneath that gable, just as there was out the front.

  Yet he’d only seen one in the attic.

  The next time he was alone in the house, he’d ventured upstairs and discovered that the back wall was hollow. After some searching, he’d found the secret door. The chamber had been empty that day, other than the cobwebs, mouse droppings, and bats.

  Those are long gone. The room’s first occupant had stuffed every crevice with steel wool.

  “Please, we have to block those holes,” the girl had begged, early on. “I can’t stand the thought of things crawling on me in the night.”

  “Anything for you, my angel.”

  “Anything? Please let me go . . .”

  Ah, anything but that.

  He no longer remembers her name, or even exactly what she’d looked like, other than that she’d been his type and had resembled those who’d come after.

  And they had all resembled the vanished woman who’d worn the moldering clothes hanging in the attic.

  Vanished? Or . . .

  No, he doesn’t allow himself to think about that. About how brown paint appeared to have been spilled here, too . . . directly above the stain on his father’s bedroom floor.

  Almost as if it had seeped down.

  He used to consider tearing out the ceiling below, just to see, but maybe he doesn’t want to know.

  Or maybe you already do. Maybe you always have, deep down inside. Maybe you never believed what your father told you about how she’d walked away.

  Before crossing the threshold into the hidden room, he drags a nearby floor lamp to prop ope
n the hinged panel. It used to stay that way on its own, but something had shifted in the foundation following the 5.0 earthquake that had rattled Ottawa back in June 2010. No amount of hardware tweaking has remedied the door’s ability to swing shut of its own accord, and if it were to close after him, he’d be trapped.

  The room is long and narrow, running the width of the house. It holds just a mattress and bedding, a couple of folding chairs, and a toilet and washbasin. Before his first visitor, he’d installed the plumbing himself, running pipes up from his own bathroom below.

  More recently, he’d welded an iron grid across the window’s interior. It was a good twelve feet up in the wall, far beyond an occupant’s reach, and too small for an adult to fit through. But when Monique’s baby had begun to transform into a boy, the Angler began to worry. What if she stacked the furniture and climbed up with her son hoisted on her shoulders?

  The cage ensured that if the window was ever within their grasp, they’d be able to do nothing but gaze out at the world like zoo animals.

  “C’est comme une prison,” she’d wailed in protest, as if it had ever been anything but.

  Oh, Monique.

  He appreciates the way she’d smoothed the quilt across the mattress on her final morning, two pillows juxtaposed at the top. Her belongings, too, are in order—cosmetics and toiletries aligned along the narrow sink, clothing, hers and the boy’s, sorted and stacked on the floor. Her paperback novels are neatly piled on the floor beside one pillow. She’d lit up the day he’d brought them, an afterthought when he’d spotted a Free Books box in the break room at the plant.

  “J’ai adoré lire,” she’d told him in French—past tense, as though her love of reading had been a long-forgotten skill. She’d lovingly stroked the bindings, examining the titles in wonder. “Merci! Merci!”

  He’d promised her that he would bring her more, reminding her that he wanted her to be happy there with him, that he wasn’t la bête noire—her worst nightmare.