and renewed circumstances. Burton gave us a history lesson on liquor trafficking on the East End during Prohibition that was more thorough and no less enthusiastic than Dorothy Hodges’s. I stuck in a joke where I could, but Amanda was too stunned with relief to absorb wisecracks.
I drove her back to her house where she said she wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep for a few weeks. She asked me to come by later in the evening to watch over her, if I wanted to.
“Leave the vodka at home,” she said. “I’ve got some Glenfiddich stashed somewhere. More appropriate to the occasion. Why are you looking at me?” she added.
“I like looking at you.”
“Not usually like that.”
“Sorry. It’s not you. I’m just thinking.”
“Okay. I’m too wasted to think. Offer’s still open,” she said, and then disappeared into her house. I kept looking at the space she’d just left behind until I was distracted by Eddie with his paws on the car door, looking in the window. I let him ride the hundred feet back down our common driveway. They say dogs have no sense of time, so I told him we were driving to Maine and back. It made him happy.
The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door. It was Rosaline Arnold, only this time I was dressed for it.
“I think I know what was wrong with Robbie Milhouser,” she said when I answered.
“You’ve been thinking?” I asked.
“I’ve been researching. I went back to storage and pulled everything they had on him all the way back to grade school.”
“Wow.”
“Then I cross-referenced everything with data pulled off the Internet. Just to get a little corroboration.”
“And?”
“Come on, Sam, I’m not doing this over the phone. Plus I have visual aids.”
“You’re in luck. My afternoon schedule just opened up. How do you feel about dogs?”
——
I fed myself out of Tupperware containers while changing into sneakers and a silk baseball jacket. Eddie hung around the whole time, knowing as he always did that he was coming along.
The nice weather seemed determined to persist. Now late afternoon, the sun’s angle was deepening the color of the trees, and the sky was working on a design for the upcoming sunset. It was cool. Too cool with the window down for a lightweight jacket, but I was committed.
For no good reason, I took a slightly different route over to Rosaline’s. I wanted to see how the day was treating the potato fields just north of County Road 39 and wasn’t disappointed. The sun’s clear light through the cloudless sky turned the bare, freshly tilled earth a supple gold. The trees and bushes planted around the new houses forming along the fringes between fields had begun to fill out and a few years of wear had settled them into the landscape. With spring’s emergence the traffic on County Road 39 had also begun to bloom, so I waited awhile to cross and head south to Rosaline’s condo complex.
“No newspaper?” she asked when she answered the door, genuinely disappointed.
“I took the high road. No newsstands.”
“You did, however, bring a dog. As promised.”
Her hair was piled on top of her head, held precariously with bobby pins and stuck with a yellow pencil. She wore a men’s dress shirt and melon-colored shorts. I guessed her father’s, since they were several sizes too big. Eddie expressed his social grace by jumping all over her.
“Is it too early for cocktails?” she asked in a gross display of the rhetorical.
“Out on the patio. I want to see the latest perennials.”
Eddie started sniffing the corners of her apartment while I went straight to my favorite wicker chair. She followed soon with glasses, bottles and several fat old manila folders. I helped her unload.
“Sit, sit. I’ll pour.”
“I didn’t expect you to keep digging,” I said.
“I’m compulsive, what can I say. It’s the Internet’s fault. It’s an amazing research tool, but can only take you so far. Eventually you have to get your hands on some good old-fashioned paper and ink. Cheers.”
She pulled up her legs so her heels were hooked on the edge of her seat, using her thighs to support the files as she leafed through. Eddie gave a sharp little bark from the other side of the French doors and I went to let him out. I walked him around the garden area for a few minutes so he could sample the local scents and piss on a few flowers, then bought him back with me to lie on the patio.
“Anyway,” said Rosaline, picking up where the conversation left off, “I already had my name all over requests for Robbie’s high school file, so why not go for broke. I still haven’t figured out what to say if I’m questioned. Maybe you can come up with something.”
“How about the truth?”
“Illegally sharing a student’s confidential information?”
“I’ll keep thinking.”
“The good news is what I uncovered is in the public domain.”
“Like what?”
She handed me a photocopy of a page from a church ledger. St. John’s Episcopal Church, Southampton. It listed marriages performed from January through April, 1966.
“Find Milhouser.”
I followed the columns till I came to “Emilia Silverio and Jefferson Milhouser.”
“Nice Italian girl,” I said. “Must have felt funny in that bastion of Waspdom.”
“You see the date?” she asked.
“Yeah. 1966.”
“Here,” she said, handing me another piece of paper.
It was a printout from the birth registry at Mt. Vernon Hospital, Mt. Vernon, New York. I traced down the columns until I found “Robert, to Emilia and Marco Silverio.”
“And the date?”
“1961. Son of a bitch.”
“Son of Italians. Very unlucky ones. Let’s move to the obits.”
The first was a scanned clipping from
Rosaline waited until I finished reading so I could look up at her face and see another piece of paper held in her hand.
“I’m enjoying this, Sam,” she said. “Rummaging around in archives, on and off the Internet, especially those involving vital statistics, gives me an intense voyeuristic delight. In fact, at certain times it actually makes me a little wet. Does that sound perverse?”
“Not at all. What else you got?”
She handed me another scanned clipping, this one from
Emilia had been spared the violent death of her first husband, but she was just as dead, this time from multiple myeloma, a less immediate but far more painful way to go. She left a husband, Jefferson Milhouser, and an eight-year-old son, Robert.
“Jeff’s not his father,” I said.
“Nope. It’s amazing how you see a family resemblance that’s not actually there. Think about it. They don’t look anything like each other.”
She put Robbie’s high school yearbook picture down on the table next to a headshot of Jeff from his days as a Town Trustee. Broad, burly Mediterranean next to lean, lanky Anglo.
“What kind of a teenager do you think you’d be if Jeff Milhouser was your only parent, your principal mentor?” she asked. “You don’t need a degree in psychology to figure that one out. I have one, by the way, and I did figure it out,” she added.
I picked up a picture in each hand and looked at the faces.
