“What’s it been, Talcott? Four years? Five?”
“Something like that. I’m sorry, Thera.”
Thera grunts what might be forgiveness. She leads me to the kitchen, where we sit on opposite sides of the counter drinking tea. A Bible is open on the Formica. Beside it is a book by Oswald Chambers. Next to the window hangs needlepoint: AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. Thera sits there, seventyish and somber and strong, surrounded by her faith, worried sick about her daughter, wondering, maybe, why Sally seems to have more of her father than of her mother in her. Except, to hear Just Alma tell it, Thera, too, was a bit wild in her day.
“What do you want, Talcott?” This part of Thera’s personality, this emotional honesty, she has indeed passed on to her daughter. Neither one of them is any good at pretending to feel what she does not, or at hiding what she is thinking. “You didn’t come all this way just to see Rachel and Josh, so don’t tell me that lie.”
“I went to see Sally this afternoon.”
Something moves in her face, and her voice grows less gruff. “How was she?”
“She’s still having a hard time.”
“I know that. What I mean is, how did she treat you?”
The question surprises me, both perspicacious and mean. I choose a diplomatic tone. “We apologized to each other.”
Thera has no patience with euphemisms. “Oh, yeah? How come? Were you screwing her, too?”
An instant’s silly panic. “No, no, please don’t think that. No, of course not.”
“Your family hasn’t been good to her, Talcott.” Your family. Thera herself was only married into it. And bore Sally before joining up.
“I know.”
“You shouldn’t have gone.” A beat. Perhaps she decides to forgive me. “So, okay, why did you go?”
I have had time to think about how to answer this. “Thera, I can’t tell you everything. I wish I could, but I can’t. But Sally was… She and my sister have been looking into what happened to my father. I didn’t want to disturb her, but there was a question I realized only she could answer. I went there to ask her.”
Thera seems amused. She takes a sip of tea. Her massive hand swallows the cup. I cannot tell whether she believes me. “And did you get the answer?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.” She waits. I hear the children whooping in the next room. Time to bite the bullet. “Thera, I have to get into Sally’s apartment.”
“What, you think I’m just gonna give you the key?”
“It’s important. I wouldn’t have driven all the way down here otherwise.”
“What’s important? What are you looking for, Talcott?”
“There’s something… something I think Sally has hidden in the apartment. Something that came from my father’s house. I need to find it.”
“You’re saying she stole something?”
I shake my head emphatically. “I think she was trying to help. I think she… thought she was doing the right thing by hiding it.”
Thera’s eyes narrow. “Help who? Your brother, right?”
“Why do you say that?” I fence.
“Because when she was crying for days before she… before she tried to do herself in? She kept talking about your brother and what he had done to her.” A moment while we think that one over. Her next question takes me by surprise, but it is a mother’s question: “Is the thing you want the reason she had her breakdown?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be… a part of the reason.”
“If you find it, will you take it away with you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“And that’s why you want the key? So you can find it and take it away?”
“Yes.”
“Wait here.”
Thera trudges off down the hall. I hear her asking the children to quiet down. She is back a moment later with a shopping bag. “I think this is what you want, Talcott.”
She hands it to me. I look inside. I see my old raincoat, the one I loaned Sally the morning she snuck out of the Hilton. I turn toward Thera, on the verge of explaining that this is not what I am worried about at all, that I still need that key, when I realize that the bag is heavier than it should be. I delve once more and discover, at the bottom of the sack, Mariah’s missing ledger. I am about to protest that this still is not what I need. Then I unfold the coat and find, wrapped inside, the blue scrapbook.
“Get that devilish thing out of here,” Thera orders me. “I knew it was from Satan the moment Sally brought it in. Can’t you feel it?” She shudders, wrapping her arms around her chest. “I should have burned it. It’s ruined too many lives already.”
I have not come this far to grow impatient. Like my brother, I do not really care about the ledger, for it holds no secrets any longer. Only the blue scrapbook draws me. But I do not look at it, not at first. Instead, I head north again, quickly reaching I-95. I zip along for another hour, watching the rearview mirror, wishing Maxine were here to advise me. But maybe she is. I finally stop at a standard-issue motel in Elkton, just inside the Maryland border, to spend the night. Dinner is a chicken sandwich from McDonald’s, after which I settle down at the not-quite-wooden table in the spartan room, fighting to concentrate through the reek of disinfectant. From the shopping bag I pull my ancient green coat, so badly wrinkled that the dry cleaner may not be able to rescue it.
Then I remove the blue leather scrapbook and center it on the table.
A thing of the devil.
I remember the day I discovered it, the Friday after my father died, and my panic when I thought poor Sally might see it. Even then, instinct told me it was better that it not see the light of day.
Well, now it is night, and I can open it and try to figure out what frightened Sally so thoroughly that, added to the other, obscene pressures from my side of the family, she tried to take her life. So, once again, I flip through the nasty pages, the catalogue of deaths of others than my baby sister, every one a hit-and-run, every one a tragedy for some family somewhere: all of these people, I am sure, were loved.
Ugly, yes. But what were Sally’s words?
I don’t know why he had to get them both. That’s what Sally said just before she took the pills. Paula, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, assumed Sally was talking about me, because she also kept saying, Poor Misha. But maybe she didn’t mean me. Maybe somebody else had to get them both.
I have made it all the way through the album again. The last pages are blank, because the Judge stopped collecting the clippings after he got well. But how did he get well? What led to the sudden change in attitude that my siblings and I remember so keenly?
I flip back to the last clipping, the final item my father pasted into the book before he stopped. Like all the others, this one is a story of a hit-and-run accident. Phil McMichael, I record, Dana’s old boyfriend and the son of the Judge’s old friend Senator Oz McMichael, run over in his Camaro by a tractor-trailer rig.
So? An interesting coincidence, but so what?
One of my father’s crabbed annotations is in the margin. It takes me a moment to decipher it. Then I have it: Excelsior.
Excelsior?
Not a chess problem, but a page in a scrapbook? Or both?
Wait a minute. Had to get them both.
I begin to read the article, trying to figure this out. The first line of the third paragraph is underlined. Ironically, Mr. McMichael’s fiancee, Michelle Hoffer, was killed in a similar accident three months ago…
My fingers are sweating as I fumble my way to an earlier page where, sure enough, I find a picture of Mchelle Hoffer, daughter of some other wealthy family, dead in a hit-and-run accident. And, right in the margin, the same word: Excelsior.
The Double Excelsior.
