He came downstairs, gathered his briefcase, checked with me to make sure we didn’t need to talk about anything else, told me he was going to be out of his office most of the afternoon, and kissed me good-bye. He was gone by seven-thirty, or earlier.
I felt we had made a success of mornings, anyway. So far.
This morning Angel reported about eight-thirty.
“Shelby says,” she began without preamble, “that we need to find out if an aerial search was made, particularly of the fields around the house.”
“Hmmmm,” I said, and made a note on my list. “I’ll remember to ask that at lunch. A local reporter is a friend of mine, and she’s coming over for lunch.”
“You sure have a social life.”
“Oh?”
“You’re always having people over, or you go out, or people call you, seems like.”
“I grew up here. I expect if you were still in the town you were born in, it would be the same.”
“Maybe,” said Angel doubtfully. “I’ve never had that many friends. When I grew up, we lived way out in the swamps. I had my brothers and sisters. What about you?”
“I have a half-brother, but he’s in California. He’s a lot younger than me.”
“Well, except for some Cubans, it was just us out there. We pretty much kept to ourselves. When I was a teenager, I began to date… but even then, I was usually glad to get home. I wasn’t much good at small talk, and if you didn’t talk and drink, they wanted to do the other thing, and I didn’t.”
We smiled at each other for the first time.
Then Angel clammed up, and I realized she would only speak about herself in rationed drips, and I had had my allotment for the day.
We went out into the bright spring air to measure the outside of the house. Then we measured each inside room and drew a detailed map of our house.
“I guess sometime having this will come in handy,” I sighed, a comparison of figures having shown that the walls were only walls and not secret compartments with grisly contents. So much for a hidden closet.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Angel said drily. “The next time someone wants to know how to get to the bathroom, all you have to do is tell him to go forty-one inches from the newel post, due east, then north two feet.”
I stared at her blankly for a second and then suddenly began to laugh.
Maybe our strange association was going to be more fun than either of us had anticipated.
Angel looked down at the plans.
“There was something in the attic,” she said.
“What! What?”
“Nothing, most likely. But you know the chimney comes up from the living room, runs up one end of your bedroom where you have a fireplace, goes through the attic and out the roof.”
“Right.”
“It seemed to me that in the attic there was too much chimney.”
“They might be sealed up in there,” I said breathlessly.
“They might not. But we can see.”
“Who can we call to knock it down?”
“Shoot, I can do it. But you got to think, here, Roe. What if there’s nothing there? What if you’re just knocking down a perfectly good chimney for the hell of it?”
“It’s my chimney.” I crossed my arms on my chest and looked up at her.
“So it is,” she said. “Then let’s go. You go up there and look, and I’ll go to the garage and get a sledgehammer and one or two other things we might need.”
I let down the attic steps and climbed up. In the heat of the little attic, with sunlight coming in through the circular vent at the back of the house, I calmed down. The attic was floored, with the old original floorboards, wide and heavy. They creaked a little as I crossed to look at the chimney. Sure enough, the bricks looked a little different from the bricks downstairs, though I couldn’t say they looked newer. And the chimney was wider.
I remained skeptical. I felt sure the police would have noticed fresh brickwork.
Angel came up the stairs in a moment, the sledgehammer in her hand.
She eyed the bricks. She slid on a pair of clear plastic safety goggles. I stared at her.
“Brick fragments,” she said practically. “You should stand well back, since you don’t have safety glasses.”
I retreated as far as I could, back into an area where I could barely stand, and on Angel’s further advice I turned my back to the action. I heard the thunk as the hammer hit the bricks, and then more and more thunks, until gradually that sound became accompanied by the noises of cracking and falling.
Then Angel was still, and I turned.
She was looking at something in the heap of dislodged bricks and mortar chips.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed.
I felt my skin crawl.
I scuttled over to Angel and stood by her looking down as she was doing.
In the rubble was a small figure wrapped in blankets blackened by smoke and soot.
My hand went up over my mouth.
We stood for the longest moments of my life, staring down at that little bundle.
Then I knelt and with shaking hands began to unwrap the blanket. A tiny white face looked up at me.
I screamed bloody murder.
I think Angel did, too, though she afterward denied it hotly.
“It’s a doll,” she said, kneeling beside me and gripping my shoulders. “It’s a doll, Roe. It’s china.” She shook me, and I believe she thought she was being gentle.
Later on, after we’d both showered and Angel had called a mason to come repair the chimney, we speculated on how the compartment had gotten sealed up, how the doll had been left inside. I figured that the story of Sarah May Zinsner’s desire for a closet and her husband’s sealing one up out of sheer cussedness had its basis in whatever had happened by the chimney. We ended up deciding that she’d ordered an extra frame of brickwork for shelving, to store-who knew what? Maybe she’d intended the shelving for the use of the maid who may have been living in the attic. But that final change had been the straw that had metaphorically broken John L. Zinsner’s back. He’d had the shelves bricked up, and while the mason was working, perhaps one of the daughters of the house had set her wrapped-up “baby” temporarily (she thought) on the shelves. Now I had it, all these years later, and it had scared the hell out of Angel and me.
Somehow, when my mother called while I was slicing strawberries for lunch, I didn’t tell her about my morning’s adventure. She would be horrified that I was looking for the Julius family; also, I didn’t care to relate how deeply upset I’d been when I’d seen that tiny white face.
For once, she didn’t sense that I was less than happy. That was remarkable, since we spoke on the phone or in person almost every day. She was all the family I had, since my father had moved with my stepbrother to California. That was something I had in common, I realized, with the Julius family. They had been nearly as untangled from the southern cobweb of family connections as I was.
“I had a closing this morning,” Mother said. She was as proud of each sale as though it were her first, which I found sort of endearing. When I was in my early teens, when she’d begun to work but before she was independent and very successful, I’d felt each house she sold should be celebrated by a party. Mother seemed just as driven now as she had been after she’d separated from my father and become a needy wage earner; my father had never been too good about sending child support payments.
“Which one?” I asked, to show polite interest.
“The Anderton house,” she said. “Remember, I told you I had it sold last week. I was scared until the last minute that they were going to back out. Some idiot told them about Tonia Lee Greenhouse.” Tonia Lee, a local realtor, had been murdered in the master bedroom. “But it went through.”
