Cassie cocked her head sideways, examining the object. Strange-looking thing. It was shaped like a ruler. About a foot long and about two inches wide, only it had five sides. Solid in the middle but five-sided. What would you call a shape like that? A polygon? She looked at the surface of the ruler lengthwise. There were strange markings inscribed in the stone. Some looked like long hash marks, and some looked like pictograms. They resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics; only they weren’t Egyptian. She’d seen enough of those in museums to recognize them. Along the sharp edge that divided the ruler into five sides were more hash marks and loops.
Cassie made no move to pick up the stone ruler. She dismissed it as something from the shop that Sybil had decided to keep. Her sister did that all the time. She’d come across another “treasure” that she just had to have for her own. The apartment was full of things she couldn’t seem to part with. African masks on the walls. A rare Chinese vase in a niche by the door. Fragments of Greek friezes. It begged the question of where the money came from for Sybil’s expensive private collection. Cassie frowned and regarded the stone ruler again for a few moments. Maybe she’d ask Rhonda about it when she saw her next.
Her eyes swept the room. The papers and the clothes and the antiques and the artwork. So much more to get through. Suddenly, she felt very tired and more than a bit overwhelmed. Nobody else to do it but her. She sighed.
Without bothering to clean up the tissues on the carpet, she got up, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment. She wanted to head back to her dorm room for a long, long nap. She could come back tomorrow. Everything would still be waiting for her. More memories to pop out of a drawer or jump off a shelf to remind her that she was alone in the world. It would keep. She’d cried enough for this day.
Chapter 5 – Corvette and Model-T
A dozen hours after Cassie fell into a restless doze, dawn broke over a suburb on the far outskirts of the metro area. It was a hamlet that had once been rural and still retained a few of its American gothic homesteads. Daylight crept toward the oldest of these original structures—a two-story farmhouse standing on an acre of green land. It was surrounded by one hundred and twenty acres of tract housing but, so far, had managed to resist being engulfed by the neighborhood. A high wooden fence surrounded the backyard which encompassed both a flower and a vegetable garden. The front lawn was wide and deep enough to accommodate massive shade trees that had been old long before the first cornfield was plowed.
Light advanced across the lawn to the house itself which was concrete stucco painted a shade of cornflower blue. A cupola in the middle of the roof had attracted a flock of burbling pigeons who hoped to warm themselves in the early sun’s rays. When an elderly woman emerged onto the Victorian gingerbread porch, the pigeons flapped off. Broom in hand, she immediately set about sweeping the front steps. An apple tree growing close to her porch was shedding its blossoms. It appeared as if her stairs were covered in bits of pinkish-white confetti. She swept briskly, if absentmindedly. It was clear that she was lost in thought. She didn’t register that someone was coming up her front walk until he stood directly in front of her.
“Faye?” the young man asked tentatively.
“Oh, Erik, you gave me a start.” Her hand flew involuntarily to her heart. Then she smiled and motioned him towards the house. “Please, do come in.”
He preceded her through the door.
“Why don’t we sit in here.” She directed him to the front parlor. In anyone else’s house, it would have been called the living room, but Faye was different. She radiated a sense of having skipped back in time. She was wearing a cotton housedress—the kind that was spattered with giant flowers in garish colors. It was topped with a green cardigan whose front pocket sagged from the weight of an oversized handkerchief. Her white hair was molded into a smooth bun at the back of her head. She might have been in her eighties, or she might have been one hundred and ten. It was hard to tell. Despite her ancient appearance, Faye’s eyes sparkled with vitality. Like her house, they were cornflower blue, and they missed nothing.
The young man who visited her couldn’t have provided a starker contrast. If people were automobiles, he would have been a Corvette to Faye’s Model-T. He had a lean, muscular frame. Not extremely tall but not short either. His dark blonde hair was shaggy and perpetually in need of a barber. Maybe it was an image that Erik wanted to project. He was so good-looking that he didn’t have to worry about how his hair was cut. In his mid-twenties, with green eyes and a cleft in his chin, he was the stuff of which movie idols are made. Whether he was consciously vain was open to question. He liked to pretend he didn’t notice how women reacted to him. He believed he had a mission in life.
Erik removed his suede jacket and tossed it on the couch. His car keys landed on top of the coat.
Faye gestured for him to sit down. “Can I get you a cup of tea, dear?”
She was about to shuffle off to the kitchen, but her guest stopped her. “No thanks, Faye, I’m fine.”
The elderly woman settled herself into a plum armchair opposite him. It had a doily perched on the headrest. The kind that
