Blackberry Winter

Chapter 16




CLAIRE

Istuffed a piece of pizza in my mouth, then washed it down with a sip of red wine. “He called,” I said to Abby. We both sat on the floor in front of the TV in my apartment, pizza box open on the coffee table, wine bottle at the ready.

“Wait,” she said. “Which one?”

“Ethan.”

“And?”

“He left two voice mails. The first: ‘Claire, I stayed at my parents’ suite at the hotel last night after the party. Had too many drinks. You understand.’”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

I frowned. “It gets worse. The second, which I just got an hour ago, went like this: “Claire, I’m heading to Portland tonight for a conference. Will be back on Sunday.”

Abby shook her head. “What conference?”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I did some searching, and take a wild guess.”

“No,” Abby said. “Don’t tell me he went with—”

“Cassandra? You guessed it. Well, I’m not one hundred percent certain, but the only conference that I could find in Portland is a food writers’ convention. So, you do the math.”

“That doesn’t bode well,” Abby said, taking a sip of wine. “If it’s true.”

I shrugged. “After seeing them together last night, I have no doubt it is.”

I set my foot on the lower ledge of the coffee table and a stack of photo albums toppled over onto the rug. One flipped open, spreading its pages out as if to taunt me. I picked it up and leaned over the page. There we were, Ethan and I on our wedding day, I in my strapless white gown. Ethan’s mother had made a fuss about strapless being inappropriate in a Catholic church, but Ethan had put a stop to it. He’d been on my team. I longed for those days. I longed for him. I ran my hand along the photo, letting my finger rest on his cheek. I’d tucked a photo of my grandparents on their wedding day next to ours when I put the album together. The black-and-white print had faded over the years. I’d looked at it hundreds of times as a girl, memorizing the look of love on both of their faces. True love. But not until that moment did I notice a piece of paper in my grandmother’s hands. I squinted, trying to make out the words.

“Abby, look at this,” I said, pointing to the photo. “Can you tell what that says?”

She reached for her glasses on the table and took the album in her hands. “Well,” she said, “I think it says, ‘Sonnet 43.’”

“What does that mean?”

“A little rusty on our English lit, are we?” she said in a mocking voice.

I rolled my eyes. “Well, while you were reciting poetry, I was hunched over the copy desk, line-editing the newspaper. There wasn’t time for fluff.” Abby had been an English literature major, while I had taken the journalism track. It was a long-running feud.

“All right, all right,” she said. “But do you want to know what this is or not?”

“Fill me in, Shakespeare.”

Abby smirked. “It’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning, silly. You know, the famous poem, ‘How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.’”

“Oh,” I said, remembering it in an instant. “I do know that one.”

“Of course you do,” she continued. “It’s only the most important love poem in the history of love poems.” She pulled up the verse on her phone and read out the lines.

I leaned back against the couch, keeping my wineglass close at hand. “How romantic,” I said, glancing at the photo again. “I bet she read it to him at their reception.”

Abby nodded. “You can see the words echoing in his ears. Look at his face. He cherishes her.”

“He did,” I said. “It’s all Mom talked about growing up, which is why she’s had two failed marriages, I think. She could never find her prince charming the way Grandma did.” I sighed, closing the album.

Abby leaned her head against my shoulder. “What are you thinking about?”

“I’m afraid of failing, Abs. I’m afraid that our marriage was put to the test, and it wilted under pressure.”

Abby opened up the album again, pointing to the black-and-white photo. “I don’t care how perfect you say their marriage was; I’m sure they had their own problems.”

I gave her a doubtful look.

“Listen, I know you, Claire, and I know you love Ethan deeply. So why not fight for him? Cassandra has her hooks in him, but only because you stepped aside.”

I took a bite of pizza crust and then tossed it back into the box, thinking of the fine food she and Ethan were probably enjoying at the conference. “So what do you think I should do? Drive down there?”

“No, but for starters, you could return his call,” she said. “He’s called you, what, twice now and left messages?”

“Yeah.”

Abby grinned. “Call him.”

I picked up my cell phone and scrolled to his number. The connection went through, and my heart beat the way it would when calling someone after a first date. After the third ring, however, I let out a disappointed sigh.

“Voice mail,” I mouthed to Abby.

“Leave him a message,” she whispered.

I shook my head.

“Do it!”

“Uh, Ethan, this is Claire. I got your messages. Listen, when you get back from the, um, conference, can we talk? I miss you.” I paused, and Abby poked me in the thigh. “And I love you.”

“There,” I said. “I sounded like a total idiot. Are you happy?”

“Good girl,” she said, refilling my wineglass.

A moment later my cell phone buzzed. The vibration startled me and I spilled wine on the coffee table as I reached for the phone. Abby sopped up the mess with a stack of napkins by the pizza box. I looked at the screen. “Abby, it’s him.”

The phone buzzed again. “Well, aren’t you going to answer it?”

I took a deep breath and picked up, holding the phone to my ear. “Hi Ethan.” I couldn’t wait to hear his voice, to hear him tell me how much he missed me, that the message I’d left had touched him. After all, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d uttered the words I love you.

But instead of his voice on the line, I heard only commotion, a distant jostling sound. I detected the jingle of car keys, then a door slamming. “Ethan?” I said. “Can you hear me?” I turned to Abby dejectedly. “I think it’s a pocket call.” I continued to listen until I thought I heard the muffled sound of a female voice.

I hung up.

“What happened? What did he say?”

I wiped a tear from my cheek, before pushing the photo album away with my foot. “I think he’s with her.”

“How do you know?” Abby said.

I folded my arms, staring ahead, crestfallen. “There was a woman in the background.”

“Claire, it could have been anyone. Maybe it was a waitress at a restaurant.”

I shook my head. “No. It was her. I know it was.”

Abby held out her hand. “Not yet,” she said. “Don’t mourn the marriage yet. Don’t write the obituary. Wait until he’s back from Portland. Talk to him. Then make your decision.”

I shrugged.

“For now, we’ll have pizza and wine.” She reached for the remote control. “And Lifetime Original Movies.”

I sighed, never more grateful for my friend than at that moment.



Before my trip to see Lillian Sharpe in Windermere on Sunday morning, I stopped at the assisted living facility where Ethan’s grandfather was recovering. After the terse exchange with Glenda at the hospital, boundary lines had been drawn, and it was clear I was to leave Warren well enough alone. But he’d called me over the weekend. He missed me. For Warren, I decided to break the rules.

“How are you?” he said as I entered. He motioned me toward the bed. The room resembled a hospital with a few extra furnishings—a sofa, a mini-refrigerator, and a dresser and closet.

“I’ve been better,” I said. “I’m researching a story that’s turning out to be quite a goose chase.”

“Oh?”

Before I could give him the details, my phone rang. I pulled it from my bag. “Ethan,” I said to Warren, dismissing the call and tossing the phone back into my purse.

“I’ve been worried about you two,” he said. “Marriage trouble?”

I sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Let me tell you about my wife,” he said, smiling up at a spot on the wall, as if he could see his beloved there gazing back at him. “Annie was a lot like you. Spirited. Driven. A bit of a temper.”

I grinned. “I would have liked her.”

“You would have loved her, Claire. She was passionate about life, just as she was passionate about me.”

The phone rang beside his bed. “Now, who would that be?” he said, giving the phone a puzzled look. He picked up. “Hello?” He paused for a long moment, his eyes showing signs of disappointment. “I can’t believe you didn’t find it…. You thought this was it…. All right…. No, now is not the time for…I’ll call you later.”

I occupied myself with a magazine on the side table, wondering what Warren was talking about.

He turned back to me. “I’m sorry about that. Now, where were we?”

“Your wife,” I said.

“Ah, yes, my wife.”

I patted his arm. “I bet you miss her so much.”

“I do,” he said. “Losing your true love is like losing your right hand. It feels just like that. Everything takes more effort. Everything feels different when she’s gone.”

“I’ve never thought about it that way.”

He nodded. “I want to tell you something.” He clasped his hands together. “A few years after she and I were married, we separated.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “What happened?”

“She left me,” he said. “I didn’t have an affair, mind you, but I did have an inappropriate friendship with a woman. A secretary at the office.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Inappropriate?”

“I was dumb as a doornail. Thirty-year-old men are, you know.”

I nodded in agreement.

“It started out innocently enough,” he continued. “I’d stay late at work. We’d flirt. Then we started having drinks together after hours. I was playing with fire. Well, Annie found out, and you can believe she was livid. She packed her bags and moved back home with her mother.

“So you think I should move out?”

“No,” he said. “I’m just saying that when I lost Annie for that short period of time, I realized how precious she was to me. I never forgot that lesson. We both loved each other more for that early blip in our marriage. Annie came to appreciate it, actually.”

“I wish I could imagine that happy ending,” I said. “Ethan seems to have a different outcome in mind.”

A nurse came in and gestured to the clock. “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Kensington, but it’s time for your physical therapy.”

He nodded and held up his finger. “Just a minute.” Then to me he said, “Call him back. Give him one more chance to prove himself. Think of me and Annie.”

I hugged him. “You’re right. Thanks, Warren.”

The nurse helped him out of his bed. “You know, they’re wasting their time on me,” he said playfully. “I’m an old geezer.”

“An old geezer who needs his physical therapy,” the nurse sparred back.

Warren winked at me. “We didn’t get a chance to talk about your article,” he said.

“Glenda will be glad,” I replied. “She forbade me from bothering you with any of my—what did she call it?—oh yes, ‘drama.’”

“To hell with Glenda,” he said without mincing words. He loved his daughter-in-law, I knew that, but not her meddling ways. “Come back and tell me about your story as soon as you can.”

I nodded. “I will.”

“Now, call that husband of yours,” he said as the nurse led him out the door. “Promise?”

“Promise.”



The cab dropped me off in front of Lillian Sharpe’s home in Windermere, the kind of neighborhood my parents might have driven through on Sundays when I was a kid, daydreaming about a better life. I looked up at the enormous home. Lillian had been right; it had the look of a place that hadn’t seen visitors in a very long time. The paint peeled. The moss-covered shingles on the roof looked weary. And while the grass had been mowed and the beds weeded, the garden didn’t appear to be loved the way the neighboring yards did. I stared at the empty driveway and looked at my watch. Five minutes early. I sat on the stoop, waiting for Lillian to arrive. My heart fluttered thinking about how I might be one step closer to understanding why Daniel Ray had disappeared.

Moments later, a gray Volvo sedan barreled into the driveway; a woman with bobbed white hair sat behind the wheel. She stepped out of the car and greeted me with a warm smile. “You must be Claire.”

“Yes,” I said, walking toward her with an outstretched hand. “Thank you so much for meeting me here. I hope it wasn’t an inconvenience.”

“Not at all, dear,” she said, staring up at the old house, then exhaling deeply. “My, I have missed this place.”

“You raised your family here?”

“I did,” she said. “Two sons.”

“When did you and your husband move out?”

She paused for a moment. “My first husband died,” she said. “Some time ago. I remarried last year.” She sighed, looking up at the house. “I haven’t been able to bring him here. Of course, I want to share it with him, as I want to share everything with him, but I worry that I may need to keep this place to myself.” She shook her head. “Too many memories.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Well,” Lillian said, “listen to me blabbering. You’ve come to look for information, and I’d like to help you find it. My father had the most interesting career. He was a partner in the largest law firm in Seattle—Sharpe, Sanford, and O’Keefe—but he always had time for the little guy. He took on cases even when he knew he wouldn’t get paid for them. He was a good man.” She walked to the front door of the house, inserting a key into the lock. “Here we are, home sweet home.” Her voice echoed against the lonely walls.

I followed her inside, brushing a cobweb from the doorway. The hardwood floors creaked beneath my feet. Everywhere furniture was covered in white fabric. “It must have been a wonderful home to raise a family in,” I said, imagining the sound of little boys’ laughter in the air.

“Yes,” Lillian said, reminiscing. “We had so much happiness here.” She pointed to a hallway ahead. “My father’s records are down this way. He was fastidious about his files. Kept copies of every document relating to each case he ever took on. Few attorneys bothered with such documentation back then, but my father cared about details. Besides, there had been too many strange incidents with the police department. Corruption, Father believed.” She nodded. “He always kept records in case anyone tried to falsify a document.”

She stopped in front of a room at the east end of the house. I watched as she began to turn the door handle, pushing against it with her frail arm, but it stuck. “That’s strange,” she said. “It’s almost as if something’s blocking the opening.”

“Let me try.” I reached for the handle and gave the door a solid shove. Whatever lay behind it was heavy, but I pushed hard until the offending object budged, opening up enough space for Lillian and me to squeeze through.

Lillian gasped. “My God. What’s happened in here?”

Glass lay on the floor in jagged shards. “Be careful,” I said, pointing to a sharp piece right in front of her feet. A window had been broken; it didn’t have the look of an accident. On the floor lay dozens of overturned boxes, spilling out reams of paperwork and files.

Lillian raised her hand to her mouth. “Who would do this?”

I held out my arm to steady her. “Someone who wanted information your father had.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “All these years, the house has never been tampered with, not once, and now this?”

I knelt down, pushing some of the papers, ankle deep, aside. I picked up a page, holding it up to Lillian. “The State vs. Edward Ainsburg.” I sighed. “Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack.”

I attempted to sort through the paperwork before rising to my feet again. “Whoever was here was looking for something. Maybe they didn’t find it.” I turned to Lillian. “Any chance that he kept his files elsewhere in the house?”

“No,” she said, visibly startled by the disarray, the intrusion.

I knelt back down. “All right, it’s at least worth a try. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

Lillian paused. “Wait…. Yes, there is one place we might look. How could I forget? Come with me.”

We walked up a set of stairs to a room filled with books. I marveled at the old leather-bound volumes that clung to the high shelves. If I lived in the home, I’d spend most of my time there, I decided.

“It’s Father’s old library,” she said, smiling. “After he passed, when Bill, my first husband, and I moved here, we kept this room exactly as it was. I wouldn’t let him remove a single book.” She closed her eyes. “I didn’t want to lose a single piece of him.” She ran her hand along the bookcase, reading every groove, every notch with her fingertips.

I took a step closer. “What are you looking for?”

Lost in thought, she didn’t answer. But a moment later, one of the shelves shifted. “Found it!” she cried.

I watched with anticipation as the shelf pushed inward, revealing a space behind the wall.

“It’s where he kept the family’s valuables,” she said. “Funny, I’d almost forgotten about this place. Come in and have a look with me.”

I crouched down and followed her inside the space, about the size of a typical bedroom closet. A sweet, musty scent lingered. Lillian pointed to a square shadow high on the shelf. “His cigars,” she said, taking the box down and holding it to her nose.

I turned back to the doorway, feeling the urge to wedge it open. I didn’t want to take the chance of being locked behind a wall. And if someone had broken into the home, what if they returned? What if they—

“It must feel a little spooky in here,” Lillian said.

“Well,” I replied, “a little.”

“I spent hours in this little room as a girl,” she said. “Father let my friend Martha and me play dolls in here while he worked. He’d light a little kerosene lantern for us. We had the most fun.”

My heart beat faster as I scanned the dim space, wishing for more light than the tiny stream from the room behind us provided. It didn’t take long for defeat to set in. The space had obviously been cleaned out at some point. What remained—a framed photo of a woman, a pair of faded opera tickets, a child’s wooden train—was merely memorabilia from long ago.

“I’m sorry,” Lillian said. “I had hoped you might find something of importance in here.” She turned to the doorway, just as something caught my eye.

“Wait,” I said. Shrouded in shadows, the outlines of a dark, rectangular shape came into focus. I knelt down and reached my arm out until my fingers touched what felt like leather. I detected a clasp and a handle. “Could this be an old briefcase?”

Lillian squinted to make out the shape. “Why, yes,” she said. “Father took it to work every day.”

I followed her back out to the library, opening the case with eager hands. Inside, a bundle of twine-bound papers waited, as neatly stacked as the day they’d been tucked inside. I tugged on the knot, but it didn’t loosen, so I attempted to pry it off from the sides, leaving a fresh paper cut on my index finger. “Ouch,” I said, shaking my hand.

I tried again, this time more carefully, and succeeded. Lillian leaned over me as I fanned the stack of pages, at least two inches thick. I shook my head in astonishment when I read the words on the first page: “Deposition of Sven W. Ivanoff.”

“My God,” I said, gasping. “We’ve found it.”

Lillian sat down on an upholstered bench near the door. It was a lot of excitement for someone of her age, and I worried about her.

“They’re the files you were looking for?”

“Yes,” I said. I skimmed the first page, nodding. “It seems your father may have represented the suspect in the murder case of Vera Ray, the mother of the little boy who went missing in 1933.”

Lillian’s face looked ashen. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I’m trying to make sense of why he decided to hide them away here.”

I shook my head. “I think there’s more to this story than everyone believed, and perhaps your father knew that. Maybe he wanted to prove it.” I looked at her. “Do you remember your father talking about any case more than another?

“No,” she said. “He suffered from dementia. It came early, in his sixties. We lost many good years with him, sadly. There might have been cases he intended to work on, but never got to. I’m not certain. But he wouldn’t have put something in the space behind the wall unless it held great importance to him.”

My grandfather had also had dementia. Grandma had started to notice when he kept putting cereal boxes in the refrigerator. Maybe Lillian’s father had simply tucked the files away for no apparent reason, or maybe he had known his mind was ailing and was attempting to preserve them before someone else destroyed the truth. The air in the room felt thick, eerily so. I tucked the loose pages back inside the briefcase and stood up. “Do you mind if I take these with me and go through them at the office? I’ll return them to you, of course. And I promise to keep them safe.”

“Yes, dear,” she said. “If you feel you can bring the truth to light, keep them. My father would be glad to know they’re in good hands.”

We walked out to the stairway, and I looked over my shoulder, feeling the urge to run, to leave the home as quickly as my feet could carry me, but I kept my pace slow and steady.

When we made our way back outside, where the birds chirped and the sun shone down on my face, I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Can I drive you back, honey?” Lillian asked, walking to the car.

“That would be wonderful, thank you,” I said, opening the passenger door of the Volvo. I turned to look at the house a final time, eyeing the upper bedrooms cautiously. Are we being watched? Silly, I told myself. As Lillian pulled the car out of the driveway, I clasped the briefcase tighter in my arms, knowing I was in possession of something very important. It was up to me to find out why.



Just as I sat down at my desk back at the office, my phone rang. I picked it up, annoyed. I didn’t want to do anything but immerse myself in the contents of the briefcase.

“Claire?” Ethan’s voice sounded far away. A world away. “Honey.”

My heart softened, but I remained silent.

“I tried you at home. I didn’t think I’d find you in the office on a Sunday. I miss you.”

He got my voice message. “I’m working on a story. I miss you too,” I said, caving, willing away the jealousy, the anger that had taken up residence in my heart. I wanted to ask him what he was doing in Portland, and whether Cassandra was part of the equation, but I bit my tongue.

“I spent all day yesterday interviewing candidates for the Journalists’ Guild Scholarship,” he said. “It was grueling.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling relieved. “I thought you were—”

“I’m coming home on the train tonight. I’d love it if we could have dinner.”

My eyes brightened. “You would?”

“Yes,” he continued. “That is, if you want to.”

“I do.”

“Seven o’clock, the Pink Door?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be waiting.”

I hung up the phone and redirected my attention to the briefcase. Lillian’s father had carried it with him every day of his working life, no doubt. It felt a little like looking inside an old doctor’s bag. You couldn’t pull out the stethoscope without thinking of the physician who had held it up to hearts hundreds of times over. Yes, I could feel Lillian’s father’s presence. Secrets waited inside this case, and I think he wanted me to find them.