"Yes." Kay started to push herself off the couch.
"I'll get it," Diana said. She went to the corner shelf and picked up the portrait. "This is Margie?"
"High school graduation. Yes. See what I mean about her being a plain Jane?" Kay said from the couch.
Diana ignored her, but had to admit, to herself, that nothing stood out about Margie Todd's portrait except her quintessential averageness. She wore her shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle and a turtleneck sweater that nearly covered her chin. Her teeth were slightly crooked, and her eyes, which were close set, appeared to be squinting ever so slightly, as though she were uncertain if she belonged in front of the camera or not.
"She's pretty," Diana said.
"They got their looks from me, and none of us were beauty queens."
Diana picked up another picture. This one showed two children—undoubtedly Margie and her younger sister—playing in a pile of leaves. They looked to be about eight and ten years old respectively.
"That was a happy time," Kay said. "That's about two years before their father died. He took the picture."
"Did you know her friends?"
"I didn't know the girls from college. She rented that room on Poplar Street. She shared a bathroom and a kitchen with some other students." She appeared to be thinking of something. "Hold on a minute."
With some effort, she pushed herself off the couch and went down another hallway where Diana assumed the bedroom was located. Kay's coffee table was covered with celebrity gossip magazines, crossword puzzle books and a copy of the New Cambridge Herald. The baby cried again next door, and this time a dog joined its chorus with a series of quick, sharp barks. Diana looked at the picture of the two Todd children a little longer, and a sweetly painful wave of nostalgia passed through her chest. She didn't even have that much to remember Rachel by. Their childhood didn't have many such memories and not many photographs. As her mother's memory evaporated, there seemed to be less and less evidence that she had had a childhood at all.
"I collected all the articles that were in the paper about Margie's disappearance." Kay reappeared with a thick accordion file in her hand. She held it out to Diana. "They have names of her friends who were interviewed and the names of the people she worked for. I only wish there was more."
"You said she cleaned houses," Diana said.
"Yes. She was working for a family called the Boltons." She still held her cigarette, but before she could take another drag, a wracking coughing fit passed through her body. She hacked and wheezed for several minutes, and Diana wouldn't have been surprised to see her lungs shoot out of her mouth. Diana wondered if she should pound her on the back or fetch a glass of water, but the coughing soon settled down, and Kay acted as though nothing were wrong. "She worked there the day she disappeared."
"Did you know these people?" Diana said.
"Heavens, no." Kay sounded particularly emphatic, as though she wanted Diana to understand this point above all others. "Margie kept her school life separate from her home life. I didn't know her friends or anything about her life at Fields. I think she felt a little ashamed of where she came from. I used to tell her there was nothing wrong with living in a trailer, that what mattered was where you ended up. I don't know if I ever got through to her."
Diana came over and took her seat on the couch again with the folder tucked under her left arm.
"You told me that you had a fight right before she went back to school, and that was the last time you saw her. But you did talk to her after the fight?"
"We talked on the phone a couple of weeks before she disappeared. It was the best conversation we'd had since our fight at Christmas. I just told her that I loved her and supported her whatever she wanted to do. She said she enjoyed working, that it was nice to get up in the morning with a clear purpose and a definite goal. 'It's just cleaning houses, Mom,' she said. 'But it feels good to do something.' I understood. I've worked all my life. She said she liked the people she was working for but might have to move on to another family."
"Why?"
"She didn't say. She didn't act like it was a big deal. In fact, she seemed kind of happy about moving on. I understand that, too. There's something that feels good about leaving one job for a better one. Or one you think is going to be better." She had let the ash build up on her cigarette again. "I called their house, the Boltons. Told them who I was and asked them if they knew what was going on in Margie's life before she disappeared. It's pretty humiliating to have to call strangers and admit that they might know your own daughter better than you do. Believe me, I didn't like it one bit. But I had to call. They had seen her three days a week for the past few months. And they saw her the day she disappeared."
"But they didn't know anything?"