So yeah, I can probably go home. But I won’t. Not yet.
Aiden’s surely not home, after all. What better time to visit his house again?
85
I PARK MY car on the shoulder of the road, just as I did last night, and I approach his house with caution, just as before.
First blush, I see nothing different about Aiden’s house. The front window through which I climbed, almost grabbing Aiden as he raced past me to his bedroom, is still open. If Aiden had come back, surely he would have closed it.
Same deal in the backyard. His bedroom window still open.
Isaac didn’t close up the house? Not his job, I suppose. And he was probably distracted.
Or maybe not. Maybe he knew I’d come back. Maybe I’m walking into a trap.
The front window would be an easier entry point, but the backyard is more private, nothing but a sloping yard and swaying trees, and total darkness.
I climb into the bedroom and stand for a moment, silent. Hard to hear much of anything inside the house. Wind coming in from windows in the front and back, simultaneously, like the entire house is whistling to me.
Daylight will come in an hour. I want to be home by then.
Start with the bedroom. A battered dresser with a framed photograph on top, one of those side-by-side frames. On the left, a beautiful young woman, probably in her late teens, with strawberry-blond hair and elegant features. On the right, the same woman, propped up against pillows in a hospital bed, her face pale, her hair unkempt, no makeup, but a radiant, beaming smile as she holds a newborn. Pretty much a standard postbirth hospital photo.
I remove the hospital photo and flip it over. On the back, handwritten in cheap blue ink:
Aiden and Mommy, 6-8-81
Aiden as a baby. And this very attractive woman, his mother. He doesn’t look a thing like her.
Then again, I haven’t seen the father yet.
I replace the photos and open some drawers, having no interest in his clothes or underwear but hoping for anything else that might be tucked away in here.
When I get to the final drawer, I don’t find clothes at all. I find a small photo album, a cheap one you’d get at a convenience store with plastic sleeves to hold the photos.
Most of them are of his mother, going back as far as the hospital photo. Little Aiden, with those raccoon eyes even as an infant, appears once or twice. And I get the first shot of the father, his cheek pressed against Aiden’s, smiling for the camera. A strong resemblance to Aiden, deep-set eyes and straw-colored hair, not by any means a handsome man.
But the mother dominates these photos. About twenty photos in all. Starting with the hospital and moving forward, chronologically I assume, but—
But she looks different as time moves on in these photos. Not older, but different. Hard to tell how much she has aged—not too much, a year or two, at most—but a definite change. Her eyes darker, deeper. Looking more gaunt, more tired.
Sick? Can’t tell, but—darker, for sure. More troubled, more weary, as the photos progress, like I’m watching the story of her decline in time-lapse photography.
And then the last photo, her head turned from the camera, her hand raised in a stop gesture, as if she didn’t want to be photographed.
And a baby bump, unmistakable, protruding from her belly, beneath her black T-shirt.
My heartbeat kicks up. A second child?
The last page doesn’t contain photos. It contains two news clippings, one of them a vertical column, the other merely a headline and photo. Old articles, each of them, faded, with the crispy texture of aged newspaper.
The vertical column, stapled to the album page, has this headline:
Hit-and-Run Kills BH Woman
They’re talking about Aiden’s mother. Gloria Willis, age thirty, of Bridgehampton, pronounced dead at Southampton Hospital after being hit by a car on Sugar Hill Road the previous night. The article claims she had several priors for prostitution and drug possession. Her blood analysis revealed the presence of narcotics and alcohol in her system at the time of her death.
The article is cut out of the bottom quarter of a newspaper page, so there’s no date. But it can’t be that hard to find out when Aiden’s mother died.
Gloria Willis was a drug addict and a prostitute?
Holden VI liked prostitutes. It seemed to be a family trait, in fact.
The other news clipping isn’t even an article. It’s a photo, likewise ripped from the center of the newspaper and thus undated. The photo shows Uncle Lang, in his chief’s uniform, holding a child swaddled in blankets.
Beneath it, this caption:
Newborn Abandoned at Police Station
Southampton Town Police Chief Langdon James holds a newborn child, left abandoned at the entrance to the Bridgehampton substation last night. The infant will be turned over to the Suffolk County Division of Child Protective Services.