This sounded like the beginning of a story. I sat down. “Around here?”
“I grew up here, missy. People used to stay where they were planted. They didn’t run around everywhere.” She sounded tired, and her wrinkled face was thin and drawn.
“What happened to them? Your people?”
“The same thing that happens to us all,” she said. “But a little faster, maybe, than we’d have liked.”
Her eyelids drooped. The apartment around us grew still and I sat and listened to the old woman’s shallow breathing. The dense quiet reminded me of when my mother and I whispered around the closed door of the bedroom while my dad slept off a bad night, both of us trying to stay as still and small as we could. At a certain age, I’d enjoyed these times, like a game. Later, not so much. And now—I would have given anything not to imagine the moment I might have sat by my elderly mother as she napped on the couch, a future no longer possible. What if I had talked her into coming with us? What if she had lived a long life, without me there? In my old town, people cast off were sent to a home on the river, the loony bin. That place, Riverdale, was a cruel taunt, a threat. At least I was glad I’d never have to see my mother placed there.
We sat for a long while until I thought Margaret had fallen asleep. When I went to get up, she reached out to grab my knee.
“I don’t think I ever ate that soup,” she said.
Margaret fed and tucked in again, I returned to the apartment to find the time had moved maddeningly onward without me. I had less than an hour to work before Joshua’s footsteps brought the outside world into the apartment again.
I dumped the mail onto the table and sat down to the neglected in-box, but my gaze transferred to my computer screen. What do you want to know? Kent had asked. And he hadn’t been talking about Charity Jordan’s death or Aidan Ransey’s disappearance. He had meant mine.
A few keystrokes and I was looking at the website for the Vilas County News-Review. The news, always the same. Fund-raisers. Fishing tournaments. School-board minutes. Lake houses for sale. Family names I should remember. I still felt nervous to click through the pictures of arrests, awards, weddings, deaths—as though someone on the other side could see me peeking. I rarely saw the names I wanted to see—or didn’t want to see—in the news. What was Ray doing? Theresa? Such quiet lives, if they still lived there. I checked the clock and searched for their names directly. Addresses in Sweetheart Lake for both. They still lived there. They still lived.
I had to force myself to close the window and get some work done. Even a little.
I sorted the day’s mail and plucked out a stationery-sized envelope. A lonelyhearts request. My ladies in anguish and doubt. That seemed like an easy, welcome task.
The letter was from a woman in San Francisco who wanted to know if she should marry her boyfriend. She had included several samples of the man’s handwriting, copies of scrawled lists and a signature ripped from what seemed a very formal document, as well as a short note on stationery that was signed with a simple Charles. I looked first at the woman’s note asking for help, noting the large, looping scroll of her letters with interest. Nothing too crazy there; the request was an honest one. Her signature appeared again on the check, which I set aside.
Now: Charles. The formal signature was sloppy, a little impatient. As though he’d had to sign the document in several places. The list was a set of notes from a household project of some kind, a checklist of purchases to make at the hardware store. I started to get a feel for Charles, for the ebb and flow of his hand on paper.
Then I took up the personal note. An original. An original was always better. There was always some doubt with a copy. Copies could be tampered with, for one thing. Part of the paper could be missing, or the whole thing could be constructed from multiple samples. Sometimes people sent me patchwork pieces in order to test my abilities. I could always tell them more about the owner of the handwriting than they had expected, and then I could tell them quite a bit about themselves, if they wanted to know.
In Charles’s note, the script had strong lines. He had a very nice hand, actually, all the markers open and charitable. Why had the woman even thought to solicit my services? That’s the sort of thing I wished my clients would put into their requests. But they didn’t, because it might lead me down some path—like telling the palm reader that you were most worried about money and having her give happy predictions on your financial troubles. They didn’t want to give me any signposts so they could be sure my work was genuine, not the work of a shyster. They believed enough to send me money, but they didn’t believe enough to send clues.
I reached for the laptop to type up a response, but paused over the personal note Charles had written. I hadn’t really read it before as much as parse its construction, a set of dots and lines that added up to a message for someone else. It was the encoding that I was paid to tear down, not the text. But a word had caught my attention: sweetheart.
I had a real dread of the word, but tried not to get distracted from Charles. Sweetheart seemed like a word Charles meant.
Satisfied, I typed up the response. This man is a keeper. Congratulations on your engagement. I finished it off with a couple of specific notes about Charles’s handwriting so that his new fiancée felt that she had received her money’s worth. But I knew the sentence that the woman would come back to again and again in the future. A keeper. It occurred to me how less than qualified I was to say so.
I set Charles aside and tore through a few more easy tasks, questions that needed a fast answer and a renewal of a discreet magazine ad that attracted the lonelyhearts. I could stand to see more letters from people like Charles.
Then I turned to email and picked through what was there until I saw a new message from Kent, recent. The Chicago businessman had some concerns about the assessment I’d done on the threatening letter he’d received. Did I have anything else to add to the report?
Without going back to my notes or files, I remembered the thoroughness with which I’d studied that letter, the careful thought I’d given in honor of the debt I owed Kent. I remembered all the thought I’d put into those gaps in the descenders of his f’s and g’s, how I worried over my access to that information about the author. I emailed back a quick reply, hiding my frustration and offering to take another look if Kent wanted me to. It was professional courtesy to offer, even if there was nothing more I could say.
I HEARD JOSHUA arriving home from the bus stop long before he got to the door. Maybe Margaret had a point about the noise he generated.
The door swung wide, hitting the back of one of the dining chairs. “Shit,” he said.
“Joshua.”