“Her mother came and took her this weekend. Quite right; it’s about time.”
When her students filed in for second period, Rose took attendance and had to be reminded of the presence of two students, whose names she overlooked. She told the class to take out the Versification book. They were reading Frost again today. She had them turn to “The Road Not Taken.” Rose couldn’t focus. What was the rhyme scheme again?
Elicit and evoke, an old teacher of Rose’s used to say. Now she tried; she asked about Frost’s intent. Only two hands went up. She called on a chatty girl named Annie. “We should take chances,” Annie said. “We shouldn’t be frightened by what is less traveled on, what we don’t know.”
“Don’t let the last stanza fool you. Read the poem again. From the top.” Rose missed Helen.
Annie did, more hesitant than the first time, and Rose pointed out that Frost called the other path “just as fair,” and how both paths had been worn “about the same.”
“Frost made it tricky, but the evidence is there. It doesn’t matter which road you take; you take one or the other. But you must take one.”
“Of course it matters,” said Susan Smith. “How can you say that our decisions don’t matter?”
“I didn’t say that. And that’s not what Frost is saying. At the end of the poem, he talks about how he’ll tell the story in the future, with a sigh. He is talking about years from then, is he not? When he returns to that moment, when he revisits that decision. You must make decisions with incomplete information, with what you know at hand. That’s the way life works. Even if it’s paltry.”
“No,” said Susan. “It’s not right.”
“Actually, it is,” Rose said sharply. It was lost on them, this feeling of darkness. Of course it was. When had they ever felt true discomfort? When had any of them been in a situation with only terrible choices? Escape a war. Leave your parents behind. “That’s what the speaker is sighing over, years later. He had to convince himself that one was better. But he had no idea which road to take. This is the lesson. You must pick. Stop your hand-wringing. You must decide.” Her voice was louder than it needed to be.
The young faces looked at her. Annie was scared, Susan sullen, resentful. A few others gazed out the window, doodled in their notebooks, paying little attention. But Rose, feeling the white heat of her own anger course through her, did not care. She folded her arms over her chest. “Any questions?”
13
Los Angeles, 2006
Lizzie didn’t know him but she did. Her recognition registered as sensation, a whistle of breath when the door to the forlorn Hollywood coffee shop opened. In came Detective Gilbert Tandy, the same detective who had shown up at her house the morning after the paintings were stolen, twenty years ago.
The small coffee shop was nestled at the far end of a strip mall next to a cell-phone store at the intersection of Sunset and El Centro. Lizzie’s booth seat was crisscrossed with electrical tape, the worn carpet sticky in spots. Tandy had suggested meeting there.
The detective was a stocky black man with a wide pleasant face. Lizzie had remembered him as much taller. He had a deliberate walk and wore baggy jeans and a pink short-sleeved collared shirt, attire that made Lizzie feel less panicked. Just minutes ago, before he walked in, she’d stared at the front door, stomach lodged in her throat, thinking: I can just get up and leave. But how terrible could it be if he was wearing pink?
“Lizzie Goldstein,” she said, rising to her feet and offering a firm hand.
“Of course,” he said, sliding in across from her. “I remember you. You look the same.”
“Well, that’s nice to say, but I hope not,” she said. “My hair was huge then.”
He didn’t crack a smile. “I’m glad you called. And thanks for meeting me out here. You’re on the Westside?”
“I’m staying there, yes,” she clarified. “I live in New York now.”
He nodded, ordered coffee from the passing waiter.
“I can’t believe how much this neighborhood has changed,” Lizzie said, feeling the need to fill the air. “I just passed Hollywood and Vine and saw condos going up. When I was in high school, I had my car radio stolen a couple blocks from here, on Gower near Melrose. I remember driving around here then and seeing all these women on corners, beautiful women in heels and microskirts leaning into cars, and I remembered thinking: ‘They’re so friendly, giving directions.’”
“Yes, it’s different, at least on the surface,” Tandy said. “But expensive condos just mask crimes of another kind.”
She nodded, her hands nesting the coffee cup. Of course; he was a detective, he probably saw crime everywhere.
“You said on the phone you wanted to talk,” he said.
“I did,” she said, and the air felt warmer. “My father died several months ago.”
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
She nodded. She bunched up her napkin in her lap. “Thank you.”
“Did you come across anything?” He asked this gently.
“What?” Lizzie was still looking down at her napkin. Even that little question made her recoil.
“Did you come across anything that seemed unusual, any payments, any correspondence, anything that you were wondering about?”
“What? No.” A prickly heat coated her neck. She had been dreading such a question long before Tandy had walked in. But she had been expecting it too—she had initiated this meeting, after all, she had chosen to be here—and that only made her want to reject it more forcibly.
“The artwork is still missing; you know that. It’s still an open case.”
“Of course I know that.”
“May I ask you—” And then: “Why did you call me?”
How could she answer that? No part of her wanted to. What was she doing here? Lizzie looked past him toward the front, where an old man in a beret was trying to get himself settled on a stool at the counter. “You want the cottage cheese, Murray?” the waiter asked. “But of course,” she heard the man say.
“So he was a suspect,” she heard herself say, eyes still fixed on Murray.
“He was a person of interest—yes. We were very interested in his story.”
She swung back toward Tandy. “And what about the private investigator? What did he say?”
“What investigator?”
“The one my father hired.”
She felt his eyes on her. “He told you he hired a PI?”
“I heard that he did. To help find the paintings.”
“That would surprise me, immensely,” he said slowly. He sipped his coffee. “I am highly skeptical that he hired an investigator on his own.”
She shook her head, confusion and terror mixing into a new terrible feeling. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. She wanted so badly not to.
“What I’m telling you,” he said, “is what I know: your father did not hire an investigator to look into this case.” There was kindness visible on his face, in his steady gaze, but Lizzie felt herself falling, and that kindness registered as an assault.