That was what was missing from Catherine Broward, that energy. Whatever it was that had really happened to her, it had left her depleted. And Lydia suspected that as she had moved from city to city, she had jettisoned things. Probably the first she would have thrown out were the very things Lydia could have used: receipts, canceled checks, letters.
Lydia opened the dresser drawers, but found nothing except the usual clothes, folded as though for display. She looked in the closet. The clothes were all hung with the same care, the shoes lined up underneath. On the shelf above, her light settled on some shoeboxes, so she reached for one. It did not feel as though it contained shoes, so she brought it down and opened it. The box was filled with bank statements. She looked at the front one, then at the one in the back, and saw that Catherine’s filing system must have been determined by the size of her shoeboxes. She had kept her statements as long as they still fit, which was about three years. Lydia looked in the next box, which was full of canceled checks.
Lydia held the light in her mouth and fingered back through the checks to last August, when Mark Romano had died. But Catherine had been gone a couple of months before, so Lydia pulled out July, June, and May too. She put the stack of checks into her purse, then reached up for the third box. It was full of photographs. The oldest were from Catherine’s childhood. The later ones had more clarity and the color got better and better because of the improvements in technology. There were a few of her as a teenager clowning with friends, then a prom picture, and a few of Catherine as a college student with some different friends. Lydia had no trouble identifying Catherine’s sister.
When Lydia reached Mark Romano’s era, she recognized him from the dim videotape. She studied the pictures to get a clearer look at his face. Sarah’s description had barely done him justice. For the first time during this case, Lydia understood what had happened to Catherine Broward. A man that handsome would be nearly impossible to resist. A woman with any imagination at all would be able to think up enough excuses for him to keep herself fooled for years. She sighed. A boyfriend who was too handsome was not a problem Lydia Jean Marks was going to have in this life. If this one was what they were like, maybe it was just as well.
She leafed through more photographs, and began to see more pictures of Romano and Catherine together: the dead couple at play on a beach, in a park, at a party. Instinctively-maybe because she knew a bit about him, and maybe because she identified with any woman who had been treated that way-she found herself hating Mark. She liked Catherine. In the pictures she had a good-natured face rather than a beautiful one, and the tapes had shown a body that was nice, but not spectacular. She looked like a good companion, a person who could tell a funny story.
As Lydia looked at the pictures, she noticed that she was feeling sleepy. If she had known she would be doing this, she would not have had wine with dinner at the hotel. When Mark’s time was up, the pictures ended. There were none that seemed to have been taken after that. She selected the photographs she wanted and put the rest back.
She kept searching the apartment patiently and carefully, but increased her pace. When she ran out of shoeboxes she stood on a chair to be sure she had found everything on the upper shelf. She looked under the frame of the futon, in the cupboards of the little kitchen. All she found confirmed the sparse and frugal tone of the place: a set of four plates, a set of four glasses, a set of four coffee cups and saucers. There were no more papers.
Lydia took a final look around her with her flashlight, wishing she had brought Bobby Mallon with her to see this place. Maybe he would have understood the girl better. Catherine had prepared everything she was leaving behind, absolutely certain that the next visitors would arrive after she was dead. By the time Bobby Mallon had seen her, there was nothing he could have done that would have changed anything.
Lydia used her flashlight to take a last look in her purse, ticking off the things she had kept: a good, clear photograph of Mark Romano and a good one of Catherine Broward, both from sometime late in their relationship; one of them together taken at a beach; the most recent bank statement from the shoebox; a stack of checks. She told herself that taking these things didn’t matter. The negatives for the pictures were still in the box in envelopes, the bank statement could be duplicated, and the checks were a year old. Taking them was a felony, but so was being here at all. There was no use for them except to somebody who was examining Catherine Broward’s death in detail, and nobody seemed to think there was anything left to know except Robert Mallon.
“You were in her apartment?” Mallon was incredulous. “You broke in?”
Lydia said, “Breaking in sounds a lot more interesting than what I did. Nothing is broken. Nobody will notice I was there, and what I took is of no value to anyone but us.”
Mallon watched as Lydia opened the plain manila envelope she carried, and began placing things on the table near the window that overlooked the bungalow’s little garden. “Here. Take a look,” she said.
Mallon studied the photographs. The two with Catherine Broward in them were painful to look at. This was a version of the sensation he had sometimes felt when he saw pictures of happy Europeans taken just before World War II. In the midst of this happiness, did they have any tiny feeling that something was coming, any fear that something about this day wasn’t quite right?
He took his eyes off Catherine Broward and studied the boyfriend. The photograph was clearer and brighter than the videotape had been. Romano had been tall, lean, and well-formed, his face almost too good, too big-eyed and perfect, so his looks almost crossed the line and became feminine. He had the sort of appearance that teenaged girls liked-the look of a boy, really, because boys weren’t as frightening as men.
There was a bank statement. Mallon looked at the address of the branch in West Los Angeles and saw that the date was only a month ago. There were about fifteen checks written for sums that invited him to identify them. Eleven hundred near the end of the month was her rent, because it was even. Thirteen hundred eighty-two and forty-nine cents on the third was a credit card bill that had arrived on the first. One twenty-seven thirteen was probably electricity. It couldn’t have been gas because it was summer and she would have used no heat. His eyes stopped at the balance, a bit over one hundred and twelve thousand dollars. There had been one deposit: twenty thousand even on the first of the month.
Lydia seemed to have read his expression. “The balance?”
“That and the only deposit.”
“The deposit is the same every month. I think it’s a trust fund. She and her sister probably each got twenty thousand a month. I could see from the apartment that she didn’t spend much, so the balance tended to grow on her. Now and then she would write a check to move some to a savings account. If she moved it from there, I didn’t see the record. She doesn’t seem to have been an investor: she didn’t have much interest in the distant future.”
Mallon was silent.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m trying to catch up. I guess I never thought of her in those terms. For a young woman who worked as a waitress, she was pretty wealthy.”