Everything that had been hers had the same effect on him, except the old cookie jar. It was in the shape of a head with puffed red cheeks that were supposed to look cheery, but he’d always imagined a sad look in the eyes, and globs of glaze around the lids made them appear to be brimming with tears. It was the only thing he’d taken from the house in Sawyerville, her only possession that didn’t give him the whim-whams.
He couldn’t remember her face, which was another oddity. There were photos of her around the house wearing one of her endless collection of flowered dresses and he’d looked at them, tried to fix the face in his mind. But it was gone the second he looked away, leaving him with an image of a flowered dress and a smear where the head should be.
His father came back on. “Got it, son,” he said happily. “She kept the lease. Kept a lease on a summer house we rented in 1960. Whatta woman! She should’ve been CEO for some big corporation or something.”
“The address, Pop?”
“Lease is between me’n Alan Rodney of Glenvale. It’s for July and August nineteen sixty for five hundred bucks. Can you believe it? Five hundred bucks for a season in a house right on the lake; close enough to spit in it from the back porch. Bet it goes for five thousand nowadays.”
“The address, Pop?”
“Three hundred Lakeshore, Raven Lake.”
10
The wind had shifted by morning, and it was cold and starting to drizzle from sky the color of a cataract when Adam pulled past 300 Lakeshore and parked on the road shoulder.
He couldn’t march up the driveway to the front of the house. She might know why he was there if she saw him, and call for help. He wanted to get into the house without her knowing, if he could, but that meant getting a look at the place first.
The best way was through the woods.
He sprayed on bug-off, got out of the car, and went into the trees. It was easy going at first, then the trees and underbrush thickened, twigs lashed him and caught at his clothes, and decades worth of dead leaves underfoot had gotten slippery in the drizzle. He should have seen the lake by now and started to worry that he’d gone wrong and was paralleling the lake instead of heading toward it. He’d have to go back to the road (if he could find it) and start over, staying closer to the drive. Then he saw a flash of inky water and got his bearings. He veered right, and a few yards more slogging brought him to the clearing and the house.
The house was small and pretty, with a patch of lawn in front and evergreen shrubs along the front porch. But the windows were dark, there was no car in the turnaround, and no garage. You had to have a car out here, so she must have driven into town.
He could’ve passed her car in the Grand Union lot in Raven Lake, or maybe she worked in an office in town or at the little stone bank on the main drag. He didn’t know if she had a job, was old or young, single or married, pretty or plain. He didn’t know anything about her except that she could see what no one else could, and she was dangerous.
Not just dangerous, he thought, and an idea flashed through his head. It came and went before he could catch it, and he told himself it probably didn’t matter anyway. But it did, something in the back of his mind insisted, it mattered a lot.
He tried to recapture it and couldn’t.
If it was important, it would come back to him sooner or later, and he stepped out of the shelter of trees into the clearing.
He didn’t remember the house, or the swing his father said he’d loved. Wrong, Pop, he thought. He’d never loved anything. But he’d played on it, must’ve yelled, “Higher, Daddy, push me higher,” the way kids do. Or more likely, “Higher, Mikey,” since his old man would have been in Sawyerville during the week and sitting on the porch here getting shit-faced on weekends.
And where was his mother all that time?
Inside, he thought. Ironing, baking, cooking, and cleaning. He tried to see her doing it, but only got the usual image of her flowered dress, broad shoulders, and strong pillar of a neck rising to the stocking-mask blur where her face should be.
He passed the swing and went up the porch steps to the front door.
It was locked, but the lock was old; he could get in and be waiting when she got back. He slid his Amoco card out of his wallet, jammed it into the door slot, and pushed. The latch resisted a second, then gave way and snapped back. He froze and listened in case the signs were wrong and she was there after all. He didn’t hear anything except the honk of a lone outrider goose leading the way north for the summer, and he opened the door and entered the house on Raven Lake for the first time in thirty-three years.
There was a small entry with a hooked rug on the floor, and to the right a large sitting room with a stone fireplace, more hooked rugs, and large pieces of furniture covered with dust sheets.
The dust sheets took a second to register, then Adam leaned against the door frame, a little surprised at how disappointed he was. You didn’t cover your furniture with dust sheets to go shopping in town; you did it when you were going away for a long time... or when your last tenant had left, and your next one hadn’t arrived yet. Either way, she was gone. His search wasn’t over, after all. It had just started, and he didn’t know what to do.
Go back, he thought. It was a little after ten; if he left now, he’d be back in Glenvale to talk to Ellen Baines before they brought her lunch.
But he was here; there might be a clue in the house to who she was or where she’d gone. He was also curious if anything about the place would bring back that “best summer ever.”
He pushed himself away from the wall and crossed the sitting room to a rolltop desk in the corner. He avoided the waxed floor that he might leave footprints on and pulled on the gloves he’d brought before he rolled up the top. The drawers were empty but, crumpled in the back of a cubbyhole, he found a 1988 bill from Adirondack Oil marked paid, and a receipt from Raven Lake Ski and Sport dated eleven days ago. It was for $250.00 and made out to S. Klein.
She could be S. Klein or it could be her husband’s name. Someone at Raven Lake Ski and Sport might remember S. Klein spending $250 on item 406 in burgundy. He slipped the receipt in his pocket and went on with the search.
Nothing else at all in the sitting room: The drawers in the tables were empty, the hearth had been swept clean. Nothing in the linen closet or hall closet either, except bent wire hangers.
The first bedroom he came to brought on a sinking sense of recall much stronger than he’d had in Frank’s parking lot six days ago.
He didn’t remember the room, but he knew it had been Mikey’s and his and there’d been bunk beds in place of the neatly made twins with an Adirondack table between them.
He searched the room and only found more twisted hangers casting strange spidery shadows on the closet wall. Then he went on to a hall bathroom that smelled of a new plastic shower curtain they’d put up for the tenants who’d arrive in a van with kids, toys, videos, and the wife’s favorite skillet. The bathroom was spotless. The pebbled window high in the wall was painted shut; the lights and a vent fan came on when he flicked the switch.