“I know you two need to talk,” Aunt Aline says, still with a hint of a Brazilian accent, “so I’m going to take a walk.”
Aline power-strides up the drive wearing running shoes, a tight Lycra top, and yoga pants. I watch her for a moment, impressed with what I see, as Patricia sidles next to me.
“Are you ogling my mother?”
“She’s also my aunt,” I say.
“That’s not really an answer.”
I kiss her cheek, and we step inside. We now stand in the foyer where her father was killed. Neither of us is superstitious, so it isn’t a question of bad luck or ghosts or whatever woo-woo nonsense often sends people away from something like this, but I have always wondered about something more concrete — the memory. Patricia, who lives here alone, had watched her father get murdered in this spot. Isn’t that something to avoid?
Years ago, I asked her about that.
“I like the reminder. It fuels me.”
Her devotion to the cause crosses the border into obsession, but that is the case with most worthwhile endeavors. Cousin Patricia and the Abeona Shelters she has built do good. Legitimately. I know her work well and support it.
I tell her all that I’ve learned.
The wall in this front foyer is something of a shrine to Patricia’s father. Uncle Aldrich took photography somewhat seriously, and while I don’t know much about how such things are judged, his work is considered substantial. The foyer is loaded up with black-and-white prints, mostly ones he took during his long sojourn in South America. The subjects are varied — landscapes, urban squalor, indigenous tribes.
To complete the shrine effect, the framed photographs surround a single shelf that holds but one item: Uncle Aldrich’s beloved camera — a rectangular-shaped Rolleiflex with twin lenses, the kind you hold at chest level rather than up to your eye. That’s how I still see Aldrich clearest when I think back on him, with this camera that seemed dated even in its heyday, carefully snapping portraits of the family and, as I mentioned earlier, Lockwood Estate in general.
“What’s our next step?” Patricia asks when I finish.
“I’m going to talk to the security guard at Haverford who was tied up during the art heist.”
She frowns. “Why?”
“We now have a link between the Haverford heist and what happened in this very room. We have to go back and review it all.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
She doesn’t sound convinced. I ask her why.
“I never put what happened here fully behind me, of course,” she says, weighing her words before they leave her mouth, “but over the years, I think I’ve successfully channeled it.”
I tell her she has.
“I... I just don’t want anything interrupting that.”
“Not even the truth?” I say, realizing how overly melodramatic that sounds.
“I’m curious, of course. And I want justice. But...” Her voice tails off.
“Interesting,” I say.
“What?”
“My father wants me to drop this too.”
“Whoa, Win, I’m not saying I want you to drop it.” Then, thinking about it, she adds, “Is your father worried how this will all reflect on the family?”
“Always and forever.”
“And that’s why you’re here?”
“I’m here to see you,” I say, “and to find out why our fathers fell out.”
“Did you ask your father?”
“He won’t tell me.”
“What makes you think I know?”
I look directly at her. “You’re stalling for one thing.”
She turns away from me, walks toward the sliding glass door, and peers out into the backyard. “I don’t see how any of this is relevant.”
“Oh good,” I say.
“What?”
“More stalling.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
I wait.
“Do you remember my Sweet Sixteen?”
I do. It had been a lavish albeit tasteful affair at Lockwood. I say tasteful because a number of our nouveau-riche friends tried to outdo one another with expensive cars and name rock bands and zoo safaris and celebrity appearances and “Sir, show me gauche.” Patricia, on the other hand, only had her closest friends attend for a simple evening on the lawn at Lockwood.
“We did a girls’ sleepover,” she says. “In tents. Down by the pond. There were eight of us.”
I put myself back into that moment. I’d gone to the dinner portion of the Sweet Sixteen, but the boys were then dismissed. I headed back to the main house. What I recall most about the event was that a lovely lass named Babs Stellman had attended and that someone had told me she had a crush on me. Naturally, I tried to — what’s the term? — score. Babs and I did manage to sneak away for a bit and necked behind a tree. She smelled wonderfully of Pert shampoo. I remember moving my hand under her sweater, though she stopped me from going any further with the always-paradoxical line, “I really like you, Win.”
“The girls all got undressed in the gazebo,” Patricia continues. She lowers her head. “And your father... he was wrong, Win. I need you to know that. But your father accused my father of watching us through a window.”
I freeze, having trouble believing what I’m hearing. “Say that again?”
Patricia almost smiles. “Now who’s stalling?”
“You mean, as in my father accusing your father of being a Peeping Tom?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“My father wouldn’t make that up,” I say.
“No, to be fair, he wouldn’t. Do you remember Ashley Wright?”
I have a vague recollection. “She was on your field hockey team?”
Patricia nods. “Ashley was the one who got upset. She wouldn’t say why. She started crying that she wanted to leave. It was all pretty weird. Anyway, her parents picked her up. When she got home, Ashley told her father that she saw my father peeking in the window when she was naked. Ashley’s father went to your father. When your father confronted mine, well, fireworks. My dad denied it. Your dad pressed him. It just escalated from there. It opened up a lot of old wounds.”
I mull this all over for a moment. “Ashley Wright,” I say.
“What about her?”
“Was she lying?”
Patricia opens her mouth, closes it, tries again. “What difference does it make now, Win?”
She has a point.
“Do you know where she lives now?”
“Ashley Wright?” Her face blanches. “Jeez, I don’t know. What, you want to talk to her? Seriously, Win? Suppose my dad was... worst-case scenario... a pervert who peeped on sixteen-year-old girls. What difference would that make now?”
Another good point. Where am I going with this? His murder and Patricia’s abduction took place two years after this. I could see zero connection.
And yet.
“Win?”
I look at her. Patricia’s eyes are on that wall — on that camera, on the photographs.
“I miss my father like hell. I want justice. And the fact that the man who hurt me, who did that to all those girls, could still be doing this... that’s haunted me for over twenty years.”
I wait.
“But it now seems pretty clear that Ry Strauss did both, right? And if that’s the case, maybe we don’t want this dug up.”
Again she sounds like my father. I nod at her.
“What?”
“You want this to go away,” I say.
“Of course I do.”
“It won’t.”
I remind her that in a few hours, the world will know about Ry Strauss’s death and the Jane Street Six and their link to the stolen Vermeer. It is only a question of time before the connection to that suitcase gets figured out by the FBI — or her connection in this is outed in some other way. I watch her deflate as I tell her all of this.
Patricia moves toward me and sits hard on the couch. I know how this is going to go. She just needs to process. Finally, she says, “I got to come home. I can never forget that.”