Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [19]
My hand reached out of its own volition and smoothed the wood, indented, drilled, splintered, puzzling.
“What have you found?” Holmes asked.
“There used to be a mezuzah on this door. My mother's father gave it to her, the year I was born. It was his first overture after the offence of her marriage, her first indication that she might be forgiven for marrying a Gentile. And as it turned out, his last, since he died a few months later. It meant a great deal to her. And it's gone.”
“Perhaps Norbert senior took it down, for safekeeping?”
“I shouldn't think it would occur to a Gentile to remove it.”
“And your mother herself wouldn't have taken it down?”
“Not unless she didn't plan to return. And they died on a week-end trip to the Lodge—our summer house down the Peninsula. We intended to be back in a few days.”
“A friend, then, who removed it, knowing what it meant to her?”
“Perhaps.” I fingered the wounded frame again, wondering. I knew none of her friends. I had a vague idea that one or two women might have visited me in hospital after the accident, but I had been injured and orphaned, and in no condition to receive their comfort. Their letters that reached me in England went into the fire unanswered, and had eventually stopped.
Oddly, although the missing object should by rights have increased my apprehension, in fact the brief vision of my mother moving through the door-way served to reassure me, as if her hand had smoothed the back of my head in passing. When I turned again to the house, it was no longer the lair of a dangerous beast, merely empty rooms where once a family had lived.
The interior looked like something out of Great Expectations, an interrupted life overlaid with a decade of dust. The gilt-framed looking-glass in the entrance hall bore a coat of grey-brown fuzz, the glass itself gone speckled and dim. I stood in the door-way to the first room, my mother's morning room, and saw that the furniture had been draped with cloths before the house was locked up, all the windows and curtains tightly shut. The air was heavy with the odours of dust and baked horse-hair, unaired cloth goods, and mildew, along with a faint trace of something burnt.
Holmes crossed to the nearest windows and stretched his hand to the curtains.
“Careful,” I warned, and his tug softened into a slow pull, so that the dust merely held in the air instead of exploding back into the room.
A drift of trembling black ashes in the fireplace was the sole indication of the house's abrupt closure. Everything else lay tidy: flower vases emptied, ash-trays cleaned, no stray coffee-cups, no abandoned books. This had been my mother's favourite room, I remembered, and unlike the formal back parlour had actually been used for something other than the entertainment of guests. She had arranged the delicate French desk (one of the Louis—XIV? XV?) so that it looked out of the window onto what had been a wisteria-framed view of the bird-bath, and was now a solid green curtain. She'd loved the view, loved the garden, even keeping yearly journals of its progress—yes, there they were, pretty albums bound in silk that she'd pored over, writing the names of shrubs planted and sketching their flowers, recording its successes and failures in her precise script so unlike my own scrawl. I turned away sharply out of the room; as Holmes followed me, he gently shut the door, cutting off the watery sunlight and plunging the hall-way back into gloom.
The entire house was a stage set with dust-coloured shrouds. The long dining-room table was little more than a floor-length cloth punctuated by the