Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [47]
Except, now, for the way it had ended.
By the time I got back to the Davises’, people were beginning to gather.
I slipped into the hall, past the family, and went on into the kitchen. I thought I’d get out of the earshot of the sobbing, lest I start in myself.
But Marita and Meghan were doing their own bawling, a subdued duet over a tray of de-crusted sandwiches. They mopped their eyes on Sferra Bros. linen napkins, twenty bucks each, a fact I knew because I’d priced them in a friend’s bridal registry. (I ended up giving her a gift certificate to PETCO.)
“Thanks, Minerva, thanks so much?” Meghan said. “Would you mind putting it on Mrs. D.’s dressing table? I’ve got to lay out her clothes for the … service?”
Some chatelaines change their décor with every Architectural Digest annual “Designers’ Own Homes” issue. For her rooms, Eloise had stuck to the blue, lilac, and silver palette she favored. When she began going gray, she had laughed that finally her hair went with the color scheme.
Leaving the jewels on the dressing table sounded like a lousy idea, considering the burglaries. I carried the bag into the bathroom. I’d tell Katharine I’d stuffed it in the back of a drawer full of makeup and skin goop until the funeral. My grandmother used to hide her dough in a box of Kotex. She figured even burglars and junkies would be too squeamish to look there.
I yanked too hard. The drawer came out completely and tipped in my hands, spilling mascara and lipstick and cotton balls all over the floor. I kneeled down to gather it up. Its owner would never touch any of it again, but it wasn’t my place to throw it away—though I did ditch the cotton balls, scooping them up as they scuttled like Nerf balls along the floor.
When I opened my fist above the wastebasket to let them cascade, I saw something at the bottom that hadn’t shaken loose when Marita emptied it. A newspaper clipping, torn raggedly into several pieces, each crumped smaller than a cotton ball itself.
I smoothed them out and assembled them on the marble floor. It was the kind of story big-city newspapers don’t bother to write anymore. A young man, a doctor, a figure of some standing in whatever town it was, had been killed by a drunk driver two weeks before.
The victim’s name meant nothing. But the face—it had the Davis family stamp to it: a little bit of Winston, a lot of Eloise.
And the town. I’d heard of the place. It wasn’t far from where Eloise had gone to college, where she and her friends met every year for their girls-only reunion.
I read on. Friends mourned the man who had been adopted into a poor but loving family, then become a high-school standout and a fine medical school student. His parents evidently scrimping to send him there. After his internship, he hadn’t run off to a fancy city practice, but returned to his hometown. He was on his way to the hospital, to take a friend’s shift, when he was killed.
As I stared at the dead face on the mangled scraps of newsprint, things began to make a sad kind of sense.
Eloise hadn’t been going to a girlfriends’ get-together every year—but she had needed everyone to think that. She had been checking on her illegitimate son. It’s not a word that Madonna’s generation uses, but it was a common one, and an unkind one, to Eloise’s generation. She’d given this boy up for adoption, as unwed mothers did then, and had gone to college nearby to be close to him.
Now her boy was dead, yes, but would she have killed herself over that? She still had two children and a loving husband, and her secret was safe in her poor son’s grave.
As I assembled the bits of newspaper, Eloise’s bracelet gleamed on my arm. The one she never took off. So much of Eloise’s jewelry were mementos