Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [91]
“It’s impossible!”
“Well …”
“Had her place been burglarized recently? Did the drawers look like they’d been rifled?”
“Not that I heard of,” Ian said.
“Was anybody else living in the house with her?”
“No …”
But a dim uneasiness flitted past him, like something you see and yet don’t see out of the corner of your eye.
“Anyone suspicious hanging about her?”
“No, no …”
But wary, suspicious Agatha pushed into his mind—her closed-off face with the puffy lids that veiled her secret thoughts.
“Now, I don’t want you to take this wrong,” Eli said, “but you are about the most unhelpful client I ever had to deal with.”
“I realize that. I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I shouldn’t have wasted your time.”
Eli shook his head, and his cowlick waggled and dipped. God’s arrow with no place to go, Ian couldn’t help thinking.
Monday noon, he told Mr. Brant he was eating at home today. He drove home and let himself into the house, announcing, “It’s me! Forgot my billfold!”
“Oh, hello, dear,” his mother called from the kitchen. Then she and his father went on talking, no doubt over their usual lunch of tinned soup and saltine crackers.
He climbed to the second floor and onward, more stealthily, to the attic, to Daphne and Agatha’s little room underneath the eaves.
Girls tended to be messier than boys, he thought. (He had noticed that in his college days.) Agatha’s bed was heaped with so many books that he wondered how she slept, and Daphne’s was a jungle of stuffed animals. He went over to Agatha’s bureau, a darkly varnished highboy that had to stand away from the wall a bit so as not to hit the eaves. The top was littered with pencil stubs and used Kleenexes and more books, but the drawers were fairly well organized. He patted each one’s contents lightly, alert for something that didn’t belong—the rustle of paper or a hard-edged address book. But there was nothing.
He knelt and looked under her bed. Dust balls. He lifted the mattress. Candy-bar wrappers. He shook his head and let the mattress drop. He tried the old fiber-board wardrobe standing at one end of the room and found a rod of clothes, half Daphne’s and half Agatha’s, packed too tightly together. Shoes and more shoes lay tangled underneath.
He bent to poke his head inside the storage room that ran under the eaves. In the dimness he made out a dress form, a lampshade, two foot lockers, and a cardboard carton. He crawled further inside and lifted one of the carton’s flaps. The musty gray smell reminded him of mice. He dragged the carton toward the door for a closer look: his mother’s framed college diploma, a bundle of letters addressed to Miss Beatrice Craig … He pushed the carton toward the rear again.
Turning to go, he saw a faded, fabric-covered box on the floor—the kind that stationery sometimes comes in. He flipped up the lid and found a clutter of barrettes and hair ribbons and junk jewelry. Agatha’s, no doubt. He let the lid fall shut and crawled on out.
In the bedroom, he paused. He reached back and pulled open the drawer in the box’s base.
Right away, he knew he’d hit on something. The contents were so tidy: flattened papers stacked in order of size, and on top of them a few pieces of jewelry, no less junky than those in the main compartment but obviously dating from an earlier time. He pushed the jewelry aside and removed the papers.
A savings booklet from Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust, showing a balance of $123.08. The title to a Chevrolet owned by Daniel C. Bedloe. A receipt from Morehead TV Repair guaranteeing all replacement parts for thirty days. A marriage certificate for Daniel Craig Bedloe and Lucy Ann Dean. (Ian paused a moment over that one. Was there any remote possibility that Ann could be a last name?) A birth certificate for Daphne Marie Bedloe. A pamphlet of instructions for filing health insurance claims. A birth certificate for Agatha Lynn Dulsimore and then one for Thomas. A receipt for—
Agatha who?
Agatha Lynn Dulsimore, born April 4, 1959. Father’s full name: Thomas Robert Dulsimore. Mother’s maiden name: Lucy Ann