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By Root 1173 0

away. My mother and I took the elevator up to the third floor and walked down a hallway with wide wooden railings along each wall until we reached number 354. Joan opened it almost before we’d finished knocking, a slight woman with thick gray hair and stylish glasses. She was dressed in blue polyester pants and a dark blue sweater, sturdy shoes. Her apartment was small, painted a neutral beige, filled with furniture she must have taken from her old house, a velvet couch and a massive entertainment center across from it, a heavy round table with carved legs, set for one. She made a pot of tea and insisted that we sit on the sofa while she carried the pot and cups to the coffee table on a wooden tray. I glanced around as she poured, her hands shaking slightly. There were Scottish terriers with red bows everywhere—in framed prints, stenciled onto the wall in a border, in the fabric of the curtains, statues perched along the windowsills.

“Aren’t they cute?” she asked wistfully when I remarked on them. “I used to have a little Scottie. I always had one, actually, but when the last one died I didn’t get another. No pets in this place,” she explained, sitting across from us in a wingback chair. “Though I do think Mr. Kitteredge down the hall is hiding a cat.”

My mother and I sipped at our tea while she talked, filling us in on the residential gossip. I was grateful to my mother, who managed to keep the conversation focused. I saw why Oliver had felt frustrated, and kept trying to steer her into conversation about her aunt. Her great-aunt, it turned out.

“It must have been quite a task to settle the estate,” I said. “We’ve been going through a few boxes at our own house this morning, and I’m already exhausted.”

“Oh,” she said. “It nearly did me in, I can tell you. There were boxes and boxes and more boxes of things—in the attic, in the basement, in the extra rooms. She was a pack rat. All sorts of memorabilia, everywhere. She never married, so there was no one else to see to it all. And she had been so active, in so many different things. Plaques from this and certificates from that. Plus, I had all the stuff from her former housemate; all of her boxes were in the attic, too.”

I put my cup down carefully on its saucer. “Did you say she had a housemate?”

“Yes, from ages ago. She died a long time back. In the 1940s, I think. But all her things were still there.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“Oh, yes, her name was Rose. They were great friends, apparently. Even at the end of her life, my aunt used to speak of her. They were radicals together, you see. Free spirits, thumbing their noses at convention, that sort of thing. My aunt was something of a black sheep in the family,” she confided. “You know, never marrying, having a career. In those days, it wasn’t the done thing. She was making a statement, at least that’s how other people felt. Really, though, she was just living her own life. She said she liked me because I showed some spirit, and when I went to college she sent me money for books every semester. We kept up a correspondence.”

“She sounds remarkable.”

“Indeed, she was. She was a suffragette, you know, and the first woman in this county to cast her vote in 1920. There was an article about her in the newspaper.” She gave a wave of her hand. “I saved it here somewhere.”

“I wonder,” I said, trying to sound more casual than I felt, “what happened to all those things that belonged to Rose?”

Joan pressed her hands together for a second. “Well, let me see. I had the auction people come—they took the stained-glass windows, for instance, that your Mr. Parrott was so keenly interested in having. They took all the biggest furniture, too. Then I had a great big garage sale. You know, pots and pans, glassware. My neighbor Bobbie Jean helped me get it organized. She’s good at that sort of thing, a little bossy, but she means well. And after everything was gone, there were still boxes and boxes of papers. Bobbie Jean took them all. She said she was dropping them off at the Women’s Rights National Park in Seneca Falls. Because you