Читать книгу The Glenwood Treasure - Kim Moritsugu - Страница 7

Mrs. Greer acted thrilled when I called to say I was interested in the research job, and after consultation of her fully loaded appointment calendar and my completely empty one, we settled on the following Friday morning to meet and discuss the details of the project, at a midtown haunt called Bagel Haven. “I go there every morning,” she said. “I’m of the firm belief that breakfast should be consumed outside the home. Just because I don’t work in a proper office doesn’t mean I shouldn’t share the rituals of those who do. Don’t you agree?”

Did I? I wasn’t sure. So on the Friday, I rode my bicycle to Bagel Haven, arrived early, and sat down at one of the small tables to observe the rituals in question. To see if, before Molly arrived, I could acquire a semi-informed opinion on the subject. On any subject other than my rapidly-becoming-boring state of woe.

In the five days since our phone conversation, I’d enjoyed the coach house’s quiet, at least when the hammering and wrecking crews renovating a house two doors down took their lunch break, and between the debris-blowing and lawn-mowing sessions conducted by various gardening teams vying for the title of best simulator of jet takeoff noise. I’d also indulged in some spells of meditative solitude in the flat between visits from my mother, who dropped by daily with essentials like an extra pillow and blanket, fresh flowers, or rolls of toilet paper. (I’d have to start tipping her soon, and/or make up a Do Not Disturb sign for my doorknob.) But there were only so many hours I could sit in a chair with an open book in my lap, staring out the window at tradesmen’s trucks jockeying for road space with sunglassed women in SUVs, and contemplating my inadequacy as a human, before I began to yearn for a change of scene and preoccupation.

So it was with interest that I watched the morning bustle at Bagel Haven. A grey-haired, jolly man with a British accent manned the till, a quick-handed woman in her thirties toasted and buttered, and a young guy in jeans, T-shirt, apron, and baseball cap periodically emerged from a back kitchen to unload hot bagels from a trolley into the display baskets at the front of the store.

A steady flow of people in office clothes took food to go, but those who ate in were a more mixed crowd. A man of about seventy, with a jaunty white visor on his head, chatted up the staff by name, ordered “the usual,” dropped a dollar in the tip jar when his coffee and bagel together cost less than two, and sat down to read his newspaper. Seated in a corner with an infant in a baby seat was an exhausted-looking woman of about my age, clad in sweats, who closed her eyes in ecstasy when she took her first sip of latte. At five minutes to nine, in sauntered three city maintenance workers, dressed in orange coveralls and construction boots. All three ate bagels toasted with butter, and they sat at the table in the window to eat them, where they talked loud and laughed between bites. As if they liked their lives, the coffee break part, anyway. My eavesdropping on their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Greer, who, when I addressed her as such, said I must call her Molly, urged me to try a focaccia bagel, and introduced me to the jolly shop manager, name of Arthur.

“Welcome to Bagel Haven,” he said. “What are you having today? A focaccia bagel and fresh-squeezed orange juice? That’s a wise choice, to mix the bitter and the sweet. The choice of someone who’s experienced both in life, I wager.”

I smiled uncertainly, hoped my unhappiness wasn’t so obvious that this stranger had seen it in an instant, paid for my order, followed Molly to a table, and said, “Does everyone get their breakfast order analyzed for its symbolic meaning, or was I just lucky today?”

She set down her tray. “Arthur considers himself something of a philosopher, but he’s a good guy.” In a more concerned tone, she said, “Was your divorce very hard? Are you bitter?”

To my dismay, tears welled up behind my eyes. I swallowed, said, “No, not too,” and ran off to the condiment station, ostensibly in search of napkins but really so that I could blink the tears away, admonish myself to exhibit better self-control, and return to the table with a composed face and a change of topic. “What news do you have of Hannah? Is she still taking pictures for that wire service?”

She was. Somewhere in Africa that week, Molly thought. Israel the month before. “Wherever there’s trouble.”

“Hannah and I have lost touch,” I said. “I invited her to my wedding, but she couldn’t make it.”

“She never can. I hardly remember the last time she was home.” Molly’s face went sad for a second, moved through hurt, and settled on proud. Similar to my mother’s progression when speaking about Noel and his glamorous, globetrotting life. Time for another topic change.

“So I’d love to hear about the research you want me to do,” I said.

“Yes, of course.” Molly cleared her face of Hannah-related emotions, pulled a pen and pad from her purse, and told me that for years, she’d wanted to write an illustrated history of Rose Park for children, in a picture book format, with a puzzle on each page. “The Rose Park Puzzle Book, I’d call it.” She grinned. “Catchy title, eh?” On the pad, she sketched an outline of an open book. “Every double-page spread would feature a different Rose Park landmark.” She drew a house shape inside the book frame, added a few gables and a chimney and a wide front porch. “And alongside each illustration would be text that gives a history of the site and provides a clue or marker to a hidden feature in the picture.”

I imagined her sketch come to life in full watercolour splendour, with every detail of the house realized, a path painted in, trees all around, rose bushes in bloom. I could almost hear a leaf-blower roaring. I said, “I like the concept, but are there enough picturesque landmarks with interesting stories in Rose Park to make a book?”

“When you take into account that each site will take up four pages — two to introduce the puzzle and two to reveal the answer — the nine sites I’ve picked should fill a picture book just fine. The problem is that I haven’t had a chance to study them and find a feature at each that’s hidden in plain sight. That’s where you come in.”

Next to us, the orange coverall guys stood up, scraped their chairs on the floor, tossed their garbage into the bin with basketball-type shots, made sports announcer commentary to match, and walked out. In the ensuing quiet, I said, “Could you give me an example of what a hidden in plain sight feature might be?”

She flipped the page over on the pad, started to draw on a clean sheet. “One landmark I want to use is the Field Street footbridge that spans the east ravine. Do you know it?”

“Vaguely.” I wasn’t a keen ravine-goer, never had been.

In a few quick motions, she had delineated a wooden bridge arched over a tree-lined chasm. “It could be something small.” Her pen hovered over the drawing. “Maybe a workman carved his initials in the bridge supports years ago.” Squiggles appeared on her drawing to indicate initials. “Or it could be something bigger. Like that on a clear day, you can see the harbour from a certain spot on the bridge.” More squiggles suggested a far-off lake.

I closed my mouth, which had hung open while she’d drawn and talked, while I’d moved outside myself into a world of her creation. I won’t claim a sparkle lit up my eyes, but a spot of colour might have come into my cheeks. “This sounds like it could be fun,” I said. If I could remember what fun felt like.

“But do you think you can find me the nine hidden features in two weeks? I promised my editor I’d have a complete manuscript to her, including illustrations, by September, and I don’t want to miss the deadline and give her an excuse to cancel the project, seeing as she only agreed to it in a weak moment when the first book of my twin detective series did so well. Though considering I’m behind on the new twin book, and Larry and I are leaving on Monday for a holiday in Nova Scotia, I’ll still have to work like a madwoman when I return to finish everything on time.”

“Two weeks should be fine.” The guy in the baseball cap pushed a trolley full of bagels by us, and I caught an appetizing whiff of roasted rosemary and yeast. “I might even have time to come in here every day and keep your seat warm.”

We discussed money next. I said I’d do the work for free, and she offered to pay me a high-sounding figure she said was a standard researcher’s hourly wage. When we’d both said, “No, I insist,” four or five times, I accepted her offer and we made a date to meet later that afternoon at her house for a hand-over of the puzzle book file. We parted outside Bagel Haven, she for a hair appointment at a nearby salon, I for the return bike ride home to bid my parents goodbye — they were going to England for one of my father’s legal conferences.

Dad was standing on the porch, surrounded by luggage, when I wheeled into the driveway on my bike. “You all set?” I said.

He peered in my direction, appeared to recognize me. “Just about. The airport limousine should arrive any minute. Your mother’s inside, on the phone.”

From across the street and down a bit came the sound of childish voices, accompanied by kid commotion in front of a large white house halfway down the block.

“Blithe, you’re here!” Mom emerged in her travel outfit of coiffed hair, gold jewellery, pantsuit, and pumps. “And we’re off. I hope you won’t be lonely with us gone.”

Lonely? More like grateful my brooding sessions would be uninterrupted. “I’ll be fine. Have a good trip.”

“Shall I give your love to Noel?”

I was about to say no, I didn’t think so, but she wouldn’t have heard, was waving a cheery hello to a fortyish blond woman coming down the sidewalk toward us. The woman’s small son preceded her on a tricycle. Twenty paces back, on foot, walked an older girl with long frizzy hair, reading a book.

“Who’s that?” Dad whispered.

Mom whispered back. “Jane Whitney, your partner’s wife. From down the street.” It was the woman Kerry had spoken about at Mom’s party, the museum curator with the unpopular daughter. She came within speaking distance, stopped, made cordial small talk to my parents about their imminent departure, and introduced us to her children. Joshua, the boy, yelled hi, then careened up and down the sidewalk on his tricycle making “vroom” sounds. The girl, Alexandra, stayed back, sat on a low stone wall in front of the house next door, kept reading, and raised a limp hand in a minimal greeting when asked to say hello.

“No school today?” Mom said.

“Josh only goes to half-day kindergarten,” Jane said. “And I sometimes take a morning off with him.” No explanation given for the daughter’s presence on the street at ten o’clock on a Friday. Jane looked back at Alexandra and a ripple of something —worry? sadness?— crossed her features. Would she say more? No. Only, “Joshua, stay on the sidewalk. A car’s coming.” And to my parents, “Is that your limo?” In the flurry of baggage loading and bon voyaging that followed, Jane and her children made their escape.

Halfway into the car, Mom said to me, “Don’t leave Tup alone too much. He’ll start chewing the furniture if he feels neglected.”

“I’ll bring him over to my place as soon as you drive away.”

She handed out a few more reminders about the gardener and garbage collection, Dad ahemed, and they left. I waved until they were out of sight, wheeled my bike up the driveway to the coach house, and caught a glimpse, through a gap in the cedar hedge, of the straight back ofJane’s daughter, still walking fifteen paces behind her mother, still intent, to the exclusion of the world around her, on her book.

On the first day of school in my grade twelve year, I was reading a book, under a tree, at lunchtime, when Hannah showed up, plunked herself down on the grass, and stuck with me for the next two years. Why, I never quite understood.

My first guess was that she might be using me to get to Noel, but he was away at Harvard and rarely came home, and the few times I mentioned his name, she showed no interest, asked no questions. She asked a lot about Northside High, though. Which teachers were the biggest pushovers, she wanted to know, which the easiest to fool? Who gave the least homework? What school rules had to be followed and which could be bent? How could she find out about the darkroom? Did I have any idea why the student council social director, the very blonde Kathleen Caswell, was giving her hostile looks? And what was the story on Peter Matheson, who drove the green BMW convertible? He’d asked Hannah out already.

I didn’t run with the likes of Kathleen Caswell or Peter Matheson, but I’d observed my peers in action long enough to know that Kathleen probably perceived Hannah as a threat. In the way that a new, pretty girl who doesn’t shave her armpits and carries an important-looking camera slung around her neck can be to someone who started highlighting her hair at age fourteen. I told Hannah this, and that Peter Matheson was a stud looking to notch his jockstrap with someone new. I also passed on the information tidbit that Mr. Randolph, the physics teacher, had tried for years to get a Camera Club going, without success.

Is there anything as gratifying as having one’s advice not just listened to, but heeded? In week two of school, Hannah obtained the key to the darkroom from Mr. Randolph and was told she could use it anytime, and order supplies for it from his departmental budget. By Halloween, she’d dated and dumped Peter Matheson — “He was such a boring lover,” she said, as if I’d know what that meant — but not before driving his Beemer all over town. And she made no effort to seek more popular friends of the Kathleen Caswell variety, seeming to prefer my quirky company instead.

I decided Hannah must value me as a guide, a docent. Except that instead of interpreting Impressionist painters at an art gallery, I was leading Hannah through high school, summarizing the ethos of each social set with pith and insight. I didn’t mind that image, of me as sage. It made a nice contrast to my regular role as the not as attractive or as smart sister to Mr. Golden Boy.

Besides, friendship with Hannah meant access to Glenwood.

Glenwood was number five on Molly’s list of puzzle book sites. After a former schoolhouse, a former golf clubhouse, a former stable — all converted since to residential use — and a former manor house still surrounded by its original stone wall. “What do you think?” Molly said. “Is it too weird if I include my own house in the book?”

We were sitting in her kitchen, where I had tried and failed to pick up any hint of ghostly vibe or psychic spark from the long-departed Jeremiah Brown about the treasure, despite a concerted mental effort on my arrival in the house that involved much grimacing and had caused Molly to ask if I was feeling sick.

“Too weird? Not at all. You must include Glenwood. Glenwood is the best thing about Rose Park, the, the — “ I remembered I was talking to a writer, considered and rejected referring to the house as a jewel on the crown, icing on the cake, or the top of the pops, settled for, “— the eye of the storm!”

Molly arched an eyebrow at me. “You’re exuberant today.”

She must have meant to say nonsensical, or maybe idiotic, but had mistakenly chosen the wrong word, an age-related habit I had noticed in my mother since my return home. I knew from experience that these slips of the tongue were better left uncorrected, so I said, “What’s this? My parents’ house is on the list? Why?”

“Because it’s the oldest in Rose Park that’s been continuously occupied by the same family.”

And was about as boring to look at as such a description would imply. “Finding a feature to highlight there will be a challenge.”

“I should mention that the feature you choose must be enduring; a flower that only blooms in June won’t do.” She twisted her mouth into a contemplative moue for a second before speaking further. “And it should be visible to the discerning eye, not to the careless glance, if you know what I mean.”

“If a discerning eye’s what you’re after, too bad Hannah’s not available to do the job.”

“Actually, Hannah did some work on the project, briefly, years ago.” Molly pulled an envelope of five-by-seven, black-and-white photographs from the file and passed it to me. “She took these pictures.”

I opened the envelope and removed the first print, a photo of Cawley Gardens, the park across the road from Glenwood, once the site of a grand mansion. Hannah’s picture of the park had been taken during what looked like a fierce summer storm — tree branches were bent over in the wind, and rain poured down in sheets.

“This is rather gloomy,” I said.

“You know Hannah and her mood shots.”

The next photo was of a wooded area. “What’s this? Part of the ravine?”

“That’s the site of a small lodge that was on Glenwood’s property when that section of the ravine belonged to this house.”

I hadn’t known about any such lodge. And given my father’s passion for local history, I should have.

Molly said,“There’s a copy in the file of an old city plan that marks the lodge site. Hannah went down to the archives and found it for me.”

I wrote,“Lodge? ask Dad,” on my notepad, and flipped to the next photo, a shadowy, mysterious one of Glenwood. Hannah had shot the picture without any cars nearby, and at such an angle that you couldn’t see the neighbouring houses, or anything modern like a telephone pole or hydro line. “Great picture,” I said. “Very atmospheric.” And much more haunted in feel than the cheery kitchen where we sat.

The next photo was of the footbridge that spanned the ravine up at Field Street, the bridge Molly had sketched at Bagel Haven. The “kissing bridge” the local kids used to call it. Noel had been there many a time in his day. Hannah, too, I was sure. “The bridge isn’t very old, is it?”

“Not that edition, no, but there’s been a bridge of some form in that location since the area was settled. There’s a picture of an old iron version of the bridge in one of the books on the reading list I’m giving you.”

There was no end to what I didn’t know. “When did Hannah take these pictures?”

“When she was at art college. She was assigned a project on some technique or other — the use of natural light, maybe. So she made a couple of my sites the subjects of her photos; to kill two birds with one stone.”

Or like a cat kills mice. I took the envelope, closed the file. “Tell you what: I’ll go home, absorb all this, and call before you leave for Nova Scotia if I have any questions. Have you arranged for anyone to keep an eye on the house while you’re away?”

“No, but we have an alarm system.”

“You’re not worried another Rose Park Burglar might come along?”

“Another? Who was the first?”

The Rose Park Burglar had haunted me the year I was fifteen, when a rash of break and enters was the talk of the neighbourhood. Most of the robberies took place when the homeowners were out, for the evening or away, but a few jobs were pulled while the victims slept, including one on my parents’ own block, at the home of an elderly widow. No harm had befallen her — she didn’t realize she’d been robbed until noon the next day — but the thought of a crime-bent stranger prowling the streets, our street, had spooked me badly.

The first night I heard the news of the burglar’s spree, I lay in bed, unable to sleep, my anxiety the only defence I could muster against our house being next. I was tormented by the idea of waking up to the feel of a gloved hand across my mouth, or a pillow pressed down on my face. I called to mind, in a murky, green-tinged palette, with surround-sound, every graphic scene of violence or horror I’d been subjected to at movie theatres during trailers for scary movies I would never see.

Long after my parents had fallen asleep, I lay and listened too closely to the night sounds. The muffled moaning I heard was our dog Angus, Tup’s predecessor. He slept on the second-floor landing and was known to have an occasional nightmare, despite a moronically sunny daytime personality. The rhythmic bangs that resounded in my room’s radiator were furnace-related, I knew, and I also recognized the sound of car doors closing outside — one, then the other — that signalled the return of our gadabout neighbours, an empty nester couple more social than my parents.

With my paranoia-enhanced, superhero-level hearing, I could isolate, from the low hum of outdoor noises that leaked inside my locked windows, the jingle of the dog collar on the greyhound down the street who was walked each night at eleven-thirty. I knew not to panic when raccoons hissed and shrieked in the alley during their territorial wars over our garbage bins. But any other exterior sound had me up and at the window, straining for a glimpse of a black-clad burglar scaling our walls or trying to jimmy our windows. Any unaccounted-for indoor sound sent me racing to my side of the locked bedroom door, to press my ear against it and wish I had a spyhole to look through, or X-ray vision to go with the hearing.

Three nights of this routine, and I was a wreck.

On the evening of the fourth night, I pleaded with my parents, at the dinner table, to let me sleep on the chaise longue in their bedroom. Desperate for relief from my runaway imagination, I made a case for the chaise expressed with a fervour unseen since September of my grade three year, when I’d come home from my first day at Brookbank Hall, a private girls’ school, sobbed for hours, and offered to perform Cinderella-esque chores for the rest of my childhood if my parents would transfer me back to Rose Park Elementary.

I’d been so compliant in the years since they’d withdrawn me from Brookbank that Mom and Dad were taken aback by my burglar-related outburst. Noel wasn’t. At seventeen, he had painlessly passed through puberty and was enjoying an adolescence free from doubt or acne. He said, “You’re being irrational, Blithe. We have nothing to fear. According to the newspapers, the thief is mainly after high-end audio equipment. Has it escaped your notice that we don’t have any?”

“How’s the burglar supposed to know that?”

Mom said,“You don’t realize how impregnable the house is, dear. There are bars on the basement windows, Dad checks the other window locks every night before bed, and there’s Angus to be our watchdog.”

I snorted. “Angus is no help. He’d roll over and play dead for a breadcrumb.”

Noel stabbed an asparagus spear with his fork. “Blithe has a point there.”

Dad considered me the way he would a client in his office. That is, he gave me his full attention, for once. “I sense that the application of reason in this situation will not allay Blithe’s fears”

Noel said, “So you admit she’s crazy?”

Dad executed a facial move Noel and I had called the Angry Eyebrow when we were younger and on speaking terms. “That’s enough, Noel. I’m not condoning Blithe’s hysteric tendencies by any means, but I would like to finish my dinner before the meat is cold. Can we reach a compromise?”

Mom tossed her napkin on the table. “A fifteen-year-old should not be sharing a bedroom with her parents, no matter how fearful she is.”

Dad said, “My proposal is that Noel and I move the chaise into Mom’s dressing room and Blithe sleeps there. Behind a closed door, but close by. All in favour?”

I might have interrupted to ask them to stop referring to me in the third person, but the promise of a normal night’s sleep kept me quiet.

Mom said, “I suppose I could tolerate that arrangement, as long as it’s temporary.”

Noel helped himself to another lamb chop from the chafing dish. “I still say Blithe’s fears are baseless, but if I’m needed to move furniture around, we’ll have to do it right after dinner. I’m going out tonight.”

“On a school night?” Mom said.

He flashed her a phony smile. “I have study group,” he said. In case anyone needed a reminder that he was the superior child.

Now, to Molly, I said, “The Rose Park Burglar committed a slew of robberies around here years ago. Before your time, I guess. But I’m just thinking I could drop over and pick up flyers from your porch if you like, move the mail out of your foyer, make it less obvious no one’s home.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

We played the no, I insist game again, and I won this time — we arranged that I would come by every few days, deal with the mail, water the houseplants, and nod in passing at various workmen Molly had lined up to perform exterior maintenance work during her absence. So when I walked out of Glenwood, I had with me the blue file folder, a spare key to the house, and, thank Molly, things to do.