Читать книгу The Glenwood Treasure - Kim Moritsugu - Страница 8

The day after my parents’ departure for London — my first day alone in Rose Park — I stayed home, luxuriated in the solitude. I ate a salad of bocconcini and tomato and basil for lunch, I read over Molly’s puzzle book file, I walked Tup. At dinnertime, I rode my bike to an English-style fish and chip shop situated a twenty-minute bike ride away and pretended the calories I burned biking there and back might be equal to more than a minuscule portion of the calories consumed.

I spent the evening rereading the family copy of Jeremiah Brown’s Treasure and didn’t look up from the book and into space more than twice. I might have enjoyed a lie-in the next morning, but Tup whined and laid his nose on my arm and drooled on me at eight-thirty. So I got up, showered, dressed, had some coffee, filled a small backpack with supplies, and set out with him for a brisk walk to midtown.

When I’d tied Tup to a bicycle rack on the sidewalk in front of the library, I went inside and found the main space to be full of small children running amok, most of them in front of the door to the community room. A stencilled sign announced that a Red Riding Hood puppet show would be performed at 10:00 a.m., in fifteen minutes.

I stepped around the children and the strollers, past the harried-looking parents and nannies, asked a library staff person for help, and was directed to the “Of Local Interest” shelf. I was after two books from Molly’s reading list: a recent publication called Rose Park: An Architectural Guide, and an old book entitled Rambles in Rose Park, by one Mary Elizabeth Bishop, published in 1910, which Molly had told me contained some interesting illustrations.

I’d thought my father’s private collection of Rose Park-abilia constituted everything there was to know about the area, but after I’d pulled the architectural guide — a recent trade paperback, subsidized by the local historical society and heavy on black-and-white photographs — off the shelf, I located the Bishop book, a memoir of sorts, bound in an anonymous but hardy library cover that protected the yellowed pages within. I opened it at random, read a paragraph or two in the old-fashioned typeface, tsked at the author’s breathy prose style, flipped through to the illustrations, and confirmed Molly’s assessment — the frontispiece was a detailed etching of a now-demolished house named Norcastle that had once stood a few blocks south of my parents’ street.

I took both books to the checkout counter, handed them to the clerk, and was standing, waiting for them, when I was tackled hard, in the shins, by a hurtling child. I cried out at the momentary splash of pain — there’d be a nice bruise the next day — bent down to help the boy up, and recognized him as Jane Whitney’s son Joshua.

Jane ran over. “Joshua! Say you’re sorry.” To me, she said, “I’m sorry. So sorry.” She hoisted a squirming Joshua onto her hip. “He’s all hyped up for this puppet show.”

I did not rub my leg or wince. I said, “It’s quite all right” and took my books and due date slip from the library staff person. “I seem to have picked a busy time to drop in”

Jane set Joshua back on the ground. “Go see Alexandra” she said, and tilted her head to read the spines of my books. “Is that Rambles in Rose Park?”

“You know it?”

“I donated it to the library. Look at the bookplate.”

Affixed to the inside front cover was a gold-rimmed label that announced Jane’s gift. I said, “Was the author a relative of yours?”

“No, we don’t go that far back in this neighbourhood. But the Bishop family built my parents’ house, the house where I grew up. There were five copies of that book in the attic when my parents moved in. Self-published, and it shows. Why are you reading it?”

I gave her a short explanation about my research assistant work for Molly.

She said, “Well, don’t believe everything Mary Elizabeth says. She wasn’t the most careful chronicler of her time.”

Joshua returned to Jane’s side, picked at her jeans, and pouted. “Mommy, Alexandra told me to go away.”

“Why don’t you go find a book to read?” she said. “One with nice pictures.” He wandered off again and she said, under her breath, “Alexandra’s here under duress.” She gestured to a chair nearby, half-hidden by a column, where Alexandra sat reading, oblivious to the preschoolers all around. Louder, Jane said, “Say hello to Blithe, honey.”

Alexandra mumbled an uninterested hello and returned to her book, which some head-tilting of my own helped me recognize as A Wrinkle in Time, one of my old favourites.

Jane pulled me aside. The cloud of worry that had surrounded her in front of my parents’ house was back. “You’ll have gathered Alexandra’s not big on social interaction,” she said. I had gathered Alexandra used reading as a way to avoid social interaction, a coping strategy with which I had both personal and professional experience. Jane went on, so low I had trouble hearing her,“There was an incident this week at school — some in-group out-group nonsense among the girls in her class. It’s been hard on her. “

I twinged with sympathy, and from behind us, Alexandra’s voice said, loudly, “What’s all that barking?”

The library’s picture windows provided a lovely view ofTup straining on his leash and shouting his head off. “Oh no,” I said, “that’s my dog,” and I ran off. Somewhere in my wake, I heard Alexandra say, “She has a dog?”

Outside, I yelled at Tup to be quiet, untied him from the bike rack, and saw why he’d barked: a pack of six dogs of varying sizes lay on the sidewalk. Unlike Tup, these dogs were peaceful and panting, and seemed well under the control of a young man in jeans and a T-shirt who sat on the library bench. He held the dogs’ different-coloured leashes in one hand, and in the other, a paperback book — a mystery novel, it looked like. A baseball cap was pulled down over his eyes. He pointed to Tup, who had begun to sniff around the dog cluster. “Your dog?”

“I’m sorry if he was disturbed by your entourage there. He doesn’t get out in public much.”

He looked up at me from under the cap brim. His eyes were light blue, or rather, blue streaked with white. He said, “My entourage?”

“I meant all the dogs.”

“I know what you meant. Is that black lab yours?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tup.”

“Yeah. I used to walk him.”

I’m sure I looked as surprised to hear this news as I felt. “You did?”

“He was on my weekday run for the last couple of years.” He gestured to the dogs at his feet. “With some of these guys. Are you the daughter that came home, then?”

I stammered yes and he introduced himself as Patrick Hennessy, a name that stirred in me vague recollections of a large family from a small house on Hillside Road in Rose Park. A large family that included several boys, though the one I could dimly remember had been older than me, and not named Patrick.

Alexandra’s voice spoke up, tugged on my thoughts. “Can I meet the dogs?” She was standing on the library steps, very still, and making direct eye contact with me for the first time. Jane stood beside her, holding Joshua by the hand. “Alexandra loves dogs,” she said.

“I can introduce you to Tup.” I tugged on Tup’s leash, got his nose away from another dog’s behind, and showed Alexandra how to have him smell her hand, let her do some timid head-patting. “And maybe Patrick here will show you his dogs.”

“They’re not all mine,” Patrick said. “I just walk them.” He pointed them out one by one. “The black lab is Pedro. He likes to chase squirrels. The border collie is Kristi — all she wants to do is catch Frisbees. The little pug is Napoleon, the old schnauzer is Asta, the weimaraner is Marmalade, and this brown mutt is Buck. Go ahead and pat them if you like. Except Pedro. He doesn’t like people much.”

Alexandra made her way through the dogs, patted each one on the head, steered clear of Pedro, and finished off with Buck, who licked her hands and made her laugh. “I like Buck the best,” she said to Patrick.

He grinned. “Me, too. Buck’s my dog”

Alexandra restarted her petting circuit, and Jane said to me, aside, “Now she won’t mind so much that I dragged her along this morning. Thank you. And your friend.”

I almost explained that Patrick wasn’t my friend, but didn’t know how to without sounding rude, so I watched Alexandra instead. The encounter with the dog congress had softened the expression on her face, made her look different, happy, like someone who could care less about grade five in-groups and out-groups. I said to Jane, “If Alexandra would like to come with me to the park sometime to walk Tup, she’d be welcome.”

“Thank you” Jane said, “but I don’t know. She’s a little shy with strangers.”

Alexandra said, “I’d like to go. When?”

We made a date for the next day, Sunday, in the afternoon, Jane and family hustled back into the library for Red Riding Hood, and I went ten steps down the sidewalk with Tup before I thought of saying goodbye and thank you to Patrick. I turned back to do so, but he was already a block away, walking in the other direction, his book stuffed into a back pocket, the dogs trotting at his side.

At home, I read through the architectural guide in a few hours and found out about several Rose Park houses I’d never noticed before. One house in particular caught my fancy, a small peak-roofed cottage on Green Street that the guide identified as an example of the Gothic Revival style. I’d have to go see it sometime, see if its charm was more than photograph-deep.

I cracked open Mary Elizabeth Bishop’s account of her life and rambles next, and learned that she was the only daughter of a prosperous brewer who lived on William Street. I also learned that her high-spirited and repetitive account of her daily walks through the area’s sylvan glades was skimworthy, at best. When I came to about the twentieth mention of her faithful terrier Jock — the rabbit-chasing scoundrel — I called an eager Tup, slipped the architectural guide and a new sketchbook I’d bought into a backpack, and set off on a ramble of our own.

Our usual walk destination was the Rose Park sports park — a lively place that was home to tennis courts, a children’s playground, and a football field, and was located four blocks away. This time, I headed off in the other direction, east, to Cawley Gardens, where I took Tup off his leash, let him roam, sat on a bench, and started contemplating the site for its potential as a piece of Molly’s puzzle.

The architectural book contained a 1901 photograph of the Cawley Gardens house, a massive château-style, three-storey, stone-faced mansion that boasted twenty windows on the front alone, multiple roofs dotted with towerettes, and a drive-through columned entranceway termed a porte-cochère. According to the short history on the page, the house reigned in splendour as a private residence for forty years, was sold to the government and used as a convalescent home after World War II, fell into disrepair, and was demolished — a white elephant — in 1960.

Not a sign of it remained. Not a brick, stone, or roof tile. Where the photo showed the house and paved forecourt to have been was now an expanse of thick grass studded with trees grown to heights and breadths sufficient to provide shade for park visitors and climbing opportunities for intrepid children. Where there had been outbuildings and formal landscaped gardens, more grass and trees. I looked around. There had to be some evidence remaining of such a significant house other than the historical society plaque nailed to a rock at the park entrance. Without some sign, how could Molly use the green scene before me for the puzzle book? What could she ask her readers to do? Count the squirrels, name the tree types, match the unleashed dogs with their owners?

There was the house’s old driveway, or drive, still extant, in the form of the rutted roadway that bisected the park. The drive entered the park on the south, flowed over a rampart built to bridge the beginning of the ravine’s slope, led to the tree-dotted lawn where the house’s front had been, and turned west to exit on Highpoint Road. There, the roadway was barred to vehicular traffic by a waist-high steel gate painted in green and white stripes, the colours of the city parks department. Circa nineteen-sixty or seventy-something was my guess for the gate’s vintage. Not any older.

I checked for Tup, spotted him moseying along toward the other end of the roadway, the south end. I stood up, followed him over, spied another green and white gate, and on the left side of it — was I seeing things? Or was that a square column standing off to the side? An old-looking square stone column, with no apparent purpose. It wasn’t attached to anything, wasn’t part of the adjoining property. Could it have been part of the old entranceway to the Cawley estate? A last remnant? Up close, I could see that the column consisted of three large sand-coloured blocks mortared together. There were badly chipped bevelled edges on top and bottom, and the stone itself had worn away on one side, to reveal a ribbed underlayer within. I touched the worn surface. I looked for lettering — a name or a number — but found neither, nor any indication of a light standard, no hole on the front or top of the column where a fixture might have been. I stroked the block surface, wanting it to be old and original. Though if it had been, wouldn’t there be a matching column on the other side of the driveway, where there was now a drinking fountain, and, ten feet over, a mounded flower bed planted with petunias? In the place where another column might have been was air. And on the ground below the air, a square of concrete was set into the grass, a square that had to mark the former base of the matching column.

I pulled out the architectural book with trembling hands and turned to the Cawley Gardens page. The main photo showed only the house, not the drive, but an inset photo in the bottom right hand corner of the page had been taken from farther back, to convey the scope of the estate at its heyday, and it showed — be still, my hands — the gateway that had once controlled entry, including my column and its disappeared mate.

Two boys on bikes came along, deked around the green-and-white gate, and rode over the grass to the water fountain. They stopped to take a drink and took no notice of me, flushed with excitement, face pressed to a beat-up piece of stone. I stepped back, took out my sketchbook, and began to draw the column, tried to capture on the page its rough, uneven surfaces, its bits of decorative moulding, its ideal suitability to be a hidden but in plain sight feature for Molly’s book. And for ten or fifteen minutes, I forgot to be sad.

When my drawing was done, I packed up, found Tup grazing on a discarded chocolate bar wrapper near the bench, and headed him back across the park to leave, past a flagstone path, partly overgrown with weeds, that led underneath the rampart and into the ravine. Graffiti was spray-painted on the lower part of the rampart wall; the path petered out under the archway. Beyond it, the land dropped down into a dark quiet under the densely leaved tops of the trees that had grown up from the ravine floor.

The footpath was that way, and the site of the old lodge Molly had mentioned, but I didn’t go down. I’d save that outing for another day, a day when unexpected rushes of emotion about sand-coloured columns wouldn’t have rendered me so vulnerable to hearing a remembered echo of Hannah’s voice in my ear, sharp and quick, chiding me to forget the past, to move on.

About a month into our friendship, I’d talked Hannah into helping me search Glenwood, top to bottom. My biggest hope for the treasure location was the lookout tower, a dramatic architectural detail that crowned the house and appeared far more promising from the outside than from within. A reporter from the neighbourhood newspaper had once speculated that Jeremiah Brown sat in the tower for hours at a time, searching for a sign on the road of the return of the two sons killed in World War II, but the first time I stepped inside the tower, I dismissed the reporter’s notion — there was nowhere to sit. Access to the tower was via a wrought-iron-railed circular staircase that led from the master bedroom on the third floor. At the top was a small square room — basically a landing — big enough only for a single person to walk around and look out the four windows set into the plaster walls. There was no hidden vault up there, no secret room, or none that I could detect after I put my ear to the wall, tapped the plaster at six-inch intervals, and listened for a telltale hollow sound. In earnest, Nancy Drew style (Hannah: “She always irritated the shit out of me”), I looked at the stair rail through a magnifying glass to see if a hairline crack in its surface might reveal the presence within of a tightly rolled paper clue covered in spidery black handwriting. Nope. I would have checked the window frames for more potential hiding places, but Hannah pointed out that the windows were new, installed within the last ten years by the house’s previous owners.

When I spotted a small trap door built into the tower’s beamed ceiling, I ran downstairs all aflutter, brought up a step stool from the kitchen three floors below, and spent ten minutes finding a way to wedge it into the narrow space between staircase and window, only to discover that the trap door opened into an empty crawl space. There was no steamer trunk in the corner, filled with old clothing and a bundle of letters, no moth-eaten military uniform set up on a dressmaker’s dummy with a clue-riddled antique postcard hidden in the breast pocket.

I abandoned the tower room at last and dragged Hannah through the rest of the house. We examined the original wood panelling in the dining room to see if a tug on a lamp sconce or the chandelier might swing a portion of the wall open. We poked around in the basement looking for cupboards with false backing, or a discolouration in the floor that might indicate the concrete had been disturbed. We completed every search technique I could think of — and there weren’t many, with so much of the house done over — until I was forced to give up.

“It kills me,” I said to Hannah one day at her kitchen table, the day we’d lifted a loose floor board in a closet, to no avail, “that we’ll never know the real story.”

Mrs. Greer walked in and set her coffee mug in the sink. “The real story about what?”

I turned to her. “Doesn’t it kill you to think that these walls know the truth about the treasure, and though we sit within them, we’ll never learn their secret?”

She said, “You have a unique outlook on life, Blithe. Has anyone ever told you that?”

Hannah said, “I don’t believe for a second that walls can know secrets, but if they could, wouldn’t it be the old walls that knew, the ones that were torn down when the kitchen was renovated?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Maybe you should make it your life’s work to solve the mystery, Blithe,” Mrs. Greer said. “Your quest. Everyone needs a quest.”

I didn’t take this comment too seriously, since Mrs. Greer was at that time writing the sequel to her first big success: a fantasy novel about a time-travelling, quest-pursuing girl who voyages to fairy-tale lands full of knights, dragons, and swirling mists.

Hannah picked up her camera and focussed in on my glass of milk. “Or you could forget the past, forget all this treasure crap, and get on with your own life.”

“Give up on the treasure without knowing what really happened? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

She had held the camera still and snapped her picture. “That’s what I’m suggesting.”

I showed Alexandra how to clip and unclip Tup’s leash to his collar, and how to wrap the end of the leash around her hand. I told her Tup would prefer to walk on the lawn side of the sidewalk because more interesting smells could be found there than on the curb side. And I let her lead the conversation.

She peppered me with questions about Tup. What breed was he and how old and did he sleep in my room, did he sleep on my bed? Had I owned a dog when I was her age? Had my parents made me look after it? We discussed the suitability of eleven-year-old girls as dog caregivers all the way to the park entrance, until she stopped and said, “Hey. Isn’t that the dogwalker over there? That Patrick guy?”

A figure that resembled Patrick Hennessy stood in the middle of the football field and threw a ball to a dog that resembled the dog he’d claimed as his own the day before. “I think it might be.”

Alexandra said,“Does Tup catch balls like Buck does?” She’d remembered the other dog’s name.

“No, Tup likes to wander around and sniff the ground. That’s his specialty.”

“Oh” Disappointment all over her face.

“But Patrick might let you throw the ball to his dog if we asked him.”

“You think so?”

“Why don’t we go see?”

We started across the field. Alexandra said, “Did you tell Patrick to meet us here?”

“No. I only met Patrick yesterday for the first time. Five minutes before you did.” Or had that been the first time? There was something familiar about him, about the way he carried himself.

“I thought maybe he was your boyfriend.”

“No, I don’t date. Anyone.”

“Why not? Are you a spinster?”

I smiled. “I suppose I am. But how do you know an old-fashioned word like that?”

“I read a lot.”

As had I, raised on classic English children’s literature, full of words like hedgerow and lolly and governess and wardrobe. And spinster.

We had come within hailing distance of Patrick, close enough to hear him grunt with exertion when he threw the ball down the length of the field. He nodded hello at us. “You guys following me?”

In the manner of a spinster governess, I said, “Good afternoon, Patrick. You remember Alexandra?”

“Hey, Alexandra.”

She looked at the ground. “Hi.”

“Alexandra’s never thrown a ball to a dog before.”

Patrick tipped his baseball cap back, said to her, “You want to throw Buck’s?”

Alexandra said, “Yes, please.”

Buck dropped a ball on a rope on the ground at Patrick’s feet, along with about a cup of saliva, and Patrick said, “The trick is to hold the toy by the rope. That way you don’t get dog spit all over your hands when he brings the ball back. Look, I’ll show you”

On Alexandra’s first attempt, the ball only travelled a few feet, but on her third try, the throw went far enough to make Buck run, and she whooped with delight. At throw number five, I sat down on the grass and let Tup off his leash, wished I’d thought to bring a book. At throw number eight, I thought about asking Patrick if I could borrow the one he had jammed into a pocket of his pants, another mystery novel from the look of the font that spelled out the author’s name. At throw ten, I said to him, “What happened to the book you were reading yesterday? Did you finish it already?”

The sideways glance he gave me was wary. “Yeah.”

“Do you read a lot?”

Warier still. “Some. Why?”

“I just wondered. I don’t meet adult avid readers very often.” Alexandra said, “I read one or two books a week, depending how long they are. How many do you read, Blithe?” I could be terse, too. “It depends.”

After four more throws, I said, “Did you go to Northside High, Patrick?”

He didn’t turn around. “Yeah.”

“I thought I’d seen you somewhere before. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six. That was a good throw, Alexandra. Nice arc.”

Two years younger than me. “Do you have siblings?”

“Five. Two older and three younger.”

“I beg your pardon? You come from a family of six children?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t say any more, but I could have sworn he asked if I wanted to make something out of it.

Three more throws, during which I realized where I’d seen Patrick, in an apron, more recently than in high school. “And you work at Bagel Haven now?” The incredulity in my tone made both Patrick and Alexandra turn around. Tup and Buck remained intent on ball-chasing and ground-sniffing.

Patrick looked back at the field. “Yeah. I do the weekday bake there. How’d you know?”

“I saw you there, last week.”

He didn’t reply, though I thought politeness would have dictated a reciprocal comment of some kind.

Alexandra said to him, “How come Buck isn’t bringing the ball back this time?”

“Sometimes he gets tired and needs a rest, so he lies down. He’ll get up when he’s ready to play some more.”

I unfolded my legs and stood up. “Come, Alexandra. We should go. We don’t want to take up all of Patrick’s afternoon.”

“Okay,” she said. “Bye, Patrick. Thanks.”

“Yes, thank you, Patrick,” I said, “and for yesterday, too.”

He said, “You’re welcome,” sat down on the grass, and opened his book.

When we were out of his earshot, Alexandra said, “Patrick’s eyes remind me of a plate we have at home that looks as if it’s cracked all over, but it’s not.”

I’d seen guardedness and suspicion, and she’d seen a cracked plate. I said, “You’ll have to show it to me later.”

We walked once around the park perimeter, stopped for a drink at the water fountain, and sat down for a few minutes next to a tennis court where an intense game was in progress between two men. “Do you play tennis?” I said.

“No. I hate sports.”

“I’ve never been too keen on them either.”

Alexandra swung her legs back and forth under the bench. “What about when you’re teaching, and kids in your class don’t want to go to gym? Do you make them go?”

“I don’t think I’ve taught a child yet who didn’t like gym. Do you dislike it?”

“It’s better since I learned to get out on purpose. Like in dodgeball. If you’re out, you can sit on the bench for the rest of the class.”

I saw Alexandra throwing her slight body in front of the ball — dreading the impact, but desiring it, too. I heard the other kids yell that she was out, saw the fierce feral expressions on their faces that elimination games so often provoke, saw her limp off to the bench, to sit and rub at the sore spot where the ball had hit her, to count the minutes until she could return to the safety of the classroom. I saw all this, and a pang of sadness for her sounded in my chest.

“Other kids love gym, though” she said. “Josh is only in kindergarten and gym is his favourite subject.”

I thought I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “What’s your favourite subject?”

No hesitation. “Silent reading.”

Jane was sitting on her front steps reading the newspaper when we came back. Joshua, in the driveway, shot a plastic puck with a hockey stick into a child-sized net. “How did the walk go?” Jane said. “Did you two have fun?”

Alexandra said, “Patrick was there with Buck and I threw a ball for Buck a bunch of times and he caught it in his mouth, and I didn’t get any dog saliva on my hands, not once.” Jane smiled. “Gee, that does sound like fun” Alexandra ran up to the door. “Can you wait a second, Blithe? I want to show you that plate I was talking about. I’ll be right back.”

Over the sound of Joshua’s hockey stick slapping the driveway, Jane said, “Thank you so much for taking Alexandra out. That’s two days in a row you’ve cheered her up.”

“It was a pleasure. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

“Thank you, but I couldn’t impose.”

“It’s no imposition. I enjoyed her company. She’s interesting and funny.” And sad.

“That’s kind of you to say.”

Why should she think I was sincere, when we’d both been brought up to favour politeness over honesty, when the two were so difficult to distinguish from each other? I said, “I’m not being kind, I mean it. How about next Sunday, at the same time?”

“He shoots, he scores!” Joshua yelled.

Jane searched my face, seemed to come to a decision. “Do you think you might be interested in babysitting Alexandra the odd time? For money?” She rushed on. “I know you’re too old for babysitting and way overqualified and you’re already doing that research job and I wouldn’t ask at all, but you two seem to relate, which is not a common occurrence with Alexandra and adults.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m so glad there are only a few weeks left in the school year. Alexandra’s teacher has no sympathy for a child like her.”

“A child like her being how?”

“Bright, but non-conforming. And not socially adept.”

How could I say no? I didn’t imagine myself an Annie Sullivan to Alexandra’s Helen Keller, but maybe if I spent some time with her, I could help her feel less alone. Help myself feel less alone.

Jane and I had just set a time to meet the next Sunday when Alexandra came back out the front door. “Here,” she said. “Now do you see what I mean?” She handed me a blue ceramic dinner plate, an artisanal piece made with a finely cracked surface under a shiny glaze.

“Why did you bring that out?” Jane said.

Alexandra said,“Don’t Patrick’s eyes look like that? They do!”

Jane and I both stared at the surface of the plate for a moment, then Jane said,“You’re right, Alexandra. Patrick’s irises do resemble this finish. I noticed them yesterday.”

Not that I much cared, but she was right.