A Quiet Death (7 page)

And for several long and blissful moments, Paul swept all my pain away.

Later, as we cuddled on the sofa watching the eleven o'clock news, I found myself drawn to, yet repelled by, the images on the screen. At least they were no longer running wall-to-wall train disaster coverage.

Channel Four was reporting that the driver of the train hadn't been at fault. He'd not been texting on his cell phone, as had been earlier speculated. Indeed, his cell phone had been found tucked away in his backpack. Metal-to-metal compression streak marks proved he'd braked, hard, before the crash.

A news anchor spent several minutes interviewing ‘experts' who theorized that a signal failure had caused our train to plow into the back of another, even though all the circuits had been checked and replaced following a devastating crash in June of 2009. The NTSB investigation was continuing.

Pictures of the victims scrolled by. The driver, the teacher, the rabbi, the programmer, the Germans and the teen. I gulped, thinking how easily my picture could have ended up on the television screen, too.

That was it then. Seven fatalities. And no one who looked the least bit like Skip was among them.

EIGHT

A
week went by, and I was functioning well, even without the pills. I'd managed a few short trips to the grocery on my own, and a visit to the Apple Store in the mall to buy a replacement for my iPhone, but most of the time I stayed home, busily reconstructing a decades-old love affair.

Early one Monday afternoon, my sister-in-law Connie popped in, armed with a plate of home-made brownies. ‘Dennis is working late tonight. Major case,' she explained. ‘So I've come over to help.'

‘Help with what?' I asked, lifting a corner of the plastic wrap that covered the brownies. I slid one off the plate directly into my mouth.

‘Dinner. You're not taking proper care of my brother, or so I hear. He had to resort to McDonald's the other night. Is that true?'

‘Perfectly true, I'm afraid,' I mumbled around a mouthful of brownie. ‘A double quarter pounder with cheese and a large order of fries.'

‘I'm shocked, shocked!' Connie carried the brownies out to the kitchen, along with a shopping bag she'd brought in with her. I trailed behind her and watched while she began assembling the wherewithal for a steak, salad and baked potato dinner on my kitchen counter.

‘So, what are you up to?' Connie asked as she rearranged a couple of mustard jars so she could fit a pint of sour cream into my fridge. ‘Any word from Skip?

‘Afraid not. But I've been giving the letters a thorough going-over.'

Connie dropped the potatoes into a pot in the sink, ran water over them. ‘The potatoes can certainly wait. Tell me about it.'

‘I'll do better than that. I'll show you.'

Connie followed me into the dining room where the results of my research efforts were strewn all over the table. ‘Whoa! I guess this means we eat in the kitchen tonight.'

I grinned. ‘We usually do, now that I've turned the dining room into a
de facto
office.' I performed a broad sweep with my arm in a television spokesmodel way. ‘There are fifty-six letters, all addressed to a Ms Lilith Chaloux. She's a lot more well-travelled than either you or I were at that age. The letters were sent to addresses all over the world.'

I picked up a strip of photos that had obviously been taken in one of those Take-Your-Own-Miniature-Portraits-4-Poses-4! carnival booths and handed it to Connie. It showed a fair, dark-haired, doe-eyed woman mugging impishly for the camera.

‘Is this Lilith?' she asked.

I nodded. ‘I keep assuming that Lilith is the mother of that man I met on the train, but there's no way to know for sure. He was fair-skinned, too, but his hair was light, not dark like hers. I keep trying to imagine his face from . . . before . . . so I can compare it with these photos of Lilith, but all I see now is his face on the train, streaked with dirt and blood and contorted in pain.'

Connie slipped her arm around me and gave me a hug. ‘I can't imagine how hard it must have been.'

I swiped tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand. ‘Frankly, this project has been a welcome diversion,' I said reaching for the box of tissues on the sideboard, whipping one out and giving my nose a good blow. ‘As you can probably see, I've arranged the envelopes in order by postmark. The letters begin in September of 1976, but I know the relationship had been going on for a good while before that. I figure the September letter arrived soon after the first time Lilith and Zan were separated.'

I tossed my used tissue into a trash bin, sat down and motioned for Connie to join me at the table.

‘What does the letter say?' Connie asked.

‘The usual. My sweet darling. Miss you terribly. Then he enclosed a poem – “Yes, call me by my pet name” – and signs it “Zan,” just “Zan.”'

‘“Let me hear the name I used to run at, when a child,”' Connie quoted. ‘Barrett-Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese.'

‘Exactly. Later on, he sends her the ubiquitous “How do I love thee, Let me count the ways.”'

‘Always a good poem,' Connie said.

‘A very good poem,' I agreed. ‘Lilith was living in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York, at the time that first poem arrived. The last letter in the collection was dated ten years later, December 1986. Lilith was staying at the Hotel Simon on García de Vinuesa in Seville. The letter was full of anticipation for their upcoming holiday. They were spending New Year's Eve together, among other things. And it's signed, “Farewell, you who make me fare well.”'

Connie flicked away an imaginary tear. ‘Romantic dude.' She fingered the envelope, turning it over. ‘No return address.'

‘Not on any of the letters.'

‘Cautious, too. Married?'

I nodded. ‘Bingo.'

‘What happened after New Year's Eve 1986?'

I shrugged. ‘I can think of several possibilities. The letters stopped because they split up, or the letters stopped because they decided to stay together, or maybe Skip didn't have all of Zan's letters.'

I handed her a packet of photos. ‘The photo on top? I figure it was taken about the time Zan's last letter was written. See where they're standing?'

Looking at the photo, Connie frowned. ‘I'll need help with that, Sherlock. All I see is a man and a woman standing arm in arm in front of some monument, taken by a third party who wasn't very good at it. Look, the photographer's too far back and he's cut off their feet.'

‘It's the tomb of Christopher Columbus,' I informed her. ‘I looked it up at the library in a Fodor's travel guide for Spain. The tomb is inside the big Catholic cathedral in Seville.'

In the photo, Lilith didn't look a day older than her earlier photos, although she'd traded in the ponytail for a short, layered do that feathered prettily around her face. She was dressed entirely in black, with a wide belt worn low on her hips. Zan, on the other hand, looked like a prep. He wore a Polo shirt tucked into the waistband of cuffed khakis. I couldn't see his eyes, hidden behind dark-framed Ray Bans, the kind popularized by Tom Cruise in the movie
Risky Business
. Yet his smile was friendly, open, as if he had no fear of being recognized.

In another photo, possibly taken the same day, the photographer had done a better job. The same outfit, but this time I could see that Zan wore penny loafers without socks. He posed in front of a fountain, his hand resting casually on the head of one of a dozen lions that formed the fountain's base. ‘I had to page through all the pictures in the guidebook before I found it. That's the Patio de los Leones at the Alhambra,' I explained.

‘What's this?' Connie laid down the photos and picked up a small envelope I'd set aside on the corner of the table.

‘Look inside. I found it among the photographs.'

‘Gift cards, note cards,' Connie commented, plucking one out of the envelope at random and examining it closely. ‘This must have come with some flowers. There have to be fifty of them here!' She squinted at the tiny print. ‘Lilies for my sweet Lilith of the valley,' she read. ‘How sweet! Dennis and I've been married for, what, seven years, and if I had a nickel for every time he'd sent me flowers, I'd have twenty-five cents.'

I laughed out loud. ‘Don't be so hard on the guy, Con. Dennis is nuts about you.'

Connie tucked the flap back into the envelope and set the envelope down on the table. ‘Zan really loved her, didn't he?'

‘“Soul mates” is a hackneyed term, almost a cliché, but I think it describes the situation perfectly.'

‘How old was he, do you know?'

‘Hard to say. Older than Lilith, certainly. From what I gather from one of the earlier letters, he was already married with one child, a daughter, when the relationship began. Later, there must have been another daughter, because he refers to them as “my girls.”

‘What I can't figure out,' I continued, ‘is what Lilith did for a living. She was an artist. I know that because Zan made reference to her “works in progress” and encouraged her to try to get a particular painting into a photorealist show going up at some gallery in Soho, but I see no evidence that she did anything more than paint for her own amusement.'

‘It costs money to travel around like that. London, Paris, Hong Kong, Rome,' Connie pointed out.

‘Exactly,' I said. ‘She spent a lot of time in Zurich, too.' I pawed through the photographs and came up with another picture. ‘I think these people may be her parents. It's labeled on the back Schloss Kyburg, Zurich, 1966.'

Connie scrutinized the photo of a sophisticated couple standing arm-in-arm in what appeared to be a castle courtyard. ‘I'd agree. There's a strong resemblance between Lilith and this other woman. They're both stunningly beautiful.'

‘Another thing I know about Lilith,' I said, ‘she was a Democrat, because in one of the earlier letters, Zan mentions how elated she must have been at the outcome of the fall elections when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford.'

Connie, a lifelong Republican, like her late parents, rolled her eyes. Dennis was a staunch Democrat, and there were some years when neither one of them went to the polls, claiming they simply cancelled each other out.

‘By the 1980s, I think Lilith settled down, Connie. Most of the letters from that period were mailed to an apartment at Thirty-nine Fifth Avenue in New York City. The address sounded very posh, so I looked it up on Google Maps. It's medium posh, as it turns out, just north of Washington Square Park, adjacent to New York University. But the letter that I sent to her there boomeranged back “Addressee Unknown. Return to Sender.”'

‘You actually
wrote
to her?'

I shrugged. ‘Why not?'

Connie had picked up my notebook and was studying the handwritten spreadsheet I had made showing where Lilith and Zan had been living at the time each of his letters was mailed. Chicago to Brooklyn. Omaha to Zurich. Mexico City to Rome. The jet-setting pair seemed to have been hopscotching all over the planet.

‘Was Zan wealthy, too?'

‘Possibly. I'm trying to find a pattern, but so far it eludes me. I wish to hell he'd written more about what was going on in his life, rather than sending her sappy poetry.' I found the envelope I was looking for, opened it and extracted a letter. ‘Listen to this!:

Connie groaned. ‘He would have been better off to stick with Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.'

‘You'll get no argument from me. When did they repeal the law that said that all poetry had to rhyme, anyway?'

‘I don't know, but clearly Zan didn't get the memo. It's that slavish use of rhyming couplets that always slays me.' She looked up from the spreadsheet. ‘Did you see
Miss Saigon
?'

‘The musical where a helicopter lands on the stage?'

Connie nodded. ‘As far as I'm concerned, the helicopter is the highlight of the show. How many hours can you take of doggerel like: “No one can stop what I must do; I swear I'd give my life for you.”'

‘Thank you!' I made a cutting motion across my throat.

‘I really like this picture of Zan, though,' Connie said, handing the short stack back to me. The color Polaroid on top featured Zan – long-haired, bearded, wearing wire-framed glasses – perched on a log and surrounded by dozens of dark-haired, brown-skinned children.

And then Connie said something that had not occurred to me before. ‘Say, Hannah. Do you suppose Zan was in the Peace Corps?'

NINE

T
he Peace Corps has a headquarters building on 20th Street between L and M, a comprehensive library, a website, a blog and a fan page on Facebook. They even Tweet. When you show up with no more than a person's nickname, however, it's one great big Dead End.

Reluctantly, I put Zan on the back-burner.

Besides, I was distracted. My cast – colorful as it was, and decorated with drawings by my talented grandchildren – hearts and flowers, and airplanes shooting down other airplanes with ack-ack fire – was driving me crazy.

‘It itches,' I complained to my husband a little over three weeks after the accident as I scrabbled in the utility drawer looking for a chopstick. I was seconds from inserting the chopstick between the cast and my skin so I could indulge myself with a good scratch, when Paul snatched the chopstick out of my hand.