Now You See Her (17 page)

“That’s reassuring, Mr. Feggiotti, because I’ve been warned about this neighborhood.”

“Crime is everywhere, Ms. Cutter. We’re not kidding ourselves. ‘The boughs not smooth, but poisoned thorns.’ Inferno, canto
13.”

Somehow Big Doc comes to mind. At Carlo’s name, his comeback was “Flames of hell.” Unless I hallucinated in the haze. “Were
you raised in Boston, Mr. Feggiotti?”

“Malden, close enough.”

“And you have long experience working here at Eldridge Place?”

“Since they poured the first truckload of concrete. I know every rebar and I-beam in the place.”

“Then maybe you can clear up some confusion. You see, I lost touch with Boston for a number of years when I lived in the Chicago
area. An old friend tells me this block had a terrible fire, the whole block. Is that true?” Carlo’s eyes do not move, but
the jaw stops dead. “My friend warns me against a possible move here. Maybe he’s superstitious?”

He shifts his gum and pats the bulge at his hip. “Yeah, superstitious.”

“Do you remember the fire?”

“Want some gum?”

“No thanks.”

He pops a fresh piece. “We’re high-tech watchdogs. Our mission is your security.”

“I’m not a superstitious person, Mr. Feggiotti, but background of this property is a factor in my peace of mind. I want to
know Eldridge Place isn’t subject to fire.”

“You’re good to go on that score. Don’t give it a thought.”

“But there was a fire?”

“Years ago.”

“Houses?”

“Couple old houses, yeah.”

“And that’s all?”

“Maybe a business.”

“Offices?”

“Like a gas station.”

“Underground gas tanks? So flammable.” Didn’t Big Doc rant about poison sewers? “And ruptured tanks would contaminate the
soil.”

His gaze narrows. “It’s all cleaned up. It was a body shop.”

“With paints and solvents, major pollutants. It all burned?”

“To the ground. ‘As flames on oil will skim across the surface, so here quick fire coursed from heel to toe… sucked by the
reddest flames.’ Canto 19, Inferno.”

“You’re quite the Dante expert. Impressive.”

“The man knew everything there is to know. Here’s a whole verse from the Purgatorio, my favorite—”

But at that moment, a side door bursts open. A short, thickset balding man in black jeans and turtleneck jogs our way. He
wears one thick oily work glove, carries the other. “Carlo, Carlo, we got a shipment. It’s—”

“Not now, Arnie. We have a visitor.”

“It’s imp—”

“I said not now. Our guest comes first.” His voice drops to a throaty growl. “I’ll meet you after.” Carlo guides me immediately,
swiftly, to the elevator. “Let me take you to your car.”

“It’s level D. I can manage.”

“I insist. Eldridge Place is all about courtesy.” The flesh of his left cheek begins to twitch. “Of course we have excellent
garage lighting, even ‘back toward where the sun is lost.’ ” His knee jiggles as he hits D, and we ride down. He studies a
ring of keys as if it’s a poker hand. The door opens, and he walks me to the car at a fast clip.

“Thanks so much,” I say. “Parking garages are claustrophobic.”

“ ‘The bottom of the universe … the place all rocks converge … that melancholy hole.’ Inferno, canto 32. Any questions or
concerns, Ms. Cutter, be in touch. We stand by to help. Good night.” He shuts my door, waits until I start my engine and back
out of the space, then disappears into the elevator.

It rises just one level, to C. To meet Arnie? What kind of shipment arrives at eleven at night? What unnerved Carlo? Is it
connected with Perk? Who is Perk?

I debate about taking the stairwell and having a quick look. But there’s no exit window here, no mud to cushion a fall. Besides,
I’m probably on camera right now—on the concierge desk monitor at a thirty-second interval. I decide to view the building
from the service roadway instead. If approached, I can say I took a wrong turn.

In moments, I’ve spiraled out of the garage, bypassed the resident/visitor exit, and pulled onto the breakdown lane of the
service entrance drive at the north side of the building. Angled on an upgrade, I’m about fifty feet from the entrance to
the city street. A concrete abutment rises about ten feet high on my right. On the left, landscaped high mounds with evergreen
shrubs form a scalloped pattern along the left lane of the service road. It feels as though I’m climbing out of a tunnel.

It’s after 11:30 p.m. No security cameras are visible, but that means nothing, because cameras might be mounted on any metal
post or a cornice of the building. If I’m under surveillance, a blue blazer should appear in minutes, or maybe a Boston cop.
I open a map from the glove box so I can plead lost if confronted. The grime on my car cuts its gloss and, I hope, its visibility.
Lamplight glows in a few units of the upper floors of Eldridge. Most everyone has turned in.

What am I looking for? Carlo and Arnie in a criminal act? Whatever, it’s not happening on this service road. I lower the window
and listen. At low volume, the Mass Pike traffic in the distance is white noise. An airliner drones, a final flight out of
Logan? I move my seat back and look around at nothing. The air feels thick, the sky a molten lead. A small bird wheels aloft—or
is it a bat? I shut the window fast.

Any commercial vehicle that enters or exits the complex must pass this spot. The Tsakis brothers deliver eggs and tomatoes
here, dry cleaners too and liquor stores. But what arrives unscheduled late at night and makes Carlo Feggiotti’s cheek twitch?
I could sit here all night and never know.

I chomp a cinnamon breath mint. The map light shows 11:52. It’s stuffy. I turn on the engine and crank up the vent blower.
The welcome fresh air is noisy. The blower roars on high, fills my car with sound and air.

Then I hear a second engine noise, the grind of a truck’s low gears. It’s coming from behind me, from the service road, its
lights off. Caught off guard, I twist around to see it gaining, shifting, approaching. In a moment, it will pull alongside
and pass me. I crane my neck, ready to look up at the cab’s windshield. But the driver’s face is a smudge. As the truck passes,
however, I look at the passenger side window. There’s a face staring down, dark yet visible. I recognize him. Our eyes meet
for just an instant. I’m sure he sees me. I’m sure I’ve been recognized. It’s Carlo Feggiotti.

M
eg Givens’s morning Mayday distress signal is a blessed distraction. Once again I slept badly. Eyes gritty, I’m on my third
cup of coffee. “You promised to research the Marlborough house, Reggie. Can you give it an hour ASAP? Please? Tania’s out
of her mind. I’m losing mine.”

“And Jeffrey?”

“Forget Jeffrey. Ghostwise, it’s all about Tania.”

On my radar screen, it’s about Jeffrey warning me off. It’s about tracing the Eldridge history to Henry Faiser’s arrest for
Peter Wald’s murder and the whole street engulfed in flames. But Igloo Sue’s research on the house is also on my to-do list
because it can pacify Tania as well as help Meg. A calmer Tania means a less stormy Jeffrey and keeps my path clear so I can
see if there’s a trail from him to the lethal Eldridge fire. I need to know how a scrappy black city kid made it to the Back
Bay and an office limo and partnership in a high-end real estate development.

By 11:30 a.m., I have made my way to the Boston Public Library, “the People’s Palace.” Founded in 1848 and the first publicly
supported library in America, it’s a city treasure with its Sargent murals and courtyard garden. The garden benches beckon
with shade and sun, but I march straight to the catalog, enter “Boston” as keyword, and get swamped. Whole forests have been
sacrificed to the city’s recorded obsession with itself.

How can an amateur possibly pick and choose from these hundreds and hundreds of titles? What documents did Igloo Sue research
before being swept off her feet to thaw and live happily ever after in Dallas? Everyone working in the catalog this morning
seems expert and savvy. Skilled hunters, they click, they jot. I eye the pale, stern woman beside me with a Bean tote and
note cards. She’s researching brooms. Straw Brooms of New England, Broom Pedlars in Vermont and New Hampshire, The Economy
of the Corn Broom. Beside her I’m a bumbling novice.

I ask myself what will satisfy Tania and let me find out more about Jeffrey. Picking titles at random is like flea market
browsing, but that’s what I do. My consumer picks: Boston: A Social History, Boston Bohemia, and Lost Boston, plus Delinquents
and Reformers in Boston and a dozen others.

It’s dizzying—and distracting too, because it’s tight quarters, despite the fact that I’ve moved to the main reading room
with its high-vaulted ceilings. Seated to my left at our shared oak trestle table, a gaunt, bearded man surrounded by Russian
tomes mumbles in cadences memorable from Doctor Zhivago. To my right, a twenty-something guy with mismatched socks and black
nail polish snaps the pages of Car and Driver. The room is crowded. I can’t move because my seat number tells the staff where
to bring more books from the stacks—into which, thank heaven, library patrons cannot go, or else I’d surely disappear into
the labyrinth. Not to mention my claustrophobia.

I open a chapter about the prestigious Back Bay and learn something jarring: that the area was once a sewage basin, a dreadful
city health hazard called “a great cesspool.” Surprise, surprise, “the neighborhood smelled like the hold of a ship after
a three years’ voyage.” By 1849, in the interests of public health, the Health Department required the area to be filled in.
Amazingly, the aristocracy of Old Boston paid a premium to live atop a city sewer—a pre-EPA cleanup to turn a toxic swamp
into luxury housing for city aristocrats. I reject the notion of telling Tania that the residents of neighboring Beacon Hill
had “put their handkerchiefs to their noses” when visiting new Back Bay construction. She’d be revolted and furious and take
it out on Meg.

Here, however, is a more Tania-friendly fact, which Jeffrey Arnot will also appreciate: 580 acres of “brand new land” were
brought to Boston in railcars from “the lure of real estate profits,” whereupon “Beacon Street extended westward. Two new
streets were developed: Newbury and Marlborough.” Bingo!

Better yet, here’s a French twist: “In the 1860s, Boston suddenly surrendered to all things French… Second Empire style. From
the very start, the Back Bay was clearly to be the most fashionable and luxurious residential section in an expanding city.”

The Arnots’ house, according to one of these books, was built in 1881 in the newly fashionable Medieval style, its first owner
Mr. Edmund Wight. An architectural writer celebrates the house for its “forward thrust of gable” and “inward pull of the deep
and spacious entrance porch.”

Pure spin, this praise for a house that’d give anyone the Gothic creeps in the brightest moonlight. I’d bet nineteenth-century
little children in knickerbockers and sailor straws streaked past that house in terror. My Jack and Molly would’ve called
it a Witch House and skipped it on Halloween, assuming they trick-or-treated in the 1880s.

Yet it’s bonbons for Tania if I can link the French Second Empire with the paranormal—or whatever they called it back then.
Animal magnetism? Or perhaps it was mesmerism, named for Franz Anton Mesmer, who put subjects into “a sleeplike condition,
a state of trance” in which “jars of ammonia passed under their noses failed to evoke even the slightest response.” I say
that anybody who’s beyond rousing with ammonia fumes is scary.

Had Edmund Wight been a follower of mesmerism?

My book of the hour is The Gentle Bostonians: Biography of the Back Bay Breed, a memoir by one Frances “Fannie” Fantrell,
who grew up on Clarendon Street in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The dates fit the Arnot house, and the location
is perfect for neighborhood lore on Wight. “Home for me is always the Back Bay,” wrote Fannie, “where houses breathe an air
of comfort and conformity.” And here’s Marlborough: “Henry James stood with Father at the head of Marlborough Street, looked
down its long expanse, and sighed.”

My pulse quickens. Surely, Edmund Wight will make an appearance in this old-fashioned book, in its own way a version of People,
with nonstop news makers and celebs of Boston history’s Who’s Who. Maybe Wight went to the Pole with Captain Scott and froze
and has haunted his own house ever since.

I’m midway through the book and getting hungry for lunch when Wight makes his entrance. “Father and Mr. Wight took their customary
stroll.” Bingo again! Mr. Wight, according to Fannie, is “a compact man, in sober clothes, round faced, with grizzled, close-cropped
mustache and eyes twinkling benignly behind steel rimmed spectacles.” In springtime, “he wears a ‘Boston Leghorn’ hat, his
walking stick swinging forward before it touches the bricks of the sidewalk.”

Wight’s valet, or maybe coachman, is named Boyle. “Boyle brought the coach round, and Mr. Wight took leave of us.”

“Boyle” is Irish, isn’t it? Moments ago I read that “hauling gravel and filling in the Back Bay furnished employment for Irish
laborers.” If I can’t find scandal or mesmerism, can I concoct a notion of a ghostly Irish servant?

I read on. Mr. Wight, it seems, courted Miss Clara Eddington of Beacon Hill, “a pretty girl with a classic nose and delicious
warm voice, a flowered hat high on her wavy hair, and velvet ribbons on her bodice.” She was “the fixed maypole around which
Mr. W. circled as if ’twere perpetual springtime.”

It seems that Miss Eddington was courted by countless suitors. Trolleys full of Harvard men made pilgrimages to her family
home on Beacon Hill. To foil rivals, Wight made his big bold move, which was to build the Marlborough house. The neighborhood
was reportedly atwitter when the architect, Charles Dehmer, persuaded his client to forgo the Academic French style in favor
of the captivating newer fashion, Medieval.

Did Miss Clara Eddington of Beacon Hill thus live happily ever afterward on Marlborough as the wife of Edmund Wight, who was,
after all, a Brahmin serving on boards of trustees and faithfully attending dinner meetings of the Monday Club, of which he
was secretary?