Quiet Dell: A Novel (15 page)

She sees Grethe, younger, the capable ten-year-old she never was, walking by the stream in Quiet Dell on their father’s arm. It is really Grethe; their father has come for her and happiness lies round them, moving over the grass of the densely green banks, into the trees that are wreathed in vines.

Annabel looks for her mother and sees her parents in their wedding clothes, walking along the Krystalgade to their reception at Copenhagen’s Royal Hotel. Annabel, borne up, wheels over them as they stand on the windy deck of an ocean liner, dressed in jackets and hats. Her mother’s scarf is a froth of white chiffon that suddenly blows up and away, beyond the sea, until it is Charles’
white silk scarf draped about Annabel’s shoulders; the turbulent sea grows smaller and smaller, calms and stills, to become the tea in her mother’s cup. The cup is atop the piano in their own living room on Cedar Street. Her mother sits with baby Grethe, who bangs on the piano, so loud, before her illness! Then Mother is bathing her in cold water to bring down the fever; baby Grethe screams and Father holds her still. Mother weeps into the water, and the edge of the tin basin floating with ice becomes the gleaming handle of a fine perambulator. Her mother pushes the carriage, a fancy one with a velvet hood, Hart the child within, and Grethe, four years old, very proud of her new eyeglasses, skips ahead of their father.

Annabel feels the feathery weight of Charles’ long white scarf and pulls it close about her. She senses her grandmother’s touch and hears her voice:
Remember they cannot see or hear you. You see what has been and what will be. You are not bound by time
.

Alone, she flies above the beautiful, unfamiliar hills. She sees all of Quiet Dell, the dirt road leading deeper into country, the creek nearby, warbling its music, pulling light from dark, for she has flown from night to day. Bluegill and minnows dart within the falling, leaping water, each a transparent sliver with a beating heart. Quiet Dell is beautiful, the trees at once gently riffling their great canopies, leading like stair steps up the sides of densely scented hills, ridge over ridge, as far as she can see. She looks back to find the others, but the garage building is a black hole. She hovers there and sees grasses and roots grow toward it at lightning speed, rushing and meeting and growing up, a fountain of green, for years are passing and the urgent land hums and flows, erasing the harrowing dark.

She turns to get away, far away. Lights in the hills blink small as fireflies. She can see through the roofs of houses deep in the hollows. A boy sits beside his mother’s bed, feeding her soup with a teaspoon. The boy wipes her mouth and a shock of dark hair falls in his eyes. It must be cool and damp, for he has put a coat and many rude grain sacks over his mother’s quilt. Annabel is about to throw down her white scarf, for its warmth is surely greater from so far, but she is standing in Broad Oaks of a summer evening.
What is Broad Oaks? The street is brick, the sidewalk a tilted strip along a bank of grass. Small wood houses, and a storefront with a board marquee standing straight and bare above the roof. That is Quincy Street, and the Powers’ Grocery, Annabel thinks, but the names mean nothing to her.

She longs for home and sees her mother and Mr. Malone, sitting opposite one another in his office at the bank. His name is on the desk in brass. How odd that she can hear the tick of the big bank clock on the wall by the tellers’ windows. The clock ticks until the sound is submerged in the evening sounds of Quiet Dell, a chorus of birdsong and crickets, and the whirl of insects past her ears. She sees Mr. Malone turn toward her mother, concerned, and then it is not her mother, but another woman, younger, her hair pulled up and fastened chignon style, writing Malone’s words in a notebook. Malone stands to be near her, and the woman stands nearly against him. They look at one another and do not speak.

Annabel hears a clatter of hoofbeats. A horse of some weight travels fast over hard ground. There is no ground, but this world contains every sound, and the mission is urgent. Yes, urgent, and as though she rides upon the horse, feeling its weight and the bellows of its breath, a night sky opens to receive her. She knows the constellations and begins to count their stars.

Come up here, O dusty feet!

Here is fairy bread to eat.

Here in my retiring room,

Children, you may dine

On the golden smell of broom

And the shade of pine;

And when you have eaten well,

Fairy stories hear and tell.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Fairy Bread,”
A Child’s Garden of Verses

Emily Thornhill must present herself to William Malone, bank president, who with Mayor McKee and Chief Harold Johnson of the Park Ridge police, seems in charge of official inquiries concerning the Eicher family. So, Park Ridge in late August—a veritable paradise, by the look of the ordered, shady streets, even here in the heart of downtown. Well heeled. Thriving, even. Homes of stockbrokers, medical men, professors and their lovely wives and perfect children.

She parks her borrowed automobile across from the First National Bank and attaches her press credential to the handle of her bag. She carries a briefcase as well, containing research, notes, accessed public records, but never opens it before subjects, and keeps information to herself in interviews: public records are misleading, sparse, often wrong. She takes her notebook from her bag and offers herself to subjects as a supremely competent professional, a blank slate interested only in factual elements. Of course, she is interested in far more. She has an instinct for play, for reading what the subject doesn’t know, but could, or might.

She looks across the street at the bank. It might be the entrance of a theater. Marble facade, columns, double brass doors, as though a crowd might need to enter and exit at once, as required at performances. Banking and business are theater, most assuredly.

Interesting that Malone asked the
Tribune
to send through her résumé, despite Mrs. Verberg’s and Mrs. McKee’s personal recommendations. He required professionalism in all things. Her
accomplishments, seven years now full-time at the
Tribune,
were impressive enough. Perhaps he is one of those who suspect successful workingwomen of flighty temperaments. Perhaps he resents independent women who require nothing of men like him.

Very well. She is Emily Thornhill, thirty-five years old, of good family, “finished” at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut, graduate of the University of Chicago, journalist for the
Chicago Tribune
. Summers with her paternal grandparents in rural Iowa after her father’s death, when she was seven. A daddy’s girl, and then her grandfather’s, certainly. Seldom saw her mother, who was nervous, “not well”; who employed a governess, early on, and later, widowed, hired an “assistant” to manage details, including Emily’s visits home and her coming out, a proper society debut. Emily supports her mother now with funds from a family trust, in a genteel facility with views of the lake. She no longer knows Emily’s name, but greets her as a social equal with whom she is distantly acquainted. Emily is her family’s sole heir; there is enough to ensure comfort, if not luxury. Her father’s parents, who loved her father and his only child, were her true home; she lived for those summer months and the train rides to Cedar Rapids. Her grandparents met her in the wagon, with a basket full of sandwiches and cookies, until Grandmam was ill, and then Granddad. They’d died, two years apart, during Emily’s summers off from college, when she was there to nurse them; she counted herself fortunate and did not pine for a different life. She is happily unmarried, though she is not a maiden, and lives in a doorman building.
Working girl
still applies, in Emily’s estimation, for there are few terms to describe someone like herself;
spinster
is inadequate in her case. Her hairdresser says they will dye her hair, subtly, when the time comes, but never cut it, the light brown color is so lovely against her complexion, and her thick curls are easily concealed in tight chignons or the Gibson girl styles she favors: old fashioned, respectable, to soften her smart suits.

She checks her image in the rearview mirror, and carefully wipes any trace of lipstick from her mouth. Malone is not the first to require that she substantiate her qualifications.

•   •   •

He stood as she entered his office. “Mayor McKee asked me to meet with you, Miss . . . Thornhill?”

“Yes. Mr. Malone.” She advanced to shake his hand across the desk. He was a tall man, handsome, distinguished even, with strong hands. His palm was cushioned and fleshy, powerful, and the instant of contact was disorienting, like the minute shift of a room. She was glad the desk remained between them, and stepped back, irritated with herself. Perhaps he had this effect generally. She did not typically succumb to general effects.

He regarded her, then indicated a chair at a round table to the right of his desk.

She took her notebook from her bag and began writing.
Mahogany paneling, deep blue carpet, massive desk. Tasteful, not opulent. Side entrance exit. Malone, as described.

He was speaking. “The story will break quite soon. No one can stop that process, which will take on a life of its own. Mayor McKee feels the community can trust you to be factual, yet sensitive, particularly to the family.” He took in her attire, her posture in his upholstered office chair, her face, her eyes, her gaze, intently focused on the notebook in which she was writing. “The
Tribune,
” he said, “the most influential newspaper in the metropolitan area, will set the tone.”

“That is my intent, Mr. Malone.” She felt his gaze and wondered what he saw. Her hair was up; she had not worn a hat, as it was a warm day. She looked at him evenly. “As you know, Mrs. Verberg arranged that I interview the housekeeper, Mrs. Abernathy, today at the Eicher home. I will interview Mr. Charles O’Boyle this evening in Chicago, before departing for West Virginia. I should arrive there a day after the Park Ridge police whose travel you funded.” She wrote,
noble, protective, skeptical.

“I did not fund them, Miss Thornhill. I merely supplemented town funds in the interest of time. We are all neighbors in Park Ridge.” Silence. He waited to catch her eye and then held her gaze,
as though demanding she acknowledge the point. “Their presence in Clarksburg was necessary in order to effect Pierson’s arrest, on the basis of numerous letters to Mrs. Eicher, found at the Eicher home. He fled in haste after police questioned him here, a week or so ago, nearly eight weeks after the family disappeared.”

“Understood, Mr. Malone.” She understood that he felt some responsibility, far more deeply than did the neighbor women. He was childless, they’d told her. These were fatherless children beyond the realm of protection. She herself had glimpsed that realm. If not for her grandparents, she would have lived within it, despite any material advantage. “Do excuse me,” she said. “The neighbor, Mrs. Verberg, is a member of my Chicago travel club, as is Mrs. McKee. They asked me to become involved. I do investigative reporting—mostly political and social issues. Their accounts, as well as my phone conversation with Mr. O’Boyle, indicate that concern is warranted. O’Boyle was apparently the first to contact the police about—Pierson, is it?”

“Yes, Pierson. I never met him and can’t comment on neighborhood talk; I live on the other side of the park.”

“But you were the Eichers’ banker for many years? You, perhaps, advised Mrs. Eicher on financial matters?”

“Yes. I knew her husband, Heinrich Eicher, a businessman—insurance—a silversmith as well, who ran his wife’s enterprise, a crafts workshop, silverwork mostly, on their property.”

“You knew them socially, as well?” She fixed her gaze on her notebook. His hair was thick, chestnut, silver at the temples. He wore it rather long.

“No. Mrs. Malone is an invalid. We don’t socialize. But I met with Heinrich Eicher several times in this office, over the years. After his death, a sudden death, a streetcar accident, five or six years ago, I met with Mrs. Eicher, and continued to do so.”

“You advised her in the wake of Heinrich’s death.” It was a statement. Emily could feel Malone’s presence in the room. Masculine. A hint of delicate, musky fragrance, like crushed flowers. She glanced at his desk and wrote,
cologne? subtle. No ashtray/pipe stand,
photographs, keepsakes. Trays of papers, correspondence, three deep, perfectly organized. Invalid wife. Streetcar, sudden death.
She could easily check records on Heinrich Eicher.

“Heinrich did not leave her well situated. They’d invested in the workshop, her fine arts business, but the lack of resources after she was widowed, and then of course the Crash, finished that. The children were young. There was Heinrich’s mother, Lavinia, to help, but she died after an illness of some months, this past Thanksgiving.”

“Leaving only Mrs. Eicher, Asta, to raise the children, support the household. And to do that—”

“Miss Thornhill, these are confidential matters. I’m sharing information with you only because Mayor McKee asked me to do so.” He stood and paced, behind his desk. “I am not optimistic. A woman, middle-aged, goes off with a man no one knows. She tells her neighbor she’s to be married to a man of means.”

“And what did she tell you, Mr. Malone?”

“Nothing. I would have asked to meet the man for a frank talk, with Mrs. Eicher’s permission, of course. Any honorable man would have agreed to such a meeting, even requested it.” He stood and walked to the window, which looked out on the alley passage beside the bank. “She wanted to stay in her home until the children were of age, and asked, last January, that the bank take over the mortgage and lend her a small sum. The debt, as well as the mortgage owed, would be paid when the house was sold.” He turned to face Emily. “She had not accepted my advice in the past. I’m afraid she did not confide in me because she believed I would think her . . . unwise.”