Just Like Home(32)

She reconsidered the dunes of clothing that surrounded her. This note had to have fallen out of a pocket. She dropped to her knees beside the plastic bin and pulled out each shirt, one at a time, feeling for hidden folds where more pages from the journal might be hidden, but there was just flimsy poly-blend fabric, rough and pilled with age and too many washes in too-hot water.

Vera read the page again.

SHE’S SO GOOD INSIDE.



This was a little piece of her father. A little piece of a family that had loved Vera. A piece that had cared about her so much that he had to write it down, had to put pen to paper and memorialize that his daughter was good. She was good.

Maybe her mother had found it and torn it up and stuffed it in a pocket to be forgotten. Maybe some visiting artist had shredded it and left it strewn around like so much trash.

Or maybe Francis, knowing he was going to disappear from his daughter’s life, had left these for her to find.

Vera sat back on her heels. Then she reached out and grabbed a cardigan. She folded it carefully, feeling along every inch of it. It took hours, but she checked every garment, folded each one neatly and slowly surrounded herself with piles of the clothes that had sheathed her mother for the last few decades of her life.

She checked every pocket. She turned up every collar. She shook out every sleeve.

There was nothing. Not a receipt, not a loose dollar, and certainly not any more of Vera’s father’s words.

It should have felt like defeat—all that effort to no real end—but Vera felt somehow steadied. This was the second scrap she’d found of her father’s journal. There might be more pieces of it littered around the house. If there were, Vera decided, she was going to find them all. Every piece of him that was left, she would gather and keep. It was her job to clear out the house, and she was going to do just that.

Until now, it had been about erasing the evidence that her mother had lived and died here.

Now, it was about more than that. Now, it was about finding evidence that once, half a lifetime ago, love had lived here too.

First, though, the folded-up clothes had to go. She could drive them to the pick-and-pull that afternoon, get rid of them for good. She loaded a few stacks into the plastic bin, then realized that what she really needed was bags, and a lot of them. Those plastic ones from under the kitchen counter, maybe, or some big garbage bags—whatever would be enough to get all of this out of here. She’d need to take the bin downstairs to figure out how many bags she needed, and then back up to load all the clothes into the bags, and then back down again, however many trips it took to empty the room.

Her arms ghosted with fatigue at the thought of heaving all that weight down the stairs and into her car, but there was no way around it. No one would be helping her. Certainly not the son of Hammett Duvall, whom she had no interest in inviting up to the second floor of the house. Vera might as well just let her arms ache until this part of the job was done.

Once it was, she’d be able to move on to another part of the house, to find what secret pieces of her father might be waiting for her.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


On Vera’s third trip from the bedroom to the car, she happened to glance into the dining room. It was dark and cold, just as it had been the day before when she had tried to clean out the kitchen. The house was quiet, still, as if all the air in it had been condensed into a single point. She couldn’t see a thing, but she could hear her mother’s labored breathing. It was a heavy noise with a click at the bottom of it, like ball bearings falling through cottage cheese.

“Daphne?” she said, standing at the threshold of the dining room, the door to the basement shadowing the edge of her vision. It occurred to her that, even with the lights off in the dining room, it shouldn’t have been so dark in there. The light from the kitchen window should have shone through, even if only a little.

She set down the overloaded bin of clothes. The half of it that was on the dining room side of the threshold vanished into blackness.

Maybe her mother had gotten up and drawn the curtains in the kitchen. Maybe she’d wanted it dark, and she’d drawn the curtains, and the sun was on the other side of the house so there wasn’t much light coming through anyway.

Vera didn’t want to walk through that darkness. She scolded herself for her childishness. It was just a dark room with a dying woman in it. Fourteen feet across, give or take a few inches because Francis Crowder had never been too precise in his measurements. There was no reason why those fourteen feet of impenetrable blackness should have made her so aware of her throat and her bladder and the way her high bun exposed the bare skin on the back of her neck.

She made a fist with her right hand, determined not to indulge her sudden, childish fear. It was just a dark room.

“Daphne, I’m coming in,” she said, her voice an imposition in the too-quiet house.

She was answered by another sucking, rattling breath.

“Fine,” she hissed to herself. She snapped the fingers of her right hand four times fast, and then, before her fear could talk her out of it, she reached around the wall and turned on the light.

Daphne was sitting up in bed, looking right at her, blankfaced.

“I’m just going through to the kitchen,” Vera said. Her mother didn’t answer—she just watched with glittering black eyes as Vera passed through the dining room.