The Map of True Places

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“Evidently not,” she said. “He was selling all your things through the window when I got here.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not,” Zee said. “He has re-created Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop in the front room. He was selling all your belongings.”

Melville couldn’t help but laugh.

“It’s not funny,” she said.

“No, but it’s creative,” he said. “Forgive me, it’s the only time I’ve even smiled all week.”

“I rescued some of your shirts,” she said.

“For that I am eternally grateful.”

“The doctor thinks it’s the new meds,” she offered. “They were causing hallucinations. We took him off them.”

“What’s he doing instead?”

“More Sinemet. One every three hours with two half doses added in twice a day.”

Melville was quiet.

“Are you still there?” Zee asked.

“Yeah.” After another long moment, Melville changed the subject. “I hired a home health aide,” he said. “Her name is Jessina. She doesn’t work on Fridays, but she’ll be in tomorrow.”

“I don’t understand how you’ve been keeping all this from me,” Zee said. “Or why.”

Melville sighed. “Finch didn’t want to worry you.”

She thought back to the effort it must have taken them both to keep things from her. “Any other secrets?”

“You should come over here. We need to figure things out,” he said.

“Where is ‘here’?”

“I’m house-sitting,” he said. “Friend of a friend. Over by the Athenaeum. Come by tomorrow after Jessina gets there.”

She wrote down the address. After she hung up, she went to the bedroom to check on Finch. He was sleeping soundly. She walked back to the kitchen and dialed Michael.

It rang three times before it went to voice mail.

Zee took out her anger on the kitchen. She cleaned. She scrubbed down stove and counters. She polished the toaster until it shined. As she pulled the canisters away from the wall and began to clean behind them, she found several items meant for decorating cakes: red and blue sugar, some bottles of food coloring, and some spices, including an old amber bottle—all stuff obviously left over from some baking project of Melville’s. She opened the amber bottle and looked inside at the tiny silver balls, the kind you might find on a fancy cake or maybe Christmas cookies—dragées, she thought they were called. They were probably too old to keep, but she didn’t want to throw anything out without asking, so she put all the bottles back in the cabinet with the other baking things.

Melville was a great cook, but he had never been great at cleaning or organizing. As she put the cake decorations away, she started reorganizing the cabinets, putting like with like, the canned goods in one cabinet, the spices in another. Her anger was fading, but the energy of adrenaline was not, and so she moved from cabinet to cabinet, wiping down the surfaces as she went, arranging the labels. She became aware that she was being a bit obsessive when she actually considered alphabetizing everything.

When she got to the third cabinet, she was surprised. Hidden behind the boxes of cereal, she found all the wine that Michael had given Finch, every birthday and Christmas for the last four years, all second-growth vintages, really good wines from Michael’s own collection. They weren’t stored on their sides but stood upright, a sure way to ruin the corks. Horrified, she pulled them out and set them on the counter.

Before his diagnosis of Parkinson’s, from his pirate days on, Finch’s alcohol consumption had been increasing steadily. He had developed a real fondness for wine. From a medical standpoint, this now made sense to Zee, though she’d never seen the phenomenon described in any of the medical journals she’d begun to read on a regular basis. Alcohol releases dopamine, the one chemical that Parkinson’s patients need.