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The inlaid mahogany bookshelves were still in place, as were the Tiffany lamps, permanently installed at the top of each shelf. At the end of the room was a huge pink marble fireplace that my dad used to call the “bordello fireplace.” It was so tall that I used to be able to walk directly into it without ducking. As I walked toward it now, I realized that I was a long way from that little girl. At five foot six, I could easily reach the mantel.
I took in the whole room, vaguely aware of Jan’s talk about how the house had been completed for the Marker family in 1905, how craftsmen had needed the previous six years to complete it. Like the entryway, the library appeared much darker than I remembered, probably because it was now adorned with period furnishings from the early 1900s to make it look as it did back then—heavy red velvet drapes, brass candelabras, uncomfortable-looking high-back chairs. But I saw it as my mother had decorated it—with soft, stuffed chairs and ottomans, vases of fresh flowers, and the corner that was saved just for me, complete with a small child’s chair, the replica of the larger ones, and my own miniature bookcases.
“How do you like it?” I heard Jan ask.
“Oh, it’s lovely. I was just imagining what it would have been like to live here.”
“Well, when the Markers were here, they had a full staff of servants to carry out their every whim, and they entertained often. The Markers were famous for their balls and their travels.”
And what about the Sutter family? I wanted to ask. What were they famous for? Does anyone remember them?
Next, Jan led me to a large drawing room on the other side of the hallway. I listened to her speech about the oil paintings and the marble sculptures, because the room held few memories for me. I couldn’t recall my family spending much time there.
But no, that wasn’t quite right. A recollection came to me of my brother, Dan, seventeen years old when I was only seven, hunched over a scarred octagonal table, his straight blond hair falling over his forehead, writing furiously in his notebook, filling it with his stories. He’d used the room as an escape from the rest of the family, his teenage years making him crave privacy.
“Let’s go upstairs now,” Jan said.
I followed her back through the lobby and up the wide, dark wood stairway that was covered with a wine-colored carpet runner.
“You’ll notice the tapestry on the landing here,” Jan said, pausing, one hand resting on a carved wood globe that formed the top of the banister. Her other hand pointed to a silk wall-hanging in colors of gray and salmon. She described how the tapestry had been hand-woven in Italy, how the artist had visited the Markers. But I had quit listening.
I had returned to a moment that had lain buried until now. I saw my mother standing at the bottom of those stairs, dressed in a powder-blue suit, her feet in high heels I’d never seen before. She moved to the front door and opened it. She spoke to someone, their voices hushed, one voice much deeper than the other. A hand was on her blue shoulder. A large man’s hand. A ring on his finger. The soft sounds of crying. Then my mother swayed, nearly fell.
I had watched this scene, I realized, from the landing where I now stood. I’d been dressed in my favorite pair of jeans and the shirt with the sunflower on the front, my face peering around the post at the top of the landing.
“Are you all right?”
I focused on Jan’s face, her eyes wary. “Sure, sure. I’m fine.” I looked back down the staircase again, but the vision was gone.
“Well, come on up this way. I’ll show you the bedrooms.”
I followed Jan again, surprised at the sudden, vivid flash of my mother. It had been ages since I’d really remembered her in any detail. There were the vague recollections, like how she ran every night, even if it was raining, sometimes coming in the house with her long hair dripping in sheets, her chest heaving as if she’d been chased and not out for a leisurely jog, and later the feel of that hair sweeping my cheek as she leaned over me, kissing me good-night, the smell of lavender on her skin.
“This bedroom belonged to Catherine, the Markers’ only daughter,” Jan said, leading me to the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.
I remembered it well. It used to be mine.
The walls were still painted peach, the fireplace still white, and a canopy bed still stood in the corner. The bed, though, which was made of dark wood, its canopy designed with heavy velvet, was different from the one I loved so much. Mine was white with an eyelet covering. Seeing the bed and the room brought back another flood of memories: myself in the bed, quilt up to my neck, reading until my mother insisted that the lights be turned off; my friend, Patsy, and I playing in front of the fireplace that was never lit; Caroline helping me with my homework at the desk against the wall.
How odd, I thought, that so few of those memories included my dad. But maybe it wasn’t so strange, since he’d spent most of his weekdays working in Chicago and most of the weeknights at his apartment there. And yet, my memories after Woodland Dunes are exclusively of my father and me. No one else.
Jan showed me through three other bedrooms, two of which had been occupied twenty years ago by my siblings. She stopped in the hallway before the master bedroom and pointed out an intercom system that had been installed by the Markers in order to talk to their servants.
“The intercom hasn’t worked in a long time,” Jan said. “At least not since the cultural center moved in here.”
“And when was that?”
“The early eighties.”
“Really?” The early eighties were when my family moved away from Woodland Dunes. “Why did the town want this specific house?”
“Well, I don’t know that they actually wanted this particular home, but from what I heard, they got it at a great price. The people who’d lived here before couldn’t sell it.”
“Why was that?”
Jan made a show of looking around, even though there was no one else near us. “We’re not supposed to talk about this,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “but a lady died here.”
I was quiet. I felt as if I was holding my breath and didn’t know how to let it out. I’d never known where my mom was when she died or exactly how it had happened. I was only seven at the time, and I didn’t remember anything—nothing at all—which had always troubled me. And yet my father and I rarely talked about the subject. When we did, or I should say when I did, it was too painful for him. She became ill, he would say, tapping his head as if to indicate some injury or disease in the brain. His eyes would cloud over, making me fearful he might cry. I knew I looked like her in some ways—my slim build, my wide shoulders, my long sandy hair. I always assumed that resemblance, combined with the horrible memories, made it too painful for him to talk about her death. And so I never stayed on the topic for long. What difference did it make, really? Eventually, I managed to ignore the issue altogether. But that letter had let loose the wonderings again.
“There was some talk, I guess,” Jan said. “The rumor was that someone had done something to her. I got this all secondhand, of course. I was just a baby when it happened.” She checked her watch. “Anyway, let’s finish up.”
She started to take a step away, but I grabbed her arm. She looked at my hand, then at me in surprise.
“I’m sorry.” I took my hand away. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but can you tell me what you mean by the rumors. I mean, what were the rumors, exactly?”
Jan gave me another wary look and rubbed at the spot on her arm. “I don’t know really. Like I said, we’re not supposed to talk about this on the tour, and I wasn’t around to hear about it at the time.”
“I understand.” I tried to make my voice easy, conversational. “But what have you heard? I’m just curious.”
Jan paused a moment, then shrugged. “Well, to be honest, I heard someone killed her, but no one was ever charged, so I’m sure it’s one of those old wives’ tales. Now let me show you the master.”
I trailed behind, her words reverberating in my mind. Someone killed her.
We entered the master bedroom, a large space with a huge bay window of curved glass at the opposite end. A secretary’s desk was tucked into the bay, but I remembered how my mother had installed a long bench under that window and covered it with pillows. I would often find her there, writing in her journal or just looking through the glass onto the front lawn.
I studied the rest of the room, and the cold feeling returned. I remembered so many things all of a sudden—my parent’s king-size bed against the right wall, a bureau of cherrywood with a mirror over it, more flowers, my mother’s yellow sweater hanging over a chair, an armoire to match the dresser, paperbacks and tissue on one nightstand, a lone alarm clock on the other. Recollections poured into my brain with such speed that they startled me. And yet, there was something else about the room that I couldn’t recall.
“Thank you,” I said, interrupting Jan’s remarks. “I have to be going.”
I turned and left the room.
“Is something wrong?” Her voice followed me.
I hurried down the stairs, distantly hearing Jan’s feet pounding behind me, until I made myself stop on the landing. Be calm, I told myself. Be calm. It wouldn’t be good to act crazy when I’d come here seeking answers.
I opened my mouth to say something, but as I gazed down the stairs, I saw my mother again in the powder-blue suit. She was struggling to stand, holding a hand to the back of her head. The doorbell rang once, then again, then pounding came from the door. My mother moved slowly, inching toward the doorway, the white of her hand never leaving her head, holding it gingerly, as if she was keeping her hairstyle in place.
“Is something wrong?” I heard Jan say again.
“No. Nothing at all.” And I turned away, because if I said anything else, I might have told her what I suddenly knew—that my mother, Leah Sutter, died in this house.
4
After leaving the Marker Mansion, formerly the Sutter home—my home—I drove slowly, not sure where I was going, letting the sights of Woodland Dunes fill my head and refresh my memories of the place. I passed the town’s riding stables, matching white barns with green roofs resting on a large field, a white fence surrounding the property. Patsy and I used to ride there on Saturdays, eating brown-bag lunches in the long grass behind the barns when we were done. The town’s championship golf course with its rolling greens and intermittent circles of sand appeared the same as it did years ago, just like the lighthouse at Murphy’s Point.
I turned left on the outskirts of town, then left again toward the lake. And suddenly, there it was. A square plot of land on a hillside dotted with trees and sprinkled with gray and white headstones. The Woodland Dunes Cemetery. I hadn’t realized I was so close. In fact, I didn’t know if I could have found it if I tried.
I pulled into the lot, the tires of the rental car crunching over the gravel. As I got out, I remembered where to go. My dad had brought me here a few times before we moved. I walked toward the far left corner, the heels of my loafers sinking into the damp, spongy ground. I passed an older man in jogging clothes squatting over a small, simple headstone. He pulled stray weeds with a quick hand as if accustomed to the movement.
I stopped when I came to the tall white column made of stone, an angel on either side looking down, protecting the grave. A grayish-green film had made its home in some of the crevices of my mother’s memorial, around the angel’s wings and in the edges of the lettering that read: Leah Rose Sutter, Beloved Wife and Mother, 1942–1982. The rest of the grave site was remarkably clean. No weeds or sand on it like some of the others nearby.
Then I noticed it. A single yellow tulip lying at the base of the monument. I stood completely still, staring at it, my mind latching onto our old house again, wandering the rooms inside, seeing it the way my mother had always kept it. Flowers below the porch, blooms in the vases in the library, and more flowers in her bedroom. In the spring, when the air was new and clean as it was now, those flowers were usually tulips, mostly yellow.
I wrapped my arms around myself. The fact that my mother loved yellow tulips, and the fact that this one had been placed by her headstone had to be a coincidence. I wasn’t aware of anyone who visited her grave. My mother’s own parents had died a few years after her, and she had no siblings. Once we moved away, my father and I never returned. As far as Dan and Caroline were concerned, I didn’t know where they were. They had both been so much older than me. After my mom died, Caroline had gone off to boarding school and Dan to college. We never really saw them after that. My dad and I moved all over for his work at the firm—San Francisco, London, Paris, Long Island—and when I asked about Caroline and Dan, he said that they had their own lives and families. He gave the impression that they didn’t want to be a part of ours any longer.
Maybe the flower had come loose from a nearby bouquet. I glanced at the other grave sites. Some were untended and nearly overgrown. A few had small flower arrangements but no tulips.
When I looked back at my mother’s grave, I had the odd feeling that someone was watching me. A few more glances around told me that I imagined it. The man in the jogging clothes had turned away, walking back to the parking lot.
I bent down and lifted the bud. It looked fairly new, only two of the petals showing signs of droop, probably no more than a day or two old. I laid it gently on the cool stone again, wondering who could have left it here. No matter. I was grateful to the person for honoring my mother, for remembering her.
This time, there were two cars parked in Della’s driveway. As I pulled in behind them, the front door flew open, and a short woman dressed in gray slacks and a sleeveless white blouse rushed down the sidewalk. I got out of the car and opened my arms to hug Della, the woman who’d helped raise me until we moved away from Woodland Dunes, and someone I recalled well, as if there was nothing to fear from my memories of her.
“Oh, Hailey.” Della held a warm hand to my cheek. “You’re so grown-up. You look so much like your mom.”
“Thank you.” Other than my father, I didn’t come across many people who knew my mom, and I liked hearing about the resemblance.
Della took me by the hand and led me around the back of the house where she had a pitcher of iced tea and a tray of cookies waiting on a metal patio table. The branches from a tall oak tree formed a canopy of shade, the breeze making its leaves ruffle and whisper.
Della fussed over me, telling me to sit in one of the chairs. While she spooned ice into our glasses and placed a few cookies on a paper plate, I noticed how little she had changed. Her olive skin was still smooth, her cheeks still full with a pink glow. Her hair, though obviously dyed to keep its black color, still lay in crinkled waves to her chin. She’d put on a few pounds, but they only made her seem more like the comforting figure of my memories.
“Tell me,” Della said, settling into the chair next to me. “Tell me everything about you.”
I talked about law school, my job, my apartment in Manhattan. When I finally slowed down, I took a bite of an oatmeal-raisin cookie, the soft, sweet taste raising a recollection of Della in our old house, lifting a baking sheet out of the oven, placing a hand on my head, telling me to wait until they were cool.
“And you’re not married?” Della said. She bit into her own cookie, but her eyes watched me, waiting for an answer.
“No. I’m a long way from married.”
“No one special then?”
I shook my head. “A few years ago, I was dating someone seriously.” I thought of Michael, sitting bare-chested in his bed, eyes playful, holding firm to my hand, trying to pull me back under the covers.
“And what happened to that?”
I shrugged. The therapist I’d seen after Michael and I broke up had nodded her head at the end of our first and only session and said in a grave tone, “Abandonment issues,” as if she was making a horrible diagnosis like, “Permanent facial disfigurement.” It was natural, she said, for a child who lost a parent so young to have such feelings, but I couldn’t carry them over into my adult relationships and push people away. I knew she had a point, but I had never learned how to avoid keeping most people at arm’s length. I got busy with the bar exam, and I didn’t keep up with the prescribed weekly appointments. Michael met someone at his firm our first year out of law school, and he slid away from me the way the others had. I didn’t think I was ever really in love with Michael, or with any of them for that matter.
I felt that I’d know true love when a kiss could make everything, the rest of the world, disappear. I kept waiting for that moment with Michael. I didn’t expect it to happen right away, but I hoped each time. I’d close my eyes, feel his lips settle over mine, and while I enjoyed it, I was always still right there. Nothing ever disappeared, not the Miles Davis music Michael always played or his high-rise apartment where we often stayed. I began to wonder if maybe I was incapable of feeling that kind of love, or maybe I was laboring beneath an unattainable fantasy.
Della asked me about college at UCLA, about high school on Long Island, about the tutors in Europe and grade school before that in San Francisco. And then we were back to Woodland Dunes, to the year my father and I left.
“I missed you all so much when you were gone,” Della said. She raised a paper napkin to her eyes, and I wondered for a second if she was going to cry. “It was like a part of my family had left.” Her voice creaked, betraying her age. “Of course, I had my own family to take care of. Max was twelve and Delphine ten. My husband said I had to get over it. I had to get over Leah’s death and get a new job.”
“And did you?”
“Oh, I got other jobs, although never as a housekeeper or a nanny again. I cleaned office buildings for a janitorial service, and I cooked meals for the sick.” Della tsked, as if none of that had mattered much. “I never got over Leah.”
“You two were close,” I said. An image drifted back of my mom and Della in the kitchen, sun slanting through the high window over the sink, the two of them laughing as they washed dishes. It seemed to me now that my mother probably kept Della around as much for her company as her housekeeping skills. I couldn’t remember my mom having any other close friends.
“She was a wonderful woman.” Della’s voice was softer now. “A good friend. And I miss her every day.”
I stayed silent, and tilted my head up for a moment, watching a squirrel above me racing from branch to branch. I had missed my mom every day, too, but not in the same way. I longed for the vague concept of my mother, of a mother in my life. I missed her especially when I was learning about boys, shopping for prom dresses, graduating from college, from law school. I had my dad for all those things, and he tried to be everything—father, mother, friend—but sometimes I craved female guidance and companionship. My friendship with Maddy had filled some of that void, yet no one could totally replace a mother.
“How did she die?” It was the question I came to ask, the one that had been haunting me since I read that letter, but I hadn’t meant to say it so abruptly.
Della sat straighter in her chair, then raised a hand to her lips. She lifted her shoulders, then let them fall again. “It’s hard to say. What do you remember?”
I pushed my mind back to that time when I was seven years old. I remember not needing to ask the question of how she had died, as if I had known the answer and didn’t want to be reminded. But somewhere along the way, I lost the knowledge.
“I don’t really remember anything specific,” I said. “That’s the problem. And I need to know.”
Della pushed her plate away and leaned on the table. “Do you remember talking to the police?”
I felt a strange pulse beating in my neck. “The police? I talked to the police?”
“We all did.”
I tried to conjure up some sense of my seven-year-old self, in a police station, sitting across from a detective, swinging my legs underneath the table. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, they never made any decisions. They never drew any conclusions. Just looked into her death and closed the file. It got people to talking, though.”
“I remember the whispering and the looks,” I said, slightly agitated now that I was getting close to the topic, yet not learning anything. “But why did the police look into it?”
A gust of wind blew through the backyard, pushing Della’s hair into her face. She brushed it away; she sighed loud enough that I heard it over the breeze. “Oh, sweetie, your mother died from a blow to the head. They wanted to find out if someone had done that to her on purpose.”
5
I checked into the Long Beach Inn, an aptly named bed-and-breakfast perched above a lengthy stretch of tawny sand that hemmed Lake Michigan. Because the summer season hadn’t yet started, I was able to get an upstairs room. It was the largest one, I’d been told by the housekeeper, who was filling in for the owner. The room took up half the third floor, a sunny space painted white, like a summer cottage. A large canopy bed covered in pillows sat in the center. The French doors on the other side led to a balcony and, beyond that, the beach. I had always dreamed of a balcony off my bedroom overlooking the water, but I was too preoccupied now to enjoy it.
I unpacked the way I always did in hotels. I traveled so often that I liked to try to create a semblance of home for myself, even if it was a fictional and transient one. Once my clothes were in the closet and my makeup in the bathroom cabinet, I called Maddy to tell her what I’d learned. For once I got no answer at either her home or cell phone. There was no one else I could tell about what I was doing, what I’d discovered.
I closed my eyes and let myself hear Della’s words again.
Your mother died from a blow to the head. They wanted to find out if someone had done that to her on purpose.
It only confirmed what I’d thought—that something strange surrounded my mother’s death. What did it mean that my mom had died of a head injury? Did that necessarily mean that someone had purposefully hurt her? I had asked Della those questions before I bolted, but she had shrugged. “There were lots of stories about what happened, but mostly people said it was an accident,” she’d said. “No one really knows.”
But someone knew. The person who’d sent the letter knew. Or at least they thought they did.
The sound of a vacuum downstairs made me realize I was standing in the middle of the room, motionless. I’d had so much momentum all day. What to do now? Though the room was cozy, a huge step up from the impersonal hotel where I’d stayed in Chicago, I wished for my own apartment right then, for my comfy sweatpants and the taupe chenille blanket my father had given me. Under different circumstances, I would have loved to curl up on the canopy bed here with a book, but I couldn’t just sit around. Not now. I couldn’t stand the thought of being in Woodland Dunes and not be moving, remembering, doing. I wasn’t here for a weekend getaway. I was here for my mother.
The thought drew me to the French doors, but for a moment, I didn’t open them. I stared out at the wide beach, the gray-blue water licking the sand. As I watched the rush and recede of the water, I remembered the feel of my small hand in my father’s as he led me down the unfinished wood pathway to the lake. I must have been about six or seven years old. He had come home to Woodland Dunes that day, a treat for the middle of the week.
“Where’s Mom?” he’d said when he was inside the front door. He crouched down and held open his arms. “Is she taking her walk on the beach?”
I nodded and charged into him, wrapping myself around his neck, breathing in the slightly stale scent of the city he always brought with him.
“Let’s find her,” he said.
