Chapter Fifty-Three
Fifty-Three
Barbara Cook lived in Franconia, New Hampshire.
A quick search on a website called gave me her address with minimal effort.
It was so easy I ended up googling Gwen Tanner and Marin Haggerty.
Gwen Tanner showed my current address and the one I’d had before that one, and I regretted every credit card I’d ever opened.
The Marin Haggerty search came up empty at least.
It took around two hours to drive there. It was a pleasant little town, with a ski resort closed for the season and some other nature-y stuff—thankfully nowhere near the pond my mother’s body was hopefully still submerged in.
The house was small and it didn’t look like more than a couple of people could live there comfortably. There was no sign of Dominic’s car or the tour van. The only vehicle in the driveway was a silver Honda Civic that I didn’t recognize.
I followed a stone path from the driveway to the front door, taking smaller-than-usual steps to stay on the stones. I reached the door, but it opened before I could knock. A middle-aged woman in nurse scrubs greeted me.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, dipping back into the house and allowing me to follow.
She scrambled around for her purse and coat and it was obvious she thought I was someone else.
“She’s easy—already asleep and probably won’t wake up.
If she does, you can usually take her to the bathroom and then she’ll go back to sleep.
She can be a little disoriented, so if she’s upset, you can turn on the Game Show Network. ”
“Okay,” I said, knowing I should explain that I was not there to relieve this caretaker—that I was actually a complete stranger with zero medical training—but how would that help anyone? This lady clearly had somewhere to be. Whoever she thought I was would show up soon. No harm, no foul.
The home nurse, or whatever she was, left me there having asked only one question: “Do you have any questions?” When I shook my head, she was satisfied and that was that.
I stood alone in the living room. The furniture was dated and sparse.
There was a worn couch with a quilted blanket placed over it and a recliner that seemed wider than the doorway.
The small table next to the chair was crowded with cups, pills, tissues—things that informed me it was mostly where the sick lady sat.
I meandered toward the kitchen, peeking my head in, feeling that if I stayed in the living room, I wasn’t quite trespassing yet.
The kitchen was tiny like everything else, one counter with a row of wooden cabinets that had a shoddy coat of white paint over them and one rectangular table against the wall, with room for four chairs if anyone ever pulled it back, but it seemed content now with only two seats.
I moved away from the kitchen toward the hallway.
The carpet was the same, running uninterrupted from the living room.
There were three doors all in a row, 1-2-3, all closed.
I put my ear to the first one and could hear her breathing.
They were weak, raspy breaths, the kind I thought might stop at any moment and she would be dead, but she kept breathing and I moved to the second door.
There was no part of me that wasn’t going to open that door, but I inhaled, pretending I had seriously debated it, then turned the knob on the exhale.
It was a bathroom, super anticlimactic. Toilet, shower, sink, lots of grab bars to help someone in her condition function. I closed the door and moved on.
I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but I had driven all this way and had a history of breaking in and snooping around Dominic’s life.
It was our thing. I remembered how that freak had known I was there in his closet and had played the whole thing out just to mess with me.
What an interesting guy. Definitely a weirdo, but in an appealing way.
I tried to stay breezy about it, but I knew I would be devastated if he was dead.
The third room was finally something I could enjoy.
It was a second bedroom, with a twin bed in the corner, but more accurately, it was a storage closet.
Hard to tell if it was last month or ten years ago, but his mom had definitely been moved there hastily.
There were boxes stacked to the ceiling with minimal labeling.
A few had kitchen or bathroom scribbled on them with a Sharpie, but most were nondescript.
I pulled one of the boxes without any labeling down onto the twin bed.
It was full of toys, old toys that maybe could be worth something.
It made me all sorts of nostalgic, not from memories of playing with those toys but from memories of seeing the commercials for them on the box TV in the recreation room at the facility.
I used to tell Natalie how much each thing cost as if I had any idea.
I would confidently report to her, “That game costs $12.99. It’s not worth it.
Those pieces are going to break the first time you play.
” She’d believed every word I’d said and it made her a little less sad about the fact that we were never going to have any of those toys.
Stop. Don’t think about her, I scolded myself.
This was new. It was unusual for the memories of Natalie that bubbled up to be pleasant—to elicit a warm feeling.
The norm was for every memory of our time together to be framed by how it had ended.
As it turns out, that night in our room as teenagers wasn’t how it had ended after all.
Instead, I’d held her in a pool of her own blood after my stalker had slit her throat.
I guess now that she was gone, dead because of knowing me, I could remember her differently.
I was becoming such a sap. It was hard to recognize myself.
I took an old Nintendo DS out of the box. The edges were scuffed and some of the color had worn off the buttons. I tried to turn it on, but who knows how long the thing had been in storage, and it might as well have been a rock.
That box was fun, but I moved on. There were a lot of towels, dishrags, washcloths.
Some of them were crunchy. Why on earth had these survived the move?
There had clearly been some depression-era thinking in the packing process.
The stuff was too old to even be Barbara’s, more like her parents’.
Hoarding passed down from generation to generation.
When Barbara died, would Dominic move all this shit into his apartment?
There were lots of souvenirs, like those tiny spoons, a million magnets, postcards from friends with the most generic greetings-from-wherever messages.
Barbara had lived a nice life, which made it even sadder to think of her in the room two doors away, her days filled with the Game Show Network and deciding whether to stay in bed or sit in that chair.
She couldn’t be that old, but the illness had robbed her of years, leaving her with the existence of a lonely elderly woman.
I stumbled upon a box of Dominic’s old art projects. They were cute, of course, but I didn’t think he was very creative. Lots of dogs. Everything was a dog or a blob where the teacher had labeled it “Dog”—Dominic, Age 5.
Finally I came across some pictures. There was a smaller box inside one of the bigger boxes stuffed with those paper envelopes that pictures used to come in when you had to get them developed.
I flipped through a bunch—people I didn’t know, fluorescent fashion, feathered hair, the occasional kid I thought must be little Dominic, a man who was maybe his father, then more men who were pretending to be his father. Barbara had been a total babe.
There were a bunch of loose pictures at the bottom, not part of any particular roll.
I grabbed a stack of them. More of the same, too many pictures of buildings and landmarks from trips, multiples of the same group posing with slightly different looks since the luxury of deleting until you got the perfect picture hadn’t existed back then.
I was ready to move on to another box but reached for one more little stack. There were pieces of faded tape in some of the corners, and the chunk of photos stuck together as I tried to separate them. They had clearly been in an album at some point, removed and relegated to this box within a box.
The clumped pictures all featured a lady I didn’t know, which wasn’t much different from my entire experience thus far, but I didn’t recognize her from any of the other pictures.
She wasn’t a stone-cold stunner like Barbara, but she had a perfect smile and I could see why someone would keep a nice little collection of her photos.
Maybe she had been Barbara’s secret lover.
This box of pictures—all the boxes, really—had turned out to be a disappointment, pretty boring, and the thought of Barbara and this woman having a secret love affair brought me back to life.
I just needed one picture to confirm my suspicions.
A picture of them together. My hands moved faster, sliding each picture from the stack onto the bed to reveal the next one.
It took seven pictures, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, before the mystery woman wasn’t alone.
She sat in a folding chair in some backyard.
Her symmetrical smile, a crop top, and a pair of jean shorts.
Behind her, picking at the food table, was Oswald Shields, sideburns and all.
- - - - -
I took the sticky picture and ran out into the hallway. I burst into Barbara’s bedroom like I had every right to be there. She didn’t wake up on my arrival. She slept propped up on a row of pillows, a thin tube running under her nose providing oxygen.
I went to her bedside and reached for her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” I said, probably not whispering as much as I liked to think I was.
I shook her shoulder a bit and she stirred. I pulled my hand back and she went still again.
“Excuse me!” I basically yelled in her face.
Her eyes shot open and she saw me. She scurried back in her bed, trying to sit up, but too weak to move fast. She started struggling to breathe and I was reminded way too late that what I was doing was terrifying.
I’d been so freaked-out by the picture of Oswald Shields in my hand that I had screamed awake a very sick stranger in her own bedroom.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” I insisted, backing away from her, lowering my voice. I reached for a lamp behind me and turned it on so she could really see me, see that I was a nonthreatening young lady.
“Where’s Marissa?” she wheezed.
“She had to go. Everything’s okay.” I crept back toward her, making sure each step was approved. “I need you to tell me something.” I raised the picture in front of me.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I didn’t have time for that. I needed to know how Dominic knew Oswald Shields.
I suddenly had much greater concerns than him being dead.
What did it mean? It was such a random connection.
Was it enough to prove it had been Dominic all along?
Pretending that his interest in Abel was innocent and born out of career ambitions?
His reaction to discovering my identity had all been a ruse?
I had let him seep right into my life, exactly what he’d wanted.
He’d wanted to convince me he wasn’t involved, make me worry about him, and then, when I discovered it was him, it would break me.
“How do you know this man?” I asked, bringing the picture closer to her.
She wanted more answers from me, but I was still being kind of scary and she acquiesced, focusing on the picture. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who that is.”
I flipped the picture back to look again. Maybe I had hallucinated Oswald Shields out of boredom and concern over Dominic, but he was definitely there.
“Why do you have this picture, then?” I shoved it back at her.
“I don’t know,” she repeated.
“Who’s the woman?”
“That’s Eva, my ex-husband Mitchell’s first wife.” Barbara started coughing and sucked for breath until it passed.
I looked at the picture again as if Eva would mean something to me.
“Why would you have this? Why would you have a picture of your ex-husband’s ex-wife?” I pressed, not understanding and knowing there was a zero percent chance it was a coincidence.
She grabbed a tissue to wipe away the tears that generated during her coughing fit. “It must have been the kid’s. When Mitchell and I split, he left tons of stuff in my house.” She started coughing again; stringing so many words together was tough.
“What kid?” The question was guttural. I had been so desperate for answers, but now I only felt queasy.
“Evie’s son. Mitchell had adopted him before she died. He was a few years older than mine, but he wasn’t smart like Dominic. He was a bizarre kid. Seems okay now though. The boys are still close.”
“What was his name?” I asked even though I had a good guess.
She coughed again. “Jacob,” she choked out before more coughing prevented her from saying anything else.