Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
Marlowe swung her legs out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom. Her mouth was dry and coated in a sour, sticky film, and her head throbbed.
Coffee, she needed coffee.
But first a shower. She stepped in before the water finished warming. The shock of cold sharpened her senses and distracted her from how sick she felt.
After her shower, she pulled on black jeans and a gray turtleneck, trying to compose herself. It wouldn’t be enough to convince her mother. Then again, maybe Glory would be too worried about Nate and Enzo to consider Marlowe’s fragile state.
A united front. Today, they were supposed to be a united front.
Frank and Glory were in the kitchen, their heads bent over their coffee and newspapers, as if it was any other morning.
“Have you heard from Poughkeepsie?” Marlowe asked.
“Nate left last night, and he stayed at a hotel with Henry and Steph,” Frank said. “Enzo was kept overnight, but they’re letting him go now.”
Her father’s voice was tight with anger. How humiliating that his son was tangled up in this mess, his presence requested at the police station when he could have just been questioned at home.
Marlowe didn’t understand why Nate had agreed to go into the station, when he didn’t have to. Ariel and Ben had said something to encourage him to show up. Nate probably did so out of pride.
The more she thought about it, the more she felt that Ariel and Ben just didn’t like Nate. They demanded that he come in just to scare him. Not because they thought he would confess.
And if Enzo was being released, that meant their evidence didn’t stick—the bracelet, the boots, his testimony. None of it.
Marlowe poured a few drops of milk into her coffee.
“You just missed a ride to town for breakfast,” Glory said. “Constance took the kids to the diner.”
“I’m not hungry.” Marlowe sank into a chair.
“Marlowe, do you realize these detectives are just playing tricks?” Her father’s voice was gentle and soothing now, as if he saw her pain. “They’re picking at us to see if there’s a weak link with something to tell, but there’s nothing. Nothing at all. We don’t know what happened.”
Marlowe stared across the kitchen at her father.
When she was a little girl, she thought her father was the most handsome man in the world.
It was always jarring when Marlowe turned toward her father, expecting to see the hale and healthy man from her girlhood, and saw instead his wrinkled skin and white hair.
And his hands. It was Frank himself who had told her to look at a man’s hands for signs of his health. He had pointed at a picture of Bill Clinton in a newspaper.
“He’s sick, age has caught up with him,” Frank had said. “He used to have big strong hands, but look at them now. Look how thin and frail. That’s the sign.”
Frank’s hands were now even worse than that. The fingers were thin and gnarled, and it took great effort for Frank to lift them from the table to grip his mug.
Glory pursed her lips and looked at her daughter. “Remember, a united front.”
“I know, I understand,” she said. They would never forgive her if she let on that their only daughter was harboring doubt.
An hour later, Henry’s car pulled into the drive. Marlowe opened the front door and watched as Henry and Enzo got out of the car and walked toward the house at a glacial pace.
The hours spent in an interrogation room had been unkind to him. He was pallid, and his clothes were rumpled.
When they reached the door, Marlowe stepped aside. She didn’t look at Henry; her gaze was fixed on Enzo.
He looked lost. He had been confused over the past few weeks, but he had always known where he was and whom he was with. He had known he was at the Gray House with Henry and Marlowe and Nate. He had been confused only about the year. But now he looked at Marlowe as if he didn’t recognize her.
“I lived in Manchester for a time,” he said. “Only a short time.”
Glory brushed past Marlowe to take Enzo’s arm, and he stared at her as if he’d never seen her before.
“Here, Enzo, let’s get you up to your room.”
As Glory and Enzo made for the stairs, Henry’s voice rang out from the kitchen. “They badgered him for hours, the lawyer said. Demanded his entire life story, and now he’s all muddled. He keeps spouting random fragments.”
Clearly, Enzo’s mind was far more deteriorated than they’d realized.
“The lawyer said they have nothing, absolutely nothing. Just random details and old memories. An anecdote about boots. An old bracelet of Nora’s that Enzo could have picked up and returned to her after she left it here,” Henry said.
“It was barely grounds for arrest in the first place. None of it would hold up.”
“Where is Nate? Is Stephanie with him now?” Frank was entirely sanguine.
“Yes, they’re right behind us, driving back,” Henry said.
“Snow is on the way, could be six inches,” Frank said. “But they’ll beat it.”
The kids would be excited. The snow would keep them occupied with sledding for at least a day or two.
Henry’s voice dropped to a lower register, and Marlowe knew they were talking about her. Frank would tell him that she had drunk herself into a stupor but was docile this morning. Marlowe didn’t need to eavesdrop to know.
She crept up the stairs and stood in the shadows of the hall outside the spare bedroom.
“I was born in Italy; they did not believe it, but I was,” Enzo was saying.
“Yes, I know, of course.” Glory’s tone was distracted. She was only half listening.
“Then Paris and then England, only for a few months.” Enzo laughed then, and it was a dry sound, like dead leaves rustling in a fall breeze. “You know in England, they call stone walls cairns. A cairn. Yes.”
“Here you are, just lie back.” Glory’s hands were probably occupied, fluffing pillows and arranging the covers over Enzo’s scrawny legs.
“But then I went back to Paris. No other city can compare.”
Sudden tears stuck to Marlowe’s eyelashes. She used to cling to every one of Enzo’s words about late-night meals in tiny restaurants tucked beneath old buildings, and long walks along the Seine. She and Nora used to perch on the kitchen stools, elbows on top of the counter, while he cooked dinner.
“Tell us about Paris,” Nora would say.
And Enzo always obliged.
“The lights are like nothing you have ever seen,” Enzo would say. “They glow as if they are touched by fairies.”
Nora and Marlowe planned out their future trips. They made lists of all the places Enzo mentioned. The Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Champs-élysées and the Louvre were on it, but also the smaller, obscure streets and restaurants Enzo could rattle off the top of his head.
When Marlowe finally got to Paris, she did a painting for Enzo. It was a view of the Seine on a June evening, with the lights gleaming atop a line of lampposts that seemed to stretch on forever. Enzo sobbed when she gave it to him.
When Enzo paused mid-memory, Glory interjected. “Just close your eyes for now, and I’ll bring you up some tea later, all right?”
Enzo was silent, and Marlowe could picture him blinking up at Glory, questioning exactly who the old woman was and why she was bringing him tea. Marlowe wondered if her mother resented the fact that she was stuck caring for two aging old men.
And then his memory wheel started up again. “It was July when I first saw New York, and I could not believe the heat.”
Marlowe didn’t bother to hide as her mother emerged from the room. Glory closed the door with a tight click, her mouth set in a thin line of anger as she regarded Marlowe.
“They broke him,” Glory said. “His mind is gone.”
Glory stomped downstairs, her loafers flying over the steps as she made a beeline for the kitchen. Marlowe plodded behind, thinking of Paris, but she froze halfway down the staircase.
Cairn. Enzo said that stone walls were called “cairns” in England.
Only they weren’t.
It meant something else.
A sudden moment of clarity brought her straight back to her college anthropology class, the pen gripped in her hand as the professor, a charming Brit, talked about burial rites.
“You’ll see these all over the United Kingdom,” he’d said.
“Piles of stones to mark significant locations or graves, or in some cases, the stones cover the actual bodies. Some societies buried the dead in rocks instead of digging into the soil. Sometimes it was a necessity, especially for soldiers or travelers, but other times it was the tradition.”
Her professor had shown a variety of pictures.
The piles could be elaborate, or simple mounds.
They could be stacked high into the sky or feature tall rocks upright like pillars.
But they weren’t stone walls. They were different from the walls that bordered sheep fields and marked property lines.
Stone walls were just stone walls. A stone wall was not a cairn.
Somewhere in his addled brain, Enzo had seized on something that made sense.
The detectives wouldn’t have caught on during his babbling about Europe. Maybe only Marlowe understood. Hadn’t she asked him the day before where Nora was? In his own way, Enzo had answered.
Find the Bend, he’d said.