Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) (14 page)

I’m going to pull the tape some more, what’s to lose? But I’d better wait until it’s quiet again. The car is coming back. I hear the door slam. I hear voices. They’re arguing.

Chapter 26

Fina. Morning Two, Phillipa

I rang Trisha Liam’s bell a few minutes past seven, and a tall woman in her late thirties answered the door, a balled-up paper towel in one hand. Her cheeks were the color of strawberries.

“Trisha told me you’d want to talk to me.” She introduced herself as Phillipa Olinski, the Liams’ housekeeper. “I thought for sure they’d find Brandy by now.” She looked at my ID and made a swift pass at the ground with her eyes before giving me and Cookie a tentative smile.

As she led us through the hall and into the kitchen, I remembered a present my gran gave me one year for Christmas, an illustrated O. Henry. Don’t hike up your lips at me, but I loved that book, loved listening to my gran reading it to me, struggling to pronounce some of the words in her thick accent. The story had something to do with love and giving. I won’t tell you what happened, but the woman in the picture book had beautiful hair, a golden chestnut color, and she wore it long and pushed up in a loose bun. On some of the pages, tendrils floated all around her as she gestured with her body, stretching and bending it into different poses. Gran said the drawings were made that way so you got the feeling of movement. Della—that was the character’s name—became my imaginary friend. She was always in motion, crying or flopping face down onto her bed and sobbing. Well, Trisha Liam’s housekeeper, Phillipa, seemed just like Della to me. She looked like her, totally. She even wore one of those old-fashioned costumes, a loose blouse, a long skirt with a striped apron, and her whole body seemed to tremble as she twisted it one way and then the other.

“I thought for sure Brandy would be back by now,” she said again and craned her neck to look out the window as if expecting her sudden appearance.

We sat in a little sunroom off the kitchen. The breakfast room, Phillipa called it. It served to catch pools of light and throw them against the china displayed on one wall. Sunbeams were bouncing all over the place, including the silver comb in Phillipa’s thick hair. I thought of Della.

“Do you think Brandy ran away?” I asked.

Phillipa blew her nose. “I don’t know what to think,” she said, her voice muffled by the wad of paper towel. “Forgive me. Would you like some coffee? We have one of those single-cup makers. It’s no trouble.”

I nodded. “A small one. Black.”

“Nothing for me,” Cookie said. “I’ve had three already.”

While Phillipa was brewing the java, I heard sounds coming from the other room and imagined Trisha in her conservatory preparing for her day in court. I should have gone in there to say hello, but somehow she seemed like a no-nonsense type, so instead I watched Phillipa moving about the kitchen. She was a natural.

“What do you usually do in the mornings?” I asked when she returned with the coffee. I put the mug up to my nose and let the steam and the smell of the beans play around my face. Cookie got out her notebook and began writing.

“Not much. I’m not the cook, if that’s what you’re asking. Trisha doesn’t have one. When I arrive, though, I go upstairs, knock on Brandy’s door, make sure she’s dressed and ready for school. She’s an independent girl, doesn’t like to be helped, not any more at least. And she’s a real talker, but not in the morning. You’ve got to give people their space, even kids. I ask her what she’d like me to fix her for lunch.”

“She takes it to school?” Cookie asked, looking at me.

“Part of it. She’s a fussy eater. I swear, she drinks more juice than she eats. Brandy’s favorite lunch is peanut butter and raspberry jam spread on saltines with an extra-large soda. And those sweet pickles.”

Cookie shuddered.

“Sometimes I throw in a bag of chips.”

I think I must have made a face because Phillipa smiled. Well, smile is too strong a word for what she did with her mouth. She hitched up one side of it.

“I know. Weird taste but she’s little Miss Consistency, just like her mom. That’s Brandy’s lunch almost every day that I can remember. Sometimes she buys herself a scoop of ice cream in the cafeteria, or pudding. Making her lunch is the extent of my kitchen duties, except to keep it clean, of course. Sometimes the house is so silent. Ghosts, you know, and there’s nothing to do. So I clean each and every room, and the house is deceptively large, believe it. You can sit and watch TV for just so long, but when I’m through cleaning, I start all over again.”

“Can’t you leave for a while, do some shopping or walk in the Promenade or something?”

She shook her head. “Trisha wants someone here at all times.”

“And you answer the phone and get the mail?”

She pressed another wad of paper towel to her face. “No. Trisha doesn’t want me answering the phone. If she’s here working in the conservatory, she’ll pick it up if she feels like it. Otherwise it goes to voicemail.”

“So you didn’t get a call yesterday morning from the school?”

The housekeeper looked at both of us like we’d just told her the sky had fallen. “No-o. At least I don’t recall the phone ringing. Well, it might have done. Like I said, I don’t do phones. When Trisha’s here, she picks up. She left the house late yesterday, about nine, so there might have been a call, but I wouldn’t remember it. Not my place, you see.”

She gave me a pleading look. Something insistent, repetitive, about Phillipa in a fragile sort of way.

“Usually she leaves earlier, but sometimes she works from home, especially if she’s going to be in court that morning. Court doesn’t usually start until later, ten or ten thirty. I think Trisha works most of the time, even in her sleep.” Phillipa’s smile was uncomfortable.

“How do Brandy and her mom get along?” Cookie asked.

Phillipa hugged herself and shot her eyes toward the conservatory, where I could hear Trisha moving about.

“That’s a difficult question. Like most mothers and thirteen-year-old daughters, I guess, they have their good days and their … bad days. Brandy was closer to her father. They had a warm, loving relationship.”

“Can you be specific?”

She smiled. “Sometimes I’d get here, and they’d be running around the house, Mitch still in his pajamas and robe, shaving cream slathered over his face, a razor in his hand, chasing after Brandy, who’d taken his towel. That kind of relationship. Trisha was never part of it. He took her to the park every good day. Sometimes he’d come home for lunch, and they’d eat together. He’d be reading the paper to her, and she’d be chewing her saltines and listening—grown-up articles about war or graft and corruption, adult news, you know—and she’d listen as if she understood everything.”

I smiled, envying Brandy having a dad like that. I thought of my dad. I think, actually, I was scared of him, but I know I didn’t like him, and even though my stomach churned more often and life just got a lot scarier, especially money-wise, I was relieved when he left. Yes, I think I was relieved, the bastard.

“I never heard them fight. Not like …” She jerked her head in the direction of the conservatory. After a slight pause, she lowered her voice. “And when he died, well, let’s just say I think there’s a part of Brandy that blames her mother for his death. After all, she’s a kid, she has to blame someone. When she’s older, perhaps, she’ll be able to blame her dad for leaving.”

“But he didn’t leave, did he? He died.”

“Same thing, to a child.”

There was a pause, and I sipped my coffee—cold, by now.

“Can I bring you another?”

I shook my head. “Do you have children, Phillipa?”

“A son. Freddy.” She didn’t elaborate.

Cookie stopped writing. “Do you have a picture of him?”

She nodded and blew her nose. Stumbling out of her chair, she ranged around the kitchen, opened a corner cupboard, and drew out her bag. When she sat, she held a small photo in her hand.

“Forgive me, I had trouble sleeping last night. This is my son, Freddy.”

She handed the picture to me. I saw a boy of maybe eight or nine. He smiled at me from his wheelchair. “Sweet boy. How old?”

“Eleven.”

I passed the photo to Cookie, who looked at Freddy, then at Phillipa.

“He’s got your forehead. So good looking. You must be proud of him.”

She nodded and put Freddy back in her wallet. “When he was born, I didn’t think he’d make it, and it took me a long time, I’m not proud of it, but it took me a long time to accept him and then to love him.”

There was a fresh crop of tears. Phillipa rooted around trying to find a dry patch in the wadded-up mess of blowers in her hand and wound up replenishing her supply of paper towels.

“And now, I don’t know what I’d do without him. It scares me sometimes when I think of losing my job. What would I do? What would happen to Freddy?”

“But you’ve got a fine job and a great employer who depends on you.”

“Nothing is forever,” Cookie said.

My foot found hers and pressed down. “Is Freddy’s father at all helpful?”

“Freddy has no father.” She said it with such finality that I felt the clang of her prison door slam shut, leaving me standing in a vacant hall.

Cookie shot a glance my way.

“Do you have family, a mother or sister who can help?”

The housekeeper shook her head. “Only child. My father’s dead. My mother lives in Kansas City, but she doesn’t know about Freddy. Well, she knows about him, but doesn’t want to know about him. She doesn’t care, never did. When I told her I was pregnant, she asked about my husband. I told her I didn’t have one, that I didn’t plan to marry. I felt another door slam in my face. It was the last time we spoke.”

“Don’t you think your mom would like to meet her grandson?”

Phillipa’s eyes darted over the ceiling, and I watched her try to stem the tide of tears. “I thought for sure they’d find Brandy by now. She’s just a child, really.” She patted her forehead with paper towel.

I couldn’t help comparing Phillipa’s reaction and demeanor, just short of feral, with Trisha’s relative calm.

“How long have you been working here?”

“Since before Brandy was born.”

“And Freddy, is he the same age?”

“Younger.”

I knew these one-word answers. I hated them. Sometimes silence made them blossom into a flow of words, but not with Phillipa. Somehow I had to get her into a good interviewing mode. So far, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Phillipa was grieving, all right, but was it for Brandy? Why was she so … tattered, that was the word. Her spirit was in shreds.

“And Trisha, did she give you time off after Freddy was born? What kind of a boss is she?”

Phillipa shrugged and reached for words. The silence stretched until finally she continued. “You know, Trisha can be difficult to understand at times. She never asked me about the pregnancy until a few months before Freddy was born—Brandy was two—and Trisha asked me to sit down. She told me she’d hired a nanny for Brandy, just to help out. ‘Obviously you’ll need a few weeks off to arrange things.’ Those were her words. ‘I don’t want the child here. Call me when you’ve made all the arrangements for his care. I assume you’re a single mother.’ That was the extent of her discussion.”

There was a long pause. I watched Cookie’s face redden, but the silence became a sort of hollowness, really, that seemed to take over. It flowed out of the room, eating everything in its wake, except for the faint pendulum swing of a grandfather clock coming from somewhere in the house.

“There were issues in the marriage. Well, not with the marriage so much as with Madeleine—that’s Brandy’s grandmother. Brandy calls her Granny Liam. She and Trisha don’t get along at all. The old lady drives a wedge wherever she can, so I make allowances for Trisha in my head. But when I found out about Freddy’s condition, this was before he was born, I guess I became more inward, and Trisha’s bluntness and her distant ways suited me. She didn’t want to hear at all about my child, and I didn’t want to think about him.”

She stopped talking, but there was something in the air, something that was sitting between the three of us. Some of the most important words of what Phillipa had to tell us were as yet unspoken. Far be it from clunky me to stomp on them, so I waited, shooting a look at Cookie. We’ve been friends for so long that she reads my face better than my words, and Cookie had the grace to keep her mouth shut.

“When they told me about Freddy, I didn’t believe it. Thought they were making some kind of terrible joke. They’d see, I’d make them see, I’d have a normal boy. But after his birth, after the first time I held him, well, I knew. Took me a while, but I grew to love him. Now all I see is a beautiful child, my child.”

“He’s so beautiful, you’re right,” Cookie blurted. “Where does he go to school?”

I frowned, hoping her remark hadn’t stopped the flow.

But Phillipa continued. “PS 372, The Children’s School on Carroll Street. They give him such wonderful care, and there’s a mother who picks him up after school along with her own child, but I don’t know what I’m going to do next year.”

I didn’t ask any questions, didn’t open my mouth, just let her talk.

“I don’t have a car, you see. The school van picks him up. Two men come, and I can tell Freddy loves them and they love him. They take him down to the car.”

“You must be an early riser, as my gran would say.”

She nodded.

“Tell us a little more about Brandy,” Cookie said.

“Brandy’s a good kid. She’s had everything handed to her, but she’s kindhearted and bright. And she has her father’s sweetness and humor.” Phillipa closed her eyes, put the wad of paper towel close to her nose, and held it there for a minute. “Sometimes I wish I’d never been born.”

What do you say after a line like that? “We’ll find Brandy, don’t you worry. Got New York’s finest plus the FBI working on it.”

She looked at me as if I were a fool.

“So what do you think?” I asked Cookie as we made our way down the stoop.

“About Phillipa? She’s on the edge of a cavern, and she’s about to fall in. Picture a jump into the Grand Canyon.”