The Double Bind (15 page)

S
HE COULD SEE
how badly the negatives were damaged from the contact sheets, but dutifully she continued to clean and print them, hoping in each case for the best. Some of the photographs, until she found someone willing to restore them digitally, would have great scratches and cracks running through the center, or whole sections smeared and blacked out. At one point, a student five or six years younger than Laurel who was working that night in the university’s large darkroom as well peered into one of her trays. He was a chunky little character in a baggy T-shirt with a line of studs along the cartilage of one of his ears and waves of shaggy hair the color of a rooster’s comb. In the red light of the darkroom, he looked almost like he had been pulled from the pages of a comic book.

“That’s Eisenhower,” he told her triumphantly, pointing at the image in the tray.

“I know,” she murmured. She recalled the story she’d once heard about Bobbie claiming that this president owed him money.

“You didn’t take those, then. They must be ancient.”

“Not ancient. But old.”

“Very.” He gazed for a moment into the chemical bath and then added, “That’s the World’s Fair. Nineteen sixty-four. Queens. That globe thing is still standing, you know. It’s by Shea Stadium.”

“Right.” She kept her voice as flat as she could without being obviously rude. She hoped she merely sounded busy. Preoccupied. Focused.

“Who took them?”

“Old fellow. Recently passed away.”

“He sure didn’t take very good care of his shit.”

“No,” agreed Laurel, “he didn’t.”

“Too bad,” he said. “He was good.”

“Yup.”

“I take mostly metal, you know?”

She didn’t, but she nodded. She wondered if she remained silent whether he would continue to chatter. She worried that he was going to insist that she look at his work.

“Yeah, cars and bikes and close-ups of chain link. That sort of thing.”

Again she bobbed her head. A small motion, barely perceptible.

“Sometimes when I tell people I take mostly metal, they think I mean rock shit. Bands. You know, as in heavy metal?”

She sighed, but this was a reflex, not commiseration. She was going to have to be rude. Or, at least, cold. She made a big production of staring at a strip of negatives dangling from a wire behind her, as if he were completely invisible, and when she didn’t say anything more he muttered importantly, “Man, I got a lot to do. Tons. Aloha.”

“Hang in there,” she said, a conversational bone that she tossed him impulsively, and much to her relief he returned to his own prints. She worked for another two hours, long after he’d left, staying until the darkroom closed for the night. She watched as not one but two presidents appeared in the shallow tubs (Lyndon Johnson in a big hat and a bolo tie was the other), as well as an actress she couldn’t quite place from a musical she didn’t know, a flashy jazz drummer smoking a cigarette, a line of hair-salon hair dryers—the helmets resembled chamber pots with wide accordion hoses attached—a very young Jesse Jackson beside a woman she believed was Coretta Scott King, a character she might have guessed was Muddy Waters (but could have been anyone), cars with fins, a lava lamp, Bob Dylan, an elderly woman she presumed was a writer, saxophones (three), a vegetable stand somewhere near Manhattan’s Fourteenth Street, the arch at Washington Square, the very tip of the Chrysler Building, a half-dozen more photos from that 1964 World’s Fair, and—from a much newer strip of negatives taken with a different camera—the dirt road she detested in Vermont. In one there was that young woman on a mountain bike in the distance. Again, as with the distressed image Bobbie had carried with him that she had first seen in the box Katherine had brought to her office, the girl was too far away for Laurel to distinguish the details of her face. But she was tall and lanky, and certainly the bicycle frame resembled her beaten-up Trek.

And, sure enough, there were also three negatives from a large-format camera of the curve of the horseshoe-shaped driveway that looped from the shore road in East Egg to the Buchanan-Marshfield estate. In them, Laurel could see a car parked beside the front steps, and though she knew little about automobiles, she could tell it was a Ford Mustang. A white body, a black hardtop. It was, she was quite certain, from the 1960s.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

K
ATHERINE
M
AGUIRE
turned her face up toward the mid-morning September sun, eyes closed, as she walked with a city attorney named Chris Fricke down the brick road that had anchored the Burlington pedestrian shopping concourse for decades. She was listening to this lawyer carefully, but she was also savoring the warmth on her eyelids.

“The attorney’s firm is in Manhattan, but he actually has a place up in Underhill—a second home, not an office. So he knows a little about BEDS,” Chris was telling her, the woman’s heels clacking on the bricks underneath every third or fourth syllable. Chris had been one of the city attorneys who assisted BEDS for six years now, almost since the day she had passed the bar and started working for Burlington. She was a little older than the BEDS executive—Chris was in her mid-fifties, Katherine guessed—and genuinely inspiring: She hadn’t even started law school until the younger of her two sons had started high school. Like most of the City Hall minions, she was energetic, determined, and absolutely confident, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that what she did made a difference in the world. She actually volunteered time at the shelter, which was more than most of the attorneys who worked with BEDS ever did. She had made an effort to get a sense of just how rotten it was on the streets and what the homeless population really needed, and thus had won Katherine’s loyalty as well as her respect.

“He saw the ad we placed in the newspaper?” Katherine asked her.

“Or his client did. Either way, he heard about what we found and he thinks the photos might belong to his client. He said she’s an older woman, lives way out on Long Island.”

“And he wants us to turn them over to him?”

“You sound disappointed,” the lawyer said.

“Well, I am. I wanted to make sure they didn’t belong to someone because that’s the right thing to do and because I wanted to cover our bases. But of course I want BEDS to have them. I honestly never thought a real owner would ever show up.”

“We don’t know for sure this is a real owner. I described the stuff that was in the box, and she could be. They could be pictures of her house, and she could be one of the kids in the snapshot.”

“You said this is an older woman. How old?”

“Mid-eighties. Old enough to match the girl in that one picture. But she’s no crumbly,” said Chris. “She may be well into her dotage, but it sounds like she is one very tough old bird. Still healthy, still with it.”

“Did the lawyer say why she wants the photos?”

“Because she’s in some, I guess. Or her house is. And she’s an art collector, and some time ago some of her photos disappeared. Some negatives, too. So she wants us to turn over the whole kit and caboodle. And she certainly doesn’t want Laurel to print anything. She wants us to send everything to the lawyer so she can recover the images that she says are hers.”

“Is she claiming to be any relation to Bobbie?”

“Just the opposite. Insists she’s no relation. Says she did have a brother, but he died some time ago. She and her lawyer aren’t sure where Bobbie got the snapshots of her family or her house or the prints that were part of her collection. But she feels violated, and she wants the images back.”

Katherine stopped where she was and turned from the sun to the attorney. “Do we have to do that?” She realized that she sounded petulant, and she didn’t like that tone in her voice. But it had been a reflex.

“Not necessarily. We need to examine this a little more closely. Here’s the irony: If this woman were related to Bobbie Crocker, then she might have a right to the photos as the sole surviving member of his family. But because she isn’t related to him, it’s much more difficult for her to claim ownership. Just because she’s in them doesn’t mean she has a right to them.”

Katherine felt a little flushed and decided it wasn’t just from the sun. “Look, I want Bobbie to have an art show. He deserved that, you know. But we denied it to him when he was alive because we didn’t take him seriously. At least I didn’t.”

“You really feel bad about that, don’t you?”

“A little, yes. But there are other issues, too: First of all, those photos are great PR for the people we serve. They show that a person who did something extraordinary with his life, who had met important people, could also wind up homeless. Second—and maybe this isn’t second at all—I’m hoping that the collection might be worth serious money for BEDS, if we can sell the show as a fund-raiser.”

“That’s not a problem—assuming, of course, we don’t have to turn everything over to this woman on Long Island.” Chris glanced at her watch and resumed clicking her way down Church Street to her office at City Hall. After a moment, she added, “And don’t be surprised if this lawyer calls you—or Laurel.”

“Really?”

“He might. He didn’t get what he wanted out of me, and so he might try to reach one of you.”

“Oh, I hope he doesn’t call Laurel.”

“Any special reason why?”

“Bobbie—or whomever—took some photos of the swim club where Laurel hung out as a child. And I gather there’s at least one of a girl on a bike up in Underhill—on the same dirt road where Laurel was attacked.”

“A girl Laurel’s age?”

“I think so. I haven’t seen it, but Laurel came across it and told me about it. It seems to have shaken her up. And the combination of those photos has led her to become very…involved.”

The lawyer knew Laurel’s history, too, and Katherine saw her glance nervously at her now. “That’s a creepy coincidence.”

“The swim club or the girl on the bicycle?”

“Both,” said Chris.

“But it is just a coincidence,” Katherine told her, suddenly feeling a little defensive. “Nothing more. Has to be, right? And I had no idea there were pictures of either when I suggested she look through them.”

Chris shook her head. “Still. It had to be a little unnerving for Laurel to know a homeless schizophrenic was taking pictures of that swimming pool. And then of a girl on a bike.”

Katherine considered reminding her that Bobbie probably wasn’t homeless back then. But she also understood what Chris was getting at, the vulnerability, and so she restrained herself. For the first time, she began to wonder if she’d made a serious mistake when she’d given Laurel that box of old photos.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

H
OWARD
M
ASON,
Paco Hidalgo, and Pete Stambolinos had all come to Bobbie’s funeral service at the soldiers’ cemetery in Winooski. On Friday morning, Laurel skipped her swim and went directly from home to the Hotel New England, where she had breakfast with the three of them in the kitchen the residents there shared. She wasn’t precisely sure what she would learn, but she was so excited that she was up and out of the house before she had heard even the faintest stirrings from behind Talia’s bedroom door. And because she was going to be having lunch later that day with Serena Sargent, she was optimistic that by nightfall she would know considerably more than she did now about Bobbie Crocker’s identity.

The kitchen at the old hotel wasn’t much bigger than the kitchens in most suburban homes. It was functional, and that was a great gift if you have been living in a homeless shelter—and before that on the street—but it wasn’t about to be featured in a home-decorating magazine. The cabinets, donated by a nearby kitchen and bath remodeling store, were made of pressed wood, and the linoleum on the floor had been given to BEDS from a high school that was redoing its cafeteria. Moreover, it was never easy for eighteen separate tenants to share a stove with four burners, a single oven, and a refrigerator that would have been fine for an individual family but was far too small for the army of quarts and pints and the occasional half gallon that was wedged upright onto the top shelves. The room had a single round kitchen table.

When Laurel arrived Friday morning, she was surprised to find that the three men had whipped up a feast. There was a Mexican breakfast pie filled with jack cheese and red peppers, French toast slathered with confectionary sugar and butter, and jelly doughnuts from the convenience store around the corner. Laurel thought the meal probably should have come with an angioplasty, but she was moved by the effort they had made. She guessed they didn’t have a whole lot of company.

Howard waved his hand solemnly over the counter where the food was displayed like a restaurant buffet and demanded, “Good, huh?”

“Looks scrumptious,” said Laurel. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“Always start with the salt. Then end with the sugar,” Paco told her. Paco was roughly her mother’s age, but his skin was so weathered and gray that he looked old enough to be her mother’s father.

“Or, you could live by that slogan you see on bumper stickers,” said Howard. “‘Life is short. Eat dessert first.’ I’ve always liked that.”

She parceled a little of everything onto her plate. She poured some hot water from the kettle on the stove into a mug and took the chair that Howard had graciously pulled out for her. Then she started steeping her tea, watching and waiting as each of the three men built for himself a small mountain of food.

“So, you want to know about Bobbie,” Pete said gruffly once he had sat down. He rested his chin in his hand, and there was a bracelet of untanned, white skin where he normally wore an old wristwatch. Like most residents of the Hotel New England, he spent a lot of time outside in the summer and autumn: It was both necessary for him to escape the confines of his Spartan room, and a routine that gave him comfort. Laurel knew that he liked to hang out on a bench not far from the Salvation Army that had sun in the morning and shade in the afternoon. Sometimes he would hold court there, and sometimes he would simply sleep. He no longer drank, but she hadn’t any idea how he’d stopped: He glared at the world too much to be a member of AA.

“He used to be rich,” Howard informed them. “Filthy rich.”

“Yeah, so was I,” said Pete.

“No, you weren’t,” Howard said.

“Maybe we’re all rich in different ways,” Paco offered.

“Nah, Bobbie really was rich,” Howard insisted.

“Now how do you know that?” Pete asked him, his voice at once bleak and annoyed. Howard’s face fell like flaking spackle. “How could you possibly know that? Bobbie didn’t even know where he was from half the time. And the other half he was having long conversations with his father. His dead father, Laurel—just so you know. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the guy had been in the state mental hospital.”

“What kinds of things did he and his father discuss?” she asked.

“Hey, he was the one who heard the voices. Not me.”

“Oh, I understand. I was just wondering if maybe he told you what they were saying.”

“When people are talking to themselves in public—and especially when they’re getting frustrated with a person who’s been dead for a while—I’m a lot more likely to ask them to pipe down than to let me in on the big secret.”

Laurel wasn’t surprised that Bobbie was angry at his father, and so she pressed for more: “So you must have overheard what Bobbie was saying.”

Pete rolled his eyes. “He said his dad had a lot of connections, a lot of clout with the right people. You know, he’d done them favors. And so he didn’t understand why his old man wasn’t calling some in to help him out. Or, better yet, to help someone else out. I have to admit, more times than not Bobbie wasn’t asking his dad to help him. Sometimes, even some of us figured in the conversations. Once, just to try and shut him up, I told Bobbie that I didn’t need any help from his old man. And when this didn’t quiet him down, I told him that his dad had really good hearing and he didn’t have to talk so loud. And that, thank you very much, at least got Bobbie to whisper for a change.”

“He knew everybody,” said Paco suddenly.

“Bobbie’s father?” Laurel asked.

“No. Bobbie.”

“He said he knew people whose pictures he took,” Pete explained, shoveling a forkful of French toast into his mouth. “Supposedly, that’s how he got to know them.”

“He never showed you his pictures, did he?” said Laurel.

Pete chuckled loudly, a great yelp, and sat back in his seat with his arms folded across his chest. “Not a prayer. He insisted someone was after them. Or him, maybe.”

“Any idea who?”

“The all-purpose they. Half the nutballs in this hotel think someone’s after them.”

“Laurel, the French toast is very good with grape jelly, too, you know,” said Howard. “If you can’t afford real maple syrup, don’t compromise with the imitation stuff. Just use grape jelly.”

“Did he tell you where he lived when he was a photographer?”

“If,” said Pete.

“No, I’ve seen the photos,” Laurel said. “I spent last night in the darkroom up at the university making contact sheets and prints from some of the negatives. He really was a photographer.”

“Son of a gun.”

“Son of a gun,” she repeated.

“What are they of?” Paco asked. “Are they really of famous people?”

She told them of the images Bobbie had left behind, and what she had seen in the negatives she had printed the night before. And then Pete surprised her by inquiring, “You been to the library yet? Looked through the old magazines on the microfilms? Tell you what: You go to those
Life
magazines and those
Look
s. They got ’em all. Then you’ll know for sure whether Bobbie really took those pictures or not by the photo credits.”

“That’s a terrific idea,” she agreed.

Howard smiled broadly and looked at his friend with pride. “Pete may be the surliest son of a bitch I know, but he’s also one of the smartest.”

“I made the French toast. I’m not surly.”

“Bobbie told someone I know that he was from Long Island,” she said. “Did he ever tell any of you that?”

“Yeah. And he grew up on a cove on the Sound,” Paco answered, and instantly she felt a thrilling flutter in her chest.

“What else?”

“He said he lived in a mansion.”

“Did he ever mention any siblings?”

Howard licked sugar from the doughnut off his fingers. “I can’t think of any.”

“He once lived in France,” said Pete. “At least he said he did. He said he fought there in World War Two.”

“When did he live there?” Laurel asked. “Did he tell you?”

“I guess it was right after the war. He fought there and then went back. Or maybe he just stayed. I don’t know. He was in Normandy.”

“And then I think he might have lived in Minnesota,” Howard said.

“Minnesota?” The surprise in her voice was apparent.

“What, you don’t think Minnesota is possible?” Pete asked. “Seems a lot more likely than him shacked up in some French villa with a lot of sunflowers around it.”

“I think anything’s possible. I just never imagined him living in the Midwest—or, for that matter, in a French villa with sunflowers.”

“Hey, I have no idea if the villa really had sunflowers. All he said was that the Nazis took it over for their officers and trashed it pretty badly, and then the U.S. shelled part of it. He said there had been a vineyard and rows of grape arbors, but they were long gone by the time the war was over. One wing of it—not the wing they were living in, of course—was little more than a big ash heap.”

“Why did he go back? Was there a woman?”

“So he said.”

“Did he tell any of you her name? Or the name of the town?”

The three men looked at each other blankly. Clearly, he hadn’t.

“Okay then, what did he tell you about Minnesota?” she asked. “When did he live there?”

“Look, maybe
live there
implies too much. I don’t know if he was there a month or a year.”

“Either way: Why?”

“He said he had family there. Course, that don’t mean a damn thing, because he also claimed he had family in Kentucky,” Pete said, lifting his plate to a jaunty angle and then using the side of his fork to scrape the very last of the Mexican pie from the plastic. “Ask him on the right day and he’d have told you he had family on Mars.”

“Well, I think he really did have cousins in Kentucky. Who do you think he had in Minnesota?”

“That I don’t know,” Howard murmured, and his voice almost instantly grew deflated.

“Did he ever mention a town?”

“No. Yes—yes he did. Saint Paul. Is Saint Paul in Minnesota?”

“Absolutely.”

“And…”

“Yes?”

“Now that I think about it, maybe he did say something about a grandfather living there,” Howard continued, the act of remembering so physically taxing that he was scrunching up his forehead with the effort. “Is it possible that he had a grandfather living in Minnesota?”

“Certainly it is. What else? A neighborhood? A name? A street? Anything?”

“Oh, I wish I knew more. He mighta said more. But my memory? You know? It’s not what it once was.”

“What about Chicago? Did he ever say anything about Chicago?”

“Maybe,” Howard said, but Laurel could tell both from his voice and the way that Pete was glowering at him that he was stretching the truth for her benefit. He was telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.

“Okay, here’s one of the main things I can’t figure out,” she said when the awkward silence had grown too much for her. “Perhaps he left behind a clue with one of you: How did a guy who may have come from a very wealthy family wind up without a cent to his name? I know he had schizophrenia. I know he had emotional problems. I know he drank way too much. But why didn’t his family take care of him? Isn’t that what families do?”

“Not mine,” Pete said.

“Or mine,” Paco agreed.

“Besides, you’re assuming that ol’ Bobbie liked his family,” said Pete.

“And they, in turn, liked him,” Paco added, as he leaned back in his chair and lit a filterless cigarette off a burner on the gas stove behind him. He inhaled deeply, and then blew a halo of blue smoke into the air.

She thought about the Buchanans for a moment—Daisy and Tom and Pamela—and how dislikable they all really were. Likewise, she considered how much people seemed to enjoy Bobbie. Perhaps he was the black sheep of the family for the simple reason that he was a nice guy. A decent fellow. It was possible that the Buchanans had cut him off, but perhaps it was more likely that he had untethered himself from them—from the rampant thoughtlessness and casual lack of decency that seemed to mark that whole awful tribe.

“Tell me a story about Bobbie,” she said.

“A story?” Howard asked.

“Something he once did—or you once did together.”

“Anything?” Paco inquired, squinting against the smoke from his cigarette.

“Anything. Something to help me understand who he was as a person.”

The men looked at each other, not exactly stumped but unsure what Laurel was searching for.

“He was scared of the devil,” Paco said finally, shrugging.

“Aren’t we all,” said Pete.

“No, really. Bobbie once saw him.”

She sat forward in her chair. “You know, he told Emily that, too. Emily Young—his caseworker. What did he say to you, Paco?”

“He took the devil’s picture.”

“He did?”

“So he said.”

“What did it look like?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s why he went crazy. You know how we can’t ever see the face of God? Maybe we can’t see the face of the devil, either.”

“Oh, please,” said Pete. “He was crazy long before he took the picture of some carnival freak he thought was the devil.”

“A carnival freak?”

“Yeah. A carny. This was some time ago. But from the little he said that made sense—and, trust me, Bobbie did not make a whole lot of sense in this case—our late friend met the devil at the fair they have in Essex at the end of the summer.”

“The Champlain Valley Fair.”

“Right. Eight, ten miles from here. Whatever. It goes till Labor Day. You got the sheep shearing and the milking and the giant pumpkins. The farming stuff. And then you got the midway with the carnies. The geeks who run the games and the rides. I am sure Bobbie met his so-called devil there. Maybe it was someone who hurt him—you know, physically. Beat him up. Or stole what little money he had. Or maybe it was just some creep who in Bobbie’s eyes looked even scarier than he was.”

“Maybe you’ll find him in those pictures of his you got,” Howard said.

She considered this for a moment. So far she hadn’t come across anyone demonic. Nor had she found any images from the county’s annual end-of-summer exposition and fair. She wondered, based on the photos she’d printed, if Pete was mistaken and it was actually someone from Bobbie’s childhood she should be looking for, perhaps an image of someone he’d known growing up. Someone from his own family.