The Sisters of Summit Avenue Page 24

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  In spite of a distant grinding that Dorothy could not identify, her eyelids were sinking shut. She should be getting up to put Ruth’s kids to bed, but she was being done in by the rhythmic bounce and snatch of one of them playing jacks while the child waited her turn at the Monopoly game. Rhythm or movement had a way of lulling Dorothy to sleep in minutes, the product of spending most of the first two years of her life being hauled along in a baby buggy as her mother worked in the Lambs’ house. To this day, the twilight of Dorothy’s consciousness before sleep was often accompanied by the sensation of being jiggled in a buggy and the image of her mother’s annoyed scowl from under her frilly white maid’s cap. Her mother’s pretty face, twisted in an ugly frown, was gazing down on Dorothy now as she felt her arm being shaken.

  She opened her eyes to little Jeanne. With her long chin, though softened with a child’s creamy skin and brown calf eyes, she was the very image of William.

  “Grandma! It’s scary outside!”

  Crunching a particle of grit between her teeth, Dorothy hoisted herself upright. Land sakes, the wind was beating on the house. How had she ever slept through such a commotion?

  She slipped into her pumps and shuffled to the window, the girls huddling behind her. She couldn’t see anything in the pitch dark.

  She looked down. A little cone of dust was piling on the windowsill like sand in an hourglass.

  “Down to the basement!” she roared. She shooed the girls. “VENUS!” Oh, where was that cat? “VENUS!”

  She trundled after the kids as fast as her knees would take her. Arcane images came to her agitated mind: her paying the life insurance man last week, watching as he had rubber-banded her dollar to the cover of his book and then recorded her payment in it with a stubby pencil, putting her one step closer to allowing her daughters to bury her with a little nest egg leftover for the grandkids; her scrubbing the little girls’ stockings over and over, to get them extra white; scouring the dishes after dinner as the rest of the family gathered in the parlor—the things she did for the ones she loved. It was all that she could offer them.

  Bubbly clarinet music was bouncing from the radio as she herded the children through the front room. Their footsteps rattled the oil lamps on the tables. She heard her own fearful voice: “Ruth! June!” She remembered John was awake now. “Johnny!”

  Where were they? Where was Richard? Even that Nick—where was he?

  June came charging out of the back bedroom. “Mother! I can’t wake John!”

  The girls stopped in their tracks. Dorothy pushed them toward the basement. “Go! I’m coming! Hurry!”

  Wiping her hands on her apron, she turned to June. “Now what about John?”

  June stared at her, a small smile on her face. Dorothy knew that look. She was frantic.

  Dorothy bellowed at Jeanne, lingering at the top basement step. “Get down there!”

  “Grandma, but what about—”

  “Get!”

  Jeanne trampled down the stairs.

  “Let me see him,” Dorothy demanded.

  “I was out here letting him rest but when I went back to check on him, he wouldn’t open his eyes.”

  “He does that sometimes.”

  “Yes, when he was ill!”

  They entered the bedroom to a sound like hundreds of mice scratching at the windows.

  “John!” Her voice was a wild warble. “Johnny! It’s Dorothy and June. June is here! I know you want to see June.”

  The truth of that hit her. He did want to see June. More than anyone, and even Ruth knew it.

  Groaning along with the house, Dorothy shook his arm. “John! Get up!”

  Now June and she both shook him. He was warm and breathing and as heavy as a log.

  “Johnny,” she pleaded, “please wake up.”

  “Go!” June snapped. “Go be with the kids.”

  Dorothy nearly lost her grip. June had never yelled at her before.

  “Get going, Mother! Why are you still there?”

  June didn’t know how much it killed Dorothy to leave her. She had sworn all those years ago that she would never leave her girl again. She inched down the dark hall toward a sinister hissing and whooping—the radio, its signal lost. Already disoriented by the thumping outside the house and by the banging of her heart, the alien keening unmoored her.

  Strange visions welled up in the gloom. The flowered chair now held Father, waiting for her to bring her baby. The floor lamp with its branching arms was the infant June, reaching out: Maa. Maa.

  For years, Dorothy had awakened in a sweat, thinking Mrs. Lamb had come. She’d race to little June’s bed, her heart in her throat like it was now, to touch her. Only the warmth of little Junie’s skin could calm her galloping heart.

  But the child she had stolen back was not the one she had given away. Oh, she might have looked the same, with her honey-blond curls and those kitty-cat eyes, but her baby laughed and cooed and reached for things. This one was as expressionless as a china doll. No wonder she celebrated each of June’s milestones after she got her back as if the child had won the Paris Olympics. Ruthie must have wondered why her own accomplishments were met with so much less enthusiasm.

  Through the otherworldly whining and sobbing on the radio, cut a series of short bleats. Morse code?

  Just like that, William was with her. He was standing over her at his desk in their bedroom back on Parnell Avenue, where she spun a dial on his crystal set—too roughly, and she knew it.

  “I can’t get it!” She rose with a scrape of chair legs, forcing him to stand back. “I don’t have time to learn this. I need to pull those weeds in the moss roses while the babies are still sleeping.”

  His voice was as mild as ever. “That’s fine, Dorothy. But before you do, give this one more try. I know you have an itch to travel. Well, here’s how you can go around the world without ever leaving home.”

  She was envisioning herself satisfyingly plucking weeds from the dirt as he tapped on a call log penciled with entries. “I’ve talked with people in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut. Even some fellow in Florida. Once I get a little more money put aside, I can get equipment that will connect us with Europe. How do you like that?”

  Her idea of connecting to Europe included eating spaghetti in Italy and clattering around in Dutch shoes, padding through English castles, and zipping around in gondolas. She wanted to see how the Old Masters lived, to have their paintings in the Cincinnati museum come excitingly to life. Edward would have understood this.

  “How will you know their language,” she scoffed, “once you connect with them?”

  “We all speak the same language here, Dorothy—Morse code. It’s universal. Know the code and you can talk to anybody on earth.”

  She had jumped up, nearly toppling the spindly chair. “Those weeds aren’t going to pull themselves.”

  He never did buy that equipment. There were shoes to buy for the girls, the roof to patch, tires to be put on the truck, the rusted coal chute to the furnace to repair. Sometimes their belts were drawn so tight that she thought she should sell her music box. But she didn’t.

  And then William was gone.

  She could feel his spirit now as she stood in the darkened room. He reached out to her, a smile lengthening that chin. “We’re not dead yet, Dorothy.”

  “Don’t say that, William!” she bleated into the cacophony of wind and electric shrieking.

  He drew her close, then smoothed her hair back from her temples, the way he knew to do. She inhaled his personal brew: pepper, soap, and whiskers. Comfort poured over her, filling her, warming her, radiating its light until it flowed through her eyes as tears.

  A muffled yelp burst from the distance. “Mommy!”

  Down the tunnel of time Dorothy plummeted, past her water breaking with June, past William leading her to his sister’s, past the birth of squalling Ruth, past the long, bleak years in which she’d raised her children—the years during which
she made herself survive, grimly as a soldier at war. Wasted years. The best years.

  “Grandma!” The little girls were calling from the basement.

  Her eyes burst open.

  She trundled toward her grandkids as fast as her bum knees would take her. She patted her way into the kitchen, where she fumbled through the cupboard behind some Ball jars for a flashlight. She switched it on then hobbled down the steps.

  How had she never known how much she loved him?

  FORTY-TWO

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934

  Ruth awoke on her back. She beat the air, gasping for breath, as she fought to open her eyes—a mistake. Daggers of grit dug into their tissue.

  She squeezed them shut and rolled to her side, where she barked until her lungs were raw. Eyes still closed, she reached up to gingerly probe the sore spot beaming from the back of her head. All she could smell was dirt.

  A man said, “You’re awake.”

  Her eyes flew open. Pale light swam through her watery vision. Dawn had come? She was digesting that fact when she found the stranger sitting across from her.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She scrambled upright then crab-crawled away from him until she bumped into an obstacle. She patted its splintery surface—a log wall—then pushed herself against it. She realized: it was quiet. The storm had passed.

  “You’ve been out cold. I feared that you were going to stop breathing.”

  She flicked glances around the empty room, afraid to take her gaze from him. They were in the homestead. Her skin prickled: Had he hit her and dragged her in?

  “That was certainly quite the tempest. One for the history books. I don’t think anyone was safe.”

  Her children! She jumped up only to be whomped back down with a black mallet of pain. She held her breath as her sight gradually came together, and with it, pieces in her fractured mind: the big car tooling around the farm; headlines about the robbery in Auburn; someone vicious enough to strike a lone woman in a storm.

  She blurted, “I know who you are!”

  “You do?” He sounded surprised. He moved closer.

  She shouldn’t have told him that. She wasn’t thinking straight—her head wasn’t right. “Stay away!”

  He began coughing into a handkerchief—starched linen with a monogram. She couldn’t read the letters before he wiped his mouth and folded the square. “I guess your mother told you a few tales.”

  Not any more than anyone else talked about this killer.

  Wait. How’d he know about Mother?

  “I suppose you and I had the same idea,” he said, “ducking in here.”

  Had he hurt her? Had he hurt the kids? Her heart raced as she calculated how to make a run for it.

  “Well, I’m glad. It gives us a chance to chat. So what has Dorothy said about me?”

  He knew her mother’s name.

  Her heart stopped.

  She blinked to clear her vision. He looked far older than in his pictures in the paper. Jowlier. With a lion’s golden eyes within a sunburst of wrinkles and a mane of white wavy hair. A life of crime must have aged him terribly.

  “Look, whoever you are, I won’t tell anybody I saw you. Just let me get back to my kids.”

  He cocked his head at her, tucking his handkerchief in his breast pocket. “Who is it that you think I am?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I know who you are—Ruth.”

  The hair rose on her neck. She gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering. “What do you want?”

  “You know.” He started coughing again.

  “I don’t, Mr. Dillinger.”

  His cough rang higher. “Dillinger?”

  “Just leave me alone. I’m not any trouble to you.”

  “I’ve been called a few things in my day, but a bank robber wasn’t one of them.”

  She flicked a glance toward the open door.

  He followed her glance. “I don’t think you’re in any condition to drive. For that matter, neither is your car. I’m afraid that you drove into a ditch.”

  Tears singed her throat, already raw from coughing. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You know the saying, ‘Better late than never’?” He gazed at her with those leonine eyes. “Has your mother ever mentioned Edward?”

  FORTY-THREE

  Indiana-Michigan line, 1934

  You could tell that this man named Edward was used to owning things, like his brewery and half of Cincinnati. He seemed to think he owned Ruth, too, that she should be grateful to hear the horrors he had been dropping into her ears over the past half hour. Her mind, already sideways from the blow, was bent further askew with each disorienting detail. Now he waited for her response with crossed arms and his thick chin up, aristocratic and arrogant in a crisp blue suit even while sitting on the cabin floor with his legs flung out like a toddler. Bad knees, he’d said.

  “Are you sure your mother did not mention me?” he asked again. “I find that hard to believe.”

  She would have shaken her head but that hurt. How was it that this man wasn’t covered with dust, propped up there on the floor, whereas Ruth felt like a human smudge, with her arms and hands and even the fabric of her dress coated with it.

  “As you can imagine,” he said, “I’ve been very anxious to get to know June.”

  “Is this before or after your mother took June from my mother and put her in the State School?”

  His Adams’s apple rippled the grainy skin under his chin. “I told you I had no control over that.”

  Rub her tongue over her teeth all she wanted, she couldn’t get the dust out of her mouth. “I grew up across from that place.”

  “I know.” He shuddered. “Nasty business, that. I’ve heard the residents wailing.”

  “You have? You were there?”

  “Perhaps she told June about me, but didn’t tell you. You would think she would want June to know so she might claim her heritage. I’ve been expecting June to look me up, although she has done remarkably well on her own. She’s a Lamb through and through.”

  “You’ve been close enough to the State School to hear the kids?”

  “What? Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Then you must not be okay with June having been committed to that place.”

  “As I said, that was my mother’s doing, not mine.”

  “If you’ve heard those kids, you must have seen them, too. You must have seen them clinging to the iron bars of the fence, or swinging all day, as shunned and forgotten as lepers. My neighborhood friends weren’t allowed to talk to the ‘tards’—their word, Mother wouldn’t let us call them that. Kids were instructed to look away if they had to walk by the place. If a State School kid escaped, everyone hid, adults and children alike. Only my mother would go out to try to help them. The neighbors thought she was crazy.” She gave a dry little laugh. “She let us believe it. She never defended herself.”

  He brushed at his sleeve. “That would be Dorothy, so refreshingly pure and simple. I like to think that her simplicity might have shielded her from some of the pain in her life. One can’t feel what they don’t know to feel.”

  Was that why Mother kept to herself? A lack of emotion? She was too naive to feel?

  Ruth struggled to her feet, her head still swimmy. She had to get back to her kids. Thinking about their panic set her nerves on fire.

  He looked up at her, his legs still splayed before him. “Well, endearing naïf that she is, Dorothy must be commended for figuring out a way to extract June in relatively short order. That took some cunning. I secretly cheered her on, even as my mother sent out Pinkerton detectives to find her and the child.”

  She put a hand to the wall for support. “You mean your child.”

  He ignored the comment. “They never thought to look under their noses, just across the street. Actually, that was clever of Dorothy. Dorothy was much more clever than Mother ever gave her credit for.”

  He rose with a groan and a
crack of knees. “I would have never known where your Mother and June were, had she not written me. She trusted me.” He brushed off his pants. “It was several years after the child was born. She signed it, ‘Your Long Ago and Faraway Friend.’ We never really got over each other, you understand.”

  Ruth grimaced. He really didn’t see how she might find him to be objectionable.

  “You wonder why I’m telling you this,” he said.

  No. She wondered why she was listening.

  His thick chin went up a notch, nudging his lion’s mane over his shirt collar. “Among other things, I’ve regretted my decisions. I’d like to tell your mother that. I’m man enough to admit my mistakes.”

  She muttered, “So you want to drag down June while you’re at it.”

  He caught her gaze with an aggressive stare. “I hardly call acknowledging my paternity ‘dragging her down.’ ” His smile was proud as a king’s. “If she has not heard the good news already, I look forward to telling her that I’m her father. I imagine she’ll find that she likes being a Lamb.”

  He glanced at Ruth as if waiting for her praise, then smiled in spite of not getting it. “I didn’t expect her to be here when I came to see Dorothy—although I’m not surprised. It’s the luck of the Lambs, you know.”

  “I really need to leave.”

  “I suppose you’re critical of my letting her be admitted to the State School. Well, I had no choice in the matter, did I?”

  Ruth murmured, “I thought we always had a choice.”

  “What? Speak up.”

  “I thought we always had a choice!”

  “That’s what I thought you said. Easy for you to say, my dear. Would you give up millions, if you were asked to? Would you give up your social standing, your whole way of life? June will understand, being a woman of means. Interesting that she married well, in spite of the environment in which she was raised. It was instinctive, I suppose—you know to which side I fall in the nature versus nurture argument. Anyhow, I wasn’t worried about her. I knew I would always make things right for her, eventually.”