On the evening of the fourth night, I pleaded with my parents, at the dinner table, to let me sleep on the chaise longue in their bedroom. Desperate for relief from my runaway imagination, I made a case for the chaise expressed with a fervour unseen since September of my grade three year, when I’d come home from my first day at Brookbank Hall, a private girls’ school, sobbed for hours, and offered to perform Cinderella-esque chores for the rest of my childhood if my parents would transfer me back to Rose Park Elementary.
I’d been so compliant in the years since they’d withdrawn me from Brookbank that Mom and Dad were taken aback by my burglar-related outburst. Noel wasn’t. At seventeen, he had painlessly passed through puberty and was enjoying an adolescence free from doubt or acne. He said, “You’re being irrational, Blithe. We have nothing to fear. According to the newspapers, the thief is mainly after high-end audio equipment. Has it escaped your notice that we don’t have any?”
“How’s the burglar supposed to know that?”
Mom said,“You don’t realize how impregnable the house is, dear. There are bars on the basement windows, Dad checks the other window locks every night before bed, and there’s Angus to be our watchdog.”
I snorted. “Angus is no help. He’d roll over and play dead for a breadcrumb.”
Noel stabbed an asparagus spear with his fork. “Blithe has a point there.”
Dad considered me the way he would a client in his office. That is, he gave me his full attention, for once. “I sense that the application of reason in this situation will not allay Blithe’s fears”
Noel said, “So you admit she’s crazy?”
Dad executed a facial move Noel and I had called the Angry Eyebrow when we were younger and on speaking terms. “That’s enough, Noel. I’m not condoning Blithe’s hysteric tendencies by any means, but I would like to finish my dinner before the meat is cold. Can we reach a compromise?”
Mom tossed her napkin on the table. “A fifteen-year-old should not be sharing a bedroom with her parents, no matter how fearful she is.”
Dad said, “My proposal is that Noel and I move the chaise into Mom’s dressing room and Blithe sleeps there. Behind a closed door, but close by. All in favour?”
I might have interrupted to ask them to stop referring to me in the third person, but the promise of a normal night’s sleep kept me quiet.
Mom said, “I suppose I could tolerate that arrangement, as long as it’s temporary.”
Noel helped himself to another lamb chop from the chafing dish. “I still say Blithe’s fears are baseless, but if I’m needed to move furniture around, we’ll have to do it right after dinner. I’m going out tonight.”
“On a school night?” Mom said.
He flashed her a phony smile. “I have study group,” he said. In case anyone needed a reminder that he was the superior child.
Now, to Molly, I said, “The Rose Park Burglar committed a slew of robberies around here years ago. Before your time, I guess. But I’m just thinking I could drop over and pick up flyers from your porch if you like, move the mail out of your foyer, make it less obvious no one’s home.”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
We played the no, I insist game again, and I won this time — we arranged that I would come by every few days, deal with the mail, water the houseplants, and nod in passing at various workmen Molly had lined up to perform exterior maintenance work during her absence. So when I walked out of Glenwood, I had with me the blue file folder, a spare key to the house, and, thank Molly, things to do.
~ Chapter 3 ~
The day after my parents’ departure for London — my first day alone in Rose Park — I stayed home, luxuriated in the solitude. I ate a salad of bocconcini and tomato and basil for lunch, I read over Molly’s puzzle book file, I walked Tup. At dinnertime, I rode my bike to an English-style fish and chip shop situated a twenty-minute bike ride away and pretended the calories I burned biking there and back might be equal to more than a minuscule portion of the calories consumed.
I spent the evening rereading the family copy of Jeremiah Brown’s Treasure and didn’t look up from the book and into space more than twice. I might have enjoyed a lie-in the next morning, but Tup whined and laid his nose on my arm and drooled on me at eight-thirty. So I got up, showered, dressed, had some coffee, filled a small backpack with supplies, and set out with him for a brisk walk to midtown.
When I’d tied Tup to a bicycle rack on the sidewalk in front of the library, I went inside and found the main space to be full of small children running amok, most of them in front of the door to the community room. A stencilled sign announced that a Red Riding Hood puppet show would be performed at 10:00 a.m., in fifteen minutes.
I stepped around the children and the strollers, past the harried-looking parents and nannies, asked a library staff person for help, and was directed to the “Of Local Interest” shelf. I was after two books from Molly’s reading list: a recent publication called Rose Park: An Architectural Guide, and an old book entitled Rambles in Rose Park, by one Mary Elizabeth Bishop, published in 1910, which Molly had told me contained some interesting illustrations.
I’d thought my father’s private collection of Rose Park-abilia constituted everything there was to know about the area, but after I’d pulled the architectural guide — a recent trade paperback, subsidized by the local historical society and heavy on black-and-white photographs — off the shelf, I located the Bishop book, a memoir of sorts, bound in an anonymous but hardy library cover that protected the yellowed pages within. I opened it at random, read a paragraph or two in the old-fashioned typeface, tsked at the author’s breathy prose style, flipped through to the illustrations, and confirmed Molly’s assessment — the frontispiece was a detailed etching of a now-demolished house named Norcastle that had once stood a few blocks south of my parents’ street.
I took both books to the checkout counter, handed them to the clerk, and was standing, waiting for them, when I was tackled hard, in the shins, by a hurtling child. I cried out at the momentary splash of pain — there’d be a nice bruise the next day — bent down to help the boy up, and recognized him as Jane Whitney’s son Joshua.
Jane ran over. “Joshua! Say you’re sorry.” To me, she said, “I’m sorry. So sorry.” She hoisted a squirming Joshua onto her hip. “He’s all hyped up for this puppet show.”
I did not rub my leg or wince. I said, “It’s quite all right” and took my books and due date slip from the library staff person. “I seem to have picked a busy time to drop in”
Jane set Joshua back on the ground. “Go see Alexandra” she said, and tilted her head to read the spines of my books. “Is that Rambles in Rose Park?”
“You know it?”
“I donated it to the library. Look at the bookplate.”
Affixed to the inside front cover was a gold-rimmed label that announced Jane’s gift. I said, “Was the author a relative of yours?”
“No, we don’t go that far back in this neighbourhood. But the Bishop family built my parents’ house, the house where I grew up. There were five copies of that book in the attic when my parents moved in. Self-published, and it shows. Why are you reading it?”
I gave her a short explanation about my research assistant work for Molly.
She said, “Well, don’t believe everything Mary Elizabeth says. She wasn’t the most careful chronicler of her time.”
Joshua returned to Jane’s side, picked at her jeans, and pouted. “Mommy, Alexandra told me to go away.”
“Why don’t you go find a book to read?” she said. “One with nice pictures.” He wandered off again and she said, under her breath,