Chương 2
“No one will come in.”
“Your security woman is outside.”
“She is responsible for the building.”
“And who is responsible for you?”
The question landed harder than Mara could have intended.
Daniel pulled out a chair but remained standing behind it. “Would you like coffee? Tea?”
“Tea.”
“What kind?”
Mara seemed confused by the question.
“Whatever people drink here.”
Daniel went to the service cabinet. The Winslow Room contained six varieties of tea, three sweeteners, china thin enough to see light through, and no paper cups. He chose black tea, then found an ordinary ceramic mug in a lower cupboard used by the banquet staff.
Mara noticed.
“You don’t have to give me the worker cup.”
“I thought it might be less hot.”
“You thought I’d break the expensive one.”
Daniel set the china cup on the table instead. “You might. Victoria breaks them constantly.”
“I do not.”
“You broke one in Montreal.”
“The handle was already loose.”
Mara looked from one to the other. Something in her face eased, though only for a moment.
Daniel poured the water and placed the cup within reach. Mara wrapped both hands around it but did not drink. The tea bag string wound twice around her forefinger.
Victoria waited.
Mara stared at the steam. “The night your mother disappeared, I was fifteen. I was sleeping in the old laundry annex behind this hotel.”
“There was no laundry annex.”
“There was before they turned it into the parking ramp.”
Victoria looked at Daniel. He gave no reaction.
Mara continued. “I had run from a foster home in Joliet. I’d been gone six days. It was February, and the train stations were sweeping people out after midnight. A kitchen porter showed me a window with a broken latch. He said I could stay until the morning shift.”
“What was his name?”
“Otis. Maybe Otis Lane. People called him Slim even though he wasn’t.”
Victoria remembered a tall porter named Otis who gave her maraschino cherries when her father brought her to the hotel. He had disappeared from staff photographs after 1993. She had assumed he retired.
“I woke up because someone hit the window,” Mara said. “Not knocking. More like falling into it.”
The tea string tightened around her finger.
“Your mother was outside. She had blood in her hair. One sleeve of her coat was torn, and she didn’t have shoes on. I thought she was drunk. She told me she needed the freight entrance, but she couldn’t remember which side of the building it was on.”
“My mother knew this hotel better than anyone.”
“She knew where she was. She didn’t know how to get out.”
Victoria’s spine pressed against the chair.
“What did she say?”
“She asked if I knew a place where men wouldn’t come looking. I knew a church shelter near the river. We walked there.”
“In February? Without shoes?”
“I gave her mine.”
Mara lifted one foot beneath the table as if she could still feel the pavement. Her boots were men’s work boots, the leather split across one toe.
“What men?” Victoria asked.
Mara looked at the locket.
“I saw a black car circling. Two men got out twice. One had a hotel coat on. The other wore a suit. Your mother hid behind a delivery truck until they passed.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“I recognized one later.”
“Who?”
Mara’s jaw tightened. “I’m telling it in the order it happened.”
“This is not a story.”
“No,” Mara said. “It isn’t.”
Daniel took the chair beside Victoria. “Let her finish.”
Victoria turned on him. “You don’t know whether any of this is true.”
“No. Neither do you.”
Mara drank the tea. Her hand trembled against the saucer, causing a faint porcelain rattle.
“At the shelter, she wouldn’t give her name. She said Eleanor once, then said Nora when the woman at the desk asked again. I told them she was my aunt. They let her stay because she could barely stand. Before I left, she gave me the locket.”
“Why would you leave her?”
“I was fifteen.”
The words held no apology.
Victoria looked down at Mara’s coat. The torn cuff had been sewn with blue thread. A hotel guest somewhere above them dropped something heavy, and the muffled impact traveled through the wall.
Mara went on. “She said she had a daughter named Victoria. She made me repeat it. Victoria Hale. She said if anything happened, I had to find you and tell you she had not gone willingly.”
A bell sounded in the corridor. The first guests for the luncheon had arrived.
Victoria’s schedule sat open on the table where Daniel had placed the folder. At eleven she was supposed to speak about stable housing for women leaving domestic violence. At noon she would present a grant to a shelter network. At one thirty she had lunch with two board members who considered homelessness primarily an aesthetic problem near hotel entrances.
Mara glanced at the folder. “You have somewhere to be.”
“So do you, apparently.”
A defensive smile appeared and vanished. “Not at eleven.”
“Did my mother leave the shelter?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said she disappeared that night.”
“She disappeared from your life that night. I didn’t say she vanished into smoke.”
“Did you go back?”
“Not the next day.”
“Why not?”
Mara pulled her coat closed. “Because a police officer picked me up at Union Station. Because my foster father reported me as a thief. Because I spent three weeks in a juvenile shelter and another month being evaluated by people who kept asking why I lied.”
“What did you steal?”
Mara’s eyes rose slowly. “You hear what you want to hear.”
“You said he reported you as a thief.”
“I stole forty dollars from his wallet before I ran. He had been coming into my room for six months. The state was more interested in the forty dollars.”
May you like
Daniel looked toward the window.
Victoria pressed her thumbnail into the soft pad of her index finger, a habit she had hidden since adolescence.
