A Quiet Death

FOUR

‘Oh. My. God.’

Still holding the sack by a bottom corner, Paul gaped at me as if I’d lost my marbles. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘That Garfinkel’s bag. It isn’t mine.’

Paul balled up the plastic sack Prince George’s Hospital Center had provided and tossed it into the trash bin under the sink. ‘Whose is it, then?’

‘Skip’s. The guy on the train I told you about.’

‘Damn! So how did it get in with your stuff?’

‘It was probably lying on the floor next to me when I passed out. The paramedics must have assumed…’

‘Garfinkel’s.’ Paul picked up the bag and peeked inside. ‘I haven’t thought about them for years. They’re out of business now, right?’

I nodded. ‘Late nineteen eighties or thereabouts. What’s inside?’ I asked, my curiosity piqued.

Studying me over the edge of the bag, Paul grinned impishly. ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ I laughed. ‘Tell me what’s in there!’

‘A box.’ He spread the opening wider, peered down into its depth. ‘Looks like one of those cardboard boxes that Christmas shirts come in.’

‘May I see?’

‘Sure.’ Paul slid the cardboard box out of the Garfinkel’s bag, brought it over to my side of the kitchen table and set the box down dead center on my placemat, like an entrée.

‘Do you think it will be OK to open it?’ I wondered.

‘Why not? Could be something. Could be nothing. You won’t know until you look.’

I nudged a corner of the box top with my forefinger, raising it about half an inch, teasing him. Another nudge, a quarter inch more.

‘Hannah!’ Paul tousled my hair playfully. ‘It’s not a bomb, for heaven’s sake! Open the damn thing!’

Thus, led by the man I married into a life of petty crime, like so many women before me, I whipped off the top of a box that didn’t belong to me.

The first thing I saw were three packets of letters, each neatly tied around the middle with pale green ribbon. I picked up one of the packets and thumbed through it clumsily with my one good hand. The letters all were postmarked in the early 1980s.

Beneath the letters I found a white envelope with a metal clasp. I opened the clasp, raised the flap and peeked inside. ‘Photographs,’ I told my husband, before laying the envelope aside.

The only item remaining in the box was an expired United States passport in the name of Lilith Marie Chaloux, who had been born April 4, 1953, in San Francisco, California. On the day she sat for her passport photo, Lilith Marie had worn a school uniform – plaid jumper, white blouse with a Peter Pan collar – and had drawn her dark hair up into a high ponytail. She looked about sixteen, but wise for her years, gazing seriously at the photographer with delicately arched brows over dark, intelligent eyes, the merest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

Paul had been kibitzing over my shoulder. ‘A rare beauty,’ he said. ‘A heartbreaker.’

I had to agree. Lilith was one of the most beautiful young women I’d ever seen, like Audrey Hepburn before she cut her hair in Roman Holiday.

‘How old would she be now?’ I wondered.

‘Fifty-seven,’ Paul declared without hesitation. He was the mathematician in the family.

I set the passport down on the table and picked up a second packet of letters. The one on top was addressed to Ms Lilith Chaloux at an address in the 17e arrondissement de Paris, and although the postmark had badly faded, I could tell it had been mailed in September of 1976 from New York City. There was no return address in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, so I peeked at the back flap. No return address there, either.

‘I wonder who the letters are from,’ I said, flipping through the second packet without untying the ribbon, and then the third. ‘They’re all in the same handwriting, but there’s absolutely no clue on the outside who sent them.’ I gave my husband a look, and waggled my eyebrows mischievously. ‘Maybe they’re love letters!’

Usually my husband is Mr Proceed With Caution, so it surprised me when he said, ‘Open one up, read it and see.’

‘No. I can’t.’ Using my good hand, I shoveled the passport, photos and letters back into the box. ‘Help me put the lid back on,’ I said.

‘Don’t you want to know…?’

‘Of course I want to know. Who wouldn’t be curious? But these letters are not mine, and it seems like an invasion of someone’s privacy to go reading them without permission from either the recipient or their current owner.’

‘Who is?’ Paul inquired reasonably.

‘Lilith Chaloux.’

‘Or…?’ Paul prompted.

‘Well, I suppose they could belong to Skip, the guy sitting next to me on the train.’

‘Whose last name is?’

I had to admit that I didn’t know.

‘I can’t simply assume that Skip died in the crash.’ I insisted, slipping the shirt box back into the Garfinkel’s bag. ‘When the paramedics arrived, I was holding his wrist. He still had a pulse. I have to make some effort to find him and return the bag. If these letters belonged to me, I’d certainly want to get them back.’

Paul poured himself a second cup of coffee, leaned back against the kitchen counter and sipped the hot liquid noisily. ‘What do you think Skip’s relation is to Lilith?’

‘She is, or was, his mother, would be my guess.’

‘Could his last name be Chaloux, too?’

I tapped the passport. ‘Unless she was married at sixteen, Chaloux would be her maiden name, Paul.’

‘Whatever,’ he said, ‘but it wouldn’t hurt to Google her.’

‘Brilliant idea, Professor Ives.’

Carrying our mugs, the two of us trooped down to Paul’s basement office, where we powered up his computer and learned that, alas, Lilith Marie Chaloux had no Internet presence at all. ‘At least she’s not dead,’ I commented wryly. ‘Or at least, she didn’t die spectacularly.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean, Hannah?’

‘When Skip thought he was dying, he told me that he’d killed somebody. If this woman had been a recent murder victim, surely there’d be something about it on the Internet somewhere.’

‘Did Skip say who he was supposed to have killed?’

I shook my head.

‘Did Skip look like a soldier?’

‘No, not at all.’ I said, wondering where Paul was going with this line of questioning. ‘He’s the right age, mid-twenties, I’d guess, but he looked like a stockbroker to me, or an accountant. An attorney, maybe. Why do you ask?’

‘He could have served in Iraq, or Afghanistan,’ Paul said reasonably. ‘He could have killed somebody over there, and be wracked with guilt. Shit happens in wartime. You said he was Catholic?’

I nodded. ‘He carries a rosary.’

Paul raised an eyebrow. ‘How old did you say this guy was?’

‘Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five.’

‘Aren’t rosaries hopelessly old-fashioned? Something only wimpled nuns and great-grandmothers still do?’

‘They’re contemplative, Paul. Praying the rosary has a quiet rhythm to it, like meditation. Or, Skip may have been carrying it as a kind of good luck charm.’

Paul grimaced. ‘As a good luck charm, it certainly fell down on the job.’

‘Speaking as someone who still wears her mother’s St Christopher medal whenever she flies, I don’t find the fact that Skip was carrying a rosary in his pocket strange at all.’ I had a sudden thought. ‘Search for Skip Chaloux.’

Paul tapped a few keys, stared intently at the screen. ‘Nothing. There’s a fitness model named Chaloux, and somebody who makes corsets. Otherwise it’s “Skip to Main Menu” or “Don’t skip breakfast!”’

‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

We tried a simple search on ‘Chaloux.’ 77,000 entries, plus or minus. After paging through half a dozen screens, I called it off.

‘So, what’s your next step?’ Paul wondered as he powered down his computer.

‘Without a last name, I’m dead in the water. As soon as I feel up to it, I’m going back to the hospital, and see if I can track Skip down. PGHC is a regional trauma center. If they pulled him out of the wreck alive, that’s probably where they would have taken him.’

‘Seems like the logical place to begin.’ Paul flipped off the desk lamp and followed me back upstairs to the kitchen. ‘But if you don’t find him there, what then?’

I smiled. ‘Then I open the letters and start looking for clues.’