The Lost Years

22

On Sunday morning Mariah went to Mass, then stopped at her father’s grave. He had bought the burial plot ten years ago in a beautiful area that had once been the grounds of a seminary. The headstone was engraved with the family name, LYONS. I have to call and get Dad’s name put on it, she thought as she looked at the fresh dirt over the area where her father’s casket had been lowered.

Phrases from the prayer she had chosen for the memorial cards at the funeral parlor came back to her. “When the fever of life is over and our work is done… may He give us a safe lodging and a holy rest and peace at the last.”

I hope you’re at peace, Daddy, Mariah thought as she fought back tears. But I have to say you’ve left us with a pretty awful problem. I know those detectives believe Mom did this to you. Dad, I just don’t know what to believe. But I do know that if they arrest Mom and she ends up in a psychiatric hospital, she will be destroyed, and then I will have lost both of you.

She started to leave but turned back. “I love you,” she whispered. “I should have tried to be more understanding about Lily. I know how hard everything was on you.”

On the fifteen-minute drive home she began to brace herself for the day. At breakfast her mother had pushed back her chair and said, “I’ll go get your father.” Delia had jumped up to stop her from going upstairs, but Mariah had shaken her head. She knew her mother would resist any effort to stop her.

“Jonathan… Jonathan… ”

Her mother’s voice rose and fell as she went from bedroom to bedroom looking for her husband. Then she slowly came downstairs again. “He’s hiding,” she had said, her expression bewildered. “But he was upstairs just a few minutes ago.”

I’m glad Alvirah and Willy are coming this afternoon, Mariah thought. Mom likes them so much. And she always recognizes them immediately. But as she turned down her parents’ street, she was alarmed to see police cars in their driveway. Sure that something had happened to her mother, she parked on the street, ran along the walk, threw open the front door, and stepped inside to the sound of voices.

Detectives Benet and Rodriguez were in the living room. Three of the drawers of the antique secretary were on the floor. They were going through a fourth that they had placed on the cocktail table. Overhead she could hear the sound of footsteps in the hallway.

“What…,” she began.

Benet looked up. “The chief detective is upstairs, if you want to talk to him. We have a search warrant for these premises, Ms. Lyons,” he said crisply. “Here is a copy of it.”

Mariah ignored the document. “Where is my mother?” she demanded.

“She’s in your father’s study with the caregiver.”

Mariah’s feet felt leaden as she rushed down the hallway. A man who had to be one of the search team was sitting at her father’s desk going through the drawers. As she had feared, her mother was in the closet again, hovering against the back wall, Delia beside her. Her mother’s head was bowed but when she heard Mariah call her, she looked up.

She had a silk scarf tied around her face so that only her blue eyes and forehead showed.

“She won’t let me take it off her,” Delia said apologetically.

Mariah went into the closet. She could feel the eyes of the detective following her. “Mom… Kathleen, it’s too hot to wear that scarf,” she said soothingly. “Whatever made you put it on?”

She knelt down and helped her mother up. “Come on; let’s get rid of that thing.” Her mother let her untie the scarf and lead her from the closet. It was only then that Mariah realized Detectives Benet and Rodriguez had followed her into the study, and from the cynical expression on Benet’s face, she was sure he still believed that her mother was putting on an act.

“Is there any reason why I cannot take my mother and Delia out while the search is going on?” she asked Benet curtly. “We often used to go to brunch at Esty Street in Park Ridge on Sunday mornings.”

“Of course. Just one question: Are these your mother’s sketches? We found them in her room.” He was holding up a sketchbook.

“Yes. It’s one of her few pleasures. She used to be an ardent amateur painter.”

“I see.”

When they got to the restaurant and the waiter began to remove the table setting for a fourth person, her mother stopped him. “My husband is coming,” she said. “Don’t take his plate away.”

The waiter looked at Mariah, knowing she had requested a table for three.

“Just leave it, please,” Mariah said.

For the next hour she tried to take consolation in the fact that her mother ate one of the poached eggs she had ordered for her and even remembered that she loved a Bloody Mary at Sunday brunch. Mariah ordered one for her, mouthing the words “without the vodka” to the waiter.

The waiter, a man in his sixties, nodded. “My mother too,” he said quietly.

She deliberately lingered over coffee, hoping against hope that the detectives would have cleared out before they got back home an hour and a half later. The squad cars in the driveway told her that they were still there, but when she went inside, she could see that they were about to leave. Detective Benet handed her an inventory of what they were taking with them. She glanced at it. Papers from her father’s desk. A box of documents that included a file of parchments. And her mother’s sketchbook.

She looked at Benet. “Is that necessary?” she demanded, pointing to the sketchbook. “If my mother looks for this, she’ll be upset that it’s gone.”

“Sorry, Ms. Lyons, we need to take it.”

“I warn you that the parchment file may contain something of indescribable value.”

“We know about the Joseph of Arimathea letter from Christ. I assure you we will find an expert to go through this file very, very carefully.”

Then they were gone.

“Let’s take a nice walk, Kathleen,” Delia suggested. “It’s so beautiful out.”

Kathleen shook her head obstinately.

“Well, then, we’ll just sit on the patio,” Delia said.

“Mom, why don’t you sit outside for a little while?” Mariah suggested. “Alvirah and Willy are coming, and I need to get ready for them.”

“Alvirah and Willy?” Kathleen smiled. “I’ll go outside and wait for them.”

Alone, Mariah began to tidy up the living room where the detectives had not completely closed the drawers of the secretary and had pushed aside the vase and candles on the cocktail table. The dining room chairs they had drawn up to it were still there. Next she went into her father’s study. The top of the big antique desk that had been his pride and joy was now littered with some of the contents of the drawers. I guess what they left here wasn’t evidence, she thought angrily. It seemed to her that the essence of her father had been taken from the room. The bright afternoon sun revealed the worn spots on the carpet. The books that he had kept in meticulous order were piled haphazardly on the shelves. The pictures of her mother and father, and herself with both of them, had been turned down as though they had been a nuisance to the prying eyes of the detective she had seen here.

She straightened out the study, then went upstairs, where it was obvious that all the rooms had been thoroughly searched. It was five o’clock when the house was finally put back together, and from the window of her bedroom she saw Willy and Alvirah’s Buick parking in the driveway.

She was at the front door opening it before they reached the front steps. “I’m so glad to see you two,” she said fervently as Alvirah’s comforting arms went around her.

“I’m so sorry we were away this week of all weeks, Mariah,” Alvirah said. “I was wringing my hands that I was in the middle of the ocean and couldn’t be with you.”

“Well, you’re here now and that’s what counts,” Mariah replied as they went inside the house. “Mother and Delia are on the patio. I heard them talking a minute ago, so Mother’s awake. She fell asleep on the couch out there, which is good because she hasn’t been sleeping much at all since Dad was—” Mariah stopped, her lips unable to form the word she had planned to say, “murdered.”

Willy hurried to fill in the void. “Nobody gets much sleep when there’s a death in the family,” he said heartily. He hurried ahead and opened the sliding glass door that led from the living room to the patio. “Hello, Kathleen, hello, Delia. You girls getting the sun?”

Kathleen’s delighted laugh was enough reassurance for Mariah that Willy would keep her mother occupied for at least a few minutes. “Alvirah, before we go out, I have to tell you. The police were here this morning with a search warrant. I think they’ve gone through every piece of paper in this house. They took the parchments my father was translating. I warned them that one of them might be an invaluable antiquity, a letter Christ wrote to Joseph of Arimathea. My father may have found it among that batch and believed it to be authentic.”

Alvirah’s eyes widened. “Mariah, are you serious?”

“Yes. Father Aiden told me about it at the funeral on Friday. Dad saw him the Wednesday before he died.”

“Did Lillian Stewart know about this parchment?” Alvirah demanded.

“I don’t know. I suspect he would have told her about it. For all I know she has it.”

Alvirah brushed her hand against her shoulder, turning on her hidden microphone. I can’t miss or misunderstand a word, she thought. Already her mind was awhirl.

Jonathan saw Father Aiden on Wednesday afternoon. Suppose Jonathan told him that he had decided to end the relationship with Lillian? Lillian saw Jonathan Wednesday night. Did he go straight up there, and if he did, what did he say to her? According to Lily, they never saw each other again and did not speak to each other in those five days.

Was she lying? Alvirah wondered. As I told Willy yesterday, somebody’s got to get the phone records of any calls from Jonathan to Lillian and from her to him between Wednesday and Monday night. If there aren’t any, it says to me that Jonathan told her it was quits…

It was too soon to suggest all this to Mariah. Instead, Alvirah said, “Mariah, let’s make a cup of tea and you try to catch me up on everything.”

“‘Everything’ is that I know the detectives believe my mother killed my father. ‘Everything’ is that I wouldn’t be surprised if they arrested her,” Mariah said, trying to keep her voice steady.

As she spoke, the doorbell rang. “Pray God those detectives aren’t back,” she murmured as she went to answer it.

It was Lloyd Scott. He did not mince words. “Mariah, I just got a call from Detective Benet. Your mother is being charged as we speak. He is allowing me to take her down to the prosecutor’s office in Hackensack to surrender her, but we have to go now. She’ll be fingerprinted and photographed there and then they will admit her to the jail. I am so sorry.”

“But they can’t put her in jail now,” Mariah protested. “My God, Lloyd, can’t they understand her condition?”

“My guess is that, in addition to setting the amount of bail, the judge will order that she have a psychiatric evaluation before releasing her so that he can set appropriate conditions of bail. That means that by tonight or tomorrow, she’ll be in a psychiatric hospital. She won’t be coming home, at least not for a while.”

At the back of the house, Willy, Kathleen, and Delia were coming in from the patio. “So much noise… so much blood,” Kathleen was telling Willy, this time in a lighthearted singsong voice.