The Vanished Child Read online

  The room was empty. White walls stripped of all paper. A few lighter patches in the plaster. White ceiling. Plain whitened board floor, boards washed and scraped and holystoned. The black marble fireplace had a single long score across it where a bullet had ricocheted.

  “Look,” Reisden said. “There’s nothing.”

  Gilbert pushed the window up and awkwardly stepped through, still holding his jacket. He laid it down on the floor, still folded. The rock was on the floor in the middle of the room; Gilbert picked it up as if absently and stood in the middle of the room, hefting the rock, staring all around him as if he were trying to take in all that emptiness. It was a good-sized granite rock, like a weapon or a talisman.

  Lodgings; more of Anna Fen

  Harry had arrived at the house while Reisden and Gilbert were still looking at the blank white front room where William Knight had died.

  “Who broke the window?” he asked, looking at the gloomy house. And, after he had been upstairs and come down again, “Where’s the bathroom?”

  There was none. No inside W.C., though Gilbert said, stricken, that he believed there was one behind the barn. No bathtub. No shower. No hot water. No running water at all except through the pump in the kitchen. Reisden looked at Gilbert. Gilbert looked at Reisden.

  “I really think we should stay with Charlie,” Gilbert said with extraordinary firmness, “and have the plumbers in.”

  Within the next day or so Gilbert had decided how he was going to deal with his father’s house. The plumbers came in, and the carpenters, and the painters. Two male decorators wandered through the rooms muttering darkly to each other and left samples of paper and paint. Gilbert walked through the house with a sturdy wooden box, took down each white china motto, wrapped it in newspaper, and stowed it in the box, murmuring with each one, “Forgive me, Lord.” Workmen carried heavy furniture, drapes, and some very large pictures out of the house.

  “We will make it quite modem,” Gilbert said nervously.

  Charlie Adair offered them two of what had been the Federal Hotel’s suites; amusingly, at the opposite end of the building from Perdita Halley’s room. Charlie Adair took his duties as chaperon very seriously; Harry and Perdita could not go out for a walk without Charlie’s knowing where.

  Perdita’s piano was in the small parlor on the first floor of the Clinic. Reisden, wakeful in the early mornings, heard her practicing softly downstairs, well before anyone else was awake. Often at other times of the day he heard her practice: while Harry was out working on his sailboat, playing golf at the small links behind the Lakeside Hotel, or playing baseball with a scratch team. Harry dealt with tension by being athletic. Perdita by practicing early in the morning? No, she said when Reisden casually asked her, she always practiced then, she had since she was a child. Reisden wondered if Harry knew how close his sweet young girl came to working professional’s hours. For that matter, did she know it herself, or realize how well she avoided making it plain to Harry? It would not work forever. Reisden could not imagine Harry happy alone in a cold bed at five in the morning while his young wife practiced piano.

  Adair added himself to their evenings of reading and talk and piano playing, speaking mostly to Gilbert. As if by mutual agreement, Reisden and he never spoke.