Grace was sitting on the doorsill, her head hanging down between her knees. She was shaking from head to foot and she’d started to weep. I helped her to her feet, easing open the apartment door.
“Lyle knew I was picking the stuff up, right?” I snapped at her. She gave me a haunted, pleading look.
“It couldn’t have been him. He wouldn’t have done that to me,” she whimpered.
“Your faith is touching,” I said. “Now sit. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I went back to the basement stairs. The beam from the flashlight cut through the blackness. There was a second bulb at the bottom of the stairs and I pulled the chain. A flat dull light from the swinging bulb threw out a yellow arc that slowed to a halt. I turned off the flashlight. I knew which bin belonged to Mrs. Glass. It had been smashed open, the padlock dangling ineffectually where the lathing had been broken through. Cardboard boxes had been torn open, the contents strewn about in haste, forming an ankle-deep mess through which I picked my way. The emptied boxes all bore the name “Elizabeth,” obligingly rendered in bold Magic Marker strokes. I wondered if we’d interrupted the intruder before or after he’d found what he was looking for. I heard a sound behind me and I whirled, raising the flashlight instantly like a club.
A man stood there staring at me with bewilderment.
“Got a problem down here?”
“Oh fuck. Who are you?”
He was middle-aged, hands in his pockets, his expression sheepish. “Frank Isenberg from apartment three,” he said apologetically. “Did somebody break in? You want me to call the police?”
“No, don’t do that yet. Let me check upstairs with Grace. This looks like the only bin that’s been damaged. Maybe it was just kids,” I said, heart still thudding. “You didn’t have to sneak up on me.”
“Sorry. I just thought you might need some help.”
” Yeah, well thanks anyway. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”
He stood there surveying the chaos for a moment and then he shrugged and went back upstairs.
I checked the basement door at the rear. The glass had been broken out and someone had pulled back the bolt by reaching through. The door was wide open of course. I shut it, pushing the bolt back into place. When I turned around, Grace was creeping timidly down the stairs, her face still pale. She clung to the railing. “Elizabeth’s things,” she whispered. “They spoiled all of her boxes, all the things I saved.”
She sank down on the steps, rubbing her temples. Her large dark eyes looked injured, perplexed, with a touch of something else that I could have sworn was guilt.
“Maybe we should call the police,” I said, feeling mean, wondering just how protective of Lyle she intended to be.
“Do you really think?” she said. Her gaze flitted back and forth indecisively and she took out a handkerchief, pressing it against her forehead as though to remove beads of sweat. “Nothing might be missing,” she said hopefully. “Maybe nothing’s gone.”
“Or maybe we won’t know the difference,” I said.
She pulled herself up and moved over to the bin, taking in the disastrous piles of papers, stuffed animals, cosmetics, underwear. She stopped, picking up papers randomly, trying to make stacks. Her hands still trembled but I didn’t think she was afraid. Startled perhaps, and thinking rapidly.
“I take it Raymond is still asleep,” I said.
She nodded, tears welling up as the extent of the vandalism became more and more apparent. I could feel myself relent.
Even if Lyle had done it, it was mean-spirited, a violation of something precious to Grace. She had already suffered enough without this. I set the flashlight aside and began to pile papers back into the boxes: costume jewelry, lingerie, old issues of Seventeen and Vogue, patterns for clothing that Libby had probably never made. “Do you mind if I take these boxes with me and go through them tonight?” I asked. “I can have them back to you by morning.”
“All right. I suppose. I can’t see what harm it would do now anyway,” she murmured, not looking at me.
It seemed hopeless to me. In this jumble, who knew what might be missing? I’d have to go through the boxes and see if I could spot anything, but the chances weren’t good. Lyle couldn’t have been down there long — if it had been him. He knew I was coming back for the stuff and when he’d been there earlier, Grace probably told him exactly what time I expected to arrive. He’d had to wait until dark and he probably thought we’d spend more time upstairs before coming down. Still, he was cutting it close — unless he simply didn’t care. And why didn’t he break in during the three days I was gone? I thought back to his insolence and I suspected that he might take a certain satisfaction in thwarting me, even if he was caught at it.
Grace helped me cart the boxes to the car, six of them. I should have taken the stuff the first time I was there, I thought, but I couldn’t picture driving to Vegas with the entire backseat filled with cardboard boxes. Still, the boxes would have been intact. It was my own damn fault, I thought sourly.
I told Grace I’d be back first thing in the morning and then I pulled out. It was going to be a long night.
I bought two containers of black coffee across the street, locked the door to my motel room, and closed the drapes. I emptied the first carton onto the bed and then I started making stacks. School papers in one pile. Personal letters. Magazines. Stuffed animals. Clothing. Cosmetics. Bills and receipts. Grace had apparently saved every article Elizabeth had touched since kindergarten. Report cards. School projects. Really, six cartons seemed modest when I realized how much there was. Blue books from college. Copies of applications for work. Tax returns. The accumulation of an entire life and it was really only so much trash. Who would ever need to refer to any of this again? The original energy and spirit had all seeped away. I did feel for her. I did get some sense of that young girl, whose gropings and triumphs and little failures were piled together now in a drab motel room. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I flipped through a diary from the fifth grade the handwriting round and dutiful, the entries dull. I tried to imagine myself dead, someone sorting carelessly through my belongings. What was there really of my life? Canceled checks. Reports all typewritten and filed. Everything of value reduced to terse prose. I didn’t keep much myself, didn’t hoard or save. Two divorce decrees. That was about the sum of it for me. I collected more information about other people’s lives than I did about my own, as though, perhaps, in poring over the facts about other people, I could discover something about myself. My own mystery, unplumbed, undetected, was sorted into files that were neatly labeled but really didn’t say much. I picked through the last of Elizabeth’s boxes but there was nothing of interest. It was 4:00 in the morning when I finished. Nothing. If there had been anything there, it was gone now and I was irritated with myself again, berating myself for my own poor judgment. This was the second time I’d arrived too late, the second time some vital piece of information had slipped away from me.
I began to repack boxes, automatically rechecking as I went, sorting. Clothes in one box, stuffed animals tucked into the spaces along the sides. School papers, diaries, blue books in the next box. Back it all went, neatly catalogued this time, compulsively arranged, as thought I owed Elizabeth Glass some kind of order after I’d pried into the hidden crevices of her abandoned life. I riffed through magazines, held textbooks by the spine, letting the pages fly loose. The stacks on the bed diminished. There weren’t that many personal letters and I felt guilty reading them, but I did. Some from an aunt in Arizona. Some from a girl named Judy whom Libby must have known in high school. No one seemed to refer to anything intimate in her life and I had to conclude that she confided little or else that she had no tales to tell. The disappointment was acute. I was down to the last pile of books, mostly paperbacks. Such taste. Leon Uris and Irving Stone, Victoria Holt, Georgette Heyer, a few more exotic samples that I guessed had been from some literature survey course in college. The letter slipped out of the pages of a dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice. I nearly tossed it in the box with the rest of the stuff. The handwriting was a tightly stroked cursive on two sides in dark blue ink. No date. No envelope. No postmark. I picked it up by one comer and read it, feeling a cold pinching sensation begin at the base of my spine.