“Please, have a seat,” Amelia said in her slightly unsteady birdsong voice. Glancing between the claw-footed embroidered sofa and the claw-footed matching peach wingback chair, Ramsey chose the chair. Amelia put his hot chocolate on a coaster on the end table beside him.
“You have a nice place here,” he told her, noticing the drywall tape coming through the wall in one corner of the small room.
“Thank you.”
“Does your landlord help you with the upkeep?” “No. I own the place.”
“The whole building?”
“No. Just this unit. The building was sold and turned into
condominiums about ten years ago. Funny, you know.” She sat on the sofa and faced him, her feet, encased in black leather slip-on shoes, resting on an upholstered step stool, her calflength silk dress pulled down over her knees. “Condominium sounds like such a fancy word. But this place is still the apartment I rented when I graduated from teacher’s college when I was twenty-one.”
“You taught here in Comfort Cove?”
“No, at a private school for girls in Boston. For the first few years I roomed on campus during the week and drove here for the weekends. I grew up in Boston, but I always loved the ocean and knew this was where I wanted to live.”
The place smelled like…lilacs, maybe. Reminding him of his mother’s bedroom when he was a kid. Or maybe her bathroom. After she’d showered, he’d go in there and the floor would be lightly dusted with a white powder that smelled just like Amelia’s living room.
Amelia had few photos. A young woman and a young man, standing on the beach. Next to a tree. In front of a car.
“Did you ever marry?” he asked her, sipping cocoa when he should have been finding out what she knew about Jack Colton and then getting the bag bearing the dead man’s suit back to the precinct for processing.
“No, sir. My Hank was called up to go to war six months before our wedding. He never made it back.” Her smile bore the sadness of many ages as she glanced toward her photos.
“So he never made it here? To this apartment?”
“No, Hank never made it here, but you guessed that I got this place while he was away, didn’t you? In preparation for him to come back. In preparation for our marriage.”
“I suspected.” Because the room spoke of standing still. And the only clue to the reason was those photos.
“This was to be our first home,” she said then, sitting back with a faraway look. “I spent hours furnishing the place. Sewing curtains and quilting a spread for the bed. I’d saved every memento from every date we ever had and put the knickknacks up on the shelves. Every time I added something new, I took photos and sent them to him. I’d make the hour drive from Boston every Friday night and spend the evening here writing to Hank. He’d write back to me that he laid in bed at night and pictured me here—us here. He’d tell me of the things we’d do as soon as he got home…?.”
Ramsey would bet his life that Amelia still had every single one of those letters. And that she read them regularly, too.
He sat listening as, over the next half hour, Amelia talked about the three years her fiancé was away. About the wedding plans that she made, in anticipation of him coming home, and then had to put off. Again and again.
He was waiting for the story to turn tragic, for the phone call, or the knock on the door, that would signify the end of Amelia’s hopes for the future. But before she got there, she sat forward, clasped her hands together and smiled at him.
“You wanted to know about that young man, Jack,” she said, sounding as happy and content as if she’d been offering him the cup of cocoa. Standing, she moved to an old secretary, a three-foot-wide china cabinet with drawers and a pulldown desk shelf. Ramsey’s grandmother had had one that she’d passed down to his sister, Diane. It still stood in Diane’s bedroom in their parents’ home, filled with Diane’s things. As far as he knew, his mother still dusted the antique every week, when she cleaned the rest of Diane’s room.
“I do remember him.” Amelia’s voice sounded distant, and Ramsey realized the woman was looking at the picture he’d handed her earlier. She’d obviously set it down on the secretary. The magnifying spectacles were perched on the end of her nose.
The old woman walked toward him, handing him back his photograph as she held the glasses and sat on the end of the couch, her knees almost touching his.
“That’s Jack,” she said, and then continued. “Mostly he was a boy of few words, but I’d say I knew him fairly well. You see, I, too, am a pretty good judge of character,” she said. “It wasn’t that long ago that he was here.”
“How long ago?” Ramsey’s demeanor didn’t change. His focus was acute.
“I’m not sure. He was still living here when I retired, I know, because I’d be walking down to the bakery just after six when he left for work in the mornings. One of the pleasures of my retirement was that I could be at the bakery as soon as the last loaves of bread came out of the oven. There’s nothing like freshly made bread. Don’t you agree, Detective?”
Ramsey had a flash of his mother, standing in the kitchen, hands covered in flour, and Diane beside her, flour on her cheek and on her chin, as she tried to get the hang of kneading bread.
He nodded at Amelia. And quickly asked, “When did you retire?”
“Nineteen eighty-six. I was sixty-seven and getting a little nervous about the hour’s drive to Boston during the winters. After those first few years, I commuted back and forth every single day.” She frowned, and then her expression cleared. “After I retired, I taught kindergarten at St. Francis down on High Street, and I remember your young man helping me carry my trash down one morning when I had my hands full. You remember St. Francis, don’t you? It burned down a few years ago…?.”
Fifteen years ago, before Ramsey had moved to Comfort Cove. Even before he’d met Tom Cook and introduced the citified Greer boy to his older sister.