Skeleton Key(105)

“I never got along with my mother, either,” Faye said.

Dorothy Moss shook her head. “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here. I’m wondering a little myself. I think I just wanted to see where she’d been living, what her life had been like, in the last few months before she died. We found her once, maybe three or four months after she left college, living on the street in Boston. Just sitting there on the pavement with a cup to collect charity in.”

“I don’t understand,” Faye said. “Had there been an argument? Was there a reason why she couldn’t go home?”

“No reason at all. We would have been glad to have her. She’d gone to Boston to set up as a—as a fortune teller, I suppose you’d say. She wanted to read Tarot cards and do horoscopes. And she had some money with her when she left, money enough to get started, I would have thought. She cleaned out her entire savings account. Then she gave it all away to somebody, to some man. ‘Loaned’ it to him, is how she put it. But he disappeared, of course. Most people would have expected him to. She didn’t have much of a sense of self-preservation.”

“Maybe that explains how she got out to Margaret Anson’s house. Maybe she got a call, or somebody stopped in, and she just—trusted the person.”

“Yes, maybe so. I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. But really, I just wanted to see, you know. I wanted to see what this place was like. I wanted to see how she was living. You’ve made it very lovely here.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s good to know she wasn’t cold, or living in filth, or hungry. You start out with so many more elaborate hopes for a child. That she’ll grow up to have a brilliant career. That she’ll marry well and produce half a dozen happy children. With Zara Anne I had to give all that up early. She was very bright—she would never have been admitted to Trinity if she had not been very bright—but she was never really stable.”

“Yes,” Faye said. This, at least, she could verify as true. Zara Anne had not been stable. Not at any time while she had been living in this house.

Dorothy Moss stood up. Like most Litchfield County ladies, she was a little too thin. The bones in her neck stood out like cords.

“Well,” she said. “I’ll leave you now. I’ve seen what I came to see. I want to thank you so much for letting me come. And for talking to me. I find that I haven’t assimilated it yet. That she’s gone. She was in and out of our lives so much, it still seems to me that she must be coming back.”

“Yes,” Faye said again.

“Of course, some of that is due to my own weaknesses. I’ve let her father do all the arrangements, you see. I haven’t taken any part in them. I haven’t been able to. Do you have any children?”

“No,” Faye said.

“Then I don’t suppose you’d understand. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Some things it’s a blessing not to understand.”

Dorothy’s black leather Coach bag was on the floor. She bent over, picked it up, and put it on her shoulder.

“Well,” she said. “Thank you again. And thank you for the tea. Now I must be going.”

“Oh,” Faye said—but she didn’t really have time to say anything.

Dorothy Moss was fast. She was out of the living room and at the front door in no time at all. Faye trailed after her, not sure if she wanted to catch up and make all the customary condoling noises or not. By the time she reached the door, Dorothy was out in the drive and at her car. Faye stopped in the doorway and waved back when Dorothy waved to her.

She wasn’t going to make condoling noises after all. She wasn’t going to say a thing that made sense, any more than she had said a thing that made sense in all the hour that Dorothy Moss had been in her house. She wasn’t even going to be able to think anything that made sense.

She saw Dorothy’s car pull out onto the Litchfield Road and head in the direction of Watertown. She retreated into her foyer and shut the door firmly on her sight of the day.

Eventually, she was going to have to open the roadside stand again. She was going to have to go on with her life. She was going to have to go through the motions. Already there had been one or two incidents, when people who had driven all the way out from New York City found that they couldn’t do the shopping they’d come to do after all.

Really, Faye thought, it wasn’t that she was bereft at the lost of Zara Anne Moss. She hadn’t even liked Zara Anne much in the end. It was the circumstances that were making her crazy, and that she couldn’t shake off.