While Rose told me about her lawyer daughter-in-law Karla’s newest case, I shuffled through serving spoons, spatulas, and long forks, careful not to make too much noise.
“Karla’s doing so well,” I said, feeling that would cover anything I missed.
When Rose moved on to John, son number two—“He had another date with Denise on Sunday. She’s old man Mattera’s granddaughter, you know”—I’d moved to the counter.
I quietly pulled the appliances out from their positions against the wall and checked behind the toaster, blender, can opener, mixer, bread box. Not a crumb. Phil’s cleaning lady had done a perfect job. Not a clue, either, however, and I wondered what we were doing there. Maybe with two hands free, Elaine and Dana were doing better in other parts of the house.
“John will find the right woman, in his own time,” I said. Another platitude to the rescue.
By the time Rose started her report on her teenaged grandson, the e-mail whiz William, and his success at basketball last night, I’d covered the whole kitchen and the half bath between the hallway and the family room.
I turned back to the kitchen and caught a side view of the bulletin board. Its wooden frame wasn’t flush with the wall at the bottom, as if something were pushing it out. I walked up to it for a closer look and saw that the bottom bolt was loose. With a pair of scissors from a drawer, I fished around in the gap at the lower edge. I wedged the phone between my jaw and shoulder and tried using the scissors and my fingers to pry the gap into a reasonable size.
“William’s a natural,” I said. I’d heard Frank use that phrase when William took off on his first set of Rollerblades; I hoped it applied to all sports.
With my head pressed against the wall, the phone in the crook of my neck, and my arms contorted to hold a gap open, I noticed the corner of a piece of white paper hanging below the bulletin board, partially obscured by the pizza coupon.
“ … in the next couple of months,” I heard. Rose was now talking about her youngest, Mary Catherine, my godchild, who was living in the mortuary apartment I’d abandoned to live with Matt.
“So MC is moving out?” I hoped I got that right.
“No, Gloria. This must be a bad connection. I have your mail here. Is this a good time to go through it? Lots of catalogs and junk mail, but there are a couple of first class pieces.”
A long distance reading of my mail was so far down on my list of priorities, it reached the status of contemporary poetry.
“Rose, I hate to go, but Elaine is waiting, and—”
“Oh, you should have told me you were busy. Sorry, Gloria. I wish I could go shopping with you two. We’ll finish later. Miss you.”
I hung up and went to find Dana and Elaine. I needed help with some carpentry.
“Nothing missing that I can see,” Elaine said. She’d already come down the stairs. “His closet’s full. His large suitcases are there. I can’t speak for his carry-ons—he has so many. And there might be a few missing shirts and pants.”
“Did you find a calendar or date book?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“How about his computer?” I asked. “Did you look through the files?”
“As many as I could access, which was most of them. Nothing.”
“I have nothing, either,” Dana said, looking as though she needed a nap.
“I might have something,” I said.
Thanks to Dana’s familiarity with her father’s garage and tools, in a few minutes the bulletin board was off the wall and standing against an island cabinet. The bolts that had held it to the kitchen wall rolled around the ivory granite of the island, surrounding the pile of business cards from the real estate broker.
As the only one who’d turned up anything vaguely useful, I was assigned the task of extricating the several eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets from the back of the cork panel. They were unbound and had been held in place by masking tape. What I’d seen during my acrobatics was the page closest to the panel, which had slipped a bit from the package.
We spread the pages—five in all, obviously photocopies—on the island and peered at them. Elaine had made coffee, decrying the lack of snack food in Phil’s cabinets or refrigerator, as well as the absence of an espresso machine.
“Not that I’ve rushed out to replace mine,” Elaine said. Her voice sounded wistful, full of nostalgia for her normal life.
“I don’t get this,” Dana said. “These are Valley Med invoices. What are they doing in my dad’s house?”
“And why would Phil hide them?” Elaine asked. I wondered if she was at all relieved that we hadn’t uncovered evidence that indicated a cold-feet theory might be in order—a perfumed love letter, perhaps, or a note saying Thanks for last night.