Puppet (17 page)

“And you’re sure the man you saw that afternoon was John Mallins?” Amanda questions.

“The police asked me the same thing. I’m absolutely positive. I’m very good with faces. It was the same man all right.”

“Think hard, Mrs. Nash. Had my mother ever mentioned John Mallins to you before?”

“Never. I still can’t believe it.”

“What?”

“That she shot that man. Like I told the police, your mother is the kindest, gentlest person I’ve ever known.”

Amanda feels the coffee mug slip through her fingers. Before she can stop it, it bounces off her lap, spilling its contents across the floral-print rug. Like John Mallins’s blood, Amanda thinks, watching as the stain reaches for her toes.

D
ID
she really say my mother is the kindest, gentlest person she’s ever known?” Amanda whispers as Corinne Nash rushes into the kitchen to retrieve some paper towels.

“That’s what she said.”

Amanda shakes her head in disbelief. “Who does she usually hang out with? Hitler?” She sinks back into the sofa, almost disappearing inside the cacophony of pink-and-green fabric flowers and vines.

“Have a cookie,” Ben offers. “They’re actually pretty good.”

Amanda grabs a biscuit from the black enamel tray, swallowing it almost whole, as Corinne Nash scurries back into the room carrying a handful of paper towels. She drops to her knees, begins blotting up the stain.

“Oh, no,” Amanda says, joining the older woman on the floor. “Please let me do that.”

“Nonsense. It’s done.” Corinne proudly displays the now-wet paper towel. “Have another cookie,” she instructs. “I’ll get some more coffee.”

“No, I’m fine,” Amanda protests. “Really. I’ve put you to enough trouble already.”

“I bet you haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?” Corinne Nash shakes her head. “Just like your mother.”

Amanda’s smile is so tight, her cheeks feel as if they might split down the middle. When she speaks, her words rumble unsteadily from her throat, as if she is gargling. “I assure you, I’m nothing like my mother.”

“Oh, really? I see all sorts of similarities,” Corinne Nash says with a smile.

“I think maybe we should be going,” Ben interjects quickly, guiding Amanda toward the front door. He keeps his arm wrapped tightly around her waist as she steps into her boots and gathers her coat around her.

“Wait,” Amanda says as they are descending the front steps. “I just thought of something.” She stops on the second-to-last step, takes a deep breath of late-afternoon air, turns back to Corinne Nash. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, have a key to my mother’s house, would you?” she asks, lowering her voice in an effort not to sound like her mother.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Corinne says with almost audible pride. “We exchanged keys a few months ago. We thought it would be a good idea. You know, in case of an emergency or something. I guess this qualifies. Would you like it?”

“Please,” Ben says before Amanda can say otherwise. “Good thinking,” he adds as Mrs. Nash disappears back into her house to find the key.

Amanda ignores the compliment. “I don’t sound anything like my mother. How could she say that? You don’t think I sound like my mother, do you?”

“Here it is,” Mrs. Nash says upon her return, proudly offering the single silver key to Amanda. “Her plants probably need watering.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Ben says, thanking the woman again.

Corinne Nash waves good-bye as they climb into the car. “Please tell your mother she’s in my prayers.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” Amanda mutters. She is still muttering and Mrs. Nash is still waving as Ben throws the Corvette into gear and pulls away from the curb.

The two-story house on the west side of Palmerston is much like its owner—aging but proud, stately but eccentric. The bricks are a dull brown, the front door a bright yellow. Snow covers the sidewalk and outside steps, and no one has bothered to shovel the narrow driveway that is shared with the house next door. “A curse on you, Mr. Walsh,” Amanda hears her mother yell as Ben pulls his car into the mutual driveway. “You’ll be dead before the new year.”

Sure enough, two months later, old Mr. Walsh was dead.

In the years that followed, several families moved in and out of the house next door. Amanda wonders who lives in it now, if they will be as incensed as her mother used to be at finding a car blocking the middle of the driveway. Not that her mother ever went anywhere, Amanda thinks, looking over at Ben, remembering how often this very car sat idling in this very position.

“You ready?” he asks.

“You’re sure this isn’t considered breaking and entering?”

In response, Ben holds up the key to the front door. “This was your idea, remember?”

“We aren’t interfering with a police investigation?”

“Do you see any yellow tape?”

Amanda exhales a deep breath of air, watches it spread across the car’s front window. He’s right, of course. The police have no reason to search her mother’s house. They already have the murder weapon. And even if they don’t have a motive, they have something much better—a confession. Amanda releases another painful breath from her lungs and pushes open the car door.

“Careful on the ice,” Ben warns as Amanda makes her way slowly to the walkway. She pretends not to see the arm he offers to help her up the snow-caked front stairs.

“Just what do you think we’ll find in here?” she asks as the key twists in the lock.

“I have no idea.”

In the second it takes for the key to release the lock, Amanda thinks of half a dozen reasons why they shouldn’t be doing this: they are snooping where they don’t belong; her mother will be furious when she finds out; this isn’t her house, not anymore; she hasn’t set foot in here since her father died; she vowed never to set foot in it again; just standing on the front porch is making her feel sick to her stomach.

To this list she adds one more reason: they might find something.

The door falls open. Ben steps confidently over the threshold. “Coming?”

“I’m not sure I can do this.”

“Would you like to wait in the car?”

Amanda shakes her head, the only part of her body that seems capable of movement. Her limbs have frozen. She has the feeling that if she tries to force one leg in front of the other, it will snap off like an icicle.

A gust of cold air blows against the back of her coat, gently nudging her inside. She steps into the small front foyer, her eyes on the tiny gray-and-white squares of the linoleum floor. “Doesn’t look like much has changed,” she hears Ben say.

Slowly, reluctantly, Amanda lifts her eyes.

What Amanda sees: the ersatz gray-and-white mosaic tiles of the foyer disappearing into the dark wood floor of the narrow hallway, the gray-carpeted living room to her left, the wood-paneled study to her right, a stairway at the back, beside the kitchen, a sobbing child flying down those stairs and darting between rooms to escape her mother’s wrath.

Amanda swallows, ignoring her mother’s voice reminding her to wipe her feet on the frayed patch of gray carpet inside the front door. “Let’s do this quickly, okay?”

“I’ll take the main floor,” Ben tells her. “Think you can handle the bedrooms?”

Amanda proceeds cautiously, as if half-expecting a deranged figure with a knife to come shrieking out of the shadows at the top of the stairs, as in
Psycho.
Already she can hear Ben rifling through the cabinets in the kitchen. What exactly is he looking for? she wonders, her boots leaving a wet trail as she climbs the steps. What are we doing here?

Her old bedroom is to the left of the landing. She stands in front of the door for several long seconds, her gaze traveling from the small twin bed against one pale pink wall, to the Renoir print of a girl standing on a swing that sits above the desk on the opposite side of the room, to the light wood dresser that fits just underneath the
side window overlooking the mutual driveway. A perfect little girl’s room, she thinks. Except that she was far from the perfect little girl.

Amanda steps into the room, spins slowly around, feels herself growing smaller with each spin, like Alice after that mysterious pill, until she is toddler-size. She hears laughter, feels strong female arms lifting her into the air, then dangling her from a great height, as her little legs kick happily at the air. “Who’s my little puppet?” she hears a woman trill.

And then the laughter suddenly stops, freezing in the air, and raining down upon her head, like hail pellets. The toddler drops from the woman’s arms, lies like a broken doll on the gray-carpeted floor, arms and legs splayed akimbo. Amanda sinks down onto the bed, wounded.

When she was a teenager, she begged her parents to let her make some changes to the decor. Her friends all had much cooler rooms, with queen-size beds and wallpaper that reflected their maturing, if questionable, tastes. She was tired of all the pink, she protested. Tired of all the girlish clutter. She’d long ago outgrown her collection of soap animals and glass paperweights. What she wanted were black walls, like Debbie Profumo. What she wanted was a state-of-the-art stereo system, like Andrea Argeris.

What she got was a warning to keep her voice down, her mother was resting.

In protest, she stopped hanging her clothes in the closet or tucking them neatly into drawers. She wallpapered her room with posters of Marilyn Manson and Sean Penn, listened to heavy-metal music, blasting her radio all night, until the time her father stormed into the
room, tore it from the wall, and hurled it to the floor, damaging it beyond repair. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded, his eyes drifting to the packet of birth control pills she’d deliberately left on top of her desk. “You know your mother can’t sleep with all that damn noise.”

Her response had been to buy a new radio, play it even louder. Her response had been to stay out later and later, until she barely came home at all, and when she did, it was always with a resounding slam of the front door. Her response had been to sleep with every male who caught her eye, because she couldn’t catch the eye of the one male who mattered most. Because his eye was elsewhere.

On her mother.

At least that’s what Oprah would probably say, Amanda decides now, growing bored with all this amateur psychology and pushing herself off the bed, impatiently pulling open the various drawers of her dresser, looking for God only knows what.

What she finds: a few sweaters belonging to her mother, some old costume jewelry, a silk scarf bordered by a thick black line and decorated with colorful butterflies. Amanda crumples the delicate silk into the palms of her hands, raises the scarf to her nose, sniffs at its folds for traces of her mother, finds none. Absently she wraps the scarf around her neck, her attention shifting from the dresser to the desk. Restless hands sift through boxes of blank stationery and empty date books. In the bottom drawer, she finds a collection of old fashion magazines and thumbs lazily through them.

“Nothing here,” she says aloud, returning the magazines to the bottom drawer, and walking back into the hall.

“Don’t go,” a small voice calls from behind her, and Amanda turns, even though she knows no one is there.

The second bedroom is only a few short steps away. It too is essentially as she remembers, its decor almost the same as the first, except that the bed that sits against the opposite wall is a double, and the walls are a subtler shade of pink. A desk is propped up against the window overlooking the street, a low dresser sits on the wall beside the closet. A Renoir print—this one of a field of flowers—hangs over the bed. Amanda can’t remember anybody ever actually occupying this room. Her parents never had any guests. On impulse, she marches over to the closet and pulls open the door, then falls back, shields her eyes, as if blinded by a sudden light.

The puppet stage sits on the floor of the otherwise empty closet, two wooden dolls folded neatly in the middle of the stage floor, their bodies stretched across their legs as if exercising, their hands folded over the tops of their feet, their eyes closed as if sleeping, their strings spread out around them, as if they’d stumbled into a spider’s web.

Amanda gingerly carries the two-foot-high stage into the center of the bedroom, lowering it to the gray broadloom and sitting down, cross-legged, beside it. With trembling fingers, she lifts the first puppet into her hands. It is a boy with a big wooden head and a high pompadour of painted-on black hair. Immediately the marionette’s eyes pop open, revealing orbs of bright neon green. His lips are thick, his smile wide. He is wearing a cotton shirt that is white and crisp, and blue sneakers peek out from beneath a pair of stiff denim jeans.

Amanda dangles the puppet from its strings, watching his awkward dance. Then she gathers the second
puppet, this one a red-cheeked girl with huge blue eyes and waves of painted blond hair, into her other hand and brings her around to face her friend. Slowly she manipulates her fingers, watching as the girl puppet responds with a curtsy and the male puppet bows. In the next instant they are swirling gracefully around the stage.

“How are you doing up there?” Ben calls from downstairs.

The marionettes jerk up and apart, their hands rising into the air, as if someone is pointing a gun at their heads. “I’m fine,” Amanda calls out, letting go of the dolls’ strings, the puppets collapsing one on top of the other, as if they have, in fact, been shot.

“Find anything?” Ben asks from the bottom of the stairs.

“No. You?”

“Nothing so far. I’m heading for the basement.”

“I should be through here soon,” she calls after him, staring guiltily at the puppets. She carefully untangles the two sets of strings and returns the dolls to their former position in the center of the stage, their bodies folded neatly over at the waist, their eyes closed. “It’s better that way,” she tells them in a whisper, returning the stage to the closet and shutting the door.

She feels movement behind her and turns in time to see her mother’s face contorted with rage. “What are you doing in here?” her mother cries, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her as if she were nothing but a puppet herself.