The Dress Shop of Dreams (11 page)

Cora has an appointment with a coroner. A coroner. She sucks at the word, turning it over with her tongue as if it’s a slice of lemon she doesn’t want to swallow. She sits on a wooden chair outside a wooden door with a panel of frosted glass upon which are engraved the letters

DR. ALEX ELIOT—FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST

The hospital corridor is blank, empty, stark. There are no tiles on the floor or bricks on the walls for Cora to count, so her nerves are bubbling up and spilling out into the air. The only saving grace is a clock: a large Victorian-style clock with a circular cream face painted with black Roman numerals. Cora multiplies and divides them at random, picking out prime numbers. But she can’t focus. She’s still unable to quite understand the turn her life has taken. What will she say to the coroner? How does one address such a person? Dr. Eliot?
Pleased to meet you, Dr. Eliot. Would you kindly tell me how my parents died? Will you give me a copy of the autopsy report?

Cora realizes she’s chewing her fingernail and stops. Sits on her hands. She glances up at the frosted-glass panel again, and before she can look away it opens. Dr. Eliot stands in the doorway with narrowed eyes and a thin, polite smile.

“Cora Carraway?” she asks.

Cora nods.

“Come in.”

Etta visits Fitzbillies several times a week. She doesn’t come because it’s her favorite café in Cambridge, though it’s become so over the years, but because it borders on the edge of a street she’s not allowed to cross, based on an agreement made long ago. Etta comes to remember and to hope. To remember the man she loved and hope that, maybe, just maybe, she might see him again. She arrives early, just as they open, before the students arrive with their laptops or the families with their sticky-fingered children, while the café is still and silent, except for the occasional grinding of the espresso machine.

Etta goes to Fitzbillies because she isn’t allowed to go to the place she really wants to visit, to the site of first love, the church where she met him. So instead of visiting the church she makes her pilgrimage across town to the café on the corner of Trumpington Street and Downing Street and she takes her mass there: a hot chocolate and Chelsea bun. Then she sits at her pew, the wooden table running the length of the window, closes her eyes and remembers.

After Etta had lied about her sister, she hadn’t been able to look the man—the handsomest young man she’d ever seen—in the eye. Sensing her discomfort, he had changed the subject as they walked. He spoke of the church, the brickwork, the architecture, but Etta hadn’t really been listening. She had watched his hands hanging by his sides, his fingers long and strong. She imagined slipping her own slight fingers between them; perhaps she could hold his hand and he wouldn’t notice, though he might feel the rub of her tiny diamond ring.

A jolt of shock had shivered through Etta then. How could she think such things? Sermons returned to her, the voice of the priest in her ear:
in thought as in word as in deed
. She knew that to think about adultery was as sinful as the act itself. Not that
this was adultery, strictly speaking, since she wasn’t married just yet. But she’d never yearned for her fiancé the way she did for this man, this stranger. Not even when she’d first met him. What was happening? She loved Joe. When he’d proposed, she’d been happy. She hadn’t cried, hadn’t wept with joy as many of her friends had, hadn’t had goose bumps or tingles right down to her toes. But that didn’t matter. They simply didn’t have that sort of love. Their relationship was founded on friendship. Which was, Etta’s mother assured her, what mattered most of all. This was what lasted after everything else had gone. So it was all right that when Joe fumbled for her hand in the cinema, she didn’t feel a rush of illicit delight, that when he pecked her cheek after walking Etta home she wasn’t desperate to kiss his lips. Because what they had together—loyalty, kindness and caring—would last for the rest of their lives.

Etta glanced across at the man. Feeling her gaze, he’d turned to her with a smile, his bright blue eyes shining with it, and she’d felt a shock of something that shivered all through her body, right down to her fingers and toes. Etta managed to smile back and he kept talking about St. Raphael, the patron saint of this church. For a moment, as they drifted out of the church together, she closed her eyes and imagined his fingers cupping her cheek, sliding up into her hair as he came forward to kiss …

He caught Etta as she fell, tumbling forward as her foot twisted on a raised paving stone. She held tight to his arms as she pulled herself up, their faces so close that she could feel his breath on her neck.

“I’m sorry,” Etta whispered. “I—”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Etta shook her head. “I’m fine, I’m … wonderful.”

“Good. Me too.” He smiled. “Well, now that I’ve saved your life I think I ought to know your name.”

“I’m Etta,” she said.

He had given his in response, but after that Etta just called him the Saint.

Dr. Eliot doesn’t waste time with pleasantries. She doesn’t offer Cora a cup of tea, a biscuit or a benign comment about the weather. She simply sits, reaches for a file, flips it open, then looks up.

“You want to know the particulars of your parents’ case, is that correct?”

Cora nods.

“Specifically, why it was ruled as an accident?”

“Yes,” Cora says, thinking this is what it must be like to be summoned into the headmistress’s office in school. Not that she ever was.

Dr. Eliot flips over a page in the file, then another and another. She leans forward to read a few lines, squinting at the words, then mutters something under her breath. Cora waits.

“Yes, okay. Well, we carried out an autopsy on both bodies.” Dr. Eliot glances up and Cora wonders if she’s expected to say something. “Our findings were conclusive. We determined that their deaths weren’t accidental, but—”

“What?” Cora sits up, no longer nervous. Her voice is strong and sharp. “The police told me—their report ruled accidental death.”

Dr. Eliot sighs. “Well then, they clearly didn’t have the specifics—”

“The fire,” Cora interrupts. “They told me it was caused by a candle setting some books alight. Wasn’t it?”

“No.” Dr. Eliot shakes her head. “That is correct. That’s how the fire started.”

“So, I don’t understand—”

“You would”—now Dr. Eliot’s voice cuts even sharper than Cora’s—“if you’d listen for long enough to allow me to explain.”

Cora glances at her lap. “Sorry.” She looks up. “Please …”

“The fire was an accident in the sense that it wasn’t intentional. But it wasn’t an accident in the sense that no one was to blame.”

Cora opens her mouth, about to interrupt again, then checks herself.

“Your parents were found to have a blood alcohol level of nearly three times the legal limit. Thus they were too drunk to act with any rational sense. In all probability they were passed out before the books caught light and died in their sleep. Well, we can certainly hope so.”

Cora gives a slight shake of her head, the screaming still echoing in her ears.

“No.” Cora shakes her head. “No, it can’t …”

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Eliot says, “I’m sure that’s not what you wanted to hear, but those are the facts. You can see for yourself.”

She slides the file across the desk, rotating it as Cora sits forward so she can see. The pages are a mess of letters and numbers, charts and graphs, black blurring on white. Normally numbers are Cora’s first language but right now they read like hieroglyphics. She follows Dr. Eliot’s finger to read, slowly and steadily, a repetition of what she’s just been told.

Cora looks up from the file, eyes narrowed and lips tight. “It isn’t true.” Her words are clipped, syllables bitten off slowly. “It isn’t true.” She spits out the last word as if it’s poisonous.

Dr. Eliot’s face darkens.

“My parents never drank,” Cora snaps. “Never. Not one drop. So either you are simply incompetent or …”

“Excuse me?” Dr. Eliot slaps the file shut, hand and paper hitting wood. “But how dare you. I was doing you a favor, giving you access to records that closed twenty years ago. And now you are bringing my professional competence into question. I am excellent at my job. In twenty-five years I’ve never had a case I worked on overturned. I graduated with the highest qualifications in the university, not in my class but the entire—”

“Well, in that case,” Cora says, “if you’re not an idiot, you must be a liar.”

Chapter Eleven

T
he word hangs between them for a moment. Then Cora pushes her chair back, letting it fall to the floor, turns and runs out of the room. She runs through the hospital corridors, following the signs for the nearest exit, and doesn’t stop running until she’s far down the street, far from Dr. Eliot. Then Cora leans against a wall and vomits.

She slides down to the pavement, not caring that anyone might be watching, and sobs. All she wants now is Etta. She wants her grandmother to hold her tight and rock her close. She wants to put on her pajamas. She wants to forget everything that’s happened in the last few days and live the life she was living before all these emotions were stirred up: the quiet, dull, boring, predictable life when she was never excited by anything, not joyous or delighted but never terrified, angry or grief-stricken either.

What’s happening? How could a coroner have found alcohol in her parents’ blood? They never drank. She’s certain of this. It was a thread of consistency woven into the fabric of Etta’s stories about them. Maggie and Robert Carraway never touched a drop of drink, never smoked or ate red meat. Which isn’t to say they were tedious teetotalers who looked down their virtuous noses at anyone less abstemious. It was simply a matter of taste. Maggie harbored a great passion for chocolate sundaes and if she skipped her treat one day she’d find herself very grumpy the next. Robert had a penchant for mint humbugs and was never without a packet in his pocket.

Cora has heard these things over and over again. She knows them as well as the periodic table or the gene segment coding for hemagglutinin. These tales about her parents were her bedtime stories. She soaked up every single fact and always asked for more detail. What was the color of her mother’s dress when her parents met? What was her father’s favorite word? What did they eat for dinner? What time did they go to bed? These were the building blocks from which Cora pieced together the picture of her parents, until she could at least imagine what they must have been like. Of course the picture wasn’t even a shadow of their brightness and brilliance in real life. It was limited, one-dimensional, unchanging. But it was something, as satisfactory and reassuring as a balanced equation.

As she thinks of them, all of a sudden Cora is seized by something and stands up. Now she is awake, alert. These are her parents. This is
her
mystery to solve. She owes it to them. If their deaths weren’t purely accidental, then they didn’t kill themselves. She doesn’t know what happened or why their case files are inaccurate. All Cora knows is that something is wrong and that she must put it right.

Cora strides along the street, heading straight for the bus station, realizing she hasn’t felt so enlivened in a long time. In fact, she has
never
felt like this before. It’s as if she has been set alight. Fire and fury rush through her veins, pumping her heart and pulsating to her fingertips. She wants to sprint across streets, to leap from tall buildings and fly. She wants to seize hold of strangers and look them in the eye. She wants to talk to people, to ask questions, to listen. She wants to connect. Suddenly she wants to
live
.

Four hours later, when the sky is dark and Cora steps off the bus in Cambridge, she still feels that way. She didn’t spend the ride counting trees or calculating the square footage of fields. Instead she thought about her parents, the policeman and the coroner, and not in a sorrowful, self-pitying sort of way. She isn’t sad anymore. She isn’t lonely or grieving. She’s passionate, excited. She’s furious. Her parents died and either the investigation was completely botched or it was covered up. Which, of course, begs the question: Why?

As she runs along Trinity Street, her bag bumping on her back, and turns into All Saints’ Passage, Cora is so desperate to see Etta she can hardly stand it. Her grandmother will know what to do next, she’ll have ideas and plans. She won’t be scared of anything. Together they’ll decide what to do. Etta is the one she needs now.

But the person she runs into is Walt. They almost collide but stop just in time, Cora’s nose inches from Walt’s neck. She looks up, looks him straight in the eye.

“Hello.”

“Hi,” Walt says. His sleeping heart is suddenly beating hard in his chest and he’s holding his breath. He takes a step back.

“How are you?”

“I’m good, thanks.” Walt exhales. “You?”

“Fine. How’s your girlfriend?”

“My …?”

“Oh, sorry,” Cora says, “the woman in the bookshop who ate my—the cherry pie. I just assumed she was your …”