“Your aunt, doll? I thought you and her-” Mr. Contreras caught the look of steel in my eyes. “Oh, your aunt. Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“More just panicking over me,” I said firmly. “But she’s my mother’s only surviving relative. She’s old and I can’t leave her hanging.” It seemed wrong somehow to confuse the redoubtable Ms. Chigwell with my mother’s mad Aunt Rosa, but you have to work with what’s at hand.
Kappelman agreed with me politely-whether he believed me was another matter. He finished his grappa in a long swallow, winced as the raw alcohol hit his esophagus, and said he’d see me to my car. “Relatives are a trial, aren’t they?” he added sardonically.
He waited patiently while I looked around the car for any obvious signs of bombs, then shut the door for me with an old-fashioned courtesy at variance with his bedraggled clothes.
The temperature had dropped some ten degrees, just below freezing. After the dull fog of the last few weeks, the sharper air braced me. A few snowflakes drifted into the windshield, but the roads were clear and I had a quick run out the Eisenhower to York Road.
Ms. Chigwell was waiting for me at the door, her gaunt fierce face unchanged for the trying events of the last few days. She thanked me unsmilingly for making the trip, but I was beginning to know her and could tell her rough manner wasn’t meant to be as unfriendly as it appeared.
“I’m having a cup of tea. My brother keeps telling me it’s a sign of weakness, turning to stimulants when one feels troubled, but I think I’ve proved to be tougher than him. Would you like a cup?”
One serving of tea a day was all the stimulus I could handle. Declining as politely as I could, I followed her into the living room. It presented a scene of cozy domesticity worthy of Harriet Beecher Stowe. A fire burning cleanly in the grate refracted rich colors in the silver tea service on a low table nearby. Ms. Chigwell gestured me to one of the chintz armchairs facing the fireplace.
“In my day young ladies did not have lives of their own outside the household,” she said abruptly, pouring tea into a translucent china cup. “We were supposed to marry. My father was a doctor out here, when it was really a separate little town, not part of the city at all. I used to help him out. By the time I was sixteen I could’ve set a simple fracture, treated a lot of the fevers he saw. But when it came time for college and medical training, that was Curtis’s role. After Father died in 1939, Curtis tried keeping up the practice. He wasn’t much good at it, though; patients kept going elsewhere until finally he had to take a position at that plant.”
She looked at me fiercely. “I see you’re an active young woman, you do what you want, you don’t take no for an answer. I wish I’d had your backbone at your age, that’s all.”
“Yes,” I said gently. “But I had help. My mother ended up on her own in a strange country-she couldn’t speak the language; the only thing she could do was sing. She almost died as a result, so she swore I would never be as helpless and scared as she was. Believe me, that makes a big difference. You’re asking too much of yourself to think you should have done it all on your own.”
Ms. Chigwell swallowed her tea in large gulps, her throat muscles working, her left hand clenching and unclenching. Finally she felt enough in command of herself to speak again.
“Well, as you can tell, I never married. My mother died when we were seventeen. I kept house for my father and then for Curtis. I even learned to type so I could help them with their work.”
She smiled mirthlessly. “I didn’t try to follow what Curtis did at that company he worked for. My father had been a great country doctor, a master diagnostician. I suspect all Curtis did was take people’s temperatures when they felt ill to see if they had a legitimate excuse to leave work early. By 1955, when he started in with these detailed records of his, I no longer knew anything of what went on in the medical world-the changes were too vast from my childhood days. But I still knew how to type, so I typed whatever he brought home for me.”
Her story made me shiver a little. And mutter a little word of thanks to my mother’s spirit. Fierce, intense, prickly, she’d been difficult to live with, but my earliest memories included her strong belief in me and what I could achieve with my life.
Ms. Chigwell must have seen some of the thought in my face. “Don’t pity me. I’ve had many fine moments in this life of mine. And I never indulge in self-pity-a far greater weakness than tea, and one Curtis is most subject to.”
We sat quietly for a while. She poured herself a second cup and drank it in slow, measured sips, staring sightlessly into the fire. When she had finished she put the cup down with a decisive snap and moved the tray to one side.
“Well, I mustn’t keep you with my maundering. You’ve come a great distance and I can tell you’re in a fair amount of pain, even though you’re trying to hide it.”
She stood upright with only a slight effort. I copied her slowly and stiffly and followed her up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. The upper landing was lined with bookshelves. Clearly a great many of Ms. Chigwell’s fine moments had come from books-there were easily a thousand of them, all neatly dusted and carefully aligned on their shelves. How she’d ever known something was amiss among this orderly infantry was amazing. It took someone axing my front door to bits for me to know I’d suffered a home invasion.
Ms. Chigwell nodded toward an open door on my right. “Curtis’s study. I came in here last Monday evening because I smelled fire. He was trying to burn his notebooks in his waste can. An appalling idea, since the waste can was leather, and it, too, began to burn with a terrible odor. I knew then that whatever was bothering him had to do with those records. But I thought it would be most wrong of him to back away from the facts by destroying them.”
I felt an uneasy sympathy for Curtis Chigwell, living with this battalion of rectitude. It would drive me to stronger stimulants than tea.
“Anyway, I took them, and hid them behind my boating books. Obviously a foolish mistake, since boating has always been my great love. It is the first place Curtis would have thought to look. But I believe he felt so humiliated by my catching him in the act, or perhaps so frightened about not being able to get rid of his guilty secret, that the next afternoon he tried killing himself.”
I shook my head. So Max had been right in a way. By stirring up the Xerxes pot I’d put so much pressure on Chigwell that he’d felt he had no options left. It made me feel a little seasick. I followed Ms. Chigwell quietly down the hall, my feet sinking in the soft gray pile.
A room at the end held a profusion of flowering plants that absorbed the eye. This was Ms. Chigwell’s sitting room, with a rocking chair, her knitting basket, and a serviceable old Remington on a small table. The books continued in here, in shelves that were built only to waist level, serving as platforms for the red and yellow and purple flowers.
She knelt in front of the shelf next to the typewriter and started pulling leather-bound volumes from it. They were old-fashioned diaries, bound in rich green, with Horace Chigwell, M.D., tooled in gold on each cover.
“I hated Curtis using Father’s personal diaries, but there seemed no good reason for him not to. Of course the war-Hitler’s war-put a stop to things like personally bound diaries, and Curtis never had his own. He coveted these terribly.”
There were twelve altogether, covering a period of twenty-eight years. I flipped through them curiously. Dr. Chigwell had written in a prim, spidery hand. It looked neat on the page, all the letters carefully aligned, but it proved tough to read. The books seemed to be an inventory of the medical history of the Xerxes employees. At least I presumed the names spelled out in the difficult script were the employees’.