One by one, the keys failed to open the lock.
And then, on the thirteenth try, the lock gave way. It’s a coincidence, Caroline told herself. There’s nothing significant about the number at all. That’s just superstition.
She slid the drawer open.
And there it was — a photograph album so thick it barely fit in the drawer at all, that matched Ryan’s description of the one he’d said was on the shelf under the lamp table. Struggling to keep her hands from trembling, she lifted the album out of the drawer, set it on the top of the desk, and opened it.
And found herself staring at a picture of Tony.
The picture looked like an old-fashioned sepia-toned image, and it depicted Tony — looking perhaps ten years younger than he did now — wearing a high-collared shirt and a snugly fitting four-button suit. His hair was parted in the middle in the fashion of the late 1800s but except for the hair and the clothes, the face was Tony’s: the same sharp planes, the curve of the eyebrows, the flare of the nostrils, and the bow of the upper lip — all of it was Tony. Caroline’s first instinct was that the picture must have been taken at some amusement park — perhaps Disney World, or even Knott’s Berry Farm, where there were plenty of shops that put people into antique-looking clothes and settings. But as she looked at the picture more closely, she saw the cracks in its surface, and the yellowing of the edges of the thick paper it was printed on. But if it was as old as it looked, how could it possibly be Tony? Her brows knitting with puzzlement, she returned her attention to the image itself.
The man who looked enough like her husband to be his twin was standing across the street from a construction site, and though the background was slightly out of focus, Caroline could make out the scaffolding that had been erected in front of the structure to support the builders.
Switching on the desk lamp, she leaned closer. And then, even before the truth dawned on her conscious mind, she felt a knot form in the pit of her stomach. The building in the picture — the building that was not yet completed — was The Rockwell. Her heart pounding, Caroline stared at the picture, telling herself it had to be wrong — it had to be some kind of mistake. Yet there it was — the lower floors of the building clearly visible, even behind the scaffolding. There was the huge double front door, and the three steps leading up to it. The windows of the second and third floors were exactly as they had looked a few minutes ago when she’d stood across the street gazing at them with the strange feeling that something about the building had changed.
Now she was staring at it before it had even been completed, and a man who appeared to be her husband was standing across the street from it, on almost the exact spot she had been standing earlier.
But the man in the picture couldn’t be Tony — the building had been constructed in the late 1870s, even before The Dakota, a couple of blocks further up.
So it had to be Tony’s grandfather — or even his great-grandfather. But was it possible Tony’s family had lived in the building since the day it had been built? She began turning the pages of the album, and with every page she turned, her mystification deepened. Tony appeared in half a dozen pictures, alone in some, with groups of people in others. In two of them he was with a woman whose resemblance to Melanie Shackleforth was so startling that Caroline could perfectly understand Ryan’s confusion. She kept turning pages, and a quarter of the way through the album everything suddenly changed.
Now the women were wearing the kind of short skirts popular in the 1920s; the men styles of the same era. There was a page filled with pictures that looked like they might have been taken in an apartment in The Rockwelclass="underline" the room in the pictures had the high ceilings, tall windows, and ornate moldings of her own apartment, though the furnishings were far different. Most of it was Art Deco with a few pieces of nouveaux thrown in as accents. Some kind of party seemed to be going on, and two children of about the same ages as Ryan and Laurie appeared to be the center of attention. But in one of the pictures, it wasn’t the people that attracted Caroline’s attention at all — it was the large chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the living room.
A chandelier she was almost certain still hung in Virginia Estherbrook’s apartment.
Sure enough, a few pages later she found pictures taken in the sixties, in the exact same room, only now it was furnished with the same furniture that was still in Virgie’s apartment, and there was the actress herself, leaning over the back of a sofa, her arms draped around the shoulders of two children.
Again, the children appeared to be the same age as her own.
She turned more pages, and came to what looked like another children’s party. This time there were twin boys, a girl who was perhaps a year or so older than the boys and another girl, somewhat younger, whom Caroline was almost certain was Rebecca Mayhew, though she looked younger — and a lot healthier — than she had when Caroline had seen her last week.
The rest of the pages were empty, but Caroline went through them anyway, searching to make sure she’d missed nothing. Then she went back to the beginning and went through the album again. This time it wasn’t just the images that looked so much like Tony and Melanie Shackleforth who caught her attention, but others as well. A couple of the men might have been younger versions of Dr. Humphries, and another bore a strong resemblance to George Burton. In the pictures from the Deco-era birthday party, there was a couple who might have been Alicia and Max Albion, except that the woman who looked like Alicia appeared to be in her seventies, and the man at least a decade older.
Was it possible that all of the apartments in The Rockwell had been handed down from one generation to another? But even that didn’t make sense — it certainly was possible that Max Albion might look like his father, but what about Alicia?
Unless her parents had lived in the building as well.
Was that it? Was that why all the neighbors were so friendly with each other? Could they really have all been childhood friends, growing up in the same building, living out their lives in the same apartments their parents and grandparents had lived in? Then it came to her — there was a way to find out; a very simple way. There was an office that held the history of every piece of real estate in the city — Brad had gone there half a dozen times on one piece of business or another. The Register’s Office — that was it!
Putting the album away, she closed the center drawer of the desk and relocked it. Then she moved on to the three drawers on the right. In the top one she found a large checkbook, and on an impulse she opened it and glanced through the stubs. Only a few checks had been written, most to something called The Biddle Institute.
She put the checkbook back, relocked the drawer, and moved on to the next one, where she found half a dozen packets of photographs from a shop on Broadway. Picking one up, she pulled out a stack of two dozen pictures. The top one was of a group of kids and she recognized one of the cages at the Central Park Zoo in the background. The next one was of the same group of kids, but in front of another cage. Flipping quickly through the rest of the stack she found nothing but more pictures of the same group of kids, sometimes in groups of half a dozen or more, at other times only twosomes or threesomes. None of the pictures looked posed; indeed, the children in them didn’t even look as if they knew they were being photographed.
She flipped a few of them over, but there was nothing on the back that would either tell her who the children were, or when the pictures had been taken. As she flipped through the last half-dozen shots, one of the girls began to appear more and more often, a girl with long blonde hair framing a heart-shaped face, dominated by large blue eyes that twinkled with mischief.