Miriam thought of her childhood in Canada, the endless winters that made her feel as if her family had been exiled from some more desirable climate. She had never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why her parents chose to leave England for Canada. Her mind skipped ahead to the blizzard of 1966 in Baltimore, a freak meteorological legend. It had fallen on Sunny’s sixth birthday, and they’d taken six little girls from her class to see The Sound of Music in a downtown theater. It had been sunny and cloudless when they entered. Two-plus hours later, the Nazis vanquished and the world safe once again for family singing troupes, the party emerged to find a city in near-whiteout conditions. How she and Dave had struggled through the streets of Baltimore, delivering each daughter to her parents-literally delivering them, carrying them so their party shoes would not be ruined, handing them to mothers and fathers standing worriedly in their doorways. They laughed about it later, but it had been terrifying at the time, the old station wagon slithering over the roads, the girls shrieking in the back. Yet Sunny and Heather later remembered it as a grand adventure. That was the miracle wrought by a happy ending. You were free to relive a terrifying story as if it were merely exciting.
“No,” she told Javier. “I’ve never seen snow.”
She told such small lies all the time. It was easier. Mexico required less lying than the places she’d lived before, because it was a place full of people trying to leave various things and people behind. She assumed all the ex-pats lied as much as she did.
Miriam had come to San Miguel de Allende for a weekend in 1989 and essentially never left. She had intended to choose a less Americanized Mexican city in which to settle-and, not incidentally, a cheaper one, where she might have been able to live on her savings and investments alone, not work at all. But within two days of alighting from the train, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She had returned to Cuernavaca to collect the rest of her things, then arranged to sell her possessions in storage back in the States. When she bought her little house, her casita, she started with only a bed and her clothes. Today she didn’t have much more. That was something else, like hearing the Spanish-soft version of her name, that never got old-waking up in a bare, uncluttered space of whitewashed walls and fluttering, sheer white curtains. The furniture, what there was of it, was pine. The Saltillo floors had been left bare. The only colors in Miriam’s apartment were in her dishes and housewares, vivid blues and greens, purchased on discount from the gallery. If she decided to move again, it would take her no more than a day or two to dispose of her things. She had no intention of moving again, but she liked having the option.
The house on Algonquin Lane had been full of stuff, bursting with it. Miriam hadn’t minded at first. For one thing, so much of what they carried then had belonged to the girls. Children didn’t travel light, not even in those pre-car-seat days. They had toys and hats and mittens and dolls and stuffed animals and those hideous plastic trolls and, in Heather’s case, a blanket known as “Bud,” whose intermittent disappearances kept the household in a frenzy. Sunny, not to be outdone, had an imaginary friend, a dog named Fitz. Strangely, Fitz was as capable of getting lost as Bud. In fact, Fitz got lost whenever Bud got lost, and then some, and Fitz proved much harder to find. Sunny would stomp up and down the stairs of the house, reporting grimly on his non-whereabouts. “Not in the basement.” “Not in the bathroom.” “Not in your bed.” “Not under the sink.” For an imaginary dog, Fitz required a lot of care. Sunny began putting food down for him, refusing to understand that this was an invitation for roaches and rodents. She left the back door open, so Fitz could go outside. On rainy days Miriam came to believe that she could smell a wet dog.
The house on Algonquin Lane had baggage of its own, as it turned out. Purchased at auction, Miriam’s first taste of her talent for real estate, it had come “as is.” Miriam and Dave had understood that this meant the systems weren’t guaranteed, that it was a bit of a Let’s Make a Deal gamble. What they hadn’t realized was that the house wouldn’t be cleaned in any way. The longtime residence of an elderly woman, it had the feel of a life interrupted, as if aliens had swept in and kidnapped the people there. A cup and saucer sat on the table, a spoon at the ready for a pot of tea that was never made. A book lay on the stairs, as if to remind someone to carry it up. The old furniture was draped with antimacassars, a few askew, waiting for a gentle hand to set them straight. It reminded Miriam of a nineteenth-century version of the automated house in that Bradbury story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The family was gone, but the house lived on.
Initially, the things left behind had seemed a bonus, a windfall. Some of the furniture was usable, and the dishes were actually valuable- Lowestoft china, too good for everyday use, nicer even than Miriam’s dinner-party china. In the backyard the girls found the remains of tea sets hidden in odd places-in the gnarled roots of the old oaks, beneath the lilac bushes, where they had rusted just a little. But these discovered treasures quickly became oppressive. They had to move as many things out as they did in. Why had so much stuff been left behind? They had been in the house for two months when a helpful neighbor volunteered that the former owner had been murdered in the kitchen by her own nephew, her only heir.
“That’s why it went to auction,” said the neighbor, Tillie Bingham. “She was dead and he was in prison, so he couldn’t inherit.”
She lowered her voice, although the girls were out of earshot and uninterested in this over-the-fence conversation. “Drugs.”
Spooked, Miriam had tried to persuade Dave to put the house back on the market, even if it meant taking a loss. They could be downtown homesteaders, she told him, knowing what would appeal to him, settling in one of the grand old town houses of Bolton Hill. This was before the era of the dollar house, before the great revival of downtown, but Miriam’s instincts about real estate were always sound. If Dave had heeded her advice, they would have had a far more valuable house in the end, for the values in their little corner of Northwest Baltimore remained flat for years.
And, of course, the girls would be alive.
That was the secret game that Miriam could never stop playing with herself, unhelpful as she knew it to be. Go back into history, change one thing. Not the day itself. That was too obvious, too easy. Their doom was sealed before that day dawned, when Sunny decided to spend the afternoon at the mall and Heather lobbied for permission to join her. But if she could go a little further back, then destiny could be thwarted. If they had put the house on Algonquin Lane up for sale as Miriam had urged, if they had never purchased it at all, then the chain of events could be disrupted. She wondered who owned it now, if the current residents knew of its talent for death. One murder in a house was bad enough, but if a buyer knew the full story of Algonquin Lane…No, not even Miriam could sell that house, and Miriam, in her heyday, could sell almost anything.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty, as the cliché would have it, but not always. After the girls had disappeared, Dave had proved to be even more myopic about their past than he had been about their present. Their problem, their curse, he insisted to neutral third parties, was that they were happy. Life was perfect, and therefore they had to fall. To hear Dave tell it, Algonquin Lane was a veritable Eden, and some unknown force had slithered through their lives and pinned its crimes on them.
The media had bought it, too. People were less cynical then, resources fewer. Today the shock of two missing sisters would have dominated national news channels, an armchair detective story for those lucky parents who knew where their children were. Back then, the girls’ disappearance had been a local story, generating only a passing mention in a Time magazine piece on missing children. More national attention might have helped achieve what Miriam was always careful to think of as a resolution, but she supposed they’d been better off without the intrusion. Nowadays it would probably take a day for an amateur blogger to uncover the nature of Miriam’s alibi, not to mention the debts that were weighing the family down. Thirty years ago the police could keep such secrets, while Equitable Trust had quietly paid off their first and second mortgages. (Children missing and presumed dead? Then you deserve a free house.)