Chapter 26 - The Warrant on Duke Street
My mother did not look like the woman from the framed photographs in the hallway on Duke Street.
Those pictures showed a woman with round, bright cheeks, copper hair tied back with velvet ribbons, and eyes that looked directly into the lens with a defiant, stubborn warmth.
The woman sitting on the cot in the precinct interview room was an iron wire stripped of its insulation. Her hair was entirely white, cropped unevenly as if she had cut it herself with sewing shears in the dark. Her collarbones protruded like axe blades against the thin flannel of an institutional nightgown.
When I stepped through the door, Marcus stayed in the hall with Vance, their shadows stretching long across the frosted glass.
She didn't look at my face. She looked immediately, unerringly, at the swollen, shaved skin behind my right ear.
"The platter," she whispered. Her voice was like two dry stones grinding together at the bottom of a well. "He used the Blue Willow platter. It was the heaviest thing on the sideboard."
"Mom," I said. My throat felt like it was lined with broken glass.
"Don't call me that," she said, her fingers curling into the rough fabric over her knees. "You don't know which one you are, Artie. You never knew."
I pulled the chair out and sat down three feet from her. The hum in my skull was frantic now, a jagged, arhythmic clicking that felt like an insect trapped inside a hollow reed.
"I found the nursery," I said. "In the orchard. Under the snow."
A terrible spasm passed through her throat. Her eyes rolled back for a fraction of a second, her hands flying to her ears in an automatic, defensive posture that looked entirely rehearsed.
"The compressor," she whispered, her gaze darting to the four corners of the ceiling. "Did you turn the compressor off?"
"There was no compressor running, Mom. The room was flooded. It’s been abandoned for years."
"No," she said, leaning forward until I could smell the cold, sour scent of her skin—a smell of damp flour and mineral spirits, the smell of the Duke Street cellar. "The orchard was only the nursery for the *rejects*. The ones whose bones wouldn't take the solder. He moved the third crib twenty years ago."
"Moved it where?"
She reached out, her fingers like bird talons, and seized my right wrist. Her grip was astonishingly strong, hard enough to pinch the radial nerve until my thumb went numb.
"Under the table, Artie. Under the Thanksgiving table. Why do you think he never let you move your chair? Why do you think you had to sit with your back to the radiator, every year, every holiday, never moving an inch until he carved the bird?"
The memory hit me with the blunt force of a lead pipe:
Twenty years of Thanksgiving dinners. James sitting at the head, carving knife in hand. The table covered in three layers of heavy damask linen that hung all the way to the floorboards.
*“Keep your feet flat on the register, Arthur. Don’t slide your chair. You know how the drafts are in this house.”*
"The floor register," I gasped.
May you like
"It wasn't a heat vent," my mother whispered, her face inches from mine, her breath freezing cold against my cheek. "It was an intake. Margaret is down there, Arthur. She’s been down there since 1998. And she’s still waiting for the tone to stop."
***
