Midnight Voices

CHAPTER 27

The smile of welcome that Claire Robinson had carefully put on her face as Caroline came through the front door of the shop began fading the moment she saw Ryan. “Shouldn’t he be in school?” she asked, not quite succeeding in keeping an edge off her voice.

“He should be, but he isn’t,” Caroline replied, and when she offered no further explanation the last traces of Claire’s smile vanished.

“It’s not really the kind of shop for children,” she said, the coldness of her voice turning the suggestion into a clear condemnation.

I don’t need this, Caroline thought. I don’t need it, and I can’t deal with it, and I feel like I’m about to explode. Throughout the walk over from the West Side, her mind had been battered with a fusillade of questions for which she had found no answers whatsoever. Questions about the disappearance of Rebecca Mayhew and Virginia Estherbrook and the sudden appearance of Melanie Shackleforth. Questions about her son’s fear of her husband, and the strange pictures Ryan claimed to have seen — pictures she hadn’t been able to find at all. Questions about Brad and Andrea and the people she’d been certain were following her yesterday. Questions about Helena Kensington, who could suddenly see. By the time she’d arrived at the store, she’d felt as if her head were about to explode, and now Claire was acting as if she’d committed some kind of crime simply by bringing Ryan with her. But I won’t explode, she told herself. I won’t give her the pleasure. “You’re absolutely right, Claire,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from trembling, but not quite succeeding. “In fact, I couldn’t agree with you more. But this is where he is today, and this is where he stays. At least he stays as long as I do.”

It was the look in Caroline’s eyes as much as the slight tremor in her voice that made Claire bite back the first words that came into her mind — words to the effect that if that was her attitude, perhaps Caroline should leave right now. But instead of uttering the words, she pursed her lips as she regarded the other woman more carefully. Though Caroline’s hair was covered with a scarf, it didn’t look quite clean to Claire, and though Caroline had put on makeup, she hadn’t taken nearly as much time with it as she should. Her complexion looked pale, even under the makeup, and her forehead was glistening with perspiration despite the fact that the city had cooled off considerably this morning. “Are you sure you should be here at all?” Claire asked, her voice carrying a far harder edge than she’d actually intended.

Her words seemed to unleash something inside Caroline. “Where else should I be?” she demanded. “I work here, remember? I—” But even as the words started to spew forth, Caroline realized how insane they would sound, at least to Claire Robinson. “Is Kevin here?” she asked, her eyes darting around the shop.

“H — He’s in the back,” Claire stammered, taking an unconscious step back from Caroline. “He’s unpacking a container.”

“Then Ryan can help him,” Caroline said, starting toward the door at the rear of the shop. “I’ll be on the computer for awhile.”

“I need you to—” Claire began, but Caroline didn’t let her finish.

“I don’t really care what you need, Claire. There are some things I have to do, and then—” She hesitated, and suddenly her shoulders sagged as if someone had opened a valve and let the steam out of some unseen engine inside her. “—and then I don’t know,” she finished.

Turning, she hurried through the shop to the back room, with Ryan half-running to keep up. As she pushed through the door, Kevin Barnes looked up from the small table he was unwrapping — a mahogany gateleg that only a few days ago Caroline would have instantly wanted to take a closer look at, but that this morning held no interest for her at all. “Hey,” Kevin said, grinning as he saw Ryan. “Look who’s here.” Then his grin faded and he added a heavy dose of severity to his voice. “Why aren’t you in school, young man? Don’t tell me, I know — you got kicked out. What did you do?”

“I only got suspended,” Ryan replied, emphasizing the penultimate syllable as if it were a completely different thing.

“Same thing,” Kevin retorted. “Just a shorter term out of the slammer. So are you going to tell me what you did, or do I have to ask your mother and get the nasty version instead of the fun version?”

“I got in a fight,” Ryan announced.

“Keep an eye on him, can you, Kevin?” Caroline broke in before Ryan could get up to full speed. “I couldn’t leave him at home and—” She spread her hands helplessly. “I’ll tell you later.”

As Ryan once more began telling the tale of how he had managed to get suspended from school, Caroline sat down in front of Claire’s computer. Until now she had used it only for things connected with work — hunting for specific pieces such as the Regency card table she’d located for Irene Delamond in a shop in London, which Irene had promptly air-freighted at a cost that was almost as much as the table itself. Though she was far from expert, she had a sense of how at least to start, and the first thing she did was bring up a site called AnyWho, which she’d come to depend on not only for her business, but for anything else she might be hunting for as well. She started out by typing Melanie Shackleforth’s last name into the blank on the “Find A Person” page, then tried to remember where Melanie had said she was from.

Had she said anything at all?

If she had, Caroline couldn’t remember. But she’d had a drawl — the kind of southern drawl you had to be born with. Georgia, maybe? Caroline typed the state’s abbreviation into the box, and clicked on the find it button.

Nothing. She tried Florida, then Louisiana, and finally went through every state in the south. Still nothing. No Shackleforths, Melanie or otherwise.

Could she have spelled it wrong? She tried a couple of variations, still found nothing, then switched to Google.

Typing in the name Shackleforth once more, she hit the search button. Most of the sites listed referred to an old Twilight Zone episode.

Which is pretty much where I feel like I am, Caroline thought. Giving up on Shackleforth — at least for the moment — she went back to AnyWho, this time typing in the name ‘Albion’ along with the state of New Mexico.

Nothing.

She swore softly, then decided maybe it was the site that was the problem. Going back to the main page, she changed the state to New York, and hit the button again.

A stream of Albions appeared, so she narrowed it down to New York City.

There was only one: Max and Alicia, at 10 °Central Park West.

So she hadn’t been able to find any listings for Virginia Estherbrook’s Shackleforth relatives, or Max Albion’s brother in New Mexico — but did it mean anything?

Now she shifted her attention to Virginia Estherbrook herself, typing the actress’s name into the form on the Google page. Dozens of pages came up, most with reviews of plays the actress had appeared in, and a half a dozen others that were sites maintained by fans. Clicking on one, Caroline found herself gazing at a picture of Virginia Estherbrook that had been taken at least thirty years ago, when Virginia Estherbrook had been in her prime. The resemblance to her niece was almost uncanny — change the hairstyle and the makeup, and she could have been looking at a picture of Melanie Shackleforth.

She scrolled down from one picture to another, then paused when she came to a brief biography of the actress.

Brief, indeed. According to this site, Virginia Estherbrook had appeared in New York seemingly out of nowhere. She had never divulged how old she was, and variously claimed to have grown up in Europe, Australia, and Argentina. ‘I am a simple player of roles,’ she had once been quoted as saying. ‘My life consists not of real people, but of made-up ones, and for my work to be believed, I, too, must be no more than a role. It is perhaps why my relationships have failed, but it is why my career has succeeded. I am nothing more than those I play on the stage; there is no one else. Do not search for my past nor predict my future, for neither of them exist. Nothing is real except what you see beneath the lights.’

Caroline read the quotation twice more, then began moving through the other sites devoted to Virginia Estherbrook. Everywhere it was the same — no hint of where she’d come from nor when, no mention of any family at all. But the quotation was always there.

’… do not search my past or predict my future…’

She went back to the search engine, this time broadening the search to the single name of Estherbrook. Other than Virginia, there were very few references at all.

Then the answer came to her, so obvious that Caroline felt like an idiot. If everything about Virginia Estherbrook was a fiction, then why wouldn’t her name be a fiction, too? She was an actress, for heaven’s sake — didn’t they all change their names? Or at least hadn’t they in Virginia Estherbrook’s heyday? Frances Gumm had turned into Judy Garland. What if Virginia Estherbrook’s real name had been something like Hortense Finkleman? Who wouldn’t have changed it? But even if she had, someone somewhere must have known. She went back to all the sites carrying information about Virginia Estherbrook’s career, not sure what she was looking for. One of the sites — by far the biggest — held not only all the information Caroline had seen half a dozen times before, but a compilation of reviews of nearly every play in which Virginia Estherbrook had ever performed. One of the earliest was a production of Romeo & Juliet from nearly fifty years ago:

’Seldom have Broadway audiences been treated to a Juliet of the depth presented by Miss Estherbrook, who succeeds brilliantly in her first attempt at a role in which several more experienced (and far better known) actresses have failed; one must reach back nearly four decades to the incomparable Faith Blaine in order to find a Juliet of such strength. Indeed, it appears to this critic at least, that Miss Estherbrook may well be the heir to the mantle of Blaine, who retired some five years ago, vanishing from the stage into her apartment in The Rockwell.’

The Rockwell?

What on earth was going on?

She searched the web once more, this time hunting for more information on Faith Blaine, whose name rang a bell in her head, but stirred no memory at all of what the actress might have looked like.

When an image popped onto the screen a few moments later, Caroline was certain she’d made a mistake, that she was back at one of the sites devoted to Virginia Estherbrook. But the caption beneath the picture was very clear: Faith Blaine as Juliet in the legendary 1914 performance that made her a star.

The picture was a vignette, everything about it testifying to the date of its origin. The actress was wearing a diaphanous costume — one that would have been considered perfect for a dramatically tragic death back in the days of melodrama when performances were far less realistic than now. Faith Blaine’s hands were clasped over her breast, and her face was tilted up as if she were gazing into paradise itself, and finding her lost love there. The image was faded and slightly out of focus, but even under the heavy makeup the actress wore, Caroline could see the resemblance not only to Virginia Estherbrook, but to Melanie Shackleforth as well.

Coincidence?

Or had Faith Blaine and Virginia Estherbrook been related?

Melanie Shackleforth’s words echoed in her mind: ‘… there are times when I suspect I’m really Aunt Virgie’s daughter…’

Was that it? Was Melanie really Virginia’s daughter?

Could Faith Blaine have been her mother? That had to be it — nothing else made sense. And it would account for the mystery in which Virginia Estherbrook had shrouded her past. It wasn’t all the mumbojumbo about ‘living the roles’ at all — it was keeping the family secret that certainly would have destroyed her mother’s career, given the time.

And the pictures Ryan had seen — they must have been old pictures of Faith Blaine.

She felt a great wave of relief flood over her, but as quickly as it came, it ebbed away.

What about the pictures of Tony?

Tony, wearing ‘old-fashioned clothes.’

Was it possible that Tony looked as much like his great-grandfather as Melanie Shackleforth looked like her grandmother?

If Faith Blaine was her grandmother, Caroline corrected herself. Which was a very, very long reach. Simply the fact that both Blaine and Virginia Estherbrook had lived in The Rockwell didn’t mean a thing. And the resemblance could as easily have been a function of make-up as anything else — how many actresses had she seen who could make themselves look so much like someone else as to be utterly unrecognizable?

Or was she once more simply being paranoid?

So Rebecca Mayhew and Virginia Estherbrook had gone on trips, and the niece who was staying in Virginia’s apartment looked a lot like her? So what?

But even as she tried to dismiss it, she kept coming back to the pictures Ryan had seen.

The pictures that were in an album on the low shelf of the lamp table by the fireplace. The shelf upon which she herself had seen a dust-free rectangle where something the same size and shape as a photo album had been.

If the album truly held nothing but old family photographs, why hadn’t Tony simply put it back on the shelf?

Why had he hidden it?

Why had he locked it away in the desk that was in turn locked away in the study from which he’d banished not only Ryan, but herself as well?

Her eyes went to the huge ring of keys that hung on the wall next to the door to the main shop. There were at least a hundred keys on the ring; keys of all description, some so large that Caroline could barely imagine a lock they might fit into, others so tiny they must have come from a doll’s house. “Lord only knows where they all came from,” Claire had explained on the first day Caroline had worked for her. “Whenever I find a key, I add it to the ring. Most of them came in with furniture, and you’d be amazed at how often I’ve had to use them to unlock something when the owners lost the key. I doubt there’s a drawer in Manhattan — desk, dresser, or anything else you can think of — that I couldn’t open with something on that ring. Not if it’s over a hundred years old, anyway.”

The desk in Tony’s study was a lot older than that.

Making up her mind, she took the key ring off the wall and dropped it in her shoulder bag.

“Come on, Ryan,” she said. “We’re going home.”

“Aw, Mom,” Ryan groaned. “Do we have to? Can’t I stay here and help Kevin?”

“No, you can’t,” Caroline snapped. “And don’t argue with me — just do what I tell you!”

“Well, that was charming,” Claire Robinson observed acidly after Caroline had vanished through the front door without so much as a nod to her employer.

“Come on, Claire, give her a break,” Kevin said, emerging from the back room. “She just lost one of her best friends—”

Claire gazed coldly at Kevin. “And she just got married, had a honeymoon on Mustique, and moved into one of the most fabulous buildings in town. Why am I having such a hard time feeling sorry for her?”

Kevin dropped his voice into a perfect parody of the kind of insincere concern Claire usually offered her customers. “I’m so sorry, darling — I forgot! In order to know how it feels to lose a friend, you have to actually have a friend, don’t you?”

Claire’s jaw tightened, and for just a moment Kevin wondered if she was going to fire him. But as the seconds ticked by he could almost see the wheels turning in her mind, and finally — when she realized that if she fired him she’d have to close the shop just to go to lunch — she forced her lips into what he supposed was her idea of a sympathetic smile.

“I suppose you’re right,” she offered. “She does look at the end of her rope, doesn’t she? I suppose I can be patient with her for another day or so.”

But no more than a day or so, she added silently to herself. Then she’s gone.