Dorset in the Dark: A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Read online

  “Don’t mind me,” Cassandra Thatchley said, “I’ll just sit here and go crazy.” Crossing her legs, she hunched into herself and we left her there, sullen, fidgety, and alone.

  “Do you make breakfast for the children when you arrive?” I asked as I followed her out of the front parlor and down the hall to the back of the house and the kitchen. She didn’t answer, but I was too busy marveling at the state of the room. I blinked. It didn’t look or smell like my kitchen did with toys and crumbs and high chairs all over the place. Here, the walls, a grayish green, had no cooking stains. There were no crumbs or spots on the wooden floors or granite counters, no water marks on the sink or the spout, no spilled milk on the table. The designer appliances could have been wrapped in cellophane. In the corner were a round table and chairs, set with three places that looked like they’d never been used. I opened the refrigerator—almost empty except for a few untouched bricks of cheese in the dairy drawer, a full bottle of catsup next to an unopened bottle of salad dressing, and half a round cake covered in chocolate frosting. I looked in the cabinets—no crumbs, just the usual sets of ironware and glasses and copper pots. Near the sink was a coffee maker, one of those single-cup jobs, and next to it, a dispenser with several kinds of sealed coffee. I felt the sides: no one had used it in the last few hours. Where was the spilled sugar, the spots of dried milk? “Is this for show?” I asked.

  Mrs. Hampton shrugged. “They have no cook. I serve coffee and tea for guests, that’s about it,” she said, turning on the coffeemaker. “And as for breakfast and lunch, they fend for themselves. I suspect most of their meals are taken out, you know, grabbed on the fly wherever they happen to be, at a fast food or a deli. They’re a modern-day family.”

  “And dinner?”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know; I leave at five. Still, it’s a long day for me, eight to five, especially at my age. But I can do it and I’m glad for the money. I’m barely scraping by as it is. Don’t get me wrong, Cassandra is so generous, but prices have skyrocketed.” I had to agree with her there.

  As I admired the vast cleanliness and looked for anything out of place, it didn’t seem to me like anyone had been breathing in this house much less eating or lacing a drink with date rape drugs. I waited for the coffee to be brewed, listening to the machine hissing steam and churning out brew. Mrs. Hampton reached for a glass and poured my water, careful to dispense one and only one cube of ice, just the way I liked it. She set Cassandra’s cup on a tray with cream and sugar and we walked back to the parlor.

  I took a seat opposite my client, who squirmed in her chair, looking not at all professorial, but why would she—her daughter, to say nothing of half her mind—had vanished.

  Just then the doorbell rang. “That’ll be the laundry,” Mrs. Hampton said, and disappeared.

  I took the opportunity to walk to the rows of books built into the wall on the other side of the room. No photos or silver or pottery on these shelves, each one packed solid with hardbacks interspersed with a few trades. I ran my finger over the spines, touching some with leather, others with worn binding, still others with their jackets intact, most of them about English or American literature except for a shelf of children’s books toward the bottom. There were rows filled with Poe and Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot, and Faulkner, all jumbled together, but works by and about Emily Dickinson occupied the center row.

  “Do you have a favorite?” I asked. “Author, I mean. I guess your favorite poet would be Emily Dickinson?”

  Cassandra Thatchley half turned to face me. Her eyes bored through me as if I were speaking a peasant dialect of Etruscan. “Emily Dickinson—she’s how I met my first husband. I was in high school and discovering the poet, you know, doing research for an assignment. We were to pick an American poet and write an essay of at least a thousand words. I remember hearing the assignment—a thousand words—and cringing, doing my share of passing around those shocked looks at my classmates. In those days, I couldn’t imagine writing a thousand words; now it’s an hour’s romp: I learned to write as fast as most people can talk. How life changes.”

  Abruptly she stopped. Lost again, I guessed, but in a second she started up again. “I was in the library and he came over—the man that would be my first husband, that is. He must have seen the book I was reading. He sat down next to me. ‘I taste a liquor never brewed,’ he began, and recited the whole poem. I was impressed. Guys aren’t usually into Emily Dickinson. It was the beginning of our long and ever so wonderful conversation.” Her eyes filmed over.

  There was something about this woman that niggled in the back of my mind. I walked to the desk on the outside wall below a bay window facing the Promenade and helped myself to several black-and-whites in silver frames. In the center was a family portrait, fading around the edges, of two children with a man and woman. I recognized Cassandra Thatchley standing next to a suited man who held a toddler with shoulder-length hair, light brown with highlights, but curly like her mother’s. A boy with slicked hair stood in front of Cassandra. I judged him to be five or six. He was smiling, one arm extended so that he could tug at his father’s shirtsleeve. Although the photograph was expertly taken, the arrangement seemed stiff and unnatural, except for the boy’s gesture, the tug that all sons felt for their fathers. It told me something about the people in it, but I couldn’t put it into words. I wished Lorraine were here—my interpreter of all things human and deep. Judging by the cut of their clothes and hair, the smooth expression of the adults, they were an upper middle-class Brooklyn Heights family, the children young, the adults in their late twenties or early thirties. I picked up a headshot of the man in the family photograph and noticed the name of the studio in the left-hand corner. Again, it was stiff if professionally taken, an almost-smile on his lips. It told me little of the man except that he was a total heartthrob. His long lashes framed soulful eyes betraying gentleness despite the sharp, knowing look he gave the photographer, and I wished I’d been the one to meet him in the library, although spouting poetry was not the way to win over my heart. Putting down the frame, I felt movement and a hand on my shoulder.

  “My first husband.” Cassandra Thatchley said nothing more for several minutes while tears pooled in her eyes. “Killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, at least we think he was. Killed because of the World Trade Center tragedy, that’s for sure.”

  Although Cookie and I were only ten when it happened, we often talked of 9/11, our overriding experience, we’d decided long ago. Suddenly the dread of that day hit me—the chaos of all the adults surrounding our world, the shouting, the ashes, the smell of burning flesh filling the streets where we lived for months afterward. I placed the horrific events of that day on top of a large heap, along with all the other griefs in my life. A faint echo of what Cassandra Thatchley’s pain must have been like when her husband never came home hit my gut, and I had to steady myself on the side of the desk.

  Cassandra Thatchley pulled out a tissue. Her hand trembled as she pressed it to her lips. “He wasn’t supposed to be in his office. Shouldn’t have been there. We found out later his appointment with some vice-president at Chase had been cancelled that morning, so he must have been there when the plane hit. Ninety-second floor of the North Tower.” She stopped talking.

  “But how do you know for certain—”

  She flapped an arm in the air as if it could wave away all pain. “He never came home. Six months later, they found his DNA on a piece of cloth two blocks from the site—the remains of a handkerchief they think, or it might have been his shirt. For the life of me, I can’t tell you what he was wearing that day. Always a suit, I know that; he used to wear only white or blue shirts.” She stopped talking, looking out into the forever lurking somewhere beyond her sight. “Once I bought him a pink shirt.” She gave a crooked smile. “He made me take it back.” A tear rolled down one cheek.

  I waited while Cassandra Thatchley collected herself.

  She sounded like an echo of hersel
f. “Whatever it was, a handkerchief or a shirt, they found it in the rubble.” Mrs. Thatchley blew her nose. “Brunswick still swears he saw his father on TV on one of the news clips a day or two later, you know how they love to replay the horror. He said he could tell by the man’s swagger that it was his dad walking away from the building. For years he hunted for him, wrote notes on buildings. But Ben Thatchley is one of the 1,100 people who vanished without a trace that day. A big part of my son still believes his father is alive, and he refused, just refused to listen to my attempts to find out, once and for all, where Ben was killed. Was he in his office? Or in an elevator? Did he help someone else and they both perished trying to escape? I still have dreams, and I know Brunswick does, too. Sometimes I hear a shout in the middle of the night.”

  She stopped for a good two minutes before going on. “And they keep finding human remains, so it will never be over for my son. For the sake of his sanity, I’ve tried to find out if my husband was in fact killed in 9/11.”

  “But surely—”

  She cut across me. “We don’t need any settlement money, but I think some acknowledgement that his father is in fact dead would close the wound that still festers in Brunswick’s heart.”

  And in hers as well, I thought. I couldn’t imagine this woman’s pain. Was her refusal of closure a kind of death wish? But I wanted to be clear, so I asked if Ben Thatchley’s name was listed on the memorial wall as one of the dead.

  She shook her head. “My son won’t hear of it.”

  “No one’s contacted you? There was a settlement for the families, a closure, the names of the dead carved—”

  She waved a hand, stopping me. “As I told you, I don’t care for settlements. The only thing that happens is that the money grabbers collect around you. And as for a memorial to Ben, I couldn’t be bothered with it, and I know Ben wouldn’t want it: he wasn’t that type. Why did you have to ask me all this? What does it have to do with Dorset’s disappearance? This is all too painful. Ben would never leave me. He must have been killed in the blast.” She gasped for air.

  The woman wasn’t making much sense. Either she wanted an end to the mystery of her first husband’s death or she didn’t. But who was I to judge? What would I do if I were in her shoes? I thought of a song my mother used to sing, something about a maid of constant sorrow. Maybe she’d defined herself as wrapped in suffering for so long that to seek closure was in some warped way akin to self-harm.

  I changed the subject. “Brunswick must be your son.”

  Cassandra Thatchley nodded. “He was eight at the time of Ben’s death, a terrible age for a boy to lose the father he adored.”

  “Is Brunswick the boy in this photograph?” I held up the black-and-white of the young family.

  She nodded, taking the frame in her hands and rubbing invisible dust off the glass with her sleeve. “For months afterward he’d leave the house in the middle of the night. Luckily I had trouble sleeping myself, so I’d hear the door shut and I’d follow. I can still see his little figure, hunched shoulders backlit by the streetlamp.” She closed her eyes and was silent for a while. “He struggled throughout middle school, but fortunately was taken under the wing of one of my friends, an English teacher who gave my son what he needed.”

  “A father figure,” I said.

  She said nothing. “Not that Brunswick had it easy. Of course, he was his own worst enemy. Still is, although he graduated cum laude and now is doing well in graduate school. He doesn’t seem to want to get a job, though. No matter.”

  “And this girl, that’s your older daughter?”

  She nodded, smiling although by this time her tears coursed down her cheeks. “Brook. Although the name doesn’t suit her.”

  I waited a few seconds for an explanation.

  “You think of someone bubbly when you hear the name, but Brook is my silent one. She never has said much about her father. Never talks much at all, actually. Straight A student. Tall, willowy, the way I used to be. Devoted to us, I know she is. I thought she’d follow in my footsteps. She was an English major, but she never wanted to go on to teach. She’s like Dorset: she loves to do things with her hands, and photography has claimed her. Or maybe I should say the light. She goes on and on about it: ‘find whatever’s in the light and shoot it.’ I’m glad, actually, even though she has a part-time job at a used bookstore in Manhattan. It doesn’t pay much, but gives her time to pursue her art. She sells her photographs online, don’t ask me where, and says she makes enough money to pay for her expenses, including a studio in DUMBO.” Cassandra Thatchley hadn’t lost it completely; she told me her older daughter rented a loft on Water Street and recited the address. “It’s on the top floor. She even has a view.”

  I brought up the location in my Maps app. I’d been taking notes about the time Cassandra began with the poetry and by this time I was writing furiously. “Do Brunswick and Brook still live at home?”

  She nodded. “If you can ever catch them here.”

  “So they weren’t at home when you left this morning?”

  She didn’t answer, but looked at me as if I’d asked her to recite the encyclopedia. Reaching past me, she set the photo down and picked up another, this one in a smaller frame, a close-up of a young girl, her face guileless, innocent, full of promise, a bright child, I could tell. “This is Dorset when she was eight.”

  “You said you had some recent photos. I want to send them to the police.”

  Cassandra Thatchley opened the desk’s middle drawer and scratched around, messing up all the contents, which I could see had been well ordered before she touched them. “I know I put them here. I took them last week. Where are they?” she asked, her voice becoming high-pitched. She glanced at her watch. “And look at the time. My life just disappears along with those around me.” She shoved herself away from the desk and began to pace, her hands pulling at her hair. But just as quickly as it had begun, her black mood subsided. “I almost forgot.” She sat down again, pulling a checkbook out, and busied herself for a few minutes, the scratching of her pen on the paper the only sound in the room as I held my breath. When she’d finished, she tore out the check and handed it to me. “Your retainer.”

  I looked at the amount and swallowed. It was nearly twice my usual fee.

  “And I have a lecture in two hours. I can’t be late for it. I must keep my job. I’m the only one working. It’s horrible, you know, having the weight of three children on my shoulders. Two of them are adults, but you’d never know. And this place doesn’t run on air. You can’t imagine our expenses, close to twenty thousand a month with all three children in school. Packer Collegiate isn’t cheap.”

  Actually I could imagine her expenses, but it was not something I wanted to think about. Denny was ready to move out of Brooklyn, convinced it would save us enough to put our twins through college. We’d had words about it, because to tell you the truth, I couldn’t imagine myself not living in Brooklyn. It practically defined me. Except for Denny and the children, of course. I looked at her, tentatively touching her arm. “Cassandra, I’m going to find Dorset, but I need your help.” I suggested she sit down again.

  She was all movement, shaking her head. “I need to go. Mrs. Hampton can help you with the details. Search the house, open all the drawers. Do whatever, but find my child. I can’t bear a night without her here, safe, sound, whatever it is they say. I’ll go mad. I’ll call you when I get back.”

  “About what time?”

  She had her hand on the doorknob when Mrs. Hampton, with what looked like folded laundry in her hand, stood on the threshold.

  Dorset’s Room

  “Sit, dear,” the housekeeper commanded her employer. “You haven’t touched your coffee. Surely you have time to drink it before you leave. It will warm you up. Let me add the milk and sugar.” Mrs. Hampton, stirring the brew, handed it to the woman and we sat, Cassandra obeying but just barely, perching herself on the edge of the sofa. She took the coffee and lifted it to her lips.


  Just as quickly, though, she set the cup down and rose, jiggling the tray with her knee and spilling some of the hot liquid onto herself, brushing the pain away as she hurried toward the door. “I’m late for my lecture. Answer any of that woman’s questions, but hurry, time’s wasting and I want my daughter back; I need my daughter back.” She flung a look at me. “You’ll have her home when I return?”

  “I’ll do my best.” I turned to the housekeeper, feeling the void as Cassandra Thatchley left the room. I heard her rapid footsteps receding down the hall, the sound of her Uggs doing a muffled pounding up the stairs.

  “She insisted on leaving the hospital before the doctors could tell her what had happened,” I said, and realized by the calm look on Mrs. Hampton’s face that whatever I’d tell her about Cassandra Thatchley wouldn’t surprise her.

  “One thing about this household,” she said, “they do what they want when they want, even if what they want changes from second to second. I could tell you stories, believe you me. Been with them long enough, but I don’t want to bore you.”

  It was the part of the investigation I loved, listening to personal history, raveling, rearranging, piecing together a life. I hoped that buried somewhere underneath the heap of all those facts, I’d find a thread, the first glimmer of what might have caused Dorset to go missing. Mrs. Hampton was a deft spinner of the tale and my client’s past unfolded like petals of a flower. I asked her one question—what was it like working for Mrs. Thatchley all those years ago—and the housekeeper took over, rattling off names and dates, milestones and memories, answering many of my questions before I’d asked them. Within reason. By that I mean Mrs. Hampton was a loyal employee, I could tell by the set of her jaw when I asked a leading question about Brunswick. Her answers were vague, saying he had had his moments, but he seemed fine now and was doing well in graduate school. “A real charmer, our Brunswick.” When I asked how she’d come to do the housekeeping for Cassandra Thatchley, she told me she’d been a lifelong friend of the first husband’s mother.