ask. It was too late to ask her why.
She tried to lift her hand, but she couldn’t; she was so sick, so thin, she was almost transparent. He begged her not to go.
She said what they say in the movies, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Then she died.
Like that! Part of Dan Carteret was gone. Oh, Mom!
And, next? Words exploded in his head – the response he’d cobbled when she made him promise never to ask about his father: As long as we both shall live.
She thought he’d promised, he knew he’d lied. She was gone. OK then.
He is free to search.
Lucy didn’t leave him much to go on. The few things she’d said that night, when she first told him the truth. She loved the guy, she admitted it! Still did. Love like that doesn’t vanish without a trace.
It will be in that jewel box she was so anxious to protect.
The little wooden chest surfaces when he goes through her empty apartment, padding thoughtfully through the silent, abandoned rooms. He finds it in her bedroom closet, stashed behind books on a shelf he used to be too small to reach. It’s tough, going through the things she kept: bangles and mismatched earrings, his high school class ring, important papers and at the bottom items from the deep past, souvenirs of the life Lucy had before Dan was imagined and they ended up living here.
He runs his fingers over raised initials on the little gold football, a cheap high school trinket that his mother cherished or she wouldn’t have kept it for so long: FJHS. OK. Tonight, he’ll type FJHS into the Google search box along with her maiden name, the first step in a global search for Lucy Carteret’s lost life in the years before she married Burt Mixon, who made her so anxious and sad.
Here’s the picture she kept: five jocks snapped on a beach, waving and grinning like fools – a fading Polaroid that he turns over in his hands like an old friend. Wait! Here’s a second one: a black-and-white of Lucy in her teens, smiling for the camera in spite of the glare. At her back, a Spanish stucco house sprawls under a row of tall Australian pines – some builder’s idea of castle, with a grand stairway and two fat turrets. She’s wearing a little white T-shirt that breaks his heart and – what? That corny gold football hanging between her breasts. Did his father take this? Why did she hide it for so long?
Instinct tells him this isn’t all she was hiding. Troubled, he runs his fingers around the box, feeling only a little guilty because the silk lining shreds at his touch. Here. A scrap of newsprint from the paper he thought she’d destroyed before he learned to read. Well, now he can read: Spontaneous Human Combustion. Holy crap! He jumps, as if she’d just set her hand between his shoulders: It’s all right, love. I’m here.
The initialed football, the snapshot. This. He feeds FJHS into the search engines, triangulates with spontaneous human combustion. Fort Jude at the top of every first page, the Florida city where – bingo: there have been three grisly, unexplained deaths by fire in the last fifty years. And, my God, the image search produces the stills that so terrified him as a kid. The crime scene photo of that bedroom slipper with a foot still in it, standing like a solitary bookend on the floor underneath the recliner where she died. He broadens the search, surfing obsessively because on the Web, everything leads to something else and in its own way, it insulates him from the ache in his belly, just below the heart.
He kept clicking; he struck gold at howstuffworks.com, where Stephanie Watson wrote about spontaneous human combustion at length.
Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object – in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person – bursts into flame from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source. The first known account of spontaneous human combustion came from the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin in 1663, who described how a woman in Paris ‘went up in ashes and smoke’ while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work ‘De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis.’
Although Lucy was sad more often than she was happy, she didn’t live the kind of inner