look into the family medicine chest: Xanax, Ambien, Zantac, laxatives, estrogen, everything but Viagra; this is a family with problems. Like the kitchen, their problems just make him sad. Sighing, he goes back downstairs.
Around now, if Dan is still thinking, he should be thinking that time is running out. It’s late. Chaplin has to come back sometime, and whether or not he does, the others will, probably soon. He needs to get done and get out before they walk in and find him here.
He should hurry; he can’t.
Instead he is stalled in the central hallway, revolving slowly, like an extra in Night of the Living Dead.
Um, he is thinking, if he’s thinking at all. Just, Um.
In fact, the only thing Lucy Carteret left in the house, the only vestige of her is here, hidden where he’ll never think to look, but Dan doesn’t know that. He’ll have to be satisfied with the useful item he will find, assuming he gets a grip. It’s in this hall.
If there’s someone else in the house with him right now, and if this stranger is marking time, willing him to give up and leave, Dan is too fried to know it. Disoriented, he rubs the glass front of a bookcase out of a pressing need to see his reflected face: first proof of the existence of Dan. He’s been standing between the bookcases for – how long? Stupid, but for the first time, he looks at the books behind the glass. Titles line the walls like people imprisoned here and forgotten. The history of Chaplin’s world.
Browsing the titles like a speed-reader, he finds the chapter he needs.
Decades’ worth of high school yearbooks fill the last bookcase, just outside the kitchen door. The logo is stamped in gold on the spine of every single fake leather binding: FJHS. The Fort Jude High School Swordfish, dozens of green padded covers faded in degrees, fill the golden oak shelves. The collection runs from the 1920s at the top to the late Seventies. Kneeling, Dan peers at the numerals on the books in the bottom row, chapter and verse on the last generation of Chaplins to grow up in this house.
The glass front rolls back easily. Greedily, he pulls them out, rummaging for his mother’s graduation year. Finds it. Plunges in, too preoccupied to know that he isn’t the only one looking for vestiges of Lucy here, or that the most important item pertaining to Lucy Carteret is not in this hall.
The object is in fact in Chaplin’s dresser, in the bedroom Dan was reluctant to invade. He might feel better if he knew that there is one item in this house that says it all, but it’s hidden so carefully that it’s stayed hidden for thirty years. He could have torn up Chaplin’s bedroom, rolled back the rug and emptied the closet and rifled his dresser, drawer by drawer without finding it, but he doesn’t know.
He doesn’t even know that a second intruder made his way inside while he was searching the upstairs, or that this nameless somebody is in the kitchen now, flat against the far side of the refrigerator, willing him to leave. Engrossed, he doesn’t know anything except that his mother was so ordinary in her freshman year, just another clueless, pretty girl.
Squatting, he skims the class pictures, looking for Lucy among the group shots of high school sophomores and juniors, working up to the senior yearbook. He finds Lucy at her best among the senior class portraits suitable for framing that kids can also order in wallet size: white T-shirt, silver hoops in her ears, Lucy smiling brighter than he knew. And, he thinks greedily, if he keeps looking he’ll identify the carousing personnel in that Jeep. All five.
Including him. Stare into their senior portraits until you know which one he is. Find your father. Then hunt him down. Shake the truth out of him.
He folds up on the floor with the yearbook open on his knees and studies it, rapt. Now, a yearbook is just a yearbook until somebody you know writes in it. Lucy has written in this one. This incriminating scrawl on the end papers: Love ya, Bobby. And thanks for that.
Dan is too intent on what he’s doing to understand that he is being watched more closely now, or to know that the stranger who kept pace with him as he closed on the Chaplin house, greedily assessing him by what little moonlight there was, the man who has