Beth still hadn’t taken a step inside. Her gaze, shadowed by yesterday’s horror, was riveted to the missing section of wall. “It’s so hard to believe…”
He wadded up the newspapers and tossed them aside. “I know it is,” he said as gently as he could. “Bad enough if she’d been a stranger, but finding out your mother had been there all these years…” Maybe not the best thing to say, but the section of wall down to bare studs might as well be an elephant swinging its trunk back and forth.
Beth nodded tightly.
“If you’ll point out the boxes, we can take them outside,” he suggested.
She drew a deep breath. “It’s awfully hot out there. I could plug in a couple of those fans in here.”
He let her do so, placed on the far side of the garage. How much the whirring fans actually cooled the stifling air in here was debatable, but they had to be better than nothing.
Beth made a half circle to the workbench, probably so she could approach it from the side that didn’t abut the opened wall that had served as her mother’s coffin for thirteen years.
“There were boxes of baby and children’s clothes. Mom must have thought they might have another baby after Emily,” she said. “So probably she packed those a long time before she…died.” Disappeared was what she’d been about to say—had been saying for all of those thirteen years. “I think those boxes are outside. Matt was going to ask his wife if she wanted to look through them, but I don’t think he actually took any of them.”
Tony nodded. “Let’s start with your mother’s things.”
“All this.” She waved, indicating under and on top of the workbench.
“Tell you what,” he said, grabbing one at random. “Can you bring those lawn chairs back in here? This is a sitting job.”
“Oh. Yes.” She looked grateful to have something to do—or for the delay in opening any of these boxes.
When she returned, he said, “You were going to tell me why you left these in here.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Because I didn’t want to make decisions. Everything else was easy, but these…” Hand on the back of one of the lawn chairs, she stared down at the box. “I think, if she’d been dead—” She flushed, looking up at him. “I mean, if I’d known she was dead, and that long ago, I could have faced sorting her clothes. As it was… My feelings about her were so muddled. Thrift store? Garage sale? It felt so…cold. Even Matt was relieved when I suggested we leave these for last.”
For another time, she meant. A year, or five years, or ten years from now.
“Did you really believe she was alive?” he asked, curious.
Beth squirmed a little. “Then…yes. Except, I couldn’t imagine her abandoning us like that. Matt and Emily and I all went through phases of feeling betrayed and angry. How could she?” She gazed toward the neatly stacked boxes instead of at him. “I suppose, over the years, I started to think something must have happened to her. Because she wouldn’t have done that to us. It could have been a car accident, or…or breast cancer or who knows what? Except it never occurred to me that Dad would have been informed, wouldn’t he?”
“If they were still married, yes.” Tony paused. “Ideally. If she’d moved out of state with a man who didn’t tell authorities she was married to someone else, had kids…it might not have happened.” He didn’t add But we know she died here, don’t we? The very day she vanished, in fact.
Beth sighed. “Well, this box is the first one I opened that had her things. Except the Christmas ornaments. I told you about those, didn’t I?”
“You did.” He’d poked through them in the garbage can, to be certain nothing else had been packed with them. “You say I opened. Your brother or sister weren’t first to look through any of these boxes?”
“No, we sort of divvied up the garage.” She turned her head. “We hadn’t gotten to the stuff on that wall at all.”
“Okay.” He pulled two pairs of latex gloves from his pocket and handed one pair to her. “I’d appreciate it if you’d wear these.”