“Mallory?” Teddy is shouting through the door of the first-floor powder room. “Can you bring me toilet paper?”
“Just a second!”
I’m not finished yet. I still have to go through the closet. I sift through all the adorable outfits that we can never convince Teddy to wear—beautiful collared shirts, miniature khakis and designer blue jeans, tiny leather belts for his twenty-two-inch waist. I spy three board games on the top shelf of the closet—Clue, Mousetrap, and Sorry!—and I’m certain I’ve found my treasure trove. But then I open the boxes and shake out the boards and all I find are game pieces and playing cards. No drawings.
“Mallory? Did you hear me?”
I put the games back in the closet, close the door, and make sure the room is more or less as I found it.
Then I grab a roll of toilet paper from the laundry room and hurry downstairs to the first-floor bathroom. “Here you go,” I tell him. He opens the door a crack, just wide enough for me to pass the paper.
“Where were you?” he asks.
“Just tidying up.”
“All right.”
He pushes the door closed and I hear the button lock click.
* * *
I spend the weekend convinced I’m being paranoid. I have no proof that Teddy is still drawing pictures. The scratching sounds from his bedroom could be anything. The black grit on his fingers could be dirt from our gardening projects, or the normal grimy smudges of a five-year-old boy. Everything else seems to be going fine, so what am I worried about?
Monday morning, I awaken to the sound of sanitation trucks making their slow rumbling crawl down Edgewood Street. They come twice a week—on Mondays for recycling, and again on Thursdays for regular trash. And in an instant I remember the one spot I didn’t think to check: the wastebasket in Ted’s second-floor office. Teddy has to walk right past it to get downstairs. It would be an easy place for him to discard his drawings, on his way out of his bedroom.
I spring out of bed, grateful that I sleep in running shorts and a T-shirt, and I sprint out my door and across the lawn. The grass is still wet with morning dew and I nearly wipe out rounding the side of the house. The truck is three doors away so I only have a minute to spare. I run to the end of the driveway, where Ted drags the blue containers every Sunday night—one for metals and glass, the other for papers and cardboard. I plunge my hands deep inside, past shreds of junk mail and utility bills, take-out menus and credit card statements and a heaping stack of mail order catalogs: Title Nine, Lands End, L.L.Bean, Vermont Country Store, they arrive every day by the dozen.
The recycling truck pulls alongside me, and a skinny guy wearing work gloves smiles at me. There’s a tattoo of a dragon coiled around his bicep.
“Lose something?”
“No, no,” I tell him. “You can take it.”
But then he reaches for the bin and all its contents shift, revealing a giant ball of crumped paper, with the same confetti edges familiar to Teddy’s drawings.
“Wait!”
He holds out the bin, allowing me to grab the ball, and I carry it back up the driveway to my cottage.
Once inside, I boil some water, make myself a mug of tea, and then sit down to study the papers. It’s a bit like peeling an onion. There are nine pages total and I use my palm to smooth out all the wrinkles. The first few drawings don’t look like anything. They’re just scribbles. But as I turn the pages there’s more control and more detail. The composition improves. There’s light and shadow. It’s like a sketchbook for some strange work in progress; some of the pages are cluttered with drawings, many of them half-finished.
11
And I’m sorry but there’s no way Teddy drew these pictures. Most adults can’t draw this well—let alone a five-year-old boy who sleeps with stuffed animals and can’t count past twenty-nine.
But how else did they end up in the recycling bin?
Did Ted draw them? Caroline?
Are the Maxwells studying illustration in their free time?
All my questions lead to more questions, and pretty soon I’m wishing I never got out of bed. I wish I’d just let the sanitation trucks carry away the clues, so I wouldn’t have to wonder what they meant.
Monday passes in a daze—LEGOs, mac and cheese, Quiet Time, swimming pool—but by nightfall I’m ready to do some serious research. I take a shower and wash my hair and put on one of Caroline’s nicest outfits, a breezy blue midi dress with pretty white flowers. Then I walk a mile into town to The Raconteur, Spring Brook’s local independent bookstore.