“I’ve got some bad news about Christmas,” Kerry said.
“Murphy called to tell us about what happened to the truck and to Spammy. I told him in no uncertain terms that he can’t just have Spammy melted down for scrap metal, but of course, your daddy sided with your brother and now it’s as good as done. I’m so mad at the two of them I could spit.”
“Mom?” Kerry said, puzzled. “I had no idea Spammy meant that much to you.”
Her mother’s voice was tearful. “Maybe I’m being silly, but I loved that old tin can. And do you want to know why?”
“Yeah.”
Birdie let out a long sigh. “I shouldn’t tell you this, and you better never repeat it, but you were conceived in that doggone trailer.”
Kerry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Seriously? In Spammy? When?”
“Do the math,” Birdie said. “The week before Christmas 1988, right there at Abingdon Square. Your daddy got into the moonshine, but I can’t remember what got into me.” She giggled. “Well, that’s not exactly true.”
“Mooom,” Kerry exclaimed. “Gross.”
“Never mind,” Birdie said briskly. “Either way, I don’t think you need to worry about waiting on tires for the truck to head home. Just get on a plane. I’ll pay for your ticket.”
Kerry bit her lip and blurted out the rest. “I can’t come home. Not right away. I’ve sort of got a commitment up here.”
“Ohhh.” Birdie laughed. “Your brother mentioned there’s a new man in the picture.”
“Mom, he’s close to ninety if he’s a day,” Kerry protested. “Has no family, lives alone in an almost unheated basement apartment, and he’s got double pneumonia. Somebody has to look after him.”
There was a long pause while her mother worked that out. “Well now, that’s different. I guess you’d better do what you can for the poor soul.”
“I’m sorry to spoil Christmas, but I can’t just walk away and leave Heinz like this.”
“I’d disown you if you did,” Birdie said. “I guess Christmas can wait until we’re all together again.”
Kerry smiled. She should have known her unselfish mother would agree with her decision to stay in the city. “Love you, Mama Bear.”
“Love you more, Baby Bear. Do you have enough clean underwear?”
“I’m thirty-four, Mom. But thanks.”
* * *
Before Kerry could walk back into the apartment, the freight elevator doors opened and Patrick stepped out, carrying two large shopping bags.
He hurried to her side and kissed her cheek. “Okay, I got the prescription and some Gatorade, and Claudia insisted on sending down a quart of soup and some crackers, and, oh yeah, I ran by the apartment and grabbed an electric blanket.”
“You must have been a Boy Scout,” Kerry said.
“Nah. We got one as a wedding gift, and I never liked the idea of sleeping under a live wire.”
They went into the apartment. Patrick found an outlet and plugged in the blanket and spread it over the still-sleeping Heinz.
“Come outside,” he whispered. “I have something else to show you.”
As soon as they stepped into the basement, Patrick held up a key chain with a single key.
“This is the key to Heinz’s apartment on the seventh floor.”
Kerry took the key from him and turned it over and over. “This has to be illegal.”
“Illegal would be letting that old man freeze to death in there, and you with him,” Patrick countered.
“How did you even get this?”
“You can thank Claudia. She bribed the super with the promise of a month’s worth of dinners on the house.”
“Totally illegal. And unethical. And how do we even know that apartment is livable?”
“We won’t. Until you go up and check it out. If it’s okay with you, I’ll stay here and watch the patient.”
chapter 47
She took the elevator to the seventh floor, found and unlocked the door, flipped a light switch, and found herself in a time capsule.
Apartment 708’s front room was a large, dimly lit open-plan space furnished as a living room. She hurried to open the heavy drapes pulled tightly across a bank of windows like the ones in Claudia’s unit. Light flooded the room, revealing a tufted Chesterfield sofa with dusty black upholstery facing a small fireplace with gas logs. A Lucite-and-brass coffee table held yellowing newspapers, a stack of unopened mail, and a mug with a spoon balanced on a plate that held what looked like a fossilized Little Debbie snack cake. A glance at the front page of the newspaper on top showed a date of August 23, 1992.
Everything was coated with a fine layer of dust. Delicate cobwebs dangled from the chrome-colored sputnik chandelier and stretched across the filmy, dust-caked windows.
“Oh my,” Kerry whispered, turning in tight circles to take it all in. The walls of the apartment were painted a deep, chocolate brown and everywhere, there was art. Over the fireplace mantel, on all the walls of the living room, art was hung floor to ceiling, gallery style, and more canvases leaned in stacks against the wall and tabletops.
It was an eclectic collection, featuring landscapes, collages, still lifes, pen-and-ink drawings, charcoal sketches, watercolors, and oils. Kerry recognized the artist’s work immediately.
She stepped up to the largest, most arresting work in the room. It was a sensitively drawn portrait, the only one in the room. The sitter was a young man, olive-skinned with large, liquid dark eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and a high forehead. A fringe of dark hair fell over one eye, and he had a dreamy, faraway half-smile.
The portrait had been done in chalk, on what looked like a recycled brown paper grocery sack, but it was mounted in a chippy gold Renaissance-style formal frame.
Kerry stood in front of the picture, studying it for a long time. In lieu of a signature in the lower right corner there was a tiny black silhouette of a tree. She moved around the room and saw that all of the other pieces had the same marking.
She took a quick tour of the apartment. In the bedroom, the bed was unmade, the covers flung aside as if the last occupant had just awakened.
A toothbrush rested on the edge of the bathroom sink, alongside a razor and a can of shaving cream. Another toothbrush was slotted into a wall-mounted toothbrush holder.
The kitchen counter held a Mr. Coffee machine with a half-full pot of blackened sludge alongside a container of dried-up half-and-half.
A narrow door on the far kitchen wall was locked. Kerry jiggled the door handle, her curiosity piqued. She was about to attempt to jimmy the lock when she spotted a single key, dangling from an under-counter mug hook.
The door opened into a smaller room that had obviously been used as a painting studio. The only furniture consisted of a large wooden easel and backless iron stool and a worktable covered with jars of brushes, boxes of watercolors, pastel crayons, and pencils. The rough-planked wooden floor and the walls were spattered with paint. Blank and half-finished canvases were stacked in a crude wall-mounted rack.
Kerry walked around the room, batting away the cobwebs covering everything, touching the canvases and trying to imagine why Heinz would have abandoned this space to move into what Austin had correctly termed a dungeon. She opened another door and discovered it held a tiny bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-foot tub, pedestal sink, and high-backed commode.