Sam rolls onto his back, tasting the sour tang of blood in his mouth. Headlights are approaching the hill; a car is coming. It’s going to be Sidney, on her way back from the gym. She’s going to spring from her minivan and ask him what on earth he’s doing on the pavement in weather like this . . .
The moths come at him again, and he opens his eyes, the bile rising in his gut, as he remembers the kick to his face and realizes he’s not outside. He’s back in the house, locked inside the room. He pulls himself up to sit and feels along the wall until he reaches the door. “Come out, come out wherever you are,” he croaks. His throat is sore and his mouth is killing him; he reaches up to his cheek and discovers a deep gash. “It’s time to change my clothes and give me a shave, Albert. You don’t want me to call Home Health Angels and report you for violating the first tenet in the employee fucking handbook—‘When you look good, you feel good!’ Do you, you deranged little shit?”
At last his fingers find the light switch. The brightness blinds him momentarily, but then he shakes off the fog, taking in the state of his clothes, the walls around him, the stacks of boxes near his feet.
He was wrong. He’s not in the room. He’s in the closet.
There’s a door within arm’s reach, and he leans forward for the knob. It opens, casting light onto the bed with the patchwork quilt, his chair. Sam sits back. This is the closet in his room. He takes a closer look at the boxes, two dozen at least, neatly stacked against the wall, “Agatha Lawrence” written in neat script across each of them.
Agatha Lawrence. The woman who died in this room.
Sam hoists himself up to a sitting position, sending a bolt of pain across his back. He reaches to the top of the stack and pulls down a box. It lands on top of his casts, the contents spilling on to the floor around him. He waits and listens. It’s quiet. He picks up a thick black book and turns it over. Charles Lawrence, 1905–1991. Inside, there’s a black-and-white photograph of a young couple and two boys, posing on the front porch of the Lawrence House.
He staves off a bout of laughter. Why did he put me in the closet?
Hmmm, let’s see. It’s Annie’s voice, fighting its way through the ache in his muddled brain. He put you in a closet with a dead woman’s boxes. Maybe because he . . . She goes quiet, waiting for him to speak. Come on, you dope. Think.
“Because he wants me to look inside them?” Sam says.
Annie is silent.
Sam drops the scrapbook and riffles quickly through the rest of the papers strewn across the closet floor—original architectural drawings, newspaper clippings from the 1930s about the founding of Lawrence Chemical, letters written from a naval ship in the Pacific. Box after box, he finds financial papers, bank statements, retirement accounts. A photo falls from one: a teenage girl with bright red hair. She’s wearing a cardigan sweater and jeans, a cigarette tipped between her fingers, and Sam recognizes her right away—that flaming red hair—as the woman in the framed photographs on Albert’s library shelf. That wasn’t Albert’s mother, as Sam had guessed. That was this woman, Agatha Lawrence.
He returns to the box from which the photograph fell and finds a smaller rectangular box, holding two neat rows of unsealed yellow envelopes. Sam selects one and removes the letter.
August 23, 1969
Hello beautiful,
I arrived in Princeton this morning and it’s as pompous and bourgeois as I imagined. My parents insisted on dropping me off and I could not wait until they left—I’m thrilled at the thought of not having to speak to them for at least three months. Good-bye, family, and good riddance. The campus is crawling with television cameras, determined to hear what it’s like for us, the first women admitted to the university. The dean had a special reception for all 101 of us and while we drank wine inside, a crowd of reptilian men protested, holding signs that read “Bring Back the Old Princeton.” Poor things, not a chance in hell they’ll get laid.
Sam folds the yellowed piece of paper and returns it to its envelope, then fingers his way to the front of the box and the first letter. July 24, 1968. Chicago.
Hello beautiful . . .
He sinks back against the wall, ignoring the throbbing pain in his head and the sinking feeling in his stomach, and starts at the beginning.
Chapter 46
I pull back the curtains with a shaky hand and risk a peek down at the front yard. Thank god. The vultures are gone.
Three of them （“journalists”）， circling since last night, when the public learned that Sam’s car was discovered at the Stor-Mor Storage facility on Route 9. The nerve of them, parking in my driveway, tearing up my lawn with their footprints, pointing their monstrous cameras at my house. “B-roll.” That’s what I overheard one of them say this morning as I barricaded myself in my bedroom, waiting for them to leave. They did, but not before getting their shot, bantering loudly back and forth the whole time about how the hell this guy’s car ended up at a storage unit.