The Back Door of Midnight

  WHEN R U OPEN?

  I was messaged right back. FOR AS LONG AS I’M HERE.

  WOULD LIKE 2 COME BY. I thought for a moment, then typed the only bait I could think of: STOPPING @ TEA LEAVES. WANT SOMETHING?

  1 DOUB ESPR + 1 REG COFFEE MED SZ W/2 CREAMS & 4 DNUTS. I’M UPSTAIRS.

  Fifteen minutes later I stood on Heron Street in front of a shingled storefront with stairs running up the outside of the building. I climbed the wooden steps and knocked on the door.

  “It’s open.”

  With one hand balancing my tray of drinks, the other grasping the bag of doughnuts and door handle, I pushed the door open with my foot.

  The man inside hopped up. “Oh, sorry,” he said, taking the tray and bag from me and setting them on a table. He held out his hand. “Tom Wittstadt. Editor in chief, editor in minor, editor ed-cetera.”

  He was medium height with a full face, curly salt-and-pepper hair, and a bit of a belly under his blue Hawaiian shirt.

  “And this is Hero.” A black Lab, lying close to the chair where Wittstadt had been sitting, thumped his tail.

  “Hello, Hero.”

  The dog lifted his head, his nose quivering. His eyes were opaque.

  “He can’t see you, so he sniffs a lot,” the editor explained. “Usually he stays put. You okay with dogs?”

  “Yeah, sure. Can I pet him?”

  The editor nodded. “Just talk to him and let him know you’re coming.”

  “How’re you doing, Hero?” I said, moving toward him slowly. “Are you the brains behind this paper?” Silently I asked, Do you like to be petted, or do you just put up with it?

  Hero pulled himself to his feet and walked toward me.

  “Whoa! You must smell good,” Mr. Wittstadt said.

  Hey, buddy.

  The dog nosed my face gently, then licked me in the crease of my neck.

  You like salt, huh? Where do you like to be petted? Those little dimples behind your ears? I scratched them.

  “Are you by any chance related to Iris O’Neill?” the editor asked.

  I sighed. “My hair?”

  “No, the way you are with Hero. He likes Iris, too.”

  I smiled. “I’m her great-niece, Anna. Anna O’Neill Kirkpatrick.”

  “Nice to meet you, Anna. I’m sorry about William.”

  The editor pulled out his wallet, then dug in his jeans for change. The office was littered with paper—piles of it, balls of it, odd-shaped scraps of it. A worktable occupied the center of the room, with ancient office furniture filling up the rest of the space. The gray walls were decorated with maps and several posters of old music icons; I recognized Bob Dylan. On a shelf above Wittstadt’s desk was a row of bobbleheads, most of them Ravens and Orioles.

  “How’s Iris doing?”

  “Okay.” I stood up and retrieved the iced tea that I had bought myself. The editor handed me the exact amount for his order.

  “You know, I tried to interview her,” he said. “She went psychic on me.”

  “Psychic or psycho?” I asked.

  I watched him empty out a tall travel mug, giving a drink to a plant, then pour both the double espresso and the regular coffee into the mug. “Psychic. That wily old woman, I think she was faking it. Mind you, I’m not saying she’s a fake. I just think she was pretending at the moment, because she didn’t want to answer my questions.”

  “Could be.”

  “Has Iris told you what she thinks happened to William?”

  “No.”

  He sipped. “Got any ideas of your own?”

  “No.”

  “Doughnut?” he offered.

  “No thanks.”

  He pulled off a piece with his teeth. “Have you been in touch with McManus?”

  “A few days ago, just to find out what the police know so far.”

  “Which is?”

  “Probably the same thing he told you.”

  Wittstadt smiled. “So why are you here, other than to torture a newspaper guy with short answers, all of which he already knew?”

  “I’d like to look in your archives.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I went online. They go back only a year and a half.”

  He laughed. “Because I go back only a year and a half. That’s when I bought this prestigious paper.” He led the way to a rear room. I followed him to stacks that were illuminated by old fluorescent-tube lights, the shelves labeled in a hand-scrawl that was yellowed over with tape.

  “What date do you want?”

  I told him the year. “I guess you don’t have an index.”

  Wittstadt snorted. “Is there a particular thing you are looking for so we can narrow the possibilities? You know, like a fishing report?”

  Despite his easygoing manner, he’d be checking the archives later to see what I was researching. He’d guess it was connected to the O’Neills. But if he was relatively new to Wisteria, he wouldn’t know anything about Mick Sanchez.

  “An obituary.”

  I saw the light flicker in his eyes. “Well, that’s easy. They are always on the second-to-last page. Always,” he repeated. “I’ve tried to redesign the paper, but each time I do, my advertisers throw a fit. I’m just lucky the old publisher stopped using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ before I took over.”

  I smiled.

  “I’ll leave you to your search, Anna. Careful with the drink, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Since the paper was a weekly and I knew the end date would be mid-August, a week after Joanna’s death, my first search wouldn’t take long. I found the article on her, the one Uncle Will had enclosed with his letter, and reread it. There was a copy machine in the office, but I figured that asking to use it would invite more questions from Mr. Wittstadt. When I retrieved a sheet of paper from a recycle bin and picked up a pencil on the worktable, he watched me but didn’t comment. I jotted down details, then worked my way backward through the weeks of July, June, and May.

  In the May 8 edition I discovered a short death notice announcing Mick Sanchez’s services and burial. I turned to the first page and combed through the newspaper, but there was no mention of the accident. Figuring that the death had come as a surprise and Audrey may have needed extra time to make funeral arrangements, I searched the previous edition. On page 3, I found it.

  FATAL ACCIDENT ON SCARBOROUGH RD.

  On the rainy evening of April 27, at approximately 7:00 p.m., Miguel Sanchez lost control of his vehicle on Scarborough Road about 4.5 miles past Wist Creek Bridge. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

  The victim, on prescription medication for a heart condition for the last two years, suffered a cardiac arrest. Police believe the medical emergency precipitated the accident.

  Sanchez, known as “Mick,” came from Chincoteague, Virginia, and had been the gardener for the Fairfax family of Oyster Creek for the last 26 years. He and his wife, Audrey (nee Randolph), also a Fairfax employee, were married for 23 years and lived at the Oyster Creek estate. They had no children. His wife is his sole survivor.

  After rereading it several times, I wondered why Audrey or Joanna would have been surprised by his death. People dropped dead from heart attacks without any kind of warning, and the man was known to have a heart condition. This information was useless, just more evidence that Audrey got obsessive. Still, I copied down the essentials:

  April 27, 7 p.m., 4.5 miles / WC Bridge

  Chincoteague, VA. 23 yrs – Audrey Randolph

  26 yrs – Fairfax garden – heart condition

  Perhaps it was the way I arranged the words on the page, or perhaps there was a similarity between my mother’s handwriting and my own, but my eyes, focusing on “garden” and “heart,” suddenly saw those words on a different page. In my mother’s poem there was a garden shaped like a heart. I remembered that a snake wrapped itself around a heart of flowers, making the flowers wilt. It was a haunting image, a picture of a heart being constricted and killed—a kind of heart attack. Co
uld the poem be about Mick’s death?

  Mr. Gill had said that my mother’s failure to foresee Mick’s accident and warn Audrey had upset her. People write about things that really upset them. And she had placed the poem in her client book.

  I quickly returned the stack of newspapers to the shelf, snatched up my tea, and said a hasty good-bye to Mr. Wittstadt and Hero. I ran all the way to my car, impatient to get home and read my mother’s poem. When a psychic wrote poetry, what kind of truths were locked inside her images?

  twenty-one

  AUNT IRIS’S GOLD sedan was parked in its usual spot. Climbing out of my car, I scanned the windows of the house, wondering which room she was in. The army of cats greeted me, some mewing and rubbing against my legs as if they wanted to be fed, but when I approached the kitchen door, they backed off and slinked away.

  Entering the kitchen, I paused to listen for movement in the house. It was silent. I tiptoed to Aunt Iris’s office, eased the door open, and found the room empty. I was tempted to go straight to Uncle Will’s den and retrieve the notebook. Then a loud crash made me spin around. I ran toward the noise, through the dining room to the center hall. Aunt Iris stood in front of a mirror that hung above the phone table. Her face quivering with fury, she slammed a hammer against the glass again and again.

  “Aunt Iris!”

  With her bare fingers, she pulled at a shard of silver that remained in the corner of the frame, trying to free it. I saw a trickle of blood. She didn’t flinch.

  “Aunt Iris, stop!”

  She swung the hammer at the frame’s backing, though only the corner sliver was left.

  “Stop!”

  A large fragment of the mirror lay on the table. Seeing it, she raised her hammer and brought it down swiftly. Shards exploded, jagged pieces of glass flying everywhere.

  I stepped back into the dining room. Part of me wanted to run; the other part was afraid to leave my aunt alone. I picked up a candlestick—as if a sane person clutching a candlestick would be a match against an insane one wielding a hammer! Entering the hall again, I found her banging a small piece of glass on the corner of the table, hammering it until the fragments were glitter.

  “Stop it!” I screamed at her. “Stop it now!”

  She froze. Her eyes traveled up my right arm, and she shrank from me. “Put it down,” she said, staring at the candlestick.

  “After you put down your hammer,” I replied.

  She licked her lips. She began to whimper: “Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.” She dropped the hammer and ran upstairs.

  I set down the candlestick, surprised, and then I remembered: When my mother was killed, two candlesticks were missing, and they never found the murder weapon. My hands shook. I had to sit on the steps for a few minutes. Finally, I rose to sweep the hall. When the glass was cleaned up, I climbed the stairs to check on my aunt.

  She had left her door open and lay motionless on her bed. With the press of trees outside her window and the shades pulled, it was nearly night in her room. I tiptoed toward her.

  “Who’s there?”

  I took a half step back. “Anna. Just Anna. How are you feeling, Aunt Iris?”

  She didn’t reply. Her hands were folded and resting on her stomach. A loosely rolled towel covered her eyes.

  “Do you have a headache?” I asked.

  Still, she didn’t answer.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Make them stop,” she said. “Make them stop talking.”

  “They—who?”

  “They’re talking their fool heads off.”

  “You mean the voices?”

  “They won’t leave me alone.”

  I moved closer. “What are they saying?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Aunt Iris, what are the voices saying?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  She lay as still as death.

  “Why did you break the mirror?” I asked.

  “They were making faces at me.”

  “You mean the voices—they have faces?”

  She shuddered. “Every time I looked in the mirror, someone was making a dreadful face at me.”

  What face could she have seen except her own? I thought. But perhaps a mirror was like a psychic’s glass, a crystal ball. Perhaps she could see ghosts of the past in it.

  “Did you see someone—in the mirror—who doesn’t like you?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Maybe you saw Uncle Will. Were you and Uncle Will arguing again?”

  She remained silent. I felt as if all the answers I wanted were locked inside her head, and I couldn’t find the question to open the vault.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I want to be alone.”

  “All right. Get some rest. I’ll be downstairs.”

  I checked the other rooms for broken objects, then returned to the first floor and checked the living room. Given the number of candlesticks, heavy lamps, and knives in the house, I felt silly locking the hammer in the trunk of my car, but I would have felt even sillier if I had left it out and she used it again. Then I headed for the den, hoping that Aunt Iris would sleep for a while and give me time to study my mother’s notebook.

  I found it where I had left it, behind a row of books, and carefully unfolded the old newspaper it was wrapped in. The journal’s entries started in January of the year my mother died. While other clients were listed only once a week or once a month, appointments for the initials A.S. appeared twice a week or more. About half of the entries, which I assumed were for Audrey Sanchez, had been marked “Paid.”

  I found an appointment for A.S. two days before Mick Sanchez’s accident. An appointment that had been set for the day after the accident was scratched out. Another appointment, four days after, was also crossed out. The final listing I found for A.S. was exactly one week after Mick Sanchez’s death. It was checked off, as were other appointments that Audrey appeared to have kept. I wondered if there had been a big blowup that day.

  At some point I needed to examine the book line by line, but I was impatient to get to the poem. I carried them both to Uncle Will’s desk, sat down, and unfolded the paper to read.

  The seed cracks open, the green sprout of a plant emerges—

  a green snake.

  The snake slides past a rabbit,

  glides past a cat.

  Winding itself around flowers—

  a garden shaped like a heart—

  the snake turns to me.

  It wears a mask.

  Flowers wilt.

  I had remembered correctly the second half of the poem. The sentence structure was inverted, but “snake” was the subject—it was the snake winding itself around flowers, winding itself around a garden shaped like a heart. I imagined a heart of flowers, something like a picture on a Valentine’s Day card, being wrapped and squeezed by a snake till all the flowers wilted. But what was this “mask” thing all about? Perhaps the snake was in disguise—or rather, the snake itself was some kind of disguise. This much I understood: Whatever was killing the heart of flowers, it was not what it appeared to be.

  I backed up in the poem. The snake had come out of a seed. I imagined it looking like a green sprout from a germinating seed, but growing into a snake. So . . . so what appeared to be good was really bad. What appeared to be as harmless as an emerging flower was really an evil snake.

  I moved on to the other animals. Why had my mother bothered to include them? I stared at them, puzzled, then tried to think about the images the way an English teacher would. A rabbit was a symbol of fertility, as in the phrase “breeding like rabbits.” It was a symbol of spring, as in the Easter Bunny. Rabbits were shy, gentle, innocent-looking creatures. Cats, on the other hand, were connected with witches and often perceived as sneaky predators in the natural world. Symbolically, they were not innocent. So what did this mean? A rabbit and a cat—innocence and sneakiness, prey and predator—

  “What are you reading?”


  I jumped at the sound of Aunt Iris’s voice. She was standing a few feet from me on the other side of the desk, having entered the room as quietly as a cat.

  “Joanna, what are you doing?”

  So I was my mother again. “Checking through my appointment book,” I replied.

  She stepped closer to the desk, eyed the notebook, then picked up the sheet of paper resting on it. “What is this?”

  “A poem.”

  She read it, her face tense with concentration. Then her eyes lifted slowly above the edge of the paper, locking on mine. “You’re working,” she said accusingly. “This is a reading.”

  A reading—as in psychic reading, I thought. Maybe when a psychic saw images—in a crystal ball or anywhere else—they weren’t necessarily literal images. They weren’t photographic glimpses, but symbols, like symbols on Tarot cards, like symbols in a poem. She had to interpret what she was seeing, had to read into them the way you read into a poem. Which is what my mother was doing, jotting down and mulling over images she had accessed psychically, trying to understand Mick’s death and how she had missed foreseeing it.

  “That’s right,” I said, taking the paper from my aunt, laying it down on the book again. “I was thinking about Mick Sanchez.”

  “But it was an accident. An accident!” she insisted, then snatched the paper and book, and ran out of the room.

  I had seen the look in her eyes: one of fear. Not surprise, not anger. Fear. Of what? What didn’t she want me—Joanna—to figure out through a psychic reading?

  Her footsteps along the porch ended with the slam of a screen door. She was in the kitchen. I suddenly realized what she could do and raced after her. Entering the kitchen, I saw the stove’s blue flames leap up to the sheet of paper. It curled into a black leaf. She turned another knob on the stove, and I saw that the notebook was on the back burner. I rushed forward. Shoving her aside, I turned the greasy knob, but the book had already caught fire. I picked it up by the corner and threw it into the sink. Turning on the faucet, I let the cold water run over the book and my arm. The underside of my wrist felt burned. What was left of my mother’s book hissed into a crumpled mess.