Running across spongy earth to get home was new to Amedeo. In his former life, he had always been a city child. He had ridden city buses to get to school and an elevator to get home.
Amedeo was a late-in-life child. His mother had had a whole life and a whole other marriage before he had come along. Her first marriage was short-lived and childless and she referred to it as “training wheels.” Although Amedeo bore his father’s surname, Kaplan, his mother continued to use not her first married name but her maiden name, Loretta Bevilaqua, professionally. His mother was an attorney by training, an executive by temperament. She described herself as a navigator. At work or home it was Loretta who determined direction, altitude, and speed. She was and always had been the principal breadwinner and decision maker in the family.
Jacob Kaplan—Jake—was the pretty one. He was an artist. Laid back and younger than his wife, he made a lot less money, so Jake was the family steward: He checked safety and offered comfort.
Being an only child and the sole passenger, Amedeo spent a lot of time in the company of adults, safely buckled in.
After her divorce from Jake, Infinitel offered Loretta Bevilaqua another promotion. This one involved relocating. Cell phones were on the cusp of becoming a major means of telephone communication, and Infinitel wanted Loretta Bevilaqua to transfer to Florida to buy land so that the company could build towers that would allow them to blanket the state with cell phone signals.
When Amedeo learned that his mother was moving them to Florida, he thought he would have to give up his major dream: to discover something.
He didn’t expect to be a star explorer like Columbus or Magellan, men who set out with a mission and who had sponsors and whose names are as important as their discoveries. He simply wanted to find something that had been lost, something that people didn’t even know was lost until it was found—by him.
When Amedeo was in the fourth grade, the owner of a farm near his mother’s hometown of Epiphany, New York, was draining a swamp and discovered a mastodon tusk sticking out of the ground. The farmer immediately cordoned off the area and invited scholars from nearby Clarion State University to help with the excavation. By the time they finished, they had uncovered the complete skeleton of a fifteen-thousand-year-old mastodon. With that discovery only two hundred miles away, Amedeo wondered if any Ice Age wonders could be concealed beneath the skyscrapers of his hometown, New York City. And that is when he joined the Backyard Explorers, an after-school club. There were not many backyards to explore in his neighborhood, but his group went on field trips to the American Museum of Natural History twice a year, and in between they learned about real backyard explorers.
Some of the stories involved boys who were not much older than he was. There was a famous true story of a young Bedouin shepherd who followed a stray goat into a cave in the Judean desert, where he found clay jars filled with ancient writings that turned out to be copies of the Bible that had not been seen for two thousand years. Those were the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. There was also the story of the four French boys who went for a walk one day and fell into a hole in the ground and found that the hole was the opening to a cave that had walls covered with paintings not seen for seventeen thousand years. That hole was the famous cave of Lascaux.
To find mysterious writings would be even more wonderful than finding a mastodon tusk, but when Amedeo learned that his mother was moving them to Florida, he thought he would have to give up his dream. What chance was there of discovering something in a state that has in its geographic center a Disney-designated Discovery Island that is itself in the middle of a designated Adventureland with a ticket booth at its entrance and a gift shop at its exit? What chance was there of discovering something in a state where every square inch of real estate has been explored and/or exploited or was soon to be purchased by his mother for cell phone towers?
Amedeo’s mother explained that St. Malo was not Disney-Orlando, and it was not condo-Miami. St. Malo was in the north, in the part of Florida that had once been settled by the French. Amedeo decided that French was good.
And so was the place on Mandarin Road.
There were only two houses on their side of the street. Both properties reached from the river to the road, and the length of two football fields separated them. Built at the same time, the houses were fraternal twins. Theirs was Mediterranean, the other Italianate. Both houses had been built on the bank of a scenic curve of the St. Malo River, and the surrounding untamed natural wilderness kept them hidden from public view.
The grounds around their house were shabby. Wornout, overgrown shabby. The driveway had broken chunks of concrete that had levered up like tectonic plates, and the lawn was a camouflage pattern of brown, black, and green: chinch bugs, fungus, and weeds. The house itself was hidden behind overgrown shrubs. Within the house, the walls were damp, and the floor warped. In one of the bedrooms, the mildew behind the wallpaper had seeped through in a mysterious pattern that Amedeo thought of as hieroglyphs. Cobwebs in the laundry room hung like hammocks, and even they had accumulated dust. The glass in the windows facing the river was as wavy as the lens of a cheap telescope and as pitted as a shower door.
The house stood close to the spot where the French had built a fort in the 1500s.
Amedeo remembered that it was a French soldier in Napoleon’s army who found the Rosetta Stone while digging in an old fort in Egypt. And the boys who discovered the cave of Lascaux were French.
St. Malo could be all right.
As soon as she bought the property, Loretta hired an array of architects, contractors, and interior designers, and for a full year their place on Mandarin Road became a construction site complete with not one but two portable toilets in the front yard.
By the time Amedeo and his mother moved in, every square foot of the lawn—front and back—was manicured. Every shrub was pruned, every tree coifed, and every corner of the house was endlessly decorated. The house sparkled. The pool, enlarged and retiled, sparkled too.
There were no sidewalks. Except for the occasional UPS or FedEx truck, the neighborhood streets were empty. There was an occasional runner, but no one seemed to walk anywhere.
Theirs was a pristine, lovely house in a pristine, lonely neighborhood.
Maybe because St. Malo was flat instead of vertical, maybe because Mrs. Zender had been part of the neighborhood for a long time, or maybe because the neighbors whose houses sparkled—they all did—resented the fact that Mrs. Zender’s house did not, people talked. Between the time Amedeo Kaplan used her turquoise princess dial-up phone and the time he stepped off the bus into a cloud of lovebugs, Amedeo had heard enough of Mrs. Zender’s story to know he wanted to know more.
Aida Lily Tull had once been the richest girl in town. Her father, Aloysius Harding Tull the Third, and his father before him, Aloysius Harding Tull the Second, had owned hundreds of acres of timberland all over north Florida and south Georgia. They also owned the paper mill. They were called the AlTulls, and until just after World War II, half the people in St. Malo worked for the AlTulls.
AlTull the Third married Vittoria de Capua. She was from Italy. No one asked from where in Italy. It could have been Rome, or it could have been Rimini. It didn’t matter. She was Italian, and she was beautiful, and she spoke three of the Romance languages. Rumors were started that she was a duchess. The rumors were never substantiated nor denied.
AlTull built the big house on the river for her. It was the biggest and fanciest, most up-to-date house in St. Malo, and Mrs. AlTull the Third soon became a town legend. She was extravagant. People whispered that she had the undersides of her shoes polished and couldn’t abide sleeping on sheets that had been folded. Contour sheets had not yet been invented, so the maids would iron her sheets flat and carry them like a tarpaulin to the bed and tuck them in with hospital corners. But she was beautiful, and she spoke three Romance languages.
In St. Malo, Vittoria de Capua Tull was a duchess.
No one saw much of Aida
Lily as she was growing up. She went to a private school in St. Malo for only a few years, and a chauffeur drove her there and back. After school she had private lessons—voice and piano and Italian—so she never played with other kids. It was the era of the notorious Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and Aida Lily’s mother, the duchess, said that she was guarding her daughter for fear of kidnappers.
Aida Lily became a mystery; famous but hidden.
When Aida Lily was about ten, she was sent to boarding school in New England and spent her summers with the duchess in Europe until World War II put an end to leisure travel.
Meanwhile, AlTull was making a fortune. The mills were manufacturing corrugated cardboard for boxes, and during the war, everything from food rations to toilet paper needed a box. Plastic for packaging did not come in until after the war.
Aida Lily Tull graduated from boarding school, but she was never presented to St. Malo society even though generations of AlTull women had always been prime debutante material. Her mother was Italian, and it was rumored that the duchess once said that the so-called debutantes never did much besides entertain each other at luncheons of iced tea and avocado salad, and everyone in St. Malo knew that Vittoria de Capua Tull served wine at luncheons even if the guests were young and debutantes.
Without making her debut, Aida Lily went off to Rochester, New York, to train as an opera singer.
St. Malo society never lost interest in the duchess or the family Tull and several years after what would have been her debut, those three words, Aida Lily Tull, began to appear regularly in the newspaper. Every week the Vindicator seemed to carry an article on the front page of the Features section about Aida Lily Tull. The newspaper always referred to her as our local diva.
Most of Aida Lily Tull’s career in opera took place in Europe. After World War II, before rock-and-roll hit the charts, the continent had many small, first-rate companies, and towns no bigger than St. Malo had opera houses. Aida Lily Tull never made it to any of the famous opera houses like La Scala in Milan or the Garnier in Paris, but she had a solid career in the first row of the second section. She toured with excellent small companies in towns all over Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Then Aida Lily Tull married Mr. Zender and moved back to St. Malo and lived in the big house on Mandarin Road and news about our local diva stopped.
Amedeo couldn’t wait.
As soon as he changed his clothes, he would be back. He would once again be inside Mrs. Zender’s pneumatic music-filled house.
He flung himself through his front door, skirted around the kitchen, and started toward his room. His mother, who was on the phone, quickly hung up and asked, “What’s happened?”
Amedeo kept walking as he tried to explain that he had to change clothes because he was going over to Mrs. Zender’s to help Mrs. Wilcox manage the sale of her estate.
“Whose estate?”
“Mrs. Zender’s.”
“I didn’t know Mrs. Zender was moving. There isn’t even a FOR SALE sign out front.”
“She is definitely moving. The rugs are already rolled.”
“Rolled rugs don’t necessarily mean she is moving. She could be having them cleaned.” Then his mother stopped, thought a minute, and said, “I’ve seen her place. Having them cleaned is not a possibility, is it?” Amedeo laughed, and his mother asked, “Where is she moving to?”
“Waldorf Court.”
“And where is that?”
“I don’t know where it is. It’s some retirement home she’s cranky about having to move to. There is a Mrs. Wilcox who is liquidating Mrs. Zender’s estate, and her son, William, invited me to help with the sale.”
“He invited you?”
“After I asked him to.”
Amedeo’s mother followed him into the bedroom. “I think I should meet this Mrs. Wilcox.”
“I don’t think you have to,” he said as he pulled off his shirt. “She’s nice. She’s just like Mrs. Vanderwaal.”
“Peter’s mother?”
“Yeah. She calls everyone dear. William told me to change clothes, but I think it’ll be all right to wear these jeans over there, don’t you?”
“Yes,” his mother answered. “What time will you be back?”
“I don’t know. I think I’ll be going over there every day for a while.”
“Every day?”
“If you’ve seen Mrs. Zender’s house, you know there is a lot to do.” His mother hesitated. As much as he didn’t want to take time to explain, Amedeo understood that after-school visits were not something she was used to. In New York, visits with kids had involved a lot of scheduling: drop-offs and pickups. Even after he was old enough to get to and from school without an escort, there had never been anything spontaneous about his after-school friendships.
Amedeo pleaded, “Mother, this is something I definitely want to do. It’s like Backyard Explorers. It will keep me busy after school, and you won’t have to rush home from work. I’ll be fine. There’s a phone over there if you need to get me. Mother, please.”
After another moment’s thought, his mother said okay, and Amedeo was out the door.
He went around back and knocked on the kitchen door.
William called, “It’s open.”
And Amedeo said, “Yes!” and to himself he added another Yes!
William was on a ladder reaching into the top shelf of one of the cupboards. “It’ll be a big help if I can hand you this stuff and not have to climb back down the ladder with each armful.”
“Where shall I put them?”
“On the countertops, the table, the stove—on any surface that doesn’t wobble.”
William waited patiently until Amedeo had safely placed and balanced whatever had been handed to him before turning back to the cabinet he was emptying. There was so much stuff—so much—that it didn’t take long for all the surfaces to be covered with stacks of dishes and cups on saucers. Amedeo asked, “What shall I do now?”
“Consolidate. Stack all the dinner plates on top a one another if they’re the same pattern. Same with the saucers and so forth. Then make some nests with the cups. Soon’s we get these top shelves empty, I’ll come down and help.”
Amedeo waited until they were both at ground level and had empty hands before asking.
“How did Mrs. Zender find your mother?”
“The Yellow Pages.”
William sat down on the second rung from the bottom of the ladder. His legs were so long that even sitting on the second step his knees were steeply bent. William had started what Amedeo would soon learn was one of his customary long pauses when Mrs. Zender burst through the swinging door of the kitchen. “It’s extremely warm today,” she said. “I’m keeping a bottle of champagne cooling in the refrigerator.”
She handed William her empty champagne flute, and without further instructions he went to the refrigerator and filled her glass. Mrs. Zender took it but didn’t leave. She asked Amedeo, “Do you know that the famous Yellow Pages do not have an index?”
She had been listening.
“No,” Amedeo answered. “I’ve never used the Yellow Pages myself. Sometimes my mother would look up the phone number of a restaurant, but she never used them for anything important.”
Mrs. Zender said, “In my considerable experience, the phone number of a restaurant is not unimportant. Every conversation I have ever had in New York City either begins or ends with a discussion of real estate or restaurants.” She lifted her glass but stopped it short of her lips. “I was thankful that the categories are listed alphabetically.” She raised high her arm holding her champagne and said, “I toast the good Lord for inventing the alphabet.” She took a drink and added, “Although I am not certain He wants credit for what I found under the letter E. The good Lord”—she lifted her eyes and her glass toward the ceiling—“knows I am not a prude, but I was shocked at what I found there: Errand Service—RENT A WIFE: Let Us Organize Your Space and Your Life. And Escort Service—EXECUTIVE ESCORTS:
Major Credit Cards Accepted. I say the world as it ought to be has come to an end.”
Amedeo said, “My mother is an executive.”
“Exactly!” Mrs. Zender said. “Executives are not what they used to be.”
“Where in the Yellow Pages did you find Mrs. Wilcox?” Amedeo asked.
“Under the letter E,” Mrs. Zender said, and swept out of the room, holding her champagne glass in one hand and pushing the door open with the other.
When the door had swung shut, William smiled shyly. “Ma is under E for Estates—Appraisals & Sales.” He opened the drawer beneath the counter, where the turquoise princess phone rested. He took out the phone book and leafed through the pages before handing the opened book to Amedeo. Near the center of the page he pointed to a small boxed ad.
Dora Ellen Wilcox
Appraisals and Estate Liquidation International Society of Appraisers
William waited until he was sure that Amedeo had focused. “Ma’s name rang a bell,” he said. “That’s what did it. The name Dora Ellen Wilcox did it. Mrs. Zender remembered an article in the St. Malo Vindicator.”
Amedeo took the prompt. “What was the article about?”
William tipped his ear to the angel on his shoulder and told Amedeo the story of how his mother had sold a Chinese silk screen to the Freer Gallery.
Amedeo asked, “Do you mean that your mother found something that actually belongs in a museum?”
“Bought it. She bought it from the Birchfield estate. Then resold it.”
“Was it very old?”
William nodded. “Hundreds of years old. About the time of Marco Polo.”
“But she did discover it, didn’t she?”