Too Quiet in Brooklyn by Susan Russo Anderson Page A

two gardens, so where were the tools?
    Mary Ward Simon’s car, a black Mercedes with New York State vanity license plates, MWS38CP, took up most of the space. I touched the hood—stone cold—hadn’t been used in a long while.
    It felt cramped in here. Still, I’d love to have a garage like this, a luxury in Brooklyn Heights. Matter of fact, the whole house was. In the nineteenth century it was a carriage house, refurbished sometime after the war for gracious living. Now they were scarce as hen’s teeth, and I’d do almost anything for one, other than kill or rape or other bad stuff I could think of and wanted to do to some people. I stood still and breathed, trying to smell horses and thinking that things were not always what they seemed.
    I tried the car door. It opened. Digging into the front pocket of my jacket, I glommed onto a flashlight and shone it on the floor, back up to the steering column looking for keys, scrunched up good so I could look on the seats, underneath them, in the glove compartment, all around the perimeter and underneath the car itself. No purse. Nothing except for a few blades of grass, but I wasn’t with the lab. They’d find plenty, I was hoping, and I sure the heck didn’t move anything. Jane’s snarl swam into my mind.
    I popped the lock to the trunk, looked inside, and found nothing, not with my naked eye at least—no dust, no paper scraps, no nothing.
    Barbara opened the back door on the passenger side and gasped. My heart reared up, almost hitting the roof of my mouth.
    “Look,” she said, pointing with her arm, her whole body rigid.
    In the back was a child’s seat, a woman’s sweater lying on the floor and a torn piece of glossy kelly green paper, thick.
    “From the cover of Charlie’s book, I know it.” Barbara reached out to grab it.
    “Don’t touch it. Let’s leave everything. Crime scene techs has sophisticated ways of lifting prints. Let’s let them find it. But would Charlie tear the cover off a book like that?”
    She shook her head back and forth several times. It looked like she was holding her breath because her face became flushed. “He loves his books. Takes good care of them. And this one’s special. He’d never tear the cover or the pages of this one.”
    “He’s too young to read, I guess.”
    She nodded. “He’s beginning to sound out letters. They teach them in pre-school.”
    “So we know there was a struggle, or at least a change of plans,” I said, taking out my phone and snapping a few pictures. A little too dark, but I could lighten them in iPhoto.
    Barbara cupped her forehead. She was still for a moment and I could almost see her grief, a thick field of smog wrapping her like a cloak, enveloping the air around her, and drowning out everything else. It was deep, honest. I felt like a rat for doubting her.
    While there was still some light, I told her I wanted to explore the back yard, trying for the most gentle sound to my voice, and found a side door leading to the garden.
    Outside the evening was beginning to cool and the back of the house was fenced and lovely, that time of year before mosquitos. It was a shade garden and small like most outdoor patches in the Heights. This one was neat and trim, with a miniature blue spruce in one corner, good spacing in between the plants, a potted blue oat grass, and some higher grasses I didn’t know the names of. In the middle was a small patch of grass, thick and newly mown, a Japanese maple on the other side, a few ferns, some alum root, lamb’s ear and a clump of lavender edging the beds. In the far corner, half hidden by the spruce, was a small tool shed where Mary Ward Simon must have kept the garden supplies. It was locked and Barbara said she didn’t have the key with her, so I made a note to return and get into that shed. I bent down to take a deep breath, but still smelled that faint odor of cordite. There were stones around the borders, a slate patio close to the house with a round