Dear Irene

“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were red. He still looked shaken.

“Nothing to be ashamed of, Steven. This is worse than I thought it would be. Why don’t you sit down for a minute? I’ll bring in some boxes and you can work on the far end of the bookcase until you feel better.”

“It’s not fair to you,” he said, but sank down onto the couch, his eyes averted from the desk. “You didn’t even know her.”

“That’s exactly why it will be easier for me to deal with the worst of it. I won’t throw anything away, I’ll just box it up. Then you can deal with it a little at a time, as you’re able to.”

If you’re ever able to, I thought. And I wouldn’t blame him if that day never came. I got him started on his part of the task, then went to the other end of the room. I moved the calendar off the desk and set it aside. I figured the desk was the worst place in the office, and I wanted to spare Steven as much as possible.

Blood-soaked papers were stuck to the desktop. Once I had gingerly peeled them off, the surface of the desk was not so bad. A neatly clipped stack of phone message slips caught my attention. At first I thought they might be recent calls, but then I saw that some of them were quite faded. The slips were in alphabetical order, and dates on them ranged over several years.

“It was her informal system,” Steven said, seeing me reading them. “They aren’t personal friends or people she contacted often – those names and numbers are in her Rolodex.” He glanced over the desktop, then turned away from it. “I guess the police took that,” he said, not very steadily. “The message slips are resource people. Librarians and researchers, archivists and curators that helped her with specialized research.”

“Such as her research on war workers?” I asked, concentrating now on the notes Edna Blaylock had written on the bottom half of each slip.

“Maybe,” he said. He was sitting on the couch again, looking pale.

“Mind if I keep any that look interesting?”

He shook his head.

“Are you all right?”

He managed an unconvincing smile. “I will be in a minute, I think.”

One of the slips was for a man named Hobson Devoe. The name itself drew my attention, but after I read the words Knew Mom at the bottom, I pocketed it.

I looked over at Steven. He had gone back to work at his end of the room, the worst apparently having passed.

I stuffed all of the contents of the desktop into one box, then closed and labeled it with a black marking pen I found in a pencil jar. For a moment, I registered surprise that there was no picture of Steven on the desk or on any of the nearby shelves, but then I remembered that theirs was a very private relationship.

That thought led to the decision to let him be the one to go through the desk drawers; despite a niggling curiosity, somehow, I didn’t want to invade Edna Blaylock’s privacy in that way. I figured Frank’s crew had probably already been over it with a fine-tooth comb anyway. I started grabbing books from the shelves that had the worst staining.

As much to keep my mind off this grisly task as anything, I asked Steven about his family, his childhood, his interests in history. We were almost finished by the time I had learned his life story. Talking seemed to relax him a little. He even started working on the desk drawers. He asked me about how I got started in journalism, and my work. He shyly ventured to ask if I was seeing anyone, and I told him about Frank. He remembered meeting Frank.

“I liked him. He was very considerate,” he said. But that had brought us back to homicide. He opened a desk drawer and was very quiet all of a sudden. I looked over to see him holding a red candlestick – or rather, the inch or so that remained of a candlestick – in his right palm. Tears were streaming down his face.

“From a special evening?” I asked.

He nodded. “Our first. I asked her to save it. I didn’t think she had.” He drew in a breath, then covered his eyes with his left hand. I put a hand on his shoulder and he broke down completely. I’ve seen men cry before, but it wasn’t the sight of him crying that was so hard to take. It was a soft sound he tried hard to hide, the kind of sobbing sound a person sometimes makes when he realizes that no matter how long he waits, the one he loved will never again share a knowing smile or call his name from another room or weigh the bed down beside him.

He got up after a while and tucked the candle carefully into his pocket, then went off to wash his face. I finished packing up the last of the books and stuff from the desk drawers while he was gone.

“What kind of car do you have?” I asked when he returned.

“A pickup truck.”

“Thank God,” I said, looking around at the stacks of boxes. We had managed to fill all of them.

“I feel bad about making you do all of this,” he said. “You-”

“I know, I know, I didn’t even know her. I know you. Now I even know the name of your elementary school. You’ll just have to accept my help. You’re saving me from having to buy indulgences.”

“I can’t picture you being much of a si

I thought of the string of blasphemies I had uttered down in the basement of the Express that very morning and laughed. “Don’t make me confess,” I said.

I was relieved to learn there was an elevator in the building, and we used it to haul the boxes down to his truck. When the last one was loaded in, he turned to me and said, “I won’t ever be able to repay you for this. But I won’t ever forget it, either. Thank you, Irene.” He gave me a quick hug and drove off before I could tell him he didn’t owe me a thing.

It wasn’t until I got home and had sat around for an hour or two that I realized I had really overdone it. My hand was especially loud in protesting, my shoulder not far behind. I put on some soft music and tried to relax. I changed into one of Frank’s pajama tops, which came to just above my knees, and crawled onto the couch to wait for him. I tried not to think about what hurt.

When he hadn’t made it by midnight, I put ice on the hand. Still it throbbed. I finally broke down and took a painkiller. It had been a few weeks since I had taken one and I had forgotten how powerful they were. I conked out on the couch.

I don’t know how long I had slept when I felt a draft of cold air. It was dark in the living room, and I was still very drowsy. A little later, I felt a pair of strong arms lifting me carefully from the couch and murmured, “You’re home.” He carried me into the bedroom and tucked me under the covers. I heard him walking back out of the room and fell asleep waiting for him to get into bed.

Later, I finally heard him undressing. “Frank?”

“Sorry, I was trying not to wake you.”

“Thanks for tucking me in.”

“What?”

Something fell into place then. Some gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. I reached over and turned on the light.

There was a jar of ants sitting on the nightstand.