Free Too Quiet in Brooklyn by Susan Russo Anderson Page B

subcategories and in alphabetical order. No garbage underneath the sink or in waste baskets, nothing to suggest any of the rooms had been used since the last cleaning except for one shelf in the library, a small den off the living room filled with children’s books. Three or four were lying flat. One was upside-down. The shelf looked messy by comparison with the rest of the house.
    Barbara stared at the bookshelf, wiping her eyes. “It’s gone.”
    “What?” I asked as I picked up the receiver, popped in the three magic digits. In a second I retrieved Mary Ward Simon’s home phone number and scribbled it in my book.
    “Charlie’s favorite book, The Giving Tree.”
    She leaned against the case, an arm over her eyes, rocking slightly back and forth.
    “Not much time,” I said, taking a breath. Better right now to keep her moving, give her work to do, but I liked Charlie already. Any child whose favorite book was The Giving Tree was my kind of kid.
    As we climbed the stairs, I said, “Don’t think that we’re forgetting about Charlie, not for one second. Charlie’s disappearance is directly related to your mother’s death, I’ll bet my house on it. The way to find Charlie is to find your mother’s killer. The closer we are to catching him, the closer we are to finding your boy.” I might have made a leap there, but I didn’t think so. The chances of two simultaneous catastrophic events happening to one person was slim indeed.
    That brought a response I was unprepared for, Barbara hugged me. “I’m so glad I found you.”
    “Let’s get Charlie back first, then you can thank me. Right now we’ve got to find you more tissues.”
    My head felt light, perhaps a reaction to the stuffiness of the house, or maybe the bruise to my eye. She crossed the landing into the master suite and came out with the box of tissues.
    I glanced inside the bathroom. It was spotless. “Wonder what service cleans your mother’s house.”
    “She does it all herself. She doesn’t want anyone …” She stopped. “Didn’t want anyone touching her things. She was a CPA. When I was young, she worked for one of those big firms in Manhattan. Specialized in forensic accounting and had a heavy schedule, but after she retired, she still got a lot of work, too much she told me last week, but she couldn’t resist it when old clients would ask for her. Even when Dad was alive and she worked seventy, eighty hours a week, she still managed to do her own cleaning and cooking. Her gym, I guess.”
    “Did she have a cell phone?”
    Barbara nodded. “Probably in her purse.”
    While Barbara talked, I looked into all the cabinet drawers. Everything neat, cosmetics and one bottle of perfume, Chanel No. 5, displayed on the counter, no dust, no stray hairs, not even on the brush. The only medicine, other than a tube of bacitracin, a box of Spider Man adhesive bandages, and a child’s liquid aspirin, was a generic medicine taken for high blood pressure.
    In the bedroom, I said, “I’d love to go through the documents in that desk, but the police should be here any minute. Is there something you know about, an address book, a diary, files, something that would tell me about her?”
    Barbara opened the desk. It was antique chestnut, I think, and in beautiful condition. Lots of cubby holes. She must have known all about her mother’s affairs. Barbara didn’t hesitate, but reached into the middle drawer and handed me three items, a MacBook Pro, a check book, and a folder with a picture of the Plymouth Church on the cover.
    “My mother was the chairperson of the women’s ministry at her church. I don’t know that much about what they do, but it’s charity of some sort. When I was growing up and my father was alive, we lived closer to the church, but as a young adult, I opted out, a source of disagreement between my mother and me, I can tell you. It all seems so petty now.”
    I nodded.
    She riffled through the folder, took out a page, opened