Free Accustomed to the Dark by Walter Satterthwait Page B

were no dishes in the rack beside the sink. Sylvia had tidied up before she left.
    So did I. I lifted the wash towel that hung from a hook attached to the refrigerator, and I used it to wipe off the prints I’d left.
    Carrying the towel in my left hand, the pistol in my right, I moved from the kitchen into the tiny dining room. The light filtering through the lace curtains was dim, like light at the bottom of an ancient well. There was a scent of lemon oil and pine in the air, but lying not far beneath those was a musty smell, a smell I associated with maiden aunts and dried flowers.
    Atop the dark hardwood floor, four mahogany cabriolet dining chairs stood rigidly at attention around a shiny mahogany table. The table was draped diagonally with a scallop-hemmed lace tablecloth, and perched in the exact center of that was a mahogany bowl piled with wax fruit. I wiped the towel lightly along one of the apples. No dust.
    The living room was the same. Murky light, the smell of lemon and must. Embroidered throw rugs, an upholstered brown sofa, square mahogany end tables supporting shiny brass reading lamps shaded with parchment. A plump leather club chair aimed comfortably toward an old boxy television console. I had the feeling that if I turned on the TV, it would be playing The Honey-mooners .
    Beneath the window ran a low, glass-fronted mahogany bookcase that held what looked like every Reader’s Digest Condensed Book ever published. Positioned in the center of the lace runner that protected the top of the bookcase was a framed black-and-white photograph. A man, a woman, a young boy, a young girl, all in their Sunday best, standing out on a lawn, a thick hedge forming a backdrop. Probably the hedge that surrounded the house.
    The woman, in her early thirties, slight and short and wiry, grasped the girl’s hand in her right, the boy’s in her left. The boy was looking up toward her, expectantly, his mouth parted. The girl was staring at the camera, and the expression on her round bland face was unreadable. The woman was gazing steadily in the same direction with a smile that seemed fixed and maybe a little forced. A long-ago breeze was ruffling her permed dark hair and fluting the hem of her white summer dress.
    The man stood apart. Stocky and powerful, he wore a dark two-piece suit and a dark tie. His arms were crossed over his chest and his heavy jaw was upraised, as though his patience with all this were beginning to wear thin.
    Presumably the children were Sylvia and Ronny Miller, and the adults were their parents.
    It didn’t look like a happy family to me. Everyone in it seemed somehow isolated from everyone else.
    But maybe I was reading too much into a single photograph, a single moment snipped from a long history of moments.
    I glanced around. There were no other photographs in the room, no pictures on the ivory-colored walls. No knickknacks anywhere. No magazines on the end tables. No books other than those trapped behind their glass cage.
    It was the kind of house that seemed to be designed not for inhabitants, but for custodians and curators. I got the feeling that it had been kept this spotless and sterile for years.
    I set down the photograph and I went down the hallway.
    In the master bedroom there was a big brass double bed, a mahogany dresser, a walk-in closet crowded with clothing and the smell of camphor. The right half held a man’s clothes, the left half held a woman’s. All of them had been manufactured before the eighties. If Sylvia Miller lived alone, and I believed she did, then these topcoats and suits and dresses and frocks must have belonged to her parents.
    In the small adjoining bathroom, on the counter beside the sink, someone had arranged, carefully and recently, a man’s toilet items—an old Gillette safety razor, a badger-bristle brush, a round cake of cracked shaving soap nestling on a wooden plate. They looked like relics in a shrine, and they made me