The Tiger in the House Read online

  “You call him Moretti. He gave me instructions to call him Mike. What do you have going on this weekend?” he asked.

  “My sister has a new catering job. She wants me to help her later in the day,” she said. “How about you?”

  “Oh, Marie probably has something cooked up for us to do.”

  At least one of them was lying. Ira folded up his map and waved a good-bye to Delia.

  CHAPTER 21

  Delia was not on call with Foster Services, and she knew exactly where she was going the moment she woke on Saturday. She was up before the sunrise, checking the Web page of the library in West Hartford to see what time they opened on Saturday. Nine a.m. MapQuest said the drive would take four hours.

  If she left at six, she’d arrive at the library while the staff was still fresh and sparkly. She and Ira left a message with Moretti with their most recent speculations regarding Hayley’s fear of tigers. Could the Lillian Tiger Library be too thin of a thread? Coincidental and unrelated?

  Moisture from the ocean rode in on the warm air of the last summer days. Soon enough, the windows would be closed, but now, the windows hadn’t been pulled shut for months, and Delia took a moment to breathe it all in; the last cup of coffee, a few bread crumbs on her plate from the toast, the heel of a loaf she’d baked two days ago in a fit of self-soothing. Her cell phone rang and Ira’s special tone, a chirping cricket, jarred her. Why was he calling so early? Why was he calling at all?

  “Delia, you’re going to West Hartford, aren’t you? My Delia Lamont radar was ticking all last night. Stop and pick me up. I’m coming with you,” he said.

  The man could see inside her brain, and she didn’t like it. She picked up her car keys.

  “Okay, maybe I was thinking about it,” she said.

  “You’re on your way out the door, I can hear the car keys jangling. I’m coming with you.” Click.

  Could she say no to him? He was still her boss and he was as tuned in to Hayley as she was. She rearranged her spine, letting go of the solo adventure, switching over to Ira sitting next to her for the four-hour drive. She filled another water bottle. That man was not going to dehydrate in her car.

  They were on the road south by six thirty. She had showered. Ira had not, and he smelled like a more condensed version of himself than his work week self. It was always better if she kept her heightened sense of smell to herself.

  For the first hour and a half, they flowed through the light traffic. The sun was muted by a thin layer of clouds. By ten thirty they were on the outskirts of Hartford.

  “Who would want to be known as the insurance capital?” said Delia, adjusting the air in the car, turning the air conditioner up one notch. The city skyline loomed in front of them with the Connecticut River on their left.

  “They could have been the Colt Single Action Gun capital,” said Ira. “They had that going for them too.” He tapped his fingers along the window. “By the way, I installed an app on my phone last night, Google Maps or some such thing. But I have the real map with me just in case.”

  Ira’s phone app guided them to West Hartford and finally to Cleveland Avenue where the solid nineteenth-century library sat.

  “Stop for a minute before you pull in; I want to find the hardware store. Just pull over,” he said.

  “You bet I’m pulling over. I had to pee about an hour ago. I’m parking in the back,” said Delia as she swung the car into the driveway that promised free parking for library patrons.

  Ira craned his head around. “Okay. Oh, there it is.”

  Delia didn’t want to spare any extraneous movement that was not related to peeing. She parked the car and made a rapid march to the front door of the library.

  “I’ll catch up,” he shouted to her.

  Delia loved libraries that didn’t hide their bathrooms. She saw the sign immediately after she pulled on the brass handles to the front doors.

  * * *

  Ira caught up with Delia in the nonfiction section. Biographies: political, corporate, religious, literary. Delia had blasted her way through college, ripping through the courses that led directly to graduate school and to a job. By the time she was twenty-four, she was employed full time. Prior to that, she’d worked part time with Foster Services while she hammered out her graduate degree. She had Juniper to consider in all of her career choices. She didn’t pause to read fiction, not often, anyway. All of that could change. Now she wanted to sink into a bathtub and read a story. She rubbed her pointer finger along the spine of a book. She pictured a time in her future when she could meander through the stacks in Longfellow Books in Portland.

  “What did you find out at the hardware store?” asked Delia, opening a copy of Obama’s prepresidential story of growing up with his grandparents and single mother.

  “I showed Hayley’s photo to two clerks, and no one remembered her. Maybe she was never in the store.”

  “What was it that the police said? Were there security cameras in the hardware store? Aren’t there cameras everywhere?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but let’s check with Mike when we return.”

  Delia and Ira had never been together in a library before. Why would they? They worked together for years, but there was no reason for them to cruise a library together. She felt misaligned, uneasy.

  “When we get back home, our first stop needs to be the police station. If heroin was coming through Hartford and if these two buildings were a regular part of the route, we are now officially out of our area of expertise. Let them look at security footage,” he said.

  Only operate within your area of experience and expertise. This was drilled into the trainees during graduate school, and now Delia felt far from her area of knowing anything.

  But they didn’t leave the Lillian Tiger Library. They sat in the periodicals section on the beige couch. They walked up a broad staircase to the second floor trying to see why a small child might have been warned off this library by Emma Gilbert. Why Emma told her never to go inside.

  They came to the corner of the library designated for audio books and DVDs. She tugged on Ira’s shirtsleeve and whispered, “If you were transporting, let’s say, ten thousand dollars worth of heroin and needed a drop-off place that would look totally innocent, invisible, wouldn’t a library be a perfect location?”

  Ira’s eyes darted around the room, refocusing. “City libraries are a respite place for homeless people. They come in during the day when they are booted out of the shelters. People need to use computers to find work. They use the bathrooms to clean up. They could provide a screen for people dropping off and picking up drugs. What I mean is, a lot of transient people now use libraries as a home base, making it perfect. Who would suspect one more unknown person coming through to use a clean bathroom?”

  Delia walked to the checkout counter for the DVDs. “Do you have a children’s section?” she asked. The young man behind the desk was thin with black-rimmed glasses, skinny jeans.

  “Garden level,” he said. “You can take the elevator.”

  Delia and Ira walked down the two flights of stairs and emerged into the children’s level. The area smelled slightly of mold and cleanser. Small chairs, miniature couches, a riot of colors and banners. On the checkout desk was a colorful stuffed tiger, abundantly large, bespectacled with tortoiseshell rims. Around its neck hung a sign that said, LILLY THE TIGER LIKES TO READ. HOW ABOUT YOU?

  She grabbed Ira’s arm, then quickly let go, remembering the scars along his forearm. “She was here, I know it. Or Emma Gilbert was here.”

  Ira tapped a little bell on the counter. A woman stood up who must have been deep into the lower shelves behind the counter. She was young, with hair shaved on both sides, counterpointed by a clump of bleached blond hair that draped over one eye.

  “Can I help you?”

  Ira slid open the envelope with Hayley’s photo.

  “I was wondering if you recall seeing this child. We’re with foster care in Maine, and we’re trying
to locate any family members.”

  She looked at the photo and shook her head. “I only started working here a few days ago. There was a volunteer librarian before me, but she left. And she wasn’t the world’s best librarian either. The place is a disaster.”

  Ira put the tips of his fingers on Delia’s arm, like hitting the pause button on the universal remote.

  “Thanks for your help,” he said to the young woman.

  They headed for the stairs. “This just went beyond our know-how,” he said. “I’m calling Mike. He needs to know about the library.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Delia drove northeast on 84 until they hit the Mass Pike, then north toward Maine. The sun sliced along Delia’s left shoulder, making her sweat by the time they crossed over into New Hampshire. She’d had a one-hour reprieve driving east on the Mass Pike, but now she was in for a long, slow bake until they hit Portland.

  She turned up the air conditioning one notch.

  “I’m freezing over here,” said Ira. “Can we settle on cool and not cold?”

  “Close the air vents on your side. Or put your jacket on.”

  “My nose is cold. I can’t put a jacket on my nose. Maybe I should drive the rest of the way so I can warm up,” he said, and cupped one hand around his nose for emphasis.

  They had called Mike Moretti and left a message for him at the station. After speculating about people using the children’s section of the library as a drop-off for drug trafficking, they still had no idea how Hayley figured into the picture. Delia was talked out, left with buzzing images that made no sense about a trio of adults running drugs with a totally unrelated child with them.

  Delia pulled into the first stop in New Hampshire, the state liquor store that sold tax-free liquor. The parking lot hummed with a steady flow of cars, people pulling in with expectations of saving lots of money and leaving with shopping carts full of beer, wine, and hard liquor, and monster bills on their credit cards.

  “Do you want to go in?” asked Delia. She stepped out of her car, feeling blood start to move through her legs again. She flopped over in a forward bend, letting her head dangle.

  “No, thanks. I’ll wait for my favorite cabernet to go on sale in Portland. Maine can have my tax dollars.” He slipped into the driver’s seat.

  They had decided that they would land on Mike’s doorstep on Monday morning and hammer away at the link that Emma Gilbert and possibly Hayley had been in the Lillian Tiger Library in West Hartford. Delia’s first priority was the child, and she was pretty sure that the first priority of the police was the murderer, followed by Hayley.

  “How is your dating experiment going? That is what you called it, isn’t it?” asked Ira, easing the car out of the liquor mega market.

  For once Delia welcomed Ira’s peek into her love life. Any topic would be a relief after the immersion into Hayley’s baffling origins. She opened the plastic air vents on her side of the car so that the cool air pointed directly at her.

  “I wish I lived during a time period when people still met each other in vivo and not through the wisdom of computer algorithms.” She slid off her shoes and pulled one knee up, wrapping her arms around her shin and resting the side of her face on her knee as she looked at Ira. She figured he had about thirty minutes of warming up and then he’d be as roasted as she was.

  “So the Match.com dates didn’t go so well?” he said. He adjusted the rearview mirror.

  “No. I mean they’re perfectly fine guys for somebody, just not me. They probably thought the same thing about me.”

  “But you didn’t give them the chance. You were the one to say no. Am I right?”

  “Yes, but why did you assume that?”

  “Come on, Delia, you know this from psych. Kids who lose their parents tend to seek out parental replacement figures for partners or they reject anyone who shows interest for fear of losing them. I didn’t make this up,” he said. Ira did a little grimace that made his mustache bounce. She had never seen his upper lip and now she didn’t want to. It would be like seeing Ira in his underwear, which she didn’t want to see either.

  “We get longing confused with desire,” he said. “Notice that I’m including myself.”

  “You’re going to keep going on about this, aren’t you? You have me captive in my own car and now you’re going to try to improve my poor romantic life.” She released the hold on her knee, straightened out her leg, and tilted the seat back one setting. She hadn’t told Ira about Tyler.

  “The path to a real relationship is hard enough, but for those of us who lost parents, we are focused on what we don’t have, rather than what we want. We think we’re looking for love and we are, but it’s the lost love,” he said.

  Ira had a heavy foot; he clicked the left blinker and passed the few cars that were actually going the speed limit.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Your parents abused you and abandoned you. How did you end up with a marriage that, from all appearances, looks pretty damn good,” she asked. She opened the glove box and found an unopened plastic bag of Twizzlers. She ripped open the bag with her teeth and pulled out a red rope of artificially colored and flavored food. Some days she needed a counterpoint to all of J Bird’s superior food.

  She offered the bag to Ira, and he pulled one out. “Two things. But I was lucky in both. I was adopted by the best parents one could ever hope for. That made up for a lot. I was able to see grown-ups in love, working together, being kind to each other. And they let me know that they loved me. Even so, I still looked for the missing mommy. So the second thing was, Marie let me know rather firmly in our second year of marriage that she wasn’t my mommy. I had to dig deep to understand that. I had to give up longing for something that was gone, so that I could desire something fresh. It was like emerging from a dark cave. Our sex life got a lot better after that too.”

  “We have two more hours until we’re home. We are not talking about your sex life for the remainder of the trip,” said Delia. Both Ira and Ben were a little younger than her father would be right now, but they did fit the need in her for a dad, sort of. Maybe she wouldn’t ever have to marry a stand-in if Ira was right.

  “I don’t want to talk about my sex life, which is just fine, thank you. I’m just offering you a small nugget of unsolicited advice. In a few weeks, you won’t be able to get this free advice from me on a daily basis.”

  She pulled out another strip of red Twizzler. “Which is what, exactly? Please limit yourself to one sentence.” She bit off a hunk.

  “Don’t look for what you’ve lost. Look for what you truly want,” he said. Now they were passing the cars that were also speeding.

  “Is this a Jewish thing?” Ira wasn’t a practicing Jew, but she had a feeling he was practicing something. “And that was two sentences.”

  “It’s my version of Jewish Buddhism. We are a small slice of the spiritual pie,” said Ira, passing a logging truck. “I don’t like following those trucks; I’m sure that one of the logs is going to pop off and come through our windshield.”

  “Could you keep it in a range that won’t ignite the State Troopers?”

  “I shall say no more.” He turned up the air conditioner and pulled back into the right lane. “It really is hot over here.”

  Where did Tyler fit in? Was he a lost love that she had been longing for? He wasn’t a stand-in for a father. He was in a different category.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was almost four in the afternoon by the time Delia arrived home. She stepped into the house and crinkled her nose and said, “Lilies. Stargazers.”

  She was exhausted from the trip to West Hartford, but she had promised her sister that she’d help with this catering job. They weren’t delivering until tomorrow.

  Juniper was in the kitchen, grating ginger with her latest gadget. “You haven’t even seen them. What if I told you they weren’t Stargazers? What if I just happened to have a few gay guy friends in the living room?”

  Baxter gre
eted her from the living room, where he was banished while baking projects were in the works. Delia let her black bag slide to a kitchen stool. “But you don’t have gay men in our living room, and those are Stargazer lilies. You can’t bear it when I’m right. Are you prepping for scones? Please tell me yes. And where did the flowers come from?”

  For one ridiculous moment, she wished that Tyler had sent them to her.

  Juniper did not have the super sniffing ability of Delia. Juniper’s nose was well above average, honed from years of baking. She smelled a banana when it was past ripe, detected grease molecules in the air at the local diner and could suggest when they should change the oil, but she mercifully could not smell the cornucopia of odors that Delia confronted.

  Delia knew she was in the same category as a bird expert, with binoculars dangling around her neck, wearing a tan baseball cap and sturdy hiking shoes, able to identify a scarlet tanager by the first note of its song. Except with Delia, the world’s song was purely olfactory.

  “One of my customers bought them for me. Is it too much for you? They’re powerful,” said Juniper. “Just say so and I’ll put the vase outside. I know how sensitive your nose is.” Juniper slid the grated ginger into a Pyrex cup of buttermilk.

  “That would be a relief,” said Delia. “I won’t be able to concentrate otherwise.” She was so glad that she hadn’t verbalized her desire about Tyler, that she kept one mortifying fear to herself.

  Delia had to concentrate on bread, not Lilly the Tiger in West Hartford, or Stargazer lilies pumping out waves of perfume from a vase.

  Delia constantly navigated the world on a tsunami of scents thundering toward her, layers and layers of complex high notes and low notes, some competing with each other for prominence, like onions and sauerkraut, or garlic and thyme. Some things should not be in the same one-mile radius of each other. On the other hand, she admired the complexity, the synchronicity of other combinations, say turmeric and cumin, or the natural marriage of cinnamon and a fresh rub of nutmeg.