Snow Wolf Read Free

never really known her.
We hadn't seen each other much over the years, a card or two, a brief letter
once in a while, because we had never been that close, not the way I had been
with my father. My parents had divorced soon after I was born and my mother had
gone her own way, leaving my father to bring me up.
    She had been a dancer in one of the
Broadway shows, and knowing my father even the little I did as a child I always
guessed they had never been suited.
    She rented a small apartment on New York's Upper East Side. I remember the place was in disarray. An untidy single bed, a
single chair, some empty gin bottles and a bottle of blond hair dye. Letters
from old boyfriends and some from my father, held together with elastic bands,
kept in an old tin box under her bed.
    I found the letter from my father. Old
and faded with years, its edges curling and the color of papyrus. It was dated
24 January 1953.
    Dear Rose, Just a line to let you know
William is well and doing fine at school. I'm going to be away for a time and
if anything should happen to me I want you to know (as usual) there's enough
money in my account to see you both through, along with my service insurance.
Dangerous times we're living in! I hear they're building air-raid shelters on
Broadway because of the threat from the Russians.
    I'm keeping well and I hope you are. One
more thing should anything happen to me: I'd be obliged if you'd check the
house, and if you find any papers lying around in the study or in the usual
place in the cellar, do me a favor and pass them on to the office in Washington. Will you do that for me?
    Jake.
    I read through the other letters out of
curiosity. There was nothing much in there. Some were from men, notes sent
backstage from someone who had seen her in the chorus line and liked her legs
and wanted to buy her dinner. There were a couple more from my father, but none
that hinted at how they might have once loved each other. I guess she destroyed
those.
    But I thought about that line in the
letter about the papers. The house that had been my father's was now mine. It
was an old clapboard place he had bought when he and my mother first moved to Washington, and when he had died it ran to ruin for a long time until I was old enough to
tidy it up. It had taken me years to get it back into shape. There had once
been a steel safe sunk into the floor in my father's study in which he used to
keep documents and papers. But I remembered him saying once that he never
trusted safes, because they could always be opened by someone determined or
clever enough. The safe was long gone, and the room refurbished. But I didn't
know of any other place he might have used.
    So the day I got back from sorting my
mother's affairs I went down to the cellar. It was a place I hardly ever went,
filled with long-forgotten bric-A-brac that had belonged to my parents, and
boxes of stuff I'd kept over the years and had forgotten I promised myself I'd
get rid of. Remembering the study safe, I shifted the cardboard and wooden
boxes around and checked the concrete floors. I found nothing. Then I started
on the walls.
    It took me quite a while before I found
the two loose red bricks high in the back wall above the cellar door.
    I remember my heart was pounding a
little, wondering whether I would find anything, or if my mother had long ago
already done as my father had asked, or ignored him as she so often did. I reached
up and pulled out the bricks. There was a deep recess inside and I saw the
large yellowed legal pad lying there between the covers of a manila file, worn
and faded.
    There are some things that change your
life forever. Like marriage or divorce or someone on the end of a telephone
telling you there's been a death of someone close in the family.
    But nothing prepared me for what I found
behind those bricks in the cellar.
    I took the old pad upstairs and read it
through. Two pages had been written on in blue ink, in my father's handwriting.
    Four names.