Little Comfort Read online

  At four feet, nine and three-quarters inches tall, Hester was a quarter inch into little person territory. She weighed eighty-nine pounds and had black hair, alabaster skin, and the voice of a two-pack-a-day smoker. More than one obnoxious stranger had told her she looked like a china doll, but Hester had learned long ago to make up for her height with confidence, even when she had to fake it. As Morgan often told her, there was nothing sexier than a woman who took charge.

  “How old is Aunt Hester?” she asked Kate.

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Good enough?”

  The waitress nodded. “What does she want?”

  “Orange soda,” Kate said.

  The waitress cocked her head for confirmation.

  “How about apple juice instead?” Hester said, prepping herself for a tantrum, but Kate, miraculously, settled in with the coloring book and pink crayon. Hester took advantage of the momentary silence to open her tablet and read through what she’d learned about Lila Blaine. A quick search of Lila’s Facebook page had shown that she valued her privacy settings. She didn’t have a LinkedIn account, but Hester had managed to determine she was thirty-five years old and lived in Holderness, New Hampshire, an enclave of New England’s WASPy elite. The only mention of her online was when she petitioned the town to change the terms of a trust on some lakefront property. Hester had spent the day imagining a woman clad in head-to-toe Patagonia, someone who skied, hiked, and entertained friends on a lovingly maintained Chris Craft, and at five o’clock on the dot, the door to the pub opened and a woman entered who nearly fit that description, minus the wealth. She wore a navy parka, had a no-nonsense auburn-colored braid that tumbled down her back, and had the healthy build and complexion of someone used to working outside. She also didn’t look like someone who’d put up with much.

  “Lila?” Hester said.

  “You’re Hester Thursby?”

  “In the flesh.”

  Lila put her hands on a chair and surveyed the scene in front of her—a tiny woman and a three-year-old dressed in head-to-toe pink—and Hester could only imagine what was going through her head. “It must have been a long drive,” she said. “Grab something to drink.”

  Kate put a pink rubber boot on the table. “Aunt Hester like my boots?” she asked.

  “I love them,” Hester said.

  “You didn’t mention there’d be a kid,” Lila said.

  “I’m new to the kid thing,” Hester said. “I still forget that she goes where I go. Sometimes there’s a dog too. But like I said on the phone today, there’s no obligation. If you decide you’d rather hire someone else, then I’ll be on my way.”

  Lila shrugged and then flagged down the waitress to order tea. She struggled out of the coat, and they made conversation till the waitress set the teapot on the table. Lila’s hand shook as she poured and added sugar. Finally, she said, “I expected someone a bit …”

  “Taller?” Hester said.

  “And …”

  “Tougher?”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  Hester was used to easing clients through their reservations, and would have been wary of anyone who wasn’t at least a little reluctant to hire her. “I don’t carry a gun or know how to fight very well, but I do have a pretty good track record in finding people. And if it helps, I’ve worked with plenty of people who’ve lost someone. Once, a couple hired me because they’d lost one of their grown daughters. She was number seven of thirteen, and they’d simply forgotten about her for a while. Turned out she moved to the next town over. Really, I can help you find your brother. If that’s what you want.”

  Lila scratched at her index finger like she had eczema. “What do you need to know?”

  Hester opened the folder. “Let’s start with the basics. What’s your brother’s name?”

  “I haven’t a clue what he goes by now.”

  Okay, this could be interesting. “Was he adopted? I’ve worked plenty of adoptions. Those can sometimes be pretty easy.”

  “He wasn’t adopted.”

  “Were you?”

  “No, that’s not it at all.” Lila sat back in her chair. “His name is Sam Blaine, like I said on the phone. I’ve looked before and haven’t found a trace of him. He’s eight years younger than I am, and we haven’t seen each other since he was a teenager. We had a falling-out. A fight, really, and we haven’t spoken since. It’s time to make amends.”

  “What did you fight about?”

  “For that, I’ll need to know you a lot better.” An edge slipped into Lila’s voice, and Hester made a mental note to return to the subject later.

  “Most people are pretty easy to track down nowadays,” she said. “Why haven’t you been able to find him yourself?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Lila swung her braid from one shoulder to the other. “I may need something stronger than tea.”

  “I hate to drink alone.”

  Lila ordered a beer, and they sat in silence till Lila poured the beer into a pint glass and drank half of it in gulps.

  “So?” Hester said.

  “I’m not sure he wants to be found,” Lila said.

  “Why not?”

  Lila scratched again, and this time it looked as though she might draw blood. “Because I’m pretty certain he changed his name. I think he may have changed it every time he’s moved. And he’s moved a lot.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Lila dug a photo from her handbag and showed it to Hester. It was of two boys standing on a wooded lakeshore. One of them looked cocky. He glared reluctantly at the camera, his hair falling in his eyes. He had the lean body of an athlete and the fine bone structure of someone who would always seem young.

  “Handsome kid,” Hester said.

  “That’s Sam,” Lila said.

  “So you’ve looked for him yourself,” Hester said. “Sorry to cut to the chase here, but are you sure he’s not dead?”

  “He’s alive. I know that much, at least.”

  Lila opened her bag again and took out stacks of postcards held together with rubber bands. She tossed them onto the table.

  “He sends me these. Usually one every couple of months or so. He makes them himself from photos. See, here’s one from when he lived in San Francisco.”

  She turned over a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was taken from the Marin Headlands. The bridge, and San Francisco behind it, was shrouded in fog. On the back, printed in the handwriting of someone who’d gone to finishing school, was written, If you were in my position, you’d do the same.

  “Before you ask,” Lila said. “I have no idea what it means. You’ll see, none of them make sense.” She thumbed through a stack and pulled out a photo from a farmer’s market. Sam had written, The science department should be able to help us.

  “That sounds like it’s from Star Trek,” Hester said. She read it through again. On the other side of the table, Kate, who’d been remarkably quiet through the conversation, looked up from her coloring book. “Potty,” she said.

  “Time to move!” Hester said, taking a stack of the postcards with her in one hand and Kate’s hand in the other and rushing to the bathroom before disaster struck. In the stall, she examined the cards while Kate perched on the toilet and yammered about peeing. The postcards were from cities all over the United States. In some, Sam had taken photos of famous landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building, while on others, he’d used more obscure locations, like doorways or street signs. Most likely, he’d chosen postcards because they were harder to trace than e-mails or phone calls, but there was plenty of information on the cards that Hester could use to find him, or at least trace where he’d been. The postmarks would make it easy enough to pull together a timeline of where he’d lived, and there had to be some pattern to the messages he wrote. She had to admit the whole scenario had her intrigued.

  “Do you know Sam’s Social Security number?” she asked w
hen they returned to the table and she’d managed to get Kate settled with her coloring book.

  “He hasn’t used it in twelve years,” Lila said. “I already went down that road.”

  “Leave it with me anyway. How about his date of birth? I can’t do much without that.”

  “April third, 1992.”

  “And his full name? Samuel?”

  “Just Sam Blaine. My parents liked to keep it simple.”

  “And what about your parents? Where do they fit into all of this?”

  “They don’t,” Lila said. “They’re dead. Both of them. They died when I was nineteen. Sam and I lived together after that, till he left, at least.”

  “So you haven’t seen him in twelve years. That would have made him, what, fourteen, maybe fifteen when he left. That’s not moving out or leaving, that’s running away. Didn’t the police look for him?”

  “Of course they did, and so did I. Everyone looked for him.”

  “Did he have friends? Was there someone else he might have been in touch with over the years?”

  Lila picked up the photo of the boys by the lake. “Him,” she said, pointing at the other boy, whom Hester had barely noticed. He smiled right into the camera, and yet still faded behind Sam’s vitality.

  “That’s Gabe DiPursio,” Lila said. “He was a foster kid who stayed with us that summer. They ran away together.” It seemed to take some effort for Lila to look away from the photo. “Gabe was, I don’t know … he was quiet. A cipher, almost. Sam brought him home from school one day that spring like a stray puppy, said they were having a sleepover, and Gabe basically never left. He’d been living with a woman across town who kept five, sometimes six foster kids at a time. I don’t think she even knew he’d moved to our house till the social worker pointed it out.”

  Hester went through her notes. “And how old would that have made you? Twenty-three?” She jerked a thumb at Kate. “I can barely handle this one, and I’m a full-fledged adult. You had two teenage boys living with you?”

  “Gabe stayed with us. It was pretty unofficial. To be honest, I couldn’t have gotten rid of him fast enough, but I have a bit of a conscience. I mean, who would take in a fourteen-year-old foster kid, especially one like Gabe? He’d been through the system since he was a toddler. His mother was a junkie, and his father was a drunk. The kid barely had a chance from the start.”

  “Are his parents still around?”

  “They may be, but I’m not sure. They brought a suit against the state when Gabe left and then they moved to Reno afterwards.”

  “Okay, I’m trying to fit these pieces together. What’s the woman’s name? The foster mother. The one Gabe had been staying with before. Does she still live in town?”

  “Cheryl Jenkins,” Lila said. “She’ll never leave. She’s New Hampshire through and through. But the cops talked to her. She didn’t know anything either.”

  “And what about family services? Didn’t they want to know what happened to Gabe?”

  “Not so much,” Lila said. “I got the impression that his social worker was happy to focus on other things.”

  “And what was her name?”

  “You mean his name. Robert Englewood. Bobby. He and I went to high school together, and he’s definitely still around. Unfortunately.”

  Hester wrote the names down. “Any chance you know Gabe’s birthdate?”

  “He only came around for a couple of months. I can see if Bobby has it.”

  Hester looked down at her notes. All she had to go on were a few random names and dates. Even with the postcards, Sam might be too well hidden to find. Still, she could use a good puzzle to solve. “Where did the last card come from?” she asked. “At least I’ll know which city to start with.”

  Lila dug a thin stack of postcards from her bag. The one on top was of a townhouse somewhere on Beacon Hill or in the Back Bay. It was taken in the fall, when the maple trees lining the streets blazed red. “He’s been in Boston since March,” Lila said.

  Hester turned the top card over. Sam had written, It’s amazing how fast you get used to such a big place. The rest of the stack showed other settings from around the city, like the side of a brick building, a chain-link fence, and a café. The last one was of a street sign for Louisburg Square.

  “Maybe he lives there,” Lila said.

  “Is he rich? He’d have to be to live on Louisburg Square.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Lila said. “Sam had a taste for the finer things. Even as a kid. But, honestly, I haven’t a clue who Sam is or who he may have become. I do know that he was smart and slick when he was fourteen, and that was when he’d spent his whole life in the backwoods of New Hampshire. God knows what some life experiences have brought him.”

  Hester flipped through the postcards once more.

  “Take them,” Lila said. “The photo too.”

  Hester put the cards and the photo in a manila folder. “I can guarantee one thing about Sam,” she said. “You’re right. He doesn’t want to be found. Not by you. Not by anyone. And people who don’t want to be found usually have a reason. Why now anyway? After all these years?”

  Lila finished her beer. “To be honest, I’m not sure I want to find Sam either, though I can’t help but be curious about what he’s become. I owe it to him. My parents owned a little piece of lakefront property that I’m putting on the market this spring. The cabin is a ruin at this point, and I’m tired of being land poor.” She paused. “You seem smart. Maybe you’ll find him, maybe you won’t, but my money’s on yes. If Sam doesn’t want to see me, tell him I’m selling Little Comfort.”

  *

  Later that evening, after she’d put Kate to bed and had dinner with Morgan, Hester sat cross-legged with a tablet balanced on her lap and the postcards Sam had sent Lila spread out on the coffee table. A little online research and a quick call to Reno confirmed that Gabe DiPursio’s parents hadn’t heard from him in years. Nor, from their tone, did they care to.

  After hanging up, Hester put the phone aside and could hear Morgan snoring through the wall. She hadn’t told him about her meeting with Lila today. She had a feeling he wouldn’t want her digging into strangers’ lives with Kate in tow, and if she told him they’d have to discuss it, which would lead to her admitting he was right. But truth be told, Hester needed the distraction. So she put together a timeline of where Sam had lived over the past twelve years using the postmarks. The first card had come from San Francisco the November after Sam had left New Hampshire, more than twelve years earlier. That meant there’d been a gap of about four months between when Sam ran away and when this card arrived. That was a long time for two teenagers to be missing without anyone seeming to mind too much. What had Lila done when this first card finally came in the mail? Had she let the local police know to contact the San Francisco authorities, or had she kept quiet? Lila herself had admitted she’d been glad to be rid of Sam’s friend Gabe. Had that ambivalence extended to her brother too? How had twenty-three-year-old Lila felt about the burden of raising a teenage boy?

  She jotted down the question and then put the kettle on and waited for it to whistle while moving stacks of dirty dishes out of the sink. She was in her own apartment, a tiny aerie in the third-floor attic of the house she and Morgan owned together. They’d bought the house in the heart of Somerville’s Union Square nearly seven years earlier, long before the square became hip. The house had three apartments. The ground floor, where Daphne and Kate used to live, was vacant awaiting Daphne’s return. Morgan lived in the largest apartment on the second and third floors. That was the adult apartment, the one where they entertained and had dinner together. On most nights, Hester and Morgan slept in his bed, with his down pillows and thousand-thread-count sheets, and in the morning they made coffee and drank it at the granite kitchen island while reading the paper on their tablets. Morgan liked things neat, so keys had their place by the door, books stayed on bookshelves, and dust never settled.

  To Hester,
it sometimes felt like a prison.

  Her apartment had a tiny red-and-green-plaid love seat and an ancient VCR attached to an even older TV set. The slanted walls were lined with stacks of VHS tapes and novels and possible treasures she’d picked up at yard sales. The bedroom had a single bed and a tiny closet filled with shoes. Hester couldn’t remember the last time she’d vacuumed. Here, dust had a permanent home. In fact, anything that entered the apartment had a permanent home. It was her sanctuary, and symbolic of her independence. Morgan had given up proposing to her a couple of years ago after she’d said “no” one too many times, and she knew that he both understood and didn’t understand why, maybe even more than she did. To her, they were as good as married. She couldn’t understand what scared her about giving in to commitment. She supposed that a part of it was simply fear of admitting that she wanted it, or that once she admitted it, that it would somehow go away.

  She went into the bedroom and crawled into the closet. At the very back, a dog door was cut into the wall that connected to Morgan’s walk-in closet on the other side. She stuck her head through the hole, and could nearly, but not quite, squeeze all the way through. Even Hester wasn’t that small. “Waffles,” she whispered. “Come here.”

  She heard a whine, and then a thump as Waffles jumped off Kate’s bed in the other room. The basset’s nails clacked on the wooden floors, and then, through the dark, a wet tongue lapped at Hester’s face. “Come,” she said. “Be with me.”

  Waffles shimmied through the hole. “Good girl,” Hester said.

  In the kitchenette, she rinsed old tea leaves out of a chipped brown teapot and replaced them with new ones. When the tea was ready, she piled the dirty dishes back into the sink, and then slid the original Friday the 13th into the VCR for background noise while nestling with Waffles under a quilt on the love seat. The dog rested her snout on Hester’s lap and sighed.

  “Tough day?”

  Waffles fell fast asleep and started to snore.

  Hester picked up another card. It was a photo of the Castro Theatre, in the heart of San Francisco, with its Spanish-colonial baroque façade. The marquee showed a double feature of Alien and Aliens that Hester would have loved to have gone to. On it, Sam had written, What was your special order? Hester read the quote again. For a moment, she thought she had a connection, but it slipped away.