Excerpt from Echoes of a Girl
By Jess McQuaid
The most difficult part of my job is convincing Dottie Uttin she needs to wear underwear.
“I don’t care if it’s period authentic, Dottie. This is a family production, and you must be wearing underwear,” I tell her for the seventh time.
Allie Kim glances up at me, eyes woeful, pins pinched between her lips as she kneels at Dottie’s feet, once more fixing the hem of a period appropriate nineteenth century walking dress in gray muslin after Dottie tore it going to the bathroom for the third time during her fitting.
Dottie is eighty-two. She’s allowed to pee as many times as she’d like. That’s not why I’m here.
As director of programs for the Bellegrave Historical Society, the Founder’s Day reenactment is Allie’s rodeo, and she only calls me in for the big stuff. Like getting Dottie Uttin to wear underwear.
The three of us are crammed into Allie’s small office in the recesses of the second floor of the Bellegrave Public Library. The room once stored the archive for the Bellegrave Bulletin, but I’d luckily had that digitized before the Great Plumbing Explosion of 2015. The room had flooded along with a good portion of the children’s section of the library below it, destroying a complete collection of Nancy Drew books, which I personally remedied because a library without Nancy Drew books is no library at all.
At the time of the plumbing mishap, this room had only been used for moderate storage, and all that was damaged were a few linens that were quickly repaired by the miracle of dry cleaning. When the library board offered us these second floor rooms as our winter offices, I’d given Allie this space because small as it was, it was the largest of the rooms here. I knew she would need the space for costumes that were part of the living history performed at the historical society’s great camp, Lady Josephine Lodge, during the summer season and for the annual reenactment of Founder’s Day, the official start to the summer season in the small Adirondack lake town that celebrates the day when Peter Bellegrave arrived at Bear Lake to build a manor to bring tourists to the wilderness.
The reenactment is followed by a gala that serves as the Bellegrave Historical Society’s biggest fundraiser of the year. That’s my rodeo. As a small Adirondack town, so many people’s livelihoods depend on tourist dollars that start to flow after the official kickoff to summer, and my entire job relies on the gala being a success.
This is why Dottie Uttin must wear underpants.
“But a woman of my class wouldn’t be caught dead wearing drawers, Della. You know as much. How am I to get into character if all of my bits are clogged up like that?” Dottie raises her eyebrows one after the other, and I can’t help but think the bushy white lines are like caterpillars inching across her face.
“No,” I say, not bothering to elaborate. “Underwear goes on or you don’t.”
Dottie sticks her tongue out at me, and I stick mine back out at her. Later she’ll stop by the cottage with thumbprint cookies and a jar of her homemade elderberry wine and try to convince me once again to plant rhubarb because it’s good for the ovaries.
I’m back to sorting stockings for the actors playing the townswomen when a flurry of red, white, and blue sails through the door, the head of David Knolls peeking out above the mass of bunting.
“This simply will not do,” he proclaims and holds the fabric out for my inspection.
I see nothing of concern and merely raise my eyes to his.
“This bunting has faded,” he adds, giving the fabric a good shake as if this will make his point clear. “The red has turned to maroon.”
I’m not sure which is worse, faded or maroon. He says both with such disdain.
David Knolls, Bellegrave’s premier real estate agent, is only a few years older than my forty, but he’s prematurely gray, which makes him appear a great deal older than he is. He favors pressed khakis with button-down shirts often printed in patterns of aquatic creatures. Today he’s wearing periwinkle blue decorated in narwhals. He has a broom mustache from the eighties, and while on someone else it would look dated and out of place, on him, it gives definite Tom Selleck vibes, which the single people (and married ones) of Bellegrave lament because he’s taken.
He’s also British, a fact that continues to surprise everyone because if time travel is ever invented, David Knolls will be the first person to use it to travel back to 1776 and join them Yankee rebels.
“I’m going to ask Kevin if there’s anything we can do to save it,” he says, referring to his husband who has kept the costumes at the Bellegrave Stock Theater for the past fifteen years. “Lord knows there isn’t money in the budget for it.”
I bite my lip to keep from smiling as David repeats a phrase I use so ubiquitously my secretary, Frances Blum, had it printed on a mug she gave me a few Christmases ago.
“What’s not in the budget?” The historical society’s facilities director, Steve Fitzpatrick, appears behind David in the doorway.
David shows him the bunting, but Steve just shrugs, nearly sloshing the coffee out of his Buffalo Bills coffee mug.
“It’s bunting.”
“It’s faded,” David reiterates with the same disgust before stomping out the door.
“We’re lucky to have volunteers like David,” I remind Steve who is already turning toward the space we had converted to a break room at the end of the hall.
He shrugs again. “I just don’t see what the fuss is about. Peter Bellegrave came tramping into the middle of nowhere. Set up a hotel, disrupted indigenous hunting parties, instigated the near extinction of forests in the Adirondacks, and died of tuberculosis leaving a heap of debt his estate could never cover. I don’t see why we celebrate him.”
“Because of him, you and many people have jobs. With dental,” I remind him, knowing he left early the previous day to take his youngest son to the orthodontist to have his braces tightened.
Steve raises his coffee mug. “All Hail, Peter Bellegrave!” he calls and saunters off in the direction of coffee.
I start when Steve is immediately replaced by someone else. The offices are busy this time of year as we prepare for both Founder’s Day and the opening of Lady Josephine Lodge after the spring thaw, but the person before me is neither a volunteer nor one of the very few members of my staff.
It’s my best friend and detective at the Bellegrave Police Department, Carmen Neil, and she’s carrying a telltale mauve rectangular bakery box.
“No,” I say before she has a chance to say anything.
Her brilliant smile of perfectly straight teeth vanishes. “C’mon,” she whines with a heavy dose of guilt directed at me. Her earrings, the size of frisbees, bob as she taps the mauve box with one hot pink manicured hand. “They’re still hot.”
She doesn’t need to say what because I know what’s in that box. I know because Carmen Neil has been my best friend since second grade when her family moved to Bellegrave from Manhattan for a better life for their children, a yard for their dog, and fresh air.
Carmen would have selected several chocolate croissants and a single black and white cookie from Cake & Cookie, the bakery on Water Street, knowing full well I’d eat a croissant now and the cookie during my two pm slump.
Both Allie and Dottie snicker behind me, and I glance down to where Allie’s tying off her stitches.
“We all know you’re going to listen to her just for the croissant,” she says around her mouthful of pins.
I can only give her a frown before Frances steps in front of the door, blocking out Carmen as Frances’s sharp eyes zero in on me over the rimless glasses perched at the very tip of her pointed nose.
“Your husband called,” she says in her no-nonsense, atonal yet slightly husky voice.
Frances started working here after her first son was born. Her sixth grandson got his driver’s license last week. I imagine she’ll never quit working, and one day she’ll disappear into the archives with the rest of Bellegrave’s history. She likes sweater sets, and today she’s wearing the plum one that sets off her long white hair that she wears parted in the middle and swept back in a bun pinned low at the nape of her neck.
“He said he’s been trying to reach you, but he thinks you’ve lost your phone again.”
My hand goes to the back pocket of my jeans, but my fingers find only emptiness. I bite my lower lip. Logan has been on me to get a smartwatch for months if only to alleviate some of the annoyance for others trying to reach me when I’ve misplaced my phone, which happens with stunning regularity.
I force a chagrined smile. “And what did Mr. James want?” I ask.
“He said he has to head into Albany this afternoon. Some emergency about an easement.”
Albany. Again.
“Emergency, huh?” Carmen mutters.
I meet her gaze, and she gives me the same look she and every member of my family has been giving me since Logan started making these unusually frequent trips to Albany.
Instead of pressing me though, Carmen holds up the box. “I brought sugar.”
“The last time you brought sugar to the office I got bedbugs from that sleazy motel the state put me up in at Monticello.”
Carmen smiles a smile more suited to a second-grade teacher and not a decorated detective with the Bellegrave Police. “We treat our expert witnesses with the utmost care.”
I frown. “I’d hate to see what you do to your suspects.”
Carmen’s smile doesn’t waver. “Chinese finger traps.”
“I knew it.” I nod in the direction of my office down the hall. “Let’s get this over with.”
Frances lowers her chin, her eyes locking on mine, and it’s like upping the power on a laser beam set to annihilate. “And what about Mr. James?”
“I’ll text him,” I say. I turn back to Allie. “You got this?”
She waves a hand, the pin cushion strapped to her wrist sparkling in the weak watery April light from the single window at the back of the room. “I’ve got this, I’ve got this,” she mutters.
“You think I shouldn’t be wearing drawers, don’t you Allie dear?” I hear Dottie probe as I leave the room, and I know that conversation isn’t over yet.
Carmen is already in my office when I get there, pouring water into the single serve espresso maker she got me at Christmas because she enjoys enabling my caffeine addiction.
My office is small, but as I’m only in it for the few short winter months when the lodge is closed, it suits me fine. I’ve made it cozy with stacks of musty boxes caring and thoughtful, if misguided, villagers have dropped off, filled with their family heirlooms they are just so sure the historical society would want. Sometimes I’ll find a rare gem in one of the boxes, so I keep taking them in even if they’re mostly filled with water-stained insurance calendars and receipts for fast food.
I’ve covered the uneven wooden floorboards with a rug I bought on clearance from Maeve’s Home Furnishings on Water Street, and the bookcase underneath the swarm of dog-eared reference books came out of my parents’ basement.
My desk is an old dining room table from my college apartment I could never bring myself to part with, and it holds my laptop surrounded by unfinished grant applications, academic journals, and this morning’s Bellegrave Bulletin.
“Logan’s going into Albany again, huh?” Carmen asks as she starts the milk frother and bends to retrieve the milk from the mini fridge under the espresso machine.
I shake my laptop awake to check my calendar for my next appointment time that afternoon and see I’m free the rest of the day. I can only hope Frances will interrupt us with some emergency, so I don’t have to tell my best friend no to her face. I like to save those kinds of loving messages for text.
I minimize my calendar, and the dopey, drooly face of my chocolate lab grins back at me. I can’t help but smile and shut my laptop as Carmen hands me a cup, steaming and fragrant.
“If only you looked at humans the way you look at your dog,” she mutters.
“If only humans knew unconditional love,” I reply, taking a blistering sip of my espresso. It burns all the way down just as I like it.
It’s a second before I realize Carmen is blinking at me.
“Do I need to tell you again it’s been thirteen years?”
“Nope.” I take another sip, savor the bitterness of it as it fills my cheeks. I swallow. “My mother reminds me every Sunday night at dinner.”
“Then how about the fact that he chose you?” She pauses, and I know this is for emphasis. “To. Live.” There it is.
“Nope, I know that as well. And I still have your therapist’s card from the last time you gave it to me.” I place my mug on my Nancy Drew coaster and poke at the Cake & Cookie box, selecting an exquisitely puffy croissant. “Now tell me why you’re here, darling.” I toss her a sarcastic smile and take an overlarge bite of my croissant as I begin the hunt for my phone somewhere in the detritus on my desk.
“Bob Reynolds,” she says without preamble.
The croissant turns to ash in my mouth.
“Nope,” I mumble around the buttery remnants on my tongue.
“You said you would listen,” Carmen protests, getting her own coffee and settling in the chair across the table from me.
I plop into my chair and wash down the now undesirable croissant with more coffee. “I said let’s get this over with. I didn’t say I’d listen.”
My fingers latch on to my phone under last month’s copy of Museum Curator, and I tilt the screen so I can see it.
Three missed calls, and I’m not sure how many texts. I swipe up and scan Logan’s messages. Albany. He’ll let the dog out when he goes back to the cottage to pack a bag. He’ll try to be back by Friday. Today is Tuesday. I type a quick reply and shove the phone back under the magazine.
When I look up, Carmen’s face is a maze of disappointed lines.
“Bob Reynolds once told me to go into the Navy because I wasn’t going to amount to anything else,” I say.
Carmen peels off a layer of croissant with her hot pink nails. “He said that to everyone at least once. You know he only became superintendent of schools because of Marty’s connections.” She pauses, her face scrunching into a grimace. “He never really was good with kids.” She pops the croissant into her mouth and chews thoughtfully.
“You know I don’t like doing this stuff, and now you’re asking me to do it for the Reynoldses?” I look around my cramped office. “Maybe next I’ll pop over the pond and ask King Charles if he has any ghosts he’d like me to evict from Buckingham Palace.”
Carmen shakes her head. “Bob is dying, Del. Martha says the doctors told him he has months if not weeks. She just wants him to know what happened to his daughter before he dies.”
“Lisa Reynolds disappeared like twenty-five years ago.”
“Twenty-seven,” Carmen clarifies.
I wave a hand as if swatting away a fly. “Same thing. If there was anything left to find, it’s probably gone by now.”
Carmen makes a face that sends her earrings bobbing. “Is that how it works?”
I shrug. “I don’t know how any of this works.”
You know that part in the movie Sixth Sense when the kid tells Bruce Willis he can see ghosts? I didn’t know that was the twist. I thought everyone could see ghosts.
I didn’t know anything at all was strange about me until my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Nickelson, asked to speak to my mother after school. Mrs. Nickelson was huge, giant of hip and shoulder, and not at all what you would think of when you might conjure an image of a first-grade teacher. She wore her hair clipped shorter than she should have and hairsprayed into a puff of right angles on her head. She only wore big, swinging skirts of military grade material, and I often wondered if she were really a troll. I still wonder actually.
Mrs. Nickelson told my mother she was concerned about how frequently I was talking to myself and wanted to recommend me for mental health testing. My mother only smiled and led me away. I spent the remainder of first grade at the Catholic school in Saranac, and my mother told me not to speak to the ghosts in school.
Carmen purses her lips and plucks another layer from her croissant. “Lisa Reynolds disappeared on the night of April 25th, 1997. She was driving her red 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass from the high school home after Key Club, but she never made it. The car was recovered the next day on Route Three. Blood found in the trunk of the car matched Lisa’s. That’s it. No ransom note, no more clues, dead end after dead end for twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-seven,” I correct around a mouthful of croissant.
Carmen gives me the second-grade-teacher look again.
I swallow the bite of croissant. “What exactly do you want from me?”
“Come with me to the Reynolds house. Marty says she’s kept Lisa’s room just as it was since the day she disappeared. Just stand in the room and tell me if you feel anything.”
“That’s it?”
Carmen leans back, hands spread. “That’s it. I promise. If you don’t feel anything, we let it go.”
I let my gaze drift out the single-pane window of my office. It’s the original nine over nine glazed window, and the image of downtown Bellegrave beyond it is blurry, but I feel the tug of affection for it anyway.
Settled around Bear Lake in a valley just south of Saranac in the Adirondacks, the village center of Bellegrave is made up of most of the original brick and stone buildings that now serve as a home to the shops and businesses along Main Street where the public library sits, and their facades proclaim names of long forgotten outfits like Providence Vine Bank and Otis and Son Haberdashery.
My favorite is the building almost to the end of town on the right side of Main Street, overlooking the lake at the bottom of the valley, the single word Water spelled out in pink granite along its top. I don’t know what or who Water is. It was one of the first things I tried to find when I became director of the Bellegrave Historical Society when I returned to the village after grad school, but even in my years of searching the archives, I never found reference to it. I like to think it’s just a founder of the village reminding everyone of the important part water has played in the life of Bellegrave. Maybe in the life of everyone.
“Remember Lisa Reynolds?” Carmen says now with a slight disbelieving tone interrupting my reverie. “What a girl. She could have been so mean as popular as she was, but she wasn’t. Remember?”
I nod, my mind drifting back to 1997 and the horrible awkwardness that is seventh grade. Is there anything crueler than a combined middle/high school? Forcing awkward middle schoolers to mingle with blossoming teenagers?
Lisa Reynolds had a curtain of red gold hair that undulated as if it were alive. She would turn her head, a musical laugh trilling from her lips, and you could just make out the pert tip of her nose. I’d never felt the grubbiness of my thrift store jeans and bangs I’d cut myself more than when I saw Lisa Reynolds walking down the hall in front of me.
“She had everything. Beauty, brains, talent, drive.” Carmen sounds like she’s writing Lisa’s dating profile. She leans forward suddenly. “Remember how she started donating blood right when she turned sixteen? Wanted to donate ten times before she graduated and went off to—” She stops, her hand stretched toward the window, the muted morning light reflecting off her hot pink nails. “Where was she going?”
“Berklee in Boston,” I supply.
Carmen drops her hand. “Lord, the pipes that girl had.” She shakes her head. “She had everything, Del, and she was still the nicest person I ever met.”
“You hardly knew her. She was a senior, and we were ogres.”
Carmen ignores this. “Something terrible happened to her, Del, and you can help us find out what.”
I pick at my croissant. “You know I don’t like doing this, Carmen.”
She leans forward again and nearly knocks me out of my chair with her earnestness. “I know. I know, and I’m only asking this one time.”
“You’ve asked like a hundred times since you made detective.”
Carmen lets her eyes drift innocently upward. “A hundred? Really?” Her voice goes up an octave.
“You’re right. Probably closer to two hundred.”
Carmen leans back and crosses her arms over her stomach. “Della James, you know you’re coming with me to the Reynolds house.”
It’s at that moment Frances pokes her head into my office.
“The bags for the gala party favors just came in,” she says, her voice brusquer in the confined space. “They’re leopard print.”
I blink, my croissant and espresso turning in my stomach before looking back at Carmen. “Why don’t we go now? It looks like my morning just opened up.”