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Expression dubious, she eased her much smaller hands into them and opened the flaps.
“These weren’t taped?”
“No. I assume Dad packed them, if you can call this packing.”
Tony would have asked what she meant, except that he could tell right away. Dumped was probably a more descriptive word. And what he’d have expected of her father.
Beth had an odd look on her face as she looked at the pink garment at the top. “Matt and I both recognized this blouse right away. It was one of Mom’s favorites. It kind of gave us chills.”
Putting himself in her shoes, he could imagine. His mother had favorites she wore long past the point when they should have been discarded. Yeah, coming across her ratty red sweater, for instance, would be creepy.
“Do you have any empty boxes?” he asked, suddenly realizing he hadn’t planned ahead as well as he should have. “So that we can transfer things as we look at them?”
“Oh. Yes.” She jumped up again, bringing one in from outside and locating a second in the garage.
It appeared everything in this box had been pulled off the rod in the closet. They decided to take the clothes off the hangers, which she would add later to a thrift store box outside. He’d look, she’d fold and pack the garments into a different box.
He asked a few questions as they proceeded. Were these clothes that her mother was wearing right before her disappearance, versus older ones she might have pushed to the back of the closet?
Tight-lipped, Beth said, “Right before.”
The woman had apparently liked pink, in a variety of shades from pale to deep rose. Envisioning her from the photos he’d now seen, he thought pastels had probably suited a woman who was tiny, blonde, delicately made. She’d had a beautiful smile, although it looked practiced to him. She was in half a dozen pictures on the fireplace mantel in the family room, more in an arrangement on the wall. He’d noticed a certain tilt of her head in virtually every photo. Pretty women learned the angles that showed them to best advantage.
He’d been struck by how those displays left this family frozen in time. Only a few additions had been made, undoubtedly by Beth. Matt, in his high school graduation robes. Emily in hers. Emily in what was probably a prom dress—pink. Matt in college graduation robes, posing in front of Memorial Hall on the Wakefield campus.
Not a single additional picture of Beth. It pissed him off that no one else in her family had noticed.
He’d also found himself wondering whether her mother had helped her see herself as attractive. With a petite mother and a petite sister, both cookie-cutter pretty, blonde and blue-eyed, Beth could easily have felt like the ugly duckling. Ironic, when he was a lot more drawn to her than he could imagine being to her sister, even if she’d been older and had a stronger personality. Still, at least seven inches taller than either her mother or sister, brown-haired to their bright blonde, rounded cheeks instead of sculpted, probably going through stages of being awkward that never happened to either of them… Yeah, he could see it.
She was trying now to hide any distress as she shook out each dress, or blouse or pair of slacks and folded it as neatly as she had every towel in that linen closet, but tiny flinches or pained sounds gave her away.
He’d have been relieved to reach the bottom of the damn box, except it was only the first.
“I know I should give these to a thrift store,” she said finally. “The styles are mostly timeless.”
“I’d like you to hold off,” he said. The relief in her tiny nod produced an odd, clutching sensation in his chest.
The next box held shoes. These seemed to bother her less, probably because they were more generic. Those she packed into a smaller box, saying, “I’ll take these to the thrift store.”
Tony didn’t bother reminding her to wait. After sliding his fingers inside and then shaking each shoe upside down, he was confident nothing had been hidden with them. Looking at the pile, however, he thought to ask if she remembered any shoes of her mother’s that weren’t here.
She frowned at them, finally saying, “I don’t know. She could have had another pair of pumps, or open-toed sandals or… Shoes aren’t that memorable.”
