A tiny cloth doll dangled from a noose made from string. The noose dangled from the top of the triangle on the coat hanger.
“Apparently,” Lillian said.
Kiersten shuddered at this crude tableau of violence made from innocent objects. Cloth from a dish towel. Kitchen twine. Wire. “But why in the world ...”
“Beats me.” Lillian raised her shoulders in a shrug. “Trey said someone tried to break into my house while I was away. He says you and Piper have gotten some strange deliveries too. He says it isn’t safe anymore, here on Beaverbrook, and I should go live in a nice retirement community.”
Kiersten frowned. How did he know about the packages she and Piper had received? They’d told the other neighbors at dinner on Sunday night. But they hadn’t told Trey or Chip or Richard.
Maybe he heard about it from Miles or Reggie or Valentina?
“Did you call the police?” she asked.
“Trey said he’d take care of it. But he told me they were unlikely to do anything because it’s not a hate crime.”
“It’s not?”
“Well, I don’t see how itcanbe. I mean, I’m an Episcopalian.”
“I can see how that would rule out a hate crime designation,” Kiersten admitted reluctantly.
“I do enjoy eating meat. And bread and pasta,” Lillian said thoughtfully. “I sometimes thinkthatmakes me a member of a marginalized group.”
“Does your family know about this?” she asked.
“Not yet. I’ll let my son know. But he’s on one of those Viking riverboat cruises. I’ll bother him when he gets home next week.”
“I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about the Davis family,” Kiersten said, leaning forward. “I found a diary belonging to a Dottie Anderson, who lived here on Beaverbrook in 1965. Does that name ring any bells?”
The old woman frowned. “We moved here in ’67, and I don’t remember ever meeting anyone named Dottie. But I do remember hearing something about Richard’s wife ... Margaret. About how she was Chip’s stepmother, not his biological mother. I vaguely remember people talking about how wonderful she was, how she loved that little boy like he was her own. They never had other children. Just Chip. And then Chip and his wife had Trey. She died a couple years ago. Heart attack. Poor thing.”
“Do you happen to know if Richard and Margaret have a fallout shelter underneath their garage?”
Lillian pursed her lips, considering the question. “When these homes were built, the developer gave people the option of a fallout shelter. Some people paid extra for that, and some didn’t. Ours doesn’t have one. But our friends Herman and Agnes had one. They were the original owners of the house where Reggie lives now.”
“What did it look like?”
She made a dismissive gesture with her teacup. “Just a cinder block room with one door, no windows, and a light bulb in the ceiling. Andusually a dirt floor. That made it a little more affordable, if you skipped the cost of concrete and linoleum for a finished floor.”
“Do you remember anything else?” she asked.
“Those shelters were cold and dark.” She tugged at her sweater, pulling it tighter. “I don’t think anyone would have survived for long down there. But you know how it was back then ... we had the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were all on edge, worried the world was about to end. Kind of like my grandkids now with all that global warming. Every generation seems to invent a new way to bring us all to the edge of extinction.”
“Did people use the shelters for anything?”
“Oh sure.” She nodded, taking a sip of her coffee. “Made a perfect root cellar. We all canned fruits and vegetables from the garden back then, and it was a perfect place to store those mason jars full of pickled beets. And they put emergency supplies in the fallout shelter. You know, things like candles. Board games. Rice and beans. Everything you’d need to survive the collapse of civilization. They came in handy, those fallout shelters, even without a nuclear apocalypse. When people remodeled their basements over the years, they usually left the fallout shelter alone.”
“Why?”
“Well, the walls were thick, and that made it really expensive to retroactively add heating and air-conditioning and plumbing. Like Agnes and Herman, the couple who owned Reggie’s house. They left their fallout shelter alone when they redid the basement. They used it to store camping gear and canned goods. That’s what most people did.”
“Is there any way to tell, from the outside, if someone on Beaverbrook has a fallout shelter under their garage?”
She considered the question. “Not that I know of. The only way to find out is to go down to the basement and see if it’s there. It would be on the north side, right under the garage.”
Kiersten nodded, then glanced at the clock shaped like an owl above the kitchen sink. “Gosh. I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time. I should get going.”
“Before you leave, I have a suggestion to make. For a field trip.”
