“Yeah, soba.”
“I’ll give you a ring before I head back,” she promised.
On the train she drew circles in her notebook and pondered her great-grandmother’s stories. She’d loved those fantastical tales of people transforming into animals and balls of fire flying through the night sky, but they always took place in what was to her an alien world. Long ago, far up the mountains. She’d never thought you could have a modern witch story. It was as if the glass and steel of office buildings repelled them. But in her backpack there was the talisman, and between her hands the notebook with her idle circles.
Iron and glass might not be enough.
She walked from the train station to Hoffman’s apartment,which was in the North End, above an Italian deli. Several of the brownstones and apartment buildings were undergoing renovations, giving way to luxury developments, but Hoffman’s building looked untouched by the changes.
Two old ladies sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk across the street, fanning themselves, and looked at her curiously. She rang the bell and was buzzed in, climbing the dark, narrow staircase until she reached the third floor.
Hoffman wore small, round glasses, a hearing aid in his left ear, and black slippers on his feet. As soon as she walked into his living room, he offered her a cup of tea. Unlike Carolyn Yates, he didn’t have a proper tea set and handed her a mug that saidBoston Athletics Associationwhile he held one with a picture of Snoopy at the typewriter. The pictures on the walls were ocean views, photos of shells, a dock. An upright piano, tucked in a corner, had more photos above it, perhaps of family and friends.
“I was glad to hear from you. Betty would have been thrilled to know people are interested in her work. You said you wanted to look at some papers I might have?”
He handed her a hexagonal coaster and she set her cup down atop the coffee table. “Carolyn Yates gave me access to Betty’s journals and a manuscript she was working on. But she said you might have a few other things of hers.”
“I do. Three boxes.”
She took out her tape recorder and her notebook. “Do you mind—”
“Go ahead, go ahead.”
She pressed the record button. “You met her when she was a freshman at Stoneridge, correct?”
“I did. I was a friend of Edgar Yates and other young men who frequented Stoneridge. They held many social functions there. It was an easy way to get to dance with a nice young lady. You’d simply ask a friend of a friend to get you an invitation to the formal dances. The girls were always looking for dance partners. Do you still hold your dances at Cohasset House?”
“We don’t really have formal dances anymore.”
“A pity. I liked dancing,” he said wistfully.
“You and Betty seem to have been close, but it wasn’t the typical relationship you might expect.”
He smiled. “No, it wasn’t the college romance most people were looking for. We connected because we stood out among the others. Betty was a poor girl trying to move up in the world and I was a Jewish boy from Brighton. And there was the fact that she liked women, and I didn’t find anyone attractive, so that put us in a different spot than others. We bonded, kept in touch through the years. I went to Chicago once and met Irene, her longtime girlfriend. When they moved to Arizona, they made sure to invite me to spend time with them there. Eventually Betty came back to the East Coast.”
“Is Irene still in Arizona?”
“I think she passed away a few years ago. But I can see if I have contact information for her friends and family.”
She lifted her cup. The tea tasted black and bitter. Minerva made a face.
He chuckled and slid a dish with sugar cubes in her direction. “Place one between your teeth and then sip the tea. It’s how we drank it.”
She took a cube and imitated him.
“Better?”
She nodded and smiled.
“She spent her last two years here, with me. I was the only one left. Irene and Betty had broken up long before that. She had a brother who died during World War II and a sister who passed away years before. No other family to help her at the end, and she never did make a great living. Copyediting. That’s what she did. Her stories, her novels, she worked on those in her free time, and she never wrote for the slicks, so there wasn’t much money. You can go through the boxes if you want, look at pictures of Betty when she was young.”
“That would be amazing.”
“Well, and what else do you need? Any other questions I can answer?”
“I was hoping to learn more about Virginia Somerset.The Vanishingseems to be inspired by her disappearance. You knew her too, right?”
There was a brief pause before he replied. “Ginny Somerset cast a long shadow over Betty’s and Edgar’s lives.”
