Chapter 2 - The House on Maple Street
The small frame house at 414 Maple Street sat between a vacant lot filled with rusted machinery and a two-family duplex whose porch had sagged into the bushes five winters ago.
Abigail guided Henry up the three wooden steps, her boots slipping twice on the ice that had formed over the grey paint. The front door had no storm window, only a brass knocker shaped like an acorn that Mary had polished every spring since Abigail was six.
When the key turned in the lock, the smell of lavender oil and cheap vegetable soup met them in the narrow hallway.
Mary Miller came out of the kitchen immediately, wiping her hands on a striped dishtowel. She was forty-two, but her hair was already streaked with iron-gray at the temples, and her shoulder blades poked sharp against the fabric of her blue house dress.
“Abby?” Mary stopped, her eyes wide as she saw the old man standing behind her daughter, his silver hair plastered to his skull by melted snow. “What happened? Why aren't you at the diner?”
“Dale fired me,” Abigail said simply. She helped Henry unbutton his coat, her fingers working carefully around the silver buttons that bore a tiny, engraved crest—a hawk holding a ring in its beak.
Mary didn't yell. She didn't ask about the electricity bill or the rent or the letter from the collection agency. She looked at Henry’s face—the blue, pinched skin around his nose, the unfocused light in his eyes—and her maid’s instinct, honed by twenty years of serving old people in large, quiet rooms, took over.
“Get his coat off,” Mary said briskly, stepping forward to take Henry’s hat. “Abby, put the kettle on. Put two logs on the stove—the dry pine from the cellar, not the oak.”
“He says his name is Henry Fitzgerald,” Abigail whispered as she carried the wet coat toward the back porch.
Mary froze, her hand still holding Henry’s elbow as she led him toward the worn armchair near the wood stove. Her eyes dropped to the small crest on the jacket lapel.
“Fitzgerald?” Mary repeated softly. “From the Ridge?”
“He was at the bus stop on Harrow,” Abigail said, returning to the kitchen with two chipped mugs. “He was sitting there in the cold. He said his son was coming for him.”
Mary didn't answer right away. She sat on the small stool beside the armchair, taking Henry’s blue, stiff fingers into her own worn hands. She didn't rub them hard; she held them gently between her palms, breathing her own warm air over his knuckles until the color began to return.
“Mr. Fitzgerald?” Mary asked softly. “Do you know where you are?”
Henry looked around the small room. He looked at the low ceiling with its water stain near the light fixture, the faded wallpaper patterned with small yellow flowers, and the narrow bookshelf held up by two red bricks.
“This isn't the house,” he said. His voice was clearer now, the warmth of the stove drawing the fog from his lungs. “The ceilings are too low. Where are the pictures?”
“This is my home, sir,” Mary said. “My name is Mary. This is Abigail. You were out in the storm.”
Henry reached into his coat pocket—he was still wearing his grey trousers—and pulled out the photograph again. He held it out to Mary with a hand that had stopped shaking.
“Have you seen him?” he asked. “Edward. He told me to wait. He said he had to buy his tobacco.”
Mary looked at the photograph. Her face went very pale.
“I know this man,” she whispered to Abigail, who had come to stand beside her with a cup of black tea. “This is Edward Fitzgerald. He’s the chairman of Fitzgerald Maritime. I cleaned his sister’s house in Chestnut Hill three years ago before she moved to London.”
“He left him,” Abigail said, her teeth sinking into her lower lip until she tasted iron. “He left him at the shelter on purpose, Mom. The temperature was zero. If I hadn't stopped—”
“We don't know that,” Mary said quickly, though her eyes were troubled as she looked at the old man’s face. “It could have been an accident. People with... with memory troubles, they wander. I saw it with old Mrs. Vance on Oak Ridge.”
“It wasn't an accident,” Henry said suddenly.
Both women turned to look at him.
The old man was sitting upright now, his back straight against the flat cushions of the armchair. His eyes were no longer pale and milky; the heat from the stove seemed to have burned away the haze that had clouded them on Harrow Street.
“Edward doesn't make accidents,” Henry said, his tone dry and hard as iron. “He has five calendars on his desk. He knows the weight of every crate that goes onto a barge in Boston harbor. He knew it was six o'clock.”
He reached into his inner breast pocket—a pocket that had been hidden beneath his scarf—and pulled out a small leather-bound notebook tied with a black ribbon.
“He thought I forgot,” Henry continued, his voice dropping an octave, taking on the heavy, commanding weight of a man who had spent fifty years giving orders in boardrooms. “He thought the doctors in Boston were right when they said my mind was slipping. I let him think it. It’s easier to see what a dog will do when he thinks you’re blind.”
Abigail exchanged a long look with her mother.
“Mr. Fitzgerald,” Mary said gently, “we should call your home. Your family must be searching for you.”
Henry looked at Mary. His blue eyes were sharp now, piercing through the dim light of the small room.
“If you call that house, my dear woman, Edward will answer. And by eight o'clock tomorrow morning, I will be in a private facility in Vermont with a nurse who signs whatever papers Edward puts in front of her.” He paused, looking at the tea mug in his hand. “How much do you make an hour, Mary?”
Mary blinked, taken aback. “Fifteen dollars, sir. When there’s work.”
“And you, child?” he asked Abigail.
“Eight-fifty,” Abigail said. “Plus tips. But I don't have a job anymore.”
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Henry Fitzgerald looked around the small, cold room again—the three envelopes beneath the sugar bowl, the broken boot on the rug, the two women standing before him in their patched clothes.
“Then it seems,” the old man said, setting his cup down on the wooden side table with a firm, solid click, “that all three of us are currently unemployed. I suggest we fix that.”
