The Tulip Eaters

“Wait a minute,” said Nora. “Do you suppose the killer and the kidnapper might have been looking for something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. But the investigators said there seemed to be a struggle—footprints up and down the stairs.” She rubbed her chin, thinking. “What if killing my mother wasn’t the only thing they came for? And we still have no idea why they’d take Rose.”

“Nora, maybe you’re just grasping at straws.”

“But what can it hurt? We’re going to pack up all of this stuff, anyway—why not search for a clue?” Possibilities rushed through her mind. “Something my mother had that they needed? Something that could give us insight into why this nightmare happened?”

Nora thought she saw Marijke bite her lip. “We have to pack up everything, anyway, and if we do a thorough job, who knows what we’ll come up with?”

“There must be a link between my mother’s bizarre murder and that man on the floor. But what?” Her eyes now fixed upon Rose’s bassinet, a cruel reminder that pierced right through her.

Marijke returned to the couch and motioned for Nora to sit, but Nora remained standing, energized by her theory. “Look, the police searched the house, but how much time did they really spend looking? Their objective was physical evidence, not motive. And one guy said he could tell by the footprints that two people went upstairs. Maybe that’s what we should focus on.”

Marijke shrugged. “If the FBI and all those policemen can’t find a connection, how can we?”

Nora felt excitement for the first time since that terrible evening. “Look, we’re going to search every nook and cranny of this house. We’ll go inch by inch until we find something—anything—that might shed light on the murder.”

“Nora, even if we do find some motive, how will that help us find Rose?”

“Because the two have to be linked. Mom was Dutch. The forged Dutch passport, the Dutch money on the killer—these aren’t coincidences. Maybe the accomplice panicked, grabbed Rose and then ran away, not thinking of the consequences.”

“But even if we find out why your mother was killed, how will that explain why his accomplice would risk kidnapping Rose? And why wouldn’t he already have called demanding a ransom?”

Nora saw Marijke react to what must have been Nora’s look of disappointment. “But,” said Marijke kindly, “anything is worth trying at this point.” She stood. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

Nora hugged her, the most positive reaction she had mustered since that awful day. She went to the kitchen counter and picked up a pad of paper and a pen. She chewed on the plastic cap, her brow furrowed. Then her eyes cleared and she wrote furiously on the pad. She tore off two pages and handed one to Marijke.

“Here’s a list. You start in Mom’s bedroom. I’ll look downstairs. Even if we don’t find anything, it will give me something to do instead of sitting by the phone going crazy.”

Marijke glanced at the page Nora had handed her. “What am I looking for?”

Nora shrugged. “I don’t really know. Anything. Old papers or letters, documents, something hidden away. If there’s anything at all, it won’t be sitting out in the open. I’ll start down here with the oldest files in my father’s study. Who knows where they would hide things?”

Marijke stood and folded her arms. “Nora, do you really think they would have kept incriminating documents?”

“Maybe not, but what else can we do but try?”

“Vooruit! I will begin.” She disappeared down the hall.

Four hours later, Nora, still sitting on the study floor, looked at the cardboard boxes now packed with books, files of financial papers and tax returns, small Delft Blue plates and figurines. The sad detritus of over thirty years—all she had left of her mom and dad. She looked around her. In a way, it was the souls of two people she was packing into those boxes, fragments of two lives not only unfinished, but unlived. She had found nothing relevant from their past, but every object had evoked a memory. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father’s wide, gentle hands holding a thick book with a look of pleasure on his face. The needlepoint pillow nestled into her mother’s chair, its profusion of roses like the ones Anneke had tended so passionately in her garden.

Nora stood, her legs cramped from sitting cross-legged while poring over her father’s files. She glanced outside. The fiery Houston sun was setting in a bath of surreal colors. Probably pollution, she thought. She walked to her father’s desk, picked up a framed photo and studied it. A dark-haired, beautiful Anneke stared out at her, a quiet smile on her face. The photo, she knew, had been taken in 1946, the year her parents married. She studied the background. Was it Holland or Houston? The sepia backdrop and faded black-and-white figures told her nothing.

She studied her father’s expression—proud and happy. He had been the affectionate one, a disciplined academic with one soft spot—his daughter. She’d never known him to be anything other than patient, kind and fair. She stared at the smaller photo next to it, Hans pulling a red wagon up the hill at Hermann Park, while a five-year-old Nora waved and smiled.

Her eyes blurred with tears. Her mother had had terrible bouts of depression, often emanating an all-consuming sadness. Sometimes they would make her angry; other times she’d withdraw to her garden or stare out of the small bay window next to her bed. Nora’s poor father had never seen Rose, had never known the relaxed woman Anneke had become during the years after his death.

As a child, whenever Nora would try to touch Anneke’s arm or awaken her from what seemed to be some kind of trance, Anneke would not react, as if her mind were elsewhere and her soul had fled. It had frightened Nora as a child and even more now.

Where had Anneke disappeared in those moments? Could it have something to do with the man who killed her? Why didn’t she ever tell me? How will I bear it if Rose never comes back to me—if I’ve lost both of them without any answers? Nora heard a keening cry, an animal in the wild, lost by its pack, howling in the dead of winter. Only after she had heard the piteous noise did she realize it had come from her.

She looked over at the door to Rose’s nursery and walked into the dark room. Rose’s sweet smell, which had permeated the house, had started to fade. Nora panicked. What if she forgot what Rose looked like? The tiny details of her chubby cheeks, the unique spectrum of blues in her eyes...would they fade, too? Would she forget all the features that made up the Rose she adored, the minute, vital things that no one knew but her mother? And if she forgot those, would Rose—wherever she was—know instinctively that her mother’s image of her had faded, feel it and then give up?

“No!” She grabbed a photo of Rose and, through blurred tears, studied each of her features—every crinkle of her smile, every shade of her flushed cheeks, every pixel of color that made her eyes the only ones Nora believed in.

She would find Rose. Rose would be safe. Her baby would come back to her. To think anything else was a black road to madness. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the dining room and stared at herself in the huge mirror over the china cabinet. The light of dusk that sifted through the plantation shades cast a fading glow. Nora felt she was looking at herself in a different century, like the wedding photograph of her parents, which had branded itself in her mind.

In the photo, Anneke sat without smiling, her dark, long hair and eyes somehow resigned, the terrible fragility of her thin body, her white skin a sharp contrast to the dark hair and eyelashes. A second look at herself in the mirror told Nora that she was her mother, her coal-smudged eyes set in skin too-pale, paper-white.

Turning away, she wondered if she should have acceded to Anneke’s pleas that she live with her. If she hadn’t agreed, at least her mother would be alive and she would still have Rose. No, she could not have done otherwise. When she saw her mother’s radiant face as she’d exited the blurred Customs door in Houston, she’d known that there was no other choice. Her mother’s piercing look of longing and love had overwhelmed her.

And Nora did need her. When she found out that she was pregnant, it had sealed their commitment to each other, walking the ancient path of life: mother, daughter, granddaughter.

She wiped away her tears and looked at the dining table, so dark, heavy and worn. Four plain chairs surrounded it, the fourth rarely hosting a guest. Although born in America, Nora was raised in an undeniably Dutch home. Dinner at six every evening—meat, potatoes, gravy and applesauce—vegetables optional. And canned, never fresh. Family meals passed through her mind, the quiet murmur of Dutch as they related the small details of their day. The house always spotless, the stoep scrubbed every day with her mother’s hard bristle brush and a cake of old-fashioned soap. Work was work, duty was duty, family was private.

As she walked through the downstairs hall, it struck Nora that Anneke had changed nothing since Hans’s death. Every object on the walls and tables, every stick of furniture, every candlestick and piece of silver, was precisely the same as it had been when Hans drew his last breath. Did it give her comfort to keep everything the same? Did she love him?

The banging of opening and closing drawers from upstairs brought Nora back to the present. Marijke had taken her instructions to heart.

Opening the hall closet, Nora pushed the winter coats aside and looked at the floor. Nothing. She ran her fingers down the row of jackets and suddenly felt something familiar, the coat Anneke had bought for Hans only months before he died. His cancer had made him so weak that he was freezing all the time. Nora tried to imagine what that felt like—to have Siberia in your bones. Raising the thermostat to its highest setting hadn’t helped. Anneke had abandoned the Dutch rule against extravagant spending and bought him a full-length navy cashmere coat. From the moment he slipped it on, Nora knew that he would never take it off. On the morning he died, it was wrapped tightly around him, as if he had created his own shroud to avoid further troubling his wife or daughter. She crushed her face into the soft sleeve, wishing he were here now to help her.

An hour later, she was finished. And not one step closer to any discovery than when she began. She felt too exhausted to cry. She heard footfalls as Marijke came downstairs and into the hallway. Marijke looked at her and shook her head.

Nora closed her eyes. Maybe she should take a nap. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time since that horrible day. And Marijke must be dead tired, too. As Nora watched her open the door and walk into the garage, she felt a stab of guilt. Had she had taken terrible advantage of the fortuitous visit of her dear friend? If her mother died, Marijke would never forgive herself for not being there. Well, a few hours’ sleep might give them both the strength they needed to carry on.

But then she thought of the attic. She hadn’t been up there since she was a small girl, playing hide-and-seek with Hans. She went into the hallway and looked up at the trapdoor, its worn rope dangling from the ceiling. Despite Nora’s height, it took her two attempts to grab it and yank it down. The old wooden stairs finally released and lowered, groaning as dust and dirt fell onto her head.

Nora wiped her eyes, stared up into the dusty abyss and then went into the kitchen. She opened the drawer where her father had always kept the flashlight and then walked back to the rickety ladder that hung with an air of crooked despondency. She picked her way carefully up, waving the flashlight back and forth as soon as she entered the murkiness of the attic.

The light traveled over rose-colored insulation and, through dust motes, the fetid air clutched at Nora’s throat. Almost immediately, rivulets of sweat ran down her face. It must be over a hundred up here! Once her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she spotted a row of old cardboard boxes. She opened every one, sneezing at the dust that rose from them.

Their contents were unremarkable. Her grade school records, baby clothes and photos of her with her parents in Galveston in summer. Her heart lurched as she saw the happiness on both their faces. Gone, gone.

When she closed the last box, she stared at her filthy hands as sweat streamed down her back. Weary and disappointed, she took another look around. She saw nothing other than the boxes she had already opened. In typical Dutch fashion, her mother had stacked them neatly against the wall, had even organized them chronologically.

She took a final glance at the marshaled nothingness around her. This was getting her nowhere. And the attic had been her last resort. Surely this was where secrets would have been hidden if they existed at all?

She swept the dim light around one last time. It fell upon a broken chair, an old broom and a pair of heavy work shoes, the kind favored by her father. She pointed the faint beam into every corner, but saw nothing except disabled toys, crippled furniture, old mattresses and torn boxes that revealed their useless contents with an almost defiant air.

She knew why her mother had saved these things. It was the Dutch way—the conviction that the moment anything was thrown away, it would be needed again. Well, it was all just junk.

She turned to go back downstairs. Her feet felt leaden, her mind reduced to dull panic. At ground level, she would call to Marijke, only to learn that she, too, had found nothing. And then she would fall into her bed and try, try, try, to make another plan—no matter how crazy—to do something to find Rose.

Thoughts tumbled over in her mind like laundry in a dryer. Why hadn’t she found even a hint of why this son of a bitch had come? Surely there had to be something that would give a clue as to what she should do next!

She again pointed the beam into every corner, but saw nothing. She had turned to go back down when the flashlight shifted in her hand and reflected something metallic in the far corner. She pushed aside a few empty boxes and looked. On the dusty floor was a small container about the size of a toolbox. She wiped the dirt off of the label. Blank. Probably empty. She picked it up. It rattled.