He went straight to one of the search websites and started looking for her, but while there were nearly thirty Rose Parkers currently in the databases, none of them, to his extreme frustration, had the right birth year apart from one with an old address in Athens, Georgia, and the only Vermonter named Rose Parker was an octogenarian. He asked a librarian about yearbooks from West Rutland High School and was excited when she pointed to a corner of the reference section, but the collection yielded little of value. Dianna, having merely “attended” high school, had no graduation portrait in the 1997 or 1998 yearbook, and after Jake looked carefully through the years before that when she might have been pictured in clubs or teams or held class offices he had to conclude that she’d been remarkably uninvolved at West Rutland High; there was only her name on a dean’s list of scholars and a single citation for a prizewinning essay on Vermont during the Revolutionary War to show she’d made any mark at all on the school. Rose Parker presented an even more frustrating absence. Born in 1996, she’d left home without graduating from high school—Sally had told him that—so it made sense that there was no Rose Parker among the graduating seniors of 2012. In fact he found only a single image of Rose Parker from what must have been her tenth-grade year: a spindly girl in short bangs and large round glasses, holding a field hockey stick in a team photo. It was small and not completely in focus, but he took out his phone and snapped a picture anyway. It might be all he’d ever find.
After that, he turned to the sale of the house on Marble Street, from Evan Parker’s heir to its first owners not to be named Parker. As the women had said, Rose wasn’t present for the transaction itself, and was apparently indifferent to the fate of a century and a half’s worth of family possessions, not to mention her own childhood belongings. But the attorney, William Gaylord, Esquire, was right here in Rutland, and if he didn’t know where Rose Parker was today he had to have known where she was at the time of the sale. That was something.
Jake gathered his notes and walked out of the Rutland Free Library and through heavy rain to his car. It was just past three in the afternoon.
The offices of William Gaylord, Esq., occupied one of those former homes on North Main Street that had once housed the wealthiest citizens of Rutland. It had gray shingles and a Queen Anne turret, and sat just south of a traffic light between a forlorn dance studio and a chartered accountancy. Jake parked beside the single car in the lot behind the building and walked around to the front porch. There, a sign beside the door read LEGAL SERVICES. He could see a woman working inside.
He hadn’t given much thought to how he might justify his interest in a three-year-old real estate transaction to which he had no obvious connection, but he decided he’d have better luck knocking on the door than trying to explain his business over the phone. With Martin Purcell he had pretended to be a teacher in some small degree of mourning for his former student, and with Sally-the-barfly he’d been a clueless stranger out for a drink. With Betty and Sylvia he’d been nearly himself, a “famous writer” paying his respects to the home of a late acquaintance. None of this had been particularly easy for him. Unlike the devious fifteen-year-old girl in Saki’s most famous story, romance at short notice was not his specialty; he was far more than adept at constructing untruths on the page, when he had all the time in the world to get the fabrication right. True, he’d been able to walk away from each of these previous encounters with information he hadn’t had before, and that had been worth the personal discomfort, but here he couldn’t simply flounder through the conversation, hoping to learn something relevant. Here he actually knew what he was trying to find out, and it was hardly something he could come straight out and ask for.
He assembled his most pleasant smile and went inside.
The woman looked up. She was dark, southeast Asian—Indian or Bangladeshi, Jake thought—and wearing an acrylic blue sweater that managed to be loose at the top and tight as a cummerbund around her thick middle. She smiled, too, when she saw Jake enter, but her smile wasn’t as pleasant as his.
“I apologize for not calling first,” he said. “But I’m wondering if Mr. Gaylord is available for a few minutes?”
The woman was giving Jake a very thorough appraisal. He was glad he hadn’t gone full Vermont for this visit. He was wearing his last clean shirt and over it a black wool sweater Anna had given him for Christmas.
“May I ask what this is about?”
“Certainly. I’m interested in purchasing some real estate.”
“Residential or commercial?” she said, still plainly suspicious.
