As Agnes finished dusting the credenza, her left hand stopped in mid-air. A tiny little disturbance took root in the back of her head. Crazy, this gray vacuum forming in her brain, but something about Cristina’s words unsettled her. The images of her father’s locket, Norman’s gold watch, and the attack in West Philadelphia merged into a single horrifying thought. Cristina knew too much about Norman, but how?
Slowly her mind went backward in time – Cristina, quiet and flanked on either side by her parents at Norman’s funeral. The first to call the morning after Norman’s accident. Norman forbidding her from seeing Cristina, and becoming ill the only time she and Angelo entertained them for dinner. Cristina’s unforgettable reaction when Agnes told her she was pregnant. Are you insane. And her contempt for Norman, almost pathological.
An affair between her husband and best friend, like a bad cliché in a dime-store novel. Agnes tried to quash the razor-like demons inside, but they kept picking at her. Ridiculous, suspecting her best friend of betrayal, all while Cristina had been happily married with two sons, a librarian in West Philadelphia. But wait – Norman had designed that library himself. Cristina had gone to work there after it opened. And then it exploded inside her head, it was true. But she had no proof.
On the other side of the room, Norman’s red box remained unopened. It’d been there since the Navy had sent it eight months ago. That box might contain the proof, one way or the other. She refused to open the box – too many painful memories inside. But now she found herself inching her way across the dining room toward it, one step at a time, knowing she’d probably find the answer to her question inside. Her heart pulsed in prestissimo, her eyes stung, and her ears burned.
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