Chapter 4 - Shadows of the Boulevard
The next morning, Nora walked Toby to the elementary school on 14th Street. The late autumn chill was biting into the maple leaves, turning them into bronze wafers that crunched beneath their shoes. Toby held her hand tightly, skipping every third step to avoid cracks in the pavement.
“Mama, why was that lady in the silk shirt so mad at us?” he asked out of nowhere.
Nora paused, adjusting his knitted scarf. “She wasn’t mad at us, Toby. She was frightened of something else, and it came out sounding like anger.”
“What is she scared of?”
“Losing things,” Nora answered truthfully. “People who hold onto things too tightly get scared when they see others surviving with almost nothing.”
After dropping him at the gate, Nora didn’t head directly to her shift at the commercial laundry. Instead, she took the cross-town bus toward the North Hill district. It was an older part of town where Victorian houses sat set back from the road behind wrought-iron fences and overgrown boxwood hedges.
This was where Evelyn Vance had lived before her husband passed away, before the property empire had fragmented into contentious disputes between surviving heirs. The Vance name had once owned half the riverfront warehouses. Now, Evelyn managed a handful of multi-family buildings with a sharp, grasping bitterness that felt more like desperation than pride.
Nora got off at Elm Street and walked until she found the low stone wall fronting Number 214. The paint on the porch trim was peeling in curled strips, though the lawn was raked spotless. Sitting on a wicker chair on the covered porch, wrapped in a heavy wool shawl, sat an older woman with silver hair pulled back in a silver comb.
It was not Evelyn Vance.
It was Evelyn’s estranged older sister, Clara Vance—a woman who had spent thirty years teaching literature at the local community college before arthritis confined her to quiet afternoons and paperbacks.
May you like
Clara looked up as the gate clicked. Her pale, intelligent eyes settled on Nora without surprise.
“You have your mother-in-law’s posture, Nora,” Clara said across the porch. “She walked up that garden path thirty years ago with the same set to her jaw.”
