Book of Alisha

For ten years, Alisha Haddon had driven past the Balfour mansion without troubling herself to look at it.

Ten years was as long as she had held a driver’s license. Before that, she had passed it in the passenger seat of her mother’s car, and before that in the back of her father’s, when her feet did not yet reach the floor and her father was still alive to tell her not to stare at other people’s houses.

There had been a time when she stared anyway.

As a child, she had watched for the mansion through the bars of its iron fence: the steep roof above the trees, the narrow upper windows, the stone faces tucked beneath the eaves. Rain had worn the faces smooth, but from a moving car they seemed to retain their expressions. One appeared to be laughing. Another had its mouth open in pain. She had never been able to decide which expression belonged to the face above the front door.

Eventually, she stopped looking.

She was not a tourist. She had been born in Providence, had grown up among its old brick buildings and crooked streets, and had learned early that a house could be famous without being of any particular interest to the people obliged to pass it on their way to work. The Balfour mansion became another familiar obstruction beyond the windshield: ironwork, trees, a length of dark retaining wall. Something glimpsed between a traffic light and the next turn.

Only occasionally did she notice a change. A limb brought down by a storm. Fresh boards over a window in an otherwise immaculate wing. Once, every curtain on the ground floor drawn back at the same precise angle, exposing rooms too dark to see into.

She could not remember ever seeing anyone enter or leave.

The mansion stood well back from the street, behind a fence whose uprights ended in long, black spearheads. Mature trees crowded the grounds, their branches interlacing above a drive that curved out of sight before reaching the house. Through them rose a confusion of slate roofs, chimneys, and steep gables. The stonework had darkened unevenly with age. Beneath the ledges and window surrounds, black stains descended in thin, persistent lines, as though something within the walls had been seeping outward for years.

Even in summer, the grounds seemed to hold the light poorly.

Alisha knew the owner’s name, of course.

Everyone seemed to know Regina Balfour’s name. What anyone actually knew about the woman was less clear. Alisha had heard her spoken of at dinner tables and in courthouse corridors, always with the curious familiarity people reserved for someone they had never met. Her wealth was taken for granted. So was her age, although no two people appeared to agree on what it was.

Alisha had never expected to hear her voice.

The call came that afternoon, after Velma had gone home.

Without her part-time assistant, the office seemed smaller and shabbier. Velma ordinarily supplied enough noise to conceal its deficiencies: the brisk tapping of keys, the scrape of file drawers, her running commentary on callers who believed an urgent tone entitled them to free legal advice. Now the little suite held only the hum of the ceiling lights and the intermittent complaint of the pipes behind the wall.

Alisha sat at her desk with an open file before her and very little reason to keep reading it.

She practiced in Providence, though most of her clients came from nearby Massachusetts. There were not enough of them. A stack of unpaid invoices lay beneath her calendar, carefully squared so she would not have to think of it as a stack of unpaid invoices. Across the room, Velma’s empty chair stood pushed neatly beneath her desk.

When the telephone rang, Alisha reached for it before the second ring had finished.

“Haddon Law. Alisha Haddon speaking. How may I help you?”

For a moment, no one answered.

She heard a faint, steady hiss, then a small sound near the receiver at the other end, as though someone had shifted a hand against it.

“Miss Haddon?”

The speaker was a woman. Elderly, Alisha thought, although there was nothing weak or uncertain in the voice. Each word arrived distinctly, with a measured care that made Alisha suddenly conscious of her own hurried greeting.

“Yes?”

“My name is Regina Balfour. I am calling because I may wish to retain your services.”

Alisha straightened in her chair.

“Of course, Mrs. Balfour.”

“The attorney with whom I ordinarily deal has recently passed away. I should like you to come to my house so that we may discuss certain matters requiring attention.”

Alisha glanced toward the outer office, absurdly wishing Velma were there to hear the name.

“I’m sorry to hear about your attorney,” she said. “May I ask who he was? Did he practice here in Providence? The legal community is small enough that I might have known him.”

“Bradford Shifflet.”

The name stopped her hand halfway to her pen.

She had known him only slightly: a tall man with an old-fashioned courtesy and a habit of lowering his voice before saying anything of consequence. She remembered silver hair combed straight back from his forehead. A dark overcoat hung on a courthouse peg. His obituary, passed from one desk to another.

Bradford Shifflet had been dead for five years.

“When would you be able to come?” Regina asked.

Alisha looked down at the blank space on her notepad.

Five years. She was certain of it. She had still been establishing the practice when he died. Velma had not yet come to work for her.

“Mrs. Balfour,” she began, then stopped.

There was no tactful way to correct a stranger’s account of her own bereavement, particularly over the telephone. Recently could mean a great many things to someone very old. Perhaps Regina had misspoken. Perhaps there had been another Bradford Shifflet.

Alisha uncapped her pen.

“I generally meet prospective clients here at my office,” she said. “We’re downtown. Would you be able to come in?”

“No.”

The reply was quiet and immediate.

Alisha waited for an explanation.

“I do not travel, Miss Haddon.”

“Not even—”

“Would you prefer to recommend someone else?”

Nothing in the woman’s tone suggested offense. That made the question more effective. Alisha had the distinct impression that Regina Balfour was quite prepared to replace her, and that if she did, she would never think of her again.

Her eyes moved to the invoices beneath the calendar.

Through the office window she could see the blank rear wall of the neighboring building. A drainpipe had come loose from one of its brackets and shifted slightly whenever the wind caught it. She had been meaning to ask the landlord about the damp patch spreading above her own window. She had been meaning to do several things that required money.

She turned to the afternoon page in her appointment book.

It was empty.

“I could come at three,” she said. “Would that be convenient?”

“That would be quite suitable.”

Alisha wrote the name carefully.

REGINA BALFOUR — 3:00.

“Let me give you the address.”

“That won’t be necessary. I know the house.”

The silence that followed was brief, but long enough for Alisha to wish she had phrased it differently.

“It’s rather famous,” she added.

“Yes,” Regina said.

A soft sound came through the receiver. Alisha could not tell whether it was a breath or the beginning of a laugh.

“Thank you, dear. I shall see you at three.”

The call ended before Alisha could say goodbye.

She kept the receiver against her ear for another moment, listening to the empty line, then set it carefully in its cradle.

On the notepad, she had written Regina’s name and the time, but nothing about the work. No mention of a will, a trust, a disputed property, or an estate. She had agreed to leave her office and visit a woman she had never met without asking the most elementary question.

What, precisely, did Mrs. Balfour want her to do?

Alisha reached toward the telephone, intending to call back.

Then she remembered that she had not taken a number.

For a little while she sat still, her hand resting beside the receiver. Outside, the loose drainpipe tapped once against the brick.

She thought of Bradford Shifflet, five years in his grave.

And for the first time in years, she tried to remember what the Balfour mansion’s front door looked like.