Cutler 02 - Secrets of the Morning

getting tired," she said quickly.
    "When will you tell me my father's name, Mother? When?" I demanded.
    "Oh dear. I can't talk like this over the phone. I'll speak to you again, soon," she said and hung up before I could say another unpleasant thing. Right after she did, I once again heard a second click. It sent a chilling ripple through my body. Agnes Morris did listen in on my phone calls, I thought. It enraged me and when I went upstairs, I told Trisha.
    "She's spying on me," I said. "I'm sure of it. And all because she believes the lies my grandmother wrote."
    "We've got to get a look at the letter," Trisha concluded. "Let's try tomorrow night when she goes to the theater with her friends. I'm sure she won't lock her bedroom door."
    "Oh, Trisha, I don't know. What if we're caught?" "We won't be. You want to see the letter, don't you?" she asked. "Well?" she pursued.
    "Yes," I said. I looked into her eyes. "I want to see that letter very much."
    The next night we sat in the sitting room and pretended to be interested in Agnes Morris's scrapbooks. It almost kept her from going out with her friends because she lingered so long to explain this picture and that and tell anecdotes about her performances and fellow actors. When Mr. Fairbanks, the clock, bonged out the hour, she realized she had to hurry to dress to meet her friends.
    After she left we went looking for Mrs. Liddy and found that she had gone into her room to listen to the radio. Trisha looked at me and nodded. She went to Agnes's door and discovered it was unlocked, just as she had expected. When she turned the knob, I thought a dozen butterflies had been frightened inside my chest. It felt like their wings were flapping against my heart. I hesitated.
    "What if she comes back while we're in there?" I asked.
    "She won't. She's gone to a show. Come on," Trisha whispered. I looked back at Mrs. Liddy's closed door. The music from the radio could still be heard, but she could still come out and see or hear us. That would be terrible, I thought. Then I thought about Grandmother Cutler and how she would glare at me with her gray-stone eyes shooting devilish electric sparks.
    "All right," I said and followed Trisha into Agnes's room. I hadn't seen past the curtain before. Trisha parted it and we entered.
    It did feel like I was walking onto a stage and entering a set. We found the bedroom dimly lit by a small Tiffany lamp on the desk to the left. Agnes had an antique white cast-iron bed with white pine night stands on either side. There were oversized pillows and a white down comforter with pink trim. The wall on the right held an enormous mirror. A long vanity table was covered with jars and tubes of makeup, cold cream and powders. In the left corner were bottles of perfume, so many it looked like a shelf in the cosmetic section of a department store. As we drew closer, I could see that a ring of small bulbs lined the mirror. It even smelled like back stage.
    There were two matching dressers on the left and a closet between them, the door now closed but a sign over it read, EXIT. I turned to Trisha with a smile of confusion on my face.
    "She's taken things from stages and put them in this room. That's an actual makeup table from an old theater. And those drapes," she said, nodding toward the windows, "were made from actual stage curtains.
    "Every morning she leaves this room, she pretends she's starring in a new play," Trisha added. I looked at the pictures on the walls. They were all pictures of Agnes wearing different costumes from the different productions she had been in. I recognized some of them from the scrapbooks.
    Suddenly, it all struck me as being very sad. Agnes lived in the past because she had no present and no future. Every day she wove her memories together on a loom of fantasy to avoid facing reality, facing the fact that she was no longer young and beautiful and in demand. She lived vicariously through her talented residents. I began to wonder how much of what she had told us was part of an illusion.
    "If the letter is anywhere," Trisha said, "it's probably on that desk."
    We went to it and began to search through the papers piled in a rather disorganized manner—bills were mixed in with personal letters, theater periodicals and advertisements. We didn't find Grandmother Cutler's letter there. Trisha opened the drawers and rifled through them, but again, we came up empty-handed.
    I touched Trisha's shoulder and indicated she should be quiet