by Mary Bowers
I looked at the younger man and he looked at me. Then I said, “Shall we?” and fell into formation behind Willa and Sherman, side-by-side but disconnected
* * * * *
Have you ever tried to strike up a conversation with somebody from a completely different age group, with whom you have nothing in common, who looks like he’d rather jump off a cliff than have to talk to you?
I began to wish Carr was one of those young people who are always texting or playing games on their cells. Yes, they’re ignoring you, but on the other hand, you can go ahead and ignore them back. Shouldn’t he at least have been taking pictures of the ocean and posting them online somewhere?
But no, he stalked along beside me, looking like he wanted to kick the sandpipers over the dune or stomp on some kid’s sandcastle.
Finally I asked him, “Were Sherman and Harriet very good friends?”
He glared. “Why? You and your friends think Sherman murdered her because he was madly in love with her and she rejected him? Don’t make me laugh. Nobody was ever madly in love with Harriet.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t think anything in particular about him at all, and as far as I know neither do my friends, but when he could easily have come and stayed with you, he decided to stay with Harriet instead. I just wondered why.”
“I was undercover, remember?”
“Come on, Carr, don’t be a brat,” I said, exasperated. “It doesn’t suit you. You seem like a nice guy. You’re wholesome-looking, in an underfed sort of a way, and you aren’t texting somebody more interesting than me right now, so I assume you’ve got some manners. You dress well, and you say you have a law degree. Loosen up! You’re in Florida. You’re at the beach. Look at all the beach umbrellas in all the pretty colors all over the place. Look at that little kid with the swim trunks falling off. Isn’t he cute? Does he care that his butt’s showing? No. He’s at the beach. He’s having fun. Pick up a seashell every now and then, will you? Look over there! A bunch of pretty girls in bikinis bouncing around playing volleyball. Doesn’t any of this make you happy?”
I figured that would either get a laugh or he’d get all huffy and pivot back to Santorini, and at that point I didn’t really care which. The kid was beginning to annoy me.
Instead of ogling the bouncing girls like a healthy young stag ought to, (I noticed a couple of them were looking at him and realized for the first time that he was kind of cute), he studied my profile for a few moments. Then I heard him snicker. I sent him a sideways look.
“You’re really something, aren’t you?” he said, working hard to suppress a smile.
I leered at him. “Don’t believe everything Ed tells you about me.”
He finally gave me the laugh I deserved, and suddenly we were buddies. Weeks of housebound solitude, peeking out of plantation shutters and avoiding the neighbors had taken its toll, and for whatever reason, Carr Edgeley decided he’d found a sympathetic fellow human being to talk to, and not a minute too soon. The dam broke.
Up ahead, Sherman was setting a blazing pace, talking, gesturing and looking demented, and Willa had to keep her distance from his flying hands and skip a few steps every now and then just to keep up with him. Carr and I were separated from them by nearly a city block by then, and totally out of earshot.
Carr poured out his soul to me.
* * * * *
Once he got started he couldn’t stop.
Yes, I had wanted to break the ice or get the heck away from him, but I began to think the latter option would have been better. Way better.
We were all the way through the stress of his passing the bar (he failed the first time, and Uncle wasn’t pleased) and getting licensed to practice law in three states, his girlfriend leaving him for a hedge fund manager, causing him to fall below the required continuing education hours one year and having to scramble to keep his career intact, and all the way to the fact that no matter what he did, Uncle always made him feel like a failure before I could even get a word in edgewise. I began to suspect that Uncle Sherman’s biggest crime was constantly saving Carr from himself. At least in Carr’s mind.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, though. He seemed so bewildered about it all. He was one of those young adults who are so awfully young, and look as if they’re going to stay that way. If he lived to be ninety, he was still going to need his Mommy, and as far as I could tell, he didn’t have a Mommy. He had an Uncle; not the same thing at all. I didn’t ask about Mom, or Dad either, for that matter. You don’t step through doors like that without knowing where the exit is.
“And now this thing with Harriet,” he said, throwing out his hands in despair and scaring a low-hanging seagull. “I mean, what was he thinking? Coming here when I had everything under control, and actually asking to stay with her!”
I understood the answer immediately, and I also knew that Carr would never figure it out. Sherman had come to see what was going on because he couldn’t get any straight answers out of his nephew. No matter what kind of a job Carr ever did for him, he was going to step in and finish it up himself, whether he needed to or not.
“Had they known one another long?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, a long time. Sherman’s been managing the Strawbridge Foundation for decades, and Harriet always followed the money. She loved preening around New York as a Strawbridge, and whenever members of the Board got invitations to grand openings or galas, she made sure she got one of the tickets out of Sherman. Representing the family, she called it. Though there’s been a lot less of that lately,” he added on the downbeat. “Tough times. We even had to sell the private jet.”
I tried to seem sympathetic.
“When I was a kid, my mom was always showing off newspaper pictures of Uncle Sherman attending some big event, and Harriet was always on his arm. It seemed like he was always escorting her somewhere important, and my mom loved namedropping about her famous big brother and his socialite friends.”
“Oh?” I perked up. “So Harriet and Sherman were a couple at one time?”
He looked at me thoughtfully and stopped for a moment. “I don’t think they were romantically involved. It was all about putting on a show. I never saw much of her when I was a kid, and I never saw her at the Foundation offices at all. Uncle Sherman played up to her, of course, but he tried to keep her out of the office. She was a disruption. Oh, he talked about her a lot, but I wasn’t around when they were together, so I don’t know how much they actually liked one another.”
“Well, they were close enough for him to invite himself to stay at her house,” I said thoughtfully. “I mean, Frieda’s house.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Willa and Sherman had turned around and were coming back towards us now. When they were twenty paces away, Carr glanced at them, looked back at me, lowered his voice and said, “I think they were pretty close, maybe even romantically, but I never had the nerve to ask.”
His confiding manner made me wonder if without meaning to, I’d flipped a switch in the young man and he was now going to regard me as his substitute Mommy. Occupational hazard, I guess. I’m always picking up strays. He’d already made an awful lot of intimate disclosures to somebody he barely knew, and I made a mental note to be careful with the tender young thing. I can be brusque, and I didn’t want to wound him. Grown men shouldn’t be so fragile, but who was I to judge?
By the time I’d worked this out, Sherman and Willa had joined us, he was looking much calmer, and the four of us walked back to Santorini together.
I decided I’d ask Willa about what exactly Sherman and Harriet’s relationship had been later, being as subtle as I could. After all, she was a Strawbridge, too. She might know something.
Chapter 20
One of these days, I’m going to have “Yes, this is the cat” tattooed on the palm of my right hand. Then, whenever anybody asks – and sooner or later, they all do – I can just hold up my hand, answering the question and telling for them to stop right t
here, all at the same time.
Trixie came in with an overnight bag as we were clearing the table after dinner. She set the bag down against the living room wall and froze, staring at Bastet, who was luxuriating on the sofa.
“Is that the cat?” She looked at Willa. “It’s not your cat, is it? You don’t have a cat, do you? It’s . . . the cat.”
“Yes, this is the cat,” I said, subtly modulating my voice to convey the “stop right there” part.
“Oh, right,” she chuckled. “Eddie said you had a mental block about the cat.”
“You’re just in time for dessert,” Willa said, just in the nick of time. “I’m not serving anything fancy. Knowing Taylor’s a vegetarian, I ran out to Publix today with Ed and got some frozen veggie patties and some nice, soft buns; can I fix you one? Wouldn’t take me but a minute. We had a tossed salad too, and there’s plenty left.”
“No thanks, honey,” Trixie said. “I ate before I came over. Dessert sounds good. And I brought some wine.”
She held up a bottle of wine big enough to christen the Queen Mary.
Willa chattered on. “It’s just red velvet cake from the grocery store bakery, but there’s ice cream, too, and I’m going to make decaf to go with it. You’re not on a diet, are you?”
“Oh, heck no, whack me off a slab and throw on the ala mode.”
“Willa, why don’t you let me do that,” I said. “You just go ahead and make the decaf.”
Gossip in the kitchen, everybody busy with their own little chores and moving around efficiently, never getting in one another’s way and chatting up a storm has always made me feel like I’m home and bonded to everyone around me, wherever I happen to be. We were off to a really good start, I thought in a self-congratulatory way, and as we moved our dessert plates and coffee cups to the table, I was very happy.
“By the way, Willa, I forgot to ask, what was Sherman going off about on the beach?” I turned to Trixie. “We took a little walk before dinner, and Sherman and Carr were going to the beach at the same time. I managed to crack Carr open eventually, but Sherman was already spouting off when we first saw him. He was waving his arms around so much on the beach I was expecting him to take off like a bird.”
“The poor man,” Willa said. “He thinks we suspect him. I tried to reassure him, but all he could talk about was being alone and helpless in a house with a murderer running around in it, and now having to put up with the neighbors all ganging up on him. Of course he’s rattled. Anyone would be. And now with the police . . . it’s been a very difficult time for him.”
Trixie and I shared a doubtful look, but didn’t contradict her. After all, if the police were really after Sherman, all this drama about being alone with a murderer might just be misdirection. Most of the neighborhood had already agreed on another scenario, of course, but we were perfectly willing to jump on another suspect if things seemed to be trending that way. But Willa is the kind of innocent thing who won’t believe that anybody she actually knows could be a killer, so we let her be.
After telling us what was biting poor, dear Sherman, she lapsed into silence, and I was beginning to feel like I’d been talking all day and I was tired of it, but Trixie started storytelling and had us laughing until long after dessert was finished, the plates had been pushed aside and the sun had gone down. By that time, Bastet was sound asleep on the sofa.
I looked over at her and thought she’d made a mistake this time. Usually when she follows me around, things are about to go wrong and we both know it. This time, she wasn’t really needed, and I began to wonder if I was either.
Trixie was the first to get up from the table, because she wanted to clear away the dirty plates, pour the wine and break out the cards.
“You girls just sit. You did all the work getting it ready.”
She gave us both more wine than we wanted, got a deck of cards out of her overnight bag and sat back down in her chair. “Now,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for this moment all day.
She didn’t know how to play pinochle, but everybody knows gin rummy, so we started to play that, but somehow, the first coziness of the get-together started to wear off. After a few hands we lost interest, and Trixie gathered the cards, idly shuffled them about ten times, then just set them aside.
I realized that Willa hadn’t closed any of the window blinds and I offered to do it myself, but she got a funny look on her face and said, “No, don’t. I don’t close them at night anymore. I don’t like feeling boxed in, alone. Sometimes I look out at the lights of the shrimp boats on the water and I wonder if anybody on board is looking back at me through binoculars. I always imagine they can. I want them to. Funny, isn’t it? Somehow, knowing somebody out there can see me kind of reassures me. Like a human touch. Maybe somebody’s looking, maybe not, but I like the thought that if they wanted to, they could, and if they did, I’d be here, real, visible, at home in my own house.”
Trixie stared at her. “The thought that somebody I can’t see is looking at me would give me the creeps.”
“I know,” Willa said dreamily. “I used to feel that way too. But if the men on the shrimp boats are looking at me, it’s a connection with somebody real. Somebody alive.”
Trixie and I shared a look, and suddenly we both started talking at once, changing the subject.
At least that made us laugh.
Willa apologized for being morbid, and we tried to downplay it.
I took a look at Bastet and could barely see a gleam of green from her slitted eyes.
“Want to see if there’s a movie on TV?” Trixie asked.
“Sure,” Willa said. “If you’d like.”
We all jumped up from the table at once, and that made us laugh again. I had a feeling of losing control, as if we were in some kind of downward spiral and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
Then I took hold of myself and thought, “What are you worried about? Everything’s fine.”
The only movie that was starting anytime soon was Night of the Living Dead.
“What’s it about?” Willa asked innocently. “Is it one of those vampire movies? I usually like them.”
“Uh, it’s kind of like that,” I said, looking at Trixie for help. “I don’t think I’m in the mood for it right now, though.”
“It’s not good campy fun, like most vampire movies,” Trixie explained. “It’s kind of, um – you know – let’s just see if anything else is on.”
Nothing else was on. Hundreds of channels of nothing. We turned the TV off.
Suddenly I was glad Willa hadn’t wanted the blinds closed. It was too quiet, and I began to feel boxed in. Maybe I’m too suggestible, but I suddenly knew what Willa meant about somebody out there being able to see you while you were alone in your own home. Somehow it was good to know that somebody was out there at all. In the quiet of the living room, I sat beside Bastet, stroking her head and feeling glad she was there.
Willa began to worry about the fact that her only other guest bedroom was a little room off the garage, downstairs, and it didn’t seem like much to offer a guest.
“It only has a twin bed,” she said, “and it’s decorated for a child. It was my playroom when I was a little girl, as a matter of fact, and my old toybox is still in the corner. I left everything as it was and just put in a bed, in case I ever needed it. I never even bothered to have the walls repainted.”
“I’ll just sleep on the couch, here,” Trixie said quickly. “After all, the idea is for us to be nearby, in case, um . . . Bastet won’t mind, will you girl?”
Bastet stared blandly; she didn’t mind.
“I’d love to see your old playroom,” I said, and Trixie turned and glared at me. I felt myself drifting, and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why Trixie looked so displeased. How nice it would be to see it all: an old toybox, a once-beloved doll, a canister of Lincoln Logs, a heap of stuffed toys. Wallpaper full of castles and forested hills – somehow I knew the room would be wallpapered, not pai
nted, and in a sweet, old-fashioned pattern that a little girl would like. Blue. Blue castles, blue hills, blue trees. And the furniture would be girl-sized white-painted wood; the rug would be an oval rag rug, like women used to braid up from old clothes. And underneath the toybox, long-forgotten and forever missed by mops and brooms, was a pink rubber ball, so old it wasn’t very pink anymore, and wouldn’t bounce.
I was halfway down the stairs before I knew I was moving, and I bypassed two closed doors and opened the third one, knowing it was the playroom of a little girl named Willa Garden, a sad child with no father, who always played alone.
* * * * *
“It’s gone,” I said to myself as I went in the door and turned on the overhead light. I turned to Willa, who had followed me and was looking worried. “Where is it? The old rag rug? Your mother made it.”
She stared at me and said nothing.
I went forward, sinking to my knees before the toybox and finding all the things I known were there: the Lincoln Logs, the dirty-faced doll with the shiny blond hair. The stuffed toys were gone, but I had known they would be. The ones that weren’t too far gone had been donated, I knew, and the others had simply been thrown out.
“The ball fell down behind,” I told Willa. “See?”
I felt behind the toybox and came up with the pink rubber ball, faded to a dirty white and crackled all over from age.
“How did you know that was there?” she whispered.
I felt cold hands gripping me and pulling at me. “Come on, Taylor,” I heard Trixie’s voice say, “you come on out of here.”
Between her pulling at me and me pushing against the toybox, I got awkwardly to my feet. I turned to the two other women and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to make things weird. I was supposed to stop that happening, and now I’m . . . .” I looked around in confusion. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”