“I think about two years ago.”
Susan was glad it was dark, because she had a hard time not smiling. Her daughter was marrying a man who was a dreadful liar. She decided not to press the issue then. Identifying the dead woman was the important thing. “Let’s go back to those years you lived in the commune. How much time passed before you saw David’s mother again?”
“Not long after that first time. I was walking down the street alone and she approached me.”
“Do you remember what she said?”
“No. Although I’ve wondered since then if she thought I was David—after all, she hadn’t seen him since he was a baby and we’re the same age and have similar coloring. I do remember that she seemed very nice—interested in what I was doing at the commune, how I liked living there. Stuff like that. Not the usual stuff, like what do you want to be when you grow up, that grown-ups always seemed to want to know back in those days. We started meeting fairly frequently after that. And then one day I ran into her when David was with me.”
“You hadn’t told him you were seeing his mother?”
“I hadn’t told anyone. I knew I wasn’t supposed to like her, but I didn’t know why exactly.” He shrugged. “So I just kept it a secret.”
“So what happened when David met her?”
“That’s when the fun began,” Stephen said warmly. “She became something of a fairy godmother—she broke all the commune rules. David was allowed to call her Mother and I called her Aunt Ginny—in the commune we were supposed to be all one family, so no one was singled out like that.”
“So you didn’t live in family groups?”
“We did, actually. My parents and I had a small suite of two rooms with an attached bath. Wendy’s and David’s families had the same arrangements.”
“So you saw David’s mother a lot?”
“Probably twice a month for a few months.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then she disappeared.”
“You haven’t seen her since you were a kid?”
“Not until today …”
“And David?”
“I … I don’t know.”
“But David is here now. You can ask him yourself.” A dark figure sagged against the car’s windshield.
“David. Man …” Stephen jumped out of the car and put an arm around his friend’s shoulders.
“I really am drunk this time, Steve. But I have a good reason. My mother’s dead. Ginny’s dead.” And the young man leaned across the car hood and began sobbing loudly.
Susan jumped out, anxious to do anything she could to comfort the young man. “Can I help?”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. He’s already thrown up twice.” Kathleen appeared from the shadows.
“I should get him to bed,” Stephen said.
“Wait. We need to know where—” Susan stopped. “How do you know your mother is dead?”
“His mother.” David waved a shaky finger at Stephen.
“What does my mother have to do with it?”
“She told me. She told me my mother was dead.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“How does she know?”
Susan knew Stephen regretted the question the minute it was out of his mouth.
“You mean you knew?” Apparently David wasn’t too drunk to realize what Stephen had just said. “Your mother told you before telling me?”
“Well …” Susan understood Stephen’s reluctance to tell his friend any more. The fact of her death obviously was more than enough for this young man to deal with right now.
David’s shoulders drooped. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. My mother’s dead. And the last words I ever said to her were angry ones.” He swayed and began to sob.
“Maybe you should go to bed?” Stephen suggested, grabbing his friend’s arm.
Kathleen was doing the same thing to Susan. “She’s his mother? The murdered woman is his mother?” she whispered in Susan’s ear.
“Maybe we should all go inside—now,” Susan said loudly. She didn’t think this was the way David should find out that his mother had been murdered.
“Good idea,” Kathleen agreed enthusiastically. “I have more than a few things to tell you,” she added in an undertone.
“Okay … Is that someone yelling?” Susan asked, realizing that the sounds she had been hearing in the distance were voices.
“It’s more than someone yelling. That commune may have had a political base, but it was filled with party animals. Poor Charles is having quite an evening,” Kathleen explained.
“You’re kidding!”
“Come on in and see.”
Susan looked over her shoulder at the two young men heading for the Inn’s main entrance. “What about them?”
“They’ll be fine. I don’t think David is capable of doing much more than passing out on his bed.”
Well, probably lots of weddings had a best man who was nursing a hangover. Susan followed Kathleen along the sidewalk toward the back of the Inn where the restaurant was located. The noise increased as they got closer. The music and the voices reminded Susan of Laugh-In reruns. Then she opened the door.
She was still napping. This couldn’t be real. She closed her eyes and opened them again. It was real.
Or possibly a hallucination?
Maybe she had unknowingly taken something in the Sixties and was only now waking up to reality? Perhaps her entire life with Jed and the kids had been a hallucination and this was just the grand finale?
“Susan? Are you okay?” Kathleen put a hand on her arm.
“Just a little tired, I guess. I thought for a second …” But she decided there was no reason to sound like she was in the middle of a breakdown—even to her best friend. “How long has this been going on?” The two women stood and stared at the scene. It was the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” nightmare—they were older and they were more foolish than their parents’ generation had been. Earlier in the evening, the elegant dining room had been filled with flowers and candles—a tribute to the daughter of the woman who had kept the owner of the Inn out of jail for murder, Susan knew—and now it was filled with over-aged hippies doing what had once been called “getting down and partying.”
“That’s exactly what I asked Charles,” Kathleen answered. “He said they all went upstairs after you and Jed left, but in just a few minutes couples started drifting back into the bar and they’d just been getting rowdier and louder ever since—remember, most of them have flown in from the West Coast, and in California it isn’t all that late.”
“Good point.” Susan thought for a moment. “So they haven’t been together in this room since dinner?” she asked, realizing that the information might be important. After all, someone had moved the dead woman—whose name, she realized, she still didn’t know.
“I sure doubt it. With all the drinking going on, I suspect each person must have made at least a few trips to the rest room, if nothing else.”
“They were probably alone, too.”
“If you’re trying to keep track of everyone, it’s not going to work,” Kathleen said. “I think—”
“I don’t believe it!” Susan interrupted. “How long have they been here?”
“Claire and her boyfriend?” Kathleen asked, glancing at a table by the window where Susan’s mother-in-law was laughing and drinking as though she were twenty-one and it was early in the evening.
“No, them!” Susan pointed to her parents. Her mother was giggling at something Freedom was saying and moving just a bit closer. Susan wondered if she was aware of the man’s sexual preference. Her father was leaning toward the redheaded woman (Susan had to think for a moment before she remembered the name Havana Rose) who was strumming a guitar, her long hair fanned out over her shoulders. Havana Rose may have been well over thirty, but she was a fabulously exotic-looking woman.
“Your parents? I think they’ve been here ever since the rehearsal dinner. They’re
having a wonderful time.”
Susan just shook her head. “Do you think everyone at the wedding tomorrow is going to be suffering from a hangover?”
“I’m sure your parents will be fine. Where are you going?”
“I need to talk with Claire for a moment.” She knew Stephen was going to need her to back up his story about the ring—or rings.
Kathleen grabbed her arm. “Susan, you don’t exactly look festive. Why don’t I ask Claire to come over here and talk to you.”
Susan, who had been unaware, until now, of the dirt that had attached itself to her during the evening’s travels, agreed readily. “Fine. Tell her it’s important and that I don’t want anyone else to know I’m here,” she added, glancing over at her parents. She knew it was stupid, but she had a feeling they would send her off to change her clothing if they saw her like this. She moved back into the shadows at the edge of the room.
But she didn’t move quickly enough, and the group was in one of those mellow, jovial moods where a newcomer is always welcome.
“Hey, look, everyone, the mother of the bride is here!”
She was swept into the party, and if anyone noticed her filthy black attire, they were too polite to comment. A chair was pulled up to the largest table for her and a glass of champagne placed in her hand. She found herself between Freedom and Hubris—the gay theater owners. They were, she realized immediately, reminiscing about their own wedding.
“We got the most incredible gifts—maybe it was because gay men back in those days seemed to be thought of as a group: domestic, artistic. We got handwoven dish towels, I remember. And the most remarkable Chinese teapot with small cups made from dark brown clay. A Waring blender—still going strong making margaritas and daiquiris in the summertime! And my favorite gift was the cookbook by a Spanish poet—it was written entirely in verse …” Freedom said. Susan’s mother looked startled by his revelations, and muttering something about it being late, moved off to join her husband.
“Hey, my best recipe for cioppino comes from that book,” Hubris cried. “Did you ever think we’d be making the same recipe, only on the opposite coast, almost twenty years later?” The men exchanged fond looks.
“You were … uh, married … when you were at the commune?” Susan asked, unsure of the terminology.
“Yes, by the Archangel,” Freedom replied.
“We actually met at the commune. We had both joined for different reasons. I was feeling guilty about getting out of the draft for what were then called psychological reasons—not that I wanted to end up a combat soldier in Vietnam, but I did think that my sexual preference shouldn’t mean that I wasn’t contributing to the antiwar movement in some sort of significant way,” Hubris said. “The commune’s ideology and emphasis on action were exactly what I was looking for.”
“And I just sort of wandered in, not knowing what to do with my life after every agent, director, and producer in L.A. had told me I didn’t have what it took to be a movie star,” Freedom explained. “What they meant was that I wasn’t macho enough, of course.”
“And we met and fell in love,” Hubris said simply.
“Well, it wasn’t quite that simple. First we had to come out to each other and then to the rest of the commune—and we sure weren’t sure of their reactions, I can tell you,” Freedom said.
“But the Archangel was wonderful then, do you remember?” Hubris asked his companion. “She saw exactly what was going on between us and offered to marry us—something fairly unusual back in those days.”
“Although, remember, there was already a gay church in San Francisco, and people were just beginning to talk about ceremonies to celebrate permanent relationships—even that far back,” Freedom reminded him.
“But you must have appreciated the Archangel’s offer,” Susan said.
“Yes, we did,” Hubris said.
“And we still do,” Freedom added with a smile. “But I’ve often thought it was interesting that the Archangel, who was and is so liberal, encouraged us to consider a step as traditional as marriage. Even our service was pretty traditional—especially by Sixties’ standards. We eliminated things like who gives this woman to be wed, but, other than the fact that all the references to husband and wife were changed to life partner, it was the service most of us had grown up with.”
“Did Chrissy and Stephen write their own vows?” Hubris asked.
“No, they’ve opted for the traditional service also,” Susan answered.
“I think that’s nice,” Hubris said. “There is something wonderful about joining the long line of couples who have been making the same promises to each other for hundreds of years. It adds something.”
“You know, I agree,” Susan said, and then asked, “Were all the services at the commune traditional?”
“No way. At least, a few of the services the Archangel performed were way out even for those days, remember!”
“You mean Dot and Brad or Wind Song and High Hopes?” Freedom asked, grinning.
“Well, Wind Song and High Hopes had a pretty typical hippie service. They wrote their own vows and walked down the aisle to Grateful Dead music—except that, of course, there wasn’t an aisle since they got married on the top of Mount Tamalpais—they kind of skipped across the grass, as I recall. And everyone was barefoot, of course. And the women all wore granny dresses and ribbons in their long hair.…”
“And the men wore bell-bottoms and streamers in their long hair, too, if I remember correctly,” Freedom reminisced. “And we had a picnic afterwards. That may have been the first time I baked bread. Dozens of loaves all shaped like wreaths. They were a little dry.…”
“But they looked beautiful,” Hubris insisted. “When you think about it, it wasn’t very odd that they would choose to have that type of service—they were almost the definitive hippies—why else would they have talked their parents into letting us all live in their building?”
“Because it was such a slum in those days that no one else would have even considered living there,” Freedom reminded him.
“Yeah, that’s true. And we did improve it. When the commune closed, no one would ever have had any idea what a wreck the place was when we moved in.”
“Were there any other weddings at the commune?” Susan asked. “You said something about … about … the couple with the normal names. I can’t believe I can’t remember their names.”
“They are less than memorable names,” Freedom said.
“They are less than memorable people,” Hubris agreed, and then supplied their names. “Dot and Brad Morris. They were Peace and Love at the commune. Now they’re dull suburbanites—then they were unimaginative hippies—at least, when it came to choosing their names.”
“But you sure couldn’t say that about their wedding,” Freedom argued. “That was far out—as we used to say.”
Susan was exhausted, but the tale Freedom and Hubris told about the Morrises’ wedding was one that would keep almost anyone awake. Apparently the Archangel and the couple conceived of combining a wedding ceremony with street theater. The results were amazing, starting with a “no chauvinist pigs allowed” bachelorette party for the women, continuing on to a “celebration of twoness” on the beach near the Golden Gate Bridge, and ending with a naked love/be-in at the entrance to the Presidio, the army’s residence in San Francisco. The bride, groom, and everyone else in the commune spent the first night of the marriage in jail.
At the end of the tale, Susan realized they had been joined by her mother-in-law. Claire was standing behind Freedom, a glass of wine in her hand and a smile on her face. If she noticed Susan’s appearance, she didn’t seem to feel that a comment was necessary. “Kathleen says you need my help,” she said immediately.
“Did you bring the ring you offered to Stephen and Chrissy?” Susan was equally abrupt.
“Yes. I know the kids refused, but I thought they might change their minds—it’s a beautiful ring.”
“I’m so glad you bro
ught it.”
“Why? Why have they changed their minds?” Claire was suddenly suspicious. “Don’t tell me something is wrong with the ring they had made—Chrissy described it to me—she was so enthusiastic.”
“It’s lost,” Susan lied. “Where is your ring?”
“In the Inn’s safe. Do you think I should go get it? I could give it to Stephen tonight if he’s still up.”
“No, it’s safe where it is. Let’s just leave it there until morning.” She looked back at the room. “It looks like everyone is having a good time.”
“Fabulous. You’ve sure learned how to give a great party.”
Susan was as aware of the fact that this party had nothing to do with her planning as her mother-in-law was, but she graciously accepted the compliment, deserved or not.
“You look like you should be home in bed,” Claire suggested.
“I know. There are just a few last-minute details to clear up and then I’ll be able to leave.”
“Well, I have to hand it to you. Everything is going fabulously well.”
“Thanks,” Susan said. If only you knew, is what she thought. “I’d better get going.”
“What time do you expect us in the morning?” Claire asked.
“Anytime after eight-thirty,” Susan answered. She resisted looking down at her watch. No matter how few hours it was until that time, she had things to do. She ran a hand through her messy hair.
“Are you two finished?” Kathleen asked, rejoining them.
“We sure are. Good night, Claire.”
“See you in the morning, dear.” Claire leaned over and kissed Susan’s cheek. “And try to get some sleep tonight.”
“I will,” she answered, hoping it wasn’t a lie.
“Shall we go?” Kathleen asked.
“Yes. How about a ride back to the Yacht Club? I left my car there.”
“No problem. And you can tell me more about Stephen on the way.”
“Yes. He’s really been wonderful about all this,” Susan said.
“Susan …” Kathleen opened the door for her friend and followed her out into the night.
“What?”
Weddings Are Murder Page 18