by Mary Daheim
Maybe was a wonderful word, Judith thought as she trooped through the twilight to the toolshed. It was tentative, but it held hope. Judith, after all, was basically an optimist. If she hadn’t been, she would never have survived the years with Dan McMonigle.
“Hello, dopey,” said Gertrude. “You’re an hour and a half late with my supper. What it is? Cat stew?”
At that moment, Sweetums crept out from behind Gertrude’s chair. He smelled the crab in the casserole and went for Judith’s ankles. Judith shook him off, arranged her mother’s meal on the card table, then went into the tiny kitchen in search of cat food.
“You should have fed Sweetums earlier,” Judith called. “You’re not the only one who gets cranky when dinner is late.”
“What?” Gertrude shot back. “I can’t hear you. I’m deaf, you know.”
“When you want to be,” Judith said under her breath. She filled Sweetums’s bowl with his favorite food. The cat gave Judith a perfunctory rub with his furry body, then plunged into his dish.
“I can call the dentist for you Monday, Mother,” Judith said when she returned to the sitting room.
“I already went,” Gertrude replied. “My partial’s fine now.”
Judith sat down on the sofa which originally had been in the main house’s living room while Grandma and Grandpa Grover were alive. “Who took you?”
“Auntie Vance and Uncle Vince. They came down from the island and brought apple cobbler. For Deb, too.” Gertrude lapped up fruit salad. “Vance is always griping about the ferry schedule. I don’t see why they want to live up on that rock anyway. They had a real nice little place right here in town. Close.”
Too close, Judith had always thought. As good-hearted as Auntie Vance was, she needed distance from the rest of her relatives. While the island on which she and Uncle Vince lived was only an hour away from the city, it provided just enough geographical and emotional space.
“Island life has its charms,” Judith remarked in a noncommittal tone.
Gertrude looked up from her plate. “How would you know? When was the last time you were on an island?”
“Mother,” Judith said, trying not show her exasperation, “I told you—Renie and I spent the week in the Santa Lucias.”
“Santa Lucias, O Sole Mios, and a big pizza pie!” Gertrude was scornful. “Never heard of ’em! The next thing I know, you’ll be telling me that you and my dingbat niece flew to the moon! The two of you come up with some pretty harebrained excuses to keep from helping Deb and me. Say, what’s in this casserole—garters? You can’t tell me it’s real crab!”
“It is,” Judith said, still exerting patience. “The first ones of the season are in. I picked up two at Falstaff’s on my way home.”
“On your way home from where?” Gertrude rasped.
“From…” Judith clamped her mouth shut. It was pointless to argue with her mother.
But Gertrude was humming, albeit off-key. “La—la—daaa—da-tata, la—la—daaa—da-tata…”
Judith recognized “Santa Lucia.” “Mother,” she interrupted in a serious voice, “are you sure you don’t remember things or are you just trying to get my goat?”
Despite her criticism of the casserole, Gertrude smacked her lips as she devoured the last morsel. “I forget a lot of stuff,” she said, also serious. “It bugs me. The other day, I forgot your father’s first name.” Gertrude shot Judith a swift, remorseful look. “But I haven’t forgotten your father. Names and places and all that—they’re not so important, are they?” Again, her small eyes swerved in Judith’s direction. “It’s people that count.”
“That’s right,” Judith agreed. “People—and how we feel about them.”
“You’re not gone now,” Gertrude said, her voice just a little quavery. “That’s what matters.”
Judith rose and went to stand by her mother’s chair. She put a hand on the older woman’s shoulder. “It’s okay to be forgetful. Sometimes I’m that way, too. But I think you were teasing about not knowing that Renie and I went to the Santa Lucias.”
Gertrude looked up at her daughter. The wrinkled old face was expressionless, but her eyes were sly. With an effort, she reached around to pat Judith’s hand. “Maybe.”
Judith started to remonstrate with her mother, then thought better of it. Being forgetful wasn’t the end of the world. In many ways, Gertrude was still sharp. Warped as it sometimes was, she kept her sense of humor. And under all the carping and criticism, Gertrude loved her daughter.
Maybe was good enough for Judith.
Despite the chatter of the guests in the living room, the house seemed empty when Judith returned. She debated about whether or not to wait to eat dinner. Joe might be gone less than an hour, or most of the evening. Finally, she decided to eat. But appetite eluded her.
If she had to be honest, she still wasn’t happy with Joe’s offer of help for Herself. Judith knew she was being selfish, but the feelings wouldn’t go away. And Judith certainly wasn’t happy about Joe keeping his ex-wife company over drinks.
Scraping most of the crab casserole and all of the fruit salad off her plate, Judith sighed. Her eyes trailed to the bulletin board on the wall next to the phone. The corkboard was completely covered with messages, reminders, and notations. It needed to be cleaned out. A swift perusal showed that some of the memos were two years old. Judith started sorting through them.
A slip of paper which Judith recognized as coming from Joe’s notebook fell to the floor. On it were some cryptic markings. “SF,” “Fri 10-7, D. 9:15 a. m., A. 10:50 a. m.,” “Sun 10-9, D. 7:45 p. m., A. 9:05 p. m.,” “St. Fran bridal suite.”
Judith clasped the small piece of paper to her breast and giggled with delight. It wasn’t hard to decipher Joe’s code. October seventh was her birthday; he had planned a surprise getaway weekend in San Francisco at the bridal suite in the St. Francis Hotel. Judith didn’t need to worry about going to Mazatlán in January. She had something truly exciting in her immediate future. Maybe she could even stop fretting about Joe’s attention to Herself’s unfortunate needs.
Maybe. But a sense of peace and—yes, Judith realized—security seemed to settle over her. Maybe it wouldn’t last. But for now, it was enough.
She was suddenly hungry. As she removed the crab casserole from the oven, the phone rang.
“Abu Hamid Mansur, twenty-three, soon formerly of Laurel Harbor,” said the elated voice at the other end of the line. “Telling Mrs. Flynn, Heraldsgate Hill, of Abu’s great journalism success. Thanking Mrs. Flynn for story which wins Abu much praise and many job offers. Abu going to Mecca.”
Puzzled, Judith hesitated before responding. “To…ah…give thanks?”
“No,” Abu asserted. “To new job. In Mecca, Indiana. Many dollars, seven-fifty each hour, better car without big shakes, not so much water, lower rent for Abu and Edelweiss. And so forth.”
Judith congratulated Abu. Then she finished dishing up her meal, sat down at the table, propped the evening newspaper in front of her, attacked the food with gusto—and so forth.
About the Author
Seattle native MARY RICHARDSON DAHEIM began reading mysteries when she was seven. She started writing them when she was eleven, but her career as a published novelist didn’t begin until much later. After graduating from the University of Washington’s School of Communications, Daheim worked on small-town newspapers and in corporate public relations. Her goal to write fiction remained in place, however, and she began publishing the Bed-and-Breakfast series in 1991, adding the Alpine mysteries a year later. She is married to David Daheim, and the couple lives in Seattle. They have three grown daughters: Barbara, Katherine, and Magdalen. Daheim received the Pacific Northwest Writers Association 2000 Achievement Award “for distinguished professional achievement and for enhancing the stature of the Northwest literary community”.
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Other Bed-and-Breakfas
t Mysteries by
Mary Daheim
from Avon Books
JUST DESSERTS
FOWL PREY
HOLY TERRORS
DUNE TO DEATH
BANTAM OF THE OPERA
A FIT OF TEMPERA
MAJOR VICES
MURDER, MY SUITE
AUNTIE MAYHEM
NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
SEPTEMBER MOURN. Copyright © 1997 by Mary Daheim. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition February 2007 ISBN 9780061736735
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