Generous Death

by Nancy Pickard

  “An abandoned icebox!” I was suddenly, fiercely furious. “They should not leave that out there! A child could lock himself in it!”

  I didn’t know why my heart was pounding so horribly. I only knew I was already in tears by the time I flung open the door of the empty refrigerator. Only, like the Testered Bed With an Alcove, it wasn’t empty.

  It was stuffed to the brim with Mrs. Charles Withers Hatch.

  “She didn’t suffer, Jenny.” Geof Bushfield took time off from, his unpleasant chores to walk over to where Mr. Ottilini and I waited in a forlorn and freezing huddle on the back steps. We had ignored Geof’s advice to go inside. Inside held Allison and a houseful of frightened staff and nearly hysterical youngsters.

  Geof’s eyes were distracted, but kind. He said, “She was already dead or unconscious when she was, uh, put in there.”

  “How do you know?” I desperately wanted to believe he wasn’t just saying that to make us feel better.

  “Because I’ve seen what abandoned refrigerators look like when someone has been locked in them alive.” His eyes held memories of unspeakable things. “There would be blood. There would be signs of a struggle to get out, to breathe …”

  “How did she die?” Mr. Ottilini asked. Geof had to bend down to hear him. In the last hour, the old man had shrunk inside his expensive overcoat; the long lines of dignity and power in his face had drooped into furrows of grief. With the loss of this third old friend and client, something vital had seeped out of Mr. Ottilini, I was nearly as worried about him, standing frail and shivering beside me, as I was about the murders.

  “I don’t know, sir, and we probably won’t know until we get the coroner’s report.” Geof scanned the lawyer’s face, then glanced at me and then back at Mr. Ottilini. Geof chewed his lower lip. Our breaths turned the air to white fog. He said, “I’ll tell you what, sir, we’ll notify the family and …”

  “No.” But there was no spirit to Mr. Ottilini’s objection. “I should do that. I will do that.”

  “Actually, sir,” Geof interrupted smoothly, “it would be better for us to do it because we’ll have to, uh, interview them anyway.” He didn’t pause long enough for the older man to get a word in. “You can call on them later today if you wish, how’s that?”

  Mr. Ottilini nodded his head as if at a dismal fate. “I’ll be at my office,” he whispered to the snow at our feet. He turned to leave, glancing back only once to attempt a smile at me and to stare with obvious pain at the white refrigerator in the snow.

  I fought back the urge to weep. I looked up into Geof’s concerned eyes. “There’s a note, isn’t there?” I asked him. “A verse, like the other two.”

  He hesitated only briefly before answering me.

  “Yes, there was a verse. Stuffed in her pocketbook. Do you want to see it?”

  I took a deep breath. It burned the inside of my nose and throat. “Yes, please,” I said.

  He pulled a clear plastic bag out of his inside coat pocket and held it so that I could read the typewritten words through the transparent plastic without touching the note.

  It said:

  Depositor in many banks,

  Giving only where there’s thanks,

  Now you’re stuffed all dead and cold,

  Like a freshly frozen soul.

  I swallowed my horror and disgust. With a deep feeling of regret, I said, “It’s somebody who knew her.”

  “Why?” He slid the envelope back into the pocket.

  I took in another breath of stinging air. “Because Mrs. Hatch was a wonderful, generous woman, but…”

  “But…”

  “… but she liked to feel appreciated. More than most volunteers or donors, I mean. If she gave you something, you’d better say thank you until your tongue got tired. She’d drop you like a hot coal if you weren’t grateful enough to please her.”

  “Had she dropped anybody lately?”

  I realized how important my answer could be, so I thought before I said, “I don’t know, Geof, but I don’t think so.”

  He nodded.

  “Go home, Jenny,” he said, and I was surprised by the gentleness in his voice. “We’ll call you into the station or drop by your house to get a formal statement. You still live at your parents’ house right?”

  I supposed he knew that fact from his investigations of the murders.

  “I can’t go home,” I said. “I’ve got to go back to the office. Call me there, okay? And yes, I’m at my parents’.” I added giddily, “They’re not. But I am.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  Amazing how much he’d learned from his investigation; of course, everybody in town knew about Mom. “The same,” I said. “No, maybe worse. I don’t know.”

  “I think you ought to go home. Don’t be brave.”

  “I’m not being brave, I’m being stubborn.” I shoved my hands, whose fingertips were numb, into my coat pockets. “I’ll be at The Foundation, Geof. Call me there, or come by, if you want to.”

  He shrugged and shook his head the way people do when they see I’m determined to have my way. His smile was tired and crooked.

  “You never let the football team give up either,” he said unexpectedly. “You were the cheerleader who kept yelling ‘push ’em back’ clear down to the last play.”

  “My gosh, is that true? How did you remember that?” I babbled. Cheerleader! How foolish it sounded in contrast to this serious, competent man standing in front of me. I felt suddenly embarrassed, inconsequential, naive, all those things I most hate to feel.

  “I remember because you were so young to be a varsity cheerleader,” he said, “and I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”

  That knocked me speechless, at least in part because the Geoffrey Bushfield I remembered had not been noted for his interest in varsity anything, though I remembered a snide joke about his having “lettered in hell-raising.” I did manage to say, “Well, that was a long time ago.”

  His lips, which were slightly chapped, formed a smile that carried to his eyes with a message I couldn’t decipher. Then he was gone, back to his men and the refrigerator.

  I drove Derek’s car back to the office.

  I had a little breaking of bad news to do myself.

  Chapter 12

  After I told my staff about Mrs. Hatch, not much work got done. Marvin and Faye were too upset to concentrate on their normal routines—as if there were a normal routine to follow anymore. Derek, however, came into my office and closed the door behind him.

  “You have to go to New York, Jenny,” he said. I stared at him in disbelief.

  “Tell me another joke,” I said.

  “I know.” He sat down across from my desk. “It sounds crazy at a time like this, but you’ll want to go when I tell you the why and the wherefore.”

  I waited for yet more bad news.

  Only it wasn’t bad. It was very nice. It seems a phone call had come for me while I was at the Welcome Home, a call from a lawyer in New York. Derek took the message. It amounted to the delightful fact that an old man from Manhattan, who had visited Poor Fred only once in his life had, on that trip, fallen in love with a certain distinguished painting by Degas which was displayed at the Martha Paul. And he just happened to have made a point of obtaining a second painting that the famous impressionist had done of the same dancer. It further seemed that the old man had recently died—of natural causes, Derek said “thankfully—and left us the second Degas!

  “Why didn’t he will it directly to the Martha Paul?” I wanted to know.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to go to New York and find out.” He tucked a forefinger in the neck of his navy blue turtleneck and tugged. “Seems there’s a contingency clause to the will.”

  “Ah ha. The catch. The ever-popular, well-known catch.”

  “And the attorneys for the old guy have respectfully requested the presence of the executive director—that’s you—in their offices tomorrow.”


  “Tomorrow.”

  “Yep. Nine o’clock and I do not mean at night.”

  “Do you realize how early I’ll have to get up?”

  “Early to bed, early to rise; that’s the song of the boss who flies.”

  “Ugh. Have Faye get me on the best flight she can, okay? Preferably one that serves decent coffee. And ask her to get me a hotel reservation just in case I have to stay over. Anywhere as long as it’s Central Park South. I’ll pay the excess over the expense allowance. And have her arrange for a cab to pick me up at my house an hour before my flight, just in case my car’s still in the ditch. Will you do all that for me, Derek?”

  “Already done, done and done. Plus, I called the standard station and asked them to dig the modern sculpture out of the snow.”

  “You’re a fine employee and I think I’ll keep you. Now then, what was the old gentleman’s name and what do you know about him?”

  We talked business for the next hour. It was an effective defense mechanism that dammed the tide of my feelings. I couldn’t afford to indulge my sadness or shock; I had to be a calm, reassuring source of support for the staff.

  Somehow, the rest of the workday passed. When everyone else had gone—I told Derek I’d take a cab home—I remained at my desk. I took advantage of the chance to be alone to consider the frightening implications of certain questions that had occurred to me; Did Mrs. Hatch leave a will? If so, did she leave any of her money to The Foundation as she always hinted she would? If both answers were yes, did somebody kill her in order to cast more suspicion on us? If either answer was no, did somebody kill her to make sure her money stayed out of our grasp?

  Either way, we lost.

  I placed a fast, nervous call to Mr. Ottilini’s office and caught him just before he left to visit the Hatch home.

  Yes, he said, she left a will. She had, In fact, signed the thing last week, having been prompted to finally take action because of the death of her friend, Arnie Culverson.

  “That’s what it often requires, you know,” he said dejectedly, “to motivate a person to write a will. When a friend dies, it occurs to us that the same thing might some day happen to us, too.”

  And yes, he also said, she left about $350,000 to The Foundation for the purpose of founding residential treatment centers for adolescents. She also left $150,000 directly to the Welcome Home. The rest of the estate went to her family.

  As to my other questions …

  “I would not want to jump to any paranoid conclusions, Miss Cain,” was how he carefully put it, “but I think that under the circumstances, we must consider the possibility that someone does not wish The Foundation well.”

  “Or,” I said, and a shiver crawled down, my spine, “someone wishes us all too well, in a rather misguided sort of way.”

  “Moshe’s funeral was this afternoon,” he noted. It had been a private service for immediate family members only.

  “Yes.” There was nothing else to say. So we said goodnight and hung up.

  On my way out the door, I lifted a bag of drip coffee and a box of granulated sugar from the tray by the office coffee machine. I’d drop them by the Welcome Home and chalk it up as a donation from The Foundation.

  Coward that I am, I jumped out of the cab when it pulled up in the driveway of the girls’ home, stuck my head in the front door and tossed the coffee and sugar to the nearest resident. “Got to run,” I lied, “give these to Allison, will you please?”

  But I was foiled by the sudden appearance of the lady herself. When I looked into Allison’s saucer eyes, I felt my own grief reflected back at me.

  “Jenny!” she cried and reached out with her small hands to grasp my larger ones. “Oh, Jenny, how could anyone do this terrible thing to that wonderful woman! What will we do without her? She was the best friend this house ever had, Jenny, she was just the most wonderful, generous person!”

  Gushers make me dry up like a prune that’s been out in the sun too long. I felt my face go stiff-and my voice go arid. “I know, Allison.” I meant to sound sympathetic, but all I heard in my own voice was distaste. I tried harder. “I feel awful for you and the girls, just awful.”

  “Oh, the girls are so sad,” she intoned mournfully. I doubted it; excited yes, maybe even scared, but not sad. For all her good works, Florence Hatch had not been a woman to whom a poor and troubled teenage girl would have been likely to get emotionally attached.

  “I’ve got a cab waiting, Allison,” I said rudely and tugged my hands out of her grasp.

  “Oh, forgive me!” She was so contrite I could have kicked her. “I didn’t mean to hold you up, Jenny, I’m so sorry!”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said, a little too loud and firm. A flicker of surprise showed in her eyes, but it disappeared as I stuttered my way out the door, saying, “I mean, it’s okay, Allison, don’t worry about it, call me if you need anything, good night.”

  But I remembered something important that would please her and I turned back to tell her.

  “Do you know about the will?” I said, completely and unforgivably out of school. She looked blank, so I explained. “I understand that Mrs. Hatch left a generous bequest to this house.”

  “Oh!” she started to spout, but I fled back to the cab before the gushing cataract of her gratitude could drown me. It occurred to me as I waved goodbye to her that Mrs. Hatch’s bequest not only ensured the future of the home, but also meant Allison might stop begging and fawning.’

  It seemed to me that was one definite if small blessing to arise from the greater tragedy.

  The cab dropped me off at home a few minutes later.

  Ginger Culverson was parked in her mother’s Seville in the driveway, which made it fairly crowded since the local traffic also included a tow truck from the Standard station, my sister’s BMW and Michael’s Jaguar.

  I’m too tired for this, I moaned to myself. I think I’ll tell them all to go away and leave me alone.

  “Hi, everyone,” I called instead, of course. I threw Michael the keys to the house. “Let the ladies in, will you, while I talk to a man about a car.”

  Michael performed the chores of a host while I stood in the cold that was getting colder and listened to the man from the garage hypothesize about how I could possibly have got my car in such a fix.

  “Your own front yard, too,” he said wonderingly. The calculator in my mind deducted a dollar from his tip. “You really got ’er stuck as a buck in the muck, ain’t you?”

  That made me laugh, so I mentally added his dollar back. I said, “Can you get it out, please? I’ll be in the house if you need me.”

  “Havin’ a nice warm cup of tea, I suppose,” he said bitterly. “While I’m out here freezin’ my butt off, isn’t that the way?”

  “I guess it is.” I wondered if he took guilt trip lessons from Allison Parker. I left him with his tip hanging precariously in the balance.

  I walked gratefully into the cozy warmth the tow truck driver envied and closed the door decisively on him and his cold twilight. I peeled off coat, hat, gloves, muffler and suit coat and hung everything that was hangable on the brass coat tree in the hall, the one toward which my father used to toss his hat and usually miss so it landed on the floor for my mother to pick up later. So tired that even my face ached, I wished I could hang myself up by the scruff of my neck and dangle, limp and sleepy. I groaned just loud enough to let my guests in the living room know my feelings about the world at that moment. I unzippered and stepped out of my wet boots and—feeling put upon—padded barefoot in to greet them.

  Michael had fulfilled the role of host to the extent of pouring drinks and hauling out the cheese and crackers. I wondered—but didn’t much care—how my sister felt about being treated like a guest in what used to be her home. Michael had a Manhattan waiting for me in the hand that didn’t hold his own Scotch and water.

  “I can never get used to your drinking these things,” he said and smiled as he handed it to me. I tasted it. Bless him, it wa
s just the way I like it—up and “perfect,” that is, a smooth-as-silk Mend of bourbon and sweet and dry vermouth. He said, “It seems such an old-fashioned drink, like something out of the ’20’s.”

  “I’m an old-fashioned girl,” I smirked. My sister snorted, thus making her opinion and her presence known.

  “Hello, Sherry,” I said lightly. “Did you have any trouble finding the place? Have to stop and get a map from a filling station?”

  Ginger, who didn’t know Michael or Sherry and barely knew me, looked startled. Maybe she was surprised to find that families other than her own also indulged in open animosity.

  “No, Sis, I didn’t have any problems finding it at all,” Sherry snapped back at me. “I just followed all the signs that said ‘dutiful daughter’ and pointed this way.”

  Michael threw me a look that said “behave yourself,” so I swallowed the supremely clever comeback that was on the tip of my bitter tongue. I turned to Ginger and put welcome in my smile.

  “I would have called first,” she said quickly. “In fact, I did call first. But your office lines have been busy all afternoon. So I just came on over. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not.” It was only a white lie; I may have been exhausted, but I was glad to see her open, friendly face. It offered such a pleasant contrast to my sister’s closed, suspicious expression. I said to Ginger, “Have you met my sister Sherry, and Michael?”

  “Yes, we’ve introduced ourselves.” A hint of mischievous amusement lit her brown eyes. “I would have guessed the two of you are sisters, anyway, even without being told. You look remarkably alike.”

  I glanced at my sister’s pale blond hair, her peaches-and-cream skin, her delicate features and tall slim body, and supposed I should have felt complimented by the comparison. “We are remarkably alike,” I said wearily, “which is probably part of the problem.”