Writing a Wrong

by Betty Hechtman

  I spent a lot of time talking about how important it was to have a fitologist for children’s shoes. I admit to making up the word and I’d be sure to get an OK from Emily and Lewis.

  LaPorte’s was the biggest job. I had several versions of their story, starting with Jeanne baking in her kitchen, and I’d written the bare bones of bios. I typed up all the menu descriptions and made sure I didn’t use mélange too many times. I tweaked the description of the chocolate mint cake and would have to see if they wanted me to describe any more pastries.

  It was long past dark when I finally stopped working. I went through the apartment turning on lights and trying to focus on the here and now. I’d taken the French press pot with me to the office, but the newspaper and place setting were still on the dining-room table. My stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten all day.

  I stopped before I walked into the kitchen. I wasn’t up for scrounging around for something to make for dinner. And after all the sitting, I was up for a walk anyway. The easiest take-out was a pan pizza from the Mezze and a salad. I ordered it and got ready to pick it up.

  The cold air felt refreshing as I walked outside. Everything seemed very quiet. There were few people on the sidewalk and little traffic. The Mezze was getting ready to close and they were wiping down the tables and sweeping the floor when I went in to pick up my food. I was surprised to see Tizzy and Theo on their way out. They waited until I got my food and the three of us walked back together. When we got in front of my building, Tizzy asked if I wanted some company. She wanted to show me something she’d written that she conveniently had on her phone. In addition to being quiet, Sunday nights always felt a little lonely to me, so I was glad to have the company. She sent Theo on home and we went up to my place.

  Tizzy took the spot on the couch where Ben usually sat. She noticed the box on the table and asked about it. I explained its strange arrival and shrugged when it came to where it came from and why. ‘It’s a mystery to me,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think it’s connected to the death of the dreamboat?’ she asked. After she said it, she paused with a smile. ‘That sounds like a good title for a mystery. Maybe you could use it for the third Derek Streeter book.’

  I let out a mirthless laugh. ‘I’ll have to finish the second one before I worry about a third.’ I set my food on the coffee table as she urged me to eat. ‘Speaking of the dreamboat, it seems as if the cops have settled on that he interrupted a burglary. The woman he lived with had drug samples they think the burglar was after. So, whatever he was doing with those letters I wrote doesn’t matter. We didn’t really have to go to the airport,’ I said with a shrug. I suggested she read her work out loud while I ate.

  Her piece turned out to be a poem about the changing moods of Lake Michigan. It was quite good and I made a couple of suggestions. She noted them and then got down to why she was really there. Had I found out what was bothering Laurel Handelman? I didn’t know what to say, so I did a pivot.

  ‘I was just working on one of the pieces for the shoe store. Let me show it to you. Maybe you have something to add.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said, getting up and following me into my office. I turned on the wall sconces in addition to the desk lamp to better illuminate the room. She looked around. ‘I’ve always wondered what it was like in here,’ she said. ‘It’s like the inner sanctum.’

  Her description seemed a little dramatic, particularly at the moment. ‘Sorry for the mess,’ I said, seeing the French press coffee pot and cup were still there. I left to take them to the back and when I returned, she was holding the yarn and crochet chain I’d stuck in the corner. Ever curious Tizzy wanted to know what it was about.

  I had never discussed that I had moments of getting stuck with the writers’ group and they all had the illusion that I merely had to sit in front of the computer screen and the words flowed. I decided to share the truth with Tizzy and at the same time show off my solution.

  ‘I had no idea it happened to you.’ She looked at me with surprise. ‘It happens to me all the time,’ she said. ‘If crocheting helps, please show me how to do it.’ I didn’t want to take a chance that she would remember that I hadn’t answered about Laurel and agreed.

  ‘Let me grab some supplies,’ I said. I’d been thinking it was a waste to use scrap yarn and make a pointless length of chain stitches and had a new idea. I came back with two skeins of yarn and two hooks.

  ‘When I did that I was just crocheting with no project in mind,’ I said. ‘But going forward, I think the best thing to do is use the stitches for something. It’s kind of a win-win. You get past the block and you have something to show for your time.’

  ‘That sounds great,’ Tizzy said with her usual enthusiasm. I handed her the hook and a skein of beige worsted yarn. She was a quick learner and picked up on how to make the slip knot and chain stitches right away. She had no trouble with single crochet stitches either. When she seemed comfortable with the process, I had her undo all the stitches.

  ‘Now we can start the project together,’ I said. Rather than explain the plan, it seemed best to have her understand it by doing. We both made a very long chain of stitches and then turned and went back over them with a single crochet in each chain. I held mine up. ‘You’ve already begun a scarf,’ I said. ‘You just keep turning and doing a row of single crochets. We’re working the long way and, after about four or five rows, all you’ll need is to add some fringe.’

  Tizzy’s eyes froze in panic before I assured her I’d be available to help with the fringe. ‘Then I can take this with me?’ she asked, holding on to the yarn and hook.

  ‘It’s yours to keep.’ I had stuck my hook in the skein of yarn and had begun winding the long piece of work around the wad of yarn. I started to put it in the corner of the desk, but it took up much more space than the scrap yarn.

  ‘Why don’t you put it in that bottom drawer?’ Tizzy said.

  I nodded with appreciation. ‘I usually have just the desk lamp on and the drawers are all in shadow. I forget they’re even here.’

  ‘Is that the one you gave to the dreamboat to use?’ she asked.

  It took a moment to register. ‘I can’t believe that you remembered and I forgot.’ I looked at the file drawer with new interest as I thought back to that first meeting with Ted. He was Tony then and showered me with compliments on the samples of my work he’d seen on my website. I wasn’t usually impressed by extremely handsome men, but there was something else about him. I suppose you’d call it charisma. He’d said he was more or less living out of a suitcase and needed some space to keep a few things. Thinking back, it seemed like he told me rather than asked. That kind of thing usually offended me, but somehow not with him. I just kept saying yes to everything. Yes, I didn’t have to meet or even know anything about whoever was getting the letters. At the time, I thought he might be gay and the reason for his secrecy was that he didn’t want me to know I would be composing letters to a man. And there were all those compliments he gave me and his insistence on giving me a larger retainer than I’d asked for. I chided myself again for letting his charm cloud my good sense, but that was before I knew he had several identities, was wooing women while living with his girlfriend. And then there was the money he’d asked Laurel for. I glanced at Tizzy and thought how she would never hear about that from me.

  ‘And you were never curious about what he had in there?’ Tizzy asked, breaking into my reverie. ‘I know I would have looked.’

  I stared at the wooden drawer with sudden trepidation while Tizzy went on. ‘It’s not big enough for a dead body.’ I’m sure she meant it as a joke, but it fell flat.

  My heart had started to thud in anticipation. ‘I always gave him a few minutes alone in my office. I assumed he looked over the batch of letters and notes I’d done for him. Maybe made some changes and then printed them up. They were always deleted when I went to my computer later.’ We were both staring at the drawer.

  ‘If you’re
not going to open it, I will,’ she said. I would have gladly let her open it, but I had an image to keep up and gave the drawer a pull but it didn’t move. It was an old wood desk and the drawers had gotten warped over time. It took some tugs and shifting before I got it open.

  After all the trepidation, it was almost a disappointment. There wasn’t a gun or a stash of cash. Just a dark green metal box. I pulled it out by the handle on top and tried to open it. No surprise, it didn’t budge, and I noticed it had a four-number combination lock on the front.

  Maybe it had the gun or stash of cash in it. I picked it up and shook it. I felt something shifting around inside, but no thud that a gun would have made. Would a stash of cash make a sound? Maybe a flutter of bills.

  ‘Maybe he used one of the obvious number sequences,’ I said. Tizzy watched as I tried putting 1234 into the lock. Nothing happened. It was the same with four zeros.

  ‘Maybe you can break the lock,’ Tizzy offered, and I gave her a look.

  I looked around at the box. ‘Maybe if I had tools,’ I said. Then I had an idea. ‘Sometimes there’s a code that comes with it on the bottom. Ted could have used that.’

  ‘This is so exciting,’ Tizzy said. ‘I feel like I’m on a case with Derek Streeter.’

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ I warned as I flipped the box. I saw nothing on the bottom but a sticker that said Made in China. Something jumped out at me as I stared at the sticker and I grabbed a paper and pencil. A few moments later, I showed Tizzy the paper with 4145 written on it. ‘Let’s see if this works.’

  I rolled the lock tumblers with the four numbers and paused for a moment, almost afraid to see if it opened. If it didn’t work, I was out of ideas. I almost wished I had a drum roll as I tried to lift the lid.

  ‘It opened,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it actually worked.’ When I looked inside there seemed to be just papers. I pulled them out and started to flip through them, glancing at what they were. There was a receipt for the post-office box, several confirmations for hotel reservations, something with a handwritten list and copies of all the things I’d written for him. At the bottom there were some blank envelopes and stamps along with a pen. Tizzy was watching over my arm.

  I noticed some scribbling in the corner of the letter that Laurel had recited to me and recognized her initials. As I looked through the letters, they all had initials on them. Some had two sets.

  I was thinking what a skunk he was, sending the same letter to two women, but I kept mum on it. It was crazy to think that Tizzy would figure out what the LH stood for, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  ‘Are those the actual letters you wrote for him?’ she asked, trying to read them.

  Since I was worried about her recognizing the initials, I handed her a couple of the short notes that had a Ch and an L, which I guessed was for Lois.

  I’m sending this note since I can’t be there in person to wish you a happy day. Just thinking about you brightens mine.

  You made my life go from black and white to Technicolor.

  Just knowing you’re underneath the same sky makes me joyful.

  You are like sunshine shining through the clouds.

  I’m counting the seconds until I see you again.

  I can’t live without your love.

  Tizzy looked at me after reading the last one. ‘OK, I started getting a little melodramatic,’ I said. I gathered up the papers and put them all back in the box.

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ I said. ‘I guess my options are ask the detective I talked to if he wants it, but then he’d probably ask a bunch of questions about why I had it. And he did tell me that they’d settled on the scenario that Ted had interrupted someone stealing drug samples, so it’s hardly pertinent.’ I looked at the box in the drawer. ‘I could take it someplace and ditch it.’ I had an image of Tizzy and me taking it over to the campus and leaving it sitting on the bridge by Botany Pond. But then someone would probably freak out and call the cops. I pictured a bunch of cops in protective gear that made them look like space people getting out of an armored truck to examine it. Or they’d send a bomb-squad robot to blow it up. It might take out the whole bridge.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Tizzy said. ‘You have a weird expression.’ I didn’t feel like sharing the bomb squad at Botany Pond. You never knew with Tizzy. She might get the story mixed up and tell someone who just heard ‘bomb at Botany Pond’ and I’d end up with the FBI knocking at my door.

  ‘I think I’ll just keep it here for now,’ I said.

  ‘That’s probably a good plan,’ Tizzy said. ‘This has been so exciting, I forgot all about the time. Theo just texted me wondering where I was. He’s waiting downstairs to walk me home. He’s such a sweetheart. It’s only a half a block, but he doesn’t want me out alone so late.’ She started toward the frosted French doors that led to the entrance hall. ‘What a weekend you’ve had. A mystery box and then the metal one.’ She stopped and turned back. ‘You didn’t tell me how you figured out the combination.’

  I was actually quite proud of myself, even though looking back it seemed obvious. ‘The combination was four numbers. There was only one word on the sticker that had four letters: made. I changed the letters into numbers by their place in the alphabet. M was the thirteenth number but I needed a single digit, so I added the 1 and the 3 to get 4. The A was 1, the D was 4 and the E was 5.’

  ‘Wow,’ Tizzy said. ‘I never would have thought of that.’ She had gotten her coat and was putting it on. ‘I know what you said the police think about what happened to the dreamboat, but what do you think?’

  I let out my breath as I considered her question. ‘I want what they said to be right, but I don’t think it is.’ I walked the short distance to the front door with her. She thanked me for the help with her poem. She was about to go out the door. She glanced back into the living room where the mystery box was still sitting on the table. ‘You know, that looks a lot like a shoe box.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was late Sunday night now and it felt as if the world was taking a pause before the week began again. Everything seemed peaceful and quiet. Except me. Thinking about the mystery box, Ted’s box, Tizzy’s visit and the episode with Ben over the last two days had left me feeling wired.

  Tizzy’s comment about the mystery box was right, it had the dimensions of a shoe box, a small shoe box – like one from Handelman’s. But why would someone from the shoe store send me an empty box. Was it supposed to be some kind of warning? How scary was a bunch of tissue paper? But getting an empty package was unsettling, so maybe that’s what they intended. Lewis had asked me to keep what Laurel had said to myself. If the package was supposed to get that message across, it should have been a lot clearer.

  Thinking about the metal box in the desk made me upset with myself. I was as bad as Lois, letting him convince me to go against the way I worked. Letting him use my office. I never let anyone in there. Tizzy had called it the inner sanctum. But I’d let Ted in like it was nothing and allowed him to be alone in there on top of it.

  Tizzy’s question stuck in my mind. Did I really think that Ted had been killed by somebody trying to get their hands on some cough syrup with codeine? It was certainly convenient, since it took any heat off of me and lessened the chance of the love letters being made public. But with all I’d found out about Ted it made me wonder. The detective had taken the focus off the victim and put it on the circumstance of his murder. I wondered how much Detective Jankowski even knew about Ted, other than he was a pilot and was living with Rita. I doubted that Lois had told him about getting the affectionate notes from Ted or that she’d let him slip out of having his name on the lease. Would Zooey have told the cop she’d seen him with another woman or that he’d tried to get her to keep it quiet?

  I had a different image of Ted. He was clearly juggling women. I had figured out that he was able to go from one to the other by claiming he w
as off flying a charter jet somewhere. His income from being a pilot seemed sketchy since he was only a standby pilot and didn’t appear to work that often. He’d put pressure on Laurel for money, and Rita was paying the bills along with who knew what else. He’d gotten Lois in trouble with her bosses after playing mind games with her. His condo story was merely an excuse as to why he always went to their place or, for that matter, my place. And that was probably only the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t bother chiding myself for the clichéd thought. Nothing else said it quite the same.

  And then there was Ben. If I was honest, I had started to think of him as more than a friend – maybe it was going toward the level of everything his sister had hoped for. I’d seen past the shell he put up and liked what I saw. He must have sensed it and gotten scared off. I would simply take a few steps back and return to seeing him as a member of the writers’ group and the bearer of food from his sister. I wondered if I should send him a text saying as much, but I worried that it would somehow make it worse and decided it was one of those times when saying nothing was the best answer.

  Tomorrow was the big reveal. I’d show everything I had so far to my clients. All the pieces were still works in progress and I expected them to want tweaks and some changes, but they needed to be OK with the basic concepts.

  I had developed thick skin over the years. It was a necessity for writers. You had to be able to take criticism without falling apart. But there was always that hope that they would love what I’d done and say it was all perfect.

  None of the above thoughts were conducive to sleep. Knowing myself by now, I took some action and made myself a cup of chamomile tea. When I brought it into the living room, I realized having the mystery box on the coffee table wasn’t helping me to relax. I stowed it in the corner of my office.

  After settling on the couch and taking a few sips of flowery herbal tea, I pulled out one of the squares I was working on. It was a basic granny square and the stitch pattern was second nature to me now, which made it good for times like this. I began to work on the square and let my mind go.