“Fuck her.”
“I’m asking for a specific reason, Cecelia. Her last name wouldn’t be Wentworth, would it?”
Cecelia stared morosely into her bag of potato chips. “Yeah. Why?”
“You and Heather used to be closer?”
“Maybe.”
“What changed that?”
“She’s a snot.”
“I was looking for something a little more specific than that. Like, did you have a falling-out?”
Cecelia knit her brows more tightly and stuffed a full handful of chips into her mouth.
Waiting politely for her to chew and swallow, I said, “She still calls you for rides to school.”
Cecelia fixed me with a virulent stare. “Yeah, well, she has to, doesn’t she? Her ma’s in the hospital for doing too many drugs, and her dad goes out of town at the drop of a hat.”
I felt a sudden sense of stillness, as if a missing arc in a circle had just dropped into place. “Drugs? Exactly what drug did Heather’s mom take?”
Cecelia took a noisy breath and let it out. “Cocaine.”
“So she’s in a rehab center.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know which one?”
“Betty Ford,” she muttered. “But she’s getting home tomorrow. So that means Heather’s father’s going to find some reason to be gone again, so the Heather bitch has to hit me for another ride.”
“Cocaine’s a nasty drug, Celie.”
“I know!”
“Who told you about it? Your mom?”
“No, Mrs. Howard. Mom was too busy—”
The heavy purr of the Mercedes’s motor sounded in the driveway. Cecelia quickly stuffed the bag of potato chips back into the pantry, closed the door, and rushed to wash her hands at the sink.
Aloud, I thought, “Cindey?” I couldn’t imagine such a conversation.
The front door opened and J. C. Menken strode in. Cecelia ducked her head furtively, as if we’d been discussing something illicit. Her father caught her by the arm as she tried to slip past him, and he planted a kiss on the top of her head. She stiffened, then leaned against him like a dog. He patted her on the shoulder, a gesture indeed more appropriate for a dog than for one’s daughter. Releasing her, he beamed at me. “Emily, I’m so glad you’re still here. How did things go?”
Taking her chance, Cecelia slipped out of his arms and disappeared down the hall to her room.
“Oh, I’d say pretty well,” began, preparing myself for what I presumed would be a long chat.
“Splendid! Now, you’ll join me for dinner tonight, yes? The Howards have invited us over, and I’m sure Cecelia would prefer to study. Cindey doesn’t like to cook, but Fred fries a passable steak when motivated.”
I tried to speak, but the very idea of eating with that pair again had made me suck in my breath so fast that a chunk of taco chips had become lodged in my windpipe.
J. C. grinned expansively. “Excellent! I’ll just freshen up and we can go!”
On opening her door and finding me standing there with J. C., the mask of Cindey Howard’s features shifted ever so slightly from blankness to shock to repellency to a cagey welcome. She glanced uncertainly into the house before opening the door the rest of the way to let us pass through.
I walked through the broad archway into that vast living room and stopped short. Over by a far window stood the hawk-faced man from Fred Howard’s office.
He turned, fixed his needle eyes on me, frowned. To Fred, he said, “Who’s this?” He didn’t speak loudly enough that I could hear him, but I could see his lips move around the words.
Fred made a gesture that said, I’ll handle this, and hurried toward us as if readying himself to tackle an advancing line of footballers.
I was damned if I was going to be handled. I marched across the room and presented my hand to be shaken. “Em Hansen,” I said, fixing my strongest gaze on that disturbing face. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The man looked not at me but at Fred. His hand rose to pull the cigarette out of his mouth, but I caught it in a handshake. It was as cold as refrigerated meat. His eyes began to burn with anger, looking a threat at his host.
“Em!” Fred squealed in a bad approximation of jollity, “we didn’t know you were coming. What a pleasure.” He grasped my arm and tried to steer me toward a wet bar that stood along one side of the room. “What’ll you have?”
I held my ground, fury feeding my rebellion. You want to push me around? Well, you had the drop on me in your office, but now I am a guest in your home, and you will treat me with respect! “A proper introduction would do nicely,” I said, sweetness hissing past my teeth.
“I’m afraid Cindey hasn’t set enough places, and we only have five filets, J. C. Maybe another night.”
“No matter,” I replied, answering for Menken. “Cecelia decided to stay home and get up-to-date on her homework. Big test in the morning, Fred. So who’s your friend?”
I caught a glimpse of Menken out of the corner of my eye. He was smiling, but he kept his lips tightly shut, letting Fred twist on whatever rope he had strung up for himself.
The entire dinner went like that. I kept trying for an introduction to the anomalous dinner guest, but Fred kept dodging me. Cindey sat at her end of the table, drinking a lot of wine while eating almost no food, looking back and forth between me and Menken. Fred made inane small talk, which Menken parried with ease. The mystery guest said nothing. Hardly anyone ate anything at all. Each course seemed to appear and disappear at the speed of a sleight-of-hand artist, and before I could say “Gotcha,” the dessert dishes were being whisked from the table. Fred all but ordered me to help Cindey hustle the spent dishes into the kitchen, but I stuck to my “date” like glue and followed the men into Fred’s den, a swank, low-slung room with another wet bar, this one done up in Black Watch plaid and leather. All the while, the dark-eyed man’s complexion grew darker and darker, like a cloud filling with rain and the threat of thunder. Fred served up snifters of brandy to himself, Menken, and the unnamed man, but ignored me. Smiling, Menken handed his to me and presented himself to Fred for another. As he sipped his brandy, the hawk-faced man, watched me closely from under his eyebrows, like a rat watching his enemies as he sucks filth at a sewer, but said nothing.
“Nice brandy,” I said, not having the slightest idea what I was talking about. “So what do we not talk about now? Maybe drilling rank wildcats on the Broken Spoke Ranch?”
Fred had his back to me, pouring another dash of the brown liquid into his snifter when I spoke. His shoulders shot up and I heard the bottle hit the counter abruptly. The unnamed man’s eyes turned dark as flint as his head swiveled toward his host. I fantasized them so sharp that they could carve through his fatted flesh.
“Em,” Menken said equitably, “this is a social occasion. I’m sure Fred doesn’t want to talk shop just now.”
Fred turned and faced him. A look of mutual reappraisal flowed between them.
The conversation settled back into inane utterances, the one man still silent. I sipped carefully at my brandy, not wanting to let the alcohol have me. After ten minutes of tense civility, Menken announced cheerily, “I’d better get Em back to the house so she can head home. She has a big day of job hunting tomorrow. Fred, thanks for a fine meal, as always. Good to see you, too, Al.” And he steered me out of the house.
Ten feet down the driveway, I said, “Al who?”
Menken began to laugh. “Emily, you were superb! You worked instinctively, killed them with good manners! I didn’t have to tell you a thing. Why, if I played bridge, I’d want you as my partner.”
I said, “Marvelous. I get treated like a day-old cow pie and you want me to be your bridge partner. Mind letting me in on the gag?”
“Gag?”
“Yeah, damn it, who was that guy, and why didn’t you want to talk to him?”
“Oh no, no, no, Emily; what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?”
I stopped abruptly. “In fact, what I don’t know can hurt me. Who was that man, why didn’t you want to talk to him, and why in hell wouldn’t Fred introduce him to me?”
“This is precisely what I mean. You knew instinctively that I didn’t want to speak privately with him, so you forced your way into the brandy and cigars ritual in the den. You were magnificent!” He had stopped walking, too, and stood facing me, hands in his pockets, grinning. His white, white teeth and the silvery thatch of his hair shone eerily in the light from the moon, which had momentarily broken free of a bank of clouds. He began to rock back and forth, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe.
I spoke quietly, earnestly. “J. C., this is not a laughing matter. You asked me to help your daughter, and I’m finding that I have to look into your wife’s past to do so. Well, her past connects her to Cindey Howard, who has a grudge against her—I say has, not had, because she’s still pretty het up about something, and she’s trying to draw me into an agenda she isn’t being so kind as to spell out to me. Now you drag me over to her house and there’s a man there who isn’t glad to see me. No big deal, except I saw him at Fred’s office, sneaking down the fire stairs, so I can only suppose he isn’t into any kind of business I’d like to be involved in. He wants to talk to you, but you don’t want to talk to him. Fine, point in your favor, but don’t go around thinking that this doesn’t put me in harm’s way, Joe, because it sure as hell might.”
J. C. Menken brought his hands up out of his pockets. “Joe? You called me Joe!”
“Damn it, listen to me! This isn’t a social meeting; this is—”
Menken’s grin widened. “Sure, I understand.”
I didn’t like the look of that grin. I started walking again, hugging my arms around my chest as if I was cold. We had a quarter mile to go to his house and my truck and a fast retreat to Boulder. I lengthened my stride and began to hustle.
Menken easily matched my stride with his long legs. “I haven’t walked in the moonlight like this in a long time,” he said. “I used to walk with Miriam like this, on summer evenings.”
I would have broken into a run if I hadn’t been afraid of looking foolish. “Fine. Let’s talk about Miriam,” I parried, adding bluntly, “I’ve been reading her journals. She seemed kind of depressed.”
“Miriam?” He tipped his head to one side, considering this thought. “She had her down moments, I suppose, but more of the time, she seemed angry. She had a healthy temper.”
“What do you mean, healthy?”
“I mean she’d yell. Yell and throw things. I’d have to leave the room, and it rather frightened Cecelia when she’d get like that.”
“What?” I stared at Menken, trying to match what he was saying to what I had read, both about him and about what I’d learned about her. Miriam’s journals painted a picture of life with a man so self-involved and inattentive to her feelings that she was half the time ready to brain him. A healthy temper indeed: was this the good old business executive Menken, putting the entrepreneurial positive spin on a bad situation? Or was this the social Menken, being candid with a family friend?
I stopped walking and looked at him again, really studying him this time. There he stood, a man nearing fifty, still upright and physically strong. Relaxed and at ease, he lounged now with his hands again in his pockets, his weight on one hip. His hair was almost fully gone to silver, but it was still thick, even if his hairline lay higher up his forehead than it used to. I could barely see his eyes, lost as they were in the warm gray shadows of the night, but with his face relaxed and contemplative like this, they seemed infinitely softer and more kind than the armored orbs he had always shown on the battlefield of the boardroom. And with his head cocked slightly to one side, his face seemed almost dear.
“Please tell me more about Miriam,” I asked.
“She was everything to me,” he replied simply. “Whenever things got tough at work, I’d think of Miriam and our child waiting for me at home, and I’d happily redouble my efforts, just to keep them safe and cared for.”
My brain skidded off this reckoning of his side of the story. Hadn’t he ever noticed that redoubling his efforts was keeping him away from home too much? “I … I get the feeling from her journals that she was something of a restless person,” I offered diplomatically.
“You’re talking about the time she went away.”
“Yes, and—”
Still looking straight at me, he said, “Miriam was a very interesting woman, Emily; almost a girl still when I first met her, but then, I was hardly more than a boy myself. A woman grows in thirty years, or if she doesn’t … well, one winds up with someone one can hardly call alive. Miriam was very much alive. Vibrantly alive. But sometimes, people that alive are … well, let me say this, Em: she could go off half-cocked.”
And all those years, Miriam had thought this man had been ignoring her. Sadness seeped into my bones. “So you knew.”
“Knew? No one ever really knows another person, even if they live with them all their lives, but yes, I knew she was restless, in a great many ways. Sometimes it was me she couldn’t stand anymore. Sometimes it was Cecelia. They fought, you know. She’d run off to see her parents, or to take a class, or—But after every departure, big or small, she always found her way home again, ready to try again; and for that, I loved her.”
I looked into Menken’s shadowed face, trying to limn greater assurance that we were both talking about the same events. It seemed too rude to look this man in the eyes and say, I read all about how angry she felt toward you, and about how little she thought of you as a lover, and about the man she preferred … . So all I said was, “I’m so sorry you lost her.”
“So am I, Emily. So am I.”
I began to feel cold and awkward. It was time to change the subject. “Well, getting back to that man at the Howards’,” I said, beginning to turn back toward the path home.
Menken didn’t move.
I turned back one more time to face him.
He said, “Em, his name is Al Rosenblatt, and he keeps company with men who ought to be in jail. He’s got Fred going on some deal, I think, and they invited me to dinner tonight to try to involve me in it. My answer is no, and you helped me say that tonight. But enough of that.” He closed the distance between us, placed his hands on my shoulders, and kissed me on the lips.
THIRTY-ONE
AN hour later, I sat in Betty Bloom’s kitchen on Baseline Road in Boulder, spilling my guts. It was weakness to tell her anything, but shit, I had to tell someone.
“So he gives you a big wet one, and then you did what?” she was saying as she tried to pump me even further up by serving me the concentrated residue of the day’s coffee.
“Not wet, damn it! He’s a … a … gentleman!” I pushed the coffee mug away in disgust. Already I was sorry I’d told her anything. How could I even begin to explain what it was like when a control freak like Menken finally shows his tender undersides to someone? It was like being handed a confidence, and here I’d gone and betrayed it to the very next person I had met.
“So you ran for it.”
“I—” No, I had not run, just walked—very quickly. And Menken had fallen into step beside me, hurrying along with his hands in his pockets, trying to behave like he did this sort of thing every night. I was only too aware that I was probably the first woman he had kissed since his wife had been killed, and if he had been more faithful to her than she had to him, I was his first taste of someone new in twenty-five years. And yes, I was running away; you betcha.
“Then what happened?” Betty demanded. “Come on, you’re dragging this out. He go for another one?”
“No, I got to my truck, and that was it. I drove here. Bam. End of story.” Or something like that. There had been an awkward moment at the truck where he’d looked like he might be on the point of apologizing or something, so I’d quickly said something like, “I’ll call you,” and he’d said—I couldn’t remember what he’d said. Had I even been so kind as
to listen? And when did I become the keeper of the feelings of a man nearly twenty years my senior?
“Well, I tell you,” Betty Bloom was saying, “Elyria told me about this Menken guy, but she never said he had that kind of trick up his sleeve.”
“You will not tell Elyria about this,” I said emphatically.
“Oh, so he did get to you. Hmm, a little ‘love among the ruins’ action.”
“Go to hell.”
“Save you a seat by the fire.”
“Please, Betty.”
“Aww …”
“Quit jerking my chain!”
“Quit being a sap.”
I straightened up like I’d been slapped. “Just what in hell you mean by that?”
“You say this fellah’s hired you to help him help his daughter, because his wife was murdered. Well, either he’s using the daughter and the dead wife routine to get you in bed, or he’s using you to get at whoever he thinks killed her. Either way, he’s playing the sympathy card, which I say stinks on ice.”
I considered her words. That was the trouble with dealing with a rationalist like Menken: just when I thought I had him figured out, he got all complicated on me, and just when I thought he was being complicated, the situation was in fact foolishly simple. The tough part was figuring out which was which.
“I’m going to bed,” I said resignedly. I got up and began to stagger out toward the stairs to my room.
“Sure. Sleep tight, Cinderella. Oh, and you got a couple calls while you were out,” she added. “On your answering machine.” She batted her eyelashes, letting me know what she thought of my contribution to the household’s electronics.
I turned and stared at her.
“Someone named Julia Richards and someone—a very nice-sounding someone—named Jim Erikson. Oh, and a regular call. Someone who said she worked for the UPS. It’s the Wyoming area code—I looked it up—and she said you could catch her tomorrow morning between eight and eight-fifteen. I told her I didn’t know when you’d be in but that I was certain you’d call back in the morning.” She lifted a slip of lavender-colored notepaper off the counter by the phone and smiled.
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