Undertaking Irene

by Pamela Burford

  Now that I had a moment alone with Jonah, I found myself doing mental backflips trying to decide how to ease into a delicate subject. Then I thought of Irene. She’d never eased into a subject in her life. Delicate, schmelicate. I’d always admired that about her.

  “Irene was expecting you the day she died,” I said.

  His pleasant expression never faltered, but he hesitated a split second too long before shaking his head. “I don’t know where you got that idea,” he said. “Last time I saw her was the Poker Posse almost a week before.”

  “Yeah, you said that. You also said you hadn’t spoken with her since that game.” I offered a wide-eyed shrug. “Yet for some reason, she thought you were coming over.”

  “What makes you think that?” he asked.

  “In going through her stuff, I discovered she made an appointment with you for that day. It’s been bugging me, so I figured I’d ask you about it.”

  The teething biscuit slipped from Gabe’s gooey fingers. A sharp-eyed beagle snapped it up the instant it hit the ground. Jonah reached into the diaper bag for another cookie before the outraged baby could work up a full head of steam.

  He sighed. “I was less than honest with you, Jane. I felt guilty about her death, if you must know.”

  My heart lurched. “What do you mean?”

  Jonah curled his fingers into the chain-link fence and glanced over his shoulder as if to ensure his wife was out of earshot. Rachel was scooping like a champ. If I’d ever yearned for a large dog, I was officially over it.

  He said, “Irene called me that morning and said her stomach had been acting up and could I swing by. She had things to do during the day, so we agreed on six p.m.”

  “But then you ended up at Harbor Memorial with Sophie,” I said. “All evening.”

  He nodded. “I called Irene and asked if she wanted to see my covering physician, but she insisted it wasn’t urgent. We rescheduled for the next morning. If only I’d managed to make it over there…” He gave a miserable shake of his head. “I keep thinking I might have been able to save her.”

  “Jonah.” I waited until he met my eyes. “Only one person is responsible for Irene’s death, and she’s currently out on bail.” In truth, two people had been responsible, but Colette O’Rourke was beyond the law—six feet beyond, to be precise.

  “It was never my intention to mislead you,” he said. “I just didn’t want to think about how I’d failed her, much less talk to anyone else about it. I didn’t realize she’d written down the appointment.”

  “She didn’t.” I quirked an eyebrow. “You were busted by a slice of carrot cake.”

  Jonah blinked in surprise. “But I—” He cut himself off.

  “Yeah, I know, you got rid of it.” I’d figured out this part. “You found the cake after I left and you knew it was meant for you, so…” I mimed tossing the thing, which made SB snap to attention. “No cake, no awkward questions from me or Maria. What you didn’t know is, I’d already spied it in the fridge.”

  That night had been stressful for me. Until now, I hadn’t realized it had been just as stressful for Jonah, due to his misplaced feelings of guilt.

  Rachel rejoined us. “That’s it, our next pet is going to be a goldfish.”

  15

  Wrong Side of the Blanket

  I TURNED ONTO Jefferson Street and slowed the car, peering at house numbers. Rocky Bay, Long Island, is only twenty-six miles from Crystal Harbor, but it’s light-years away in all other respects. I passed a few dozen modest, cookie-cutter houses on lots about forty feet wide. The properties were decently maintained for the most part. Serviceable sedans and minivans occupied the driveways. I spied a few kids walking home from school, and two young moms with strollers chatting on the sidewalk. It was another sunny spring afternoon.

  I’d already made the long drive to Tierney’s Publick House way out in Southampton. Tommy, the grumpy owner, remembered me from my first visit two weeks earlier. He gave Sexy Beast, my “service animal,” the stinkeye as he informed me Martin was off that day. I asked him for the padre’s home address.

  He frowned in intense cogitation. “Am I allowed to do that?”

  “Absolutely,” I replied without hesitation.

  That had been good enough for Tommy, who’d scrawled the address on a cocktail napkin.

  I’d often wondered where Martin lived, my overactive imagination conjuring one mysterious man cave after another. A gloomy abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. A slick penthouse apartment in Manhattan. A sleeping bag that traveled from beach to woods to friends’ floors as the mood struck.

  I had to admit, a one-and-a-half-story Cape in working-class Rocky Bay had never been in the running.

  I pulled up in front of 2639 Jefferson and sat staring at it. White paint, light blue trim. A patched roof. A few azaleas fronted by a straggle of daffodils. I tried in vain to picture the padre on his knees planting bulbs. And next to the front stoop, a cluster of big-eyed lawn ornaments: a lop-eared mama rabbit and three baby bunnies.

  Oh, and? A big, gleaming red Mercedes in the driveway. I recognized the first prize in the recent Crystal Harbor Historical Society Poker Tournament. It was parked behind a bodacious black Harley which I also recognized.

  All right then. I settled Sexy Beast in a comfortable football hold, grabbed my tote bag, and traversed the short distance to the front door, which was adorned with an Easter wreath—pastel eggs, baby chicks—that should have been taken down a couple of weeks earlier. I had to ring twice, but eventually the door swung open.

  I wasn’t surprised to see a woman on the other side of the threshold. That girlie wreath was the clincher. The padre did not live alone. She had longish blond hair, the top section wrapped around some of those fat Velcro rollers, the kind I could never quite master. She was barefoot and wore faded jeans and a logo tee-shirt featuring a band I’d never heard of. The woman was in the process of putting on her face. The way I knew this? She held a blush compact and makeup brush in one hand and a portable, lighted mirror in the other. Plus one cheek was rosier than the other. See? I could have been a detective.

  “Yes?” she asked, not rudely but with an unmistakable I don’t want whatever you’re selling vibe.

  “Um…I’m here to see Martin?”

  “Marty!” she hollered over her shoulder. “Look sharp, you have company.” She stepped aside and beckoned me to enter. “I’m Stephanie. Everyone calls me Stevie.”

  “Hi, Stevie. Jane Delaney.” I stuck out my hand, then retracted it when she apologetically indicated her full hands. “I’m a, um, friend of Martin’s,” I added.

  “And yet you look so respectable. Marty!” Stevie had a good figure. From the neck down, she could have been thirty. Her face was unlined, but her throat and hands told a different story—this lady was no spring chicken. I supposed that said something good about the padre, that his live-in wasn’t some airhead half his age.

  “And who’s this cutie?” she asked, bending to admire SB, only to jerk back with a startled laugh when he tried to lick her freshly made-up eye.

  “His name is Sexy Beast.” I braced for the usual snort of derision.

  Instead she said, “Loved the movie. Go on, sit.” She nodded toward the matching sofa and love seat. “Just shove the newspapers onto the floor.” The living room was cluttered, but in a normal, lived-in way, not a Buried alive in their home! Story at six! way. SB sniffed avidly, taking inventory.

  A Siamese cat strolled into the room, prompting him to stiffen and growl. I tightened my grip, certain that a showdown between the two animals would not end well for my runty pet. The cat growled right back, long tail twitching, blue eyes skewering SB like lasers.

  Stevie wagged a finger. “Miss Persephone, you behave yourself.” She offered me a drink, which I declined. I heard feet pounding down the stairs, then Martin appeared, pulling a black tee-shirt over his torso. Just like at the bar that time, he showed zero surprise at seeing me. He was altogether the most irritating
man I’d ever met.

  “Don’t mean to be rude,” Stevie said as she headed for one of the rooms off the small central hallway, “but I’m running late.”

  Martin stalked over to the cat and unceremoniously lifted it by the scruff. He stared it down as its growls intensified. “I hate this thing.” Following in Stevie’s tracks, he opened the door she’d disappeared behind, flung the animal inside, and slammed the door shut.

  He said, “You gonna sit or what?” and threw himself on the love seat.

  I shifted the stacks of newspaper on the sofa and sat on the end nearest Martin. SB curled up next to me. “So,” I asked. “How long have you and Stevie been together?”

  “Forty-two years.”

  It took my wee brain a couple of seconds to figure it out, then I muttered a bad word as my face warmed.

  “Mom!” he yelled toward the hallway. “Jane thought you were my girlfriend.”

  Peals of delighted laughter rang out from behind Stevie’s closed door. She called out, “I like Jane.”

  “Wow,” I said. “She looks good for her age. Whatever that is.”

  “Sixty-one,” he said. “Mom’s a poster child for good genes and an active lifestyle. She still dances.”

  That triggered a memory. At Tierney’s, Martin had mentioned the married deacon who’d sired him: Arthur and Anne McAuliffe’s middle son, Hugh. My mom was an exotic dancer he was screwing on the side.

  He smiled, watching my expression. “She long ago retired from that kind of dancing.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I didn’t think…” I hated how smug he looked. I decided to do something about that. “So does this work for you? Being a middle-aged man living with his mom?”

  “It’s temporary. And it beats being a middle-aged woman living in Mr. F’s basement,” he replied smoothly. “Oh, but wait. You fixed that.”

  I bit my tongue to keep from blurting, I didn’t fix anything, I didn’t even know Irene was leaving me the house. He already knew that. Instead I said, “I consider the lower threshold for middle age to be forty. That gives me ten months before I have to start shopping for mom jeans.”

  “Let’s agree on forty-five and I’ll never mention Dogpatch again.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “And you’d look good in anything.” A flirtatious smile. “Even mom jeans.”

  Good grief. And just when the heat in my cheeks had begun to cool. Martin hadn’t asked why I’d come looking for him. Maybe he thought I just couldn’t stay away. I said, “I was noodling around the internet and came across something interesting.” I pulled a folded sheet of paper out of my tote bag and handed it to him. I watched him unfold it and examine the image I’d printed out.

  It was a silver shield topped with a gold boar’s head. Three blue stars decorated the shield, along with three blue mermaids, each holding a comb and mirror.

  The McAuliffe family coat of arms.

  He tossed the paper onto the coffee table. “Took you long enough to make the connection.”

  “You could have made it for me and saved me the research,” I said.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” He stood. “You want a beer?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I left SB on the sofa and followed him into the kitchen, where he grabbed a Guinness from the fridge and popped the cap with a gargoyle-shaped opener screwed into a knotty-pine cabinet. I parked my buns on a counter stool and watched him expertly pour the dark brew down the side of a glass, resulting in a thick, creamy, downright sexy head.

  “You could have been a bartender,” I said.

  “So I’ve been told.” He tipped back the glass and took a deep gulp.

  I was dying to know what other occupations he’d had, or still had, in addition to bartender, but I didn’t waste my breath asking. “So I already knew that the mermaid brooch is a family heirloom,” I said, “made by some famous jewelry artist over a century ago. What I didn’t know is that the mermaid design is based on the McAuliffe coat of arms.”

  He leaned back against the sink. “What’s your point?”

  “I’m curious, is all,” I said. “Have you fenced the brooch yet?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re still trying to get her back for O’Rourke.”

  “I don’t think you have any intention of selling her,” I said. “I’m beginning to think you weren’t BS’ing Irene, or me, about why you swiped her. She belongs in the family.” Just as his grandmother Anne’s dream house, now my home, belonged in the family. Martin McAuliffe had a complicated love-hate relationship with his father’s people. Theirs was a blood connection, almost tribal. He despised most of the McAuliffes, yet he was inescapably one of them.

  “That’s why Grandma returned the mermaid to Grandpa when they divorced,” he said. “Because she’s a McAuliffe heirloom. He gave her to Grandma when they got married and she could have kept her—would’ve been well within her rights after he dumped her for Irene—but she did the right thing. Answer me,” he said. “Is that why you’re here? To get your hands on the mermaid?”

  I puffed out a conflicted sigh. “Technically she belongs to Patrick. He’s Colette’s heir.”

  Martin turned his hand into a stop sign. “He’s the heir of the woman who persuaded her granddaughter, paid her granddaughter, to poison her old friend Irene, who herself was so protective of her dead husband’s heirloom that she threw it into the pot during a poker game. Just to put the whole thing into perspective. Proceed.”

  “None of that changes the fact that Patrick is the legitimate owner, strictly from a legal standpoint.”

  Martin sensed my reservations. “But…” he prompted.

  I took a deep breath. “But the thing is, he’s super-rich now. He doesn’t need the brooch to, you know, elevate his lifestyle.” Or to send his daughter to college, as I’d originally hoped. Cheyenne was going nowhere but prison. “And he has no sentimental attachment to it. I mean, he’s not a McAuliffe. The brooch means zip to him.”

  “While you’re working so hard to justify stiffing the ‘legitimate owner,’ there’s something else you might want to take into consideration. O’Rourke is suspect numero uno in Nina Wallace’s disappearance. He might be off the hook for Irene’s murder, but until his pregnant mistress turns up...” He spread his hands.

  “Yeah, well, innocent until proven guilty and all that,” I said. “It bugs me that the cops are concentrating so hard on Patrick. I mean, I haven’t known him that long, but he just doesn’t seem capable of anything really awful.”

  “That’s not what you were saying a few days ago.”

  “Only because the evidence seemed so compelling,” I said, “linking him to Irene’s death. Even then I had a hard time picturing him as a murderer.”

  “Why, because he’s a good family man?” Martin offered a crooked half smile. “Because he loves his wife and kids?”

  “Okay, so I’m hopelessly naïve. Better that than being hopelessly cynical.”

  “If you say so.”

  From somewhere far away came a familiar tune and Isaac Hayes’s mellifluous voice inquiring as to the identity of the African-American private detective who reliably provides satisfying carnal relations to all the young females of his acquaintance. Except not in those words.

  It was the “Theme from Shaft,” which just happened to be Irene’s ring tone. I leapt off the stool. “You have Irene’s phone! No wonder I couldn’t find it.” I followed the music out of the kitchen and up the carpeted stairs. Not until I stood staring at Martin’s crisply made bed did I realize where my indignation had taken me.

  I let out a startled yip as he brushed past me to get to Irene’s cell phone, which was on his chest of drawers. He answered it, listened for a moment, then said, “Mrs. Storch, this is Irene’s grandson, Martin. Step-grandson. I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad news. Irene died two weeks ago.”

  He listened some more while I scanned his surprisingly neat and clutter-free room, which had nothing in common with either
the abandoned Brooklyn warehouse or the swanky Manhattan penthouse of my imagination. Or any variety of man cave, however that term might be defined.

  “I know,” he told Mrs. Storch in soothing tones, “it was a shock to everyone. Very sudden… I agree, we can be grateful for that.” His eyes never left me as I roamed around his room, taking in the small desk with laptop and reading lamp, a pair of guitars in a stand, a stack of plastic milk crates crammed with CD’s and paperbacks: thrillers, sci-fi, dog-eared classics.

  The walls were bare—no art or posters. No curtains covering the blinds.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “my dad is Hugh, Arthur’s middle son… Don’t blame your memory. I’m sure Irene never mentioned me. I was born on the wrong side of the blanket, to use a quaint old expression.”

  He watched me lift a framed photograph from his chest of drawers, an outdoor shot of Arthur and Anne sitting on a picnic blanket with a boy about twelve years old. The boy had shaggy blond hair and blue, blue eyes. I recognized the rear of my house, Anne’s dream house, in the background. About three years after this photo was taken, Arthur would divorce his wife of fifty years to marry Irene Hardy, a well-preserved forty-nine-year-old home wrecker who’d probably passed herself off as thirty-nine.

  “Well, that’s a very enlightened attitude, Mrs. Storch,” he said. “I wish everyone shared it.” He gave her the where and when of the memorial mass that would be held at the end of the month and said good-bye.

  “Have you been doing that a lot?” I asked. “Answering Irene’s phone and telling complete strangers about the ‘wrong side of the blanket’ thing?”

  “Every chance I get.”

  “I wonder how your father the deacon feels about that,” I said. “It has to be getting back to him.”