Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

by Gillian Roberts

  “I just told you how I feel about Helena. Emmy was much more forgiving. And much more intimidated. Besides, it looked good for the housewarming.” Beth laughed, a bit uncomfortably, and continued to remove every item from a bottom cabinet with such expertise and nonchalance that the inventory and search seemed second nature to her.

  “A peace offering,” she continued. “Helena was here, probably just to make sure that Emmy wasn’t living as well as she was. The part that infuriates me is that Helena could have made a difference. She owns an antiques store. She could have pulled a few pieces of her inventory, given them to her sister. Brightened the place up, made it less impersonal. She could have and should have. It was Emmy who provided the capital that started Helena’s pretentious store. Emmy loaned her most of her share of their inheritance. Poor Emmy. Her timing stunk in just about everything. She loaned Helena the money one month before her marriage exploded and she suddenly needed it.”

  “Maybe Helena was going to repay her. Maybe that’s what she meant about having a way out of the money problems,” I suggested.

  “My foot.” Beth replaced a carton of dry milk, a plastic container of pasta, and a bottle of oil. “Helena’s store doesn’t bring in a penny. Helena just insists on living as if she were wealthy, and heaven forbid she should take a job that’s beneath her imagined status. But what does any of it matter now? What I’m saying is that even if Helena wasn’t making money, she could have given her sister, who technically must own half the store’s stock, something pretty that would have made this place more like a home.”

  Beth sounded ready to burst into tears again. I dropped the topic. It didn’t matter. “Is—Was Emmy getting support despite this battle?”

  Beth looked still more troubled. “I’m not sure now.” She spoke slowly. “She told me nothing tangible, no details, but she was under pressure and the sisters were quarreling about the money….” She shook her head. “I’m making it sound terrible. I’m not suggesting that Helena…” But she looked worried.

  “Maybe Sam could find out about the will, too,” I suggested. “At least some sense of how much was left to the two of them.”

  Beth sighed. “He’ll hate my asking all these obvious questions. Sam’s still friends with… you know how couples wind up choosing one or the other half of a divorce, but I can see Sam’s point—he and Ray went to law school together, worked together all these years, were made partner around the same time. But it made it so hard on me. Like I was sneaking around to still see Emmy, and then to be a good wife to Sam, to make his life easier at work, I’d have to be polite and sociable with Ray when I knew what a louse he was.” She opened an eye-level cabinet that had two dishes, two cups, two saucers, and two soup bowls.

  “Sam didn’t actually come up here Sunday.” Beth was staring at the nearly empty cabinet as if mesmerized. “He walked around town with the kids, used them as his excuse, but it was really because it felt awkward to him. It makes me bone-tired. Angry, too.”

  The night’s foray made better sense now. It was more than a final act of friendship—it was also an act of defiance. Of solidarity with a dead friend.

  “So far her kitchen is pathetically tidy.” Beth’s voice was cleansed of its bitter overtones. She gently closed the cabinet door. “Not even a true junk drawer.”

  I wandered back to the living room and over to the bookcase. It’s how I peg a person, and as far as I could see, it was the one place in this set of rooms where a personality might peek through. I expected a librarian to have interesting shelves.

  The bulk of her library was given over to world classics, heavy on the Russians, poetry collections, James Joyce, Irish playwrights. I have almost the same titles in the same editions—or had, before my house blew up. College texts—the books she’d have brought into the marriage. Plus one title about book collecting and, next to it, a dealer’s catalogue, and another that was obviously the text for the computer course she’d said she was taking. One on helping your child through your divorce. One on managing money. You could chart her life by her book titles. The suburban years were represented, I suspected, by a small collection of relatively new fiction. “Hey, Beth,” I said, checking, “did your book group read Ursula Hegi? Stones from the River?”

  “About a year ago. Maybe longer.”

  “Cold Mountain? Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood ?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “My group read them, too. And a few more that are here, all separated from the college classics. Ray let her keep them even though they were acquired during the marriage. Big of him.”

  “Probably thought they were revolutionary. Or worse—women’s books!”

  The fatigue I’d been fighting returned in waves that threatened to pull me under, and I saw how futile and silly this outing was. I went into the kitchen. “Let’s go home,” I said. “This is as impersonal a place as I can imagine, so why are we really here? To annoy Sam? To prove something? Do you actually think she had anything she didn’t want people to see? And if so, who are those people? And how am I supposed to find something I don’t know about? I’d like to throw out all her furniture, but surely that isn’t what she meant. I’m useless here.”

  Beth looked on the verge of tears again. “I think… I think she was afraid on behalf of her son. I think she assumed I understood that there were love letters. Something Ray could use to poison their son against even her memory.”

  “Then why the kitchen? Who’d hide love letters there?”

  Beth looked surprised, then she quickly opened another door and peered inside with excessive interest, examining its contents, which were paltry and sparse.

  “You? You have—you’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “You don’t think I have a life, do you?” She turned to me, her lips pursed. “You don’t think I have a personality. The kitchen’s a perfect place. Everybody hides things in their lingerie drawer, so everybody knows to look there. Anybody with imagination would realize how much better kitchens are. Men almost never…well, Sam almost never goes into the cabinets. Ingredients don’t interest him.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and waited. It always worked on my students.

  “I use a half-full box of rice. Been using it for a dozen years. An old boyfriend had a resurgence of feeling for me about a year after I was married. I didn’t answer except to say I wasn’t interested, and I wasn’t—but all the same, I couldn’t throw them away, either, even though I knew they’d upset Sam if he found them. And about once a year the man still writes—as a friend—but he always says that in case I’ve changed my mind, he’s waiting.” She shrugged, bit at her top lip. “I can’t throw them out, but I wouldn’t want…” And she turned her back to me and continued pulling every bottle and box off the kitchen shelves.

  “So,” I said, “do you want me to…if, say, you were hit by a bus—”

  At which Beth grabbed a dishtowel and wiped at her eyes. “See? Yes. Because Emmy…that was the pact.”

  To think that for all these years a piece of my sister’s heart had lived in an old box of rice. Beth had always seemed to me the one truly serene woman in the world. No longer. I’d always accepted her at face value, but several times tonight I’d seen her smoothly pave over her features, give that face its desired value. It saddened me—not the knowledge that Beth was more complicated than I’d given her credit for being, but that I’d wanted to hold on to the idea that there was a thoroughly and perpetually contented woman somewhere on earth.

  “I don’t think Emmy used the pantry.” Beth’s voice was once again smooth.

  “I’ll check the bedroom,” I said. “That’s where I’d hide my secrets, even if it’s predictable and clichéd.” It depressed me to realize I didn’t have anything that would embarrass me posthumously except general clutter, and I didn’t know if that was because I was stupefyingly boring or so far gone that I didn’t give a damn.

  “Have you gone through her desk yet?”

  I h
adn’t, because it was a stupid thing—a shellacky copy of one of those rickety, undersized stations where ladies in bustles wrote bread-and-butter notes with quill pens. Its surface was uncluttered, with nothing under the unmarked blotter pad. When I pulled open its single shallow drawer, the results were equally unimpressive and predictable. Pens, pencils, highlighters, a ruler, and a notebook, which I opened.

  Its contents were as close to clutter as Emily Buttonwood seemed to have gotten. The lined sheets had notes in a precise hand, the sort that would have pleased her teachers. Looking at it, though, I felt sorrow behind its tidiness, a desperate need to do this correctly. But I was undoubtedly reading into it what I already knew about her. I glanced at her notes, filled with abbreviations and signals for her computer course. I wondered where the computer itself had gone. A laptop would fit on this wee desk. And in Ray Buttonwood’s shopping bag. It was technically his, too, I suppose, but he still seemed a vulture in swooping it up.

  The binder paper’s notes were tidy, but the rest of the binder’s contents were a dramatic contrast to that tight, neat penmanship. It seemed as if every inch was filled with notes to herself on scraps of paper, some with adhesive backing, some clipped to pages, many to the front and back covers, and all trivial or unintelligible. Mostly they seemed the sort of reminders meant to be chucked as soon as the chore was completed. Emmy hadn’t believed in the chucking part.

  She had a housekeeping flaw. I felt a great wave of relief and kinship.

  I compulsively read the scraps and bits, looking at their various designs—angels and teddy bears, and FROM THE KITCHEN OF and DON’T FORGET, stamped across the tops. Lined and plain, pastel and deep hues.

  One had a list of books to buy or check out for her son: Cat in Hat, Pooh, I Can Reads, and another I assumed was for Gage as well: Trucks, esp. red. Couldn’t she remember that? Was she falling apart so much she needed such primitive reminders? I’d once read about a rare neurological disorder where the afflicted couldn’t “dump” temporal information. While the rest of us park our car in a structure and remember the space only until we reclaim the car, those poor souls can’t get rid of the information. They remember every laundry receipt and due date at the library until their minds must be pure clutter.

  Emily’s notebook seemed the written equivalent. Her notes were mundane, from recipe and dental reminders—Moussaka recipe/Terry, 12mo, VF, dent—to cryptic missives about friends (or at least I hoped they were friends; this woman needed people) or dates—Clark/Shoemaker/Buck95, Bauman knows?—to the totally unintelligible (unless this was her shorthand for CDs she wanted to buy): CDPP, CDDC, CDEDILL. One had been imprinted with the drawing of a finger with a string tied around it on top and, in her writing, Check/Bauman/Sabin/leaf, gutters. I had to assume she no longer paid the bills for maintenance on a home she’d left, so why hang on to this probably painful reminder? In fact, there were two more notes mentioning Sabin at other spots in the book. I thought of the fellow who had come up with the first polio vaccine. My aunt Lydia was convinced that Sabin, whose name was whispered reverentially, had personally, specially, saved her children from the dire disease that had killed her sister. It was impossible to visit Aunt Lydia without hearing that anecdote—Sabin hadn’t saved her from being boring.

  I amused myself with thoughts that the doc had given away the rights to the vaccine and had been forced to repair Emily’s gutters to make a living.

  Which was the point when I realized what a waste of time engaged me. No sleep, and stupid thoughts. I pulled a stickum off and carried it into the kitchen. “Does anything on here make any sense to you?” I asked my sister. The paper read Bauman/Sabin: AL: CDPP—17K, EAPMS95K—PMS?—medications for it? I wondered—CDEDil21K, and more of the same.

  She studied the paper and shook her head. “Sabin,” she finally said. “He developed the oral polio vaccine for Aunt Lydia, remember?”

  “Thanks a lot.” Emily Buttonwood, with no sense of what was important and what was not, had been a self-stick packrat. I put the notebook back into the drawer.

  This outing was my dry run for my ninth graders’ garbology assignment, reconstructing Emmy from her pitiable leavings. But even though I hadn’t finished, I’d already collected more for my students to work with than Emily’s actual life had provided Beth and me.

  Luckily, because I was fading fast, Emily turned out to be just as clichéd as I would have been. The letters were in her dresser, between slips and stockings, and tied with a blue ribbon. She’d read a whole lot of nineteenth-century novels. Too many, perhaps. “Hunt’s over,” I called out. “They’re here.”

  I handed the packet to my sister. She eyed them first, and then me. “What if they’re something else altogether? What if they’re from her dad before he died? I feel as if I’m violating her trust, but if she’d explained herself, I wouldn’t have to… I need to read at least one, make sure I’m not burning something Gage would want.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, undid the ribbon, and opened the top envelope. It had no return address. That was enough for me to believe they were from the ex-lover. But I couldn’t have burned anything without checking, either.

  Neither of us was motivated by anything as base as unwholesome curiosity, you understand.

  “Oh, jeez,” Beth said. “She had them in reverse order. This is the end. The last one. It’s like a legal document. So cold!” She cleared her throat and read. “‘Emmy.’ Just that, no salutation. Afraid to even say ‘Dear’? ‘Emmy, this is the only possible scenario. Mistakes were made on both our parts, but it is time to resume our lives and places and minimize the harm we hold the potential to inflict.’ That’s it. Not even what I’d call a kiss-off. And only an initial. P.” She said the letter scornfully, almost spitting it out.

  Living as I did with a man with no apparent first or middle name, I couldn’t fault the letter writer for signing off with an initial. But I could on all the rest of his chilly, cut-the-ties-and-cut-out tone. “Know who P. is?” I asked.

  Beth shrugged. “It won’t help anybody to say it. His wife’s a good woman who never publicly acknowledges what went on.”

  “But what if—”

  Beth shook her head. “He didn’t kill Emmy.”

  “How do you—”

  She rifled through the packet to the one at the bottom. “Look here, he was writing to her a year and a half earlier. This wasn’t a one-night thing, and even this early one is careful and chilly.” She skimmed the rest of the letter, then checked the envelopes, all of which had been typed in the same no-return-address fashion. “I’m burning them,” she said. “How he attracted two such good women as his wife and Emmy, I will never know.”

  “He’s obviously heartless. Why are you so sure he couldn’t have—”

  “Because in truth he did have a heart, although not the way you mean. He had the one that pumps the blood around, and it failed him,” Beth said. “He reconciled with his wife—they’d never separated or anything—and had a fatal heart attack three months later. Is being dead enough of an alibi?”

  I nodded, sad on too many counts to list, but mostly on behalf of Emmy, who wanted to keep letters from a man as wooden and careful as that one sounded. Sad to have spent so long with him, tragic to have lost custody of her child because of that involvement. “It is something of a relief, though,” I said. “I was worried that old love letters could be criminal evidence. The police would want to know about passions that might have led to murder. Actually, even if he were still alive, I guess I could imagine her killing him for writing such constipated claptrap. But not vice versa.”

  “I’m burning them here. Now.”

  “The police will notice that the fireplace has been used recently.”

  Beth’s face was set and solemn. “So let them.”

  I thought she was being foolish, and I thought I’d be much better off sleeping before I faced another day, but I have learned not to argue with that jawline.

  She carried the sma
ll packet into the living room. “Five minutes, then it’s done. I’ve kept my promise.” She opened the glass door of the fireplace and bent to turn on the gas flame. “The logs are fake—I hope this won’t smoke up the place.” It didn’t. She put the letters into the flames, one at a time, and they flared and turned to carbon while she watched, stoking the pile now and then.

  As she bent over, a heart she wore on a silver chain dangled from her neck, and the pose clicked on my memory. “I did recognize her,” I said. “She was in the library. I saw her.”

  “What?” Beth asked, half turning. “What’s that?”

  “She was wearing a big silk scarf over one shoulder, bending over an exhibit case, near the cabinet with the cuneiform tablets. Adam scared her—he was walking toward her. When she saw him, she straightened up and left. Went somewhere else. But first I saw her necklace—” I lifted the photo from off the mantel. “This necklace, a long gold chain with black stones. It had been hanging the way yours just did, hitting the glass case.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Beth carefully placed the last letter in the fireplace. “Or who. Or is it whom?”

  I watched the last letter’s corner catch and glow. “Helena. Emmy’s sister. The one in that picture. Helena was in the library today. In the department where her sister works. Her sister was killed right outside of it.”

  “Oh, Mandy.” Beth’s voice was rich with sympathy and disbelief. “I understand that you’re twitchy, having been there and all. But first it was Ray you saw, now it’s… Helena’s never read a book, as far as I can tell. Coming to see where her sister worked doesn’t sound at all like her, so why would she be there? Why on earth?”

  “I have no idea.” That wasn’t completely true. I did have an idea. The idea that an oversized scarf could be used to strangle somebody.

  Eight

  I walked into the loft and hit the wall. Metaphorically, that is, although had there been a wall nearby, I’d have hit it headfirst. I had no more juice left in my body or brain or spirit or whatever else makes up a person. I headed toward the bed like a drowning victim spotting a distant atoll. I didn’t bother to check for messages, because Mackenzie wouldn’t have phoned this late. He might have e-mailed me, but in that case the message would say he wasn’t here and didn’t know when he would be, and I already knew that. I couldn’t see the point of detouring to the computer when the bed was just over the mountain, waiting. And if my mother had called, it would be to say either that she’d changed her mind and indeed, I should immediately marry. Or that she hadn’t changed her mind, and what was I doing about the rest of my life? I couldn’t consider touching either one.