I settled in behind my desk, wondering when she was going to offer me what was in the bag.
“To go over some questions I had about my story?” she asked, looking so enthusiastic for my help that it almost broke my heart. She was trying so hard but didn’t have the confidence yet to write with the training wheels off, so to speak, still feeling a little self-conscious and thinking that she didn’t belong. To her mind, she was not a writer and didn’t have any business in a class with young adults. Every time class ended, I attempted to disabuse her of both notions and encouraged her to come see me for help. I just wished that today hadn’t been one of the days she did, the coffee and whatever baked good was in the bag notwithstanding.
It was hard to look positive peering out from behind big black sunglasses, but I did my best. I peered over the top again; nope, still sunny. “Sure, Mary Lou. What questions do you have?” I hoped they weren’t hard to answer; I had nothing in the tank.
She pulled out a big sheaf of papers and started thumbing through them, identifying places where she was stuck or where she had a question about how to proceed. All told, there were twenty different queries that we miraculously managed to get through before I had to go to class. About midway through, I was able to take off my sunglasses without feeling like someone was driving a steak knife through each eye, and Mary Lou’s sharp intake of breath at my appearance didn’t go unnoticed by me.
The only thing that reminded her that she still hadn’t given me either the coffee or the muffin or scone in the bag was the persistent rumble of my stomach after we had finished going through her story.
“Oh! I forgot,” she said, handing me the coffee and the bag.
Inside was a giant piece of crumb cake, powdered sugar covering the brown peaks that dotted the top. I nearly wept with joy. “Thank you, Mary Lou. This looks delicious,” I said, daintily breaking off a piece. The minute she left my office, I was going to shove the entire piece in my mouth and wash it down with scalding hot coffee, those two things in combination in my stomach being the only way I was going to get through the day. I stared lovingly at the crumb cake, trying to tell her with my mind that she needed to leave so that we could be alone.
Mary Lou had other plans, namely finding out how I was doing. “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair, her hands clasped together between her knees. “I mean, really okay?”
It wasn’t until she asked that I realized I wasn’t. I was tired, overwrought, and grieving Max’s father. I was holding it together, but barely. Someone showing a little compassion, like she was, was dangerous, and I feared that if I opened my mouth, I would crumble. I nodded and smiled in an effort to assure her that I was absolutely fine.
“You just look so tired,” she said. “I hope you’re not burning the candle at both ends.” Her smile was sad. “You look like you need a hug.”
That was the last thing I needed but what I got anyway.
That’s when it hit. Soon I was sobbing in this wonderful woman’s arms, my tears wetting the shoulders of her very soft, and very expensive, cashmere pullover. I was thankful that I hadn’t had time to put on makeup that morning, because if I had, I would probably have been stuck with a dry-cleaning bill for God knew how much, since my crying jag was likely to ruin her sweater. My best friend was bereft, her dear father dead, but she was also angry with me for a variety of infractions. Over the last several weeks, I decided, I’d felt a little adrift socially, with a bunch of people surrounding me from the dark recesses of my husband’s former life—his life before me—and that left me seeking solace and comfort anywhere I could at that particular moment.
“There, there,” she said and stood up straight. I was still in my desk chair, and she had leaned over to hug me, folding her tall frame to fit in the small space between my desk and the filing cabinet. She went back to her seat. “Now why don’t you tell me what happened and why you are so sad?” she asked.
Crying to Mary Lou Bannerman wasn’t my intention, and it was something I would never have foreseen doing, but she was there with a sympathetic ear, a compassionate look on her beautiful face, and a willingness to hear my entire sordid tale. Not being strong enough to use better judgment, I just let the whole thing out, squalid detail by squalid detail.
I started at the beginning, all the way back to when Crawford was married and had a bunch of crazy brothers-in-law and no Alison Bergeron in his life, and ended with the night before and my best friend—the former priest—being taken on a major boondoggle to a strip club to chase a woman named Sassafras who may or may not have been a murderer. When I got to the part about Turkey Mountain, Mary Lou’s eyes lit up.
“Lovely place,” she said. “My husband and I hiked there all the time.”
I agreed but also reminded her that being there in the dead of night in high-heeled leather boots with a hysterical man, looking for signs of life, was not the best way to be introduced to the nature preserve’s loveliness. She saw my point.
“This Sassafras woman,” she said. “Did she hurt you?”
I shook my head, a few tears dropping onto the folder in front of me on my desk. “No. She just wants to find out where the money is and why she can’t get at it.”
“Do you think maybe she’s the person who poisoned your dog?”
“I asked her, and she denied it.” I thought about that for a moment. “What did she have to gain by denying it? She had already vandalized our car, stolen my husband’s bag of backup work clothes, and kidnapped us. Poisoning a dog is the least of her offenses, it would seem.”
“Maybe…”
I rested my head on my folded arms, my voice muffled. “I just want to be left alone.”
She chuckled. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have gone looking for her.”
“Not you, too,” I said, groaning. “I just wanted to tell her the story from my perspective and see if I could get her to leave us alone. As you now know, that was a mildly misguided plan.”
“Maybe you should write a short story about it?” she asked, her tone still light. She was trying to cheer me up and doing a passable job at it.
I lifted my head and smiled, then dropped it back down so I could think in the warm embrace of my own arms. I had to pull myself together to get through the next few hours of teaching, if not the entire day. Finally, I raised my head, blew my nose and wiped my eyes, and took a huge bite of the crumb cake, figuring at the very least it would make me feel better. Exhaustion coupled with hunger was a deadly combination, I had learned over the years, so I scarfed down the generous slice, slurped up some more coffee, and steeled my resolve for the day.
“Thank you, Mary Lou,” I said, standing. “I’m terribly sorry for that outburst. I don’t know what came over me. That was extremely unprofessional.”
The sun glinted off the big hunks of diamonds, beautiful studs, in her ears. “You needed a friend. I just happened to be here.” She picked up her bag. “Your secret—or should I say secrets?—are safe with me.”
“Please, Mary Lou,” I said. “This is embarrassing.”
She smiled her beatific smile again. She lifted a finger to her lips and turned them slightly as if she were locking them shut. “Not a word will be spoken.” She started for the door and then stopped. “It’s really reassuring to know that someone like you has problems.”
“Someone like me?”
“Yes, someone who seems like she has everything together. The great job, the wonderful husband, lots of friends. You’ve got it all.”
I did? Where she had gotten this impression I would never know. I only had some of it, and even some of that wasn’t very good.
“Now I see you’ve got your crosses to bear, and some of them are very heavy,” she said and opened the door. “Take care of yourself. I’ll see you later.”
Maybe that was her way of telling me to count the blessings that I had. Besides wanting to repair my relationship with Max—the first blessing that I asked for—the only other blessing that I really w
anted at this point was for someone to find Sassafras Du Pris and to make her stop her reign of terror, her quest for something that would never in a million years be hers.
By the end of the day, I had one of my wishes.
Thirty-Eight
I learned through the obituaries online and then a text from Fred that Marty Rayfield would be laid out—as my mother used to put it in her usual eloquent fashion—at a funeral home with which I was familiar up near the Rayfields’ home. The viewing, as Catholics call it, was from seven to nine, and a quick flurry of texts between me and Crawford confirmed that he would meet me at home by six so that we could head up there together. I raced through the door at six-oh-five and he wasn’t there, so I didn’t have to listen to him lecture me about leaving myself enough time or some kind of gobbledygook like that. I do leave myself enough time, that is, if enough time means always being five minutes behind schedule. I clipped on Trixie’s leash and dragged her toward the front door, something that she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about because she could hear the rain hitting the pavement, making the prospect of her evening constitutional less than desirable.
“Come on, Trixie,” I said, pulling. She responded by sitting heavily on the floor and digging her heels in, the only result of my pulling being that she was now surfing along the tiled hallway on the fake Persian area rug that ran from the front door to the stairs. Let me tell you, Home Depot replicates Persian rugs like nobody’s business. The rug bunched up in front of the door and onto my feet, and I stepped to the side. I finally gave up. “It’s your bladder,” I said, unclipping the leash and putting it back on the counter in the kitchen.
Crawford walked in a few minutes later. “Does Trixie need to go out?” he asked.
“She’s on strike,” I said. I brushed some rain off the shoulder of his jacket. “It’s raining. She won’t go out when it rains, remember?”
He shrugged and looked at the dog. “It’s your bladder.”
She looked at the two of us, nonplussed. In a showdown between owner and animal, animal always got her way even at the expense of her own comfort. At least in this house.
I grabbed an umbrella from the hook next to the back door and raced across the backyard to Crawford’s car. He called out to me to clean off the seat before I got in; when I opened the door, I saw a large envelope on the seat with Rayfield Family written across the front in his big, looping handwriting. I picked it up. Mass card.
“How did you have time to get a Mass card?” I asked. “Thank you, by the way.”
“I stopped at one of the four thousand churches in the Bronx while I was working and picked it up. It’s a really nice one. I spared no expense,” he said, backing down the rain-slicked driveway. “You know where this place is?”
I gave him some sketchy directions, thinking that I remembered the funeral parlor from when Max’s grandmother died, about fifteen years previous. Turns out I had no idea where it was, and after driving around a tiny hamlet for what seemed like three days, when in actuality it was only twenty minutes, Crawford pulled over and did what most men wouldn’t think of doing: He asked for directions. The woman walking her dog in the pouring rain didn’t look happy for the interruption, but she obliged, telling us to make one left turn at the end of the street and drive one hundred feet to the funeral parlor parking lot.
I gave myself a little head smack. “Right! Left on Hamilton.”
Crawford was not amused, even though he was as exhausted as I was. Whereas I had entered the land of the punchy, he had landed in the land of the bad tempered, and I realized that this was not the time for jokes, even if they were at my own expense.
The funeral parlor was a grand Victorian affair, high on a hill with an unobstructed view of the Hudson River. On any other night, I would have stopped to admire the view, but the rain was the kind that was cold and pelted against your skin, so getting to the lobby was job one. I wasn’t surprised to see that the parking lot was filled with cars or that the lobby was teeming with people; Marty Rayfield had been a colorful, popular figure in the town in which Max had grown up and in which he had lived all of his adult life, and people came out to support the family. It was my hope that Max was now focused on the proceedings of the next few days, too much so to still be angry at me for any perceived slight.
We don’t always get what we hope for.
After we signed our names to the guest book, we made our way into the cramped viewing room—actually two rooms, a small area that had probably been a parlor back when this funeral home was an actual home. In the first room sat assorted Rayfield family members, including some of the rambunctious children I had met at Max’s birthday party a few weeks earlier. In the next room, separated from the first by an arched doorway, was the coffin in which Marty was laid out, dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and colorful tie, a small smile playing on his lips. Whoever the undertaker was here either knew Marty well or had a sick sense of humor; I wasn’t sure how Max felt about Marty smirking for all eternity, but to me, it was a bit jarring. Max and her mother sat side by side in giant comfy Queen Anne chairs, Gigi looking gorgeous and composed, Max looking small and sad. Fred hulked in a nearby doorway, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but here. He had once told me that he didn’t understand the whole concept of a wake with a body on full display, and obviously, even though he spent a good deal of time around dead people, he didn’t like to do it in his off hours.
Crawford and I waited in line to approach the casket and finally got there—several of the mourners ahead of us having paused so long it seemed like they were reciting the Declaration of Independence to Marty’s dead body. We knelt side by side to pray. I looked at Marty and was flooded with memories ranging from the first time he met me and asked me to watch out for his daughter while we were at school, a task that proved to be incredibly challenging for an eighteen-year-old with not a lot of life experience herself, to my wedding day, when, without a father, I was without someone to walk me down the aisle aside from my very traditional mother, who thought that Uncle Phillippe would be a fine stand-in. He would have been if I had actually known him. Marty to the rescue. We were an odd pair, this little, elfin man and the statuesque bride beside him, holding on for dear life, but together we walked down the aisle. At the altar he whispered in my ear, right before lifting my veil from my face to give me a kiss, “You could walk away right now and no one would blame you.” He knew, as did most everyone in the church, that Ray Stark wasn’t the right man for me, or for anyone for that matter. He was a liar and a cheater, and a bad one at that, arousing my suspicions almost immediately after saying “I do.” He was all wrong for me and I was blind to that fact, so intent on making my mother happy in the knowledge that her only daughter had married before she died. Marty had gently tried to coax me into changing my mind before the wedding, and although that one last-ditch effort in the church angered me at the time, in hindsight I found it to be incredibly courageous and knowing. He only wanted the best for me, and he knew the best wasn’t a handsome, yet delusional, fellow professor with a taste for any woman who wasn’t me.
Crawford and I got up, and I wiped my eyes, turning to face Max and her mother. Gigi was her usual gracious self, wrapping me in her thin arms, the scent of her perfume filling my nose and bringing with it a wave of nostalgia. She touched my face with her hand, the skin thin and papery but soft.
“He loved you like a daughter, Alison,” she said, and I resisted the urge to go into a complete hysterical meltdown. He wasn’t my father, when all was said and done, he was Max’s, and for her, I had to hold it together.
I bent down and gave Max a kiss, but her body stiffened. “Nice of you to come,” she said, the words innocuous enough but the tone portraying something else. Crawford stood behind us, his hands clasped in front of him.
“And Bobby,” Gigi said, grabbing his hands, not tall enough to give him a kiss.
He gave her an awkward hug, looking like he was afraid he might break her in two. “So sorry fo
r your loss, Mrs. Rayfield.”
“Please, dear, call me Gigi.”
He didn’t, and I knew he wouldn’t. I looked at Max and tried to discern exactly what had happened to make her so edgy with me. “The funeral is Saturday?” I asked.
She nodded, still cold. “Ten o’clock. You won’t be investigating any major crimes at that time, will you?”
I decided to play it straight and not banter with her like I normally would, even under these circumstances. “No. I’m free. I’ll be there.”
She didn’t acknowledge my response, greeting the person behind me instead and giving him her complete attention. I stood there in an uncomfortable silence for a few seconds before Crawford’s hand on my back let me know it was time to move on. I looked over my shoulder at him, searching for any sign that he might know what was going on. Obviously, this wasn’t the time to ask Max.
Fred was moving toward the back door of the funeral home and out to a balcony that overlooked the river. We followed him and stood, clustered together, under the big yellow-and-white-striped awning that protected the wooden structure. I didn’t think it was fair to ask him at that time either, so we made small talk until Crawford decided that it was acceptable to bring him up to speed on the previous night’s adventures.
Fred raised an eyebrow, his forehead wrinkling like that of a shar-pei. “Really? She threw you in a van and took you to what? Turkey Mountain?” He shook his head. “Did I really hear all of that correctly?”
“Unfortunately, yes, you did,” I said.
“I assume nobody got hurt?”
I did a mental assessment of my physical state. “A little banged up from riding around in the back of a van, but other than that, feeling fine.”
“Where did they find the van?” he asked Crawford.
“Rest stop near the Bear Mountain Bridge.”
Fred closed his eyes and played out some kind of scenario in his head. “She must have been meeting someone. No way to get too far from there, at night, if you don’t have wheels.”
Extra Credit Page 23