Extracurricular Activities

by Maggie Barbieri

  I stayed focused on the couple in question and almost threw up when the man rolled onto his back and off the woman; I got a look at his face and gasped out loud. The woman sat up and put her hand to his cheek. Her breathy giggle wafted over to our blanket on the fragrant breeze.

  Terri. And Jackson.

  Chapter 7

  It took me a minute to really understand what I was seeing. Fortunately for me, Terri never saw me, jumping on top of Jackson soon after I spotted them to resume their juvenile public make-out session.

  “Look who that is,” I whispered. She turned her head to look and I hissed, “Don’t look!” Max isn’t really very good at the art of surveillance. But she did catch a look at my supposedly murderous neighbor and his supposedly terrified wife. I don’t know—if you really think your husband is a cold-blooded killer, do you make out with him in public? I think not.

  “It’s Jackson,” she said. “I’d know that weak chin anywhere.”

  “Does that look like a woman who’s afraid of her own husband?” I continued to keep them in my peripheral vision; although they were far enough away that I could spy unobserved, I turned to the side in the hopes that they wouldn’t see me.

  Max eased up onto her elbows, looking like she was setting up her position in a foxhole. She studied them for a few minutes and then looked at me. “Do you really want to see this play?”

  “Let’s go,” I said, throwing all of the food back into the paper bag and rolling up the picnic blanket. I handed her the paper bag and threw the blanket over my shoulder. “But we’re not breaking into their house,” I said, knowing that that was exactly what she had planned.

  “Whatever,” Max said, walking toward the parking lot.

  I grabbed her arm. “Promise me.”

  “You don’t have to break in anywhere. I’ll do it.”

  “Max, I’m serious.”

  “‘I’m serious,’” she mimicked. “Well, I am, too. How do you expect to find Ray’s killer if we don’t do a little sleuthing?”

  “Breaking in is not sleuthing,” I said. “It’s a felony.”

  She continued to walk toward the car with purpose. I ran to keep up with her, turning around every few seconds to see if Terri or Jackson had spotted us. They continued to roll around on their own blanket, seemingly oblivious to everything and everyone around them, so I figured we were safe.

  We reached the car and put everything into the Beetle’s miniscule trunk and started for home. She drove along Route 9D and came to the turnoff that would take us across Garrison and back toward the road that would take us to my house. “So, the Terri thing this morning was a giant setup.”

  I was looking out the window and didn’t really hear her. “What?”

  “Terri. It was a setup. She’s got something to hide.”

  Of course, she was right. I had been had. And now, we had to figure out why.

  Even though a steady rain had begun to fall, and lightning crossed the dusky sky, we made it home in record time. Max pulled into my driveway and turned off the car. She turned to look at me, her mouth set in a thin line of determination. “Are you in or out?”

  I got that queasy feeling in my stomach that signals the onset of intestinal distress. “What do you think you’re going to find? A bloody chain saw? A diary entry with ‘Dear Diary, today I killed Ray…get saw blade re-sharpened’?” I sighed. “Remember the last time we broke in somewhere? We almost got arrested!”

  “Well, I guess I’ve got your answer,” she said, and got out of the car. She shimmied between the hedgerow and strode across their backyard with purpose. I didn’t know whether to be in awe of or terrified by her force of will and lack of judgment.

  It was in that instant that I remembered to tell her about Trixie, the massive golden retriever who, at ninety pounds, weighed nearly as much as Max. It was too late. By the time I reached the hedge, she was already on the ground, Trixie on top of her covering her with wet, sloppy kisses. As watchdogs go, Trixie sucks. But as a lovable family pet, she’s clearly the tops. Max struggled beneath the weight of the dog, her white T-shirt covered with muddy paw prints, the back of her pants wet and soggy.

  “A little help here?!” she gasped, her hands on the dog’s belly in an attempt to liberate herself from Trixie’s underside.

  I plowed through the hedge. “Trixie! Here, girl!” I called and Trixie bounded toward me, freeing Max from her canine clutches. She tackled me, which left Max free to find access to the house. I wondered if Terri and Jackson ever let this poor animal in the house; every time I came home, she was outside and tonight was no different.

  It was not unusual to find doors unlocked, even open, in our town. Nobody is too cautious about locking things up, especially when they’ve gone out for a short period of time. I, myself, had been guilty of this lax attitude toward security, so I wasn’t surprised when Max opened up the sliding glass door on the patio and slithered inside the house. I guess it wasn’t breaking in, technically, if the door is unlocked. I suspected, however, that Crawford might beg to disagree.

  I sat with Trixie in the backyard, in the rain, and waited for what seemed like an eternity for Max to emerge from the house. As we sat and watched the back door for activity, my ears perked up to the sound of a car driving slowly up the driveway. The intestinal distress kicked up a notch as it dawned on me that the car belonged to Terri and Jackson. With the rain now coming down in a steady downpour, it was obvious that they had fled Boscobel rather than sit under the leaky tent where the play would be performed.

  “Come up with a story,” I muttered to myself, stroking the dog. I looked deep into Trixie’s eyes, hoping to figure out what to say when they got out of the car. I didn’t know how I was going to keep them out of the house long enough for Max to leave but my mind was working overtime as I watched them make their way from the driveway to my side.

  They were damp and looked a little bewildered as to why I was sitting in their backyard. “Hi,” Jackson said, a question in his voice. His hair gel had made his hair harden into a weird helmet that made him look like an extra in a Pompeii reenactment.

  “Hey,” I said, drawing out the syllable for as long as possible. “Hey.”

  Terri looked at me and furrowed her brow. Jackson produced an umbrella and gallantly put it over her head, leaving me to get soaked. “What are you doing, Alison?”

  I got up from my crouch next to Trixie. “It started to rain and I saw the dog and she was wet and then I thought ‘gosh, the dog is wet,’ and so I felt bad and then I thought I would come out here and get her and then I saw you drive up,” I babbled. I cast a nervous glance at the house but couldn’t tell if Max was in or out. “Wow!” I screamed as loud as I could, hoping that she could hear me. “It’s really raining!”

  Jackson stared at me as if I had gone insane. “Well, we’re back now so we’ll take Trixie inside.” He took the dog by the collar and pushed her in the direction of the house. Trixie stayed firmly planted by my side.

  “And I need sugar!” I cried. I pushed a wet lock of hair off my forehead.

  “Okay,” Terri said. “Come inside and I’ll give you some sugar.”

  I followed them inside and stood at the edge of their kitchen, next to the sliding door, trying not to get their gleaming wood floors wet or muddy. Terri went into the kitchen and rooted around in the maple cabinets for sugar. She produced an entire five-pound bag and pushed it at me. “Here. Take the whole thing.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t!” I hollered, hoping that my voice was carrying throughout the entire house.

  “Yes, you can!” she hollered back, convinced of my sudden onset of deafness.

  I stalled for another minute, looking around the kitchen, which was attached to a large family room with a stone fireplace. Their wedding portrait, re-created in oil paints, had a prominent place over the mantel. It appeared that the antebellum South had been their theme. Terri was seated on what looked like a toadstool with a parasol at her feet; Jackson stood over her w
ith one hand on her shoulder, the other in the pocket of his suit vest. He was sporting a Vandyke goatee/soul patch sort of thing on his chin which he had since had the good sense to shave off. Yuck.

  I put my hand on the door handle and pushed the slider aside. “I’ll be going now. Thanks for the sugar.” I stepped through the door and back out in the rain, offering a prayer that Max was out of the house and safe somewhere.

  She was sitting at my kitchen table, in exactly the same place in which I had found Ray, waiting for me to return. She looked disappointed. “No bloody chain saws,” she said. “But did you get a load of the toadstool and the parasol?”

  Crawford met his daughters at Grand Central Station early Sunday morning. The girls, twins, were going to be seventeen in a few months and their mother had finally relented to letting them take the train from Greenwich to Grand Central with the caveat that their father meet them at the train doors and make sure they were seated on the right train when it was time to go home. Crawford waited on the track, right where the third car would open its doors; it was their plan and it was foolproof. The doors would open and they would race out, as always.

  Meaghan and Erin Crawford had been born three minutes apart in the midst of a December snowstorm; their mother had been escorted to the hospital by two police cars, her husband walking a beat somewhere in the Bronx and unable to get back to the Upper West Side to get her there himself. He arrived just in time to see Erin, then Meaghan, be born, the first blond, the other dark.

  The train doors opened and Meaghan, a full six feet, preceded her smaller sister. She jumped into his arms and kissed him, forgetting that she was almost as tall as he and not a little kid anymore. He stumbled backward at the force of her embrace. Meaghan was the more gregarious of the two, an athlete and honor student. Erin was small, like her mother, and more reticent. Crawford didn’t get a lot from her in terms of affection and had given up trying to figure her out. She was who she was and probably more like him than he cared to admit. Erin waited for her sister to finish before standing on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. They hadn’t brought any bags since this was only a day visit; he had missed his Saturday-night visit with them but had made sure he could spend the entire Sunday with them.

  Meaghan grabbed his hand. “Did you catch the skel?” she asked. Their mother had explained to them why their father had had to cancel his usual Saturday visit.

  He turned to her, surprised. “Skel? Where did you hear that word?”

  “I saw a documentary about the NYPD on television and they used that word a lot.”

  He shook his head. “Okay, that’s not a word we’re going to use in normal conversation. Got it?”

  She nodded. “Got it,” she said, flashing a grin that was identical to his.

  Erin slipped her hand into his free one, smaller and more fine-boned than that of her younger sister. “What do you want to do today?”

  He gave her hand a squeeze. “Well, Bea suggested we attend the Divine Mercy Hour at Trinity Church, but I told her we had a full day of Stations of the Cross on the agenda.” The girls chuckled; Aunt Bea was an old-time Catholic and hated the fact that Crawford didn’t enforce a weekly mass ritual on Sundays. His time with them was precious; he didn’t want an hour eaten up going to church. “What do you want to do?”

  They walked across the wide-open space of Grand Central, the girls looking up every now and again to get a look at the beautiful planetarium scene on the domed ceiling; they never tired of it. Crawford ushered them up the great staircase that led to Michael Jordan’s The Steak House on the right and the Campbell Apartment on the left, an intimate bar and bistro that he had never been to but had passed a hundred times. The girls told him that they were starving and wanted brunch. They exited at Vanderbilt Avenue and walked a block and a half to an Irish pub.

  They took a booth away from the bar and toward the back of the restaurant. Crawford let them choose where they wanted to sit; they chose to sit together, across from him, where they could both see him.

  The waiter appeared and asked them if they’d like a drink. Crawford looked at his watch and saw that it was just after ten. He ordered the girls their usual glasses of water and a coffee for himself.

  Erin cut to the chase. “Mom said you’re going ahead with the divorce.”

  Meaghan shot her a look. “Nice going. Can we have a drink before we get into all of that?”

  Crawford sighed. He and Christine had a relatively good relationship, amicable mostly, but sometimes, she let the girls in on things that he would just as soon keep between them. She was very open and, admittedly, he was a little closed. It had been one of the things that she had grown to dislike in him, but it was who he was and he was not great at change. He spread his hands out on the table, looking down at his fingers instead of into their eyes. “We’re moving forward with the divorce,” he confirmed. Technically, that was true. But they still had the lengthy annulment process in front of them before everything was finalized. He didn’t think Christine was signing the divorce papers until the process had at least commenced.

  Erin’s eyes filled with tears, something that he didn’t expect.

  “Hey,” he said, grabbing her hand. “Don’t cry. Everything’s fine.” He touched her cheek with his other hand. “Nothing’s going to change. Everything is going to be exactly the same except that we won’t be legally married anymore.”

  Meaghan put her arm around her sister. “We’ve talked about this a lot, but she still thinks there’s a chance.”

  Crawford was puzzled. A chance?

  Meaghan explained. “That you’d get back together.”

  He hadn’t considered that either of them would ever think that was a possibility.

  Erin wiped her eyes with her napkin. “I’m sorry, Dad. It just makes things so final.” She let out a quiet sob.

  He nodded. He understood. The holding pattern that he and Christine had been in for six years was hardly fair to anyone, least of all their daughters.

  “Does it have something to do with the woman we saw at the restaurant that night?” Erin asked, keeping the napkin pressed to her eyes. “The woman from the hospital?”

  Crawford pulled a folded handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. He took the balled-up napkin from her and pushed it to the side of the table. “It does.”

  Meaghan, remarkably composed, started the interrogation regarding Alison. “How did you meet?”

  Crawford explained that they had met when he was investigating a murder.

  Erin kept his handkerchief over her face, not wanting to look at him. “Do you love her? Are you going to marry her?”

  He didn’t know and he told them as much. “She’s a little mad at me right now.”

  Meaghan laughed. “What did you do?”

  He was in awe of her maturity. She didn’t seem the least bit fazed by the conversation and had obviously come to terms with her family situation. He found himself looking at a very confident young woman and couldn’t remember when the transition from childhood had taken place. “Well, I didn’t explain our situation all that well. She met Mom at the hospital and…”

  Meaghan winced. “I get it.” She looked down at the table. “You really blew that one.”

  He had to agree. He asked Meaghan to change seats with him and he slid into the booth next to Erin. He pulled her close and she sobbed on his shirt. He stroked her hair and waited until she didn’t have any more tears left.

  She pulled back. Her face was red and tearstained. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. The waiter came and delivered their drinks, assessed the situation and said that he would be back in a few minutes to take their order. “I’m sorry, too.” He looked at Meaghan. “Are you all right with everything?”

  She nodded and took a long sip from her water glass. “I’m all right with everything.” She smiled, a little sad, but resigned to the truth: her parents were better off apart. And as divorced, or almost-divorced, families
went, theirs was pretty functional. Neither parent used Meaghan or her sister to their own gain, they saw their father as much as they possibly could given his crazy work schedule, and their parents seemed to genuinely like each other, even if they didn’t love each other anymore. There were no financial issues to speak of; their father took very good care of them and made sure they wanted for nothing. There was no ill will or resentment in the air when their parents spoke. As she tried to tell Erin, it could be much, much worse. She gave her father a punch in the arm. “And frankly, Dad, you need a woman. You’re getting awfully cranky.”

  Chapter 8

  I woke up the next morning after a fitful night’s sleep. I dreamed that I was making mad, passionate love to Crawford, only to find that it was really Ray when all was said and done. And next to us in bed was Terri.

  You didn’t have to be a psych major to figure that one out. Calling Dr. Freud…

  Max and I had spent a couple of hours on the computer Googling all sorts of things related to murder. It became apparent to us that a corpse missing its hands and feet had been killed by a Miceli foot soldier before; that seemed to be their trademark in murder. Something about identification being harder without fingerprints and all. I guess the Micelis had never heard of facial identification, dental identification, or DNA. What a bunch of morons. I made a mental note to tell Crawford, even though I assumed he was smart enough to have already researched this signature and was all over it.

  But if we could Google and get this information so easily, so could anyone with a computer and Internet connection. It didn’t really prove anything beyond the fact that someone knew how the Micelis signed off on their executions. And that still left Jackson and Terri on my short list of suspects.

  I got up and stumbled around the bedroom. I had on the oversized navy blue NYPD T-shirt that Crawford had given me in the spring and a pair of underpants. I padded out to the hallway and down the stairs, hoping that I had enough coffee beans in the cupboard to make a big, strong pot of the stuff. I was half asleep and only slightly cogent, but I could make out the outline of a bowling-ball-shaped person standing in my kitchen. When my eyes adjusted and I made out who it was, I nearly fell to my knees.