Gone With the Woof

by Laurien Berenson

  The Irish Setter was in the kitchen, snoozing in a cedar-filled dog bed situated in a patch of sun. As soon as Charlotte called her name, she leapt to her feet, happy to join in the adventure. I opened the back door, and a burst of cold air came rushing in. As I paused to zip my parka and pull on my gloves, Robin squeezed past me and flew down the steps. Before Charlotte and I were even outside, the setter was already halfway across the yard.

  “Robin loves this.” Charlotte pulled a knitted cap low over her ears. “I try to get her out for a really long walk at least once a day. Mr. March used to make sure that she got plenty of exercise, but now it’s my job.”

  Robin zipped on ahead of us through the snow. She danced; she bounced; she gamboled happily. Then she caught a scent and lowered her nose into the white powder, leaving a shallow tunnel in her wake as she raced away.

  I started to run after her, but Charlotte called me back.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We don’t have to keep up. Robin will circle back around and wait for us if she gets too far ahead. All this land out here belongs to Mr. March. It’s not like she can get into any trouble.”

  We tramped through the snow in silence for several minutes. Now that we’d achieved a measure of privacy, I expected Charlotte to tell me what she hadn’t wanted to say inside. Instead, she seemed to have relaxed, content to simply enjoy a stroll through the open fields behind the house.

  “So,” I said finally. “What really happened earlier?”

  Charlotte shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I’m sorry I made you come all the way out here for nothing. I just had this awful vision of the police showing up and dragging Mr. March away in handcuffs. And I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about that.”

  All at once she looked both very young and very vulnerable. The ten-year gap between our ages seemed like an eternity.

  “It looked to me like Detective Wygod only wanted to talk,” I said.

  “I know that now. I guess maybe I overreacted a little.”

  I thought of my headlong, high-adrenaline drive from Wilton to Westport. Charlotte had overreacted a lot. Not only that, but I got the impression there was something she wasn’t telling me.

  “You seem like a pretty levelheaded person,” I said.

  Charlotte’s chin lifted. “I am.”

  “So what made you think that Detective Wygod was going to arrest Mr. March?”

  Her eyes tracked the red setter, now racing toward a belt of trees. Robin hit a snowdrift running flat out, and a shower of powder sprayed in all directions. It didn’t even slow her down. Charlotte watched for another few seconds, then turned back to me.

  “Because that’s what my mother said is going to happen. She told me that Mr. March seems like a nice man on the surface, but underneath he’s a black-hearted scoundrel.”

  I was pretty sure that anyone who thought March seemed like a nice man had probably never spent much time in his company. The scoundrel part sounded about right, though.

  “Does your mother think March had something to do with his son’s death?” I asked curiously.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  That was interesting.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think that it doesn’t pay to disagree with my mother,” Charlotte said firmly. “No matter what she says.”

  As we approached the trees, Robin came flying back out into the open. Small hard balls of ice swung from the feathers on her tail and legs. Charlotte called the setter over and checked the pads of her feet. She dug out several chunks of snow from between the setter’s toes.

  “Your mother’s the one who got you the job working for March,” I said as I watched her work.

  Charlotte released the dog and dusted the snow off her hands. “That’s right.”

  “Why would she do that if she thought so poorly of him?”

  “I don’t know. She’s her own woman. She does what she wants. I gave up trying to understand my mother a long time ago.”

  It was a shame that so many mother-daughter relationships were so difficult, I thought. I’d lost my own mother unexpectedly when I was just about Charlotte’s age. There were so many things I would have done differently had I known how limited our time together was going to be.

  “Maybe your mother used to have a higher opinion of him,” I said, thinking out loud. “And then she changed her mind. Has anything happened between them recently?”

  “Not that I know of. They don’t really keep in touch.” Charlotte paused, then added, “I guess she heard about that stupid book. But my mother didn’t seem to care about that.”

  “She told me the same thing.”

  Charlotte glanced my way. “You talked to her?”

  “At a dog show over the weekend. She said she didn’t think the book would ever really happen.”

  “Well, as usual, my mother was right. Because now it looks like it won’t.”

  We reached the crest of a small hill and stopped to admire the view. A snow-covered meadow spread out before us, pristine and unspoiled. Open land was a luxury in Fairfield County. A property this size was testament to March’s financial success.

  “Look down there,” said Charlotte.

  After a last headlong dash down the hill, Robin had finally succeeded in wearing herself out. I’d been watching as she came trotting back to us, but now I turned the other way and saw what looked like a hunting lodge nestled in a shaded hollow.

  “That was Andrew’s cottage,” Charlotte told me.

  “Have you been inside?”

  “Just one time. I took the police there on the day he died so that they could have a look around.”

  “And?” I asked curiously.

  “There wasn’t much to see. The place was a bit of a mess. I guess Julia had been there earlier that morning, packing things up.”

  “You knew she was here?”

  “Of course I knew. Julia had just gotten her apartment, but before that she’d been staying with me.”

  I looked at her, surprised. “How did that come about?”

  “When Andrew tossed her out, she didn’t have anywhere else to go. I told her she could come to my place for a couple of days. At that point, neither one of us figured that they’d be apart any longer than that.”

  Charlotte and Julia had to be closer to each other than I had realized. “Did you know she was pregnant?” I asked.

  “Not before she showed up that night. That’s when I found out. You know how it is when you have a fight with your boyfriend. You want to talk to someone about it. You want to dissect every detail and figure out what went wrong. . . .”

  “You want a friend who will tell you that he’s being an ass.”

  “That too. Of course, once she told me what their argument had been about, it wasn’t hard to come to that conclusion. My father left my mother before I was born. I never even got to meet him. So it was easy for me to take her side.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be.” Charlotte turned around and started back the way we’d come. I could see the main house off in the distance through the trees. “I never knew any different, so it seemed normal to me. And my mother made sure that I had more parenting than any one child could ever possibly need.”

  “I’m sure she meant well,” I said with a laugh.

  “She would agree with you,” Charlotte replied cheerfully. “Me, not so much.”

  As we walked back, I pondered Julia’s situation. At least it looked like she was surrounded by plenty of friends. That would definitely help. Then that thought led to another, and I remembered something I’d meant to look into.

  “What do you know about Sherm Yablonsky?” I asked as we climbed over the low stone wall that marked the edge of the yard.

  Robin was once again running on ahead. The setter bounded across the last expanse and hopped up the steps that led to the back door.

  “Just that he and Andrew were old friends,” Charlotte replied. “A
ndrew really made an effort to keep his personal life separate from what went on up here.”

  I could readily understand why. I certainly wouldn’t want to live my life with Edward March looking over my shoulder.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I said lightly.

  At least none that I wanted to divulge just yet. But I couldn’t help but wonder why Andrew’s old friend had looked so comfortable visiting his buddy’s ex-girlfriend’s apartment.

  Chapter 20

  I crammed that all into one afternoon and still managed to beat Davey’s bus home. Once there, I relieved Sam of Kevin duty and got the two boys settled on the living-room floor with a castle blueprint and a full box of Legos. That freed up fifteen minutes, which I used to run the Poodles around the backyard a couple of times. An hour later, I had a pot of spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove and a loaf of garlic bread in the oven. A generous glass of red wine completed the agenda. That’s what I call multitasking.

  After dinner, when Kevin was in bed and Davey was working on his homework, Sam asked how things were going. By mutual agreement, we never talk about what I’m working on in front of the kids. The Poodles, however, gather around us and listen to every word.

  I’m sure Faith would have valuable insights to add if only she were able to communicate them. Since we haven’t figured out a way around that barrier, I have to settle for Sam.

  He and I were sitting side by side on the couch, and I snuggled into the crook of his arm. “This whole group of people I’m dealing with makes me feel very old-fashioned,” I said.

  “You?” Sam laughed. “Ms. Low Tech? How is that possible?”

  I reached around and swatted him. “That’s not the problem. That, I could understand.”

  “What is the problem, then?”

  “Edward March has a string of ex-girlfriends a mile long. And now it looks as though his son continued the tradition. Apparently, Andrew considered his company’s pool of female employees to be fair game.”

  “That could lead to lawsuits,” Sam pointed out.

  “It already has. At least one that I know of.”

  “It sounds to me like Andrew’s the one who was out of touch with current standards.”

  Eve hopped up onto the couch. I pulled her into my lap, and she lay down, spreading her body across my legs.

  “Even worse than that,” I said, “Andrew dumped his girlfriend when he found out that she was pregnant. They’d been living together in his house, and he kicked her out, with no place to go.”

  “I hope she’s the one who hit him with the car.”

  “I don’t. She seems like a nice woman.”

  “Then I hope you find someone else to blame it on.”

  I sat up and looked at him. Sam was smiling.

  “You’re not taking me seriously.”

  “On the contrary, I take you very seriously. It’s the loony people you seem to get involved with that I refuse to give credence to.”

  Sam’s arm was wrapped around my shoulder. His fingers played idly through the strands of my hair. When his hand slid up and his palm cupped the side of my jaw, I leaned into the caress and sighed.

  “Kevin’s asleep,” Sam mentioned.

  “In an hour Davey will be in bed, too,” I replied.

  It was all we needed to say. That’s the great thing about being married. We both understood the shorthand.

  Charlotte had given me Sherm Yablonsky’s contact info and had told me that he was a lawyer in downtown Stamford. That sounded easy enough.

  When I looked him up online, I found that the legal offices of Grady & Yablonsky were located on a side street just off of West Broad. According to their website, they specialized in cases involving personal injury, wrongful death, auto accidents, and disability. Walk-ins were welcome.

  So Tuesday morning I went to Stamford and paid Sherm a visit. Considering the kind of law his firm practiced, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the picture painted by the website was far grander than the reality. At first I didn’t even recognize the small clapboard building, now sadly in need of a paint job, as the same tidy office I’d seen online.

  There was plenty of parking on the street out front. I crossed the cracked sidewalk, hopped up two steps, and opened the door. A bell chimed to announce my arrival as I entered a small stark room that looked as though it had been furnished at Big Lots.

  The desk and two chairs were generic; the carpeting was industrial grade. A collection of legal tomes was scattered across a low bookshelf. The ficus tree by the window appeared to be badly in need of water. The most interesting thing in the room was a large banner on the back wall, proudly emblazoned with the firm’s slogan, WE WILL FIGHT FOR THE VICTIM! Aside from me, the plant, and the banner, however, the room was empty.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  A voice answered from behind a door in the back wall. “Have a seat. I’ll be right out.”

  I looked around at the available choices and opted to remain standing. Sherm exited the bathroom a minute later, still drying his hands. Though he’d been wearing a suit and tie on the website, today he was dressed down in khaki pants, a V-neck sweater, and a button-down shirt that was open at the throat. Maybe the casual look was meant to put potential clients at ease.

  Sherm paused a moment to form an impression of me. Then he balled up the paper towel in his hands and tossed it in the trash. He took two steps, and I took two steps, and we met in the middle of the room.

  “Sherman Yablonsky, Attorney-at-Law,” he said pompously.

  He extended a still damp hand, and I shook it briefly as I introduced myself. Sherm took my coat and offered me a cup of coffee, which I declined. We sat down opposite each other in the two modular chairs.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m here to talk about Andrew March.”

  Sherm’s surprise was evident. With his job, I’d have expected him to have more of a poker face. I wondered if that was a problem when he argued cases in front of a jury.

  As I watched, he rearranged his features into a more suitable expression. “It was a terrible shame,” he said, shaking his head. “To lose a good guy like that so young. What a tragedy.”

  “I heard your eulogy at the memorial service,” I said. “You and Andrew must have been close friends.”

  “He was my best friend. We met in college, so I knew him more than half my life. That leaves a huge hole, now that he’s gone. I guess you probably know about that. You were a friend, too?”

  Sherm reached over and placed his hand on top of mine. The gesture was probably supposed to be comforting. I found it kind of creepy.

  “Not exactly.” I slid my hand away. “We’d only just met.”

  “Ahh.”

  There seemed to be a wealth of meaning contained within that single syllable. Abruptly, I got the impression that Sherm was formulating all the wrong assumptions about my relationship with Andrew.

  “Actually,” I said crisply, “I’m a friend of Andrew’s father.”

  “Oh.”

  Again with the single word. I was beginning to think that law school had been wasted on this guy.

  “Obviously, the police are looking into what happened,” I said. “But Mr. March asked me to make some inquiries, too.”

  “With regard to what exactly?”

  “He wants to know what happened to his son.”

  “You mean, who’s responsible?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” Sherm said firmly. “Any problems Andrew might have had, they had nothing to do with me.”

  What an interesting response.

  “What kind of problems are we talking about?” I asked.

  “You know. The usual.”

  “Perhaps you could elaborate for me.”

  “Like any guy might have. Work, women.” Sherm winked at me complicitly. “Those are the typical complaints, aren’t they?”

/>   “If you say so. Are we talking about any work or woman problems in particular?”

  “You know Andrew,” Sherm said.

  I took that to be a figure of speech and nodded.

  “Even back in our college days, he was always up to his ears in girls, and not much has changed since. Usually, it worked out great for him. But sometimes it backfired, and then he’d have to scramble around to make things right.”

  “I heard he’d been doing quite a bit of scrambling lately,” I said.

  Sherm nodded. “You must know Julia, then.”

  “I do.”

  “And Miranda too?”

  “Excuse me?” I sputtered. “Who?”

  “Miranda . . . Andrew’s girlfriend.”

  Good thing I was sitting down.

  “I thought Julia was Andrew’s girlfriend,” I said.

  “She was, but . . .” Sherm spread his hands helplessly. “Andrew wasn’t a big believer in monogamy. You know what I mean?”

  More and more every moment.

  “So while he was living with Julia, he was also seeing Miranda on the side?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess you didn’t know about that?”

  “No, I didn’t. Did Julia?”

  “Not at first. But later on, she found out about it. Miranda made sure of that.”

  “Miranda sounds like a real sweetheart,” I said.

  “She can be,” Sherm replied.

  Clearly, my sarcasm had gone right over his head. Then he saw the expression on my face and began to backpedal.

  “Well, obviously, Julia didn’t think so.”

  “Obviously not,” I agreed.

  Sherm babbled on, still trying to cover his gaffe. “Anyway, she pretty much ignored what was going on with Miranda. I guess Julia figured that eventually Andrew would come back to her, like he always had before. Especially since she had an ace of her own to play.”

  “The baby,” I said. “Andrew’s child.”

  “Precisely. Julia was convinced she was going to get a marriage proposal.”

  Sherm paused expectantly, like he thought he’d come up with something I didn’t know and maybe I’d want to applaud. Instead, I simply sat and waited him out.