Keepsake

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  The sound of bodies rolling and thumping on the floor above them made Quinn glance involuntarily at the ceiling to see if it was coming down.

  Mike sighed. "I hate January," he repeated. "I hate Bunco. But most of all I hate being responsible for breakage when Mitzi's out for the night. You're a lucky sonofabitch you never married, Quinn."

  "Yeah, well, the right one just never—"

  The rest of Quinn's sentence got drowned out by the whine of the saw as Mike split the sheet into halves, then quarters. It was fairly obvious that Mike didn't care nearly as much about Quinn's love life as he did about woodworking. Mike was a hard-driving, extremely successful businessman, the owner of his own import-export firm, but his real passion in life was wood. Right now he looked overjoyed to be traipsing around in piles of sawdust, despite all the macho griping about being forced to baby-sit.

  A bloodcurdling scream followed by a horrific thunk sent Mike back to the foot of the basement stairs. "Hey! Guys! You sound like a herd of elephants up there! I'm not gonna tell you again!"

  He returned to his cabinetry and to Quinn. "So what's on your mind?" he asked as he took a sip of tea from a World's Greatest Dad mug.

  Quinn put down his own mug and said, "When we were at Ray's, some of the guys were throwing rumors around about Alison. You tried to shut 'em up, and I appreciate the spirit in which you did it—but I'd like to hear what you know that I don't."

  Mike looked suddenly uncomfortable. He shrugged and said, "Hey, it's nothing we know, exactly. It's just what we heard."

  "I understand that they're just rumors," Quinn reassured him. "But I'd like to hear them anyway."

  After a long pause, Mike said, "All right, I guess it's only fair. But it's pretty sleazy stuff. Don't ever tell Mitzi I told you. She's too much of a parent to believe it can happen."

  Quinn nodded his agreement and waited.

  "Look, it's just talk, but... after you and your dad left Keepsake, Myra Lupidnick got drunk one night with Monty Johnson and got a little blabby. She told MoJo that Alison once confided that her father used to like to feel her up. Later Myra took it all back. She said it wasn't Alison's father at all who used to cop the feels, but the owner of the dress shop where Alison worked after school."

  "What, that shop on Main?"

  "Yeah, it's not there anymore. Casual Shop? Something like that. The owner had already died of a stroke by the time Myra ran off at the mouth to MoJo, so, you know, that was that."

  "Did anyone ever tell Vickers this?"

  Mike picked up a sanding block. "You'd have to ask him," he said, gently hitting the raw edges of the sawn wood. "Anyway, no one really believed Myra. You know how she was. Hell, she went around bragging to anyone who'd listen that she took your cherry."

  "Huh?"

  "Did she?"

  "No."

  "See? She was a lotta talk. I'll say this for her, though. She gave pretty good—" Mike glanced upstairs and lowered his voice. "You know."

  He chuckled in fond reminiscence and said, "You remember the time she sneaked into our locker room and—oh, no, wait, you were gone by then. Well, anyway, back then we figured Myra was just trying to puff herself up by spouting so-called inside knowledge. She was always trying to be somebody. That's the thing about going to a really good public high. The parking lot is filled with Jeeps and Corvettes, and the kids who take the bus have to walk right past them on their way to class. One way or another Myra managed to hitch a ride, every once in a while."

  "Where does Rand fit in all of this?"

  "That's a good question," Mike said. He pondered a vague spot in the air as he formed his answer.

  Suddenly he moaned, "Oh, geez, I forgot to close the lid on the washing machine," and hustled over to the appliance. "Mitzi is gonna have a fit," he muttered, blowing sawdust off the agitator cap and out of the bleach dispenser. He dropped the lid and wiped off the top of the machine with the sleeve of his flannel shirt, then came back to the workbench where Quinn was waiting with arms folded casually across his chest.

  For the rest of his life, Quinn remembered exactly what the scene looked and sounded and smelled like at that moment: the fine mist of sawdust swirling under the long fluorescent light, itself swaying lightly on its chains as the boys tore through the house; the pungent bite of newly cut wood tickling his nostrils; the giggly bickering of the kids somewhere distant. Everything seemed so right, so ordinary, so utterly benign.

  Until Mike spoke. "Look, it's obvious that you and Livvy have something going, so I don't even know why I'm telling you this. I need your word that you'll forget that I'm the one who said it."

  "You have it."

  "Okay. Here's the deal: Rand Bennett apparently had a heavy-duty thing for his cousin Alison. Again, the source for all this was MoJo, and he's dead as a doornail after wrapping himself around that tree in the Alps, so believe as much of it as you want."

  Quinn was listening so intently that he could hear the rasp of Mike's beard as he rubbed the palm of his hand along his jawline.

  "You know what a hound MoJo was," Mike went on. "Before he settled for easy sex with Myra, he made a big move on Alison. She rebuffed him and must have told Rand, because Rand confronted him about it and beat the crap out of him. Now, the way MoJo told it to us, all he did was make an everyday, garden-variety pass. So why did Rand react like MoJo tried to rape Alison or something? That's what you naturally wonder."

  Quinn was thinking that Alison's father had sexually abused her; that she had run to Rand for comfort; and that Rand had overreacted by taking it out on somebody else. That's all that Quinn was thinking.

  "There's more," Mike said quietly.

  Quinn didn't want to hear it. He did not want to hear it.

  "MoJo said that when Rand had him pinned to the ground with his hands around his throat, Rand said to him, 'No one touches her but one man. Got it? One man. And you're not that man.' "

  It was as bad as Quinn had feared.

  "So MoJo somehow gets the courage to croak, 'Oh, yeah? I suppose you are?' And Rand says 'That's for me to know and you to find out.' "

  Quinn's relief came out in a snort of laughter. " 'For me to know and you to find out'? Come on, Mike, get real. MoJo made that up. No adult talks that way."

  "We were barely seventeen," Mike pointed out. "And it was a—slightly—more innocent age."

  "It's still not conclusive."

  "There's more."

  "Christ. What," Quinn snapped, annoyed at Mike for parceling out the revelation.

  "The next day, when MoJo showed up in school with a black eye and a busted nose—remember? He told us he got in a fight with some biker?—Alison supposedly said to him, 'I'm glad you wouldn't take no for an answer. Because of you I just got engaged. 'To who?' says MoJo. She answers, 'To someone I'm not supposed to marry, at least according to the Church.'"

  Quinn let out a long, low whistle. "Ho-ly shit."

  "Exactly. I never was as smart as you," Mike said without irony, "but it doesn't take Scholar of the Year to figure out that marriage between first cousins is forbidden in the Catholic Church."

  "So is a marriage to someone divorced," Quinn shot back.

  Mike gave him a skeptical look. "Put it all together, man. She was talking about Rand. I don't know who got her pregnant, her father or Rand, but the promise to marry her—that had to be Rand."

  "It looks that way," Quinn conceded, but all the while he was shaking his head in denial.

  Mike added, "You remember how Ray and a couple of the guys got real quiet when the talk turned to Alison over at his house on New Year's Day? They're still scared shitless that someday this will all get back to Rand, and their asses will end up in a sling. The Bennetts own this town—you know that. Rand could pull some strings and have them fired from their jobs in the blink of an eye—and probably me as well if I were still working at the mill, never mind that I was their top-grossing salesman. As it is, Owen Bennett and his son have to make nice-nice to me. They know I'd r
ather buy Polartec from Malden Mills than Artica from him for my shop in the Philippines."

  Mike Redding was a bear of a man with a thick head of hair that was graying way too fast. Maybe it was the three boys; maybe it was his concern for his old teammates; maybe it was the time he was spending in the air between Keepsake and the Philippines, away from his family and table saw. Whatever it was that was stressing him out, Quinn did not want to add to his burden.

  "Understood," he said simply. "I won't drag your names into anything. Tell me one thing, though. When did MoJo tell you all this?"

  "It was during our first New Year's Day reunion, four or five years after you and your dad split. We all got good and ripped and vowed to meet faithfully every year, wives and girlfriends be damned. Someone mentioned that we should've invited Rand, but you know how it is. We blamed him for that lousy season even more than we blamed you," he said with a wry smile. "Anyway, that's when MoJo told us the stuff about Alison."

  "Was Coach at that first reunion?"

  "Yeah. Why do you ask?"

  "Just wondering."

  There was more thumping upstairs—this time, followed by a loud crash of something heavy onto the floor.

  Mike cocked his ear. "I didn't hear actual breakage, did you? Sounds like they just knocked over a bookcase or something." He went back to the foot of the stairs.

  "Hey, up there!'' he bellowed. He listened for a response and got silence. "Ah, the hell with it," he said, and went back to his tea.

  There was stoic acceptance in Quinn's voice as he said, "I appreciate this, Mike."

  "Hey, c'mon," Mike said, waving away Quinn's gratitude. "We go way back. I owe you for all kinds of stuff, including the time you stepped in between me and the coach; he could have had me up for assault. Besides, I always thought your dad really got screwed. The way they jumped on him was criminal."

  ****

  Quinn left Mike to his sawing and hammering and headed back to Mrs. Dewsbury's to check on her before going on to Olivia's. He mulled over Mike's revelations, looking for an interpretation that he could live with, but he came up empty. The Bennetts—one or more of them—seemed to be up to their ears in the tragedy that was Alison.

  The thought absolutely paralyzed Quinn.

  He kept veering away from his suspicions, preferring to focus on his old coach. How did Bronsky fit in? He had been present when MoJo blabbed to everyone about Alison, and he had done nothing.

  Quinn could understand why his old teammates had been too intimidated to expose the Bennett family to an investigation, but he couldn't understand how the coach, a close friend of Chief Vickers, could keep such incriminating information from him. Vickers had been a sergeant back then. You would think a pal would want to give a low-ranking officer his big break.

  On the other hand, maybe Coach Bronsky was being bought off; maybe that's how he was managing to hold on to his job despite his drinking problem. Ironic, that it was Olivia who'd suggested the coach might have friends in high places.

  For that matter, maybe Chief Vickers had been bought off as well. He was the chief of police, after all. Maybe all of Keepsake was in on a conspiracy of silence. At the very least, it looked as if a lot of people had been turning a blind eye to the whole affair. It pissed Quinn off more than he could say.

  Money and sex: They were powerful motives, and completely entwined in this case. Olivia believed that the rift between her father and her Uncle Rupert was over money—how they had handled their inheritances. What if it were over Rupert Bennett's sexual abuse of Alison instead? That would account for the genteel break between Owen and Rupert; Olivia's father didn't seem like the type to turn in his brother for being a child molester, no matter how appalling the crime.

  Say that Alison had become pregnant by her father. In that case, it was possible that Rand had acted out of chivalry and had offered to marry his cousin simply to get her away from her abusive father. But would Alison keep a baby conceived in those heartbreaking conditions, and would Rand take over the fathering of it? It was hard for Quinn, knowing Rand, to believe that.

  On the other hand, if Rand was the father, maybe he decided to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the baby. It was easy to picture Rand in love with his cousin: She was good-looking and personable—just like him. He was the Montague to her Capulet. The idea of love betweenfirst cousins of a feuding family would have appealed to Rand's emotional, tragic side.

  There was a third possibility. Maybe Rand got Alison pregnant and regretted it. Maybe he wanted her to get an abortion and she refused. Maybe she began living some fantasy, hearing a proposal where none had been made.

  And maybe Rand decided to murder her.

  Quinn slammed his hand in frustration on the wheel of his truck. The two top suspects in his investigation so far were Rupert Bennett and his nephew Rand. Somehow Quinn had got himself in the bizarre position of actually hoping that it was Alison's father who had made her pregnant and then murdered her. It was the less horrifying of two horrific scenarios.

  Quinn's mood was utterly black as he let himself in through the front door of Mrs. Dewsbury's big white house on Elm. He found his old mentor at a makeshift desk in the dining room, seated in front of her brand-new toy: a twenty-inch closed-circuit TV that magnified printed material by a huge amount and made it possible for her to read again with relative ease.

  Mrs. Dewsbury looked up from the screen at him and her face creased into a county roadmap of wrinkled joy. "Quinn, I love this CCTV thing," she said in a young girl's voice. "I had just about stopped reading, and look at me now!"

  She motioned him over. She had placed a list of recent books acquired by the Keepsake Library under the camera, and the list was being magnified twenty times on the screen.

  "See all the books I've checked off on this list? I'm going to reserve every one of them, from the biographies to the sexy historicals. This is—truly—a miracle! Thank you so much for buying it on the spot when you came across it. Two hundred dollars seems awfully reasonable for something so sophisticated."

  It had cost Quinn two thousand dollars, but she never would have accepted a gift like that from him, so he had made up a story about finding the vision aid in the Granny's Attic shop of his uncle's retirement home in Old Saybrook. Even at that, she had insisted on reimbursing him for it.

  "All it is is a camera and a TV box," he explained to defend the apparently low price. "The concept is actually very simple."

  "It doesn't look that way to me," she said. She added, "How do I know it isn't stolen?"

  He pretended to be scandalized. "Mrs. D.! What do you take me for?"

  "Well... all right. Just be sure to cash my check, you hear? I don't want you carrying it around in your wallet for a month the way you do. It throws off my bank balance."

  "Yes, ma'am," he said, pleased to see her so pleased.

  She cocked her head at him. "I see you're not taking off your jacket. I assume this means that you won't be back tonight?"

  "Nope. I just stopped by to activate the alarm, because the chances are good that you will not."

  "Yes I will. But not right away. Helen next door is coming over to see this thing. Her mother has macular."

  "But you'll set it after she leaves?"

  "Mm-hmm," the schoolteacher said absently. It was clear that her mind was on something else, and it wasn't the library list.

  Out of the blue, she said, "May I ask you what your intentions are toward Olivia Bennett?"

  His intentions. Now there was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. He wanted to say, "Entirely honorable." But it was hard to reconcile that answer with his ongoing campaign to investigate Olivia's family.

  "We're enjoying one another's company," he settled for saying.

  "So are you and I. That doesn't mean that we'll be marrying anytime soon."

  He laughed, then lifted one eyebrow and said, "Just because I haven't asked you yet ..."

  "Quinn, I'm serious. Sleeping over is what teen
agers do at slumber parties. You are thirty-four years old. You should be a father by now. If the attraction between you and Olivia is that deep ... that irresistible ... well, don't you think you ought to be backing it up with a commitment of some sort?''

  Feeling cornered, he said, "I'd give her a fraternity pin, but you know how it is—I'd have to go to college first."

  "Don't be flip. Besides, you're only a few night courses away from a degree, so stop trying to sound underprivileged. It will not work with me."

  He shifted tactics and went on the offensive. "The 'attraction,' as you term it, has only been going on for a couple of weeks or so."

  "The attraction has been going on all of your lives! Why do you suppose neither of you has ever married? Can't you see that you've been waiting for one another? My goodness—I thought I was blind."

  "It's not as simple as that," he said, looking away. How could he possibly explain that his love for Olivia was now at odds with his love for his father?

  Mrs. Dewsbury picked up on the torment he thought he was concealing. "Quinn. Look at you! What's going on?"

  Now he did feel cornered. "The pranks," he said, hedging the truth. "They're demoralizing."

  "Oh, those. Of course they are. But sooner or later, this man is going to do something stupid. He'll be caught in the act and made to feel ashamed. Or else he'll see that you're determined to stay in Keepsake, and he'll simply give up. That's what I predict. He'll simply give up and fade away."

  It wasn't what Mrs. Dewsbury said, exactly; it was more the way she said it. Here she was, an eighty-something woman with limited means and failing eyesight, and she was bucking him up.

  Quinn smiled and said, "I bow to your indomitable spirit, Mrs. D. You are one in a million." He bent down to kiss the top of her head and said on his way out, "Don't forget the alarm."

  "The alarm ... right," she said, off in a world of her own.

  ****

  Quinn made love to Olivia with exquisite tenderness, even sadness, after he returned from seeing Mike Redding and Mrs. Dewsbury. Olivia was surprised by his melancholy, which seemed to run deep.