by Susan Conant
“This neighborhood is private property,” Mr. Trotsky informed her. He swept an arm around. “All private property.”
“If I’m trespassing,” countered the woman, “perhaps you should call the police. The Boston police will undoubtedly come running when they hear that my dog put her paw on your lawn.”
“Pardon me,” Felicity said, “but—”
Mr. Trotsky ignored her. “No dogs! No pets! No trespassers!”
“You know something?” asked the woman. “People who don’t know how to live in good neighborhoods shouldn’t move to them. Or anywhere near them. Until these houses went up, Norwood Hill was the quietest, safest place you can imagine, and now we have cars speeding down our narrow streets and ruining everything. As a matter of fact, a complaint has been lodged with your condominium association.”
Before her Russian neighbor could respond, Felicity said, “I’m so sorry there’s trouble here. There’s no reason at all to object to having people walk through here. Most of us—”
“No pets!” shouted Mr. Trotsky. “A cat! I saw a cat in your window!” He turned his back on her and stomped to his house.
“Charming neighbor you have,” said the woman.
“He really is the exception,” said Felicity.
“I’d hope so. At least you’re not all Russian. There’s that to be thankful for. How they get their money out of Russia is a mystery to me. And how they made it to begin with!”
“This neighborhood is actually quite diverse,” Felicity said. “And I suspect that back in Russia, people found him pretty rude, too. If your dog wants to walk on a lawn, let him walk on mine. It won’t bother me.”
“Her. Her. She’s female!” With that, the woman clucked to the dog and walked briskly away.
Felicity went back inside and resumed her examination of her correspondence. It seemed to her that some of the reviews she’d received would have provided grounds for justifiable homicide, but the blurbs she’d written for the covers of other people’s mysteries, feline and otherwise, had been laudatory. She had, of course, declined to blurb some books, and she’d begged off reading some manuscripts, but it seemed to her that her refusals had been kind and tactful. For instance, to Janice Mattingly, she’d written, “How sorry I am not to have the treat of reading your manuscript right now! As it is, I am up against a looming deadline and barely have time to read my own book. I look forward to enjoying Tailspin when it comes out and certainly wish you the very best of luck with it.” She’d previously weaseled out of recommending Janice to her agent, too, but to the best of her recollection, she’d been equally inoffensive on that occasion.
As she was turning to old e-mail in search of slights and grudges, the phone interrupted her.
“So,” said her sister, “you find a corpse at your door, and you don’t even bother to tell me?” Angie’s Boston accent was intact: corpse was “cawpse,” door was “dough-uh.”
“I’m sorry. I told Mother.” Felicity had long ago discarded Ma. “I assumed she’d tell you. But I should’ve called. It’s been very stressful.”
“Poor you. At least you don’t have to go to work every day.”
“Angie, I work at home, but I do work. And I’m the first person to say that I don’t miss teaching. I’m sorry you’re still stuck in the classroom.”
“Well, thank God for cell phones. They’re the only thing that keeps me sane.”
Angie taught in a middle school in an impoverished city that had once been a mill town. Whenever Felicity read or heard about laudable efforts to recruit bright, well-educated college graduates to teach economically disadvantaged students in public schools, she thought of her sister, who was exactly the kind of teacher in immediate need of replacement.
“I was a rotten teacher myself,” Felicity said.
“I am not a rotten teacher! Why would you say such a thing when you know that I’m stuck here with these obnoxious kids who don’t give a damn about anything, least of all school. Wasn’t it enough that you had to go and suck up to Bob and Thelma without rubbing it in?”
“Speaking of Bob and Thelma—” Felicity began.
“Don’t! Just don’t! The less I have to hear about them, the better! I gotta go.” And she hung up.
On the theory that toxins might as well be consumed all at once instead of little by little, Felicity immediately called her mother, who had bored her with family stories for five decades and should therefore be easy to pump for information about Uncle Bob. He wouldn’t have told his sister about financial shenanigans that would account for the cash, but Mary might know something without understanding its significance.
Mary answered the phone with a thick, “Hello?”
“Mother, it’s Felicity.”
“Who?”
“Felicity!”
“Let me turn down the television.” After the inevitable and, in Felicity’s opinion, unnecessarily prolonged delay, Mary returned to the phone. “Who did you say you were?”
“Felicity!” The impulse to shout was uncontrollable and had become more so after Felicity, in desperation, had dragged her mother to an audiologist. The result of the exam had been unequivocal: Mary Pride had exceptionally acute hearing. After arranging to visit her mother that same afternoon, Felicity slammed down the phone. How could she have imagined that her mother bore her a strong enough grudge to retaliate by leaving a murder victim at her front door? Far from bearing her a grudge, her mother couldn’t even remember who she was.
TWENTY-ONE
Newton Park Estates could properly be called a housing development: A developer had bought a tract of land and built houses on it. Because the collection of multimillion-dollar houses was organized as a condominium, each dwelling was a unit. If Felicity had felt secure about the position in the world to which her recent inheritance had elevated her, she would have recognized the absurdity of referring to her opulent abode as a unit in a housing development; in reading the morning paper, she would have responded with amusement rather than outrage. Her hypersensitivity to the perceived slight stemmed largely from the irrational feeling that the innocent, if misleading, little newspaper article had mistaken her living situation for her mother’s. Mary Robertson Pride occupied a one-bedroom unit in a new and attractive complex intended to provide senior citizens with affordable apartments. The Robertson clan unanimously agreed that Mary lived in a garden apartment in a small retirement community. No one, not even Felicity, ever said that Mary Robertson lived in public housing.
The complex certainly bore no resemblance to the notoriously rundown and crime-ridden projects of the inner city. On the contrary, its two-story buildings were covered in cedar shingles, their trim was freshly painted in cranberry, the foundation shrubs were neatly pruned, and mulched paths ran from building to building and down to a small pond. Inside, the hallways and apartments were bright, and a social center offered many activities in which Mary refused to participate on the grounds that she was a better Scrabble player and bridge player than anyone else there, and she had no interest in yoga, nature walks, or, indeed, any other form of physical exercise. Still, it was because of the retirement community’s overall excellence that Bob Robertson had used his considerable clout to move his sister to the top of the long waiting list for available units. He had also been responsible for the negligence with which Mary’s application had been examined. In particular, no one had raised the question of whether she was, in fact, a widow, and no one had asked whether her financial circumstances were, in fact, severely reduced.
When Felicity parked Aunt Thelma’s unpretentious Honda CR-V in front of her mother’s building that afternoon, she uttered a short prayer: “Dear God, thank you for allowing the illegitimate nature of my mother’s occupancy to remain undetected. Gratefully yours, Felicity Pride.”
If a thorough and conscientious administrator ever examined the details of residents’ applications, would Mary be booted out? Sent a hefty rent bill for past years? Perhaps even charged with fraud? Probab
ly not. Although Uncle Bob had been a man of influence, there was no reason to suppose that his sister was the only resident who’d slipped in under false pretenses. For all Felicity knew, not a single occupant of the attractive units was actually entitled to subsidized housing; the entire place was probably populated by the relatives of persons of financial or political power. And the units were attractive. The entrance hall of her mother’s building was spotless. A low table held a mixed bouquet of flowers in a glass vase. Tacked to a cork bulletin board above the table were notices of events: Children from a local school would give a concert on Thursday afternoon, a shuttle bus would transport people to a Boston theater on Saturday for the matinee performance of a musical comedy, and lessons in watercolor painting would begin on Monday at ten A.M.
Felicity rapped her knuckles on the first door on the left. “Mother?” She could hear the television. After a long wait, she rapped again and called loudly, “Mother! It’s Felicity!”
Eventually, there was a sound of shuffling, and Mary said, “Who is it?”
“Felicity!”
“Who?”
“Felicity!”
The door opened. Mary wore a cotton duster, a flower-patterned garment halfway between a bathrobe and a dress. She made as if to hug and kiss Felicity, but succeeded only in scratching Felicity’s face with the brush rollers that covered her head. “Come in! Don’t stand out there. You’re letting in a draft. Those shoes are new. I always think that a woman with big feet should look for something with a short vamp.”
“They’re boots,” Felicity said. “It’s cold out.”
Mary settled herself in a padded lounger that faced the television. “I wouldn’t know,” Mary said. “I can’t get out very much.”
Won’t, thought Felicity as she turned off the TV.
“Sit down and tell me all about your murder,” her mother said. “It puts me in mind of my grandmother. She loved a murder. She spoke broad Scots, you know, and when the paper came, she always opened it and said, ‘Any guid meerders today?’”
“This wasn’t a particularly good murder. It wasn’t exactly pleasant to find—”
“Do you remember that woman who shot her husband and threw him over the bridge? You and Angie and I followed that in the papers. It went on for weeks. She and her boyfriend killed the husband. What was her name? Nancy? And the boyfriend was ten years younger than she was. She shot her husband in the head, but he didn’t die right away, so she called the boyfriend to finish him off and help her get rid of the body.”
“Could I have a cup of coffee?” Felicity asked. “Do you want one?”
“Help yourself. Nothing for me. I had a nice poached egg for lunch. You know, Felicity, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. This review you sent me? Of your book?”
“Yes?”
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
“Yes?”
“It says here you’re funny.”
“What do reviewers know?” Felicity moved to the small kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a divider. She put the kettle on and got out instant coffee, sugar, milk, and a cup and saucer. Her mother disapproved of mugs. As she fixed coffee for herself, her mother reminisced about other murders that the family had enjoyed following in the papers throughout Felicity’s childhood: husbands who had hired thugs to brain wayward wives with baseball bats, doctors and nurses who had habitually done in patients, mothers who had drowned their children in bathtubs.
Returning to the living room and taking a seat, Felicity said, “I’ve wondered whether the body was left at my house by mistake. It’s occurred to me that maybe someone didn’t know about Bob and Thelma and thought that Uncle Bob still lived there.”
“Why would someone dump a body at Bob’s doorstep?”
“Why would someone dump a body at mine?”
“You’ll know more about that than I will. I’ve never believed in interfering in my children’s lives.”
“I don’t know a thing about it. That’s why I’m wondering about Uncle Bob.”
Mary put her hands on the arms of the recliner and leaned forward. “My brother was a fine man until Thelma got her clutches in him. She could see he was going places, and she set her cap for him. She was always greedy, Thelma was. A sly one, that’s what she was. Did I ever tell you what she did when my mother died?”
Ten thousand times. But having diverted her mother from sensational murder cases to Bob and Thelma, she said, “What was that?”
“She stole my mother’s jewelry right off her body! After the funeral, right after, she went to the undertaker and got him to give it to her. My mother’s opal ring and her gold chain. Of course, I don’t believe in an open casket myself, but I had no say in it, and look how it ended up!”
“A new argument for closed caskets. Worried about the family kleptomaniac? Shut that lid!”
“What was that, Felicity?”
“Nothing. Look, Mother, this business of the murder and Uncle Bob. I know you thought a lot of him before Thelma came along, but was there anything not quite on the up and up in his past? Anything that would lead anyone to . . . I don’t know. Anything I might not know about?”
Mary closed her mouth and locked her jaw. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A family secret.”
“In our family?”
“In our family. About Uncle Bob.”
“You know, Felicity, the Depression was a terrible time for men. It’s hard for a man to worry about not having a job.”
And easy for a woman. “So, Uncle Bob worried?”
“There’s no real harm in rum-running. A lot of people did it.”
“He was a bootlegger? Uncle Bob?”
“Not a bootlegger, really. No. He just had friends at Seabrook Beach. It wasn’t bootlegging. It was just rum-running. He wasn’t much more than a boy, anyway. That’s how he got started in the liquor business.”
“Mother, rum-running is bootlegging.”
“It was a long time ago. And he gave it up, after all.”
“Of course he gave it up! Prohibition ended!”
Mary laughed hoarsely. “It wasn’t very profitable afterwards, was it? Hah! It wasn’t very profitable after that!”
TWENTY-TWO
Felicity arrived home to find a message on her answering machine from a neighbor named Loretta who more or less ran the condo association. Loretta was a single mother with two young children fathered by two different men, neither of whom Loretta had married. As far as Felicity could tell, Loretta had somehow managed to grow up in the United States and reach the age of thirty or thereabouts without encountering the notion that society expected women to marry before having babies and frowned on those who violated the expectation. Loretta didn’t seem to defy the rules, nor did she seem to have liberated herself from them; she seemed not to realize that they existed.
What puzzled Felicity and the other residents of Newton Park was not, however, Loretta’s startling openness about having given out-of-wedlock birth to two children with two different fathers. Rather, the mystery about Loretta was the source of her apparently boundless wealth. Frugality was anything but the norm in Newton Park, but even by the extravagant standards of the neighborhood, Loretta threw away money with abandon. Although her house had been brand new when she’d bought it, she’d immediately redone the entire kitchen. Dissatisfied with the result, she’d then had the second new kitchen torn out and a third one installed. When she’d decided that the medium beige of her house was a bit more yellow than she liked, she’d had it repainted in a shade indistinguishable from the original. She clearly had a job: She left the house early every morning and returned home in the evening, and her children were known to attend an expensive day care center. She was rumored to do something with computers, but it was hard to imagine what she could possibly do to earn what she spent.