by Meg O'Brien
Which can’t be as hard as I make it out to be. Jeffrey doesn’t understand much about computers; he has secretaries for that. Assistants, really, but he won’t call them assistants or even allow them to classify themselves as such on a résumé. To do so would dilute, he has said quite openly, his own position of power.
When the file comes up I see that my last journal entry was six months ago, just after I caught Jeffrey with the bimbo. Since then, I haven’t had the heart to put my life down in black and white. My feelings have been too embarrassing, even humiliating.
When I was a child, I used to pray, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Later on, in my twenties, I fell hopelessly in love with someone for three years, and took to this writing of journals. Absolutely everything went into them, every foolish, futile longing. When it was over I had a corrugated Seagram’s carton three feet by three, bulging with spiral-bound notebooks from the drugstore that were filled with largely unreadable ramblings, scrawled in blue ink from a ballpoint pen. For years, I toted this damn box with me every time I moved, like a turtle unwilling to shed its shell. I’d go zooming down a freeway with this stupid thing in my trunk, scared to death I’d be killed by some idiot suffering road rage and my survivors would end up reading all that dross. I couldn’t let go of the dross, however, neither the journals nor the man. Thus my nightly prayer became, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my journals to take.”
Now I know that there are more ways of dying than one can conceive. Further, there are days when there is no Lord, or at least he’s checked out for the day.
Jeffrey came along after that three-year journal-writing madness, on one of those Lordless days. My heart still had a hole in it, and my car still had that box in its trunk. I just didn’t think about it so much anymore, thoughtlessly shoving it aside to make room for groceries every Friday night. Then I met Jeffrey. And a whole new literary era began.
Because heaven was closed that day, I fell head over asinine heels in love with Jeffrey Northrup, right off the bat. And because I still believed in journals, I spread the craziness of our lives across the clean pages of a bright new book, as if making up the bed of my heart with fresh new sheets. In the beginning, I wrote down all the “I know he really loves me” stuff and the “I’ll die if he doesn’t remember my birthday” madness.
The irony is, Jeffrey is dead now, not I. Oh, he walks and talks. But for me the funeral took place six months ago.
I met my husband sixteen years ago at the Pebble Beach Golf Club. I was down from San Francisco having lunch with a couple of other women, all three of us in our early twenties. They were friends of mine and secretaries, as Jeffrey would say, though they did all but run Monterey for their employers. I was working as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and had a pretty good career going. I’d come down for lunch on a day off and to soak up some sun.
Jeffrey was at the club that day playing golf. At two hundred dollars a game, that set him far above us. But he came in all sweaty and smiling, especially when he saw us. Not that he knew us. Jeffery, I later learned, always smiled at good-looking women.
I counted myself among them, at that time, the good-looking women. I had dark hair that fell to my shoulders in shiny waves, and huge brown eyes. There was something exotic about me, I’d been told by some. Not that you could prove it by me. I still had those mental tapes from childhood, the ones that said I couldn’t do anything right, my hair looked like a rat’s nest, and I’d never amount to much.
How I got those tapes, where they came from, is a mystery to me still. Certainly not from my parents, who supported me in every way. Sometimes I think those beliefs, running over and over in my head, came with me from another life, that I carried them in when I was born.
Which presumes a belief in reincarnation—something I’d rather not think about. The very idea of having to do all this over again and again and again makes me cry, at least on those days when it doesn’t make me laugh.
Jeffrey made me laugh. At first, he said truly funny things, a born comic who never made it onstage but went, instead, into politics and business. Then, later, he made me laugh in another way. Oh, I know I shouldn’t have. But he’d come into the bedroom stark naked with that—that appendage sticking out ten inches if it was one, like some old-time romance writer’s “flaming sword,” and he’d look at me with those sultry eyes and rasp, “You really want it, don’t you?”
And I couldn’t help it. His hair would be wet from the shower, black curls clinging to his forehead, and my eyes would travel from that to the green eyes I had once loved, the aristocratic nose, the chest a thicket of graying black hair, and I’d laugh.
Largely, I’d laugh because by then I knew I wasn’t the only woman Jeffrey used that line on. We’d been married ten years, and good old Jeffrey had cut a swath a mile wide through the women of Carmel with that flaming sword. The very idea that I’d still want either him or his impressive appendage was ludicrous. So I’d try to muffle the chuckles, but, well…
Several times I thought Jeffrey might hit me when I laughed. He never did. Instead, he got his revenge by taking away my child.
The vet gives Murphy a couple of shots and, after voicing innumerable questions about the letter A, declares him on the mend—physically, at least. Murphy still has a sad, hound-dog-look about him. I take him home and find Frannie waiting for us, though it isn’t her usual day to work.
“I couldn’t believe it when you told me what happened,” she says, her hazel eyes worried under the mop of red hair. She gives Murphy a hug. “Are you okay, fella?”
He doesn’t seem ready to be touched, backing off from her and giving a slight growl, which stuns me. Never have I seen Murphy behave this way.
“The doctor said he might be touchy for a while,” I offer by way of apology.
Frannie nods and follows me into the kitchen. “I swear to you, Abby, I don’t know how he got out. I was sure he was inside when I left.”
“Well, he’s a sneaky little guy. When he gets it into his head to bust loose, he does have his ways.”
“That’s true,” she says thoughtfully. “Remember the day he ran out while I was bringing in groceries? I thought he was up in your room all the while. And one day he scooted right past you when you came in, and you had to run halfway down Scenic to catch him, him with his tail wagging all the way.”
We both laugh at the ordinariness of Murphy’s escapes, carefully skirting the truth—that this is not one of those ordinary times, and the letter carved into my dog’s back only proves it.
“It’s hard to keep track of him lately,” I say, waving a hand around the kitchen. “There are too many places in this house for him to disappear to, especially now that Jeffrey’s not here half the time.”
Frannie shakes her head. “You should sell this place. Cliff said he could get at least three times what you bought it for sixteen years ago.”
Cliff, her new boyfriend, is a local Realtor.
“And go where?” I say. “Out to the valley? Into a condo? I’d miss the ocean too much. Besides, I’ve always liked this place.”
Frannie casts a look around. “You’ve got a great view, I’ll say that. But if I were you, I’d be nervous alone here at night.”
“Nervous? Why?”
“You don’t know? You haven’t heard it?” She clamps her lips down as if wishing she hadn’t said anything.
“Heard what, Frannie?” I am only half smiling. “For heaven’s sake, you’re not buying into that old ghost story, are you?”
“Hell, no. I’m talking about something much more earthly than that. Last week, when I was up in the attic—”
She breaks off, turning away.
“What about the attic? Did you hear something?”
Her green eyes flick my way. “Why? Did you?”
“Frannie, stop it! Just tell me. What did you hear?”
“A noise,” she says. “Just a noise, that’s all. It took
me a while to get up the courage to go up there. And when I did, there wasn’t anyone there.”
“That’s odd,” I say. “I heard a noise, too. It scared me half to death.”
Her eyes meet mine, widening. “What do you think it was?”
“Now that it’s daytime and the sun’s out? I’m inclined to believe it was a squirrel.”
“And last night?”
“Last night, I was certain it was that guy in the movies with the hockey mask, lurking in the shadows to grab me.”
She wraps her arms around herself, shivering. “I kind of thought that, too. Abby, you should get out of here. Cliff says—”
Cliff, I think, is angling real hard for a sale and a commission.
I change the subject. “Frannie, did you take the second bulb out of the light fixture? There’s only one in there.”
“No. I thought you did that. I could hardly see my way around, and I meant to go back up with another bulb, then I forgot. Sorry.”
“Never mind, I can do it. But if you didn’t take it out, who did?”
“Jeffrey?” Frannie asks, shrugging.
“He hates going up in the attic. Says it’s—”
“Stuffed with a lot of worthless junk that makes him sneeze,” she finishes for me, grinning. “That’s why I put some of his favorite things up there every time I clean.”
“You don’t!”
“I do,” she says complacently. “It wasn’t very nice, what he did to you with that floozy.”
Ben calls around six. “I need to see you. Can you meet me in town?”
“I could, but why don’t you come out here?”
“Town,” otherwise known as “the Village,” is only a few blocks away, but I’m already in my comfortable sweats and don’t feel like dressing again.
“You know I don’t like coming there,” he says.
“Jeffrey’s hobnobbing with the president. He won’t be home till the weekend.”
“Even so.”
Ben is hoping for a promotion to chief of police when the current chief retires. But for all its artists and writers, Carmel is basically a conservative town, and Ben worries about gossip. An adulterous affair in his personnel folder wouldn’t impress the town council or those on the board who might appoint him.
“I don’t know why you don’t divorce him and get it over with,” he says, not for the first time. “Throw the prick out.”
“I already did throw the prick out. It’s the rest of him I can’t get rid of.”
He laughs. “No, seriously—just do it.”
“You know I promised I’d stay till after the election in November. My freedom will be my Christmas present.”
“I still don’t get it. My gut feeling tells me Jeffrey is up to something, and it doesn’t have anything to do with his position as primary mover and shaker in the reigning party. Any idea what it might be?”
“In politics? Who knows? He says he’s worried that any scandal in his life could rub off on the president, and he doesn’t want to take any chances, given the moral climate of the country these days—the backlash that’s carried over from previous presidential capers.”
“Abby, just how close is he to President Chase?”
“They’re thick as thieves from what I can see. Jeffrey’s one of the few men in the country who’s on the phone with him several times a week. And he’s virtually running his campaign for reelection. From behind the scenes, of course.”
“What about Jeffrey himself? Does he have aspirations to run for office?”
“Not at all. He looks upon politicians as drones, or rather chess pieces he can move from here to there at his whim.”
“Abby, divorce isn’t all that scandalous these days. And he only works for the president. What makes you think Jeffrey isn’t making you stay with him till after the election just so he can live in the house?”
“Yeah, like he has such a good time here now.”
“Then it’s something else. Maybe he wants you back.”
“People in hell—”
“Want ice water,” he finishes for me. “I know. So meet me for dinner, okay? At the Red Lion?”
“You mean the Britannia, or whatever they’re calling it now?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to have dinner with me in public? Good Lord, man, are you on drugs?”
“Nobody there will care. It’s not like the Mission Ranch, for God’s sake.”
I sigh. “Okay, but—”
“But you’re already in your sweats and you don’t feel like dressing. One more reason for the Red Lion—the Britannia, whatever. I’ll meet you in the pub.”
“Why not the Bully III?”
“I’m already at the Red Lion.”
“But the Bully III has the best French dip in town.”
“You won’t eat much, anyway.”
I sigh. “You know me too damned well.”
“How’s the Murph?” Ben says once we’re settled at a table in the Red Lion, now the Britannia, by the fireplace and have ordered drinks. The Britannia pub is a place where locals hang out, sort of a Cheers bar, and just about everyone in here knows us. It amazes me that Ben’s willing to be seen with me here.
“Murphy?” I say, answering his question. “He’s not too bad. Snappy, though.”
He frowns. “Have you heard anything more about how that might have happened?”
“No. The kid who brought him home said there wasn’t anyone else around, so I haven’t gone out asking.”
“Still, I think I should talk to him. Maybe there’s something he saw, but didn’t realize its importance. Did you get a phone number?”
“No. I wish I had. He put his own leash on Murphy to bring him home and forgot to take it back. It looks expensive. Possibly even custom-made.”
“Why don’t I take a look at it? If it was made by a local artisan, I might be able to track the guy down.”
“Okay. I’ll get it to you.”
“We’ve found Marti’s brother, Ned, by the way.” Ben smiles a thank-you at the waitress, who sets down our drinks. “He’s coming out here to arrange the funeral.”
“That’s what I called you about earlier. You got my message?”
He nods, taking a deep draft of his Sierra Nevada pale ale. “I thought we could talk here instead of on the phone.”
I toy with my Chardonnay. “When is Marti…how soon can it be?”
“At the end of the week, Ted says. He thinks the toxicology reports will be pretty much routine, and he’s put a rush on them to get them out of the way as soon as possible. He’s doing it for you, he says. He likes you.”
“Ted’s a sweetheart. So’s his wife, so don’t get any ideas. But back to Marti’s brother. He wants the funeral here? I’m surprised.”
“I take it he feels that’s the most expedient way to do it. Financially, that is. I also got the impression he and Marti didn’t get along.”
“That’s true. She didn’t talk about him much, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I saw them together.”
“You don’t know why they might have been estranged? If they were?”
“No. But he’s a lot older. Ten years, I think. Maybe he resented having a new baby around when he was the only child for so long.”
I sip my wine, and Ben looks at me with a teasing light in his eyes.
“Great hairdo,” he comments, remarking on my quickly pulled-back ponytail. “And I love the beaten-up running shoes. Pure Carmel.”
“Well, I need to be fleet-of-foot when I’m around you.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Perhaps because you asked me here to interrogate me,” I say.
“I could have done that at the station.”
“Oh, so you brought me here to woo me? Gee, I thought we did that at your house, not in public.”
When he hasn’t an answer to that, I sigh. “Okay, so just get on with it. What do you want to know?”
He
sets the heavy glass of ale down on the table. The fire crackles beside us, and I’m starting to get too warm, which is what I get for not layering. At the bar the patrons, mostly locals, carry on easy conversations with one eye on the television on the back wall.
“I want to know about Marti’s baby,” Ben says. “That’s one thing you forgot to mention, Ab—the reason for that Cesareian scar.”
“I didn’t forget,” I say, shrugging. “I just promised her I’d never tell anyone.”
“But she’s—”
“Dead now. Yeah, gee, you know what? I know that.” I frown. “It’s just hard. Anyway, why do you need to know about that?”
“I’m not sure yet. I just have a feeling it’s got something to do with the reason she died.”
“You do, huh?”
Ben’s “feelings” are something I’ve learned not to ignore. He’s known for his intuitive skills, not that he’s like one of those fancy profilers on television. He just thinks things through better than most, while seeming not to move ahead much at all.
Besides, wine has always loosened my tongue. It doesn’t take much on an empty stomach.
“It was a long time ago,” I say after we’ve ordered food. “Back in the eighties. Marti had been working in Central America a lot, so I didn’t see her much. One day she showed up at my door, already in labor. It was shortly after I’d married Jeffrey.”
“She came here? To Carmel?”
“Right. I tried to get her to tell the father about the baby so he could help her, but she was adamant. Said it would be better for everyone concerned if he never knew. She wouldn’t even tell me who the father was.”
“Maybe he was married,” Ben says.
“Maybe.”
“What did she want from you?” he asks.
“Only to stand by her, I think. Her parents had been killed a few years before in a plane crash in Honduras, and except for Ned, that left her pretty much alone in the world. She never had much time for making close friends, with all the traveling and the kind of work she did.”