Return to Dust

by Andrew Lanh

  I smiled. “Buddha says, when you are weak, drink tea.”

  “He actually said that?”

  “Yes.”

  I ordered bowls of spicy bun for both of us, a traditional dish of diced spring roll, thin barbecued pork strips, served over cellophane vermicelli noodles, with a slight hint of mint, basil, enhanced by fiery nuoc mam sauce. And I ordered hot French-style Vietnamese coffee, the vaguely cloying concoction with sweetened condensed milk. I loved the smells wafting through the place. At a rear table another waiter named Diep was dicing two-foot shafts of aromatic lemongrass.

  While we drank steamy crab and asparagus soup—compliments of the house—I filled Karen in on my activities. The case was too new, I told her. I’d wanted to have lunch because I really wanted to ask her questions.

  “Karen, I’m having trouble getting a clear-cut picture of your aunt.”

  “Why?”

  “I mean, I knew her as this sweet, older woman, you know, unremarkably middle class, neat as a pin, tidy, with an old lady’s blue-tinted permanent, and sensible shoes. A little nosy, yes—judgmental. A—well, cleaning lady.”

  “She was that.” An edge to her voice.

  “But Davey portrays her as an intrusive monster, cold and unyielding. You paint her as a nice average aunt, a woman who liked Atlantic City and church. But I sense you had your own problems with her—you loved her, yet you were annoyed by her control.”

  Karen looked hurt, drumming the table with chopsticks. “She was those things. Nobody is just one thing. You know that. What are you saying?”

  “If we’re talking murder, she had to be something else. Something about her had to trigger murderous intent in someone. Someone willing to murder her—possibly to be caught.”

  She bit her lower lip. “That’s true.” Said too quietly. “But that’s what you have to find out. So what’s the problem?” Her voice became clipped, brittle.

  “Well,” I breathed in slowly, “I had a talk with Richard Wilcox and he described her as—well, a woman who liked the company of men. That’s how he put it. An aged femme fatale running around with a bottle of Windex. She seemed to like her good times…”

  Karen cut me off. “Yes, I know that about her. She could be flirtatious and a little forward sometimes. Sort of embarrassing in an old lady, true. She enjoyed dancing and parties. We talked about it, she and I. She wanted me to go out more to meet people. It was all innocent. After all, a woman her age…”

  “But even at her age she wanted companionship. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe a little romance. A liaison.” The words stuck in my throat. I pictured Marta scooting around my apartment with a vacuum cleaner. “She could still have wanted a relationship. Did she have one after her husband died?”

  A pause while she sipped tepid tea, her hand circling the small cup. “Not that I knew of. Actually we didn’t talk about things like that. Anything real personal. We avoided stuff like that. It came up now and then, almost by accident.”

  “What do you mean—by accident?”

  “Well, I know that she’d have these little tiffs with the men she worked for.”

  “Tiffs?”

  “She’d get into a snit if she didn’t get the right amount of attention, I think. They were all jealous of each other, all those old men. She liked the attention of men.”

  “Wilcox said she could be mean-spirited and hard.”

  She nodded, agreeing. “It had to do with Joshua. Everything always came back to Joshua, the old professor.” She sat back, sucked in her breath. “Something happened during her last year. I mean she always talked about those old guys in the same way—revered men, educated men who liked her—but suddenly she focused exclusively on Joshua. It was Joshua this and Joshua that. You know. It got a little embarrassing. And scary, I thought.”

  “Scary?”

  “After all, Joshua was eighty maybe. Maybe older. A decade older than her. I know she found him charming and mannerly—you know. She wanted to be part of that world. He was old guard, old-fashioned prep school finish. Farmington WASP to the nth degree.”

  “But why scary?”

  “Because there was something life-or-death about the way she spoke about him.”

  I pictured the irascible Joshua Jennings—another small, frail man like Richard Wilcox, but bright-eyed, quick-witted, sprightly for his age. He fancied himself a daring spirit, the cruel old man with the wicked remark, slightly risqué, but he was really a conservative snob. Dressed in worn sport jackets with leather packets, old gray slacks that rode too high on his waist, he watched the world with condescending eyes.

  “And rich,” I said out loud.

  Karen nodded her head. “Yes, very rich. I know that Marta talked of his money. But she didn’t need money.”

  “What did she want?”

  “I think Marta thought she might marry Joshua. Travel with him. All that.”

  “But they stopped being friends.”

  “They fought. Some nasty fight. Bitter. She told me it was about the gardener, that Willie guy, but I don’t know. It had to be something else. I think it was about marriage. He could be a notorious flirt, too—a lecher really. I think it gave her the wrong idea. I don’t know for certain but I think Marta pressured him. I’m guessing. Let me tell you, that topic was taboo with us. He was a sick old fool, an old geezer, Marta called him once—but they played off each other that way. I think they loved the game.”

  “Maybe he loved the game, not her.”

  “Maybe. Yeah, Marta wouldn’t.”

  “But she changed the rules.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I suppose it scared him. He was an old bachelor with only Marta as a friend. A hermit.”

  “Is that why he moved?”

  We dug into the bun, me with chopsticks, Karen with a fork. For a second her mouth puckered at the tartness of the nuoc mom. The aroma of sweet basil wafted across the table. The quiet of the restaurant was broken when the door opened and a bunch of kids tumbled in, screaming and running. For a second Karen looked disoriented. Then she looked at me.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. He’d been trying to sell that big old derelict house on the green for a while. Off and on. Fickle. For sale—not for sale. He was getting weaker and was afraid of falling down the stairs. I think she said he had trouble climbing to the second floor. He mentioned a retirement village—near a library, back in Amherst where he’d gone to school, a small place for him and his rare books—and Marta fought him. I suppose she thought she would take care of him. They fought, stopped talking for months. Marta thought it temporary—they loved their stormy silences—but then he sold the house, moved away, and Marta fumed.”

  “It must have broken her heart.”

  Karen frowned. “Rick, she was angry—not depressed. She got in the dumps when he died six months later. She imagined herself living in that big old house, the wife of the sophisticated, respected Joshua Jennings. She’d play lady-of-the-manor for those boring college receptions he hosted there. It was an old lady’s stupid fantasy.”

  “I know. I used to go there. We all did. That’s how he met the Canterburys who bought the house. He even loved Liz, my ex-wife.”

  She wasn’t listening. “A foolish woman.”

  “Karen, his death must’ve hit her hard. Two weeks later she’s dead.”

  “Well, think about it. She reads it in the paper. He dies in New York City, you see, visiting a relative or something, a niece, and there was the huge, front-page obituary in the local paper. It drove her nuts because she’d always planned on a reconciliation.”

  “But he’d finally made a decision.”

  “And didn’t say good-bye.”

  “He was still angry with her?”

  Her voice cracked. “He wanted nothing to do with her. She violated some awful rule he had. It had to be more than a simple fight. She would never discu
ss it.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked. I poured her more tea.

  Karen fiddled with her napkin, crumpling the paper. “I need to tell you something. She sent at least one letter to him in Amherst, early on, back in May, and he never answered. One letter that I know of. She got his address from the boys’ school, and I think she pleaded with him. He got it, of course—he didn’t refuse it—but he never answered. I remember she sent the letter certified, on purpose, so he’d have to sign. She saw that signature on the little green card as his ultimate insult to her. She carried it around all summer, steaming. She threatened to go there—to confront him. Tell him off.”

  “She told you this?”

  “Only after he didn’t answer her letter. She never mentioned the letter to me—before that, I mean. Then he died.”

  She started fumbling with some papers. “I have the obituary here.” She smiled. “Those papers I mentioned to you. I have them here.” She handed me a folder of papers, and I glanced inside. Neatly clipped news clippings, the insurance policy I’d asked about, other personal papers, all bound with elastic bands.

  “I can borrow these?”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  For a while we ate in silence, absorbed in the food.

  I caught her looking at me, a whisper of a smile on her face. “You have an interesting face.”

  I smiled. “Interesting?”

  “I mean that in a good way—attractive, I mean.” She got flustered. “I mean the Asian and the blue eyes and the…”

  I grinned.

  She looked down, embarrassed. “Conversation messes me up.”

  “Thanks.” I cleared my throat. “Tell me about Davey.”

  For a few minutes she told me what I already knew from my conversation with him. They weren’t close, but she claimed to love him. Years ago, when their parents suddenly died, they were inseparable, hiding together in the lonely shadows, sheltered by Marta and her husband until he died. But they drifted apart as grownups.

  “He’s real strange, and Aunt Marta had little use for him.”

  “Why?” I watched her face. “That bothers me.”

  “I think she saw him as a bum. At one point he was more…Catholic than she was, if that was possible. At the end I couldn’t even bring him up in conversation.”

  “They had a fight?”

  A pause. “Maybe. Yes.”

  “Your aunt seems to have a habit of fighting on a grand scale.”

  “She was passionate about things she believed in.”

  I let it go. “Davey told me something interesting. Marta always got what she wanted. The only way he’d see her killing herself was if she couldn’t have what she wanted.”

  “I said she was—passionate.”

  “My question is, what did she really want that she couldn’t have?”

  She frowned. “Are you thinking Joshua?”

  “Maybe. But maybe that’s too simple. Maybe there’s something else. If it’s Joshua, there goes your murder theory. Joshua was dead by then. There was no chance they’d ever reconcile.”

  “And it makes the suicide more realistic.” She sighed. “I still cannot see her killing herself. If you were at that last conversation I had with her…”

  “Davey and I talked about her being Catholic and all.”

  “She was devout. Devout people don’t kill themselves.”

  “Yes, they do,” I said.

  She looked into my face. “This is Davey talking, I think.”

  I waited. “Davey makes me nervous,” I broke in. I deliberated a moment. “He warned me about you. Said you had bouts of—depression. Mentioned medication. Illness.”

  Karen’s face hardened, anger seeping in. Then she forced an apologetic smile. “I knew he’d tell you that. A breakdown in high school. One in college. I went to school in Boston, at Emerson, but the city got to me. I had problems so I had counseling. So what? Bouts of depression come and go, so I deal with them. Marta wanted me to be a carbon copy of her—her bigotry, her rigidity, her fear of different people. Her knee-jerk Catholicism. She bought me clothes like hers—all pastels and matronly stuff. But Davey has made a point of telling everyone I’m nuts. I’m not surprised. It’s his favorite story. I can get moody, I know. I get overwhelmed.” She looked into my face. “I’m still like Marta in that way. I sometimes want the world to obey my orders, and then I fall apart. I get lost.”

  She suddenly reached out and touched the back of my hand. “I’m not crazy. My family has problems—I mean me and Davey. We had a peculiar childhood after our parents got killed. We sink low and come back up.” She smiled, thin, wistful. “We’re not crazy. My family is not crazy. Doctors do let us walk in the streets.”

  When we left the restaurant, we lingered in the parking lot, for some reason not ready to leave each other. The day was bright with cold sun, those icy shafts of light that spike a lazy November afternoon. She started to leave, but turned back, grinning. “Doctors do let us walk the streets.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I planned to spend the next day interviewing. I got up at five, jogged for a couple of miles in the early morning cold, bundled in old sweats and a pullover knit cap, and sat at the breakfast table with coffee and dry toast. I leafed through the folder Karen had given me, but nothing jarred. The insurance policy was typical, the other papers were familiar tedious documents from Social Security, federal and state governments, stapled tax returns from H&R Block, the usual conservative and mechanical portfolio of an average wary citizen. Everything in order. The insurance policy confirmed my earlier observation—if I proved Marta was not a suicide, Karen got a lot of money.

  The only item I lingered on was the obituary of Joshua Jennings, a man I vaguely knew—and liked. I recalled reading that very obit in the local newspaper. The frayed clipping—it looked much handled, and I imagined Marta rereading it late at night—showed an old photograph when he was probably fifty or fifty-five, a head shot revealing bright intelligent eyes in a narrow, patrician face. He had that signature Van Dyke beard, but it was dark then. The last time I saw Joshua it was white—a pale murky white, a little unkempt and poorly clipped.

  The article had appeared in the Farmington Weekly, so it was front-page and extensive. Jennings was a prominent local citizen, and one of the richest. The article talked of his long, distinguished career as a Latin professor at the equally distinguished Farmington Boys’ Academy off the town green. It mentioned his retirement at sixty-five and his subsequent involvement with nearby Farmington College as advisor, lecturer, and adjunct faculty, teaching German and French courses.

  “I like to keep my hand in it,” he was quoted as saying.

  I remembered how Marta had used the same expression about her housekeeping jobs.

  It mentioned his legendary philanthropy, his inveterate bachelorhood, his feisty presence at town council meetings, his membership on the Republican Town Committee, the Masons, and it mentioned his move six months earlier to Amherst, Massachusetts. He wanted a retirement village in the town he remembered fondly. It mentioned a surviving great-niece in New York City, whose apartment he was visiting when the massive stroke hit him. The niece requested contributions to the Boys’ Academy where the school was already organizing a scholarship in his name. The article mentioned that all his assets—the reporter talked of a bequest rumored in the amount of over four-million dollars—were left to the boy’s school. An endowment in his memory. He wanted a new library wing named in his honor.

  I put down the article. Nothing untoward here, the only surprise being the amount of the bequest to the school. That was a hefty piece of change. Had Marta wanted that money? that world? that aristocratic aura? Joshua lived in a huge Federal brick colonial off the green, across from Miss Porter’s School, and the old homestead had been filled with family antiques, leather-bound books, and quiet, inherited
charm. When he moved out of state, most of his furniture and other possessions had been given to the college to benefit a scholarship fund.

  A descendant of early founders, Jennings epitomized old-guard New England, Puritan glory filtered down through the ages into less reverential times. He’d also been an inveterate book collector, whose fine-tooled leather volumes were the subject of my own intense envy during my infrequent visits. He once showed me a volume of incunabula, kept behind lock and key in a document box he claimed once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Did Marta imagine herself the nouveau-riche mistress of that polished, sleek, understated world?

  But Joshua wanted out of it—he’d been talking of quiet retirement villages for years. The house went on and off the market, always with excessively high asking prices, because, someone told me, he was ambivalent about leaving Farmington. He was in failing health. We all watched as he finally sold to Selena and Peter, and we celebrated with them. I’d actually gone to the celebration at the house. Their timing was right because Joshua had fallen, and he panicked. He wanted to get out. Joshua toasted Peter and Selena, who beamed. Joshua looked melancholic, but said he had no choice. A one-level home in Amherst, his bedroom set, the desk in his library, his rare volumes.

  “Remember me,” he’d asked us, a poignant valedictory.

  I phoned the newspaper to talk to the writer of the obit. I left a message on his machine. Could he please call me? I wanted the name of the great-niece in New York.

  ***

  Marta’s only woman friend, Hattie Cozzins, answered my knocking immediately, halfway through my second knock, as though she’d been standing behind the door. Eleven in the morning, she was dressed for a cocktail hour. She seemed out of breath, speaking in a faint, Marilyn Monroe whisper, her hand against her chest.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  It was a dumb question. Of course she was all right. We were doing old-time Hollywood movies here. Some Like it Hot.

  “Come in.” She pointed to a chair. “I thought you might be late.” I’d told her eleven o’clock on the phone. It was five before the hour.