Return to Dust

by Andrew Lanh

  Surprising me, she walked into the unlit kitchen and stood in the darkness. She lit a cigarette in the dim light, and the match and cigarette lit the dark with such deliberate movement it seemed as if she were landing airplanes. She drew ambitious arcs in the darkness, ovals and circles and stabs at the night. Red-glow punctuation. She was starting to scare me.

  “Yes, I wanted it like you,” she said finally, talking to the wall in front of her, away from me.

  “And?”

  “But you have to leave. You can’t stay.”

  “Karen,” I began, but stopped.

  She was shaking her head. I thought she might be crying, but no sound came from her. The dim light of the cigarette made her shadowy, ghostlike. The cigarette waved me out the door, pointing the way.

  Buddha talked to me: Abstain from sexual misconduct.

  I closed my eyes.

  He had a point, that wise man. What had I missed here? I was never good at reading women, I knew that, always off-center, insecure, afraid my moves were—what?—too obvious, too boyish, too something. But Karen had played this her own way, and I couldn’t follow. Suddenly I thought of Davey’s line about her: Karen runs from everything while she actually thinks she’s running to it.

  I found myself thinking about Liz. Every woman I would ever meet would pale beside her.

  In the parking lot, sweating in the cold wind, I looked up at the darkened window and I swear I saw a shadow fall away, behind the drawn curtain. Suddenly the window was dark again. No movement. I shivered. A ghost had walked into my shadow.

  Chapter Nineteen

  At five o’clock in the morning I was up for a run. The house was quiet except for the creaking of old Victorian woodwork, the breathing of loose-paned windows against dark morning wind. I ran the empty streets. A thick frost covered everything. Veins of white lace twisted on buildings and fences and cars. Wearing sweat shorts and a light parka and knit cap, I was numb with cold. So I ran and ran.

  I ran until I exorcised the confusing night—Karen lovely in her fragile bones—out of my system. Sweating, exhilarated, eyes bright with the coming sunny day, I took a long hot shower, steamed my skin into reddish wrinkles, and settled down to hot, fresh coffee and a bran muffin from Whole Foods.

  Hank knocked at eight. I was expecting him.

  “You’ve been running.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You got that health-club glow.”

  “The body dutiful.”

  He poured himself coffee. “Is everything all right? You got a look on your face.”

  I ignored him. “You ready to go?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m here. I’m supposed to be studying at the Academy. Instead I follow you around like a puppy dog.”

  “I’m the Alpha dog.”

  “Clever.”

  “Let’s move. You want to watch how a real PI functions, right?”

  “If I did, I’d be in Hollywood on the set of CSI: Special Victims Unit.”

  We headed for the town of Clinton, a town less than an hour away, down I-91 and over to I-95. I turned off the highway into the small shoreline village. I’d never been there before. Some shoreline towns like Branford and Guilford I knew—friends rented beach homes in summer. In November Clinton looked lazy and anonymous, a coastal town getting ready for winter, the tourists gone and permanent waterfront homes beginning to wear their drawn-in sheltered look. Beach cottages, with their bleached, blue-gray wood, lined narrow roads near the water, clustered together tight and cozy. We could smell the seaweed-laced salt water.

  We drove around, found Main Street with its rustic coffee shops, antique shops, and clothing boutiques. We asked directions. Gusts of wind off the unseen ocean made walking difficult. The complex we sought was a few streets removed from the shore, tucked into a hidden cove, overlooking choppy water where hungry, swooping seagulls dipped and swooped. Only a few boats remained in the water now. A quiet secluded area, a hidden retreat for the very few.

  “Looks like real money,” I told Hank.

  “Everything looks like money on the shore. A shack is money here.”

  The string of cottages circled the cove, but everything was closed now, off-season. A chain stretched across the entrance, blocking passage, a sign announcing it a private road. I copied down the realtor’s name and address. But first I wanted to walk the grounds, despite the blustery cold. We ducked under the chain and strolled among the bleak, deserted tiny bungalows, smaller than I would expect, but carefully styled, all shuttered and shingled to look a hundred years old. I tried to imagine the place in summer, at the height of the season, but I realized it must have been isolated even then because towering white pines clustered around the edges, closing off the place from idle passersby.

  “Money,” Hank was muttering. “The rich ain’t like we are.”

  I could easily see Joshua summering here during the long, lazy days, near to dying, the night breezes from the sea chilling his old bones. But I couldn’t see it as a place a young person—say, his niece—would rent for herself. His money—yes. Her phone call—maybe. This had the feel of a retirement colony—old people with their private nurses, the New York Times, and their blissful reveries.

  It took us most of the morning to locate the realtor, convince her that we were not troublemakers and simply investigators of the most benign sort—we smiled a lot and she frowned a lot—but she finally told us the name of a man who might help us, a Clinton old-timer who served as caretaker during the high season. After much prodding—and Hank’s annoying questions about rental costs and possible student discounts—she provided me with Mary Powell’s New York phone and address. Manhattan, Upper West Side. My old neighborhood near Columbia. Finally I had a definite lead on the elusive Mary Powell.

  As we left the office, she gave me her card. “It’s a good time to rent for the coming summer.” She looked at Hank. “We have the best rental properties. You and your little brother would love it here.”

  Hank grinned. Little brother.

  Hank and I stopped for lunch at a coffee shop in the center, munching on tuna salad sandwiches while we waited for Mr. Jared Peakes to answer his phone. It was busy whenever I dialed—no message clicked on—and we were waiting for him—or whoever—to hang up. The realtor had told us he was a retired man in his late seventies.

  “Quite the eccentric in a town of lots of eccentric people. He used to be a hardware salesman.” She had stressed the word and clicked her tongue as though he’d been in porno flicks. His son now ran the business. “If you know what I mean,” she added.

  I didn’t but I also didn’t want to know.

  An hour later, Mr. Peakes answered grumpily, and when I said I’d been calling, he said, “So what?”

  That stopped me cold.

  “The dog knocked the phone off the cradle. Landed in the laundry basket. She’s a mixed breed,” he added, as though that explained the problem with the phone.

  For some reason I was tempted to apologize.

  “So what do you want? You’d better not be selling something. My home phone don’t belong to the business community, and that includes the Lions Club and the selling of those light bulbs that go out…”

  I cut into his rambling and mentioned the summer bungalows and his job as handyman. He agreed to meet us at the very coffee shop we were in.

  “I live one street down back,” he informed us. “Haven’t eaten yet. Thank you.”

  “We’re buying him lunch, I guess,” I told Hank.

  Mr. Peakes was not what I expected, one of those skinny, wiry old Down East cracker-barrel souls, one of those frizzled, wizened old New England types out of Desire under the Elms or an old Yankee magazine you see in a dentist’s office. No, Mr. Peakes was a squat roly-poly man, with tired milky eyes and a pronounced asthmatic wheeze. He sat down across from us, adjusted his vast
weight as though settling potatoes in a sack, and sighed.

  He ordered four or five items, and I figured he had a crowd coming. He caught me glancing at Hank. “Retirement makes one hungry.”

  Hank chuckled.

  “Your younger brother?” he asked.

  Now Hank and I, both tall and lean, do not look alike, except for a dim Asian connection.

  “Yes,” said Hank. “But different mothers.”

  I stared at him.

  I explained why we were there. What did he remember of Joshua or his niece? I held off mentioning Marta.

  “Of course I remember them, though I have no idea what you’re up to here. The niece was a beauty.” He snickered. “Of course, at my age, what young woman ain’t? Unless you’re talking about those cows on afternoon TV talk shows, those…” He was ready to sweep off into some tirade.

  “And Joshua?” I cut in before it was too late.

  “Him I scarcely talked to. Maybe once or twice. Getting sicker by the minute. Old, old, skin and bones. One weekend there was a problem with a lock and I brought over a locksmith. Old man lying on the deck covered in blankets. Nodded to me. Mumbled something about being hungry for sunlight on his bones. Nonsense.”

  “He moved in the beginning of July?”

  Mr. Peakes raised an eyebrow. “Exactly. His niece—Mary Powell, the name, a fine figure of a girl, dark hair like a crow’s, but too much makeup, these women, you know—had rented the place in June. Out of the blue. She had called and we had a cancellation. We got a repeat crowd of older types. We are not cheap. We rent from May to September, but someone bailed out because of illness. That happens. Old people cancel. Some even die. It happens. Moved in sometime in June. Reduced rate. Her timing was great. We usually don’t do such things.”

  “Did she say why she waited so late to rent?”

  “Not unusual. First-time renters—like young people—think they can rent anytime, walk right in, not realizing things get booked up early. Or they discover they cannot stand the city in the summer. You know.”

  “She drove up from New York City?”

  “Exactly. Weekends. Not much that I saw, at first. She always had mounds of paperwork with her. She whispered to me that her uncle demanded she get him someplace…balmy. He was a nuisance, she said, ruining her schedule. He had money, it seems. Young people have no respect.”

  Mr. Peakes was already digging into the second sandwich, an overstuffed roast beef on rye. Meals surrounded him. He surveyed them all, carefully choosing one over the other. He talked with his mouth full.

  “She told me he was a problem. Oh, now I do remember something. Yes, indeedy, I do. She said he had located her in New York. A long lost relative. He had no living relatives, so he thought, but during his stay in Amherst, the college library did some genealogical research on the Internet—Ancestry.com, some snoops, I imagine—and discovered a family line that ended in her. Some long-dead disinherited stepbrother’s child. Something like that. Excited, he wrote to her. She was surprised, but I think she was a little annoyed.”

  “Why so?” From Hank.

  I sipped my third cup of coffee and watched him answer.

  “Demanding, he was. And the minute they met, he started to die and she had to take care of him.”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that some distant relative would take care of an old man she just met—even family?”

  He eyed me. “The girl had dollar signs in her eyes—you could see it. She was pissed off that he’d sold some mansion upstate. ‘I’m always a day late,’ she told me. Unpleasant.”

  “Unusual.”

  “I tactlessly mentioned a will to her and she laughed. ‘He has lots of money, but it’s going to some goddamn school.’ I sensed she thought he’d make a few adjustments along the way—you know, lovey-dovey. Family blood, and all that. ‘Who knows, I might still get a little something.’ Then he got sick one weekend when she was here, and an ambulance took him out of here. She called and told someone he’d had a little stroke and was at Yale-New Haven Hospital.”

  “When was that?”

  He bit into a sandwich. Mayonnaise oozed from its generous corners.

  “Near the end of the month—August, that is. She came back to close up the place—the lease was ending anyway—and said he could walk but with difficulty. ‘A matter of weeks,’ she told me. I think she said he was going into some hospice.”

  I interrupted. “He died September 15 in New York City.”

  Mr. Peakes didn’t miss a beat. “He lasted that long? He looked like death itself. There was a box waiting for that man, for sure.”

  “That’s it?”

  I waited while he sucked in a cheeseburger, a few French fries hanging off the melted cheese, dangling like icicles until, with a swoop of a large gray tongue, he dragged them into his mouth. I’d seen dogs perform such a feat, but never a human being.

  “Guess so.” He sipped his coffee. “The gal was charming, I must say. And clever. She always joked with me. He was—well, he was an old man far from home who was dying. Mentally, I think he was losing it. Him and me had one small conversation. He told me he missed home. Moving was a big, big mistake. ‘Strangers around me.’ That’s what he said. ‘I made a mistake. Got no home to die in.’ That’s all he did in the short stay here—he went about the business of dying. It’s a full-time job, you know.”

  He was looking at the dessert menu.

  “One other thing.” I waited until he put down the menu. “Do you remember a visit from a woman named Marta Kowalski, sometime around the beginning of September, after Joshua was gone? A woman in her sixties?”

  For a moment I thought he wasn’t listening. Then a smile appeared on his glistening, mayonnaised lips. “A handsome woman. A truly handsome woman.”

  I sat up. “So you remember her?”

  He took a sip of coffee, seemed to gargle it, and I expected him to spit it into the saucer. “Hard to forget that one. Appeared one day, one afternoon, by chance. The first chill of fall that morning, I remember, a quiet time, summer people all gone, the kids back in school. Quiet time. Shutting things down. Half the places cleared out. I work until the last ones leave—the middle of September. She appears with a piece of paper and says she wants to see Joshua Jennings. She’s looking mighty attractive in a yellow summer dress and her hair up. A little lipstick. A classy woman, let me tell you. So I tell her it’s too late. I mention the stroke and him gone to a hospice. I mentioned the niece.”

  “Did she know about the niece?”

  He shifted in the chair, and the folds of fat moved, glacier-like.

  “I dunno. All I know is that she stands there, rigid as steel, her face suddenly changing. I was expecting tears, hysterics, the breakdown of a woman in love. I’ve been through it myself many times. You can always see it coming. But no, the face became real hard. Her eyes on fire. And she screamed, real dramatic-like, ‘People don’t walk away from me and leave me like that.’ Something like that. Real Joan Crawford. And then she walks away. Not even a good-bye. One mighty angry woman. I figured she headed to the hospital in New Haven.”

  “You didn’t hear from her again?”

  He pointed to custard pie on the menu, just pointed. I signaled the waitress.

  “Why should I? Joshua was gone. That’s who she wanted. Love has only one point of view, you know. Lovers only got one story, really. Yup, she was a mighty handsome woman. Handsome. But too steely for me. A scare, that one.”

  I left my card.

  Getting into the car Hank mumbled, “A scare, that one.”

  We started laughing.

  Sitting in the car, I made a note to check Yale-New Haven Hospital, some local hospices, as well as follow up on the address the realtor had given me for Mary Powell in Manhattan. I summed up my observations on the laptop, while Hank texted everybody he’d ever met in his
life.

  “So what have we learned?” I asked Hank.

  “We learned Marta’s timing was way off. She was always one destination too late.”

  “And then Joshua was dead.”

  “She was even late for that,” Hank said.

  “But I’m bothered by the niece, Mary Powell.”

  “Why?”

  “How does she fit into the picture? What’s her story? So he located her through Ancestry.com or something, and she’s all over the place.”

  “Money.”

  “Sounds like it. But why rent this place here? Was that Joshua’s idea? Or was she planning on bringing him here all along?”

  “She got a summer vacation out of it. Out of the city.”

  “Did Marta know about her?” I asked.

  “Joshua’s a key, Rick.”

  “Yes. All of Marta’s behavior in her last days centered on her pursuit of Joshua, anger at him, despair, and so on. She was onto something. He held some key. He knew something. Or he had told her something. Or she wanted to tell him something. I feel he had the answer to her death.”

  “Yet he died before she did,” Hank summed up.

  “But he’s the cause of her death, one way or the other. I know it.” At that moment Buddha talked to me. The two do exist here because of the One. I smiled. “Their deaths are one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Each one’s death is reflected in the other.”

  “He’s in his grave.”

  “And she’s in hers. Everyone with an answer is dead.”

  Buddha, again. If One is all, the One is many.

  “Maybe not everyone.” Hank stared into my face.

  I nodded. “Someone knows something. ‘One is all. All is part of One.’ I have to believe someone alive understood what happened between them. Out there.”

  I pointed through a window at the chilly landscape.

  Chapter Twenty

  That evening, around five, I waited for Marcie and Vinnie on the sidewalk outside my apartment. Then the three of us strolled under umbrellas through the drizzly, raw twilight streets to Selena and Peter Canterbury’s house for a small cocktail party. It was their first gathering since moving into the old Joshua Jennings homestead.