Auld Lang Syne

by Judith Ivie

  Ten minutes under a stinging hot spray did wonders to clear away the cobwebs. I wrapped a towel around my wet hair and padded down the hall to the kitchen in my disreputable, but cozy, bathrobe with Gracie on my heels. After I filled her bowl with the stinky ahi tuna she favored, I stared at the coffeemaker, willing it to drip faster as I contemplated the day ahead, the last one before I had to keep my agreement with Margo and come clean to John.

  My conversation with Joanie the previous evening had almost certainly supplied the explanation for Mindy’s inordinate intoxication toward the end of the reunion, and it also offered a possible reason for Ariel’s going into hiding. We couldn’t be sure until we talked to Ariel and confronted her with our theory, but Joanie had promised to do her best to set up a meeting with her friend before the end of the day.

  I looked out the front window at the threatening snow clouds and hoped the impending storm wouldn’t be too bad or at least would hold off until evening. After fortifying myself with several swigs of strong coffee, the Gevalia brew Armando preferred, I carried my mug to the big chair in the living room to consider my progress, if you could call it that. My latest goal was to identify enough additional leads for the Brewster Police Department to diffuse their interest in Carrie, once she came forward with the tale of her revenge prank, but so far I had succeeded only in setting up poor Ariel to suffer serious consequences for her actions, if what Joanie and I suspected turned out to be true. Her drugging of Mindy with Ambien could have been lethal, however unintentionally, if Mindy had fallen down a flight of stairs or in front of a moving vehicle instead of passing out in a public restroom. Ariel had also created a conveniently unconscious victim for the real killer, who remained at large. Until I developed a solid lead on that person, I hadn’t accomplished a whole hell of a lot.

  I rubbed my temples wearily. Mindy Marchelewski had been a miserable excuse for a human being, I reminded myself. Her own relatives didn’t seem to give a flying fig about her demise. No one had insisted that the Brewster Police Department’s cursory investigation be deepened. I certainly had not been Mindy’s admirer. In fact, I’d carried an enormous grudge about her seduction of my high school boyfriend for many years. So why was I beating myself up with this inquiry which so far promised only impossible complications for Carrie, Ariel, Pat and Joanie?

  I creaked to my feet and went back to the kitchen for a refill, still pondering. Maybe the smartest thing to do here was to let it go. I could tell everyone I’d simply struck out, which was very nearly the truth, and let Carrie and Ariel deal with their consciences as best they could.

  But someone had deliberately ended Mindy’s life, and that someone was still out there somewhere. Having committed such a heinous act once, he or she might do so again and with less provocation this time. They say after the first killing, it gets easier.

  That knowledge spurred me to make a last ditch effort to turn up a strong suspect in the time remaining to me, but where to start? The only additional glimmer I’d had was Joanie’s story about poor Dave Engle and the tragedy of his girlfriend’s suicide. I wondered if Harold King had followed up on my request for Internet research on Dave. Surely, if he’d turned up anything significant, he would have let me know, but I’d heard nothing from him.

  Setting my empty mug on a side table, I retrieved the Brewster High School yearbook, class of 1978, and flipped through the pages idly, hoping for inspiration. Which other spirits had Mindy crushed during her reign of terror, I wondered as I examined the bright young faces. Joanie said Mitch and Dave weren’t her only conquests. Seducing other girls’ boyfriends had been something of a sport for her, so there must be plenty of other seriously disgruntled feelings concealed behind these careful smiles.

  Having run through all the senior class portraits, I continued to the pages containing photos of each senior and junior class homeroom, the glee club, drama society, chess club, Future Nurses of America, National Honor Society, and every athletic team in the school. I thought I recognized Agnes in a photo of the girls’ double octet and ran my finger along the names beneath to confirm it. Yes, there she was, fourth from the left in the second row. How odd to think that when this photo was taken, neither Agnes nor I had any idea that it was her life that Mitch would be sharing, not mine.

  Or was that true? Mindy had made her move on Mitch around Christmas of that year, I remembered, and Mitch and I broke up right after that, so maybe Agnes had been making her plans already.

  I tried to remember when photos were taken for the yearbooks. It was a long process each year, as I recalled, with student staffers supervised by a faculty member. In those pre-computer days, layout and production would have been done manually, an almost unimaginable task involving typesetting and the pasting-up of individual pages. To get all of that accomplished by spring, the photos would have had to be taken in the autumn.

  What had Joanie said about Dave Engle? Gone by Christmas, shipped off to private school after his betrayed girlfriend had hanged herself. How horrible that he’d had to bear such disproportionate consequences of one encounter with sluttish Mindy his entire adult life.

  I flipped back to the start of the group photo section. Dave hadn’t graduated from Brewster, so his portrait wouldn’t be in the first section, but if he’d been at Brewster until mid-year, perhaps he was in one of the club or team shots. I perused the pages slowly. Since I had no idea what Dave looked like, I concentrated on the names beneath each picture, a series of first initials and last names given by row. Photo after photo, page after page, turned up nothing. Well, he had transferred to Brewster only a year before. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough time to develop major interests or join a team. He’d been a studious type, if I remembered Joanie correctly.

  On impulse I turned to the page featuring the newly inducted members of the National Honor society. There weren’t many. C. Ainsworth, R. Peterson, J. Gordes, P. Henry … and D. Engle. Almost afraid to look, I raised my eyes to scan the faces of the five intelligent young people, posed sedately behind a long table in the school library, and there he was. “David Engle, a welcome addition to the Class of 1978 from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Best subjects: chemistry and biology. Interested in pursuing a career in medicine.”

  I stared into his eyes, half hidden behind heavy horn-rimmed glasses. Whatever became of you, David Engle, I asked him silently, my heart thudding, and what can you tell me about Mindy Marchelewski’s death?

  After getting dressed and seeing Armando off to work, I occupied myself with small domestic tasks. As I made the bed and cleaned up our few dishes, I listened for the phone, hoping for a call from Joanie. The only sounds in the house came from the chugging of the dishwasher, unless I counted Gracie’s chittering as she watched birds darting in and out of the feeder outside the back windows. Restless and jittery, I yanked our ancient Hoover out of the front closet and pushed it around the first floor carpets to blow off some steam. It felt so good that I hauled the machine to the second floor and repeated the exercise on that level, to Gracie’s disgust. After that there was the dishwasher to unload.

  Predictably, once I’d wrested my attention from the telephone and started vacuuming, it rang. When I flopped back into the living room chair, flushed and virtuous from my labors, I saw the message light blinking and lunged for the playback button. I expected a message from Joanie about a time to see Ariel. Instead, it was Harold King.

  “Hi, Kate, Harold King here. I’ll try you at the office, too. Listen, I did some research on Dave Engle like you asked me to, and something kind of interesting turned up. I’m not sure what it means or if it means anything at all, but I thought we should probably talk about it in person. I have to be in Boston on business tomorrow, so I thought I’d take the Lear into Hartford today and stay over, wait out the storm. If you’re free for a late lunch, I should be landing at Brainard around noon. I’ll try your office number now. Hope to see you later.”

  Wow, talk about being on the same wavelength. Not three hours ago I’d been s
taring at Dave’s photo in the yearbook, and now this message from Harold. My heart started its curious pounding again as I looked at my watch. Twelve-thirty, so Harold’s plane must already have landed. I ran back upstairs to find his cell phone number in my contacts and was punching it into the wireless when the doorbell rang. Isn’t that always the way?

  Pounding back down the stairs, I pulled open the door just as Harold answered my call.

  “Kate?” he asked, grinning at me through the glass storm door. “I’m standing on your front porch. Are you ready for lunch, because I’m starving?”

  A scant half-hour later we were seated at Panera Bread, the nearest eatery I could think of. Once again I was compelled to watch my companion scarfing down food I loved—in this instance, a delicious corn chowder and big chunks of crusty bread—while I pretended to be contented with my garden salad and apple slices. It was a very good salad, but, you know.

  “I can’t believe you flew in ahead of a snowstorm to give me the results of your research, Harold.”

  He slurped some soup and looked abashed. “Yeah, kind of a grandstand play, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Having a private jet and a pilot on standby gives me a lot of flexibility, but what good is it if I never take advantage of it? Besides, who can I strut my stuff to if not my old pal from high school?”

  I winced. “Easy on the old references, pal of mine, and since you ask, I can think of one other person who would be very glad to see you, strutting or otherwise.”

  He raised an eyebrow, since his mouth was full of bread.

  “Joanie Haines, cohort of Mindy and Ariel in high school but not a real fan of Mindy, as it turns out. She’s still friends with Ariel, and that’s a whole other story, which I’ll tell you in a minute. She speaks of you very fondly with a look in her eye I can only describe as wistful.” I wiggled my eyebrows meaningfully.

  “Does she now?” he laughed, then sobered. “I always thought maybe … well, that was a long time ago, but it would be interesting to see Joan again without her being joined at the hip to Mindy Marchelewski. That’s why I didn’t approach her at the reunion. There they were again, the three witches. It was déjà vu all over again, as Yogi said.”

  “I might be able to arrange that, but I’m dying to hear your news about Dave Engle. Come on, spill it. I’m on a deadline here.”

  “Okay, but first I need you to catch me up on what’s been happening here.”

  Exasperated, I did my best to summarize my findings of the last few days without mentioning either Carrie’s or Ariel’s name, but I fumbled it when I recapped my conversation with Joanie the previous evening. Anyone with two functioning brain cells could figure out I was talking about Ariel, and Harold had several million more than that.

  A few minutes into my recitation, he wiped his mouth and shoved his tray aside to lean his elbows on the table. Propping his chin in his hands, he listened with flattering attention, and when I wound down, he leaned back in his chair and slapped the table.

  “What did I tell you about the competition between mean girls?” he gloated. “I kind of figured Ariel was in on the action, but who else at Brewster wanted to knock Mindy off her throne thirty-five years later?”

  “Oh, Carrie wasn’t a mean girl,” I started, then clapped a hand over my mouth. I could feel myself reddening. Now I was zero for two in the keeping a secret derby.

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “Carrie, huh? Funny, I don’t remember a Carrie in our class.”

  I wanted to kick myself, but it was too late now. All I could do was throw myself on Harold’s mercy and hope he could keep a confidence better than I could.

  “You’ve got to promise me to keep Carrie’s name to yourself, Harold, at least for one more day. She’s the woman who came with Pat Connelly to the reunion. They’re domestic partners and have been for at least ten years.”

  “Ahhhh,” Harold nodded. “I wondered about that. Good for them for coming to the reunion together. Man, that would not have been possible in 1978.”

  “Anyway, I have to turn over this new information about Carrie and Ariel to the Brewster Police tomorrow morning. I promised Margo.” Here followed another digression to explain who Margo and her husband were and why I was obliged to come clean the following morning. “I was just so hoping to have another lead or two to give the police at the same time so they wouldn’t put too much emphasis on Carrie and Ariel.”

  “Which brings me to my research,” Harold segued neatly, “or more accurately the research of a private investigator friend of mine I asked to look into it for me. He’s much better at this stuff than I am, and he has better resources.”

  I was dismayed. “I didn’t want you to have to hire someone.”

  He dismissed my concern with a wave. “Calling him my friend is probably an overstatement. He’s on retainer with my company and gets paid every week whether he does anything or not. Mostly we use him on industrial espionage stuff, leaks, that sort of thing, but it’s been quiet lately. Doing this let him earn his fee honestly for a change.”

  In the interest of moving this along I decided to accept Harold’s largesse without further protestations. “Okay, thanks so much, Harold. What did he find out about Dave Engle?”

  I prepared to give Harold the same rapt attention he’d given me but took the opportunity to shove a forkful of salad into my mouth.

  “Let’s start with what we already knew about Dave going in,” he began

  “In my case, not much,” I muttered. “Sorry. You were saying?”

  “Dave’s father was a military man. Air Force, it turns out, the commander at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts back when it was a real base and Guam before that. The family moved every couple of years, which has got to be tough on a kid, especially one with no brothers or sisters. Anyway, they moved to Brewster in 1977, when the father retired from active duty. Dave enrolled in Brewster High that November.” He paused to take a sip of water.

  “I don’t remember Dave at all, and he was a member of our class for a whole year,” I mused.

  Harold snorted. “There were over two hundred other kids in our class. Do you remember every one of them? I sure don’t.”

  “I know, but it seems wrong somehow. If we lived in a town of two hundred people, we’d for sure know every single one of them.”

  “Because we’re adults and hopefully more aware of those around us than we were as adolescents. Well, most of us anyway,” he laughed. “I can think of a few exceptions to that rule. But remember, we didn’t go to school with just the members of our class. Brewster had freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, so there were at least four times that many kids milling around.”

  I nodded, munching on an apple slice. “Still, the awful thing that happened with Dave’s girlfriend would have been the talk of the school, wouldn’t it?”

  Harold shrugged philosophically. “Dave was a loner for the most part. Kathy Schuyler, his girlfriend, was pretty much his only companion at Brewster. He didn’t play sports or join any of the clubs …”

  “ … except the National Honor Society,” I interrupted. “I found the picture in our yearbook this morning.”

  “Really?” Harold was surprised. “That’s not something you just sign up for, though. Membership is based on the results of some exam, sort of like the SAT, that’s given once a year throughout the country.”

  “You’re right, but what else did you find out? This is all old news.”

  Harold raised his eyebrows. “Yes, Ma’am. So Mindy targeted Dave for her own sick little sport, and we know what happened after that. Kathy, feeling totally betrayed and not having the inner strength to get over it, hanged herself and left a note saying why. Then Dave was yanked out of Brewster and packed off to a private high school in Massachusetts to finish high school. It’s what comes next that’s interesting.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I said through clenched teeth. Would the man never get to it?

  “After he got his diploma, Dave matricula
ted at Boston University and graduated with a BS in 1982. Then, get this, he enrolled in medical school. Tufts University School of Medicine, no less.” He paused, waiting for my reaction.

  “Uh huh, so he went to med school and became a doctor. That meshes with his National Honor Society write-up, which said something about his being especially interested in chemistry and biology.”

  Harold was momentarily deflated. “It did? Oh.”

  “Where did he wind up practicing?”

  Harold brightened. “He didn’t, never even finished medical school. He walked out one day in the autumn of his third year and never came back.”

  That did surprise me. “He didn’t turn up in another medical school a few years later or something?”

  Harold’s head shake was emphatic. “Believe me, our investigator left no stone unturned. There was no other school admission, no Peace Corps, no military service. He left most of his personal belongings in storage, but after a year, which is all he’d paid for in advance, they were auctioned off or destroyed. He climbed into his old Chevy and drove away into the sunset. I have no idea if he even told his parents where he was, and now they’re both deceased. Weird, yes?”

  “Maybe not so much, Harold. It was the eighties, all those drugs and antiwar sentiment. Lots of young people dropped out, walked away from the establishment and its values for a few years, remember? Maybe the grind of medical school and the prospect of years of internship and residency still ahead simply became too much for Dave. Is that the end of the story, or did he turn up again somewhere?”

  Harold smiled his crooked smile. “No, but now it gets into the realm of speculation. He didn’t turn up. That is, Dave Engle didn’t re-emerge. After he left Tufts we found twenty years of nothing, no Social Security earnings, no tax returns, motor vehicle registration records, voter registrations, nada.”