by Judith Ivie
Ariel looked from one to the other of us, then slumped back in her chair, looking, if possible, even more defeated.
“That figures. I can’t even make a confession without screwing it up. I guess I’ve made a big enough mess already. No point making a bigger one for the cleaning staff to deal with.” She laid the little pistol on the manicure table and let her hands fall into her lap. “I’m exhausted.”
“I don’t believe you wanted to kill yourself anyway, Ariel. You could have done that anytime over the past week, but you didn’t. What you really want is for someone to hear you, and we do. I only wish you had asked for help thirty-five years ago.”
She looked me full in the face. “I was seventeen years old. My mother hated me, and my father barely knew I was alive. I didn’t know how to ask for help, and anyway, would you have heard me then?”
I struggled to answer her honestly, but the truth was, I didn’t know. “Maybe. I think I would have. I hope so.”
At that moment John Harkness stepped into the room, followed closely by Margo. His right hand was in his overcoat pocket. I suspected it was clamped firmly around his police issue .38, but after taking in the details of the scene before him, he pulled out his cell phone.
“The West Hartford police are standing by outside. What should I tell them?” He looked at my hands and Joanie’s, still taped to our chairs, at Ariel sagging drunkenly in her chair and her pistol lying on the manicure table. His eyes met mine.
I looked over at Joanie, and she nodded slightly.
“Tell them it was a false alarm,” I told John. “Everything is okay here.”
Nineteen
Surprising the forecasters, who are often forced to revise their predictions in New England, the storm had blown through quickly and was already moving out to sea. John brushed the snow from Joanie’s Honda and helped her get Ariel buckled into the passenger seat after confiscating her gun. He followed them to Joan’s place in his car, and Margo rode home with me.
“How did you know where I was?” I finally found a moment to ask her. It never even occurred to me that she had not engineered this rescue scenario. She snorted in amusement.
“You might think more kindly about your cell phone after this, Sugar. Everything turned out all right this time, but the way your life goes, you might really have been in trouble.” She waved her own phone at me.
I glanced at her briefly, not understanding, before returning my attention to the still treacherous pavement. “I thought of using it, but I couldn’t reach it in my pocket with my hands taped to the chair, so what possible good did it do me?”
This time she laughed out loud. “You butt-dialed me, silly woman. You must have been squirmin’ around in that chair, and somehow you pressed my speed dial. I’d been frettin’ about you all day, especially after Joanie and Harold both called Mack Realty lookin’ for you because you weren’t answerin’ your home phone, so I just snatched up my cell phone when I saw your number displayed. I left poor Mr. Eberhart at the bank hangin’ on the Mack line in the middle of a sentence. And what did I hear? Some drunk fool yappin’ on and on about her terrible adolescence, as if anyone has a good one. Then I heard you yelp.”
“That must have been when Ariel ripped the duct tape off my mouth.”
“Ouch! Well, anyway, I naturally called John, and he traced the location of your phone …”
“They can do that?” I asked, amazed.
“They can do that,” she assured me. “So he put the West Hartford PD on alert, and we high-tailed it over here to see what was what. We saw your car in the lot, and luckily, the back door to the salon was unlocked. We didn’t want to bust into what sounded like a delicate situation, so we stood in the back room listenin’ until it looked like things had settled down some. It’s a good thing Ariel put that pistol down when she did, though. John was gettin’ that twitchy look he gets when he’s had about enough, you know?”
“I do know that look. Armando has one just like it,” I assured her.
We were quiet for a minute. Then, “Why was Harold King in town anyway?” Margo remembered to ask.
Harold! We had promised each other to be in touch by five o’clock, no matter what. It was well past that, and my cell phone had obviously been busy for a very long time. I startled Margo by screeching into the parking lot of a CVS and fumbled for my phone.
“Finally,” Harold growled after answering my call on the first ring. “I was getting really concerned, but since you were obviously talking on your phone for the last hour, I figured you had to be okay.”
I slid my eyes to Margo. “I wasn’t exactly talking, and getting to okay took some doing.” I gave him a condensed version of the afternoon’s events, which he digested in silence. Midway through, Margo climbed out of the car and walked around to my side, where she motioned me to do the same.
“I’ll drive,” she mouthed.
“Hold on for a second, Harold. I’m going to switch seats with Margo so she can drive while I talk.” This necessitated more explanations of why Margo was in the car with me. By the time I got to the part about, um, inadvertently dialing Margo on my cell, Harold was howling.
“I don’t believe it. You butt-dialed her, and she moved heaven and earth to get you out of whatever jam you were in. What a great friend.”
I looked at Margo, wearing the eyeglasses she detested as she steered the Jetta across the Wethersfield town line at a cautious twenty-five miles per hour with a death grip on the steering wheel.
“I do have great friends, and now I’m happy to count you among them. It’s your turn. How was your meeting with Dan-Dave? Was he home with the flu like he told the people at Shady Hill?”
“There was no meeting,” Harold announced with disgust. “I drove all the way down there in the snow and rang his doorbell for about five minutes, but no one answered. I got a funny feeling while I was standing there, like the place was empty and had been for quite a while … cold and sort of blank, you know? So I went down to the communal mailboxes and looked into the one for Emerson. They don’t lock, and there was so much junk mail crammed into this one that the door would hardly close. Nobody’s picked up his mail in several days, Kate.”
We were silent as we considered what that might mean.
“Ariel thought she recognized one of the ambulance personnel Saturday night as Dave Engle,” I reminded Harold.
“Yeah, you said.” We were quiet again. “Anyway, it looks as if we’ll be cleared to take off first thing in the morning. I figure you’ll be turning over everything to the Brewster cops tomorrow, so I left my file on Engle inside your front storm door. I’m sure they’ll know what to do with it.”
Margo eased the Jetta into my driveway and pushed the automatic garage door opener on my visor with obvious relief.
“Thanks for everything, Harold. You really came through for me, and I’ll never forget it.”
“I won’t let you,” he joked. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t had this much excitement in my life in years. Besides, I might have a dinner date in the area in a couple of weeks. Maybe we could meet up for coffee, and you can tell me the end of the story.”
I didn’t ask him who he was inviting to dinner. I didn’t have to.
“Oh, I’ll be e-mailing you the details long before then, but we can have a cup of coffee anyway. Now that we’re reacquainted, I don’t want you to disappear from my life again.” I thought about Agnes and Mitch, Maryellyn and Jean and Joanne, Pam and Gail, Pat and Carrie, and I realized I felt the same way about each and every one of them. Then I remembered Armando and Emma, Joey and Justine, Strutter and J.D., and especially Margo and John. What would I do without any of them? I squeezed Margo’s shoulder affectionately.
“A girl can never have too many friends.”
After half an hour with Detective Hagearty in the same dingy Brewster PD conference room in which we’d first talked, I felt I finally had the man’s full attention. Having John Harkness sitting beside me helped with that, as d
id the complete file Harold had left me on Dave Engle, a.k.a. Dan Emerson. John had advised me to be truthful about Carrie’s and Ariel’s less-than-praiseworthy activities the night of the reunion but not to linger over them, simply set the stage and move on to the facts about Dave Engle.
At first Hagearty wore the same weary, albeit more respectful, expression he’d displayed at our initial meeting, but after he leafed through the pages in Harold’s research folder, he snapped to attention. When I mentioned Ariel’s belief that she’d recognized Dave as one of the paramedics on duty the night of the reunion and Harold’s unsuccessful attempt to rouse the man at his condominium, Hagearty excused himself for a minute and left the room, carrying the file. When he returned, I related the story of Dave and Mindy and her culpability in his girlfriend Kathy’s death.
By the time I finished my mouth was dry, and Hagearty’s eyebrows had climbed halfway up his forehead. He got to his feet and personally brought me a paper cup of water from the cooler against the wall.
“You put all this together in a week?” he asked me, but he was looking at John.
“Told you so,” John grinned. “She’s got a real gift for investigation. I trust her instincts. Besides, my wife would murder me if I didn’t help Kate out from time to time. They’re business partners,” he explained.
“Well, I had a little help from my friends,” I demurred, but I couldn’t help being pleased.
After a perfunctory tap on the door, Officer McCarthy stepped in and spoke quietly in Hagearty’s ear. I hadn’t thought it possible, but the detective’s eyebrows climbed even higher as he listened. Then he sighed heavily and looked me full in the face.
“Normally, I wouldn’t reveal this sort of information to a civilian, but since you’ve been instrumental in moving this investigation ahead, and Harkness here vouches for you, I’m going to make an exception. A little while ago I dispatched a squad car to Daniel Emerson’s address with instructions for the officers to enter using any means necessary. The two officers did so and radioed a message to me, which McCarthy just delivered. Daniel Emerson committed suicide several days ago, from the look of things. Overdosed himself with morphine. There was apparently quite a stash of the stuff in Emerson’s condo, which may explain another suspicious death at Shady Hill a year or so ago.” Hagearty sighed.
“He also left a suicide note that pretty much confirms everything you’ve told me this morning, how Mindy Marchelewski drove his high school girlfriend to suicide and ruined his life, how his guilt about betraying her plagued him and made it impossible for him to finish medical school as he’d planned. He tried to erase the past by changing his identity and atone for his past mistakes by working as a paramedic and volunteering with the local ambulance corps. It was sheer coincidence that he was on duty the night of the reunion, but being in that place and seeing Mindy brought it all back. He was overcome with rage and injected her with morphine when he was alone with her in the back of the ambulance, knowing the ER staff wouldn’t be able to check the dilation of her pupils until it was too late because of the glued eyelids. A few days later he was sick with remorse and decided to put an end to his suffering once and for all. Wanted to be with Kathy again, he said.”
I had expected to feel relieved, even jubilant, at having the mystery of Mindy’s death solved at last, but I was neither. “Imagine being so hated that three different people would seek revenge in a single evening,” I shivered and choked up.
John put an arm around my shoulders, not quite hugging me. “It wasn’t like the Christie novel,” he observed, “where the perpetrators deliberately planned their actions. I guess this was more like an unintentional conspiracy.”
When I could speak again, I asked Hagearty what would happen to Carrie and Ariel.
“They’ll have to come in and give statements. After that it will be up to the D.A. to decide whether to prosecute. Between you and me, I think he’ll take a pass.”
Only then did relief flood through me along with an inexplicable weariness, and I sagged back against John’s comforting arm. Margo was one very lucky lady.
“Let’s get you home,” he said briskly. “That’s the best place for you after the week you’ve had.”
As always, I was happy to follow his advice and hope he saw the gratitude in my eyes.
Epilogue
After a solid week of torrential rain, more appropriate to April than to June, it was a relief for Emma and me to lace up our walking shoes in the late spring sunshine and take a brisk walk around the Broad Street Green. We began our circuit at the Nathaniel Foote monument, which I patted ritualistically in passing. Our intention was to burn off some calories, now that I had managed to lose eleven pounds and was trying to keep my weight stable, before showering and changing into more suitable clothes.
Suzanne Flaherty’s mother was hosting a baby shower for her daughter at her home, and the goodies would likely be plentiful. Emma and I felt obliged to attend to keep Margo company. Traditionalist that she was, Suzanne’s mom had not included men in the event, as many young women did these days, so Armando and John were off the hook.
“I hate these things,” Emma groused. “All the experienced mothers sit around scaring the one who’s expecting with horror stories about their seventy-two-hour labors and excruciating deliveries. It’s macabre, not to mention a waste of a perfectly good Sunday afternoon.”
“You know I agree with you. The purpose of these things is to equip the parents-to-be with the necessities, so I usually just call wherever the parents are registered, give them my credit card, and have a nice gift sent with my regrets. It works out fine. They get the loot they’re after, and I don’t have to suffer through those idiotic games women seem compelled to play on these occasions.”
“Why aren’t we doing that this time?” Emma wondered aloud.
“Because Margo would kill us if we didn’t show up,” I laughed. “She hates these girly affairs more than we do.”
“Boy, talk about no good deed going unpunished. If I’d known this was going to be my reward for waiving my fee on the house sale to John and Margo, I never would have done it.”
“Yes, you would, dearie, and you’ll slap a smile on your face and endure the shower this afternoon, too, because your mother brought you up right.”
She grimaced. “My bad luck. Whatever happened with your old school chums, the ones who’ve been longing for each other from afar for all these years?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that dramatically, but they’ve been in touch. Harold has to come through Connecticut on business every month or so, and they’ve had dinner several times. They both seem content with that arrangement for the time being. Joanie’s divorce and Ariel’s latest stint in rehab are almost accomplished, and then we’ll see.”
We concluded our lap of the green in silence and returned to the split in the road where we’d parked our cars. As Emma fumbled for her key fob, I waved at her to follow me down the righthand fork that led to the pond.
“Come on, there’s something I want you to see.”
During the final months of winter, we had encountered Droopy and Fray, the geese who could not fly because of damaged wings, on only the coldest days, when much of the marsh water was frozen, and they were unable to find food. Only then did they make the long march over snow and ice to accept our offerings of cracked corn.
As spring warmed the pond and brook that fed into the marsh, we slowly withdrew our supplementary feedings, encouraging the birds to return to their natural diet as they tended the eggs that would produce this year’s crop of fuzzy offspring. I had seen Droopy occasionally, but Fray had completely vanished, and I fretted about her fate.
“Are George and Laura back?” Emma asked, referring to the huge swans that had raised their cygnets on the Spring Street Pond for years. Unfortunately, necessary repairs to the earthen dam at the far end of the pond had dislodged them, and they now merely passed through in the spring on their way to new summer quarters. I shook my head.
“Armando and I saw them just once. We thought they might return to their old pattern, but they’ve moved on.”
As we neared the pond we stepped softly, not wanting to disturb the three or four families of geese dozing in the sunshine on the grassy bank. Babies piled on their mothers’ backs for protection and warmth as the males stood guard, their beady eyes fixed upon us. I found the feathery group I was looking for and pointed. Emma broke into a face-splitting grin.
“It’s Fray, and she has babies … four, five—no, six of them. Wow, when did she reappear?”
“A few days ago. She must have been sitting on her eggs somewhere down in the marsh all this time, but now the kids are big enough to handle the trip up to the pond.”
We beamed upon the new family from a discreet distance, and the gander standing guard beside them downgraded from high alert to watchfulness.
“Way better than a stupid baby shower,” Emma sighed, and I had to agree.
“I wanted to remind you there are some good deeds that are their own reward. Fray and Droopy are extremely resourceful geese, despite their handicaps, but the little help we gave them this winter probably made a difference.”
We headed back to our cars, refreshed by our visit.
“How are Charlie and Duane doing? Still enjoying being famous?” Emma asked. The You Tube video had gone viral, in spite of some fallout from the more conservative parents in the community, and its entire cast had become local celebrities.
After seeing the production for ourselves, we had feared briefly for Bill Biederman and Betty Kozinsky, who might well have lost their jobs for encouraging and participating in such a controversial project, but the teachers had assessed the risks and proceeded intelligently. For one thing, the video had not been produced on school property. It had been filmed in a private facility after regular school hours, except for the scenes done in Duane’s house. His parents, who had turned out to be as supportive as we’d hoped once Duane finally confided in them, had signed the necessary releases for Duane, as had Strutter and J.D. for Charlie. The parents of other underage actors had done the same, but most of those sharing stories were over eighteen years of age and thus able to sign releases for themselves.