by Craig Smith
I hung up, and went upstairs to see Molly. ‘Johnna Masterson,’ I said. ‘She wants to talk.’
‘Good for Johnna. Does she keep a diary too?’
‘This could be important. I’m going into town.’
‘Now?’
‘Why not now?’
The phone rang again, cutting off Molly’s response.
Molly snatched the receiver up and spoke softly, her voice mellow. ‘Hello? Yes. Just a minute.’ She set the phone between her cheek and shoulder. ‘Do you mind closing the door on your way out?’
Through the closed door of what was once our bedroom, I could hear Molly’s voice, though not all of the words. She laughed the way she had once laughed with me.
I spent most of the drive into town contemplating just what I had lost and wondering if by some miracle Johnna Masterson was about to offer me a way to get it back.
Over my third cup of coffee, watching the door and the sidewalk outside, I was still thinking about Johnna’s motives and what it could mean for my marriage when the waitress came up to my booth. ‘You Dr Albo?’ I said I was. ‘There’s a call for you. Lady said it’s an emergency.’
When I got to the telephone by the cash register, I heard Buddy Elder’s voice. ‘Hey, Dave. You looking for Johnna?’
‘Where is she?’
‘You’re not stalking that poor girl, are you?’
‘What do you want, Buddy?’
‘I heard a rumour today at the funeral home. They’re saying letter of censure. Good news, huh? Hope nothing happens to change their minds.’
‘Do yourself a favour,’ I said. ‘Get out of my life before I decide to kill you!’
At just that moment Buddy Elder decided to disconnect. I looked up and saw the cashier staring at me.
Why not? I had just threatened to take a life. I gave her a friendly smile, but I expect it looked like bad acting.
Chapter 21
I WENT TO THE HOUSE WHERE I KNEW Buddy was staying. His car was not there, nor did he answer the door when I knocked. I drove to his old apartment close to The Slipper after that. That too was dark, no sign of his Mercury. Finally, late, I checked Johnna Masterson’s address in a telephone directory.
There was only a rural route number, so I could not find her place. I tried her home number with my cell phone, but there was no answer. On a hunch, I went out to Walt’s and Barbara’s place. Roger and his girlfriend were out as well.
Tired and frustrated, I went back to the farm and crawled into bed around three-thirty. When I got up late the next morning the horses were already out in the pasture. I found Molly upstairs installing the base-boards. ‘How was Johnna?’ she asked cheerfully.
‘She didn’t show up.’
‘Did you sleep with her too, David?’
‘She told me last night on the phone she wanted to talk to me about Buddy.’
Molly’s electric drill punctuated my answer. She stood up, walked to the next mark and set the screw. ‘I keep trying to figure out why everyone but you is lying.’
She gave me a pretty smile, and I could have sworn something had changed. ‘How many were there over the years? Just so I know.’
‘I’ve never cheated on you, Molly.’
‘Now see?’ She settled the drill on the makeshift worktable. ‘You say that as if it’s true, and we both know it isn’t.’
IT HAD BEEN A SHORT NIGHT for us, though on that occasion Molly and I had spent it together. In fact, I had just started drifting off when I heard her tramping around the front room. I rolled over and saw this beautiful blonde wearing work boots and tight jeans, looking down at me in the gloomy first light of a Monday morning. This was how our third date ended.
‘Make yourself at home, professor. There’s food in the kitchen. The coffee just needs to be turned on. You want to see me again I’ll be home when it’s dark. You want to think about it for a few days like last time, that’s okay too.’ She bent over the bed and kissed my eyelids, something no one had ever done to me. ‘Just don’t think about it too long. You might hurt my feelings.’
I rolled out of bed and sat up. I told her I was just getting up myself. Molly laughed like one of her carpenter friends. She knew better than that! People with things to do got up at dawn. Poets and professors-in-training and used car salesmen could let the morning get away from them. I tried to pretend I was only a couple of minutes from sitting down to compose a little iambic pentameter while I drank my first cup of coffee, but all she did was laugh at me.
As she went toward the door I called to her impulsively: ‘Will you marry me, Molly McBride?’ Her step caught. Her shoulders froze. Then she looked back at me with a smile. ‘Ask me like you mean it and I might.’
I was there that evening, and I asked her with a diamond ring.
I didn’t have that kind of money on hand of course.
I had called Tubs that morning and told him I’d found the woman I wanted to marry. I hated doing it like that, especially telling him I needed the money by that afternoon, but it was the only way to show Molly I meant it. Tubs didn’t ask how long I’d known her. He didn’t even ask her name. He told me to have the jewellery store give him a call when I found what I wanted. I could pay him back come summer.
Molly wasn’t expecting a man on bended knee that evening, but she handled it well. She said she needed a couple of days to think about it, if I didn’t mind.
Nothing at all to think about, I told her. ‘Just say yes and the three of us will live happily-ever-after.’ That was the thing, she said. There were three of us. She wanted to talk to Lucy about it. A few days after that Molly said Lucy had told her it was all right. We set the wedding for early January in DeKalb. For various reasons we spent the rest of that fall, about six weeks in total, living separately. We would meet in the morning and usually late in the evening. On the rainy days, we would steal an afternoon in Molly’s bed while the neighbour kept Lucy.
I finished the semester pretty much as I had started it. I would work most of the day, then drift over for beer and talk in the late afternoon at my favourite bar. A lot of times a whole group of us showed up.
Sometimes only two or three of us were there. Beth Ruby was a regular and wouldn’t let up with the carpenter jokes once she found out I was engaged. I didn’t really care. My attraction to the woman had faded. Molly McBride was the centre of my life, and I was foolish enough to tell her that. That was when Beth started talking about ‘a life sentence of monogamy.’
I told her it sounded good, but even as I said it, I felt a little nervous, the way a man will when he puts a tie on for his first job and thinks that for the next forty-five years he’s going to be doing the same thing.
Never can sure seem like a long time when you’re young.
A couple of weeks before the end of the semester, about three or four weeks before the wedding, I was sitting across from Beth Ruby at the Pub, just the two of us. Monogamy was the topic of the afternoon again, and it was a long afternoon. After we had had enough, I said I was going, had to meet Molly later. Beth asked for a ride home. Beth usually walked because she only lived a few blocks away, but I had given her rides before. She made a show of her bare thighs inside the truck. They were very nice thighs, too. She laughed at me for looking. I wasn’t ready to get married! I’d cheat on Molly with the first woman who came along. I said I was impervious. She opened her legs slowly and said,
‘You would do me right here, right now if I let you.’
I was still looking at her thighs, and I guess I forgot to tell her that I wouldn’t. In fact, I didn’t have a whole lot to say until I was pulling my pants up afterwards.
When I got home, I took a shower. I felt better after that but still guilty. Molly showed up as I was getting dressed. She asked me how my day had been. I told her it had been okay, nothing special. She saw the light on my answering machine and punched the button.
Beth Ruby’s voice was distinctive even on a cheap answering machine. ‘Hey! I can’t believe
we did it in your pickup! Thanks for the first, Davey, and by the way, I was right and you were wrong. You’re definitely not cut out for monogamy.’
Molly stood there for several seconds without speaking. Then she just turned and walked away.
I tried calling. I went by her house. For several days she wouldn’t talk to me, but I finally wore her down.
I said I could explain if she just gave me a chance.
Of course I couldn’t, and I think Molly agreed to see me just to hear what I would come up with. We went to the best restaurant in town. We had a couple of mixed drinks and talked about our lives as if we had not seen each other for several years. In fact, it had only been a couple of weeks, the longest and most miserable of my life.
There was no explanation for what I had done, so I settled with saying I was sorry. I didn’t think there was anything I could do to make up for it, but if Molly could forgive me I would do anything. It was stupid, irresponsible, the biggest mistake of my life.
Molly listened politely, but I wasn’t sure I was making progress, so I fell back on an old standby: ‘...it didn’t mean a thing.’
Very quietly but with a firmness I knew meant business, Molly answered me. Was she supposed to feel better because it didn’t mean anything? I tried to explain that. Beth had wanted to prove to herself she could have me if she wanted.
‘Well, she had you.’
What could I do to make things right? Molly looked at me for a long time without responding. Finally she said, ‘Nothing. That’s the thing. There’s nothing you can do to ever make up for it.’
She wondered if I could I forgive her if I had heard something like that on her answering machine right after she had told me she had a boring day. I said I could. I wouldn’t mind sounding like a joke between her and her lover? I tried to argue this, but Molly wouldn’t give it to me. Beth Ruby had turned her into a joke.
I agreed that I would hesitate. But that didn’t mean it would be over! If I thought it would never happen again, if I really believed it, nothing would keep us apart.
Molly considered this quietly. ‘Easy to say, David.’
‘I mean it!’
‘Listen to me,’ Molly said. ‘No matter what you say, I know you believe there’s a difference. Men are excused, women are stained.’
That wasn’t true, I said. There was no difference.
Things like that could happen to men or women!
‘Do you want to marry the town tramp, David?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Neither do I.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Be honest.’
‘It was exactly like that.’
‘And if I wanted one last fling, how would you handle that?’
‘Molly…’
‘It wouldn’t mean a thing.’
She was smiling, baiting me with my own words.
‘If that’s what you want,’ I said morosely.
‘It’s not what I want.’
I drew a deep, satisfied breath.
‘You see? It’s okay because you know it won’t happen!’
What did she want me to do? She thought for moment and shook her head. ‘Give me a couple of days to think about it.’
And that was it. Two, maybe three nights later I heard Molly’s key in my door and looked at the clock by my bed. It was after three. I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Molly appeared at the door to my bedroom backlit by the light in the front room. I could not see her face, but I could tell by the way she moved and by the stink of cigarettes on her clothes she had been out. When I spoke, she came toward me and pulled up the hem of her dress. Touching her thighs I understood at once what had happened.
‘Who?’ I muttered.
‘I didn’t get their names.’
Molly called me the next morning, about two hours later, actually. ‘You still want to get married?’ she asked cheerfully.
‘More than anything,’ I told her.
According to our custom, we never spoke about that night – never again mentioned the name of Beth Ruby.
Chapter 22
WE HEARD A CAR COMING OFF the pavement late the following afternoon. It was too soon for Lucy to be home from school, so I went to the window and looked down on the driveway from the third floor.
In summer you could not see who was coming until the car burst out of the heavy foliage and pulled into the circle before the house. In late fall, the leaves almost all gone, I got a glimpse of the vehicle as it crested the hill. Two men sat inside a brown and tan late model Jeep Wagoneer. I didn’t know them. By their age and the clothing they wore, I was fairly sure they were not selling religion. In fact, I was fairly sure they weren’t selling anything at all.
Molly and I went downstairs together and met them as they were getting out of their vehicle. I thought cops, though I could not have said why. Maybe it was the way both men locked in on me. Most men noticed Molly first. I offered the standard country greeting,
‘Help you?’
They reached into their jackets slowly at the same time and pulled out badges with picture IDs. I felt no satisfaction in being right. I looked at Molly for some kind of explanation, but she was looking at me. I think we both thought of Lucy at the same time. Supposed to be in school, out for a drive instead: a parent’s worst nightmare.
‘Is something wrong?’ Molly asked, an unfamiliar tremor in her voice.
The older man shook his head, apparently understanding our fear. ‘We’d just like to ask Professor Albo a couple of questions, if that’s all right. I’m Detective Dalton. This is Detective Jacobs.’
As he said this, he extended his badge and ID for me to inspect.
I took a long hard look at his identification, trying as I did to figure out what they might want to talk to me about. Harassment? Stalking? An assault charge from the funeral home? What came next?
Kip Dalton was about average height, pleasantly thick through the middle, with neatly oiled black hair just starting to turn. In his late-forties, I guessed. He had the tranquil brown eyes of a preacher or a psychologist, a confidence I would have associated with a prosperous businessman.
Dalton’s partner, whose identification I just glanced at, was easier to comprehend and less interesting. He was so ramrod straight and uptight he might as well have been wearing a uniform. In his mid-thirties with thinning light brown hair, Detective Jacobs was a couple of inches over six feet and exceedingly thin. His eyes were deep set, small and quick. He had a jaw you could break your fist on.
Molly stepped forward aggressively the moment Kip Dalton announced their purpose. What did they want to talk about? Dalton was reluctant to explain himself in the driveway. It would just take a few minutes.
Molly looked at me as she might have in the old days, reading my expression at a glance. Why not? She smiled at both men, the good country wife who has just remembered her manners. ‘You care for some coffee?’
Dalton said that sounded like a mighty fine idea.
We took them through the back porch and into our kitchen. Molly made coffee while Dalton complimented us on the restoration. He was especially interested in the enormous fireplace where the cooking had originally taken place when the house was newly built in the 1820s.
‘Functional?’ he asked.
I answered with the first lie that came to mind. ‘Oh yeah! A couple of times a year we have people out and cook the meal right there, pioneer-style.’ Dalton, who clearly enjoyed antiques smiled fondly at the notion. I said next time we would invite him. I glanced at Jacobs, who exuded all the warmth of an andiron.
I included him in the invitation as well. Why not? It didn’t cost me anything. As I spoke I was fairly sure Kip Dalton wasn’t buying my line, but I didn’t care.
I continued talking about the old cookware we used and the flavour of coffee boiled on an open fire. I said it was quite a sight to see everyone standing around a fireplace like this all dressed up in early nineteenth century costumes.
Molly, who was used to my nonsense, didn’t bother telling the men I was lying. Usually, she enjoyed it, what I could spin out on short notice, but I expect she thought it wasn’t a very smart thing to do with a couple of detectives. After I had run down a little, Dalton moved about the kitchen, inspecting the old plank board table, the original brick floors and walls, the bric-a-brac on the various shelves.
‘I was out here about ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Place didn’t look anything like this.’
‘It was all here,’ Molly answered, ‘but some fool thought he ought to modernize it.’ She was talking about her father and his ill-conceived attempt to turn Bernard Place into an apartment building.
I asked what had brought him out to the house ten years ago. He had been on patrol, he said. He and his partner had found a party and had run the kids off after putting the fear of the law in them.
Jacobs spoke now, his first words since muttering ma’am at the introductions. ‘Seems like they had a lot of trouble selling this place. Sat empty for years.’
‘That wasn’t the reason. There were two owners, a brother and sister. One wanted to sell the place. The other didn’t.’
Jacobs nodded at Molly’s explanation. ‘A squabble over the family inheritance?’
‘Isn’t it always?’
When she asked them their business with me Kip Dalton pretended it wasn’t very urgent. ‘We got a call from the university this morning. One of the graduate students up there in your department is teaching a couple of courses, and she didn’t show up for her classes yesterday. Some people checked around. The usual. They went by her house, called her parents, contacted the hospitals. She just disappeared.’
Molly looked at me, as certain as I was, I think.
‘Johnna Masterson?’ I asked.
Dalton tried not to look surprised. ‘One of her friends said she was going to talk to you about some kind of complaint she filed earlier this semester.’
‘I haven’t spoken to Johnna since early October.’ I thought about leaving it there, but the instinct for self-preservation saved me. ‘Two nights ago she called here and wanted to meet me in town. I drove in and she stood me up. You mind telling me who the friend was?’