Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  And though I owe this long friendship to that meddling teacher, I have tried to never replicate that kind of interference with my own students. But the point is, Sasha and I go way back, through the traumas of her nutsy parents’ multi-marriages, and then her own. Her family is genetically incapable of learning from others’ or their own mistakes when it comes to the opposite sex. And this morning, I realized I could capitalize upon that trait. Duplicitously.

  I reached for the phone, too early, but she would simply have to understand.

  She didn’t, not for a long, yawny while.

  “I adore the idea of moss green,” I said. “It’s different, and the fact that you have china that matches it—well, it’s perfect.”

  Mackenzie had the bathroom door open, defogging the mirror after his shower, and he poked his wet-haired head out and said, “Am I hearing correctly? You’ve had a conversion experience?”

  Even Macavity, snoozing on the duvet, opened one yellow-green eye in amazement.

  I waved off both my skeptical males while Sasha mumbled that she was glad I’d made up my mind, but in truth, the announcement could have waited a few hours.

  If she’d been wide-awake, she would have been as sharp as the feline, and would have been suspicious of my chipper bridal zest. But she was seriously sleep-fogged, which is why I was calling at this hour. “I wanted to catch you before I went to work, because I thought we could hang out today during my lunch hour,” I said. “Settle everything and maybe I could help with something. I mean it’s happening in a matter of days and you must be swamped.”

  “Can’t,” she said. “That’s Tom Severin’s funeral. I’m going. I’m not sure why—respect, I guess—but I am.”

  Good. “Really? Then after school? We could take a walk. It’s pretty out, I think.” It was never easy judging the weather from the loft. We could tell whether it was wet or dry through the skylight, and we could get a sense of how bright a day it was, but temperature was gauged by the attire of passersby three stories down. “Combine that with last-minute shower talk, and TGIF and new sights you missed while you were away.”

  “That’d work.”

  “It’ll be fun.”

  “Can’t wait,” she said. “Girlfriend talk, a glass of wine, a sight or two. Who could ask for anything more?”

  She could have, that’s who. She could have asked for honesty and forthrightness.

  MACKENZIE LEFT A MESSAGE on the cell. “Severin and Cornelius met at the lawyer’s office for about forty-five minutes, till just before noon when Severin ended it to keep another date, the one with Sasha, I have to figure. Beyond that, of course, I couldn’t get any information about what they said, what the tone was, whether it ended acrimoniously or with the two men embracing. My guess? From the way I was told ‘Mr. Severin had to leave for another appointment at noon,’ I had the feeling the meeting could have, or should have lasted longer, but when he left, nothing was resolved between them.”

  Sasha had said it was a quick, short lunch. He had an appointment afterward, which, given how soon after that he’d come to the school, and given that he hadn’t had the school in mind until that lunch with Sasha, had to mean the appointment was at the coffee shop, and brief. So brief that he got his tea to go.

  Or did he leave with the other person? Could that person have come to Philly Prep with him?

  Finding a take-out for tea between the restaurant where Sasha had met him and Philly Prep wasn’t that difficult, but how to find out who else was there? That seemed close to impossible.

  Penelope drank tea. Was she the date?

  I heard myself thank the message for the information and felt like a fool. The nice thing about the omnipresent cell phones—and there are a few nice things about them—is that nobody knows if you’re actually speaking to someone, or having a psychotic break and talking to your hand.

  I turned off and closed the phone and tried to forget about everything except my day job. Friendly letter writing—as if people still did that. Oral book reports. The slithy toves.

  My ninth-graders were wending their way through a poetry unit, and I was hoping to actually help them feel the human urge to make music with words, and the joy of it. We’d reminisced and reread childhood favorites from Mother Goose et al, then read and listened to ballads, and it felt time to toss in “Jabberwocky,” that nonsensical mock-ballad that’s so much fun.

  And, continuing my day’s theme of deception and duplicity, I sneaked into their minds and planted a secret grammar lesson.

  “Jabberwocky” substitutes delicious nonsense words, but slots them precisely and in the manner of our actual language, so it can also quietly teach a lesson or two about how differently functioning words build into meaning.

  Imagine the groans and sighs if I told them we were going to talk about syntax. Thanks to Lewis Carroll, I didn’t have to. “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” I read. “What do you picture when I read that peculiar sentence?”

  I knew their first instinct was to picture me in a straitjacket. Gibberish, nonsense, silliness. Sometimes the most difficult lesson was getting them to loosen up, enjoy the games of language. “There is no wrong answer possible,” I said.

  “Slithy sounds slimey,” someone said, and “Brillig—sounds like a weather report,” another person said, “because ‘twas’—it was something. Rainy? Hot?” “I think a tove looks like an elephant seal—you know the ones with the huge trunk? They’re so ugly they’re cool. I think they’d gyre and gimble, and shake their noses.”

  We talked amiably about the role different sorts of words play in sentences. We had syntax without tears.

  O frabjous day!

  SASHA HAD BEEN BACK for three months, but this was the first time I was in her apartment. “It’s so different,” I said, feeling vaguely cheated. I wanted to go home again—to her home—and once more, had found out it wasn’t possible.

  “Like it?”

  I nodded, though I still wanted it to be a place of tossed scarves and the green tufted chair with the carved mahogany arms that had been painful to sit in, and slightly ridiculous, but very Sasha. Now, as spacious as the place was—Sasha’s condo was the guilty spoils of one of her parents’ many marriages and divorces—it seemed overstuffed, and its contours covered with chintz and wildly rampaging flowers. About as un-Sasha as it gets. “A man is involved in this, right?”

  “A lesser member of the nobility,” she said. “He not only offered me a container’s worth of furniture, but he shipped it here for me. He had too many houses, and he was consolidating a few, and there I was. We were briefly engaged.” She put a hand up. “It wasn’t a long enough betrothal for me to get around to mentioning it.”

  “I assume the new china is from him, too?”

  She nodded. “He was shipping stuff over to his daughter, and she didn’t want everything he wanted to get rid of. My pieces filled out the container. Kind of a pan-Atlantic Goodwill donation.” The room looked as if it were waiting for antimacassars.

  “But I don’t know,” she said, “I keep having the oddest sensation that I should be gardening, or visiting the vicar.”

  This furniture was doomed. I asked no more about the minor royalty and the engagement. Since she’d been home, Sasha had casually mentioned at least seven men with whom she’d been involved during the year she was away. As she herself has said, if you lower your standards sufficiently, you can really have a good time.

  She filled two glasses with white wine. “Why go in search of a bar?” she asked. “We can take a walk later. TGIF indeed. This has been a hell of a week.”

  “How was the funeral?”

  She shrugged and settled herself on red-flower-splashed chintz. “How can funerals be? Sad, but oddly unemotional at the same time. Very large, but you didn’t have the feeling it was because he was beloved. More because he was important. Or more precisely—rich kind of important. Not because he invented anything or was leading something. He was just
plugged in.”

  “Did they give talks—eulogies?”

  She shook her head. “Strictly formal. The minister gave the eulogy and it was . . . I thought I’d find out more about him there, but I didn’t, not really. That was kind of sad. Nobody personalized the loss by saying what role he’d played in their life, or anything like that.”

  I’d hoped to find things out secondhand because both Sasha and Mackenzie had been there, but I could see that I wasn’t going to.

  “The most interesting part was beforehand,” Sasha said. “The couple sitting next to me. The woman, I assume the wife, kept half-rising, looking around until her husband would yank her back down and say stuff like ‘Nonsense,’ and ‘You’re being too obvious!’ I thought for sure somebody famous was arriving, but eventually I heard them whispering—but the way old, slightly deaf people think is whispering—about ‘her’ and whether she’d show up, and that it was only right that she should, but she probably wouldn’t and was she locked up somewhere or maybe not even alive, and why wasn’t she mentioned in the obituary.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

  I was hooked. “Did they ever say who they meant?”

  “What do you think it was? A stupid TV crime show? Of course they didn’t say! They knew perfectly well who they were talking about.”

  “You think he had a fourth wife who wasn’t mentioned in the obituary?”

  “I thought maybe they meant his fiancée—the ex-fiancée,” Sasha said, “except that I think somebody said she was there. Georgeanne, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And of course then they got into the maybe she’s dead business.”

  “A mystery.”

  “Indeed.” She sipped more of her wine, then leaned back farther on her busy country-house sofa.

  “And now . . .” Sasha said with something close to the sound of a drumroll, “Amanda Pepper will, if she wants to live, reveal the true purpose of her mission here today.”

  “Me? What are you talking about? I’m here about the shower.”

  She slowly shook her head back and forth. “Nooooo,” she said. “Not in this lifetime, bunky.”

  “How long have you suspected?”

  “Not suspected. Known. And only since you phoned this morning. Here’s a hot tip for your career as a sleuthette. If you’re pretending to be here for a reason, mention that reason. You haven’t remembered to say a word about the shower since you got here.”

  “What can I say except whoops?”

  “Plus,” she said, “I saw Mister No-First-Name at the funeral. Why is that? Am I to believe you stumbled over Tom Severin’s body and that bonded both of you to him forever, so that C.K. felt compelled to witness his interment?”

  “We were hired.”

  She nodded acknowledgment. “I appreciate your candor, albeit belated, but who hired you? The wife he was about to dump? Oh, no—wait—the fiancée he had already dumped. She had it in for me, all right. Not that he ended it with her because of me. He would have, of course, but not quite that instantaneously. But the wife—you following this?—she phoned me. Me! She called me ‘a bitch from England.’ Moi.” She grinned. “Being a bitch from England is so much more fun than being a bitch from Philly.”

  “It’s not about you.”

  “I am so a bitch from England.”

  “Being hired, I mean. It wasn’t about your relationship with Tom Severin.”

  Her shoulders slumped and she looked altogether disappointed by the news. “Then who could it be about? The police haven’t arrested anyone, so you can’t be working for the defense.”

  “Mrs. Severin Senior’s social secretary—”

  “Is this a limerick?”

  “—wanted us to look into something.”

  “What?”

  I shook my head.

  She tsked and sighed. “Okay. But what did you really want with me? Not the description of the funeral because your man was there.”

  “Right, although he wouldn’t have heard that couple next to you, so thanks.”

  She waited.

  “I don’t know, Sasha. Honestly. My hope was that he said something to you—pillow talk, perhaps—that didn’t seem significant at the time, but that might be a line of investigation nobody’s thought about yet.”

  “He didn’t just fall down those stairs? He was murdered?”

  “Looks that way because he was drugged. Not a fun-time drug that he might have given himself. And not a fatal poison, at least not normally. A stupid date-rape drug.”

  “Makes no sense.”

  “Nothing makes sense in this. But I thought you might remember something he said. After all, he told you he was being bothered.”

  “By the phone calls. Yeah. But he didn’t know who was calling him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Anything useful? Not that I can think of right off the bat. We only had three times together. We talked about my London year, we talked about his trips there, we talked about foods we liked—you know the drill. It wasn’t till that day when I mentioned your wedding—I was hoping he’d be my date, Manda . . .” She grew quiet.

  “The phone calls,” I prompted.

  She shrugged and poured more wine. “I told you what I remembered. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore after he told me about it, so I didn’t push.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “I don’t know where to go with this, and I don’t think the police do, either.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’ll work out.”

  “I’m afraid it will work out that one of my students is arrested for this.”

  “Why would he?”

  “Because it turns out he’s Severin’s son. From the first marriage, and Severin treated him with contempt.”

  “Maybe the kid really did do it. It makes sense.”

  “No.” I refused to accept that. “He had motive, the drug’s one that every kid in my school says they can get hold of easily, but he couldn’t have been where the drug was administered and in the school building at the same time.” I kept the cast and the broken cheekbone to myself. “The police have questioned him, though. I’m sure he’s a suspect.”

  “Well, they make mistakes.” Her expression suddenly brightened. “Hey—here’s what to do. Tell them—”

  “Who?”

  “The police. Tell them they’re ignoring the obvious and in this case, the so very obvious!”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Detecting one-oh-one, girl. Come on—what’s the bottom line of sleuthing? Surely you take a break from great lit every so often and read a mystery.”

  “You want me to tell the cops that the butler did it?”

  “Did he? That wasn’t what I had in mind.”

  “You’ve had too much wine.”

  She poured herself still more, then leaned close. “It’s a literary convention, and I’m shocked and dismayed by your ignorance. What do we do when faced with crime? We cherchez la femme! And hasn’t this particular dear departed provided you with a bevy of femmes for which to cherchez? My God, there are three wives, a fiancée, the limerick lady—”

  “Who?”

  “The Severin Senior’s social secretary—and me. And don’t forget his mother, who is known to be something of a nightmare. And those are the ones we know about, so cherchez, cherchez, and remind those cops to do the same thing.”

  Imagine, the teachers in junior high hadn’t thought Sasha was bright.

  * * *

  Fifteen

  * * *

  * * *

  PENELOPE Koepple did not respect the sanctity of the weekend. She phoned at twenty-six minutes past seven A.M. That would be annoying on a workday, but on Saturday, it was first alarming, and then . . . alarming, because the only rationale would be an emergency, Penelope telling us either that the building was on fire or that we ourselves were fired. I yawned audibly into the receiver. It was possibly unintentional.

  “Did
I wake you?” she asked, not sounding at all concerned.

  I was by now so perturbed by her imperial manner that I used the snarky response that forced apologies out of people. “Oh, it’s all right,” I said. “I was going to have to wake up at some point, anyway.”

  “Good, then,” she snapped. I was sure there were Prussian generals on every branch of the Koepple family tree. “In that case, let us have our status conference within the hour.”

  “Our . . . ?” No matter how groggy I was, I knew I’d never have agreed to anything called a “status conference.” What did it even mean? An update? Did I have to teach her to communicate more clearly? Why didn’t she say she wanted to know what we were doing with her money and what we had found out about or fabricated against Cornelius Westerly?

  I would have told her on the phone. Later in the morning.

  I had planned, I had fantasized, I had anticipated with great pleasure, a dawdling morning, the kind where I didn’t have to do anything immediately. Anything I didn’t want to do, that was.

  And Penelope was most assuredly not on my “want-to” list. She was, however, pressed for time, she said. She didn’t say why, but I remembered the news that she was being let go, and I’m sure she felt that pressure day in and day out. At least we’d get some more of our fee up front today, and that in itself was reason enough to meet.

  My partner in crime-solving was not overjoyed by this rescheduling. He’d planned to spend every free minute of the day studying for a looming midterm and finishing a paper. Such were our wild weekend plans.

  I must admit walking to the so-called status conference was almost as enjoyable as dawdling around the loft would have been. The glorious autumnal weather was hanging in there, with air so crisp I could almost hear it crackle, and even in Center City, it carried the scent of cider. We walked south on Second Street, then turned up Chestnut to Independence Mall, which always feels like time travel of the best sort: Carpenter’s Hall, the First—and Second—Bank of the U.S., Independence Hall, the Philadelphia Exchange, the new democracy’s political shrines in all their unprepossessing red brick glory, the shrines to money veneered with marble and built in classical style, as if afraid to try anything too new.