Gourdfellas

by Maggie Bruce

  Everyone agreed that the plan was sound.

  “And,” I said as I finally lifted my fork and scooped up a piece of Nora’s beautiful pie, “I’m going to tell Michele Castro about my conversation with Anita.”

  Elizabeth had returned to the sofa and sat, feet planted straight in front of her, like a schoolgirl trying for a behavior commendation. She quirked an eyebrow and nodded. “We do need to let the police know when we find anything significant. And Anita’s little bombshell definitely qualifies.”

  That phone call wouldn’t be the most fun I ever had, but it had to be done.

  Chapter 21

  Michele Castro asked a couple of questions about Anita and our conversation, and then thanked me for my time. The phone call lasted about seven minutes, and when it was over, I felt deflated. The relief I’d expected lasted only long enough for me to replace the receiver.

  “You have to talk to Seth and find out what’s going on. That’s why you’re so wired. I know you think it’s because you’re falling behind on your writing deadlines. But that’s not why. That’s just another result of all the other stuff. The stuff that you can’t just push into a drawer until later.” My brother pointed his grilled cheese sandwich at me accusingly. “You need to get it over with, Lili. Have the talk. Ask the questions. But do it smart. Safe, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear the answers.” That was it. As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew that Neil was right and I’d have to do it. Otherwise, I’d have only fear, and that was a sack of stones I didn’t want to drag around with me. “Okay, I’m going to do it. We’ll take a walk or something and get things straight.”

  Neil laughed. “You don’t want to do this somewhere that’s isolated, right? No meeting the bad guy in a dark alley.”

  “Not exactly what I had in mind,” I said, smiling. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  I love that Rhinebeck is fifteen miles from Walden Corners. That makes it close enough for me to enjoy the movies at Downstate, the great selection of books at Oblong, and the lovely luxury items that the exclusive shops sell for prices way out of my range. It’s also far enough so that I can avoid the weekenders with attitude that they fling over their shoulders with all the casual self-consciousness of their cashmere sweaters.

  “I need to buy my brother a special birthday gift,” I’d told Seth. “Would you meet me at Ponte Vecchio and help me pick out just the right thing?”

  That part was true.

  And it was also true that when I saw Seth get out of his truck, a pang of regret stabbed at my heart. His son Ron climbed down from the passenger side and the two stood talking and laughing for a minute, until Seth grabbed the six-foot tall boy in a hug and then watched as Ron headed for the movie theater. Even from across the street, his face glowed with satisfaction. At least he didn’t seem to be conflicted about fatherhood.

  I waved, and Seth headed toward me. His jeans showed his long legs off, and his broad shoulders filled out the teal blue sweater nicely. He looked pretty fine, and I almost forgot the plan.

  He kissed my cheek and then stood back and looked at me. “So, should we go walk around the store and pretend that we’re looking at cashmere sweaters or do you want to tell me what this is really about?”

  I’m sure I turned the color of the tulips in the window box of the antique shop down the street.

  “Okay, so I’m not good at prevarication. I do have other talents.” I collected my wits and grabbed Seth’s elbow. “Let’s walk a little and then we’ll go sit down someplace where we can see each others’ eyes.”

  “Always a good idea. I mean, if you’re going to say what I think, then making eye contact is going to make it harder and maybe you won’t say it.”

  As we approached the town parking lot, the meaning of his words hit me. He thought I was going to tell him that I didn’t want to see him any more. This had gotten way out of hand. All because I’d let my imagination get carried away. And I was still doing it.

  “There’s a bench,” I said. “Look casual and maybe no one will know we’re going to grab it.”

  He laughed and sat down on the bench. His eyes scanned my face as I unzipped my sweatshirt and then sat beside him.

  “I’m confused, and we need to talk about a couple of things.” Well, that certainly sounded like the intro to a brush-off. “It’s all about Marjorie’s murder. I’ve been under the microscope, which has me in knots. I no longer trust people I thought I could depend on. I keep seeing things through a dark lens. Some of it has affected how I think about you. Two things especially.”

  Before I could find the words to start the hard part he said, “I bet I know what one of them is. Your gang has connections to everyone in four surroundings counties, so I have to assume that you’ve heard about my little trip to see Anita. I see now that I should have just told you where I was going and why, instead of making up that lame excuse about canceling dinner to do paperwork. I should have let you know who. It was pure business—the house, a possible mortgage customer. I was trying to keep things simple at a time when you had so much on your plate. I’m sure by now your friends have told you that I dated Anita in high school. That was more than twenty years ago, Lili. There’s nothing between us now except a potential business deal. I’m sorry I wasn’t completely honest.”

  Either he was a very good actor, or I wanted to believe him, or he was telling the truth.

  I nodded. “Makes sense, what you’re saying. I can understand that it’s a little tricky, trying to protect me. That’s another conversation, though. Plus, we’re seeing each other, we care about each other, but we don’t owe each other explanations for every move. God, I hope I never get into a relationship where that’s a requirement.”

  “See? I knew you were more than just a pretty face.” His smile softened. “So we’re okay about me going to Tennessee?”

  “I am. You too? Poor Anita—she seemed so angry when I saw her. Is that a permanent state, do you think?” I was stalling and I knew it, avoiding the next question.

  “If she wasn’t born angry, then Marjorie did a fine job of making her that way. When we were young, Anita used to get into so much trouble. Kid stuff, really, when I look back on it. You know—shoplifting, spraypainting graffiti on public buildings, breaking into the school. Even then, I knew that she wanted to get some kind of reaction from her mother, but all she got was grounded. Once we—” His face reddened and he looked away, eyes downcast and head shaking.

  “What? You started to say something. What was it?” I kept my voice soft, neutral.

  He looked up, directly into my eyes. I tried to remove any trace of judgment from my mind. Whatever they did all those years ago, they were only kids.

  “We doped Marjorie’s drink. It was Homecoming Week, my senior year. She begged me to take her to the dance.

  She’d been grounded for one thing or another. The plan was for me to get some of my father’s sleeping pills and then she’d put them in her mother’s Scotch, and she’d slip out so we could go to the dance.”

  So Marjorie and my mother had at least one thing in common.

  “And you did it?” This time, a note of surprise crept into my voice, but I smiled as though to say “Oh, those wacky kids.”

  He nodded. “She emptied two of those capsules into her mother’s glass, waited until Marjorie passed out on the sofa, and then ran out the back door. We had it all planned. Her dress and shoes and stuff were in my car. I waited for her about fifty yards from her house on the side of the road. She walked off into the woods, and voila! Out stepped a party girl.”

  From someone else, in some other situation, the story might have made me smile indulgently. No harm, no foul, and youthful ingenuity had saved the day. But today, all I could think was that Seth Selinsky and Anita Mellon had conspired against Marjorie once. Or was it only once?

  “I guess, looking back, it was really bad judgment on my part. Who knows what could have happened to her mother. But I wasn’t s
o smart then.” He frowned, examining his palms as carefully as a fortuneteller. “Marjorie had this way of making everyone feel either hurt or angry. You know how the kids say it—she was harsh, man. Definitely not the dispenser of warm fuzzies. Made the rest of us appreciate our parents in a whole new way. I realized pretty early on that one of the reasons I had a hard time when we broke up was that I felt sorry for Anita.”

  Had Anita told Seth about her mother’s discovery? If I believed him about the trip, that it was simply business and not an opportunity to conspire to kill Marjorie, then I should ask him.

  “You know I stopped by at Anita’s to return a sweatshirt of Marjorie’s, right?”

  Seth answered with a frown.

  “Well, I did. And she told me something that made me think twice.” My forehead scrunched together. I meant to keep my feelings out of the telling, but my face had other ideas. A compact little bird with glistening brown feathers and a cheerful white face lit on the sidewalk in front of us and pecked energetically at things I couldn’t see.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what she said?”

  When I looked up finally, Seth was turned toward me with a puzzled, expectant expression on his face. “Didn’t she tell you when you saw her? I assume she came back to Walden Corners after the funeral to follow up on what she told me. She could have just let you and Linda handle all the real estate transactions.”

  A hiss of exasperation escaped with Seth’s breath. “Lili, you’re not being clear. And you’re definitely not being straight with me. This feels really crappy. I feel like I’m being accused of something without ever knowing what the charges are. Okay, maybe I’m being dramatic but I still don’t like this.”

  Who could blame him? He was right on all counts.

  “Sorry. Let me try again. Did Anita tell you anything about Marjorie knowing a secret?” I was still holding back, but it was the only way to get a real answer.

  Seth laughed. “If Anita knew Marjorie’s secret, she’d have used it by now. She’s not much for long-term planning. No, she didn’t say anything like that. I hope it isn’t about me.”

  I must have paled, because he took my hand and said, “I was kidding. I don’t have any secrets. Well, maybe my business strategies, but that’s not something that Marjorie would have bothered about. I’m afraid I’m as clueless as anyone about Marjorie’s secret.”

  “If you were about to call me clueless . . .”

  He laughed. “Okay, I answered one question. What’s the other?”

  “Remember the day of the tornado?”

  Seth’s face turned white. “Of course. That was one of the scariest hours of my life. Why? What does—”

  “Lili, Seth, hi.”

  I looked up into Connie Lovett’s clouded eyes. Her bright blue Yankees cap shadowed the top part of her face but it couldn’t hide her gray pallor and the downturned corners of her mouth. She hung onto Mel’s arm as though she might sink to the ground if not for his support. Seth jumped up and motioned for Connie to sit.

  “Thanks for warming it for me,” she said, her voice shaky and her smile weak as Mel helped her lower herself to the hard slats of the bench. “I just wanted to say hello. I thought the sunshine and a little activity would make me feel better. I just saw poor Anita, and that certainly didn’t help anything.”

  “A bad day?” I asked gently.

  “I’m not sure I’ll make it to your place on Tuesday.” Her eyes darted from the bird to her husband, and then, briefly, to my face. “I guess modern medicine has its miracles, but I’m not one of them.”

  “Oh, Connie, I’m sorry you feel so bad. Is there anything I can do? Have you let the doctor know? Maybe he can change the dosage or something. Want me to bring the gourds to you? I can do that, no problem.” I was throwing a lot at her in an attempt to solve a problem that I was powerless to change. I finally willed myself to shut up.

  “Thanks but I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll feel better next week,” she said. “I should go fill that prescription. The doctor said this is the last week I’ll take them.”

  “The last week?” I heard the alarm in my voice and wished I could take it back. “And then what?”

  “Then he’ll try something else,” Mel said gently.

  “Which probably won’t be any better than this. This was the one I was counting on.” Connie pushed herself to a standing position, accepting Mel’s hand to help her steady herself. “Sorry for being the bearer of gloom. You enjoy this day, you hear?”

  I watched as Connie shuffled beside her husband toward the parking lot, wishing with all my might that I had something to break or stomp or throw. It wasn’t fair, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “It’s hard to see her like that. She’s trying, though.” Seth’s voice cracked with emotion. “That’s not always enough, is it?”

  I had no answer. Not to his question, not to Connie’s situation. And definitely not to what I should do next.

  “You said you had two questions for me. You started to say something about the day of the storm.”

  I almost got up, walked away, and took his original explanation as gospel. Nearly threw the whole thing over in favor of getting in my car and going back to my house, where I could cry as loud and as long as I wanted to at the prospect of losing Connie. Instead I said, “Did you try to run me off the road?”

  Seth stared at me, his eyes flickering over parts of my face with such intense concentration that I felt as though he could see through my skin to the bones beneath.

  “Lili, I already told you. I was looking for you. I was so relieved when I saw your car ahead of me. I didn’t try to run you off the road. I don’t know how you can think that.” His voice had grown softer with each word, so that by the time he finished his sentence I was practically reading his lips. “And if you really do think I did something so awful, then . . . I don’t know. What about trust? I mean, isn’t it sort of a requirement?”

  “Let’s back up.” I took a deep breath and glanced up into the face of a man strolling past. His frankly curious gaze made me want to pull the shades down, but there were no shades here. “That truck was silver. There I was, driving along Route Nine, kind of in a hurry because the sky was so, you know, yellow. I knew there was going to be a storm, but I was stuck behind a hay wagon going about zero miles an hour. So I pulled out, right near Walden Lane, and all of a sudden this pickup truck crested the hill. I thought I could speed up and get around the wagon, but the truck kept coming right at me. I had to pull onto the shoulder to keep from getting creamed. By someone driving a silver pickup truck just like yours.”

  Even telling the story set me thrumming. My jaw clenched and my breath quickened, and my arms vibrated like plucked guitar strings.

  “Not so much of a stretch to believe that there could be two people around with silver trucks. Anyway, I wasn’t anywhere near Route Nine. I was on Iron Mill Road, going from your house toward town.” He sat further back, away from me, squeezing himself into a corner of the bench. “You carried this around all this time? Even after we talked about it? No wonder I’ve been picking up weird signals.”

  “I’m sorry. It just . . . I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I guess it was only a coincidence.” If making a royal mess of things was a contest, I’d win in a walk.

  If he was telling the truth.

  “Can we go have coffee down the street and see what the pie special is? And talk about something that’s not loaded, you know, movies or books or politics or religion?”

  Seth’s smile was worth waiting for. “How about something light, like fixing the health care system or the Middle East crisis? Come on, I think it’s your turn to buy.”

  Maybe this had been the right thing to do after all. A sliver of light had entered the cave of my heart’s secrets, and that felt very good indeed.

  Chapter 22

  The final casino meeting was to start at seven o’clock in the high school auditorium, the largest gathering place in town. The b
uzz was that people would be turned away when the fire marshall thought the maximum head count had been reached, and Nora suggested that we arrive no later than six.

  At five forty-five, the parking lot was full.

  “Good thing we drove together. If everyone came four to a car, we might not even get in. Elizabeth and Melissa might not have been able to save us seats, so be prepared to stand.” Nora deftly maneuvered the car into a space behind the open shed that served as an animal barn for 4-H members. “Coach would have said this is stretching the rules. These spots are supposed to be for feed deliveries, but no one’s going to be dropping off mash or bran tonight.”

  “Your name on the auto registration,” I shrugged, happy that she’d mentioned her husband. In the seven months since his death, she’d seldom referred to him in casual conversation.

  “If the car gets towed, I’m not the only one who’ll be walking home.” She waited until I shut my door and locked the car with a chirp. We marched toward the bright lights of the open double doors behind two couples who walked side by side, holding hands. The night air was damp, stars obscured behind thick clouds. It had rained only twice, the day of the big storm and one other, since I’d found the rifle in my attic.

  Could four weeks have passed already?

  According to my work schedule, I’d delivered the spa flyer and the health benefits booklet, was ten days late delivering the Boite Blanc brochure, and hadn’t even started proposals for two more jobs that I’d promised for last week. If I had another month like that, I’d be in trouble.

  Neil was already making plans to go back to his apartment. Mom and Dad had postponed their planned visit to me, waiting until after they helped my brother get settled at home. Michele Castro and Gene Murphy seemed no closer to finding Marjorie Mellon’s killer than they were when Neil first drove up in that long black limo. Connie Lovett’s health had declined, and I’d been through a series of surprises that I never would have predicted when I took Tom Ford up on his offer and moved into the cottage.