Follow the Dotted Line

by Nancy Hersage

  When she finally arrived in the kitchen, Andy’s fellow gang members were seated at the breakfast table playing Scrabble.

  “Sorry. We ate without you,” Lorna smiled. “Eggs and bacon are in the frying pan.”

  “Wanna play, Aunt Andy?”

  She limped toward the stove, picking up a plate en route.

  “No thanks, Harley. I’m afraid I am the bearer of some good news this morning,” Andy said with resignation. Eyeing the contents of the pan, she pinched a slice of bacon from the surrounding grease and wrapped it in a paper towel, then extracted it, holding it up for examination. “I got a text from Sam this morning.”

  The game made an unscheduled stop.

  Lorna watched her friend wave the strip of pork back and forth like a flag of surrender. “Oy vey,” she muttered.

  “Oy vey,” Andy confirmed. “Let me make two points,” she continued, turning her gaze squarely on her only relative in the room and biting into the bacon at the same time. “First, I will never keep a kosher kitchen—”

  Harley’s body began to contract in anticipation.

  “—and, yes, we are definitely Jewish.”

  “I knew it!” he erupted. “I just knew it!”

  She graciously gave her nephew his moment of jubilation.

  “Do you have any idea what this means?” he trilled.

  “I do not,” she said with faux curiosity, as she walked toward the coffeemaker, trying not to imagine the deep well of stupidity from which he would draw his answer. Dutifully, she took the bait. “Please, Harley. Tell me.”

  “It means Tilda’s powers are for real!”

  “Tilda’s powers?” She’d forgotten all about the question he’d asked at his psychic reading. Great, now even our genealogy is tainted by the she-devil, she thought.

  “And so is that scrying stone,” he whispered, shocked and awed.

  “Ah, yes, the scrying stone,” she repeated. “That does give one pause, doesn’t it?”

  She turned to Lorna for a little tacit pity; the accountant was too busy enjoying the show.

  Andy filled her cup with liquid comfort and felt the familiar chafe of enamel on enamel, as her molars began their predictable grind.

  Chapter 22

  The Attitudes of Entomologists

  “That’s because the scientists who study spiders are generally male,” Lil hypothesized. “Only men would come up with a term like sexual cannibalism.”

  “Still, the truth is, black widows eat their partners, right?” Andy argued.

  “Yes. But insects are not people. And the problem is that people, male people, like to foist their sexist vocabulary onto arachnids. It probably sells more textbooks.”

  Without mentioning the weekend trip to Big Bear, Andy had not-so-nimbly gotten herself into a discussion with her eldest daughter about the chances of Tilda Trivette being a man-eater. They had been talking, uninterrupted by munchkins, for nearly twelve minutes, and Andy feared the end was statistically very near. She tore headlong into the topic.

  “All I’m saying is that when a woman under forty has four husbands and each one of them dies intestate, it sounds a little anthropomorphic, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Lil corrected. “That would be giving the spider Tilda’s characteristics. You’re doing the opposite, Mother. You’re making this whole thing sound animalistic. In fact, you’re trying to make it is sound downright insecticidal. But Tilda is not a spider, and whatever she’s up to, you can’t explain it using the mating habits of another genus and species. If she really is killing other Homo sapiens, somebody’s gotta prove it. And I’m not sure that responsibility falls to you. Which, of course, begs the obvious question.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following your logic, Lil,” said Andy, who was, of course, following it precisely.

  So Lil brought her train of thought into the station. “You’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?”

  “No!” Andy heard herself protest, with just the right touch of indignation. It was amazing how easy Tilda had made it for her to lie to her children. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Good. And have you managed to find out where Tilda is?”

  “Still working on that.”

  “Okay. But you absolutely promise you won’t go near her, wherever she is?”

  “I promise,” Andy pledged, without hesitation. “Right now, I’m trying to learn more about Tilda’s other three husbands.”

  “That’s a little out of your purview, isn’t it? I mean, I thought you were supposed to be finding out what happened to Dad.”

  “I’m looking for a pattern from which to extrapolate, Lil.”

  “The black widow pattern,” Lil said, with a little more condescension than Andy thought necessary.

  “Well, the truth is, I have no idea at this point what’s happened to your dad. So I thought I’d work on his predecessors for a while.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was being disingenuous, Mom.”

  “I wouldn’t have you any other way, Lilly.” Feeling she had fulfilled her obligation to keep her offspring apprised of her current activities, Andy decided to move to higher, safer ground. “How are my Boise Boys?” she asked.

  “We are going to a cape party next weekend. They’re very excited.”

  “What’s a cape party?”

  “You dress as your favorite superhero. The boys like seeing themselves in capes. I kind of get off on seeing them all in tights.”

  “You’re dressing the twins in tights?”

  “Oh, yes! Little matching Batmen. It’s the closest I’m ever going to get to having girls.”

  In the background, Andy heard the battery-powered cacophony of light sabers and knew the end was near.

  “I have to go,” Lil announced, unnecessarily.

  “Right.”

  “Oh, I wanted to ask you a favor.”

  “Out with it,” Andy said, trying not to hold up the conversation.

  “If I send you a bag of clothes, will you take it to Scotland with you next week?”

  “How many clothes?”

  “Jeans. Some shirts. Two jackets. A few sweaters . . .”

  “Lil . . .”

  “You can make room, Mom. I know you can. And Sam really needs them for Jake.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “I’ll send them UPS, so you’ll have plenty of time to pack. Thanks. Love you.”

  “Love you, too, honey.”

  Traveling to Edinburgh had grown from routine to ritual for Andy in the decade since Samantha and Graham had met and married. She often went twice a year, always preferring August, when the days are as warm as they ever get in the neighborhood of the North Sea and when the city’s arts festival turns pub crawling into an aesthetic experience.

  She had made real friends in Edinburgh: Sam’s in-laws, who were Scottish nationalists and spent Saturdays at the lawn bowling club; a young social worker from Belfast who introduced Andy to late-night kabobs and deep fried Mars bars; and a fiddle player from Aberdeen with a degree in math from St. Andrews who made his living writing equations for Ladbrokes, the British gambling consortium. She loved the politics and Georgian architecture and rowdy hen parties wandering up and down Princes Street. Mostly, though, she loved the golf and the Scottish golfer her daughter had the good sense to marry—because Graham was, above all else, a democrat and a gentlemen, and he never failed to take her with him when he went to the course.

  Lil’s package of used boy clothing arrived near the end of the week, and Andy set it next to her large and, as yet, unpacked suitcase at the end of her bed. Her travel preparations had become so mechanical that she rarely got around to serious packing until the day before she left. Besides, since her return from the break-in at Tilda’s cabin, she had been preoccupied with ferreting out the phone number of anyone related to one of Tilda’s former life partners. After five days of highly creative and totally nonproductive Googling, Andy concl
uded the assignment might be above her pay grade. But on this Friday morning she was seized by a stroke of genius that would have put Nicola Tesla to shame. Digging out a copy of the defunct dogs-for-sale ad of husband number three, Gus Andropoulos, Andy entered ‘cocker spaniel puppies eagle pass texas’ into the search engine. The link popped up to the ten-year-old listing on Craigslist with its useless phone number. And right under it was a link to a website called The Del Rio Puppy Palace—Home of the Valley’s Canine Royalty. Del Rio, she could see from Google Maps, was just up the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass. If Gus-the-Third had actually been a dog breeder in the area, maybe he had known the folks at the home of canine royalty, Andy speculated. More importantly, maybe there was still somebody at the Puppy Palace who had known Gus.

  His name, it turned out, was Billy Michaelides, and he was Gus’s second cousin once removed. A generation younger than Gus, Billy had bought puppies from ‘the old man’ on an ad hoc basis and had run into him occasionally at a few of those Big Fat Greek weddings.

  “Did you know his last wife?” Andy asked.

  “Last wife?”

  “Tilda.”

  “Only wife. Gus was never married in his life. Except at the end.”

  “The end?”

  “Just a year or two before he died,” explained Billy. “Kind of a curmudgeon. She was pretty hot, though. Surprised the hell out of everybody when he told us he got married.”

  “They skipped the conventional nuptials?”

  “Yup. He didn’t hang out with the rest of us much. He said they eloped.”

  “Rest of us? You mean the family?”

  “Right.”

  The conversation was flowing like ice-melt now, coursing down from a remote glacier of information Andy never thought she’d find. Why in the hell hadn’t she written down the questions she wanted to ask?

  “How’d he die?” Just keep winging it, she told herself.

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Oh,” said Andy.

  “His sister in Ohio just got his ashes one day in the mail.”

  Andy sat up in order to give her heart more room in which to pound. “No kidding,” she said. “Did you ever have the ashes tested?”

  “What?” he grunted. “Why would we do that?”

  Keep it on the straight and narrow, she chided herself, don’t wander off into the sinister. “No reason.”

  “Why did you say you were interested in Gus?” Billy suddenly inquired, evidently trying to make up for the fact that he had neglected to ask until now.

  “Well, I knew about his puppy business,” she stammered, dumbly. “We, ah, have a mutual acquaintance. In a Kevin-Bacon-sort-of-way. You know, degrees of separation.”

  She stopped talking long enough to see if he had given up on trying to understand her convoluted connection.

  “Un huh,” he hummed, having done just that.

  “And I knew he died. But I didn’t know why. And, well, to be honest, I was just curious.”

  “Okay,” he sighed. “So is there anything else?”

  “Well, sure. If you don’t mind.” She decided she better get to what she really wanted to know before he hung up on her. “Tell me, Billy, just out of curiosity, did Gus own a house?” It was a completely inappropriate question for the circumstance, but she needed an address in order to see if Tilda had filed a grant deed and, with it, a death certificate.

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” he said, growing restless.

  “What I mean is, because I’m just trying to understand the kind of man he was, did he leave anybody in the family a legacy? You know, like a house or—”

  “No.” The man from the Puppy Palace sounded as if he’d sliced off the word with a razor. “His wife got the house. I assume she got everything.” The invisible blade in Billy Michaelides’s voice cut right through the phone line. “Why did you really call me?”

  She was so close. All she wanted was an address. And now she was going to blow it. Time to wander off the beaten path and into the forest prime-evil.

  “Billy,” she said, “I think there’s a chance Gus was murdered.”

  “What? What’s this about? Are you a cop?” he demanded.

  “No. I’m an investigator. And I need the address of the house Gus owned when he died.

  “An investigator?”

  “We have reason to believe Tilda Trivette may be a black widow.” She heard him inhale air and information in one gulp. “Do you know what a black widow is, Billy?”

  “Man-eaters, right?” he said, with the reverence of a male entomologist.

  “Right. Billy. Can you help me out here?”

  Ten minutes later she was hanging up with the information she needed and without having explained precisely who she was. It was the kind of success that made customarily honest people want to take a shower; Andy couldn’t get into the bathroom fast enough.

  Cleansed, head to soul, Andy emerged twenty minutes later to the command of her cell phone. She crossed her office loft and looked down on her desk to see that her youngest child was calling for the second time in a week. The oddity of it induced a hot flash.

  “Ian?”

  “Hi, Mom!” he said.

  She actually blinked from the brightness in his voice. “Well, hi. How are you?”

  “Good. I’m really good. I just called to tell you it went great!” The words practically glowed.

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” she said, trying to match his uncharacteristic enthusiasm, while she recollected what might have turned out wonderful. The date! “You went out with the IRS agent?”

  “Twice.”

  “And you like her?”

  “Lots. She can talk, you know. An easy talker. I love that because, you know, I’m not.”

  “You’re a good talker, Ian.”

  “No, Mom. I make a better listener.”

  He already knew himself better than she did. “So it seems like a good match.”

  “Hope so.”

  “I do, too, honey.”

  Determined not to fill in all the available silences, she waited.

  “I, um, wanted to ask your advice again.”

  More evidence that every time she kept her mouth shut, he opened his. “Sure,” she said.

  “Annabelle, that’s her name, she tells such great stories, you know. Mostly about her family. They crack me up.”

  “Right.”

  “So I thought maybe I should tell a few about my family. You know?”

  “Okay. That sounds like a good idea.”

  “Anyway. I was just wondering. Do you mind . . . do you think it’s all right, if I tell her about Dad?”

  “Dad?”

  “You know. The ashes and the hex and Tilda.”

  “You want to tell her about Tilda?”

  “I mean, it’s a pretty good story, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I think we agreed on that,” she said, harkening back to their last conversation. “In fact, I vaguely remember you accusing me of living in a TV movie.”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything bad by that.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyway, that’s kind of my point. I need a story, and this one is a real whopper, right?”

  She had to smile at how the witch was weaseling her way into everything, including Ian’s love life. “Yup. One of the biggest whoppers ever.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” he agreed, a splash of pride in his voice. “But I thought I should ask your permission first.”

  It seemed like such an unnecessary request. The kind her other children would never bother making. “Why would you need my permission, honey?”

  “Um, well,” he said, haltingly, “I guess because he’s our dad. And because you’re our mom and you once loved him. You know?”

  She did know, actually; he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “It’s okay, Ian. Tell Annabelle the story. It is what it is. Tell her we can’t help ourselves.”

  “You’re
sure you don’t mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind. Really.”

  “Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m glad you haven’t given up on finding Dad. Even if this whole thing seems so bizarre.”

  “No, I haven’t given up.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”

  “Right back at you, Ian.”

  Chapter 23

  Witty Transgressions and Buried Futures

  As personal statements, beards are among the most in-your-face declarations a man can make. They turn sweet countenances severe and often camouflage what would otherwise be thin-skinned weaknesses. Of all human hairs, Andy had long ago concluded that facial hair was the most symbolic. Revolutionaries wore beards. Reactionaries wore beards. Anarchists wore them, and so did artists. Not shaving could be as much a sign of disrespect as it could be a sign of true devotion. Whatever the meaning, whiskers always meant something. Even on Harley Davidson.

  “Where are you off to?” Andy asked, as her bristling nephew passed through the dining room into the kitchen, touching base at the refrigerator, where he grabbed a cold soda and dropped it in his backpack before turning toward the front door.

  “Chabad,” he answered.

  “You know, you could try the reform Temple. They have a great youth program, I hear.”

  “I’m not a youth,” he said, unconsciously scraping his fingers along the grain of the stubble foresting his lower cheeks.

  “Itch much?” she asked.

  “I’m going to Torah study,” he said, ignoring her tease and moving toward a quick exit. “And then I’m staying for the adult Hebrew class.” Harley reached for the door handle but then pulled back and turned to face her, struck by a grave inspiration. He put his fingers together, as if he were forming a steeple of wisdom. “Aunt Andy, why don’t you come with me?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’d like you to come with me.”

  “You would?”

  “Why not? You’re retired, right? So you don’t really have anything to do anymore . . .”