by J. D. Griffo
Alberta wasn’t entirely sure she was comfortable in her relationship with Sloan McLelland, a librarian at the Tranquility Public Library and the unofficial town historian, who had taken her to dinner several times. He was a true gentleman and she enjoyed his company, but it was odd dating a man after forty years of marriage. Even if those forty years of marriage weren’t always blissful and idyllic. Alberta felt even less comfortable when she bent over and attempted to touch her toes, but enduring physical pain was better than enduring the conversation Jinx was trying to have. She let her head hang upside down and desperately tried to elongate her fingers so they could reach the edges of her sneakers, but only succeeded in grabbing hold of her shins. Meanwhile, Jinx continued her questioning in an even more inappropriate manner.
“Does that mean that the two of you have done it already?!”
In response to Jinx’s question, Alberta raised her head so quickly she got dizzy and had to hold onto the kitchen counter to steady herself. Only when the room stopped spinning was she able to reply.
“That, Signorina Maldonado, is none of your business,” Alberta said. “But, of course, the answer is absolutely not. What kind of woman do you take me for?”
“The normal kind.”
Standing up, Jinx bent her leg at the knee and grabbed her ankle with her hand, pressing the heel of her foot into her buttock. Alberta tried to mimic the position, but could only manage to bend her leg until it was half a foot away from her own bum. Normally, Jinx would get behind Alberta and coax her into a full stretch, but this morning she was more interested in coaxing her grandmother into spilling the salacious details of her sex life.
Waving her finger at Jinx, Alberta declared, “A normal girl doesn’t talk about such personal things, you remember that.”
“I don’t want all the details,” Jinx started, then corrected herself. “That’s a lie, actually I do, but I’ll take what I can get. I’ve been patient long enough, Gram, I want to know all about your boyfriend.”
“Sloan McLelland isn’t my boyfriend!”
“He is, too!”
“He’s taken me out to a few dinners, that’s all.”
“That is so not all!” Jinx contradicted, “He was also your date for the Tranquility Waterfest Aqua Ball. How can you forget such a special event like that? Which, by the way, was your first date.”
“So we’ve gone out to a few dinners . . . and the Aqua Ball.”
“Which was back in August and it’s now October, which means Sloan McLelland is officially your boyfriend.”
Alberta had been around Jinx’s company long enough now to know that she wasn’t going to win the conversation so while she didn’t necessarily agree with her granddaughter that she had a boyfriend, she knew that it was futile to convince her otherwise.
“Fine, you win!” Alberta exclaimed. “Your grandmother’s got a boyfriend.”
“I knew it!”
Jinx squealed so loudly it made Lola run out of the kitchen. Alberta shook her head, but couldn’t suppress a smile as she watched Jinx do a happy dance in the middle of her kitchen. Her display of unbridled joy was almost infectious, and if Alberta didn’t need to conserve all her energy to run for over a mile, she might have joined in. But she knew that within a few minutes she was going to be huffing and puffing and silently cursing herself for ever agreeing to such a cockamamie scheme, and that if she didn’t take control of the situation and get them both out of the house immediately, she was going to flop on the couch next to Lola and watch the morning news shows. Grabbing the bottle of water she wouldn’t dare leave behind, Alberta knew it was time to start their workout.
“C’mon, let’s defy every law of nature and trick this body of mine into thinking it can do something more stressful than walk,” Alberta announced, leading them both out of the house.
“Try to keep up, Alberta,” Jinx said as she began to jog in place. “Or should I say the future Mrs. McLelland.”
“You listen to me, Jinx!”
But Jinx was already several feet ahead so if Alberta wanted her granddaughter to hear what she had to say she was going to have to pick up the pace. Grumbling, she moved her legs as fast as possible and pumped her arms at her sides, but was still jogging several strides behind Jinx. Alberta sighed heavily and muttered, “I guess it’s going to be one of those mornings.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later the women trotted through the ornate archway that signified the entrance to Tranquility Park. Over twelve feet high, the black metal structure was a recent addition to the park and designed and built by a local artist. The sides depicted branches that twisted and intertwined with one another and were embellished with leaves, birds, and even a few squirrels. On the top, Tranquility Park was written in script and directly underneath the lettering, at the arch’s midpoint, hung a fixture that Jinx had told Alberta was the Chinese symbol for tranquility. It was comprised of a period on top of a horizontal line that had vertical etchings on either ends, and below the line was what looked like a J. The individual components of the design were welded together with thin pieces of metal and since it dangled several feet above even the tallest person’s head, each element appeared to be floating in space. It was meant to offer tranquility and peace to all who entered the park, which Alberta thought was a lovely sentiment, but the main reason she liked it was because the J made her think of Jinx. It also served as a reminder that whenever they jogged underneath it they had hit the halfway mark of their run.
“You should drink some water, Gram.”
Jinx made the same comment every time they entered the park, and it always made Alberta smile because it reminded her of the old Italian women from her childhood, who could be counted on to utter the same remark over and over again. In a flash, Alberta was whisked back to Hoboken, New Jersey, and could clearly see Mrs. Esposito, a widow of thirty-some-odd years, leaning out of her second story window, elbows resting on a folded dish towel, yelling, “Careful crossing that street, Berta, the traffic lights are no good over there, no good at all.” She said the same thing every single time she saw Alberta headed toward Washington Street, which was at least twice a week, and the words always sounded as if they were being spoken for the first time. Some things really never did change.
Surprisingly Alberta didn’t feel the need to hydrate even though it had become habit to take a swig of water when she entered the park. She figured she might as well continue the status quo and take a drink so she wouldn’t disappoint her granddaughter. During the pause in their run, she thought it would be a good time to remind Jinx that she also hadn’t forgotten their earlier conversation and that Alberta could be just as meddlesome.
“So how’s your boyfriend, lovey?” Alberta asked.
Unlike Alberta, however, Jinx was delighted to talk about her boyfriend.
“Freddy’s wonderful,” Jinx shared. “He’s smart, sweet, funny, and not preoccupied with sex like most guys his age.”
That was a tad more information than Alberta had hoped Jinx would share about Freddy Frangelico, nonetheless, she was relieved to hear that Freddy was respectful. The disclosure, however, made Alberta realize she felt even more uncomfortable talking about her granddaughter’s sex life than she was talking about her own, so she deliberately turned away from Jinx to avoid eye contact and took in the scenery.
The park grounds were vibrant, fertile, and not overly manicured so it possessed a hint of an uncivilized landscape. Small enclaves looked like they had been left untouched from before the time the park was built so as to become a window into the town’s past; this is what it had looked like before structure and order took over. Alberta didn’t remember coming here as a young girl when her family visited the lake area, but she had an idea that it had been more forest than park. It would’ve been fun to explore the area with her siblings and cousins playing adventurers on the hunt for some hidden treasure. Just as Alberta was about to turn back to Jinx, she discovered that some treasures were lying right out in the
open.
About five hundred yards away was something Alberta had never seen before, a tree house tucked into the branches of a very large and presumably very old oak tree.
“Jinx, do you see that over there?”
Looking in Alberta’s direction, it took Jinx a few seconds and a few squints to see what her grandmother was referring to. “Looks like a tree house.”
“I’ve never noticed that before, have you?”
“No,” Jinx admitted. “Guess I’m too busy listening to music or talking to you to notice my surroundings when I jog through here.”
The tree house wasn’t large, less than fifty square feet and made out of plywood that was weather-beaten but still in decent condition. There were a few patches of the slanted roof that were threadbare, but otherwise it looked like whoever built the structure used quality materials and knew what he was doing. There was a window next to the front door that Alberta imagined was once adorned with curtains that would blow in the breeze. Now, the window was just an opening that offered a view right into the interior of the tree house.
“Did you see that?!”
“What now?” Jinx asked as she started to jog in place.
“I saw a shadow or something inside the tree house,” Alberta said. “Through the window.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“I could’ve sworn I saw something,” Alberta insisted, jogging in place alongside Jinx.
“Probably just a bird living the high life,” Jinx surmised. “Can you imagine how roomy that thing must be to some bird family after having to live cramped together in a little bird’s nest?”
“Maybe,” Alberta said, though she was unconvinced of Jinx’s theory.
Alberta felt a tingle in her chest and although it could have been a muscle spasm, her intuition told her Jinx was off the mark.
“Alberta and Sloan sittin’ in a tree,” Jinx sang.
She was also off-key.
“Ah cavolo! You sing worse than you cook.”
Laughing, Jinx replied, “That may be true, but I still sing the truth!”
Once again Jinx sprinted ahead and Alberta had to increase her speed if she wanted to keep up with her granddaughter. After about thirty seconds of a fast-paced run, Jinx slowed down her pace dramatically allowing Alberta to pass her by.
“Hurry up, lovey!” Alberta cried. “You don’t want to get beat by an old lady.”
But Jinx didn’t care. She held back knowing, instinctively, that sometimes the old lady was the best person to lead the way.
* * *
The women continued to jog around the circumference of the park, and on their way back, Alberta steered them on a slightly different route than the one they usually took so they could wind up directly underneath the tree house. Alberta wasn’t sure why, but she wanted to take a closer look. Maybe she found it odd that she had never noticed the tree house before, or maybe it was intriguing to her because she had never seen any kind of tree house up close. There was also a third option: that her earlier intuition was right and she subconsciously knew the house snuggled into the body of the tree was soon to become a crime scene.
Alberta and Jinx stopped in their tracks at the same time when they saw the body lying in the grass just underneath the tree house. There was no reason to search for a pulse because they could tell from the unnatural position the man’s body was in that he was dead.
“Dove c’è la vita, c’è la morte,” Alberta gasped.
Jinx’s Italian was getting better since she had been spending time around her older relatives, who spoke the language fluently, but she was too preoccupied staring at the dead body to translate. “What did you say, Gram?”
“Where there’s life, there’s death.”
Alberta’s tingle in her chest hadn’t been a muscle spasm. It had been her instinct telling her that death, once again, had disturbed the peaceful town of Tranquility.
CHAPTER 2
Guarda prima di saltare.
“Here we go again!”
Jinx didn’t have to say another word for Alberta to understand exactly what she was talking about. They had been in this position before, remarkably just a few months ago, and as unbelievable as it was, history was already repeating itself.
“Another dead body showing up right at your feet, Gram. And I mean literally right at your feet.”
What were the odds, Alberta thought, that something like this could happen again? And so soon? Weren’t there rules according to the laws of the universe that prevented such things from happening? Wasn’t stumbling on a dead body once in a person’s lifetime enough to fill a quota? Regardless of how much of a long shot it was, there was no denying that Alberta was again the witness to death.
“Please do not tell me that you know this one, too,” Jinx said. “That would be way too much of an eerie coincidence.”
Ignoring Jinx, Alberta touched the gold crucifix she always wore around her neck and silently recited the Hail Mary, her go-to prayer. This time she didn’t know the lifeless body lying on the grass in front of her and she had no obvious history with the man, but she still felt a connection. She didn’t know who the man was or if he had been Catholic, Jewish, or religious at all, but she knew that every recently departed soul deserved some kind of acknowledgment.
Following Alberta’s lead, Jinx bowed her head to add her own silent prayer to the unspoken ceremony. After Alberta kissed her crucifix, Jinx joined her in making the sign of the cross, though she was a few beats behind her grandmother. Still, she had participated and hoped God would understand that she was a bit rusty when executing spiritual formalities. When it came to more material matters, Jinx was much more focused. And yet she still wasn’t as quick as her grandmother.
Alberta knelt down to take a closer look at the man’s body, and like an obedient student Jinx took the same position on the other side of the corpse. From a distance they resembled experienced professionals objectively conducting a forensic examination instead of the amateur sleuths that they were. But even though they had no formal training, they had plenty of street smarts.
The man looked to be in his sixties, but Alberta sensed that he was younger and only appeared older because he had led a hardscrabble life. She recognized the craggy lines on the sides of the man’s face, the splotchy skin, the receding hairline, and especially the thick, red veins decorating his nose. It was all physical evidence that, for whatever reason, the man had not had an easy life.
He reminded Alberta of her Uncle Paolo, her father’s older brother. Paolo had the same upbringing as Frank, Alberta’s father, the same advantages and disadvantages, and yet the two men couldn’t have turned out any different. They both married and had three children, but the comparison stopped there. While Frank was the strong and silent, family-oriented man, Paolo was loud, obnoxious and got even louder and more obnoxious when he drank, which was almost daily. Where Alberta’s father died at eighty-two, surrounded by his family, Uncle Paolo died from a stroke a few days after his sixty-first birthday, alone in a neighborhood bar. Alberta would never forget how ancient he looked lying in his casket because no amount of mortician’s magic had been able to wipe away the years of self-induced physical trauma.
Looking at this unknown man, Alberta didn’t know if his countenance was the result of his own reckless choices or if life simply had been unkind to him. Either way, she could feel the tears well up in her eyes because she understood what it was like to buckle under pressure. She didn’t approve of her Uncle Paolo’s lifestyle, but she understood what could drive a person to act so irresponsibly.
Alberta shook her head roughly and wiped away a few defiant tears. It wasn’t time to contemplate this man’s past, whatever that might be, it was time to try and figure out how he had come to his present state. And what a state he was in.
His eyes were closed and his head was twisted to the right so if you looked no further, he appeared to be asleep. From the neck down, unfortunately, he didn’t look as restful. His left a
rm was bent at the elbow with his hand reaching overhead, while his right arm lay limp against his side. His left leg looked normal, but his right must have taken the brunt of the fall as it appeared to be pulled from its socket and was lying almost horizontal from his hip. Improperly, it reminded Alberta of Jinx stretching on the floor of her kitchen, but she knew that there was no way this man would have been able to achieve that position while he was alive. His flexibility was a result of his death.
But how did he die? Alberta bent closer to the man’s face searching for a clue and once again she was overcome by an unwelcome feeling of déjà vu. She couldn’t believe that for the second time in only a few months she was face-to-face with a deceased body. And not the preserved, embalmed body on display at a wake, but the raw, untouched body with the kiss of death still fresh on its lips. Leaning back, Alberta examined the face in its entirety and not each individual feature, and she concluded that something was off.
Just as she leaned in closer to get a better look there was a banging so loud that it startled her and Jinx, causing them to gasp at the same time.
“What was that?” they screamed in unison.
Looking around to see who or what was nearby and making such a ruckus, it wasn’t until they heard the noise again that they realized it was coming from above. The door to the tree house swung outward and banged a third time against the front wall as it revealed itself to be the culprit. Somehow the door had been opened but never locked. Perhaps that was because the person who unlocked the door was now lying at their feet.
“He must’ve accidentally fallen out of the tree house?” Jinx surmised.
Alberta looked at the dead body and then up at the door that was still moving to and fro languidly in the now stagnant air and judged Jinx to be right.
“Guarda prima di saltare.”
Again, Jinx was confused by the foreign phrase. This time, however, she didn’t have to ask for it to be translated as Alberta could tell by her expression that she was still far from mastering their family’s native tongue so she interpreted the phrase into English. “Look before you leap.”