Bristling at his words or his self-congratulatory style, I stepped back, jabbing at a tear. “Wait a minute. Are you sure this isn’t about childishness? I didn’t share with you, so now you won’t share with me.” I meant Adam.
His face hardened, and he pointed an accusing finger at me. “See, this is it. This is what you do. You have to show me how strong you can be, and you use it to shut me out.” He turned and took a few steps, before facing me again.
I was ready. “You can’t have it both ways, Gideon. Am I strong or weak?” I griped, weighing the options, first in one palm, then the other, like a balance scale.
“Let’s just step back here,” he said, smiling through his aggravation.
I tracked him as he paced across black and white tiles. He forced himself into the role of peacemaker. I knew I was being antagonistic, but I wanted answers. Perhaps this was a way to get them.
“Childishness doesn’t describe it, but selfishness might. And envy.”
I felt my eyes nearly leap out of my head. I took a step. “Selfishness. Envy. What are you talking about?”
“Me.”
His one-word answer and his blue eyes soaked through with pain stopped me in my tracks.
“I wanted you to need me. This was my chance to test the man who was not the playboy anymore or the husband who must have been doing something wrong.” His hands slid into his pockets, pulling down the slope of his shoulders. “I wanted to know if I’d grown up, for lack of a better term. Then you took that all away. I love you so much, and this was my chance. Don’t you see?” His eyes bore into mine. “If a tear fell and I went to you, you brushed it away before I got there. I know it sounds corny, but I wanted to dry your tears.”
My heart swelled and broke in the same instant. “But I didn’t want you to see me as a child—that I couldn’t handle being grown up,” I said, reluctantly throwing back the same term. “I didn’t realize it until just now. It was my childhood all over again. There probably has been something wrong with me. It’s the abandonment I felt when my parents left. I did what I did then: My defenses went up. It took Grams forever to get in.” A tear formed at the thought.
We still stood some distance apart.
He tilted his head and his face softened. “You two were so close. I always envied that. I’m ashamed for wanting to benefit from her death. But I thought if something good came from it, it would be that we’d be closer. It was a test.” The teacher shrugged at the simplicity, but that was his world. “Granted, it was a test only I cared about. But I wanted to take it. It was important to me. You’re important to me. Then test day came, and, lord, Wrenn, you changed all the questions.”
I stared, transfixed. He came to me. I just saw us through his eyes. Yesterday, I glimpsed us through Sherrie Lippincott’s. I offered him my conclusion. “Aren’t we a pair of misfits?”
With his thumb, he gently caught the tear slipping down my cheek, then gathered me into his arms. “Oh, I don’t know. I think we fit pretty well.”
Still cuddling, I asked, “What can I do to help you?”
“You’re doing it.” And we tightened our hold on each other.
The omelet Gideon prepared was excellent, then the chef graciously gave me a pass from swabbing plates since I still itched to get outside.
With the slap of the screen door, I crossed the slate patio, my sights on the garage. The garage stands alone in a cove created by the uneven border of woods. Nature’s privacy screen encircles three sides of the house. If it’s possible, the garage is a miniature of the small cottage: stone and brick with white doors and trim.
I pushed the walk-through door open on its old hinges and heard the phone ring in the house. Absently, I wondered if the caller was President Dillon.
For three years, the garage has been home to Gideon’s 1974 white Karmann Ghia. This foreign sports car is to him what weeding is to me: It’s a therapeutic lifeline to his soul. He polished, and tinkered, and recuperated from two remarkably quick marriages in remarkably quick succession. I know very little of the circumstances that placed the car’s healing abilities into play. When I take what I do know through the paces, I didn’t see his marriages ending similarly to my parents’ abandonment of me. He didn’t come home in either instance to find his wife packed and gone.
No, I saw Gideon, standing as still as a statue, watching the woman he married walk away. From my vantage point, I saw neither the face of the husband nor the wife. Perhaps this preserved my peace of mind. Today, I stood alone, studying the car bathed in cool shadow, and owned a keen sense of his emptiness and of the tracks of tears on his cheeks, with no one there to brush them away. If the six-year old me cried, would I have let Grams dry my tears? This, I shall never know.
I moved to the long workbench. It held my most-prized possession: Grams’ garden gloves. The bends of her fingers were still held by the fabric. It was as if she just removed them and would take them up to wear again. I never put them on, but they lay next to my old metal pail for trimmings.
I pulled my own gloves on, then carted the pail, garden scissors, and a hand trowel outside and went first—as I do without fail—past a variegated row of impatiens, to the patch of Shasta daisies. Last summer, I worried about the daisies. This year, they bounced back and were thriving. The tall, strong stems flowered with rays of brilliant white petals, bursting from a contrasting yellow center.
I bent to the daisies. Sunshine stabbed through the trees, warming my back. “I’m out here to talk about guilt. And my guilt starts with you.” My conversation from that point on became an internal one.
Grams and I picked this spot for daisies the spring after I moved in. They were my favorite flower. Hers too. She and I had a tradition of planting daisy seeds together and watching them grow. Our first batch went in the flowerbed under my bedroom window when I was eight. Starting beds of my own meant continuing the custom. Grams purchased a packet of seeds and waited with her ever-enduring tolerance. Without a cross word, a reminder, or a hint of disappointment, she left me with regret and the seeds we never planted. After she died, I transplanted the daises from her house to this spot. The seeds she bought lay on my desk within the golden ring. They were a painful reminder to do the things that are important with the people who are important before it’s too late.
Having collected my snippings and a couple of weedy upstarts in the pail, I shifted to the annuals and picked through healthy plants, just starting to fill in. Inside, Gideon and I didn’t resolve the Adam crisis, but out here, subliminal truths also filled in quite nicely. This thing with the two men could all stem from our bad timing—Gideon’s and mine—and a string of missed connections.
Gideon made several archeological expeditions to Egypt during his college days, extending those days a good bit; and he has waited for a chance to go back. Three things happened three years ago: Gideon had been in line to take the first group of Eastwood’s seniors to Cairo, Professor Berryhill retired without warning, and Grams’ heart trouble started. While the Collegiate Foundation grant lasted, I could’ve gone with him every year for the three or four months he traveled abroad. But I wouldn’t leave Grams, and, given her failing health, he hadn’t asked. He passed on the opportunity and settled for the chairmanship instead, leaving Adam Porter with the plum assignment. Part of this has to be about that. These circumstances bring Adam, Grams, Gideon, and I together, and this grouping is the one Gideon repeatedly focused on earlier. I tossed a weed into the pail, feeling I rooted out the center of the problem.
I went to unwind the hose fed from a waterline at the back of the house and reaffirmed Gideon’s right to his own feelings and beliefs. The kitchen conversation remained about him: his wants, his desires, his needs. In his next breath, he told me he loved me. True to form, I hadn’t felt deserving, but I would nestle deeply into the warmth it brought and feel safe there, as safe with Gideon as I ever felt with Grams.
With the first sputtering shudder of water from the nozzle, I vowed that my writi
ng was never a substitute for needing him. I needed him, and I needed to write. Grams hadn’t planted the writing seed, but she nurtured it to blossom. “Writing and Wrenn are two halves of the same heart. They cannot be separated.” She said this more than once, and, one would presume, always out of earshot of Gideon.
What Gideon hadn’t grasped was that the writing brought me back. It gave me a new beginning. In fact, two beginnings broke ground on the same day. The same Sunday edition of the Messenger where my Baxter Opera House story appeared, also contained Adam Porter’s interview, announcing Eastwood’s grant to study Egyptian artifacts. I see now the road Gideon trod: Adam and I recklessly plowing forward while he worked to keep us on course. Somehow Adam strayed disastrously. I still have very little understanding of that.
After stowing the tools in the garage, I found Gideon inspecting the small flowerbed. He complimented my endeavors, then stepped in to recoil the hose. When I returned from washing my hands, he told me his police statement was ready for his signature. The caller had not been President Dillon. I would have mentioned mine was ready, but logistics prevented us driving in together to sign since I had the rest of my day ahead of me in town. Gideon’s ban from campus gave his day an unexpected turn. No point in emphasizing that.
I hooked my elbow around his, and we walked slowly to the car. His warm loving arms encircled me at the driver’s door, and I let him hold on until he was ready to let go, thinking again of the baggage we each carried into this relationship and of its similarity. His two wives left him as had my two parents.
From the lane, when I thought I might wave, I saw his back disappear into the dark recesses of the garage. My heart ached for him, my dear sweet Gideon.
Rosemont’s Secret
Primrose Park Subdivision was laid out some fifty-odd years ago, just east of the park itself. It was comprised entirely of tract housing, utilizing the same floor plan. With every third house, the floor plan was flipped; every other one got shutters. While Ruby Griswold’s house was not decked out with shutters, it was freshly painted, the color of misty blue wisteria.
I passed in front of Midnight’s bumper and stepped over the curb. Little Carlson’s tricycle stood alone on the sidewalk. The cement path dividing the modest yard led to four steps and a roofed porch. A washtub of scarlet begonias enjoyed the shade at the stoop’s front edge. The tub was new. I could tell by the galvanized shine.
I frowned as the shape and color of some leaves in the tub caught my eye. Without hesitation, my long fingers trailed a vile weed down through the flowers until they met soil, then gave a slow, steady tug. I spied another and repeated the process. Tidy gardener that I am, I could not simply flick them into the yard. Eyeing the plastic sack protecting Little Carlson’s book, I made the following exchange: the book came out of the bag, and the weeds, dripping roots and soil, went in. I dusted my hands, twisted the sack down small, put the book in the bend of my arm, crossed to the screen door, and rapped.
I stood in this very spot several times in past weeks. On each occasion, Ruby regaled me with stories about the Rosemont family. For an old woman on the verge of extinction—her words, not mine—she possessed amazing recall.
From the back of the house, I heard voices, quickly growing in volume.
“Hurry, Ga’ma, hurry,” squealed a youngster.
“Wait for Ga’ma, Little Carlson. Let me see who it is first,” a wise voice cautioned.
An apple-cheeked little boy tore through the kitchen’s doorway into the living room, running with all the steam his short stocky legs could muster. They stuck out from denim cutoffs just like the big boys wore. For all his hasty determination, the boy stopped abruptly just a few feet into the room, staring over at me.
Two seconds later, Ruby Griswold emerged, pulling up behind the child. She, too, was clad in denim shorts. Her T-shirt hailed from The Great Smokey Mountains. Her day-to-day wardrobe told the story of vacation trips she took with her now late husband well into their golden years.
“Oh, it’s Miss Wrenn.” Ruby’s raspy voice was the byproduct of a lifetime of smoking. She grinned broadly, tucking her chin to her neck. The petite woman stepped around her great-grandson and crossed to the door. Even the mesh screen could not obscure the lines webbing her face. They resembled fragile cracks in plaster, ready to crumble without the slightest provocation.
“Hi, Ruby,” I said.
She lifted the hook from the door and pushed it open. I stepped inside and gave her a one-arm hug. The smell of nicotine clung to her mop of thick pewter hair, hanging around her thin shoulders in uneven lengths.
“Hello, Little Carlson.” I used a toned-down volume and added a smile.
In response, the knuckles and fingers of one hand went straight to his mouth.
Ruby fixed loving eyes on the child, then went to stand behind him, hands on his shoulders. I took a few steps closer myself.
“Say hello, sweetheart,” Ruby urged. Little Carlson’s eyes dropped, then he ran in a close circle behind her to hide. Ruby pushed a long section of hair behind her ear. She looked down at the cherubic face. “My bashful boy,” she cooed and stroked his russet curls.
“I have a present for you.” I held the book down to the quarter-sized brown eyes peeking around Ruby’s leg.
“A book,” Ruby said in animated surprise. “You love books.”
With just a little prodding, Ruby persuaded the boy to come forward and receive his gift. He did not make eye contact, but remembered his manners when prompted.
“What a sweet thing you are to do that,” she said from behind tortoise-rimmed frames. Her lively eyes narrowed to make room for full, rounded cheeks.
Little Carlson clutched the book, skipped off to a spot behind her, and dropped to the floor. While she watched him, I marveled at her energy, hands-on, raising a third generation.
At that point, I took in the room. I always knew Ruby to keep a neat house, so I was surprised by the number of boxes of every imaginable size stacked wherever the small room allowed. The carpeting and upholstered furnishings inside the room showed wear. The lamp tables were scarred. A portable television sat on a rolling cart in the corner.
“What’s going on, Ruby?” I cocked my head to read the hand-printed labeling on the nearest carton.
“I’m looking for something for Mr. Clay, and it all got started because of this,” she said, crooking a finger at me.
Stepping around Little Carlson sprawled near the doorway, she led me into the kitchen with its dull linoleum flooring, painted cabinets in short supply, and standard white appliances. One of the room’s two windows lighted the square oak table pushed against the wall. A sheet of map-sized paper lay there. Its hand-drawn tracings were proficient, and I recognized them instantly.
“This is Rosemont’s floor plan. What are you guys up to?”
“Mr. Clay stopped by yesterday, and we spent most of the afternoon on this.”
Her words reminded me I forgot my manners. “Ruby,” I interrupted, “I’m so sorry about Trey. I know Clay told you what happened. It must’ve been a shock. How are you doing?”
Her face darkened into a pained expression. “Well, Mr. Clay had to lend me his handkerchief pretty darn quick. Lordy, I thought I dealt with all those emotions years ago. His mother and I cried our hearts out. But this. Murdered in the house he grew up in. Lordy,” she trailed off.
I knew that with Ruby’s long tenure at Rosement, she had a hand in raising Trey, from his arrival as a newborn through his departure for college. I lay a hand on her shoulder. “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know. Will you?”
“You’re too good to me. Both you and Mr. Clay. I’ll be okay.”
I turned as she glanced past me to Little Carlson using his finger to trace the numbers and chatting to himself. I believed she would be okay.
She pulled out a chair from the table, asked me to sit, and took my balled-up sack to the trash. Crossing to the Frigidaire, she said, “I’ll get us some lemonade, the
n tell you about that.” She pointed to the drawing before me, done in crayon, mostly primary colors.
“Are these Little Carlson’s crayons, or did Clay bring his own?”
She laughed.
“Where’d you find paper like this?”
“Oh, somewhere in my life, I ended up with large sheets of newsprint,” she said, pouring our drinks into tumblers. “Yesterday, it finally got put to good use. We started on this as soon as Mr. Clay told me about the locked doors.”
That piqued my interest.
She carried the tumblers to the table. “I think it’s just awful that he was questioned like a common criminal. And both of your pictures in the paper this morning. Well, I’m trying not to think about that.”
“Me, too. What about the locked doors, Ruby?”
“As soon as he told me the doors were shut up tight and he changed the locks, I knew how Trey got in.”
“How?”
“The secret passageways, Miss Wrenn. I forgot all about them.” Her face beamed with delight. She reached for a pack of Salems and a disposable lighter.
I wiggled to the edge of my seat. “You’re kidding. Where are they?”
“That’s the thing.” She tapped out a cigarette and lit it. “I know they’re there. I just don’t know where. Mr. Clay has been doing some electrical work, so he’s been studying the plans. We decided to draw the house on paper and see what we could figure out.”
The makeshift plans were a sensible replacement. I assumed Clay became separated from the originals when the estate was closed by the authorities.
We paused to sip lemonade.
“I can’t get over it. Secret passages. How cool is that? Finding them would certainly get Clay off the hook.”
“Pretty darn quick, at that.”
Ruby and I spent the next few minutes with our heads together, bent over the floor plan. With Clay’s rendering, I retraced the course he and I followed the morning before, when we stepped from the portico into the foyer and found Trey’s body lying on the marble floor. My index finger pressed to the newsprint substituted for Clay and me.
Deadly Homecoming at Rosemont Page 13