Pawing Through the Past

by Rita Mae Brown

“In a way it was. I roped Chris into this because of a bet we made on a golf game this summer. Of course, she was really hoping to meet a man and she found Dennis. Right now, I doubt she’s too happy about that, too.”

  “I didn’t say one thing about all that extra food.” Pewter waited for praise to follow.

  “Miracle. I’ve lived to see a miracle.” Mrs. Murphy gaily sped out of the gym.

  Cynthia sat in her squad car in the parking lot. The school, even with the heat on, was a bit chilly. The car heater warmed her. She’d found no residue on anyone’s hands or clothing. The killer probably wore plastic gloves. She’d had every garbage can at school checked. While she held everyone in the gym, Jason went through the dumpster. Nothing—but disposing of a thin pair of gloves would have been easy.

  * * *

  42

  As Harry drove away from Crozet High School she glanced in her rearview mirror at the brick building. The four white pillars on the front lent what really was a simple structure a distinguished air. Stained glass over the double-door main entrance bore the initials CHS in blue against a yellow background.

  Situated on a slight rise, the school overlooked a sweeping valley to the east, a view now partially obscured by the brand-new, expensive grade school on the opposite side of the state road. The mountains, to the west, provided a backdrop.

  Like most high-school students, when she attended Crozet High she took it for granted. She never thought about architecture, the lovely setting, the nearness to the village of Crozet. She thought about her friends, the football games, her grades.

  A memory floated into her mind, a soft breeze from an earlier time. She had been wearing a beautiful fuchsia sweater and Fair wore a deep turquoise one. They hadn’t intended to color coordinate but the effect, when they stood together, was startling.

  She remembered that junior year, hurrying from her classroom during break, hoping to catch sight of Fair as he moved on to his next class. When she’d see him her heart would skip a beat like in some corny song lyric. She didn’t know exactly what she was feeling or why she was feeling it, only that the sensation was disquieting yet simultaneously pleasurable. She thought she was the only person in the world to feel like this. People didn’t much talk about emotions at Crozet High, or if they did, she’d missed it. Then, too, an extravagant display of emotion was for people who lived elsewhere—not Virginia. Young though they all were, they had learned that vital lesson. And today most of them had forgotten it, good manners worn out by fear, police questioning, and suspicion of one another.

  Harry burst into tears.

  “Mom, what’s the matter?” Mrs. Murphy put her paws on Harry’s shoulder to lick the right side of her face.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll protect you.” Tucker’s soft brown eyes seemed even kinder than usual.

  “Yeah, scratch that murderer’s eyes out!” Pewter puffed up.

  “Damn, I never have Kleenex in the truck.” She sniffled. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Nostalgia.” She petted Murphy, then reached over her to pat the other two as she turned right toward home. “Why is it that when I look back, it seems better? I was so innocent, which is another word for stupid.” She sniffed again but the tears continued to roll. “I fell in love with my high-school boyfriend and married him. I actually thought we’d live happily ever after. I never thought about—well—the things that happen. I never even thought about paying the bills. I supposed I would live on air.” She pulled over to the side of the road, put on her flashers, and reached under the seat, pulling out a rag she used to clean the windshield. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Smells like oil. I must have used this to check my oil. That’s dumb—putting it back in the cab.” She closed her eyes. A headache fast approached from the direction of lost youth.

  “We love you,” Tucker said for all of them.

  “I love you guys,” she replied, then bawled anew, feeling, like so many people, that the only true love comes from one’s pets. “I love Fair, but is it real? Or is it just the memories from before? This is one hell of a reunion.”

  Mrs. Murphy tried the sensible approach. “Time will tell. If you two can be together, you’ll know it if you just go slow. About your reunion, how could anyone not feel terrible?”

  “Some nutcase,” Pewter said. “Someone who is now feeling very powerful.”

  Tucker nuzzled up to Harry. “Mom, it’s the reunion. It’s stirred up feelings, good and evil.”

  She blew her nose again, popped the truck in gear, and headed toward home. “I guess when I was in high school I thought trouble happened to other people, not to me. I had a wrong number.” She ruefully laughed. “But you know, kids, that love is so pure when you’re young. It never comes again. Maybe you fall in love again and maybe it’s a wiser and better love but it’s never that pure, uncomplicated love.”

  “Humans worry too much about time,” Pewter observed. “Suppose they can’t help it. There’s clocks and watches and deadlines like April fifteenth. It’d make me a raving lunatic.”

  “Hasn’t helped them any.” Tucker nudged close to Harry and stared out the window as the familiar small houses and larger farms ticked by.

  Mrs. Murphy sat on the back of the seat. She had an even higher view.

  “I look around at everyone at the reunion and wonder what’s happened to them. How’d we get here so fast? With a murderer in our midst. Our class? I read somewhere and I can’t remember where, ‘Time conquers time’—maybe it’s true. Maybe I’ll reach a time when I let it all go. Or when I’m renewed with a spiritual or even physical second wind.”

  “Mom, you’ve missed the turn!” Tucker acted like a backseat driver.

  “She’s clearing her head. Whenever she needs an inner vacation she cruises around. Cruising around in the dually is a statement.” Mrs. Murphy didn’t mind; she appreciated the plush upholstery covered with sheepskin. “She had to show up at her reunion in this new truck. Funny, isn’t it? The desire to shine.”

  The warm autumn light turned the red of cow barns even deeper, the fire of the maples even brighter.

  Harry loved the seasons but had never applied them, an obvious but potent metaphor, to her own life. “Know what’s really funny? No one ever believes they’ll get old. There must be a point where you accept it, like Mrs. Hogendobber.” She thought a moment. “But then Mim hasn’t truly accepted it. And she’s the same age as Miranda.” Her conversation picked up. The ride was invigorating her. “Here’s what I don’t get. First, someone is killing off men in the class of ’80. Someone is actually carrying out a plan of revenge. I’ve been mad enough to kill people but I didn’t. What trips someone over the edge? And then I think about death. Death is something out there, some shadow being, a feared acquaintance. He snatches you in a car wreck or through cancer. By design or by chance. But he’s oddly impersonal. That’s what gets me about this stuff. It’s brutally personal.”

  * * *

  43

  Harry had no sooner walked through the kitchen door than the phone rang.

  “Hello,” Fair said. “I’m at the clinic but I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll meet you at school for supper. Don’t worry.” She hung up the phone and it rang again.

  “Hey,” Susan said. “I dropped off two English boxwoods for Chris. I feel guilty. She’s not coming to the dinner tonight, obviously. She was funny, though. She said if we survived our reunion she’d love to play golf next weekend. Oh, she’s through with Dennis, too. Said she’s shocked at the way he behaved. That’s what really upset her.”

  “Well—good for her. Did you think of anything for Bitsy? It’s really E.R.’s responsibility to thank her for her work but, well, I liked working with her.”

  “The full treatment at Vendome.” Susan mentioned the most exclusive beauty parlor in town, where one could have a haircut, massage, waxing, manicure, pedicure, and complete makeover, emerging rejuvenated.

  “That’s a good idea. We�
��ll get BoomBoom to cough up the money. Those two worked as hard on our reunion as we did.”

  “I paid for the boxwoods. It was my bet. If Boom won’t pay for Vendome, I’ll do it. It’s only right.”

  “I’ll split it with you.”

  “No, you won’t. You put away that money you’re getting on rent.”

  “I guess Tracy will leave after his reunion. He hasn’t said anything. I’ll tell you, though, his rent money has made my life easier.”

  “You’re the truck queen of Crozet.” Susan laughed, since she knew the rent money went to pay for the truck.

  “Susan, are you scared?”

  “About the dinner?” They’d known one another since in-fancy so elaborate explanations weren’t needed, nor were transitions between subjects.

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I’ll have Ned with me. Also, I don’t think we’re involved except as bystanders.”

  “There won’t be that many people there. I wonder if the killer will attend? And I wonder if we’re doing the right thing. We haven’t even had time to process Rex’s murder. I feel like we’re being whittled away.”

  “Are you scared?” Susan asked.

  “Yes. I’m not afraid I’ll get bumped off. I’m afraid of what I’ll feel.”

  “Blindsided.” Susan referred to the manner in which emotions flatten a person.

  “You, too?”

  A long pause followed. “Yes. I joked about who was that young person in the Best All-Round photograph but I meant it. And then I look at Danny and Brooks.” She referred to her son and daughter. “And I realize they’re feeling all the same emotions and confusions we did but in a different time. I’m beginning to believe that the human story is the same story over and over again, only the sets change.”

  “A in History,” Harry laughed.

  Susan thought back on her A’s in History and just about everything else. “The difference is that I understand it now—before, I just knew it.”

  “Can you understand the murders?”

  “No. I don’t even know what to call the way I feel. Intense . . . disturbed? No, I don’t understand it and I don’t remember anything that horrible from high school. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary like two people hating one another so much it lasts for twenty years. But we’re in the dark. Even Market seems to know something we don’t, and Dennis—good Lord.”

  “Think Denny Rablan will show his face?”

  “He doesn’t dare.”

  * * *

  44

  Denny sat there as big as life and twice as smug. No one wanted to sit next to him. Finally Harry did, only because Susan had put out the exact number of chairs based on the head count. The sheer quantity of food overwhelmed the tables: spicy chicken wings, corn bread, perfectly roasted beef with a thin pepper crust, moist Virginia ham cooked to perfection, biscuits, shrimp remoulade, a mustard-based sauce for the beef, sweet potatoes candied and shining orange. Three different kinds of salad satisfied those who didn’t wish such heavy foods. The women sat down, claiming they’d stick to the salads. That lasted five minutes.

  The desserts, reposing on a distant table, beckoned after the main course. Carrot cake, tiny, high-impact brownies, fruit compote, luxurious cheeses from Denmark, England, and France rested among heaps of pale green grapes. If that wasn’t enough, a thin, dense fruitcake with hard sauce filled out the menu.

  The bar was open, which somewhat raised the conversation level.

  The thirty-one people who came to the dinner ate themselves into a stupor. Mike Alvarez did not return. His wife had put her foot down but he left the tapes for everyone to enjoy, if “enjoy” was the right word. During dinner BoomBoom played the slow tapes. “Digestion tapes,” she called them.

  Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker ate from paper plates on the floor under the table. Since there was so much food, Harry didn’t think anyone would begrudge her animals.

  Fair sat on the other side of Harry, her left side. Hank Bittner refused to sit next to Dennis even though he came in late and seats were taken. Bonnie Baltier switched seats with Hank so she sat on the other side of Dennis.

  “Anything turn up in the lab?” Bonnie asked Dennis as her fork cut into the steaming sweet potato.

  “No. Rick Shaw took the pictures and left. He said he had suspects but they always say that. I just said, ‘Yeah, the whole class.’”

  “Is there a digital time frame on the photographs?”

  Dennis answered Harry. “No. I’m using a Nikon that’s thirty years old. Never found a camera I liked better.”

  “Oh.” Harry returned to her dinner.

  Miranda and Tracy ducked their heads in the open doors. Susan waved them in. Harry hadn’t seen them.

  “Miranda, you look stunning.” Fair stood up to compliment her.

  “Sit down, sit down. I’ll spoil your dinner.” She blushed.

  “She’s the belle of the ball.” Tracy beamed. “Doesn’t that emerald green dress set off her hair and her eyes?”

  “Yes,” they agreed.

  “Mrs. Hogendobber, come down to the studio in that outfit. I’ll take a picture—for free. I should have my camera with me but I forgot it.”

  “You’ve,” Miranda paused, “been discombobulated.”

  “Mrs. Hogendobber, you should be a diplomat,” Hank Bittner laughed. “And you do look lovely. If the women look as good as you do when we have our fiftieth reunion, I’ll be a happy man.”

  “You men will turn my head.” She blushed some more as Tracy winked at the men.

  “Come on, beautiful. I don’t trust these guys.” Tracy gently put his hand in the small of her back, guiding her out of the room.

  Susan, on her way for second helpings, swooped past Harry. “Are they getting serious or what? She really does look fabulous. That treadmill has worked wonders.”

  “Tracy has worked wonders.” Fair smiled. “It’s a magic that never fails.” He turned to Harry and whispered, “You’ll always be magic to me, Sweetheart.”

  Harry blushed and mumbled, “Thanks.”

  BoomBoom raised her glass. “Here’s to the class of 1980!”

  The group hesitated, then raised their glasses. “Hear. Hear.”

  “What’s left of us.” Dennis held up his glass for a second toast.

  “Rablan, shut up.” Bittner stood and held up his glass. “To the organizers for their hard work and their heart when things didn’t turn out quite as they—or any of us—expected.”

  Everyone cheered.

  “I don’t remember Hank being so eloquent,” Fair remarked.

  “He learned somewhere along the way.” Bonnie leaned over Dennis. “Brightwood Records wouldn’t promote an unpolished stone. I’d kill to have his stock options.”

  “You’d have to,” Dennis laughed.

  “You haven’t exactly made a fortune. In fact, you lost one,” Bonnie replied.

  “You’re right.” He shut up.

  The cats and Tucker decided to walk under the tables. This was a stroll, not a search for crumbs. They’d eaten too much.

  “Hee hee.” Pewter nudged Mrs. Murphy as she watched a lady, heels off, run her foot over a man’s calf. He wore charcoal pants.

  Mrs. Murphy popped her head from under the tablecloth. “BoomBoom.”

  Pewter ducked out on the other side. “Bob Shoaf.”

  “Figures,” Murphy said as she walked back under the table-cloth.

  “He’s married, isn’t he?” Tucker could have told them it was BoomBoom since Tucker paid a lot of attention to shoes and smells.

  “Yes. He left the Mrs. at home, though,” Pewter said.

  Bored with their stroll, the animals emerged by the food tables.

  “I could probably eat one more piece of beef.” Tucker gazed upward.

  “Don’t. You’ve stuffed yourself. If you eat too much you’ll get sick on the way home,” Mrs. Murphy counseled.

  Their conversation didn’t finish because an explosion from Bonnie Balti
er sent them back to that table.

  “What are you talking about?” She slammed her hand on the table, making the plates jump.

  “I thought you knew.” Dennis blinked.

  Hank leaned over Bonnie. “None of the women knew, you asshole!”

  Bonnie stood up, walked around Dennis to Harry. “Did you know about a gang rape on the day senior superlatives were voted?”

  “No.” Harry gasped as did Susan.