“Palmer!” Therese’s sharp voice cut through his sentence. “My sorority sisters are coming tonight. Remember?”
Elise had long noted that the Ambersons’ shared birthright, not familial love, kept them functioning as a unit. Timmy barely registered the rescinded dinner invitation. Watching the narrow shoulders quake, she felt compassion for the boy.
Ignoring the others, she maneuvered her painful self from the chair to join the young man on the sofa. “Tim.” He looked at her, tears dripping. She patted Jeff’s damp fur and wondered what misguided and foreign impulse led her to offer comfort to an Amberson. “Your dad wasn’t very demonstrative. But you and Vanessa meant a lot to him.” He watched her, eyes dull and bloodshot. She struggled on. “Even this house wasn’t more important than you. I think he felt the same about your children.” Inspiration struck. “Wait here a minute.”
In the bedroom she’d shared so infrequently with Timothy she took his wallet from a dresser. Thankfully, it hadn’t been in his pocket the night he’d drowned. Finding what she wanted she hobbled back to the solarium. Therese had left the room but Palmer and Timmy sat where she’d left them.
“He carried this in his billfold.” She handed Timmy a photograph. It showed Timmy standing behind his father, who held his first grandchild. Timmy had a deer-in-the-headlights smile directed at the infant, but Timothy’s eyes stared straight at the camera. The baby he cradled not on his lap but in both arms. One of Timothy’s elbows crooked forward in an aggressively protective gesture.
Timmy took it, hands shaking. Tears splashed onto the picture. When he spoke, his breath shuddered. “I misjudged you.” For a second Elise thought he meant her. “Oh, Father, can you forgive me?”
Palmer shot a puzzled glance at Elise and approached Timmy warily, but the boy ignored him and continued to whimper and apologize over the photo. His uncle leaned over and peered at it. He started and his mouth tightened. Through narrowed eyes he looked from Elise to Timmy, and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder in a clumsy attempt at consolation. Timmy made a massive effort to control his sobs but kept eyes fixed on the picture. Palmer crooked a finger at Elise, making it clear he expected her to follow.
In the foyer, he hissed, “I know you meant well. But the gesture only served to open old wounds further. The boy had a complicated relationship with his father and that photo can’t bring back good memories. Timothy and Timmy had had words only moments before Timmy asked me to take the picture. I’m sure he’s remembering, realizing it can never be made right.” He took a breath and repeated, “But you meant well.” On that bit of cold comfort, he stalked away.
Elise wasn’t certain Palmer had read Timmy’s reaction correctly. Before she could speculate on why the photo triggered such remorse, Godfrey approached. She’d never been comfortable speaking to her father-in-law, but abandoned a quickly-formed plan to maintain polite silence with him. He had been almost cordial to her today.
“Godfrey, I appreciate your offer to let me stay on for a bit. I won’t take advantage of it. My parents and I are going out Sunday to look for places. They’ll be living with me.”
He nodded, uninterested but at least not belligerent. Jeff and Mutt roamed the foyer, searching for Ambersons. Godfrey crouched and they rushed him. “I suppose you’ll be taking the dogs?”
“Yes.”
“They are good dogs.” He stood again, swaying, and steadied himself. He looked every day of his seventy-seven years. “I’ll be going.” He paused and asked, with an attempt at diffidence, “Have you heard from Vanessa?”
“Vanessa?” She’d be less surprised if he’d asked had a Martian come calling. “No. I mean, not today. She came yesterday.”
“She did? She—has she made a habit of visiting?”
Elise stopped herself from exclaiming, “Heavens, no!” Instead she answered mildly, “No, not really. I was surprised to see her.”
“Can I ask about the nature of her visit?”
“Um. I guess. She didn’t say to keep it secret. Timothy had told her about a packet of papers. They would come to her when he died.”
Godfrey looked confused. “What sort of papers?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. Neither did she.”
He stood, thinking, then walked to the door.
“Godfrey!”
“Yes?”
“Why did you ask if I’d heard from her?”
“I saw her truck today, near home, but she didn’t come to see her grandmother and me, and neither Palmer nor Timmy heard from her. She comes to town so seldom.”
That was an understatement. She raised practically everything she needed for sustenance and her pet remedies on her small farm west of town. She didn’t want or need human contact.
Palmer and Therese emerged from the kitchen. Elise resisted the urge to ask if they’d whipped up an afternoon snack.
“We’ll be going now.” Palmer forced a concerned smile. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay at a hotel tonight, Elise?”
“Actually, I would love to. But the dogs have had a tough week, too. If I don’t give them some normalcy, I’ll be bringing them to a doggie psychiatrist. I’ll lock the doors and set the alarm and I won’t open anything till morning. No one can get me. Except Ambersons, of course.” She laughed.
It fell with a hollow thud as Therese and Palmer exchanged a charged glance.
“I would set the deadbolt on the doors, dear.” Therese made her exit, not bothering to see if Palmer would follow. He would. But first he stepped toward Elise and, after a moment’s awkward indecision, shook her hand.
“Well. Be careful. And keep the dogs in the house. Since Mutt can get under the fence you don’t want to chase him down the street in the middle of the night.”
“A nice wide street with lots of lights is preferable to that passageway along the garage. It’s like something from a fairytale nightmare. Little malicious goblins hiding under damp hostas, and ferns reaching for your ankles.” She shuddered. “Sorry. I guess I’m a bit too sensitive to atmosphere.”
Palmer, not overly-sensitive to much, had turned away before she finished speaking. With a few more safety directives and a suggestion that she let no one—no one—in, he joined his wife, already settled in Lexi.
Elise had no idea of the time but guessed mid-afternoon. She wondered if the mourners, those happy, hope-filled mourners, were gathered at the Washington home, feasting and reminiscing and enjoying one another. Russ would probably stay till the end to help put away tables and chairs and put garbage bags by the road. He was like that.
She didn’t know what to do with herself. She could throw a dart at a map and hope it landed on a promising place for her and her parents to live. She could begin packing personal items but that wouldn’t eat up more than an hour of the long day dragging before her. She hadn’t kept many mementos of her marriage to Christopher and most of her childhood possessions had been donated or dumped when her parents moved.
She had to start somewhere. Vowing any house she bought would be a single story, she trudged up to her room, pulled her laptop case from the bottom shelf of her bedside table, and trudged back down to the deck off the kitchen. Before she settled, she dug in a kitchen drawer for paper and pencil. The dogs at her heels announced in most dramatic fashion that they were hungry. They weren’t the only ones. Elise couldn’t remember if she had eaten at all that day.
After feeding Mutt and Jeff, she piled a plate with an enormous sandwich, chips, carrot sticks, an apple, and two painkillers. She set a pot of coffee going and took her feast outside. As she ate, she searched websites for real estate agents, best neighborhoods in Des Moines, best senior social clubs. Her mind was on none of it. Crumpling the sheet of paper with its useless notes, she started another.
She listed events since the funeral, when her entire world turned odd. Reading it over, she felt convinced that no new widow had ever crammed as many unique occurrences into three days.
Remembering the hints dropped by Palme
r and Therese, she chose a fresh sheet of paper to list which Ambersons had been to the house in those days. She titled a second column “Who would have pushed me in the water?”, and after a few seconds of intense thought, added another. “Who would have hit Timothy?”
She debated adding “Who had motive?” But she’d already tired of this. The world was so much bigger than the perfectly proper Amberson clan. She might have misinterpreted the enigmatic look between Therese and Palmer and the thinly veiled warnings.
And there lay the sticking point. Except the shutting of Mutt in the closet—which could have been the result of old-house settling or, horribly, her own somnambulant self—all the other peculiarities happened outdoors. If you could call murder and attempted murder merely peculiar. The family had absolutely no reason to hurt Timothy or herself. Most of Timothy’s personal fortune came to her and her money went to family and her chosen causes. Besides, these weren’t hot-blooded people. They didn’t carry grudges. Elise prided herself as the only person on earth capable of goading Timothy into an uncivilized shouting match.
The dogs wanted out. She poured her coffee and let them down the stairs onto the lawn only long enough to take care of business. When they returned even Mutt was ready to relax, and, dogs at her feet, she resumed thinking.
The family had access to the house any time, and lately they’d accessed it regularly. But anyone could get onto the grounds. Only the tall fence guarded them, and as Russ had pointed out, it was not impossible to scale.
Russ. Her only friend and she’d sent him packing. No matter that it was for his own good. She wished he hadn’t listened to her. Didn’t he know her well enough to realize she meant very little of what she said?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day’s dead sanctities.
“The Hound of Heaven,” Lines 84-86
Setting aside the paper and pencil, she decided she wasn’t cut out for detective work. It had been a means to avoid what she must do.
The last time she read “The Hound of Heaven,” Christopher sat next to her. It was the eve of his final deployment. They’d skimmed over the first stanzas of flight and fancy and fear, choosing to savor the closing verse. The one in which the quarry, exhausted and defeated, looks at its hated pursuer and sees…love.
Now, sitting stiffly on a deck chair, Elise read the poem several times, always stopping short of the final lines of the final stanza. With Christopher, she had drawn joy from the certainty of constraining love. Now, reading of the frenzied, headlong trajectory away from a tenacious stalker, she identified with the hopeless need to escape those unperturbed, unhurriedly persistent feet. Following, following…
Elise shivered. Clouds, opaque and predatory, devoured blue sky and belched out night. She looked at the kitchen clock. A few minutes after six.
Probably, all those years ago when she had been so certain her adoration was directed at a loving Captor, she’d confused it with love for Christopher. She’d never really been caught. Christopher had, with Elise content to lope alongside his cage, poking her nose through the bars and sharing in his joy of the capture.
“I’m the free one, Chris. I need to stay that way. Please understand.”
The dogs whined at the door, less concerned with metaphysics than their personal safety. In the distance, across suburbs and corn fields and scurrying tractors, lightning flashed and flickered. Automatically Elise counted the seconds. One, two, three, four…the disturbed air thundered less than five miles away.
“Okay, boys. We are in for a doozy.”
She turned on all the lights in the kitchen and got another cup of coffee. After a losing argument with herself she found a package of chocolate chip cookies Timothy had ordered from an earth-friendly bakery in New York. They arrived the day after his death.
After setting the laptop on the table in the breakfast nook, she took a tentative bite. “Timothy, I’m sorry you never got to eat one. These are good.” Although she would never be the rabid environmentalist of her husband’s aspirations, an open mind didn’t hurt.
The sky grew even darker and she turned on the television to see if any tornado watches had been issued. Nothing but severe thunderstorms. She looked sympathetically at the dogs. They would prefer a quick, one-and-done tornado to the marathon thunderstorms Iowa often experienced.
Had Russ, she wondered, given her regrets to Jerusha Washington? A phone call to check wouldn’t hurt, along with a promise to repay him for bailing out Bubba. She scrolled to his number and pushed “call.” He didn’t pick up. She waited for the beep to leave a message, blanked out on what to say and hung up, feeling foolish.
“It’s the storm, boys. I’m all discombobulated.” They had no sympathy to spare. Even Jeff paced, pausing only at the window in hopes the torment had passed. Mutt started to cry. Elise picked him up and his small body trembled.
“That does it. You’re going into the study.”
The study was the dogs’ version of a panic room, and almost soundproof, thanks to some commotion-phobic Amberson of the past. Without preambles the boys curled up in front of the fireplace, retrofitted with low-emission gas logs. She flipped the fake fire’s switch, turned on the stereo system to Timothy’s easy jazz playlist, and pulled the door not quite shut.
She needed the bright ordinariness of the kitchen. She sat in the nook, staring past her own reflection to the tumult beyond, and it seemed she was not an observer of the chaos, but a casualty. Buffeting wind laughed at her belief in resistance. Never for even a moment did it pander to the notion that she was at peace with the cosmos. Elise, the intruder, thought creation would provide refuge from her pursuer. Creation, in subjugation to that very pursuer, tossed her away. No place would give her haven.
Before the weather worsened, she went through the entire house, dead bolting doors, double checking window locks. She wouldn’t set the alarm till she went to bed, but barricading herself should give a sense of security.
Elise tried calling Russ again. Again, after too many rings, it went to voice mail. This time she croaked out a jumbled message about Jerusha and money and the weather but her ramblings were cut off. She flipped on all the yard lights and her reflection disappeared. Too restless to sit, she picked up her notes and paced while she read.
Palmer had been concerned, even worried over something. Vanessa roamed the streets of Des Moines, avoiding family and asking about a mysterious pack of papers. Timmy needed his dead father to forgive him for an unknown trespass. They all couldn’t wait to sell the house.
But no Amberson had a discernible motive for pushing her into the pool even if killing Timothy sped up the sale of the estate. Her wildest imaginings couldn’t conjure up an image of Timmy or Vanessa smashing a rock into Timothy’s head. So, what options remained? Plenty. Attorneys made enemies who seethed with desire for revenge. A man walking off steam after a blow up with a spouse might surprise a prowler, who might in turn panic and bash him in the head with a rock. But the bounds of coincidence stretched to breaking at the notion that the angry client or a vicious intruder would kill Timothy and come back the next week on the off-chance of repeating the maneuver on the dead man’s wife.
A sound from the hall made her whirl. The dogs, relaxed at a break in the thunder and ready for adventure, grinned at her. “Naughty boys. Taking advantage of my nerves. I know you don’t need a potty break. But let’s go out for a minute. Then I’ll set the alarm and we’ll call it a night.”
A brief tussle with the patio door delayed their exit. The rain had let up momentarily but the wind stayed to play.
She surveyed the yard from north to south, to the pool, pool house and beyond. Frowning, she repeated the move. Something was different. The pool water whipped and tumbled, but nothing floated in it. What didn’t ring true? She shut her eyes to regain the image from that predawn hour. Opening them, still frowning in concentration, she squinted around the co
rner into the kitchen at the bank of lights. All on. So why couldn’t she see a square of yellow light on the grass behind the garage?
She closed her eyes again. No, she didn’t imagine it. The light had been on because she’d tried to see Jeff illumined in it. Picturing it now, she wondered why the location and outline of the patch of light hadn’t struck her at the time. Too high, too neatly square, to be from one of the motion sensors or yard lights, it must have come from the room above the garage. Somebody had turned it on, and then, someone had turned it off.
What in the old billiard-turned-storage room would hold so much fascination for a would-be burglar? Decrepit lawn furniture, rusty bikes, tomato cages, part of a badminton set, and junk even more useless. Elise leaned over the rail and thought, dogs quiet at her side. The memory hit as a shard of lightning pierced the sky.
“Inside, babies. Back to Daddy’s study.” They followed, crowding her ankles, hurrying her. They settled and she drifted to the nook, remembering.
It had been the day before Timmy Junior’s youngest child was to be christened. The ensuing celebration—one of the few family get-togethers—would be at the estate. Elise returned early from bringing her father to a doctor’s appointment and found Timothy “consulting” with Lucille. They hadn’t technically been in a compromising position, but Reverend Montague looked so guilty Elise found it hard to believe their discussion had been limited to the traditions surrounding infant baptism.
She’d been depressed, angry, really, that the diagnosis of Parkinson’s had been confirmed. Her father held an unsteady grip to his brave front which irritated her even more. So she decided to make Timothy miserable. It hadn’t been one of her banner days. She made snide comments in front of the cleaning lady. When she heard Timothy on the phone she’d picked up the extension and breezily dialed through. Coming back from a swim, she’d startled him on his descent from the old billiard room above the garage—startled him so badly he almost dropped the statue he carried. He’d exploded and she’d scurried off, half-pleased and half-frightened. But she’d been too curious. He carried the Timmy statue, so hated by the boy that as a child the mere sight of it sent him into hysterics. Did Timothy intend to put the statue back in the former rock garden, now that Timmy had grown and hopefully put away childish fears? So, while he struggled down the rest of the steps she dashed to the xeriscape.
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