All's Well That Ends

by Gillian Roberts

  “Please! How would that play at recess? Somebody calls you a bastard and you say, ‘Maybe, but my great-grandpa was a poet, so how do you feel about that, mister?’ You think the ignorant bully would slink away, head down low?”

  “Nonetheless, their kind of talk sounds like what must happen late at night at the neighborhood bar. Instead of ‘I could have been somebody,’ ‘I was somebody,’ or ‘somebody was somebody.’”

  Sasha stood up and walked in a tight circle. The room did not have enough clear space in which to pace. Aside from being overfilled with furniture, the shelves and surfaces were so covered with collections, nobody wanted to bump into anything. As she passed the bookcase, she paused, and lifted a zebra, holding it in her palm while she studied it. “I thought about that, too, before you got here. But what would it be?”

  “How about this? If you’re going to lie anyway, why not be simple and logical and say her father died. Even say you were married, but he died. We have enough wars. Make him a casualty of one of them. Wouldn’t that be logical?” I thought of two generations of women spinning ludicrous stories to cover their embarrassment about their unorthodox reproductive behavior, and I felt sorry for them.

  “Logical and boring and suspect.”

  “Right, and the idea of generations of New Jersey–factory workers being the irresistible inamoratas of royalty makes lots of sense. At least she could have come up with a lie that reflected a democratic country. Hadn’t she noticed we don’t have kings?”

  “I agree it’s a stretch.”

  “Stretch? Nothing’s that elastic. The logic in it snapped the first time her ma mentioned it. Anyway, how did they supposedly meet their princes?”

  “They were courtesans. That would make any babies born to them very possibly the children of the royals, or something like that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Courtesan’s a fancy word for—”

  “I know it and you know it, and so what?”

  “I just think that you have an illegitimate kid in New Jersey in the forties, there are easier stories to weave than one involving a royal court. I mean sooner or later your kid’s going to think it through and know it’s completely insane and that your mother still wasn’t married to your father, no matter who he was.”

  She shrugged. “I think Phoebe was torn between wanting to believe their stories, and knowing they weren’t real. And I think that’s why she was so obsessed with finding her roots—a totally impossible task, once her mother was dead—and finding out everybody else’s as well.”

  “And the tchotchkes?”

  “That part’s from the poverty, I guess. Simply wanting nice things, even if she didn’t have a clear concept of what that meant. There was apparently also a lot of talk about treasures they’d had, or lost, or didn’t recognize or—”

  Life was too short for drunken old wives’ tales. “What’s for me to do?”

  “There’s a carton there for you with everything from her desk, including her laptop and backup files. I couldn’t see anything interesting, but I’m not the trained investigator, and I didn’t look very hard. Maybe there’s more somewhere else, but I went through the house opening drawers and doors and looking under beds, and in the garage, and I think that’s about it for paper and electronic records. Except for old tax forms, but I can’t see how they’d help find out who poisoned her that night.”

  “Nobody knows that somebody—”

  “Okay, the alleged—”

  “—by you alone—”

  “—poisoner.” And then she stood up straighter and squinted at me. Her face darkened, as if a light had been turned off.

  “You’re humoring me, aren’t you? You’re just going through the motions.”

  “I—no—I—”

  “You think I’m crazy. Deluded the way her mother and grandmother were.”

  “Of course not, Sasha, but in truth, aside from the discomfort of sitting on spike heels, which you have to admit is a pretty weak piece of evidence, I don’t get the sense—”

  “How long have you known me?”

  “For Pete’s sake, you know precisely the day, the year. Seventh grade. You were still Susan, having not yet discovered your inner Sasha. Do the math yourself. If we’re thirty-two—how old are seventh graders, and really, who cares? A very long time is the answer.”

  “And has this friendship endured despite my being incredibly stupid about people?”

  “Honestly? Yes.”

  Her eyes widened, then she furrowed her brow. I couldn’t believe she’d asked me that question or been surprised by my response. “You’re talking about my taste in men,” she finally said.

  I nodded.

  Her mouth turned up at one side in a crooked grin. “Point taken. I am incredibly stupid about sexy men. But I’m not stupid in general, am I?”

  I shook my head.

  “I knew her. She was not suicidal. She wasn’t the type.”

  “Anybody can be pushed to—”

  Sasha’s turn at head-shaking. “Even if that’s true, nothing was pushing her that way. She was sad about her husband, but she was also one of the most resilient people I ever knew. She was looking forward to online dating, to trying new things. She was not in a place where she’d up and off herself.”

  “How about the whole fracas about the business? The charges of embezzling or stealing?”

  “That was ridiculous! She knew it was, and Merilee knew it was, too. They would have made peace if she’d had a little more time. It’s what she expected. They were in a bad patch because of Merilee’s divorce.”

  I must not have looked convinced.

  “Listen, Manda, I know a dozen people I’d believe might commit suicide. They’re moody, they sink into long depressions. They have constant, mind-grinding stress. Phoebe wasn’t like that.”

  I must still not have looked convinced.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I mean. It’s my gut impression that you’re pretty much okay right now. Maybe it’s bugging you to be here, helping me with something you don’t believe happened, maybe you’re stressed with two jobs and Mackenzie with years of school to go, and maybe you’re really worried about his family, and the floods and what’s going to be—and even with his stress over it all.”

  I was feeling worse and worse as she enumerated my woes.

  “But you’re not devastated. So if you died tonight, and tomorrow somebody told me that you’d committed suicide, and the evidence pointed that way, could I believe them? Would it be rational of me to insist, kicking and screaming, that you were not suicidal when I saw you today? That it was not your personality to solve something that way, that I did not believe you’d done it?”

  “You feel it that strongly?”

  She nodded.

  “Then I’ll believe it, too.” I tried my best to truly mean it.

  “On your side of the ledger, I now know that she was expecting a visitor the night she died. A surprise visitor. That’s why she wouldn’t have told you.”

  “All right! You’re good. How did you find that out so quickly? Who knew that?”

  “Next door—”

  “Oh, Lord—Ramona Not-That-I’m-Prying-But? I should have known. Phoebe used to laugh about her. She said that all Ramona lacked was a periscope aimed at the bedroom and a phone tap, but she wasn’t so sure about the phone tap.”

  I settled on the sofa with the carton of papers and ancient-looking floppy disks nearby. “For all her snooping, the only thing that registered, or that she was willing to share, was a parade of mostly men coming in and out of this house. Ditto for the woman who lives behind this house.”

  “The problem is that while Ramona loves to pry, she’s so self-involved she barely sees what’s in front of her. Her ideal situation would be spying on herself, because that’s what interests her most. Or so Phoebe said. Basically, Ramona was horrified that Phoebe was socializing after her widowhood. She’d thought Phoebe would quit her job, join Ramona’s Bible-study group, play B
ingo, all those sorts of things. She was disappointed and disapproving that Phoebe wasn’t interested.”

  “Except the woman in the back said Ramona was also jealous, because another neighbor fixed Phoebe up with a date, and Ramona apparently thought she was ahead of Phoebe in line for men.”

  “Would she kill her perceived rival? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I have no idea what I’m saying. But do you know anything about that man? That’s the most specific information I’ve gotten about anybody so far.”

  Sasha looked into some middle distance. I imagined a small Rolodex file spinning card by card in her mind, name after possible name, the memory of conversations long gone searched for names, and found wanting. “Nothing,” she said. “Can’t we go ask the neighbor who fixed her up?”

  “Tomorrow. She’s not home today.”

  Sasha’s features softened, the muscles in her face relaxed.

  “Good,” she said. “Besides, if she was still interested in doing some hunting online, he couldn’t have been Mr. Perfect. She was a serial monogamist. If she’d found him, she wouldn’t have looked any further. Until she decided to lose him again, that is. But there’d be a marriage in between. So that fix-up date probably fizzled pretty quickly, or she’d have been engaged again. Unless, of course, she rejected him and he was the surprise visitor-killer that night.” She looked concerned for a moment, then sighed, and shook her head. “Hungry yet?”

  “Well, I guess…I was going to look through those papers, and it’s early, but…”

  “Then, if you can hold off a minute, look at this.” She turned and lifted a clear glass bowl of matchbooks and handed it to me with a flourish.

  “Matchbooks,” I said. “Just what I always wanted.”

  “For the case!”

  “Did Phoebe smoke?”

  “Not really. But matchbooks mean something, don’t they?”

  “They mean she collected them, too, Sash.”

  “In the movies, they’re always a clue.” She was actually serious. Nobody in the movies found three dozen matchbooks in a glass bowl. “They could lead you to where she maybe picked up a date,” Sasha said. “The one who was here that night.”

  “There was only one glass of wine,” I said.

  “Sure, but maybe he was AA, or…”

  “I promise to follow up with the matchbooks.” I emptied the bowl into the carton. If Sasha weren’t so desperate, she’d recognize they were no more than another of Phoebe’s acquisitions, like the rows of tiny glass bells, or the flowers made of woven horsehair, and whatever else was on the tables, shelves, and windowsills of this house.

  “I picked up a barbecued chicken and salads,” Sasha said. “You can look at things and eat at the same time, can’t you?”

  I could indeed multitask. We relocated to the kitchen, which looked less used and functional than Neva’s had. In addition to cooking necessities, Phoebe had another collection on the countertops: roosters and chickens made of china, tin, painted wood, and plastic. I peered inside the refrigerator, a better clue to its owner than a matchbook, but Phoebe’s had been cleaned out, except for the eternal half-filled bottles of condiments. I didn’t know who’d cleaned the fridge out, or why those bottles were left. What was to become of an inch and a half of teriyaki sauce, a small bottle of horseradish in cream, six bread-and-butter pickles, and nearly empty containers of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise?

  But the archeological digging was still fine on the outside of the refrigerator. Angel magnets held calendars, reminders of doctors’ appointments, snapshots, newspaper clippings, and cards from local purveyors of driveway repair, delicatessen, and aromatherapy.

  “Whoops,” Sasha said. “I forgot all about that junk.”

  I carefully relocated the surface papers to one of the boxes Sasha had handed me, and made a pile of the fat, thin, ethereal, silly, and cherubic angels.

  Sasha munched salad greens and watched me. “Whatever else, Phoebe answered the age-old question,” she said.

  “I give up.”

  Sasha gestured at the box on the floor. “Hasn’t mankind always been tormented by the question of how many angels fit on the front of a refrigerator?”

  Seven

  * * *

  * * *

  We settled in to dinner while I half-heartedly clicked my way through Phoebe’s laptop. “You may have been right about The Shopping Channel,” I said. “She had a real problem. Her bookmarks are for online shopping sites and auctions. Look at this—kitchenware, antiques, home furnishings, linens, toys, music, books, art, more antiques, household goods, table coverings, pottery, accessories, original art from—”

  “I am not surprised. Think about it. Even her business was about turning dogs and cats into tchotchke collectors—or tchotchkes themselves.”

  “Her shopping included the male market. Lots of fix-’em-up sites are bookmarked, but how would I know if she’d enrolled in any of them?”

  “Believe it or not, I have never done online dating.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “True,” she said, nodding for emphasis. “Never.”

  “Wait a minute. It’s not about guys or arranged or blind dates with you, is it. It’s about computer illiteracy.”

  “Call it what you will,” she said, finishing off a drumstick. “But the truth is, I don’ need no stinking Internet.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “Yet,” she agreed. “Besides, we’re talking about Phoebe, and she was waiting for those photos I took. I think that means she was waiting to officially sign up and put a picture of herself on there. Wherever ‘there’ is. Maybe those bookmarks were more a case of checking out the possibilities.”

  There’d be time to find out later. Meanwhile, unless something leaped out wearing neon script that said “This is important!” I wasn’t going to find anything worthwhile, so I moved on to the word processing program. “Oh, wait. Listen to this. It’s in a file called Shopping. I thought it would be an inventory or something of her purchases, but I think it’s more a list of future, ah, acquisitions, or a rough draft. She was a funny lady, wasn’t she?”

  Sasha looked wistful, and nodded. “She was fun,” she said. “But what are you talking about?”

  “She was getting ready for those photos and a lot of shopping.” I cleared my throat and read, “Interested in a feisty forty?”

  “An ad? Her ad?”

  “A draft of it, anyway.”

  “Forty? Phoebe?”

  “—who loves games, hates dishonesty—”

  “Forty!” Sasha repeated. “And she hates dishonesty?”

  “—interested in art, history, genealogy, movies, sports—”

  “She hated sports,” Sasha said. “She’d leave the room when my dad watched football, and never went to the games with him. How stupid is writing an ad like that? What if it works? And he loves sports and wants somebody forty?”

  “Funnier still if they’d both lied, and they wind up at game after game and are both secretly bored out of their skulls. Anyway, the list goes on. She’s also interested in cooking, old music—”

  “I hope she included shoes on that list of interests,” Sasha said.

  “—and knowing someone deeply and—”

  “Stop,” Sasha said softly. “No more. It’s too sad.” She shook her head and said nothing else.

  I agreed. “Maybe this is more than we need to know.”

  “Sad,” she repeated. “Lying in a rough draft. Lying to herself. There’s something funny about an ad called ‘personal’ that isn’t close to the truth of the person, isn’t there? An ad supposedly designed to find your soul mate—and you aren’t truthful about your own interests?” Sasha’s voice was still muted.

  “Everybody fudges in these ads,” I said. Sasha looked at me intently. “As far as I’ve heard.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly. “I thought maybe you…nah.”

  I tried to get into Phoebe’s online financial accou
nt, but I didn’t have her password. I’d have to leave finding it up to Mackenzie or Ozzie. There wasn’t all that much else. I could go to all the sites and see what she’d bought if I figured out her password, but I couldn’t see the point.

  “There’s a calendar program on here,” I said. “That could be helpful. Who was she expecting to see that last evening of her life?”

  But it was password protected, and I felt stymied and annoyed at having to make everything wait until I found a computer genius to decipher the password.

  I ate my last slice of chicken breast, and looked at the stainless flatware for a moment before I remembered. “Sasha, what was Phoebe’s maiden name?”

  She thought for a moment. “Something weathery. Summer? Winter? Rayne? River?”

  “River isn’t weathery. It’s geologically.”

  “Got it—Breeze! She said it had once been French and something like deBreece, but the kids made fun of it and called it “debris” and then called her ‘Trashie.’ So her mother, who had also hated the name, dropped the ‘de’ part and changed the spelling. Or so the story went.”

  Another “B,” so the monograms on the silver could have been from a better day for the deBreece family. Or—“Did your father and Phoebe have sterling silver flatware with their initial on it? Kind of ornate?”

  Sasha’s forehead wrinkled. “Can’t remember,” she said. “Maybe. I do remember her setting what another woman called ‘quite a table.’ The expression stuck because I found it so weird back then. And I do have a memory of helping Phoebe polish spoons that drove me crazy for all the little creases and crevasses in the design. So maybe…but all the same, I wouldn’t think so. When it comes to spending money on wives, as opposed to spending it on fiancées or dates, Dad can be frugal. Why? Did you see something?”

  “I heard about it, didn’t see it. Ramona mentioned it. You didn’t run across a set of monogrammed silver? It should still be here.”

  “Maybe in the dining room. I didn’t get there yet.” She went to look while I made notes and read a clipping I’d taken off the refrigerator. Apparently, Antiques Roadshow was coming to New Jersey, and Phoebe had wanted a chance to be part of it.