All's Well That Ends

by Gillian Roberts

  * * *

  * * *

  Jonesy Farmer sat on Sasha’s sofa between the two of us. I still held the skinny centurion that Jonesy, hearing Sasha’s protests, had thought was a gun.

  “What are you doing in my home?” Sasha demanded.

  It was an unnecessary question. He’d been sitting in the far corner of the darkroom, clutching the rosewood case that held the ornate silver.

  “Why were you in my darkroom?” It was her sanctum, hers alone. Of all this young man’s crimes, right now, Sasha was most horrified by that one.

  “I couldn’t get out the window in time. You came upstairs fast, and I had the box and…” He shook his head. “I was scared,” he mumbled. “I thought I’d be able to stay in there till you went to bed, and I could leave then.” His eyes were still half filled with liquid, and he blinked furiously, ashamed, even at this most ridiculous moment, of crying.

  “I’ve warned you about that fire escape,” I said to Sasha. “And open windows with no grates on them.”

  “I had no idea I had to protect myself against Philly Prep kids,” she said, her hands in fists. She tapped the rosewood box of silver. “How did you know about this?”

  He looked at her, still fighting for control. I wasn’t sure if he was more horrified at what he’d done or at having been found crying. “I saw you take it.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “The house, not you.”

  “And you knew what was valuable, didn’t you?” I asked rhetorically, because it hadn’t been Jesse Farmer, although he’d known the worth of Phoebe’s treasures. “You saw the report your father was going to deliver to Phoebe.” I wanted him to deny it, to explain why he hadn’t done any of the things I knew he had.

  “It was on the computer,” he said. “He was going to print it out and mail it to her.”

  “Were you along for that business dinner? Is that how you knew to look? To be interested?”

  “It was my week with him. My Dad. We—he—lives upstairs from the store and he’s weird about leaving me alone on his weeks. It’s like I’m a kid to him. Besides, he thought it would be interesting for me to learn more about what he did. Get a head for business, is what he always says.”

  Some lesson learned. Along with everyone else who’d been hurt along the way, I felt terrible for Jesse Farmer, who had so innocently played a role in all this.

  “I don’t get it,” Sasha said. “I just don’t. You killed my friend, a really nice person. You poisoned her. Why? Why on earth?”

  “I didn’t mean to! I swear it. I wanted her to fall asleep so I could take stuff and she’d never know—she had so much! She’d told my dad she had problems sleeping, I knew she’d have had to have her doctor give her stuff, so I put two pills in her drink, to be sure she’d sleep. It was only one drink. How was I supposed to know she’d been drinking before I got there? I got so…I just left.”

  We were guarding him, but we didn’t really have to. He was defeated in more ways than I could count. “I still don’t get it, kid,” Sasha said. “What do you want with engraved sterling, or whatever else you took?”

  He looked down at his hands and shook his head. “I didn’t take anything that time.”

  But the thoughts of money had answered that for me already. “You were in debt, weren’t you?” I said. “That perpetual poker game. Big debt, it must have been. That’s what those conferences with Griffith were about. Did he charge interest, too? And then, you thought Phoebe’s treasures would solve everything, but poor Phoebe died.”

  He swallowed hard.

  “So you siphoned funds from the hurricane money. How? Strong-arming kids in the hall? I don’t care how. I can think of a dozen ways. And you still went back to that house in Jersey when you could. It was kind of like your ATM machine, wasn’t it?”

  “My father would have killed me. He doesn’t like Griffith. He warned me, said he’d pull me out of that school if I got too mixed up with the rich kids.”

  “What exactly does Griffith have to do with this?”

  “He loaned me money to play. I kept losing until I owed him so much with interest and all. I…I’m not rich like he is, and I shouldn’t have played, but they make fun of you if you don’t. You’re out, you’re nothing. You’re one of the losers. I know I shouldn’t care, but I did.”

  We were silent for a moment. “You don’t have a car, do you?” I asked. He shook his head, as if ashamed. “So when you went back to Jersey to see what else was there, you needed a lift?”

  He nodded.

  Griffith, I thought. He had an SUV.

  “But the day you—the day the woman was in the house and you were surprised—Griffith left you there. That’s why you took her BMW. To get home.” I felt a moment’s shameful, but nonetheless powerful, gladness that Griffith was involved; that Griffith would be in trouble himself.

  “How did you know?” Jonesy asked. “But not Griffith—Casey. Griffith loaned him the car.”

  So much for that. Griffith, I was sure, was one of those people who’d skim through life creating situations for which his cohorts paid, while he himself did not. He had an invisible shield that made him impervious. I could only hope it had an expiration date on its warranty.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Jonesy said, his voice catching again. “I thought somebody was going to hurt me! She came around a corner and screamed and punched me! I grabbed something near me—a cane, I think it was, just to protect myself, not to hurt anybody, but then—she was so little, I guess that’s why…”

  I could only shake my head. There was no point saying the obvious. He could have called for help. He could have stayed.

  He could have said no to stealing funds meant for innocent people in distress they hadn’t caused.

  He could have understood that Griffith was a pernicious influence, and that he, not Griffith, would be the one to pay for whatever their relationship produced.

  He could have admitted his debt and culpability to his father before anything more serious than being punished was the result.

  Jonesy’s eyes widened at the sound of the approaching siren. “One more thing,” I said. “Why did you go see Phoebe that night? Why did she think you were there?”

  “For stamps.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “At dinner the night before, she asked me if I collected anything, and my dad said stamps. I really haven’t for a while, but she said her son had a collection he didn’t care about. She said I could see it—maybe have it if I liked it.”

  She’d offered an act of kindness. Set out cookies for Mitch, her “M,” because his father didn’t use the nickname “Jonesy.” There hadn’t ever been a second glass of wine. Her visitor was underage. She was protecting him, taking care of him. Putting out cookies.

  The sirens grew deafening, then shut off.

  We waited in silence. There was nothing left to say.

  Twenty-two

  * * *

  * * *

  Mackenzie arrived shortly after the police escorted Jonesy out of the condo. I was still sitting on the sofa. Sasha and I had barely spoken a word for the first ten minutes, after which she’d put her hand on my arm and said, “You call me when you’re ready,” and she kindly found busywork tidying up her darkroom. I wasn’t ready to talk about the thoughts swirling in my mind. Not even my mind was ready. It was too tired.

  Mackenzie looked as he did most of the time lately, as if he’d barely emerged as the winner in a battle with his own demons and divided loyalties.

  I knew, then. Knew what I thought, what I wanted to say. I took a deep breath and patted the seat next to me. When he was beside me, I said, “This isn’t the adventure I want to be having right now.”

  He nodded slowly and put his arm around me. “Me, neither,” he said.

  Twenty-three

  * * *

  * * *

  Happy New Year!” Mackenzie’s kiss was followed by a click of our champagne glasses.


  “I think it will be,” I said. “But it does feel odd to not be freezing on New Year’s Eve. Actually—all of this feels odd.”

  “But right?”

  “But right.” We sat on beach chairs on a friend-of-a-friend’s rooftop garden, the party’s laughter and tooting party-horns fading into a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” rising up from open windows below. I felt dizzy, and not from the champagne. Life had never spun as quickly as it had these past weeks. In the movie reel of my mind, I’d said a magical sentence there on Sasha’s sofa. Because if neither of us was having the adventure we wanted at the moment, then—poof!—pick another adventure.

  So we did.

  Of course, it was there—here—waiting for us to realize it. And for all that I felt tied to and part of my teaching life, it was the end of a semester and a relatively easy time to disengage. I tried handling the loose edges as much as I could. After we talked about it, Rachel Leary, the school counselor, promised to work on a program that would discuss the issues of gambling and peer pressure. As usual, she was willing to buck huge cultural pressures, which is why she’s one of my heroes.

  My headmaster cloaked his relief in getting rid of me by spouting convoluted hymns of praise to my “Mission of Mercy.” Of course I’d miss the students—or most of them, but I was hoping to help a city in which every school had been damaged to some extent, a city with students and staff spread around the country in exile, a city rebuilding its system in every sense.

  Sad to leave Pepperville, as the students had dubbed it, but some of them had promised to write. And of those, a handful would. And I had promised to return to testify, sign statements, do whatever I could to mitigate what happened to Jonesy. I wanted him to have a chance to grow back into the good person he was intended to be.

  I’d be back for happier occasions, too, for the prom and graduation, if so invited.

  As always, the students would move on. This time, so would I.

  As Opal Codd said sweetly my last day, her apopemptic word for me was “agathism.”

  Once again, I could do no more than smile and ask her to translate. “My dear,” she said, “apopemptic! Pertaining to farewell, of course.”

  “Of course. But ‘agathism’? A belief in Agatha Christie?”

  “That’s nice, too, dear, but it actually is the concept that all is for the better.”

  I’d had fits of giggles and anxiety trying to hold on to agathism while we turned our lives in a new direction with dizzying speed. Things weren’t supposed to happen that fast. That same click of the fingers and our loft was rented and Mackenzie’s advisor at Penn agreed that New Orleans, with its less than stellar crime-fighting past and post-catastrophic rebuilding, was a gigantic Petri dish for criminologists. The only trouble he might have in writing a dissertation here was narrowing down the appallingly numerous possibilities.

  But sometimes it felt as if we were moving so fast, we’d broken the sound barrier. “I don’t even know what I’ll actually do there,” I lamented during one such fit.

  “That’s why it’s an adventure,” Mackenzie reminded me. “For both of us. But while you’re finding what you’ll do next, why not think about where you’ve been? The adventures you’ve already had. You’ve always said you wanted to write.”

  I had, but…“What adventures?” I thought of storm-ravaged cities, plunges into the unknown, lions and tigers and Hemingway. Bodily combat. I drew a blank.

  “At school,” he said. “These past few years. Even these past few weeks. You’ve certainly got stories.”

  I certainly did. It was, indeed, an idea.

  The only household member who was less than gleeful about the prospect of new adventures was the cat. Macavity is by feline nature a conservative who likes everything to remain as it is. Furniture is not to be moved, let alone his own self. However, Macavity is by feline nature pragmatic, and by the second day after we’d all relocated into the tiny studio apartment a friend of a friend had found for us, he’d come out from under the bed and was exploring his new quarters and food location and declaring it acceptable. And Louisiana has fine winged insects to entertain him every time we open a window.

  And so we moved at warp speed, finding a tenant for our loft, storing possessions that wouldn’t fit in the new quarters, changing all manner of addresses, becoming overly familiar with Bubble Wrap, newspaper and cartons, and a great round of good-bye-for-nows. Good-bye to Philly Prep, to Penn, to Ozzie Bright Investigations.

  And to the irreplaceables: my sister, her family, and our friends. But we’d talk, we’d e-mail, we’d visit, and we’d be back when it was time for yet another adventure.

  My parents in Florida, of course, would simply be at a different angle to us than they currently were. My mother at first thought my leaving Philly Prep meant I was having a baby, but she reconciled herself to reality and was intrigued by the move more than anything. She knew that her cell phone could dial a new area code as easily as it had been hitting 215. She’d be able to remind me of my biological clock wherever I might be.

  In the meantime, during the whirl of good-byes and the multitude of arrangements, Sasha and her oceanographer—who did, indeed, look as if he might be her next husband, and a wonderful one at that—threw us a “pack-em-up” party (“Not that we want them to go, but—” the invitation said). I hadn’t known we knew that many people, or that there was that much Bubble Wrap available in North America.

  My brother-in-law Sam was among the many partygoing packers. Sam is a quiet man, so when I heard him say, “My God! What’s this? What’s this doing here?” I felt a rush of panic.

  When I saw what he was looking at, I felt a rush of horror.

  The less-than-thrilling painting Sasha had given me was still on the floor, propped against the wall, close to the entry. I simply had had too much on my mind, and that painting was never a part of it, so it stayed down there on the floor, migrating closer and closer to the door, as if preparing to leave on its own.

  I worked at convincing myself that the open door all but covered it, and my dear friend, for all her comings and goings at the loft these past weeks, had never noticed as she whisked past.

  I still didn’t like it. It was too dark, and it was too still a life, if that is an acceptable opinion. But I had never wanted Sasha to know.

  Too bad for me that Sam had fixated on it. Sasha possessed a radar that felt Sam’s interest even though she’d been at the opposite end of the loft, packing books. She walked over in time to see Sam lift the painting from its place on the floor, and hold it up, turning so as to get more light on it.

  She looked at him, then at me. “You know,” she said, “I have no particular bond to that painting.”

  “Oh, don’t misinterpret the fact that—I’ve been trying to decide where to hang—”

  “—or if you even keep it. I only wanted you to have a Phoebe-souvenir. We could find something else, like the skinny Caesar man. You seemed quite attached to it at my place that night.”

  “No, I—”

  “When did you get this?” Sam asked. “Where?”

  “I gave it to her,” Sasha said. “It had belonged to a friend of mine. It had sentimental value.”

  “It has more than that,” he said. “Who was your friend?”

  “A housewife in Jersey who collected anything and everything. Matchbooks, refrigerator magnets, homely statues, paintings…”

  “And this,” Sam said in a reverent tone. “Of course I could be wrong, and this could be a brilliant reproduction or copy, but it certainly looks like Willem Kalf’s work. I’d bet it was, except housewives in New Jersey do not have Kalf on their walls.”

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “Dutch, seventeenth century. Studied in Paris. Known for pronkstilleven—ostentatious still lifes—because of the expensive objects he’d make a part of the painting.” The amazement on our faces must have been obvious, because he laughed. “I was an art history major, remember?”

  I didn’t
. I quite unfairly tended to think of lawyer Sam as having been born in a three-piece suit.

  “I loved the Dutch masters most of all,” he said.

  “One Jersey housewife did indeed own a Kalf,” Sasha said with a big smile. “And, to be honest, some other doozies as well, like the still life I now have at home.”

  “That—Phoebe? How do you know?”

  “Jesse Farmer’s appraisal. I rehired him. He had a list of eight objects he’d seen at the house: the silver I took, the landscape, another small painting, an Italian bowl, a Chinese bowl, a ring, and believe it or not, one of those damnable porcelain doo-dads. Luckily, none of the real treasures would be easy for a kid to pawn, that’s why Jonesy must have left them. Until he came for the silver. So now, I have seven goodies and you’ve got the eighth. And Dennis? He’s probably going to jail for attempted bank fraud, so he gets zilch.”

  “This painting is valuable?”

  “Incredibly so,” Sam said, his voice near a whisper, yet audible all over the room, apparently. Packing ceased, Bubble Wrap no longer popped, and I felt as if I were in a surrealistic dream.

  I shook myself back to reality. “Then I couldn’t—”

  “Sam, you’ve ruined my surprise,” Sasha said. Then she grinned at me. “I was planning a big ta-DAH! kind of announcement later in the evening. But so be it. Bottom line is: You will keep it,” she said. “And you should sell it.”

  “Oh, no! I love—”

  “No you don’t. I know you think I haven’t noticed it sitting there, looking horribly out of place. Wrong. I don’t like it either—it was only a souvenir, remember? I’ll give you one of the commemorative plates she collected, how’s that? I’ll give you all of them!”

  “You take it,” I said. “She left it to you. Dennis said you could have everything in the house.”

  “I know, and I’m giving you this, and suggesting that you put it up for auction. Fund your new life. Don’t worry about money for a while.”