“Probably when we got to be over fifty,” I chuckled as I joined her at the table, “but I know what you mean. My daughter and I both used to enjoy that magazine and give in to the temptation to buy a copy now and then, but when the cover price hit five dollars, I decided we would both save money if we split the cost of a subscription. Unfortunately, that was about the same time the publisher changed the format, so now it’s all ads and superficial pap. Heaven forbid that anything should require an attention span greater than the average houseplant’s to digest. That’s one subscription I won’t be renewing.”
May nodded in agreement and turned the magazine face down. “I appreciate the hospitality, dearie, but I’m feeling rather anxious about my poor, torn up house. I’ve been in touch with the fellow who plows out my drive, and he says it’s all clear now, so as soon as you feel mobile, you can get me out of your hair. I know Armando is flying in this evening, and you must have things to do. I’ve taken up quite enough of your time and Margo’s, not to mention Duane’s and Becky’s.”
An hour later we were on the road in the dazzling, post-storm sunshine. Everywhere we looked, clumps of snow were sliding off tree branches and pitched roofs, accompanied by the steady dripping of melting ice. True to her handyman’s word, May’s driveway had been cleared right down to the pavement. We pulled in, and she pressed the garage door opener in her handbag. The door slid up smoothly to reveal her little sedan.
“I’ll just sweep up the glass from that broken window and pick up my mail,” May said, but she didn’t move from the passenger seat. Although as composed as always, her face revealed the strain of recent events. She could not have been looking forward to another look at her trashed house. “What could possibly be worth all this?” she wondered aloud.
I reached over and squeezed her hand. “It’s hard for a decent, kindhearted person like you to understand, I know, but John Harkness could tell you a few stories about what money—even the promise of a windfall—can do to people. Just say the word, and we can call this whole wild goose chase off. Lizabeth’s little joke may have been well intentioned, but it’s simply not fun anymore. Come to think of it, it never was. What do you say we just throw in the towel and let Renata and Martin find the flash drive, if they can, and enjoy their ill-gotten gains?”
May raised her eyebrows and seemed to be giving that option serious consideration, but then she sighed and shrugged. “No can do, I’m afraid. For one thing, I’m sure Lizzie’s lawyer, wherever he may be, will see to it that Renata and Martin never prosper from the publication of Trague’s last manuscript, even if they do manage to get their hands on it before we do. I’ve got an original, signed letter in Lizzie’s own handwriting stating her intention that I should publish it, and come hell or high water, I shall.” She turned to me, her expression resolved. “I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with the proceeds, if there are any. Remember, Trague could have been completely gaga by the time he wrote it. Either way, you can bet your booties that manuscript will wind up in my care, just like Lizabeth wanted.”
I grinned, pleased with the stiffening of May’s backbone. She was sounding more like herself by the minute. “I never doubted it. Now I’ll go get your mail out of the box, and then we can clean up that broken glass. Do you need to go inside to check on anything? Pick up more clothes?”
Briefly, her expression turned bleak again. “No, I’m not going inside this morning. To tell you the truth, I’m not at all sure when I’ll be able to face going into that house again. A couple of years ago, when those hooligans were harassing me … well, that was bad enough, but this is worse somehow. This is a willful violation of my personal space for monetary gain. It’s as if this place has a dark cloud hanging over it. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the same way about my little house again.”
By the time I’d dropped May off at Margo’s house, I was already thinking about the tasks I needed to accomplish before retrieving Armando from the airport that evening. To my relief, the list was short. Other than feeding the birds, making a trip to the supermarket and putting out clean towels in his bathroom, I had very little to do. The laundry was up to date, and I’d made a run through the downstairs with the vacuum cleaner a couple of days ago. It was surprising how easy the house was to keep without a man in it, I realized with a touch of resentment, especially one as oblivious to disorder as my husband was. It continually amazed me how such a personally fastidious man could appear in the kitchen each morning, perfectly turned out for the day, while leaving a trail of total destruction behind him. I groaned inwardly, realizing my vacation from housekeeping was over. Still, it would be good to have Armando home, safe and sound, and I knew for certain that Gracie would be overjoyed to see her favorite person again.
As I turned onto Spring Street and caught my first glimpse of the pond, I was pleased to see that, despite the impressive snowfall, the ice toward the back of the pond was beginning to break up. Rising temperatures would create open water there very soon, I knew, and I rejoiced for the geese and ducks who had endured most of the winter in the marsh, awaiting this very day. As I parked the Jetta at the side of the street, I saw a dozen or more geese slipping and sliding over the ice, eyes fixed on the opening in the ice. For once, they were almost oblivious to me and my pitchers of cracked corn. The ducks, however, were not, and I hurried to pour out my offerings.
After I’d refilled the pitchers with birdseed for my next stop at the overpass, a patch of white caught my attention, and I shaded my eyes with one hand for a better look. Sure enough, one of the big, goofy swans was swimming in a strip of open water at the rear of the pond. The opening was so narrow, I could only infer its existence by the swan’s movements. Was he alone, I wondered, or was his pal with him? And was the companion swan a mate or just a buddy? I remembered a couple of years ago when the swans then resident had produced a record-breaking seven cygnets and, snapping turtles notwithstanding, managed to raise all of them to maturity. As is the custom with swans, sometime in November the young swans started leaving the pond in twos and threes—all except one, who’d been slow to mature. As his siblings’ feathers turned to white, his remained mostly brown, and he stayed at the pond for weeks after even George and Laura had departed for their winter quarters. At least, we assumed that he was a male. The sex of a swan is very hard to determine at a distance, so we were never certain. After that summer, it was he, we assumed, who made a rest stop at Spring Street Pond during his semi-annual migrations, coming and going. Until now, though, he’d never stayed for the entire season. If he had found a mate, I hoped they would decide to make our pond their summer residence. It would be a treat to have a swan family to watch once again.
At the overpass I picked my way carefully over the melting ice on the sidewalk. There was a particularly treacherous patch about halfway to the feeding point, deceptively dry looking but often dangerously slick. I knew it well, having lost my footing and fallen on my backside the previous winter. Fortunately, only my ego had been seriously bruised, and the birds were only too happy to clean up the spilled seed; but I wasn’t getting any younger, and I didn’t relish the idea of having a titanium hip any sooner than absolutely necessary.
On my way to the local Stop & Shop, I turned May’s final words over in my mind and wondered if I should have alerted Margo to the way her aunt was feeling. Although I refused to believe in nonsensical things like curses and bad mojo, May had certainly experienced more than her share of trouble in her new home. After moving north from Atlanta, she had spared no expense to update and decorate her little house, suffering harassment during the process for no discernible reason. Still, she had persevered and become something of a grandmother to the neighborhood kids, many of whom flocked to her home on Wednesday afternoons in good weather for sessions on everything from baking to building bat houses.
This latest bout of trouble, while totally unrelated, seemed particularly unfair when May had already endured so much. No matter how I looked at the situation, I could
n’t see any way that she’d done anything to prompt this current mess except perhaps to be a bit too trusting of a man she’d just met. Even that thought I squelched firmly. May was a lovely, open person, but she was no fool. Her only crime here was her loyalty to a cranky, embittered publishing colleague and her determination to carry out her final wishes. Talk about no good deed going unpunished.
I pushed a cart through the familiar aisles of the supermarket, mechanically pulling what I thought of as Armando food from the shelves and bins: fresh fruit and vegetables, ciabatta rolls and cinnamon-raisin bagels, real sugar and butter, sliced turkey from the deli, cranberry-apple tea. From the butcher case I selected a whole roasting chicken, which would do nicely for our dinner. Thanks to an oven that allowed me to program a delayed start time, I could slide the uncooked bird, stuffed with fresh lemons and garlic and surrounded by carrots and tiny red potatoes, into the oven just before I left for the airport and be confident that it would be done to succulent perfection when we returned. If Armando’s flight was delayed, the oven would simply shut itself off at the conclusion of the designated roasting time, and we’d still have a decent chicken dinner, albeit a bit overcooked.
As an afterthought, I retraced my steps to add Splenda, sugar-free coffee creamer, frozen fish fillets and low fat cottage cheese, my own culinary staples. You can’t be a fairly sedentary woman over fifty and expect to keep your weight within reason while eating real butter and sugar. It had taken me nearly three months of starvation hell a few years earlier to shed a dozen pounds, and I didn’t intend to have to repeat the experience. Not for the first time, I felt a twinge of resentment for Margo, who seemed able to consume anything she wanted without gaining an ounce. She’d told me repeatedly that wasn’t true, but looking at May, fifteen years Margo’s senior and just as svelte, I had to believe genetics played a big role. Both women made stunning look easy.
After a quick stop at the package store to pick up a bottle of Armando’s favorite shiraz, I headed for home. As I unpacked my canvas bags in our sunny kitchen, I flashed on the image of May’s ruined home. It wasn’t only the physical damage that was so upsetting, I realized. It was the viciousness of the destruction. You could almost imagine the rage propelling every slash as the perpetrator methodically trashed each room. He or she had been intent on finding the USB drive, yes, but there was an element of pure hatred driving each rip and tear that was almost palpable. It was the malevolent emotion hanging in the air, the clear wish to exact revenge, that especially puzzled me, and I knew May and Margo sensed it, as well. What harm, real or imagined, could May have inflicted on someone to provoke such a response? Or was it Lizabeth who had been the unwitting instigator?
As I stood in the baggage claim area of Bradley International Airport that evening, I wondered how much of the past week’s experiences I should confide to my husband. Because of his Latino temper and tendency to overreact, I had learned to choose my words with care over our years together. Margo, Strutter and I had an undeniable predilection for becoming involved in dangerous situations. Although Armando had become more philosophical about it, as had John Harkness and J.D. Putnam, Strutter’s husband, I’d suffered his withdrawal into icy politeness, which was his response to being frightened for my safety when he could do nothing to protect me, on several occasions. I had learned with the years that he believed discretion to be the better part of valor, and he also knew my partners and I didn’t have a huge supply of it. We tended to act first and think later, which led to some uncomfortable confrontations with our respective husbands.
As the only bilingual contract expert for Telecom International, now headquartered in Orlando, Armando traveled a good deal on business these days, and we had perfected our system for departure and arrival days. While he was on the upper level of Bradley International, dancing the TSA Tango, I skipped security altogether and headed directly for the baggage carousels. On a couple of occasions, I’d been able to snag his familiar green suitcase off the belt and wheel it away from the crowd before he even got downstairs, but tonight wasn’t one of those times.
When I saw other passengers crowding down the escalators, I kept one eye on the carousel and the other on the new arrivals and waved when I saw my handsome husband coming toward me. As always when we were reunited after a separation, we both wore big grins and hugged each other warmly. After more than fifteen years, our relationship had mellowed, but we were always happy to see each other.
“So, Cara,” he said as he wheeled his big suitcase toward my car in the short-term parking lot. “What mischief have you and your ladies been up to while I was safely out of the way? No, don’t try to tell me it is nothing. I have heard something in your voice during our last few conversations that has already given you away, and I am too tired to coax it out of you. Just tell me, please.”
I smiled sheepishly as I handed him his carry-on bag to put in the trunk. “You know me too well. I thought I was going a great job of not burdening you with another of our strange situations.” I handed him the keys. Latino men are not chauffeured by their women.
He snorted as he slid behind the wheel and unlocked the passenger door. “Even had I heard nothing in your voice and simply assumed enough time had passed for yet another mystery to present itself, I would have an excellent chance of being correct, do you not agree?”
I had to admit he had a point. Armando, John and J.D. had the distinction of having the only wives in Wethersfield who were on a first name basis with most of the town’s police officers, paramedics and other emergency personnel. Was that a good thing, I wondered? Probably not.
By the time we got to Wethersfield, I’d come clean, and Armando was officially up to date. He must really be tired, I thought, because a Colombian meltdown had not occurred. He just drove and listened, a resigned expression on his face, nodding now and then. When the car was in our garage, he turned off the engine and sat quietly, his hands still on the steering wheel.
“Um, are you okay, honey?” I asked. His silence was unnerving me. “I already brought in the mail. It was the usual junk mail and a couple of bills.”
At last, he spoke. “What was the name of May’s friend again, the one who died in the hotel?”
“Lizabeth Mulgrew,” I told him.
“Spell it for me.”
I did.
“And the name of this famous deceased author for whose manuscript you are all searching?”
“W.Z.B. Trague,” I said. “The W stands for Wilhelm, Z and B stand for middle names of some sort, and Trague is spelled T-R-A-G-U-E. It’s funny you should ask that, because Emma asked me the same thing on the phone the other day.”
A small smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. Finally, he turned to face me. “I am not at all surprised. It is too bad you did not choose to tell me all of this sooner, Cara. I could have saved you a great deal of trouble.”
I looked at him warily. Was the man joking, or did he really have some insight to offer? “Are you going to make me beg, or are you going to tell me what you think you know?”
“Oh, I am going to tell you—just not right now. I am tired, and I am hungry, and I would very much like to have my dinner first.”
I decided that, considering my sin of omission, things were going pretty well between us. I would let him have his little joke. What information could he possibly have about this situation anyway? Tonight was the first he’d heard of any of it, and we’d all been wracking our brains for more than a week now in an attempt to solve Lizabeth’s riddle.
“Okay,” I replied serenely. “There’s roast chicken and potatoes for dinner and homemade applesauce for dessert. You bring your bags in, and I’ll get it on some plates. The aroma from the oven must have made Gracie crazy by now. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to have her man home again, feeding her pieces of chicken from his plate like he knows he’s not supposed to do.”
I should have known better than to think he would make it that easy for me. After he had taken his luggage upstairs, an
d we’d shared our chicken dinner with Gracie, Armando picked up the TV remote and began reviewing the programs that had recorded in his absence. He pointedly said nothing at all about our previous conversation. I fumed silently, but I’d be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction of asking what he had to say. After loading the dishwasher and sitting through a recording of “Project Runway,” a show I found particularly loathsome, I gave him a cool kiss on the cheek and headed for the bathtub. “Sleep well, Armando,” was all I said before I turned my back on him.
A low chuckle escaped him. “Do not go away angry, Cara. After keeping all of this from me, you deserved to wait a little while for the answer to the riddle you and the ladies have been pursuing all of the last week.”
In spite of myself, I was intrigued. I gritted my teeth and turned around, one eyebrow raised. “Well?”
“I think that all of you have been, how do you say, too close to the trees to see the forest,” he said, mangling the English metaphor as only Armando could. “It is really very simple. There is no Wilhelm Z.B. Trague. There probably never was. In my opinion, May’s friend was having a bit of fun with her and the rest of the people with whom she worked all of those years. She meant it to be her final joke, although it has not turned out to be as amusing as she intended it to be.”
I huffed in exasperation. “What do you mean there was never any Wilhelm Trague? He was one of the most successful mystery authors in the business.”
Armando smiled that annoying smile again. “Wilhelm Z.B. Trague and Lizabeth Mulgrew are one and the same person, can you not see it? Each name has the same letters. It is what you call an amalgam?”
“An anagram,” I said sourly, the light dawning. “Fresh eyes. It happens every time someone new takes a look at this situation.”
“Or in this instance, fresh ears,” Armando pointed out, ever the stickler. “I have not myself seen anything.”
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