“I’m not prepared to offer you a specific number at this point,” Izzy says. “But I imagine we’d be talking somewhere in the lower third of that range.”
Myrna frowns at this, and I want to nudge Izzy and try to convince him to bump his estimate up. Myrna is ready to work and can start in just two weeks. While she won’t hit the ground running, I get a sense that she’s the quick learner she says she is and would be up to speed relatively quickly. Relief for me is in sight, and I want to grab it so it doesn’t get away.
Izzy offers to give Myrna a quick tour of our office—an offer she quickly accepts—and while they are doing that, I hang in the library to wait for the next interview. Curious, I head over to my desk and do a Google search for Myrna Nesbitt. I don’t expect to find much, but I find plenty. And what I find dashes my hopes of a quick hire.
Izzy returns ten minutes later. “So what did you think of Myrna?” he asks me. “I like her. She seems motivated, eager, and smart enough.”
“But not open-minded enough,” I say with a sad, apologetic look. I then show him what I’ve found online. Myrna Nesbitt is a major leader in a group that calls themselves CADS, which stands for Christians Against Depraved Souls. And a large part of their rhetoric involves an anti-gay movement that labels gay people as immoral, wicked, and damned to hell, put on earth to undermine society’s good Christian people.
“Damn,” Izzy says. “I had high hopes for her, too.”
“So did I,” I say with a tired sigh.
We change subjects and spend a few minutes discussing the skeletal remains unearthed on our property, with Izzy saying he’s eager to see what the bone specialist has to say, and me bemoaning the indeterminate delays the find will cause for our building project. Then Cass pokes her head into the room.
“Your next interview is here,” she says.
“Great,” Izzy tells her. “Bring him on back.” Cass disappears, and Izzy hands me the résumé for our next candidate. “Here’s hoping this one is better,” he says.
The next person in line is a man named Norman Gates, who looks to be in his mid to late thirties. The similarity in his name to the infamous Psycho character is unfortunate, particularly since the guy bears a striking resemblance to the late actor Anthony Perkins.
According to Norman’s résumé, he has a bachelor’s degree in biology, and his previous work experience, starting from the most recent, includes five years at a funeral home in a town about forty miles from here, a brief stint of two years as an orderly and OR tech at a hospital in Milwaukee, and a few years spent working on a dairy farm up north while he was going to school. At least with his hospital and funeral home experience, he should possess the basic skill set necessary to do the job.
Izzy once again does the introductions and offers Norman a pastry. Unlike Myrna, he accepts, opting for a glazed fritter I had my eye on as an after-lunch dessert. This makes me lower my opinion of him several notches, not just because he stole my donut, but because his willingness to eat during a job interview is a professional faux pas that makes me think he isn’t all that serious about wanting the job.
“Thank you,” Norman says, accepting the donut. “I normally wouldn’t do this during an interview, but I ran into a traffic jam on my way here and didn’t have time to grab something to eat.” With that, he takes a bite and chews while Izzy does his spiel describing the job.
Once Izzy is done, he asks Norman, who has wolfed that fritter down, why he wants to work here.
“I think it would be a good combination with my skill set,” he says. “I have experience with handling bodies and have assisted with the embalming procedures. I also have experience with seeing the human body cut open, thanks to the time I spent working as an OR tech. Plus, I enjoy puzzles, and the investigative part of the job would fit nicely with that.”
They are all good answers, and I begin to consider forgiving Norman for his donut grab.
“Let’s get over the elephant in the room thing,” Norman says. “My name. I’m used to the Psycho references, and I know I bear a passing resemblance to Anthony Perkins. I get teased about it all the time.”
“The name thing is interesting,” Izzy admits. “But I don’t see how it would interfere with your ability to do the job. Why are you looking to leave the funeral job?”
“Hmm, yeah . . . about that,” he says hesitantly. “My current employer got a little upset with me because he found out I have a hobby that made him uncomfortable.”
This piques my interest. “What hobby?” I ask.
“I’ve always had an interest in ancient Egypt and mummification,” he says. “I have a collection at home that is . . . well . . . unusual.”
Izzy and I both stare at him, waiting for him to continue.
“They are mummified animals, two of which I bought online, and one of which I did myself when my pet cat died.”
Okay, this is a bit odd, and creepy, but when I weigh this against my need to find someone to relieve me workwise, I’m not sure it’s a deal breaker. Then Norman explains further.
“We had a body at the funeral home, a man who died of natural causes and whose only surviving relative was a homeless person. Since we couldn’t find any other living family members, and the one relative we did have was broke as broke can be, my boss offered to cremate the remains for free. I’ve been wanting to try out my mummification process on a human, and I thought this particular body might be the perfect candidate. So I asked the relative if he would be willing to give me permission. He was fine with it—to be honest, I think he just wanted the whole thing to go away whatever way it could—but my boss freaked out and told me I was morbid and inappropriate. And ever since then, all he lets me do is oversee ceremonies and sell coffins. That’s not enough for me. I want more hands-on experience with the corpses. And to be honest, I’ve run out of cozy metaphors to help me sell those overpriced death boxes to people who can’t afford them half the time.”
I glance over at Izzy to see his reaction to this, and judging from the stunned expression on his face, it’s similar to mine.
Norman is sitting across from us, looking serene and pleased with himself, as if he’d just told us he likes to bake cakes as opposed to experiment with dead bodies.
Izzy finally collects himself, thanks Norman for coming in, and offers to show him out. I notice he does not offer to give him a tour of the place, which tells me all I need to know about Norman’s chances of receiving a job offer.
Out of curiosity, I do a Google search on Norman while waiting for Izzy’s return, but surprisingly, I don’t find much of anything other than the obvious corrected finds for Norman Bates and some info on a character actor who also has the name Norman Gates.
Izzy returns, still looking a little shocked as well as apologetic. “Sorry about that,” he says. “We’ll keep looking.”
I let out a sigh of disappointment, and nod. “I suppose it was too much to hope we would find someone quickly,” I say, feeling my sense of exhaustion increase merely at the thought of having to continue at the rate I’ve been going. “And on that happy note, you should go home and get some rest. I’ve got some investigating to do.”
“What are you looking into?”
“For starters, I’m going to pay a visit to Patty Volker to talk to her about the life insurance policies on Meredith Lansing and Craig Knowlton.”
Izzy arches his eyebrows at this. “That could be . . . interesting.”
“Tell me about it. And just to make it more interesting, I’m meeting her at her house, the house, the new one David built.”
“Are you sure you’re up for that?” Izzy asks, looking concerned.
“Hell, yeah,” I say, waving away his concern. “I’m dying to see what the inside of the new place looks like. And I’m not worried about Patty. She’s always been easygoing and nice.”
“Be careful,” Izzy says. “Curiosity did kill the cat.”
Words to die by.
CHAPTER 18
I make my way down to the garage and my car. This requires me to walk past the pastries one more time, and my eyes are drawn to them as if they’re magnetized and my eyes are made of metal. I lift the lid on the box and eye the remaining specimens. A particularly attractive donut with maple frosting on it skewers my attention. For a full minute I argue with myself, knowing that I don’t need it, that the calories in it would take me an eternity to burn off, and that I really should eat something a little healthier. Then I realize that just by standing this close to it I’ve probably absorbed some of the calories already and throw caution to the wind. In a last-ditch effort to show some restraint, I break the donut in half and leave one of the pieces in the box—the slightly smaller piece, of course. By the time I reach the garage, I’m seriously considering retracing my steps back to the library to get the second half, but I manage to make it to my car. I’m a stress eater—justification number five thousand and twenty-one—and I promise myself I’ll do better tomorrow.
I drive to a local coffee shop and order a latte with a double shot of espresso, skim milk, and sugar-free almond flavoring. Then I give myself kudos for doing better with my diet already. As I’m waiting for my concoction, I mentally prepare myself for the visit ahead, for the inevitable flood of old memories that will likely hit me, and the awkwardness of having to deal with my ex-husband’s new wife. The stress it all triggers makes me seriously consider adding a piece of coffee cake to my order, but I stay strong.
Driving down the road to my old house, which also happens to be the road to the cottage I lived in after David and I split up, I feel a twinge of nostalgia. It’s not for the McMansion life I had with David, but rather the solitary, cozy, relatively uncomplicated life I had while living in the cottage. Though I suppose uncomplicated isn’t a true description considering that I underwent a separation, a divorce, the start of a new job, the discovery of a new love, the near loss of that new love, a pregnancy, and the birth of my first child while living there. Still, compared to the life I have now, it seems so peaceful and idyllic to me. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.
When I look back on the past couple of years, it amazes me how many changes have occurred in my life. Chief among them is the dissolution of my marriage to David, which wasn’t a smooth ride, but also wasn’t as acrimonious as some I’ve heard of.
I want to resent or dislike Patty on some level, though I can’t come up with a rational reason why I feel this way. There is a level of awkwardness between us now—how could there not be?—but it’s minimal in my mind. Patty’s a nice person who has always been kind and friendly toward me. Her only transgression—and it’s a suspected one, not a proven one—is that there were some shenanigans that took place in the settlement of our insurance policy after the fire that burned down our old house, shenanigans that might have let David benefit a little more from the settlement than I did.
Despite my suspicions, I am happy enough with what I got at the time—and the lesson I learned about establishing credit in one’s own name—and I considered it a reasonable payment to be released from a marriage that had suffered a fatal blow.
Despite the fact that my relationship with David ended painfully, I still harbor a fair number of fond memories, memories of good times we shared when our love was still new and strong. David isn’t a bad person, in general. After all, he chose an occupation that dedicates him to trying to better or save other people’s lives. But like all of us, he isn’t perfect, and his inability to keep his one-eyed monster in his pants cave was an imperfection I couldn’t overcome.
My mother, whose primary goal in life has always been to see me and my sister, Desi, married to rich, influential men, regardless of any shortcomings they may have, couldn’t believe I was willing to walk away from a marriage to a doctor . . . a surgeon, no less. The fact that I then hooked up with a lowly cop only made things worse in her eyes. To my mother, infidelity wasn’t nearly reason enough to give up on a marriage that assured one a financially secure, somewhat prestigious future. The irony of my mother giving marital advice to anyone, given that she has been married and divorced four times and is currently living with a man I once dated, is lost on her.
Then again, my mother isn’t always playing with a full deck when it comes to her mental health. She’s a hypochondriac with a serious case of OCD and a warped way of looking at the world. It is due in part to her hypochondria that my divorce from David was such a blow to her. He was a key player in this part of her illness, and she consulted him endless times regarding whatever imagined symptoms she was having and the possible diagnoses that went with them.
While growing up, my mother’s hypochondria led to a sense of instability for me, because before I understood her illness, I believed she was likely to die any day, any time. Gradually, I came to realize that most of her illnesses—at least the physical ones—were imagined, and any real ones she had were hugely overblown. As it turned out, this quirk had a positive spin to it in my later life because my mother’s cumulative acquired medical knowledge and her library of medical textbooks was so extensive by the time I started nursing school that it gave me an advantage in learning all I needed to know to ace my classes.
Recently, I’ve started to wonder if some of my mother’s mental health issues stem from the way my father handled things back when he left us. Learning the true circumstances around his disappearance has shed a new light on my mother’s issues for me. But while I may have a better understanding of why she is the way she is, it doesn’t make her any easier to live with. The last time I visited her house with my son in tow, she nearly had a heart attack—maybe even a real one. Matthew, in his typical style, left a trail of detritus everywhere he went: cookie crumbs, spilt juice puddles, jellied fingerprints, and the ultimate crime in my mother’s eyes, a major dump in his drawers. My mother, whose skin is normally the color of alabaster, turned so white at the smell of Matthew’s poo that she would have been invisible in a snowstorm. And by the time I had plopped Matthew down on my mother’s bathroom floor to change and clean him and put his new clothes on, my mother had dressed herself in full biohazard gear. She was wearing a Tyvek bodysuit with a hood, rubber gloves, a gas mask, and rubber boots. I suspect the only reason she wasn’t wearing a CDC-level respirator is because she hasn’t figured out how to get one yet. She came armed with no less than six bottles of various cleaning agents. If she’d had a flamethrower, I suspect she would have brought that, too. As soon as I had emerged from the bathroom, my mother entered it and locked herself inside. I waited nearly an hour, and when she still hadn’t emerged, I packed up my son and left.
In retrospect, my marital woes with David fit in well with my family history of dysfunction, and in a way, my childhood tribulations have helped to prepare me for the meeting I’m about to have with my ex’s new wife. I became an expert at dealing with awkward at a very young age.
As I pull up in front of David and Patty’s house, I marvel at the newness of it—how clean the exterior is, how fresh the trim paint looks, how young and green the landscaping appears. It triggers a twinge of envy in me (one I quickly quash) since I know that the building of my new house is now on hold indefinitely.
I park and head up the stone front steps to the porch. The front door is a massive, wooden, arched affair with a small, grated window near the top. There is a large, wrought iron knocker on it, but I forgo it in favor of the doorbell. When I push the button, I hear a rich, melodious chime from inside.
Patty answers quickly, and as always, she is gracious and kind, greeting me with a warm, genuine smile and a cheerful, “Good morning, Mattie. Come on in.”
As I step over the threshold, I expect to be hit with a flood of memories, but it doesn’t happen. The interior of the house is a stark contrast to the medieval-looking front door, probably because David picked out the house plan and started building it before he and Patty got serious. Everything about the house is vastly different from the one I had lived in. The structure is different, the colors a
re different, and the furnishings are all new and strange to me. My taste in design tends toward the traditional, or at least transitional, and I favor warm colors and soft, cushy lines. This house, however, is very modern in its design, with lots of smooth, sleek lines, monochromatic walls, floors, and furnishings touched by tiny splashes of scattered color in the accessories, and lots of open spaces. It’s a relief in a way, because it bears no resemblance to the house I once called my own. But it’s also a little sad.
“Good morning, Patty,” I say. I stand a moment and take in my surroundings. “Wow! You’ve done an amazing job with the place.”
“Thanks,” she says, looking a little abashed. “Why don’t we go into my office?” She waves a hand down the central area of the house. “It’s the second door on the right.”
I walk down the hall, hearing the cold echo of my steps on the stone floor. I glance in at the first room on the right and see that it is David’s office. I can’t resist a smile at the décor. It’s a sharp contrast to the rest of the house and more in line with the office David had in our old home: lots of dark wood, plush carpeting, a warm, peach color on the walls, and bookcases filled with medical texts. I move past it to Patty’s office, where the modern design is once more in play. Her desk is a glass-and-chrome affair that faces the entrance to the room; the floor is the same whitewashed-looking wood I saw in the living area, accented by a small area rug in a faux zebra pattern in front of the desk. Three of the walls are basic white, dotted with a half-dozen black-framed pictures. The fourth wall is an accent wall, with a pattern of horizontal panels in varying shades of gray. Sitting in front of this wall is a metallic credenza with four storage drawers—two on either end—and a second desk area in the middle. Atop this desk area is a row of manuals and books, bookended with two L-shaped slabs of stone, a multifunction printer/copier/scanner, and a Keurig coffeemaker.
The chair behind Patty’s desk has a chrome frame with a molded mesh body, and a matching one sits on the side of the desk near the door. Behind the desk is a large window that looks out onto the side yard and the woods that separate this house from Izzy’s.
Dead Calm Page 17