“Did you enjoy the service?” he asked McGuire. His tentative smile said he was expecting a compliment.
“I’m not sure I understood it,” McGuire said. “I was surprised you even held one for her.”
“The service you mean? Your aunt requested it.” Willoughby spoke with the satisfaction of someone revealing the truth to an unbeliever.
“Cora? She was hardly religious.”
“Nevertheless, she prepared instructions on how the service was to be performed. She wrote the sermon. And she chose the people she wanted to attend. She named you and everyone else in this room.”
“Funny old broad!” It was Ellie Stevenson, eavesdropping on the conversation. Her outburst was punctuated with cold laughter. “She wrote all that crap?”
Willoughby turned his head to her and nodded with a tight smile, his eyes closed, the kind of gesture he might make to a small child who had asked if there really was a God. “She also instructed me to give you a copy of the sermon for your interest,” he said, turning back to McGuire. He reached a slim hand, the fingers like parchment-wrapped twigs, inside his jacket and removed two sheets of paper, folded vertically. “Here you are,” he said. “She was really quite good at expressing herself in, I suppose we should say, poetic terms. Don’t you think?”
“Cora was good at everything she set her mind to,” McGuire said. He folded the papers twice and stuffed them in his jacket pocket. “Thanks for doing that,” he added. “If Cora wanted it done, then it was important to her.”
Willoughby smiled and bowed his head slightly as though unworthy of an anticipated compliment and backed away through the others gathered around the two men.
“Will you be staying at Cora’s house?” It was Bunny Gilroy. Her voice was high-pitched but attractive.
“Nowhere else to go,” McGuire shrugged.
“You can always stay here. . . .” June Leedale began.
“No, let him stay at Cora’s house,” Parker Leedale ordered. “He may want to check out the inventory.”
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind going over there now,” McGuire said. “Freshen up a bit and turn in early.”
“Sure thing.” Parker Leedale set his cup aside and walked to a maple sideboard where he opened a drawer and withdrew a small white envelope and locked tin container the size of a lunch box. “Keys,” he said, handing the envelope to McGuire. “The big one opens the front door, the little one opens the back door. There’s an old cast iron key in there—I think she said it’s for Terry’s room. There’s a key for her old Saab in the garage. I think it’s drivable. I know she had the tag renewed this year.” He looked around at the others. “Complained that Massachusetts should give a rebate to her estate if she died before it expired,” he laughed. “She was serious too.”
The others smiled and grinned. “Good old Cora,” Blake Stevenson said in his gravelly voice.
“Also a key for the box, the one with Cora’s deed to the house and some other legal papers in it, just tax bills I think, that kind of stuff. You might as well keep it. She gave it to me a couple of years ago, after she had her first heart attack.”
“Thanks for everything,” McGuire said, taking the small file box from Leedale and heading for the door.
“Don’t forget this.” Parker Leedale handed McGuire his canvas bag. “See you tomorrow. Ten o’clock, my office. Right across from the library, second floor. You want a ride down?”
“I can walk it,” McGuire answered, hefting the bag on his shoulder.
He stepped into the late afternoon air, closing the door behind him.
Now they’re free to talk about me, he thought, studying the flagstones as he walked.
Chapter Eight
McGuire’s shadow preceded him down the Leedales’ flagstones and across Miner’s Lane to Cora’s house.
To his left, Miner’s Lane curved toward Mill Pond Road and downtown Compton; to his right, it led across the broad peninsula of land known as The Thumb, which extended into the brackish waters of Stage Harbour. There were neither sidewalks nor streetlights on Miner’s Lane. The houses were on oversized lots and widely scattered, each distinctive from its neighbours in design and proportion yet identical in detail: cedar shingles, working louvered shutters, massive brick chimneys and twin dormers.
Cora Godwin’s house—now his house, if what June Leedale said was correct, McGuire reminded himself—was set like its neighbours well back from the road, amid an expansive lawn with flower gardens planted down both sides of the building. Small flakes of white enamel paint coated the surfaces of the window sills and door trim. The shutters, open wide to welcome the late afternoon sun, were finished in Wedgwood blue, as was the solid pine front door. A white stain spread like bird droppings from the base of the massive whitewashed brick chimney down the steeply pitched cedar shingled roof and between the dormers.
McGuire slung the canvas bag over his shoulder, tore open the white envelope Parker Leedale had given him, withdrew the largest key, dropped the others in his pocket and unlocked the front door.
Like a time machine, he thought in silent awe as he entered the house. Like stepping from this life into a previous one that’s been waiting all these years on the other side of the door.
He recalled his aunt striding across this very living room, drying her hands on a towel or brushing flour from her apron, to greet him on his arrivals from Worcester. Her figure remained slim and while the years had deepened the lines of her face her eyes kept their bright and blue radiance. He could picture her now, walking with perfect posture toward him.
Her strong voice echoed in McGuire’s ears.
“So what do you think of those Red Sox?” she would say. “Give me a hug now, then up the stairs and change into some clean clothes, your mother packed clean clothes for you, didn’t she? Then come on down and have some blueberry pie and I’ll fetch Terry from wherever he is. The baseball diamond maybe, or over at the bluffs near the lighthouse.”
So alive. So active. So eager to challenge whatever the world threw in her path. He had loved her then, far more than he could ever love his own taciturn and defeated mother. But as an adult, sheathed in his chain of crises, his two failed marriages and his stormy career as a detective, he neglected her except for sending greeting cards and phone calls when he made promises to visit.
He would miss her. He dropped his bag to the floor and leaned against the alcove wall for a moment.
He would miss her.
Much of what he saw in Cora’s house remained unchanged from his memory. He noted the same wide-planked pine floors, the wallpaper with its white fleurs-de-lys on a cranberry background, the impractical red velvet sitting chair, its back against the stairs leading to the upstairs bedroom and the seat too low to sit comfortably upon.
McGuire breathed deeply and flicked a wall switch. The glow cast by two wall-mounted brass lamps and a small overhead chandelier bathed the alcove and living room in light.
Cora Godwin had thrived on honesty in every measure of her being, including the manner in which she furnished her house. There was room for neither pretension nor imitation in her life. Especially in her home. “Ersatz!” she would bark when encountering reproductions of furniture, paintings or artifacts. McGuire learned to love the word. “Ersatz!” he and Terry would shout at each other when they heard a playmate lying or exaggerating, and burst into laughter.
“Authenticity is honesty, and honesty is truth,” Cora would remind them.
She budged not an inch in her fight against cheap imitation, which was why her home had been so sparsely furnished, much to the consternation of her husband and son. If it was not authentic, she rejected it. And if her family could not afford the real thing, it would settle for nothing less.
Surprisingly, this didn’t extend to gadgets, as Cora called them, such as televisions and stereo music systems. Gadgets, she claimed, were true to the
ir time. Besides, stereo systems produced the music of Puccini and Verdi and Rossini, music that would always be true, music that could never be dishonest, could never be ersatz.
McGuire smiled at the sight of Cora’s old TV set resting comfortably on a battered pine blanket box finished, Cora had explained to him once, in milk-based paint applied almost a hundred and fifty years ago.
To his left, against the wall separating the living room from the dining room, or Keeping Room as Cora called it, was the fireplace, its white enameled mantel scarred and dusty.
McGuire wandered through the house, touching the wood of the furniture and the wainscoting and carved door frames with his fingertips, as though greeting old friends or bestowing blessings on the abandoned.
He entered the den with its crowded bookshelves, the contents of every volume read at least once by Cora. He admired the beamed ceiling of the dining room and its long elegant pine table rescued from a Catholic retreat house in Sandwich. Finally, he explored the kitchen and its glass-fronted cupboards, heavy with generations of white paint applied layer upon layer over the years, like poultices.
The refrigerator held a jar of instant coffee, containers of Cora’s homemade jam—peach, raspberry, currant—a few pats of butter and assorted condiments, and little else. He closed the appliance door, feeling like an intruder, a voyeur.
Walking to the kitchen window he stared out at the garden, the beds thick with the brown husks of frost-killed peonies, day lilies, zinnias, Canterbury bells and clematis.
On the journey north from Green Turtle Cay, McGuire knew he would shed no tears for his aunt. Not because he had not loved her. Nor because he felt no guilt about avoiding her. But because there was no reason to.
“Never cry over the inevitable,” Cora told him when he visited her after the announcement of Terry’s death. “You cry only for the avoidable, for the unnecessary, for massive stupidity.” And then she sobbed against McGuire’s shoulder while her husband sat alone upstairs in Terry’s bedroom and poured Wild Turkey from a bottle into a glass and drank it, and then poured more into the glass and drank it too.
McGuire focused his eyes for the first time on the window beside the refrigerator and its antique brass window lock, turned aside. He reached and slid it to the closed position. Cora, always so trusting. Living out her life in a prosperous small town where neighbours came and went through your house like boarders.
McGuire was never that trusting.
He walked to a heavy door leading to the garage attached to the side of the house. Groping for the light switch, he turned it on to discover Cora’s dusty Saab, a few rusting garden implements and several old rockers hung from rafters of the garage. He switched the light off, closed the door and set the lock.
Leaving the kitchen, McGuire checked the lock on the front door before carrying the tin box upstairs, hearing each step creak beneath his weight. He paused in the upper hallway. To his right was Cora’s bedroom. He pushed the door open, revealing the high four-poster pine bed and its multihued quilt. A faded but still valuable Persian carpet lay between the foot of the bed and the hearth of the upstairs fireplace, whose mantel was flanked by multi-paned windows hung with gray lace curtains.
All of it the same, McGuire reflected. All as it had been thirty years ago. He turned to explore the other rooms and, surprised to discover that Terry’s was locked, withdrew the cast iron key and inserted it in the lock above the porcelain knob.
Terry’s room was also undisturbed from McGuire’s memory. On a shelf above the antique sleigh-shaped bed sat several photos of his cousin in full football gear. McGuire set the tin document box on a shelf and carried one of the photographs to the fading afternoon light that slanted through the window. It showed Terry leaping into the air, both feet clear of the ground, a football gripped in his right hand and angled upward, his left arm extended for balance, the fingers of his left hand splayed. His teeth were clenched and his mouth was spread in a grimace of aggression and determination.
“He’s already buried,” Cora had repeated against McGuire’s shoulder between sobs. “Dead and buried. All at once. How efficient our armies are.”
She vowed to leave Terry’s room undisturbed from the day her son had left home for the last time. And she had, McGuire recognized. The room had been cleaned and dusted recently but Terry’s clothes still hung in the closet, his high school yearbooks still stood upright on the shelf, his collection of strangely antique-looking vinyl records were still arranged in alphabetical order beneath a sixties-vintage stereo cabinet.
McGuire replaced the football photograph and examined Terry’s high school graduation picture. Staring back at the confident face of a handsome young man who had been dead for more years than he had lived, McGuire admitted he had never been close to his cousin. There had been admiration, yes. And envy as well. And the peculiar bonding of two boys entering adolescence together. But there had been something too cocky, too coolly ambitious about Terry Godwin, for McGuire to ever feel as close to him as he might have.
And Cora recognized it, McGuire suspected.
Not only that but, for all of her pride in Terry’s achievements, McGuire felt that Cora maintained a special affection for him that she could not extend to her own son. Perhaps because McGuire exhibited traits that Terry Godwin lacked, traits more important to Cora than athletic skills and social graces. McGuire wasn’t sure what they were and he didn’t care to speculate about them. But he knew, somehow.
For all her love for Terry, Cora had somehow grown ashamed of her own son, he thought, setting the photograph down again. She loved him like a mother to the end but something happened.
The realization had nested in his mind throughout his adult life and only now was he capable of acknowledging it.
He remembered the copy of the sermon Cora had composed for her funeral service. He withdrew the papers from his pocket and spread them open atop the stereo cabinet.
The words were in Cora’s flowery handwriting, the letters perfectly formed with gracious little upsweeps and deep, rounded curves. Reading the first few sentences, he almost heard her speaking them aloud in that strange voice of hers, high-pitched and feminine yet strong and severe.
The present proceedings of life are not to be performed in private. For they are neither filled with passion nor satiated with sin. It is, after all, the bookends of our lives which we seek to conceal. The conception of a new life through the consummation of love. And the termination of an existing life. By events. By time. By strangers. By friends. These are not public acts. But they may in fact be private sins.
What the hell was she talking about? Was she delirious? He shuffled through the sheets of paper, scanning without reading the lines of prose and their obscure references. The musicality of anger. The jagged rhythm of disillusion.
McGuire felt alienated in this young man’s room, unchanged since his death more than twenty years earlier. Without absorbing the meaning of the words he refolded the sheets, stuffed them in his pocket and quickly left, locking the door behind him. He would sleep in Cora’s room tonight. She would understand.
And there was a telephone there, the dial tone friendly and familiar.
He entered his aunt’s bedroom, tossed his jacket aside, sprawled on the bed and dialed the number of Barbara’s villa on Treasure Cay.
Barbara answered, almost breathless, on the first ring.
“It’s me,” McGuire said gently. “How are you doing?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “No, I’m not,” she added quickly.
“What’s the problem?”
“You’re not here, that’s the problem.”
McGuire exhaled slowly, saying nothing.
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is something the matter?”
“My aunt’s doctor thinks she was murdered.”
“Well, what are the police doing? Aren’t the police looking after it?”
“They’re doing what they can. . . .”
“Joe, I miss you. I want you back here.”
“Barbara . . .” he began.
“I need you, damn it!”
“Look, I miss you. . . .”
“That’s not the same thing!”
No, not this, McGuire thought, closing his eyes. Not with this woman. He waited in silence for her to regain her composure.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to put pressure on you. . . . I know I’m acting like a child but I need you so much. . . .”
“I know,” McGuire said. “I just want to stay here long enough to see if there’s anything to it. My aunt being murdered, I mean.”
“How long?”
“A few days. There’s not much to go on. If nothing turns up in a couple of days, I’ll have to say the hell with it.”
“Where are you staying?”
“In my aunt’s house. Looks like it’s mine now. Or will be tomorrow.” He gave her the telephone number. They exchanged goodbyes and he hung up almost too quickly, anxious to end the conversation. Then he lay back on the bed and rested his forearm across his eyes.
“How many people,” Cora asked him on his visit after Terry was reported missing, “does it take to change a light bulb in Compton?”
McGuire, knowing humour was her tentacle to sanity, said he didn’t know.
“None,” she told him. “Nobody in Compton wants to change anything.”
He had smiled at her joke, and she had smiled back. But not at the humour, which would never be enough in itself to blunt the pain of her son’s useless death—Cora’s word, repeated over and over: “Useless, useless, useless.” No, she had smiled at McGuire and his expression, almost fleetingly happy, at her joke.
He closed his eyes and imagined Barbara next to him, her head on his shoulder, the sun warming them. . . .
He awoke with a start in the melancholy grayness of the autumn dusk and looked at his watch. Almost an hour had passed. His stomach was growling and his head felt like a crow had nested within it.
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