StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  “Not that I’m aware of.” In fact, I’d always assumed Georgia had money. There was a quality to the furnishings a young couple did not purchase on a salary, while Georgia herself had a certain ease I associated with boarding school and a trust fund, or a doting father.

  “Mrs. Bowland just left. She’s got another meeting about Steve La France. You seen them bumper stickers? She is one smart cookie. Good thing for Steve. He’s dumber than his old man, and we’re talkin’ dumb.”

  “Actually, I came to see you.”

  “Find me another job?”

  I shook my head. The Bowlands’ living room looked like a bomb had hit it: lampshades askew, vacuum hoses snaked like fire hoses in the blitz, paper towels and Windex spray everywhere. I picked up a double photo frame that had tumbled to the carpet. One side showed Georgia holding her baby like an unsolicited delivery from Federal Express, the other, Rick in a Brooks Brothers shirt grilling hot dogs at the Fire Department cookout.

  “Yeah, you don’t give me work any more. It all goes to your Mrs. Mealy. Well, let me tell you something, Ben. I don’t need the work. I got plenty.”

  “Your Mrs. Mealy” lived in an apartment over my barn with her daughter, Alison. I’d found them hitchhiking and homeless and brought them home. Marie and her armies had a field day broadcasting their speculations upon our relationship, but gradually the stories had died down, particularly as I was seen around town with several other ladies, including the far more gossipable first selectman.

  “I knew you had plenty of work. That’s why I passed a couple of things Mrs. Mealy’s way.”

  “So she could pay your rent.”

  Marie, a voluminous, outwardly jolly lady, preferred bad news to good news, dirt to joy. Offering no fuel on the subject of rent, I asked instead, “Are you still working for the Fisks?”

  “Sure. Though there’s things going on there that would curl your hair.”

  “Like what?”

  “Where’ve you been? The party?”

  “I was there.”

  “You were?”

  “It was great. Duane did a marinated lamb he could open a restaurant with.”

  Marie looked at me with undisguised pity. “Not the cookout. The party. After. In the Jacuzzi.”

  “I didn’t get in any Jacuzzi.”

  “That’s ’cause you weren’t invited.”

  “Who was?” I knew, of course, but I hoped to flatter her into my camp.

  “The Bowlands. The Barretts. The Carters.”

  “Wow. The Bowlands? The Barretts? And the Carters? The builder Carters? Sherry and Bill?”

  “You heard it here first.”

  “And the Fisks.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the bathing suit Michelle bought for that party.”

  “But they’ve been in bed together for years.”

  “What?” Marie grabbed my arm in a powerful hand and jerked hard. “What do you mean? What do you know?”

  “Marie. It’s a joke.”

  “What do you mean, joke? What kind of joke?” she demanded, and I saw a lifetime of orgies pass unreported before her eyes.

  “An expression.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Rick Bowland and Ted Barrett are on the Planning and Zoning Commission. Right? They have to approve new construction. Right? Bill Carter is a builder. And Duane does drains and footings and septics and speculates in land. When you’ve got a bunch of friends all in the business of building or regulating building, you could say they’re in bed together.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard that expression. Yeah, but you made a joke—Hey, that’s pretty good, Ben.” She laughed loud and long, with great relief, and slapped one ample thigh.

  “So they stayed overnight?”

  “It was one of those parties, if you know what I mean.”

  I said, “Oh, come on, Ted and Susan are the tightest couple I know.”

  “Yeah,” Marie admitted. “You never hear nothin’ about them. ’Course, they went bust…Wouldn’t put anything past Sherry Carter.”

  I shrugged. Personally, I thought Sherry was more talk than action; but I didn’t want to argue with Marie, I wanted her to keep talking. Which she did, in a hoarse whisper in case the nanny was listening from the gazebo. “Mrs. Bowland? Wouldn’t put anything past her, either, when she’s drinkin’—You seen that party room the Fisks built?”

  “Heard about it.”

  “Check it out, sometime. Heavy duty.” She grinned, gap-toothedly. “Like a porn video.”

  “How would you know about a porn video, Marie?”

  “Hey, you wouldn’t believe the people who go in and out of that little side room at the rental. Your cousin Brian told me—”

  “You said just three couples—four couples, counting Duane and Michelle.”

  “Plus the crashers.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Somebody stayed late. From the cookout. Slipped into the Jacuzzi with the rest of them.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Lights out?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the word is, there was somebody else and they ran off into the woods.”

  “Al Bell said they had a stripper who jumped out of a cake.”

  “Al Bell doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. What the hell would four couples in a Jacuzzi need a stripper for?”

  “I wondered about that. But he said the stripper ran into the swamp.”

  “The man is a fool, Ben. He doesn’t know crap. There was no goddamned stripper. And that’s the truth.”

  “But there was a crasher.”

  “Right.”

  “I get it.”

  “At last.”

  I drove home and wandered over to Town Hall to chat up Vicky, who usually had her ear to the ground and had arrived at the cookout shortly before I left.

  She was busy as hell and in no mood to chat, though she did hint she’d be available for a late beer and burger at the Yankee Drover. As I had some reason to hope that Rita Long might be up from New York, I weaseled out of it and asked, even as she edged me toward the door, “Do you know if any extras stayed on for Stage Two of the Fisk party?”

  “No.”

  “No, you don’t know, or no, no one stayed?”

  “No, I don’t know, and I doubt any did. Michelle was acting like a chaperone at a Methodist dance.”

  “Methodists don’t dance.”

  “That’s what I meant. Bye, Ben. I gotta—”

  “Did you by chance see Reg at the cookout?”

  “What?”

  “I gather you stayed late.”

  “Not that late.”

  “But did you see Reg?”

  Vicky hesitated, then closed the door she’d been attempting to hustle me through. “When I arrived,” she said.

  “I didn’t see him then.”

  “He didn’t come in. He was kind of driving by.”

  “Kind of? What do you mean?”

  “I was coming from town, so I was about to turn left into their drive, when I saw Reg coming the other way, in his Blazer. I waited for him to turn right, but he just slowed down a second and then kept going.”

  “When was this?”

  “About six-thirty.”

  “Did you talk?”

  “No. I waved. But he just went by.”

  “Didn’t wave back?”

  “No…”

  “He didn’t turn in?”

  “I saw his face. He looked so sad…Like he was going to cry.”

  “You didn’t say anything Sunday, when I told you we found him.”

  Vicky didn’t answer me. Instead, she mused, “It was like he was saying goodbye or something. Too bad he didn’t come in; it might have been different.”

  “He wasn’t invited.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’d kind of drifted apart aft
er Reg stopped drinking. You didn’t see him later?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Between you and me, Janey wants to prove that Reg wasn’t doing dope.”

  “That’s crazy. What does she care? They’re divorcing, and besides, it’s obvious he was.”

  I agreed it looked that way. She said, “Why not leave it alone then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have enough problems fighting Steve without this turning into a bigger deal than it was. You know, ‘Lax Government Encourages Newbury Dope Fiends.’”

  “It’s no big deal. I’m really just helping Janey ease into the idea that Reg ODed.”

  “And what if he didn’t?”

  “Then Janey has a right to her insurance.”

  “Of course.”

  I promised to stop by re-election headquarters above the General Store for an envelope-stuffing session and went back to my office, where I put my feet up and reviewed: After dressing and eating and gassing up, Reg had swung past the Fisk party before disappearing until eleven. Terrific. I’d filled in another ten minutes. And heard that he’d looked sad. Which was about how I would have felt if my former best friends hadn’t invited me to a cookout attended by half the town.

  It had just occurred to me that Janey Hopkins might have spent her money better on Marie Butler, when I heard a familiar scratching noise at the door.

  “Do I hear a muskrat?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “No.”

  “Otter?”

  “No.”

  “Does it wear braces and a smile like an Oldsmobile?”

  “You rat.”

  “Hello, Alison.”

  She scuttled in, dropped her book bag and flute case on the floor, and climbed into the client’s chair, though at eleven she’d not be house shopping, and even less likely to know Reg’s whereabouts Saturday night. From my desk I produced a mini-size Kit Kat, which she opened solemnly.

  “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “The music teacher?”

  “Who has a name.”

  “Mr. Shipley. He gave me two tickets to the Newbury Friends of Music.”

  “Great!”

  “The Ping Quartet.”

  “Really?” An inconsistent group, the Pings. Very good when they were good, dreary when they weren’t.

  “From Shanghai.”

  “Yes.” They had in fact been living in Chicago for some years and were a regular feature on the Northeast concert circuit.

  “Want to come?”

  “Why not ask your mom?” I said, recalling insipid Brahms, bad Beethoven, and a grim dose of Ravel the last time the Pings had blown through town.

  Alison’s smile of gleaming braces closed like a zipper. “She won’t come.”

  “Did you ask her?” Mrs. Mealy was a shy woman, painfully conscious of old New England class lines that few but the very poor honored anymore.

  “No. But she won’t come. Will you?”

  “Only if your mother won’t go.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Ask.”

  “Okay. Then you’ll come?”

  “Sunday?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  ***

  Our neighboring towns in northwestern Connecticut were known for sparkling art galleries or serious antique shops (blessedly light on Ye Olde, but heavy on the checkbook), but Newbury had a lock on good music. One reason was our energetic and old-money funded Friends of Music. The other was that the movie theater in Town Hall doubled as a rather splendid concert auditorium, a gift way back in 1930 from a young heiress. Its official name, engraved above the marble portico, was Leslie Town Hall—Leslie for Edgar Leslie, a World War I hero who died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918 and whose connection to my maiden aunt was lost in history, if not in her heart.

  A big crowd was bustling in behind us.

  “Where should we sit?” asked Alison, cute and squirmy in a little dress Connie had produced from her gigantic attic.

  “Down front on the left.”

  We found two seats in the sixth row, behind Connie and a group of well-dressed elderly ladies discussing their recent trips to the Amazon.

  The Pings, a handsome family of string players, took the stage.

  I glanced at the program and groaned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Ravel. The Friends of Music ought to set aside a Ravel Haters Room we could retreat to.”

  Aunt Connie turned around and told me to behave myself. The first violin stamped his foot and the Pings galloped into some fine Mozart. I scanned the program notes, written with a flourish by Scooter’s wife; Eleanor made the Ravel piece sound interesting, but when they got to it, it wasn’t.

  There’s something about Ravel. Musicians love the guy. There’s rarely a Friends concert without him, and barely a note of movie and TV music that hasn’t been lifted from the Frenchman that critics more knowledgeable than I have dubbed “the musical self-abuser.” I whispered to Alison that New Guinea headhunter pickup bands play Ravel on their neighbors’ skulls at least once an evening.

  Predictably, he cleared the hall like grapeshot. Only half the audience returned from intermission, which was a shame, because the Pings had grown to a quintet, procuring the services of a vast lady in red who played a showy piano. She bounced on her stool like a Jeep Cherokee on a washboard road and tossed her long black hair with such ecstasy that I had to wonder what it would be like to be on the bottom making love with her. After she took her bows, the Pings got real with a Corelli piece intended to make angels weep.

  “Jesus!” Alison breathed when it was over.

  “‘Gosh’ will do, thank you.”

  “Why do you always correct me?”

  I glanced at Connie’s white head. She was applauding with enthusiasm. I said, “Because when I was growing up, Connie and my parents did it for me, and it helps me know now what’s appropriate when and where. Makes you comfortable, no matter what the company.”

  “But Ben, it was a ‘Jesus!’ moment.”

  I admitted she had me there and wondered if ice cream at the General Store was a good idea. But we were being very grown up today, and Alison said, a little tentatively, as she does when she’s afraid of being disappointed, “There’s a reception to meet the musicians. Can we go?”

  “Yeah, I want to meet the lady in red.”

  “Say ‘yes,’ Ben. Not ‘yeah.’”

  The lady in red turned out to be as jolly offstage as on, and Alison got a little jealous until the violinist paid some attention to her, which left her starry-eyed all the way home. I walked her to the barn door.

  “Thanks for asking me.”

  “Thanks for coming. Hey, Ben?”

  “What?”

  “I heard you were asking about Mr. Hopkins?”

  “Yes?”

  “You should have asked me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “The big kids saw him that night.”

  “When?”

  “Late.”

  “Where?”

  She drew back, and I realized I had grabbed her shoulder and was squeezing. “Sorry.” I stepped back. “What do you mean, hon? Who saw him?”

  “I don’t know. Big kids. They were riding their bikes real late and they saw him.”

  Bikes. When I was a “big kid” fourteen to sixteen, we walked everywhere. But nowadays they got around on bikes, which we had scorned as kid stuff as soon as we were old enough to start counting the years to a driver’s license.

  “Where did they see him?”

  “The party that the Fisks gave.”

  “The cookout?”

  “No. You know. The grownup party. The Jacuzzi party.”

  I bent down until we were eye to eye. “This is important. What time?”

  “Late. Midnight, maybe.”<
br />
  “What were they doing out at the Fisks’ at midnight?”

  “Some of them rode out hoping to watch.”

  “Watch what?”

  “You know. The Jacuzzi. The grownups in the Jacuzzi.”

  “And they say they saw Mr. Hopkins go to the party, at midnight?”

  “I think so.”

  “In his Chevy Blazer?”

  “Yeah. The blue S10 with the WindVents.”

  Just that once, I didn’t tell her to say “yes” for “yeah.”

  I’d inquired of about fifteen people if they’d seen Reg. Who had the answer, but my little backyard neighbor? I thought immediately of going out and bracing Duane and Michelle, who had assured me Reg hadn’t showed. But that was strong stuff to base on high-school stories. Better, maybe, to come at them sideways.

  Bill Carter had been at the sleepover. And Bill had built a $600,000 spec house he couldn’t unload, which gave a real estate agent some leverage.

  Chapter 7

  It was one of those houses built for the builder’s convenience. Bill Carter had plunked it smack on the required setback line, ignoring a lovely rise sixty feet deeper in the lot. The driveway, sporting a pretentious wiggle, invaded the property in precisely the spot that destroyed maximum privacy. The septic field looked like he had buried Moby Dick in the front yard.

  “Sherry’s sorry she couldn’t make it, Ben.”

  That was fine with me. Flirty gazelles notwithstanding, Sherry was very much the brains of the Carter marriage, and I was grateful to have Bill to myself. I claimed I was sorry too and said, “Let’s see your house.”

  Bill was proud of the kitchen, where he’d saved some money on Garland and Sub-Zero knockoffs, and prouder still of the downstairs powder room, which offered guests pushing the front door bell an unobstructed view of its fine porcelain commode.

  “The entire structure,” Bill beamed, “is architect-designed.”

  I told him we could work around that problem too. I’d always liked him. He was the kind of optimist you had to be if you wanted to raise spec houses for a living.

  “I’m amazed, Ben. I thought she’d sell in a flash. Goddamned recession.”

  “It’s a bitch, Bill.” I wondered, not for the first time, whether “the economy” had become a secular society’s “the Devil made me do it.”