by Laura Alden
“Is that Staci Yost?” She peered at the woman. “And her husband . . . What’s his name . . . ? No, don’t tell me.” She snapped her fingers. “Ryan. I had no idea that Dennis was Staci’s father. Or I suppose Ryan could be a stepson. Or Staci could be a stepdaughter, come to think of it.”
The permutations of an amalgamated family’s structure were extensive and more complicated than I wanted to think about at this point. “Shhh,” I cautioned, because we were at the start of the line.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I murmured to a fortyish man. “Dennis was a fine man. He will be missed.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “My dad would have been pleased to know how many people cared for him.”
He released my hand and turned to Marina. I went on to the next person in line. We exchanged similar comments and I went on to the next grieving family member.
“So sorry for your loss. . . . My sympathies to your family. . . .” And then I was shaking Staci’s hand. She was one of the younger mothers in the PTA at not yet thirty, and she’d impressed me with her constant willingness to pitch in to do the hard work. “It’s for the kids,” she’d always say, shrugging off my compliments. “I don’t mind a little work if it’s the kids who benefit.”
I squeezed her hand and tried to give her a hug around the shoulders with my free arm. “Staci, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you were related to Dennis. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
Her body stood straight and tall against my light embrace. “You’re already done enough, thanks so very much.”
The brittle words startled me. “I’m . . . very sorry.”
“Oh, sure you are.” She jerked her hand out of my grasp. “If it wasn’t for you, my dad would still be alive. My kids would still have their grandpoppa.”
Her fierceness struck at me hard. I hadn’t once considered that the grandchildren had lost a grandparent. How could I have been so thoughtless? I knew full well what it was like for children to be without a grandfather. Why hadn’t I thought this through? “I . . .” But what could I say?
“Staci,” Ryan murmured.
“What?” She twisted the question into a piercing accusation. “Beth’s the one who asked Dad to go to that stupid PTA meeting in the first place.”
Her husband put his hand on her shoulder. “This isn’t the time or place.”
“I think it’s exactly the time and the perfect place.” She flung out her arm and pointed at the gleaming casket. “There’s my dad. He was killed at her meeting. How can it not be her fault that he’s dead?”
The room had fallen silent. There was no noise, only a hushed quiet that held a terrible tension.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, stumbling over the tears that were filling my throat.
Then I fled.
Chapter 7
After I dropped the kids off at school the next morning, I parked the car behind the store and went straight to the police station, not passing go, definitely not collecting two hundred dollars, and not even pausing at the store to check e-mail.
My family had eventually learned that the best place to e-mail me was through the store’s e-mail, and my morning mailbox was often crowded with single-sentence imperatives from my mother (“Start teaching Jenna how to cook”), questions from my sister Kathy (“When was the last time you called Mom?”), bad jokes from my sister Darlene (Question: Why did checkout lines start asking, “Paper or Plastic?” Answer: Because baggers can’t be choosers), and questions from my seventeen-year-old nephew, Max.
Max was the only child of my physicist brother, Tim, and his molecular biologist ex-wife. When they’d divorced a few years back, they’d renovated their house southwest of Chicago into a duplex, pleasing the three major parties involved. It puzzled everyone else, but it made the shared custody arrangement easy on Max, and that was the most important thing.
The big problem these days was how Max was going to tell his science-fixated parents that his current career plans didn’t include any sort of science. His e-mails were full of plaintive queries such as: “Mom and Dad make jokes about liberal arts colleges. They’re never going to let me go to one,” or “Dad thinks reading fiction is a waste of time. He’s going to hit the ceiling when I tell him I want to teach high school English.”
Our back-and-forth e-mailing on the topic was getting a little more frantic now that Max was a high school senior. “Mom and Dad want me to take a tour of college campuses. But they’re all tech schools. What am I going to do?” My calm replies were having less and less effect, and a long and unpleasant phone call with my brother was starting to become an inevitability.
I sighed as I scuffed down the sidewalk. Tim wouldn’t understand why Max had been talking to me instead of him. Tim wouldn’t understand how Max could possibly turn his back on his inherent mathematical abilities. Tim would think that Max was being shortsighted and not seeing things clearly. Talking to Tim about something he didn’t understand was an extremely frustrating exercise. He didn’t understand that he didn’t understand, and that made a true discussion impossible.
Poor Max. How he’d turned out to be such a good kid with a father like that, I didn’t know. I’d had a hard enough time having Tim as a brother, but at least my dad had listened to me when I’d needed to talk. Though Dad had died far too young, he’d lived long enough to help shepherd the four of us kids through school.
I pushed open the door to the police station, my mind full of family.
“Good morning, Mrs. Kennedy.” Officer Sean Zimmerman, handsome and impossibly young, smiled at me from his desk behind the high counter. “How are you today?”
And just like that, his easy grin pulled away the thin gray curtain that was coloring my morning. Why dwell on the problems between Tim and Max? Max would eventually stand up to his dad. If not, I’d go down there and smack their heads together myself.
“Peachy,” I said, smiling back at him.
“Chief Eiseley said to send you in.” Sean nodded toward the short hallway. “And just so you know, he came in with a bag of Alice’s cookies.”
I thanked him and headed in the direction of his nod. The hallway’s hard flooring was showing its age: dull and worn in the middle, vaguely bright on the outsides; no amount of buffing would bring back the original seventies-era blue-green. Which might not be a bad thing, really.
I knocked on the jamb of Gus’s open office door and peeked in.
“Hey, Beth. Come on in.” He stood and came around the desk. “Let me get these papers off the chair. There you go. Sit right down.” He held out the chair and helped me settle in. “Coffee? Water? Gotta to have something to wash these cookies down. Water? No problem.” He handed me a bottle and a plate of two cookies. “There’s more of everything.”
As he went back around to sit in his squeaky-wheeled chair, I set the plate on the edge of his desk. The solicitous attention was disconcerting. A few short months ago, the two of us had had a falling-out of proportions massive enough to make me think I’d never be invited to set foot in this office again. Yet here I was, and here Gus was trying to make up for his earlier treatment of me. It was all very strange.
“So.” Gus pushed the plate of cookies at me. “When you called last night, you said you wanted to talk to me about something you overheard at Dennis Halpern’s visitation.”
“The county’s taken over the investigation?”
Gus pulled a cookie out of the white bag sitting on his desk. “That happened the next day. A new guy, Barlow, is heading it up.”
“What happened to Sharon Wheeler?”
Deputy Wheeler and I had met a few times. We’d had a rocky start, but had come around to having . . . well, you couldn’t call it a working relationship, but we’d gotten to the point where she at least appeared to take me seriously.
“Maternity leave. Barlow seems okay, but he’s not from here. He’s from Oregon. Or was it Washington?” Gus pointed a peanut butter cookie in a westerly direction. “Some
where out there.”
“I’m sure he’s perfectly qualified to run a murder investigation.”
Gus grinned. “That sounded pretty prim and proper. He’ll do fine, I’m sure. So. What do you have for me?”
I told him what Marina and I had overhead about Dennis wanting to change his will.
During the telling, he nodded, ate his cookie, took notes, and made a series of interested noises.
“Interesting,” he said when I’d finished. “I’ll pass this on to the county folks.”
“I’m not sure how much it will help.” The bottle of water in my hand was lukewarm, but it was wet, so I took a swallow. “Without knowing how Dennis wanted to change his will, it’s not very useful.”
“Don’t know about that.” Gus made another note. “If Dennis had mentioned changing the will to any of his family, it might have triggered something, even if no one knew for sure what the change was. Good work, Beth.”
The praise made my head swell a little, but his next sentence deflated it down to pinhead size.
“I hear there was quite a scene at Scovill’s yesterday.”
“Oh.” I looked at my shoes, something I’d recently sworn off doing, as it was hardly ever a good idea for a single mother of two youngish children who owned her own business to look at her scuffed and worn footwear. Demoralizing at best, downright depressing at worst. I kept the dark thoughts at bay by thinking of the nice new back-to-school shoes I’d bought for Jenna and Oliver. Yes, that was much better. “How did you hear about that?” I asked.
He half smiled, half didn’t, and didn’t answer my question. “Don’t take what Staci said to heart. She’s young and she’s grieving. You were a handy target, that’s all.”
How nice for me. “And here I thought I’d left my bull’s-eye shirt at home last night.”
Gus laughed. “I can think of other people I’d rather see wearing one.” I looked at him speculatively, but he just smiled.
On my way out, I sketched Sean a wave. He was on the phone, taking down the address of a vacationing homeowner (“Yes, ma’am, we’ll keep an eye on your place when you’re gone. All part of the service here in Rynwood.”) and gave me a distracted nod.
I was distracted myself, to tell the truth. For all I’d been able to joke with Gus about Staci’s accusations, I’d spent a good share of last night staring at the bedroom ceiling. Even when I had, at last, fallen asleep, my dreams had been shadowed by the specter of Auntie May haranguing me in front of the entire student body of my high school. She went on and on about feeding the kids more vegetables, and then the dream morphed into me on a unicycle, riding around in Tarver’s parking lot.
“I’ve never even been on a unicycle,” I muttered at the sidewalk. “And I don’t really want to.”
“Excuse me?”
I looked up to see a man standing directly in front of me. “Oh, um . . .” His dark hair was turning white in a salt-and-peppery way, so I guessed his age to be fiftyish, but the worn expression on his face added a decade. “Sorry. Just talking to myself.” I smiled, hoping to lighten his obviously sad mood. No luck. “Nice day, isn’t it?”
He glanced at the blue sky dotted with lamblike clouds. “I hadn’t noticed.”
A female voice came from behind me. “How could you?”
While it wasn’t quite a shout, it was louder than plain scolding. I turned around and saw a blond woman patting a Rottweiler’s head, her many bracelets jingling. “Leaving this poor thing in the sun without water could have killed him,” Melody Kreutzer said. “How could you do that to this wonderful dog?”
The three oversized teenaged boys shuffled their feet. “I dunno,” said the biggest one. “I guess we weren’t thinking. Old Rover here’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, he is, right?”
His two buddies made mumbling noises that weren’t quite words. They were smaller in size, but each one of the three easily topped a bulky six feet. Melody was about my size, but their sheer mass made her look like a pixie.
“It’s a crime to mistreat an animal,” Melody said, staring at them hard. “If he dies, all three of you could go to jail.”
I wasn’t sure she was right, but the boys seemed convinced. “We’re really sorry, Mrs. Kreutzer. It won’t happen again,” the biggest one said. “Right, guys?”
“Right,” they chorused. “Never.”
“Well.” Melody crossed her arms and tapped her fingernails against her biceps. “This one time, I’ll let you go. But if I see this happening again, I’m going straight to Chief Eiseley.”
The boys skittered off down the sidewalk. I turned to share a smile with Mr. Sad, but he was gone. I moved down the sidewalk to Melody and waved hello. “Good for you. I bet that dog is the best-treated pup in town for the next six months.”
Melody pushed her hair back. “Maybe I was a little hard on them, but seeing an animal mistreated just makes me so mad.”
Mad enough to tackle a trio that had been in and out of juvenile court for the last half dozen years. I didn’t know much about Rynwood crime, but even I knew about the Harvey brothers.
“Tackling those three was pretty brave,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Brave would be being afraid and going ahead and doing what you’re afraid of. I was too mad to be afraid.” She smiled. “And I’m going to be afraid of Glenn if I don’t get a bag of Alice’s Amazingly Awesomes before they’re all gone.”
I watched her go, wondering what it would be like to be completely unafraid. Melody seemed to be managing it, and she’d had children. Well, one. He was grown and had moved to Oregon years ago. Still, she was a mother and must have suffered those motherly fears.
I stood quiet and tried hard as I could to not be afraid of anything. Tried to be unconcerned about my children’s upcoming teen years. Tried to assume that their future career choices and spouses would be the perfect matches. Tried to think that I’d find a new spouse for myself after the kids were grown. Tried to see my old age surrounded by loving grandchildren and giggling great-grandchildren.
For one brief, shining second, I almost had it. A moment without worry or apprehension. A moment without anxiety. Without fear.
Almost, but not quite. Because in that near-moment, I realized that the only possible way that I wouldn’t worry about my children was if I were dead.
And then I was back to feeling guilty about Dennis.
My thoughts dark and dreary, I walked to the store, my shoes tapping the sidewalk cheerily. “Stupid shoes,” I told them.
Luckily, they didn’t answer.
• • •
I was in my office, alternating between reconciling the accounts and slogging through a pile of returns, when Marina bounced in, bringing with her the scent of fresh air and sunshine.
“I’m kidless until school’s out,” she said. “It’s time for lunch, and don’t say you don’t have time because your staff has cleared your schedule for the next hour.”
“Maybe my staff doesn’t remember that I vowed not to leave this chair until I balanced the checking account.”
“That’s the stupidest vow I ever heard.” She reached for the back of my chair and spun me away from the desk. “Obviously, I was born so I could rescue you from it. Here’s your purse.” She opened the bottom desk drawer where I kept the oversized handbag, pulled it out, and put it on my lap.
“And we’re not going to the Green Tractor, either,” she said. “You’ll have one of those horribly healthy salads, with maybe a side order of cottage cheese if you’re ready for a walk on the wild side. Not today.” She poked at my upper arm. “You need a little more flesh on those bones if you’re ever going to attract a man, and I know just the place for that.”
Ten minutes later, we were seated in a booth at the Grill. Technically Fred’s Eclectic Collections and Food from the Grill, the restaurant was packed from stem to stern with the oddball collections Fred had amassed over the years: toasters, musical instruments, sports equipment, gas station paraphernalia, airplane
parts; Fred’s stuff was hung from the ceiling, mounted on walls, and spraddled across high shelves.
The women in town held private debates on whether or not anything on those shelves was ever dusted, but to my knowledge no one had dared climb on a chair to take a look. Some things were better left unknown.
Marina pointed at her paper place mat while our waitress looked on. “I want one of those.” The place mats doubled as menus, and there was room left over for a legend about the beginnings of Fred’s first collection. “Hamburger with cheese and a large order of fries.”
The waitress looked at me. I read and reread the menu. During the months I was trying so hard to lose weight, I’d managed to stay away from the Grill, where the menu was hamburgers, hot dogs, brats, and French fries. The only variation beyond that was the size. Medium, large, and obnoxious.
“Hamburger,” I said. “No cheese, and a medium fry.”
“Drinks?”
“Ice water for both of us.” I cut off Marina’s protest. “That’s it, thanks.”
Marina pouted. “How is it you can take the fun out of being bad?”
“How is it that you want to ruin your health, rot your teeth, and shorten your life span?”
“Well, if you put it that way.” She put her elbows on the plastic laminate table and cupped her chin in her hands. “So. Tell me everything Gus said.”
I furrowed my brow. “Well, let me think a minute. First he said ‘Hey, Beth. Come on in.’ Then he said, ‘Let me get these papers off the chair.’ Then he said—”
Marina uncupped her chin and made a T with her hands. “Time out. Let me rephrase that. Tell me everything Gus said that I actually care about. And I know you’re just getting back at me for dragging you out to lunch, so yadda yadda yah.”
I grinned at her. We’d been friends for a very long time. By the time our ice water arrived, I’d given her a quick summary. By the time our food showed up, I’d given her all the details, including the fact that Gus had already known what had happened at the funeral home last night.