Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  That thought made the decision for him. At work, he was almost constantly dealing with other people; at home, Louise’s querulous voice stalked him from room to room until he hated the rooms themselves, the very house they comprised. Any threat of fatigue was utterly outweighed by the promise of ten blissful minutes of privacy. So he drove himself.

  Once outside the station parking lot, he was in the small and incredibly congested downtown area. He was not much bothered by heavy traffic; he had learned years earlier that if you allowed the traffic to get to you, you only wound up twice as stressed. So when you got caught in a long line of cars going slowly nowhere, you took several deep breaths and studied your surroundings.

  It was a drizzly day. Light rain fell, then stopped, then fell again. In spite of the weather, the old stone buildings around Peller Square managed to look as dignified and self-satisfied as they always did. The Orange Inn was no fake-antique watering hole, it was circa seventeen hundred and something, and it always pleased Holder to look at it. Those responsible for its restoration and modernization had possessed historical sensitivity, impeccable taste, and a great deal of money. Every time Tom saw it, he thought how satisfying it was to look at the work of people who knew what they were doing.

  The line of cars he was a part of had inched its way past the back corner of the square and suddenly encountered the suburbs. The cars in front of him seemed to melt away in all directions, and in a couple of minutes Holder was cruising along at a comfortable twenty-five miles per hour.

  Rackman-Stanley Real Estate was in a small shopping center with parking barely a step from the door. Inside, the office had that indefinable but unmistakable look of having been Done (capital D) by a Decorator (capital D), but not, thank God, by a Decorator with Something to Prove. The deep pile carpet was dark enough not to show every trace of mud, which was sensible in this climate, and it had a good pad under it. The walls were some forgettable color, and hung with large watercolors of sumptuous if botanically inaccurate flowers. The effect was more humane than George Kimbrough’s house and more approachable than the Stanleys’.

  The reception area was presided over by a damp-looking girl flaunting conspicuous symptoms of a bad cold. Her appearance was made all the more unprepossessing by a mane of sandy-blond hair that looked to Holder like it hadn’t been combed in a week. He knew that messy hair was supposed to be fashionable these days, but he had not gotten used to it and he didn’t plan to. Being put off by the hair, he further decided that the girl’s bronze eye shadow was hardly suitable for the office, besides emphasizing unattractively the watery state of her eyes, and her fingernails were a positively revolting shade of brown. She should spend some of her makeup money on getting that lopsided tooth fixed. And if she was all that sick, why didn’t she just stay home? At that point he noticed he was being crabby (if only mentally) and immediately atoned for it by giving her his friendliest smile.

  He got a small, brave smile in return, and a “May I help you?” that hinted at the sore throat the sufferer was nobly trying to disguise.

  “Yes, please, I’m looking for Bill Stanley,” said Holder, who was doing no such thing.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the girl said, actually sounding sorry, “but Mr. Stanley won’t be in today. He’s home with the flu.” This last was said mournfully, as though inviting Holder to see for himself what deplorable condition the firm was in.

  “That’s too bad,” Holder lied, giving himself points for having this figured out in advance. He took one of the chairs in the small waiting area and settled into it with a comfortable sigh, as though glad to get a load off his feet.

  Tom Holder’s techniques were more sophisticated than his vocabulary. He could not have described his smile as guileless, but it was, and it got better results than slow torture. He told the girl his name, and looked at her inquiringly.

  This tactic was hugely successful; not many people are interested in a receptionist’s name. “I’m Vickie Baskin,” she said, momentarily forgetting to suffer, and responding with a warmth she usually saved for men of approximately her own age.

  “I’m Chief of Police,” Holder remarked as if it were quite a commonplace thing to be, and pulled out his credentials with a silent prayer that her goodwill would not evaporate. It didn’t, quite, but it was instantly diluted by surprise and the merest hint of caution. “About Mr. Stanley’s next-door neighbor,” he continued. “You know about that?”

  “No, what?” Her ignorance seemed genuine.

  “Well, the Stanleys live next door to some people named Kimbrough.”

  “Yes, I know, they’re—” Here Vickie was interrupted by a fit of coughing, the tenor of which erased any lingering doubts Holder might have had about whether the girl was really ill. “Sorry,” she rasped when she had gotten it under control.

  “You should be home in bed,” Tom said sympathetically.

  “Yes,” she croaked, “I know. I’ll probably leave in a little while, I only came in just in case— Never mind. It isn’t important.” She waved it away, whatever it was, with the lacquered nails of one hand, while with the other she opened the desk drawer and extracted a box of cough drops. She shook one out, carefully unwrapped it, and laid it on her tongue as devoutly as if it were a Communion wafer. She then plucked a pale green tissue out of a box on the desk and dabbed ineffectually at her nose.

  Holder resumed. “I was saying that the Stanleys live next door to the Kimbroughs, and you were saying you knew that.”

  “That’s right,” she said, nodding weakly. “The Kimbroughs are Mrs. Stanley’s cousins. Well, I mean, he is. Mr. Kimbrough.” It sounded like “Bister Kibbrough”; her nose was beginning to stop up.

  “That’s right. You know Mrs. Kimbrough?”

  “I’ve bet her.”

  “ ’Scuse me? Oh! You’ve met her.” Holder noticed that under Vickie Baskin’s long-suffering nose, her small mouth had tightened ever so slightly. “What’d you think of her?” he asked as though pleased to discover that she might help him out on this baffling topic.

  This blunt inquiry was clearly unexpected, and for a moment she stammered. “I—uh, well, I dode really dough her like a fred, you dough, just—uh, I just bet her.”

  Tom hid a smile, and said with genuine concern and in his best Dutch-uncle tone, “Vickie, you poor thing, you really ought to go home.”

  “Oh, I’ll be all right, but—could you excuse be for a biddit?”

  As Tom said “Sure, no problem,” she wavered to her feet, scooped up the entire box of tissues, dragged her handbag out from under the desk, and vanished down a narrow corridor. This gave Holder a chance to get a good look at her retreating legs, which, he was forced to admit, were not bad. In his youth he had admitted to being a leg man. That was before he had married a beautiful set of legs that were attached, as he later discovered, to the most depressing woman in the state. Belatedly he wondered if the stopped-up nose had been an excuse, and the girl had really retreated in order to figure out what to say—or not to say—about Grace Kimbrough.

  Vickie reappeared six minutes later with a wan smile. “Well, that’s better. At least I can talk without sounding like a joke.”

  “You sound fine. Ah, if you don’t mind my asking”—as if that would stop me, he thought—“how did you happen to meet Mrs. Kimbrough?”

  “It was at the Christmas party last year,” she said as she resumed her seat at the desk. “You know, the company Christmas party. Bill’s—I mean, Mrs. Stanley was out of town with her cousin on some business trip, so Mr. Stanley brought her instead. Mrs. Kimbrough, I mean.” Vickie sniffed.

  If she had pounded the desk and declared in ringing tones that she disapproved, she could not have made herself more clear. Holder was intrigued. Ms. Baskin did not have the look of a prude, so it seemed unlikely that her objection was on moral grounds.

  “She’s missing, you know.” He said it in the manner of one who drops a pebble in a pond in order to observe the pattern of the ripples. />
  “Mrs. Kimbrough?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Missing?”

  “That’s right. Since about one o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

  Vickie Baskin sat perfectly still for three full seconds. Then she said, “How terrible.” It was so patently false that Holder for an instant wondered if she was even trying to sound sincere. He waited, hoping she would reveal something more either by word or expression, but she merely looked at him with watery eyes unfocused, forgetting even to look miserable. It was as though she had been switched off. Tom let the silence lengthen.

  Finally she reanimated. “Sorry,” she said with a noise that in a healthier respiratory system would have been a self-conscious laugh. “It’s just such a surprise, you know. It’s not—well, you hear about things like that, but you don’t—” She waved her hands, as if they might waft her meaning over to Holder without the assistance of words.

  “That sort of thing always happens to other people,” Holder agreed with an understanding smile. Would she smile back?

  She did. “That’s exactly it! It happens to those people you see on the ten o’clock news, it doesn’t happen to real people, like me.”

  There was enough shrewdness in this reply to make Holder decide that he had miscalculated Vickie Baskin’s intelligence. It’s that damn hair, he thought. Any woman with hair like that ought to be a bimbo.

  As though realizing she had slipped out of her part, Vickie pulled another tissue out of the box and held it waveringly in the immediate vicinity of her face, as though to cope with any unexpected behavior on the part of her mouth or nose. She asked sadly, “How can I help you?”

  Holder explained that they were trying to establish when Mrs. Kimbrough had last been seen, managing rather adroitly to suggest, without actually lying, that Bill Stanley had not yet been questioned about his movements on the previous afternoon.

  It was pie. In fact, it was so easy that Holder began to be a little suspicious of it. Vickie readily answered his every question about Bill Stanley’s comings and goings the previous day: Bill had left the office a few minutes after one, shortly after taking a brief phone call from his wife, saying he was on his way home and didn’t want any calls there. Vickie spoke with absolute conviction about all these details, and even brought out the observation that it was extremely strange for a real estate agent (accustomed to working from home as well as office, and both in and out of regular business hours) to tell his receptionist to hold his calls. “It made me wonder,” she said, looking Holder sapiently in the eye and taking time to create a significant pause, “if something was wrong.”

  Amazing, Holder thought. She was actually enjoying herself. The trace of caution with which she had greeted his identity as a policeman—Holder had judged it about average; most people greeted cops that way—was now nowhere in sight. He had told her about something very serious indeed, and instead of growing more cautious, she was blooming right under his nose, unfurling like a tawny morning glory in the sun.

  When it was over, Holder found himself back in his car without any very clear idea of how he’d gotten there. It was obvious that Vickie Baskin had instantly assumed the worst about Grace Kimbrough. Wishful thinking? Pleased at the elimination of a rival? A rival in fantasy only, Holder judged; Vickie, when she spoke of Bill Stanley, did not have the air of possession with which a woman speaks of her lover. No, Ms. Baskin was one of those who love unrequited, happy only to serve in small ways. She knew exactly when Bill had left the office, because his comings and goings were of paramount importance to her. Holder felt sure that if he’d asked her what Stanley had been wearing yesterday, she could have obliged right down to the color of his socks.

  Interesting that the girl had been jealous of Grace Kimbrough but not of Stanley’s wife. She had spoken of Carolyn with warmth, making plain that Carolyn was the sort of nice person who took time to be polite to the receptionist.

  What was interesting to Tom was that it confirmed the normality of a phenomenon he had noticed in himself more than once. When he was carrying on one of his make-believe love affairs—he would not think about Kathryn, he refused to think about Kathryn—he was violently jealous of any man to whom his paramour paid any attention—except her husband. For some reason the husbands never bothered him.

  And the wife didn’t bother Vickie Baskin. But the girlfriend! That was a different bucket of trout.

  So he filed that as normal—any behavior that echoed his own was by definition normal—but there was something else he couldn’t fathom. He was utterly certain that Vickie Baskin would lie through her crooked teeth to protect Bill Stanley. And he was equally certain she had not lied. A cop had come around asking her questions about the disappearance (and presumed death) of a woman who might have been, for all Vickie knew, Stanley’s lover. And instead of shutting up like a clam, or getting suddenly vague, she had unhesitatingly given him an exact report of Stanley’s movements. She had made not the slightest attempt to defend his privacy against police inquiry.

  “Why, why, why?” Holder asked his steering wheel. Receiving no answer, he sighed, started the car, and drove thoughtfully back to the station.

  CHAPTER 10

  Kathryn Koerney stepped out of the small rock-walled building in which her seminars were held, acknowledged the casual farewells of a couple of her students, and scrutinized the sky. It had the uninspiring appearance of leftover oatmeal. It was not, however, letting fall with anything at that moment, so she tucked her umbrella under her arm and set off down the sidewalk in the direction of Main Street.

  It was a pleasant walk despite the unfriendly sky and the damp winter landscape. Harton was an exceptionally pretty town, particularly at its center; a charming shopping district bordered the campus of the university, and the seminary nestled in a residential area notable for magnificent trees and equally magnificent bank accounts.

  Possessed of trees, bank accounts, and a tenure-track job at the seminary, Kathryn walked through her all-but-perfect world and felt profoundly grateful. A half-remembered verse from the Psalms flickered across her mind: something about the lot falling to one in a good ground. What was that wretched line? Either of my little Baptists, she thought with a sigh of envy, could spout that verbatim—with chapter and verse. Or did Baptists only memorize the New Testament? She would have to ask them at the next seminar.

  Her mouth twitched in a suppressed smile; the comeback would be good, probably good enough to provoke a few interdenominational catcalls from the one Episcopalian, two Congregationalists, and seven Presbyterians who made up the rest of the class. That particular seminar frequently turned into an ecumenical free-for-all, with the different denominations cheerfully attacking one another’s absurdities with all the vigor of the Monty Python gang shouting “Your mother was a hamster” at one another. Kathryn deliberately conducted the seminar in a manner that encouraged this sort of debate, and every time they all dissolved into howls of laughter, she was once again convinced that there was hope for the Church Universal.

  She walked past St. Margaret’s Church, a fair imitation of Victorian Gothic, right down (or up) to the gargoyles on the bell tower. The parish wags maintained that the gargoyles, being Episcopalian, were glaring in the direction of the mostly Presbyterian seminary, and in point of fact they were right. Kathryn wondered if the architect had done it deliberately. The parishioners of St. Margaret’s were sadly outnumbered; the town of Harton, like its seminary, had been dominated by the Presbyterians since the time of Cotton Mather. Now, he would have known that psalm!

  She was walking past the churchyard gate she had entered the previous day on her way to the committee meeting. Glancing at it, she remembered the exchange she’d had with Tom Holder, and that, of course, made her remember the dream. She was accustomed to having that nightmare whenever she felt guilty about something in her sex life, but since her sex life at the present was, alas, virtually nonexistent, she was at a loss to explain why she had had the dream last night
. It obviously had something to do with that written conversation she’d had with Tom. Well, then, starting with that: What had she been feeling?

  She had felt . . . angry. Rebellious against the waste of her time. Frustrated by her boredom. Contemptuous of Carson and Miss Amalie. So she had concocted that jibe and shared it with whoever was handy, as a way of venting her anger. Was that it? Yes. She’d been angry. But how did that anger get transmuted into the sexual guilt that was surely the trigger for the dream?

  Back to the drawing board. O.K., she had been angry, she had made up a pretty savage joke to express that anger, and then shared it with whoever— Hang on. Suzy Norton had been sitting on her left. Why had she passed the note to Tom and not to Suzy? As Kathryn was no self-deceiver, the answer to this question struck her almost at the moment she asked it. She had given the note to Tom because he was a man, and she liked him, and she wanted him to think she was witty. Not just that. A private joke is an intimate thing, be the intimacy ever so slight, and she had wanted to have that intimacy with Tom rather than with Suzy because Tom was a man.

  He was a man, moreover (she continued ruthlessly), for whom she felt not the slightest sexual attraction, which meant that she had been—really, she was afraid she was going to have to call it flirting—she had been flirting with this man who was not very interesting to her, perfectly willing to make herself interesting to him. She had been, in short, collecting scalps. And she had succeeded, hadn’t she? A very neat little compliment she had elicited from him, most gratifying to the ego.

  Well, there was a certain satisfaction in knowing the answer to the question Why the dream? But the answer was hardly comforting. It all went back to an ego that seemed insatiable; it appeared that she could never get enough admiration from the opposite sex. She wondered if it had anything to do with her father. She decided to think about it later.

  All this self-examination transpired in the course of one block, bringing her out onto Main Street close to the building that doubled as City Hall and Police Station. This edifice, despite being the only modern building within half a mile, was handsome enough, and managed not to jar the serenity of an area in which nothing else had been built in the last sixty years. She waited for the pedestrian crossing light (to do otherwise on Orange Street is suicide), crossed the street, turned right, and within a scant minute had arrived at the tastefully restored storefront occupied by Elton Kimbrough Interiors.