Grime and Punishment jj-1

by Jill Churchill

  She passed the Staplers' house. The red MG was parked in front. VanDyne must be questioning everyone. Her attention was soon diverted as she passed the Happy Helper van going the other way at the end of the street, and had a horrible shock as she pulled in her driveway. It was like yesterday, but a mirror image — her house instead of Shelley's. Standing at her kitchen door was Mrs. Thurgood!

  Jane slammed on the brakes and the woman turned. No, of course it wasn't the dead cleaning lady, but she was of a similar build with frizzy, blond hair. That and the blue uniform gave a scary impression.

  “You must be Edith," Jane said, hoping the fact that she was carrying a huge, heavy sack would account for her breathlessness.

  “That's right," Edith said, without offering to help. She merely stood back like company as Jane struggled to fit her key in the lock while balancing the cleaning materials. This didn't bode well, but then the woman's job didn't really start until she got inside. Jane knew her opinions of the moment were being influenced by Dorothy Wallenberg's claims. Still, it was odd that people had such widely different impressions of Edith.

  While Jane showed her around and mentioned a few of the things she was particularly concerned about having done, Edith just sauntered along behind her, making the occasional affirmative noise. Jane couldn't figure out whether the woman took it all as a matter of course, or whether she simply wasn't interested in what Jane was saying. Neither of them referred to the events of the day before, even though it was obvious Edith must have known what had befallen her substitute. Jane kept feeling she ought to say something sympathetic, but didn't know what.

  The tour was mercifully interrupted by the phone. Jane left Edith to strip the beds and ran downstairs to answer it. It was Uncle Jim.

  “Honey, I just read the papers. That was right on your block, wasn't it? Are you all right?"

  “You mean the murder? Yes, it was next door, at Shelley's, but I'm fine. Just kinda shaky."

  “You want me to come stay with you until this is sorted out? I don't like to think about you and the kids there by yourselves."

  “That's nice of you to offer, but you'd have an hour and a half drive each way to work.”

  “I wouldn't mind."

  “Well, I would. No, I'm okay. Really. See you Sunday.”

  She had only a half hour before driving her blind kids, but she took the time for a quick shower and sprayed on a tiny, precious bit of the Giorgio perfume to which she'd treated herself for her birthday. These kids, having lost one sense, had developed the others to a high degree. It was a running joke with them to guess what sort of soap and shampoo she'd used, and they could often tell if she'd been to the store recently because of the scent of onions or cleaning materials or whatever she'd carted around in the station wagon.

  As she flew through the kitchen, she found Edith leaning on the counter, gazing out the window and languidly sipping at a cup of coffee. There was no sign of her having done any cleaning at all.

  Jane had a delightful morning with her kids. They identified the perfume right away, and knew about the cleaning materials. One of them also pointed out that there was a weak spot in the upholstery in the back seat, and the muffler didn't sound at all good.

  The previous spring Jane had told the teacher that, come the new school year, she wanted to start learning how to help these kids in a more concrete way than simply acting as taxi driver. So, during class, she was blindfolded. "You can't pretend you're blind, Mrs. Jeffry," the teacher said. "You won't be really motivated unless you experience not seeing.”

  Jane acquired a few bruises trying to get through a maze of chairs using a cane, and discovered she had insensitive, if not downright numb, fingertips when she was introduced to braille. Still, as she drove home, she felt she'd gained valuable insight into what these children faced.

  The experience gave her a lot to think about. Back in February, when Steve died, her great-aunt May had phoned to say, "My dear, I'm going to tell you the best advice I got when I was widowed and I want you to follow it. Do nothing for a year. Make no changes, no decisions that aren't necessary. Too many new widows dash into things they shouldn't before they've come to terms with their loss.”

  It was, she'd discovered, good advice, and she was glad she'd taken it, but now, little more than halfway through the first year, she was feeling impatient. She must do something. The children were growing up fast; in a few years they wouldn't need her so much. But she would still have whole days to fill. She needed to start planning how she was going to fill them.

  It was probably too late now, but by the spring semester she was going to start some courses at the local junior college. She wanted to find out what else she might like and be good at besides mothering. Working with the blind children might be exactly that avenue.

  When she got home, the kitchen was actually clean. Not spotless, by any means, but better than when she left. She had come in very quietly, not exactly admitting to herself that she wanted to sneak up on Edith, but doing so just the same. Dorothy's remarks about the cleaninglady just slouching around kept echoing in her mind. She wanted to know at what pace the woman worked when she was unsupervised. The vacuum cleaner was sitting in the living room and the magazines were straightened up. She ran her finger over the coffee table and sighed. No dusting had been done. There was no sign of Edith.

  She went upstairs, hating herself for being so stealthy. No sign of her there, either, although the beds were made. She must be doing the family room in the basement. The last step creaked — it always did and Jane had forgotten — so she abandoned her sneaking. "Edith? Are you here?”

  From the small adjoining office, Edith answered. "You're going to have a mildew problem down here if you don't get some circulation. Spiders too." She emerged, carrying a feather duster, and frowned sourly at Jane.

  “I thought I told you I didn't want anything done in there." Jane was irritated. The office was off limits to everyone, even the kids. Steve had worked there, and she'd taken it over last winter for bill-paying and just plain hiding out. She considered it her own ward of a sort of personal mental health institute. It was the one place she could go and be absolutely alone when the pressure built up. She resented any intrusion. She was sure she had told Edith not to do the room, but Edith must not have been listening. Neither did she appear chagrined at the mistake.

  “Those webs will get in the typewriter and make a mess of it," Edith said, clumping up the steps. It was clear that the discussion was over as far as she was concerned.

  Suddenly Jane felt unaccountably depressed. She'd come home so buoyant, and now, because of a trivial irritation, she was deflated. These spells had come over her frequently last winter and spring, but over the summer, with the kids around all the time they had become less of a problem. Now that school had started and the regular routine was beginning, would she be subject to them again? Shelley had told her she should see a shrink, something about grief therapy, but she had found therapy of her own.

  She closed the door, sat down in the butt-sprung chair, popped a tape of the 1812 Overture into the tiny cassette player she kept in the top drawer, and leaned back with her feet on the desk top. She closed her eyes and let the music take her away. Within a few minutes, she was smiling and directing the orchestra.

  Seven

  Jane would have had a whole, precious hour of solitude if Shelley hadn't phoned. "Jane, you are going to that PTA meeting at the junior high this afternoon, aren't you?" she asked briskly.

  “Are you crazy?"

  “Good. I'm so glad. Early planning for the spring fund-raising carnival is so important."

  “You have gone mad. You can't have forgotten the last one. The time I had to run the cotton candy machine and got that goo in my hair and vowed never to become involved again."

  “I knew you'd feel that way. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. I'd give you a ride, but Paul is dropping me off."

  “I see. Paul's there and you can't say what you mean."
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  “Wonderful. Yes, of course. See you then.”

  Jane gave some serious thought to the nature of friendship before dragging herself to the junior high. This seemed too high a price to pay. But, if Shelley was desperate enough to attend such a meeting, Jane's curiosity alone was roused to the point of enduring the setting to find out what was up.

  She parked at the front of the big circle drive, the better to escape when the opportunity came. She had to sit quite still, getting her nerves under control, before she could enter the building. In Jane's opinion, junior high schools were possibly the worst idea educators had ever come up with. At the age children most needed to have older teens to look up to and younger children to set examples for, the system pulled them out and isolated them to flounder around without guidance. No, not without guidance; they had nearly as many counselors as teachers assigned to the school, but those supposedly trained adults hadn't a fraction of the influence the mere presence of exalted high school kids would have had.

  Drawing a deep breath, Jane entered the school. Unfortunately, at that moment, the bell rang for the last class change and she found herself engulfed in a tide of children. A good third of the boys towered over her and half of them tripped over her. She was jostled unmercifully as she struggled to make her way to the art room, where the meeting was to be held. Some of the kids ran into her deliberately, some because they weren't paying attention, and a few because the poor things simply didn't know where all the parts of their rapidly developing bodies were at any given moment. Twice, as she clawed her way forward, a timid voice greeted her by name. She couldn't discern the source either time.

  She thought she glimpsed Katie, but made no attempt to get her attention. That would have been asking for a snub. She knew that junior high schoolers always tried to maintain the fiction that they had no parents. They might, if pressed, grudgingly admit to a father for the sake of filling out forms, but not to a mother. And never in public.

  She all but fell into the art room when she finally reached it. There were about twenty women present, most of them more or less familiar. Grade-school PTAs consisted of a beleaguered cross section of parents. By junior high, however, only the truly devoted club women were involved. These were the folks they should have called on to bail out Chrysler; they'd have staged international bake sales to boggle the mind. Small knots of conversation were breaking up, and the women were moving (with obscene eagerness, it seemed to Jane) toward desks so the meeting could commence.

  “It positively reeks of hormones in this building," one of them was muttering to her friend.

  “It isn't all hormones. It's dirty gym socks and chalk dust too. And cheap perfume," the friend replied.

  Before Jane could contribute her opinion, Shelley appeared and dragged her to the back of the room, where she'd staked out two desks for them. "Thank God!" Jane exclaimed. "I thought you'd gotten me here and not shown up yourself. What is it?"

  “Remember when Paul's mother died a year ago?" Shelley was talking fast, anxious to convey as much as possible before the group was called to order.

  “Huh? Yes, but what on earth—?"

  “Well, she left him — not me, mind you, but him — a strand of pearls that belonged to her mother. They're missing."

  “Forgive me, but what in the world are you talking about? A strand of real pearls? But I thought—"

  “—that Paul's people were dirt poor. Right. I don't know if the pearls are genuine or not. See, his mother emigrated from Poland just after World War I with her parents. The pearls were supposed to have been given to her folks during the war by some Russian soldier they helped escape a firing squad or some such thing. They were probably trash, but they might have been the result of some high-class looting. For all I know he might have ripped them off Anastasia's neck."

  “You never told me."

  “I never took the story seriously. They looked pretty ratty to me. Kinda discolored and lumpy.It crossed my mind that they were just tightly rolled dough lumps with a little varnish. Anyhow, Paul thought they were the family treasure, and said he was going to take them to New York sometime and have them appraised and cleaned and restrung. In the meantime, he told me to put them in the safe-deposit box."

  “Ladies!let me have your attention…" a woman at the front of the room said, clapping her hands in a very school-teacherish way. She was an angular, hard-featured woman with a belligerent manner. The kid who tried to jostle her in the halls probably came away with serious bruises.

  Jane lowered her voice. "Am I to assume you didn't bother to lock them up?"

  “Exactly. I just forgot. They were in an envelope in the drawer with my bras and slips and now they're gone."

  “Now, as you know, the carnival is our primary source of revenue for the purchase of an annual gift. Ladies? In the back! Could I please have your attention?”

  Jane and Shelley pretended interest for a few moments, and when the speaker had lost interest in policing them, Jane whispered out of the side of her mouth, "Why is this a secret? Have you told VanDyne?"

  “No. I don't want Paul to know."

  “But, Shelley, the police have to know. It surely has a bearing on the motive for the murder."

  “Maybe…"

  “How many of you ladies have worked the annual carnival before?" the speaker was asking.

  Jane obediently put her arm up and went on whispering to Shelley. "So why are you telling me this before you've told them?"

  “I just can't have Paul knowing. It might be a mistake. I mean, maybe I did put them in the box at the bank and just forgot."

  “You now better! Have you ever had amnesia before?"

  “I can't remember," Shelley said, smiling feebly.

  “I'm serious. You have to tell VanDyne, no matter how upset Paul might get. What's the worst he can do?"

  “He won't do anything except be terribly hurt that I was so neglectful of something that meant so much to his whole family. Jane, I think you should—"

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jeffry. I knew we could count on you.”

  put your arm down."

  “Count on me?" Jane asked, fearing the worst. "I think you just volunteered to run the cotton candy machine again."

  “Shit!”

  After this, in self-defense, she gave her full attention to the meeting in progress. It broke up moments before the final bell, and she and Shelley fled. No self-respecting adult would set themselves up for being in the building at the final bell on a Friday afternoon. "Jane, I want you to talk to the police for me," Shelley said, once they were breathing fresh, free air again.

  “Shelley, I can't do that. For one thing, Van-Dyne already thinks I'm half-crazy and wouldn't believe me. He'd run straight to Paul to confirm the story and get a description of the pearls — or bread pellets or whatever they are."

  “Then they just aren't going to know."

  “The police have to know. It's important to their investigation."

  “I'm not so sure. Jane, hasn't it struck you as odd? The whole thing? I mean, nobody knew I even had the damned things except Paul's family, and none of them live anywhere near. So why would some random thief come in my house, ignore the silver, the home computer, the stereo, the other jewelry — all that stuff they usually steal — and go straight to my underwear drawer to steal a string of highly questionable pearls?"

  “Of course it's odd. But what do you think it means?"

  “I have no idea.”

  Further discussion was cut short by the clanging of the final bell. Within seconds they were buffeted by kids escaping the building. "There's Paul, parked up the street. I've got to go."

  “But we haven't settled anything." Jane raised her voice over the sounds of chaos around her.

  “No, but I'll figure out what to do. Don't worry," Shelley said. "See you later.”

  Jane went back to the relative safety of her car to wait for Katie to emerge from school. She lit a cigarette and sat staring sightlessly at the crowd of kids swarming
past. The whole situation was very strange. Why would someone ignore all the other obviously valuable things in Shelley's home and go straight to the possibly fake string of pearls? She had said Paul's family all lived somewhere else, but suppose one of them had slipped into town and taken the necklace? Still, even if that were true, how would anybody know where she kept them? Shelley certainly hadn't sat around after the funeral and said to Paul's family that she thought she'd just take the pearls home and put them in with her slips and bras.

  The house hadn't shown any overt signs of ransacking. Even a subtle search would have been apparent to Shelley, considering the kind of meticulous housekeeper she was. No, it would seem that somebody knew exactly where to look. And nobody but Shelley herself knew where they were. Even Paul thought they were safely in the bank.

  A nasty little thought was flitting around the back of her mind. If Shelley was the only one who knew where they were, could she be faking a theft? Jane shook her head as if to physically dispel the notion. Why in the world would Shelley do that, and what kind of friend would suspect her?

  “What were you doing in the school?" Katie asked, flinging the door open and startling Jane.

  “Wasting time. Inadvertently volunteering to work at the carnival," Jane replied sourly.

  “Oh, Mother! Do you have to come?”

  No, Jane thought, with any luck I'll die before then. Of course, that woman in charge would probably just prop her up behind the cotton candy booth and expect her to do her job anyway.

  Eight

  Shelley phoned as Jane was running in the door. She explained that Paul didn't want her to be frightened by staying in the house until the killer was found. They were going to a hotel ten miles away.