by Susan Conant
“The Gateway,” Robert said with scorn. “The Gateway! Death and roaches!”
“I’ve never seen roaches there.” I didn’t mention that I’d heard about them, looked for them, and found none.
“According to our research,” Hugh countered, “there are five superior facilities in the area.”
“There are probably hundreds of inferior ones,” I loyally replied. Then I did a mental double take. Research? Had Hugh and Robert been visiting nursing homes? I hadn’t done comparative shopping. When Rowdy and I had begun to volunteer, my expectations of nursing homes had been so low that almost any half-decent facility would have been better than I’d feared. For all I knew, the Gateway had roaches I hadn’t seen. I remembered the unresponsive attendant, Ralph, the one we’d met by the elevators, the one I wouldn’t have hired as kennel help. The roaches might be imaginary. Ralph was real. Rowdy and I arrived at the Gateway at ten-thirty one morning a week. What went on when I wasn’t there? And it was true that the Gateway offered Althea no intellectual companionship. Almost no one else showed any interest in books, and Althea had never shown the slightest interest in any of the social activities that drew Helen Musgrave. Helen was pleasant and cheerful, but wouldn’t Althea happily trade her roommate for the luxury of privacy and the space for more than a handful of personal possessions? Maybe Althea would be better off at one of the five superior facilities. But the Gateway simply had to be a better-than-average facility. There was nothing cheap-looking about it. It occurred to me that I had no real proof that Jonathan’s visit here had anything to do with Irene Wheeler, spectral dogs, con jobs, or the great-aunt at whose house he had been murdered. Maybe the purpose of his visit had concerned his other great-aunt, Althea. According to Ceci, Jonathan had Althea’s power of attorney. It had been Jonathan who’d written monthly checks to the Gateway. It might not meet Hugh and Robert’s standards as a suitable place for Althea—would any institution?—but those checks must have been for large sums. Any nursing home was expensive. Could Jonathan have come here not to protect Ceci from a con job, but to move Althea from the Gateway to some cut-rate place?
Another possibility occurred to me. On the Saturday when Jonathan had arrived here, he had talked on the phone to Irene Wheeler, and she had come here to meet him. What else had he done? Had the psychic been the only one he’d talked to? Althea had known of his impending arrival. She must have told Hugh and Robert. Had they presented Jonathan with information about the five superior facilities? Hugh, I felt certain, had carefully entered tons of data on local nursing homes in a file on his laptop. With research data available, Hugh and Robert could have presented Jonathan with the demand that Althea be moved to a facility of their choice. Or perhaps they’d insisted that she at least have a private room. If Jonathan had refused? Ceci had told me that she was positively not going to take over Althea’s finances; with Jonathan dead, someone else would have to assume the responsibility. Hugh and Robert had known Ceci for decades. They’d surely have been able to predict that response. They were the obvious people to take over from Jonathan. Perhaps one of them already had Althea’s power of attorney. Perhaps plans were now under way to move her. But did Althea have the funds to pay for a palatial nursing home? The sister who did was Ceci. Could this entire Holmesian investigation of Jonathan’s murder be an elaborate smokescreen? With Jonathan dead, Althea was Ceci’s heir. Oh, yes! Althea would inherit not only Ceci’s money, but her house on Norwood Hill. The money would be more than sufficient to pay for round-the-clock care. And unlike any institution, this grand and beautiful house would be a suitable residence for the woman.
Irene Wheeler was supposed to visit Ceci this evening. Were Hugh and Robert really here to set a trap for Jonathan’s murderer? Or to frame the psychic and her confederate for the murder they themselves intended to commit? Hugh, I reminded myself, had sent one man to the hospital. And another to the morgue?
Chapter Thirty
IF HUGH AND ROBERT had murdered Jonathan, they were here tonight to reenact their Baskervillian drama. This time, however, Ceci would play the victim. Rowdy, I imagined, would find himself miscast as the demonic hound. Did I, too, have a role? Or was I caught not in a Holmesian play, but in a psychic con game? Irene Wheeler had already duped me. I didn’t blame myself. Gaining misplaced trust was how she made her living. Violence was not her game. It was, of course, her confederate’s. He’d tried to drown a sickly, aging cat. He’d fled at the sight of Kevin Dennehy, a cop whose face had appeared in the papers and on television in connection with the murder of Donald Lively. If the man with the bulbous forehead had murdered Jonathan, he’d made an unexpected move in Irene’s game. Then there was Ceci’s metaphor, the one she’d borrowed from Conan Doyle: the joyous image of the gates that were not shut, the great news that the dead were not lost to us, but eager to communicate, ready to speak, to listen, and even to return to those who loved them.
But the Holmesian drama was a game, wasn’t it? The Great Game: the pretense that fiction was history. And Irene’s con game was her drama. The people of the drama: Irene as the grifter, Gloria and Scott as her shills, and Ceci as the perfect chump. And the content of the game, the theme of the play, was the illusion of reality, or perhaps the reality of illusion. To Conan Doyle, who was, after all, in a position to know, Holmes and Watson were creatures of the imagination; to Hugh and Robert, the Great Detective, the Friendship, and the Sacred Writings were overarching realities. Conan Doyle’s true mission was not to create a Canon more real than reality, but to awaken the world to the reality that was the substance of Irene Wheeler’s con game, the same illusion that was now Ceci’s reality, the splendid news that death itself was an illusion and that its gates swung open in both directions. Until Jonathan tried to lock that gate.
The actual gate to Ceci’s yard, the iron gate, was shut but unlocked. When it came to spectral dogs, mundane security precautions evidently did not apply. For all I knew, maybe the gate had never had a lock. And if it had been Ceci who’d murdered Jonathan, she obviously had no need to protect herself against the murderer’s return. As to Simon’s access, Ceci must credit him with the power to undo latches or maybe to pass through material barriers. When I pushed the gate inward, it squeaked on its hinges. Why had Jonathan left the house? Because he had heard something outside: the squeal of this gate.
Robert made genteel noises of objection and asked what I thought I was doing.
Hedging my bets, I wanted to say. Heading away from violence: the two of you. The man with the bulbous forehead. Even if Ceci had killed Jonathan, she was morally innocent of murder. Besides, she was no physical threat to me. Furthermore, she knew I was the last person in this world or any other to stand between a loving owner and a beloved dog. Far from trying to hurt me, she might tell me what she’d done. She’d already have spoken about the deed to Irene Wheeler. Ceci would have wanted to communicate with Jonathan. She’d have required Irene’s help. And in any case, Ceci would have assumed that the psychic would know without having to be told. If so, Ceci needed another kind of help. Violence was not the psychic’s style. But blackmail was.
When I closed the gate behind me, its hinges gave another horror-movie squeak. The noise reminded me to remove Rowdy’s rolled-leather collar with its collection of jingling tags. I pulled him close to my left side, held still, and found my bearings. The fog was still thick. I had to rely on my memory. The sundial, Simon’s grave, and the scene of Jonathan’s murder must be to my left and four or five yards uphill. Directly ahead of me, I remembered, a long bluestone walk led to a flight of steps that gave access to the terrace at the rear of Ceci’s house. Like the edge of a stage, the patio was dark. Center stage glowed hazily. Then a breeze stirred, and the fog briefly cleared. The French doors that formed the big alcove were transparent curtains. Flanked by tall fronds of potted palms, two chairs had been drawn close to the edge of the stage, almost as if their occupants were acting in the sort of so-called experimental play that forces actors and a
udience to reverse roles. So-called: If the result of an experiment has been replicated zillions of times, the experiment isn’t exactly experimental anymore, is it? I mean, if theatergoers wanted to be actors, they’d audition, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t buy tickets. And that, of course, is the zillion-times-replicated result. Tonight, for example, the entire audience consisted of a woman and a dog who’d sneaked in without paying and occupied standing room near the rear exit of an otherwise empty theater.
On another night, another gate-crasher had made it all the way to the edge of the stage. Crushing flowers and foliage beneath his feet, the man with the bulbous forehead had stood in the wings, where he had eavesdropped on the action. But which side of the footlights had he really stood on? Was he a sort of stagehand or animal assistant who awaited Irene Wheeler’s cue to send the dog onstage? Or perhaps he was a vigilant and mistrustful director who wanted assurance that Irene was speaking her lines correctly. What was she saying now? What was Ceci saying?
To approach unobserved, I couldn’t stride up the bluestone path with a big, flashy dog. No, I’d need to take a circuitous route. I wished I’d seen the yard in daylight. Looking uphill, I could see the bright alcove, of course, and the silhouettes of the house and, to its left, the low roof of the garage. The sundial was to my left. Near it was the semi-excavated resting place of Simon’s ashes. Jonathan Hubbell had not, of course, caught a foot in the grave and taken a mortal fall onto the sundial. If I tripped or bumped myself, I’d survive. But not necessarily in silence. I moved to my right. With Rowdy’s leash in my left hand, I stretched out my right and inched along until my fingers brushed the hedge. Ceci had said that the yard was fully fenced. We’d follow the perimeter. Any hazardous pieces of garden sculpture would be on display in prime locations, not tucked in the boundary shrubs. I’d let Rowdy move ahead of me. Dogs have excellent night vision and, of course, that uncanny sense of smell. I’d keep an eye on Rowdy’s white tail. If he moved to avoid an object, I’d avoid it, too. And if we needed to vanish, the shrubbery would offer hiding places. If we needed to bolt, we could run like mad for the stretch of fence to the right of the house, and in seconds we’d be through the gate and on the sidewalk of Upper Norwood Road.
The plan worked perfectly for about thirty seconds. We followed our course to the right, turned left, and were starting uphill when the bright lights in the alcove suddenly went out. In the blackness, I heard the simultaneous sound of a door and the wail of Ceci’s voice in the open air. “Simon, come!” she screamed. Her voice had the high-pitched musical quiver that you hear when elderly women sing hymns. “Simon, come! Here, Simon! Here! Simon, come!” Caroling to her dead dog, she was heartbreakingly eager and desperate. “Simon, please! Please come back!” Then impatience crept in, as if the long-gone Newfoundland bounced and pranced just out of reach, happily engaged in some infuriating game of catch-me-if-you-can. “Simon!” Ceci scolded. “Simon, come! Come here right now!”
Although Ceci’s behavior now strikes me as ludicrous and pitiful, its immediate effect was bizarrely convincing. On visits to the Gateway, I often took part in present-tense conversations about dogs who had left this world decades earlier, but lived on in the lives of their owners. There was a woman named Gladys who always perked up at the sight of Rowdy and announced to me in the familiar tones of canine fellowship, “I have two French bulldogs!” The first few times Rowdy and I visited Gladys, I assumed that her dogs lived nearby with a relative and that she got a chance to see them every week or so. I started to catch on when she happened to mention that she drove a Studebaker. I also learned that Gladys was an enthusiastic gardener. She complained about how hard it was to get the soil out from under her nails. To prove her point, she held out a clean hand. Gladys and I nonetheless continued to discuss her French bulldogs. I couldn’t bring myself to ask a brittle, cheerful, “And how are your dogs?” Rather, on each visit, I let Gladys reestablish the present-day reality of the two French bulldogs and all the rest. Once she did, I always felt perfectly comfortable. Relativity didn’t freak out Einstein, did it? On the contrary, he enjoyed it. So did I.
Gladys’s Frenchies lived where she did, in an internally consistent past made present by physiological change, which is to say by a merciful act of God. Her relationship with them was thus as harmonious as mine with Rowdy and Kimi. Gladys and I had been blessed by coincidence: Temporal relativity had granted us the comforting good fortune of coinciding with our dogs. Furthermore, as surely as I could have driven Kimi to the Gateway to introduce her to Gladys, Gladys could not have presented her dogs to me, because they existed with her in her time, not with me in mine except during brief visits when Gladys, Rowdy, and I coincided in space. Is this getting too cosmic? The point is that in listening to Ceci’s expectant, melodious calls to a dog whose ashes lay buried nearby, I entertained the fleeting fantasy that there were two spectral dogs: one the unwitting impostor, the other the true Simon, who might triumph over time, space, death, and human fakery to leap over the heavenly and earthly gates to sail past me and into Ceci’s arms.
Rowdy stirred. From the house, I heard soothing murmurs: Irene. The French door closed; the lights came back on. Rowdy and I resumed our uphill course, reached the level of the terrace, and inched our way from the shrubbery to the corner of the house, and from there toward the spot where Hugh and Robert had found the crushed flowers. Light spilled onto the terrace from the French doors at the center of the alcove, but the immense pot and lush foliage of the tropical plant at this corner of the little conservatory created an ideal post for eavesdropping. I could already hear soft voices. As I’ve mentioned, dogs have good night vision, and the long down had always been one obedience exercise that Rowdy performed quite reliably, if rather more noisily than the AKC obedience regulations allowed. Even if he hadn’t been able to see the downward sweep of my right hand, he’d have sensed the familiar signal to drop to the ground and stay put. Mindful that malamutes are malamutes, I repeated the signal to stay. I knew he wouldn’t get up. And in the absence of an AKC judge and a crowd of entertainment-hungry spectators, he probably wouldn’t howl.
An obedience dog knows that when you start with your left foot, you expect him to move with you: Heel! Consequently, when you leave a dog on a long down, you start off on your right foot. I took three small steps in front of Rowdy, squatted, and peered into the alcove. A plant entirely blocked my view, but I could hear everything. Irene was, however, speaking about a topic so unexpected that I was tempted to put my ear to the glass to make sure I was hearing correctly. I’d assumed that Ceci and her psychic would be discussing Simon, of course, and Ceci’s impatience for his return. I’d hoped to overhear talk of Jonathan and his murder. Or evidence of blackmail? What I got instead was, of all things, a damned travelogue. Irene Wheeler was discussing California.
“The climate,” she said with emphasis, “in all senses of the word, is naturally appealing. The atmosphere is wonderfully receptive.”
“According to the papers,” Ceci replied, “the smog is absolutely terrible, you can hardly breathe, and police brutality, and the cost of real estate is simply sky-high, you pay millions for a dismal little hovel of a place, and the people! Thinking of nothing but making movies and riding on surfboards and sending some harmless man to jail for life because he forgot to pay for a slice of pizza pie. And what do you call it? Silicon! Everywhere! It’s terrible! I can’t imagine why anyone, certainly not you, would want to live in such a place.”
After softly clearing her throat, Irene confessed that finances were a consideration. “The foundation,” she said in a reluctant tone, “is not on the solid footing I had hoped. The endowment campaign”—she let the phrase hang for a moment—“has fallen short of my goals.” Without giving Ceci a second to respond, she added, “I must remain focused on the crucial importance of the work as a whole. I cannot sacrifice my greater mission. The global possibilities simply must take precedence over my ability to meet the needs of a few individuals, no
matter how deserving.”
“But Simon is so close!” Ceci protested. “You can feel his presence! You felt it only five or ten minutes ago!”
“This very evening, he may yet appear,” Irene said.
“I have waited and waited! I have done everything!”
“Perhaps there remains some small impediment we have overlooked.” Irene was stalling. Had Simon’s impostor failed to turn up for a scheduled appearance? “The impediment may be my own discord,” she confessed. “My worldly worries are perhaps creating a field of negativity.” In an unusual burst of what sounded like genuine frustration, she exclaimed, “How I loathe and despise being weighted down by these petty material concerns!”
Ceci was not to be diverted. “Could Jonathan be interfering again?” She made her murdered relative sound like some bothersome character in a soap opera.
“Jonathan has repeatedly assured us,” Irene reminded his great-aunt, “that he is at peace. Now that his eyes are open, he fully understands and appreciates our earthly efforts to awaken him to beauty and fullness.”
“And,” Ceci added, as if speaking a line that Irene had absentmindedly forgotten, “he has forgiven me completely.”
“He has passed beyond blame. If he forgives you, you must forgive yourself.”
“If I’d had the least idea that he’d go wandering out chasing away the burglar, I’d have warned him not to trip and fall on the sundial. But whoever would have thought that he’d go out?”
“The workings of the universe are just that,” Irene said firmly. “Accept his messages of love and peace.”
“Oh, I do, but I still can’t help blaming myself, not enough to drive Simon away, but I keep wondering—”