Murder Ink

by Betty Hechtman

  I watched him take a deep breath and then let it out. His whole body seemed to relax. ‘That’s a relief.’ He dipped the tip of his sandwich in the soup. ‘I like your company, and of course the rest of the group’s. The writing group is doing what Sara hoped it would – it gets me to be with people who aren’t cops or suspects.’ When he looked up, I saw he was smiling to let me know that was supposed to be a joke. So, he did have a sense of humor after all.

  ‘Problem solved,’ I said. ‘We can be friends with no benefits.’ I smiled to let him know it was a joke too. ‘Let’s watch the movie.’

  I hit a few buttons on the remote and Gaslight began. It was in black and white and the sets looked artificial compared to movies now. It was also a little melodramatic, but it still got my attention and soon I forgot all about eating. The story was simple – a charming man played by Charles Boyer married a vulnerable woman played by Ingrid Bergman and he attempts to convince her she’s going insane by making her believe she is seeing things that aren’t there and that her memory isn’t working right.

  ‘Well, now I understand what Tizzy was talking about,’ I said as I turned off the set when it finished, almost disappointed that the TV hadn’t acted up. ‘But the difference is someone was telling Ingrid Bergman’s character that she was losing her mind while making things happen to reinforce what he was saying. I’ve just had weird occurrences.’

  Ben ate the last of his food. ‘The obvious fact is that unless you have a ghost, someone would have had to come into your place to switch the DVD.’ He didn’t say it, but I knew he meant that if it was real.

  ‘There was no sign of anyone breaking in. I was gone a lot of that day,’ I said with a shrug.

  ‘Does anyone have keys to your place?’ he asked.

  ‘Your sister does,’ I said.

  ‘Well then, we should talk to her.’ He was already getting up from the couch.

  I grabbed my keys and shut the door behind us. The light was on in the hallway and when I looked up through the skylight, I saw the moon in the night sky. We went down to the second floor and he knocked at the door, calling out that it was him.

  When Sara saw that it was both of us, she got a knowing smile. ‘You’re together,’ she said, sounding surprised and pleased. ‘Come in, come.’ Her smile had turned smug and I knew what she was thinking. All her efforts to match us up were working. First, we’d been together at the coffee shop and now here we were together again. Before she could say anything embarrassing, Ben gave her a severe look and a quick shake of his head.

  ‘Veronica said that you have keys to her place. Have you let anybody in there in the last couple of days? Maybe somebody claimed to be a plumber or the pest control guy.’

  Her smiled faded. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You remember that DVD that I showed you?’

  She shrugged. ‘You mean the one that didn’t have what you thought on it?’

  ‘Yes, that one,’ I said, and then gestured to Ben. ‘I was telling him about it. And we were trying to figure out how the DVD could have been switched.’

  Ben broke in. ‘Someone would have had to have gone into her place to switch it. Did you let anyone up there and maybe forget to tell Veronica?’

  She appeared shocked at the question. ‘Of course not. The keys are for an emergency or if Veronica gets locked out. I wouldn’t let anybody in her apartment and if I had, I’d have told Veronica.’ She seemed upset with her brother. ‘You know me better than that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I had to ask. We were looking for a logical explanation.’ She repeated that he should know her better than to think she’d be careless with my keys and he apologized again. I was still getting used to the change in him. I suppose he’d always been more relaxed with his sister, but he was suddenly like a new person to me. As they spoke, I felt like I was looking at him for the first time. I’d never noticed that his dark hair had a hint of a wave in it that probably would become curls if he didn’t keep his hair cut so short. His brown eyes had always seemed flat, but now there was some life in them. His formerly expressionless mouth had actually gone into a smile before. The kind of smile that went all the way up his face and made crinkles around his eyes. He’d dropped the monotone and sounded like a regular person.

  While they were having their brother-and-sister moment, I remembered something from the other day. I turned to Sara. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but didn’t you say you saw someone in the hall?’ I said.

  Sara thought it over and muttered something about how quiet it had been, then her face lit up with a memory. ‘That’s right. I did see a woman on the stairs. She introduced herself as Penny Clark, explaining she worked for the real estate company that manages the building and handles selling the condos. She seemed a little nervous, explaining that she was new at the job. She had someone who was interested in the unit across the hall from you.’ She turned to her brother. ‘The condo has been for sale for a while. You should look at it. Then you could see Mikey all the time.’ She made just the slightest gesture toward me, then said, ‘I’m afraid I was a little needy for adult company that day. She kept trying get away. She wanted to check the apartment to make sure it was presentable before she brought over the client. I told her the place was empty and tried to give her some information about the building, but she barely listened.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip about the condo,’ he said clearly filing it in the forget-about-it file in his mind. ‘Did you see the prospective buyer?’

  Sara shook her head. ‘We went to the playground. They must have come while we were gone.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ I said. ‘It’s not like she would have had keys to my place.’

  A little voice started calling ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ or the toddler version of it, as something crashed in the other room. Sara looked panicked. ‘Oh, no. I gotta go,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go back upstairs and put your heads together some more.’ I had the feeling she didn’t mean it like brainstorming either. I think she was hoping for something a little more literal. She rushed down the hall and we let ourselves out.

  He hesitated at the landing and I thought he was going to say goodbye, but then he pointed toward the third floor. ‘I left my jacket.’ He followed me up to the next floor and glanced at the door to the apartment across the hall while I unlocked my door. ‘Could the woman from the management company have had a master key?’

  I shook my head. ‘Everybody has their own locks.’

  We went back into my living room and he looked at the trays on the coffee table. ‘Let me help you clean up,’ he said.

  I let him carry his tray back to the kitchen and then we walked back down the hall toward the living room. ‘It seems like we reached a dead end,’ I said, as we passed through the entrance hall. I looked at my front door. ‘Unless there’s a way someone could have managed to pass through a solid wood door, I can’t figure out how they could have come in here. I think I’ll have to accept that I didn’t really watch the DVD the first time. I was tired and I had pictures of that client I’d scanned into my computer. It probably all got mixed up in a dream.’

  ‘Fine, maybe you did imagine it, but that doesn’t mean you’re losing your mind.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  He thanked me for dinner and the movie. I thanked him for rescuing Tizzy and me from the cop before he decided we were both nut cases.

  He grabbed his jacket off the end of the couch, and I opened the door. There was a moment of awkwardness of how to end the evening. When he was there for the writers’ group, he just went out the door like the others with a quick goodbye. This time he stood in the doorway.

  ‘Thanks for being so understanding about what I said. I didn’t want you to take it personally.’

  ‘I know. You said that,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t.’ I smiled thinking of Sara. ‘You know she’s probably going to step up her campaign after seeing us together the last couple of days.’

  He shook his head with mock
regret. ‘You’re right.’

  It seemed like there had to be some kind of gesture between us now that we were no longer just teacher and student. A hug was too much, but a handshake seemed weird. Rather than just thinking about it, I brought it up to him. ‘It seems like a gesture should go along with our goodbye,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘How about an arm pat?’

  ‘Arm pat, or upper arm squeeze?’ I said, returning his smile.

  ‘OK, how about this – on the count of three, we give each other an arm whatever,’ he offered.

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said.

  We counted three together and I gave him an arm pat and he gave me an upper arm squeeze, then we both laughed and said goodnight.

  Even if we’d reached a dead end on the mystery of the changing DVD, it had been quite an evening. It was as if the robot had come to life.

  I had no idea that something was going to happen that would change everything.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I felt at loose ends after Ben left. It had all been a little surreal. How he happened to visit and the visit itself. But I had things to do, so I pushed it out of my mind.

  I left the dishes until later, made myself a strong cup of tea and went into my office determined to get some work done. But then I just sat, drinking my tea and looking around the room, stalling. I often wondered what this space had been designed for when the building was first built. It was separated from the living room by a pair of French doors, while another pair of French doors opened onto the entrance hall. There was a closet which made it seem like it was supposed to be a bedroom. Another door led to the shaving closet as it was called. The tiny space had a marble sink and a white tiled floor and opened onto the next bedroom as well.

  Outside, the weather had changed and I could hear rain pelting loudly against the window. Instead of feeling cozy to be inside, I felt on edge.

  I usually smiled when I used the square with a sunflower in the middle as a coaster. It was one of the first squares I’d crocheted that had a motif in the middle and I was really proud of it. Tonight I barely noticed. After Camille’s phone call, I knew I had to work on Rachel’s book first. I wrote up Mr Parker’s story and positioned the photograph of Rachel on the boat. Since the booklet was still on the light side for copy, I sent an email to the teachers asking if they had anything else. I googled for clip art to sprinkle through the copy and found some nice boats, ballet slippers and a little schoolhouse. I started to look through a book of quotations but closed it after a few minutes.

  My mind had wandered back to the evening with Ben. It was a little unsettling to see him as an emotionally functioning human. He even looked different since he’d dropped the brick wall he’d seemed to have had around him. I remembered giving him the once-over when he’d come to the first session. My impression was nice features, but no heat.

  Personality wise, I’d tagged him as distant and cold and then really hadn’t thought much about him. Until now, though I suppose it had started when he helped with the cat. I had to recalculate my impression of him. He was actually OK, maybe a little better than OK. I hadn’t been totally honest when I said I wasn’t interested in a relationship. I wasn’t averse to something with the right person, but certainly not with him since he’d made it so clear he had issues.

  I thought about how I would describe Ben now. Nice guy with nice features, could be heat. Details to follow as they become known. It was easier with the rest of them. They’d been more open from the start. Ed was the old guy with sex on the brain who was basically a good guy and very helpful if I needed advice on something that needed fixing in my place. His job was in maintenance and he knew how everything worked, or why it didn’t, and he was generous with the information. Whenever I thought about Daryl all I could think of was a minefield. It felt like we were all walking through one when we discussed her work. I often wondered why she kept coming to the group since she was so upset with what anyone said. She stood out because, unlike the rest of us, she was always dressed in the latest style thanks to her job as manager of a trendy clothing store.

  Tizzy was a whirlwind of enthusiasm, though there was more of a comfort level with her than with the others since she lived down the street and I’d known her before she’d joined the group. Like Ed, she was generous about sharing. And injecting herself in the middle of things. I thought back to the afternoon and what she’d started with all her talk about gaslighting.

  There was that word again. As soon as I even thought about it, everything started to swirl around in my mind. What was real and what wasn’t. I thought about how I’d overreacted to the low battery on the phone. How real was the concept of gaslighting? Or was it something that Tizzy had grabbed onto and made more of than it was? Was it even an actual term? I did what I always did when I had a question about something – I researched it. The first step was checking my paper dictionary. I pulled out the heavy hard-bound book and thumbed through the almost tissue-thin pages. Old habits die hard. I chided myself for thinking in clichés. The trouble was that they got the message across in a few words. I considered what other words I could use that had the same meaning. It was my habit and it was hard to break. It took more words and didn’t have the same zing that the cliché had.

  There was no entry for gaslighting. The closet word was gaslight and it referred to lights that were powered by gas.

  I put the book back on the shelf and got more contemporary. I typed the word into my browser to see what would come up. I was surprised to see a whole list of information. It started with a definition from an online dictionary followed by a long list of articles and subheadings.

  I clicked on the definition first and read that gaslighting was a transitive verb meaning to control a person by undermining their sense of reality by denying facts, denying the environment around them or denying their feelings.

  Next I clicked on one of the entries about the movie. Along with a description that said Husband manipulates his adoring wife into believing she can no longer trust her own perception of reality, there were stills from the movie. Just seeing a picture of the Charles Boyer character with his sinister charm gave me the creeps. I moved on to the articles and read until my eyes were spinning. They all confirmed each other. Someone with bad intent manipulates someone else so that the person doubts their own perception. The likely perpetrators were spouses, even parents, bosses or co-workers and finally cult leaders.

  It seemed the point of someone doing it was to get control over another person. It didn’t quite fit in with what was going on with me since there was no person connected with the three strange incidents. But then I thought of Rachel. When I’d helped with her vows, she’d seemed confident and happy much like the Ingrid Bergman character at the beginning of the movie. But from what I’d heard from everyone I’d talked to recently, she’d become confused, forgetful and frantic like the Ingrid Bergman character when she was under the spell of the Charles Boyer character.

  All along I’d been wondering what had happened to make her change. Now I began to think it was more a case of who had caused her to change. Could someone have pushed her so far to the edge that she felt there was no way out but to die? Made her so confused she didn’t know what was real anymore? And the unsent text saying she needed help had been her way of saying she was giving up. She must have felt hopeless.

  It was a crime to push someone to suicide, if that is what had happened. The question was who and how could it possibly be proven.

  The rain had picked up in intensity and the wind had started to blow. The weather coupled with what I’d been thinking about left me feeling more on edge. I tried to brush it all aside and picked up the notes from the dance gym. Maybe if I typed them up, I’d get my mind on something else. I looked over the notes on belly dancing, but I couldn’t concentrate on them. The more I tried the tenser I got. The drumming sound of the rain only made it worse. The best thing to do was walk away from my work for a while.

  I emptied the undrunk str
ong tea into the sink and put the kettle back on. I pulled out a chamomile tea bag and put it in the mug. When the kettle whistled, I poured in the steaming water. The sweet floral scent of the tea was already beginning to calm me as I carried the mug back to the living room. The bag of crochet things was still sitting out from when I’d shown it to Ben. I picked up the hook and partially done square and began to crochet. Rocky came out from wherever he’d been hiding and joined me on the couch, as the storm really let loose. The wind was making the windows rattle and suddenly I felt a rush of cold wet air and saw that the door to the balcony had blown open.

  I rushed to close it, making sure to click the lock. As I looked at the torrent of rain hit the dark balcony, I suddenly realized how someone could have come into my place.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The storm was forgotten by morning, but not what it had showed me. I took my coffee to the living room and stood looking out of the glass insert on the door to the balcony. I saw how easily someone could have come from the apartment across the hall. The divider between the two sides of the balcony would have been easy to slip over. It was barely waist high. And I’d left the door unlocked, so there would have been no problem getting into my place.

  I had mixed feelings. A logical explanation meant that I hadn’t imagined the pictures of Rachel, but it was disturbing to think someone had gone into my place with the intent to make me think my mind was going. Who could have done it?

  And then I remembered Sara’s story about the woman in the hall who was going to show the apartment across the hall to a potential buyer. I’d dismissed it when Sara had said it since there didn’t seem to be a way into my place. But now I knew different and was suddenly very curious about who’d been next door.

  After a quick shower I put on my gym uniform of a pair of black leggings and a loose black T-shirt. I added the boots and stowed my sneakers in a plastic bag.

  I was glad to be getting close to the end of the different classes. I found them interesting and I needed the exercise, but they’d also become unrelenting. Just one class next week and I would have experienced them all.