The First Time I Died

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The First Time I Died Page 21

by Joanne Macgregor


  She handed me a bottle of water — Beaumont’s sparkling Eau de Café — and poured herself a large chardonnay. Touching her glass to my bottle, she said, “Here’s to daytime drinking,” and took a serious sip of her wine.

  “Your father insisted,” I said.

  “You’ve been to see him?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “That’s how you tracked me down, I suppose. How was he?”

  “Tired.”

  Also, cagey and not very forthcoming.

  Jessica’s erect posture slumped a little, and she took another swallow of wine. We moved into a corner near the bar, out of the way of the caterers who were placing tray after tray of food on a serried arrangement of three tables in the center of the gallery. My stomach growled, reminding me how little I’d eaten that day.

  “How’s your mother doing?” I asked.

  “She’s fine, still stays in the old house on Pond Road, but she’s not up to taking care of my father now — well, you saw how ill he is. He gets great care at Roseacres, though, and I visit him as often as I can,” she said, sounding defensive. “When he wasn’t quite so frail, we’d have him and Mom over every Sunday for lunch.”

  “And Blunt? See him often?”

  “We’ve never had him at our house.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nico wouldn’t like it, and besides, I want nothing more to do with my brother.” Judging by the fierce bitterness of her tone and the swig of chardonnay that followed, things with Blunt had been rough over the last decade.

  “I hear he has a place in the woods?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Hugo. The old guy who runs the hardware store on Cabot Street.”

  She gave a sharp bark of laughter that sounded very much like her father’s. “That man’s a terrible gossip, and he’s more than a few colors short of a full palette. Did he tell you about the lights in the sky above the new golf estate?”

  “Government surveillance?”

  “Hmm. He told me it was aliens, and the farmers ought to lock their cows in their barns at night, so they don’t get experimented on. Animal dissections and diseases — that’s the agenda of the little gray men, according to Hugo.”

  “So, your brother doesn’t live in the woods behind the estate?” I pressed.

  She raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. “James struggles to function in society. That’s why he lives in a trailer back up there.”

  “He has mental problems?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know — to be honest, it’s hard to tell. He’s pretty much fried his brain with drugs over the years.”

  “I remember he always used to smoke pot.”

  “And deal it — no need to be polite with me. He got into dealing prescription opioids, and when law enforcement cracked down on that, he switched to heroin.” She avoided meeting my eye as she signaled to the bartender for another glass of wine. “Heroin is cheap and easy to use. Vermont’s rotten with it. And now fentanyl, of course.”

  Had Colby’s path crossed Blunt’s, or had he perhaps tangled with a trafficker? There was big money in drugs, and people hyped up out of their right minds. Messing with them would have been dangerous.

  “And sometimes I’ve wondered if he …” Jessica’s voice petered out as she stared into space, deep in thought.

  I gave her a few moments and then prompted, “You were saying something about Blunt?”

  “Was I? I don’t remember now.” She intercepted a woman placing a stack of laundered hand towels on the counter near the door and directed her to the bathroom at the back of the gallery.

  “Catch me up on your life, and on how you wound up married to such a talented artist.” I gestured at the works on the wall.

  “He is great, isn’t he?” she said, smiling complacently.

  She had, she said, met Nico Mantovani just before she graduated with a business degree from the University of Vermont, in Burlington.

  “It was his first ever exhibition, and it was held at the university’s gallery, where I had a part-time job. He was eleven years older than me, and he wasn’t famous yet, but I could tell he would be. He took me under his wing.”

  Listening to what she’d accomplished in the years since, I rather thought she may have taken him under hers, because it sure sounded like she’d been the force behind his rise to prominence and success in the art world. She’d married him, gotten a second degree, this time in the fine arts, opened this gallery to showcase his work and occasionally that of other local artists, and along the way found time to have a pair of twin sons. I was exhausted just listening to it all.

  And also a little sad.

  If Colby hadn’t died, would he and I have married and had kids by now? I wondered if we’d still have been in love, or whether we would have gone the route of most childhood sweethearts — growing apart as we grew up. Always and forever, or older and colder?

  “Twin boys! Will I meet them here tonight?” I asked Jessica.

  “Goodness, no! They’re really noisy and high energy. I mean, they’re three-year-old boys.” She picked an invisible speck off the rim of her glass. “Nico likes peace and quiet. He finds they distract him from his work.”

  Not all wedded bliss in the Mantovani mansion, then?

  “Oh, will he be doing work here tonight? Painting something for us?” I asked.

  “No,” she said stiffly, holding her glass out to the bartender for a top-up.

  “You used to have a thing for Pete Dillon. I always thought” — when I thought about Pitchford and its citizens at all, which was hardly ever — “that you might wind up with him.”

  Jessica smiled, and a naughty glint lit her eyes. For a moment she looked like the friend I’d once known. “I always thought so, too. But duty came first.”

  “Duty?”

  “Oh, finally!” she said, speaking to a man who’d just come in, carrying a tower of stacked boxes. “On the food tables, please, and wipe the platters before you transfer the sushi onto them. Come see, Garnet, what do you think of these stands?”

  “They’re … extraordinary,” I said, eyeing the pewter octopuses which balanced glass platters in their writhing tentacles. In truth, I couldn’t tell whether they were phenomenally stylish, or horribly kitschy.

  Keeping one eye on the bustling caterers, Jessica asked me the question I’d been hoping she wouldn’t: “So, what have you been up to all these years?”

  33

  NOW

  Wednesday, December 20, 2017

  Catching Jessica up on my life took less than a minute. While she’d been getting degrees, popping out babies, and growing a business, I basically hadn’t accomplished a damn thing, either professionally or personally. As she grasped this, Jessica loosened up noticeably. Perhaps I was being unfair — maybe she was relaxing because the exhibition arrangements were clearly under her firm control, or perhaps it was because she was already well into her third glass of wine. A chip off the old Doc Armstrong block.

  When the caterer presented her with an invoice for signing, however, she took it with a steady hand, inspected it with an expert eye, and immediately detected some error in the charges.

  “Excuse me a minute, Garnet, I need to sort this out.” She marched to the counter near the front door, whipped out a fancy stainless-steel calculator, and began adding figures.

  “I’ll just help set out the food,” I said, moving over to the tables, where after checking over my shoulder that Jessica was still occupied in her calculations, I wolfed down several cucumber maki and one huge rainbow roll.

  “Not enough wasabi,” I told the guy still arranging food on the octopus platters.

  He said nothing but stared at my mouth while brushing his top lip; I was just in time to wipe a few incriminating grains of rice off my own before Jessica returned.

  “Honestly, you can’t trust anyone!” She glared at me, and for a moment I thought she was mad that I’d made inroads into the food, but then I realized she was t
alking about the supplier. I wasn’t off the hook, however, because she added, “I need to get something off my chest, Garnet.”

  I braced myself. “I’m listening.”

  “I’m still angry with you for what you did back then, in senior year. How you basically just stopped being my friend.”

  I was surprised to see that her eyes were moist. This obviously still mattered to her.

  “Jessica, I’m sorry. It was such a bad time for me. I was …” How to put that confusing mixture of agonizing grief and necessary numbness into words? “Broken,” I finished lamely.

  “I could have helped you mend, but you wouldn’t let me!” she accused. “You’d think that after Colby was gone, we would have drawn closer together, gone back to being the best friends we’d been before you two started dating, but you just locked me out of your life.”

  “You’re right.”

  I tried to explain how I’d shut down on everybody, how I’d lost the capacity to connect with anyone, how I’d no longer trusted others not to disappear from my life without warning, taking the pieces they’d torn out of me with them.

  Better never to have loved at all, than to have loved and lost — that had been the conclusion drawn by my seventeen-year-old self. I’d hurt Jessica, I knew that, but I’d needed to be alone, to depend on no one but myself. When she became friends with Ashleigh and Taylor and stopped trying to reconnect with me, I’d felt only relief, because there’d been one less thing to remind me of the past.

  “You were so much a part of the happy times with Colby, and also so much a part of those awful days when he was missing…” Waiting out the storm. Tramping through the snow. Calling his name. Putting posters on poles. The pond. “I needed to block out those memories, you know? Which meant I couldn’t hang out with people who’d been there. I wasn’t strong enough to handle it. I was a coward,” I admitted.

  “I can understand what you must have been going through, it’s just” — she blew out a long breath — “it really hurt to lose my best friend, you know?”

  “I do know,” I said, though I was thinking of Colby.

  “Nothing was ever the same after that.”

  “I’m truly sorry.” I gave her forearm a squeeze; I didn’t think she’d welcome another hug. “You know, that whole time has been on my mind lately — Colby’s disappearance, his funeral, how his death was never solved.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you ever remember anything that could shed light on it?”

  “Me?” She looked startled.

  “Yeah. Maybe something that in hindsight, or from the perspective of your adult self, seemed odd or suspicious?”

  “No, nothing. Why do you ask?”

  “I just … It’s not finished for me, you know? I’ve battled to get on with my life because it’s still … open.”

  A flicker of sympathy crossed her features. It would no doubt disappear when I asked the questions I needed to.

  “And did you send Colby—” I began, then stopped, trying to think of a way to find out what I wanted to know without tipping my hand. “Did you perhaps have any contact with him the day before he disappeared? Like, did you maybe call him, or send a text, or meet up with him that Sunday?”

  “What the hell, Garnet? Are you accusing me of cheating with your boyfriend?”

  Interesting. I hadn’t said anything about cheating.

  “Not at all. I’m just asking if there was any reason you’d have wanted to meet him. I remember you guys had an argument about Blunt, and I thought maybe …”

  “Maybe — what, exactly? Are you accusing me of murdering Colby?” She slammed her glass down hard on the table. A little wine sloshed over the edge and puddled on the tablecloth.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m just trying to figure out what happened, okay?”

  Flustered, she left me and went to greet a cellist who’d just arrived and was setting up near one of the front windows. Guests started trickling in a few minutes later. I was surprised to see Pete Dillon among the early arrivers. I would have said he was more the type to spend a winter’s evening in front of the TV, beer in one hand, remote control in the other. It seemed like everyone except me had changed since high school. Jessica greeted Pete at the door, her cheeks pink and her face suddenly looking fully awake. I walked over to join them.

  “Pete, you remember Garnet McGee from high school?” she said.

  He nodded a greeting at me. “Yeah. She was in the coffee shop on Saturday.”

  “You’ve been here four days already?” Jessica said, clearly pissed that I hadn’t made contact with her sooner.

  “I did spend two of them in the hospital after nearly drowning in the pond!” I said.

  “That was you?” Jessica didn’t seem too worried at my brush with death. “I’d heard there was an incident, but I’ve been too busy organizing this show to read the papers.”

  I turned to Pete. “Where’s Judy?”

  “At home with the kids.”

  In a snippy tone, Jessica told Pete, “Inspector McGee here is trying to solve our town’s grand mystery — Colby’s Beaumont’s death.”

  “Oh, yeah? Discovered anything yet?” he asked.

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. “I may have found something.”

  Pete looked ready to ask me for details, but just then the great artist himself arrived, making a show of embracing his wife and greeting the guests loudly, and Pete melted away to grab a drink at the bar. Jessica introduced me to her husband, and it took me only five minutes to discover that Nico Mantovani was a douchebag. Attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing, and clearly uninterested in small fish like me who lacked either the funds to purchase his art or the influence to promote his fame. If this was the alternative to spending nights alone in my small apartment in Boston, Jessica was welcome to it.

  The gallery was filling up quickly, and the noise level rising apace. I recognized many of the faces from back when I’d still lived in the town, but had no desire to reconnect with any of them. Jessica moved around the room, welcoming new arrivals and pressing food and wine on everybody. When Ryan arrived, looking even better in his smart pants, blue shirt and black blazer than he did in uniform, he made a beeline directly for me.

  “What did you find out about Colby’s death?”

  “Can’t a girl have a drink before she gets interrogated?”

  “Fine. What would you like?”

  Beer, but none was on offer. “White wine. With ice.”

  “With ice? Like, in the wine?”

  “I like my cold things cold,” I explained.

  “Even in winter?”

  “Even in winter.”

  “Whatever you say.” He moved off through the throng to the bar while I edged over to the food tables and piled a plate with sushi.

  Michelle Armstrong made her entrance in a flurry of loud greetings. I examined her with keen interest. Her figure was a little softer than a decade ago, but not much, and her face was, if anything, younger. She’d had it heightened, tightened and brightened — I’d put good money on that. In her tight-waisted, low-necked mini dress, her six-inch heels, and with her determinedly blond hair curled in ringlets around her face, she looked more than a little ridiculous. Mutton dressed as lamb.

  Her eyes scanned the room, passing over me without a hint of recognition, and then returned to Nico. After fawning over him for several minutes — touching his hand, adjusting his collar — she turned her attention to a new arrival, Roger Beaumont. Colby’s uncle was dapper in a navy suit, but he looked considerably older than the last time I’d seen him. I wanted to speak to both him and Michelle, to ask them about their calls and messages to Colby, but the room was crowded, and I couldn’t seem to get near them. Instead, Ryan and I wound up chatting to Jessica, Pete, and Ashleigh Hale about how things had changed in Pitchford in the last ten years.

  I sipped my wine which, sadly, had only two ice cubes bobbing about in it. I was only half-listening to the conversation
; my thoughts were back on Colby’s phone and that text message. The number had begun with the 802 Vermont area code and, if I remembered correctly, had a one in it somewhere. As soon as I got home, I’d charge the phone, note the number, dial it from my own phone, and identify who’d arranged that rendezvous with Colby.

  There were several contenders for the sender, “J”. It could have been Jessica — she’d certainly seemed overly defensive earlier — or her brother. I couldn’t recall if James used to refer to himself by his given name or by the nickname we’d assigned him. The “J” could also have been Judy trying to worm her way back into Colby’s affections. I didn’t think she’d ever resigned herself to having Pete instead of Colby. Who would? Of course, the “J” might have referred to a surname, like — I cut a glance across at Ryan — Jackson. Suddenly, I was out of patience.

  “It’s too noisy here to catch up on everyone’s news,” I said. “How about we get together while I’m in town and do it properly? I’ll book a table at the Frost Inn, and we can catch up on old times. Jessica, I have your number.” I pulled my phone out of my handbag and looked at Pete expectantly. “But I don’t have yours, or Judy’s. Unless they’re the same numbers as you had ten years ago?”

  “No, they’re different.”

  Damn. So much for my sneaky ruse.

  Although I had no need for Pete and Judy’s current numbers, I made a show of keying them into my phone and saving them as contacts when Pete rattled them off.

  “Looks like it’s time for an upgrade, there, Garnet,” Pete said, curling his lip at my phone. “I can recommend this baby.”

  Smiling smugly, he showed us his phone — a sleek gold thing which may well have been worth more than my car.

  “It’s a thing of beauty, Pete,” I deadpanned, wondering if overpriced phones were the new phallic symbols. Maybe I could do my thesis on that; it sounded like a lot more fun than grief.

  “I bought one for Judy, too. I like to take care of my woman.”

  I couldn’t be sure, over the loud hubbub in the room, whether he’d said woman or women — plural. Either way, it was the kind of patronizing comment that Jess and I would once have mocked, but now she said nothing. Her cheeks were high spots of color — from alcohol, heat or excitement?

 

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