by R J Fournier
“That doesn’t mean they make sense to the rest of us. It’s like cutting your toe off because of a hangnail.”
Helen thought about that for a moment. “But if Cécile DuQuenne had been a hangnail needing to be removed, on whose foot? The niece and nephew seem to think they had a claim on her estate. That would be a bigger hangnail than a fight over stolen fruit.”
“Yeah, but maybe the murderer didn’t need a big hangnail, just one that was big enough.”
Helen let silence be her response, but it lasted too long and became a rebuke she hadn’t intended.
“Besides,” Frank said finally, “there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to leave it up to the authorities.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Helen said partly to avoid another uneasy silence. But when she thought about it, she decided he was right: she should let it drop.
◆◆◆
“So retire,” Frank said, a hint of exasperation creeping into his voice. They were driving to his art opening in the city. “You’ll have your pension and I’ll be getting social security.”
“That won’t be much,” Helen immediately regretted saying it. Frank might take it as a rebuke for the years they lived off her salary. He hadn’t earned much even when he worked full-time.
“Every little bit helps. And my art is selling now.”
“I’m not worried about money.”
“Then what is it?”
Helen wasn’t sure how they’d gotten on the topic, although lately good news about his art—an opening, a positive review, a sale—brought to mind the possibility of her retiring. She didn’t begrudge him his success, but it highlighted what was lacking in her life. It started at the party for her thirtieth year teaching. She was amazed at how many people showed up, students from her first years as a teacher sharing how much she’d influenced them, how much they owed their success to her. It was touching and gratifying and all about the past. She didn’t want to be the woman who used to be a teacher; she wanted to be something now. She wanted a present. She just couldn’t decide what that something should be. Whatever it might be, Frank’s success reminded her she needed to get started on it soon.
Frank was distracted maneuvering city traffic and didn’t notice she hadn’t answered his question. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said.
“You’re doing fine, dear.”
He missed the parking structure and had to go two blocks out of the way to circle back because of one-way streets. But once they were in the gallery, his mood improved. He complained he didn’t like going to art openings, but he was very good at them. He had many friends, mostly fellow artists, and he’d invite them all. Few of them were in the market to buy, but the crowd and bustle created a sense of enthusiasm for the show that could transfer to the gallery’s true customers. And Frank was adept at talking to everyone, from artist friends to art patrons to local critics to those there for the free wine and cheese.
While Frank entertained, Helen went to find her own glass of wine. The young woman, standing behind a table lined with glasses and bottles and dressed in the black uniform of the art world, her long, dark hair swept over one shoulder and reaching halfway to her waist, asked, “Would you like champagne?”
“Oh, no. I’m strictly ‘ABC’,” Helen told her with a smile.
The woman looked puzzled. “We also have some sparkling water.” As if Helen had meant to say A. A.
“ABC—Anything But Champagne.”
The woman stared unsmiling.
“Do you have a still white?”
“Chardonnay?”
That was another ‘C’ but Helen agreed to it.
“How do you know the artist?” the woman asked.
“I’m the artist’s wife.”
She handed Helen a glass with a meager two-fingers of wine. “It must be wonderful living around so much creativity.”
Helen would have objected to the assumption that the wife could not be creative on her own, except she didn’t feel creative. “Thank you,” was all she said before wandering back to where Frank was holding court.
He had five works in the show but the ducks were getting all the attention. The gallery had built a three-sided room in the middle of a large open space and turned it into an old-fashioned bathroom—claw-foot tub, pedestal sink and pull-chain toilet. On the fake ceiling above it all hung the ducks.
“What’s the one duck so scared of?” someone asked.
When they were at home and Helen had asked the same question, Frank had said, “Seeing me naked in the bathtub.” In his role as a serious artist he answered, “Think about it. A duck turns upside down expecting to see the muddy bottom of a pond and instead encounters a whole different reality, a world he hadn’t even dreamed of before. And looking up at him is this huge, alien creature. It’d scare the bejeezus out of anybody.” The small group standing around him laughed.
Helen laughed with them, but she took Frank’s advice, and on the drive home she thought about it.
She asked herself what would be so terrifying that it would traumatize a duck? People throw trash into ponds all the time. Sinks, refrigerators, even whole cars if the pond is deep enough. Yet you don’t see ducks standing on the edge afraid to put their webbed feet in because of what might be lurking beneath the familiar surface. Frank had it right the first time. It was people moving around down there that had scared the duck.
When Helen found poor Cécile DuQuenne, she glimpsed an alien world hiding below the surface of her familiar pond. It wasn’t the body. It wasn’t even that she’d been murdered. It was that someone capable of murder was moving around in Helen’s particular pond. She couldn’t believe it was Mikey. She didn’t believe it was any of the familiar denizens of her small pond.
The niece and nephew were strangers, and they had motive. Yet Griffin refused to look into them. Frank was right; it really wasn’t her concern. She should let the authorities handle it. They wouldn’t listen to her in any case. But she had a sudden thought. What if a newspaper got hold of it? What if that reporter wrote an article asking why the police weren’t investigating other suspects? That could light a fire under Griffin’s bottom.
Helen decided to invite the reporter for coffee and tell her about her encounters with Cécile DuQuenne’s relatives. She pulled out her phone and started writing an email.
“Who’re you writing to, hon?” Frank asked, not taking his eyes off the road.
“Just a reminder to myself.” She didn’t elaborate. She was too busy trying to remember the reporter’s name.
SEVEN
“What’re you doing today?” Josh asked. Although their meetings were as sporadic as before, he’d started calling Delyth each morning as he drove to work and Delyth sat in her kitchen sipping a second cup of coffee.
“Do you remember Helen Terfel?”
“How could I forget her?”
“Why’d you say it that way?” Delyth wondered if there was some reason she didn’t know why she shouldn’t keep her appointment. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s one of those busybodies who thinks she knows more about my job than I do.”
“She called and invited me for coffee.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’ll find out at nine o’clock.”
“I meant, why are you going?”
“Who knows? I might learn something new.”
“Let me know if you do.”
As far as Josh was concerned, the sharing of information about the DuQuenne murder was all in one direction. It was better that way; otherwise, Delyth would be in an ethical bind. Still, She wasn’t sure why she bothered telling him anything. She fantasized about finding a crucial clue and letting him find out about it in the Post like everyone else.
◆◆◆
Delyth pulled up to a comfortable-looking, board-and-batten home painted the color of damp moss. Two dormers peered from the roof like a pair of vigilant eyes above the crooked smile of a porch that ran along tw
o-thirds of the front.
Helen seemed distracted when she answered Delyth’s knock. “Come in.” She turned and walked inside. “We’re putting up the tree.”
Delyth followed her into the living room where a man was lying under a fat fir tree.
“How about now?” he asked.
From the middle of the room Helen scrutinized the tree. “A little more to the left.” After some grunts from under the tree and rustle of branches, she said, “Perfect.”
Turning to Delyth she explained, “Our son and his two boys are coming this afternoon. The in-laws have them on Christmas this year. We want all the lights up before they get here so the kids can help decorate.”
The man emerged from under the tree. “Hi, I’m Frank. You must be Del.”
Helen and Frank looked alike in the way married couples often do. Beyond the middle of middle age, they had thickened and sagged but not too much of either. Frank’s still full hair was mostly white; Helen’s was a suspiciously uniform black.
“Delyth,” she corrected with a smile, but the smell of pine and cookies had thrown her off her game.
“You’ll excuse me,” Frank said. “I want to get some water into the stand.”
“We can sit at the big table," Helen said. "It’s so much sunnier in the dining room. I hope you like chocolate chip cookies. A little early in the day but ‘tis the season.”
The onslaught of Christmas and Helen’s ebullience felt like a wave forcing Delyth back to her childhood and the charade of familial concord her mother insisted on during the holidays. A sneaker wave, Delyth thought, like the ones that wash unsuspecting people out to sea. She fought back. By the time Helen had served the coffee and put a plate of cookies between them, Delyth was herself again.
“Help yourself,” Helen said, pushing the cookies closer.
Delyth took one.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I called this meeting,” Helen said, her voice betraying the deadpan delivery.
Delyth smiled, acknowledging the feint to humor. “I’m usually the one who makes the call and most people say no.”
Helen gave a polite nod. “Your article about Mikey Vitkus’ arrest was quite sympathetic.”
Not as sympathetic as the original, Delyth almost confided. She’d worked in much of her interview with Sam Gawley. Ted snapped that she wasn’t working for the defense. He had her delete everything but “the important facts," as he put it. She wasn’t sure who should determine which facts were important, but it was clear who did.
“You see,” Helen went on, “I don’t believe Mike Vitkus is guilty of this horrible crime. I think the police rushed to judgment without checking out other people who might be involved. People who had better motives.”
One of the TV stations had picked up Delyth’s story, calling it the “persimmon murder,” as if the murderer and his motive were a given. They were running with PTSD as the slant, mentioning Mike and the murder only in the lede as if his guilt were an established fact. They made it seem like all returning veterans were powder kegs ready to explode at the least provocation. Delyth would enjoy proving them wrong. At the same time, Delyth knew how seriously Josh took his job. He had to be certain about Vitkus or he wouldn’t have arrested him.
“I’m sure the police have followed up on every lead,” she told Helen. Still, the reporter in her had to ask, “Do you have anyone in mind?”
Helen told her about her encounters with Sophie Poirier and André DuQuenne. “Don’t you think it’s suspicious them both showing up just when their aunt is killed? André breaking into her house and searching for something? He said he was looking for a will. That certainly seems awfully fast, don’t you think? Two days after she was killed. They hadn’t even put her in the ground yet. And all the girl’s talk about a painting that’s been in the family for three hundred years. I don’t know. Suspicious is all I can say.”
“You said you saw the painting when you were there?”
“I have a photo.” Helen went into the kitchen and returned with her phone. “I thought I’d send it to the niece but it seems she’s disappeared.” She handed the phone to Delyth. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
Delyth analyzed the photo then said, “That’s a Jansenist cross. Notice how the arms are stretched in a Y-shape.” She turned the phone toward Helen but didn’t give it back. “The small wedge between the arms symbolizes the number of chosen compared to the rest of humanity. The Jansenists believed that God chose the elect from before time. Nothing a person does can save you.”
“How dreadful! What about doing good?”
“It’s God working through the elect. For the rest, doing good is a waste of time.”
“I certainly don’t like that.”
“Neither did the pope.” Delyth was suddenly embarrassed. She handed back the phone. When Helen didn’t take it, she left it on the table between them, and grabbed another cookie to put an end to her digression.
“How do you know so much?”
“I minored in comparative theology.” Delyth used one of Helen’s Christmas-themed napkins to scoop up the few crumbs that had escaped her lips between words.
“That’s interesting.”
Delyth knew from the way Helen had said it, she meant why on earth would anyone do that? To the unspoken question she gave her job-interview response, “My family was religious.” As if that explained anything. When her father left, her mother embraced everything Welsh as an anchor in an alien land, including a neo-Calvinism not seen in the homeland for a hundred years. Delyth knew about the Jansenists because she’d done her senior paper on sects that believed in double predestination, the kind of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin distinction that left most people rolling their eyes. She’d hoped the arguments she learned in school could lead her mother back to the modern world. She was wrong.
“And you ended up a reporter?” Helen asked.
“Not many jobs for theologians who don’t believe in God.”
Reaching for Helen’s phone, she tried enlarging the picture, but the quality was too poor for her to make out anything new. “The timing’s right though.” She handed the phone back to Helen. “This could have been painted in the beginning of the eighteenth century. That’s when the Jansenists were still going strong. How big is it?”
“Maybe three by four feet.” Helen measured the height and width with her hands. “Not including the frame that was four or five inches wide all around. Don’t you think it’s strange that all the jewels have been removed? Sophie said her brother told her they were glass. Why would someone bother to remove them if they were fakes?”
“The question is, how did it get into the hands of the DuQuennes? The story about it being passed down over three hundred years is probably just that—a story. The painting’s probably not that old. Hardly a motive for murder.”
“But if people believed it were valuable…”
“Wouldn’t André have taken it when he was searching the house?” Delyth countered. “I’m more interested in the fact that the niece and nephew showed up out of nowhere just when the aunt is killed. A coincidence?” She paused, thinking over her own question. “Probably, but worth looking into. I could tell the police I want to interview them about their aunt.” The “police” in this case meant Josh. Delyth wasn’t sure how she could ask him without overstepping their implicit agreement. She wasn’t even sure what she’d ask if she did get to talk with the niece and nephew.
“That would be splendid.” Helen looked toward the living room. “How’s it going, Frank?”
“It’s going.”
“Frank is a perfectionist about the tree. He starts by wrapping the trunk with lights then each of the branches. It’s beautiful the way he does it, but a lot of work. I should be helping him.”
Delyth didn’t take offense at the abrupt dismissal; she was glad to be leaving Christmas behind.
EIGHT
Helen poked her head into Frank’s studio. “I think I’m going to take Mrs. Vi
tkus some cookies.” It was the day after Christmas. “It must be so difficult for her with her son in jail.”
“Do you want some company?”
His new project mustn’t be going well, she thought, or else he’d be too involved to offer. “No, I think she’ll be more comfortable if it’s only me.”
She didn’t even call ahead, thinking Marija Vitkus would put her off. Coco and Mollie raced to the fence of their enclosure, expecting a walk. “Sorry, girls,” Helen called back to them. “No dogs either.” She set out on her own, enjoying the sunny, crisp day.
When Marija opened the door, her “Yes?” was cool and drawn-out.
Helen didn’t know her well. Over the years they’d been invited to a few neighborhood parties together and exchanged greetings whenever they bumped into one another at a store or along the road, but they’d never progressed beyond that. She was taller than Helen remembered although the long skirt could have added to the effect. A pale green scarf that hung loosely from her shoulders was the only relief from the uniform gray of her clothes.
“I’m Helen Terfel from next door.”
“I know.”
“I brought you some Christmas cookies.” Helen held up the tin decorated with poinsettias and a stick-on bow. “If you’re busy I’ll just leave them.”
“Christmas,” Marija said as if it were a foreign word. After a moment she smiled. “How kind of you. Won’t you come in?”
She led Helen to a large room, the furniture all leather and chrome, elegant in the way of a city apartment but somehow soulless, like a stage set after the play has run its course.
Marija moved to the sofa and motioned Helen to the chair positioned opposite her.
Helen set the tin on the glass table in front of her.
“Would you like something?” Marija asked. “Coffee, tea?”
“Just some water would be fine.”
When she returned from the kitchen with a glass, Marija said, “Thank you for the cookies. They’re the only reminder of Christmas I’ll have this year.”