A Truth for a Truth (28 page)

“What happened next? Can you tell me?”

“I stepped back here”—she moved against the wall beyond the window to demonstrate—“so I wouldn’t be seen. And I watched them for maybe a minute. No, probably even longer. I was frozen in place. They were standing close together, and I could hear their voices, but not their words. Finally Win hugged her, then he set her away.” Hildy put her hands up in the air and pushed, as if she was pushing on somebody’s shoulders. “He moved past her and around the house, but he didn’t come in the front door. When I realized he wasn’t going to, I used it myself, went outside and confronted her.”

“You didn’t see him?”

“No.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he went around the house and in through the kitchen. I didn’t see him again until I went into the kitchen myself. By the time I did, he was cleaning up. He’d put some of the food into containers by then, thrown some away. I was furious . . .” She swallowed. “I told you the rest.”

“Right.” I stepped toward the window and peered out. “If the phone hadn’t rung, you never would have seen them together.”

“Not likely, no.”

“How long were you out of the kitchen altogether, would you say?”

“Counting the time I was straightening things and turning out the lights? Maybe five minutes. “Why?”

“Five minutes until you went out the front door and confronted Marie?”

“About. Maybe more.”

“You weren’t in the kitchen, and Win wasn’t there, and the caterer was already gone. The last of the guests were gone, too. The kitchen was empty, you were across the house in the alcove, and you were unlikely to return immediately, since you were busy watching your husband with another woman.”

“That’s all true. Are you saying . . . ?”

“That somebody may have taken advantage of your absence and used it to poison the shrimp dip? I think I am. I may even be saying that whoever made that telephone call, did it to get you to the one place in this house where you could see Win talking to Marie. And Hildy, that could be the person who murdered your husband.”

Deena and Ed would have been proud of me. I let my fingers do the walking, and while I was still sitting in front of Hildy’s house, I made two calls on my nearly virgin cell phone. The first was the easiest. I called Roussos, who, to his credit, didn’t point out that I just left his office. I asked him if he would find out who had made the call to Hildy on the night Win died, and explained why. He told me I was reaching, but he didn’t refuse. I was satisfied he would get around to it, but would he tell me what he discovered? Unlikely.

The second call was less pleasant. I considered going to Marie Grandower’s house to talk in person, but in the end I decided she would be easier to tolerate on the telephone so I looked her up in the church directory under my seat.

Marie was not happy to hear from me and told me so immediately. I followed up that excellent start with a question—as if she hadn’t just called me a meddler and a pain in a place from which her surgeon husband had probably removed a lifetime of hemorrhoids to keep her in diamonds.

“Marie, can you tell me why you and Win were in the side yard talking on the night of the party? Why there?”

“What’s this? You’re trying to implicate me in his murder?”

“Absolutely not. In fact, if I’m right, your answer will make it clear it couldn’t have been you.” Which was more or less true. If I was right and the murderer had guided Hildy to that spot with a phone call in order to have the kitchen empty to do the deed, the murderer couldn’t have been Marie, who was busy talking to Win and not making prank calls.

“Why don’t you get a real job? Who do you think you are?”

“The person who’s trying to make sure nobody suspects you of killing Win Dorchester.”

Okay, I confused myself with all the double talk, but luckily it seemed to be having the same effect on her. She actually answered. “Well, Win wanted to meet me there, that’s who. It was
his
idea. I just did what he asked.”

I thought that was too bad, since I was pretty sure Win didn’t kill himself. Suicide by shrimp dip is always suspicious.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

She hung up, which probably meant she was.

For the moment I gave up and went to my favorite little Italian grocery, DiBenedetto’s, where the produce is always fresh and the hunky son of the proprietor spends some unknown amount of time in Manhattan visiting my older sister. I say unknown, because even though Vel admits that she and Marco DiBenedetto see each other now and then, she refuses to tell me how distant now is from then. Days, weeks, months? I am surrounded by secretive women.

Among other goodies, I bought glistening asparagus, aged Swiss, and farm fresh eggs to make a quiche for dinner, since our stove was still hooked up, even if it had been pulled into the middle of the kitchen by the floor guys. Marco himself walked me through the checkout line and asked about our family as I tried not to swoon. In turn I asked about his two young sons, who, in my opinion, desperately need a mother with Junie’s extraordinary parenting genes. Vel, of course, fits that description, since we have the same mother, if not the same father. To my credit, I didn’t add that suggestion to the conversation. My busybody reputation is undeserved.

The radio was on when I returned home, and it wasn’t a station Ed would willingly choose. I opened the door to a song that was some combination of R&B, salsa, and punk. I might have suspected burglars, but I’m pretty sure they have better taste in music.

“Deena?” I called. “What are you doing home?”

Deena poked her head through the kitchen doorway, pale apricot hair swinging around her face. “Getting something to eat. It’s almost lunchtime.”

I joined her in the demolition site formerly known as a kitchen, a grocery bag in each arm. “You know that’s not what I mean. Why are you home when you’re supposed to be in school?”

“Half day today, remember? Teacher training.”

Now I
did
remember, although it seemed like years since I’d seen the notice in the school newsletter. I supposed forgetting was a sign that Win’s murder was taking over my life and shoving my family on their own resources.

Too bad.

“How long have you been home?” I asked, as I set bags on the counter.

“I don’t know. Fifteen minutes.” She peeked into the first bag. “How come you never buy potato chips?”

“Loaded with fat, salt, and preservatives.”

“I just go to other people’s houses and eat them.”

“I’ll see if our health insurance covers that.”

We made sandwiches with tofu turkey and fresh tomatoes. I haven’t always been a vegetarian, and I still remember what real turkey tastes like. I’m still hoping someday the tofu turkey folks will remember, too. But how can they compare if they’re vegetarians and don’t eat meat? How will they ever know?

We took our lunch into the living room, where our shoes didn’t stick to the floor, and we didn’t have to view the mess.

“When’s the new floor coming?” Deena asked.

“I have to go back to the dealer this afternoon and pick out something else. Turns out the one I like was discontinued.”

“Great. We’re never going to have a working kitchen, are we?”

“Never is a stretch. Just probably not in your lifetime.”

“So, have you been reading Right In the Middle lately?”

I studied the question silently, wishing I could throw my sandwich into the air and run for the computer.

“Something on there you’d like to tell me about?” I asked, as nonchalantly as I could.

“Not really.”

“Why’d you bring it up?”

“Just making conversation.”

Girls Deena’s age do not make conversation with their parents. In fact avoiding conversation is on the first page of the “You’re a Teenager Now” handbook.

“Okay,” I said, topping my last try at nonchalance.

“What do you think of it?”

I’d already told her, so this was yet another clue. But I played along. “It’s well done. Clever. Not mean, which it could be. Why?”

“You ask that a lot.”

“It’s rooted in my DNA.”

She chewed a moment, and I stayed silent. I’ve known her since birth, nine months before, in fact, and I had a pretty good idea something was about to gush forth. I swallowed to prepare, so I wouldn’t choke.

“It’s just that Mr. Collins . . .”

I stayed perfectly still, and did not compress my sandwich into a sphere the size of a Ping-Pong ball. When she didn’t continue, I ventured a guess.

“Somebody’s reported him for something? Another student?”

She frowned. “No. What do you mean?”

I backtracked. “I was trying to finish your sentence. You kind of left it hanging.”

“Mr. Collins said I should talk to you.”

That was completely unexpected. I had swallowed for nothing. “Did he?”

“I just said so, right? I mean, I heard myself say it.”

Patient Aggie disappeared. “Deena, what’s this about?”

She wrinkled her nose. I’ve been careful not to tell her how cute nose wrinkling is, just in case she tries it on some pimply adolescent of the opposite sex.

“Mr. Collins knows . . .”

“What does he know?” I demanded. This time I didn’t finish her thought and prayed she’d get around to it eventually.

“Well, he knows Tara and Maddie and I are the ones behind Right In the Middle. It’s our blog.” She narrowed her eyes. “And don’t go all ballistic, okay?”

“Yours?”

She nodded.

“But I asked you all about it. I asked you who was doing it!”

“And I told you who everybody
thought
was doing it, and why they probably weren’t right. I never really lied to you. I just said nobody knows who’s doing it, and that’s true, well, except Tara, Maddie, and me. And Mr. Collins.”

“Why does
he
know?”

“You aren’t going to get this part.”

I leaned forward and gave her my best Mom look. “Better try me.”

“Well, I told him about Right In the Middle when I went to talk to him about quitting the debate team. See, I hate debating, only I didn’t want to tell anybody, because Daddy loves it so much. I wanted Daddy to be proud of me. And you don’t have to tell me he’s proud of me anyway, like I don’t know that. But it was something we could share. Teddy’s not the only one in this family with a brain.”

“Whoever in your short life said she was?”

“It’s just that the two of them like all the same stuff. They have everything in common. Church stuff. Finding out about everything, even stupid stuff. And Teddy loves being in front of people the way Daddy does.”

“You don’t.” It was not a question.

She nodded. “I hated being up there. I liked writing and researching, you know, and putting ideas on paper. I just hate being up there presenting it. I can’t think. I feel like I’m talking underwater.”

“But you didn’t want to tell your father? You thought he wouldn’t understand?”

“He won’t, not exactly, because we don’t really think alike, him and me. I’m more like you, and you always think way outside the box and drive him crazy. I guess I will, too.”

“Wow,” I said. What else could I say? It was more or less true.

“So I kept going to the debate meetings and hating them more. I tried the school newspaper a couple of times, thinking maybe I could switch without anybody getting upset, but the meetings were so stupid, all about staying positive. Then one day Tara said we ought to start our own blog with real news about school. We messed around with it and I realized how much I liked doing it. It was so different. Plenty of time to get everything right and think it through, and nobody’s watching me. That’s when I knew I had to quit the team and do what I wanted instead.”

“So you went to Mr. Collins?”

She nodded.

I was ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t quite let go of the idea that Stephen Collins had somehow acted inappropriately with Deena. The possibility had haunted me too long. “I bet he was sorry to lose you,” I said.

“Not very. He already figured out I wasn’t all that into it and needed something else to do. He’s a good teacher. He always says every student has talents and just needs to try different things to find them. That’s why we all like him so much. He doesn’t push, and he doesn’t make us feel bad. But when he saw me this morning in the hall, he took me aside and told me I needed to tell you the truth, because it wasn’t fair to worry you. I guess he was right about that, too.”

I finally let go of what had been a huge, nearly catastrophic, misjudgment. Stephen Collins had obviously never by word or deed hurt or upset my daughter. He had, in fact, just encouraged her to do what her father and I had always told her to do. Follow her heart. This had never been about sexual misconduct. Deena had simply worried she might disappoint her father.

As if.

“I wish you’d told me sooner,” I said. “I could have told you Dad doesn’t care one bit whether you debate or write or join the pep squad. He’s always proud of you.”

She cocked her head and stared at me as if my brain had shrunk to walnut size.

I retrenched. “Okay, he might not be all that understanding about the pep squad. He’s a guy. But Deena, he’s nuts about you, and that means the real you.”

“He and Teddy are always doing stuff together.”

“Because you have your own life now, and not as much time for us. Teddy still likes hanging around with us. When you were eight, we did a lot of things together, too. That’s how it works.”

When she didn’t look convinced, I reached over and patted her knee. “I’ll tell you what. I won’t say a word to him. You talk to your father tonight and tell him yourself. Watch his face. He’ll be completely blown away, I promise. You never had to keep it a secret.”