All's Well That Ends (15 page)

Marc Wilkins—and his oeuvre—stayed on the list.

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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS

I was meeting Sasha at five, but I didn’t want to drive to Jersey at all, and I didn’t want to sit in Phoebe’s cluttered rooms and look at more teddy bears or souvenir spoons. We’d moved through the house yesterday with amazing speed. It was easy, after all, to decide about the large objects, the ones that would be Toy’s primary focus. And even the abundance of what Phoebe would have called “collectibles” was no real chore. No sentimentality was attached to the perfume bottles, though Sasha thought they might appeal to an antiques dealer along with a dozen or more enamel boxes and a group of milk-glass vases. The paintings in their ornate frames were mostly unlikeable—including the one Sasha had so generously given me—and we left their fate up to Toy.

Our decision-making ability accelerated with the hours, and by night’s end, the house was close to inventoried, at least as far as things to be saved, sold, or forgotten were concerned. I went home with the painting and the carton holding Phoebe’s laptop and all the contents of her desk. Sasha had gone home with three cartons’ worth of Phoebe memorabilia, including the silver.

We could have called it quits yesterday, and I thought we should have, but Toy was coming over around five for that last walk-through, or showdown. I was to be moral support in case of a clash of wills or, more likely, a clash of budgets.

Once in my car, I hesitated, debating between going home for an hour or going into the office for the same amount of time.

But the thought of Ozzie Bright’s office made me remember that my other act of Sasha–friendship required closure. I had to finish, to Sasha’s satisfaction, the futile investigation of Phoebe’s cause of death. So Bordentown it would be.

The weather was nastier than it should have been at this point on the calendar, with a raw wind blowing off the Delaware, and I wanted to be home, curled on the sofa, or standing by the range, making soup. Even marking papers seemed preferable to spinning wheels in Bordentown, and nothing was helped by the traffic creeping over the bridge.

Nor did I have any hopes that this interview—if it GILLIAN ROBERTS

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happened—would reveal anything worthwhile. Why would Phoebe have been any more forthcoming with this neighbor than with the other two in her tea-party trio?

I might not have been overly enthusiastic about meeting her, but as soon as Sally Molinari opened the door, she behaved as if she’d been waiting for me all her life.

“Hey!” she said with a big smile. “Glad to see you!”

I hadn’t said a word. Not an introduction or an explanation of my presence, and she had no way of knowing who I was. I had a fleeting moment of fear that she was part of a cult and I should refuse her overly friendly greetings, but then I decided that I didn’t mind being prequalified as good news. What would school be like if all the students greeted me this way? And meant it?

I explained my presence, heavy on the word “investigator”

and intimations of an inheritance “confusion.”

She nodded and smiled even more, waving me into her home with one hand as she held the door wide open with the other.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “I read mysteries and I know lawyers hire investigators, use them all the time, to sort things through.” I didn’t contradict her because what she said was true, even if it didn’t have anything to do with my presence.

“Come in, come in, make yourself comfortable,” she said.

“Poor Phoebe, of course I knew her, and there—sit there. It’s a comfy couch. Or here, on this chair. Or anywhere, really.”

She’d pointed to the sofa, then a wing chair, and I settled on the latter, already feeling a bit exhausted. The living room and what I could see of the dining room behind it, the mirror image of Phoebe’s layout, were filled with heavy pine and maple Early American pieces, with a rag rug on the floor, a dry sink on one wall, rush-bottomed chairs in the dining room, and everywhere, brass accessories. Even what I was sure was a TV cabinet had been engineered to appear to be a Colonial hutch. Every wood surface looked lovingly waxed or polished, and the phrase “controlled comfort” popped onto my mental screen, even though I wasn’t sure what it meant.

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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS

Sally plumped a sofa cushion before sitting down on the one next to it. She was an ace homemaker.

The coffee table in front of her held a wineglass and a fraction of a second after she sat down, she popped back up and retrieved a second goblet and a bottle of red wine. “Yes?” she said, already pouring.

“Thank you.” It seemed the polite thing to say.

“So sad about Phoebe.” She settled back into the cushions.

She was a solidly built woman with a pretty, though wrinkled, face and a flush that suggested her late-afternoon drink might not be the first she’d had today. “I thought we were going to be such friends! I thought we were well on our way!”

“Her death was a shock to you, then?”

Her mouth formed an “o” like a comic-book character.

“Shock? What’s beyond that? I thought I’d die myself when I heard not only that she’d died but that she’d killed herself ! I didn’t think she could be that unhappy—I mean, I thought I knew her. At least a little. We went out together a few times. You want to be a good neighbor, don’t you? And she was a nice woman so it wasn’t any real effort. To the movies, that kind of thing. I knew she’d been newly widowed and was probably feeling raw—

I know how that feels—so we only saw comedies, and old-time comedies, you know? None of the dirty sort that’s popular now.

Nothing that would upset her in any way. And she seemed fine.

Sad, of course. And her with her only child living so far away and no grandchildren to brighten the picture. I felt sorry for her, but I wasn’t worried about her. She seemed a person who’d rather be happy than not. And she was pretty enough, and kept herself up, so if she was going to be in the market for a man again—and she did seem the sort to need to stay in that market, didn’t she?—

then she probably wasn’t going to have all that hard a time. Unless she was hyper-picky of course. The pickings for older women are not exactly luxurious.”

While I was trying to extract anything concrete and helpful from the verbal avalanche, Sally stood up again and retrieved a GILLIAN ROBERTS

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porcelain shepherdess in wide skirts and a white apron, a crook held in one tiny porcelain hand. “She gave me this. Generous woman, but she said she had so much—maybe that was a sign, then? Isn’t that what they say? People up and give things away?

Divest themselves?” She put the shepherdess into my hands, being careful to avoid cracking the crook. The little statue was cold and heavy with a vapid expression on its face, as if she were playacting at being this bucolic lassie and was bored with the performance.

It didn’t belong in this room, and in truth, I couldn’t think of a room I’d like where it might belong. Luckily, Sally didn’t seem to expect me to say anything about it.

“Person thinking about suicide starts giving things away,” she said, retrieving the shepherdess and carefully putting it back on a knickknack shelf in the corner. “But these—she gave things to other neighbors, too—were such . . . well, they weren’t personal things. She certainly had personal treasures she adored, and she delighted in showing them to us: little paintings and figurines and things she’d had passed down from her grandma. But she didn’t give those away, far as I know, and that’s what I would have considered a sign—important, valuable, personal things, wouldn’t you? So how do you tell a gift of friendship from a cry for help?

Should I have known? Did I miss it altogether?” She refilled her wineglass and raised an eyebrow, held the bottle at the ready to do the same for mine. I smiled and shook my head. “I’m still fine,” I said.

I wondered if she was this garrulous when not sipping wine.

“As far as I can tell, nobody saw any signs indicating that serious a depression,” I said. “You really shouldn’t blame yourself for whatever—”

“I tried, you know.” She sighed from deep within her own narrative, and the best I could do was to simply go along and understand that nothing worthwhile would come of this. I hadn’t expected to learn anything, anyway. This visit was a formality.

The whole so-called investigation was.

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“She was a woman who liked having a man in her life,” Sally said. “You know she was married a whole lot of times?” She shook her head in incredulity.

I nodded.

“Well, I valued our friendship and I think she did, too, and I’m not sure I would have thought of it on my own—there are so few available men around for women our age, anyway, and I’m one who is completely happy with her own company and so the idea didn’t pop right into my brain. But one night, we were having coffee after the movie—decaf really, at our age—and my cousin’s brother-in-law walked in—former brother-in-law because my cousin’s sister passed on, and he’s a widower, too, poor soul, lives with his sister, who’s a widow—and he saw me and said hello. And then, the next morning, he phoned me and asked about my ‘companion,’ who’d obviously impressed him. So that’s how I played cupid, or matchmaker.”

“They went out, then?” I asked.

“Ooooh, yes,” she said with semi-drunk exaggeration.

“Ooooh, yes indeed.”

“The date,” I said carefully. “How did it go? When was that?

How was your matchmaking?”

She rolled her eyes. “It was nothing short of a catastrophe!”

Things were finally interesting. “Oh my,” I said in the mildest voice I could master. “What happened?”

She shook her head, her mouth pursed. “What didn’t? She wasn’t quite ready when he arrived, and he’s a bit of a priss, I’m afraid. A man lives alone for a long time, and he hadn’t married until he was fifty-one, a confirmed bachelor, and oh, how happy my cousin’s family was that their daughter had finally found somebody! I always wonder how that marriage went, when he finally took the plunge. He wasn’t the easiest—but then, neither was she, and then poof ! Over within two years!”

“You’re not suggesting that . . . well, that somebody helped it end sooner than it might have?”

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“What?” She blinked. “Oh! Oh my, no! She got some weird virus, and an infection and—no, no. I didn’t mean to suggest that at all!” She looked slightly suspicious of me now.

I nodded and smiled. She forgave me and resumed her wandering interminable narrative.

“And nowadays, he and his sister just rattle around a big house and I don’t think they speak to each other all that much and he’s just not used to—to going with the flow, you know what I mean? People get older and get stuck in their ways. Women, too. Probably has happened even to me!” She laughed incredulously, checked the level of the wine in the bottle, and excused herself, returning quickly with an opener and a new bottle.

So much for that glimmer of an actual potential murderer.

“But that’s not all,” Sally said, her glass refreshed, her enthusiasm unquenched along with her thirst. “He took her to a seafood restaurant. A good place, but she must have eaten something that didn’t agree with her—that can happen, even in the best of places—but all the same, what could put more of a damper on things than that? I mean she didn’t throw up on him or anything, but she came close; she was queasy, and he thought she was making it up, just to avoid him when he tried, well, you know. What men try.”

“Did they . . . did, um—I can’t believe I forgot his name!” I said.

“Gregory’s?”

“Right. I am so bad with names,” I said briskly before she remembered that she’d never mentioned it. “I meet people and zip!

Their names are out of my head.”

“You know Gregory McIntyre?”

“Not well,” I said, “but I’m bad with everybody’s names.” I was sad that she seemed to have slipped beyond a clear memory of what she’d said and hadn’t said before I could get anything solid from her. I checked the time. Fifteen minutes before I was meeting Sasha, so I might as well plug on. “About when was this catastrophe of a date?” I asked.

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She sighed, and wrinkled her forehead. “You want a specific date? Like on those cop shows?”

“Not necessarily. As close as you can get, though. Summer?

Near Thanksgiving? Or Labor Day?”

More forehead gymnastics. Then a big smile. “Right around Halloween, because Gregory came to visit me and I still had the pumpkin outside, but it was getting mushy-faced, and that’s when I heard about the being-sick business and all.” She sat back on her sofa, and looked as if she’d just conquered a huge impedi-ment.

“So did Phoebe and Gregory try a second time? When maybe she wouldn’t have an upset stomach?”

“I think so. I know he wanted to. In fact, he never used to visit me, and I thought he came over so as to be on her street, you know what I mean? Maybe just happen to drop in?” She frowned. “I think in fact he phoned from here and maybe they made a plan but then she . . . I don’t know if it actually . . . Why can’t I remember? She was busy, I think that’s what she told him first, and you know, that wasn’t necessarily an excuse. That woman was always on the go. Had a job, of course, and we all know that owning a business is the worst kind of thing for having free time. I know because my late husband owned his business and . . .” She may have noticed my expression. She cleared her throat, and pushed herself back on track. “Gregory wasn’t her only gentleman caller, and then there were the women, too, or at least one woman I saw. That one nearly ran me over! Came screeching into the street, and if a car can be angry, that one was.

And she just screeched to a halt, banged the door shut, and stomped into Phoebe’s house.”

“Do you remember anything about her?”

“Red hair. Long, straight red hair completely inappropriate for a woman her age, know what I mean?”

I did, and I knew to whose head that long red hair was attached.

“There’s a time and place for everything, and middle age isn’t GILLIAN ROBERTS