Death Will Extend Your Vacation (3 page)

Once they’d finished with the three of us, we still had to hang around while they looked for evidence of any connection with Clea and what had happened to her. Checking all our belongings, including the car, took ages. They let us sit on the beach. The sun beat down on us. People started walking by and had to be stopped from continuing on toward what I thought of as the real scene. A few turned and walked the other way. Most of them stayed and gawked.

“This is embarrassing,” Barbara said. “They’ll think we’re criminals.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. Why bother asking a chronic codependent why she cares what other people think?

“Speaking of turning red,” Jimmy said, “if I don’t get out of this sun soon, we are all going to regret it by this evening.”

“Oh, baby, no!” Barbara exclaimed. “Let me tell them. They’ve got to give you the sun block or let you sit under the umbrella.” They’d both be up all night if Jimmy got a bad sunburn.

She started to jump up, but Jimmy pulled her back down.

“I can do it myself, petunia.”

He used his grip on her arm to lever himself from the sand where we were sitting to a standing position.

“Officer!” he called. The uniformed guy was still there, keeping an eye on us and acting as a gofer for the detectives. “Is it okay if we move into the shade?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

The shadow the umbrella cast had moved off the blanket. We moved it and plunked ourselves down again. Officer Mike even got a tube of sun block from the patrol car and handed it to Jimmy.

“I’m starving,” Barbara announced.

“Sorry, ma’am. Can’t help you there. Please be patient. It won’t be much longer.”

He lied. There was a mild commotion when another police car squealed into the lot and headed down the track. I would have thought they’d use four-wheel drive vehicles, which could go on the beach. But tire tracks would stir up the sand, maybe contaminate the crime scene. Worse, they might damage a baby piping plover. Lewis, the guy who’d organized our house, had already told us that not just Dedhampton, but the whole East End, got passionate about environmental issues. Actually, the word he used was “nuts.”

“Look, it’s Lewis,” Barbara said, “in the back of that police car.”

“You’re right,” Jimmy said. “He’s so tall that that firecracker hair of his is practically hitting the roof of the cop car.”

“I bet they asked him to identify the body,” Barbara said. “Wouldn’t he know her full name?”

“He’s the guy I wrote the check to,” Jimmy said. “Probably the others did too.”

A few minutes later, the cop came over to us.

“I just talked to Sergeant Wiznewski at the scene. The body’s been identified. We’re taking the witness back to your house, so you might as well ride along.”

“I would kill for lunch,” Barbara said, and then clapped her hand to her mouth. “Anyhow, why can’t we take our car?”

“Part of the scene, miss.”

“They’ve got our keys, Barb,” Jimmy said.

“So you drive us back, I mean the officers do, and then what?”

“The officers will find a place for you to wait.” Officer Mike’s face twitched.

“You mean in the house?”

“That’s part of the scene, too, miss. Maybe the deck. Someone will brief you.” He took in Barbara’s dismayed expression and got human again. “I’ll tell the officer driving you to stop at the deli on the way.”

“I can’t believe you told them we’re a clean and sober house,” Lewis said. He stabbed his fork into a mound of spaghetti and twirled it. He was such a big guy that he got a lot of torque.

He scowled at Jimmy as he spoke.

“Don’t look at him, dude,” I said. “It was me. Rigorous honesty, right? They were gonna find out, anyhow.”

I helped myself to a freshly made biscuit, dancing my fingers over it till I decided it wasn’t too hot to hold. Sudden death seemed to have made all of us hungry. There’d been a cooking frenzy in the kitchen once the cops had left. And now the whole gang of us sat around the table shoveling in the results.

The house had an upside-down design. The entrance was on the ground floor with the four bedrooms. Upstairs was a big living room open to the beams of the roof, a loft where three of the women bunked, and the kitchen. We ate in the living room, laid out to catch as much light and air as possible. Right now, twilight deepening outside the windows leached color from the treetops.

“I can’t believe you told them we’re a group house, Lewis.” Karen picked olives out of her salad, her big-boned frame hunched over the plate as if she were a giant who had trouble perceiving objects on that scale. Or maybe she needed glasses. She and Lewis were married. “We could get thrown out. We could lose our deposit.”

“Clea’s dead, and you’re worried about our deposit?” Lewis turned brick red.

“Guys, hey, easy does it.” Jeannette, large and pink like the overblown roses on her muumuu, mopped her damp forehead, plastered with tendrils of dark curly hair, with a napkin as she tried to make peace. “We’re all upset.”

A second team of detectives had been there all afternoon, taking depositions and searching not just Clea’s room, but everyone’s. Waiting out on the deck until they said we could go in had gotten very, very boring. It had been hardest on Jimmy, because he’d left his laptop in the house. Jimmy unplugged is a shadow of himself.

In a different kind of group, it would have seemed callous how, right after that, we calmly sat down to a good dinner. But for alcoholics, booze is the hard shell that armors that vulnerable inner child we’re supposed to have. We don’t know how to deal with feelings, and we’re good at finding ways to avoid them. Me, I get flippant. I’m working on it. Clea’s staring face and sprawled limbs on the beach hadn’t evoked a single wisecrack.

“Who wouldn’t be upset with the Gestapo pounding at the door?” Lewis reached out and snagged the last biscuit. “I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee.”

“Oh, come on, Lewis,” Cindy said. I liked the look of her. Compact, like me, with a forthright way of talking. Her sweatshirt said “Beach Blanket Babe,” but the way she wore it, it was clothing, not a come-on. “They didn’t have their weapons out. They were perfectly courteous. And they didn’t drag anyone away.”

“They did drag me away,” Lewis said.

“Only because you could identify her. They brought you right back.”

“Clea’s dead!” Barbara burst out. “Doesn’t anybody care?”

“Thank you, Barbara!” Stewie, my roommate for the summer, folded his arms across his chest and glared around the table. He had the muscle definition of a body builder. Oiled tan skin and a tank top made the most of it. “We should be celebrating her beautiful spirit, not wallowing in self-centered fear.”

“Self-centered fear” was an AA tag line. I thought it hit the nail on the head. I had at least one secret I wanted to keep from the cops, and I’d only arrived yesterday. Some of these folks had done shares with Clea before. Did they all agree she had a beautiful spirit? She had been working the room last night. It was possible not everybody read her vibe the same.

“I was scared.” Skinny little Stephanie ran the tip of her tongue over the braces on her slightly protruding teeth. “They asked a million questions, and they didn’t really say what happened.”

“Thank you,” Karen said. “I’m tired of pretending I’m not scared.”

“Asking questions is their job,” Cindy said. “And they don’t know what happened yet. They will, though.”

“I’m grieving for Clea,” Jeannette said. Her face flushed an even hotter pink. “So much beauty. So much potential for happiness. I’m sad for her and I’m sad for me— for all of us.”

“‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls’,” Jimmy quoted.

“That’s what I meant,” Jeannette said. She blotted her face with a fresh napkin, hiding either tears or rivulets of sweat. Maybe both. She hadn’t mentioned Clea’s spirit or claimed that Clea had been happy.

“If we were a bunch of civilians,” I said, “we’d probably be getting drunk right now and congratulating ourselves on holding a damn fine wake.”

“You’ve got a point,” Karen said. “When I was drinking, I had one all-purpose response that worked for everything, even death.”

“Same here,” I said. “‘Fuck it, let’s have a drink.’ Was that your mantra too?”

“Right before ‘Let’s have another,’” Karen said.

“Yea and amen,” Lewis said.

Cindy raised her water glass in a mock toast and tossed it back. I looked around the table. For a split second, I felt as if I knew all of them very, very well. The moment passed when I remembered the murder. If it was a murder. Sure, she could have drowned by accident. But something told me different. Maybe all that yellow crime scene tape. Or the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Anyhow, don’t worry about the group house,” Lewis said. “We’ve never had a problem, and neither has Oscar.”

“Oscar?” Barbara asked.

“The nearest other clean and sober house, down by Dedhampton Beach,” Jeannette explained across the table. “Some of us had shares there last year.”

“And the year before,” Stephanie said.

“Oscar owns the house,” Karen said. “They can’t stop him having guests.”

“Town ordinance puts a limit on how many unrelated people he can have,” Cindy said. Maybe she was a lawyer. “If it’s a clean and sober house, I guess his parties aren’t wild enough to draw police attention. Anyhow, all that happens is the landlord gets a ticket. A big ticket, like fifty thousand bucks.”

“Oscar has plenty of money,” Karen said. “And his parties were mega wild until he got clean.”

“So all the program people in the neighborhood knew Clea?” Barbara asked.

“Oh, yes. Especially anyone who’s stayed at Oscar’s.”

Silence fell. I could hear a heavy branch that grew too close to the house scrape against a window. The big battery-operated clock over the kitchen sink tocked. The birds outside got ready for bed.

“Talk about an elephant in the living room,” Lewis said finally.

“‘Don’t drink and go to meetings’ won’t make a murder go away,” Karen said.

“Maybe she just drowned,” Stephanie said.

“We’ll know when they do the autopsy,” Cindy said.

Stewie shuddered.

“I don’t like to think about that.”

“Still, we’ll probably feel a lot better once we know one way or the other.”

“The cops aren’t interested in our feelings,” Jeannette said. “And why should they tell us anything?”

“Do you think they’ll keep coming back?” Stephanie hunched her shoulders and shivered like a pixie in a snowstorm.

“If they find evidence of a homicide, they will,” Cindy said. “If they determined she drowned by accident, they’ll drop the investigation, and we won’t see much more of them.”

“So what was Clea like?” Barbara asked. “Can you imagine anyone having a reason to kill her?”

“She was a free spirit,” Stewie said. “I knew her in the city— she’s the one who told me about this house. Actually I met her a few summers ago when she came out to visit my old group house in the Pines. We used to go shopping together, and we both loved to cook.” He lifted a few curly strands of pasta with his fork and let them slide slowly back down onto his plate. “I used her special sun-dried tomato and fresh basil sauce recipe tonight. And we always used fusilli for the pasta. We used to joke that it was like her hair.”

I got the feeling this guy wasn’t going to be my rival for Cindy’s affections.

“The Pines is in Fire Island, right?” Barbara said. “So you switched to be with Clea.”

“Not exactly,” Stewie said. “When I got into SCA, my sponsor thought I’d better stay away from people, places, and things, you know?”

Everybody else seemed to know what SCA was. I didn’t want to ask, so I puzzled it out. Sexual Compulsives Anonymous. Don’t drink, go to meetings, and, in Stewie’s case, sleep with me on his vacation. I wondered what straight sexual compulsives did to avoid people, places, and things that triggered their addiction. Hang out in gay bars? Spend the summer in the Pines?

“So Clea never threatened anyone,” Jimmy said.

Stephanie looked at Karen. Karen and Lewis looked away from each other. Jeannette looked down at her plate.

“She was a doll,” Stewie said. No one chimed in.

“She was a very determined person,” Karen said. “She wanted what she wanted, and she liked to get her way.”

“She was a journalist,” Lewis said. “Did you know?”

Barbara, Jimmy, Cindy, and I shook our heads.

“She could have ticked someone off,” Stephanie said, “in an article or something. She liked to nose around. She said that’s what journalists do.”

“She was a bit of a crusader,” Karen said.

“She drowned!” Jeannette pushed back her chair. It clattered and almost fell as she blundered into the kitchen. Did this conversation upset her more than the rest of us? Or did she simply want her dessert? She came back to the table in a minute, a pie in either hand.

“Strawberry rhubarb and lemon tart,” she announced. “Mrs. Dowling made them, the farmer’s wife down the road.”

“She’s kind of a lemon tart herself,” Karen said.

“A tart?” I asked, intrigued in spite of myself.

“More of a lemon. American Gothic. But she makes a great pie.”

Barbara wasn’t ready to let it go.

“Is there any chance Clea could have killed herself?” she asked. “People do swim out to sea sometimes.”

“No way.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Clea? Never in a million years.”

Besides, I thought, if she’d swum out far enough to have no choice about getting back, she wouldn’t have been washed back to shore right where she’d left her clothes and gone in. We’d been only an hour or two behind her. If she’d drowned well out to sea, would she have washed ashore at all by the time we’d found her?

“So everybody here knew her,” Cindy said, “except me?”

“I knew her from meetings,” Karen said, “and she was in Oscar’s house before.”

“We didn’t,” Barbara said. “Jimmy and Bruce and me. It’s our first time in Dedhampton.”

“Mine too,” Stewie said. “I’ve always gone to the Pines.”

“So Oscar and maybe his housemates all knew Clea,” Cindy said. “Did anybody mention that to the police?”

Karen and Lewis looked at each other. So did Stephanie and Jeannette.