Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month (2 page)

What they couldn’t accept was that I had to go through this adjustment process in my own way, and it would take more time than was comfortable for them. Right after Tony died, it helped that I was still a mother because mothers know the art of putting their children’s needs first. We worked through those early months together, going through the shock and anger at the unfairness of our bitter loss.

After a few months, my three strong daughters started looking ahead to their own lives and activities, which was the way it should be. At that point, my motherly duties diminished, but that meant I could no longer avoid confronting my own altered future. Suddenly a great weariness overtook me, and I spent several more months hunkered down in the black Early American rocking chair, listening to the ticking of the clock as it agonized its way through the endless hours.

Resentment eventually overtook lethargy as I wondered why I was required to go on without Tony, why I would even want to go on without him. We had been happy together, but all of a sudden he was gone and everything had changed. I didn’t want to start all over again, learning new ways to fill my days and my life. Recently Bianca had suggested that I consider dating, especially after she realized that several local men had already asked me out. The idea that I might be attractive to men surprised all my daughters at first, but they soon adjusted to the notion, though Bianca’s description of me as “really healthy looking” left something to be desired. Tony had found me a little more exciting than that, but then he had been a sucker for my green eyes, chestnut hair, and wide smile from the moment we met. Up to now, going out with someone else still seemed quite impossible and uninteresting, but little by little I had found a few minutes each day when I wasn’t thinking about Tony. I felt guilty about those times at first because it seemed that I was abandoning him, but at least those minutes didn’t hurt so much.

Being a mother still helped fill a lot of empty hours. When Bianca’s call had shrilled its way into my dream a few minutes earlier, it was only my motherly instinct, thoroughly ingrained, that had caused me to answer it. It wasn’t that I was expecting anything interesting to come from a telephone call, but what if one of the kids needed me? The call was more likely to be an unsolicited offer to fix a cracked windshield, but old habits die hard and I had dutifully scrambled to answer it, just in case.

Motherhood was a mixed blessing though, especially with Bianca. Tony and I had felt rather smug about our parental abilities as we saw our older two daughters, Susannah and Emily, progress smoothly through their youth and adolescence. But Bianca proved that the peacefulness we had experienced with the first two was less the result of good parenting than pure luck of the personality draw.

Susannah was currently enjoying her role as wife and mother in Ely, Minnesota, thrilled with her husband and two-year-old son, and excited about the prospect of giving little Kevin a brother or sister any day now. Emily, our middle child, was having the time of her studious young life this summer as a member of a crew from the University of Oregon grubbing around a newly-discovered Inca ruin in Peru.

Then there was Bianca, the baby of the family. She wasn’t so much marching to a different drummer as dancing to about nine different bongo rhythms which no one else had heard before or would ever hear again. For starters, at age fourteen she had dismissed the name we gave her at birth, Louise, declaring it too boring for words and refusing to answer to anything other than Bianca. Just like that, our dear little Louise was gone. Life with Bianca after that was anything but boring.

Unfortunately, she also decided about then that Tony and I were also unspeakably boring, and though she couldn’t manage to give us complete personality transplants, she had felt no compunction about expressing her disdain for almost everything we said or did. This continued right up until Tony’s death. After that, he had magically become the ideal father in her mind, leaving me to bear the brunt of her unremitting scorn for everything from my taste in refrigerator cartoons to my unfashionable political opinions.

Her determination shortly after Tony’s death to travel alone around the United States had triggered my strong objections, but off she went. At least her absence had lessened the daily tension between us. I was terrified about the dangers inherent in her solitary journey, but she called in now and then and I tried to concentrate on anticipating her safe return home. However, her arrival here in Juniper late this spring had soon caused my stomach to knot even more. My lovely, will-o-the-wisp daughter had come home, and here she had stayed with her latest mission: to “do something about Mom.”

Was I supposed to be happy today that her attention had been temporarily deflected from my shortcomings in favor of a new crusade? Maybe so. If she had stuck to some of her earlier causes—boycotting Safeway because they sold beef treated with growth hormones or writing letters to the
Juniper Journal
about the lack of affordable housing for low-income workers in the tourist industry—I could live with the slight embarrassment. Those activities were harmless, but her baseless accusation against Gil was not. I feared she was about to go too far.

I looked once again at
Making Peace with your Adult Child
. There it lay in all its best-selling glory, glossy and authoritative. I picked it up and examined the smiling, confident face of Raymond Morris on the cover. No worry lines. I was willing to bet that all his children were boys. What did he know about stress? Disgusted, I dropped the book onto the couch once more. No point in checking the index for a heading about how to respond when your daughter accuses someone of murder.

The dueling aromas of cigarette smoke and incense greeted me as I trudged toward the heavily carpeted front staircase of the somewhat faded, but still imposing Victorian structure that housed Thornton’s Books, the small independent bookstore where I worked. When I was working, I didn’t mind running up and down both the front and back stairs, counting it an easy way to get exercise, but tonight, knowing that I was on my way to our book club meeting, I dragged up the stairs like a prisoner en route to the gallows.

Even without tonight’s threat of Bianca’s bizarre accusation about Gil, these meetings were excruciating. Each gathering of the recently formed mystery book club had grown more acrimonious than the one before, leading me to wonder why everyone kept coming. Either they enjoyed torturing themselves or they relished the prospect of torturing each other. With this bunch, either explanation was plausible. I might as well have put a sign on the door saying “Welcome, Weirdos!” A meeting between the National Rifle Association and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would surely have produced a more compatible group.

The jangle of voices from above convinced me that Bianca and Alix had wasted no time in commencing their inevitable argument tonight. Alix, another charter member of the book club, was the cynical and, thus, somewhat improbable owner of a local bridal shop called “The Wedding Belle.” She and Bianca mixed just slightly less well than oil and water. So far, they’d been in total disagreement on every topic, starting with the choice of books to discuss and moving on to the question of profanity in modern literature, the admissibility of Alix’s cigarettes in the meeting room, and the value of seaweed as an aid to concentration. Their latest battle had been expanded to include the opinions of another member, Minnie Salter, and concerned the possible correlation between the number of grisly murders described and the effectiveness of a mystery. A couple of months into meetings with this experimental book club, my only remaining question was how long it would take before we arrived at the actual slaughter of one club member by another.

I’d been naively elated when Bianca had wanted to join the new club, thinking that this was an easy way for her to meet people when she moved back to Juniper in June. Visions of mother-daughter bonding on a new level now that we were both adults had floated through my head, but they hadn’t stayed long. If Bianca and I, her own loving mother, skirmished regularly over her opinions, I should have realized that Bianca and the no-nonsense Alix, a total stranger, would likely move quickly to all-out warfare. In our initial meeting, Bianca had expressed her fervent hope that we’d all be able to get in touch with a higher spiritual awareness through studying the crime-solving aptitudes of animals.

While most of us absorbed this statement in stunned silence, the ever-cynical Alix had offered a muttered response: “If the essence of our spiritual awareness involves disconnecting our brains, that just might work.” The relationship between Bianca and Alix had gone downhill from there.

The original reason for the formation of this club had been to help Tyler, my employer’s fifteen-year-old grandson, adapt to his forced presence in “this hick town,” as he put it, for the summer. Tyler had yet to say much, but his sideways looks regularly demonstrated his disdain for the group. He was staying with his grandfather while his mother tried yet another drug rehab facility. I hadn’t decided yet whether he was naturally unpleasant or simply reacting to a situation he found totally unsatisfactory.

Only Minnie Salter, at sixty the oldest member of the book club, seemed to enjoy herself at our meetings, but then Minnie apparently loved everything she did. On Sundays she taught Sunday school classes. On Mondays she hosted an evening knitting group at the church. On Tuesdays, she arranged flowers at the local cemetery and tended gravesites that would otherwise be neglected. On Wednesdays, she delivered casseroles to people just out of the hospital or otherwise incapacitated. And on Thursday nights this summer, she had given up her usual bunco game so she could attend our meetings at Thornton’s Books, where she hoped to discuss in gory detail the latest in the string of true-crime novels she churned through at an amazing rate.

These meetings were bad enough at the best of times, but with Bianca’s new crusade against Gil, we were probably about to hit a new low. From the decibel level emanating from above, I judged that we were going to witness my long-predicted real-life murder in the next ten minutes. That sounded fine to me, as then I’d have a good excuse to disband this ill-assorted group once and for all. On the other hand, it would be hard work cleaning the gore off the Oriental carpets.

“
Have a good meeting, Jane.” My elderly employer, Laurence Thornton, spoke from his lonely post at the counter below. No customers were currently in the store, though he had stayed open on this warm summer night, just in case. Unfortunately, business had fallen off at Thornton’s Books after the recent grand opening of the glossy Megabooks Plus! bookstore on Highway 97 north of town. Once the private residence of Marcus T. Konig, an early Juniper saloonkeeper, this house’s Victorian charm and central location on an oversized city lot had proved an ideal setting for the quiet business of selling books for the past ten years. With Juniper’s growth and booming economy, people were buying more books than ever, but our friendliness and personalized service couldn’t compete with the deep discounts offered by Megabooks Plus!—nor their animal-costumed sales staff flown in from Arizona one Saturday a month.

If Laurence, a retired classics professor, had possessed even one shred of salesmanship, if he had ever looked up from his reading of
The History of Herodotus
long enough to notice the falling sales, maybe I wouldn’t have been foolish enough to propose that we host a mystery book club right at Thornton’s. But Laurence had been looking forlorn about his grandson’s sullen inability to find something to occupy him this summer, and Tyler had shown a slight interest in mysteries, so I had offered the brilliant suggestion that perhaps starting the club would serve the double purpose of giving Tyler something to do and spurring book sales.

But anyone who would name his store simply “Thornton’s Books” and stock his shelves with Sophocles and Shakespeare instead of the latest celebrity tell-all fluff was definitely not a marketing whiz. While my own degree in English literature made me sympathetic to Laurence’s taste in reading, I assumed that Thornton’s could improve sales by stocking reading matter that was at least a few centuries more contemporary.

And now he had the nerve to tell me to have a good meeting. I leaned against the ornate banister and shot him a baleful look. The false smile he wore made me sorry I wasn’t carrying something, preferably something hot and sticky, that I could drop on his head. The old rogue was trying to soothe me as though I were a nervous freshman faced with studying Thomas Aquinas for the first time.

“
I can hardly wait. We always have such a jolly time.”

He ignored my sarcasm. Approaching eighty years of age, his once tall frame was stooped and his hair had thinned, but Laurence Thornton still retained his professorial air of calm competence. “Tonight’s meeting will be fine. You’ll see.”

“
Oh, yeah. I’ll see something all right, but … just listen to what’s going on upstairs!”

“
Well, literary discussions do tend to get heated.”

“
Literary? We’re not anywhere close to literary. Do you want to know why?” I descended a few steps. “Well, I’ll tell you.” I was more than happy to delay the trip upstairs. Besides, I’d been itching to tell Laurence a thing or two about what I’d been going though with this book club. “Let me give you a few pointers about how to set up a book club that might actually have a chance to achieve a literary discussion. Point one: Don’t let lunatics into your club. Point two: If they do slip in, don’t agree to a minimum three-month trial period because for some reason those lunatics will enjoy coming and won’t want to disband—”