Practical Jean (12 page)

“I still don't see anything,” said Dorothy.

Jean was right behind her. Her heart was thumping harder than she'd expected, but just because she wanted to do well. She didn't want to ruin anything.

Dorothy stopped in the lane and peered forward. “Was it an animal or what?”

“Just keep looking, you'll see.”

Jean lifted the shovel over Dorothy's head, knowing that what she was doing she was doing because she loved her friend, because she had been taught by terrible experience that to leave old age to chance was to open your arms to the dragon's fire, to let the flames lick at will. And the flames were terrible, they were merciless, and they consumed life's beauty first. And when it came to her dear friends that was something Jean Vale Horemarsh could not allow. She gave the shovel a wave in the air, to get a feel for its heft and to line up her swing. But it was an old shovel, made of a kind of cast iron, and quite a bit heavier than she'd anticipated. So it traveled a few inches farther than she wanted and plunked Dorothy in the back of the head.

“Ow!” she said. “Jesus, Jean, what the hell?”

Jean's heart nearly stopped. “Sorry! I'm so sorry, Dorothy! That was an accident.”

“Christ, that hurt,” said Dorothy, rubbing the back of her head.

“But . . . you're still happy, aren't you?”

Dorothy wobbled her head as if to clear it, then she straightened her hair and put her hands on her hips. She sighed, looking off toward her house. “Yes, I am.”

“Phew,” said Jean. She raised the shovel again over Dorothy's head and brought it down like an axe.

Chapter 9

“M
rs. Yoon, I don't know.”

They were alone in the tasting room, the heavy oak tables and chairs scattered around them mute and unmoving, like appalled grandmothers. Through the square-paned windows came self-righteous rays of sunlight. The beamed ceiling suspended above them made Cheryl think of the underside of a drawbridge about to drop on their heads.
Do it, God
, she thought.
Do it now
.

Sitting across from her, Mr. Binderman had his sleeves rolled up, his bare elbows on the table, his bristly cheek resting in his hand. On his face hung a look of bewildered disappointment. Except for his stringy white hair, his workman's overalls, and the purple stains on his hands, he had the appearance of an Austrian schoolteacher watching his student getting it all wrong at the blackboard.

Mr. Binderman was Cheryl Nunley's lone employee, the last of the Bier Ridge Vineyard staff. He had asked to meet her at noon, which meant he had something important to tell her. Among all the hours of the day, noon was about as good as it got for Cheryl. She was able to stand straight at noon, was able to see and hear and understand most of what was said to her if she concentrated very hard. And with her mental machinery running at nearly full strength, Cheryl knew what Mr. Binderman meant when he said
I don't know
. He meant that he didn't know whether he could keep working at the winery. Or whether he even wanted to. He didn't know if he could do the jobs of four or five men anymore, men younger than him, men who had gotten fed up and quit. He didn't know if he could face, again, having to pick the owner of the winery off the parking lot pavement a few hours after dawn.

“Mrs. Yoon—”

“Mr. Binderman,” said Cheryl, her head still, her eyes open only as wide as necessary, “please don't call me that. I asked you yesterday. I keep asking.”

Mr. Binderman smushed a rough, stained hand noisily over his face and gripped his sturdy nose before releasing it. “In the parking lot, that is what you were trying to say?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Binderman frowned. “It did not make so much sense to me.” He compressed his lips in the prissy way he had, which made Cheryl feel like a six-year-old walking into church with a jam stain on her blouse. “You don't speak so clear sometimes.”

“I'm speaking clearly now, Mr. Binderman. I want you to call me Miss Nunley. Cheryl Nunley. It's my maiden name.”

Mr. Binderman shrugged and brought his hands down flat on the table. “So, okay. Miss Nunley, yes? We are here to talk now.” He patted the table, taking his time, and Cheryl did not hurry him. Any time spent not listening to or thinking about bad news was almost like being happy.

“Here is what I think now.” Mr. Binderman stared at his hands. “I think I can't do for you anymore what you need with this winery. I am just a single person, you know. This is not so easy for three or four men here, but for one man it is just too hard.” He pronounced the last word like
heart
. It was too
heart
to work here. “So what I think, maybe you can sell this place. Okay? That is a good plan for you I think.” He patted the table once more with his purple hands. “You sell this place soon, and make a good life now. Forget about everything, yes, and start from the new.”

He looked up at her, finally.

“And for now I think you forget about Mr. Yoon.”

Cheryl made a spitting noise. “Who?”

For a moment Mr. Binderman regarded Cheryl with grave concern. Then he brushed away the strands of white hair falling over his eyes and compressed his lips with finality.

“Listen now and I tell you all what needs doing. In the barn, you have in the red tank six hundred gallons of Cabernet Franc that needs soon to go to the barrels. That's a big job for two men. Also, in the white tank eight hundred gallons of semi-dry Riesling that is ready for the bottling. Another big job for that, and when it's done, where do we put the cases?”

Cheryl tried to comprehend. Even in her best hour, this fragile hour of noon, a fog sometimes engulfed her, making things gray and distant, pulling what passed for clear purpose and coherence out of her reach. Sometimes the fog comforted her. Sometimes she thought she might be smothered by it. Like so many of the things in her life, it seemed, the fog was not altogether reliable.

Opposite her, Mr. Binderman raised a stained digit for every task he named, and though Cheryl focused on the digits, they weren't enough. The digits did not provide sufficient information. She tried focusing on Mr. Binderman's mouth.

“In the cold room is already four hundred fifty cases full. I know you are drinking it, but even you, I'm sorry, can't drink that fast. So that needs to be sold. Or we leave the cases and sell the Riesling for bulk. Anyway, another man for that. Now think about the vineyard. Yes? Miss Nunley?” He waved his hand in front of her face. Silly to do that. Silly Mr. Binderman. “Miss Nunley, in the vineyard is another big problem. Because the mildew comes now and so it needs spraying. I can do that.”

When he spoke, Mr. Binderman seemed to use many more
T
s and
D
s than necessary and this made listening to him even more complicated. Cheryl lurched forward out of her fog. “Can't?”

“No,
can
. Listen,
can
. It's very clear. But also now is the time to rise the catch wires. You understand? The catch wires all over the vineyard have to go up now. To rise up the vine shoots.” He lifted his arms like a gull. He appeared to be trying to make things as easy to understand as possible, which was probably a strain on his Austrian dignity, and Cheryl appreciated this effort and hated it. “This is so the sun can come on the grapes to make them get ripe, you see? Also a very big job. So there is many jobs to do right now. And I can't do it all.”

She tipped toward Mr. Binderman. “Can?”

“No, no.
Can't
.
Can't
. You have to listen please, it's very important.” Mr. Binderman smushed his face and gripped his nose once more. “Mrs. Yoon . . . Miss Nunley . . . I don't want to leave you in a bad position, but one man here is not enough. A winery is a living thing, you know. It's a . . . what you say . . . an organism. Yes? Like a person. Everything must work together or it all stops. So if one part is not working, like a leg”—trying hard, he extended a leg and shook it for her to see—“then maybe it survives, but if the other leg goes and then the one arm”—he made his second leg stiff and contorted an arm into a hook, he was a scarecrow—“soon you know the whole thing is gone kaput.” He collapsed his limbs and let them lie limp, the arms of a rag doll, for a moment of Austrian chagrin. Then he gathered himself up, reached across the table to lay a rough purple hand on her wrist, and said, almost in a whisper, “Soon we go kaput I think.” He patted her wrist in a way that Cheryl thought was probably meant to be comforting but wasn't at all.

“I am sure you know the truth,” said Mr. Binderman. He sighed and stood. “And how is the bird?”

Cheryl stared from under her heavy lids at the space where Mr. Binderman had been. “The bird is an asshole.”

“But a good friend to you I think.”

A
gut frent
, Cheryl heard. And closed her eyes.

Chapter 10

W
elland waved frantically at Jean, and his hands closed into tight, waggling fists at his sides, the way they would when he was a little boy excited about building a sand castle or finishing his model of a World War II Messerschmitt and afraid that no one would see it before Andrew Jr. stomped it into ruins.

“I found her!” he said.

Jean had come to the police station because she'd received a call around nine o'clock that morning from Suzy Felter, saying that Andrew Jr. wanted to see her down there right away. She'd gotten that call at home, while she and Milt were in the middle of being mad at each other. Milt was mad at Jean for the same reason he'd been mad the previous night. Because she had left him alone with Roy for more than four hours—“At the mercy of that idiot,” was how Milt put it—and then rushed him out the door without a chance to say goodbye to Dorothy. And without answering any of his questions, such as what the heck took so long and why were her feet covered in mud and where
was
Dorothy, anyway? And Jean was mad at Milt for being generally unsupportive and prickly when it should have been obvious to him (they had only been married for twenty-nine years) that just now she needed calm and tempered interactions. Because she had a great deal on her mind.

Jean had questions of her own plaguing her. For one thing, she wondered whether it had been right to drag Dorothy's body into the ditch by the side of the lane. Half the night Jean had spent thinking about that. And should she have left her in a jumble in the weeds, her hair all tangled and limbs every which way, or should she have laid her out in a manner that might have been considered more traditionally respectful? Nothing with friends was ever easy, because no one wanted to hurt anybody's feelings. Jean remembered the time that she and Louise had gone to Niagara Falls for a weekend, and Natalie had found out and wanted to know why she hadn't been invited, and the whole thing had become very tricky. Jean had had to spend money she didn't really have so that she and Natalie could get hot rock massages together. And Natalie didn't even
like
Niagara Falls.

So questions such as whether Dorothy got or didn't get a certain kind of treatment that someone else might or might not want—Jean took those things seriously. On the other hand, she had to remind herself that sometimes practicalities dictated the course of events, and you couldn't always plan out every single detail. And surely friends could be forgiving about that sort of thing, just every once in a while.

But something else was weighing on Jean too. It was embarrassing to admit even to herself, and yet it was true—she was beginning to have doubts. Because here's what happened when she got home: After the petty fight with Milt that had begun in the car, which was really more a tense standoff than an argument, she'd escaped into the bathroom to have a soak in the tub, and when she was down there in the water, comfy, with suds around her knees and shoulders, she started to cry. Just like that. It hadn't even been two hours since she'd given Dorothy a last joyous experience and swifted her past all the pain and fear of old age. And already she was missing her. Suddenly every little thing they had ever done together, every insignificant chat on the phone or quick coffee or exchange of clever, inexpensive Christmas gifts rang as the most lovely experience never to be repeated. And never again would she be in the vicinity of Dorothy while she was having frantic sex with a young man, which in a certain way was the experience that had bookended their long friendship. Sitting in the tub, Jean seemed to miss and cherish Dorothy more than she ever had when Dorothy was alive, and she began to realize—it occurred to her for the first time—how hard it was going to be to carry out her plan to its completion. She saw, more plainly than she ever had before, what a sacrifice she was expecting herself to make. Giving up all her friendships as a good deed . . . she didn't know if she could do it. She wasn't sure she was selfless enough.

That's what was going on in Jean's head in the central corridor of the police station when she was going to meet Andrew Jr. And now Welland was waving and saying he'd found somebody, and Jean was at a momentary loss.

“You found who?”

“Cheryl Nunley!”

“Oh,” said Jean. And then she remembered. “Oh! You found her! That's wonderful!”

“I know,” said Welland, beaming.

It seemed that Ted Yongdale had gotten somebody onto training Welland on the CPIC data system almost as soon as he'd gotten off the phone with Jean (which Jean was not surprised to hear). And so Welland had been up to speed on the CPIC within a few hours. And he was given a couple of hours on the RMS and the NCIC and one or two other data systems for good measure. (Jean thought this smacked a bit of “Let's train him on every damn thing and be done with it.” But she kept that thought to herself.)

At the end of all that training, said Welland, he was able to hunt around in the records of police departments from Baffin Island to Puerto Rico. It meant he could punch in the name Cheryl Nunley and see if it came up anywhere, for anything. A speeding ticket, say, or maybe a protest march for something.

“I can't imagine Cheryl Nunley ever protesting anything,” said Jean.

“That's not the point,” said Welland. “Are you letting me tell the story or—?”

“Sorry!” Jean made a zipping motion across her lips.

When Welland did the search, he came up with about a dozen different Cheryl Nunleys. But most of them were women who were either too old or too young or too something else (there was a transsexual prostitute named Cheryl Nunley in Vancouver, Welland discovered). The one citation for a Cheryl Nunley that might have fit—she'd gotten a ticket for running a red light in Portland, Oregon—was about twenty-five years out of date. He looked for the name in the Portland phone book, just in case, but nothing. So Welland thought he was stumped.

“That's when I had my brainstorm,” he told Jean with a grin. “I thought, what if she's not called Cheryl Nunley anymore?”

It seemed that one of the databases connected to a huge registry of marriage licenses. Welland looked in there to see if any Cheryl Nunleys had been married in the last twenty-five years, and sure enough some had. It took Welland all of the next day to work through the various Cheryls. Old and young, black and white, living and dead. “I didn't even break for lunch,” said Welland. “Just worked straight through.” And finally, Welland said, he found her.

“Guess what her name is,” he told Jean.

“I couldn't possibly guess.”

“Cheryl Yoon,” said Welland, looking as proud as if he'd carved somebody's head on a mountain.

“Yoon?”

“She married a guy named Tam Yoon. Now she's living in Bier Ridge, New York. That's in the Finger Lakes. I only found her because she was arrested for driving under the influence and causing damage to municipal property in March.”

“No.” Jean had begun shaking her head at the word
arrested
. “That's not Cheryl.”

“Oh, no?”

Welland took from his back pocket a folded sheet of paper and opened it with a snap in front of Jean's face. It was a laser-printed mug shot of a bleary-eyed woman with messy, piled hair and an expression of utter surrender. It was the picture of an aging woman who had fallen into the embrace of some incalculable despair. And it did not take much studying of this strange, frightening image for Jean to see, hidden somewhere within this tragic woman's features, the very same Cheryl Nunley she had known so long ago.

“Ha!” exclaimed Welland. “I guess I'm not bad at this police stuff.”

When Jean entered the waiting area outside Andrew Jr.'s office there was nobody sitting at Suzy's tidy desk. Andrew Jr.'s door was closed and Jean could hear muffled giggling coming from the other side. She decided to wait. When the door finally opened, Suzy's hand was leaving Andrew Jr.'s arm and the two of them were all big-teeth smiles and laughter, as if policing were just the most uproarious work imaginable. Then Suzy saw Jean, and her face set into a wax slab of gravity. It was a look that came so sudden and sure, Jean wondered if she practiced it.

“Jean, I didn't know you were here.”

“Why would you?”

“Andrew Jr. wants to see you.”

“I know.”

Inside Andrew Jr.'s office, Jean watched her brother roll out his big leather chief's chair and waited for an invitation to seat herself. Andrew Jr. set his bulk into his chair and coughed into his fist.

“Jean, were you out with Dorothy Perks last night?”

“Yes, I was. Milt and I went out with Dorothy and Roy to Ted's Big Catch. Why do you want to know?”

“Did you go out with Dorothy by yourself after that?”

“I did, as a matter of fact. She and I went for a little ride.”

“Who with?”

Jean gave up waiting to be asked and sat herself in the round-backed velour guest chair. She had vivid memories of this chair; it was the same one she would jump up on as a child, when she and her mother would come to visit her father in the days when Andrew Jr. was still being pushed around in a stroller. She'd perch on her knees on the chair's thick cushion and do drawings at the corner of Drew's desk. Crayoned pictures of places in her imagination, where camels and cats and puppies and fish and teddy bears all played together, far from scalpels and garbage bins and her mother. She would conjure them up with such creative fury that the crayons would sometimes slide right off the paper and leave waxy scars on the surface of the desk, so that her visits with her father invariably ended with a shooing motion.

“Who says we were with anyone?” said Jean.

Sitting across from her, Andrew Jr. made no sound but gave her a droopy-eyelid look that she recognized from years of her brother being unimpressed by anything but drinking and football. Throughout his teen years Andrew Jr.'s droopy-eyelid look had been a permanent fixture of his wide, fleshy face.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” she said, “we went out with that Jeff Birdy. Ash's boy. He took us to a nice swimming pond out on some concession. I couldn't tell you which one; we drove around so long I lost track.”

“How long were you with him?”

“Andrew Jr., I'm not answering any more questions until you tell me what this is about.”

“Dorothy Perks is a friend of yours, correct?”

“You know that. She was at Mom's funeral.”

Andrew Jr.'s expression became very solemn. Almost brotherly, Jean thought. He coughed again into his fist. “I'm sorry to tell you this, Jean, but . . . Dorothy Perks has been murdered.”

Jean knew that she was supposed to be shocked by this news. She had been anticipating it, of course, ever since Suzy's face went so very flat and waxy. And it has to be said that she didn't like hearing the word
murdered
. It was a grubby, commonplace word, making her think of gravel-voiced gangsters, or B-movies about conniving business partners, or slavering serial killers with pictures of their victims pinned to a dank basement wall. But she knew that something more than being grated by a word was expected of her in this moment, and if she didn't provide that something, then even more questions would be asked, and life might become much more complicated. Again, she saw that practicalities had a way of dictating their own terms. And right here, right now, practicality demanded a display of emotion. The trouble was that Jean had never been a particularly good actress. School plays had been things she attended, not performed in. The only acting she'd ever done was smiling in the face of a friend's terrible choice of hairstyle, or pretending that she wasn't hurt when someone canceled plans at the last minute. Masking she was good at. But big emotion on cue—it was out of her range.

In front of Andrew Jr. she did the only thing she could think of . . . she covered her face with her hands. “Oh my God,” she said into her palms. It sounded wooden even to her.

But apparently for Andrew Jr. it was enough. For once, Jean was able to enjoy a benefit from her brother being such a big lummox around feminine feelings. She saw through her fingers that Andrew Jr. was becoming flushed and agitated. He coughed twice into his fist and tried to look anywhere but at Jean. It seemed that, for him, watching his sister being affected by terrible news was an excruciatingly uncomfortable ordeal.

“Oh my God,” Jean repeated, just to stick the knife in a bit further.

After a second's hesitation, Andrew Jr. got up from his chair and hovered near his office door with his hands in his pockets. “Look, uh, Jean,” he said, “I think we're getting a handle on what happened, so . . . maybe Suzy has a tissue or something.”

He grabbed the knob of his door and wrenched it open. Before he was able to call Suzy for help, Jean rose from her seat and rushed out, past the danger zone of Suzy's desk (Suzy had always struck Jean as being one of those women with radar like a bat) and into the safety of the corridor beyond.

The next day, the Kotemee
Star-Lookout
reported that police were questioning witnesses at Ted's Big Catch about incidents leading up to Dorothy Perks's murder. Jeff Birdy was declared a “person of interest” and brought in for interrogation, then released without charges. It wasn't long after that that Roy “Big Boy” Lundquist was arrested for brutally slaying his wife in a fit of jealous rage. It was the first ever murder in Kotemee, so there were lots of reporters and TV cameras from the city as Roy was taken into custody. Jean felt a bit sorry for Roy, who looked sad and bewildered as he was led up the steps of Hern Regional Jail, but then, of course, as a violent man with a jumbled brain, he was probably much better off in an institution. Certainly Milt was keen to express his horror at these events and remind Jean repeatedly that she had left him alone “with that murderer” for what he now described as “half the night.” She dearly wished that he would take a summer teaching position somewhere so that he would have a reason to leave the house and give her time and quiet to think.