Return to Dust (15 page)

“When was that?”

“About the same time. Back in September.”

“She never said why she went?”

Hattie was ready to end the conversation, her words running together. “Look, maybe Marta was a little overboard about Joshua. I tell you that outright. A silly woman dreaming about a silly man. I've been there, but not
that
silly. Joshua was a pompous fool who led her on. Old folks acting like spring chickens.”

I waited, drumming my fingers.

“That,” she added in a cackle, “and the fact that she was drinking too heavily after he left. I knew the woman—she was my friend, you know—but she could tip that elbow something fierce. I like my little cocktail now and then, but there's a limit. It may not have been suicide, young man.”

“No?”

“No. Maybe she toppled off that bridge in a drunken stupor. Let me tell you this, sonny. I've seen her fall into the all-you-can-eat buffet at Caesar's Palace in Vegas.”

Chapter Eighteen

I wandered into Zeke's Olde Tavern on a lazy Sunday afternoon, meeting up with Marcie and Vinnie. Manic laughter and loud backslapping assailed me. A crowd of folks, mostly college kids, watched a football game on TV, and the noise slammed me in the face.

This was not my favorite time of day at the Tavern. I liked it later at night, near closing time, a few regulars crowding the bar, the ancient jukebox filling the corners with early Motown and soft rock from, say, The Delfonics. Music to miss the old days you never really had.

Vinnie pushed a chair at me. “Have a seat, sleuth.”

“You making fun of me?”

“Of course.”

“I want to be taken seriously.”

“No chance of that.” Marcie leaned into me, drumming her fingers on my arm, flashing me a big smile.

“You both been drinking here a while?”

“Your tone suggests a new temperance campaign,” Vinnie said soberly. “Carrie Nation lives.”

“We're married to each other. He votes Republican,” Marcie laughed. “I—we—have to drink.”

Vinnie raised his glass in tribute.

Marcie smiled again. “Vinnie and I both have our pet theories on your little murder. You want to hear?”

“No.” I waved the barmaid to the table. I wanted a long, cool scotch.

Marcie didn't stop. “Of course you do. There is absolutely no proof, but I know it was murder. It has to be. For one reason alone. Women don't throw themselves off bridges when they're on the way to a man's house. They throw themselves off bridges when they
leave
men's houses. Then they have reason to.”

Vinnie scoffed. “And my theory. Simple desperation. Depression. She wanted a man to marry her, and he moved away—rejected her. Women die when men reject them.” Of course, he pronounced this last bit of wisdom facing his wife.

They went back and forth, light-hearted, throwing frivolous barbs. But genially. It amazed me that they had been able to locate and settle into some middle ground where their marriage could survive and thrive. Humor, I guess, and genuine love. I envied them. But then I stopped because you don't envy friends. Buddha said:
Your true friend is only that part of you that is love
. I smiled.

Marcie was denouncing Vinnie as “deplorably sexist,” adding, “Women no longer kill because of what men do to them. Women kill to get rid of men. Men are barnacles on the
H.M.S. Sisterhood
.”

Vinnie insisted women die for love. “In Victorian times they just pined away.”

“Because,” Marcie insisted, “men refused to bathe more than once a year.”

“Women still die for love.”

“Rick, look who's the romantic in the family. Vinnie, you should write Harlequin romances. E-books for the emotionally challenged. The supermarket shelves await your purple prose.”

Finally, realizing I was sitting there silently, nursing a scotch in which the ice had melted, Marcie turned to me. “And what do you think?”

“Simple. She killed herself to get away from friends who never stopped talking about her private business.”

“Well,” both roared at once, looking at each other and laughing.

“Well,” I concluded, “sometimes bridges look inviting.”

Marcie sneered. “Then you should tell your girlfriends to keep their mouths wide open.”

“That makes no sense,” Vinnie told her.

The afternoon drifted by. Around seven o'clock—long after I'd planned on leaving—I stepped outside and dialed Karen. Marcie and Vinnie were headed off to get pizza in West Hartford after failing to persuade me to join them.

“Did something happen?” Karen asked.

“No, checking in.”

“Come over. Rick. We can go for a ride or something. I'm going crazy here.”

I deliberated. “All right.”

“Just come over.”

“I don't have anything new to tell you. A little, maybe. My trip to Amherst.”

“I don't care. I need to talk to a human being.”

“I don't know…”

Before she hung up she surprised me. “No talk of Aunt Marta. Not one word tonight. Promise me.”

So we didn't. We caught the late movie at Trinity College, a French farce that bored me. Near the end Karen nudged me, and so we left. She smiled. “I couldn't follow the plot.”

“I kept spotting grammatical errors in the subtitles.”

She didn't want to stop for coffee and a snack—we'd munched on leftover pasta at her place just before leaving for the movies—but she didn't want to go home yet.

“No,” she kept saying, “drive.”

Drive, she said. So I drove. She fiddled with the radio dial and turned up the music. She settled for the Hartford retro seventies station, complete with inane disco patter and soft-rock musings.
Turn the beat around…like to hear percussion
. She twisted in her seat, but her movements didn't seem to be in time with the music's insistent rhythm:
in and out of love. This time, baby
. Karen mumbled the words. She ignored me.

“I was happy then.” The joke I always made whenever some forgettable decade from the past intruded on my present life. People were always pulling me into their past lives. High times at the old high school. Or senior prom. Or sorority dance. It didn't matter what past event. I was happy then. Deliriously.

Of course, I was a rag-tag boy running the streets of Saigon during that decade. Ho Chi Minh City.

…
boogie nights
…

Karen faced me, alarmed. “Why did you stop being happy?”

I didn't answer her.

She turned the music louder when the Bee Gees suddenly somersaulted from the backseat into the front. I almost went off the road.
Stayin' Alive
.
Stayin' alive…ooh ooh ooh
…I thought of crisp white suits and black dress shirts.

Karen made me drive aimlessly for an hour. When I stopped to refill the tank, she bought junk food and soda. Then I took her home. Watching me closely, she invited me into the apartment, but I hesitated. I didn't know why.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

We stood for a moment on the sidewalk while she groped for keys. It was bone-marrow cold, with knife-like wind, and I suddenly felt the coming assault of winter. I got depressed standing in the ink-black night, the groaning wind rustling in the trees nearby. I was staring at Karen who looked helpless, fumbling in her purse, swearing, twitching her head in frustration. She looked ready to cry, her jaw tight, tucked into her neck.

Inside, she seemed relieved to be out of the cold. Taking her time, measuring and nodding, she made me delicious hot chocolate laced with real cream. I was still chilled, and my body shook from a cold spasm. I remembered a line my adopted mother used to say late at night when a chill went through her body:
Somebody just walked on my grave.
That was always a conversation stopper in the old New Jersey household.

But now I think I understood it. I slurped down the hot drink while Karen watched me, peering over her cup. She took the cup from me and refilled it. She poured herself some liqueur that looked sticky and smelled sweet. It seemed medicinal, so I refused the glass she offered me.

I hated her apartment, a sterile modern box, all angles and lines, none of them graceful, with redundant off-white walls. Everything was in block form, from the square windows to the boxy kitchen cabinets. The awful sameness was lightened, but only slightly, by her own huge abstract oil paintings gracing every wall. Phantasmagoric splashes of primary color. It was the stuff of serious nightmare. I tried to convince myself it all dated from an earlier, disturbed period, now happily past.

“Are you nervous?” she asked, sitting down near me, her arms folded against her chest.

“No.”

“You look nervous.”

But I wasn't. In fact, she looked nervous, squirming around, sitting, standing, folding and unfolding her arms, tossing her head back, pursing her lips. I sat stone-like, concentrating on my hot drink, happy with it, and my head swam a bit. I was relaxed now. I wasn't cold any longer.

“
You
look nervous,” I told her.

“I'm not nervous.” Too loud. She suddenly jumped up and walked behind me. Had I been some devotee of Hollywood's
Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street
horror flicks, I would have expected a brutal cleaver severing my fragile neck. That was really the way she moved. Instead I felt a soft hand on my shoulder and I smelled a hint of sweet perfume. Roses, I thought. And sweet powder. Her breath was hot with sweetness—that green liqueur. I closed my eyes.

She leaned over and kissed the nape of my neck, her hair brushing my cheek. She had her hands on my shoulders, so I reached back and covered them with mine. Her skin was soft but the hands, fluttery now, slid out from under mine and disappeared back into the folds of her dress. I turned to face her. Eyes closed, mouth open, she looked drugged, a face melting from its own warmth.

I left the chair and walked back to her, taking her hands into mine. She opened her eyes and for a moment looked startled, as if seeing me for the first time, as if coming out of a narcotic stupor. But then there was the slight sliver of a smile, the gray-blue of her eyes becoming dark and cloudy.

I kissed her and felt her mouth tighten. She didn't seem to want this, but then slowly, as though forcing herself, she slackened her mouth, her jaw.

“Yes,” she whispered.

She kissed me, almost panicky, out of breath, and then stopped, afraid of something. She didn't move. A chill spread through me.

She said nothing but her hand lifted to her face, and she sighed.

“Karen.”

Silence for an answer.

Surprising me, she walked into the unlit kitchen and stood in the darkness. She lit a cigarette in the dim light, and the match and cigarette lit the dark with such deliberate movement it seemed as if she were landing airplanes. She drew ambitious arcs in the darkness, ovals and circles and stabs at the night. Red-glow punctuation. She was starting to scare me.

“Yes, I wanted it like you,” she said finally, talking to the wall in front of her, away from me.

“And?”

“But you have to leave. You can't stay.”

“Karen,” I began, but stopped.

She was shaking her head. I thought she might be crying, but no sound came from her. The dim light of the cigarette made her shadowy, ghostlike. The cigarette waved me out the door, pointing the way.

Buddha talked to me:
Abstain from sexual misconduct
.

I closed my eyes.

He had a point, that wise man. What had I missed here? I was never good at reading women, I knew that, always off-center, insecure, afraid my moves were—what?—too obvious, too boyish, too something. But Karen had played this her own way, and I couldn't follow. Suddenly I thought of Davey's line about her:
Karen runs from everything while she actually thinks she's running to it.

I found myself thinking about Liz. Every woman I would ever meet would pale beside her.

In the parking lot, sweating in the cold wind, I looked up at the darkened window and I swear I saw a shadow fall away, behind the drawn curtain. Suddenly the window was dark again. No movement. I shivered. A ghost had walked into my shadow.

Chapter Nineteen

At five o'clock in the morning I was up for a run. The house was quiet except for the creaking of old Victorian woodwork, the breathing of loose-paned windows against dark morning wind. I ran the empty streets. A thick frost covered everything. Veins of white lace twisted on buildings and fences and cars. Wearing sweat shorts and a light parka and knit cap, I was numb with cold. So I ran and ran.

I ran until I exorcised the confusing night—Karen lovely in her fragile bones—out of my system. Sweating, exhilarated, eyes bright with the coming sunny day, I took a long hot shower, steamed my skin into reddish wrinkles, and settled down to hot, fresh coffee and a bran muffin from Whole Foods.

Hank knocked at eight. I was expecting him.

“You've been running.”

“How'd you know?”

“You got that health-club glow.”

“The body dutiful.”

He poured himself coffee. “Is everything all right? You got a look on your face.”

I ignored him. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah, that's why I'm here. I'm supposed to be studying at the Academy. Instead I follow you around like a puppy dog.”

“I'm the Alpha dog.”

“Clever.”

“Let's move. You want to watch how a real PI functions, right?”

“If I did, I'd be in Hollywood on the set of
CSI: Special Victims Unit.
”

We headed for the town of Clinton, a town less than an hour away, down I-91 and over to I-95. I turned off the highway into the small shoreline village. I'd never been there before. Some shoreline towns like Branford and Guilford I knew—friends rented beach homes in summer. In November Clinton looked lazy and anonymous, a coastal town getting ready for winter, the tourists gone and permanent waterfront homes beginning to wear their drawn-in sheltered look. Beach cottages, with their bleached, blue-gray wood, lined narrow roads near the water, clustered together tight and cozy. We could smell the seaweed-laced salt water.

We drove around, found Main Street with its rustic coffee shops, antique shops, and clothing boutiques. We asked directions. Gusts of wind off the unseen ocean made walking difficult. The complex we sought was a few streets removed from the shore, tucked into a hidden cove, overlooking choppy water where hungry, swooping seagulls dipped and swooped. Only a few boats remained in the water now. A quiet secluded area, a hidden retreat for the very few.

“Looks like real money,” I told Hank.

“Everything looks like money on the shore. A shack is money here.”

The string of cottages circled the cove, but everything was closed now, off-season. A chain stretched across the entrance, blocking passage, a sign announcing it a private road. I copied down the realtor's name and address. But first I wanted to walk the grounds, despite the blustery cold. We ducked under the chain and strolled among the bleak, deserted tiny bungalows, smaller than I would expect, but carefully styled, all shuttered and shingled to look a hundred years old. I tried to imagine the place in summer, at the height of the season, but I realized it must have been isolated even then because towering white pines clustered around the edges, closing off the place from idle passersby.

“Money,” Hank was muttering. “The rich ain't like we are.”

I could easily see Joshua summering here during the long, lazy days, near to dying, the night breezes from the sea chilling his old bones. But I couldn't see it as a place a young person—say, his niece—would rent for herself. His money—yes. Her phone call—maybe. This had the feel of a retirement colony—old people with their private nurses, the
New York Times
, and their blissful reveries.

It took us most of the morning to locate the realtor, convince her that we were not troublemakers and simply investigators of the most benign sort—we smiled a lot and she frowned a lot—but she finally told us the name of a man who might help us, a Clinton old-timer who served as caretaker during the high season. After much prodding—and Hank's annoying questions about rental costs and possible student discounts—she provided me with Mary Powell's New York phone and address. Manhattan, Upper West Side. My old neighborhood near Columbia. Finally I had a definite lead on the elusive Mary Powell.

As we left the office, she gave me her card. “It's a good time to rent for the coming summer.” She looked at Hank. “We have the best rental properties. You and your little brother would love it here.”

Hank grinned. Little brother.

Hank and I stopped for lunch at a coffee shop in the center, munching on tuna salad sandwiches while we waited for Mr. Jared Peakes to answer his phone. It was busy whenever I dialed—no message clicked on—and we were waiting for him—or whoever—to hang up. The realtor had told us he was a retired man in his late seventies.

“Quite the eccentric in a town of lots of eccentric people. He used to be a
hardware
salesman.” She had stressed the word and clicked her tongue as though he'd been in porno flicks. His son now ran the business. “If you know what I mean,” she added.

I didn't but I also didn't want to know.

An hour later, Mr. Peakes answered grumpily, and when I said I'd been calling, he said, “So what?”

That stopped me cold.

“The dog knocked the phone off the cradle. Landed in the laundry basket. She's a mixed breed,” he added, as though that explained the problem with the phone.

For some reason I was tempted to apologize.

“So what do you want? You'd better not be selling something. My home phone don't belong to the business community, and that includes the Lions Club and the selling of those light bulbs that go out…”

I cut into his rambling and mentioned the summer bungalows and his job as handyman. He agreed to meet us at the very coffee shop we were in.

“I live one street down back,” he informed us. “Haven't eaten yet. Thank you.”

“We're buying him lunch, I guess,” I told Hank.

Mr. Peakes was not what I expected, one of those skinny, wiry old Down East cracker-barrel souls, one of those frizzled, wizened old New England types out of
Desire under the Elms
or an old
Yankee
magazine you see in a dentist's office. No, Mr. Peakes was a squat roly-poly man, with tired milky eyes and a pronounced asthmatic wheeze. He sat down across from us, adjusted his vast weight as though settling potatoes in a sack, and sighed.

He ordered four or five items, and I figured he had a crowd coming. He caught me glancing at Hank. “Retirement makes one hungry.”

Hank chuckled.

“Your younger brother?” he asked.

Now Hank and I, both tall and lean, do not look alike, except for a dim Asian connection.

“Yes,” said Hank. “But different mothers.”

I stared at him.

I explained why we were there. What did he remember of Joshua or his niece? I held off mentioning Marta.

“Of course I remember them, though I have no idea what you're up to here. The niece was a beauty.” He snickered. “Of course, at my age, what young woman ain't? Unless you're talking about those cows on afternoon TV talk shows, those…” He was ready to sweep off into some tirade.

“And Joshua?” I cut in before it was too late.

“Him I scarcely talked to. Maybe once or twice. Getting sicker by the minute. Old, old, skin and bones. One weekend there was a problem with a lock and I brought over a locksmith. Old man lying on the deck covered in blankets. Nodded to me. Mumbled something about being hungry for sunlight on his bones. Nonsense.”

“He moved in the beginning of July?”

Mr. Peakes raised an eyebrow. “Exactly. His niece—Mary Powell, the name, a fine figure of a girl, dark hair like a crow's, but too much makeup, these women, you know—had rented the place in June. Out of the blue. She had called and we had a cancellation. We got a repeat crowd of older types. We are not cheap. We rent from May to September, but someone bailed out because of illness. That happens. Old people cancel. Some even die. It happens. Moved in sometime in June. Reduced rate. Her timing was great. We usually don't do such things.”

“Did she say why she waited so late to rent?”

“Not unusual. First-time renters—like young people—think they can rent anytime, walk right in, not realizing things get booked up early. Or they discover they cannot stand the city in the summer. You know.”

“She drove up from New York City?”

“Exactly. Weekends. Not much that I saw, at first. She always had mounds of paperwork with her. She whispered to me that her uncle demanded she get him someplace…balmy. He was a nuisance, she said, ruining her schedule. He had money, it seems. Young people have no respect.”

Mr. Peakes was already digging into the second sandwich, an overstuffed roast beef on rye. Meals surrounded him. He surveyed them all, carefully choosing one over the other. He talked with his mouth full.

“She told me he was a problem. Oh, now I do remember something. Yes, indeedy, I do. She said he had located her in New York. A long lost relative. He had no living relatives, so he thought, but during his stay in Amherst, the college library did some genealogical research on the Internet—Ancestry.com, some snoops, I imagine—and discovered a family line that ended in her. Some long-dead disinherited stepbrother's child. Something like that. Excited, he wrote to her. She was surprised, but I think she was a little annoyed.”

“Why so?” From Hank.

I sipped my third cup of coffee and watched him answer.

“Demanding, he was. And the minute they met, he started to die and she had to take care of him.”

“Don't you think it's odd that some distant relative would take care of an old man she just met—even family?”

He eyed me. “The girl had dollar signs in her eyes—you could see it. She was pissed off that he'd sold some mansion upstate. ‘I'm always a day late,' she told me. Unpleasant.”

“Unusual.”

“I tactlessly mentioned a will to her and she laughed. ‘He has lots of money, but it's going to some goddamn school.' I sensed she thought he'd make a few adjustments along the way—you know, lovey-dovey. Family blood, and all that. ‘Who knows, I might still get a little something.' Then he got sick one weekend when she was here, and an ambulance took him out of here. She called and told someone he'd had a little stroke and was at Yale-New Haven Hospital.”

“When was that?”

He bit into a sandwich. Mayonnaise oozed from its generous corners.

“Near the end of the month—August, that is. She came back to close up the place—the lease was ending anyway—and said he could walk but with difficulty. ‘A matter of weeks,' she told me. I think she said he was going into some hospice.”

I interrupted. “He died September 15 in New York City.”

Mr. Peakes didn't miss a beat. “He lasted that long? He looked like death itself. There was a box waiting for that man, for sure.”

“That's it?”

I waited while he sucked in a cheeseburger, a few French fries hanging off the melted cheese, dangling like icicles until, with a swoop of a large gray tongue, he dragged them into his mouth. I'd seen dogs perform such a feat, but never a human being.

“Guess so.” He sipped his coffee. “The gal was charming, I must say. And clever. She always joked with me. He was—well, he was an old man far from home who was dying. Mentally, I think he was losing it. Him and me had one small conversation. He told me he missed home. Moving was a big, big mistake. ‘Strangers around me.' That's what he said. ‘I made a mistake. Got no home to die in.' That's all he did in the short stay here—he went about the business of dying. It's a full-time job, you know.”

He was looking at the dessert menu.

“One other thing.” I waited until he put down the menu. “Do you remember a visit from a woman named Marta Kowalski, sometime around the beginning of September, after Joshua was gone? A woman in her sixties?”

For a moment I thought he wasn't listening. Then a smile appeared on his glistening, mayonnaised lips. “A handsome woman. A truly handsome woman.”

I sat up. “So you remember her?”

He took a sip of coffee, seemed to gargle it, and I expected him to spit it into the saucer. “Hard to forget that one. Appeared one day, one afternoon, by chance. The first chill of fall that morning, I remember, a quiet time, summer people all gone, the kids back in school. Quiet time. Shutting things down. Half the places cleared out. I work until the last ones leave—the middle of September. She appears with a piece of paper and says she wants to see Joshua Jennings. She's looking mighty attractive in a yellow summer dress and her hair up. A little lipstick. A classy woman, let me tell you. So I tell her it's too late. I mention the stroke and him gone to a hospice. I mentioned the niece.”

“Did she know about the niece?”

He shifted in the chair, and the folds of fat moved, glacier-like.

“I dunno. All I know is that she stands there, rigid as steel, her face suddenly changing. I was expecting tears, hysterics, the breakdown of a woman in love. I've been through it myself many times. You can always see it coming. But no, the face became real hard. Her eyes on fire. And she screamed, real dramatic-like, ‘People don't walk away from me and leave me like that.' Something like that. Real Joan Crawford. And then she walks away. Not even a good-bye. One mighty angry woman. I figured she headed to the hospital in New Haven.”

“You didn't hear from her again?”

He pointed to custard pie on the menu, just pointed. I signaled the waitress.

“Why should I? Joshua was gone. That's who she wanted. Love has only one point of view, you know. Lovers only got one story, really. Yup, she was a mighty handsome woman. Handsome. But too steely for me. A scare, that one.”

I left my card.

Getting into the car Hank mumbled, “A scare, that one.”