Auld Lang Syne (4 page)

“Creepy,”
Strutter
shuddered.

“You really think?” Margo wondered aloud. “I don’t know
,
hon. Thirty-five years is a heck of a long time to hold enough of a grudge to murder one woman, let alone three. What would be the point after all this time?”

“You’re looking for logic in an illogical situation,” I pointed out. “Grudges don’t have time limits on them, and psychological wounds don’t always heal, we know that. Sometimes they fester. In fact, it’s often the oldest hurts that cause the most trouble emotionally. Just ask any psychiatrist,” I laughed, and Margo joined in.

“I guess you’ve got a point there, but I’m afraid I can’t relate. We southern gals love our mothers and daddies to pieces, right along with our girlfriends and heartthrobs and aunties and crazy-as-bedbugs distant relatives.
 
Of course, things are different in our lovely Georgia climate. I believe this snow and ice and absolutely bone
chillin
’ wind for half the year makes you Yankees brittle,” she sniffed.

“More so with every passing year,” I agreed but returned to my point. “I was happy to see that most of my former classmates, even the ones who suffered at the hands of Mindy, Ariel and Joanie, seem so happy and well adjusted; but I saw more than one flicker of fear cross a face last night when the mean girls showed up. Some of those bad feelings may have been buried under carefully cultivated layers of civilized restraint, but I’d bet any money they aren’t forgotten or forgiven. Judging from the way the situation played out, I’m thinking someone in the gym had an old grievance that had been pushed down for years, but instead of lying dormant, it fed on itself and finally broke free when the victim was faced with those tormentors one more time.”

“Someone who just happened to have a loaded hypodermic handy?”
Margo lifted one exquisite eyebrow.

“I know, I know. It’s farfetched, but emotionally it makes sense to me. You’re saying it must have been planned, if whatever was in that needle killed Mindy, but I don’t think it was. I believe the combination of being in that setting again with those women resurrected all the hurt and the anger more powerfully than ever before and turned a usually nice, normal human being into a murderer.”

Margo looked thoughtful. “Lord knows we’ve seen it happen before. I just hope to God you don’t get stuck
openin
’ this particular can of worms.”

Three

“You’d think having a high school arch-enemy finally get what she deserved would be more
satisfyin
’,” Margo observed. We sat in the living room of the little Wheeler Road Cape where she was conducting an open house. When we left the diner,
Strutter
had hustled off to release her sixteen-year-old son Charlie from babysitting his pre-school-age sister Olivia. Armando had decided to put in a few hours of paperwork time at the
TeleCom
offices, so I’d opted to keep Margo
company
during what promised to be a slow afternoon.

As expected during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, lookers were almost nonexistent, but the anxious sellers had insisted.

“Oddly enough, it’s not all that much fun, especially when I’m one of the suspects in her murder,” I agreed. “They really seemed to want to talk to poor Mitch, too, but I don’t imagine he had much to tell them. I can’t even recall him or Agnes speaking to Mindy last night.”

“Well, it all seems silly,” Margo dismissed my fears while idly picking a long, white cat hair from her otherwise immaculate trousers. A fat Persian cat, the source of the offending hair, purred from a wing chair near the fireplace where a
Duraflame
log burned cozily behind the screen. Too bad no prospects were here to enjoy the effect.

“Not if you know my history with Mindy, it isn’t,” I pointed out. “Unfortunately, three-quarters of the people at that reunion do know it and were all too happy to share it with Officer McCarthy last night.” I stared out the front windows at the For Sale sign staked in the tidy lawn. A red balloon was tied to it and bobbed forlornly in the cold breeze.

“Ancient history.
My goodness, we’re
talkin
’ about 1978. Who can even remember that far back?” Margo scoffed. She
recrossed
her elegant legs and tucked a stray lock back into her blonde chignon.

“I can, just as clearly as if it all happened yesterday,” I mourned. “I’d have a lot of trouble coming up with specifics about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, when I was up to my ears in kids and housework and a full-time job, but high school and my first real boyfriend are right here.” I tapped my forehead. “I can remember who said what to whom, why they said it, when, and what I was wearing at the time. When you’re seventeen, there’s nothing quite like being publicly dumped by your boyfriend of two years in favor of the biggest tramp in town to create a lasting memory.”

“Hormones trump true love every time at that age,” Margo agreed. “Still do, come to think of it. It has been my experience—and as you know, I’ve had plenty—that men of almost any age will follow their little captains wherever they lead ‘
em
. Tell me all about it, Sugar.”

I thought back with some reluctance, not at all eager to relive a major hurt of my youth. “Mitch and I were seniors. It was spring, and Mitch was feeling his oats, the way boys do at that time of year especially.
 
He’d been pressuring me to go further than I wanted to go, but I was one of those anachronistic hold-outs of the sexual revolution, a virgin at the age of seventeen.”

“Imagine that,” Margo
tsk-ed
in disbelief. “You two had been an item for quite a while by that time, am I right?”

“On and off, mostly on, since I was fourteen and still in junior high school. That’s what we called it then. I couldn’t even remember wanting to date anyone before Mitch, and after I met him, it never entered my mind. He was The One, capital T, capital O.”

“He didn’t feel the same way?” Margo prompted. “But he must have. Why else would he have stuck with you all through high school?”

I shrugged. “Oh, he was fond of me, I know that; but as you say, four years is a long dry spell for a hormone-addled teenage boy whose friends are all crowing about their conquests. Thinking back on it now, I can see Mitch must have been getting pretty desperate.”

“So he sampled Mindy’s wares, is that about it?” Margo got up to adjust the fire screen and paused to stroke the purring cat. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed suspiciously at her hand. “He smells Rhett and Sassy on me,” she surmised, alluding to her chocolate Labrador, a devoted companion of several years, and the new dog in her household, a young female of mixed breed.

“Mitch was ready, and Mindy was willing, as she apparently was with any young stud
who
showed an interest. Sorry,” I added. “Mindy wasn’t doing anything different than about ninety percent of the other girls of that era, but I can’t seem to stop being catty about her, even knowing she’s dead.”

Margo
snorted,
an unladylike reaction she often had when something struck her funny. “Sugar, if I’d caught some little gal
comin
’ on to my sweetie, a catty remark wouldn’t quite cover it.
 
That girl would have teeth marks on her. Mine,” she added just in case I hadn’t gotten the picture. “Even all these years later, I’d have to work real hard at
controllin
’ myself, so you just have yourself a good hiss and spit.” She shrugged and grinned. “Trouble is, back in those days, it was mostly me
givin
’ the other gals’ men the eye.”

“How did your sweetie feel about that?” I inquired, and Margo hooted.

“My sweetie of the week or my next-in-line sweetie?
Sugar, you know I like men
better’n
I like chocolate candy, but up until I met John
Harkness
, I could take or leave ‘
em
all.”

I knew my libidinous friend well enough to know what she said was true. I also knew that chapter in her life had ended the day she’d married John. The best-looking hunk in Connecticut couldn’t tempt Margo to be unfaithful to her husband of four years.

“So if you’d been my classmate at Brewster High, I would have had to worry about you instead of Mindy
Marchelewski
, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Don’t know about that, but you can bet if I’d been at Brewster, Mindy would have had to worry about
me
.”

I laughed along with her but sobered quickly as the events of the previous evening came back into focus.
 
I had left Joanie and Ariel to the ministrations of concerned onlookers and rushed into the cramped women’s room to find Mindy slumped on the floor. I called her name repeatedly and attempted to locate a pulse beneath her jaw and in one limp wrist, but I didn’t find one, so I shoved my way back out the door and yelled at the gawkers to call 911. Officer McCarthy, who’d been moonlighting as the security officer required for such events in a public building, had quickly taken over, pushing back the crowd and summoning medical help before attempting CPR. My next clear memory was of Mindy’s still form being taken by stretcher to the waiting ambulance.

Margo read my expression and took a stab at lightening my gloom. “You’d think by now you’d be able to take a dead body or two in
stride
, Miss
Marple
,” she joked gently. Over the past few years my partners in Mack Realty and I had been drawn into an unusual number of local homicide inquiries. Apparently, the real estate business was fraught with opportunities, not to mention motivations, for collateral mayhem, even in the picturesque and historic area known as Old Wethersfield.

“It’s Mrs. Fletcher, according to Armando, and I have no desire to channel either one of those ladies,” I growled. “I knew Mindy
Marchelewski
personally.”

“Didn’t like her, though,” Margo reminded me.

“That doesn’t mean I wished her dead.
 
I wasn’t crazy about
Prudy
Crane or Alain
Girouard
either, but it wasn’t fun finding them dead, as I recall,” I moped, referring to two other investigations in our shared past. “I’m seriously beginning to wonder if I’m a jinx or have bad karma or something.”

Margo sank down beside me on the sofa and propped her chin on one fist. “Do you know, I’ve been
havin
’ the same idea, Sugar. It seems like ever since I met you at that
revoltin
’ law firm in
Hartford,
it’s just been one murder after another. There was the lawyer, and then
Prudy
. After that came the skeleton in the
Henstock
sisters’ basement and the executive’s brother who turned up dead at the Wadsworth
Atheneum
gala. Then there was the mysterious death at the retirement home. Let’s face it,
hon
,
you’re just bad news
waitin
’ to happen. The only question is,
who’s
next?” She shrank away from me in mock horror and moved to the end of the sofa.

I regarded her sourly.
“Very funny.
You know perfectly well that every one of those unfortunate incidents had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
It’s
pure coincidence that I—make that we—got involved in the investigations at all. One of them wasn’t even a murder. If you and
Strutter
and I hadn’t become friends and then business partners, you wouldn’t even have known about those things.”

“You are who you know,” Margo agreed, grinning. “Just my bad luck, I guess.”

I grabbed a sofa pillow and thumped her over the head as she dissolved into giggles. The Persian cat huffed off, alarmed, and I fluffed the pillow carefully before returning it to its original position.

The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully. The doorbell didn’t ring once, and Margo and I amused
ourselves
by playing double solitaire on the coffee table. At four o’clock, the designated ending time for the open house, the young owners of the house returned to find us packing up our briefcases and washing teacups.

“Anything?” the wife, a tense-looking redhead, asked without preamble. Margo shook her head but smiled to soften the report.

“I’m so sorry, Suzanne. It’s just that time of year. I’m afraid almost
nothin
’ happens in this business between Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Your house looks wonderful,” I hastened to add, “so warm and appealing.”

The young woman slumped into a kitchen chair, the picture of dejection. “Nobody even came, Dennis,” she told her husband as he came into the kitchen from garaging their car. He, too, showed his disappointment.

“We’ll give it another try next weekend. We may have to come down on the
askin
’ price a bit, but we’ve never had a
listin
’ that we didn’t sell eventually,” Margo reassured them.

“Eventually,” Dennis echoed dully, “and I’m going to find another job eventually, just not right now when I need it.” His wife covered his slack hands on the kitchen table
with her own
.

“Don’t worry, honey. I’ve still got my job, and you’ve got unemployment compensation. It’ll be tight for a while, but we can do it.”

His bark of laughter was humorless. “Guess we don’t have any choice. Man, I never thought I’d be that guy who let his wife support him.” He got to his feet abruptly and left the room. Suzanne sat looking after him, her concern evident. One hand strayed to cover her abdomen protectively. It was the universal gesture of expectant women everywhere.

Margo and I exchanged a look. “Have you told him yet?” she asked Suzanne quietly.

The redhead looked startled, then sorrowful. “Would you?”

We both nodded our understanding of her predicament. Timing was everything in these matters, and the timing for this announcement could not be worse. I couldn’t think of anything that Dennis would want to hear less right now. Still, it seemed a shame that Suzanne couldn’t celebrate such momentous news with her husband.

“Well, congratulations,” I said with as much warmth as I could muster, “even if mum’s the word for now.”

Margo winced at my unintentional pun and leaned over to give Suzanne a squeeze. “Your secret is safe with us, and we’re
goin
’ to do our damnedest to get this house sold for you two. It seems a shame, though. This is such a cute place for a young family.”

Sadness engulfed the pretty face. “It would have been,” she agreed.

After making arrangements for the following weekend, we let ourselves out through the front door and collected the open house sign from the yard.

“That really stinks,” I said, popping the red balloon more energetically than necessary.

“It surely does. In fact, I think it’s high time these young people got themselves a fairy godmother, don’t you?” Margo fluttered her arms and waved an imaginary wand.

I looked at her doubtfully. “
Glinda
the good witch, maybe. What are you up to?”

“Why, Sugar, whatever
do
you mean?” She winked broadly and headed for her car in the driveway. “See you in the
mornin
’.”