Auld Lang Syne (6 page)

Strutter
and J.D. gazed at the little girl fondly. “I’ll go,” he volunteered and went to carry her upstairs to bed while
Strutter
poured out the coffee.

As we were settling around the card table about an hour later for some serious gin rummy, we were startled to hear Charlie banging through the door between the garage and the kitchen.
Strutter
checked her watch and frowned at J.D.
 
“It’s not even ten o’clock.” She raised her voice as we heard Charlie tromp down the hall to the stairs. “Is everything okay, Charlie?”

His footsteps didn’t even
slow
. “The dance was stupid, so we didn’t feel like hanging around. No biggie,” he threw over his shoulder as he practically ran up the stairs.

J.D.’s eyes
narrowed,
and he pushed back his chair. “Now you know there has to be more to the story than that. He’s been looking forward to this dance for weeks.”

Strutter
put a restraining hand on his arm. “Of course there is, but we don’t need to hear it this minute. He’s home, he’s safe, and he obviously doesn’t want to talk about it right now, so let’s give him some space until he settles down a bit.”

“That would be my plan … not that anyone asked for my opinion,” I added hastily as Armando shook his head slightly at me.
Once a mother, always a mother.

“Bet some little girlie did him wrong,” Margo opined, “although how she could resist that gorgeous son of yours is a mystery to me.”

“Down, girl,”
Strutter
chided her. “That’s my son you’re talking about—my sixteen-year-old son.”

J.D. busied himself shuffling cards but arched a brow at Margo.

“Oh, be serious, you two. You know perfectly well what I mean. Charlie is just one of those young men who can’t help
catchin
’ a girl’s eye for all sorts of reasons, not only because he’s good
lookin
.’ He’s athletic and smart as a whip, and he’s so good tempered, too. Why, look how sweet he is with that baby girl of yours.” She poked J.D. playfully. “Come to think of it, are you absolutely sure
Strutter’s
his mama? He doesn’t take after her a bit. I mean, think about it. We only have her word for it.”

That got a laugh out of all of us. Charlie was the child of
Strutter’s
early and disastrous first marriage many years ago.

We returned our attention to our card playing while we waited for the New Year to arrive. Surfeited with good food and wine, I struggled mightily to stay awake until midnight and noticed Margo also stifling a yawn or two. Thanks to
Strutter’s
good coffee, we all made it. At a few minutes before midnight we adjourned to the den, where we toasted the descending ball in Times Square, New York, in front of the television. The hundreds of thousands of revelers who were there in person broke into an enthusiastic rendition of “Auld Lang
Syne
.” Armando and I couldn’t help making faces at each other.

After exchanging affectionate hugs and kisses all around, we collected our coats and headed for the door. “Playing rooster in the hen house again, eh, Armando?” J.D. joked as my husband helped Margo and me into our wraps preparatory to dropping Margo off at her house.

“Huh!” Margo scoffed. “More like a thorn between two roses,” but her wink removed any sting from her words.

My eyes strayed to the staircase leading to the second floor bedrooms. “It’s awfully quiet up there,” I observed. “Think he’s asleep?”

“Not likely. My money’s on one of the computer games he plays incessantly,” said J.D.

“Or
Facebook
,”
Strutter
added, “or texting or tweeting. Heaven forbid these youngsters should let an hour go by without knowing each other’s every move and thought. I really don’t get it, because I never want to be that accessible.”

“I’ll have to tell John the police are
missin
’ a good bet,” said Margo. “They don’t need a detective squad to find out what’s
goin
’ on these days. All they need is a couple of teenagers with
smartphones
. Anybody make any New Year’s resolutions, by the way?”

“Two I said without hesitation. “First, I’m going to lose these eight pounds or die trying, not that
Strutter
has been any help on that score tonight, and second, I will never, ever attend …”

“ …
another reunion,” they all chorused, and on that note we made our way into the new year.

Despite the dramatic conclusion of 2012, I had high hopes for the coming year and was filled with determination on our ride home to get off to a good start. My enthusiasm lasted all the way from the
Putnams
’ house on Ridge Road to John and Margo’s sleek ranch in Wells Quarter, where we waited until our friend was safely inside. At last we drove to our own oversized Cape at The Birches condominium community and found Joanie Haines waiting for us in her car parked in the driveway.

Five

“This can’t be good,” I groaned but climbed out of the
Jetta
to tap on the window of Joanie’s Honda sedan. I’d recognized her pile of red hair, crushed up against the driver’s side window. In light of recent events, I felt apprehensive until I saw her stir. I guessed she’d fallen asleep waiting for us.
“Joanie?
It’s Kate.” I tapped again a bit more forcefully.

She startled awake and cringed away from the window until her sleep-fogged eyes registered my face. Armando pulled our car into the garage and came to join us, although his reluctance was evident in every step.

“It’s okay,” I told him, nodding at our uninvited guest. “It’s Joanie, Mindy’s and Ariel’s friend from the other night.”

“Ah,” he said enigmatically.

Joanie pulled herself together and fumbled her way out of the car. She’d almost made it when one of her high heels struck the frame, and she stumbled. Armando caught her before she sprawled on the driveway, and she winked
boozily
at him.

“Thanks, handsome. Now where did I put that pesky purse?” She stuck her head back inside the car and groped along the seats.

Armando looked at me with resignation. “It would appear that your friend has enjoyed a bit too much of the holiday spirits once again.”

“It was Ariel who was tipsy Saturday night, the one who called me fat. This is the other one. She’s hardly my friend, but it is New Year’s Eve—or Day, I guess I should say at this point.”

“Got it!”
Joanie reappeared, waving the errant evening purse triumphantly, and promptly slammed her designer cape in the car door.
“
Ooops
!”
She stood, tugging at it in vain until I pulled open the door. “Thanks, Katie. I had a little too much vodka while I waited for you.” She produced a flask from her pocket and held it upside down. “
Allll
gone,” she slurred sadly.

“Uh huh, it sure is,” I agreed while I apologized to Armando with my eyes. Together we got Joanie turned around and headed into the garage and up the stairs leading to the kitchen entrance. To my amazement she navigated the eight steps with ease and was soon ensconced on our sofa, blinking at an untouched cup of Armando’s excellent coffee. I’d had enough at
Strutter’s
house to keep me awake until Friday, but despite the hour Armando had risen to the occasion and brewed a medicinal
mugful
for Joanie.

“So what brings you here?” I asked casually, as if it were not after one o’clock in the morning. “Come to think of it, how did you know where to find me?”

“Business card you gave me Saturday night,” she said. “Didn’t have your home address on it, but it listed your home telephone number, and thanks to a little app called reverse look-up, voila!” She flipped one hand jauntily. “Here I am.”

Her coffee slopped dangerously. I relocated it to the table in front of us.

“You are here because?” Armando prodded, unable to resist glancing at his watch. I was longing for my bed, too, but this was far too interesting a development not to pursue.
Joan Haines, formerly of the Queens of Mean, seeking me out thirty-five years after graduation.
I couldn’t wait to hear this. Maybe she was about to confess to the murder of Mindy
Marchelewski
, if it had been a murder, of course. Unfortunately, Joanie seemed to be in no hurry.

“Nice place,” she commented, her eyes wandering over the heavy draperies, wall-to-ceiling bookshelves and oriental-style carpeting. “Homey, you know. The kind of place where the people living in it really like each other, you can tell. Do you use the fireplace much?” She gazed wistfully at the stack of firewood next to the cold hearth, but I had my limits.

“As often as we can.” In an effort to move this along, I opted for a more direct approach. “Joanie, I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but it’s nearly 1:30 a.m. Except for five minutes last Saturday night, we haven’t seen each other since graduation and, quite frankly, we didn’t feel inclined to. Why have you come to see me?” I said this last part slowly and distinctly.

At last my question seemed to sink in, or maybe the vodka fog was starting to lift.
She
scooched
around to face me fully.
“Because I don’t have anywhere else to go.
I’m scared to death, and there’s not one single person I can ask for help. My soon-to-be-ex-husband is in Rio with his latest bimbo. I don’t have any real friends besides Ari, and lately I’m not so sure about her. The cops would never take me seriously after all the horror stories my dear old Brewster classmates have been telling them about our high school days. Then I thought of you and what everyone at the reunion was saying about your unofficial investigations.”

Her eyes welled up, and she scrabbled through the beaded evening bag on her lap. I presumed she was looking for a tissue and handed her one from the box on the end table, but she waved it away. My eyes met Armando’s over her bowed head. He shrugged.

“Here it is. This is what I want you to see.” She tossed her purse aside and dangled a small piece of folded paper at me.

I admit it. I was curious. I unfolded it carefully and saw a brief message printed in block letters on plain white paper. “Don’t get involved or you’re next,” I read out loud. “Who’s next and for what?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know,” Joanie wailed, “but after what happened to Mindy Saturday night, I have a pretty good idea.”

Armando spoke up. “Why do you connect that unfortunate incident with this message, if that is what it is?”

“Because that’s the last time I used this little evening bag. I mean, I wouldn’t usually have two dressy occasions in the same week, but there was the reunion and then this party at Max Downtown tonight for salon employees, so I used it again.”

I examined the note more closely, but nothing special stood out. Black ink, probably ballpoint pen, all caps, white computer paper. “That’s when you found it, when you were getting ready to go out this evening?”

“No, not until later tonight after dinner.
I left the purse on my bureau last weekend because I knew I’d need it again tonight. Everything was already in it—lipstick, comb, tissues, you know. So tonight I just stuffed in my driver’s license and a twenty dollar bill, and that was it. It wasn’t until I went to fix my face with Ari after dinner at Max that I opened it, and this thing,” she pointed at the note, “fell out on the floor.”

I thought for a minute. “So you don’t know for certain the note was put into your purse on Saturday. It could have been tonight, right?”

She stared at me blankly. “That doesn’t make any sense. Tonight was just the people we work with. Ari and I don’t even know them very well, but we figured we’d better show up. The salon owner made it pretty clear it was a command performance.” I remembered that she and Ariel both worked at Shear Heaven, the exclusive West Hartford salon and day spa.

Armando cleared his throat. “You say your friend was with you when you found the note. What is her opinion about all of this?”

Joanie gave a humorless bark of laughter.
“Opinion?
If you think I’m an airhead—and I know you do because you always did, Kate, admit it—you’re not totally up to speed on Ari. Compared to her, I’m Hillary Clinton. She’s even more scared than I
am,
which is why I’m here alone.”

It was my turn to draw a blank. “I’m not following you.”

Joanie grabbed the little purse and shook it in my face. “Ari thinks the message might be for her. She thinks she’s
next on the hit list.”

My head was beginning to ache. “In that case why would someone leave a threatening note, if that’s even what this is, in your purse instead of hers?” I asked, still not comprehending. I was really going to have to make an effort to stop conversing with inebriates.

Joanie dropped the purse back in her lap and clapped both hands to her head. “Oh my god, I forgot to tell you. See, that’s the whole thing, why Ari was the one who found the note. She thought this was her purse, not mine. She has one exactly like it. We were together when we bought them at a big sale at the mall last year. So we were in the
loo
tonight, and both bags were on the counter, and she grabbed this one instead of hers.”

“And the note fell out?”

“Well, yes. That is, Ari picked it up off the floor.”

“You saw her do that?” Armando piped up, obviously going down the same path I was. He’d met Ariel, after all, and knew something of her activities back in the day.

Joanie squeezed her eyes shut in an effort to remember.
“Not exactly.
I was searching through her bag for my comb, thinking it was mine. She bent over to pick something up. When it finally dawned on me that we’d switched bags by mistake and turned around to tell her, she handed me the note.” She opened her eyes and looked from one to the other of us. “Why do you want to know?”

This was going to be a little tricky. “I was remembering how the three of you used to enjoy playing tricks on people in high school.”
Tricks?
Make that vicious, potentially life altering pranks, I thought. “It occurred to me that Ariel might have, well …”

“ …
put the message into your purse herself,” Armando helped me out.

“As a little joke, of course,” I hastened to add. The sort of mean-spirited, tasteless humor on which you all used to thrive, the inner voice editorialized. A chuckle stuck in my throat.

Joanie’s eyes widened.
“Ari?
Why would she do an awful thing like that to me? She knows how freaked out I’ve been over what happened to Mindy.”

Why did any of you do the hateful things you did so gleefully and frequently to your Brewster classmates and who knows who else over the years? I shook my head in an effort to get Jaded Kate to quit the comments.

“To be funny, I guess.” I shrugged. “Anyway, we don’t know that’s what happened here. I’m just running through the possibilities. When was the last time you remember for certain that the note was not in your purse?”

“I opened it tonight before I left my apartment, but it was just a crack to shove in my license and the twenty, so that doesn’t count. I keep my car keys in the pocket of my cape, so I never opened the purse again until we were in the restroom, and then it was Ari who opened it, not me. I guess that would make it Saturday night when I went to the ladies’ room a few minutes after we got to the reunion. I had it open then, and there was no note.”

“That was around ten o’clock. Was Ari with you at that time?”

Joanie shook her red head slowly. “No, I went in by myself. When I came out, that’s when we spoke to you, and then we caught up with Mindy. We stood around for a while, but these heels are murder, and we all sat down at a little table to check out the crowd. Well, Ari and I were looking at the dancers. Mindy was focused on the DJ,” she amended.

“Someone she knew?”

Joanie snorted. “No, but she had high hopes. Mindy was always trolling, looking for the next guy, you know?”

“She was not married?” Armando asked.

“Not at the moment,” Joanie confirmed, “but honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered even if she hadn’t been between husbands. She was always on the prowl for as long as I knew her.” Her eyes filled again, and I dragged her back to the subject at hand.

“So you sat down at the table. Did anyone join you?”

That banished the tears. “Oh, sure, they were lining up to say hello, couldn’t wait to sit down and talk about the good old days,” she sneered. “Can’t say I blamed them,” she added a bit wistfully.

I looked at the woman next to me in her party dress, showing every one of her fifty-two years despite her carefully coiffed hair and professionally applied make-up, and my heart softened in spite of myself. Of the mean girl trio, Joanie had never quite seemed to fit the mold. To my knowledge, she had not been an instigator, merely a follower so happy to be included that she went along with whatever Mindy and Ariel proposed. The fact that she had chosen to appear with them at the reunion seemed to indicate she still craved that connection.

“Forgive me for asking, Joanie, but why did the three of you even attend the reunion? You had to know you weren’t exactly going to be welcomed. What was the attraction for you?”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know. No, that’s not true, at least in my case. I do know.” She gave me a wobbly smile. “I told you about my husband being away with his new girlfriend. He’s trading me in for a younger model. It’s an old story, and I’ve seen it coming for years. Between you and me, it’s sort of a relief, but then the holidays came along, and that was depressing.” She looked over my shoulder, then down at her hands. “You probably can’t understand, having been married for so long and all.”