Authors: Janice Weber
Until today, when Augustine had exhumed all the sleeping demons, seducing her with tales of love and gore and, most astonishingly,
extant human participants. Part of her wanted to know everything. But was it wise to replace fog with a willful mother, an
unwilling father, and a third wheel named Leo? So she had been born on a couch in a monastery: so what? Wasn’t that her stupid
mother’s fault? She could have gone to a hospital and had a safe delivery. She could have married Leo, whoever the hell that
was, and gotten on with her life. Why should Emily get all roiled up about a father now, why presume that after forty years
a stranger’s silence would suddenly blossom into love just because an illegitimate daughter showed up? Uncle Jasper had been
parent enough; maybe she should be thankful for that blessing and let the other ghosts rest in peace. Pursuit of
this tawdry little history treaded a fine line between curiosity and masochism, and to what end? She wasn’t about to write
it down in a family Bible for future generations to read. Did she hope that getting to the bottom of this story would fill
in some of those psychic craters? Dream on: Life was one huge crater, dug in secret, ended at random, no matter who one’s
parents were.
Emily was staring at the long, plush contrail of a silver airplane, thinking of Guy, when the phone rang. Perhaps it was Ross;
she needed him here, now. “Hello?”
Santa Monica police: Philippa had been shot twice at close range by an unknown assailant. She was in the operating room now,
playing dead. The man told Emily that his office had booked her on a flight leaving Boston in forty-five minutes. If she missed
it, there was another at six o’clock, but he didn’t recommend that one. Emily slammed down the phone. Flinging clothes into
a suitcase, praying for time to stand still, she gunned her car down Joy Street. The hell with the dead; they had waited for
forty years. They could wait a little more.
Late in the afternoon, when Ross returned to the office from his site visits, several messages awaited him. The only ones
of interest came from the shop on Newbury Street and his wife. Ross returned her call first: no answer. Couldn’t have been
terribly important. Maybe she was just checking in to see if he had been free for lunch. Ross decided to go home early tonight.
They could spend another pleasant evening with atlases and escapist fantasies, the wilder the better; this could be the year
he finally talked Emily into the Paris-Dakar road race. Ross shut his office door before calling the shop on Newbury Street.
“Were you able to find anything for me?” he asked the salesman investigating the purple bikinis.
“Yes, sir. Fortunately, our recordkeeping is meticulous.” Of course it was; how else could the man earn thousands of dollars
on the side looking up suspect lingerie purchases? “As I told you, many customers bought that particular bikini. It was very
popular with power dressers of the early eighties. Red and purple
were the big sellers. Had it not been for the monogram of the pitchfork, my search might not have been successful. But I was
able to contact Heddi, the woman who does all our custom embroidery. She remembered the job. The purchase was made by Rita
Ward.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Does that name ring a bell?”
“Vaguely,” Ross replied.
“She paid fifteen dollars for the monogram.”
“Any particular reason for the pitchfork?”
“I asked Heddi that exact question. All she could remember was that it had to do with devils rather than farmers. By the way,”
the man said just as Ross was about to hang up and stagger to the liquor cabinet, “Heddi said that you’re the second person
who’s asked about that monogram. She remembers a woman coming into the store with the bikinis a week after the purchase. Quite
angry.”
Ross sighed, guessing the scenario. “What happened?”
“I told her nothing,” the man said.
That’s because Ardith had slipped Heddi, not him, the hundred bucks. “Did the woman find out about Rita?”
“There is a remote chance that she did,” the man lied.
“Does Heddi remember what she looked like?” Ross asked, just in case he was on the wrong planet.
“She says the lady wore a hat and a wedding ring with three marquise diamonds. She was rather unpleasant.”
Ardith, all right; even ten years ago, she knew her marriage was a travesty. “Thank you,” Ross said. “It’s all becoming clear
to me now.” He hung up.
After a moment’s paralysis, he bounded out of his chair and went across the hall to Dana’s office. “Marjorie! Could you come
here a second, please?”
She found him struggling with the bronze bust. “Finally chucking that thing out the window?”
“Don’t make stupid jokes,” he snapped, tipping it on its side. “Read me the initials on the bottom again, would you?”
“‘R.W. 1983.’”
“Goddamn it! Nobody tells me anything around here!”
Marjorie closed the door. “What’s going on, Ross?”
“Don’t think Tin nuts,” he said, pacing agitatedly in circles, “but I’m fairly sure that the girl who jumped off the Darnell
Building was the same one who made this statue of Dana. Rita Ward was her name. She was the one who gave him that purple underwear.
They probably met while he was doing that renovation at Diavolina. The affair really went down the tubes.”
Marjorie watched him pace for a quarter mile. “So what?” she asked finally. “They’re both dead.”
What was he supposed to say to that? So is Guy Witten? “It’s been on my mind,” he rasped, walking around a few more circles.
“Dana never told me about it.”
“You couldn’t have prevented anything.”
“But that girl killed herself! For nothing!”
“Says who?”
“I don’t understand! Why didn’t Dana tell me? Didn’t he feel bad about it?”
“Either no, he didn’t, or yes, he felt so bad that he couldn’t ever speak to you about it. Why should Dana confess, anyway?”
“Catharsis. Forgiveness. If he had just said something to the family,” Ross said, almost talking to himself. “Apologized or
something. Not left them in the dark with no idea whom the girl had killed herself over.”
“Are you joking? Can you imagine Dana going to the grieving parents and saying something like ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but
I was screwing your daughter and she couldn’t handle my wife and two kids’? That’s almost beyond fiction.”
“If he wanted to forget about it, why save the underwear? That bust?”
“Souvenirs of the good days, I’d say.”
Dana had always been very clever about props; that bronze bust had probably provided the perfect excuse for artist and model
to get together three afternoons a week for months. When Dana first installed the sculpture in his office, he had explained
that it was a trade for services. Ross hadn’t even asked what the services had been. Now he sat on Dana’s soft couch, wondering
if Rita had sat there once, whispering as she stroked
Dana’s hair. “Do you think it was a crime?” he said softly. “Is that why he kept his mouth shut?”
“I’m not familiar with the Massachusetts laws on fornication and adultery,” Marjorie said archly. “But if unrequited love
were illegal, half the world would be in prison.” Rising, she put a hand on Ross’s shoulder. “Let sleeping dogs lie. In Dana’s
case, the less we know, the better.”
He watched her lovely legs waft her toward the door. After several moments alone with the cold, mute bust of Dana, Ross called
Diavolina. “Ward, please,” he said, then waited a long time. “I have to see you.”
“Again? You’re not about to start blackmailing me now, are you?”
“Don’t be asinine! Where and when? Preferably in the next half hour.”
“This must be an emergency. How about the waiting room at Back Bay Station?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Ross methodically cleared his desk, as he did every day before going home. Then he took the subway to Back Bay and waited
in the crowded Amtrak lounge, where lots of actor types with gorgeous hairdos and cheap luggage awaited the next train to
New York. Ward finally swept in with the same voluminous cape she had worn to Guy’s funeral. Heads turned as she cut a grand
swath through the crowd. Ward had gotten her hair trimmed and curled. It looked rather cute. She had stenciled her eyes with
heavy liner that imitated the flow of her cape. Smiling like a debutante, she sailed past Ross out to the sidewalk.
He followed her to a park bench across the street. “I hate the smell of old coffee,” Ward remarked, pulling up her hood. “Getting
a little nippy out here, isn’t it? What’s on your mind, Major?”
She spoke so vibrantly that he sighed; why ruin another woman? Why not let sleeping dogs lie, as Marjorie had said? For a
few moments, struggling, Ross said nothing. Then he thought about Guy bleeding to death alone, in the rain. “Just a few minor
points,” he began. “One, you really should have stolen
Guy’s wallet. Made it look more like a robbery. O’Keefe’s very suspicious about that.”
“O’Keefe’s pissing in the wind. He doesn’t have a speck of evidence.”
“What did you do with the crossbow?” Ross asked.
“Threw it off the Tobin Bridge. Small consolation, all things considered.”
Poor, poor Guy. He had died abandoned and betrayed, whimpering Emily’s name: no consolation for that, none at all. Ross pulled
a small card from his breast pocket and handed it to Ward. “Recognize this?” he asked softly.
As Ward stared at the word
Madly,
the bloom left her face. “Where’d you get it?”
“Dana’s closet. My dead partner Dana. The stiff in your restaurant.” As Ross saw the old, dull look fleet across Ward’s eyes,
pity supplanted his anger; she had been happy for such a short time. Perhaps it was fitting that, having made her happiness
possible, Ross should also be the man to snatch it away. That’s how it worked in love, why not in war? “Dana did a renovation
at Diavolina about ten years ago. Was your sister working there then?”
“Yes. As a waitress. While she was going to art school.”
“I think they were lovers.”
“What? No way.”
Ross shrugged; what did he know? “Dana kept a bronze bust in the corner of his office. On the bottom it says ‘R.W. 1983.’
Once, when I asked him where it came from, Dana told me that someone was repaying a favor. I believed him. What kind of favor
are we talking about?”
Ward watched a torrent of commuters emerge from the Back Bay Station and scatter like wind-up soldiers in all directions.
When they had all gone, she said, “Just before her last year, Rita got an anonymous scholarship to the Academy of Art. She
never told me where it came from. Maybe she didn’t know. But after that, she started sneaking around at night, disappearing
in the afternoon, acting sly as a juvenile delinquent.” Ward held
up the little card with the one small word in its center. “What’s this?”
“When I was cleaning out Dana’s closet, I came across a little box from a shop on Newbury Street. Inside was that note and
a pair of men’s bikinis embroidered with a little pitchfork. I brought it back to the shop and made a few inquiries.”
“Why?”
Because cuckoldry metamorphosed a decent man into a suspicious little varmint forever. “I wanted to know why Dana would keep
such a dangerous souvenir. The statue would have been enough. It is your sister’s handwriting, isn’t it?” Ward didn’t have
to answer. “I went to the Academy of Art.”
“That was incredibly stupid. O’Keefe’s going to latch on to that like a heat- seeking missile.”
Ross almost didn’t care. “The dean told me that Guy Witten had been a model there for years and years,” he continued. “He
was married at the time your sister was falling apart. Did you ever consider that he was just a confidant? From what my wife
tells me, he was an excellent listener.”
“He listened an awful lot, then,” Ward said, without conviction. “He was at her place all the time. Evidently he had a key
to her apartment. The night Rita died, Guy went there and cleaned out his things.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. The landlady saw him leaving with a couple of duffel bags.”
That wasn’t too hard to figure out, if you knew Dana. But Ward didn’t. “If I were Dana, having an affair with your sister,”
Ross said slowly, “I would have called Guy the minute I heard that Rita was dead. I would have known Guy was her best friend.
I would have given him my key to her apartment and cried and begged for mercy and talked about the scandal my wife Ardith
would have to face and maybe I would have given Guy ten thousand bucks to get my things out of Rita’s apartment before the
police showed up.”
“And why would Guy agree to do such a thing?”
“Because he would know that Rita would have wanted it that way.”
Ward’s hulk had sagged deep into the park bench. “This is not good news.”
“I agree. You’ve possibly killed an innocent bystander, not to mention your sister’s one true friend.”
The old fire flashed in Wards eyes. “And I’ve possibly not killed Rita’s one true murderer.”
“That’s all you can say for yourself? And you call Philippa a beast for letting Guy bleed to death out on my porch? The both
of you are inhuman!” Ross spat into the gutter. “Thank God Dana’s dead! Otherwise, you’d have to go out and buy a new crossbow!”
“No kidding.” Ward laughed hideously. “I’ve been robbed.”
“So has Guy! So has your sister! So have I! So has Ardith! So has half the human race!”
“Get hold of yourself, Major. People are beginning to stare.”
Ross swallowed a sea of bile. “I think I’m right about this, and you know it.”
“I don’t understand you, mister. You sicced me on Witten. I took care of him for you. Why’d you have to tell me about Dana?
Why not just let me live with my delusions?”
“Because, unlike you, I feel Guy’s blood on my hands. And don’t give me this Poor Deluded Ward bullshit. If Dana were alive,
you’d be only too happy to knock off a second Romeo.”
“Seems to me you’re the only one who’s come out of this ahead.”
“You’re dead wrong. I’ve lost more than you will ever know.”
They both glared into the passing traffic. “May I keep the note?” Ward asked finally.