Fete Worse Than Death (9781101595138) (2 page)
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Authors: Claudia Bishop
Believe It or Not, There Is an Underwater Weapons Naval Testing Facility
Jeeter Swenson sat in a rocker between his son and his daughter-in-law on the porch of his cottage overlooking Cayuga Lake. He was ninety-eight years old today, and there was a lot to like about that. For one thing, he was looking at the prettiest view in upstate New York. It was an afternoon in late August and the sun was that rich antique yellow that meant autumn was closing in. The placid surface of the lake shrugged a little under a mild breeze. The shoreline was thick with trees. A little sailboat—Jeeter pushed his spectacles up his nose and squinted—looked like a Hobie Cat, or maybe a Sunfish—tacked merrily back and forth on the aluminum-colored water. She tacked leeward and Jeeter squinted once more. A Hobie Cat. He knew it. Nothing wrong with his eyesight that a good pair of glasses couldn’t fix.
Nothing wrong with the rest of him, either. He’d outlived his enemies, buried a nagging wife, and his digestion worked just fine. The little aide that came to see him three days a week was a pip. His relatives didn’t bother him much, except to plague him on his birthday. And that was
more about wondering if he was ready to give up the lake house than a bid for his attention.
Which was why they’d showed up today, wasn’t it?
He turned his head and glared at his son, Porter. The kid was what—sixty-three now? Maybe even sixty-five? He’d never been good with crap like birthdays. And look at the flab on him. They should have named him Portly.
Jeeter giggled, smacked his own flat belly, then thumped his cane on the porch floor, narrowly missing Porter’s tasseled loafers. “Buzzards,” he said with sudden ferocity.
Porter’s wife Melbourne leaned forward in her chair and peered up at the sky. “Buzzards, Dad? Where?”
Truth to tell, Melbourne scared Jeeter a little. She was more bullheaded than a decent woman ought to be, and although he knew for a fact she was drawing her Social Security check, she didn’t look much more than forty-five. Unnatural. Unnatural and bullheaded. Porter sure’d gotten himself a prize.
“You see any buzzards up there?” Jeeter demanded. “Me, neither. But there’s a couple of them buzzarding around me, you bet your life.”
Porter Swenson rolled his eyes at his wife. Melbourne acknowledged the look with a slight nod, then leaned forward and placed a solicitous hand on Jeeter’s knee. “You okay, there, Dad?”
Jeeter looked at his watch. It was a thirty-one-year-old Rolex and it ran like he did; a little hitch in its git-along now and then, but mostly worked just fine. “They gave me this watch the day I retired.”
Melbourne Swenson added an extra layer of warm sincerity to her voice. “So they did, Dad.”
“‘To Alfred Swenson: In recognition of forty years dedicated service.’ Says so right on the back.”
Melbourne couldn’t resist an overly patient sigh. She’d heard it all before. Over and over again. She adjusted the tasteful little sapphire stud in her right ear. “Yes, indeedy.”
“Forty years chasing buzzards in the fraud unit of the New York state controller. Which means I know a buzzard when I see one.” He hefted the cane and narrowed his eyes at his son. “And that’s what I’m looking at now. Buzzards.”
Porter moved his feet out of the way. “We’re just very concerned for your welfare, Dad. The lake house is too isolated. It’s miles from anywhere…”
“Red Tail Winery’s just down the road. Got busloads of tourists running up and down Route 14 all hours of the day and night. Seneca’s a popular spot. And that Red Tail wine’s damn delicious.”
“…That offers any kind of emergency services. And there’s no denying the fact that you’re getting on a bit…”
“…Which makes this place worth roughly twenty-two times what your mother and I paid for it in 1986…”
“…And we want you to make that century mark!”
“A hundred, hell.” Jeeter grinned at Melbourne. “Article in the
Wall Street Journal
this morning said the oldest living American’s a hundred and seventeen. Figure I can break that record if I put my mind to it.”
Melbourne’s answering smile was stiff. She removed her hand from his knee. “We’re just very, very worried that something will happen in the middle of the night…”
“Now I’ll tell you something about the middle of the night. Best part of being old is getting up at two in the
morning.” Jeeter waved at the lake. “Seneca Lake by moonlight is something to see.”
“…A fall, for example.” Melbourne blinked her heavily mascara’d eyelashes in an effort to summon a few tears. “And there you’d be…all alone. In pain. Perhaps dying. I just can’t stand to think of it, Dad. I lie awake nights worrying about it.”
“If you’re up at night, you ought to get up and do something useful,” Jeeter said. “Surveillance, that’d be useful. Hike on out to that big backyard of yours in Rochester. You’d be pretty amazed at what you can see along of two o’clock in the morning.”
“Surveillance,” Melbourne repeated. “Right.”
For a long moment, all three of them were silent. The lake sparkled in the mellow August sunshine. The remains of Jeeter’s ninety-eighth birthday cake sat on the teak picnic table. Melbourne was dressed for the country in white linen trousers and a blue linen camp shirt that hid that frustrating roll of flesh at her waist. Porter had on worn chinos (Melbourne forbade shorts) and an Izod golf shirt. Jeeter himself wore shorts, a Cornell University sweatshirt so old it was transparent in places, and a John Deere tractor billed hat.
Anyone boating by would figure them for a nice happy family celebrating the summer afternoon at their lake stone estate.
Estate.
Jeeter huffed to himself. Well, maybe estate was too pretentious a word for the comfortable old house. But the price that pushy little Realtor had given him just last week would have bought an estate in his day. And that’s what
the greedy buzzards sitting on
his
porch, in
his
rocking chairs, after stuffing themselves with
his
cake, were after. His estate. His retirement fund. His
savings
. Dammit.
Porter broke the silence. “Surveillance? What do you mean exactly?” He and his wife exchanged more meaningful looks. Jeeter was getting pretty sick of the conversation they weren’t having, as opposed to the one they were. “If Melly did venture out into the backyard on a summer’s night, what do you think she’d see, Dad?”
Jeeter shrugged. He never should have sent the kid to law school. Once Porter had graduated, he’d starting talking like he was running for office and he hadn’t shut up since. “You never know,” he said mysteriously. “You just never know. You know Seneca’s the deepest lake in the state. Close to nine hundred feet. That’d bury a sixty-story skyscraper so you’d never know it’s there. Fact is, along of a summer’s night, you just might run across something like the Loch Ness Monster.”
Melbourne and Porter digested this for a moment. “Is that so,” Porter said.
“Damn straight.” Jeeter clamped his lips shut tight. They weren’t getting another word out of him, not if they fell flat on the porch deck and begged like a dog.
~
It took another twenty minutes to get the story out of him. And after they did, the younger Swensons couldn’t suppress the faintest glow of satisfaction as they made their farewells.
~
“Oh dear Lord.” Melbourne sank into the Lexus’s passenger seat with a sigh and tossed her straw tote in the back. “I knew it. I just knew it. He’s losing it, Porter. We’ve just got to get him out of there and into somewhere safe.” The look of concern on her face wouldn’t have fooled Jeeter for a minute.
“‘Not so much like a reptile as a seal,’” Porter quoted his father. “Swimming along the shoreline, crawling up the rocks. The Seneca Lake Monster. And he’s thinking about calling the papers.” He put the Lexus into gear and drove slowly down the cobbled drive. The lake house was a good half mile off Route 14, a road that ran for eighteen miles up Seneca Lake’s west side. Porter signaled to pull onto 14. They drove without speaking until they passed the Seneca Shores winery.
Porter cleared his throat. “We’ve been fortunate so far. Very, very fortunate. Dad’s physical health is splendid. Splendid. But that can’t last forever. And as you know, a decent nursing home’s going to run six thousand, seven thousand dollars a month. His estate’s not going to handle that kind of expense, not without us kicking in. He’s got Medicare, which doesn’t cover long-term care, and so he’s going to have to pay for it himself.”
Melbourne smoothed her hair over her ears with nervous jerks of her fingertips. “Do you suppose he was right? About that guy who’s lived to be a hundred and seventeen?”
“He’s usually right where numbers are involved. Life’s a giant general ledger to him. Always has been.” Porter wasn’t particularly perturbed by this. Life was a general ledger to him, too.
Route 14 had taken them into the heart of Geneva. Porter would have bet there were more nineteenth-century brick buildings in the village than in the whole of Tompkins, Ontario, and Wayne Counties. He stopped at the intersection of 41 and 5 and 20, and signaled a left turn. “Town’s looking a little seedy. Seems like there’s another dozen for sale signs every time we come through here.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Melbourne said. “There’s some marvelous Greek Revival buildings here, and a couple of stunning examples of Carpenter Gothic. The Finger Lakes wine industry’s made a huge difference in the econ—”
“What I’m getting at, Melbourne, is that Dad’s lakefront property might not be worth what he thinks it is.”
“He won’t sell it to us, Porter, and he’s not about to get his scrawny butt out of there unless we make him, and you’ve been harping on the fact that the state is going to take all his assets if he ends up in a nursing home until he finally kicks off at a hundred and seventeen, and then go after our assets, maybe, and we’ve got to do something.” She stopped for breath. “This business about the lake monster, for instance. It’s ridiculous. Isn’t there something we can do? The old geez…I mean poor old guy is losing it. Can’t we hold a competency hearing or something?”
Porter winced.
“Sorry,” Melbourne said. “That’d make it pretty public, I guess. But what else are we going to do? We’re concerned for him, that’s all. Both of us. Honestly, how are we going to feel if that little aide calls us up one morning and tells us she’s found him dead as a doornail in the lake? Or,” Melbourne continued, since Porter’s face had a
“might be the best thing” sort of look on it, “with a broken hip or some other totally disabling problem. Honestly, the best thing for him is a nice little nursing home somewhere. But he needs to sell the lake house to us first for a rational price so the nursing home can’t get its paws on it. That will let him live out the rest of his life on his savings in a protected environment. Honestly…”
Porter held his hand up. “I hear you. I’ll think about it. These things aren’t as easy as you might think.”
“What things?”
“Competency hearings. The state’s not all that anxious to lock people up, believe it or not.”
“I’m not talking about locking him up. I’m talking about seeing that he’s safe and…”
“Be
quiet
, Melbourne. I know what I’m doing.”
The red light clicked to green, and Porter pulled onto 5 and 20 with a squeal of the Lexus’s tires. “We don’t want to try something like this in Rochester or Syracuse. We need a small town, where these kinds of cases aren’t as usual and maybe some personal influence will help.”
Melbourne smiled a little.
“There’s an old classmate of mine from Cornell. Howie Murchison. He’s got a small-town practice. I think it’s over near Ithaca. Place is called Hemlock Falls.” He reached over and squeezed Melbourne’s knee. “Howie will sympathize. The Loch Ness Monster in Seneca Lake. Right.”