Return to Dust (6 page)

Then she married the cagiest man we all knew, the zealous law professor who was always talking of the Deal to be made. She couldn't help herself, she said—she fell in love like a besotted high-school girl. Okay, the ice queen wed Machiavelli Junior. Inevitably they would have found each other. Somehow, though, marriage changed both. They lived on his meager assistant professor's salary and the scant income from her gift store in town. It obviously wasn't enough. They were invited to all school parties, but everyone hoped they wouldn't show up. She'd become louder now, more domineering, and sometimes when I saw her she looked on the verge of tears. At those times I remembered her stories of breakdowns, failed therapy, and madness in the eye corners. She flared up in public. She was cruel to people like shop clerks and waiters. He, in turn, had lost his steam, that fiery upward-I'm-going passion. I gave the marriage six months. If that.

One time she told Marcie she should have married me. When Marcie told her it was too late, she'd whispered, “We'll see about that. Rick is my destiny.”

“Watch out,” Marcie had warned me. “You're not free of her.”

“Oh yes I am.”

Chapter Seven

Karen met me at her aunt's house on Forest Road in the Unionville section of Farmington. The front door was wide open despite the chilly air, and she stood facing out, her arms folded over her chest. She looked impatient, though I knew I was prompt. I'm always on time. The good sisters in Saigon taught me that trick. It was one way to survive the bamboo rod against my backside.

Aunt Marta had lived in a small, drab house, a simple cookie-cutter Cape Cod tucked behind thick overgrown hemlocks with weeping willows smothering the roof. Perhaps the house had been cared for at one time when her husband was alive, but it wore a look of decay now, the gray clapboards faded and chipped, roof tiles slipping, a gone-to-seed front yard blanketed by windblown leaves and stringy, dead grasses. As I walked in, Karen backed up, sank into a wing chair by the front window.

“I'm selling the house. I don't want to live here. I hate this house.”

She looked ready to cry but pulled herself together.

I looked around. A house lacking personality. Faded rose chintz on the sofa, thin blue polyester drapes, dusty plastic flowers on the glass-top coffee table. Glossy religious icons in plastic frames, one after the other, hanging crookedly on the walls, shriveled palms tucked around them. Everything was neat here, but cheap. I breathed in—a hint of mothballs in the air that reminded me of an old closet suddenly opened—that kind of cloying smell. Marta had not wanted to spend money on furnishings, so she froze her settings in some undefined decade long gone.

Karen saw me looking around. “I've already taken some things out. The few things I want to save. Photo albums, old furniture of my grandparents'. A table I remember. Nothing else I want here. I'm gonna sell it all.”

She waved her hands again, as though she hoped her gesture would make it all disappear.

Dressed in brown slacks, a little too tight in the thigh, she had thrown a bulky off-yellow cotton sweater over them. With her long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, she looked self-consciously seasonal. Even her lipstick was a shade of Halloween orange, an eccentricity that jarred—but compelled you to look.

Once, walking with Hank Nguyen through the arcade, he'd commented on her window display of her own art. It wasn't the first time he'd mocked her artwork. “Thomas Kinkaid meets Jean-Michel Basquiet at a potluck supper.”

She moved from the wing chair to sit on the sofa next to me, so close her sleeve touched me, and I smelled lavender perfume, the kind her aunt wore. Turning to look at her, I saw Marta's face—the same angular bone structure, the same razor-thin lips, the same wispy blue eyes.

“Here is the list I promised you.”

I had asked her for a list of her aunt's last cleaning jobs, the people whose homes she routinely cleaned. I quickly scanned the list. Karen had written their names in neat script, with phone numbers.

“Any acquaintances I should talk to?”

She ignored that. “I copied it from her notebook. She had scaled back her jobs lately—mainly two professors.”

I saw the two professors' names, and I saw Marcie and Vinnie's names. She pointed. “One of her last jobs. There may have been others.” A quick smile. “You—when you called her.”

“I know.” It was a small list, but a decent place to begin.

“You asked if I knew folks she had trouble with—like arguments.”

“And?”

She shook her head. “Off and on spats with Hattie Cozzins, her old friend. And—that scene with Willie Do. She didn't
like
him.”

I nodded and tucked the list into my pocket.

I spent the next hour checking out the house, and Karen left me alone, busying herself in the kitchen, rifling through boxes, selecting items she'd carry to her apartment. When I walked into the kitchen, I spotted her idiosyncratic choices: a stained pot holder, Dutch boy-and-girl salt and pepper shakers, a chipped serving dish, a pie tin. The longer she emptied the cabinets, the lighter her spirits became. I heard humming at one point, a top-ten radio hit I vaguely recognized as an old Michael Jackson song.
The man in the mirror…
She was happy by herself, so I left her alone. Every so often I looked over, said something, but each time she frowned. Obviously I was smashing through some reverie she was enjoying.

A waste of time, this survey. I discovered nothing unusual. A small cubbyhole desk yielded piles of bills and receipts, but nothing out of the ordinary so far as I could tell. Sadly, Marta threw little out, which could be a good thing for someone looking for clues, but not always. In my laptop I jotted down bank numbers and accounts. I entered names copied from letters, some from out of state. Casual acquaintances she met in Atlantic City and Vegas. A number for the bus company that ran tours to gambling centers.

What secrets did this woman have?

I pulled out drawers, ran my fingers across the bottoms, and Karen, entering the living room where the little desk sat, bit her lip. Breathing in loudly, she glared at me as though I were a surprise prowler. Quirky, she obviously had an invisible boundary I was always crossing, something that baffled me. She may have hired me, but she looked unhappy that I was rifling through a dead woman's life. Then she went back into the kitchen and I heard cupboards opening and closing. A dish broke, and she swore.

I walked through the basement, the upstairs bedrooms, the attic crawlspace. Nothing out of the ordinary—no secret vices, no hidden cardboard box sealed with duct tape. This was a conventional lady, by all accounts. She paid her bills faithfully and didn't touch that hundred grand from hubby's insurance. I found a huge carton of Christmas cards from years past, each year's arrival bound by elastic bands and each placed back in the original envelopes. She'd saved them all. Hundreds. The words inside were standard and hardly personal—the platitudinous “Have a great Christmas” sentiment. Yet something bothered me, and eventually I went back to check the addresses—every card was from a man. Not one was signed with a woman's name. Did she know women? Yes, obviously, there was Hattie Cozzins, for one. Her travel companion. But no cards in the pile from Hattie.

On a side table, pinned between two bald-eagle plaster bookends, were a few old books, two volumes of
Reader's Digest
condensed novels, as well as a three-volume
History of the World
from 1897, bound in faded red leather, an American Bible Tract, circa 1850, with broken spine. Slips of paper marked pages. A book on Scripture that contained a pull-out chart at the back, tracing the history of the Christian world from Creation to 1900, a documented span of four thousand years or so. Adam and Eve to—well, McKinley. I found a couple of worn nineteenth-century novels, with mottled gilt edges.
The Wide, Wide World. The Gates Ajar.

“Aunt Marta's home-correspondence school,” Karen noted as she walked by me.

“Bizarre collection.”

“Church sales, probably. She didn't like to read anything that disturbed her.”

“I collect old books.” I examined the thick volume of
The Gates Ajar.

“Joshua Jennings wanted her to read classic literature.” Karen shook her head. “Him, the old teacher and collector. He valued old books over people. Imagine Marta reading, well, I don't know—Plutarch? Lord, Shakespeare? She moved her lips when she read supermarket tabloids. She never did read anything. He would lend her volumes, but she didn't want to read them. She only wanted to impress him. If she returned one with a smudge, he'd flip out. Not that he gave her the collectible ones. God forbid. Books were sacred.”

“Books
are
sacred.”

“I remember once she told me he was astounded that she'd never read James Fenimore Cooper. His favorite author. She said he yelled ‘Natty Bumppo' at her, and she said nobody in their right mind is named Natty Bumppo. He wasn't happy.” She chuckled at the memory.

I laughed, too. “She started.” I pointed to the dining room table where I'd seen an unopened book resting on some newspapers. I went to get it and held it up. An exquisite volume.
The Last of the Mohicans
from an elegant, leather-bound set from the turn of the century. My hands lovingly handled it. A volume out of G. Putnam's, bound in half-morocco, a silk ribbon market, unfortunately located on page two. A facsimile manuscript page.

“This is classic Victoriana,” I told her.

“Whatever.”

“She didn't get very far.”

Karen glanced at it. “Yeah, she mentioned Cooper to me. ‘Impossible,' she said. The first page put her to sleep.”

I laughed. “I bet she never returned library books either.”

“Joshua realized his home-correspondence school was a bust.”

“So she had dreams of a life with Joshua?”

Karen looked into my face. “My aunt could be a foolish woman, Rick. I tell you—she was too fond of Joshua—with that big house on the green, his—his patrician background, his kindness to her. She thought he cared for her, and I guess he did in his own way. She even thought they, you know, might marry and travel. He flattered her—teased.” A sigh. “She was foolish.”

“That explains her depression when he died.”

She shook her head back and forth. “Well, that started earlier when they had that fight. He told her not to come to the house. To stay away.”

“That must have hurt her.”

She bit her lip. “No woman wants a man to reject her.”

“No man wants a woman to reject him.”

“It's not the same thing, Rick.”

“How so?”

“It just isn't. Men don't get it.”

“But…”

She turned away. “I don't want this conversation.”

The house yielded no surprises. I found nothing out of bounds in the closets. No hidden men's clothing to suggest secret lovers, no rattling skeletons, no Victoria's Secret catalogs, no taboo sex toys. Hers was a modest, decent life lived simply. No rose for Emily, this woman. There were no exotic foodstuffs in the kitchen cabinets, no international coffee flavors, no low-fat cuisine in the freezer, no food processor. Maxwell House coffee. Dial soap. In a hall cupboard were five bottles of whiskey, rye and scotch, two unopened. The third was nearly empty. She used an old-fashioned coffee percolator, sparkling clean. Technology was ignored here: no answering machine, no cordless phone. She had an old VCR, broken, with a cassette of
The Sound of Music
resting on top of it. She had an old RCA TV in her living room, not a sleek flat-screen. Here was a doggedly conventional woman. There was nothing to break the pattern that caught your eye when you opened the front door—a sort of lower-middle-class life lived redundantly in all the rooms.

But deeply religious. Ivy curled from the belly of the Infant of Prague statue on the TV. Gilded crosses adorned the walls. Glossy Russian icons of Jesus' head, oversized and startling, hung on the bedroom wall. She was, I knew, a church-going Catholic. I'd found canceled checks for payments to the church, regular contributions to Catholic Charities, payments for memorial Masses for her dead husband. A Mass card from his funeral. Pamphlets for pilgrimages to shrines at Lourdes. A book on Our Lady of Fatima. Nothing offbeat here where conservative religion thrived.

Except for a stack of pamphlets bound together with elastic bands. Manifestos from the Brown Bonnets, a vociferous, local charismatic Catholic women's group opposed to abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, progressive Catholicism, and all-around good fun. A group that marched in Washington at pro-life rallies. They'd picketed Bill Maher when he performed at the Bushnell. These pamphlets bore Marta's address label, with some numbers above it. I recorded the information.

“Nothing to suggest violence hiding in a corner of her life,” I told Karen.

She looked disheartened.

“But there's nothing to suggest suicide, either,” I added.

No pills. No prescription drugs, no letters chronicling depression. No suggestion of a woman on the edge. It was the undemonstrative house of an old woman decidedly content, someone whose life was defined by periodic trips to gambling palaces with busloads of other women. Yes, a little fanatical when it came to religion, but she was, well—normal.

Karen was in a hurry to leave, snapping lights off before I could gather my jacket. In the driveway she confessed, “The place gives me the jitters.” She added, “It's worse with you here.”

“Why?”

“With you going through her stuff, well, the smell of murder fills the place.”

“No murder yet, Karen.”

“I get a little crazy.” A long pause. “Sometimes.” She smiled an apology. “I feel like she's been staring over my shoulder here, telling me I'm doing something wrong.”

“How about a cup of coffee? We can talk.”

She turned away. “I have to get back to the shop, Rick. I'm unloading stock later.”

Alone, I decided to walk Marta's final route to verify the timing. I checked my watch. Four-fifteen on the dot. I set out on foot for Richard Wilcox's condo, Marta's destination the night she died. I walked down the sidewalk, ambled along the narrow road and through a small park near his home. I walked slowly, trying to approximate the methodical steps of a depressed woman, one nearly seventy years old, a woman with a little too much whiskey in her bloodstream. At exactly 4:37, by my watch, I turned onto the road that crossed the Farmington River. The garden-style townhouses were in sight. It was a short walk, shorter than I'd assumed. That was why she never drove her car.

Standing on the stone bridge, I gazed down into the Farmington River, churning and swelling with the heavy autumn rains we'd had recently. A few huge dark boulders dominated the stream. When she died in September, it must have been a mere trickle of water—after a parched August. I focused on the boulders, a run of sharp rocks and broken branches. From this spot Marta had fallen—or was pushed. Or, I realized, possibly killed elsewhere and dumped here. But that seemed a stretch.