The Dearly Departed (2 page)

“So I imagine that you won't be staying very long after the funeral.”

“To what end?”

“To go through your father's things and decide what you want to keep. Someone's got to do his packing.”

“Packing?” Fletcher repeated, as if Sunny had said
sharecropping.
“You
pay
people to pack—moving companies pack. They can do a whole house in two days.”

“If it's the cottage I'm thinking of on Boot Lake, it won't take you very long.”

“Whatever,” said Fletcher.

“I'm going up tomorrow. You can reach me at the King's Nite Motel,” said Sunny.

“Fine.”

“Do you know my name?” she asked.

“Sunny?”

“Batten,” she said, and spelled it.

The night she returned to King George, the local news reported that a motorist, after running the town's only stop sign, had shot the chief of police. Sunny, watching on the motel television, first thought, Good—people in this town will have something to talk about besides my mother; and second, It's him, Marilee's brother, the cop. She crawled from the head of her bed to its foot for a closer inspection. Indeed, Chief Joseph J. Loach
was
Joey Loach, the kid who'd swaggered around the halls of King George Regional more than a dozen years before, the detention regular and goofball who could fold his eyelids up and inside out, now a hero wounded in the line of moving violations. Because his bullet-proof vest had saved him, Chief Loach was being presented a state-of-the-art model by the vest's proud manufacturer, bedside. “I guess it wasn't my time,” Joey told the reporter.

Mentioned obliquely in the hushed wrap-up: The perpetrator was still at large.

 

A
ctress” in the obituary's headline, especially without the modifier “amateur,” would have delighted Margaret Batten, who'd been stagestruck in middle age, recruited at the beauty parlor by the wife of the superintendent of schools. Might Margaret, she asked, consider a tiny but vital role in the King George Community Players' fall production of
The Bad Seed
? Duly flattered and only briefly deflated to learn that she had no lines, Margaret threw herself into her first production—understudying, baking for the bake sale, and embracing the subculture that was the King George Community Players. She was a woman alone, a divorcee looking for a social life in a town of 1,008 year-round residents.

Sunny was in high school when the acting bug burrowed under her mother's skin. They lived on the edge of the King George Links, a semi-private golf course, in a small house with rotting trellises, leased for a pittance under an odd historical footnote concerning a runaway slave and a host abolitionist, now moot and inapplicable. Still, it carried with it a legacy and the taint of a scholarship awarded on the basis of need. Historically, poor people lived in the gray bungalow, visible from the seventeenth fairway; their underprivileged children fished waylaid golf balls out of the course's water traps. Margaret had qualified as a lessee under the unwritten widow-with-child clause: Sunny's father was dead, or so the tale on the application went.

Margaret was not a habitual liar, but the little house had been vacant when she moved to King George. A real estate agent, sizing her up correctly as a single mother without means, said, “I know I'm shooting myself in the foot to let you in on this, but there's this little house that belongs to the town . . .” Margaret asked to see it. The pine floors had been stripped of linoleum and left a tarry black; instead of doors, faded blue burlap hung from curtain rods between rooms, and the kitchen sink was a soapstone trough. But Margaret was a great believer in soap, water, ammonia, bleach, lemon oil, paint, shellac, wallpaper, and fresh flowers. She could see the small provincial print she'd choose for fabrics and the museum posters of lily pads and haystacks she'd frame for the walls. “How much?” she whispered.

“A dollar a day—and that includes utilities.”

“And you think I could get it?”

The agent confided, “They don't check, so lay it on a little thick in the application. They like widows and orphans—the more the better.”

“I only have Sunny.”

The agent said, “I happen to know from personal experience that if they like you, they're not sticklers.”

The truth would have been nowhere near good enough: Margaret had lost a husband in the most prosaic fashion, to nothing more tragic than an uncharacteristic slip—hers. She still couldn't believe she had sinned and that the perfectly decent John Batten, who updated kitchen cabinets with laminates, had not forgiven her. It hadn't even been a love affair but a temp job, a professional courtesy: The lawyers for whom she worked had loaned her and her shorthand skills to an out-of-town client running for Congress. He hadn't announced yet; he told the newspaper that he was visiting primarily on business and, yes, maybe to shake a few hands along the Saint Patrick's Day Parade route. And when he did, as Margaret would observe, it was with such penetrating eye contact and warm, two-fisted handshakes that the woman in his grip felt more attractive and interesting than she knew herself to be.

Pretty in a round-faced, wholesome way; short, with a generous bust and small waist, Margaret was in her mid-twenties and looked eighteen. Safe, her employers thought. Not bait. Harmless as a secretarial loan to a reputed womanizer. At the end of Miles Finn's visit, after two days of depositions, he invited her to dinner, in a hotel dining room famous for its Caesar salads prepared at the table.

Thank you, but she couldn't, Margaret said.

“A previous engagement?”

“I'm married.”

“I am too! This isn't a date. I'm so sorry that's what you thought. This is a thank-you for a job well done and a grueling two days of boring testimony. Dinner seems the least I could do. . . . Perhaps your husband would like to come along.”

“He's on a job,” she said.

“Out of town?”

“Camden,” she said. “A school renovation. It's supposed to open the day after Labor Day.”

She seemed torn, concerned about something other than the appearance of social impropriety. Her hands ran down the sides of her brown cotton A-line skirt.

“What if we made it for seven or eight?” he prompted. “That way you can go home and change into something for evening.”

She nearly curtsied with relief, and said, “I do have something new I was saving for a special occasion.”

“How old are you?” he asked. “I only ask because I'd like to toast my campaign.”

“I'm twenty-six!”

“Twenty-six.” He smiled.

He asked for a quiet table, away from other diners. Margaret arrived in what his wife would call a little black dress, poofy and crisscrossed with chiffon at the bosom, in very high heels that looked a size too big, and carrying a long, thin clutch purse with a rhinestone clasp; a heart-shaped barrette held her brown hair off her shiny forehead. She ate her Caesar salad and her veal rollatini with such earnestly exquisite shopgirl manners, refusing to speak until she had chewed and swallowed every morsel of food and washed it down with a ladylike sip from her water goblet, that he felt chivalrous, which, in turn, impelled him to invite her upstairs to have Kahlúa on his balcony. He wanted to flatter her; wanted this sweet-faced girl to feel that she had been an excellent dinner partner and that Miles Finn enjoyed her company. If he needed a secretarial pinch-hitter again—say, next month?—could she get away?

She shouldn't have spent the night, shouldn't have assumed that her heretofore nonpregnant state was her failing and not her husband's; should have checked her good black dress for the long, prematurely silver hairs that John removed with tweezers and saved in an amber pill bottle. He filed for divorce, gallantly characterizing it as no-fault. Their two lawyers privately agreed upon a paltry monthly payment in lieu of a paternity test.

When no one had a good word for John Batten, the brute who divorced his sweet, pregnant wife, Margaret told her family, “It's not what it appears to be. Don't blame John. That's all I'll say,” and took her wispy-haired baby girl to King George, a town in the shadow of the White Mountains. Candidate Finn had recommended it unwittingly as the site of idyllic boyhood summers and a future retirement. John Batten moved his laminating business to a booming Phoenix and sent Margaret a wedding announcement ten months later. “She's a keeper,” he wrote in one ecru corner.

Believing that the bungalow on the golf course would provide a month or two's shelter, Margaret typed in the space allowed that she had been briefly married to a wonderful man, who had died an accidental death in a helicopter crash. In parentheses, she wrote that her late husband flew critically ill people, or sometimes just their hearts and kidneys, from the scenes of accidents to hospitals, from country to city, where teams of specialists met him atop hospital helipads. He had died in the line of duty, whereupon
his
organs and corneas were harvested and transplanted into no fewer than five near-death breadwinners. The committee for the Abel Cotton House had considered the poorly punctuated appeals of too many teenage mothers who came to interviews in cutoff jeans. Times had changed. Runaway slaves had given way to war widows, who'd given way to church-sponsored refugees with extended families. English-speaking applicants were scarce; people who would fit in were scarcer. With a house in suburban Philadelphia as her last address, an associate's degree, a dented Pinto, a thin, sad gold band and diamond chip on her widowed left hand, and a little blond daughter, the soft-spoken Margaret Batten was the happy choice of every philanthropist on the committee.