Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  “I’d think that would be obvious,” Mimi had responded, working to cover her amusement that so transparent a statement be pronounced with such gravity.

  “You’d think,” Kate had replied, not seeming at all amused.

  “I think most people believe once they’re in a relationship, it’ll behave the way they imagine relationships do or should, without understanding that they’re responsible for creating the relationship that works best for them,” Sue offered thoughtfully, and poured the rest of the wine into her glass.

  “For heavens sake, Sue!” Kate exclaimed through an exhalation of cigarette smoke, “you sound like a self-help tape.”

  Sue gave her a good-natured smile. “Maybe so, but I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Kate nodded. “I suppose. Just see if you can’t find some different words to say it next time, OK?”

  Now Sue snorted. “What next time? Mimi’s the only person who’s been either polite enough or interested enough or non-threatened enough for this kind of conversation in ages.” And as if on cue, both looked questioningly at her, though it took her a moment to realize it because she was buttering an ear of corn—her third.

  “You want to know if I’m polite?” Mimi asked, chewing and talking at the same time. “I guess I’m more interested and non-threatened,” she added, still talking with her mouth full, “though I’m thinking now that maybe I don’t really know what you meant, exactly.”

  Sue further explained herself: “All couples have areas of disagreement and the only way to keep those areas from becoming battlefields is to work through them, or to agree that they’re always going to be disagreements and agree to accept them—and to stay the hell away from them. You and Gianna haven’t done that yet.”

  “No shit,” Mimi readily agreed, despite the discomfort the revelation brought. “We’re definitely still at the battlefield stage in some areas of our relationship.” Like discussing our work with each other, she thought.

  Kate had stood and begun clearing the table. “Don’t press her any more, Sue, this isn’t an easy conversation to have, as you well know.”

  Sue had stiffened slightly and was momentarily silent before opening another bottle of wine and resuming conversation on a different topic. But Mimi had noticed and wondered, and then had dismissed the episode, concentrating instead on the sun setting over the Gulf and on the wine and on trying to remember when she’d eaten three ears of corn at one sitting. Later, her focus was on getting through the pile of books borrowed from Sue and Kate’s well-stocked library. She was taking Tyler at his word and relishing every moment of it. She went to the golf course with Sue and thoroughly enjoyed the world at daybreak, as she did the early morning golfers: Three other women, one of whom clearly was more than just a friend to Sue. The following day she spent with Kate, discovering that the antique store where she worked she also owned, and that she made the drive to Tampa in order to get stuck in traffic, as much as to be of service to the dying.

  “I don’t miss the grind of a day job,” she told Mimi, “but I do miss big city energy. I know it sounds really crazy to say, but the traffic jams help relieve the little twinges of homesickness I feel for the East Coast.” Then she peered through the windshield at the bumper- to-bumper traffic surrounding them and gave a bark of laughter. “And this ain’t even real traffic, given that mess on 495.”

  Mimi agreed. The parking lot that was the Washington Beltway was notoriously and habitually jammed and Mimi always swore she’d either change jobs or change residences if ever she found herself required to traverse its eight lanes twice a day. “I refuse to get on the thing, but I went to school in Los Angeles and I remember traffic jams.” She pushed the button that lowered her window as Kate lit a cigarette, and Mimi realized that it was only since she’d begun frequenting a bar again that she ever encountered people who smoked. Kate noticed and stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Sorry. I’m not used to having somebody else in the car.”

  “Sue doesn’t mind?” she asked and Kate shrugged, prompting Mimi to probe before she realized what she was doing. “Does that mean you care that the smoke bothers me, but you don’t care if it bothers Sue?”

  “It means that Sue drinks and I smoke,” Kate said with another shrug, and Mimi left it alone, though she wondered, just as she had wondered the night before when Kate had terminated the discussion at the dinner table. There definitely was a battlefield- caliber issue lurking just beneath the surface of the Sue-Kate relationship, but that was none of Mimi’s business. She had her own problems. Besides, she was enjoying herself on this stolen vacation. She liked both Sue and Kate, and hoped that this visit would develop into a friendship, because she thought that Gianna would like them, too. She knew that they missed the D.C.-Baltimore area and she was prepared to welcome them as guests in her home on their visits east. The last thing she wanted was to be placed in the middle of a domestic dispute, especially one in which it was necessary to take sides.

  “I’d like to take you and Sue to dinner tonight.”

  “Thanks, Mimi, but we’d kind of planned a little surprise for your last night with us,” Kate said, her voice definitely holding a hint of a surprise.

  “Oh. Well, then.” Mimi certainly was surprised, and that was without knowing what it was. “In that case, I’m all yours.”

  “Good,” Kate said with enthusiasm. “I’m going to drop you off at home and I’ve got two quick stops to make, then I’ll be along.” She was turning into the street that led to the waterway that led to their enclave. It was, Mimi thought again, a beautiful place and way to live, though she also wondered, again, whether it would or could ever be the life for her. When she looked at Sue and Kate, she didn’t see old, she didn’t see “retired.” They both were fifty-five and alive, vibrant, active, fully engaged in life and living. They were wealthy women enjoying the benefits of their wealth. But there was a “but” in the equation for Mimi, and she couldn’t pinpoint it; couldn’t shake off the feeling that she should care. Why should she? It wasn’t her life and it didn’t have to be. No law required that at a given age, she must “retire” and live differently from the way she lived now. As sick as she was of ferreting out graft and corruption and sending scumbags to jail, she didn’t want to leave Washington and her life there.

  Those thoughts held her as she traversed the walkway, opened the front door, and entered the house, and it took her a moment to understand what she was looking at through the expanse of interior glass that opened onto the pool and the courtyard. “Oh, shit,” she muttered when she realized that she’d stumbled upon Sue in a hot embrace with her golf partner. “Damn!” There was no way to get to her room without being seen, though Sue and what’s-her-name definitely weren’t interested in her. She took a couple of backward steps, thinking she could leave, but the motion must have caught Sue’s eye because she stepped out of the lip-lock she was in and looked directly toward Mimi. Then she smiled and gestured that Mimi should come out. “What the hell is the matter with her?” Mimi muttered, taking tiny, reluctant steps toward the sliding glass doors leading to the courtyard. Why would someone caught in the clutches of an illicit affair be smiling about it? Mimi opened the door and stepped from the interior coolness into the warm outside air.

  “Mimi,” Sue said without a hint of embarrassment in her voice. “I didn’t expect you back so early. Where’s Kate?”

  “She had a couple of errands to run so she dropped me off. She’ll be back shortly.”

  Sue waved off the explanation. “You remember Lynne?”

  Mimi nodded. She remembered Lynne though she hadn’t remembered her name. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, tanned bronze, tall and athletic. She and Lynne nodded a greeting at each other, and Lynne turned away and sauntered toward the door to Sue’s office. Had they anticipated Mimi’s arrival, Lynne could have disappeared without a trace; Sue’s office had a private entrance from the side of the house. “Sorry,” Mimi said when Lynne was gone.

  “Sorr
y for what?” Surprise and dismay spread across Sue’s face, and instantly were replaced by the embarrassment that had been absent a moment ago. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Mimi. I didn’t realize you didn’t know.”

  “How would I know?” Mimi asked curtly, annoyed now by Sue’s casual attitude. Why the hell would she know about Sue’s affair with Lynne?

  “Since you spent the day with Kate, I thought she would have told you about Lynne,” Sue replied in answer to the question Mimi had thought but not voiced, “but it seems she let you discover for yourself and left the explaining to me.”

  Now Mimi was pissed as well as confused. “I really don’t want to be in the middle of whatever is going on here, Sue.”

  “You’re not in the middle of anything, Mimi. We should have done a better job of explaining.”

  Mimi shook her head and wished she could evaporate. “You don’t owe me any explanation for how you live your lives. I appreciate your hospitality. I’ve truly enjoyed being here—”

  “—and the reason we wanted to explain,” Sue said, interrupting, pleading in her expression and her voice, “is because we like and enjoy you, and we want you as a friend. You and Gianna. So, can we sit and talk and I can explain this?” She gestured toward the pool and the chaise lounges. Mimi, who’d worn a bathing suit constantly since her arrival, had planned on a swim anyway.

  “Sure,” she said, pulling her tee shirt over her head and stepping out of her shorts and reluctantly dropping down on to a chaise, but ready to dive into head first into the pool to escape whatever was coming if necessary.

  Sue sat down opposite her. “In a nutshell, Kate and I don’t have sex together any more. Kate’s choice, not mine; I feel sexier now than I did twenty years ago. So, I can leave Kate, or stay and find sex elsewhere. Ergo, Lynne.”

  “Whew!” was Mimi’s reaction.

  “Yeah, that’s kinda how I feel about it,” Sue said.

  “You’re not happy with this arrangement.” It was not a question but Sue shook her head in reply as if it were, then she shrugged, but didn’t speak. “So, why,” Mimi began, then found she didn’t know where to go from there. She felt very much out of her element in this discussion.

  “What else can I do, Mimi? What would you do? I don’t want to leave Sue. Not only do I love her, I like her better than anybody I’ve ever known. She’s my best friend, closest confidant, and a true partner.”

  Mimi hesitated, and then asked, “What happened? Kate wasn’t always uninterested in sex, was she?”

  Sadness closed Sue’s face. “This has been going on for the last two years or so, thanks to menopause.” Then she laughed and the sadness vanished. “Don’t look so terrified, Mimi, loss of libido isn’t every woman’s fate, though there aren’t any absolutes in menopause, and no rules. It happens differently for every woman and fortunately there are herbs and other stuff to ease most of the symptoms.”

  “Then why doesn’t Kate take something?”

  “That’s the problem, dammit! Kate hates everything about menopause. She’s taking it personally— the weight gain, the loss of libido, the mood swings—the nerve of Nature doing these things to her! Tell you the truth, Mimi, Kate still hasn’t recovered from being fifty. She’s not aging gracefully. Almost every conversation has some reference to when she was thirty or forty, and she won’t even acknowledge a birthday.”

  “And so you just don’t talk about the problem any more?” Mimi asked. “You’re just letting all this stuff hang there while you’re doing Lynne and Kate’s doing nothing?”

  Sue sighed and suddenly looked very tired. “I think one of her friends finally has convinced her to see a therapist. She’s older and wiser and Kate trusts her. But if that fails, there’s not much else I can do.”

  “Sure there is,” Mimi retorted, not trying very hard to cover her impatience. “You can find another lover.”

  “That’s the first dumb thing you’ve said,” Sue shot back, taking Mimi totally by surprise. “I’m fifty-five years old. Where am I going to find another partner, somebody I can like and love? When was the last time you saw an unattached fifty-something lesbian?”

  Sue and Kate’s surprise for Mimi was a good-bye dinner-pool party. They’d invited a couple dozen men and women, set up three gas grills at different intervals in the courtyard, turned on the speakers, and got a full-fledged party going. Mimi was glad she’d had the chance to practice some dance steps at The Bayou, though even with her practice she found it difficult to keep pace with a couple of her partners. When dancing required more energy than she had left, Mimi fell into the pool, along with half a dozen others, and floated on the water’s surface, gazing at the sky and wishing Gianna were here with her. Then she climbed out of the water and ate until she was too full to move, which left her at the mercy of a table of storytellers whose expertise was tall tales, if one were generous, lies if one were truthful. She laughed until her sides hurt. It was an eclectic group of people: the eldest probably was in her seventies, the youngest probably hadn’t had his twenty-fifth birthday, and they all seemed to know and enjoy each other. Mimi was beginning to understand the dilemma facing her new friends: It would not be an easy thing to walk away from this life, from this circle of friends.

  By midnight, just Sue, Kate, Mimi, and two other women—Sarah and Cissy—were left, both of whom were former D.C. residents who had visited Florida for the first time the previous year and, as a result, had quit their jobs, sold their house, and moved south. Mimi wondered briefly if they still were lovers, then banished the thought. They knew of Mimi’s work, they said, and Gianna’s, too, but rather than comment on some aspect of newspaper or police work, as Mimi expected and was braced for, they asked for her help: Find out what happened to their missing friend.

  “She can’t do that!” Kate exclaimed.

  “Why not?” Sue asked, pouncing on the notion like a hungry predator. “It never crossed my mind to ask, but it’s a damn good idea and I wish I’d thought of it. Could you look into it, Mimi? We’d sure appreciate it.”

  “Look into what, exactly?” Mimi asked cautiously.

  “Sarah’s friend, Ellie Litton, disappeared without a trace. One minute she’s bought a new house, a new car, new clothes, hell, a whole new life, and the next minute she’s gone. Vanished into thin air, like a character in a 1920's British murder mystery.” Sue clearly was upset, as were Kate and their friends, especially Sarah who had known Ellie since they were girls in Iowa and had kept in touch over the years, thrilled to discover, as adults, that both were lesbians.

  Mimi’s antennae were fully at attention. “Disappeared from where? And what did you say her name was?”

  *****

  Eric Ashby slapped the conference table with the palm of his hand, making a sharp, loud noise that irritated Gianna, though she understood both why he was upset and why she allowed herself to be annoyed by his display of pique. Marianne had indeed recognized Ellie’s photo but knew nothing more about her. “Ellie Litton’s her name and it’s a damn good thing she had the kind of job that required a security clearance because we probably never would have found out who she was otherwise!” There now were six murdered women presumed to be lesbians and they’d identified only two of them: Millicent Cartcher and Ellie Litton. The company that Ellie worked for had contracts with the military, requiring that its top computer people undergo security checks, which included fingerprints on file; otherwise, Ellie likely would have remained a Jane Doe forever. Or at least as long as Millicent Cartcher had.

  Cassie, Kenny and Linda had combed the files Gianna had brought from the Medical Examiner’s office and concluded that not only was there potentially a very big problem confronting them, it also was too big for the three of them work alone. “If it’s true that all these women are lesbians, Boss.” Cassie shivered. “I don’t even want to think about what that means.”

  “I don’t, either,” Kenny and Linda said in unison, and Gianna took their meaning. Neither of them were lesbians and th
ey were unnerved by what they were finding in the files.

  Gianna had to decide quickly, not only what to do, but how to do it. She was walking bare-assed in a minefield and if she stumbled there would be no salvation. Not following through on the Irish guns was not an option; the chief would fire her for that. But conscience would not let her ignore the possibility that someone was targeting lesbians for murder. She might be able to manage her resources well enough to work both cases, but how would she manage the jurisdictional problem without involving the chief? He’d fire her for that, too, if she got caught. And she had a jurisdictional problem of gargantuan proportions. Millicent Cartcher had lived in Virginia and Ellie Litton had lived in Maryland and both were murdered in D.C., but on Federal property, which made them matters for the Feds. But Gianna wanted these cases. She believed she could successfully argue that the murders were hate crimes if she could prove that all the women were lesbians, and that their sexual identity was the reason for their murders. But she couldn’t do that without knowing the identity of the other victims, and there didn’t seem to be much hope for that after so much time had elapsed. But first things first.

  She pulled Eric from the guns investigation to supervise Cassie, Kenny and Linda. Alice Long would be a swing member of that team because she was a lesbian and could traverse the terrain, though nobody else knew that, and Gianna didn’t intend to reveal the fact. It would cause discomfort for Cassie, and Gianna didn’t want that. But because Alice also had a handle on the operation of the Jamaican drug dealers who were after the Irish guns, she’d have to keep one eye on that investigation, and be back-up for Bobby. Which left Tim without back-up. And which left Gianna, herself, to play that role. And to some how keep them all from getting blown to smithereens if she made a misstep and landed on a live mine.