“David’s doing great,” I told her, and thanked her for asking. “If you’re thinking there might have been something you could have done to prevent it, believe me, there wasn’t. The only people who could have kept it from happening are the people who did it. Or the person.”
“No …” She hesitated. “Leads?”
I laughed. “You’ve been seeing too much of the police lately, haven’t you, Nellie? No, no real leads, as they say.” Impulsively, given that she was acting like a new woman, I did something different, too: I gave her a quick, gentle hug—being careful of both her wounds and mine—and I told her how glad I was to see her look and sound so well.
She made a rueful face and said, “I’m as colorful as the trees, though, if you could see my other bruises.” I saw then that she’d very effectively hidden the one on her jaw, but it did look a bit oak yellow and maple red under her makeup. “Nothing really hurts, though, at least not with a couple of aspirin to see me through.”
“Your living and dining rooms look almost back to normal,” I commented, as we walked through them on our way to the kitchen.
“I’ve been working hard, and Bill has tried to help, too.”
Tried to help? I thought. Why didn’t he just help, or better yet, just do his share? I had a husband who didn’t even think in terms like “try” or “help.” Geof did what he and I both considered to be his share; neither of us thought of it as helping me. But then, the Kennedys were a generation older, and what a difference that could make in the division of marital tasks. It occurred to me that the relationship between Nellie and Bill, which I had always interpreted one way, could be seen another way: Maybe she was one of those people who call themselves perfectionists, when what they really mean is, nothing’s right until everybody does it their way, and that’s why they end up doing so much themselves.
I stared speculatively at the back of her head.
A few minutes later, I hauled myself up out of those ungracious thoughts and thanked my hostess when she handed me coffee in a mug and a muffin on a plate.
Bill wandered in, dressed in jeans and a plaid workshirt that was buttoned wrong, and he looked at us vaguely as if he couldn’t quite place what the two of us were doing there in his kitchen. I wondered how he managed to find his socks of a morning. Nellie probably had to hand them to him. Stop that, I commanded myself, and said, “Morning, Bill.”
“Is it?” he asked, and then wandered over to the counter, took the muffin that Nellie had placed on a plate for herself, and ambled back out of the room again. “Have a nice day.”
I laughed, assuming a joke.
“Does he ever sit still, Nellie?”
“Oh, he’s just like a toddler, always on the move. He picks things up and puts them down places, and I never know where I’ll find them. It just drives me crazy, sometimes. I thought he’d stop that at home, but now I think maybe he was better off with all those aisles at the store, so he could wander up and down to his heart’s content.”
“What are you guys going to do now, Nellie?”
She sat down at the table with me, with a substitute muffin and her own mug. “Insurance will pay for us to rebuild … or retire, Jenny. We don’t have to rebuild, although we could even do that, and then sell it. Hardly seems worth the effort though, when we could just take the money and sit things out. It may be better this way, to quit now because the fire forces us to. Otherwise, we might dither about it for years, until we’re both half in the grave. The fire may have done us a favor and made up my mind for me.”
“A young retirement.” I smiled at her. “And well earned, everybody would say. What will you do, though?”
“Oh. I imagine we’ll just stay put. Together. Here.”
“No grand travel plans? No cruises, no Airstream trailer?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Jenny, what will we do about your remaining orders? I’m afraid the office is gone, and all of the papers that were in it.”
“I have my copies,” I reminded her, and so we spent the next hour going over them, with Nellie frequently picking up the phone to talk to her suppliers for me. When we finished, we were both satisfied with our work.
“Only two days left to get all this stuff,” she reminded me.
“If it arrives, it does … if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
“Things are going to turn out all right,” she observed.
“I guess they are. I get my festival. You get to retire, if you really want to. And the police get their man.”
“Oh, they’ll never convict him, I told you that.”
“No? He confessed to setting that effigy on fire, Nellie. And he was in your store that night.”
“But they’ll never manage to connect him to our fire, Jenny.”
“Why not?”
“Because the man didn’t have any reason to do it!”
“I don’t think arsonists need a reason beyond their own pleasure, do they?”
‘Well, you’ll see that I’m right.”
“Don’t you want it to be him?”
“Heavens, Jenny, not if the poor man is innocent!”
“Well, no … but if he did it …” I trailed off and then said, “I met the man who died in the fire, did I tell you?”
“Please.” She put up her hands. “Please don’t talk about that. I can’t stand to think about him.”
“I’m sorry, Nellie.”
Bill shuffled through just at that moment when I needed something else to talk about, so I asked them both where they’d stood originally on the issue of God’s Highway.
“Our property doesn’t go down that far,” Nellie told me, but she looked depressed now, with the thought of the victim of the fire on her mind, thanks to me. “Besides, we were always too busy at the store to get involved in politics.”
Unlike some daughters I could mention, I thought But what I said was, “Bill? How about you? Were you in favor of the nature trail, or opposed to it?”
“Oh, Bill didn’t know any more about it than I did. If you want to know who really fought that trail, it was the family to the north side of the bridge. The Solbergs. They practically lay down on the railroad tracks to stop it.”
I smiled. “Not much danger there, no train had run in years.”
“I wish we still had the train,” Nellie said wistfully, and I really thought she might cry. “I get tired of driving. It would be nice just to hop on a commuter train and go to town.”
Bill stirred himself to utterd a lone but—I thought—pertinent and happy word. “Muffins.” He was eyeing the ones remaining in the tin. He shuffled over and began to dig one. out with a knife that was lying on the counter. By the time he got it into his hand, it was almost all crumbs, and he’d made a mess on the countertop.
“Oh, Bill!” Nellie got up and began to clean up after him. “First you take my muffin, then you get crumbs all over everything! Can’t you be more careful? You should have let me do that.”
“I’ve got to go,” I announced, and stood up. “I’ll tell you, Nellie, those muffins are wonderful, no matter how many pieces they’re in, right, Bill?”
That seemed to mollify her, to judge by her smile. Still, I knew I was leaving a less happy and relaxed woman than the one who had met me at the door, and that it wasn’t Bill’s fault if that were so. It was mine, for my thoughtless talk of the fire. I should have realized how bleak that could make her feel. Her face, as she said good-bye to me from her front doorway, showed the strain that hadn’t been there only an hour previously. She opened the door for me without unlocking anything.
“You’re not locking your doors?” I asked her, surprised.
“Oh!” The shadow across her face deepened, and I thought: Nice going, Jenny, first you make her sad, then you scare her. “Did I forget to do that when you came in? It’s hard to remember after all these years of never having to lock anything.”
I finally departed, not exactly leaving cheer and sunshine in my wake.
I remembe
red the Solberg family, and as it turned out, they remembered me.
“Of course you may have a word with us,” Appy Solberg, the octogenarian patriarch of their large and opinionated brood said to me when I appeared on their doorstep, having crossed the bridge and all of their “No Trespassing” signs, as well. “I remember you, Jenny. That’s why you may have a word with us. You tried to help us, that’s what I recall about you. Brave girl, that’s what Tressa and I called you then, and I don’t expect you’ve changed, ten years or no. Come in, come in, right this minute.”
Tressa Solberg was his equal in force of personality, if not quite in age. Like Appy, she was—to use Polly’s preacher’s term—morally steadfast. She appeared, wiping her hands on a towel and smiling from ear to ear. They had a reputation for fearsome cantankerousness, but they never directed it at their friends, who were legion.
Tressa pressed food and coffee on me, and I really had to be firm to get out of there quickly without getting stuffed with her cooking like a Christmas turkey.
“You know the fatalities at the trail crossing?” I asked them. “The young man and the little girl before him? Well, the widow of the man who died wants my foundation to come up with a scheme to make that crossing safer for people on the trail.”
“I have the perfect scheme for you,” Appy said.
“Yes, close the whole darn trail.” Tressa finished his thought for him. It was an entirely different sort of interruption, though, than the kind that Nellie inflicted on Bill Kennedy. This was more like two halves of the same brain. “If they hadn’t opened it, nobody would have gotten hurt.”
I made a regretful face. “Too late. But really, what if I wanted to hold a hearing—nothing formal, more like a meeting of interested parties—to get everybody’s ideas about how to save the most lives for the least expense. Or the most expense, I suppose, if that’s what it takes. What do you think the reaction would be from the folks around here?”
“They might say go to hell,” Appy warned me. “Except that it’s you calling the meeting—”
“And,” Tressa added, “there was a child died down there, and nobody wants that to happen again.”
“You’re giving me too much credit,” I told Appy, “but … you’d come, both of you?”
“Jenny,” said Tressa, “did you ever hear of a Solberg who didn’t express his or her opinion any chance they got?”
I smiled at them. “Never did.”
“Never will,” Appy declared, and he grinned, spreading wrinkles across his face like ripples in a pond. Before I left their house, he admonished me to “give that police hubby of yours a piece of my mind about all the trouble we’ve had because of that darned trail. Things just up and disappear from our patios, and we don’t dare leave anything outside overnight. Firewood disappears like snow on a sunny day. I’ll wager I’ve lost a cord of it, all total. It’s just the sort of trouble we predicted ten years ago.”
“We have to lock things up now,” Tressa chimed in, “especially after that horrible thing that happened to Nellie and Bill Kennedy. I offered to help her clean up afterwards, but she wouldn’t hear of it, said she could take care of it all by herself. I think she was feeling bad, myself, just feeling too bad to want anybody else around. Sometimes people just want to lock themselves away from everybody when they’ve been violently invaded, like that.” She looked thoughtful. “We never used to have to ‘lock up,’ either figuratively or literally. If it weren’t for the trail, we still wouldn’t have to.”
“Appy,” I said, a few minutes later, as he showed me courteously to the door, “what’s your latest crusade?”
“Gun ownership,” was his prompt reply, and he looked every bit a stouthearted man of the Massachusetts militia—the original one. “If a man can’t have a right to defend his property and family, I don’t know what this country’s coming to. And you know who we have to be ready to defend ourselves against, ultimately, don’t you?”
“Tell me.”
“Our own government!” He nodded, looking outraged and sage. Appy Solberg never cared if his causes were popular or fashionable; once he formed an opinion, it remained solid. Some people dismissed him and Tressa as right-wing fanatics, but I’d never thought of them as nuts, just as having strong ideas which, unlike many citizens, they actually acted on. “Never trust a government that wants to disarm an honest citizen. Gotta keep your eyes and your sights pinned on those bastards at all times.”
“Apner!” came a sharp reproof from inside the house. “The price of freedom may be eternal vigilance, but not at the cost of your language, sir!”
Appy, having cocked an ear to his wife’s admonition, leaned close to me, so she couldn’t overhear. “I’m not sure that made much sense, do you think it did? You think maybe the old girl’s getting feeble, maybe getting Alzheimer’s?” A wink told me he didn’t mean it.
“You’re both too contrary to age,” I retorted. “You and Tressa will refuse to get old, if it denies your constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness.”
Appy laughed loud at that. “That was a good one, Jenny!”
That wink went a long way toward reassuring me that we might be able to help Melissa Barney without causing controversy among the neighbors. The Solbergs were always the most confrontational and oppositional folks around; if they cooperated, the rest of the neighborhood was sure to go along, too.
Dorothy Wilheim’s address, as taken off our telephone caller identification system, was 5223 W. 63rd St. Circle, which put her in the corner unit of a block of two-story condominiums on a bluff overlooking the ocean. It was prize real estate, because such high ocean views are rare in our area, where most of the terrain marches flatly to the sea. We’re not marshy, like the Cape, and neither are we the Berkshires. Our land is straightforward, much like our citizens, I suppose.
These condos were easily in the quarter- to half-million-dollar class, with terrific views—if you actually like watching hurricanes come to get you.
I had dithered about calling Wilheim first, but decided not to, on the grounds that if there is one thing an anonymous caller is clear about, it’s that she doesn’t want you to call her back. A surprise visit was my tactic, therefore, and I hoped I had more than a macabre reason for staging it. If I were a hurricane approaching her door, she wasn’t going to see me coming.
“Let this not be an exercise in ghoulish curiosity, Jenny,” I warned myself. “You’d better be here only because this woman can tell you firsthand exactly what’s wrong with that trail crossing.”
She was home—or somebody was, judging from the quick clatter of footsteps down a stairway inside the condo. It sounded for all the world like tap shoes on marble.
The woman who opened the door said immediately, “How did you find me?”
22
“CALLER I.D.,” I TOLD HER, FEELING PRETTY SURPRISED, MYSELF.
She was small, thin, with a stylish cap of short silver hair and the most beautiful complexion I’d seen in a long time on any woman of any age. I guessed her to be around sixty. She was wearing a black leotard, black tights, and black tap shoes.
“You are Jenny Cain?” she asked, as if making sure.
“Yes, but how—”
“Your picture’s in the paper a lot, and you’ve been on the news, because of that festival. I don’t think I would have called you, if I hadn’t seen you. You have a sympathetic face. I never expected this, though. I guess you’d like to come in?” A strange expression crossed her rather pixieish face. “Or maybe you don’t. But I guess you must, or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”
A fellow ditherer, I could tell.
When she opened the door wide, I accepted the invitation and stepped inside. There was white marble on the foyer floor, and going up the stairs. The rooms I saw from where I stood were light, mostly white, an individualistic blend of luxury and space. Oil paintings—which I somehow had a feeling she had painted—were explosions of emotional color on the white walls.
&nbs
p; “I mostly live upstairs,” she said, leading me into a pristine white living room with a wall full of spectacular blue ocean view. Her tap shoes clicked pleasantly across the floor, then were muffled by a thick pile carpet with a design woven in different shades of ivory. Her thin arms swung at her sides, like a tin soldier’s. “It’s just one room up there. I use it as my bedroom and my do-everything studio. It’s where I dance and paint and play my flute and hide.”
“This is beautiful.” I sat down on a soft ivory sofa, facing the sea. Everything in the room faced that view, including Dorothy Wilheim and me. She sat two cushions away, creating just the right aesthetic and psychological distance between us. I thought about what she had just said and murmured, “Hide?”
“Look,” she said, in a frank way, “you’re here because I did that stupid thing of calling you. And the only reason I did that was because sometimes I drink too much, and when I do I feel sorry for myself, and I do dumb things. I wasn’t,” she said quickly, “drinking the day of the … accident.”
“You told me to close the highway.”
She flushed, so her face looked very rosy against the white wall and sofa. “Like I said, dumb. I know you can’t do that. That was just me being melodramatic. But if you take the idea down to a more logical level, do you think that trail crossing—just the crossing—could be closed?”
“Well, people—hikers, and the like—would still have to get from one side of the path to the other. I wonder … could you tell me … what is wrong with that place? Is it the stop sign? Is it the hill, or the curve in the road, or the way the trees are so close to the street?”
“In other words, you want to know what happened.”
“I guess I do. I hope it’s not just prurient curiosity.”
“Is there any other kind?”
She took some time unfastening and slipping off her shoes, then tucking her feet up under her. Finally, she looked out to sea, while I looked at her, and then she started talking.
“I don’t—still don’t—know exactly what happened, Jenny. May I call you that? I’d been out for a drive, looking for something, some fresh something, to paint. And I was heading west and it was around seven in the evening on that Sunday, when suddenly I saw my painting. There it was! It was the sunset right in front of my windshield. I was enchanted by the colors. So I was just kind of driving along on automatic pilot, I guess, and drinking up all of that purple and gold and rose and blue and seeing it transferred, just like it was, into oils.”
Twilight Page 25
