by Lynn Bulock
Before long the music began to gather tune and sound more purposeful, and several people gathered to sit in the chairs set out facing the benches, close to the speaker’s podium. While plenty of flowers surrounded the urn, nowhere were there definite symbols of any specific religion in the way of banners, crosses or anything else. White candles flickered in stands tied with pale ribbon, all of it lending an air of poignancy to the occasion.
The memorial service turned out to be much more “inspirational” than religious. California has a host of churches and religious institutions that I’d never heard of before coming out here, and the woman presiding over today’s service was of one of those faith expressions. God was mentioned as a creator spirit in a sort of vague way. The whole proceedings made me wonder what Hal and Nicole’s marriage ceremony would have sounded like.
Friends and colleagues got up and said things about Nicole. She was remembered as a kind, conscientious person who might have made quite a mark in her profession had she lived. Hal talked briefly, managing to hold himself together for most of his speech, making my heart ache for him. Even though any romantic feelings for him had disappeared years ago, I still understood the man better than I did most of the male population. I knew that talking about Nicole under these circumstances in front of this many people had to be tearing him apart.
The minister or presider or whatever she might be called then spoke for a while, and it was fairly apparent that while she might have known the Barnes family in a peripheral kind of way, she hadn’t had much contact with Nicole. Nothing she said about her had the depth that Hal’s remarks or even Nicole’s fellow grad students had shown. I found myself getting weepy wondering how I’d be remembered if I died at this point in my life. Who could say something substantial about me? And how much of it would be good?
While I’d been in my little reverie they’d played a piece of music that probably had a great deal of significance for Nicole and others her age, but that was totally unfamiliar to me. Then her father stepped to the podium, clearing his throat several times before he could speak. “From the moment that she was born, Nicole was the brightest spot in my life,” he began. I decided then and there the man had all the typical people skills of a surgeon. Here he stood in front of his wife and his living daughter and basically told them they were second best. He continued to go on about Nicoleher sunny disposition as a child, her determination to succeed academically and her dreams to become a doctor. I hoped he and Lillian would be sitting near each other at La Tavola so they could compare notes on their brilliant kids. He hadn’t seemed to think much of Hal, and I was fairly positive that Hal’s mom would have said that while Nicole might have come closer than I did, she wasn’t good enough for Lillian’s pride and joy.
Listening to all of this kept teasing an idea from my brain. I wanted to pull a pen from my purse and write something on the back of the service bulletin just to remind me to ask a few questions at the gathering afterward. That would be rude, though, and call attention to me. As it was I just listened intently to Paul Barnes continue to praise his dead daughter while the living one moved ever closer to her mother’s side.
After Paul finished speaking there was another song, one that I almost recognized. The lovely young soloist sang perfectly with tears softly running down her cheeks. Once more the horrible irony of the day overwhelmed me. This girl must have bought her dress and learned her piece to sing at a wedding and instead she was performing at a funeral. Many of the people there had joined the singer in tears by the time she finished and the older woman in her dark suit closed the proceedings. The family led the way out of the “chapel” and the rest of us followed slowly. Outside the June gloom of the morning had burned off into brilliant sunshine, mocking the mood of the service.
Before I reached my car Ben caught up with me. “Dad sent me over to ask if you are coming to the restaurant. I think he really wants you there.” My son looked like he’d been crying, and the handkerchief that had been tucked into his breast pocket was gone.
“Yes, I’ll come. Tell him I won’t stay for hours because I don’t think it would be right, but I’ll be there for a while.” I straightened Ben’s collar and patted him on the shoulder. “I’ve probably already told you this, but I’m proud of the way you’ve been there for your dad lately.” Unspoken between us was the thought that Hal might not have been able to give Ben the same kind of support had the situation demanded.
“Thanks, Mom.” He looked down at me and gave me a brief hug. “I don’t think I’m the only guy who learned to be a man from watching his mom handle life.” He dropped a quick kiss somewhere in the region of the top of my head and loped back across the parking lot toward the building. If I’d been proud of him before, I was, as my Granny Jo would have said, “fit to bust” watching him now.
La Tavola was the kind of place where alcoves often held celebrities having a quiet dinner and the chef was rumored to be so hot that he was next up for a show on the cable food channel. Whatever the trendy ingredients of the moment and cooking styles on the cutting edge were, whether it was roasted pumpkin seeds, goat cheese croutons or things like fondueso uncool that it was cool againthey would show up here first.
I’d never been through the front doors before, not being willing to drop a week’s pay on lunch. Today the smoked-glass doors had elegant hand-lettered signs informing the regular clientele that lunch service would be limited to the patio due to a private party.
Inside the atmosphere was somber and the bar darkened. The trendy Tuscan decor lent itself to the quiet mood and the staff had obviously been well-informed of the nature of the gathering because they went about their work with little conversation.
Tables for eight ranged around the main room of the restaurant, heavy damask tablecloths further adding to the noise-dampening quality of the place. Across the room Hal stood, having loosened his tie a bit and draped his dark gray suit jacket over the back of a chair. In the low light he didn’t look much older than Ben until I got close enough to see the new lines on either side of his mouth. “Ben said you were coming. I appreciate it, Gracie Lee.”
“Hey, I told you I’d try to make it,” I told him. “I hope you get time to eat something. You look like it’s been days since you had a real meal.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Now you sound like my mother. I’ve even turned down her offers to cook chicken and dumplings so you know I’ve had no appetite.”
“That’s pretty understandable. Try to eat something anyway, just to keep yourself going. Is it hard to get into the habit of doing your own meals with Nicole gone?”
He shrugged. “Not that much different. We went out a lot of nights, even with that granite-and-cherry kitchen big enough to have a party in. We did a lot of sushi.”
That was hard for me to wrap my mind around, but I didn’t press. “And when you stayed home?” I asked.
Hal looked off in the middle distance, remembering what must have been better times. “Nicole mostly fixed herself a salad or had one of those dinky cups of nonfat yogurt. She’d bring in all kinds of stuff for me, but any time lately I mentioned grilling a steak or having pizza or anything she clucked about fitting into that backless wedding dress.”
The idea I’d had before grew stronger with every word Hal spoke. The picture of Nicole in her white lab coat the day I’d met her at Playa del Sol flashed in my memory; I could see her frail wrists poking out from the cuffs of the coat, and the way she’d absently toyed with her engagement ring.
Hal stopped talking, looking like he’d run out of steam. “Well, I don’t want to get Ellie mad at you, so I’ll move on to a table someplace before she gets here,” I told him. “I’ll come back and say goodbye before I leave.”
He nodded with a distracted air, scanning the room in case his almost in-laws came through the door. I hadn’t seen them yet, but I did notice Cat and Monica standing near the buffet table of salads, talking softly with a third young woman I thought I recognized f
rom the hospital.
Once they had gotten plates and the group dispersed I went quickly through the line myself, putting food on my plate so that I fit in with the rest, then going over to the table where Monica and the nurse sat together. They asked me to join them and I did, picking at my food for a little while, waiting for the right moment to ask them a few things. It came quickly when Cat excused herself to get up for a moment.
“Maybe this is terrible, but I’ve always heard this place has the best tiramisu in the county and I’ll never come here again on my own. Do you two want anything from the dessert table?”
Monica and I both turned her down. Once Cat had left the table I leaned closer to Monica. She had gray-blue circles under her eyes that her makeup couldn’t quite conceal. “Do you feel like you made it through today all right?” I asked her. “This has to have been a difficult day.”
“It has been, but I’m getting through okay.” Even in this slightly dark corner of the restaurant, I could see the stress on Monica’s face.
“I’d like to ask you a question, and I’ll understand if you choose not to answer,” I told her. “After looking at all the pictures of Nicole last night, it made me wonder. Did she have an eating disorder when you roomed together at Vanderbilt?”
Monica looked at me silently for a moment and I felt sure that she was ready to shut me down. Then she looked away and spoke softly. “Not so much at first. She told me she’d gotten some treatment in high school, but that being away from her family she was okay. And she was, until about a week before finals. Then she probably dropped five pounds in as many days, and she was the only girl on the floor who hadn’t gained the Freshman Fifteen. On her you could really notice when she stopped eating out of stress.”
“The pictures seemed to show a pattern. She looked thinner and a bit distracted in every big ‘event’ photo that involved her, and not nearly as much otherwise.”
Monica nodded. “That was Nicole. Always sure she could control everything, wanted life to be perfect. Somewhere along the line her brain bought into the idea that perfect meant thin, and her eating was the one thing she could control when everything else fell apart.”
I went with my gut instinct and asked the big question. “When did she start doing that again? And did her parents know?”
Monica’s eyes filled with tears. “I told her she ought to tell them but Nicole said no way. She talked her therapist into sending her to somebody they knew who would prescribe some meds for her and she just kept on going. I thought maybe she should postpone the wedding if everything was that nuts for her, but she didn’t go for that idea, either.”
I couldn’t tell Monica just how much her friend actually had gone for that idea, although it had done her little good. “So you don’t think her family knew this time that she’d needed a doctor?”
“Probably not. And I know Hal didn’t. She made me swear not to tell him, even the day she almost passed out at work.”
There are sometimes I hated to be right and this was one of them. “Did anybody else know besides you and her doctors, do you think?”
Monica’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “Cat, maybe. Nicole confided in her as much as she did in me, I think. But otherwise she would have kept it quiet. If the hospital would have found out they might have pulled her off group therapy rotation and she needed the clinical hours to finish up her degree.”
Before we could say more Cat came back with a small plate in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. “Tiramisu and ricotta-almond cannoli, too. And I brought enough cookies to share.” We stopped our conversation for a moment and each took a cookie from the plate as Cat sat down. Right now a little sugar sounded as good as anything else. If I didn’t already feel so jumpy I might have looked for a cup of real Italian espresso to go with it all. Maybe they had decaf.
SIXTEEN
I ended up getting decaf cappuccino for Monica and myself, and then sat and listened to her and Cat talk a little more about Nicole. Cat asked Monica what Nicole had been like as a roommate. “I mean, could she find anything in her half of the room? Did it look like her cubicle at the hospital?”
“Worse. By October I’d bought this special bowl that was bright red, and I put it on top of my dresser. Not her dresser, but mine. And every time she came in the room I made her put her keys in it because I was already tired of the hour-long searches and calling the residence hall service that made keys.”
“Which was up to you because half the time she didn’t have a phone, right?”
Monica nodded. “Right. She didn’t ever lose the phone, but she always forgot to charge it or she couldn’t find the charger. At least she got over that part.”
Cat wrinkled her nose, emphasizing the pale freckles across her cheeks. “Yeah. It’s hard to forget a phone that rings every three minutes. Even that last night, it never stopped ringing.”
This sounded like new information. “Who was she talking to?” Surely Hal didn’t keep that close a watch on her. He might be a type-A neat freak but he wasn’t controlling in other ways.
“Paige,” they both said together.
“Her sister felt really bad about not coming with us that night, and she must have called Nicole seven or eight times,” Monica explained. “I told her to just turn the phone off, but she wouldn’t do it.”
“She wanted to talk to Paige,” Cat added. “There was something going on that she wasn’t telling us. Monica might have been her best friend, but Paige always ranked higher.”
Okay, that surprised me, and I said so. “From what I’ve seen of the parents I would have thought the girls would be at each other’s throats.”
Monica smiled. “You don’t have a sister, do you?”
“Nope. I’m an only child,” I admitted.
“Kids whose parents play favorites either compete their whole lives or band together in sympathy. Nicole and Paige stuck together. But even Paige didn’t know that Nicole was taking anti-anxiety drugs to try to combat the anorexia.”
Cat took another sip of coffee, looking thoughtful. “That’s one thing we knew that her family didn’t. Nicole’s biggest problem might have been that she didn’t let anybody in on all her secrets. I think she and Hal might have had a fight before she left the house that night, but Nicole pretended everything was great. She kept tossing down Kamikaze shots fast enough to worry both of us.” She looked over at Monica. “I know I paid the bartender at that second place to leave the vodka out of hers. I was afraid she was going to get sick.”
Monica shook her head, looking down at the table. “I think we were both trying to keep her from drinking. Why didn’t it work?”
Cat suddenly looked more somber. “Maybe it did. Even though she swore she was going straight home after we poured coffee down her at your place, I heard her talking to Paige again in the car right before she left. What if they met up somewhere?”
Monica rocked back in her chair, and I felt cold fingers climb my spine. This could be the missing piece of the puzzle. Perhaps Nicole’s secrecy and need to be perfect were the ultimate causes of her death. I looked around the room, scanning each table from our quiet spot with its great vantage point. Twenty or thirty others gathered at different areas, but I couldn’t find the person I wanted most.
Actually, there were a few people I wanted to find, and my first look around didn’t spot any of them. Not only was Paige absent but I didn’t see Hal anywhere, or Ellie Barnes. I told myself that could mean the three of them were finally having their differences out somewhere, but the atmosphere of the room was still too subdued for there to be that kind of argument going on. On a hunch, I went into the ladies’ room and found Ellie at the long vanity mirror sitting on one of the upholstered stools where women sat to fix their makeup.
“What on earth are you doing here?” She glared into the mirror as I stood behind her. “Don’t you have the decency to let our family grieve in peace?”
“I’m sorry my presence upsets you, Mrs. Barnes, but Hal asked me to
come and I said I would. He loved your daughter very much and I think he needs all the support he can get right now.” We seemed to be the only two people here. “Actually I’m getting ready to leave, and I wanted to talk to Paige first.”
“Well, she’s not with me. I haven’t seen her since we got here. We had to almost manhandle her to get her into her father’s car for the trip to the restaurant. He was barely parked when she leaped out.”
“Did that surprise you?” I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but as usual, my tongue was running ahead of my common sense.
“Not really. I’ve tried to tell her that her father doesn’t mean half of what he says, and that right now he’s just beside himself, anyway. But Paige has always been sensitive where her father’s concerned.”
That might be the understatement of the year. “After talking to Cat and Monica I’m a little concerned about your daughter, Ellie. Do you think she’s still here somewhere?”
“Of course. We all came together and she doesn’t have enough money with her to get back to Newport Beach otherwise. Even somebody in as good a shape as Paige wouldn’t leave on foot dressed like she was.”
“I hope you’re right,” I told her, my worry growing with the minute. I had a funny feeling about all of this, and whether he would believe me or not, it was time to tell Ray. I left Ellie still looking in the mirror and went out into the main room to find my favorite detective.
Of course nobody had seen him in at least fifteen minutes. “I think he took a phone call about something, and then he left quickly.” I got the information from what I thought was the least likely source, my former mother-in-law. When I couldn’t find Ray I’d started looking for Hal. Naturally he’d gone into the manager’s office, according to his mother, to settle the bill. When I mentioned I’d actually been looking for the detective she surprised me by telling me where he’d gone, as well.
