The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

by C. R. Corwin

  That’s the problem with Ike, by the way. He’s known me long enough to know what not to do.

  It took us twenty minutes to get there. The huge, double-story building was dark except for a few windows at the rear. We drove toward them across the empty parking lot. Ike pulled up to the curb. He already had his instructions, but he knew enough to show a smidgeon of empathy anyway. “You sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

  “James would just throw a fit.”

  He leaned across my overnight bag and kissed my lips. “You behave in there, okay?”

  I got out of the car. Bent down and gave him the evil eye. “Not a minute after six!”

  “I’ll be here.”

  I forced myself up the walk to the door. The gold letters on the glass looked three feet high: HANNAWA SLEEP CENTER.

  Behind the candy bowl on the counter sat a big woman wearing a white smock covered with happy blue bunnies. She was lost in a romance novel. “I’m here for my sleep test,” I said. “Sprowls.”

  Without looking up she handed me a questionnaire snapped to a clipboard. “After you fill it out I’ll take you to your room.” Her voice was soft and breathy, no doubt very much like the voice of the beautiful heiress in her book at that very moment surrendering to the passions broiling within her for so very long.

  I answered the questions as truthfully as I could. When I went back to the counter, she dog-eared her page, stuck the book in the pocket of her smock and led me down the hallway to my room. It was not the sterile hospital room I expected. It was as homey as anything you’d find at a Best Western. Double bed with a real wooden headboard. Paintings bolted to the flowery wallpaper. Fuzzy rug. TV on the dresser. I put my overnight bag on the bed. “How many are being tested tonight?”

  “All five rooms are filled.”

  “Men and women?”

  “Men one night and women the next,” she said. “We don’t need anything interesting happening, do we?”

  I was relieved. I’d been worrying about some grisly old sleepwalker trying to nuzzle up to me in the night. “You’re going to glue lots of wires to me, I gather.”

  She headed for the door. Her hand was already retrieving the book from her smock. “Get into your PJs. Patti will be in shortly to prepare you.”

  Patti turned out to be Patti Kapustova, a sawed-off girl with impressive hips that would serve her well once she was old enough to bear children. “You look too young to be a nurse,” I said.

  She took it as a compliment. “I’m thirty-three—but thanks.” She looked tired and a bit agitated. She was having a devil of a time trying to untangle the wad of wires she’d brought in with her. “And I’m not a nurse,” she said. “I’m a polysomnographic technologist.”

  She went into a lengthy explanation of the test, how those electrodes in her hand would be attached to my scalp, face, chest, legs, and fingers. How she would monitor my sleep from an adjoining room. How if nature called during the night I could call her and she’d help me waddle to the bathroom. “You have any questions, Mrs. Sprowls?”

  I did have a question. “Kapustova—that wouldn’t be Romanian, would it?”

  She softened a little. “It’s Slovak. My ex-husband’s name. I’m actually French Canadian and Welsh. Barbou and Jones and I end up with Kapustova.”

  “I’m saddled with my ex’s name, too.”

  She glued an electrode to the top of my head. “I recognized your name on the test order. You’re that newspaper woman who solves murders.”

  Unfortunately, The Herald-Union had glowingly reported my role in solving the Buddy Wing and Gordon Sweet murders. “Just my luck,” I cracked. “A polysomnographic technologist with a newspaper subscription.”

  Patti pushed up my pajama legs and glued an electrode to my calf, to record, she said, how much kicking and squirming I did in my sleep. “That’s got to be exciting. Solving murders, and all.”

  “It’s a pain in the ass.”

  She held up the last of her electrodes. Devilishly swayed it back and forth.

  “Oh no you don’t!”

  She glued it on my other calf. “Why did you ask if I was Romanian?”

  It was time to obfuscate. “Names intrigue me.”

  She hooked a small plastic tube under my nose, to monitor my breathing. “I thought maybe you we looking into the death of that woman who claimed to be a queen or whatever.”

  Now it was time to lie. “Heaven’s to Betsy, no.”

  “One of my uncles is married to a Romanian.”

  I pretended not to be interested. “I had an uncle who married a Lithuanian. They’re both dead now, of course.”

  “My uncle and his wife are still alive. In Youngstown.”

  “That’s only half alive, dear.”

  Patti was finally finished with me. “Comfy?”

  “With all these wires I feel like a fly caught in a spider’s web.”

  She smiled at me—just like a spider—and headed for the door. “You’ll be surprised how well you sleep.”

  I hadn’t been very nice to her and I was struggling with an emotion that rarely bubbles up in me. Guilt. I called out to her. “Kapustova is a very pretty name!”

  This time she smiled at me like a puppy. “You know what Kapustova means in Slovak, Mrs. Sprowls? Cabbage! Patti the Cabbage! Nighty night!” She pulled the door shut behind her. I clicked off my lamp and closed my eyes. I twisted this way and that until I was comfortable.

  You’d think I would have used that opportunity to wrestle with the few facts I had about Violeta Bell’s murder, wouldn’t you? The skeleton keys. The lack of blood everywhere but on Eddie’s porch. Eddie’s aversion to guns. Kay Hausenfelter’s pretty pistol. Violeta’s fake Social Security card and surprising poverty. But all I could think about was Ike and why I was taking that damn sleep test for him. I didn’t like what my inner voice was telling me. Not one iota.

  ***

  Saturday, July 29

  Patti the Cabbage woke me up at 5:30. The poor girl had been worn to a frazzle the night before, but now, after eight hours of watching a gaggle of other women sleep, she was wide awake. And way too perky. She started prying the electrodes off me, humming through her nose like a Hawaiian guitar.

  “How’d I do?” I asked her.

  “You snored.”

  I was afraid that was going to be the answer. “How bad?”

  “Like a herd of wild pigs.”

  “Sorry.”

  “For what? I get $18.50 an hour to listen to people snore.”

  The night before I’d had to struggle with guilt. Now it was envy. The young twit made fifty cents more an hour than I did! Then again, to be fair, all I did all day was test the upper limits of people’s blood pressure. “I didn’t stop breathing, did I?”

  She pried off the last electrode. The one on the top of my head. “Your doctor will give you the bad news.”

  I got dressed and headed for the parking lot. Ike and James were waiting for me. They both wanted to kiss me. But I wanted no part of that. I just wanted to go home and shower. I had little blotches of itchy glue all over me. “This might improve your mood,” Ike said, handing me a folded copy of The Herald-Union as we zipped across the empty parking lot. He proudly used the newspaper lingo he’d learned from me. “B-1, below the fold.”

  I pulled out the Metro section. I immediately spotted the story Ike wanted me to read. It was a small story:

  Blood On Cabbie’s Porch

  Not Violeta Bell’s

  HANNAWA—The blood found on the second-story porch of cab driver Edward French was not that of slain antique dealer Violeta Bell, police said.

  In fact, Police Department Public Information Officer Sgt. Michael Giannone said that laboratory tests determined that the blood was not human at all, but from a rabbit.

  Giannone refused to say if French remains a suspect in the 72-year-old woman’s murder.

  The rest of the story offered nothing new—just a rehash of Eddie’s arrest an
d bail. I tore the story out of the paper and stuck it in my overnight bag.

  “Looks like Mr. French was telling the truth,” Ike said.

  “About the cat at least.”

  12

  Monday, July 31

  I backed out of my driveway at six on the dot. It was going to be a long day. And a long week. I was driving home to LaFargeville, New York. Not because I wanted to. Or had to. I was going to LaFargeville because it was right next door to another place I was going. To Wolfe Island. To pay a surprise visit to Prince Anton Alexandur Clopotar, vegetable grower extraordinaire, pretender to the Romanian throne. I knew if I drove all that way to see the prince without making a perfunctory pilgrimage to my own hometown, well, I’d be pounding myself on the head in regret for the rest of my life. The way those idiots in the commercials pound themselves for having a plate of Krispy Kremes for breakfast instead of a V8.

  I drove out West Apple to Hemphill College then took the Indian Creek Parkway north to I-77. It was still dark but already the traffic was picking up. Sleepy, coffee-slurping suburbanites on their way to their jobs in Cleveland.

  I’d asked Ike to close his coffee shop for a week and come with me. But as I expected, he said no. “You know I can’t be taking off willy-nilly like that,” he said, as we stood side by side in front of my bathroom mirror brushing our teeth. “My regulars rely on me.”

  Being the proud old bird I was, I could hardly tell him that I was afraid of facing my childhood alone. All I could do was shrug, spit my Tartar-Control Sensodyne into the sink and say, “Okay, but you’re going to miss out on one of the worst experiences of your life.”

  Ike did show some concern about my going alone. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving that cranky old Dodge of yours,” he said. “You won’t get to the Pennsylvania line before something under the hood goes kerflooey.”

  And that’s why I was floating up I-77 in his big, sensible Chevrolet. Thermos of Darjeeling tea on the empty seat next to me. James in the back seat licking himself. Bush-Cheney ’04 sticker on the bumper.

  I must confess that Ike was not my first choice as a travel companion. My first choice, believe it or not, would have been Eric Chen. He’d already taken a couple of road trips with me on past investigations. He was surprisingly easy to handle—as long as I kept him well supplied with junk food and Mountain Dews. Gabriella Nash might have made another good travel buddy. She was afraid of me. She was already up to her eyeballs in my secret effort to learn the truth about Violeta Bell. Unfortunately she’d only been at the paper for six weeks. She could hardly take a week’s vacation. Another possibility was Effie Fredmansky, my old college pal and owner of Last Gasp Books. The previous summer we’d driven to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia together. We had a damn good time even though I suspected her of murder. But Effie, like Ike, had a business to run. And so James got the nod.

  Thanks to the heavy traffic, and my decision to pour myself a cup of tea at the worst possible time, I missed the bypass and had to drive straight into downtown Cleveland. I made it around that hellish bend the locals call Deadman’s Curve—not something everybody does successfully apparently—and headed east on I-90, along the southern shore of Lake Erie. The water was just as pretty as it could be.

  For a long while I drove past abandoned factories and empty railroad yards. Then little by little I eased into Ohio’s grape country. It isn’t the Napa Valley, but it is still quite impressive. One vineyard after another, for I don’t know how many miles, taking advantage of the warm lake air. I reached Erie, Pennsylvania at nine. Buffalo, New York at 10:30. Buffalo is a big Hannawa. Which doesn’t say much about either city.

  I got on the turnpike and headed into the bumpy bowels of upstate New York. At a service plaza outside Rochester I stopped for gas. I bought a rubbery chicken sandwich for my lunch. I found a nice plot of grass for James to irrigate.

  I reached Syracuse at two o’clock. I took I-81 north. Ninety minutes later I was in Watertown, population 27,705. What London is to the English and Paris to the French, Watertown is to the people of Jefferson County, New York. The big city they outwardly loathe while secretly lusting to visit.

  LaFargeville was just 15 miles up the road. But I’d been driving, and thinking, for ten hours. I was pooped. Physically and psychologically. I got off the interstate and drove downtown. I checked into the Best Western. It was right there on Washington Street. Right about where fifty years before I’d caught the Greyhound Bus to Hannawa and Hemphill College. It was a pet-friendly hotel, meaning that James could stay in my room for an extra ten dollars. I didn’t take him with me into the lobby. I figured they’d take one look at the big bear and charge me an extra hundred.

  ***

  Tuesday, August 1

  I walked James around the hotel grounds until he found just the right spot on the dew-soaked grass to pee. Then we headed up Route 12 toward LaFargeville. Outside Watertown we were immediately surrounded by cow pastures and cornfields. As far as I knew, those were the very same cows and the very same stalks of corn that drove me out of LaFargeville in the fifties.

  This narrow plain between Lake Ontario to the west and the Adirondack Mountains to the east is low and scruffy. Which makes it hot and buggy in the summer and absolutely uninhabitable in the winter. The lake winds drive the temperatures low and pile the snow high. There’s not much for people to do up there but make babies and cheese. And they make a lot of both. And both leave as soon as they’re properly aged. I turned onto Route 180 and headed toward LaFargeville.

  My first stop was Grove Cemetery. I followed the looping drive around to where we Madisons have been burying each other for 150 years.

  Grove Cemetery is well named. The graves are forever in the shadows of the great oaks towering above them. The older stones are covered with moss. I let James run free and walked across the slippery grass to my parents’ headstone. I hadn’t been there in sixteen years. Since my mother’s funeral. And I’d never seen the date of her death chiseled on the stone. It threw me for a loop.

  My mother had survived my father by twelve years. Those twelve years weren’t very happy ones for her. But neither were the forty-two years she’d been married to my father. She loved my father, I think. And she loved us kids, I’m sure. But she wasn’t so keen on herself. She never kept herself fixed up as well as she might. “What’s the use with all the work I’ve got to do?” she’d say. And she never allowed herself to have a good time. “How can I enjoy myself with all the work I’ve got waiting at home?” she’d say. Today your family would force you to see somebody. You’d be diagnosed with clinical depression and given some pills. But back then when my mother was struggling to stay afloat, depression was seen as a moral weakness. And a stigma on the entire family. All my father could do was warn my brother and me that, “Mama’s a little down in the dumps today.”

  My father, on the other hand, was the happiest man on the planet. He loved being a dairy farmer. He loved his cows. He loved going out to the barn and sticking those milking machine nozzles on their teats. He loved taking his filled cans of milk to the dairy. He loved handing the money over to my mother when he got back. “Not much for all the work, is it?” she’d say.

  My brother, George Jr., is buried next to my mother and father. He died when I was sixteen. In Korea. When he was nineteen. My parents bought a plot next to his for themselves. They bought one for me, too. One big enough for a future husband and for any future children that might, like George Jr., die before their time.

  I can’t blame my parents for thinking that I’d stay in LaFargeville, or at least settle down nearby in Depauville or Clayton. Even when I went off to Hemphill College to study library science, I’m sure they figured I wouldn’t end up any farther away than Alexandria Bay, or, since I was proving to be a headstrong girl with gumption, Watertown. Little did they know that my sights were set on Syracuse. When I was ten, my Aunt Dorothy took me to the main library in downtown Syracuse. I was staying with her that summer, help
ing her with her housework while she was recovering from her “women’s problem” surgery. Anyway, I took one look at that big castle full of books and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in there, bathed in all that respectful silence, sniffing in all that slowly decaying ink and paper, far away from the smell and moo of my father’s cows.

  Instead, I met and married Lawrence Sprowls, who after a few fairly happy years of marriage metamorphosed into a skirtchasing skunk. But that marriage did keep me far away from LaFargeville. And it did land me the best-possible job in the world: head librarian of The Hannawa Herald-Union. I remember what I wrote my aunt a few months after getting the job: It’s better than a castle, auntie. It’s a newsroom.