by Jo Barney
As he drives away, he goes over the evidence. A woman who knows the tides gets caught behind a rock in a cove and is unable to escape, in fact, is pinned down behind a rock, and on top of that, is weighed down by an illegal number of mussels in a pack she carries on the front of her body. The woman has not told anyone where she is going at 5:00 a.m., and no one hears her go. Her friends find her walking stick on the beach but do not report her absence until late that day. They say she might have a lover, might be somewhere close, but retract that idea a few hours later because she would never let them worry. They insist on a search party, which turns up nothing.
And then there’s the walking stick, he tells himself, as he pulls up in front of his office.
Last night, when he remarked on the tide book and said they should go behind the point in the morning, it was as if the women had already decided to go and were waiting for him to suggest it. They go; they find their dead friend. So does a mussel hunter who makes it around the point before they do. A guy with a tall walking stick, a lot like the one that now lies on the mantel, wet.
* * *
Lucius pulls in front of his office, not willing to get out of the car until he completes the thought. Suppose the man with the bruised hands, this Roger, helped the women kill their friend. That would explain the strange vibes he receives every time he sees them. Motivation? Maybe money. Maybe she left her money to them. Shouldn’t be hard to find out.
“My mom says everything’s about money. Her and my dad watch Perry Mason every noon and it’s always money.” Liz has listened to his conjectures with the bright eyes of a paperback mystery lover. He probably shouldn’t have told her his suspicions, at least before they got to be somewhat more substantiated, but who else was there? Times like this he misses his first wife, who at least pretended she was listening, among other things. However, in the telling, he begins to get the feeling that his ideas are all wet. None of those women would murder a friend, even if the friend isn’t really a friend. He’d bet his retirement on that, once he tries to imagine Lou and Jackie and Joan sitting down and planning it like Madge’s menus. Even for money. Especially for money, despite what Liz’s mother says.
Maybe the sons will shed some light on this. Lucius tells Liz to close up the office and heads to the practice range. A bucket of balls will settle his stomach if not his doubts. On the way out, he picks up a pink telephone message Liz has left in the IN basket. Jack Marshall, the guy building the McMansion up on the hill, wants him to know that an old lady is using the garage. Does he have to post a security guard or what?
Liz has not indicated what tone of voice the Or What was delivered in. He wads the paper and tosses it toward the wastebasket.
Chapter Fifty
Monday Afternoon: Blowout
Lou
“So far, so good.” Jackie’s little diatribe seemed to impress Lucius, and all that remains now is to tell Jim and Grant today’s sad story. At least one version of it, the one Madge wanted her sons to hear. This may be the hardest part. Lou looks through the window at the devastated man in the lounge chair and realizes that it is his to tell. Madge would have thought it a bit ironic. She hopes Roger can do it. She moves through the sliding door and sits down beside him.
When Jim and Grant arrive an hour later, Lou answers the door, and they look at her and know. She brings them into the living room where the others wait, and Roger rises to meet them, extending a hand, then collapsing against each of them in turn. “Tell us,” the sons say. The women are silent as Roger describes how he arrived early, went to the point ahead of the sheriff and the others because he knew in his heart what he would find, and he wanted to be the one to find her. He tells of the full mussel bag, the tire iron that held her under the rock so that she had been found, the carrying of her body out of the cove and then to the hospital.
Lou can hardly stand to hear his words, to know what he is not saying, to realize the courage it is taking to tell this story. She turns away, wipes her eyes on her sweatshirt, sees Jackie reach for a cocktail napkin.
“A terrible accident,” Roger says. “Your mother was taken by the sea she loved. We’ll never know if she lost track of time, fell, or was overwhelmed by a sneaker wave. We’ll never know.”
The sons do not ask questions as he speaks. Tears wet Grant’s cheeks. Jim looks toward the ocean, unmoving.
Lou bends to light a fire. Her own sons will weep when she dies, like these two sons, despite what they will know about her as time goes by. Sons are quick to forgive their mothers. These sons have forgiven theirs for becoming ill. They will also forgive her for dying and disrupting the rhythm of their lives.
Grant speaks. “You said she was okay the day she disappeared. Was she, Lou?”
She doesn’t have to lie. Yes, Madge was okay. She knew exactly what she was about. She was looking forward to the next few days. Lou does not say that Madge’s words lay in her lap that first night, were read in hesitant phrases, pages turning softly. They do not need to know any of that. Or how Madge burned those pages early the next morning, the warm ashes fluttering and sinking in the coals as the others woke up, found her gone. She does not tell them of the walk the three of them had taken along Madge’s ocean, grieving as the ashes cooled.
The sons go out on the beach, their strides in counterpoint across the rough dunes, shoulders brushing, jarring missteps. When they reach the hard wet sand, their legs find a rhythm, the slow beat of a mourning drum, perhaps. Lou, watching from the window above them, believes she sees their hands touching as their bodies blend into one moving entity below her. She turns, feeling a breath on her neck, and finds Jackie and Joan standing behind her, also watching. “We’re like them, aren’t we?” Jackie says. “In this together.”
“Yep,” Joan answers, “and we’re not quite finished.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Monday Late Afternoon: Seventh Wave
Lucius
What old lady? Lucius has just shot a ball two hundred and fifty yards toward the back fence and in the midst of a flood of heady satisfaction, the question floats to the surface. When he and Liz scoured the village, they found very few old ladies with the exception of the three at Madge’s beach house.
A phone call later, he discovers that the Hispanic worker has the license number of the car in his pocket. A drive past the Madge’s beach house confirms it is the same as that of the car parked in the driveway when he came by this morning. Another car, also a rental, is parked next to it. The sons have arrived. Lucius pulls up behind them. A few months ago, he and his grandson found out that at some point, a person has to dig fast with both hands bring up a razor clam. A lot like now. He’ll have to meet the sons first, though, before he starts digging.
Jackie answers the door. Despite her sad eyes, she looks good, her wild hair tamed against her neck, her lips red and curved in welcome. “Come in, Lucius,” she says. “I was about to have a glass of wine. Will you join me?” Lucius says yes and looks around. A pot on the kitchen stove is bubbling a little, Italian, he guesses from the smell of garlic. Jackie watches him glancing at the emptiness of the living room and says, “They’re all out on the beach. Jim and Grant are taking their mother’s death very hard.” She hands him a glass of red wine. “Roger, too. We’re all screwed up.” She leads him to the couch. “Sorry I yelled at you this morning. Joan reminded me later that you were just doing your job.”
She’s pretty calm, Lucius thinks, for a woman who was screaming like a banshee three hours earlier. This probably isn’t her first drink of the day, the way she’s leaning back against a pillow like she is in total control of herself, of everything. He watches as she drains her glass and sets it on the trunk in front of them.
“You seemed uncomfortable with things this morning, like there is something…” she pauses, raises her eyes, “wrong with Madge’s death, not that it wasn’t wrong to begin with.” She blinks away the wetness gathering on her eyelashes. “I mean, suspicious. Right?”
In di
fferent circumstances, Lucius might believe that now it is Jackie who was coming on to him, but she is so still against her pillow, so sad, he wonders if it’s maybe meds, not him, she’s experiencing. Maybe she really is cracking up, as he guessed she might the first day he met her.
A good time to start the digging, maybe. He settles his wine glass next to hers, their knees almost touching.
“I hate this part of my job,” he says. “Dotting all the i’s before I can close the file. I do have a couple more questions.”
Before he can begin, Jackie asks him to bring out the bottle of zin from the kitchen. She’d like a little more. So would he, she says. And she’ll answer as truthfully as she can.
He pours them both another glass, takes a swallow, and plunges in. “Why was Roger here a day before you said he had come?”
Jackie hesitates, fingers brushing her lips as if to grant them forgiveness for what they are about to say. “He loved her. So much that he disobeyed her instructions, took the risk of being caught. He had to be a part of it all.”
“Caught?”
“In the know, about the plan. No one was supposed to know. Except us three, of course.” Jackie shook her head, looked into her glass. “I knew it couldn’t work, right from the beginning. Even if Madge had planned everything down to the last detail. The others wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Madge planned her death?”
“Of course.”
“Why all the—”
“Because of the insurance. Roger can’t be involved in any way. Her sons will get her estate, her books, the houses, but the insurance is for Roger. But only part of it if they know she’s killed herself.” Tears wander down her strong jaw and drop to her breast. Lucius wishes he had a handkerchief to hand her.
“And her sons. Madge didn’t want them to know.”
Lucius doesn’t get it. “Know what? They had to know that she died. Dead is dead. What difference would it make, how?”
Of course, it would make a difference, Lucius realizes. Which would be easier to accept, a mother who drowned or a mother who abandoned them? Even he, having experienced some abandonment himself, knows the answer to that question.
His hand finds its way to Jackie’s knee. She wipes away the trail of tears on her chin with a sleeve and looks down at his fingers, silent.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “The question should be, ‘Why?’”
Her leg moves under his hand as she turns toward him. “She couldn’t write any more. She was losing all her words. She was losing all of her people, even the boys. She was losing her world. If she had to lose all this, she wanted to lose it on her own terms.” Jackie’s brown eyes rise to his, unblinking, steady. She is asking something of him.
Yes, plucky, loyal, good liars, except that these women are even more courageous when they tell the truth. Lucius understands they are daring him to be as brave, to join the plot, finish Madge’s story the way she had planned. He considers the idea for a moment, and he can’t think why he shouldn’t. Like he said, dead is dead. He squeezes her knee in answer. He likes the smile she gives him, likes that it is his hand on her, not the reverse.
“Must have been a sneaker wave,” he says, “like you all guessed.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Monday Evening: Moonlit Ripple
Joan
Jim and Grant have gone off to the B&B to sleep, perhaps, and to meet with Lucius and the doctor in the morning to make the arrangements for Madge. They will also deal with journalists creating their obituaries for a writer no one anticipated would die mid-novel and nowhere near the end of a successful run. Roger, sleeping at the moment in the back bedroom, will talk with Madge’s publisher, her agent, other literary hangers-on.
Her three friends will pack and leave. But not quite yet. In the morning. At the moment, they are lounging in front of the fire, the dark windows reflecting flickers of soft faces, a moving chiaroscuro scene, Joan thinks.
“Jackie, we love you. No one else could have done it. Really. A confession from a woman who a few hours before wanted to duke it out with him. His suspicions confirmed. His ego plumped up to overflowing. His hand on your knee.” Joan is feeling the wine, but she knows the truth of what she says. She tips her glass at the other two, and Lou adds, “You betchum, Red Rider.” She also has had a couple drinks and has put aside the medieval English for the moment.
“Lucius isn’t a bad guy, you know.” Jackie’s eyes have lit up at Joan’s compliment, and she is spreading the credit around. “You were right, Joan. I didn’t have to get hysterical or anything, like you said. He understood right away.”
Lou grins. “I loved the way you just let his hand be there, silently connecting the two of you.”
“Knee cap Morse code. Joan taught me.”
“A handy skill.” Joan is lying on the couch and tries not to spill her wine as she lifts it to her lips. Impossible. She sits up. “I couldn’t do it; he was getting gun-shy around me, antsy, like he wasn’t sure what I’d touch next. We needed a surprise attack. You, Jackie, who couldn’t ever stay in the same room with Lucius without getting mad or sick.” Joan empties her glass and reaches for the bottle. “And we need to drink to our Mexican buddy who ratted on us, and to a still-damp piece of wood which gave it all away, and to our dear friend Madge who inspired us to rise above our mundane ambitions and become story tellers of the highest ilk.”
“Hear, hear,” Lou says. “And to you, Joan, who realized in time that we were in deep shit, story-telling wise.”
“What’s ilk?” Jackie asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” Joan answers.
Jackie pouts. ”You’re doing it again.”
“And you enjoy it.”
“I’ll miss her.”
Lou nods. “But she left us a lot to remember her by. Including her versions of our lives in Think on These Things.”
Joan lets an idea flit through her, cause her heart to quicken. “I recorded what we said last night, for no good reason. Maybe we could finish her book somehow. Our goodbye gift?”
“A new take on closure? I hate that word.”
Joan knows it’s not the word Lou hates, of course, it’s the reason the word exists. “And I hate goodbye, too. How about a project to keep Madge alive and part of us?”
“We could dedicate the book to our friendship, to solariums, to…”
“Finding things of good report. For women like us who might be wondering if such things exist. Madge would like that.”
“Don’t look at me,” Jackie says. “My talent lies in impressing sheriffs. I majored in P.E., remember?”
“But Roger could put Madge’s book together.” Lou’s bare feet hit the floor as she sits up, wine splashing onto her toes. “He’s been reading and editing her books for a long time. What do you think, Joan? Only please hold up publication until I talk to my sons?” She sighs. “They’re in for a surprise.”
“You’ve got a year at least. By then they’ll know, and it’ll be okay.” Joan realizes this last Madge project is possible, runs her tongue over her upper lip. “I’ve only a day or two before I will finish up my story.” She nods at Jackie. “Maybe just a ‘Fuck off and go pray somewhere.’ Only with Brian it will be, ‘Go stray somewhere.’” She’ll have time to practice on the drive to San Francisco. It’ll be a short sweet speech, attached to a short sweet plan for dividing their goods, for renewing one season opera ticket, not two, for dumping a dream, learning to live free.
“We’re about done here, aren’t we?” Jackie looks exhausted by her success, their success. And Joan knows, by the flood of sadness filling this flame-flickered room, a sadness that no amount of wine and laughter can hold back.
Lou closes her eyes. “I’m not sure I’m through crying.”
“We won’t ever be, do you think?” Joan murmurs.
Jackie yawns, perhaps too drained to think about that sad idea. “Madge would say that old ladies need their sleep.”
“And that tomorrow’s another day.�
�� Joan hears his wise voice, the man in the periwinkle golf pants again.
“Whatever that means. Like is that hopeful?”
Lou sits up. “It’s the best we’ve got, Jackie. Madge taught us that, didn’t she?” She pulls her cat pajama leg over a skinny shin, shifts to get up.
Jackie yawns again. “A little like jumping out window, I think.”
California Girl takes over. “We have to move Roger to the couch. Or the three of us could sleep on it like in college, falling into each other’s bony legs and hips.”
“Waking up with cramps.”
“Spilling cold black coffee down our robes.”
“Talking about sex.”
“Instead of doing it.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Don’t brag, Jackie.”
“I still can’t get over how Lucius knew what we wanted him to do. He just gave my knee a squeeze, said, ‘Okay. Probably a sneaker wave.’ And then he and got up and left. We should probably thank him.”
Lou sighs one more time, stands, makes her way to the kitchen with the wine bottle and the glasses. “Methinks you’ll find a way, friend. Let’s move Roger. We’re way too old for the couch.”
About the Author
After graduating from Willamette University, Jo spent the most of next thirty years teaching, counseling, mothering, wifing and of course, writing.
* * *
Her writing first appeared in small literary magazines and professional publications. Since retirement, she has had time to write four novels and two screenplays. The first book used her teaching life as inspiration and served as a way to leave a profession she loved. The second story focused on her then-prodigal son, the hockey player. She’s quite sure he is relieved that it has not yet been published. Her third novel, Her Last Words (formerly Uprush), is an intimate, almost true, story of four middle-aged women lot like her own long-time friends. The Runaway (formerly Graffiti Grandma) examines the life of an elderly woman and the underworld of the homeless. Never Too Late tells the story of Edith who wakes up one morning to find she is a widow.
