by Maggie King
I stifled a gasp at her increasing anger. The phrase “I finally got rid of Carlene” had not escaped me. Was she saying that she personally got rid of Carlene? If so, her confession ratcheted up our personal danger an infinite number of notches. And no sign of Vince, confirming my earlier fear that I hadn’t pressed the speed-dial button firmly enough. If only I could get my hand in my pocket again—but Helen had me on the hot seat, not taking her eyes off me. She paid little attention to Lucy, making me think that if Lucy could access her phone she could call Vince. I doubted that Lucy had Vince on speed dial, but she could call 911. But Lucy didn’t have her purse and, besides, Art could be the watchdog for her. If only we’d developed a contingency plan in case things went awry—and things were very, very awry.
“I was kind of surprised when she actually died.” Helen spoke in a matter-of-fact, reasonable tone, like she was discussing the price of milk.
“Mom . . .” Art warned. Helen ignored him.
Lucy matched Helen’s matter-of-fact tone. “Why were you surprised?”
“That stuff was so old, from World War II. I didn’t know how potent it was. I mean, I did research and all, but couldn’t find anything about how long the stuff would last. I didn’t know if she’d die or just get really sick.”
“Mom, you better not say anything more.”
“Oh, they won’t say anything. If they do I’ll take this gun and go after them. I do know how to use this, you know.” I didn’t doubt it. The NRA sticker plastered on her car loomed large in my mind. “Just consider this whole evening a warning. Not a word about this conversation. And stay away from Evan.”
I squeaked, “No problem.” Lucy nodded her agreement.
Did that mean we could go? That Helen wasn’t going to kill us? Or was she toying with us, fully intending to consign us to a ghostly eternity haunting her beige apartment? What would they do with our bodies—dump us in the James River at 3 a.m.? I looked from the gun to Art, still at his post by the door.
Figuring it wouldn’t hurt to ask, I did so. “Does that mean we can go?”
“Why, not until I’ve served refreshments.” But Helen didn’t make a move toward the kitchen. She hadn’t produced the tea she’d promised earlier, but I figured that was a good thing. Again I wondered if we could overtake the two of them. If the gun was loaded—and I didn’t relish verifying this—its power trumped any collective muscle Lucy and I could summon up. Plus Helen was in good shape. We’d have better luck getting around the undernourished-looking Art, but we had to get past his mother first. Maybe we could just throw a net over the obsessed Helen and get her admitted to a psych ward. Such a feat, of course, required a net. Again, I silently cursed the absent Kat.
A feeling of disembodiment came over me. I couldn’t decide if that was good or bad, but given the situation, more bearable. Our best strategy was to keep Helen talking. We knew too much already, so we might as well learn as much as we could and get it recorded. Hopefully my recorder wouldn’t make a clicking sound. And I’d keep alert for an opportunity to press Vince’s speed dial.
Lucy seemed to be of the same mind. “Helen, I’m curious about something . . . Evan and Carlene got married over five years ago. What made you so upset all these years later?”
Helen recounted the story of her and Art spotting Carlene and the man Lucy and I now knew was B.J. in the library parking lot, apparently forgetting that she’d shared the story with me already. I didn’t remind her. “I couldn’t believe the woman, performing like that in a public parking lot.”
Lucy said gently, like she might to a child, “But Helen, Carlene and Evan were separated.”
“Separated?” Helen’s startled look turned to a wary one, like she suspected a trap. She pressed her lips together, saying nothing for a moment. “Still, they were married and that tramp committed adultery.”
This time I asked, trying to imitate Lucy’s soft tone. “Are you sure it wasn’t Evan in the car with her?”
Art fielded that question. “It wasn’t. We saw Carlene talking to a guy earlier. They were sitting on one of the benches outside the library. He wasn’t Evan, his hair was much longer. So we assumed the guy in the car later was the same not-Evan guy. I mean, we didn’t want to stare at them.”
Oh, no, staring was rude. But killing was fine. What it came down to was that Helen had killed Carlene over an assumption. In this case the much-bandied definition of assume, “making an ass out of you and me,” took on an alternative and sinister meaning. The fact that Helen was correct in her assumption didn’t matter—an assumption it was. It wasn’t inconceivable that Carlene could talk to one man and jump in the backseat with another an hour or so later.
“I wasn’t going to let her get away with it, making a fool out of my boy. But I didn’t mean to kill her. Really I didn’t. I just wanted to make her really sick. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Lucy assured her with a straight face. I seconded the lie. What choice did we have?
Lucy asked a question that surprised me. “Helen, how long have you been in love with Evan?”
Helen looked aghast. But Art, back against the door, said with an air of resignation, “All my life. And then some.”
“All your life?” Lucy looked puzzled.
That was when my brain cells went into such a frenzy I could almost hear the snap, snap, snap as puzzle pieces fell into place. “My boy,” the pictures of Evan, Carol, the gossipy high school friend who speculated that Helen had a baby in high school, Vivian and Annabel with their “baby boys.” Just the night before I’d suggested to Lucy that mothers and sons permeated conversations involving Carlene and her death. But the significance had, until that moment, eluded me.
But age remained a sticking point. When Donna McCarthy told me about fifteen-year-old Helen having a baby, I’d figured the boy must be about forty-five by now. Evan was fifty-five.
I regarded Helen, reassessing her age. Could she be older than sixty?
Helen looked affronted. “Why are you staring at me?”
“Helen, how old are you?”
“How rude!”
“She’s seventy.”
“Arthur! That’s enough from you.”
Seventy, I thought, amazed. “You certainly don’t look it, Helen.” Lucy echoed my compliment. Did we think if we buttered her up, she’d let us go, sparing our lives?
Art smirked. “She’s had a lot of work done.”
If I was in the market for shaving ten years off my face, I’d get a referral from Helen.
With the math worked out so that Helen could have a fifty-five-year-old son, I pressed on. “So, Helen, I’m guessing you’re in love with Evan, but not romantically. He’s your son, isn’t he?”
Helen looked stunned, eyes widened, lips parted.
Then she burst into tears.
CHAPTER 25
WHILE HELEN WAILED, LUCY looked at me in disbelief and Art broke into gales of laughter, doubled over, clutching his stomach. “I can’t believe you guessed,” he said one word at a time between laughing fits. “The big secret.”
I sat there, shocked at my own revelation. Apparently Evan had been born out of wedlock and given up for adoption. Why was I learning this for the first time? However long ago or short our marriage, it was information I would expect to have. Why hadn’t he told me? I looked at Lucy, holding my hands palms up in bewilderment. She mirrored my gestures.
Laugher subsiding, Art said, “I had to endure that goddamn Evan my whole life. Evan this, Evan that—”
“Arthur, watch your language!”
“Arthur” ignored his mother and carried on with his diatribe against Evan. “Evan summed up my childhood. The guy’s duller than dirt, but Mom thinks he’s the best thing since—I don’t know—sliced bread?”
I couldn’t disagree with Art. Why had it taken me so long to notice Evan’s dullness? Had my standards improved that much over the years? But his personality, or lack thereof, wasn’t relevant at the momen
t. I noticed that the gun now rested at Helen’s side and that she’d pulled her sweater around her like she was cold. Figuring her tears would divert her attention from me, I went for my pocket.
No such luck. “What are you doing now, Hazel?” A teary-eyed and sniffling Helen lifted the gun and aimed it at me. “What’s in your pocket?”
“Just tissues.” I pulled out several, taking care not to dislodge my phone in the process, and tossed them in her direction. “I thought you could use some.”
She cast a wary eye on the pile, perhaps suspecting—what?—an explosive? After gingerly selecting a tissue, she blew her nose with her free hand.
The incongruity of Helen’s gun and tears made an already bizarre situation more so. It was hard enough dealing with a woman who’d killed once and may kill again—a distraught killer added another level of danger. I needed to keep alert not only for an opportunity to contact Vince but to catch our two captors off guard.
Lucy, with a gentle voice, began, “So, Helen, you were fifteen when Evan was born?” When Helen nodded, Lucy prompted, “And you gave him up for adoption?”
Helen handed the gun to Art. “You tell the story, Art. I’m much too upset.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll tell it.”
“And don’t take your eyes off these two, especially this one.” She hooked a thumb at me, aka “this one.”
“Yes, Mother.” Art rolled his eyes like a long-suffering adolescent, but quickly warmed to the subject, a classic tale of the fifties: when teenage Helen got pregnant, her parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York where she was sequestered until her baby was born. Then, strong-armed by parents and social workers, she gave the child up for adoption.
“She went back to Syracuse but didn’t get along with her parents. She was seething from resentment at being forced to give up her baby. And she definitely didn’t want to go back to the same high school. So she moved to Rochester to live with her grandmother. The old lady doted on her only granddaughter, never denying her a thing. Mom finished high school in Rochester and enrolled in secretarial school. She’d cut off ties with everyone in Syracuse except for Carol Mobley, the one she mentioned earlier. That was only because Carol had relatives in Rochester, so she visited often. And Carol’s a persistent type; it’s hard to say no to her.
“Mom didn’t like being a secretary, so she drifted around a bit, doing this and that, until she wound up being a magician’s assistant. It wasn’t long before she married the magician, who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. That marriage lasted less than a year.
“So she went back to Grandma, who sent her to art school. She still moonlighted as a magician’s assistant, just with a different magician.”
That explained the pictures with the rabbit and the man with the top hat. And now that I knew Helen’s age, her being the young woman sporting a fifties-style hairdo made sense. “The magician’s assistant job sounds familiar. Did I know about that?”
Art said, “I told you at the lunch. You asked what jobs Mom had when I was growing up. One was doing magic shows for kids. And someone talked her into doing gigs as a clown.”
The first time Art had told me about Helen being a clown, I couldn’t fathom the idea because I’d thought Helen too refined and dignified. Now, despite the tears streaming down her face, I considered her too evil to be entertaining children. Lucy looked startled—I guess I’d neglected to share that tidbit of information with her.
Art said, “Anyway, Mom stayed single for a few years. She held down various jobs and painted in her spare time. She didn’t have to work, Grandma didn’t mind supporting her, but Mom was always restless. Then she met and married Gordon Woods and they had me.”
When Art paused, Lucy asked Helen, “Did either of your husbands know about Evan?”
“Not from me.” Helen blotted her face with one of my tissues. Again, she had her cardigan wrapped tightly around her and I saw that she was shivering.
Art snorted. “You sure talked about Evan to me.” Turning to us, he said, “Mom was obsessed with the guy. As for Dad, he was very bossy and controlling, but not abusive. Their marriage wasn’t a model of open communication. But he provided well for us and that was all she cared about. When he died he left her pretty well set. Not that you could tell from the way she lives, but Mom’s a born miser.” Art swept his arm in an arc to indicate the unappealing apartment, illustrating his mother’s tightfisted ways.
“If I didn’t have to support you half the time I could do better. You can’t even keep your dead-end jobs . . .” Helen trailed off.
Art opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He looked mutinous but also helpless. Interesting that Helen supported Art. But it made sense—he couldn’t be making much of a living wage at Walmart and he was frequently out of work. The book group never met at his place because he said it was too small. I pictured a mini version of his mother’s apartment with books stacked to the ceiling.
I didn’t want to digress into Art and Helen’s far-from-ideal relationship, so I kept to the matter at hand. I asked Helen, “So did you do a search for Evan?”
But Art maintained his role as his mother’s spokesperson. “She did. When Dad died in the early nineties, Mom started the search. She found out what she had to do and eventually, much to her surprise and delight, found him right there in Rochester.”
“That was quite a coincidence,” Lucy noted.
“Not really. She had Evan in Syracuse, which isn’t that far from Rochester. Anyway, she contacted Evan and they talked for a bit. But Evan was more interested in medical history than in chatting. Mom wanted them to meet, but he put her off. She called him a few times but he wouldn’t agree to meet. Finally he changed his number. She was devastated.” I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy . . . a very small pang.
Art carried on with the sorry saga. “She consoled herself by remarrying, but she still pined for Evan. He hadn’t told her anything about where he lived, worked, whether he was married—in short, nothing. She even considered hiring an investigator. As it turned out, she didn’t have to go the PI route. In a serendipitous moment she saw Evan’s name mentioned in an article about insurance fraud, the insurance company being Acer. The serendipity continued when she got a job there.
“As you can imagine she was in seventh heaven, getting to admire the object of her affection from a distance. They were in different departments, so never really met, just passed in the halls or cafeteria, greeting each other in the distant, polite way of strangers.” This more or less squared with what Donna McCarthy had told me. “This went on for three years until Evan took early retirement and moved down here to teach.
“In three months, Mom sold her house in Rochester and headed south, with me tagging along. Once here in Richmond she found out where Evan lived and got an apartment in the same complex. She called all area colleges and found him at Tanson Community College and promptly enrolled. She didn’t want to be too obvious and have Evan as a teacher, so she passed up the business courses and opted for computer ones. Down the road that would prove to be a good choice for her—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
I help up my hand. “Wait a minute. What about her husband?”
Art looked puzzled, like he couldn’t remember his stepfather. “Oh, him—they got divorced.” He continued, “Like in so many apartment complexes, especially an anonymous one like this one, the only way to meet people is in the laundry room. So she staked out that area for days until Evan finally showed up. She was no longer willing to admire him from afar; she wanted to establish a relationship, tell him they were mother and son. Problem was that she went about it all wrong. She started having him over for dinner on a regular basis. That went on for quite some time.”
Lucy asked, looking skeptical. “Wait a minute. You said that Helen had talked to Evan on the phone in Rochester. And worked at the same company. Didn’t he realize that he was now having regular dinners with the same woman?”
“Nope. W
hen they met up down here, Mom told him she was from Rochester and had worked at Acer.” Art, unfazed by Helen’s tears, gave her an amused look. “She didn’t care if he recognized her from Acer, but that was unlikely—when we got here she transformed herself into the hot chick you see now. She used to look like a frumpy housewife.” Again, Art’s tale paralleled Donna’s.
“What she didn’t want was for Evan to find out that she was his mother, at least for a while. Since she went through a couple of name changes, that wasn’t a problem.”
When we looked blank, Art amplified. “When she first contacted Evan she was Helen Woods. By the time she went to work at Acer, she had remarried. After she divorced Mr. Riley she circled back to her maiden name of Adams.” Art gave an uneasy laugh. “And it helped that Evan wasn’t exactly, uh, sharp. At least not in my opinion.” When he slanted his eyes at me I spread both hands in a dismissive gesture.
Lucy asked, “So, Helen, did you ever tell Evan he was your son?”
She shook her head and remained silent. Try as we would to engage Helen in telling her own story, she just sat there, mopping up her tears and offering no more than a nod of assent here and there. But I detected a hyperalertness about her, a readiness to pounce if I stepped out of line. So Art continued to field our questions.
“One time when Evan was over for dinner she approached the subject in a hypothetical fashion. Like ‘how about if a mother had to give up her child for adoption and years later found him and wanted to be reunited?’ Evan said why not let things be—the mother gave the child up, so why the sudden interest?”
I said, “How devastating. And hardly the time to spring the news that she was a very interested mother . . . to him.”
“Yeah, she’d trapped herself and knew it. After that, she was really skittish and didn’t want to let him know. She resigned herself to being a mom-in-secret.” Art twisted his mouth. Helen’s weeping continued, unabated.
A tragic story, I thought, on so many levels. I felt acute frustration just thinking of it. Surely if Helen had told Evan the truth he’d have reconsidered his position. He was responding to a hypothetical scenario. When I asked if Evan had ever told Helen he was adopted, Art said, “Not to my knowledge,” and Helen moved her head from side to side. That figured. God forbid Evan should volunteer personal information. He and Carlene had been compatible in that department.
