Flirting With Pete: A Novel

by Barbara Delinsky

  He had no idea what he was looking for.

  Then again, he did. Following a hunch, he left the granite for a narrow path that wove through the trees. His sense of certainty grew as he worked his way over pine needles and tree roots, past snarled evergreen thickets, under overhanging boughs.

  Even before he reached it, he knew what he would find. Darden Clyde’s old Buick was hidden in the trees in a spot that few in town knew existed. He hadn’t dreamed Jenny knew of it. He had underestimated her.

  The Buick was empty. He knew that even before he looked. It was part of his certainty, as was the sudden knowledge of what she had done.

  He bowed his head. A spasm of sorrow worked its way up from his gut and forced his head back with a moan. It was a minute before the sorrow gave way to guilt, and another minute before the guilt let him move.

  Retracing his steps to the granite pool, he picked his watchful way around its edge, but there was no sorrow here. There was nothing heavy or tragic or dark. The air was lighter, brighter. His shoulder felt fine here.

  It made no sense, of course. But there it was.

  The fog danced over the water in playful little gusts. A thin spot in the mist caught his eye. He followed it from place to place, higher and higher, until his gaze rested on the dirt ledge above. That was when he saw the clothes.

  He felt another spasm of guilt, but it didn’t paralyze him. Fast now, he went to the far side of the quarry and began to climb. Boulder to boulder he went until he reached the ledge.

  He recognized the dress right away as the one Jenny had bought at Miss Jane’s and worn to the dance the Friday before. It lay neatly folded next to her underthings and the worn sneakers that had taken her many miles into town and back. Her footprints were small and delicate, which few people thought of Jenny as being because delicacy suggested fragility, which suggested vulnerability, which suggested innocence, which should have inspired protectiveness. But Little Falls hadn’t protected Jenny Clyde any more than Dan had. He would live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.

  Small, delicate, lonely footprints were the sole markings on dirt that earlier had been washed smooth by the rain. If she had been with a fellow, he hadn’t accompanied her here. The map was clear, a trail from the spot where Dan stood, to the one where she had removed her clothes, to the very edge where she had let her heels take her weight while her toes went ahead. Then nothing.

  The odds and ends that had nagged at him earlier now fit into a single piece. All the little things Jenny had done that had unsettled him over the past months, even more so over the last few days, made sense. Had he been sharper, he might have seen the emerging picture.

  No. Sharpness had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t added up the signs in Jenny, because he hadn’t wanted to know the sum. Knowing it would have meant acting on it, and he was a party of one in this town, at least where feeling bad for Jenny Clyde was concerned.

  He studied the water. It was calm, still, smug in its silence. They would dredge it, but her body might well have drifted downstream in the rush of water that had followed the storm. They would track the shores in case the body had washed up, but most never did. The annals of Little Falls contained other such suicides, and in none of those had a body ever appeared. According to popular lore, what the quarry swallowed never came back up.

  Seeing nothing in the water, Dan ran his eye slowly around the rim of the bowl and into the edge of the woods. The fog played games with him now, creating the semblance of something alive, something human, before clearing and leaving nothing but stone, trees, moss.

  Suicide was a sin. Dan couldn’t condone what Jenny had done. But he knew how narrow her world had been. Within that narrow world, she had chosen what she had seen to be the lesser of two evils. He couldn’t find it in himself to condemn her for that.

  Darden Clyde was another matter. It struck Dan that Jenny had exacted the purest form of justice. In killing herself, she had robbed Darden of what he had most perversely wanted. She had left him alone in a hell of his own making.

  That pleased Dan. He wanted Darden tormented, and he wanted Jenny free. Though he grieved for her, he felt content. He guessed that was why the ache in his shoulder was gone.

  Suddenly tired, he drew in a deep breath. Exhaling, he hooked his hands on the waistband of his trousers. There was work to do. He should call in the report and get help here for the more focused search that would have to be done. But not yet. Not for another minute. There was something about this place, something peaceful, something at odds with the idea that a life had been lost here last night. Dan wanted to think that it was the spirit of Jenny Clyde wafting through the woods— Jenny Clyde free at last, and happy.

  Then the fog shifted. A flash of red, far below, caught his eye. He grew alert. The flash of red moved only the smallest bit, but it was enough to get him going.

  Unexpectedly, as he hurried back down, he felt a stab of disappointment. He had wanted Jenny to escape. There was no life for her here, not with Darden back.

  On the heels of that thought, the germ of another took root. If doing good was what mattered, there was possibility here.

  He raced down the boulder trail, sliding part of the way in his rush and not minding the sting in the least. At the bottom, he jogged into the woods toward the spot where the flash of red had appeared. He slowed as he neared, fearing that she would be spooked and would run away. But Jenny Clyde wasn’t moving. She was huddled over herself, a pitiful little bundle of shivering flesh with her face buried in her knees and her red hair shockingly vivid against all that pale skin.

  As he trotted the last few steps, he removed his jacket. He knelt by her side, covered her, and scooped her up. Without a word, he headed back to the Jeep. Once there, he tucked her inside, curled low enough in the passenger’s seat that she would not be seen. Then he slid behind the wheel and drove off.

  He took the back road out of town, the one he knew he would have to himself. When Jenny continued to shiver, he turned up the heat. She kept her head buried and didn’t say a word. He drove on.

  When he was well past the town limits and into a zone where his car phone reception was strong, he called information, got the number he wanted, and spent three minutes talking with an old college friend, who was perfectly happy to take two hours from work and meet him halfway.

  His father would have been livid. “Obstruction of justice!” he would bellow, ever the stickler about following the letter of the law. “You’re in big trouble, Dan-O, and so’s your friend. Is this what I sent you to college for?”

  But his father would never know. Nor would anyone else in town. The quarry would be dredged and the streambed searched. The consensus would be that her body had either been carried into the deeper, rougher whitewater of the river and wedged under a bed of rock, or lost to whatever mysterious force ruled the quarry.

  The cause didn’t matter, only the effect. For all practical purposes, Jenny Clyde was dead.

  Chapter One

  Boston

  The memorial service was held in a dark stone church on Boston’s Marlboro Street, not far from where Cornelius Unger had lived and worked. It took place on a sunny Wednesday in June, three weeks after the man’s death, just as he had instructed. Whatever had occurred before then had been private and small. Casey Ellis had not been invited.

  She sat four rows from the back of the church, and a more genteel audience she couldn’t imagine. There was no sniffling, no whispering, no sighs or moans or wails. Sorrow was not a factor here. This was a professional gathering, a crowd of men and women wearing the neutral shades of those who would rather see than be seen. These were researchers and therapists, present today because Connie Unger had been an eminent leader in their field for more than forty years. The packed house attested as much to the man’s longevity as to his brilliance.

  Casey would have bet on the fact that of the several hundred gathered here, she was the only one with an emotional stake, and she included his wife i
n the count. It was well known that the renowned Dr. Unger kept his spouse in a lovely home on the North Shore, where she did her own thing, while he lived alone in Boston and visited her on the occasional weekend. Connie liked private time. He disliked social gatherings. He had colleagues, not friends, and if he had family in the form of sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, or cousins, no one knew of them. He had never had children with his wife.

  Casey was his daughter by a woman he had never married, a woman to whom he had never said more than a dozen words after their single night together. Since no one here knew about that night or about Casey, to them she was just one more face in the crowd.

  On the other hand, she knew quite a few people here, though not thanks to her father. He had never acknowledged her, had never reached out, offered help, opened a door. There had never been child support. Casey’s mother hadn’t asked for it, and by the time Casey learned the name of her father, she was so heavily into teenage defiance that she wouldn’t have approached the man if her life had depended on it.

  Elements of that defiance remained. Casey was pleased to sit near the back of the church, just one more colleague taking a long lunch hour. She was pleased to think that her presence here was more than the man deserved. She was pleased to think that she would leave the church and never look back.

  Focusing on these things was easier than acknowledging the loss. She had never formally met Cornelius Unger, but as long as he was alive, so too was the hope that one day he would seek her out. With his death, that hope was gone.

  Did you ever try to approach him yourself? her friend Brianna had asked. Did you ever try to confront him? Did you ever send him a letter, an e-mail, a gift?

  The answer was no on all scores. Pride played a part, as did anger, as did loyalty to her mother. And then there was hero worship. Typical of love-hate relationships, in addition to being her nemesis, Cornelius Unger had been her role model for nearly as long as she had known his name. At sixteen she had been curious, but curiosity quickly turned to drive. He taught at Harvard; she had applied there and been rejected. Should she have approached him and told him she had failed on that score?

  She subsequently got her degrees from Tufts and Boston College. The latter was a master’s in social work— not quite the Ph.D. Cornelius had, but she counseled clients as he did, and now she even had an offer to teach. She didn’t know if she would take it, but that was another issue. She loved counseling. She imagined her father had, too, if his dedication meant anything. Over the years she had read virtually everything he had written, attended every open lecture he gave, clipped every review of his work. He saw therapy as a scavenger hunt, with clues hidden in the various “rooms” of one’s life. He advocated talk therapy to ferret them out— an irony, since by all reports the man couldn’t carry on a social conversation for beans— but he knew the right questions to ask.

  That was what therapy was about, he lectured— asking the right questions. Listening, then asking questions that pointed the patient in the right direction so that he could find the answer for himself.

  Casey was quite good at that, judging from the growth of her practice. The people she knew here today were her own colleagues. She had studied with them, shared office space, attended workshops, and consulted with them. They respected her as a counselor, enough to make their referrals a significant source of her clientele. These colleagues were oblivious to any connection between her and the deceased.

  The warmth of June remained outside on the steps of the church. Inside, the sun’s rays were reduced to muted shards of color cast from the stained glass high atop the stone, and the air was comfortably cool, smelling of history as relics of the Revolutionary War did. Casey loved that smell. It gave her the sense of history that her life lacked.

  She took comfort in that as one speaker after another filed to the front of the church, but they said nothing Casey didn’t already know. Professionally, Connie Unger had been loved. His taciturnity was alternately viewed as shyness or pensiveness, his refusal to attend department parties as a sweet, social awkwardness. At some point in his career, people had taken to protecting him. Casey had often wondered whether his lack of a personal life helped that along. In the absence of friends, his colleagues felt responsible for him.

  The service ended and people began to file out of the church; like Casey, they were headed back to work. She smiled at one friend, hitched her chin at another, paused briefly on the front steps to talk with the man who had been her thesis adviser, returned a hug when a passing colleague leaned in. Then she stopped again, this time at the behest of one of her partners.

  There were five partners in the group. John Borella was the only psychiatrist. Of the other four, two were Ph.D. therapists. Casey and one other had their master’s in social work.

  “We have to meet later,” the psychiatrist said.

  Casey wasn’t concerned by the urgency in his voice. John was a chronic alarmist. “My day is tight,” she warned.

  “Stuart’s gone.”

  That gave her pause. Stuart Bell was one of the Ph.D. therapists. More important, he paid the office bills.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” she asked cautiously.

  “Gone,” John repeated, speaking lower now. “His wife called me a little while ago. She came home from work last night to an empty house— empty drawers, empty closets, empty bank book. I checked his office. Same thing.”

  Casey was startled. “His files?”

  “Gone.”

  Her startled reaction grew to appalled. “Our bank account?”

  “Empty.”

  “Aeyyyy.” She felt a touch of panic. “Okay. We’ll talk later.”

  “He has the rent money.”

  “I know.”

  “Seven months’ worth.”

  “Yes.” Casey had given Stuart a check for her share on the first of each of those seven months. They had learned the week before that the rent hadn’t been paid for any of those months. When confronted, Stuart had claimed it was a simple oversight, lost in the mounds of paperwork that had taken over so much of their time— and they understood, because they all knew how that went. He had promised to pay it in full.

  “It’s due next week,” John reminded Casey now.

  They would have to come up with the money. The alternative was eviction. But Casey couldn’t discuss eviction now. She couldn’t even think about it with Cornelius Unger watching and listening. “This isn’t the time or the place, John. Let’s talk later.”

  “Excuse me?” said a slim, gray-haired gentleman in a navy suit who had come down the steps of the church as the crowd thinned. “Miss Ellis?”

  As John moved on, Casey turned to the newcomer.

  “I’m Paul Winnig,” he said. “I was Dr. Unger’s lawyer. I’m the executor of his estate. Could we talk for a minute?”

  She would have asked what the executor of Dr. Unger’s estate wanted with her, if the lawyer’s eyes hadn’t answered the question. Yes, he did know who she was.

  Surprised by that awareness and quickly unsettled, she managed, “Uh, of course. Whenever.”

  “Now would be good.”

  “Now?” She glanced at her watch and felt a trace of annoyance. She didn’t know whether her father kept clients waiting. She did not. “I have an appointment in thirty minutes.”

  “This will only take five,” the lawyer said. With a light hand at her elbow, he gently guided her down the steps and onto a narrow stone path that led around the side of the church.

  Casey’s heart was beating hard. Before she could even begin to wonder what he had to say, or what she felt about his saying anything at all, the path opened into a small courtyard out of sight of the street. Releasing her elbow, the lawyer gestured her to a wrought-iron bench. When they were both seated, he said, “Dr. Unger left instructions that you should be contacted as soon as the memorial service was done.”

  “I don’t know why,” Casey remarked, having recovered a bit of composure. “He had
no interest in me at all.”

  “I believe you’re wrong,” the lawyer chided. He pulled an envelope from the pocket of his suit jacket. It was a small manila thing the size of an index card, with a clasp at the top.

  Casey stared at the envelope.

  The lawyer held it up to show her the front. “It has your name on it.”

  So it did—“Cassandra Ellis,” written in the same shaky scrawl she had seen dozens of times in margin notes on the graphs and charts that Connie Unger projected onto screens during lectures.

  Cassandra Ellis. Her name, written by her father. It was a first.

  Her heart began to rap against her ribs. Her eyes returned to the lawyer’s. Apprehensive, not quite knowing what she wanted to find in the envelope but fearing that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be there, she gingerly reached out. The envelope was lumpy.

  “There’s a key inside,” Paul Winnig explained. “Dr. Unger left you his townhouse.”

  Casey frowned, pulled in her chin, regarded the lawyer with doubt. When he nodded, she dropped her eyes to the envelope. Carefully, she unfolded the clasp, raised the small flap, and looked inside. She tipped out a key, then pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded over many times to fit. In the seconds it took to unfold it— several seconds longer than it might have taken had her hands been steadier— her fantasy flared. In those seconds, she imagined a warm little note. It didn’t have to be long. It could be as simple as, You are my daughter, Casey. I’ve watched you all these years. You’ve made me proud.

  There was in fact writing on the paper, but the message was succinct. She saw the address of the townhouse. She saw an alarm code. She saw a short list of names beside words like “plumber,” “painter,” and “electrician.” The names of the gardener and the maid had asterisks beside them.

  “Dr. Unger would like the gardener and maid retained,” the lawyer explained. “In the end it’s your choice, but he felt that both were good and that they loved the house as much as he did.”