A Witch In Time

by Madelyn Alt

  The image of him gravely leaving his family behind said yes.

  “He’s sick, you know,” Marcus was saying.

  “What?” My eyes darted to his. “I didn’t know that.”

  He nodded. “Joyce was practically force-feeding him his heart medicine that night, while you were stuck in the elevator. Maybe that would be incentive enough, do you think? To see his son happy? His grandchild taken care of?”

  That was the problem. I could see it. I could more than see it. I was totally feeling it.

  But before I could give into the feeling, I heard my cell phone ring in the other room.

  “I’ll get it. You stay put.”

  From the living room, I heard the inevitable shuffle through the flotsam of my bag as the phone tweetered on, then Marcus answering.

  “Hell—Oh, hello, Mrs. O’Neill. Yes, Maggie’s here. I’ll put her on, just a moment,” he said as he walked back into the bedroom, having already been on his way.

  He handed me the phone. “Hi, Mom—”

  “Maggie? Thank God. Oh, I don’t know what I’m going to do, this is so unlike her and—”

  “Calm down, Mom. This is so unlike who?”

  “Whom, dear. It’s Melanie.”

  Melanie again? “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s left the hospital. Oh, I just don’t know what’s gotten into her! She couldn’t check herself out without a release from her OB/GYN, so she just up and disappeared on the nursing staff. I found her—she isn’t so beside herself that she’s no longer answering her cell phone—but she is dead set that she has too many pressing details to take care of to stay at the hospital another night. Little Isabella and Sophie are safe and sound in the nursery, thank goodness—she couldn’t sneak two low-birth-weight babies off the floor without raising an alarm. But that should tell you something as to her emotional state. And that’s not the whole of it . . .”

  I’ll admit it—I drifted. My mother has a tendency to ramble when she is upset or uptight, and now was one of those moments. Of course, maybe in this one instance she had a right to. It did seem to be a teensy bit erratic on Mel’s part to leave without her doctor’s permission. Usually she’d be all for milking the pampering of an extended hospital stay. I guess the whole abandonment prospect was more than enough to drive any hormonal new mommy over the edge.

  “Are you going over to her house?” I interrupted.

  “I can’t! The girls from Bridge Club are due here at any moment, and I have a quiche in the oven, and—”

  “Tell her we’ll go.”

  Marcus’s voice cut into my mom’s monologue, and I gaped up at him in surprise. You sure? I mouthed. He nodded.

  “Mom, Marcus and I will head over there and make sure Mel is okay.”

  “You will? Oh, Maggie, that’s a huge load off my mind. Thank you, honey!” Wow, I actually got a thank you? A rare thing. “Margot has Jenna and Courtney at her place tonight, thank goodness. At least I don’t have to worry about them, too. Oh, there’s the doorbell. I have to go.” And with that she abruptly hung up. It was also a rare thing to escape my mom with so little fanfare. That made two things to be thankful for.

  It wouldn’t do for me to descend upon Mel’s home wearing nothing more than a big, fluffy bathrobe, so Marcus brought me some clothes from the bag Steff had dropped off on the porch. Jeans were completely out since they wouldn’t fit over my cast, so I selected a pair of stretchy yoga pants and a light cami. Undergarments and a single flip-flop rounded out my casual look.

  “Ready?”

  I looked up at Marcus and nodded. “Ready.”

  He would have carried me out to the truck, but I insisted on the crutches—no point in wearing my welcome out too soon. We barely spoke on the quick blitz over to Mel’s subdivision, but I couldn’t help noticing that he stopped and looked as we passed the gates to the subdivision that the Watkinses lived in, that we had only just left a few short hours ago. I knew we were both thinking about the same things. Wondering . . . were we right?

  How Mel had gotten home, I didn’t know, but home she was. The front door stood open and there were lights on all over the house. Occasional movement beyond the curtains proved it.

  “Well,” I said, gazing over at Marcus, “I guess I’d better go in.”

  “Not without me,” he said, already halfway out his door. He opened mine for me and helped me down, reaching into the back for my crutches. “Come on, Hopalong.”

  We opened the storm door and stepped inside. “Melanie?” I called out.

  From the rear of the house I heard a thud and a bump. A moment later, Mel peeked her head out of a room down the hall from the kitchen. “Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here? Never mind, don’t tell me, let me guess. Mom sent you.”

  She turned back into the room she’d peered out of without another word. Exchanging a concerned glance with Marcus, the two of us moved to follow.

  The room was Greg’s home office, one I had been in only once right after the young married couple had signed on the dotted line for the house five years before. I’m sure the room didn’t normally look the way that it looked right now: the drawers lying open and the lamp pulled over to the edge of the desk... all the better to see the file contents, my dear.

  “Soooo,” I drawled, leaning on my crutches just inside the door, “what are we doing?”

  Mel didn’t stop, and she didn’t look up. “We,” she said in a tone that was short and businesslike, “are trying to find pertinent information in Greg’s files.”

  “Are we, now?” I clumped forward, Marcus following, until I could see into the drawer she was rifling through. “What sort of things are we looking for?”

  “Bank statements. Insurance information. Investment portfolios. Savings account books. Credit card statements.” Flip, flip, flip went her nimble little fingers. “It was too late for me to hit our bank account today, but that’s okay. It was too late for him to hit it, too. But you can bet, first thing Monday morning, I’ll be waiting at the doors.”

  I leaned a hip on the edge of the desk. “Mel, don’t you think this could have waited until you were released from the hospital?”

  “Hmm. No. You see, I realized today, as I stared down into the perfect beauty of my two new baby girls and tried to come to terms with the fact that their father found it acceptable to leave them in their first hours of life, how little I know him. He has his job, he works long hours, he has to entertain clients, and I am not invited along. He pays the bills. He takes care of everything, Maggie. He always has. He always insisted. And I let him. Stupidly, maybe. And I realized today how easy it would be for him to have . . .”

  “Have a double life?” I supplied when her voice trailed off.

  “Yeah. Yeah, a double life.” She sighed and leaned back in the desk chair, pushing uncharacteristically limp blond hair out of her eyes with trembling fingers. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  I thought of the sense I’d had that something was not quite right in Mel and Greg’s perfect life . . . and then I thought of Frannie Watkins and her husband and their new baby, and secrets that refused to stay hidden. “No, I think it’s quite sensible. But Mel, you just had a baby. Two babies. By C-section.”

  “And you just broke your ankle. And yet we’re both here, aren’t we,” she said, going back to the task at hand.

  Marcus’s eyebrows shot up. Good man that he was, he smothered the smirk that threatened.

  “Here, why don’t you lie down on the sofa at least, and let me do that for you,” I told her. “Maybe you’d like a cup of tea. Marcus?”

  “Pop would be great,” Mel said, sighing, as she shifted over to the sofa. “With ice.”

  Marcus didn’t seem to be fazed to be taking orders. “Back in a sec,” he told me.

  When he’d gone, I slipped into the desk chair. “You’re sure you’re all right?” I asked her. I didn’t like her color, or should I say lack of it? A true blond, Melanie was always pale, but not colorless.

&n
bsp; She groaned as she leaned back against the pillows and crossed her arms over her stomach, closing her eyes. “I’ll be okay.”

  She would be after I took her back to the hospital. Muttering inwardly about my stupid, selfish brother-in-law and his spectacularly jackass behavior, I decided the faster I searched through his files for her, the better. “You’re sure what you’re looking for will be here?”

  “Oh, it’ll be there, all right. Greg was nothing if not meticulous about paperwork. He even kept duplicate client files here at home in the event that he needed to access something quickly.”

  I paused midflick through the folders. “Really ... ?” I suddenly wondered if that would include a file for the preempted divorce proceedings called off between Harry Jr. and Frannie Watkins . . .

  Most of the personal and home files were in this drawer, but that didn’t stop me from opening the next while Mel wasn’t paying attention. A quick check of the folder labels showed contents A through D. I closed the drawer and carefully slid down to the floor in order to get to the lowest one. Surreptitiously peeking around the corner of the desk to make sure that Mel had not noticed, I eased the drawer open. S through Z. Bingo.

  I felt a twinge of conscience as I swiftly found the W’s, and my twinge grew even worse as my fingers did the walking through to Watkins, Harold Jr. vs. Watkins, Frances C.... It was none of my business, no way, no how... but would it hurt anything, really? It’s not as though I was reading through someone’s personal information in order to use it against them in some way. Although, when I allowed myself to think that far, that was exactly what I was doing, wasn’t it ... assuming that all the speculation and conjecture and guesswork that Marcus and I had run through had merit. But it wasn’t for personal gain, I amended in my mind. Just... balance in the universe.

  Crossing my fingers for karmic luck, I spread the folder out on the wool carpet. The curtains were still drawn tight, leaving the room cast in shadow, and the small desk lamp wasn’t doing enough to cut through the gloom, so I was forced to lean in close for a better view as I quickly began flipping through the papers. Irreconcilable differences, financial statements, blah, blah. All went unperused. That wasn’t what I was looking for.

  Toward the back of the file amid various legal documents and written statements, I came across a manila envelope. Quickly I scanned for a return address for some hint as to the contents. “Bartlett Investigations,” I silently read in the upper left corner. That and the words “Private and Confidential” stamped on the envelope made me think I had found what I was looking for.

  “What are we doing?”

  Marcus’s voice came from right behind me, so suddenly that I nearly leapt from my skin. I clapped my hand over my heart and gave him an accusing stare. “Criminey, you could have killed me.”

  He grinned and tweaked a curl that had escaped from my clips. “Sorry about that. I didn’t think I needed to announce myself.”

  “Did you find something, Maggie?” Mel asked, straightening from her vantage point over on the leather sofa.

  “Erm, not yet,” I told her, pushing the folder over a bit in case she could see around the edge of the desk.

  Marcus handed Mel her cold pop, but she waved a hand at it and went back to her reclining posture against the pillows, resting her head against her hand. He set a glass on the edge of the desk for me—pop again, lots of ice. “No tea that I could find.”

  “That’s okay. It probably would have been instant, anyway,” I joked.

  “Here, let me help you,” he said, taking my hands and pulling me up to a standing position so I could sit on the chair. Then he squatted down and started scooping the folder together.

  “Oh, don’t do that—” I started, but it was too late. He had already set it on the desk beneath the lamp. His eyebrows raised when his gaze caught on the contents of the folder. He lifted his to mine. All I could do was shrug, my cheeks hot with embarrassment.

  Still I couldn’t help but feel a little bit vindicated when he started flipping through the pages. Eager to help, I reached for the manila folder and drew it out on top.

  Cautiously, his eyes on Melanie, he reached for a pad of paper and a pen. Is that what I think it is? he wrote.

  I took up the pen. PI report, I scrawled back.

  He glanced over at Mel. No response, so he carefully turned the envelope over.

  It was sealed. A large label had been carefully affixed over the top of the retaped envelope, ensuring it stayed that way: “HIGHLY SENSITIVE CONTENTS. REPORT HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED TO CLIENTS. KEEP ON FILE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. NO EXCEPTIONS.”

  My gaze flew to his. I grabbed the pen. Has not been released to clients?? I underscored the s. Record definitely still sealed.

  Marcus frowned, his mind working a mile a minute. As was mine.

  On paper I slashed out: So if neither Harold Sr. nor Harry Jr. had been advised of Frannie’s affair by the firm...

  Didn’t that also mean that neither Watkins had definitive foreknowledge of the affair? Or was I jumping to conclusions ? I was getting myself confused. Perhaps Harry Jr. had had his suspicions, perhaps not ... but at least with this unbroken seal, it was pretty much assured that he did not have the outright pictorial proof that this envelope in all likelihood contained. And without that, there went all of our conjecture about the relationship between Harry Jr. and Nunzio like so much toilet water swirling down the drain.

  My head was spinning, fact and supposition and intuition no longer separable in my mind. At least I could take solace in the knowledge that Marcus didn’t seem to be faring any better.

  Grandma Cora always used to say, when you dropped a stitch in your knitting, the only thing to do was to unravel it ... It was old-timey wisdom, sure, but it still applied. Go back to the beginning. Go back to basics. Get down to brass tacks. Cut your losses and start all over again fresh.

  In other words, just the facts, ma’am. Because that was the problem with speculation. Sometimes the facts got lost in the dirty laundry.

  Fact: Someone at the Watkins home that night phoned Nunzio. The police mentioned this, so I could only assume they had data to back it up.

  Fact: The police were told that Nunzio was an intruder. Hm.

  Fact: The police were also told that they, the Watkins, did not know Nunzio. Which of course had to be refuted by the phone record data, not to mention the fact that Frannie knew Nunzio very well. Even I was witness to that little tidbit.

  Fact: Harold Sr. was unlikely to have been at his son’s home that night, which to my mind made him an unlikely factor in Nunzio’s death. Which also made his confession bogus.

  Fact: I was talking myself in circles. Was I missing something ? I had to be.

  Think, Margaret, If it does not make sense, it cannot be true ...

  I tried again. Fact: Nunzio and Frannie had been having an affair.

  Frannie and Nunzio. Nunzio and ...

  One other fact did present itself to me, but I was having a hard time going there. There was someone at the Watkins residence last night who definitely knew Nunzio, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Frannie. Oh, but that wouldn’t make sense either, would it?

  Would it?

  Not once in all the conjecture and supposition had I allowed myself to explore Frannie as a possibility. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that as a new mother fresh from delivering her bundle of joy, she was supposed to be caught up in the heady, heartfelt throes of maternal love. Could that joyous state be put aside for something as ruthless as inviting Nunzio to her home with the intention of shooting him in cold blood? My head was spinning, trying to make the connections.

  Because Frannie was the only other possibility, and she was the last one I would have suspected.

  Slowly, laboriously, I opened my memory of the last few days, trying to see where my intuition had gone wrong, why I had leapt to seeing guilt where it did not lie—in the laps of Harold Sr., and then, by default, Harry Jr.

  Harold Sr. had been the obvious,
of course. His confession had effectively guaranteed that he was the first to come to mind, which was just what he had intended. To deflect from the truth.

  That it was Frannie who had decided to eliminate the threat of her former lover; Frannie who had wielded the gun.

  Marcus was writing on the pad of paper again. I glanced over. Frannie, he wrote, followed by three question marks. Then, Could it have been? Funny, that we had both hit on her as a possibility at the same time. The universe works in mysterious ways.

  The argument I had overheard ... is that when she decided to do it? When she realized he was serious about wanting to be a part of her son’s life? Was Nunzio really that much of a threat to her happy little family?

  I guess the answer to that question was a resounding yes. At least in Frannie’s mind.

  Blood ...

  The word that Marcus had channeled floated back into my head one more time, only this time it had another meaning that I was suddenly able to perceive, a meaning my mind previously could not grasp. The word was not relevant only because Nunzio had been shot. But also because blood is thicker than water, and blood is what tied the baby to Nunzio, and blood is what Frannie was afraid might have given her secret away?

  She hadn’t lost the baby’s bassinet card in the magazine Joyce had misplaced and my mother had inadvertently brought into Mel’s hospital room. She had purposely tucked it away. That’s why she had been worried about finding the magazine. That’s why she had crumpled the card when we brought it to their house that day. The card listed the baby’s blood type. Hadn’t Harold Sr. also mentioned something about the baby’s blood type being different from Harry Jr.’s? I racked my brain, thinking back. I was almost positive he had. Another thing he must have gotten from his mother ... Dollars to doughnuts, I was betting that the baby’s blood type didn’t match Frannie’s, either. My money was on the odds that it matched Nunzio’s.

  Blood, I wrote on the pad. Baby’s blood type? Nunzio’s, not Harry’s?

  Maybe? Marcus wrote back.

  Only Frannie knew what really went down. But Frannie had remained silent, all the while watching her father-in-law take the blame for a death she had caused. How had she convinced Harold Sr. to do that? Why had he been willing to step in, rather than let her deal with the situation herself? Was it because he believed in her relative innocence? If he truly thought her innocent, surely he would have believed in the judicial system enough to let the police work through the details.