Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

“The Aurora borealis,” breathed a woman with a frank, friendly face, trailing her fingers through the air over her head.

  “Cindy Wilson,” said Caroline with a laugh, “I swear you’re the only one who calls it that.” Martin Kelleher raised his glass. “Say Northern lights, Northern lights—”

  Cindy knocked back a margarita. “It’s my Wendaban Moment,” she said with a frank smile, “and I can call it whatever I damn well please.”

  Sipping a Chilean Malbec, Val watched Martin Kelleher circulate with a platter of beluga caviar toasts. He approached his guests with a stern intensity that looked like he was giving them their choice of dueling pistols. Across the water, the light shifted and shadows lengthened. All that was left in the western sky was a vermilion cusp of a sun.

  “Mine is that thunderhead with all those lightning bolts that time.”

  “What’s yours, Caroline?”

  Val glanced at the owner of Camp Sajo, where she stood in a loose yellow sleeveless shift, her silver bangles glinting in someone else’s Wendaban Moment, and she smiled into her single malt on the rocks. “Mine?” She looked up at the cottagers who drew closer, curious and protective, wondering if it had been a thoughtless question, what with one Selkirk tragedy after another. Caroline’s thicket of red hair was held off her face tonight with a wide gathered headband of teal and rose. “I have so many,” she said finally.

  “One, just one.”

  “No, two or three,” someone coaxed.

  Caroline’s gaze passed them all. “Night fishing with my father,” she said with a beautiful smile. Someone clapped. “Dancing at eighteen in the Sajo lodge—” she lifted her cocktail glass, “—with Wade.”

  At a flurry of “naughty, naughty” sounds and cautionary finger waggling, Martin floated behind her and whispered, just loud enough to be heard, “Keep it clean, Selkirk.”

  Everyone roared in a lively, bawling way that told Val they were waiting for something choice to go on about, and Caroline Selkirk had supplied it. Foggy dawns and dead mayflies just weren’t going to do it.

  Cindy of the Aurora borealis took that moment to jump in again, saying baldly, “And then that sister snagged him.” That sister. The chorus of horrified gasps that followed might very well have qualified as Val’s own perfect Wendaban Moment. Maybe she should buy a hat. “Well, what?” responded Cindy, splashing her drink. “She did!”

  “And then look what happened to her,” someone in the back actually muttered. As though snagging Wade Decker and getting hurled through a second story window were cause and effect somehow. The cottagers fell quite silent, their poor faces stricken. At the truth. At Caroline, who deserved better. At their indiscretion. A series of old lined lips hung open, waiting for something, something to make it all right again. Just a nice evening at Martin and Diane Kelleher’s cottage, where the food was splendid and the drink was plentiful and the devotion to the preservation of the lake was shared.

  Caroline stepped forward and grabbed Cindy in a hug. It was a fond and deliberate move, and Val felt impressed. “You’re so right, Cindy. Leslie just up and snagged him. She was a quick one, that sister of mine. Do you remember the camp races every summer?” Nothing quite like an appeal to the communal memory.

  Spirits lifted. “No one could beat her!”

  “Wade and I were just kids,” she went on to explain with a dismissive little laugh. “I went on to other things, and Leslie Selkirk and Wade Decker teamed up for the long run.”

  “Those things happen,” said a wise old head, nodding. And so does murder, thought Val, and sometimes those long runs aren’t so very long, after all. She sipped her wine, noting that Caroline had defused a tense moment among Wendaban Moments without really explaining much of anything at all. Not what happened to her and Wade, not what led to Leslie and Wade, not what other things she went on to, unless it involved keeping a failing family business alive. And certainly not what happened to her murdered sister.

  Val folded her arms as the little crowd fell back to blurting their favorite moments. A man with a buzz cut and a tidy little paunch suddenly blared, “That eight-pound pickerel I caught three years ago, that’s my Wendaban Moment.”

  “Oh, Stan, you and that pickerel, enough already.”

  Others laughed nervously. But the gaffe with Caroline had made them all edgy and quantities of alcohol kept them there. Just as Diane Kelleher appeared in a black camisole and elegant white palazzo pants to announce dinner, Martin planted his legs like a captain on a quarter deck. Passing the tray of caviar toasts to Clem Corcoran, who seemed honored, Martin folded his meaty arms.

  “With the acid rain levels on this lake,” he said in a commanding way—never very far from a board room—“you won’t be catching any more eight-pound pickerel, Stan,” he shook his head at him, then kept going around the circle of guests, “and you won’t be getting your mayflies, or you your great blue heron, or you your loon chicks, or you—” touching Caroline’s perfect shoulder briefly, “or you your camp, Caroline.”

  Diane lifted her chin with a thin smile. “Martin.” She cued him with a small gesture.

  His eyes merely rippled at her. “Step inside, my dearest pals on this beautiful lake, and over whatever Diane has in store for us, I’ll share the latest environmental studies with you.” They were definitely in for it, Val could tell. As the guests stepped haltingly past him, gabbling their alarm that now had nothing to do with Caroline Selkirk’s family history, Martin threw in conversation killers like blueberry blight and eyelid palsy. At that point, Val expected a band to launch into a number about seventy-six trombones.

  Val was just close enough to Caroline to hear her say quietly, as she passed him and leaned in, “Really, Martin. Any day now you’ll equate tailings from mining ore with erectile dysfunction.”

  They gave each other a complicated look. “I don’t have those figures,” he told her with a tight smile.

  “Not interested?”

  “I stick to what’s relevant.”

  Caroline’s eyes widened, only slightly. “Lucky Diane,” she quipped, and for some reason, Val thought there was something wicked afoot that had nothing to do with Leslie Decker’s murder. As Diane lighted the tapers and fourteen dinner guests struggled with place cards and chairs, Val could hear in their chatter there was some generalized hysteria about declining property values.

  Martin Kelleher was masterful.

  If only he could mobilize the cottagers, property values would remain high and properties would stay off the market. But these berry-picking cottagers were in their sixties and seventies and maybe they were weighing the relative merits of working themselves silly, with no guarantees, for laws to protect The Wendaban Moment against selling out and buying some Disney timeshares. Martin Kelleher’s master plan might well backfire.

  Could Leslie Decker have made a difference?

  Had she not been murdered, would she have been the perfect poster child for preserving the worsening Lake Wendaban environment that, to listen to Martin Kelleher tell it, would soon be held responsible for flatulence and ugly hats? Val ended the evening scrutinizing the dinner guests, trying to penetrate any hypocrisies that might have wanted someone to keep beautiful, blond Leslie Decker from the work she was born to do.

  No obvious suspects jumped out at her.

  All of them seemed perfectly appalled and sincere.

  With possibly one exception: Diane Kelleher. When Leslie’s name came up during dinner, in much the same way as people talk reverently about the miracle at Lourdes, only Diane stayed silent, swirling her wine. And Val suddenly remembered what Wade Decker had said about his murdered wife after the mêlée at Camp Sajo when they were cleaning up the messy aftermath. One of these people killed her. Caroline had scoffed, but Decker was very clear on that point.

  But Charlie Cable had been at the meeting in the Camp Sajo lodge, however briefly, and hadn’
t been invited to dinner. Despite his being an environmental activist of long standing. Or had he been invited and declined? Was that life so utterly behind him? Or did he just try to minimize his contact with the sister of the woman he had beaten up and thrown out a second-story window?

  Diane knew the signs.

  She knew the signs before they even became signs. For instance, Diane knew her father was running around on her mother two months before her mother figured it out. He started wearing an ascot—of all the damn things—and Brut, the cologne choice of twenty-somethings, back when. Once, when they had gone to the Jersey shore without her, Diane poked around and found Grecian Formula for Men and gold chains so her Mayflower daddy could look like a goombah.

  And there, lying in a dish on his dresser, any of them to see, was a phony New Jersey driver’s license. Harlen March was now someone called Arnaldo Marchione. Apparently Mr. Marchione, who looked like a darker-haired version of her father the classics professor, lived on a nonexistent street in the next town. At eighteen, she was old enough to know he wasn’t a spy. And she was young enough to feel the world she knew rumble beneath her feet.

  So she had known Martin Francis Kelleher, Boston College distinguished alum, Wharton M.B.A., CEO of Cintorix Corporation, was sticking it where he shouldn’t. Again. On the days she worked at her potter’s wheel, her mind roamed over things. There was something about the rhythmic spin of the wheel, the feel of the wet clay under her thumbs, that led to strange moments of insight.

  With Martin the signs did not include Grecian Formula or tacky jewelry. No, with him it was philanthropy. The more serious the fuck, the greater his contributions. The Arts League, the Children’s Hospital, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. A year ago he was singlehandedly responsible for the new choir loft. Diane had come to think of it as Martin’s guilt tax. She kept an eye on his contributions the summer he was boning a Continental Express flight attendant, and he only sweetened his annual membership to public radio by just a few dollars, which Diane took to mean the flight attendant was hardly worth the price of a room.

  But these days Diane didn’t know where Martin was stripping off his monogrammed silk boxers. Her best guess was at Stacy’s, the robo-blonde Cintorix hired to head up inside sales, all the while making some inside sales of her own that were not included in the job description. There is always a woman, somewhere, eager to sleep with your husband. That much Diane knew. And Martin still had a kind of Irish streetwise charm that played well in airport lounges, boxing matches, casinos—all the places that poor kid from south Philly still inside him liked to prowl when he stepped outside the boardroom of Cintorix Corporation.

  The money had just given him added luster. I’m a halfway laddie, he had told her when they were dating, which was just his way of telling her something about his background. He had grown up with two half-brothers in half a house with a driveway shared by another family and a father he saw only every other week. The yard, already small, had been divided by the landlord with an ugly vinyl and chain-link fence so each half of the duplex was clear on what’s what. Diane knew his childhood had something to do with his hunger for land.

  There was certainly nothing halfway left in Martin Kelleher, when some casual acquaintance brought him and another Wharton guy to the dance at Bryn Mawr. He was different from everything Diane March hated in those days, which was everything from fake goombahs to pathetic intellectual classics professors. I’m going places, he told her, and she knew it was true. And since she wanted to see how he worked it out, and the natural smell of him was greater than anything Brut could bottle, she found herself tearing at his pants in the back of his half-brother’s borrowed Mustang just three weeks later.

  Two weeks after graduation, they got married—Martin insisted on a full Catholic Mass at a Mainline Catholic Church—and as she sat there composed and slightly bored behind her white veil while the priest raised the Eucharist, she knew it had less to do with Martin’s faith than it did with his certainty that this was the first influential club he could join in his bid for wealth.

  The sun slipped behind the trees as Diane watched Martin oversee the activity on the dock. One gal started up her engine, which burbled loudly in the first slip, and shouted her anxiety about illegal access roads. Martin said something brief and cast off her line. Caroline stood talking with the woman from New York who had the angular brightness of that beautiful city, not to mention a shiner.

  Two of the dinner guests settled into their tandem kayak and adjusted the straps on their Australian outback hats. The others spread out over the deck of a pontoon boat, topping each other with questions for Martin. One kept wanting to hire a lawyer, as if yelling it over and over again would make it either happen or worth doing. Another departing guest insisted a petition campaign was the way to go.

  To Diane it had the sound of all the same old impotencies in the face of a dreary inevitability. Martin seemed unfazed, which meant he had something up his sleeve. Diane wondered if it had something to do with the calls she’d overheard during the last few months, the couriered papers, the closed doors, which, when she asked, he dismissed with something about diversifying. Was Cintorix starting up a mining subsidiary? A distinctly interesting possibility, but only because he wasn’t sharing it tonight at dinner with his cottager coalition.

  Caroline Selkirk shook hands with Martin and climbed into the Camp Sajo skiff, a lovely old boat that needed some work—like everything else at the camp, according to Martin. The gal from New York was huddled in her life jacket as Caroline, at the helm, waited for the pontoon boat to clear the dock. There was something in the way she waved at Martin, who nodded, that made Diane wonder whether the statuesque Caroline was Martin’s reason for the choir loft. Diane narrowed her eyes at the first interesting idea she had come in contact with that whole night. Yes, Caroline Selkirk might definitely explain a big ticket, guilt-tax item like a choir loft.

  Diane looked around at the first dab of nightfall, when the wind settles down. Goodbye, Diane, people were calling, the voices lovely, and they were all of them caught poised in a golden story about happy times among the rich. Diane waved to no one in particular while Martin stood stock still at the end of the dock, arms crossed, legs apart, like he was reffing a game, which was in a way always the truth.

  And what, Diane wondered, did Leslie Decker have to do with whatever secret expansion Cintorix Corporation, a software company, was now experiencing? There was no one Diane could talk to about how very much she had disliked Leslie Selkirk Decker because, quite simply, everyone on this lake was either her family, her father’s former employee, her gobsmacked fan, or her lover. Martin wasn’t related, he had never worked for Trey Selkirk, and he didn’t always agree with Leslie, even in public.

  But Diane knew her to be what hardly anyone ever says about a woman anymore, that she had been dangerous, and it really had very little to do with the fact that in the year or two before Leslie’s death, Martin began to mention how he was talking to the Arts League about starting an endowment for scholarships to young, disadvantaged artists. And there was that weekend itself, that weekend Leslie Decker went out a second-story window, when the Kellehers were home in Philadelphia, and Martin told Diane he was sailing the schooner down off the eastern shore of Maryland, where he could do some fishing and work on a big presentation. Alone.

  She wondered whatever became of the Arts League endowment.

  She knew what became of Leslie Decker.

  But not entirely.

  12

  The hands set the dull green metal box on the table. It was a tall box, and wide, and deep enough for file folders, if that’s what it ever held. Fireproof, Army surplus, old, any of which could be true—or not. Like its owner, about whom anything at all could be true—or not. It was thin metal, two small dents in front. The hands rotated the box: one dent in back, some rust. It had a lid that closed over the top, hinged at the back, and whe
re a padlock would slip through the latch, someone had driven a thin and bent piece of metal. Probably the owner, right after she scratched her initials into the front, just above the latch: LDS.

  Leslie Dungannon Selkirk.

  Each line was scratched several times, either to thicken each initial, or make it more artistic, or make it clear once and for all that the box was her very own property. None of it had happened. The letters weren’t any thicker, they certainly weren’t artistic, and the box had only been Leslie Selkirk’s property for just as long as she was alive. It was pure Leslie, after all. Nothing ever turned out quite the way she expected, but she was self-absorbed enough not to notice. It was an attitude that led to—trouble.

  For a moment, the hands were still, resting alongside the box that had been stood up on the table. Then they slid out the piece of bent metal and opened it all up. The box was tilted backwards, and the contents slid out. A camera, a few photos, loose papers, clippings, a wallet, piece of jewelry, notebooks, little dollhouse toys, a jump drive wrapped and rubber-banded with a scrap of paper labeled MY FOOLPROOF PLAN TO SAVE OUR PRECIOUS CAMP. Something on the level of bake sales, no doubt.

  It was all old, old stuff. Nothing that would get the authorities any closer to figuring out what had happened to her that day in October—unless her theft of her friend Janie’s Weebles Treehouse when she was ten finally caught up with her. The treehouse, according to the ratty spiral notebook used as a proto-diary by the girl Leslie, never found its way back to Janie’s.

  Janie has like twenty-seven Weebles, can you believe it? What a pig. And Janie has two, TWO! Weebles treehouses, went the rationale, and can hardly use them both, who could? And besides, after I play with it just for tonight I will donate it to the giving tree at school, wrapped up of course so Janie doesn’t see it, and some poor kid will get it and really really like it. BUT WHAT IF THE POOR KID WHO GETS IT DOESN’T HAVE ANY WEEBLES FOR THE WEEBLES TREEHOUSE??