by Vicki Delany
I thought, not for the first time, that Muddle Harbor would be better served helping to promote Rudolph and hoping to attract some of our visitors. Instead, they’d put up a virtual wall between us. No one from Rudolph ever went to Muddle Harbor, and the Muddites came to Rudolph only if they were out to make trouble. They’d prefer to drive all the way to Rochester rather than be seen shopping on Jingle Bell Lane.
Today, the motel parking lot was almost full. Two empty spots were close to the doors, reserved for unloading cars. My dad never parked where he wasn’t supposed to, so he drove through the lot searching for a place. He found one around the corner from the lobby. First-floor rooms opened directly onto the parking lot, and an open hallway ran along the second floor. Mom grumbled about having to walk so far when we were only going to be here for a few minutes. Dad gave her an indulgent smile, and we got out of the car.
“What room?” I asked.
“One-two-five,” Mom said.
The lobby was empty except for a young man standing behind the reception desk. He couldn’t possibly have looked more bored if he tried. He blinked as the doors whooshed open and said hopefully, “Good afternoon. Are you checking in?”
Mom passed him in a swirl of her red cape, trailing the scent of Chanel No. 5. “Just visiting friends. We’re expected.” She marched down the hall, heels tapping.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” Dad said to the clerk.
We trotted after Mom.
Room 125 was situated next to the elevators. We hadn’t needed to have been given the number. As we approached, we could hear the whine of high-pitched voices.
“Still at it, I see.” Mom hammered on the door with a red leather–gloved hand.
Barbara opened the door. She didn’t bother with preambles. “Okay, the gang’s all here. One last time. What’s this about, Aline?”
The Wilkinson family walked into the room. It was a standard budget-chain-motel room. Double bed, desk, mass-produced prints on the wall above the bed, tea and coffee things on top of a tiny fridge, cheap furniture. Barbara had not unpacked. Her suitcase stood next to the door.
Genevieve sat in the desk chair, and Constance stood at the window, looking out over the parking lot.
“We’ve decided to leave, never mind what that cop has to say about it.” Constance turned. “My father’s lawyer advised against it, but I’ve made up my mind. She can arrest us if she wants, but I’m not staying in this”—she shuddered—“place a moment longer.”
“One for all and all for one,” Genevieve said. “If Constance leaves, we’re going to go, too. Barbara and I are heading for the city and dropping Constance at the Rochester airport.”
“I thought your father was sending a private plane?” Mom said.
Constance flushed. “As his lawyer advised me not to leave, my father won’t help me.”
“Never mind that,” Genevieve said. “Whatever you have to say, Aline, say it now.”
“You meant well by trying to get us all together for a reunion,” Barbara said. “Not your fault it didn’t work out.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” Constance said.
“I have nothing to say except good-bye.” Mom turned to me. “But my daughter does. Merry?”
Dad hadn’t immediately followed us into the room, but now he came in, pulling the door behind him. He leaned against it, his arms crossed over his chest. Mom perched on the edge of the bed. She didn’t take off her gloves or unfasten her cape.
I cleared my throat. All eyes were on me, and I was suddenly unsure of my conclusions. It had made sense in my mind and on paper. Now, looking at the faces of the watching women, I wasn’t so sure.
Constance let out a long sigh of impatience. Genevieve studied her fingernails and pretended to stifle a yawn. Barbara said, “Get on with it.”
“Secrets,” I said. “This is all about secrets. Ruth was right about that when she said secrets are at the heart of any mystery novel. The heart of almost any novel, come to think of it. But one of you thought she wasn’t making a general observation. One of you thought she was talking specifically to you. I was there when she said it. You all were.” I remembered how Ruth had made a simple statement sound like a declaration. How she looked at each of the women in turn.
“She spoke as though she knew something. She didn’t, but as the saying goes, ‘The guilty run when no one pursueth.’”
“What of it?” Barbara said. “Ruth is always nattering on about her tedious books.”
“And her tedious life,” Constance said.
“Merry and I visited her in the hospital this morning,” Mom said. “It would be nice if you did also. She’s awake and allowed to have visitors.”
“As we said, we’re leaving town,” Genevieve said. “We don’t have time to go, but we sent flowers.”
“I sent them, as in paid for them,” Constance said. “I let you put your names on the card.”
“Wasn’t that nice of you,” Genevieve said.
“I thought so,” Constance replied.
I was losing control of the conversation here. “One of you has a secret, a secret so important Karla had to be killed to protect it. That person then thought Ruth had either guessed the secret or figured out who killed Karla, and so she had to be silenced in turn. That person probably thought that as Ruth hadn’t gone to the police with what she knew, she was intending to use the information for blackmail.”
“Hey!” Genevieve said. “You promised not to tell anyone about that.”
“About what?” Mom said.
I turned to Genevieve. “I’m not. This is about something other than what we discussed, but you’ve just proven my point about the guilty running for no reason.”
She flushed and looked away.
The other women, including my mom, gave her curious looks.
“And,” I said, “as this person had already killed once to keep her secret, meaning Karla, she decided it would be necessary to get rid of Ruth also. Fortunately for Ruth, I happened along and interrupted the attack. None of you have alibis for that time.”
“I do,” Genevieve said. “I was in a restaurant.”
“But the waiter can’t say positively what time you left.” I didn’t actually know if that was true. Simmonds hadn’t shared the results of the alibi checks with me.
“I didn’t slip out early and attack anyone,” she snapped. “The whole idea is preposterous.”
“I was having a walk. By myself, as I like it,” Barbara said. “If I’d known I’d need an alibi, I would have marched up and down Main Street with a sign.”
“Jingle Bell Lane,” Dad spoke for the first time.
“What?” Barbara said.
“Our town’s main street is called Jingle Bell Lane, not Main Street.”
She threw up her hands. “Whatever.”
“Among all the bickering and backbiting you five, including Karla, engaged in this week, two things stood out,” I said. “Constance never stopped needling Ruth about not having any money.”
“I was hardly needling,” Constance said. “I was trying to be a friend. I didn’t want her to feel left out because she couldn’t do some of the activities the others of us did.”
“Needling,” I said. “Making her feel inadequate. Embarrassing her. You never lost a chance to remind her that you have money and she does not.”
I stole a quick glance at Genevieve. She was intently studying the pattern in the veneer on the desk.
“That’s true,” Barbara said. “But what the heck. That’s the way Constance is. Her bragging about something she had nothing to do with is her way of compensating for all her other inadequacies.”
“As this seems to have turned into a bash-Constance session, I’m outa here.” Constance’s Michael Kors bag lay on the desk; she picked it up and headed for the door. “I’ll find my
own way to the airport.”
Dad didn’t move to get out of her way. “Why don’t we let Merry finish?”
She hesitated for a moment, and then she turned around to face into the room. “If I must.”
“The other point of contention,” I said, “was the issue of children. Ruth and Karla have good-sized families.”
“Believe me”—Constance shifted her purse from one hand to the other—“we know. Boy, do we know.”
“Not that that seems to have made Karla at all happy,” Barbara said. “She lied to us about her marriage.”
“Yes, she did. She lied because she had something to prove. Even to herself. Most of all to herself.”
I looked directly at Constance.
Mom, Dad, Barbara, and Genevieve glanced at one another.
Constance stared back at me. Something moved in the depths of her eyes.
“Karla only agreed to come on this weekend because you wrote and told her you were coming, Constance. She told me that. I thought nothing of it, assuming she wanted to catch up. A little stroll down memory lane. But from the very beginning, I didn’t see anything at all close between the two of you.”
“If you’re going to rehash all of Karla’s petty grievances,” Constance said, “I’m going to demand you let me leave. Keeping me here against my will is called kidnapping, you know.”
“I’m almost finished,” I said. “Are you aware that Karla kept a picture of you with her at all times, Constance?”
“What? That’s rather creepy.”
“Why would she do that?” Barbara asked. “Constance and Karla weren’t close, even back then.”
“Good question,” I said. “But when I thought about it later, I remembered that Constance isn’t the only one in that picture. There’s a young man with you. Your son, I assume. He’s a good-looking man.”
“Thank you,” Constance said. “I’m very proud of him.”
“He’s quite a bit shorter than you, though. Children are generally taller than their parents, particularly sons and mothers. But not always.”
“I have absolutely no idea where this is going,” Barbara said. “I hope you’re not going to tell us Karla has been nurturing a secret crush on Constance all these years. She was an unhappy woman.”
She had to convince herself that she hadn’t made a mistake in giving her son up for adoption all those years ago. Giving him to you, Constance, to raise.”
Barbara sucked in a breath, and Genevieve let out a low whistle.
“Oh yeah,” Barbara said. “That would work.”
“Something Mom said put me on the track.”
“Me?” My mother glanced up, startled. “I didn’t know anything about it until you started asking me earlier today.”
“‘A secret you’d kill a lifetime later over’ are the words you used when we were speaking to Ruth at the hospital this morning. It hasn’t been your entire lifetime since college, has it? But it has been for Karla’s baby.”
Constance’s eyes darted around the room. “What of it? Is that all you bunch have to do? Dig up old dirt?”
“Karla got pregnant in our junior year,” Mom said. “At first, she tried to hide it, but of course we all knew. This was the 1970s. An unmarried pregnancy wasn’t the scandal it might have been ten or twenty years earlier, but to some families, it was still a matter of disgrace.”
“She quit college and went to stay with an aunt. Or so she told us,” Barbara said. “She intended to have the baby adopted when it was born. Isn’t that what happened?”
“Yes, it happened like that,” I said. “But what you didn’t know is that Constance adopted him. Karla didn’t keep a picture of you, Constance. She kept a picture of her son.”
Constance said nothing.
“I don’t mind telling you that I checked into your backgrounds on the Internet,” I said.
“That was rude,” Barbara said.
“It’s public information. I was looking for a reason that would turn a woman into a killer. Constance has one son, and that son would have been conceived at the time you were all still in college.”
“I, unlike Karla, got married before I had a child,” Constance said. “Not that that’s any of your business.”
“One day, right out of the blue,” Genevieve said, “you announced you were quitting college and going back to California to marry Frank, your boyfriend.”
“I remember,” Barbara said. “It was a mighty quick wedding; none of us were invited. I also remember we weren’t entirely surprised when we got a birth notice from Constance a few months after that.”
“Only Ruth, Barbara, Aline, and I were left of the original six to finish college,” Genevieve said. “We said at the time that Constance’s baby and Karla’s would have been born very close to each other. Now you’re saying there was only one baby. Wow.”
“Why on earth,” Barbara said, “would someone go into a shotgun marriage if she wasn’t pregnant? Constance, as I recall, was always reading magazines, nattering on and on about the grand society wedding she planned to have one day. Even then, all she ever talked about was spending money.”
“What surprised us most, Constance,” Mom said, “was that you were going to marry the odious Frank. He was studying philosophy, and he thought he was God’s gift to women. Earlier in the year you were thinking of breaking up with him because you suspected he had another girlfriend on the side. Then, all of a sudden, you announced an engagement and quit school. Naturally we assumed there could only be one reason for that.”
“He was extremely good-looking,” Genevieve said. “As I remember.”
“Constance and Frank had one child, Edward,” I said. “He was born six months after the marriage. But then, no more children.” The look Constance gave me would melt ice at the North Pole. She could have demanded Dad get out of her way and left. He wouldn’t try to physically stop her. That she stayed, to hear me out, told me I was on the right track.
“That, of course, is absolutely none of my business,” I continued. “But, as Karla was murdered in my mother’s house, I decided to make it my business. I also learned that once you’d settled in California, Frank went back to university and switched to a business degree at UCLA. After graduating, he took over as your father’s heir apparent in the business and got full control of the company ten years later, when your father had to step down after a stroke. Five years ago, Frank died in an apparent, and unsolved, home invasion.”
I paused. I knew all this from simply reading Constance’s bio on the Stewart Industries website and other bits and pieces I’d collected off the Internet. Everything else was largely conjecture on my part, helped by snippets of Mom’s memory as to what had been going on when the group was in college. There had to be a reason Constance and Frank had no more children, and I could assume, judging by Constance’s reaction to other women’s talk of children and grandchildren, that it wasn’t a voluntary decision. “You mentioned your son’s allergic to peanuts. Like Karla.”
“Exactly like Karla,” Barbara said.
“When Karla talked about her peanut allergy, she said she was grateful that none of Eric’s and her children inherited it. I thought nothing of it at the time, but then later I realized that—particularly as she and Eric were fighting a bitter divorce—she would be more likely to say ‘my children.’ But she added the qualifier. So I asked myself why she’d done that.”
“It’s all starting to come back now,” Barbara said. “You were worried that Frank had another girlfriend on the side in college. I knew, but I never told you because I didn’t think that would be helpful, that it was Karla. Frank got Karla pregnant, not you. But you married the guy.”
“Karla came into my shop without the rest of you one day,” I said. “She called Frank a slimeball. At the time I thought that a strong word for someone she’d barely known forty years before, but i
t turns out she had good reason to remember him, didn’t she, Constance? And not at all fondly.”
“It makes sense,” Barbara said.
“You’re talking nonsense,” Constance said. “Why on earth would I have done something like that if he was cheating on me?”
“Because you loved him,” Mom said. “Why else? Love forgives a lot of sins, but it can’t withstand that sort of betrayal, can it? If a man fools around before you’re even married, he’s not likely to stay faithful to his marriage vows. I doubt your marriage was a happy one.”
And then Frank died. Getting rid of a bad husband and giving Constance control of the business.
Constance had been suspected, or so the papers said, of being responsible for her husband’s death, but nothing was ever proven.
“It wasn’t happy,” Constance said slowly. “The honeymoon period didn’t last long. You’re right in one thing only: love doesn’t last, not if it’s all coming from one side. I asked Frank to marry me, not the other way around. He was willing enough. Why wouldn’t he be with all the extras he got as part of the deal? And it was a deal. Love and eternal happiness for me. A job for life and a rich father-in-law for him.”
I held my breath, willing no one to interrupt. If I was right, Constance had been carrying this secret for a long, long time. She must be desperate to let it out at last.
“Adopting Karla’s baby was part of the deal. Frank had been horrified when Karla told him she was pregnant. She wanted to get married, of course, but not only did he not love her—he didn’t even like her much—he had no intention of joining the working classes to support a family at that stage of his life. Frank wasn’t all that smart, I have to say, and he thought I was doing it for him when I said we could adopt Karla’s baby. His baby.”
“I still don’t understand why,” Mom said. “Why would you want to raise your husband’s child by another woman? Why pretend it was yours?”
“My father has some old-fashioned ideas about the roles of women. My brother and my mother died in a car accident when I was in high school, leaving my dad with only me—a girl—as his heir to both his money and his company. That would never do, not in my father’s eyes. If he didn’t have a son, he wanted—needed—a son-in-law and a grandson. After my mom’s death, he started bringing young, and not-so-young but unmarried, men around to the house to meet me. Each one of them more dreadful than the last. That’s why I went to Steinhardt. To get as far away from him and his endless parade of supposedly suitable men as I could. I had some idea of being an actress and cutting ties with my father, but I soon realized that wasn’t going to work.”
