Crime & Punctuation

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Note to self: Put in hearing aids when you get up in the middle of the night. Had I done so, I’d have been forewarned of the plumbing crisis in progress before I walked into it.

  After a moment of stunned immobility, I sloshed through about a half inch of water to turn off the faucet. It was a good thing I’d decided to get up, but my plan to indulge in a relaxing snack was off the table. First I had to schlep a sodden scatter rug through the utility room and out onto my tiny back porch. I hung it over the railing and left it to drip dry. On my way back to the kitchen, I grabbed a mop and a bucket. Sopping and wringing took up the best part of the next hour. At the end of that time I had a very clean kitchen floor.

  It could have been worse, I told myself. If I’d slept through the night, there would have been water everywhere. As it was, only a portion of the tile floor had been inundated, and there had been no damage to the contents of drawers and cabinets or to the wall-to-wall carpeting in the hall or, on the other side, the oak flooring in my dining room/temporary office. The floodwaters hadn’t even reached the dinette, so I was spared having to move the table and chairs and mop the alcove.

  By the time the cleanup was done, I was exhausted. I located Calpurnia, blissfully asleep on the living room loveseat, and carried her upstairs with me. After carefully closing my bedroom door to prevent her from repeating her trick with the faucet, I fell into bed and was out like a light.

  I came to, briefly, to find my cat sitting on the nightstand and staring at me. It was just past dawn. As I watched her, Calpurnia delicately extended a paw and tapped me on the nose. Ignoring her, I closed my eyes and drifted off again.

  When my alarm clock went off, I smacked it into silence. I’ll get up in a minute, I promised myself. I had at least an hour until Matt showed up to fix the faucet and finish up in the downstairs bath.

  I must have drifted off again. My bed faced east and the sun, higher than it had been at dawn, shone in through light-colored drapes. As I blinked and slowly came awake, I found myself staring at eerie shadows playing across the fabric.

  Shadows?

  Heart racing, I sat bolt upright and fumbled for my glasses. Putting them on didn’t improve matters. The shadows at my second-floor bedroom window were man-sized and rose and fell as I watched.

  For a moment the theme music from an old horror movie played in my head.

  Calpurnia chose that moment to hop up onto the dresser and shove the curtain aside so she could look out. Part of a jean-clad leg appeared in the gap. In perfect Gothic-heroine style, I reacted by pulling the bedcovers up to my neck.

  A millisecond before I embarrassed myself by screaming or dialing 911, my groggy brain finally started to function. My face heated even as I had to laugh at myself.

  “It’s Tuesday,” I said aloud. “The day my contractor scheduled workmen to remove the old shingles from the porch roof.”

  They would be replaced, as the roof over the rest of the house already had been, by a nice new metal one. Out of respect for my strained finances, we’d left the front and back porches and the garage until now, since leaks in those locations didn’t matter as much.

  While my heart rate settled back to normal, I groped for the case holding my hearing aids, pushed the little trap doors closed to seat the batteries, and popped them into my ears. That done, I could finally hear the sounds of demolition.

  A glance at the clock told me it wasn’t as late as I’d thought. The roofers apparently liked to get an early start on their day. I still had plenty of time to shower and dress before I had to let Matt and George and the other regulars into the house.

  “Put the curtain back,” I called to Calpurnia, in a fair imitation of a similar command in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and got out of bed to start my day.

  Chapter 17

  Later that day, when I took a late-afternoon break from work, I phoned Darlene. I hadn’t heard from her since I dropped her off at her house after her Friday appointment with the eye doctor, and I thought that if she was still in a funk I could cheer her up with a lively account of last night’s water sports. If she was feeling more herself, a condition devoutly to be hoped for, then I could use her as a sounding board for my suspicions about Tiffany’s death.

  “How are you doing?” I asked when she answered.

  “Fine.” She sounded listless.

  Oh-oh. That was not her usual response. Tendrils of concern snaked through me. “Okay if I stop by later?”

  Instead of her accustomed invitation to “come on over,” she put me off. “This just isn’t a good time.”

  “I’ve got a story that will make you laugh.” Enough time had passed that I’d begun to see the humor in both my middle-of-the-night flood and early-morning panic attack.

  The roofers, having removed all the old shingles, put down new tar paper, and cleaned up the mess created by the demolition process, had already left for the day. They’d be back first thing in the morning to put a new roof on the porch—metal this time so that the snow would slide off and I would never again have to make use of a roof rake. The day after that, they’d start on the garage roof, and they’d finish up with the roof over the small back porch off the utility room.

  There was a long pause before Darlene answered. “Thanks, but . . . not today, okay?”

  “Well, sure,” I said. “I don’t want to intrude. Is there anything I can do for you? Pick up groceries? Walk the dog?” Darlene and Frank had an aged schnauzer who spent most of his time asleep in his favorite sunny spot in their fenced-in backyard. “I’m just looking for an excuse to get out of the house,” I added with a laugh that didn’t come out sounding anywhere near as natural as I’d hoped.

  “I don’t need any help.” Listlessness morphed into impatience. After the briefest of goodbyes, Darlene ended the call.

  I stared at the phone for a long moment before I put it down. The friend I’d come to know again in the last couple of months had been unfailingly upbeat. She’d always been ready to chat on the phone or spend an hour or two together at her place. Sure, everyone has a bad day now and again, but I couldn’t help but feel there was more to it than that.

  Sometimes I think better when I’m moving. As I pondered, I wandered through the downstairs, finally ending up on my front porch. I stepped outside just as the parochial school across the street let out for the day. Primary school children streamed out of the squat, square building. Some headed home on foot. Others were being picked up by waiting parents. Noisy chatter, interspersed with laughter, filled the crisp autumn air. Now and again, a parent called out a name, urging the little darling to hurry it up.

  My mind was still on Darlene, but my gaze skimmed idly over the vehicles parked along the opposite side of Wedemeyer Terrace. I didn’t expect to recognize any of the drivers, although some of the people who currently had kids in grade school could well be the children of former classmates. At least they could if both generations had started their families a little later in life.

  Seconds after that thought crossed my mind, I did spot someone I knew. At first I couldn’t place him. I stared harder. His profile wasn’t familiar, but there was something about the way his large hands gripped the steering wheel of the dark blue SUV that rang a bell. Then he turned his head and I bit back a gasp. It was the guard from Wonderful World, the one who’d tried to confiscate my smartphone because I’d dared to snap a few pictures of the scenery.

  I took a couple of hasty steps sideways so that I was better hidden by the high railing and low roof of my porch. Since my house faced east and it was a midafternoon in late September, I was safely in shadow.

  “Idiot,” I muttered, meaning myself.

  Just because the guard had hassled me for trespassing didn’t mean there was anything sinister about his reappearance in front of my house. He was obviously giving his kid a ride home after school, as were many other parents. While I watched, cars departed one by one until only the SUV remained. It was parked in such a way that it blocked my view of th
e entrance to the school, so I couldn’t tell if a small child had come out of the building and climbed in on the passenger side or not. I assumed one had because the Mongaup Valley Security guy started his engine and drove slowly away. Never once had I seen him glance my way, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been watching my house.

  “Paranoid idiot,” I said aloud. Next I’d be imagining that the grumpy woman who’d sat near me at the DMV and given me such an ugly look when we stood at adjoining windows was stalking me. I guess those eerie shadows on my bedroom curtains had affected me more than I’d realized.

  I went back inside and returned to fretting about Darlene. I wondered again if her odd mood had something to do with Greg Onslow. If that business deal gone bad had caused repercussions I knew nothing about, anything was possible. Frank and Darlene might well be in serious financial trouble. On the surface they seemed to have an ideal life in their retirement—house, transportation, hobbies—but appearances can be deceiving.

  The alternative wasn’t any more pleasant to contemplate. What if Dr. Shapiro had given Darlene bad news of some kind? If she hated the idea of surgery as much as I did, she’d be pretty upset about the prospect of having cataracts fixed, assuming that she had cataracts. I shook my head. As my own eye doctor had pointed out to me on more than one occasion, these days cataract surgery was no big deal. If Darlene had a health issue, it had to be something more serious than that.

  As I wandered through the house, Calpurnia appeared and began to strop herself against my legs. I lifted her up to touch noses with her. “You know what my problem is?” I asked.

  She made a little huffing sound, as if to say “What now?”

  “I obsess about things. That’s what James always used to say.”

  And then he’d insist we talk out whatever it was that was bothering me and, somehow, my worries would always disappear. God, I missed that man! He’d been my rock.

  I carried Cal with me into the kitchen, deciding that what I needed to cheer myself up was a nice cup of green tea and a ginger cookie. Cal could have one of her cat treats, and we’d both feel better.

  I’ve got to stop talking to the cat, I thought. Maybe that was my real problem. I hadn’t made the slightest effort to make new friends since I’d moved back to Lenape Hollow. Was I so lonely that I’d begun to obsess about other people’s problems and imagine scary scenarios that had no basis in reality?

  Considering that Darlene was the only person I spent much time with, it was easy to see why I ended up using Calpurnia as a sounding board. That had to stop. I had no excuse save laziness for not cultivating new acquaintances and renewing relationships with old ones.

  You’d think I’d learn, but what is it they say about old dogs and new tricks? I’d done the same thing during my marriage. For years I’d relied for companionship on one person, my soul mate, best friend, and husband. I’d been devastated when he died, but I’d also found it ridiculously easy to pull up stakes and move. I hadn’t been close to anyone else, not even his sister and her family.

  As an only child, I suppose I was always something of a loner. My parents had long since gone to their reward. So had a sprinkling of older first cousins, none of whom had lived near me in any case. It wasn’t that I was standoffish. I’d just never gone out of my way to socialize. On reflection, I realized that wasn’t a very healthy attitude and was probably one I should change before I turned into a stereotype. I didn’t think I was likely to become a hermit or a hoarder, but crazy cat lady was a distinct possibility.

  Self-analysis can be painful, but my ruminations ended on a positive note. By starting over in my old hometown, I had the perfect opportunity to change my ways.

  I was in the kitchen by the time I had this epiphany, and a glance out the window at the O’Day house next door revealed a chance to seize the moment. Tom and Marie were out in their side yard and looking straight at me. I gave them a little finger wave and hurried outside by way of the back door.

  We met over the chest-high fence that separated our two properties. That’s chest-high for me. Since they were both taller than I am by a good three inches, this wasn’t as awkward as it might have been. They’d obviously been at work. They wore nearly identical suits, his accessorized with a tie and hers with a scarf.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “You two are home early.”

  Together, they owned and operated one of Lenape Hollow’s small businesses, an antiques shop located in a building I remembered as a clothing store. I’d been meaning to stop by, if only to be neighborly, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it.

  “We leave the kids in charge one afternoon a week after school,” Tom said. “Gives them a sense of responsibility.”

  “And it gives me a chance to work in my garden,” Marie added, “although at this time of year there isn’t much to do.”

  She’d created a charming scene in their upward-sloping backyard with flower beds, rock gardens, and winding flagstone walkways, and I told her so. I expected a smile in return for the compliment. Instead, a pained look came over her face. She glanced at her husband in the way that wives do when they want him to be the one to speak up.

  Tom cleared his throat. “We’ve been wondering about your trees.”

  I followed the direction of his gaze to the virtual forest in my backyard and sighed. “I plan to have most of them taken down, but to be honest, I can’t afford to do it just yet. The work on the house itself had to be done first.”

  Marie sent me a sympathetic look but then delivered a little lecture, the gist of which was that my trees were a fire hazard, created a security risk, and most likely provided a home for the kind of tick that spreads Lyme disease. She was correct on all counts, but there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment.

  So much for turning the neighbors into bosom buddies.

  I returned to the house to resume my musings on that score. There were at least a dozen people in Lenape Hollow with whom I already had something in common: all those years we’d spent together in grade school and high school. Instead of using Darlene as a lifeline or cultivating the O’Days, I needed to reach out to some of them. I’d already made a beginning with Mike. There had been no progress with Ronnie, but the two of them weren’t the only former classmates still living in the area. In fact, I’d just recently encountered another one.

  Without further ado, I picked up the phone, found the number I’d made a note of for future reference, and called Dr. Shapiro’s office. When Sarah answered, I asked her if she’d like to meet me the next day for lunch.

  Chapter 18

  At noon on Wednesday, I sat alone at a table for two in Harriet’s. Sarah Shapiro was late. I should have expected I’d have to wait for her. Back in high school she’d been dubbed “the late Miss Sarah” for her habit of wandering in halfway through a meeting of the yearbook committee or the drama club, babbling away about how she’d mixed up the time or run into someone who’d distracted her or just plain forgotten what time we were getting together. She gave excuses, but she never actually apologized, and she was always laughing about her tardiness, as if she thought we were sure to forgive her because she was scatterbrained and that was just so darned cute.

  I’ve become more tolerant in many ways over the years, but my patience for self-centered foolishness has always been in short supply. I found myself wishing I’d remembered Sarah’s bad habit before I left the house. I could have finished the editing project I’d been working on all morning.

  As I sat there twiddling my thumbs and trying to tamp down my annoyance, I remembered another of Sarah’s less than appealing traits. She had dearly loved to know other people’s secrets, and she’d never had any qualms about sharing what she found out with all and sundry. I supposed that, these days, doctor-patient confidentiality applied to her on two levels, both as the doctor’s receptionist and as his mother. Too bad, I thought. Otherwise I might have been able to ask her straight out if anything had upset Darlene during her visit
to the eye doctor.

  I sipped coffee as I waited, lecturing myself all the while. Snooping was bad, especially when it involved friends. When Darlene was ready, she’d tell me what was troubling her. Or not. A pal didn’t pry into private matters. I’d be there if Darlene needed me—that was the important thing to remember.

  To amuse myself and pass the time, I studied the other customers at Harriet’s. There were two men at separate tables and two women, a strawberry blonde and a brunette, seated together. I didn’t know any of them.

  “I hear Greg Onslow is going to take Ronnie North to court over that will,” the strawberry blonde confided in her luncheon companion.

  My ears perked up.

  “He claims he has the real will,” she continued, “one that leaves all those shares in Mongaup Valley Ventures to him.”

  “You mean he’s saying the one Ronnie has is a forgery?” The brunette wore a baby blue sweater snug enough to emphasize a generous bosom but with a cowl neck to cover the wrinkled skin that was one of the unavoidable signs of getting older. At a guess, she was somewhere in her mid-fifties.

  “Are you surprised?” the blonde asked with a laugh. “After all, Mike is the one who came up with that will.”

  Her companion gave a ladylike snort. “Well, then, of course it’s a fake. He can’t be trusted. Is it true that his second wife threatened to have him arrested for assault if she didn’t get a good settlement in the divorce?”

  I waited with bated breath for the answer but, of course, with impeccable timing, Sarah chose that moment to arrive. The two women stopped talking to greet her. The blonde invited her to join them, even though they were already halfway through their meal.

  “Sorry, Sonya,” Sarah said, gesturing at me, “but I’ve already got a date.”