by Lisa Preston
She recalled being twenty-one, still living at home, when a neighbor a few houses away had a chimney fire. The flames spread to the roof and the street had filled with emergency vehicles and neighbors watching the spectacle.
The fire erupted the same week a fledgling feeling of competence as a roofer began to soak into her hands and mind, just before she’d moved in with Thea. Watching the firefighters stand on that smoking roof, chainsawing into the very heart of a burning home, creating smoke ejection ports to force the fire where they wanted it—making safe passage for the crew inside—she’d wanted to join in. Destruction appeared as satisfying as building, as roofing. To break something down and then rebuild it seemed maybe even better than starting something anew. So, the little odd jobs that commenced with removing an old, rotting roof drew her. That was why last Tuesday she’d stripped and reshingled an old shed’s roof, done it solo.
But she’d come to realize she’d rather a structure be built so well it would last a lifetime. She could do the necessary deconstruction, but to live, she loved building.
Turning now from the street and its emergency vehicles to gawk through her mother’s windows, Daphne gasped when a hand touched her shoulder just as the firefighters inside righted the refrigerator.
Thea’s eyes were wide. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“Um, well, look,” Daphne said, pointing through the kitchen window at her handiwork inside. In the wrecked room, paramedics and firefighters lifted Guff’s bloody form to the gurney.
“Did you kill that guy?”
Daphne’s smile twisted. “Nah. He’s still alive. Besides, he came here to kill me, Thea.”
“That Lincoln owner in California,” Thea began, but stopped as the fire department crew maneuvered the gurney through the front door, the male police officer escorting them. Guff’s face was gray and the back of his head had stained the pillow crimson. One paramedic tried to put an oxygen mask on him.
Guff swiped it away and rasped to the police officer. “That bitch hit me and she was going to cut my head off with a chainsaw!”
“My, what an imagination he has,” Daphne said. “I guess it takes a lot of imagination to conceive the kind of crimes he does. Taking old people’s money, killing them …”
The cop looked at her.
“Or is his girlfriend the brains of their enterprise?” Daphne asked.
The cop was about to say something but stopped and cocked his head as though listening to his ear bud. Then he pressed a button and spoke into his shoulder mic. “Ten-four.” He listened some more. “Copy that. And what’s your ETA?”
She stiffened. “Whose ETA? Who’s coming?”
“Officer Taminsky. He’s in another precinct. He responded to a complaint you made earlier? We have two detectives en route as well and officers on scene at the hotel. Now, Ms. Mayfield, you can go inside. Officer Howe needs to talk to you about what happened after the refrigerator fell.” He looked at Thea, who stood now with a notebook and digital recorder out. “Press?”
“Seattle Times,” she nodded.
“You cannot go inside without the owner’s permission.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Thea grinned.
He headed for his police car, following the ambulance.
What happened after the refrigerator fell.
Daphne thought of the mess in her mom’s kitchen that began when she dropped the telephone. The phone. She figured she’d violated the law by striking and threatening a man who posed no immediate threat to her and felt caught. Thea might have heard what she did. Thea sometimes recorded phone calls, too.
They would know. Everybody would know how she’d tortured Guff, made him tell her where they held Minnie hostage.
She’d used force when it was legally wrong to do so. She’d assaulted Guff.
She would go to jail.
From the front door, the first female officer—Howe?—waved her in.
Daphne’s voice fell low and urgent. “Thea, did you hang up? How long were you on the phone after I asked you to call the police?”
Thea’s gaze narrowed as she studied Daphne. “I called the cops and called Vic, all as I was driving over here.”
“Ms. Mayfield? Come inside, please. I need to clear up a few things,” Officer Howe called from the door.
Daphne did her best to maintain a poker face as she felt Thea studying her. She imagined Thea’s pending question, What did you do, Daphne?
She thought of Vic’s often restrained, impassive expression and did her best to mimic the look. And then she saw him, coming on foot through emergency vehicles, his face full of worry. He closed the distance between them at a run.
“Daph? Are you all right? What’s going on?” He grabbed her as he spoke, hands climbing her arms, taking her shoulders, hugging her, then holding her away again to search her face.
“Yes.”
“Yes, you’re okay?”
“Yes.” She would keep saying yes to him. They would be okay. “What time is it, Vic?”
He looked at his watch. The diesel roar of a departing fire engine drowned out any chance of talking. Vic cocked his wrist to show her the watch face. After midnight. Daphne felt satisfaction, maybe the beginnings of peace, trickle into her core.
She gave Thea the hotel location and Thea bolted for her car. She brought Vic inside and told him in front of the police a version of what happened. She began at the beginning as the two female cops, Howe and a sergeant, worked to deconstruct the events, but Daphne kept things as simple as she could, pretending confusion or fear or whatever it took when the questions edged too close to self-incrimination. She wanted to build, to go forward, not get swamped in what happened earlier in the kitchen. Or elsewhere.
A detective arrived and she gave him her consistent statement, too. Vic stayed close until his cell phone rang as Daphne finished up with the detective.
When Vic waved from a few feet away, holding his phone to his chest, Daphne slipped over to him. “Thea’s on the phone. She’s with Minerva Watts,” he reported. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
It was Sunday, by minutes, but it was a pretty good start of a Sunday. It was Suzanne’s birthday.
It was the day after the ten-year anniversary of her dad’s death, and she had something to tell him. And she didn’t have to go to his grave. Like Blanche wrote to her mom, she could talk to him anywhere, anytime.
“Dad, I didn’t quit.”
CHAPTER 27
In the town of Leavenworth, Washington, Daphne searched for her vacationing mother. She used her best game face, dragging and tired instead of refreshed by the restless nap she’d snagged with Vic after the police left. The early drive she had to make in order to arrive in central Washington before her mother came home left her yawning.
The resort her mother’s bridge partner had chosen was nestled in the forest, behind the Bavarian-style main streets, abutting ragged, snowy mountains. The apple trees were in flower, not offering fruit until fall. The weather was warm enough to relax by the pool, but not to swim. Frances Mayfield sat on a deck chair with her feet propped up, smiling across the water at a posing family.
Blanche beamed, a baby in her arms, bookended by a young couple. The man held a wiggling toddler. A hotel employee snapped a picture of the five and handed the camera back.
Daphne greeted her mother with calming words, said she didn’t want her mother to worry when arriving home to a bit of a mess.
“You’re here! Oh, Daphne, I’m so glad. Don’t worry about some mess. Nothing else matters now that you’re here.”
“Well, hear me out. I need to explain,” Daphne said, thinking of so much she ought to say that had nothing to do with a man breaking into the house and Daphne wrecking the kitchen. She and Vic had patched the broken windowpane in the back door before they left. She would install a new door as soon as her mother picked one out, but for now, she began at the beginning.
Frances listened to her daughter explain, amazed. “A man broke in
to the house? Did he steal anything? Imagine getting robbed while you’re on a weekend vacation.”
“There’s more, Mom.”
Her mother looked across the pool to the little family again, cupped her hands, and called, “Look, Daphne came after all. She came to be with me.”
Daphne waved at Blanche and her family. Frances leaned in to hug Daphne, who swallowed like mad. “I’m sorry I didn’t come with you in the first place. This, of all weekends.”
Frances smoothed her slacks. “Well, you’re here now.”
Blinking, Daphne remembered Minnie forgiving her in the woods for not coming sooner. “Mom, there’s a lot I need to—”
“Yes, this breakin, now. Blanche told me to have emergency phone numbers right on the refrigerator. That’s why the police knew to call you, isn’t it?”
Taking a breath, Daphne said, “You need a new fridge. I’m going to buy one for you. See, I was already there, Mom. I went over last night to stay.”
She hesitated under her mother’s next question about why she was at the house. Not that she wasn’t always welcome, Frances told her.
“I kind of had a fight with Vic. I was upset and out of sorts and wanted to get away.”
“Oh. Well, that will be all right, won’t it?” Frances waited for Daphne’s head to dip in agreement before saying, “Imagine someone breaking in on the one night I’m not there, but you happen to be home. Goodness, for your sake, I wish you hadn’t been there that one night.”
Daphne opened her mouth and shut it, looking at the mountains beyond the quaint facades of Leavenworth’s main street. Here, she could believe they sat poolside in Germany. In a faraway land, everything could be different. In make-believe, she hadn’t held her mother back and she hadn’t placed childish blame on her mother over her father’s death. The family hadn’t built walls in their minds—suspended themselves—when Suzanne’s case was suspended. They could handle things.
In that imaginary place, her father had handled his grief, his dead daughter’s birthday, the fact that they might never know who committed Suzanne’s murder, never see justice.
Daphne pressed her fingers to her mouth and shook her head, eyes closed for a flicker before she made herself open them, not wanting to upset her mother.
Frances Mayfield shook her head, her gaze narrow. “Why do you shut me out?”
“I’m not, I, I just …” And then Daphne felt the wall crumble. She softened her shoulders and spent a long time telling her mother the whole story, all about Minnie, everything that happened since Wednesday afternoon.
Her mother praised her for intervening, for trying hard when it seemed like such a small chance, so crazy, that Minnie Watts could be experiencing a genuine catastrophe. She marveled over her daughter’s resolve and asked more questions, and Daphne told her no, it hadn’t seemed like something they should talk about at the time, but she wished it had. It did now.
“Goodness,” Frances said at last.
“Right.” After a time, Daphne said, “Mom, did you know Suzanne used to sneak out at night? She did it quite a bit.”
Frances tilted her head. “She wasn’t a bad girl, Daphne, but she wasn’t a good girl like you. I knew. Mothers know their daughters.”
Daphne slipped her palms into her mother’s hands. “You’re cleaning out all the old stuff, all the …”
The squeeze of her mother’s hands relieved her of having to say more when her voice cracked.
“It was just so hard,” Frances said, her voice super soft. “I never got started with it before because it was just so hard … to start.”
“I’ll help you finish,” Daphne promised.
Daphne spent a week at the family house, helping sort old belongings, her father’s, her sister’s. Monday morning she had a new refrigerator delivered. Monday night, she took her mother to meet Minnie Watts on Eastpark Avenue. Minnie said she used to play bridge and would love to start again. On Tuesday afternoon, Frances took Minnie to a beauty parlor, then shopping.
The next weekend, ready to move back in with Vic, Daphne brought the Sunday paper in as her mother introduced Minnie to her bridge partners, Blanche, and the others.
“And everyone here knows my daughter, Daphne,” Frances said.
“Oh,” Blanche said, studying the new partner playing at the Mayfield house. “You know Frances’s girl?”
Minnie smiled and squeezed Daphne’s arm as Daphne hugged her.
Thea’s breaking scoop made the front page and flew to other major papers. Her editor sent her to California. She uncovered a case in Arizona perpetrated before the Lincoln owner’s death, too. She interviewed former neighbors and employers. Guff—Edward Gufler—and his girlfriend, Andrea Osborn, had worked for a financial firm. They’d located and planned their victims from the company’s records. Minnie was to be their next murder. The Arizona man and California woman were dead and had signed over everything right before they passed. Thea thought there was a victim in Oregon, too, and was still searching obituaries for more matches.
And Thea withdrew her earlier advice to Daphne to ask for a deferred prosecution on the reckless driving charge. “Turns out you can only get that if your wrongful conduct, as they say, is the result of or caused by alcoholic or drug-addicted actions. Or if you’re just plain mental.”
Daphne snorted.
“Just plead no contest,” Thea said with a grin. “I’ll be surprised if they don’t dismiss charges before you even have to plead. I bet they just dump the reckless charge. I bet they read the papers. You’re a fucking hero. But that Gufler guy sure said some interesting stuff about you while he was in the hospital.”
“I bet he did.” Daphne tightened her grin.
Vic’s patience was there as he helped her haul another load of her father’s things home, and she recognized the manifestation of love.
When they took a breather, slow-walking Grazie in the Peace Park, he said, “I want to do the surgery. I want to go all the way. I’ll take some leave and you can and the kids will give up some fun time. We’ll all take turns nursing her.”
Daphne considered this, not wanting to be placated, wanting him to want it. “This is very different from what you said you wanted last week.”
“Last week I … I didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“That I cannot take an ounce less of tenderness in the world. I know people come first, I do understand that. But Grazie has helped me, and you. She’s helped us raise the kids, and she’ll always be a part of us.”
Daphne braced herself for him to balance this comment against the other side of the equation, for talk about money and bleeding hearts and there had to be limits, best-case and worst-case scenarios, the suspension.
But there was nothing more. No slight roll of his eyes, sigh, or diminishing words, however kindly spoken.
She reviewed the change. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I do not want to be less than I can be. I want to be as kind as I can be, as compassionate as I can be. I want to engage all the way. Like you, Daph.” Vic took her hand, squeezed. She squeezed back. “Well, that’s solved then except for the doing it part. It will be hard. A bit of a battle. But I’ll get it scheduled this week. We should do it in summer, as soon as we can.”
She drifted, lost in thought about how some things stay unsolved. What a battle it was, and would remain, some parts of their lives. Cassandra. The dawning teen years with Jed and Josie. And she felt the need for many deep breaths.
He pressed his body to hers.
“It’ll be fine,” Daphne said, determined although every bit as daunted as the prospect deserved. She thought of his kids, at least one of whom was not biologically his, and again admired Vic for doing right by them with such marvelous patience. “But you’re right, it’ll be a battle.”
He looked at her and she knew he realized they were talking about more than Grazie’s hip surgery.
“It never ends,” he said.
“Battles, duti
es. They should go to the end, not be cut short just because it’s hard or uncomfortable,” Daphne said. “But the main thing is we’re supposed to care for one another. Including family and strangers and old, hurting dogs. Until the end.”
Vic cleared his throat. “So we’ll buy our old dog some new hips.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Solved.” With another squeeze of her hand, lingering on her left ring finger. “When my first marriage soured, you know, as Cassandra showed this other side of herself and just wouldn’t stay faithful, wouldn’t make amends when she’d muck things up, wouldn’t even try—”
“She didn’t deserve you. She doesn’t deserve Jed and Josie either.”
“But they’re hers.”
“Oh, I know. I get that. Just saying, m’kay?” She swallowed, noticed his appraising look, and asked, “What?”
“You try so hard with my kids and I know it’s hard, but I … was satisfied with what you and I had.”
“Satisfied?” Daphne shook her head. “I want to do better than that.”
“I get that. Maybe I always did, but it’s a little scary to shoot for better than satisfied. It was good enough for me. You seemed content. I thought we were content, but you’ve changed. I’ve seen it in the last few days.”
“I only changed in the last few days.”
“But, what? What did you change?” He appeared to have pondered the question and been unable to find the answer.
“I don’t want to be … suspended. I saw that I was. I want more, better.”
“I have better, having you. I’ll do better.” Vic nodded his promise. “I’ll engage. We’ll not be walked on by Cassandra, not tolerate her damaging the kids.”
Daphne felt the flood of possibility, of reasonable hope and real love. And she loved the realization that she loved her life. “I used to think the best thing about your house was being so close to the Peace Park.”
