by Glen Ebisch
Charles stood there staring across the road for a few minutes, wondering how he really did feel about being shot at for the first time in forty years. He was surprised to find that he felt very angry. Whether the intention was to kill or only frighten, Charles considered that the action had changed things. With Underwood’s death, his interest had been primarily to avoid being blamed, but now he felt that the killer had directly involved him in the matter. It was time for him to see what he could do to discover the identity of the murderer.
Easier said than done, he thought. He didn’t have any special skills at detecting. However, he reminded himself, scholarship was a matter of sifting evidence and finding support for a conclusion. These skills could easily be adapted to discovering who had murdered Underwood. He would go out and gather data, then subject it to rigorous analysis.
He took a deep breath, and felt more determined than he had since Barbara’s death. He might not have cared for the murdered man, but now their fates were inextricably linked.
Chapter Ten
Charles pulled into the parking lot of Saint David’s Episcopal Church, and parked in a row of cars near the door. An arrow saying “Soup Kitchen” pointed in the direction of the basement, and he followed it down. There were noises at the far end of the basement, and he followed them into the kitchen. A group of about five women were working away, feverishly preparing food. Charles went up to the woman talking loudest, who had a natural air of command, and introduced himself.
“Hi, I’m Nancy,” she said, reaching out to shake his hand. Realizing she was wearing an oven mitt, she waved instead. “You’ll be setting up the tables with John as soon as he gets here.”
“If he gets here,” a younger woman muttered.
Nancy smiled weakly. “John has several health issues that make him less than completely reliable.”
The younger woman looked up as if she intended to elaborate on that statement, but at a glance from Nancy she changed her mind and returned to her work. Charles was about to ask if there was anything he could do in the meantime when a skinny man wearing a white t-shirt and jeans appeared in the doorway. He shifted nervously from foot to foot as if anticipating the need to escape at any minute. Charles pegged him as a guy who did alcohol or drugs instead of food.
“Good morning, ladies,” he shouted in a raspy voice.
There was a chorus of disinterested grunts in reply.
“John, this is Charles,” Nancy said, pointing her oven mitt in his direction. “He’ll be helping you with the tables.”
“Well, let’s get started, then,” John said, as if he had been waiting hours for Charles to arrive.
They walked back along the length of the basement to where the tables were stacked against the wall. He went to one end of the stack and Charles to the other.
“We start setting them up at this end and go to the other. They might not seem heavy at first, but by the tenth one you’ll start to feel it.”
Charles lifted his end of the table and was surprised at how heavy it was. They were older tables with a solid steel construction: heavy but durable. John gave a grunt and lifted his end. Without a moment of hesitation, he directed Charles to where he wanted it placed. They worked steadily and in silence until all the tables were arranged the way John wanted them. Charles could feel the sweat running down his back, and John’s face was such a bright red that Charles wondered if he was going to have a heart attack or a stroke. But after he stood leaning against the last table for a minute staring into space, he seemed to get a second wind.
“So what did you do before you started with this?” John asked, as if arranging tables in a soup kitchen had been a career move.
“I taught college.”
“At Opal?”
Charles nodded.
“What did you teach?”
“American literature.”
John grunted in such a way that Charles wasn’t sure whether he approved or didn’t approve of the subject.
“So Professor,” he said, managing to make the title sound disreputable, “What’s your opinion of doing real work?”
Charles wasn’t sure how to respond to such a loaded question. Any answer was bound to make it sound like he’d never done any physical labour before that morning.
“It was fine,” he said neutrally.
John smirked. “Try doing it for a full day, then a full week, and then a month and see how you like it.”
Charles had had enough. “So what sort of work are you currently doing?” he asked, figuring he had a pretty good idea of the answer.
John fidgeted and eyed the door as if it offered an escape from answering.
“I’m between jobs right now. That’s why I help out here.”
“I see,” Charles said, managing to make it sound like he knew exactly why John had no job.
The other man blushed. He looked like he might take a swing at him, so Charles braced himself. Fighting in the soup kitchen on his first day wasn’t going to help his reputation.
“Charles, we need you to take your place on the line,” Nancy said, quickly walking over and standing between the two men. “John, go to the door and tell folks they can start filing in.”
Casting a last venomous look at Charles, John headed for the door.
“Don’t mind him,” Nancy said, taking Charles’ arm and guiding him toward the serving tables, where the steaming food was set up in in large bins. “He gets rather aggressive around other men.”
Charles thought she made John sound like a dog you wouldn’t want to adopt from the pound.
Nancy led him over to the line of women standing behind the food. There was one empty space where she neatly slotted Charles. He looked in front of him and saw an aluminium pan filled to overflowing with mashed potatoes. For some reason the sight of so much food made him feel slightly nauseous.
“Now don’t give anyone more than one scoop. Some people will ask for more, especially when they see a new person on the line who they think might be an easy mark. But we have to make sure we don’t run out.” Nancy stared hard at Charles waiting for a response. He slowly nodded.
“Good. If you have any questions the ladies can help you.”
“Don’t pay any attention to Nancy,” a woman whispered in his left ear once Nancy had walked away. “We only ran out of food once last year, but she was so spooked by it that now she overdoes it, and we’re always throwing food away at the end of the day. If somebody asks for more, give it to them if Nancy isn’t looking. That’s what I do.”
Charles looked over at the woman who had spoken to him. She was pleasantly attractive but a bit out of date, like perhaps she had played the lead in a late seventies sitcom and never changed her look. He wondered when it was that pleasantly attractive older women had become his age.
“I’m Karen Melrose,” she said, extending a plastic glove covered hand, which Charles shook.
“Have you been doing this long?” he asked, nodding to the row of food.
“Two years. I started right after my husband, George, died.”
“I’m sorry,” Charles said.
Karen nodded. “It was very sudden. I was in the kitchen making dinner. When I came out to the living room to get him, he was on the floor, dead of a massive stroke.”
“That must have been a terrible shock.”
“Yes. People always say that it was a blessing that he didn’t linger in a vegetative state. I suppose that’s true, but it might have given me a little time to get used to the whole idea of his being gone.”
“My wife died suddenly as well,” Charles said, surprised that he mentioned it. He almost never talked about Barbara. It was still too raw.
“How did it happen?”
He felt his throat close up as tears began to sting his eyes.
“Auto accident,” he managed to choke out.
Whether Karen could sense that he was barely under control or not, she mercifully didn’t ask him any more questions. Soon the line of people arrived, and they were busy
doing their respective jobs.
The folks going down the line with plastic plates in hand were mostly men. They effusively thanked the women servers, but barely gave him a nod. Perhaps it was because he did not look so much different from them. All were older and, aside from being unshaven in several cases or having gap-toothed expressions from missing teeth, with a little personal care, they would not have looked out of place at an Opal College faculty meeting. And probably they would accomplish more, Charles thought with a silent chuckle.
But slowly a more serious thought began, as the similarity brought home to him how porous was the line between being respectable and being considered a derelict. He told himself that when he got home, he would take a hard look at his retirement account and perhaps make an appointment with his money manager. He had generally ignored the man’s calls and solicitations, but that might be foolish now that his well-being depended entirely on his investments.
After the lunch rush was over, which was short but fierce, the staff pushed a couple of tables together and sat down to eat what was left of the same food they’d been doling out. Charles was introduced by Nancy to the group as a whole, and everyone nodded politely. The women quickly divided up into several small conversational groupings. He was the only man at the table. John had eaten with some of the men who had come in, and he was now standing just outside the door smoking and chatting with them. Karen was seated next to him, and although she talked sporadically to several women on her left, she frequently made comments to Charles, who responded politely. Clearly she wanted him to be involved in the conversation either out of politeness or friendliness.
Charles found that he didn’t have much of an appetite, and pushed the food around on his plate, barely eating any. He thought it might have been because he rarely ate very much for lunch.
“The smell of the food puts you off eating,” Karen said with authority.
“Why is that?” he asked. “The food is all good, isn’t it?”
“Of course, but I think the smell might be a substitute for eating. In some strange way the aroma fills you up.”
Charles thought about that for a moment.
“Maybe the part of your brain that makes you hungry becomes numbed by all the smells.”
“Could be. A friend of mine came up from the south last week and brought me several pints of blueberries. Do you like blueberry crumble?”
“Sure, I think so,” Charles replied. He vaguely remembered Barbara had made something with blueberries, but whether it was a crumble or cobbler, he couldn’t recall.
Karen smiled and nodded. “Are you going to be back tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “I’m only on three days a week. I won’t be back until Friday.”
Karen looked disappointed. “Will you really be coming back?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked in surprise.
She shrugged. “Most men come once, and never return.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I think it’s because they’re not in charge of anything. Men like to be in charge, you know. They don’t adjust well to just being another worker. And men don’t get much thanks from our clients.”
“Clients?”
“That’s what Nancy wants us to call the people we feed.”
“Well, I noticed that the men seemed to thank the women more than me.”
“Another man makes them feel ashamed of what’s happened to them. Being successful, you make them feel even more like a failure.”
Charles thought for a moment. “There’s not much I can do about that.”
“I don’t suppose there is. Just be nice to them, and eventually they’ll get used to you.”
A firm hand came down on his shoulder and John stuck his face in his. Charles could smell the stench of cigarette smoke and a hint of beer.
“Time to take down the tables, Professor, if you still feel up to it.”
As Charles stood, he turned to Karen, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back,” he said, certain he would, but not really sure why.
Chapter Eleven
It was the middle of the afternoon when Charles got home. He thought for a long moment about sitting out on the patio, on the assumption that the shooter was unlikely to visit twice on the same day, but then he thought how angry Lieutenant Thorndike would be if he got shot right after she had warned him to be careful. Angry and, he hoped, a little bit sad.
With a sigh he went into his study and sat behind his desk. He looked at the desktop, covered with the remains of abandoned projects, feeling like a captain at the helm of a ghost ship. He thought for one liberating moment about sweeping the desk clean, throwing all the detritus of the past few years into the garbage bin and starting life anew.
But old habits die hard, and his mind drifted back to a period when he and Barbara shared happy times together on the long summer nights. His reverie was interrupted by a knock on the front door. He walked out into the hall and opened it. Andrea stood there, studying him anxiously.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I heard that someone took a shot at you this morning.”
Charles directed her into the living room, and took a seat across from where she was perched on the sofa.
“Where did you hear that?”
“The security guard at the college heard it from someone on the police.”
“Word spreads fast,” he said, thinking that Thorndike wouldn’t be happy to discover police lips weren’t tightly sealed.
“Is it true?”
“Well, there’s some dispute over whether the person was actually shooting at me. The only casualties were three flower pots.”
“But you were out there at the time, right?”
“True. The question is whether the perpetrator was shooting at me and missed, which is extremely unlikely given the distance, or whether he was attempting to make it appear that I was the real target from the start rather than Underwood, in that way possibly diverting the police investigation.”
“That last theory is very clever,” said Andrea.
“And probably the most likely. If the police thought I was meant to be the original victim, they’d stop focusing on Underwood’s life and look at mine, which has been almost utterly blameless.”
Andrea smiled. “I think you underestimate yourself. I’m sure there are a few skeletons in your closet.”
“If so, they’ve gathered a lot of dust over many years, whereas I suspect Underwood’s are still fresh, dancing about clean and shiny.”
Andrea looked around. “Speaking of clean and shiny, you keep this house in tiptop shape.”
“Lieutenant Thornton said the same thing earlier today.”
“Has she been coming around harassing you? Does she still insist on thinking of you as a suspect?”
Charles wondered if Andrea was only concerned about police harassment or whether she was a bit jealous of the Lieutenant. But he quickly dismissed that idea as a geriatric delusion.
“I was never a suspect, merely a person of interest. And I think I may even be leaving that list rather shortly.”
“I should hope so.”
Andrea took another glance around the room.
“Keeping everything clean is fine, Charles, but you’ve also kept it exactly as it was when Barbara was alive. It’s like a museum in here.”
Charles shrugged. “I see no reason to rearrange things just for the sake of variety. The way we had them is the way that suits me.” He knew he sounded prim and fussy, but it was the truth.
“But now that you’re retired you can’t just sit around here all day remembering the past. It’s not healthy. Like I suggested before, why don’t you ask the Dean to give back one of the courses he transferred to Ritter? I’m sure he’d be more than happy to do it.”
“Like I said, when I’m done, I’m done. My time at Opal College has come to an end.”
Andrea shook her head in frustration. “You can be in
credibly stubborn at times.”
“I worked at the soup kitchen for a few hours today. I’m scheduled to do that three times a week. That will get me out of the house.”
“I never thought of you as the charitable sort.”
“Because I’m too self-centred?”
“No, too worried about being patronizing.”
“People have to eat. I simply dole it out to them—hopefully in a non-patronizing way.”
Andrea frowned. “Isn’t there some new project you could find to work on? One that used more of your training and skills than food service does?”
“You know that I’ve had trouble concentrating ever since Barbara died. I can still manage the easy things, like teaching, just not the hard, original stuff. A scholarly project just isn’t in the cards.”
“Maybe you could go visit Amy.”
“Now that would be a project,” Charles said with a smile.
“What I mean is that she might have some ideas for what you can do.”
“I’m sure. But I’m afraid she’d never let me come back. She’s already been talking about having me move to some place near Boston.”
“I’ve never noticed that anyone, with the occasional exception of Barbara, has ever had luck in forcing you to do much.”
“But family members do exert more pressure than others. Can you imagine me as a fulltime babysitter for my grandchildren during the day and spending my evenings discussing the stock market with Philistine Jack?”
Andrea grinned. “That’s an image I’ll always cherish.”
She stood up to go.
“Do you have to leave?”
“I’d better get back to work. Now that I’m actually teaching in my field of American literature, I’d better get going on that proposed book. I’m working on an article on The Woman’s American Home by Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was the standard domestic handbook for women in the nineteenth century. If the article works out, I hope it can be a major chapter in my book.”
She gave Charles a hug, then stepped back and looked at him.
“Try to be happy. I’ll give you a call, and we can have lunch or dinner together in the next couple of weeks.”
