A Body In My Office (The Charles Bentley Mysteries Book 1)

by Glen Ebisch

  Approximately three and a half hours later, he was knocking on Amy’s front door. She opened it and stood there in jeans and a sweater with her hair pulled back in a severe but functional ponytail. She looked so young that for one disconcerting moment, Charles saw her as the girl she had been, forgetting that she was in her thirties and a married mother of two.

  “You made excellent time,” she said, giving him a hug. “You can put your bag in Jack’s study. You remember that doubles as a guest room.”

  Charles went up the stairs and into the room at the end of the hall. A large desk with an oversized computer dominated the room. In one corner was a small sleeper sofa that Charles remembered as having a bar that hit him right in a sensitive part of his back when he tried to sleep at night. Ah, well, he thought, I can survive anything for two nights, and it’s better than being shot at.

  When he came back downstairs, he heard Amy at work in the kitchen, and went to join her.

  “I hope you don’t mind tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.”

  “I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have them. You ate them almost every day through high school.”

  Amy laughed. “I’m lucky I didn’t get mercury poisoning. I don’t eat them nearly as much now, but once in a while I get a hankering for some comfort food.” She placed the sandwiches on a plate and poured a glass of milk for herself. “Do you want some of this morning’s leftover coffee?”

  “Sounds great,” Charles said, settling into a chair around the kitchen table.

  Amy and Jack had repurposed the dining room as a playroom for the boys and always ate in the kitchen. When Charles once asked Amy what they did when they had adults over for a dinner party she just rolled her eyes. “We don’t do that much anymore. We mostly meet our adult friends at kids’ events like birthdays and sports activities.”

  “Don’t you miss normal adult conversation about ideas and events of the day?” he’d asked.

  “I do. But I don’t think Jack does. He only has two topics of conversation: the boys and financial investing.”

  “Doesn’t Jack have any friends? What about the people he works with?”

  “He says they’re competitors, not friends.”

  They’d had this discussion six months ago, and it had been the only time Amy had expressed even a whiff of criticism of Jack. Charles had always been amazed that she seemed to think him perfect.

  “This is great!” Amy said, chewing her sandwich with obvious delight. You really need comfort food once in a while.”

  Charles nodded, but thought that all this talk of comfort food required more examination.

  “How are things going in your life?” he asked.

  “Great! The boys are doing well in school, and both of them have gone out for peewee soccer. It’s a wonderful way for them to burn off their after school energy. Jack just got a promotion at work. He’s the supervisor of his territory now.”

  “Does he have to spend more time at work?”

  “Yes. But he’s very good about taking weekends off to be with the boys, and he comes to all the other activities he possibly can.”

  “And what about you? Are you happy with your life?”

  Amy shrugged. “My life is the boys. That’s almost inevitable at this stage.”

  “I always forget. What grades are the boys in?”

  “Jack Jr. is in second grade, and Kevin is in first.”

  “So they’re both away for a good part of the day.”

  Amy gave him a piercing glance. “I know where this is going. You’re wondering what I do with all my time when the boys are in school. Well, there’s lots of housework to do, plans to be made, shopping, and I have to be ready to pick the boys up when school gets out to take them to their various activities. I don’t have time to get a job.”

  “Would you like to have one?” Charles asked.

  Amy paused as if stumped by the question, then she resumed in a flatter tone.

  “Some days I think I would. Just a chance to get out of the house and be with adults in a productive environment would add a lot of spice to my life. Plus I worked hard for my degree, I’d like to have a chance to use it.”

  “Couldn’t you look into a part time job? That way you could be home for the boys after school. You could even volunteer, become a docent in the museum, then you would have very limited hours.”

  “Or I could work in a soup kitchen,” she said with a teasing smile.

  Charles smiled back. “There are worse things.”

  Her face became sober. “Jack wouldn’t be happy about that - he’s kind of old fashioned. His mother was a full-time homemaker and still is. Jack feels that any husband worth the title should be able to support his wife and family. He gets that from his Dad.”

  “I’m sure,” Charles said drily.

  “It’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

  “Supporting your family is admirable, but not letting your wife develop her talents isn’t.”

  Amy shrugged, and they changed the topic. After lunch, Charles went upstairs and took a nap on the sofa in his room. When he awoke he was surprised to see that an hour had passed. Rousing himself, and feeling a little bit guilty at sleeping in the middle of the day, he went in the bathroom and washed his face. Then he retrieved the novel he had brought, and read until he heard Amy come home with the boys. Girding he loins he went downstairs into the dining room that had been converted into a playroom.

  “Grandad!” Jack Jr. shouted, running towards him.

  Charles squatted down, hearing his knees crack, and Jack gave him a big hug. Kevin, younger and always a bit shyer, came over more slowly and hugged him on the other side. Although the boys still liked the physical contact of wrestling around, during his last couple of visits Charles had noted that now the boys wanted to talk, to tell him lengthy and sometimes non-sequential stories of their day. This time was no different as they settled on the broken down sofa in the playroom, and each boy began to talk with urgency. They interrupted each other so frequently that Charles finally had to impose order so only one spoke at a time. If one went on too long, a few interspersed tickles would soon distract him and give the other boy a chance to speak.

  Thinking back to when Amy had been that age, it seemed to him that, although she liked to talk, there had always been something a bit more disciplined about her, as if the art of conversation had come to her earlier. Perhaps it was because she was around adults more, or possibly it was innate. Although Charles was a great believer in female equality, his discussions with friends who had both boys and girls had convinced him that there were physiological differences between the sexes that could be mitigated but not eliminated by upbringing. Whether these differences made one gender superior to the other depended on the type of society they lived in. Modern society, having less use for upper body strength and physical aggressiveness and more for fine motor skills and the ability to negotiate, might be showing a bias in favour of women that didn’t bode well for his grandsons.

  He played with the boys until their mother took them into the kitchen for a snack. When they came back, they settled on the couch and watched a video that the boys had seen before but still apparently enjoyed. Despite their vocal guidance as to what was going to happen next, Charles had difficulty following the plotline. When six o’clock came around there was the sound of the garage door opening, and like little automatons that boys simultaneously shouted “Daddy’s home!” and made a beeline to the door from the garage into the kitchen.

  Charles debated joining the greeting line, but finally decided to stay where he was until Jack put in an appearance. A few minutes later Jack came into the playroom with the boys dancing around his feet like small attendants to the king. Jack gave Charles an embarrassed smile as if to suggest that he couldn’t do anything about such adoration. Charles thought he revelled in it.

  “Charles,” Jack finally said, reaching out his hand over Kevin’s head.

  “Jack,” Charles replied giving it a firm shake.r />
  “Good of you to come.”

  “Good of you to have me.”

  “Why don’t we go into the living room? That’s the one place off-limits to the boys. Would you like a drink?”

  “A scotch would be nice.”

  Jack nodded and headed back into the kitchen with the boys trailing along behind him. Charles went across the hall to the living room. It was furnished rather formally with a sofa and three chairs in a conversational grouping. Clearly it had been decorated at a time when Amy had expected to have more adult gatherings. Before she chose to devote her life completely to her husband and boys.

  Jack came in and handed him a drink, then settled down in the chair across from him.

  “We’ll have to drink fast, dinner is almost ready. Things have to run like clockwork around here with the boys. They’re very much creatures of habit, and seem to have little internal clocks that tell them when everything has to happen.”

  Charles nodded and sipped his drink. He wondered how long to wait until asking Jack about work and unleashing a monologue that would last through dinner.

  “I hear there was some excitement out your way. Someone was killed in your office.”

  Charles admitted that was the case.

  “Have the police got any leads?”

  “They have a few suspicions, but so far I don’t think they have a fully coherent view of what happened.” Charles thought it best not to mention the second murder.

  Jack shook his head. “Everywhere is dangerous today. There’s not enough law and order.”

  Charles nodded, not wanting to provoke a discussion that would doubtlessly reveal differences of opinion between them.

  “And now you’ve retired,” Jack said, as if somehow that was a consequence of the murder. Although, Charles had to admit, it was in a way, Jack had no reason to think so.

  “That’s right. It was time to pull the trigger,” he said, consciously using a phrase that he thought Jack would appreciate.

  “What are you going to do with yourself? Of course, it isn’t like college teaching is exactly a full time job.”

  Charles gave him an inquiring look.

  “I mean you have summers off, and holidays, and you don’t exactly put in a forty hour workweek. So retirement isn’t as much of a shock as it would be for most men.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Charles admitted, realizing his manhood had been called into question.

  “I can’t imagine retiring,” Jack said, taking a long pull on his drink as if the very idea stressed him. “I need the challenge of competing in the workplace. One thing about financial management, the numbers don’t lie, you always know whether you’re being successful or not. I guess that isn’t true in college teaching.”

  “Yes, it’s hard to tell what kind of influence you’re having on the students even in the short run. And in the long run, who knows what kind of an impact, if any, your course will make on their lives.”

  “That would frustrate the hell out of me. I need to know what I’ve achieved at the end of every day. I want it to be quantifiable. Otherwise I’d feel that I was just wasting my time.”

  Feeling that his career had just been casually written off, Charles decided to shift to a safer subject.

  “It must be hard for you when the stock market is down like it’s been lately.”

  “That just means there’s a buying opportunity, Charles. You buy when the market is down and hang on as it goes up.”

  “I see. But your clients must get nervous seeing their nest eggs shrink.”

  Jack rattled the ice in his glass and gave a chuckle. “That’s why so much of my job is hand holding. I have to support people through difficult times, sometimes even drag them kicking and screaming into acting in their own self-interest.”

  “I guess people aren’t as naturally rational as Adam Smith thought.”

  Jack nodded blankly, and Charles wondered if he’d ever heard of Adam Smith. Jack had gone to college, but perhaps business programs no longer emphasized the classics.

  Amy popped her head into the living room. “Supper’s on, boys. Get it before it gets cold.”

  Charles and Jack got to their feet and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Amy mentioned to me that you’ve gotten a recent promotion. How is your new job different from the old?” Charles asked.

  He knew he’d just established the conversation for dinner: safe but boring.

  *****

  Charles woke up early the next morning. He lay on his back thinking about what course of action to take when he returned home. He had called Nancy, the woman in charge of the soup kitchen, and told her he wouldn’t be available for a few days. He had every intention of returning, although he wondered what his reception would be like once people knew of his role in Karen’s shooting. The concern kept him from falling back to sleep, and when he heard a footfall in the hall around six o’clock, he decided to go downstairs to see if a cup of coffee was available.

  When he went into the kitchen, Jack was sitting at the table, already dressed in a business suit, eating a bowl of cereal. He was reading The Wall Street Journal, which shattered Charles’ hopes for The New York Times. Jack looked up and gave him a restrained smile.

  “You’re up early.”

  “I never sleep well in a new place.”

  Jack nodded. “There’s coffee if you want some.”

  Charles poured himself a cup and sat down on the other side of the table. He didn’t want to sit across from Jack with nothing to do, as though he expected to be engaged conversation. His hand was inching toward the back of the Journal when Jack put down his paper and stared at him.

  “Amy told me that you thought she should get a job.”

  “I didn’t say that. I merely suggested that if she wanted one, she should give it some thought. Did the two of you discuss it?”

  “Discuss it? Of course not.”

  Of course not, you coward, Charles thought.

  “She’s too busy with the boys right now to think about a job. Since my promotion I’m getting paid enough to easily support us and set aside money for both boys to go to a good college.”

  “So Amy isn’t interested in working right now?”

  “No, she isn’t,” Jack said with defiance.

  Charles shrugged. “You know some day, not much more than a decade from now, your boys are going to go off to those fine colleges you’ll be paying for, and Amy is going to be by herself with you. And she’s going to think about all these years when you told her she could do without a job, and she might well decide that now she can do without you.”

  Jack blushed a bright red and his hands clenched. Charles wondered if Jack was likely to last out another decade with such barely controlled anger. Finally the man smiled humourlessly.

  “You know I used to always tell Amy that she should encourage you to come out more often. They get to see my parents a lot, and I wanted them to have a balanced view of the family. Whenever I said that, Amy would give me kind of a funny look, like I should be careful what I wished for. Now I understand what she meant.”

  “Perhaps she was right,” Charles replied.

  Jack stood up abruptly, dumped what was left of his cereal in the sink, and strode out of the room. A few seconds later Charles heard the garage door go up and the engine start. Charles thought that some client was going to get less than his expected amount of hand holding today.

  He poured himself a second cup of coffee and thought about how this had not been a good beginning to the day.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Fifteen minutes later Amy came down and said good morning to her father.

  “The boys will be down in ten minutes, and it will be a zoo in here. You might want to have your breakfast now or wait until they go.”

  “I’ll have a bowl of cereal now,” Charles said.

  Amy got him a bowl and a glass of orange juice. Charles poured out some of the same cereal Jack had been eating.

  “D
id you see Jack before he left?” she asked.

  Charles nodded.

  “Did you discuss anything important?” she asked giving him a meaningful glance.

  “Let’s talk about it after the boys go.”

  Charles had just finished his breakfast when he heard the thumping of feet on the stairs, he stood up in battle position as the boys tore into the room.

  “Grandpa!” they both shouted, giving him hugs.

  “Now I’m going in the front room for a while to read the paper,” he said, immediately standing up and tucking The Wall Street Journal under his arm. “You eat and get ready for school.” Giving each boy a pat on the head, he left the room.

  Although he found less of interest in The Wall Street Journal than in The Times, Charles managed to occupy himself until the boys came into the room wearing their backpacks and gave him a kiss before Amy drove them to school.

  “Will you be here again tonight, Grandpa?” Jack Jr. asked.

  “We’ll see,” Charles replied.

  Amy gave him a pointed look and followed the boys out to the car. Charles went into his room and carefully packed his things. He put his bag by the front door and resumed his seat in the living room. Five minutes later Amy returned. She eyed his bag as she sat down across from him.

  “Planning to run away again?” she asked.

  Charles shrugged. “It might be for the best. Jack really doesn’t care for me.”

  “What did the two of you talk about?”

  “Jack made it quite clear to me that being a wife and mother is more than enough for you, and that I should mind my own business.”

  “We did have a brief discussion of my getting a job last night,” Amy admitted.