by Judith Ivie
“Help me!” I screamed again, my voice hoarse and failing. Once more, I pounded on the wall.
To my astonishment, my plea was answered almost immediately. The voice was young, male, and all business. “Wethersfield Police, Miz Lawrence. We’re going to get you out of there, but we have to break through this siding to do it. Get as far back from the wall as you can, and cover your head and face.”
The shock of being answered changed quickly to relief and concern for the officers outside.
“It’s Mort Delahanty,” I yelled through the crack. “He’s crazy. He set the Law Barn on fire,” I added unnecessarily as I heard the wail of fire engines rapidly approaching.
“Momma!” Emma yelled from farther away. “Just do it. Do what he says!”
I scrambled to obey and hunkered down against the far wall with my arms over my head. “Okay, I’m away from the wall.”
Immediately, the siding was battered by what sounded like a platoon of axes, and I was cheered by the sound of old wood cracking and yielding. Within moments, a large hand reached through the hole that had been created and tore away the jagged planking. I put down my arms and looked up to see Officer Ron Chapman crashing through the man-sized opening, followed closely by Rick Fletcher. The grim expressions on both young men’s faces relaxed when they spotted me huddled against the far wall, and I felt tears welling alarmingly.
“Well, hello again, Miz Lawrence,” Rick said. He handed his axe to Ron and crouched down beside me. His kind young eyes searched my face. “My partner here got the idea that you might be having kind of a rough day, so we thought we’d come and see if we could help you out.” From behind him came a cacophony of voices and machines engaged in crowd control and fire fighting. Having correctly assessed my condition as shaky but functional, he stood up and held out a steadying arm as he had only days before on the sidewalk in front of Blades.
I tried to thank Rick but couldn’t seem to force words through my suddenly chattering teeth as once again, he hauled me to my feet. I stood for a moment, swaying uncertainly. “Delahanty?” was all I managed to get out.
Ron Chapman spoke up. “Got away from us in the crowd,” he said tersely, “but don’t worry. There’s an all point bulletin out for that black Trans Am. We’ll get him.” He stepped back through the hole in the wall and vanished into the confusion outside.
Rick guided me to the opening and placed a sheltering hand over my head as I eased through the shattered planking. Once again, I found myself the center of attention at a crime scene. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I observed in a feeble attempt at humor. “How did you know where to find me? Over all that noise outside, I’m amazed that anyone could hear me yelling.
“We didn’t,” Rick grinned. “We knew where you were because we’ve had you under close surveillance since Glastonbury PD informed us about your little adventure this morning. We knew Delahanty would turn up again, and we didn’t want to take any chances. We just didn’t figure on your barricading the Law Barn with him inside it. When we couldn’t reach you by phone, we figured something must be very wrong in here. We got to Emma, and she knew right away where you’d be hiding. In fact, it was all we could do to keep her from breaking down the wall herself.”
At that moment Emma herself shoved under the crime scene tape and shook off assorted official hands attempting to restrain her. “Get away from me,” she advised, holding up her hands in a back off gesture. “That’s my mother, and if I have to drag every last one of you with me, I’m going to her right now.” Silent signals passed among the assemblage, and tacit permission was granted to let her through to where I stood awaiting my scrappy daughter. “Momma?”
Rick turned away discreetly. He really was the nicest young man, I thought again with an inward sigh, but Ron Chapman seemed a decent sort, too. “I’m just fine, Emma, or at least I will be, but I’m afraid I can’t say the same for your cell phone. I dropped it on the tiles in there, and …” I turned my palms up and shrugged bleakly.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you’d find some way to destroy my cell phone. I can’t believe I trusted you with it. You are so lame.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head in mock disgust. Then she hugged me fiercely.
Twelve
In the end, a compromise measure was passed that established a limited number of designated, outside smoking areas and banned smoking anywhere else in the historic district. Nobody was completely happy with the measure, but then, as Margo had so correctly pointed out, that’s the nature of compromise.
It turned out that Mort Delahanty had served in Viet Nam with Frank Wainwright—had, in fact, saved Frank’s life and had the Purple Heart and the post-traumatic stress syndrome to prove it—which is why Frank and Abby gave Mort a job and even shared their home with him for a while when he fell on hard times years later. Following Frank’s death, Mort’s gratitude for their kindness had turned into an obsessive need to protect Abby, and when Prudy Crane threatened her well-being, Mort stepped over the edge into madness. He never considered how his chosen method of disposing of Prudy set Abby up for the murder. That realization drove him still further into insanity, and, well, we had pretty much figured out the rest.
Ironically, although it had been the entries in her diary that tipped me to Mort, the business with Harriett Wheeler turned out to be of little consequence. Her incessant complaints over several years to the powers that be about Abby’s immoral living arrangements had merely earned Harriett the label of eccentric, and thus unworthy of serious attention. In 2002, just before Mort moved into an apartment of his own and bought the infamous Trans Am, Harriett had apparently hired a couple of local teenagers to glue what she felt were appropriate passages from the Bible, condemning adultery and fornication and what have you, to the front door of the Diner, believing that once customers were aware of the owners’ sinfulness, business would drop off sharply. Unfortunately for Harriett, Abby and Frank came to work so early that the public never saw her messages, which they had removed long before the doors opened.
“Even if they had,” Abby assured me with the first chuckle I had heard from her in a very long time, “they would have rightly attributed them to the work of a crackpot.”
I hoped she was right.
Emma never did tell me who she was covering for when she was seen making that blackmail payment to Prudy, and I finally had to accept the fact that she was all grown up now and entitled to her privacy. I let it go, knowing she must have had an awfully good reason for doing what she did. In return, she didn’t scold me overly about destroying her cell phone, which I replaced with the very latest model. It does everything but drive for her, but I’m sticking with my faithful little flippy, which the Wethersfield PD finally allowed me to retrieve from their evidence locker. Emma and Ron Chapman seem very well suited to each other, and I enjoy seeing her have some fun with a nice young man, even if it isn’t Rick Fletcher. If Emma and Joey have their way, I am never going to hear the end of that one.
The news that the murder charges against Abby Stoddard had been dropped, and Mort Delahanty was sought in connection with the investigation, spread like wildfire. No one has seen him since the night of the hearing, but the dragnet is being tightened in the northwestern Massachusetts area where Mort apparently has ties to other View Nam War veterans. It wouldn’t be much longer before he would be apprehended. Despite everything, Abby is anxious that Mort get the help he needs. He saved Frank’s life under the worst possible circumstances, and God knows that war messed up the heads of thousands of good men. As Abby put it, “Maybe killing Prudence Crane was an act of sanity compared to the insanity of being ordered to murder hundreds of innocent civilians,” and in that context, I see her point.
The trunk of my Altima, which had been parked in the service alley behind the Law Barn, had been levered open with a crowbar or some such implement. All of the diaries were gone. I didn’t miss them.
Margo didn’t even want her leather tote bag back and donated it
to the Goodwill. She and John Harkness and Rhett Butler were becoming a threesome around town, especially on the weekends when they took long strolls. Abby had taken to stocking a bag of dog cookies behind her counter, and their standard order was two coffees and a doggie treat to go. I liked the way they looked together.
The fire damage to the Law Barn had been minimal. My assumption about the bonfire on the sofa had been accurate, but I had underestimated the fire retardant qualities of the upholstery, which had stubbornly resisted the flames. When Mort’s pile of paper had been consumed, the fire simply died. The damage had been caused primarily by smoke and the water trained on the smoldering remains by the firefighters who had been summoned from the station only a block down Old Main Street. As part of the redecorating, we demystified the reading room by adding an actual knob to the door and ditching the big coat rack that had concealed it. We turned the coatroom into a small conference room and now entertain first-time visitors with a tour of the previous owner’s eccentricities. I, for one, have had enough of secrets to last me a very long time.
As it turned out, the reading room wasn’t all that much of a secret anyway. Any number of locals knew about it, including old Mr. Hitchcock, who came to patch up the exterior wall. He remembered the Viet Nam vet he had taken on “in the summer of ’99, I believe it was,” at the urging of Frank Wainwright, giving him a few weeks of carpentry and plumbing work on the Picture Palace, his term for the Law Barn during Mr. Watercolors’s tenure.
“Fella who owned it then was crazier ‘n a bedbug, but hey, work was work. He wanted a secret room, so we built him one. It was kinda fun, to tell you the honest truth.”
All things considered, I had a lot of news for Strutter, when she finally dragged herself away from her honeymoon, but mostly, I wanted to talk to her about Armando.
“First I was mad, and then I got scared.” We were sitting in the late fall sunshine. Strutter’s usual attractiveness was unfairly enhanced, I thought meanly, by two weeks of Jamaican frolicking with her new hubby. Charlene “Strutter” Putnam, nee Tuttle, was quite simply the most stunning black woman I have ever seen. Soft brown curls fell to her shoulders, her skin was the color of milk chocolate, and her figure was simultaneously slim and curvaceous. Her warm smile was charmingly framed in dimples.
We occupied one of the four curved benches that surrounded a small fountain to one side of the Keeney Memorial. Although she wasn’t due back in the office for another two weeks, I had asked her to meet me for coffee. She hadn’t even asked why, just abandoned her honeymoon and showed up an hour later at La Dolce Bakery, where we ordered two cinnamon coffees and took them back out into the glorious morning. Now we sat side by side, faces tilted to the sun, eyes closed. “Mm hmm” had been her only comment thus far. Maybe I hadn’t gotten through to her. I opened my eyes and tried again.
“I swear to you, if he had sprouted horns and begun to speak in tongues, I could not have been more astonished. This man, who prides himself on his exquisite courtesy, turned into an arrogant jackass right before my eyes. I was standing there holding the rake with my mouth hanging open, and he was practically snapping his fingers at an exhausted guy who had been doing heavy labor all day, telling him to move this and rake behind that as if this was his personal servant. ‘That’s what he gets paid for,’ was all he had to offer by way of a rationale. I just wanted to scream at him.”
Strutter opened her eyes, which were a startling turquoise color, and took a thoughtful sip of her coffee. “Ooohh, that’s good. I surely have missed this.” She closed her eyes again.
I stared at her, all curls and curves and glowing with honeymoon contentment. With difficulty, I managed not to dump my coffee on her head. “So what do you think,” I prompted finally from between gritted teeth, “or perhaps you’d rather I ran along so you can nap in peace?”
Strutter opened her eyes once more and gazed at me with gentle humor.
“Don’t get pissy with me, girl, just because your man has fallen off that pedestal you’ve had him up on. Seems to me that all that’s happened here is you’ve found out you’re in love with a real, honest-to-goodness, human-type fella and not God’s gift to the human race. And what do I think about that? I think it’s about time.” Another sip.
“So what should I do?”
“Get over it.”
“Get over it? That’s your sage advice?”
“You told him how you felt about it. He heard you. Now, move on.”
I sat and looked at my good friend for a moment. Strutter had saved my life once. She was maybe the wisest, most centered woman I had ever known, and I loved her like a sister. Maybe more than a sister. At the moment, I wanted to strangle her.
“What superior knowledge gives you the right to tell me to ‘get over it’?”
Strutter grinned. “Ba-dum-bum. It took a little while, but I surely knew it was coming.”
I waited some more.
“Okay, here’s a little story for you. The week before John and I were married, we planned a sort of a last date. You know, he came over, and I had cooked a romantic little dinner, and he brought flowers and a bottle of wine. Charlie stayed over at a friend’s house, so we had the place to ourselves. John built a fire in the fireplace. The whole nine yards.
“Sounds nice. What’s your point?”
She chuckled at the memory. “Oh, it was nice. I was on cloud nine, about to be married to the most wonderful man in the world, a whole luxurious evening ahead of us. And then he threw a shoe at my cat.”
I was shocked. “John threw a shoe at Farley? He’s such a big teddy bear of a cat. I can’t imagine it.”
“Neither could I, believe me. There I was, putting out my shrimp puffs on the coffee table, ready to snuggle up on the sofa next to my big, sexy man. I was so into the whole thing that I’d forgotten to feed Farley. That’s usually Charlie’s job. So the poor cat was starving for his dinner, and I plopped a plate of shrimp puffs on the coffee table. He just couldn’t help himself. He grabbed one off the plate and ran to the other side of the room to gobble it down, and John took off one of his loafers and threw it at him.”
“That’s awful! Did he hit him?”
“No, he didn’t. He swore he had no intention of hitting him, just wanted to scare him and so on and so forth. I lit into him good anyway, of course. But after I stopped yelling and fed the cat, it dawned on me that John had no idea why I was upset. He’s not an unkind person, you know that, but he wasn’t raised with pets, never had a cat or a dog or even a hamster. He was raised on the island, and they have a whole different relationship with critters there. They aren’t members of the family like Farley and Jasmine and Simon are. The idea of an animal stealing people’s food and being allowed to get away with it was just wrong to him. He has a different perspective, do you see?”
I did see, but I still didn’t like it.
“I love John, and I always will. Doesn’t mean I don’t see him clearly. The good news is, I know he loves me the same way, even my less-than-lovable qualities.”
“I didn’t know you admitted to having any.”
Strutter ignored me. “I realize that you’re operating under a handicap here.”
“Which is?”
“You’re a middle-aged white woman who was raised in New England.”
“Excuse me?”
She patted my arm apologetically. “I didn’t mean that as an ethnic slur or anything.”
“Yes, you did.”
We were quiet for a moment as Strutter weighed what she still had to say against my ability to hear it. It was a thing I’d seen her do dozens of times. Then she shrugged, and I knew she had decided to say her piece and hope I could take it.
“House pets are not in John’s cultural frame of reference. It’s the same with Armando and servants.”
“I don’t have any servants.”
“Nooo, but in Colombia, I’m sure he did. He was probably brought up with them, and where he comes from, that’s how you talk to se
rvants, how his mother and his tias talked to them. It’s not unkind, really, just authoritarian. It’s the way it’s done in Latin America.”
I had to hand it to her. She had my attention.
“In New England, on a hot day in July, I’ll bet your mama brought the buy who mowed your lawn a glass of lemonade or maybe some iced tea, am I right?”
I nodded.
“And you do the same, don’t you?”
I nodded again. “Of course I do. It’s only civil.”
“But you don’t have one with him, stand around and chat.”
“No. He’d think that was weird.”
“Uh huh. He’s grateful for the cold drink, but anything more than that would be uncomfortable for both of you. Well, in Jamaica, where I was raised, and probably in Colombia, too, the gardener cools off with a drink from the hose. He’s glad to have access to it, but beyond that, he’d just as soon be left alone. That’s what he expects, and that’s what he’s comfortable with. It’s his cultural frame of reference.”
“But this isn’t Colombia.”
“So you need to talk to Armando about how things are done here. He looks fairly trainable to me.”
I chewed on that for a while. “So you’re saying I overreacted.”
She twinkled at me kindly. I had a feeling that Strutter was a very good mom, although I am fully ten years her senior.
“How’s married life?” I asked her, changing the subject.
“Married life is just fine, thank you. I think I’ll get back to it and let you get back to work.”
We stood and hugged briefly.
“Tell Margo I said hey. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”
