How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  “This here’s the other one was staying here,” the policeman said. “Needs her toothbrush and things.”

  “What did you have planned for up here? Something really kinky with both you girls?” the hot-pink woman demanded. Her ensemble was also outlined in rivets. The bolted look was a fashion development I didn’t mind having missed.

  “Didnja hear what he said? She isn’t the one who was here,” the widow told her sister. “I didn’t mean to infer. Imply. Suggest. I’m rattled, you know?” She put out her gloved hand. “I’m Poppy Reese,” she said solemnly. “That’s my sister Holly.”

  I wondered if they had other botanically named siblings, if there were boy-children with plant names as well.

  Then she turned to the patrolman. “We spent a lot of time here together, you know. It brings back too many…” She dabbed at her eyes, although there was no moisture for her black lace hanky to catch.

  “Sorry, ma’am. We thought maybe you’d see something out of place, or wrong. You know.”

  “My sister’s upset,” the woman in pink said. She lounged against the silk-covered wall and tapped one hot-pink shoe. “Her husband—her lying, cheating, no-good husband who’d already wasted half their money—was killed yesterday, in case you forgot. Her whole entire world has just collapsed.”

  “We’re out of here,” Poppy Reese said.

  The law nodded. “You’ll be home, then? In Haddonfield?”

  Poppy shook her head. “My sister’s house. Holly Booker, up at the end of the boardwalk, in Ventnor. I gave you the address already.”

  “Why should my sister be in her big house all alone? It’s too far away and too full of memories, am I right, Poppy?”

  Poppy’s nod was woe itself.

  “This way, we can walk the boards, come in here for a massage, a little workout. It’ll be good for her. Physical activity, a little pampering—it’s always good for a person.”

  “She works here,” Poppy said. “In the spa.”

  Holly worked here. And what was her relationship with the deceased? Could Jesse have happened to be around the bar because he was seeing Sis on the sly?

  “Besides,” Holly said, “we haven’t seen each other for a while. Ever since her car went into the shop, like a year ago, she can’t get here, and that no-good husband of hers, you’d think he’d bring her? I picked her up this morning. I said, ‘You’re staying with me.’”

  “It’s been in the shop two weeks,” Poppy corrected her. “Not a year. I drive a special car,” she said to the policeman. “Because of my…” She looked momentarily sad for real.

  “Besides,” Holly said again, “she has her businesses to look after. Especially now that—”

  “Business?” the cop asked.

  Wait, I thought. Wait. This was all wrong. Poppy was in Atlantic City last night. Why didn’t she want her sister to know? Also, if she couldn’t drive herself, then with whom had she come, if not her husband? The suspicion that she’d been spying on Jesse, perhaps because of her sister, grew.

  I’d have to talk with Mackenzie about this—but when? We were supposed to for once and finally talk about us, and who knew what would happen after that?

  “Businesses,” Holly said. “My sister’s very talented. You’re looking at the next Liz Claiborne, so help me.”

  Holly wasn’t behaving like my idea of a woman who’d been cheating with her sister’s husband. Or someone whose lover had just been offed. Or maybe she was. Maybe she was being overly solicitous, overly obvious about her solicitousness.

  Holly patted her sister’s shoulder and winked at the cop, like a mother pushing her child forward for praise. Make the kid feel better, she seemed to be saying. “The store has three lines—Glitz for Gals. Studz—with a z—for Guys, Twinklz—with another z—for Tots. Three entire lines. Rivets are her personal fashion statement. You heard it first here.”

  “I’m sorry.” The patrolman looked apologetic. “I don’t know a whole lot about fashion, so…”

  “Well,” Holly said, “it isn’t exactly open yet.” She sounded a little testy, as if we were demeaning her sister by quibbling over inessentials—real store or figment, who cared?

  “And now, look what happened. Talk about a setback,” the widow said. I found it an interesting way to categorize—or dismiss—her husband’s death. “You never know, do you?”

  Poppy took a deep breath. “Still, life must go on.” And then, followed by her pink sibling, she left.

  The patrolman stared at her afterimage. “Did you know she was Miss Nebraska or Kansas—someplace like that—awhile back?” he asked me. “They’re usually a lot taller. A real shame about her being lame now and all.” He kept staring at the space she’d vacated until her lingering spell finally broke. Then he nodded me in the general direction of the bedroom.

  Once again, and probably for the last time, I admired the elegant serenity of the Eastern Suite. Only its name troubled me. East for me would be England. A room filled with Hepplewhite would be an Eastern Suite. Why had we adopted England’s egocentric and geographically backward labels, as if we were still their colony?

  “Don’t touch anything except what you have to,” the cop said. I wondered why, at this point, it mattered. Everything must have been long since dusted, sprayed, photographed, documented, or removed. I decided he’d said it out of sheer spite. He wanted to make everything hard for me because he didn’t like me as much as he’d liked the widow Poppy. But then, I’d never been Miss Anything except Pepper.

  At the bedroom door I gasped and put both my hands up to my mouth. Perhaps I’d unconsciously assumed that once everything was measured and noted, the room would be freshened up by a special postmortem chambermaid, but the room looked as if the murder were happening now, but for the absence of the victim.

  One of the two beds was pulled apart, the bedding dangling onto the floor, pulled half off the mattress, but that wasn’t it.

  It was the red-brown splat on the sheeting, the gory spread, the rusty mattress pad. It was where blood had arced and dripped in splatters across the once beautiful screen behind the bed, and onto the wall beyond it.

  “Dear God.” I turned my head away, nauseous and on the verge of tears.

  The detective said nothing, but I felt his eyes on my skin, studying me, as if my every word and action were important evidence.

  I ducked my head, averted my eyes, and pulled my suitcase out of the closet.

  “Make sure you only take your own things,” he said. “Let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary—you don’t have to check the pockets or anything.”

  Because they already had. The idea made me even sicker. Had I left anything peculiar, unethical, or unworthy in my pockets? Was this like having an accident with ripped underwear?

  Oh, God, my underwear. Surely they’d been through that, too, so it was exactly like that! I hoped nobody told my mother.

  “But anything out of the ordinary,” he repeated.

  Such as what? A ten-million-dollar check from Publishers Clearing House stapled to the hem of my green blouse? A komodo dragon on my blazer lapel? My jeans’ legs sewn together? What could possibly be out of the ordinary about my pathetic wardrobe, given that disarray and poor maintenance was the norm, and that they’d already examined every fiber of it, anyway?

  I folded each piece carefully, wanting to impress the officer with my wholesome packing expertise. “Couldn’t somebody from the hotel do this?” I finally asked. “Bring a rack and hang everything up?”

  He nodded. “Except you’d still have to say which is yours and which is hers, you know. This is just as efficient.”

  Not for me. The process seemed voyeuristic and creepy. I tucked the sandals I’d optimistically packed for the beach into the edge of the suitcase, scooped up my underwear without checking it for imperfections or fingerprints, and retrieved my tennis shoes, remembering bitterly the peaceful solitary walks I’d also fantasized. “Is it all right if I change shoes?” I asked
the detective. “These loafers are…my feet have been hurting since last night.”

  I wanted him to smile, to ease up, but he didn’t oblige me. He shook his head, somehow conveying that I was yet another Cinderella wannabe, squeezing my feet into tiny sizes. Or was that my own crabbed conscience speaking? In any case, the man said my footwear didn’t make any difference to him.

  I didn’t think I should muss the good bed, certainly didn’t want to go near the gory bed and didn’t want to ask Officer Smiles’s permission to sit on any other surface, so I accomplished the great shoe switch on the floor. The back throb I’d felt earlier with Lucky upped its voltage. I switched positions along with shoes and convinced myself that I did not have anything as trite and boring as a back problem. What I did have were blisters on both my heels and, when I stood up, a very sharp and extremely painful pressure on a toe.

  “You done, then?” the policeman asked.

  “No. Sorry.” I sat back down. “A pebble,” I said by way of explanation as I pulled the shoe off and shook it. He yawned and turned away.

  A former pebble, I should have said. Once upon a time, when it lodged itself in the belly of an oyster. Now, a pearl earring with a sharp post that had been drilling through my toe. I shook the shoe some more, to see if the clasp was in there as well, but it was not.

  I bent over the earring on the carpet, afraid to touch it. Surely it had prints on it. I didn’t know good pearls from paste, but this one had a nice sheen and a quietly elegant setting that suggested it had not been a Kmart special.

  I stood up straight and rubbed my back. I didn’t own anything like that earring, and Sasha wouldn’t. It was too understated, too unobtrusive. With her wild curly mane, she felt there was no point to earrings unless they were humungous enough to swing free and shine.

  “Excuse me,” I told the cop, whose back was to me as he stared out the window. I was glad he didn’t seem literate enough to read my mind and find me thinking of the expression pearls before swine.

  “Yeah?” he asked, back still to me.

  “I did.”

  He turned my way slowly, reluctantly. “You did what?”

  “Find something out of the ordinary in my clothes.”

  Twelve

  YOU’D THINK HE’D BE EXCITED—a genuine, honest-to-God clue to the presence, in this room, of another woman besides Sasha. But his attitude suggested that I was fixating on a bit of flotsam simply to add to his workload and give him grief.

  He lumbered over with all deliberate sloth, grunted as he bent and reached for the pearl with thick fingers.

  “Wait!” I said. “I mean, of course you know what you’re doing, but isn’t it possible that—don’t you think an earring might—probably would—have fingerprints on it? I mean, given how you’d—how I’d—put one in, you’d almost have to get your prints on it, wouldn’t you? Do you think you—do you think we should touch it that way?” It was necessary to overstate the case because he failed to react normally. He hunched over the earring, watching it with the blank goggle eyes of a guppy.

  I was proud of my tact and reserve. I had refrained from using the word stupid or any of its synonyms, which was better than he deserved. But virtue was rewarded because the patrolman slowly unbent and gave me a hooded, disdainful look, as if all on his own he’d decided against pawing the earring with his bare hands. “It’s not like I don’t know about prints,” he said.

  It was no mystery why, at nearly retirement age, he was still precariously balanced on a very low rung of the police ladder.

  “But have it your way,” he said in a standard-issue dismissive male tone that makes my viscera churn. He picked the earring up in a piece of tissue, looked at it and made a small pfffut exhalation. “Not much,” he said. “What do you people see in pearls, anyway?”

  “Us people?”

  “Yeah. You people. Women. What do you see in pearls?”

  “Normally, nothing. Right now, evidence.”

  “Not really. Lots of people use this room. Atlantic City’s real popular, you know. Number one tourist destination in the U.S.”

  I wondered how many times a day that statistic was dragged out.

  “You know,” he continued, “some of the help nowadays, well, they’re not necessarily the most perfect cleaners in the world. I could tell you stories—”

  “I’ll bet you could. But as I’m sure you realize, that particular earring couldn’t have been left here by a previous tenant. No matter how sloppy the chambermaid was. Don’t you agree?” I was really afraid that out of spite toward me, or life, or bad cleaning-women, the oaf was going to discount and thereby ruin this chance to prove Sasha’s innocence. “I mean,” I said in such a simpering tone I nearly made myself nauseous, “one need not be female to know that does not compute, isn’t that so?”

  “Well,” he said with a shrug, “I guess I…what was that again about computers?” His face grew ruddy, as if slowly building up pressure.

  “What I mean is, even if a person doesn’t wear earrings, he can understand that a little leftover pearl earring cannot jump into a shoe. It’s funny even to think of such a thing.”

  “Not so silly if you think about it a little longer, miss. If you think about it logically, you’ll realize that if, say, it gets itself stepped on the right way and ricochets…”

  I cut to the chase and did not react to his emphasized logically and its sexist undertones. “Have you ever noticed that if the back of an earring comes off—as in a struggle of some kind—then the front part’s unmoored and it can fly through the air like a little missile when the woman shakes her head. Want me to show you how?” I reached for my own earring. “

  He didn’t want to see, which was lucky, since I was wearing a hoop that was all one piece, and I couldn’t have demonstrated a thing. “Somebody wearing that earring was in this room last night,” I said. “Somebody who is not my friend Sasha.”

  “Yeah? How can you prove this doesn’t belong to your friend? Or even”—an actual idea had just now crept into his head—“it could belong to you!” His voice dripped with suspicion—of what, I couldn’t have said.

  Did the dimwit think I would have mentioned the earring if it belonged to one of us, or that I would have shown the thing to him if it were in any way self-incriminating? He should have been suspicious about whether I was planting false evidence to implicate somebody else. But I saw no need to direct his thinking or to instruct him. I was on vacation, after all.

  “Maybe you brought it from Philly,” he said.

  “You mean accidentally? The way ships carry rats, or produce carries insects?”

  “You probably packed it. It’s pretty small, you know.”

  “I don’t own pearl earrings.” I had to grit my teeth to keep my temper. “So it wouldn’t have been around my house, falling into my shoes. Besides, I wore those shoes yesterday. Here. I drove down here in them and kept on wearing them when I went on the beach. I didn’t change my shoes until I was going out later on. There wasn’t any earring inside of them. I would have felt it.”

  “Okay, fine. We’re wasting time. I’ll take care of it. You packed?”

  I ran into the bathroom for my toiletries, which were in appalling disarray all over the counter.

  “Looks like they scuffled in here, too,” the patrolman said.

  It wasn’t a question, so I said nothing, just tossed shampoo and eyeliner into my travel pack. I was relieved that I’d screwed the top back on the toothpaste before I left last evening, and ashamed of myself for thinking about such an inanity.

  He stood at the bathroom door, arms crossed over his chest, waiting for me to finish.

  “Okay, that’s it.” I rushed back to the bedroom and tossed the last of my belongings into the suitcase. I was beyond caring what he thought of my packing expertise or how I handled toothpaste tubes. “I’m out of here, okay?”

  He shook his head. I had to walk through the living room with him, slowly checking whether any other possessio
ns of mine were in evidence. I retrieved my untouched books, hoping he’d noticed War and Peace or Gift from the Sea and not the sex and shopping tome, and solemnly assured him that there was now not a trace of me left in there because I hadn’t had the time to further litter the premises.

  “You know,” he said, “the eyewitness…what he saw was a tall dark-haired woman. You think much about that? Because you know, you’re not exactly short yourself, are you? What do you have to say about that?”

  All I said was goodbye.

  * * *

  I couldn’t remember whether Mackenzie had mentioned when he’d be back. Since the scheduled program for the evening was breaking up, perhaps I’d blocked the time frame specifics. I tried reading War and Peace, but like Georgette, I had trouble concentrating on their various names. I wondered if life were more interesting when everybody called you something different the way they did in old Russia. I wondered if that tradition had persisted right through Perestroika.

  I wondered, too, whether Mackenzie, had he been born Russian, would have actual names, and lots of them—or would he simply be known by ever-shifting initials? C.K. for one social situation, T.K. for another, and so forth, à la russe.

  I wondered where Mackenzie was.

  Although I was staying in Atlantic City for only one more day, I completely unpacked, stacking undies tidily, making sure my toiletries were arranged with military precision. Nothing encourages good housekeeping as effectively as having your most personal objects pawed through by officials.

  I waited for Mackenzie some more. I was no longer certain that the man was ever going to show up, although a silent disappearance was not his style.

  “I was stood up for my break-up,” I sang, plucking at an imaginary guitar. “Stood up ’fore my break-up. Breakin’ up is harder to do if there’s no one to break up with you.” The next Nashville sensation. Words and life by Mandy Pepper.