Trail of the Spellmans

by Lisa Lutz

  DAD: We have no other option.

  MOM: I understand.

  DAD: We’ll get through it.

  MOM: We’ll see.

  DAD: We’ve been through worse.

  MOM: You sure about that?

  DAD: I have it under control.

  MOM: Al, at some point you might have to make a choice.

  DAD: I know. And I’ll make the right one.

  Believe me, I’ve tried direct questioning on many occasions; it’s never been a successful route for me to take. That conversation could have been about anything—financial difficulties, an issue with a client, or even marital problems. I hid in the basement because I didn’t want to tip off my parents, but I knew something was going on—something very serious indeed.

  I left my father in the office to digest his illicit cookie and returned to the dining room, where I found D watching his afternoon soap (a habit that apparently started thirteen years ago in prison) and my mother indulging in her latest hobby.

  “Mom, what are you doing?”

  “Checking out some online dating sites,” she replied.

  “That’s generally frowned upon when you’re married,” I said.

  “For D,” Mom said, maintaining her gaze on the computer screen.

  “He’ll never agree to it,” I said.

  “Already has,” Mom smugly replied. Mom waited until she heard the blast of a commercial to directly interrupt D. “D, what’s the tallest woman you’d date?”

  “Surprise me,” D replied, decidedly uninterested in the endeavor.

  “Six-three?”

  “Why not?”

  Mom studied the candidate’s profile and shook her head. “Forget it. She’ll only date water signs.”

  It seemed that intrigue was popping up like spring flowers that day. There was no good reason D would allow my mother to set him up on dates. Perhaps this was one mystery I could get to the bottom of. I plopped down on the couch and gazed at the TV screen. D’s soap never interested me much—there was way too much history to catch up on (and no appendix to help you out), but I feigned interest.

  “So . . . um . . . did things work out between that guy with the awful tan—Blake, that was his name—and that woman with the eye patch?”

  “Christina?”

  “Is there more than one woman on the show with an eye patch?”

  “No.”

  “So, how are things with Blake and Christina?”

  “Why the sudden interest?”

  “Why the sudden suspicion?”

  “You don’t care about my program,” D said. “Something else is on your mind.”

  “Fair enough,” I replied. “But you can say that about anything. I mean, don’t you currently have something else on your mind besides your program?”

  “Yes,” D said. “How I can get you to leave me in peace for just fifteen more minutes.”

  “Done.”

  I sat in silence and watched another orange-hued male and tangerine-shaded woman conspire in a murder plot against a wealthy heiress with vertigo. Apparently, the plan was to knock her down a flight of stairs, which would be plausible under the circumstances. D shushed me when I asked how they’d benefit from the crime. When the show finally ended, he explained that the orange man was married to the old lady with vertigo.

  “That’s kind of gross, don’t you think?”

  “Love is deaf, dumb, and blind.”

  “And orange, apparently,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why does everyone have a fake tan?” I asked the universe.

  But D answered: “I long ago stopped trying to figure out half of the weird shit white people do to themselves. Any other questions I can fail to answer for you?”

  “Yeah. Do you need some backup with my mom?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The whole Internet dating thing,” I whispered. “Clearly, she’s manipulating you in some capacity. I can have her taken care of, if you know what I mean.”

  “Is it so hard to believe I might want to go on a date after being in prison for fifteen years?”

  “No, but handing over the reins to my mom is.”

  “It’s a jungle out there. I’m just allowing her to clear away some of the brush.”

  “So, how’s it been going?” I asked, trying to change the tenor of the conversation from interrogative to interested.

  “I’ve met a number of nice ladies.”

  “So, approximately how many nice ladies have you met?”

  “I’ve been on four dates so far.”

  “How many second dates?” I asked.

  “None.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I haven’t met anyone special yet.”

  “Is that code for ‘they were all crazy’?” I asked. “That’s what you get when you let my mother pick your dates. Now, if you gave me a shot at it . . .”

  “I’m officially ending this conversation,” D said.1

  “But I have some helpful suggestions.”

  “And I have a job to do,” D said, returning to the office.

  I followed my mother into the kitchen and was about to tackle another branch of the investigation when she gave me the slip with a question of her own.

  “When were you going to tell me that Henry’s mother is in town?”

  “After she left,” I replied.

  “You weren’t planning on introducing us?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why? Are you ashamed of us?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Very funny, Isabel. I invited Henry and Gertrude over for Sunday dinner. Any special requests?”

  “Order in.”

  “You can come too, if you like.”

  “I’ll think it over,” I replied.

  “I have to decide between inviting David and Rae. Do you have a preference?”

  “Why is it either/or?”

  “David won’t come if Rae is here.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s worse than I thought,” my mother said.

  “It’s worse than I thought,” I said.

  “Do you know what happened?” Mom asked.

  “No idea. You?”

  “Well, obviously, it has nothing to do with the liquor cabinet. I’m not in the mood to play Sophie’s Choice yet again, so you tell me who to invite.”

  “David,” I quickly replied. “Get him sloshed and maybe he’ll talk.”

  “I like the way you think,” Mom said. “Well, I’d love to stay and explore the many angles of my children’s dysfunction, but I’m late for my class,” Mom said as she slipped her arm through the straps of a canvas bag and made her way to the door.

  “What’s in the bag, Mom?”

  “I don’t believe that’s any of your concern,” she said, waving a cheery good-bye.

  I promptly entered the office and got to the bottom of at least one matter. Well, not quite the bottom. Somewhere in the middle, I suppose.

  “Dad, I’ll keep that cookie secret, even the next one, if you tell me what ‘class’2 Mom is heading to right now.”

  Dad pulled a calendar from his desk and said, “Let me check her schedule. What day is it?”

  “Monday,” D answered.

  “Monday is sculpting,” Dad said. “And book club once a month.”

  “Give me that,” I said, approaching his desk.

  Dad reluctantly handed me the calendar. I don’t believe he was under any directive not to provide this intelligence, but he was under a directive not to eat baked goods.

  I was shocked to discover a traffic jam of “leisure” activities on the calendar, all in blue ink, blanketing the page like a tidal wave. There was virtually no time unaccounted for beyond work hours. I made a photocopy of the page and returned it to my father. I provide for you now my mother’s hobby schedule for the month of September.

  Monday, 6–9 P.M., Beginning Pottery; 8:00 P.M., book club (second Monday of month)

  Tues
day, 5–6 P.M., yoga; 7–10 P.M., Russian 101

  Wednesday, 6:30–8 P.M., crochet3

  Thursday, 7:30–10:30 P.M., Tarting It Up [fret not; it was a cooking class]

  Friday, 7:30–9 P.M., Music Appreciation

  Saturday, 9–10 A.M., yoga; 11 A.M.–1 P.M., decoupage

  Sunday, 9 A.M.–12 P.M., volunteer work; 2–3 P.M., tennis; 5–6 P.M., prep for family dinner

  I had so many questions that it was impossible to unite them in any semblance of logic or order. I simply chose them at random like scraps of paper tossed in a hat.

  “What the fuck is decoupage?” was the first to surface.

  “Some kind of craft thing,” Dad replied.

  “It’s the technique of decorating with cutouts from a newspaper or magazine on a flat surface and coating with a layer of finish,” D explained.

  “I’m confused. Why would somebody do that?”

  “I did it in prison once or twice in art class. It was kind of relaxing.”

  “In prison, the point is to kill time. I wouldn’t be surprised if you took a knitting class as well.”

  “Knitting would have been very popular,” D replied. “And dangerous.”

  “Since when does Mom volunteer?” was the next question that fought through the competing interrogatives.

  “She’s worked at the food bank on a few occasions.”

  “Dad, what’s going on?” I asked. “It isn’t like Mom to have outside interests.”

  “She’s been taking yoga with me for the last few years,” Dad replied.

  “That’s to make you go to yoga.”

  “What’s the harm in your mother having a hobby or two?”

  “She’s booked solid.”

  “She promised me she’d drop a few after the first couple of weeks.”

  “You don’t think she’s up to something?” I said.

  “She’s taking some classes to broaden her horizons.”

  “Russian!”

  “Spanish was at a bad time,” my father nonchalantly replied.

  “You know more than you’re saying.”

  “Maybe you should get a few extracurricular activities of your own. Then maybe you won’t be so preoccupied with your mother’s.”

  “I have extracurricular activities,” I smugly replied.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad said. “I forgot you play the Game of Kings. How’s that working out for you?”

  KING, QUEEN, CASTLE, HORSE

  Three months earlier

  “What did you do?” Henry asked as he returned from the kitchen.

  “I took your castle with my horse.”

  Henry sat his cup of chamomile next to my whiskey beside the chess-board. “Please call the pieces by their appropriate names.”

  Sigh.

  “What is the horsey called?” he asked in a condescending tone.

  “Um . . . knight.”

  “And the castle?”

  “I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Rook.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took your rook with my knight.”

  Henry studied the chessboard.

  “First of all, if you’re going to take thirty minutes to decide on your next move, the least you can do is wait for me to return to the table before you steal my rook.”

  “Steal? Is that the proper language for the game?”

  “It is when you’re cheating.”

  “I didn’t cheat.”

  “This isn’t poker, Isabel. You need to show some good sportsman-ship.”

  “We’ve met before, right?”

  “I’m going to let the rook-stealing slide just this once.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Check,” Henry said, and the game was over.

  The three previous times we played chess together, Henry had made me study the endgame. To ensure that this would not happen again, I slid my arm across the board and knocked the pieces back into the box.

  “Once again, I’d like to remind you that the only reason we’re playing chess is because your dentist overbooked one day.”

  This is, in fact, truer than you can imagine. An emergency root canal was to blame for my current state of forced chess study and weekly losses. Henry was trapped in the waiting room of one Daniel Castillo, DDS’s office without any of his own reading material. Dr. Castillo (Ex #11) had left the magazine subscription duties to his full-time office manager, who has an unnatural fondness for trashy rags. The options were Hollywood tabloids or women’s magazines. Henry read, cover to cover, an issue of a magazine geared toward women in their thirties on a nose-diving mission for marriage, called Me.2 (So, if you’re talking to your friend about the magazine, you’d say, “Hey, have you read the latest Me Squared?”) One of the many articles he read (which included an astrological fashion assessment)1 was a piece on relationship compatibility that strongly encouraged the sharing of each other’s activities. Turns out Henry and I, up to that point, had not shared any activities besides watching Doctor Who and debating the many issues on which we do not concur. I debated that the debating alone offered us plenty of shared experience, but Henry stood his ground and demanded that we each choose an activity that we could do together.

  I didn’t choose, thinking this phase would blow over. But when Henry bought me a book called Chess for Imbeciles, I realized how serious this had become. My only response was retaliation. I chose beer tasting as my hobby. This, as far as I was concerned, meant going to a dive bar and drinking beer.

  Henry, however, had a more lofty approach and would often arrange tours at local microbreweries. If you ask me, listening to someone lecture you about why beer tastes the way it does kind of takes the fun out of drinking it. Plus, when they say “tasting” they’re dead serious about that. You’re lucky if you can get a pint in you after a three-hour tour.

  But I digress. Much to my dismay, when I returned home that night, I found Gertrude and Henry in the midst of what appeared to be an intense and evenly matched game of chess.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked, feeling a bit betrayed by Gerty.

  “Just a friendly game,” Henry said.

  “Why do people always have to add the word ‘friendly’?” I asked.

  “To remind people like you not to cheat,” Henry replied, sliding his bishop across the board and taking his mother’s knight.

  “You can always forfeit, Gerty, and then we can go get a drink.”

  “This won’t take long,” Gerty replied, taking Henry’s rook.

  “He hates losing his rook,” I said, taking a spectator seat.

  “I especially hate it when it’s taken by a pawn three rows down when I’m not looking.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a chess player,” I said to Gerty without bothering to hide my disappointment.

  “I’m not.”

  “And yet you seem to be decent at it,” I replied, judging purely by the mass of Henry’s material3 by the side of the board.

  “Henry’s father taught me ages ago. I got tired of losing so I began taking lessons with a grand master. I decided that one day I was going to win, no matter what it took.”

  “How long did that take?” I asked.

  “Seven long years,” Gertrude replied. “Check.”

  While Henry stared at the board, attempting to retrace the series of moves that derailed him, Gerty got up from the table, grabbed her coat, and said, “Izzy and I are going to grab a drink. Care to join us?”

  “Again?” Henry asked. “You went out last night. I think you could use a night in, Isabel.”

  I couldn’t risk the exposure of a night alone with Henry; he had that look he gets when he wants to have an adult conversation. I was going to stick with my usual—the Avoidance Method™.4

  “I think I could go out again,” I said.

  “Dad phoned earlier. Did you call him back?” Henry said.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow,” Gerty replied. “He’s probably asle
ep by now.”

  “Don’t stay out too late,” Henry said.

  “Don’t wait up,” Gerty replied.

  THE FOURTH WALL

  One of the many benefits of Rae’s reduced workload is a reduction in the time that I must spend in her company. She surfaces only on Fridays for the summit and the occasional Sunday-night dinner, which have been less religiously enforced since the arrival of Sydney.1 The next time Rae showed up at the office, she was once again wearing the doctored $$ JUSTICE 4 MERRI-WEATHER $$ T-shirt. D tried to ignore her by avoiding eye contact, which I’ve noticed is effective with some animals but not so many people, and definitely not Rae.

  “Have you had time to read the material I sent you?” Rae asked D.

  D, not looking up from his computer, replied, “Been busy.”

  “You should look it over, D. You’re running out of time. The statute of limitations on a malicious prosecution case is two years. You’ve got six months left. But the waiting doesn’t look good. You lose credibility.”

  “Thank you, Rae,” D firmly replied. “If I wish to discuss this matter further, I will contact Maggie. Do we understand each other?”

  “Is there a subtext I’m missing?” Rae asked.

  D finally looked her straight in the eye. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you again. If I choose to pursue this matter, which is unlikely, I will discuss it with my attorney, not a college girl who checks her stock portfolio every hour. Now, do we understand each other?”

  “What have you got against money?”

  “That will be all, Rae,” my mother said with a note of finality in her voice. On occasion Mom adds a certain edge to her tone and you just instinctually know not to cross it.

  Rae quietly returned to her desk and got back to work.

  The Sparrow got a new nickname after a week of being tailed by the Weasel.

  “The Sparrow’s a snore. I thought this case had some juice,” Rae said, sounding like an old cop from a bad TV show. An hour after the Demetrius incident, Rae submitted her first surveillance report on Vivien Blake and was clearly nonplussed by the coed’s bland freshman behavior. Apparently, Vivien went to class, the library, an occasional movie, sometimes a coffee shop, and one party, at which she imbibed exactly two beers.

  “The least she could do is take some hallucinogens like everybody else at Berkeley,” Rae said.