by Judith Ivie
“We left them on our chairs to save our places. It was crowded, and it wasn’t as if anybody there was a criminal who was going to steal them or anything.”
“As it happened, you were mistaken. Someone there was the worst kind of criminal,” Armando couldn’t resist pointing out.
I shook my head at him, but fortunately, Joanie’s mind was still on evening bags.
“You’re right, we walked away from our purses, and they were sitting there in the open where anybody could have slipped that note inside.” She grinned at her cleverness in having deduced the opportunity for herself. I kind of hated to burst her bubble.
“The thing is, the two handbags were identical and easy to confuse, so we still don’t know which one of you was the note’s intended target, you or Ariel. And there’s one more thing.”
Her smile faltered. “What?”
I looked at my husband and arched a brow. Let’s see just how good you are at this stuff, I challenged him silently.
“At that time all three of you ladies were alive and well. Mindy was not yet a victim, so the writer may have intended his message for any one of you. Confusion about the identical purses may not have been an issue, since we do not know if he or she planned to murder Mindy or you or Ariel that night. Perhaps Mindy simply presented the first opportunity when she went to the restroom by herself during the last dance.”
I nodded. “Which means we’re really no closer to knowing who the next intended victim is. As Armando says, it may be that all three of you have been targeted. Or none of you, and Mindy’s death was just a weird coincidence followed by a poison pen prankster,” I added as Joanie’s face fell.
“Coincidence, right, and disco music is making a comeback.” She fiddled absently with her wedding band, turning it around and around on her finger. “I can’t seem to make myself take the damned thing off.” Abruptly, she drained her cold coffee and got to her feet. “I don’t know why I thought you could help me or even that you’d want to. I’m sorry I bothered you, both of you,” she nodded at Armando. “I’ll be running along now.” She headed for the kitchen with her empty mug, and we scrambled after her.
“I’d help you if I could, honestly,” I told her. “There’s just not enough to go on. We don’t even know the cause of Mindy’s death yet. Maybe it was an accidental overdose of something she was addicted to without your knowing about it.”
Joanie placed her mug in the sink, and Armando helped her rewrap herself in her cape. To our assessing eyes, she now looked stone cold sober and thus safe to drive. I guess being threatened will do that. She fished for her car keys in her pocket.
“You seriously think she was shooting up in the ladies room at her high school reunion? Not even Mindy is that twisted. Was,” she corrected herself.
I exchanged helpless looks with Armando. “If you think of anything else, give me a call, and if I learn anything more, I’ll do the same. Write down your number for me.” I tore a sheet of paper from the grocery pad I kept on the counter. As she scribbled I considered and rejected mentioning that my best friend’s husband was a police officer who might have access to a little inside information about the cause of Mindy’s death.
As Armando saw her out to her car, I shivered in the doorway. My notion of a peaceful and productive new year had shifted in some way. I was no longer as optimistic as I had been about what the days ahead might hold, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
Six
I was keeping Gracie company the next morning, watching the birds at our feeder out the back window while Armando snoozed a while longer. I had a lot to mull over, but I wasn’t getting very far. My mind kept running in circles from Mindy to Joanie to Ari and back again, and the identical evening bag thing made the situation even more confusing. It was such a muddle, it was impossible to draw any conclusions. All I knew for sure was that this thing, whatever it was, wasn’t over.
At about eleven the phone rang, and I snatched it off the base before it could rouse Rip Van Winkle. Emma was calling.
“You’re up and about earlier than I would have expected today,” I greeted her. “Did yesterday evening not go well?”
“It was fine, no big deal. Joey and Justine and I played with Allie until she practically begged to go to bed. Then we ate Chinese take-out and watched Meet Me in St. Louis for the hundredth time. I was tucked up before the New York crowd broke into “Auld Lang Syne.”
I flinched once again. If people didn’t stop mentioning that song, I was going to get an ear worm.
“How did things go at Strutter’s last night? Everything okay?”
“I’m surprised you’d be interested in five middle-aged people playing cards, number one, and you sound as if there’s a reason behind your question, number two. What’s up?”
Emma huffed but didn’t deny the truth of my observation. “Okay, I’ll get right to it. Charlie went to the dance at the high school with Duane, didn’t he?”
I frowned. “Yes, but they didn’t stay long. Charlie came home in a snit and stomped right upstairs. What do you know about that?”
“More than you do, I’ll bet, and his parents are probably clueless, as well. I went over to the diner about an hour ago to get some decent coffee and read my Kindle for a while, and there was Charlie Putnam, sitting all by himself at the end of the counter, not drinking the hot chocolate in front of him. He looked as if he could use a friendly face, so I went over to say hey.”
I waited. “And?”
“You are not going to believe this one.”
At two-thirty that afternoon Strutter and I were hunched over a tiny table at Starbuck’s in Rocky Hill, trying to hear each other speak. From the look of it, most of the female residents of Hartford County were there with us, united in their zeal to escape the college football hoopla on television at home, not to mention their beer-swilling hubbies and boyfriends.
We had discarded the idea of an energizing walk around the Broad Street Green, in which Margo categorically refused to join us, and opted instead to renew our energy with another shot of caffeine. Considering the quantity of coffee I’d consumed the previous evening, my suggestion to go for coffee surprised Strutter, but only until I’d filled her in on the details of our late-late visitor and hinted I had even more to tell her.
“No wonder you’re too tired for a walk,” she hollered over the din. “J.D. and I crashed half a minute after you left. Thank goodness Olivia gave us a break and slept until six-thirty this morning.”
“What do you think I should do about Joanie and Ariel?” I bellowed.
“What? Oh, this is ridiculous. Let’s drink our coffee in the car,” she yelled back.
Two minutes later we were slumped in the front seats of the Jetta, our shoeless feet propped companionably on the dashboard.
“Much better,” Strutter sighed. “To answer your question about the Joanie and Ariel situation, what can you do, and even if you could, why would you? You said yourself they were never anything but mean to you and everyone else around them.”
“Joanie wasn’t so bad, just a sort of hanger-on. I didn’t think about it at the time, of course, being absolutely as self-centered as every other teenager in the world, but Joanie wanted so terribly to belong, fit in somewhere. I guess we all did. Mindy and Ariel were the best Joanie could do. Anyway, I feel bad for what’s happening to her now, what with her husband taking off and Mindy dying and now this.”
“That’s because you’re a decent human being, but realistically, what are you going to do, follow her around to see if she’s being stalked? You don’t even know for sure if the note was intended for Ariel or Joanie.”
“I know, I know. Mindy’s death hasn’t even been officially pronounced a murder, just labeled suspicious, so there’s no police investigation under way. John Harkness was able to get that much information out of the Brewster Police Department via cell phone.”
We were quiet for a minute while Strutter waited for me to get to the real reason we were having coff
ee in Starbucks’ parking lot when we had seen each other barely twelve hours ago and would see each other in the office tomorrow. I attributed her unusual perceptiveness to her Jamaican ancestry. She didn’t confirm or deny, but I felt sure there had to be some Obeah blood in her gene pool somewhere. I cleared my throat.
“Did you ever find out what’s going on with Charlie?”
“Not yet. We left him alone last night. He holed up in his room, moping around as if he’d lost his best friend. This morning he announced he was going to get a cup of hot chocolate at the diner and took off on foot, so I decided to let him walk it off.”
If I waited a year, I’d never get a better segue into this difficult topic. “In a manner of speaking, he has lost his best friend,” I said before I lost my nerve.
Strutter looked blank, as well she might. “But Duane was right there with him last night. Do you mean he’s moving away? Oh! You mean they’re quarreling about something. Probably one of those hot-to-trot little hussies at the dance was flirting with Duane instead of Charlie.” She stirred her latte. “Makes sense. Charlie was just fine when he left the house to pick up Duane. You could see that for yourself, but what was it, an hour or so later the sky had fallen.”
“I’m sure that’s what it felt like to him,” I muttered more to myself than to Strutter. Then, “The thing is, Emma stopped in at the diner this morning, too. She ran into Charlie, as a matter of fact, and well, you know how young people are. Sometimes they prefer to talk to someone closer to their own age.”
Strutter peered at me closely. “Did he tell Emma what the quarrel was about?”
I looked at my friend, happily going down the wrong road here, and wondered how to broach the real problem. As long and as well as I’d known Charlene Putnam, nee Tuttle, she had never demonstrated an ounce of prejudice, but homosexuality was a topic we had never discussed. Well, there was that one occasion when I had mistakenly and hilariously encouraged a romance between Emma and a gay police officer, but that’s another story.
“He did say he and Duane had had a misunderstanding at the dance, but it wasn’t about a girl.” I gulped nervously at my cappuccino as Strutter’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re being awfully coy, Kate. It isn’t like you, and it’s starting to worry me. What problem is my son having that he could confide to your daughter but not to J.D. or me? Is Charlie dabbling in drugs?”
There was a steely edge to her voice that mothers get when their children are in harm’s way.
“No, no drugs, nothing like that. In fact, there’s nothing illegal involved at all. You don’t need to worry about that.”
Strutter’s shoulders relaxed infinitesimally, but she remained braced for disaster. “Then what do I need to worry about? Stop shilly-shallying and just spit it out. Is Duane in some kind of trouble? I’ve known that boy for years and think of him as one of my own.”
She was right. I had to stop dithering and tell Strutter the truth, but still I hesitated. It felt like such an intrusion to both Charlie and Duane, revealing something so personal. Would either of them thank me for outing Duane to Charlie’s mom? I doubted it. Still, Charlie had opened up to Emma. He was clearly looking for some help with this devastating news. Could Strutter handle it? Could J.D.?
All of a sudden Strutter’s face cleared, and she sat up straight. “Charlie finally realized Duane is gay,” she said in obvious relief. “Something happened at the dance, and now Charlie knows. That’s it, isn’t it?”
I gaped at the amazing, insightful woman I had completely underestimated once again.
“Close your mouth. You look like a beached fish,” she instructed.
I was sure she was right and struggled to straighten out my features. “You know Duane is gay? But you just said you thought Charlie and Duane were quarreling over a girl last night.”
“I didn’t really say that, but I implied it, and I’m sorry about that. I was going along with Duane’s cover, the public persona he’s cultivated so carefully since the boys were in middle school and the hormones started surging.”
“You knew way back then, but Charlie didn’t?”
“Oh, sure,” she said as casually as if she were discussing the weather. “It’s something J.D. and I have known forever, but it wasn’t our place to fill Charlie in. Kids don’t always pick up on these things right away, but we knew Duane would tell Charlie when he was ready. I guess that was last night, huh?”
“Yes, and he sure picked his moment, right there in front of a gymnasium full of teenagers.” I grimaced, imagining the scene.
“He told Charlie in front of a bunch of other kids?”
“Not exactly. Apparently, Duane thought Charlie was already aware of his gender preference and drew the wrong conclusion when Charlie agreed to go with him to the dance last night.”
Understanding dawned in Strutter’s eyes. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. There they were, laughing and talking with a group of their friends, when the first slow song of the evening started up. The girls were all giggly, hoping one or the other of the boys would choose them, you know.”
“What happened?” Strutter asked, already knowing the answer.
I gulped. “Duane asked Charlie to dance.”
We stared at each other, trying to picture the sheer awfulness of the moment. Then we burst out laughing.
“Oh, my god,” Strutter howled. “My poor baby.”
After dinner that evening Armando and I sat in front of a dying fire as I filled him in on Charlie’s dilemma. Gracie watched the flickering light, her eyes dreamy and far away. “If anything, this reinforces my opinion that high school may be an okay experience for some kids, but if it really turns out to be the best part of their lives, that’s pretty sad. Most of us suffer the most hurtful situations we will ever experience. I do not understand people’s ceaseless quest to relive those years, however much time has elapsed.” I looked at him curiously. “So tell me your deepest, darkest high school humiliation. You’ve never said.”
He smiled. “I was in the seminary, remember?” Armando had studied for the priesthood for several years in Colombia.
“Ah, yes, until you realized that you really, really liked girls,” I teased him. “Very convenient. You probably saved yourself enormous emotional damage.”
“Postponed, would be a better word,” he corrected but did not elaborate. I already knew a good deal about the baggage he carried around, so he didn’t need to. “Still, I had some very good friends in Colombia, and I do wonder what has become of them.”
“You could probably find out if you made a Facebook page for yourself and put out the word, but frankly, I don’t want to be that accessible. It feels dangerous to me, or at least potentially awkward. As sure as I’m sitting here, the one person I never wanted to hear from again would find me and want to get together.” I made a face.
“The one person? Who would that person be?” Armando asked. He stroked the back of my hand absently, and Gracie narrowed her eyes in jealousy. I had my uses, such as filling her food dish regularly, but Armando was her special person, and it annoyed her when his attention shifted to me.
I thought about his question. “I don’t know right at the moment, but I’m sure there’s one out there somewhere. Or two. I’ve made peace with most of the villains in my past, but there must be a couple I’ve forgotten for the moment whose reappearance wouldn’t please me. Before Saturday night, Mindy Marchelewski would have been right at the top of my list, but she already resurfaced, and look how well that turned out.” I sighed. “What with one thing and another, this holiday has been among the most complicated and depressing I can remember, except for the time you and I have spent together.”
“That is always good, is it not?”
We were quiet for a minute, gazing at the dying fire. Gracie had decided to be magnanimous about Armando’s shameful inattention and curled up with her tail over her nose.
“What resolutions did you make for the new year?” I asked him.
“To make love to my wife more often,” he responded promptly, and his stroking hand found my thigh. “Starting now.”
I returned his smile. “No sense putting these things off,” I agreed.
Seven
“By the way, how did you leave things with Charlie yesterday? I was so worried about having to tell Strutter about your conversation with him, I forgot to ask you.”
Emma and I were stumping around the Broad Street Green Tuesday morning, almost glad to get back to our normal routine after the excesses of the holidays.
“He didn’t want to go back to school this morning, I can tell you that.”
“I can imagine,” I sympathized. “I seem to recall a few mornings years ago when you and Joey weren’t eager to face your friends, like the time the two of you got into a brawl on the school bus and were suspended from riding it for a week, or when Joey got braces.”
“And the time in the eighth grade I burned off my bangs with the curling iron,” Emma grinned, “but being asked to dance by your same sex best friend you didn’t even know was gay in front of the entire school? That’s a whole new level of awful.”
“Awful for both boys,” I agreed. “After all, Duane assumed Charlie was totally up to speed and ready to support him when he came out. Otherwise, Charlie never would have accepted what in Duane’s mind was a sort of a date for the dance.”
“Was that realistic or just wishful thinking on Duane’s part? Those two guys have known each other forever. How could Duane have thought Charlie was anything but hetero?”
“Good point. When you go through puberty together, you’re pretty clear about your best friend’s gender preference, I’d imagine.”
“Except maybe for the bi’s,” Emma mused.
“Buys? I’m not following.”
“As in bisexuals,” Emma explained in her be-patient-with-clueless-old-mom voice. “Those can be pretty tough to spot.”
