“What are the kids doing?” Peter asked.
“Jennifer just graduated from police academy and will be going to work at the Roseville Police Department, just outside Sacramento. Jason is getting his teaching credential at San Francisco State.”
“How about Anna?” Gordon asked El.
“She just finished her first year at USC law school. She’ll be home a week from Sunday.”
“So all the kids did well,” he said.
“Since you were so bold as to ask me,” Peter looked at Gina as she said this, “are either of you attached now?”
Both women laughed. Peter gave Gordon a “What’s the joke?” look.
“Do you want to explain?” El said.
“This is probably the worst place in the world to be a single woman,” Gina said. “There are two kinds of people in a town like this. The ones who get married straight out of high school and never leave, and the ones who leave after high school and never come back. And the ones who get married tend to stay married, so there aren’t a lot of eligible bachelors around here.”
“To give you an idea how bad it is,” El continued, “I belong to the Rotary Club. I was the first woman they let in when they had to. Every Thursday I go to that meeting, and there are 47 men in the room. Forty six of them are married.”
“At least there’s one prospect,” Peter said.
“That ‘prospect’ would be Len Iverson, the former football coach. He’s 88 and comes to the meetings with a cane. Just between us, I think he’s hanging on for one more football season before he goes to the great stadium in the sky. No, I’m not even looking anymore. I figure my only chance is to wait another ten years until one of the wives dies, and pounce.”
“You’ve thought it out better than I have,” Gina said. “I’m just going to wait for the perfect man, and you know what they say?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” murmured Peter.
She looked at him. “The perfect man doesn’t drink, doesn’t cheat and doesn’t exist.”
Both women laughed louder and longer than would have been expected given the single glass of wine they’d each consumed. Peter and Gordon exchanged a silent glance. The waitress showed up with their dinners, once again saving the day.
AS HE ATE HIS SPAGHETTI, Gordon could see why the workers who built Año Nuevo Dam had liked it so much. It was hearty, with a rich tomato flavor, but the herbs and spices kept the tomato from overpowering and made the sauce feel almost creamy. He remembered eating spaghetti like this at restaurants his parents had taken the family to when he was a child, and realized that this sort of comfort-food spaghetti had all but vanished from the menus of Italian restaurants in the Bay Area.
After a few minutes he set his fork down and looked at Gina.
“Now that we’ve decided to follow up on what Charlotte gave me, I’d like to know a bit more about her. I take it you met at the high school.”
Gina nodded. “She helped me out quite a bit my first year there, but that was Charlotte. She made a point of being accessible to the new faculty, and what she did for me, which helped a lot, wasn’t unusual. We didn’t really become good friends until my marriage blew up.”
“You confided in her?” said El.
“She was easy to talk to, and I needed someone. We hadn’t been here that long, you know, and almost everyone we knew, we knew as a couple. That made it awkward. She just knew me, so I could vent with her.” She laughed. “God, I’d forgotten how tiresome I must have been back then. But we ended up getting together a lot after school that year, and it grew into a friendship. I never thought of it until just now, but being single in a town where almost everybody’s married, well, she must have needed a friend, too.”
“Is there anything you particularly remember her saying?” interjected Peter. “Anything that made an impression on you and really helped?”
“Early on, when I was really angry and having revenge fantasies, she told me to remember what we try to impress on our students as English teachers: That everyone is flawed, that everyone has his reasons, and we need to keep that in mind, even as we judge. There was one other thing she said that I’ve never forgotten. I was crying in my wine one night, and wailing about how could he do this to me. She leaned across the table, put a hand on my forearm, and said:
“ ‘Gina, darling. There’s something you need to remember. It’s very seldom that people are doing something to you. They are usually doing it for themselves, and if you get hurt along the way, you’re just collateral damage.’ I really didn’t want to hear those things at the time, but after a while I processed them, and it helped me let go.”
“And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Gordon said.
“We had a lot in common, and we were both single. Most of the other teachers were married or moved on after a couple of years. So we started doing more and more things together. Every Monday night, we’d get together, usually at her house, for a glass of sherry and conversation. I was on my way over this past Monday night when I saw the fire. Actually, I called first, but she didn’t answer, so I left a message and started over. Oh, God. I wonder if she was trapped in the fire when I called?”
Her lip began to quiver, and a tear rolled from the corner of her left eye down her cheek. She dabbed at it with her napkin.
“There was nothing you could have done,” said El. “Why don’t you try to remember some more?”
Gina collected herself after a moment.
“A lot of great memories. Charlotte was mad about books, and every other month, we’d leave first thing on a Saturday morning and drive to Sacramento. We’d go to Time Tested Books and spend a couple of hours there. Sometimes Charlotte bought $500 worth of books. Money wasn’t an issue for her, you know. We’d have lunch, maybe do some other shopping, and drive back. Sometimes in the winter, if a storm was moving in, we’d stay overnight. What I really remember, though, was the conversations we had on those long drives, when it was just us in the car and we didn’t have to worry about being overheard.
“And every summer for the past ten years, we’ve gone to one of the Shakespeare festivals — usually at Tahoe or Ashland, Oregon. In fact, we had tickets for Ashland next month. They’re doing Coriolanus, and Charlotte was really looking forward to it. It’s a wonderful play, and one that doesn’t get produced terribly often.”
“It sounds,” Gordon said, “as if she lived what she taught. I’d like to know what kind of a teacher she was. In your opinion.”
“She was the best, and that’s not my opinion — it’s everybody’s. When she retired a year ago, she was irreplaceable. They don’t make teachers like her any more. Smart young women can make so much more money in business now, but that wasn’t an option for Charlotte when she graduated from college in 1957. The choices were nurse, librarian and teacher. This town has no idea how lucky it is that she picked the last one.”
“I still remember the good teachers, from early on all the way through medical school,” said Peter. “It’s a gift. What do you think made her good?”
“She loved language, and she loved literature, and she had a real ability to convey that love to students and get them caught up in it. Not all of them, of course. That never happens. But a surprisingly high number. She treated them like adults, and challenged them, and they fed off her enthusiasm. Charlotte believed that being able to think and write well were part of the same package, and that they were skills that helped immeasurably in life. Her students wrote a lot, and she spent a lot of time grading their papers and commenting on them.
“And she also had a way of conveying literature. She could show the students — well, some of them, anyway — that it was a way of understanding your feelings and understanding other people. And again, that those were skills that definitely served you well as you went through life.
“Her senior Advanced English class was legendary. Over the course of a year, she taught Oedipus Rex, the Book of Job, a bit of Chaucer and Milton, Macbeth, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, the Brownings, the Rossettis, and Great Expectations.”
“That’s impressive,” said Gordon. “I thought the nuns at my high school made us read a lot, but it wasn’t that much.”
“Hmm,” said El. “A Catholic boy. My father always told me to watch out for Catholic boys. He said they’d have their way with you, and figure all they had to do to make it OK was confess to the priest.”
“Did that keep you away from Catholic boys?” Gina asked.
“It didn’t keep me away from any boys, but we’re getting off subject.”
Gina continued. “There was one decision about that advanced class that Charlotte put off until Christmas each year. Between Coleridge and the other poets, the students would read another novel, and she wanted to see how good a class she had before deciding which one. If it was a really good class, they read Pride and Prejudice. If it wasn’t quite so good, they read Jane Eyre.”
She looked around the table to see if that had sunk in.
“That makes some sense,” Peter said. “Bronte’s a very good writer, but you don’t get from her what you get from Austen. And Austen takes more teaching than Bronte.”
“Exactly.” She put a hand on his arm. “You understand. And Pride and Prejudice, though some people might not think so, is a relevant book here. So much of it is about making a good match, and we see so many students who get married straight out of high school — just because. Charlotte felt that reading and understanding that book would make at least some of them think more broadly and deeply about what, after all, is one of the most important decisions they’ll ever make.”
“I’d be curious to know,” Gordon said, “if there were any books Charlotte wanted to teach but didn’t.”
Gina nodded. “We actually talked about that several times on the way to Sacramento and the Shakespeare festivals. She said the regret she’d die with was that she couldn’t teach George Eliot and Tolstoy; she really loved Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. But she just didn’t feel that even the best high school class, as a group, could handle the length and complexity. She gave copies to a few special students, but she was afraid an entire class would get lost.”
“She’s probably right,” Gordon said. “I finally got around to Middlemarch a couple of years ago, when I was recuperating from a hernia surgery. Peter did it, actually; that’s how we met. It’s a wonderful book, but I wouldn’t have gotten it in high school. And I doubt I would have taken it on at all if I hadn’t been facing a week at home, barely able to move, during a rainy winter.”
“I haven’t read either of those,” Peter said. “I’m more of a poetry man. ‘O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being …’ Keats, right?”
“Shelley,” Gina said, “but I’m impressed nonetheless.”
“Could we interrupt the book circle and get back to something else?” said El. “You mentioned how Charlotte helped you when you were going through the other woman and the divorce, and I was interested in what she said. We know she never married, but do you think she had any experience in love that she might have drawn on? It sounds as if she might have.”
“That’s a very good question. And one I wondered about a number of times. Charlotte was so forthcoming about a lot of things, but she very much gave the impression that her love life was off limits, and there was something about her that, well, I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking. But just once, something slipped out.
“It was when the divorce became final. It hit me like a ton of bricks, and I went over to her place to cry on her shoulder. And at one point she said, ‘I know how you feel. I’ve loved someone myself, and it didn’t end well.’ Then she seemed to catch herself and turned the conversation back to me and my problems. That was more than ten years ago, and she never brought it up again.”
It was 8:30, and they had finished their dinners. The waitress came to clear the table and asked about dessert. Gordon looked around.
“We still haven’t discussed what we’re going to do next,” he said. “We might as well have dessert while we do that.”
“I’m easy,” said El.
“But we knew that already,” muttered Gina.
“THE FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS,” Gordon said, after they ordered dessert, “Is to figure out what needs to be done and who’s going to do it.”
“A lot of it’s going to fall on me,” El said. “For no other reason than the newspaper would be expected to be asking questions.”
“It may not be as bad as that,” Gordon said. “As it turns out, I have an excellent reason for asking questions and talking to people as well.” All eyes turned to him. “This morning I got a call from Cameron Winters, Charlotte’s attorney. It turns out that the day she died she added a handwritten codicil to her will appointing me as her literary executor.”
“What?” said Gina.
“I don’t understand it, either. I’d have thought if she were doing something like that, she would have named someone she knew. You, for instance. Or her brother.”
Gina sat silently for a moment before answering.
“Not her brother. He’s a decent man, at least as far as I know, and reasonably smart in a business sense. But he doesn’t have a literary bone in his body. Still, that’s the sort of thing she could have asked me to do, and I would have said yes gladly.”
“I’m in over my head on this,” Gordon said. “I’m probably going to have to lean on you for help, Gina.”
“Anything I can do, but … Well, if she picked you, she had a reason and probably a good one. We just don’t know what it is yet.”
“Just looking at the family history,” Gordon said, “there are three things that jump out right away. The first is the A.D. she had in her notes to talk to about her father’s accident. Anybody have any ideas who A.D. might be?”
Nobody did.
“We’ll leave that for the time being. The second thing is to talk to Bart Sturges about what happened when he changed his mind and voted for The Peninsulas.”
“I can set that up,” said El. “He’s in Sacramento but he usually comes up weekends.”
“The weekend would be good. That gives us a little more time to pull together some background information on what happened back then. How are the newspaper’s clip files?”
“For 1970-71? A disaster area. The guy we bought the paper from never did any indexing or clipping. He figured he could remember anything he needed, so he held on to back issues for two years, then threw them out. By the time we took over, 1970-71 were turning into organic matter at the landfill.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gina. “Alice could help with that. Alice Laszlo.”
“The librarian?” El said.
“Sure. They have a microfilm machine that makes copies. She could probably have someone on her staff go through the six months before the vote and print out all the articles. That’s only 26 issues of the paper to wade through.”
“If she can’t do that, I can,” Peter said. “I need to contribute something.”
“I’ll call her in the morning. Do you have a phone number where I can reach you if she says no?”
Peter took a business card from his wallet, circled his cell phone number and handed it to her. “If you can’t reach me on that, leave a message at Stanhope House.” A flicker of a smile crossed her face as she slipped the card into her purse.
“The other thing, at least for right now,” Gordon said, “is to talk to Charlotte’s brother and the Paris family. They were the ones who worked with her father on The Peninsulas, and I’d like to hear the story from them.”
“I can talk to Greg,” Gina said. “I know him a bit, and the fact we’re both mourning Charlotte is reason enough for asking.”
“Good. But wait a day to see what we find out tomorrow.” He turned to El. “How do I go about setting up a meeting with the Paris family?”
“Tomorrow’s your lucky day. What are you doing at noon?”
“Well, we were going fishing in the morni
ng, but if you had something else in mind …”
“Skip the fishing or cut it short. The Rotary Club meets at noon tomorrow at the North Woods Inn, and you’re going to be my guest. Roger, Robert and Ronald Paris should be there. I’ll introduce you and tell them your connection to Charlotte. I’m sure they’d talk to you.”
“Deal.”
Dessert arrived, and the waitress set the check on the table halfway between Gordon and Peter, who pushed the check across to his friend.
“This is on Gordon,” Peter said. “He’s opening a detective agency, so it’s a tax-deductible business expense.”
The women laughed and thanked Gordon, who quickly added up the bill in his head and slipped a credit card over it on the tray.
“We need to meet again tomorrow,” El said. “Is everybody free at the end of the day?
“I’m in,” said Gina.
“So are we,” Gordon said.
“How about six o’clock at the newspaper office? The rest of the staff should be gone by then.”
It was settled, and they parted after finishing dessert. Although it was after nine and mostly dark when they stepped outside, there was still a hint of light in the western sky. The wind that had been blowing all day had finally died down, but it was cooler than the last two nights. Gordon and Peter walked the short distance back to Stanhope House and crossed the deserted state highway at a leisurely pace.
As they got to the gate, Gordon turned to Peter.
“I think I’m going to sit in the gazebo for a few minutes and clear my head.”
“You want company, or would you rather be alone?”
“If you’re the company, that’s fine.”
They walked across the broad, well kept lawn to the gazebo. There was little moon, and they could look upward to a vast sky, filled with stars — something they never saw in the city. An owl hooted, a dog barked in the distance, and a car drove past on the highway as they reached the gazebo. Otherwise it was silent. Two cushioned rattan chairs were placed at angles, and they sat in them. They could see Stanhope House across the lawn, most of its windows dark. Neither said a word for minutes.
Not Death, But Love (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 3) Page 10
