by Madelyn Alt
"Before your mom goes all hari-kari on you and tells you how you should have taken better care not to lose a perfectly good job, and maybe you should have had better sense than to take a job with someone of questionable background?" She put her arm around my shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. "Don't worry, honey. Your mom and I have never seen eye-to-eye on everything. Besides, you're an adult. You make the decisions that are right for you. There isn't a thing your mom can do about it, and that's what makes her really crazy."
I couldn't help laughing. "You're right. It does."
We headed companionably for the stairs.
"So, what are your feelings about your boss?" Marian asked me. "It's Felicity Dow, isn't it? How serious do you think the questioning is?"
"I don't know. I just started there yesterday, and then this happens. It's thrown me for a loop," I admitted. "I like her—I really do. She's kind, and funny, and I felt from the moment I met her that I'd known her for ages. Does that make sense? I think this could be the perfect job, in a way."
"But—?"
"But I can't help wondering. What if I'm just seeing what I want to see?"
Marian nodded. "You want her to be innocent."
"But not only because I like the job and want to keep it. I'm not as mercenary as all that."
"You want to know that your perceptions weren't so far off the mark that you were able to trust someone capable of murdering a member of her family."
"I guess so. God, that does sound selfish."
"Human. That sounds human."
A group of middle schoolers had come in while we were downstairs and were congregating around one of the PC stations. Marian nodded toward them. "Looks like I'm going to have to go break that up. No telling what they've got up on that screen, but by their faces I'd say she's got one hell of a rack. See you later, kiddo. I'll be in touch if I find anything."
* * * *
I was so ready to get home. A little peace, a little quiet, a little time to think about everything that had happened. It was just what the doctor ordered.
Turning onto Willow, I eased Christine to a halt beside the curb and switched off the key. Home again. The house was a large Victorian classic that had been broken apart into three decent-sized apartments back at a time when it had become less fashionable to have large families and the house had become an obsolete monstrosity. Still, when I think Victorian, I think cozy, and my converted basement apartment was anything but cozy. Maybe it was the closed feeling that being surrounded by dirt gives you. There were nights when I lay in bed scarcely breathing, the covers drawn tightly up beneath my chin in my clenched fists, because I had fancied I'd heard a heartbeat vibrating through my walls, as if the earth around me was a living, breathing entity. Then there were the nights when the wind screamed around the old house's myriad corners and coves, tossing dried leaves against the tiny recessed windows with a sound that was like the skittering of insects.
Creepy.
The house's saving grace was the fact that my lifelong best friend lived in the upper-level apartment. That and an affordable price tag, something that was next to impossible to find when you're living on a shoestring budget. My shoestring was already frayed from overuse as it was, so a nervous moment every now and then seemed a small price to pay for security.
I let myself in, set my purse and jacket on the chair next to the door, and stooped with a sigh to pick up the few dried leaves that had found their way in on the air currents. The apartment's sunken entrance was always accumulating a puddle of leaves in the landing, and a few inevitably accompanied my every homecoming. Dropping the bits of flotsam into the wastebasket, I went immediately to the' tiny galley-style kitchen. A flip of a switch and the overhead fluorescents eventually blinked on, flooding that corner of the room with harsh light.
My priorities always arrow-straight, I made a beeline for the fridge and quickly surveyed the contents. After a few moments of hemming and hawing, I decided on a delicious gourmet meal of crunchy peanut butter and strawberry jam—on whole wheat, of course—and a bottle of water. After a few more minutes of soul-searching, I guiltily traded the water for a can of Coke Classic and closed the door before I could change my mind. Life was too short to worry about the little things. Better to let the moms of the world do that. They were great at it.
I carried my goodies to my favorite chair, a big, old down-filled wingback that used to belong to my grandparents. It was a barf green color that had been highly popular in the fifties and it really didn't go with my decor (Early Laminate Paneling—very retrochic), but the feathers conformed to and around my body like a kind of nest, and the color hid the stains and tatters of years of use. It was ugly, but I would pay to have the monster recovered before I'd get rid of it, so I guess that's saying something. Kicking off my shoes, I settled in with a sigh and scooted the ottoman closer with my feet.
Ahhh… Paradise.
On the small table next to me, the message light on my answering machine blinked urgently at me. Blink-blink-blink. Blink-blink-blink. Three messages. I looked at the clock. Six thirty-one. Mental countdown to Magnum P.I.: Twenty-eight minutes, forty-two seconds. I let the message light blink a few more times as I tried to decide whether to listen to them now, or put them off until later.
It didn't take long. There were some things in this world I could put off indefinitely. A message on an answering machine was not one of those things. All it would take was one ignored message in an emergency situation, and boom, I'd feel like dirt for the rest of my natural life. You just never knew. Resigned to my fate as a slave to technology, I heaved a sigh and pressed the button.
Beep. The first, as expected, was my mother. "Margaret Mary-Catherine, this is your mother calling. Obviously, you are not home." This with a tone of reproach, as though I had missed her call on purpose. "Why you're never home at seven-thirty at night, I won't even hazard a guess. I'm assuming it has something to do with that woman who hired you. Why you felt the need to leave a perfectly good job to work for some person you had known a matter of minutes ..." Her sigh was long and loud and meant to lay a load of guilt at my feet. My mother had endured a lifetime of regrets over my selfish choices. She liked to share the wealth of her suffering every chance she got. "But that's all water under the bridge now. We'll discuss this later, dear. Call me the moment you get in."
The machine's mechanical voice intoned the date and time. Seven-thirty-two, yesterday. Mother was probably fit to be tied by now.
I made a mental note to return her call last.
The second beep preceded a similar call from my sister, Melanie. Mel wanted to know what was going on, was it true what everyone was saying about Felicity Dow (my hackles went up at that), and how could I possibly keep all of this to myself? The least I could do is share what I knew. And wasn't it strange that Felicity had hired me, despite my lack of experience, just before all this happened? Well, she was sure it meant nothing, but I had to admit it certainly was odd.
Annoyed, I jabbed at the delete key. No return call necessary.
Third in line came a cryptic, three-word message: "Tell me everything."
I grinned, all of my annoyance melting away. The voice belonged to Stephanie Marie Evans—Steff to her friends—and the message was the opening to almost all of our conversations over the last eighteen and a half years. Steff and I first met when her family moved to town the summer I'd turned ten. I was riding my bike down her cul-de-sac—alone as usual—and she was sitting on the swing on her front porch with her big brute of a tomcat, Buttercup. Our eyes met and I saw fireworks—in my head, at least; I'd rammed my five-speed into an oak tree and flown over the handlebars. Being the kind, nurturing soul that she is, Steff rushed to my aid, eager to tend my scraped palms and skinned knees, and we spent the rest of the hot, hazy afternoon in the shade of her front porch, sucking down lemonade and playing Crazy Eights and gabbing like we'd known each other since infancy.
Over the years we'd traded up our lemonades, first f
or Cokes in our early teens, Diet Cokes at figure-conscious sixteen, rum and Cokes at adventurous twenty-one, wine coolers at twenty-five because we had become true adults and were far too sophisticated for the more hardline rum and Coke, and now fast approaching health-conscious thirty we drank bottled water as we once again warily watched our waistlines. But the flow of chatter was as constant as the change of seasons. Comfortable. Familiar. Jobs, men, fashion, men, mothers, men, hopes and dreams and fears, and… men.
Did I mention that we sometimes talk about men?
Picking up the handset of my cordless, I speed-dialed her number. The ring whirred in my ear less than a second before she picked up. I heard her pause to take a breath.
"Hello?" she said in a low, sexy voice carefully calculated to drop a man to his knees.
"I gotta warn you. Hot and sultry will get you nowhere with me, babe."
"Mags!" Immediately her tone settled into its usual light and airy rhythm. "Hiya!"
"Hey."
"I heard what happened."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Not many secrets at the hospital, you know." After an adolescence filled with tending to every sick or hurting pet that came her way, Steff had quietly assumed her role in life as an RN at our tiny local hospital. It was the only thing she'd ever done quietly. Gregarious and fun and full of life, she was able to fill a room with warmth just by walking through the door.
"I suppose not," I said thoughtfully. In a small town, keeping a secret was hard. You had neighbors, friends, neighbors of friends, friends of your mother's, neighbors of your mother's. Everyone talked about what they'd seen, what they'd heard, what someone else had said they'd seen or heard. Talk was the food of life. That was the way small towns had functioned from the time man had first come in out of the forests. Smalltown secrets were very tricky to navigate. In an even smaller scale environment, like the hospital, I imagined it was nigh onto impossible.
"Wanna talk about it?"
"You know I'll tell you everything." Then: "Magnum's on in twenty minutes."
"Down in ten."
She made it to my door in seven, armed with a flat square box that smelled like a little piece of heaven, fuzzy slippers, and a smile. "Am I late?"
"Perfect. What's that?" I asked, indicating the box with a nod of my head. Not that I really needed to ask. I was like a bloodhound when it came to junk food.
"Pizza. Giovanni's." She opened the box lid to display eight pieces of the local pizza dive's prize specialty, a-deep dish smorgasbord of six layers of cheese, pepperoni, Italian sausage, red and green peppers, spicy herb enhanced sauce, and crust. She flapped the lid enticingly before me. "Your favorite."
My mouth instantly began to water as oregano-and-garlic-scented steam reached my pleasure centers. I thought for a moment about the peanut butter and jam sandwich waiting for me inside. Then I abandoned it gleefully, grabbing the box from her hands and setting it on the wrought-iron patio table-for-two that served as my kitchen nook. "You want it heated?"
"Nah. We'd just burn the roofs of our mouths on the cheese."
"Right."
Equipped with a plate, a fork, and a paper towel for a napkin, she plopped down on my sofa while I did the same in my chair. The muted TV changed images in usual rapid-fire fashion in the background while we took immediate measures to satisfy our hunger pangs.
"Yummm." Inhaling the first piece tended to take the edge off a person's hunger, allowing for the introduction of conversation to a meal. "I just love Giovanni's. Do you think he's really Italian?"
Steff waved her fork at me. "Cut the crap, Mags. You always try to turn the talk away from something that makes you uncomfortable. What's going on?"
She was right. Short, middle-aged Giovanni of the protruding tummy held no fascination for me. He made deep dish in a way that was almost sexual, but I had more important things on my mind than physical gratification. "Well… You know that my boss's sister turned up dead."
She nodded. "That's why I called. Among other things, of course."
"Did you know that they questioned her about it?"
"I had heard… but Maggie, as I heard it, she found the body. They had to question her."
Yes, but there was more to it than mere questioning. It was more than the nuances of attitude in the postures of the police officers conducting the questioning, more than the strange comments made by Deputy Fielding. It was even more than Marcus pressuring Felicity to try to piece together what she remembered. They suspected her. For whatever reason, they suspected her, and I acknowledged that now with a certainty I shouldn't possess.
But I couldn't tell Steff that. She'd think I was being my usual worrywart self. "Overly sensitive" was how my grandmother would so graciously have put it. Always getting ideas about people, imagining them guilty of all sorts of things. I could hear her voice in my head now, admonishing me not to be so fanciful. Don't butt into others' private lives. I should just be the good Catholic girl I'd been raised to be and not worry myself sick about what other people were thinking and feeling.
I shook myself in annoyance as I recognized the self-correcting pattern of my thoughts. Well, in spite of my mom's and my grandma's best efforts, I wasn't such a great Catholic. Not anymore. Not for a long time. I was just your average, everyday girl, doing my best to make sense of the crazy world around me. And I couldn't help the feelings I got. The ones that settled in at the pit of my stomach like a meal gone bad, or that clutched at my throat and made my skin crawl with fear and trepidation. I'd buried them for so long I'd almost convinced myself they were figments of an overactive imagination. And yet ignoring them had accomplished nothing beyond making me self-conscious and unsure of myself. Maybe it was time that I listened to them rather than smother them.
Maybe it was time that I took back my self-respect.
I was so caught up in my internal monologue that I forgot about Magnum until I saw the familiar red sports car zipping across the TV screen and the fun-loving lilt of Tom Selleck's famous mustache.
"Oooh… oooh…" Steff and I both said at once, snapping our fingers at the screen as if we could magically turn up the sound. More sensibly, I grabbed the remote and clicked off the mute.
The familiar strains of the Magnum, P.I. theme song filled the room, accompanied by the wondrous sights of Hawaii and, let us not forget, the fabulous dimples of Tom Selleck. With my eyes glued to the screen, I watched the opening credits, sighing just a little as his baby blues twinkled at me and only me through the magic of television. "I love this show."
Over on the couch, Steff had her knees drawn up to her chin. "Me, too," she cooed happily, a kooky little smile on her face. I was pretty sure it matched my own.
Magnum was another guilty pleasure Steff and I shared. When most people our age barely knew who Tom was outside of his brief but memorable stint on Friends, Steff and I often giggled and sighed over classic reruns of Selleck as Thomas Magnum, private investigator extraordinaire and dream man above all others. I mean, let's face it, the guy was perfect. Ice chip blue eyes that melted through a woman when he smiled, a sexy eat-me-alive-you-know-you'd-love-it grin, thick hair that begged the touch of a woman's hand, a sense of adventure, a sense of humor complete with a semigoony laugh that was wholly endearing, and a hole in his heart from the loss of his wife and child years before. Definite hero material. Never mind the fact that the man was probably now on the downhill slide from fifty. Thanks to a little TV magic, he was preserved in a state of perfect youth, perfect masculinity, perfect everything, all for me.
Us, us, I meant us.
We didn't speak again until the first commercial break a third of the way through the hour-long show.
Steff turned to me, instantly back in best-friend mode. "So you're concerned about your new boss?"
I tore off a chunk of pizza crust and started to rip it into bits. "Who wouldn't be? She's a nice person, Steff. She doesn't deserve this."
Steff's eyes fastened on my busy fingers. "I wasn't aware police
questioning had gotten very far."
"It hasn't. At least, I don't think it has. I'm just worried, that's all."
"I'm sure they're just trying to gather as much information as they can. It's not every day we have a murder here in Stony Mill. Despite the element of tragedy, I'll bet our town boys are secretly elated."
The thought disturbed me, that anyone could derive pleasure from a person's untimely death, but I knew she was probably right. "The thrill of the chase, I suppose you mean?"
But Magnum's TV-land chase returned from a commercial, interrupting us. We gasped as Magnum was nearly forced off a rocky seaside cliff by the malevolent intentions of some faceless foe. We licked our lips as he kissed the hapless woman he was protecting, who seemed to be as powerless against his animal magnetism as we were. We watched in awe as Magnum returned to the Masters estate, and giggled when he insulted Higgins yet again for his stuffed-shirt pomposity.
Another commercial. Steff waved a cleanly picked pizza crust in my direction. "Tell me why you're worried about—Felicity, did you say?"
"I'm not. It's more the situation. I was there at the police station when they let her go."
"You were there?"
I nodded. "I went to pick her up. Lend moral support. It seemed like the right thing to do."
"So, what happened? Did they treat her badly?"
I frowned, picturing the scene in my head. "Well, not badly, per se."
"Then what?"
"Well, I mean, they were polite enough." I frowned, trying to find the right words to explain what were mostly impressions and feelings. "One of them, I think, had a bit of a thing for her."
"And that's a problem."
"No. The other cop was the problem. He made it very clear that she was not to leave town."
"She's at the very least an important witness as the first person on the scene. And I hate to say this, honey, but I want to be sure you've thought this through. What do you know about Felicity? Do you, trust her?"
