A Wee Dose of Death

by Fran Stewart

  Violins, cellos. I could identify some of the instruments, but quickly stopped trying and just listened to the glorious sounds, utterly transfixed by the voices. “The Flower Duet” from Lakmé had to be one of the loveliest, most haunting songs ever written for female voices.

  After the song faded into that final ethereal chord, Emily lifted the record, tucked it into a paper record jacket lying nearby, and returned it to a shelf that held what looked like hundreds of other records. She leafed through them, chose another one, and placed it on the turntable.

  Again, we listened in rapt silence. This time it was a solo voice and its power was almost palpable as the singer’s notes soared. “My Turandot,” she said when it ended.

  “I know,” I said. “When I was growing up, our neighbor, before she died, used to play opera records all the time. In the summer, when her windows were open, I’d sit in my backyard and listen to them.” I leaned against Dr. Wantstring’s desk. “Eventually she noticed me listening and invited me inside. She taught me a lot, although I’m no expert by any means. Turandot was one of her favorites.”

  She nodded, but it looked to me like her thoughts were elsewhere. I couldn’t think of a way to bring her back, so I just waited, wondering who’d recorded those two arias. I was fairly sure it was the same voice on each record. The quality of the records was too good to be Callas—all her recordings were fairly scratchy, even the remastered ones—so maybe it was Sutherland? Fontini? Nilsson? Someone pretty remarkable, that was for sure.

  Tears glistened on Emily’s cheeks. Dirk stood beside her in spellbound silence. I had no idea he was an opera fanatic. Well, of course he wasn’t. Opera hadn’t been around in the fourteenth century. Had I really not listened to any opera in the five months I’d had Dirk hanging around? I looked again at his face. Transfixed. Okay. Maybe he’d forgive me for wrapping him up if I pulled out a bunch of my opera CDs when I got home.

  He leaned a bit closer to Emily, as if to comfort her.

  I’d certainly been moved by the music—it was absolutely glorious—but I was nowhere near crying. I must have missed something. Maybe these songs were ones she’d enjoyed listening to with her husband? But her reaction seemed overly dramatic, even for a new widow.

  “Mistress Emily is sad.”

  Of course she was sad. What did he expect me to do—answer him? I nodded. “What did you do before you and Dr. Wantstring married?” Why wasn’t she chattering the way she usually did? And why wasn’t Dirk helping me out here?

  Her quick intake of breath was audible. She wiped a hand across her eyes and gestured to the record player.

  I waited for her to answer me. Maybe she’d been one of those women, so common in her generation, who never worked for a living and didn’t want to admit it.

  She must have seen the question still in my face. “The recordings,” she said.

  “What would be reecordinks?”

  I ignored Dirk. “Recordings?”

  She led the way into her living room and motioned for me to sit on the blue couch. She waited for me to settle in before she said, “That was my voice.”

  “That was you?”

  “What was? Who was who?” Dirk couldn’t keep quiet.

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I sang with the Met.”

  “The Metropolitan Opera?”

  “What would be—”

  “You needn’t keep parroting me like that. I was singing with a smaller opera company when I met Marcus, but then a couple of years later, shortly after we married, I had a chance to audition at the Met and . . . and I was accepted.” She leaned forward over her coffee table. The surface was so highly polished I could see her reflection upside down. She moved a magazine about a quarter of an inch to the left. I couldn’t see that the repositioning made any appreciable improvement. It had looked tidy enough to start with. “Now,” she said, “the only music I have is on those recordings of my voice.” She gazed back down the hallway in the direction of Dr. Wantstring’s study. “The ones I just played for you were only two of the hundreds we have.”

  All of a sudden all the pieces clicked into place. “The recordings. You? You were Emily Fontini, weren’t you? I mean, aren’t you? The Great Fontini?”

  “What”—Dirk cleared his throat—“or who would be a fonteenee?”

  “I don’t know about the great part, but yes, I was Fontini. The verb is past tense.” She grimaced. “That’s right. Past tense. I was Emily Fontini. I certainly did have my name up in lights for quite a while.” She tugged aside her turtleneck and fingered the scar on her throat.

  I looked away from the pain in her face. She sounded exceptionally bitter, but I could see why, if she’d had a voice like that—and then had given it all up. But why? Why would she stop when she was so famous? “My neighbor,” I said, “the one who introduced me to opera, thought Fontini was even greater than Sutherland.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow in a denial that I happened to see because I’d glanced quickly toward her. “No. Not at all. Joan was one of my idols. I was blessed to have been able to sing with her in three different productions, but I could never have surpassed her sublime quality.”

  Good grief. This woman I’d been berating for so many months had been on a first-name basis with one of the greatest operatic sopranos of all time, and—no matter what she said—had had a voice as wonderful as Sutherland’s. Why hadn’t I been kinder? Grasping for something to say, I asked, “Were your children born after you, uh, retired from the Met?”

  “What a delicate way of phrasing your question. The answer is no. I sang twelve seasons and Mark . . . took care of the boys.” She crossed her legs and leaned back against one of the many fat pillows scattered over the back of the couch. “He was so good with them.”

  I wondered why they weren’t here with their mother.

  “But then the cancer attacked my throat. With surgery and radiation, my larynx was so badly compromised I was never able to sing again.”

  I glanced up at Dirk, who stood poised, towering over her from behind the yellow couch. His face held a quizzical expression, and I could almost hear the queries ringing inside his head. What would be a lairynks? What would be raydeeasion? He still had a very fourteenth-century way of thinking about spelling, as I’d found out when I’d had to spell various words for him. Why wasn’t he asking his usual questions? Not that I wanted him to, because there wasn’t a way in the world I could have answered him. But it wasn’t like him not to question something like this.

  I needed to say something. I’m so sorry didn’t seem adequate, but I said it anyway.

  She didn’t even acknowledge my words. Not that I blamed her. She hugged her sweater tighter around her, even though her house seemed to have gotten ten degrees warmer in the last few minutes.

  “I’m so very sorry,” I said again. This time I truly meant it. “I’ve listened to your recordings for years and never realized . . .”

  “We didn’t let many people know why I had to quit.” She crossed her legs the other way, braced an elbow on her knee, and propped her chin on a fist that was closed so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Throat cancer. I didn’t want pity. Especially not from anyone in my old life . . . my life at the opera.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I love your voice.”

  She turned her face toward the window, away from me. “Not anymore, you don’t.”

  Dirk had spent so much time telling me what to say and when to say it, and now when I needed his advice—all right, his bossy directions—he abandoned me.

  I finally made my excuses, draped the shawl around the neck of my parka, and left.

  Opening the car door and pausing long enough for Dirk to get inside had become almost second nature to me. I waited until I was at least a block away from Emily’s house so she wouldn’t see me apparently talking out loud to myself.

  “You co
uld have said something in there. You left me floundering.”

  “Flowndring? What would be—”

  “A flounder is a kind of fish,” I explained. “When it’s out of water, it can’t breathe, so it flops around, and I think that’s where the word came from.” Or maybe not. I was making this up as I went along.

  From the corner of my eye I could see him shake his head, sadly, slowly, as if mourning the passing of a minor intellect. Mine. “I didna say anything when we were with Mistress Emily because I didna know what type o’ rare beastie that canser must ha’ been to attack her and tear at her throat in that way.”

  “Huh? What do you . . . Oh, cancer. It’s not an animal. It’s a disease. Emily got very ill, very sick, and her throat was damaged by the illness. ‘Cancer’ is what the illness is called. It hits a lot of people nowadays. I imagine it does feel something like an attack.” Obviously it did, if she’d used that word to describe what it had done to her. Poor Emily.

  He cleared his throat—unnecessarily, I thought—and proclaimed, “And ye say that my time was bad. We didna have such . . .”

  For once he seemed to be at a loss for words.

  28

  Another Wee Tiff

  Saturday morning, Mac hid his turtle in the drawer of the little table beside the bed. He’d already eaten all the cookies. Then he called the station at seven.

  “Hamelin Po-lice,” Moira drawled.

  “You’ve lived in this state for thirty years,” he growled. “Why don’t you learn to talk right?”

  “And just what would I be saying wrong?”

  Her words sounded syrupy to Mac. Why couldn’t she talk faster? “What’s been going on around there? Anybody arrested yet?”

  “I am not a dee-tective,” she said. “All I do is answer this little bitty phone. I don’t know a thing about what’s going on.”

  “Well, don’t waste my time. Who’s there?”

  “I am,” she said.

  Mac missed the sarcasm. “Who else?”

  “Fairing,” she said. “I’ll switch you over to her.”

  “No!” Mac didn’t want to talk to any woman. Moira didn’t count. She was a dispatcher. Dispatchers could be women. Officers ought to be men. He’d had to hire Fairing, though. Not because he wanted to, but because she was the town moderator’s niece.

  He’d hired her after a blistering discussion in Archie’s office. So what if she had commendations from the NYPD? So what if she’d performed heroic acts on 9/11? So what if she’d saved a bunch of lives? Mac didn’t believe it. Some man had probably done those things, given up his life in the performance of his duties, and Fairing had taken the credit. Yeah, that was probably it. He’d hired her, but he didn’t have to like it.

  He called back twenty minutes later and asked to speak to Murphy. And again an hour later. Didn’t the man ever do any work at his desk? Without his own cell phone and contact list, Mac didn’t know any of his officers’ cell numbers. He would have called them at home if he’d been able to, but if there was a phone book anywhere in the damn hospital room, he sure couldn’t see it. He’d wait until they changed shifts. Three o’clock. He could get the new nurse to give him a phone book. That Amy person wouldn’t give him the time of day.

  * * *

  I walked out to get the paper Saturday—I usually looked through it over breakfast—and the headline screamed:

  SENATOR CALAIS KNIFED

  I glanced quickly over the first few paragraphs, enough to know she’d been attacked outside the Capitol Building. But she’d survived. Good. I always voted for her.

  I walked inside and spread the paper out on my kitchen table while I pulled bacon and eggs out of the fridge. Dirk wandered in from the front room, the shawl thrown negligently over his shoulder. “Will ye be eating wee eggs and fatted pig?” I’d tried to introduce him to the term “bacon,” but he preferred his little bit of whimsy.

  He bent over the paper. “Ahh,” he said. “Oh?” A little later, as I lifted four strips of crisp bacon out of the fry pan, he asked, “Did ye read this stor-r-r-r-y?” His r’s rolled together like little lemmings char-r-r-r-ging toward the sea.

  I turned the bacon over to drain off the fat from the other side. “What story?”

  He cleared his throat. Oh, dear. I should have known what was coming. He started at the beginning and read the story word for word. Senator Josie Calais, it seemed, was just leaving the Capitol Building, walking down the steps to meet her husband. They had plans to go out to dinner. Dirk looked up at me and wiggled his eyebrows. “Did I no tell ye?”

  “Tell me what?”

  He kept reading. The gist of the story was that as the senator’s husband climbed the steps to meet her—the reporter made a big deal about that for some reason—he saw a man lurch toward her, the blade of a knife glinting in the early-evening sunlight. He tackled the guy from behind. As the man fell, he managed to slash open the senator’s leg from her knee almost to her ankle, without severing an artery. At press time her attacker had been arrested and the senator was, according to her husband, recovering and in fine spirits.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Who in real life would say, My wife is recovering and is in fine spirits? Somebody made up that part of it for sure. I wonder how many stitches she needed.”

  “Ye werena listening as I read, were ye?”

  “I heard it.” I scooped scrambled eggs out of the skillet onto my plate. I sat and lifted my fork.

  “She needed a man to protect her.”

  I stopped the fork halfway to my mouth. I’m afraid my mouth was open rather unattractively but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You . . . She . . . That’s the most . . .”

  Dirk just folded his arms over his chest as I spluttered. “Ye need a man,” he said finally, in tones that brooked no dissent.

  I dissented anyway, and we argued back and forth about freedom and individual choice, and a dozen other things that he approached from one point of view—a Middle Ages point of view—and I saw from a totally different, modern perspective.

  “I don’t need a man,” I finally said. “I’ve got you.”

  That shut him up.

  * * *

  Emily stumbled out of her car and closed the garage door. She didn’t know what to do with all those bags they’d given her. She’d left them in the trunk. That way she wouldn’t have to think about them for a while. Mark’s “personal effects.” That was what they’d called them. They made her sign something to say she’d received them all. One of the officers had strapped Mark’s skis to the roof rack on the car and had loaded everything else in the car for her. That was after they’d opened every bag and checked off the contents on some sort of master list.

  His food, his cooking pot, his sleeping bag, his green ballpoint pens. His jeans and his underwear. His socks, the ones she’d knitted for him all those years ago, only the police officers didn’t know that. They didn’t know any of her and Mark’s story. All they knew was that interminable list. It went on and on. Backpack, collapsible cup, three candy wrappers, but no Tootsie Rolls. Mark never went anywhere without his Tootsie Rolls. He must have eaten all the ones she was sure he would have taken with him. But if that was the case, why hadn’t they found more than just three wrappers?

  She’d been calm through the entire process until that horrible moment when they’d opened the bag with his brown flannel shirt. The collar was dark and stiff with dried blood. Mark’s blood.

  Why hadn’t they warned her before they opened it?

  “This isn’t fair,” she said, pushing open the door into the kitchen. The house felt empty. It was empty. They didn’t even have a dog. And Mark was gone. He’d asked once, years ago, about getting a puppy, but Emily hadn’t wanted the mess, the bother. Now Mark wouldn’t be coming home to this empty dogless house ever again. “I hate this place,” she said, plopping her
purse on the granite countertop.

  She wandered into the living room and reached for her knitting bag, but it wasn’t there. She always left it beside her chair. She thought back over the past few days. She hadn’t done any knitting since they’d arrived here last Saturday. The last time she could remember picking up that brown sweater she’d just recently started knitting for Mark was . . . Was it back in Burlington? Had she left her knitting there? No. Now that she thought about it, she could remember tossing it into the backseat of the car on top of Mark’s green binder just before they left Burlington, and she’d forgotten all about it until now.

  She trudged back out to the garage and opened the rear door on the driver’s side. Yes. There it was. She closed the door, knitting bag in hand, but something seemed wrong. She looked back at the empty seat. Mark’s binder wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. He would have brought it inside. But if he had, why hadn’t he brought in her knitting as well? He’d always been thoughtful that way.

  Inside, she perched her knitting on the ottoman and peered out at the snow-covered yard. The young couple next door must have shoveled her driveway for her. She hadn’t even thought about it when she backed out of the driveway earlier today.

  She wondered whether she should call that nice Sergeant Fairing and tell her about the box. And the missing Tootsie Rolls, the scarf, the binder . . . They hadn’t been with Mark’s—it took her a moment to swallow—personal effects. What a cold, clinical term for all that was left of her husband. No, Tootsie Rolls and binders couldn’t have anything to do with the reason Marcus had been killed. Some maniac. It had to be that.

  She rubbed her hands together and shivered. The thermostat was set on eighty-one degrees, but she felt thoroughly chilled. What good were insulation and comfortable furniture and a kitchen full of food when Marcus was gone? She hadn’t called him Marcus in more than twenty years, ever since her surgery. Something had died in her, under the scalpel and during those terrible bouts of nausea. Her dreams. The dreams she’d shared with Marcus. Those dreams had died. So, as he sat with her, held her hand, steadied the bowl, cleaned her face afterward with a warm washcloth, she’d started calling him Mark. How could she have done that to him? How could she have insisted on calling him by a name he hated? Her illness wasn’t his fault. How could she have picked away at such a good, good man?