The End of the Pier

by Martha Grimes

  “Interesting,” Sam said.

  “Not for me, at least, or Chad.”

  “Then how do you account for the money Sonny Stuck makes at that big funeral home? The best-looking building in La Porte?”

  She wiped the counter hard with a dish rag, frowning. “I don’t know. It’s a trick or something. But I guess that’s not the point. What does the book say?”

  “Read it,” Sam had said, and then left.

  It was surprising. There were countless other people who had felt a rushing wind of wings. It made her feel better to know she wasn’t alone. It made her feel worse when she read that this was one, usually the first, of several steps towards an out-of-body experience. Maud sometimes felt that something was trying to drag her off the pier. Like some people during an operation could float above the table and watch the doctors and nurses hacking the hell out of what was left. No, thanks. Then a brilliant light was reported by all of them. That was usually the last step. Or at least the last step before the first step you took into the land of the dead.

  If she just stuck it out, she knew the panic would end; and it did. The pier was firm beneath her feet, and everything was as it should be. Except she was sure she was dying. Oh, not in that stupid soul-leaving-the-body sense. There would be no bright light, no sight of the dead whom she had loved.

  She was now thinking about Dr. Hooper’s son. She had seen a snapshot of him and thought him very handsome; he looked just like his mother. Maud wished suddenly that she’d invited Dr. Hooper down to the pier tonight. Well, that was a stupid thought; imagine asking someone like Dr. Hooper, “Hey, would you like to come down to the pier for a drink?” Really.

  Dr. Hooper stayed overnight sometimes at Stucks’ place, or “the Brandywine,” as they liked to call it. Perhaps she’d gone out to dinner at one of the places the lake people frequented, such as the Silver Pear, a restaurant that specialized in quaint. It was quaint and expensive, and she and Chad disliked it intensely. Dr. Hooper probably would dislike it too, although she could easily afford to eat there instead of the Rainbow Café. You could tell she did very well in her profession just from her clothes. Or maybe she’d just stayed at the Brandywine and gone to bed; she probably didn’t feel like being among people any more than Maud herself did. Yet Dr. Hooper could at least look forward to four or five more years of seeing her son on weekends and vacations, since he was only in the second year of prep school.

  Maud lit a cigarette and envied Dr. Hooper. No, she didn’t, for on the minus side was that the boy lived with his father. Lived with his father and might even like his father better, for hadn’t his own mother given up on him?

  She felt for Dr. Hooper’s son. And she wondered if he’d forgiven his mother. To Maud she seemed such a wonderful woman—calm, quiet, intelligent. Sweet—yes, sweet. Sam had said that. Maud thought about that movie with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman in it, where Meryl Streep had left the husband and the little boy. She remembered how eloquently Meryl had pled her case at the end, and she was sure Dr. Hooper could too, if she’d wanted.

  She herself could never in a million years have left Chad like that, but she did not at all think this a point in her favor. She did not think that Meryl Streep and Dr. Hooper had loved their children any less. They had simply been able at some point to imagine themselves as existing separately from them. Maud couldn’t.

  Well, the father might well be the favored one with the Hoopers’ son. But what right did Ned have after he’d run off with the Toyota saleswoman to come trooping back into their lives and pick up almost as if he’d never left? Achieving, she thought sometimes, for Chad, almost a certain glamour. The Prodigal Dad. He who should be favored over old stay-at-home Mom, the lady who was always boringly there . . .

  Oh, Christ, don’t be ridiculous. Still, she stayed on the alert for signs of Chad’s switching his affections.

  She squinted across the lake. There came another couple away from the party down to the dock.

  After all, Chad didn’t know why his father had gone off, and occasionally he hinted around that maybe it was her fault. It was an idea Maud knew he liked to toy with, seeing how he could divvy up the blame. She had never told him his father had run away with another woman. It wasn’t because she was noble. She was just saving that particular little morsel in case Chad showed signs of bolting, of going over to the enemy camp.

  Maud chewed the skin around her thumbnail. Well, maybe that wasn’t precisely the reason she hadn’t told Chad. Actually, it embarrassed her that she hadn’t really cared that much when Ned had taken off with that saleswoman at the Toyota dealership, the one who’d sold them their last car. Maud remembered her as wearing draped and silky dresses of the sort that Velda favored, with big belts and shoulder pads. Maud couldn’t recall whether she’d looked like Velda—probably not, since Velda was a fashion model. Maud never did know where Ned had met Velda, or what had happened to the Toyota saleswoman.

  Maud much preferred the way Dr. Hooper wore her clothes. That blue dress she’d been wearing today was perfectly plain linen, cut on the bias, and probably cost a fortune. Maud could tell; she used to sew. Maud wondered again if Dr. Hooper had gone out to one of the lake restaurants for dinner. Maybe the Silver Pear.

  At the Silver Pear you didn’t simply eat, you had a “dining experience.” It was one of those restaurants that offered large promises and small portions. Chad had needed another basket of bread just to fill up. It was in an old Victorian house about a mile farther up the lake. The owners were Gaby and Julian (restaurateurs, Maud had noticed, always had names like that, never “Mary” and “Bob”), and they’d carefully kept to the original structure, turning the several downstairs parlors into separate small dining rooms. Between the fireplaces and the candles in hurricane lamps, the rooms were masses of flickering shadows, an effect that pricy restaurants often strove for. Besides the glass-enclosed candle, each table seemed littered with the detritus of some New York designer’s notion of rustic splendor. Chad had taken her there two years ago on her birthday. All through dinner she had moved things around—vase, little silver basket of potpourri, silver-painted pear (one on every table)—trying to get to the silver salt and pepper shakers, also pear-shaped. It was like maneuvering through a tiny silver-plated orchard.

  • • •

  The argument had been over Chad’s Christmas vacation and where he was going to spend it. Ned and Velda wanted him to go to Vail in Colorado. Even though Maud knew it wasn’t them Chad wanted to cozy up to, that it was the blazing fireplace in some swanky lodge in Vail where they would be Christmasing (Velda’s word; in constant motion, all her nouns were verbs). Chad had never skied in his life, but what difference did that make when there were all of those blond girls in ski boots and heavy sweaters with reindeer designs sitting by the fire with drinks, après-ski-ing?

  Maud knew she’d lose, she knew she’d have to agree; still, there must be room for negotiation. “Well, all right—but not the last half of the vacation.”

  Oh, what a trial, his sigh had said. “Mom, that’s when they’ll be there.”

  “And I’m supposed to Christmas without you?” She was shoving the poached salmon around her plate, appetite gone. Then she worried the silver pear, moving it here and there, imagining the silver orchard, trying to remember that fairy tale that silver pear trees figured in . . .

  “Of course not Christmas Day,” Chad was saying. “I’ll be here Christmas Day.” He was being eminently reasonable—couldn’t she see that?

  “But you’ll be New Year’s-ing there, is that what you mean?”

  “Well, yeah . . . ‘New Year’s-ing’?-What kind of word’s that?”

  Maud looked at him narrowly. She was growing increasingly suspicious. “So how long do you mean to hang around the slopes?”

  Very casually, he said, “Oh. Well, we thought I could just fly back to school from Vail.”

  The other diners, lake people who all appeared to wear white, probably flew back from V
ail, or at least talked about flying back from Vail, all the time. “Vail” was falling just a little too trippingly off Chad’s tongue, as if he’d been careening all over the slopes in his mind and it was hardly to be borne that he might have to return to La Porte. “Vail” grated on her ear. More important, her stomach felt hollow: Chad would be spending the last part of his vacation with Ned and Velda.

  “Why can’t you Christmas with them the first week of your vacation and New Year’s with me?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mom, stop talking like that. And I just said: how can I if they’re going to be in Vail the second week, not the first?”

  Of course it shouldn’t make any difference; but it did, and he knew it. It was always harder to endure his absence at the end, for then she had nothing to look forward to. Nothing but absence.

  Maud remembered gazing at the room, at the diners there, the couples and the foursomes, the women in pastels from which the firelight had drained the color, so that everyone seemed dressed in white, white attendants at yet another of her deathbeds. Every departure a death, so of course she had to negotiate: a few more days, please.

  The couple at the next table, the man lighting cigarettes, then slipping the slim silver lighter into his white duck pocket: these summer people did things in smooth, single motions, like swimmers cutting seamlessly through water, or skiers slanting down mountains, or players sliding across the court to make their perfect returns. Maud heard, in her mind’s ear, tennis balls plop like pine cones in the snow.

  And she thought: their lives must be soft like that, for they reeked of privilege. Their voices, their modulated laughter seemed to float toward Maud like mist rolling over the lake.

  Did the four at that table by the window, the panes starry with reflected points of light—did they have children?

  Yes, of course they did; but they were smooth, ornamental children, maintained for giving pleasure much like the little boats that slipped by on the water, or docked for the night, berthed along the water’s edge. Maud could envision the children asleep now, floating in dreams, bobbing up and down to the rhythm of dream imagery.

  And if they got divorced, there would be no predicament. Maud could see that woman in the filmy pastel dress back in New York, now separated from him, living her own life in her vast, museumlike Manhattan apartment, where she had a Life of Her Own as a painter or perhaps an editor with some literary sort of publisher. Maud could see the son shamble in, tan, cashmere-sweatered, plopping down in a soft armchair, breezily greeting his mother and saying he might be Christmasing with a few friends in Portofino; and then, here comes the daughter: “Daddy wants me to Christmas in the Hamptons. It sounds super . . .”

  And the mother, the woman with the pale hair, so absorbed in her paints and canvas or else her brilliant first novel, or an author she’s discovered, barely hears this, for it barely matters, and thinks, “Ah, now I can Christmas with Kyle.” Or Robert. Whichever lover she feels is deserving of her Christmas company.

  No, this beautiful painter-editor-with-lovers mother—she didn’t need to strike bargains. But for Maud, it was always like that: the little trade-offs, negotiating and renegotiating.

  Then she had started wondering about the birthday dinner itself: was it simply a sop, a way of getting her in a good mood so she wouldn’t give him a hard time about Vail? That was painful, not being sure.

  “I’ve got to spend some time with them, for god’s sake.”

  “I didn’t say not to. I’m just talking about which time, which part.”

  She hated herself, felt ashamed for sounding like some haggling purveyor of beads and silks in a Baghdad bazaar, trying to raise the selling price a rupee at a time, just a little more, a little more. The argument had escalated, not in raised voices but in rancor and bitterness. He couldn’t understand, or said he couldn’t, why she had to make such an issue of it.

  It was odd, though, he never gave as a reason that, after all, his dad was paying for the university. Sometimes she thought it was because he knew it would be taking unfair advantage, and other times she thought it was because they both knew it was not really an issue. If Maud had had all of that money, these arguments would still have gone on. Ned probably thought he had staying power because he had buying power. In a way Maud almost wished it were true; it would make her and Chad’s relationship much easier to understand.

  • • •

  She watched several more of the party-goers try to get into their boats, with a lot of whoops and hollers and laughing when one nearly went over the side. But the music went on. They’d probably be up until dawn, especially since this was the last party.

  The ice in the bucket had melted except for a few pieces, which she chased through the water and put in her glass. Sam said he’d be back, so he would, even at this hour. It was after two a.m.

  It was wonderful: no more had she thought it, she heard the car, the door slamming, and he was coming down the walk. She hoped he wouldn’t start some depressing talk about the end of the season.

  “Hello, Maud.”

  She turned. “Wade Hayden, for the Lord’s sake! What are you doing wandering around at this hour? I expect you couldn’t sleep, either.” She did not want to make it appear that she sat down here for any other reason.

  “Mind if I set down, Maud?” She nodded. He sat in Sam’s chair and put a brown paper bag beside it. He looked at the forgotten can of Coors. “I don’t drink as a rule, but I wonder, would you mind. . . ?”

  Actually, she would: if the last beer were drunk, it might mean Sam wouldn’t come. Oh, for pete’s sake. “Go right ahead, Wade.” Then she thought Sam would get a real thrill out of this—Wade Hayden taking the Coors out of the cold water and popping the top.

  “Someone having a party over there, Maud?” His smile was just a twitching up of the lip. “And never invited us?”

  There was something slightly chilling about the way he coupled them. “Us.” She drank the weak martini.

  “Something I got here to show you.” He reached into the brown paper bag and brought out the blue dress. “Pretty, ain’t it?”

  Maud sat dead still. She felt very fragile; were she to move, she might splinter apart. She was cold with fear. The dress was Dr. Hooper’s. Maud always looked carefully at her clothes, wishing she herself could wear such simple things and look as good as Dr. Hooper. She had to respond. Her mouth was dry, but she said, “Wade, that is very pretty. Is it a present for someone, maybe?” She didn’t know how she got her mouth to move; it felt that tight.

  Wade Hayden smiled that unfelt smile again. “It sure is. It’s for you.”

  She had never seen Wade Hayden anywhere but in the post office or the Rainbow, and he never said anything except hello and goodbye. Something was horribly wrong; she had to be careful of what she said . . . but not so careful he would hear the fear in it. “Well, that is a nice dress, Wade. But why should you be giving me a present? It’s not my birthday.” She managed to bring to her frozen mouth a little smile.

  “Oh, you’d never guess what it’s for. I know your boy’s left for school, and I know you miss him. This is just a little something I brought you for being a good mother. There’s not a better mother for miles around; there’s not even one as good. You could say that being postmaster, you know an awful lot about people. Can’t help but.” His look at her was oddly kind. “You want to try it on to see if it fits?”

  Without looking at him, she took the dress and held it on her lap. And without speaking to him, she looked up and over the water and saw that it was quiet, all quiet, no one except for a man—she could make out the glimmer of his white jacket—standing on the dock over there, smoking a cigarette. The tip made a tiny glow, a pinpoint of light winking on, then off. But he was too far to call to, might as well have been in a plane up there in the black night whose winking red light meant people were going somewhere, places she couldn’t follow—back to school, to the city, to that room whose balcony hung over the sea.

&nbs
p; Maud smoothed and smoothed the dress. Two tears made their way down her face, fell on the dress. Dr. Hooper.

  “No, Wade. I don’t think I can try on your dress, thank you all the same.”

  Elizabeth Hooper would never come through La Porte again, never sit at the counter eating pie again, never see her son again.

  FOUR

  Sam hadn’t moved the car, hadn’t done anything. Stupid to get on the bad side of Sedgewick. But everybody has their limits, he thought, and he was sick of kowtowing to blind bastards like the sheriff.

  He switched on the engine as if he knew where to go and let it idle.

  If it had been his kid . . . He thought of Wade. Stony, silent except to try and go over the murder of his own daughter again and again. No wonder. What else would go through a man’s mind after something like that happened?

  Sam suddenly thought of Rosie. He thought of Rosie strolling down Fifth on her lunch hour, looking in shop windows, eyeing a Spanish shawl, brilliant splashes of reds and orange for her red-gold hair, something to toss over her shoulder in a grand gesture, go sweeping down Fifth Avenue in the soft air of one of those perfect spring days to which even New York City gets treated—

  A spasm caught at his hand and he dropped the cigarette when he realized he’d been thinking of an imaginary girl. Watching her, following that bright Spanish shawl worn by a girl who didn’t even exist until he’d said her name to Maud. There had never been a Rosie.

  Grinding out the cigarette with his heel, Sam wondered, was he going Maud-mad? Maud-Mediterranea-mad? He smiled. The thought and the smile revived him a little, enough to go back over the whole damned business.

  He leaned his head against the head rest, closed his eyes, and thought about the women. To him, they were different. Tony Perry might have been an out-and-out whore (though he loathed the word), a woman with children she didn’t pay much or any attention to. Loreen Butts, according to the mother, was shy and quiet; according to the husband, could be hard to handle; according to Boy Chalmers, ditto. Carl Butts was away most of the time, leaving her the care of the son. Not that the son ever got much care . . . Sam frowned. But how could Elizabeth Hooper even be compared? Or Nancy Alonzo? Nancy had been a local, yes; but that was about all she had in common with Perry and Butts. He lit a cigarette; his frown deepened. But wait a minute. Yes—yes, she could, if she’d walked out on her son and husband. Eunice Hayden. Eunice hadn’t been raped, no . . . Still, he knew all of these killings had been done by the same man; knew it as well as he knew that his headlights were running twin paths of smoky light through the woods, sectioning off trees, undergrowth, rocks. What else did the victims have in common except they all had kids? Not Eunice, though.