I patted my friend’s shoulder. “You miss her a lot,” I said quietly.
Sasha nodded, her head still downcast.
“Maybe the date was with a woman,” I said. “Maybe she had plans to paint the town with another woman, or be fixed up for a double date.”
“And what?” Sasha asked. “They had drinks before facing the evening out, and then Phoebe said, ‘Oh, wait—I need to commit suicide instead, so would you please go wash out your glass and hide it?’ How does that work?”
“Then maybe they were simply spending a quiet evening together. We do that sometimes, you and I. Why not Phoebe?”
“Or maybe a man drugged her,” Mackenzie said softly.
Sasha shrugged.
“Do you know her women friends? Know how those relationships were going?” he asked her.
Sasha turned and stared at the side wall. A couple at a table frowned at her, thinking she was staring at them. She wasn’t, and they finally realized it, shrugged, and returned to their meal. Finally Sasha blinked and returned to this planet. “Friends,” she said. “The ones there today. Joanie and Harriet something, Carolyn and…a neighbor, though I think in a different time, husband, and neighborhood. I could look them up, but I don’t think any of them were hanging-out-together kinds of friends. She was in a book group a year or two back, but I don’t know if she saw those people nowadays. And there’s her business partner—former partner because the place is going under—that flake, Merilee. They’ve been friends for years. Since when Phoebe and my dad were married.”
Two years ago, when Phoebe and the pampered Merilee had been funded by Merilee’s husband, supposedly via his trust fund, I took it as a given, though I never asked, that nobody expected the biz to actually make money. How could it? Does any dog need a manicure set or a pair of sunglasses? Are there doggie gourmets who prefer hand-shaped and home-baked “cookies”? Do kitties feel better if their litterbox is in a turreted castle enclosure or they’re eating their food off hand-painted plates? How about feather boas and tiaras for your pets?
“Her husband pulled the plug,” Sasha added.
“Phoebe must have been furious.”
“More like acutely disappointed. Merilee was the furious one—but with Phoebe, although it was ridiculous. Marc Wilkins was very dramatic about the closing. He came to the store, and not surprisingly there were no customers, and he used that as the trigger for exploding. He chewed out the two women—blaming Phoebe in particular because she hadn’t risked a cent of her own. He said they were bleeding him dry and he wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. They were out of business as of that moment.” Sasha sighed again and shook her head, though nobody had offered her anything. “The real story was that Marc Wilkins was revving up to dump Merilee. He’d found somebody newer, and the floundering pet shop—his lost trust fund cash flow—was the pretense for his splitting. The crazy thing is that instead of being furious with him, which would have been rational, Merilee turned on Phoebe. Acted as if Phoebe’s need for this business, or Phoebe’s bad business sense or outright thievery, had driven Marc into the arms of whoever it now was. She revved up to the point where she accused Phoebe of having stolen the money or cooked the books—she could never decide which, but stealing in one form or another. And Marc snapped up that theory as well.
“I’m sure the fit of insanity would have passed and they’d be friends again, and in fact, before the big accusation of stealing, Phoebe was trying to show Merilee how to come out on top after the divorce, to make things really hard on Marc. After four divorces, Phoebe was, after all, something of an expert.”
“I’m sure those efforts further endeared Phoebe to Mr. Wilkins. And perhaps Merilee as well,” Mackenzie said quietly.
“But then—Phoebe died.”
“And not by accident, you believe.”
“Right.” Sasha realized what Mackenzie had implied. “But Merilee? No. There’d be no point.”
“How big a point do you need?” He pulled off a part of the remaining injera and surveyed what fillings were left. “Revenge is a pretty time-honored response if you think somebody ruined your life.”
“Merilee’s too—too silly to do something like that. Too engrossed in playing games. I mean like a little kid plays games. She likes to spend her spare time dressing up her bulldog. When last I saw him, he was in a top hat and a bow-tie collar.” She shook her head again.
“Silly people in danger of losing everything can do stupid things. She could decide removing Phoebe would endear her to her husband. And what about him, in fact?”
“I’d love it to be him—the creep—but I don’t know if Phoebe’d have dressed up that way for him, welcomed him after the way he treated her.”
“Any other enemies?”
“Ex-husbands?” I prompted.
She shook her head. “You saw, one was there today.”
“Even his son came,” I added.
“That’s pretty amicable, don’t you think? The recent one’s dead, my dad’s in Spain, and the other two…she never had huge court fights or got enormous settlements or whatever keeps those kinds of feuds going. She’s always managed to get by, but she isn’t—wasn’t—rich. The stuff she was trying to teach Merilee was based on what she hadn’t done.”
“It’s very sad,” Mackenzie murmured politely. At some point within the past minute, I’d seen his attention drift again, and while he was properly sympathetic and even asking questions by rote, Sasha’s friend and former stepmother, Phoebe, no longer occupied much of his mind.
“Can you help me?” Sasha asked.
Mackenzie snapped back to attention. “Me? How?”
“Find out who killed her. I can pay you. I’m getting half of the sale of the house.”
“Sasha,” he said softly, “grief does strange things, including making us look for a villain, a source, an explanation. Phoebe must have been lonely. Fifth marriage and she’s widowed within months. Her only son’s worthless and uninterested. His only virtue’s that he lives far away from her. She drank; and either by a sad accident or by design, she mixed booze and sleeping pills and killed herself. Nobody wants to believe that, so we look for outside reasons, when rationally speaking, there do not seem to be any. You yourself just said so.”
“I said I couldn’t think of any, but they must be there, and you’d find them. That’s your job, and I know you’re good at it, Mackenzie. Please?”
“I’d feel unethical. I surely wouldn’t take your money for this kind of thing, Sasha, and I’d feel I was stringing you along. I hate to disappoint you, but you know, I’m pretty involved now with my family, not to mention school and work, and this…Well, I’m sorry, but nothing you’ve said makes me think it’s anything except a sad accident or a deliberate act on her part. There’s nothing to investigate.”
“Wait.” I’d been re-rolling the conversation, looking for how the pieces fit, at least for Sasha, and something had hit me.
“Could you describe her shoes?”
“Shoes?” Mackenzie asked.
I nodded. “You said they were great, that her whole outfit was great.”
Sasha had done a small double-take, but proceeded with gusto. “Very sexy. Very high,” she said. “The kind that made me afraid she was going to break her neck in them. These were red strappy things, maybe alligator—or fake alligator—four-inch or five-inch stilettos, with a strap that buckled around the ankle. That enough?”
“Good Lord.” I was sure Mackenzie was about to put his hand on both our foreheads to test for fevers.
“Was she wearing them when you found her?” I continued.
Sasha nodded, rather absently, and then she looked at me and her eyes widened. “Of course!” she said, and turned to Mackenzie, smiling triumphantly. “You see?” she said.
“What?” he asked. “What?”
“No woman curls up with that kind of shoe on,” I said. “No woman. In our teens, we’ll do most anything to look cool, be in constant pain if a cute
guy’s around. But Phoebe was way beyond that stage. Do you know how uncomfortable they had to be under her that way? Buckle digging into soft flesh? Ankle straps cutting off circulation when you pull your legs under you? Heel ruining the sofa and whatever body parts it touched? No woman leaves on shoes like that while she sedates herself to death. So Sasha has a point. Somebody else was there when and as she died. Phoebe had no intention of making that position her last one of this life.”
His jaw hadn’t actually dropped, but his lips were slightly parted, as if too many words to contain were stacked inside them.
“I take your expression to be one of awe at my deduction,” I said. “And that we’ll look into it.”
He crossed his eyes, then he shut them.
I took that as a yes.
Three
* * *
* * *
Margaret Burbidge looked worried, and that was not an emotion that I’d normally associate with her. The ninth grader had the spirit of a bouncing ball, and when she perceived a problem, she almost immediately rebounded with a potential solution.
Eddie Schneider, also normally a cheerful person, stood beside her, looking serious and nodding agreement with everything she said.
“It doesn’t make sense.” Margaret’s face was barely able to register the worry lines she was forcing between her eyebrows.
I was only half-listening, most of my mind pondering why there couldn’t be a pot of coffee in my classroom. In every classroom! Would it hurt anyone if we were all more awake?
I’d stayed up too late the night before talking with Sasha about love, death, and realtors and had gotten up this morning with the sinking sense of having promised not only to look into Phoebe’s death but also to help Sasha get Phoebe’s house ready to be sold.
All through my groggy morning rituals, I kept hoping I was misremembering my promises, but when I stopped in the office before class, I picked up a message saying, “See you at four at Phoebe’s. Dinner provided.” And then a set of directions as to how to get there.
I agreed that Phoebe’s lifelong need to acquire anything that was flounced, pleated, ruffled, gilded, or labeled “a collectible” needed to be smoothed over so as to avoid terrifying away prospective buyers. Still, I didn’t know how I was going to manage my life plus what now seemed like managing Sasha’s as well. I consoled myself with the idea that I might be able to combine the two acts of friendship by interviewing Phoebe’s neighbors while I was also housecleaning there today. That would have felt like a more efficient use of my time if I had a clue as to what I was going to ask them. What, in fact, I wanted to find out. I stifled a yawn.
“Something is very wrong,” Margaret said with dramatic flair.
“The bulletin this morning was wrong,” Eddie said, his eyes wide and his expression still solemn. “Our homeroom teacher read it to us, but it was wrong. I mean about the money for Louisiana.”
“We asked her to read it again. And then we asked her to check if there was a typo,” Margaret said.
I shook my head, still not sure what their point was.
“The holiday gift?” Margaret prompted me.
“Wrong, how?”
Eddie cleared his throat. “Me and Margaret—”
“Margaret and I,” I said before I could censor it. Even without enough coffee, some parts of my brain work.
“Yeah. Margaret and I have been keeping a record.”
“Like our own charts. Not official,” she said.
“But we know we’re right,” he said. “And what they said we collected is wrong.”
“Eddie’s really, really good at math,” Margaret said, and I wondered if her proprietary air meant that they were a couple. “And I know we collected more than the big total in the bulletin this morning. Look!” She waved the notice sheet that goes to all homerooms every day. “It says congratulations to everybody for being so generous, but we know that number? The fifteen hundred dollars? It’s wrong.”
“Backtrack a little,” I said. “You kept the records?” Since the start of December, the school had been collecting donations to be used to buy Christmas gifts for hurricane victims. The collection drive was going to end this week, and this morning’s bulletin had published the tally to date, probably as an incentive to those who hadn’t yet donated.
Both of them shook their heads. “The office kept the records of the whole thing, but we asked everybody’s homerooms what they’d collected.”
“Every day,” Eddie added.
“And then we added it up,” Margaret said. “Every day.”
My thoughts wandered back to coffee. Margaret and Eddie meant well, but surely numbers the homeroom collectors remembered were not a solid basis for a challenge.
Besides, I had nothing to do with the collection except to be delighted that the students had thought of it.
Margaret waved the bulletin again. “It says we’ve collected one thousand five hundred dollars and fifty cents so far.”
I nodded. “I know. I receive the bulletin each morning, too. I was impressed with how much you’ve all donated.” I was. After all, aside from my own household, the hurricane wasn’t front-page news anymore, and teenaged memories are no longer than their adult counterparts’. Not only had this idea been suggested by the student council, and to my reckoning had been a success, but there was talk of a New Year’s resolution to adopt a group of still-closed schools in New Orleans, and to send money for books and supplies for six months.
“Well, it would be nice, except we know it was close to two thousand dollars!” Margaret stood with her bottom lip and one hip pushed out. I thought fleetingly of comic book superwomen.
“One thousand, nine hundred and forty-seven dollars,” Eddie said.
“You sure?” I looked at my watch. “A nearly five-hundred-dollar discrepancy?” Their classmates would be here any second, and I had some necessary preparation. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m still listening, but I’ve got to do this.” I wrote A Tale of Two Cities vocabulary list on the board: Cessation. Soliloquy. Inexorable. Epoch. I was so tired that I stared at “epoch” as if it were a word I’d never seen before. A silly-looking word, too.
I finally turned around.
Margaret’s expression, which she’d obviously carefully maintained while I wrote on and studied the whiteboard was, if not quite withering, then a combination of having been betrayed and outraged.
Eddie’s expression was more discreet, but no less unhappy with my reaction.
“Okay, you’re sure,” I said. “Sorry. I’m not great at math, and the collections came in somewhat randomly, I think, so I’m always ready to believe I’ve made a mistake. But did we really collect nearly two thousand dollars? That’s huge.”
“It’s not that huge, Miss Pepper,” Eddie said. “If you do the math, it’s around four dollars a student in fourteen days. Two dollars a week. Less per capita if you include the teachers who donated. And the cafeteria workers. All those people. Most of us waste a whole lot more than two dollars a week.”
Margaret rolled her eyes for emphasis, to make sure I comprehended just how much cash our students wasted. She mutated from a mini-superwoman into an avenging angel. Or Madame Defarge, knitting while the cash-wasters were beheaded.
“I am impressed with your calculations; and I trust them,” I said. “It isn’t that, but isn’t it also possible that the people you asked about the daily takes miscounted or misremembered?”
I wanted coffee. The ninth grade class was bearing down on my room. Plus, why come to me with this set of woes?
How did I keep getting myself entwined in things that had nothing to do with me—like Phoebe’s death? Last night, having shoes on while supposedly committing suicide had sounded so significant. Sherlock Holmesian. Make that Cher LaCombs, the new female sleuth. C’est moi.
I realized that two entirely likeable young people were staring at me with expressions that belonged on a Save the Children poster.
“Let me just remind you that
lots of the donations, at least in my homeroom, are in small coins, so it’s easy enough for the person tallying it up to mix up a nickel and a quarter or…”
Wrong response. If anything, their eyes grew wider, their lips more tightly compressed.
I continued on with the vocabulary list. Sad that Dickens could assume his magazine readers already knew the words I was writing on the board, all of which were still in use, and none of which my ninth grade class would be likely to have in their vocabulary. Sonorous, I wrote. Levity. Evanescence. Supplicatory. Gradations.
“The totals are wrong,” Eddie said. “Nearly five hundred dollars wrong.” His voice, still in the process of changing, betrayed how uncomfortable he was with all of this. He was accusing somebody in this school of embezzling funds meant for the children of a disaster.
I conspicuously looked at my watch, then at the open doorway. The sounds of the approaching horde were clear. “I think you have a case to make,” I said. “But I think you have to take it up with Miss…the secretary…” I had again forgotten the new secretary’s true name, because she’d only been in school for one week so far, and I had labeled her “Miss Odd” as a way to remember her actual name. Unfortunately, I forgot what the link was.
Lately, the occupants of the main office’s desk had been arriving and departing too quickly for my wee brain. “Did you ask for a recount?”
Margaret shrugged. “Mrs. Codd says she did.”
Codd. “Like the fish, but with an extra ‘d’ so you know I’m not tonight’s dinner,” the sweet woman had said. “Opal Codd.” I felt a wave of irrational relief at having her name once again.
“She says she recounted it twice. I don’t know if she even listens to me, because I’m not in charge of anything. Just a concerned citizen.”
All's Well That Ends Page 3
