All's Well That Ends

by Gillian Roberts

  That helplessness included having her husband provide her with a hobby in the shape of a silly store. Now she reminded me of a child who is being punished by having her toys taken away.

  I wasn’t going to encourage her bratty behavior. “Surely,” I said in as mild a voice as I could muster, “surely you don’t really think that Phoebe deliberately wrecked your business.”

  And the angry child face flashed again. “We—I could have done well, made a success of this place and…and…it’s a clever store, and people are crazy about their pets. She stole the money—cooked the books—did something! Why else were we so in the red all of a sudden? And then—she could have admitted it. That’s all I asked her to do, admit it, but she stonewalled me!” She looked as if she actually believed what she was saying, and it chilled me to think that.

  “Merilee, think. Why did you ask her to be your partner in the first place? You needed her retail expertise. You had none. You went into the red when your husband stopped underwriting the place. You were never truly making a—”

  “We were! I was! I could have! And why do you think he stopped investing in it? Because she was ruining everything!”

  “She” meaning Phoebe? When the other “she” was out there, tapping her stilettos, waiting for the divorce? Merilee had rewritten history whole cloth until it fit her comfortably, and the most necessary part of the weave was casting Phoebe as the devil and the source of all her grief.

  I was suddenly sure I was looking at “M.” “M” as in mad, misguided, and malevolent. Maybe she’d meant to talk with Phoebe during the first visit, convince her to return the money—the money Phoebe had never taken, of course. And maybe she knew Phoebe had sleeping pills, or they were there—or maybe she used her own prescription. Maybe it wasn’t premeditated at all.

  But the second visit had been more frantic, and definitely planned. She must have thought that now that the house was empty, she’d find proof of what Phoebe had done, if not a stash of money itself.

  Merilee-the-Murderer wept at the many injustices life had dealt her.

  I surprised myself by feeling another wavelet of sorrow for her because like the child she was emotionally, she had few resources of her own, a warped image of what the world owed her, and no real coping skills. I couldn’t imagine how she’d manage now that she was being forced to grow up. Maybe Marc could provide her with a big enough settlement to allow her to fill her days with weeping spells, such as the one I now waited out.

  Or prison would become her big surrogate sugar daddy. No more decisions to make on her own. But no more pedicures, either.

  The snuffles and wails threatened to go on forever. I looked at the remaining wares on the store’s shelves to fill the time and give me something to do.

  “You want to buy something?” she squeaked. Then she blew her nose and cleared her throat. The weeping spell was put on hold.

  “I have a cat,” I said. “But…”

  “Prices are really low. Cost.” This produced a short renewal of the miseries.

  I considered a pouffy cat bed, but rejected it because it was fancier than the one I shared with Mackenzie. I loved my cat, but all the same, that didn’t seem right. I looked at leather collars with faux jewels, delicate chain collars that could have served as bracelets for humans, but even if I were ready to spend the week’s food money on a necklace for my cat, the fact was Macavity never left home, and detested anything around his neck. “All this is quite wonderful,” I finally said, “but fairly rich for my feline. He’s kind of a minimalist.”

  She didn’t push or try to convince me that Macavity needed a red vinyl raincoat and matching boots, although I would have liked to watch—from a distance—as somebody tried to get that onto the creature. She was a good salesperson. I could feel her studying me, and following my expressions and sight line, and only when I glanced at a cobalt blue double bowl, did she speak up again.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it? I am crazy for that blue…although there are other glazes available. All gorgeous colors. And it’s very cheap now. See, it’s a sample, really. Kibble on one side, water on the other, or stations for two cats, plus the option to have your pet’s name in calligraphy around the rim, and in the color of your choice.”

  I was pretty sure Macavity was illiterate, let alone into calligraphy. Sometimes he behaved as if he didn’t know his name in the first place. Could other cats read well enough to appreciate monogrammed dishes? Had Macavity flunked out of “Leave No Puss Behind”?

  “But,” she continued, “I’m out of here end of the year, and that’s too soon for me to have the time or ability to order a personalized one and get it back in time.”

  When speaking of a cat, should one use the word “personalized”? “Catalized” didn’t work, either.

  “Of course,” she said, “since it’s you, if it would really matter, I could do it, and find you whenever it ships to me. You live in town, don’t you? I could deliver it.”

  “How much is this sample?” It was a gorgeous color. I didn’t want to further antagonize Merilee by pointing out that cats, if not color-blind, were unlikely to find futures as color specialists. Day or night, the world is interestingly grayish to a cat. But I’m in love with color, and the blast of intense blue would give me pleasure, as long as its price didn’t cause pain.

  She considered, then sighed, and said, “Five dollars. It sells for forty-seven dollars when it’s personalized, but what the hell?”

  “Sold.”

  The idea of a transaction visibly cheered her. I’d returned her to the role she’d chosen—except for the married part of it, of course—and we bonded. Time to get back to the actual point of this visit, although having seen her venomous denunciation of Phoebe—a fury that seemed to have increased with Phoebe’s death—I didn’t feel an acute need for lots more information, and tried to think of what I did want to know, and how to phrase it, even to broach it. “What did you think about what happened at Phoebe’s house yesterday?” I asked as she wrapped the double bowl and put it in a bag that said “Top Cat and Tails.” She sighed and patted the bag. “Save this. It’s a collector’s item now,” she said, and gave a weak smile.

  Only then did she seem to hear my question, as if the words had hung near her until she was ready for them. “Yesterday?” she asked me, her face blank of expression. “Her house?”

  Playing dumb? Or really dumb? “I thought you’d have seen it in the paper,” I said. “Or on TV.”

  “I…yesterday? I watched a movie at home last night and I was just so tired, I didn’t…”

  Was she presenting me with a prepared alibi? But, of course, the murder hadn’t taken place late at night at all, so maybe not.

  “Really, the late afternoon,” I said.

  She wrinkled her brow. Shook her head. “Same difference,” she said, using that expression that has always confused me. “I didn’t watch TV yesterday. Too depressing. What could happen to a house? Was there a fire?”

  “At the house, not to the house.” No response. “There was a murder,” I said softly.

  Her eyes, which would have been a lovely gray if not quite as bloodshot, opened wide. “A murder, but—who? Nobody lives there anymore. How? The house was empty!”

  She seemed so honestly dumbfounded it was hard to believe she’d had anything to do with Toy’s demise. On the other hand, she’d had plenty of time to think this through and plan her response. I wasn’t crossing her name off the list quite yet.

  “A woman was there to stage the house. Spruce it up for sale.”

  She rocked back on her heels, her eyes comic-book wide-open. “A stager?” Then her jaw dropped, she straightened up, and her eyes managed to pop still wider open. “That girl?”

  “You know her?”

  “I don’t know her, not really, but if it’s her, then yeah, sure, I met…what’s her name. Or I think so.”

  “Why do you think you know who it was?”

  She shrugged. “How many stagers…She had
a funny name. Pet? Cuddles? Something not normal. I’m sensitive to names. Merilee got made fun of lots of times, and I remember wondering how it would have been to carry her label around.”

  Okay. For whatever reason, out of all the stagers there must be in the tristate area, she’d pegged the one who’d died in Phoebe’s house. “Was her name Toy?” I asked quietly.

  At this, Merilee’s face blanched. “Toy,” she whispered. “Yes. A tiny bit of a thing, right? Big hair, little girl? Flashy. Just started in these parts like six months ago.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know, but I wanted to know how Merilee did.

  “He brought her here,” she said, as if reading my mind.

  “Who?” I was afraid she was going to say that Toy was her lousy husband’s new squeeze, and that he’d actually dragged her into Merilee’s store. I knew somebody to whom that had happened. The husband, as dumb as a post, wanted his about-to-be-dumped wife to understand his choice, and in fact, to understand why anyone in his right mind would pick the other woman over her. He felt his wife’s meeting her rival would explain it all.

  It didn’t. It did, however, convince his wife to find the meanest, most aggressive divorce lawyer in the tristate area.

  “Dennis,” Merilee said.

  “Dennis Allenby?”

  “Yes. Phoebe’s kid. That’s how I met her.”

  “He knew her? When was this?” I tried to think of how Toy had introduced herself, but to tell the truth, I could more easily remember how chilly the house became with the door open while she made introductions. It had been clear that he’d hired her, but I somehow assumed he’d found her through recommendations.

  “Has he known her?” Merilee laughed, though there wasn’t much joy in the sound. “You mean that in the biblical sense? They were an item. Phoebe thought there’d be a wedding, but that didn’t seem to happen. Long-distance romance and all. But dead? Honestly?”

  I nodded. “Back up a second. To when you met her.”

  “It was here, in the store. What’s to say? They were all lovey-dovey then. Phoebe said something later, that it was kaput, or going to be. How did she put it? That Dennis was trying to extract Toy’s claws from under his skin. Of course, Phoebe would never blame her son for anything, even though he was a man and behaving just like the worst of them. Extracting her claws had to mean he was finished with her. Or that Phoebe wanted them to be. She didn’t like Toy.”

  “But when you met her?” I prompted.

  She shrugged. “That was then. They were definitely a couple. But men don’t have long memories, do they?”

  I was afraid she was going to cry about her husband again. “Why was Dennis in Philadelphia, then? Was he visiting Phoebe?”

  Another mirthless laugh. “Only then, meaning that minute, right here. Only saw his mother when he came into where she was working, and brought the girl. She’d just moved here from Chicago. She was trying to get him to move here, too. I figured he brought her in for his mother to meet. I thought, Finally he’s going to settle down. And I figured he thought Phoebe and I would know people, send business her way.”

  My head felt like a house in which all the furniture had been violently relocated. I kept bumping into things that were out of place.

  Toy and Dennis. A couple. From Chicago. Why wouldn’t he have said anything? Why hadn’t she?

  Why was he still here in Philadelphia, when he’d been so adamant about catching his plane home on Sunday after the memorial service?

  He had an SUV.

  Extracting claws didn’t sound a happy ending to the relationship. Had the entire hiring been a setup? A way to get rid of Toy once and for all in a pretend robbery? Had, in fact, Phoebe’s death been part of his plan as well? A two-fer that would rid him of his mother, and then his now-redundant lover? And, not incidentally, help him out with cash to pay his creditors.

  It was a staggering idea, but not one I could dismiss as ridiculous.

  “Dennis is a weird person,” Merilee said. “Not in a funny way. And really mean to his mother, too.”

  This from the woman who had posthumously accused Dennis’s mother of having first stolen money from her, and then to further annoy her, to have spitefully committed suicide.

  M.L.M. his mother had called him. My little man. “M” she’d written in her datebook. And a social visit from him would have certainly been considered the sort of happy surprise she’d suggested to her neighbor.

  I might have stood there, gape-mouthed, for hours, had I not glanced at a remaining piece of stock—a dog-shaped clock with a tail that wagged back and forth with the passing minutes. The minute hand was approaching his doggie brow, and I knew for whom the schoolhouse bell was about to toll.

  Fifteen

  * * *

  * * *

  I hoped my students could hear me above the growls and protests of my empty stomach.

  I had returned a brief writing exercise and was asking them to edit their own writing by fixing their pronoun misuse. I spoke loudly and with enthusiasm, which isn’t that easy when the topic at hand is the pronoun “it.” An entire hour of the pronoun “it.”

  Most people are unaware of the myriad ways in which the pronoun “it” can be abused, and that’s the problem, right there. So there was more than enough to fill the hour. And then to fill another hour the next day, by which time the class would have forgotten 99 percent of what I’d said.

  But if I could clarify the difference between “its” and “it’s,” let alone the idea that the word “it” has to refer to something specific, I would justify my existence, make my small contribution to mankind and know that I’d left the world a better place than when I found it.

  After they’d moaned and groaned, and insisted that the concepts were now crystal clear, I gave them a brief in-class writing exercise, the better to use their new pronoun-beefed-up muscles.

  Even a cursory glance at the results they handed me at the end of the period showed that “it” wasn’t going to be the way I made my contribution to this planet. I tried to be philosophical about it. If teens absorbed everything you had to say the first time around—even the first time around this semester—then the school year probably could be reduced to two or three weeks. There was a reason we had ten months in which to state and restate everything. And we then gave them two months in which to pretty much forget it, which ensured teachers of further employment the following year.

  The repetitive process wasn’t discouraging if I looked at it that way. Job security was a good thing. Besides, my own mind wasn’t holding on to things as well as I’d have liked it to. I was still embarrassed about my failure to remember that I hadn’t seen Phoebe’s pocketbook. What else so defines a woman besides her literal “baggage”?

  And what else had I forgotten? What was I forgetting this very moment? I knew how to use the pronoun “it,” but there was no need to be smug. I did not know how to use what little bits and scraps of information I had.

  The juniors walked in casually and found their seats. I could see the faint flush of vacation fever in their postures. Winter break was near, and these youngsters were not into the zen concept of living in the moment, at least not when the moment was at a school desk. Their bodies might be here, but their minds and hearts were already elsewhere, whether or not their holiday plans included travel.

  I suspected that my holiday plans would take me—take us—to Louisiana, and sometimes lately I thought we might remove “holiday” from that. I didn’t know for how long Mackenzie could—or should—stand being torn between his life in Philadelphia and the devastated land and people he’d left in Louisiana.

  A tale of two cities indeed, as Margaret had said.

  Mackenzie had been to see his parents twice since the hurricane. I would have gone, but we decided to conserve funds and let him fly twice instead of spending anything on plane fare for me. Besides, when Mackenzie was there, he tried to weave his way through the bureaucracy to find loans and temporary housing for h
is family, tried to locate relatives and friends whose whereabouts were still unknown, and I’m sure was able to offer psychological, if not physical, help to his parents. He was useful. I wasn’t sure I could offer anything worthwhile except psychic support, but now and then I thought about those ghost schools.

  My students were looking forward to more comforting holidays, wherever they’d find themselves. And till it was officially winter break, each hour of this and the following days would be an attempt to wrench them from daydreams back into the schoolroom.

  We were working our way through an anthology of American writing, and we’d come to a sampler of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poems about the people of Tilbury Town. “Richard Cory” was always a favorite, a poem that worked even before holidays. It seldom failed to produce an emotional response and heated discussion once my overprivileged charges discovered that the wealthiest, most elegant and envied man in town commits suicide. While they search for explanations, I use the poem, which is all clues and no solution to the mystery, to encourage close reading. Of course, I never admit that we’re doing that.

  But suicide pulled my thoughts back to Phoebe, even though I no longer believed she’d taken her own life, and I was once again obsessed with trying to identify what I had to remember. No more missed pocketbooks!

  For example, where was Dennis secretly staying? Where did—had—Toy lived? What was going on with them?

  If Dennis wasn’t at a hotel, he could be next to impossible to find. And he could be gone. We weren’t going to know till he rang up some more credit card charges. I wondered if Mackenzie had checked for airline or train ticket charges within the last day.

  Dennis as the killer was the only thing that made sense, or close to sense. Dennis, in debt and trying to end a relationship was the only person with a motive for both deaths, hateful as it was to think about his relationship with his mother in particular.