AHMM, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I explained who I was and what I wanted, enticing her with the prospect of possibly increasing the restaurant's business.

  Her hard black eyes glinted.

  "Is Mrs. Forelli the current owner?” I asked, partially for information for the series and partially because I thought I could get Mrs. Cinella to part with some information about the old woman. When I'm wrong, I'm really wrong.

  "Yes,” she said.

  "Would I be able to talk with her?"

  Mrs. Cinella's cheeks puffed out even more. I thought she was going to spit some chewed-up nuts at me, if that's what chipmunks eat. “No."

  "Oh,” I said brazenly. “Why not? Is she ill?"

  "Yes. She's bedridden."

  "She is? But I saw her a few days ago, sitting at the window."

  "Maybe you did. She feels all right some days, but not most. And she doesn't like to see anybody."

  "I wouldn't talk to her much,” I persisted, out of pure spite. “I'd just like to get a little history of the place, maybe a picture of her."

  "That's not possible. And I don't think I want you doing any article.” She looked as if she were contemplating rolling me into a ball and stuffing me down some dark chipmunk hole.

  We stared at each other for about thirty seconds. I blinked. Mrs. Cinella turned and marched back into the kitchen.

  Mary came over. “Could you use a glass of wine?"

  "I could use a bottle,” I said. “Wow. She is one buzz saw."

  "I warned you,” Mary said, and went to get my wine.

  I didn't stay long in Forelli's after that. I was scared Mrs. Cinella would come back out of the kitchen with her carving knife. But that night, I got to thinking. Why had she gotten so defensive when I'd asked to see Mrs. Forelli? She'd been curt even when I asked if Mrs. Forelli were the owner of the restaurant. Something was wrong. I decided to go down to the courthouse on Tuesday. A guy I'd dated back in high school worked there.

  On Tuesday, I really dolled up. Big hair, curling just above my shoulders, lashes thick as male mink fur with tons of mascara, just a touch of blush, and a touch of blue shadow over and under my eyes, making them look even bluer.

  I got some stares from two men I passed on the way into the courthouse, but they looked too much like my ex to spark any return interest in me. I don't need any more business types; I'm looking for a mountain climber or a scuba diver.

  Paul, my old high school flame, still looked pretty good himself. He sputtered with flattering comments when he saw me. I might have gotten interested, but when he stood up, he looked as if he'd been doing a lot more beer drinking than mountain climbing. So I smiled and reminisced about our dates just enough to soften him up. When I hit him with my request to check on the ownership of Forelli's, he was too far into dreamy high school days to refuse. He trotted off and came back with confirmation I'd sought. Mrs. Forelli was sole owner of the restaurant and had been so since her husband died. It had never passed out of her possession.

  Paul wondered what my interest in Forelli's was. I told him.

  "Writing articles about small town restaurants?” He pulled back a little, as if he just found out the mink coat he was going to buy was actually rabbit. “I thought you were a reporter in New York or Paris or somewhere like that."

  "There isn't anyplace like New York or Paris,” I snapped, then calmed down. After all, he'd done what I'd asked. “My mother's in a nursing home now, so I came back home for a while."

  "Yeah,” he said, looking down at his protruding stomach, thereby dragging us both out of high school and plunging us back into middle age. “I guess we're all getting old. Even Forelli. Or Cinella. Or whatever his name is."

  "Oh? Do you know him?” I asked, ready to let a lock of hair droop seductively over an eye if I had to. I didn't have to.

  "He belongs to the same church I do. Didn't you talk to him? He runs the restaurant. He and his second wife."

  "No. I haven't talked to him yet."

  "He's got a bit of a limp. Used to be quite a hiker. Even got on the local news once. He always hiked in Hickory Run. You remember, the state park about fifteen miles east.” Paul drooled a bit.

  "Of course,” I snapped. I had enough old-fashioned modesty left to blush. Paul and I went swimming in that park in our senior year. Nude. My introduction to sex. To this day, my mother knows nothing about that episode. “So how did he make the news?"

  "He used to take Boy Scouts hiking in the park. I mean Boy Scouts came from all over the country and he'd lead groups up there to see Boulder Field. Knew it like the back of his hand, they said."

  Boulder Field, I recalled, was the area's claim to fame. It's a national landmark, an area over a football field in width and six football fields in length, full of Ice Age rocks. Nothing but rocks: no grass, no trees, just rocks, ranging from little ones of about four inches to big boulders of twenty or more feet. Not a soft spot to be had. If you fell in Boulder Field, you'd break something, or die.

  "So something happened to his leg in Boulder Field?"

  "Sure did. Happened about a year ago."

  "A year ago,” I repeated. About the time Mrs. Forelli went to England and about the time Mr. Cinella turned morose. Maybe having to stay home with his new wife did it.

  "It was in the local papers,” Paul said. “I think Cinella had to be rescued. He couldn't get out of the park or something."

  "It was in the paper?"

  "Yeah.” Paul looked at me as if he suddenly didn't recognize me. “What's the big deal anyway. You interested in Cinella?"

  "No. His mother. Thanks, Paul. Maybe we can have lunch sometime."

  "Yeah, sure. Sure."

  I could feel his eyes on my back as I left.

  I wanted to go straight to the Osterhout Library, but I knew my mother was waiting for me. I stopped to pick up some magazines for her and headed for the nursing home.

  Fortunately, the Osterhout was open that evening so I didn't have to lose another night's sleep. After leafing through several months’ copies of The Citizen's Voice, I found the article on Cinella. Cinella had been hiking in the park on a cold day in November, had slipped on one of the many snow covered boulders, fallen, and broken his leg. He'd had to crawl out to the parking lot and drag himself into his car, where he passed out. A park ranger found him a few hours later and transported him out of the car and to a hospital. The ranger didn't retrieve Cinella's car for a week, as an ice storm, following two days after the snowstorm of a few inches, made the park's unpaved road impassable.

  I wondered what the hell Cinella was doing out in Boulder Field right after a snowstorm? Okay, it was only a few inches, but even a light snow makes Boulder Field a pretty dangerous place to hike. I forgot about old Mrs. Forelli and began to wonder how and when the first Mrs. Cinella had died and where she was buried.

  I found myself getting antsy to see Boulder Field and to find out if the first Mrs. Cinella had had a standard death, with a death certificate, open casket, wake—the whole ritual. So I put in a call to Stan Rychek. He's the sheriff for the district and quite an outdoorsman himself. I'd dated him too. Fact is, I'd have married him. He's a great guy, but he fell in love with the Atlantic Ocean instead of me and joined the navy. How the hell can you compete with an ocean?

  I was in luck. Stan said he'd hook me up with a geologist who was doing some research on Boulder Field. Even luckier, the geologist, whom Stan called Raymond the Rockman, was planning to make a helicopter pass over the landmark in a few days, and Stan figured Raymond would take me along if I was having a good hair day when I asked. That suited me just fine. Even though you can drive right up to the edge of Boulder Field, you have to drive over several miles of unpaved roads through forests of pines and thickets of mountain laurel and rhododendrons. It's beautiful, but I get nervous when I'm too far away from restaurants and paved roads. Maybe I should look for a race car driver instead of a mountain climber.

  On Wednesday, I met Raymond the Rockman at a local airport at one in the a
fternoon. I wasn't in a good mood. My mother didn't have ther-apy that afternoon so she'd miss me. Moreover, I would miss her. We'd had a good time the day before going over all my old boyfriends. Mom agreed that I'd missed out when Stan got away.

  Raymond would have met with Mom's approval. He was pretty good looking, taught at a community college, did research on his own. Not exactly high power jobs, but steady enough for Mom and me. I didn't care that much about a fat bankbook anymore. If I did I would have stayed with my ex. I wondered if I could learn to love rocks as much as this guy did. I doubted it.

  Raymond gave me a running commentary as we flew over Boulder Field, informing me that the boulders actually ran twelve feet deep. Boulders on boulders.

  You could hide a hundred bodies in there.

  After fifteen minutes of flying over boulders, my eyes started to glaze over. I couldn't imagine what I'd hoped to see.

  "The field was formed twenty thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age,” Raymond the Rockman droned on.

  "Twenty thousand,” I repeated.

  "Yes, but not by the glacier itself."

  "Not by the glacier."

  "By the changes in temperature. Repeated cycles of freezing and thawing broke up the hard bedrock and brought the boulders to the surface. This is the largest field of its kind in the eastern United States."

  "What's that?” I said, peering down out of the helicopter's window.

  "I said it's the largest—"

  "No, I mean what's that back there on that big boulder? Can you turn this thing around?"

  Raymond looked a little wary. “What do you think you saw?"

  "Something painted on one of the rocks."

  "A lot of the rocks have something painted on them. The Kilroys of the world feel the need to let us all know where they've been."

  "This rock didn't have writing on it. Can you turn this thing around?"

  "Of course, but I doubt we can find the exact boulder you want to see. Do you know how many boulders there are down there?"

  "No. Can you turn this thing around?"

  "Nobody knows how many boulders. That's the point."

  I let a lock of my hair fall seductively forward. “Could we try to find the one I saw? I'm telling you, it had something strange on it."

  "Oh, okay,” Raymond said. I was pretty sure than he was more interested in the possibility of something strange rather than my lock of hair, but I didn't much care as long as he turned around.

  It took three passes, the last one accompanied by a good deal of mumbling from Raymond, until I spotted again what I'd seen. About halfway into the field from the road was a large boulder, maybe fifteen feet long, with a lot of small boulders nestled up against it. On one end of the large boulder, someone had painted a cross, a white cross about two feet long. Hard to spot, but clear once you saw it. I was willing to bet that I'd found the first Mrs. Cinella.

  I decided not to reveal my finding until I'd checked out some data. So I said nothing when Raymond contemptuously dismissed the cross as just graffiti from a religious nut. I thanked him for the ride, left him mumbling about a waste of fuel, and called a friend, a female friend. I like female friends. The only bribe they require is a drink or a lunch, and most of the time not even that. And it doesn't matter how your hair looks. Shirley had lived near Forelli's Restaurant until she moved to a four bedroom, three bathroom house in our local lake community. I figured she might have kept in touch with the gossip about the old neighborhood. But Shirley wasn't available for a few days. She was recovering from laryngitis and, after ten minutes of conversation, she sounded like a whistling teakettle whose whistle was going on the blink.

  So I stewed for about two days and then gave in to a nasty idea. I decided to locate Mrs. Forelli's daughter in England. I called Mary to see if she knew the woman's last name, hoping against hope it wasn't Thomas or some other name possessed by half the population of Britain. Fortunately, it wasn't. The name was Merryman and she lived in Croydon. According to Mary, letters for Mrs. Forelli arrived at the restaurant on a regular basis so I could be pretty sure the daughter hadn't moved.

  After some discussion with an overseas operator, I secured a number and dialed. I have to admit that I felt like some CIA spook or the star reporter for a tabloid. But I convinced myself that I was just acting like lovable Miss Jane Marple.

  When I connected with Mrs. Merryman, I told a whopper of a lie. I said that I worked at the courthouse in Wilkes-Barre and that we were trying to replace some records that had been lost. Fortunately, Mrs. Merryman didn't ask how we'd been so careless as to lose records.

  "I'm sorry,” I said, “if I'm intruding or bringing back a sorrowful time, but I wondered if you could confirm for us when your sister, Mrs. Cinella, died."

  Mrs. Merryman was very cooperative. She gave me the date and said that her sister had died after a long bout with multiple sclerosis.

  I wanted to ‘fess up then and there and go find some nails to walk on or maybe go read the dictionary to calm down my obviously overblown imagination.

  I thanked Mrs. Merryman, who observed that I needn't have wasted a call to England since her sister's husband or her mother could have answered the question.

  I sank into even deeper mud, telling her that I hadn't been able to reach Mr. Cinella and certainly hadn't wanted to bother Mrs. Forelli since she was obviously up in age. “Is she in good health?” I asked.

  "Yes, so she says. To tell you the truth, I am rather worried about her. She sounds funny, and she doesn't call or write as often as she did. When she does write, her letters are, well, short and flat, if you know what I mean. I'm afraid I haven't seen her since my sister's funeral. I wanted her to come live with me then, but she didn't want to leave the States."

  "You haven't seen her since the funeral?"

  "Well, it's my son, you see. He has asthma and I can't leave him. I just can't."

  "Your mother hasn't been to visit you since the funeral?"

  "No. You see, she just won't fly, and I can't leave my son or bring him. I just can't."

  Mrs. Merryman sounded more guilty than even I felt.

  I tried to make amends. “I can check up on your mother and let you know how she's doing, if you would like."

  "Would you do that? My brother-in-law isn't very communicative."

  "Of course I'll do that."

  I rang off. “What the hell is going on?” I muttered, guilt swept away by curiosity, puzzlement, and even anger. Someone had frightened Mrs. Forelli into withdrawal from the world, even from her remaining daughter. Moreover, unless Mary had simply made a mistake, someone had lied about her flying to England after Cinella had remarried.

  I called Shirley and told her I'd be over tomorrow, carrying some nice chicken soup that would do wonders for her throat. I didn't give her time to protest.

  * * * *

  The next day, Shirley really did seem grateful for the soup. I filled her in on the latest pomposities from my ex who calls me now and then with tales of job promotions and European jaunts to let me know exactly what I'm missing. Then I told her about my restaurant series and asked about the Cinella family.

  "I really can't tell you much,” Shirley squeaked. “I haven't really kept up. I hear his leg never healed properly and that he limps a little. Did you know that he broke his leg?"

  "Yes,” I said. “Paul told me."

  Shirley's eyebrows shot up.

  "No, we haven't renewed our passionate senior-year affair. Neither of us are quite up to passion. But apparently Cinella is, or was. He remarried pretty fast after his wife's death."

  Shirley nodded. “Roberta had been sick for a long time. She wasted away. Donald Cinella took care of her well enough, even heroically. But he was worn out emotionally. I think he desperately needed someone to lean on, and his second wife fit the bill. She was a practical nurse, you know. Helped take care of Roberta. And probably old Mrs. Forelli too."

  "Good grief,” I said. “A nurse. I would have gue
ssed she was a construction machine operator or a demolition expert."

  "Ah,” Shirley said. “You've met her."

  "And lived to tell about it. I had dinner at Forelli's a week or so ago."

  "What's the old place look like?"

  "I'll show you.” I pulled out the picture with Mrs. Forelli in it and handed it to Shirley.

  "The restaurant hasn't changed any,” she said. “Who's the woman?"

  "Mrs. Forelli,” I said.

  Shirley looked up at me and cleared her throat. “No, it isn't."

  I stared at her. “But of course it is. It has to be."

  "Well, it isn't her. Why do you say it has to be?"

  "Everyone at the restaurant says so. Anyway, who else could it be?"

  Shirley tilted her head and peered at me. “I don't know, but I know it isn't Mrs. Forelli. Mrs. Forelli was bigger boned than this woman. Besides, her face was round, really round, like a smiley face.” Shirley handed me the picture. “This is not Mrs. Forelli."

  "Well, she's been ill, I understand."

  Shirley shook her head. “Maybe so. But I knew Mrs. Forelli well. I'm telling you this is not her."

  "So who is it then?"

  Shirley shrugged. “I don't know. A relative of Mrs. Cinella's?"

  "But Mrs. Cinella said it was Mrs. Forelli or, at least, she didn't contradict me about it. And the waitresses say it's Mrs. Forelli.” I paused. “At least, they think it is."

  "Why would anybody pretend to be Mrs. Forelli?"

  "Why indeed?"

  "And anyway,” Shirley croaked, her voice starting to give out, “where is the real Mrs. Forelli?"

  "Another good question. I can make a guess.” I got up to leave.

  Shirley started to protest but managed only a few squeaks.

  "Don't worry,” I assured her. “I'll be back as soon as I get some answers."

  * * * *

  Stan Rychek was skeptical. He absolutely refused to barge into Forelli's and demand to question the old woman living there. Something about search warrants and probable legal cause and all that. But he did agree to collect Raymond and go up to Boulder Field on what he called “a wild body chase."