Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Murder is one thing, Gwendolyn. Everyone feels homicidal now and then. But sleeping with a woman’s husband not two months after she’s been killed…Well, you’ve really crossed the line this time.”

  Gwen scanned the article, too agitated to pay close attention to what she was reading.

  “You know that dream everyone is supposed to have?” she said. “The one where you suddenly realize you’ve studied for the wrong exam? That’s how I feel right now, like this is some sort of test, only my whole life has prepared me for a different set of questions. I mean, what was Barry doing up here? I never gave him directions to Penaquoit, I never even called him. I never wanted to see him again. And who the hell posted bail this morning? I don’t know anyone with access to half a million dollars.”

  “But they’d only need to post ten percent. I can run an activity analysis and see if anyone drew a check on the bank for that amount.”

  “Thanks,” Gwen said.

  “I’ll call you later if anything turns up. In the meantime, what are your plans?”

  “Apparently Mike Contaldi claims he saw Barry in the diner the morning of the kidnapping. I thought I’d talk to him.” She shrugged. “The alternative is giving a press conference on my front lawn.”

  “I wish I could come with you, but I have an interview with a bank in Albany late this afternoon.”

  “Albany? I thought you never wanted to leave Sohegan.”

  “Me too. But this kidnapping, the murder, and now what’s happening to you—the town is poisoned for me. I used to think we were kind of a blue-collar Brigadoon, the town that time and prosperity forgot. Now the whole world’s watching. It’s not the same.”

  “What does Betsy think?”

  “About Albany?” Sheila picked up a printout from her desk and pretended to look at it. “She’s not leaving Sohegan, if that’s what you mean.”

  Gwen didn’t have the time or the heart to pursue this.

  “Well, good luck, for what it’s worth.” She hugged Sheila again and left.

  Only when Gwen was several yards into the Mecca did she realize that people were staring. Everyone was staring, in fact, forks poised in midair, jaws locked midchew, lips frozen mid-sentence. Even Mike was uncharacteristically speechless.

  “Can we talk for a minute?” she said, leaning over the counter. “In private?”

  He looked puzzled and uncomfortable. “Nobody can hear us standing right here.”

  True enough. But she was beginning to sweat from the heat of two dozen eyes.

  “I’d prefer the kitchen, actually. Just a few questions.”

  He glanced around the diner before nodding. “It’s getting toward lunchtime, but okay.”

  The kitchen was smaller than she remembered and smelled of old grease and ammonia. Mike leaned against the slop sink and folded his hands across his chest.

  “Why’d you have to come back here, Gwen? Sohegan’s a small town.”

  A pariah at Mike’s? She’d really hit rock bottom.

  “You told the police that my husband was here, in the diner, the day of the kidnapping.”

  “They showed me a picture, I pointed out the guy. I didn’t know he was your husband.”

  “Are you sure it was him?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “And he didn’t meet anyone while he was in here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did he ask you for directions, mention my name?”

  “Nope.”

  She sighed and shook her head. Well, coming to the Mecca was a long shot, she’d know that from the beginning.

  “Thanks, Mike.” She started to leave the kitchen.

  “Who’da guessed it would end like this,” he said.

  “It hasn’t ended yet, Mike.”

  “I mean, five months ago Nick Lawrence comes by for coffee, asks about the new waitress we got here. Now that waitress is accused of—”

  “He asked about me?” She wheeled around and walked back toward him.

  “Sure, on a Saturday, your day off. I’d never seen him before, didn’t even know who he was till one of the other customers tells me after he left.”

  “What did he ask about?”

  “Oh, you know, your name, how long you been here, where you were from. He says he saw you around town, thought he might need a new baby-sitter. I figured he meant for nighttime work, else I wouldn’t have been so helpful. Poaching another man’s employees isn’t right.”

  “But he told me his old sitter left just a few days before he asked me to work for him.”

  Mike shrugged. “Next thing I know, you quit.”

  Nick had asked about her a few weeks before his baby-sitter left?

  “What exactly did you tell him?” Gwen asked.

  “Like I said, your name, where you lived.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I think maybe he asked about your kid, your husband.”

  “Husband? What did you tell him?”

  “Just what I knew.” He scratched the side of his head.

  “Mike.”

  “You never told me squat, so what could I tell him?” His face was bright red.

  “Tell me exactly what you told him. Now.”

  “Shit.” He stretched the word into several long syllables as he reamed his right ear with a pinkie. “He said he thought he might have known you, from down in the city, wanted your old address. So I showed him that application you filled out.”

  “You gave him my old address.” Barry’s address.

  “Big deal, so he looked at the application. He said he didn’t think it was the same person after all. What harm was there?”

  Plenty harm, though she couldn’t say exactly what. She headed for the kitchen door.

  “Uh, Gwen? You mind using the back door? Some people, they don’t keep an open mind like I do. Nothing personal, just—”

  “Fuck you, Mike.” She pushed open the swinging door and walked slowly through the crowded, suddenly dead-quiet restaurant.

  She got home at one o’clock feeling hungry but completely uninterested in food. The crowd out front had thinned a bit, thank God. She managed to down a slice of bread and a few sips of milk from the carton. Then the phone rang.

  “Are you sitting down?” It was Sheila. “We just had a fax from our correspondent bank in Whitesville. Guess who drew a check on the bank this morning for fifty thousand dollars?”

  She sat down. “Who?”

  “It’s a joint account, in the name of Russell and Maxine Cunningham. The signature was hers.”

  “Maxine Cunningham bailed me out?”

  “Your guardian angel.”

  Gwen thanked her, hung up, and grabbed her car keys.

  “You shouldn’t have come here.” Maxine Cunningham, wearing sunglasses, gently rubbed her right cheek. She motioned Gwen inside the house and quickly closed the door. Gwen noticed a stack of cartons just inside the living room. Beyond them she saw a four-poster bed, a rocking chair…

  “Priscilla’s things,” she said. “From the basement at Penaquoit.”

  “Russell asked Piacevic to move them over here, bit by bit. He says he doesn’t trust Nick with the stuff, but…” Maxine shook her head slowly.

  “But what?”

  “I just think he wants to be closer to it. I’ve drawn the line at bringing the magazines here, but he won’t hear about throwing them out.”

  They both stared at the jumble of furniture and boxes for a while.

  “I don’t know what we’ll do with it,” Maxine said wearily, as if, after all the tragedy she’d faced, this was the biggest challenge of her life. “Our basement is already so full.”

  “Is your husband home?”

  Maxine shook her head. “But if he discovers you were here…”

  “Why did you post bail for me?”

  “You weren’t supposed to find out.”

  “Why?”

  Maxine took a deep, wheezing breath and let it
out slowly. “Because I know you didn’t kill my daughter.”

  God, it felt good to hear that. “Thank you,” Gwen said softly.

  “It wasn’t charity,” Maxine snapped. “With you in jail, my husband and the police and the FBI were content to stop their search for the true killer.”

  “But what can I do?”

  “Find the truth and save yourself.”

  Gwen considered her a moment. Maxine looked thinner than ever, almost feathery, as if a stiff breeze could knock her over, or perhaps carry her up and away.

  “How do you know I’m innocent?” Gwen asked. “No one else thinks so.”

  “Because”—Maxine pushed her sunglasses up her nose—“I saw you with Tess. I don’t think you could hurt her, and taking a mother from a child is very cruel.” She nodded, as if to confirm her own opinion.

  “And what else?” Gwen asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “There’s something else.”

  Maxine was silent for almost a minute, adjusting her sunglasses every fifteen seconds or so. Gwen wished she could see her eyes.

  “Come,” Maxine finally said, gesturing for Gwen to follow her. “In case Russell comes home.”

  She led Gwen into the family room. The drapes were closed, as always, the room lit only by table lamps. She stood in the center of the room.

  “This whole…nightmare, it began a long time ago, before you came to Penaquoit.” Maxine started to remove her sunglasses but left them on.

  Gwen thought immediately of Nick asking about her at the diner, back in the late spring, before he’d spoken directly to her.

  “You mean earlier this spring,” she said, “before I even came here?”

  “No!” Maxine swatted the air with her right hand. “Long before you were in the picture, years ago.”

  “Nick and Priscilla…”

  “Yes,” she hissed. “What about them?”

  “Something wasn’t right between them, from the beginning.” Maxine held up a hand. “Please, don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t. I simply knew that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be between a young couple. It wasn’t just Nick, either. Priscilla wasn’t the same girl after she moved back up here. You’d think motherhood would have softened her, but it didn’t, not one bit.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “I don’t know. But have you ever been in a room and suddenly realized that everyone else around you is in on some sort of private joke, or secret?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “Well, that’s how I felt whenever Nick and my daughter were around, that they shared something, some important secret. It was the only bond between them, I think, whatever it was.” She cocked her head slightly. “And it formed a wall around them, kept them apart from everyone else, including me.”

  “And you have no idea what that secret was?”

  She shook her head slowly. “But I know this. Once you discover the secret, you’ll know what really happened at the Devil’s Ravine.”

  Gwen remembered what Rosa Piacevic had overheard that night at Penaquoit.

  “Did Nick ever have any trouble with the law?”

  She waited a beat, then shook her head.

  “Are you sure? Nothing involving drugs?”

  “He’s my granddaughter’s father,” Maxine said slowly. “My only surviving…my…”

  That wasn’t exactly an answer, but Gwen didn’t have the heart to press her.

  “You said that I had to find the truth in order to save myself. Nick won’t even speak to me; the police aren’t exactly eager to help prove my innocence. What can I do?”

  “I can’t help you, I’m afraid. I’ve done all I can.”

  “But you must know something.”

  “No, I…”

  “Please, I need help.”

  “You need help? You need help?” Maxine removed her sunglasses, revealing a purple-black bruise around her left eye.

  “This is what I got for posting your bail. I freed my daughter’s murderer, that’s what he thinks.” She put the glasses back on with shaky fingers. “I’ve done all I can.”

  “I’m so…sorry, Mrs. Cunningham.”

  “Enough,” Maxine said. “Leave this place, now. If someone should see you here…” She walked into the foyer.

  Before following her, Gwen took a photo from a side table and shoved it into her purse: Priscilla, standing on the terrace at Penaquoit, held a grinning Tess, looking a bit nervous, as if clutching an antique porcelain vase. Gwen glanced around the room for a photo of Nick but found none, not surprisingly—this was Russell Cunningham’s house, after all.

  “Your husband destroyed all the thistle plants in Priscilla’s garden,” Gwen said at the front door.

  “He…” Maxine’s head began to tremble.

  “Why, Mrs. Cunningham? Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t…I really don’t know.” Tears emerged from behind the sunglasses. “That policeman, Hawkins, he keeps asking us about that damn flower. We don’t know why Priscilla had it with her, we don’t have a clue.”

  Oh, yes, you do, Gwen felt like saying. But if Maxine hadn’t told the police, she wasn’t going to tell her. Anyway, the old woman had suffered enough. She thanked her, left the house, and got in her car. She was about to drive off when the front door opened. Maxine walked gingerly to the car, as if she were barefoot, and handed a slip of paper through the half-open car window.

  “Start there.” She turned and headed back inside.

  The paper contained a name, Mitchell Ellikin, MD, written in a faint, unstable hand, followed by three letters: NYC.

  Chapter 38

  That evening she told Jimmy that she had to go to New York City for a few days. He took it well—too well. His only concern seemed to be the Pearsons, who made him go to bed earlier than usual, and hogged their sole television set watching the Food Channel. She called Sheila and Betsy, who happily agreed to take Jimmy for a few nights. The Pearsons would pick him up from camp at three, as usual, and hand him over to Sheila at six. At least he’d be away from the reporters who had formed a dwindling but seemingly permanent outpost in front of the house.

  Working until almost one-thirty that night, she finished painting the dining-room walls satin white. Covering the old, off-white pigment with fresh new paint was the only satisfaction she’d had in what felt like a lifetime. She left for Manhattan the next morning after dropping Jimmy at camp.

  When she first caught sight of the Manhattan skyline from the upper level of the George Washington Bridge, at eleven-fifteen that morning, Gwen turned away, focusing determinedly on the road ahead. In the past, returning to the city from out of town made her feel like a hopeful immigrant, the Oz-like spectacle of midtown Manhattan promising excitement and opportunity. Now it made her queasy with apprehension. Barry’s gone, she reminded herself as she merged onto the West Side Highway, heading downtown. He can’t harm either of us. Jimmy’s safe.

  Was he, though? If she couldn’t prove her innocence, what would become of him? If Maxine Cunningham was right, the key to Priscilla’s murder, and thus to her own future, lay in Manhattan, the place she’d fled nearly six months ago, vowing never to return.

  By noon she had checked into the Boulevard Hotel on the West Side, close to where she and Barry had lived. Too close, actually, but she didn’t have time to search Manhattan for an affordable hotel room; the Boulevard was convenient to Mitchell Ellikin’s office, inexpensive, and clean. She left her suitcase in the room and caught the 79th Street crosstown bus on Broadway.

  As she walked from the bus stop toward Ellikin’s office on East 78th Street, she prayed no one would recognize her from the photograph that was circulating in newspapers and on television. The press had somehow gotten hold of a photo taken at last year’s Christmas party in the lobby of her old building.

  She’d stopped at an East Side newsstand and studied her face on the front page of the Post. Her hair had been long
er then, and most of her features were in shadow. She almost didn’t recognize herself, especially the tense expression on her face as she held a plastic wineglass to her lips; Barry had been drinking that night.

  Ellikin’s address, which she’d gotten from directory assistance that morning, led her to something called East Side Reproductive Services. It was located on the second floor of a modern apartment building just off Third Avenue, in a suite of medical offices accessible directly from the street. She walked down a long corridor until she found Mitchell Ellikin among several doctors’ names stenciled on a glass door. She pressed the doorbell and was immediately buzzed in.

  She crossed the waiting room to a long, waist-high counter. An attractive young black woman looked up from a very crowded appointment register.

  “I need to see Dr. Ellikin,” Gwen said.

  “Your name?”

  “I don’t have an appointment.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll—”

  “Tell him I’m a friend of Nick Lawrence.”

  “I’m afraid we—”

  “Tell him.”

  The receptionist frowned and disappeared through a doorway. The waiting room decor was blandly contemporary: pastel fabrics, framed art posters, stacks of old magazines, little signs indicating that credit cards were accepted, smoking wasn’t. There was one patient, a woman.

  The receptionist returned and asked Gwen to follow. She led her to a small, windowless examination room. A man joined her a moment later, wearing a white lab jacket over a dark blue shirt and rich burgundy tie.

  “I’m Dr. Ellikin,” he said. “And you are?”

  Ellikin was tall and quite thin. He had glossy black hair rigidly parted on the side, revealing a line of flesh as white as the newly painted trim in her dining room. He looked to be in his mid- to late-forties, yet his pale face was unexpectedly youthful, virtually wrinkle-free.

  “My name is Gwen Amiel. I think you know who I am.”

  He seemed ready to contradict her, but after a brief hesitation he nodded, shoulders sagging.

  “What’s this about?” he said. “I have a patient in my office and another in the room next door.”