The Winter Widow

by Charlene Weir

  Parkhurst opened the door for her, his dark eyes expressionless and watchful. Any sympathy he might feel was buried deep inside the man, and the police officer observed her, ready to exploit her confusion and grief if it would further his investigation.

  In the dim hallway, a young woman called out, “Ben!” and hurried toward them with a tweed coat swirling around high-heeled boots.

  To hold herself together, to block out images of Daniel dead on an autopsy table, Susan concentrated hard on the young woman: plaid skirt, white sweater, black belt slung low around her hips.

  When she got nearer, Susan recognized Lucille Guthman, a reporter for the local paper. Lucille had been at the house this afternoon looking for Daniel. Danny, she had called him, and eyed Susan with surprising hostility until Susan realized Lucille hadn’t come so much to see Daniel as to get a look at his wife.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Lucille said to Parkhurst, then darted a glance at Susan. “Oh. I didn’t—”

  “Mrs. Wren,” Parkhurst said.

  “Yes, I know.” Lucille’s blue eyes got teary. She raked a hand through the ash-blond curls spilling around her gamine face. “I’m sorry, so very sorry,” she said awkwardly, hesitated, and then turned back to Parkhurst. “What have you found out?”

  “We’re proceeding with the investigation.”

  “But, Ben, why was Danny killed? Who had a reason to kill him?”

  She looks frightened, Susan thought. I wonder what I look like.

  “Questions that need to be answered,” Parkhurst said.

  “What can you tell me? Have you got any leads?”

  “I’ll let you know when we have anything definite.”

  “I have a right to know.”

  Parkhurst raised an eyebrow.

  “For the paper,” Lucille insisted. “As a reporter I need to write the news.”

  Susan’s mind was detached, observing from a distance, as though none of this had anything to do with her.

  “What did you find at the scene of the crime?” Lucille stuck a hand in her coat pocket, then yanked it out again as though her fingers had been stung.

  “I have nothing to give you yet.” Parkhurst took a step and reached for Susan’s elbow.

  “Wait, Ben, what—”

  “It’s too soon.” Parkhurst looked angry.

  Something scary about him, Susan thought, some aura of suppressed violence. The pressure of his hand tightened and she allowed herself to be guided down the hallway. She felt Lucille’s eyes staring at her back and wondered why Lucille had been looking for Daniel that afternoon, and if she’d found him.

  At home, Susan refused to let Parkhurst walk her to the door, refused to let him call anyone to stay with her, told him to leave. I want to be alone, she thought, and choked on a swell of manic laughter at that tired old line.

  From a kitchen drawer, she took a pack of cigarettes, held it in her hand and stared at it, ran a thumb across the smooth cellophane. She’d quit because she and Daniel were flirting with the idea of a baby. There wasn’t going to be any baby. She opened the pack and lit a cigarette.

  * * *

  HOURS stacked up like unclaimed packages.

  On Friday people came: Daniel’s sister; Sophie the cat lady; the Reverend Mullet; the cops on Daniel’s force; neighbors. They brought food and spoke gently, sadly, quietly in shocked voices.

  She turned a cold face and stony eyes on all of them and left Daniel’s sister, Helen, to cope with casseroles and expressions of sympathy.

  Her mind was filled with distances, mists and wraiths. Her parents arrived from San Francisco; Patrick Donovan brusque and grim, Anna pale and anxious. Susan felt the expensive softness of her father’s cashmere jacket against her cheek as he held her too tightly. With the exactness of a camera recording, she noted his look of helpless anguish.

  Through the next two days, she moved with heavy effort and made decisions about her husband’s funeral. Emmanuel Lutheran Church, every pew filled, people standing in the rear, pulsed with strains of Bach. She sat in the front row and heard the Reverend Mullet speak about Daniel. All these people had known him longer than she had.

  The day after the funeral, her father told her the plane reservations were confirmed and she wasn’t to worry about anything; he would send someone out to deal with all the legal matters, pack up the household and sell the house.

  For the first time in four days, she felt a crack in her icy numbness, felt a flicker of relief just behind her breastbone.

  In the bedroom, she sat on the end of the bed she had shared with Daniel, smoked cigarette after cigarette and stared blankly at the deep blue carpet under her feet. A suitcase lay open beside her; her mother neatly and efficiently folded garments and placed them inside.

  “Susan?”

  She focused her eyes on her petite, fair-haired mother.

  “Darling, do you want to take this coat? It seems suitable for Siberia. Probably entirely too warm to wear at home.”

  Home. Susan looked around the bedroom, at the solid oak chest and dresser, the white walls and blue drapes. This was Daniel’s home, for ten days hers and Daniel’s. She gazed at the small silly painting Daniel had bought at a street fair in San Francisco, a wolfhound with an expression of apprehension, apology and half-concealed alarm. A haughty, elegant Siamese cat crouched between his outstretched paws.

  “That’s us,” Daniel had said with glee. “The one with the dopey-ass look is me.”

  They had been drunk that day, on love and crystal sunshine and heady discoveries of each other. They were funny and clever and their games were inexhaustible. Laughter affected them like wine. Every color was sharpened, every odor pungent and every sense overreceptive.

  With incomparable clarity, she saw him standing on the balcony of her apartment. She had a sharp-colored image of his profile with the strong line of chin and jaw. Blue-green water dazzled in the marina below. Tearing off chunks of French bread, he threw them to the gulls in flight. She came out through the open sliding door with two glasses of red wine and joined him at the railing.

  Cupping her face with his capable, long-fingered hands, he smiled. “This sure doesn’t look like Kansas, Toto,” he had said and kissed her.

  “Susan?” her mother said.

  She blinked. For God’s sake, where is my brain? She thought back over the last few days and looked at the packed suitcase, angry and appalled with herself. She felt fragile and light-headed as though she were just awakening from a long illness.

  At least my mind is working again.

  I can’t go home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE child lives on in the adult body, she thought as she paused in the kitchen doorway, ridiculously nervous about telling her father she was staying here.

  Patrick Donovan sat at the kitchen table, suit coat draped over the back of the chair, white shirtsleeves rolled up, reading the Hampstead Herald. In appearance, she was definitely her father’s daughter. She had his height and dark hair and blue eyes; her facial features had been planed down to a feminine version of his. She had none of her mother’s gentle blondness, as though even Anna Donovan’s genes had given way to those of her overpowering husband.

  Patrick looked up and shoved the paper aside. “Daring to beard the lion in his den?”

  As she sat down across the table from him, she felt a cottony rush of nostalgia. He still had the provoking ability to read her mind. She loved her father and knew how much he loved her, but they had always fought. As a child, she’d been defiant. So many fights took place in the kitchen, her mother had started calling it the lion’s den.

  “I’m glad you came, Dad. This one was—” She waved a hand, searching for words to explain her confusion and paralysis. “An inextricable problem.”

  “I’m always here for you, baby,” he said with a soft smile and reached for her hand to stop its movement. “But ‘inextricable’ doesn’t quite fit with ‘problem.’”

  Always cri
tical. She slid her hand from his. He understood she was saying thanks, but had to correct her way of saying it. Damn it, I’m not a child anymore. I no longer need your approval. I’m not that little girl striving for little drops of praise. Even when he said something nice, he’d immediately followed it with criticism. He picked up the glass of orange juice and took a sip.

  “You’re not drinking coffee,” she said in surprise. He habitually drank endless cups of a lethal brew she used to call roofing tar.

  “I’ve cut down.”

  With a little clutch of fear, she looked at him closely and wondered if he was all right. She saw a little more gray in his dark curls and a few more lines in his face, but he was still a very handsome man.

  “I have to stay, Dad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m staying. In Hampstead.”

  “Of course you’re not. You’re coming home.”

  “No.”

  “Susan, this is a bad time, a hard time. You’re not thinking clearly. Staying is a mistake. Finish up your packing so we can get out of here.”

  She’d hoped he would understand and give his support. She should have known he’d just point out the reasons why she was wrong.

  “Susan,” he said persuasively, “you can’t stay.”

  “I’m thirty-four years old. ‘Can’t’?”

  She felt her mother’s anxious presence in the doorway behind her. It was ever her mother’s place to act as a buffer between them. If her mother had stepped aside years ago and let them claw at each other, would they have torn down some walls? Or would they have ended up hating each other?

  They were trapped behind their own defenses. Even the death of her husband hadn’t changed anything between them. They just got into the same old games and, always, always, he managed to make her feel that nothing she did was ever quite good enough.

  “If only—” he began.

  She stiffened. If only what? I hadn’t married Daniel? He’s too old for you. He’s been married. His background’s too different. Come to this godforsaken place? Kansas? Good God, there’s nothing in Kansas but wheat fields. What do you think you’ll do there? Or was it even worse than that? If only I had obediently followed your blueprint for my life and joined your firm after I graduated from law school.

  The doorbell rang and her mother murmured, “I’ll get it.”

  Patrick shook his head. “Amazing Grace, you always were the most stubborn kid I ever knew.”

  Tears prickled against her eyelids. He hadn’t called her that in a long time. Grace was her middle name, and whenever he had been angry or exasperated or disappointed, she was Amazing Grace. It had as many inflections and interpretations as any Chinese ideogram.

  Some kind of weird guilt stuck to her like fingerprints on sticky varnish. She wasn’t so addled she felt responsible for Daniel’s death, but she’d frolicked into marriage, singing “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” without giving a thought to life ever after. Deep down in some yeasty corner of her subconscious, doubts had fermented, doubts that no matter how much she loved Daniel, she wouldn’t hack it as a housewife. It was those doubts, as though they were some kind of disloyalty to Daniel and he had deserved better, that created the guilt.

  How could she explain something to her father she couldn’t even explain to herself? He’d never understand, certainly never give his approval. Screw it.

  “Susan,” her mother said. “Honey, the mayor is here. He’d like to see you.”

  Patrick rose. “I’ll take care of it.” He rolled down his sleeves and reached for his suit coat.

  Susan scooted back her chair and jumped up. “I want to talk with him,” she said, and heard an echo of the defiant child.

  “Susan—” Her mother placed a hand on her arm as she scurried after her father.

  In the living room, Martin Bakover, seated in the blue chair by the fireplace, cane leaning against his knee, stood up to shake hands with her father.

  “Such a very sad occasion,” the mayor said, looking at Susan. He was a man in his late forties with the beginnings of excess weight, dressed in a black suit and white shirt. He had sandy-gray hair and a fleshy face with a tendency to ruddiness. “Before you leave us, I felt I must again express my deep-felt sympathies.” He rested both hands on the silver handle of the carved ash cane he always carried—mostly for effect, she thought.

  “Very kind of you,” Patrick said.

  “Dan was a good man,” Bakover said. “A good man. We all feel his loss keenly. He won’t be easy to replace. Please—” He gave each of them in turn a solemn look of his deep-felt sympathy. “Please, let me say how very sorry I am—we all are.” He stopped at Susan. “Is there anything I can do for you, anything at all?”

  “Thank you,” Patrick said, “but there’s nothing—”

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  Three pairs of eyes regarded her inquiringly, her father’s narrowed in wariness.

  “Anything,” the mayor repeated.

  “I want Daniel’s job.”

  A startled silence followed her clipped words; then Patrick said, “Susan—”

  “Why don’t we all sit down,” Anna said. “Mr. Bakover, please have a seat.” She gently nudged him to the chair behind him, turned to Patrick with a warning look, then took Susan’s arm and chivvied her to the couch, sat beside her and picked up her hand. Patrick settled in the chair on the opposite side of the fireplace.

  “Oh, my dear young lady,” Bakover said as though there had been no interruption, “I know how you must feel.”

  The hell you do, Susan thought.

  “But you are not to worry. Rest assured this murderer will be caught.” He smiled, a small condescending smile from adult to child-who-doesn’t-understand-the-ways-of-the-world. “Dan’s job.” He shook his head. “That’s simply not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Susan,” Patrick said, “this has been a dreadful blow. You’re not thinking clearly.” He turned toward the mayor. “She’s still in shock.”

  Don’t talk about me as though I’m not here.

  “Of course she is. Understandable. Entirely understandable.”

  “Why not?” Susan repeated with an insistent edge.

  “Well, my dear, a murder investigation, you must understand, requires someone … trained, trained and uh … tough, you understand, tough enough to handle the enormity of the job.” He paused and then added reasonably, “You can see how you’d be unable to handle it.”

  “I’m a cop, Mr. Bakover, a good cop. I had nine years with the San Francisco police force.”

  “Nine years?” Bakover said in surprise.

  Yes indeed. Nine years of proving I was tough enough, handling the enormity of the job, you pompous ass, and being the butt of jokes that were thinly disguised insults and listening to crude remarks about how I got my promotions.

  “Well,” Bakover said. “I didn’t know that. Well, well. And I’m sure a very fine policewoman you were too.”

  “Damn fine policewoman,” Patrick said. “You couldn’t get a better investigator. Her work is noted for its excellence. She has two commendations for valor, and nearly gave her life in the performance of duty.”

  “Very impressive. Yes. But this isn’t San Francisco. This is a small town.”

  “You feel,” Patrick said, “an officer trained by one of the finest police departments in the country is unsuited to cope with small-town crime?”

  “Dad—”

  “Not at all,” Bakover said. “But I’m not sure this town is ready for a woman in the position of police chief.”

  Patrick put his elbows on the chair arms and placed his fingertips together across his flat stomach. “What did you say?” he asked in a voice like silk, adversarial gleam in his blue eyes.

  “Dad—” Susan said, a harder edge to her voice.

  The mayor smiled a politician’s smile; he recognized a litigator when he saw one. “Perhaps you misunderstood me.”

>   Patrick smiled.

  “I simply meant to suggest that Miz Wren”—Bakover nodded at Susan—“is an outsider here. She doesn’t know the town or the people. That could be a handicap.”

  Patrick gently tapped his fingertips together. “Let me see if I have this clear. You stated—”

  Goddammit, let me fight my own battles. She opened her mouth, but before the words came out her mother said, “Would anyone like some coffee?” She was ignored.

  “You need someone right now,” Susan said.

  The mayor nodded. “There are good people in my police department. George Halpern has been an officer here for more than forty years.”

  Susan didn’t know about the good part, but she did know from talking with Daniel that George Halpern, the logical choice, had never wanted to be chief and was now close to retirement. Osey Pickett was still so young he’d barely recovered from the acne of adolescence, and he didn’t seem overly bright. That left only Ben Parkhurst, another outsider, and the antipathy between him and Bakover raised hackles on both sides. The mayor would be wary of putting power in Parkhurst’s hands.

  “Appoint me acting chief. That’ll give you time to find somebody.”

  Bakover gazed at her long and thoughtfully.

  “Mr. Mayor—” Patrick began.

  Susan glared at her father.

  “Temporary basis?” Bakover asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe,” he said after a long pause, “maybe it could be worked out.”

  She took a breath.

  “Temporarily,” Bakover added.

  She nodded with a small twinge of uneasiness as a shrewd, calculating look appeared briefly in the mayor’s eyes. Was he judging her capability, or did he have his own reasons for giving her the job?

  * * *

  THE sun, sliding low behind the shallow hills, cast a long shadow as she stood on the road where Daniel had been shot. Emptiness surrounded her. The wind blew. The dead grass shivered. The gravel was black with Daniel’s blood.

  I promise, Daniel, I promise you I’ll get the bastard.

  CHAPTER FOUR