“Yeah,” Alice said. She was thinking of Ed’s attention, and when she’d known she had it. Not long after the football game, when he’d called for a date. No, sooner than that. “Getting my husband’s attention wasn’t the problem. He was very outgoing, you know? Very funny. And he liked me right away. I thought so, anyway. Becky told me later that he’d asked her to set us up, but even before I knew that I could tell he liked me. But the thing about boys is—you want me to tell you the thing about boys?”
“Of course.”
“The thing is not getting their attention, you can usually do that. It’s getting the right kind and keeping it. That’s the hard part.”
“I see.”
“Yes, you’re a boy, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean,” she said. “Anyway. What I try to remember is when I decided to try to keep his attention. At some point I decided to—at some point he became the one for me, you know? And what really bugs me is, I can’t remember deciding that.” She looked away and finished her coffee, ashamed of herself for talking about Ed like this to someone she didn’t know. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” she said quietly.
“I don’t mind,” Sam said.
“He’s a good guy,” Alice said. “A really good guy. That’s what made me decide, he was a really good guy. He still is. But I can’t tell—I just don’t know if he’s really changed or I have or neither of us has at all. It’s just—my God, I cannot believe I’m telling you this.”
“Finish,” Sam said.
“I don’t know. It’s my fault, I’m sure it is. If he’s become—if there’s a problem I’m sure it’s because I let him down somehow, you know? How can I blame him? We’re just different now, that’s all. Both of us.”
Sam nodded and wanted very much to say something.
“You’re sweet to listen to me,” Alice said. “I’m sorry to go on like this, it’s just a mood.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Sam said.
“So, do you—are you—” Alice started but her voice disappeared. Was it worse of her to feel those things about Ed or to say them to another man? Alice, what have you done, she wondered. What are you feeling and what can you do about it? Nothing, she told herself, it’s just a mood and there’s nothing to be done about it.
“Are you ok?” Sam asked.
“Yes, fine,” Alice answered from behind her napkin. “Would you excuse me for a second?”
“Of course,” Sam said. He paid the waitress, sipped his coffee, and stared at one of the televisions.
In the bathroom Alice washed her face with cold water. Handle it, she told herself. How fast from the football game to here; how fast to ten more years.
She kept her eyes closed until she was ready to look herself in the face. After she did that she went back to Sam.
“I’m sorry,” she said, standing behind her chair.
“No, please,” Sam said, standing up.
“What—how much do I owe you for lunch?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing. Let me get this one,” Sam said.
“No, no. Just tell me how much.” She sorted through her pocketbook for her wallet.
“Ok,” Sam said. “It was about ten dollars each—yours was a little less, actually, so—”
“Fine,” Alice said. She handed him a bill. “Thanks for a nice lunch. It was really great.”
“Thank you,” Sam said.
“So, I’ll, umm, let you know what the next book is, if you want.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
“Ok.” Alice looked up at his face. She smiled.
“Could we—want to have lunch again sometime?” he asked.
“I’ll have to see, ok? My schedule is very busy, I don’t know how I managed to get away today. It’s like a once-a-year thing for me, you know?”
Sam nodded. “Ok,” he said. He got her coat and held it for her but she took it from him and put it on.
She held out her hand for a shake. “Thanks again,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’ll see you at the next meeting, I think it’ll be at my house this time.” She rolled her eyes and smiled.
“Ok,” he said, smiling at her. He watched her leave and then put on his coat. Outside, the bright cold day touched his face. The most pathetic part of being lonely, he thought, is the hundreds of times a face or a glance or a few words of conversation make you feel that deliverance is at hand.
Chapter Eighteen
Murder
Late March, 1915
The last light of evening struggled in mist and low-hanging clouds. Long drops of rain slanted gently inland. An automobile backfired, startling a delivery horse. From the cement box of the subway entrance at the edge of the Common Isabel, in a wide canvas hat, oilskin coat, and long black skirt stained at the hem with mud, emerged, unfurled an umbrella, and, pressing chin to collarbone, began the uphill walk in the direction of the Statehouse. A lady coming down the hill on the arm of a tall gentleman passed close and frowned, covering her thin, pale nose with her hand.
Isabel was thinking of the brown shingles and faded blue shutters of her house, of the hill it sat on, of the nearby marshes and inlets. The ocean wasn’t far and you could smell it anytime the wind was from the east. The driveway made a circle in front of the house, branched off behind a tumor-like lump of ground, and extended down to the kennels. From the top story of the house, where her room was, you could see over the lump; sometimes, in the early morning when the palest of red had just shown on the eastern horizon, she would look out at her babies and see Hammond moving about, talking to them, cleaning a bit of machinery. Next to the kennels was the carriage house, which was new and clean. They had argued about getting an automobile. Hammond wanted to pave the drive and then buy one. She hadn’t seen the need for it and the noise would give the dogs nerves. Nervous animals don’t win.
Beyond the kennel a path led through some brushy woods to the sagging caretaker’s cottage where Hammond lived. When he’d first moved down he had bought himself new black suits with her money and had stayed in the main house, which had been scandalous to the town, to Boston, to everyone. And one night, bent over his supper plate like a snake, he’d told her it wasn’t right, him staying in the house like that, so he’d moved to the cottage. It might have been a fine place to live if he’d made any effort over it. She never went there, save to wake him up if he’d gotten too drunk the night before, and then she would only bang on the door. She would not enter. She’d gone inside once and found him lying on a filthy sofa, his legs up on the board he used for a table, dirty shirts and linen hanging on every piece of furniture and dirty pans and plates covering the kitchen table. The roof was low, the room was dark. It was disgusting. He took better care of the kennels than of his own living quarters, and that was a good thing—if he hadn’t she would have dismissed him on the spot.
She thought of New York, of the hotel room. Maybe that was when he’d started to hate her, maybe—but what did it matter. At some point he’d gone cold to her, hating himself as he always had, she guessed, but taking it out on her.
At the foot of the rain-enshrouded gold dome of the Statehouse she turned right and, a few steps further on, paused at a low doorway marked “Ephraim Cox, Esquire”.
She hugged herself, feeling sick, thinking of when she’d met Hammond in Hank’s bar, of how hard he’d worked in the beginning—sitting in the kitchen late at night mending socks or tending to a sick dog; carrying bags to the carriage for her as she prepared to leave for New York; even taking Harriet and, later, Icarus—a pup named for the same aviatrix, who had died in a crash—through routines as Isabel had sat on a stool, watching like a judge. She’d taken him to Westminster with her twice. But not this year. She remembered dreadful Von Eckstein, like a cold pudding, looking at her and asking after the lovely young man who’d been such a help to her in previous years. Just the slightest emphasis on “man.”
She thought of Hammond’s narrow face expanded in a smile
, his lanky arm extended, holding a leash, and Icarus trotting behind, stiff and proud. She knew he was stealing from her, he’d sold off some of her father’s antique silver. When she’d asked him he’d fidgeted and lied and stormed out, returning with her pipe, his eyes mocking, telling her the smoke was making her paranoid. She’d tried to throw her fork at him and he’d laughed at her, his face breaking into a thousand derisive shards. She’d taken the pipe, too sick not to.
She entered Mr. Cox’s office. A fire sputtered in the fireplace, spreading brassy flashes where its light caught doorknob or plaque, polished wood or the glass of a lamp. Over the mantelpiece a swirling, dark painting of a ship at sea hung in an ornate gold frame. Behind a dark wood desk with drawers and cubbyholes like ramparts a gaunt man with a strand of blonde hair combed mercilessly across the top of his head hunched over the light of a lamp, entering tiny black ink numbers into a ledger. At the sound of the door closing he looked up, squinted, and cleared his throat.
“Good evening, Miss South,” he said, standing up and smoothing his jacket against his hips with long fingers.
“Good evening, Mr. Edwards,” Isabel said, leaning her umbrella in the stand next to the door. She held a soiled blue bandanna to her mouth with a pudgy calloused hand. Her oversized, muddy boots sank into the blue Oriental carpet as she approached the desk.
Edwards smoothed his strand into place. “I know Mr. Cox is expecting you, if you’ll wait here one moment,” he said, nodding quickly.
“Fine,” Isabel answered. Her voice was deep and breathy, as if she were about to cough.
Edwards nodded and knocked softly with one knuckle on a thick door, to the right of which the banister of a white staircase curled on top of itself in a smooth, lustrous circle. At an acknowledgment audible only to himself Edwards opened the door a few inches and spoke quietly, adjusting his jacket sleeves.
“Please,” he said, turning, holding the door open expansively, his eyes closed as if he were divining a distant, beautiful note.
As Isabel passed him she pushed her hat back and glanced up, meeting the eyes he always, she knew, opened at such close range. He blushed and bowed his head slightly in a half-nod that ended with his chin down and his eyebrows raised, his eyes closed again.
“Don’t you want to take my coat?” she asked, looking at the spot where his white collar pressed into the red skin of his neck.
His eyes fluttered open. “Why of course—I am so sorry, Miss—”
“Nevermind,” she said, turning away, flicking a hand.
“It has not been your habit—ever—to—” he stammered.
“Thank you, Edwards,” a wide man with gray skin and green eyes said, coming around his leather-topped desk to shake Isabel’s hand. His black suit was of fine wool, his shirt of delicate, pressed cotton, his layered cuffs sealed with gold cufflinks.
Edwards withdrew, pulling the door shut silently but for the fat click of the latch falling into place.
“Good evening, Miss South,” Mr. Cox said, ushering her to a squat chair padded with dark red leather.
“Good evening,” Isabel answered, as if admitting something.
“Tell me how the house is,” Cox said, his back stiffly upright, his hands folded together on his desk. “Have you had a chance to refurbish the caretaker’s cottage yet?” The odor of stale clothing, farm mud, and tobacco smoke spread around him.
“No,” Isabel answered, her eyes fixed on a point halfway between her chair and the desk.
“I see. Are the dogs happy in the kennel?”
At this her eyes flicked up to his for an instant, directly resuming their midpoint.
“Yes, very much so,” she said.
“And you took Harriet to Westminster this year?”
“No,” Isabel mumbled behind the blue bandanna. “Icarus, her pup. But that awful Von Eckstein won again. It’s a wonder they let Germans in, and I don’t care if he was born here. I am beginning to think they rig the show.” She remembered with a sick feeling why she had come. It was amazing how even thoughts that nagged and worried her through morning, afternoon, and restless night for days on end, put aside for only a moment, could re-emerge in the coil and twist of her brain with the shock of fresh bad news.
“The competition is always excellent,” Cox said.
“Be that as it may,” Isabel said. She unbuttoned the top button of her coat, slid her hand into the inside breast pocket, and pulled out a sheaf of folded papers, some crisp with age, others dirty and soggy. “I wish to change my will,” she said, as evenly as she could, leaning forward over her thick middle to drop the papers on the desk.
“I see,” Cox said, leaning back, squinting, one finger pushing thoughtfully at the plump gray skin of his cheek.
“That’s the old will and my notes for a new one,” Isabel said, nodding at the pile.
With a gentle tug Cox separated the new papers from the old. He spread the damp pages, scrawled all over with a slanting, unsteady hand, on the desk before him. Entire paragraphs were crossed out; arrows led from ink blotch to crossed-out sentence to vague square and line. In the center of the top page, circled twice, were the words “Nothing to ANYBODY and scatter my ashes at Westminster.”
Cox glanced from the paper to his client and back again. “You and Mr. Hammond have argued again,” he said.
Isabel shook her head, not looking up. She rubbed her boots together. She felt suddenly ill and swallowed dryly. It is the powders, of course, she told herself. The gritty, chalky powders. She had nothing to be afraid of. What would Hammond do? She swallowed again.
Cox sighed. “Have you and Mr. Hammond discussed this?”
She shook her head, peering out from under her wide canvas hat, biting her lip against the nausea.
“Please,” Cox said. “Whatever it is you are angry about, I am quite sure—”
“I am not angry,” Isabel said, her voice dipping into a hollow, shaded register.
Cox rubbed his forefinger in a thoughtful downward motion from alongside his nose to his chin. “Yes, of course,” he mumbled, clearing his throat. “However, may I remind you that there have been occasions in the past when you and Mr. Hammond have—yes—fallen into disagreements, and that, indeed, these have not prevented Mr. Hammond from remaining an excellent—”
“Mr. Cox,” Isabel interrupted, her eyes raised to the window beyond his left eye. “May I not leave my property to whomever I choose?”
He saw in the dim light a strained face, heavily lined about the eyes. “Of course, Miss South,” he said. “However, I am obligated to point out that nothing—if you leave no instructions, your property will pass, of course, to your siblings.”
Isabel’s gray level eyes flashed to Cox’s face and held there; she touched the bandanna to her lips. “Then I shall leave it to the dogs,” she said.
Cox circled back to his chair and lowered himself into it.
“Perhaps I could speak to Mr.—”
“Yes, I shall leave it to the dogs, Mr. Cox,” Isabel said, her flashing eyes lowered to the carpet, her jaw and pale neck quivering with the effort of dry swallowing.
“I would urge you to consider this,” Cox said.
“I have. Draw up the papers, please.”
“Miss South, I cannot—” Cox began, steeling his voice.
“Please,” she interrupted, quietly. She stood up and smoothed her coat. Her legs trembled. She thought to tell Cox the rest—the fear and illness and Hammonds’ foul intentions. But Cox of course would dismiss her story as melodramatic and perhaps insane, whereupon he might even call Hammond. It was hard to be afraid alone. Very hard.
Cox leaned back in his chair, studying her.
“I will come back next week to sign the will, if that is convenient.”
Cox nodded, mute, belatedly getting to his feet as she reached for the door handle.
“Don’t bother,” she said, pulling the door open.
He flipped the corner of one of the damp sheets of paper with his lef
t index finger.
She has been angry before, he thought. Maybe not like this. She looked worse than ever—squatter, filthier, horribly pale, and with that disgusting hair on her upper lip. She was upset and wasn’t thinking properly, of course. He slid open the bottom right drawer of his desk and dropped the papers into it. Perhaps she would get caught up in her dogs, in renovating the caretaker’s cottage. Hammond would be helpful with that. Then she would reconsider this foolishness.
“Edwards,” he called. “Would you bring me tea, please.”
Edwards appeared, smoothing, touching, re-arranging his twist of hair, nodding. “Right away, Mr. Cox,” he said.
The next morning was gray as eternity and wet-cold that made Isabel’s bones ache and her feet swell but she couldn’t stop sweating. She never could stop sweating. She woke up early because of it and lay in bed under a quilt and three blankets, chilled and sweaty, watching the mist outside the window lighten as if from within. It rained for a while, the drops like grapeshot against the window. She pulled the blankets up to her nose. She didn’t think she could get out of bed. Alone on a hill, pelted with rain. Mud thickening in the drive and souring the brown lawn, dead these many months since summer.
The fire in her room had burned out. The windows rattled. The house took the brunt of cold spring winds in the front; Hammond was supposed to keep fires going in her room, in the parlor, and in the kitchen stove. She could work, too, and she did, but some things he was paid to do so he did them whether he’d grown to hate her or not. When had—but she had promised herself she would stop trying to figure that out. It didn’t matter. Perhaps his malice had really begun in acceptance, in talking, in listening to her talk of her father. Hammond had never said much about himself and now she couldn’t remember much about his life. But she’d felt she knew him well, that they were intimate. She tried to remember: His people were from Boston, from the slums of the West End, and he hadn’t talked to them in years—but how would she know if that were true? Had he hated her and lied to her the whole time?
THE GHOST DETECTIVE: Boston Page 18
