The Bluest Blood

by Gillian Roberts

  While Mackenzie paused to find a piece of paper and write something on it, I snagged a piece of smoked salmon.

  “This one’s an English teacher’s dream,” he said. “A guy goes into a bank off Broad Street and hands the teller a note that reads like this.” He handed me the piece of paper.

  This is stikup. Give me yer muny kwik or I shut you with my gun.

  “So,” Mackenzie continued, “the teller figures this isn’t exactly a genius in front of him, and he says no problem, he’ll hand over the money, except that the robber has to sign for it because that’s the bank’s policy on robberies.”

  “And he did?”

  Mackenzie nodded. “Signed his name and address, took the money, and was arrested maybe an hour later.”

  “The moral is, work on your spelling.”

  Perhaps because she is a fine speller, Mackenzie said, “I just remembered—your mother called.”

  “Why?”

  “Does she need a reason? The rates drop, and the woman phones. This time, she wondered if you’d seen something on the news about a woman up here who was killed by her fiancé. She’d like you to call her, too.”

  I nodded.

  “Any kind of tension between the two of you?”

  I shrugged. “Not really. You know how my mother is.”

  “She said I should ask whether you were thinking it over. What’s it? Are you?”

  My mother was out of her mind, playing games, laying clues in front of a homicide detective. His work might be tedious, but he was good at it.

  I don’t as a rule approve of lying, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth. Partly, I feared, because my mother had touched a sore spot. There were indeed lots of things I didn’t know about the man I lived with, beginning with his first name, as she’d pointed out. “You know how they are about my living in the city,” I muttered. “There’s a condo near them she wants me to buy.”

  The trouble with trusting one another is that it makes it too easy to lie.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “They think the solution is for you to move to Florida, is that it?”

  And that’s the trouble with intelligence. Mackenzie didn’t believe my lie for a second. I liked him for that.

  But I was determined to make the evening work, despite the long-distance doubt my mother had planted. “Think about it,” she’d said, and willingly or not, I had. And kept doing so.

  While it seemed appalling to hire a P.I., it didn’t seem offensive to sleuth on my own. The investigation of each other was a long and honorable tradition called courtship. “So, um, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked, apropos of nothing, after I’d downed a piece of unagi. I knew stories about scads of Mackenzies, swamps-full, but it suddenly seemed suspicious that C. K. had never produced a precise head count. Genealogical charts, birth and marriage stats. Photos, Social Security numbers.

  “Depends whether you include Alicia and Junior Bear, the second cousins once removed who came to us when their folks went to work down in Guatemala and stayed seven years, or Carl Henry, after his folks died in a small-plane crash,” he said. “Or the foster boy, Micah. He was with us four-five years. Or Sally Marie, my mother’s youngest sister—she’s nearer our ages than Mom’s, and she moved in along with Grandma after Grandpa died. Then again, you wouldn’t count her. She’s my aunt.”

  His family was a mob scene in a Hollywood spectacular without the togas and horses. People swirling, appearing, disappearing. “How did you all find room in one house?” I asked.

  “You-all? You tryin’ to talk Southern now?”

  “I’m talking all, I’m talking hordes.” Maybe he’d grown up in a plantation mansion, a Tara.

  “Bunk beds, four to a room. Dorm style, any which way. Depending on the current population, people slept on roll-aways in the dining room, and on the dining room table as needed. On the couch, on the porch swing. Floor, two chairs. Whatever worked. It wasn’t a flophouse or a shanty, but it wasn’t Architectural Digest, either.” He grinned. “We managed. Somebody needed space, we found it. My mother is—” I watched him search for the right word, “—a most resilient woman.”

  My mother seemed his mother’s shadow self, so unresiliently nervous about possibility, she wanted to hire a detective to control my fate. “But who were all of you? Aside from the cousins and wards and those who wandered through.”

  “Why the sudden interest?”

  “It’s not sudden. I get your stories mixed up, and then I’m not sure I know all that much about you.” At least some of that was true.

  “Don’ think of myself as a secretive type,” he murmured.

  “Nor do I. So who is there, as in siblings?”

  He ticked off names, looking mildly bemused. “Lessee…my brothers Porter, Nick, Madison, and Noah—and my sisters Phoebe, Bunny, and Lutie.”

  “There were eight of you,” I said. Had I known that? “Not counting the floaters.”

  “You look surprised. Surely I’ve provided this data before.”

  “Have you? In any case, it is an awesome amount. Just imagine my mother with all those people to fuss over.”

  “Numbers of that magnitude dilute fussin’ till you can’t hardly recognize it.”

  “Nice names they all have,” I said, even though I thought Bunny belonged in the nickname category, a bit too precious should she want to be the first female president of the U.S., say. “Why’d they reduce you to initials?”

  He smiled and shrugged.

  “What do they call you when you’re all at the homestead together?”

  He looked around, then leaned over the small table, so close I was tempted to kiss him—but then I’d miss the answer. At long last. “They call me C. K.,” he whispered. “Don’t tell.” He sat back, chewed sushi, drank sake, then smiled again. “Have we finished that odd drill?”

  I sighed and nodded.

  “Then are you ready to tell me what your mother really wants? Surely it wasn’t an accounting of who all slept at the Mackenzies’.”

  What the hell. “It’s too ridiculous. The niece of a lady in her complex almost married a rotter, so she’s into hiring a detective to ferret out your secrets.”

  “My secrets? Ah—the murdered woman in the news. Or maybe she means those bodies I stashed in the basement. Tell her it was a bad day. They got on my nerves. It won’t happen again if you don’t annoy me.”

  “That’s why I didn’t want to tell. It’s mortifying. Besides, you don’t have secrets.”

  He extracted his charge card from his wallet. “Didn’t say that.” His voice was soft, lulling. “Everybody has secrets. And isn’t that nice, too. Keeps the mystery alive.”

  “You mean your name?”

  “That, too,” he said.

  I found his response disquieting. I like mysteries, but not unsolved ones, so I pestered and pouted and finally, after we’d both made our way home in our separate cars, and after we were back up in the loft and I continued to dither, he put his index finger up in mock scholarly-lecturer fashion.

  “I have a relevant tale to tell,” he said. “Of the literary variety. You know the sad tale of Peter Schlemiel?”

  “You’re making him up the way my father used to make up homilies about kids who’d met with disaster because they didn’t look both ways before crossing.”

  “Amanda, Peter Schlemiel is an ancient fable, and the subject of Adelbert von Chamisso’s most famous work. Those Northern schools...”

  I hate it when he takes to my field and bests me at it. I had never heard of either Peter Schlemiel or Adelbert von Chamisso. And neither, I was willing to bet, had most normal people.

  “Peter Schlemiel sold his shadow,” Mackenzie said. “A useless thing, we’d say—to a mysterious stranger.”

  “The Devil?”

  Mackenzie shrugged. “If you like. In return for this easy trade, he got never-ending riches. But the thing is, without his shadow, he frightened everyone, so they all rejected him and he c
ouldn’t find friendship or love.”

  “And the point is?”

  “We need our dark sides, our shadow selves. Without that, we’re two-dimensional freaks. Inhuman.”

  “And you?” I asked. “What is your shadow side?”

  He ran his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair, looked worried, and paced. “Hell,” he finally said, “you’d find out, so it might as well be now.”

  The air around us hissed my mother’s warnings—see? See?

  “In fifth grade, I shoplifted three packs of baseball cards. And got caught. My record was sealed because of my age, but my parents considered me a criminal and kept my butt on the line for a long while.” He winked a river-blue eye. “And now you know.”

  I did. I knew this man even if I didn’t have all his stats, and I knew him to be good. The rest was details.

  My mother should have had lots more children, the way C. K.’s mother had, to divvy up the worrying and hovering until they reached a normal level for each offspring. Or better still, to have had—and still have—a life of her own aside from the totally domesticated, other-centered one she led. Problem is that nothing much ever happened to her, so she invented demons—“What if her boyfriend turns out to be a mass murderer, hmm?”—then shooed them away in order to generate excitement.

  I wouldn’t be as foolish as my mother. I’d enjoy what I had, completely. All was well, and it was a good evening in a good world.

  This is what’s meant by “Ignorance is bliss.”

  Seven

  At a ridiculously early hour we arose, Mackenzie to leave for the Midwest, I to see him off. The sun wasn’t yet up, but TV never sleeps, so I clicked it on for a forecast, though I couldn’t say why. No predictions except news of the imminent Apocalypse would change the miserable days ahead. Mackenzie would leave town, the kids would protest, Havermeyer would have small strokes, and tomorrow’s dawn would bring prospective applicants to stare at me as I taught. Nonetheless, I puttered about, listening for the jolly nonsense spiel of the weatherman while I made coffee.

  Meantime, I worked myself into a Lovers Bid Farewell! mood. I saw the letters in white on a black backdrop in a silent film. My man was flying off while I waved my hankie and wept, discreetly.

  I enjoyed wallowing in the image, although my socks and fuzzy bedroom slippers, the aroma of the coffee, Mackenzie’s absentminded whistle-and-hum as he tossed toiletries into his suitcase, the chatter of the TV, and the tangle of my morning hair made it a difficult fantasy to sustain. We needed a train platform, steam billowing, possibly a fine rain as well.

  Mackenzie’s biggest fan did not require props. Macavity the cat knew something was different about the morning routine, and to an archconservative feline, different means bad. Mackenzie sat down to drink coffee and Macavity plunked himself on the chair next to him. Over the oak table’s surface, the cat stared without blinking at his now-suspicious idol.

  “If looks could kill,” Mackenzie said. “‘Pussycat sits on a chair/Implacably with acid stare….’”

  “Tell me you made that up,” I said. “Please.”

  “Can’t. It’s from a poem by Edward Horn. Seemed appropriate.”

  By a remarkable act of will, I said nothing. Not about that and not about the idea that if he were going to spout poetry before dawn, it should be about my eyes, not a cat’s. But smart-ass reactions to literary show-offs did not fit the goodbye-at-the-railroad-station scenario. I went to brush my hair. Which is what I was doing when Mackenzie kissed the tip of my nose and said he had to get moving. I had offered to drive him to the airport, but he wanted his car there. It wasn’t a farewell fraught with glamour, waving goodbye at an elevator door. And in the background, the weatherman admitted this wasn’t going to be the best of all possible days, which I already knew without studying meteorology.

  It was too early to go to school, but too late to go back to bed. So while the news team recited traffic reports, I made much of washing our coffee cups and deciding what I would have for my solitary dinner, and then I gave up and began dressing. Given that pleasant yesterday had apparently been a tease, and March was reverting to the “winds doth blow” mode, I decided on a light blue turtleneck under my blazer. Almost the color of Mackenzie’s eyes. When he was gone, I felt at loose ends and slightly deserted, which was ridiculous, but true. I didn’t like the sensation of being incomplete when by myself. Not at all. Living with someone was getting to me, and not in altogether favorable ways.

  My mind once again circled the pros and cons of cohabitation, a subject that deserved a better hour and fully activated brain cells. On about my third mental trip around the issue, I realized that the anchor’s voice had dropped into a solemnly alarmed register, the timbre that signals a Big Story. And Big Stories are always bad news.

  “There’s been a tragic end to a conflict we’ve been monitoring.” His co-anchor erased her smile and nodded gravely. “Just yesterday,” he continued, “this station was preparing a special in-depth Roundtable Report—”

  Tragic. Roundtable. Yesterday. A hammer banged my ear. From inside.

  “—to be broadcast Saturday as part of our ongoing—”

  I took several deep breaths. That did nothing except produce hyperventilation.

  “This morning, police are left wondering whether a conflict over freedom of speech may have escalated all the way to homicide.”

  I had been edging toward the set while he spoke. Now I sat down on the sofa and waited. One of us, one of the people in the greenroom—was dead. Murdered.

  “This is the sight that greeted police late last night.” The clip showed a flaming bundle, the twin of the effigy outside Glamorgan. The anchor’s voice rode over the image. “…at first seemed another ‘guerrilla bonfire’ as the Moral Ecologists call these staged events, even while disclaiming personal responsibility for…”

  They’d killed this time, crossed the line and murdered someone. It had seemed inevitable the night of the Roederers’ party, and yet now, it seemed inconceivable that anyone would kill over the right to speak freely.

  “But what Radnor Township police found late last evening was not an effigy but a body—”

  Radnor, where the Roederers lived? They killed one of the Roederers? Killed to punish them for perceived immorality?

  Neddy. I thought of the Trashman effigy the night of the party, of the raging hatred Harvey Spiers had breathed in the greenroom the day before. The man was like a dog with its fangs in Roederer’s calf. And now, in his throat. I felt ill, fearful that I had unwittingly started a ball rolling toward Neddy Roederer’s murder by involving him in our library’s future, which in turn led to the fund-raiser, which produced the first face-to-face between those two men.

  “—wrapped in layers of cloth in order, police theorize, to resemble the symbolic bodies burned as protests. But this was not symbolic. Inside the wrapper was a human being.” He paused, listening, I suspected, to the voice in his earpiece. Something else had happened. His eyes widened before he resumed his neutral face.

  “Radnor Township police have just now released the identity of the victim,” he said. “He is the Reverend Harvey Spiers, leader of and spokesperson for the Moral Ecologists, the same protest group that has lately…”

  I found myself looking around the room, as if some other presence would validate that I’d misheard. Harvey Spiers?

  Burned as if in effigy? Hoist with his own petard? But why? By whom?

  “Preliminary autopsy results indicate that the victim was dead by strangulation before he was immolated, but at this time, police are unwilling to comment on motives or suspects, nor have any charges been made.”

  “You think the Roederers could have had anything to do with…” I was talking to an enormous but empty room, except for the cat, who apparently had no opinion.

  Besides I didn’t think the Roederers had anything to do with it. They weren’t the type—elegant madcap stranglers?—and they didn’t need to resort to violence. They could
move away if they were uncomfortable. Another gift of wealth.

  “...further details as they are released. And now, in another fire story, but with a more positive note,” the female anchor said, “people are cheering a valiant cat named Scarlett who yesterday returned to a burning building five times, each time to save one of her kittens. At last report, Mama was singed but with a good prognosis, and her kittens were safe and sound.”

  The screen was filled with a shot of a bandaged and seared cat. Heartrending, although the segue had been in the worst taste. But even with burned flesh as the link, this was an “up” sort of story. A demagogue had been strangled, then strung up and burned, but we weren’t to think about it for a second longer.

  I saluted the heroic cat, but I felt bad. Very. Even Harvey Spiers deserved a full moment of reflection. I turned off the set and slumped onto the sofa, still holding my pantyhose.

  Harvey Spiers loomed over me, charred and smoking. I was amazed by his mortality and by the ironic method of his murder, and wondered what it meant to the other people who’d been in the greenroom.

  Could Jake now go back to Canada if he still wanted to?

  Would this protect the Widow Spiers and her funds so that she could more easily spend them on her son and a better life?

  Would Mother Vivien exult in having lost her competitor and threat?

  Without the reverend on his case, would Havermeyer relent about the books, and would that end the demonstrations?

  Would Neddy Roederer let Griffin remain at Philly Prep and restore the grant? Would Jake stay in favor with the family, keep his closest friend?

  Every possibility that had come into my mind was positive. A whole lot of people would be happier because Spiers was dead, and no one would be truly sorrowful.

  Which was the saddest epitaph I could imagine. He’d lived in vain.

  It also meant, no matter how I felt about them or their characters, any of the above could have killed him.