Murder Ink

by Betty Hechtman

  ‘It’s Ed,’ I said, getting up to press the button to unlock the downstairs door for him.

  Ed was just coming up to the third-floor landing as I opened the door. He was dressed in the usual track pants and a windbreaker, but his demeanor was different. He was all animated and held out a pile of papers. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be on the website again.’ He paused in the entrance hall and he glanced into the living room. His gaze went right to Ben holding his glass of wine and on to the plate of food and back to me. ‘Wine, food, looks pretty cozy. Am I interrupting something?’

  He stared at Ben. ‘You look different. You’re smiling,’ he said in an accusatory tone. ‘Are you trying to be teacher’s pet?’

  I almost laughed. Ed sounded jealous that Ben might be getting secret extra writing help. ‘You’re the one getting the extra help,’ I reminded him, pointing at the pile of pages. ‘Ben was visiting his sister and she sent him up with a plate of leftovers.’

  Ed sniffed the air. ‘Looks tasty,’ he said, taking a seat to the side of the couch. I saw him looking at Ben’s wine and I offered him a glass with the same qualifier that I used it for cooking.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, seeming unconcerned about the quality. I left them and went in the back to get him his drink. I had to search for another wine glass. I really needed to be more prepared for company.

  He’d taken the glass and was already sipping it before I’d even sat down. This time I avoided the middle and sat on the far side from him.

  ‘So if he’s not getting extra writing help, why’s he here?’ Ed said to me. ‘He could have just given you the plate of food. It is Saturday night. Maybe there’s a little romance in the air between you two, huh?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said quickly. ‘Actually, Ben and I were discussing some weird stuff that’s been going on with me.’

  ‘Kinky weird stuff,’ Ed said, his eyes getting brighter.

  ‘Hardly. Do you know the movie called Gaslight?’

  ‘The old black-and-white film with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, sure,’ he said with a shrug.

  I told him about the changing DVD and the other two happenings. ‘Tizzy thought that someone was trying to gaslight me and Ben was trying to help me figure how someone could have gotten in here and switched the DVD.’

  ‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’ he said, sounding hurt. ‘I’m good at figuring things out. You forget, I’m a maintenance engineer at the university and deal with bizarre situations all the time.’

  ‘It’s not too late,’ I said.

  He asked for more details about the TV and I told him the channel had switched back and forth and the volume changed. ‘Tizzy was here when it happened the second time,’ I said.

  ‘Tizzy was here watching TV with you?’ he said almost pouting.

  ‘It was the other night after the group outing. She forgot to record a program and was going to miss it. She told you about it, but you said you had to get home.’ I couldn’t believe the fuss he was making.

  ‘Oh, OK,’ he said. He got up and looked around the living room and then went to the window. ‘I think I have an answer,’ he said, and then asked for the remote. He did some fiddling with it and then started to laugh.

  I got up to see what was going on. I followed his gaze out the window and across the street. I could see the big-screen TV suddenly change stations. The guy watching it jumped and then looked around. ‘There’s your demon,’ he said. Ed laughed again and he used my remote again. The channel changed and the guy got up and seemed to be examining the set. I knew exactly how he felt. ‘I told you I’m good at figuring out stuff.’

  ‘You mean it was that guy?’ I peered closer. ‘But he did it by accident, right?’

  Ed looked across the street and thought about it. ‘Naw, I think it was deliberate. You have stand in the window and aim the remote just right.’

  ‘But I don’t know him. Why would he want to bother me?’

  By now Ben had joined us, looking out the window. ‘Maybe it wasn’t him.’ He pointed at the apartment next to them. The windows were dark.

  ‘That flat is for lease,’ I said, remembering I’d seen the sign in front of the building.

  Ben and I looked at each other. ‘F. Poppins strikes again,’ he said.

  ‘F. Poppins?’ Ed asked. To make sure he didn’t feel left out, I told him about the real estate agent and the story of who had looked at the apartment across the hall from me.

  I looked toward the windows. ‘You know, it could have just been the TV set malfunctioning,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ Ed said with a shrug. ‘But if you don’t mind, can we get down to going over my work? I’m hoping I can be a regular on the fictional dating show website. If I get enough followers, I’ll even get paid.’ He handed me the pages.

  ‘Do you want Ben to read them out loud?’ I asked, biting my lip so not to smile.

  ‘No,’ Ed said. ‘I’m not looking for any of your suggested word changes.’ He gave us both a look that made it clear of what he thought of the group’s effort to get him to tone down his word choices. ‘They like it just the way I write it. No hiding behind some romance novel terms like his “maleness.” When Callan gets Cleopatra in their version of the Getting to Know You Suite, I’m very clear that he’s talking about his—’

  ‘We get the picture,’ Ben interrupted, and then gave me a wink. I almost thought I’d imagined it. Was Ben of the flat voice and expressionless face actually being playful?

  ‘OK, then. I just want you to make sure all the commas are in the right place,’ Ed said.

  I read the pages while the two men sat looking at each other. Then one of them brought up the last Bears game and all the awkwardness went away. Chicago people were true sports fans. They loved their teams win or lose. I handed the sheets back to Ed with a few grammatical corrections. I hoped I wasn’t blushing. All I could say was Callan and Cleopatra had quite a session, using every inch of the Let’s Do It Suite.

  Ed took the sheets back and glanced over them quickly. He didn’t seem to have any issue with the corrections I’d made and thanked me. ‘I’ll make you proud,’ he said, getting up. ‘I guess being on the website makes me your star pupil.’ He sounded like he was gloating. I started to get up to walk him to the door. ‘I can let myself out. Then you two can get back to whatever you weren’t doing,’ he said with a chuckle.

  Ben watched the door close and gave it a minute for Ed to be on his way down the stairs. ‘I think the dynamic of the group just changed. Star student – in his own mind,’ he said, shaking his head. He looked at the almost empty plate. ‘I guess my work is done. I can take a report back to Sara that you liked the food. Any comment you want to add?’

  ‘You can tell her it was great, and I’ll get the plate back to her tomorrow.’ I waited for him to stand up, but he didn’t seem to be making a move, so I did. He followed suit and looked around the room again.

  ‘I know you said you’re back to thinking you imagined the photographs and the TV could have been something in the set, but you know there might be something in that gaslighting business.’ He seemed thoughtful. ‘Maybe you should contact that cop Tizzy flagged down and tell him about F. Poppins.’

  ‘Really? And tell him what? That a mystery person might have come into my place so they could pull what was basically a prank.’

  ‘What about if I talked to him cop to cop?’ Ben said. Then he thought about what he’d said. ‘You’re right.’ It seemed to be taking him a long time to take the few steps to the front door. ‘Just make sure you keep that balcony door locked.’

  When we got to the door, Ben smiled. ‘I don’t remember, did you do the shoulder squeeze and I did the arm squeeze?’

  There was a comedy of errors as we tried to reenact our goodbye move from the night before. When he left, I thought my evening was over, but there was more company to come. And there would be a surprise revelation about the third incident.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

>   Sara barely waited until Ben left for home before texting me that Mikey was asleep and Quentin was glued to the TV and was I up for some company. I was sure that a big part of her motivation was to find how things were going between Ben and me. I knew she was going to be disappointed, but told her to come up anyway.

  ‘So, tell me everything,’ Sara said, as she walked in. ‘In fact, tell me anything that has nothing to do with Engineer Billy and his train crew. You might notice that Mikey has a thing for trains. Quentin just wants to watch sports and I need some adult conversation.’ She was dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt. Her brown hair was pulled into a ponytail and there might have been a rogue piece of macaroni caught between the strands.

  I hadn’t even had time to clear up before she arrived. She came into the living room and her gaze went right to the two empty wine glasses on the coffee table.

  ‘You drank wine with Ben,’ she said, sounding surprised and excited. Before she could build it into something, I told her about Ed’s visit.

  ‘Oh, I thought you two were alone.’ Her disappointment was obvious, and I figured I better clue her in on the actual situation between her brother and me.

  ‘First of all, there is no need for Ben and me to be alone. We talked over your efforts to push us together yesterday and Ben was very clear he’s off limits when it comes to a relationship, which by the way is fine with me. I’m in pretty much the same place. We’re fine with being friends, and he’s been helping me solve the mystery of the switching DVD,’ I said in a light tone.

  Her eyes went to the empty wine glasses again. ‘Did they drink it all?’ she asked.

  ‘Nope, you want a glass?’ I was already grabbing the empties when she nodded. I let her sit and enjoy the peace with being off mom duty while I took everything back to the kitchen. I washed up one of the glasses and returned with it filled with the dark red liquid.

  ‘You know that friends thing never works,’ she said, as she accepted the glass. She took a generous sip.

  ‘Except if you’re both on the same page – and we are.’

  She let out a disbelieving sigh and then shrugged it off. ‘You said you figured out something about that DVD.’

  It was embarrassing, but I told her the whole story about the unlocked balcony door and what I’d found out about the mystery person who’d looked at the apartment across the hall. ‘That person could have come into my place and switched them. I wish I could have gotten a description of them.’

  ‘If only we hadn’t gone to the park and I’d been a nosy neighbor, I might have gotten a peek at the person.’ I didn’t say anything, but I thought she had the nosy neighbor thing down.

  She knew Ed was in the writing group and wanted to know why he’d come over.

  ‘Sorry I asked,’ Sara said, making a face when I got finished telling her about Callan and Cleopatra’s adventure in the private suite being posted to a website.

  ‘But he did serve a useful purpose,’ I said. ‘He figured out what could have made my TV seem possessed.’

  She looked puzzled and I realized the only weird happening she knew about was the DVD. I went through the whole thing with her including the concept of gaslighting and the movie. ‘But I think it’s over with. You know how things come in threes?’ The rule of three was really more of a superstition thing, but it felt like it was true.

  ‘Wow, I sure feel out of the loop. There were three incidents? What’s the third one?’

  ‘That one might have actually been an accident.’ I told her about the package arriving with a sweater that I was sure I didn’t order. ‘I had put it in my wish list. Maybe the store’s app somehow opened on its own and I hit something and placed the order by mistake.’

  Sara was an expert at buying things on her phone. It was easier than trying to navigate an actual store with a toddler. She asked for my phone and we checked the app. ‘It might have opened on its own, but I don’t see how you could have just hit something by mistake and ordered it. You would have had to at least put in your CVS code,’ she said shaking her head. ‘Someone must have used your phone.’

  I was about to say impossible when a vision of the Bellingham bar came into my mind’s eye. The bartender had used the patron’s phone to order a ride for her. I thought back to when Luke had been working. I’d laid my phone on the bar and left it there when I went to the powder room. I’d left my credit card with the bill at the same time.

  ‘What’s with you?’ Sara asked. ‘You have the strangest look on your face. As if you’d just found the tooth fairy wasn’t real.

  ‘Or maybe that Prince Charming turned out to be a toad.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  I could always tell when it was Sunday. There was a special quietness. The apartment buildings on either side of the street made a canyon that funneled the noise from the street up and when any big trucks rumbled by, it seemed like they were driving in my living room. But on Sunday, there were none. Instead I heard church bells when I went to the small grocery shop around the corner to pick up the Sunday paper. I knew it made me seem like a dinosaur, but I liked the print edition.

  When I got home, I put some coffee on to brew – I always drank French roast on Sunday – and I took a waffle out of the freezer. I made a batch of them from scratch the week before and then froze them to be used as needed.

  When I took my breakfast into the dining room, a beam of sunlight had managed to squeeze between the brick wall of the next building and mine, bathing the table in warm light. It was the perfect Sunday morning, but I couldn’t enjoy it.

  All I could think about was Luke. I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that if he was behind the efforts to make me think I was losing touch with reality, he’d done it to Rachel, too.

  Rachel had been so in love with him and trusted him. It made me look at everything in a new way. The teachers had said Rachel changed after the summer off. He must have spent the whole time playing mind games with her. He could have easily arranged for packages she didn’t remember ordering and texts that she didn’t remember sending.

  When he told me Rachel could have used a friend, it was just a cover. Having a friend was probably the last thing he would have wanted for her. A friend would have seen what he was doing.

  There had to be a dark side to him behind that easy-going charm. He was like the Charles Boyer character only worse, because Luke was real, not some character in a movie. What was his goal? Was it to make her feel so lost that there seemed no way out?

  Did he already have someone on the side? I had an upsetting thought: what if it was Sally? She worked at the hotel and could know Luke. Maybe she and Luke were just waiting until everything was settled and then they’d come out as a couple. Oh, no, poor Evan if that was true. The big question was what could I do about it? Go to the police? I thought of the expression on the cop’s face when Tizzy was telling him about the DVD and my TV. Unless I had some kind of proof, I’d seem like a nut case with a vivid imagination. And what kind of proof could there even be? It was hopeless. The best thing to do was to let it go.

  I looked down at my plate. I’d eaten the waffle and drunk the coffee without even noticing. The newspaper was still folded on the table. It would have to wait until later. For now I had to get back to work and finish the memory book.

  I opened up the file with the celebration of life book and started to go through it, looking at every word and image. I read the copy, making a correction here or there and rewriting an occasional sentence. I was tense the whole time. I had to please Camille Parker. Then I sighed to myself. Even if it pleased Camille Parker, she’d never say it. As I read it over again, I decided that the only part she would really care about was the section I’d made up about the shower she and her daughters had put on for Rachel. It was probably fine the way it was, but as extra insurance I added that the event had been a gift from the heart and that all the guests raved about Mrs Parker’s skill at entertaining. I made sure that I included a photograph showing Camille in
her best light.

  I went over the piece about Mr Parker taking Rachel to work with him. It seemed to me to be perfect, though that alone was probably going to stir up Camille’s ire. Then I looked at the two stories Luke had provided.

  I suddenly saw their trip to Door County in a different way. They’d been away from it all. Away from everyone. He could have used the time to begin the whole process of confusing her. I wondered if I should say something to Camille about Luke. No. Assuming she even believed me, the last thing she wanted was any kind of scandal.

  I read the whole thing over numerous times until the words ceased to make sense anymore. Then I printed up the pages and put them in a plastic binder. I made a title sheet with Rachel’s name and dates of her birth and death, along with some flourishes before sliding it into the plastic sleeve on the cover. I also copied everything on to a thumb drive. The final thing was to pack it in my blue leather messenger bag I used as a briefcase. And I was done.

  I always had a bittersweet feeling when I finished a project, but I was even more emotional and confused about this one.

  When I finally looked up from the computer it was long past sunset. Rocky had come into the room unnoticed and was sitting in my reading chair. It was time to think about dinner for both of us. He got some pinky-looking fish, and it was scrambled eggs, toast and a sliced orange for me. I started to read the paper, but I was too tense. I kept thinking of all I had to do the next day. The plan was to meet Camille Parker first. I knew that once that was over with, I could relax and go to the gym to collect whatever additional information I needed and take the last class. If all went well, I was treating myself to a nice lunch. It was only when I was getting ready for bed that I realized I hadn’t heard anything from Evan. I wondered what that meant.