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  All this activity happened before he married a woman named Selena. She and I had dated briefly and intensely one long, hot summer, but she threw me over for Peter. We’d been out to dinner during which we probably exchanged five coherent words.

  “You’ll always be poor,” she said to me, dismissing me.

  Then she married Peter, which stunned us. Yes, he was good-looking, and a lawyer. But he was ginger ale, and Selena saw herself as champagne. And because of my brief, unhappy fling with Selena, Peter often avoided me—or sniped at me. According to Marcie, he harbored suspicions about Selena and me, convinced we still had a thing for each other. There were no grounds for such thinking, of course. Selena looked through me, and I—well, looked beyond her. Yet Peter was afraid of me. That, coupled with what turned out to be a fragile marriage, spitfire quarrels in public, made life rough for him. When she drank, Selena flirted. She also flirted when she was sober, but not so obviously. A beautiful woman who understood men’s weaknesses, she’d even continued flirting with me because it was her way of annoying Peter. It had nothing to do with me. As far as I’m concerned, it was over. I had no feeling for Selena.

  “Join us,” Marcie told him. I wish she hadn’t.

  “Nobody’s laughing at this table.” He was watching Marcie, avoiding me.

  Marcie grinned. “This is business, Peter.” She lowered her voice melodramatically. I laughed out loud, and Peter squinted, waiting for a punch line. “Rick has been hired to investigate Marta Kowalski’s death.”

  For the first time Peter looked at me, a crooked smile that suggested people were crazy to put their trust in a bumpkin such as myself, but he said nothing.

  I closed my laptop, and kept still.

  Vinnie abruptly changed the conversation, drifting onto some school politics he was hot about, and Marcie countered him. The sparks flew. I stood up. “I need to leave.” I waved good-bye. “I’m headed to meet Karen at her aunt’s home.”

  “Why?” From Vinnie.

  “To pick up some papers and to scout around.”

  Everyone stood up, and Peter glanced at his watch. “I’ll walk out with you. I’m already late. Selena’s in the parking lot.”

  We didn’t speak for the few minutes it took us to get outside. Once there, Selena looked startled to see the two of us together, but she flashed a broad smile. She was leaning against her car, bundled up, a knit cap pulled over her forehead. Despite the mild chill in the air, she seemed ready for an Arctic blast.

  “My, my, dear Rick.”

  Peter frowned. “Selena.” He mumbled the name.

  I felt his eyes darting from her to me. Christ, I thought—must every encounter be a test?

  “Well, well, well,” Selena hummed. “If it ain’t Bruce Lee.” A pause. “Or the Karate Kid, revisited.”

  “Hello, Selena,” I smiled back.

  Saying nothing, Peter climbed into the passenger seat, leaning over to open the driver’s door for Selena. She was still standing outside, watching me. Through the glass I could see Peter’s face—rigid, disapproving—curious expressions for such a soft, pliant face. Selena’s head swerved, catching a glimpse of Peter, and she smiled.

  “Looking handsome.” She winked at me, but her voice was too loud, almost strident.

  Peter leaned on the horn.

  “Come on, Selena, for Christ’s sake.”

  Marcie once told me, “They never learned how to get it right—marriage. You can’t get married for all the wrong reasons.”

  I’d thought of my marriage to Liz—wrong, as well, but we never stopped loving each other.

  They drove off, but Peter’s wild gestures suggested another fight. As the car turned, I saw his face—hot, flushed. Selena, as usual, was rigid, but the twist of her head was violent. And something else now, meanness of spirit. This was not the couple I knew last year. They’d been the charmed couple. Zelda and Scott on the Riviera. Dancing the night away at the Farmington Country Club. The cat’s meow couple.

  She wasn’t always that way. When we dated, back before Peter, she was often difficult, but fun. A warm, lovely woman who craved attention. Yes, I found her crispness annoying some of the time, as well as her blatant envy of others, but she made up for it with surprisingly tender moments, witty chatter, irreverent, spirited, and lots of ribald laughter. At times she got lost in doomed silence, heavy as lead, a faraway look clouding her eyes. She’d had breakdowns as an adolescent, she confided one night, bouts of dreadful panic mimicking a cruel mother given to fits of madness. She’d joke about it.

  “They said I wasn’t all there. I’m missing a piece.”

  So I always thought of her that way—a puzzle begging to be completed.

  Then she married the cagiest man we all knew, the zealous law professor who was always talking of the Deal to be made. She couldn’t help herself, she said—she fell in love like a besotted high-school girl. Okay, the ice queen wed Machiavelli Junior. Inevitably they would have found each other. Somehow, though, marriage changed both. They lived on his meager assistant professor’s salary and the scant income from her gift store in town. It obviously wasn’t enough. They were invited to all school parties, but everyone hoped they wouldn’t show up. She’d become louder now, more domineering, and sometimes when I saw her she looked on the verge of tears. At those times I remembered her stories of breakdowns, failed therapy, and madness in the eye corners. She flared up in public. She was cruel to people like shop clerks and waiters. He, in turn, had lost his steam, that fiery upward-I’m-going passion. I gave the marriage six months. If that.

  One time she told Marcie she should have married me. When Marcie told her it was too late, she’d whispered, “We’ll see about that. Rick is my destiny.”

  “Watch out,” Marcie had warned me. “You’re not free of her.”

  “Oh yes I am.”

  Chapter Seven

  Karen met me at her aunt’s house on Forest Road in the Unionville section of Farmington. The front door was wide open despite the chilly air, and she stood facing out, her arms folded over her chest. She looked impatient, though I knew I was prompt. I’m always on time. The good sisters in Saigon taught me that trick. It was one way to survive the bamboo rod against my backside.

  Aunt Marta had lived in a small, drab house, a simple cookie-cutter Cape Cod tucked behind thick overgrown hemlocks with weeping willows smothering the roof. Perhaps the house had been cared for at one time when her husband was alive, but it wore a look of decay now, the gray clapboards faded and chipped, roof tiles slipping, a gone-to-seed front yard blanketed by windblown leaves and stringy, dead grasses. As I walked in, Karen backed up, sank into a wing chair by the front window.

  “I’m selling the house. I don’t want to live here. I hate this house.”

  She looked ready to cry but pulled herself together.

  I looked around. A house lacking personality. Faded rose chintz on the sofa, thin blue polyester drapes, dusty plastic flowers on the glass-top coffee table. Glossy religious icons in plastic frames, one after the other, hanging crookedly on the walls, shriveled palms tucked around them. Everything was neat here, but cheap. I breathed in—a hint of mothballs in the air that reminded me of an old closet suddenly opened—that kind of cloying smell. Marta had not wanted to spend money on furnishings, so she froze her settings in some undefined decade long gone.

  Karen saw me looking around. “I’ve already taken some things out. The few things I want to save. Photo albums, old furniture of my grandparents’. A table I remember. Nothing else I want here. I’m gonna sell it all.”

  She waved her hands again, as though she hoped her gesture would make it all disappear.

  Dressed in brown slacks, a little too tight in the thigh, she had thrown a bulky off-yellow cotton sweater over them. With her long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, she looked self-consciously seasonal. Even her lipstick was a shade
of Halloween orange, an eccentricity that jarred—but compelled you to look.

  Once, walking with Hank Nguyen through the arcade, he’d commented on her window display of her own art. It wasn’t the first time he’d mocked her artwork. “Thomas Kinkaid meets Jean-Michel Basquiet at a potluck supper.”

  She moved from the wing chair to sit on the sofa next to me, so close her sleeve touched me, and I smelled lavender perfume, the kind her aunt wore. Turning to look at her, I saw Marta’s face—the same angular bone structure, the same razor-thin lips, the same wispy blue eyes.

  “Here is the list I promised you.”

  I had asked her for a list of her aunt’s last cleaning jobs, the people whose homes she routinely cleaned. I quickly scanned the list. Karen had written their names in neat script, with phone numbers.

  “Any acquaintances I should talk to?”

  She ignored that. “I copied it from her notebook. She had scaled back her jobs lately—mainly two professors.”

  I saw the two professors’ names, and I saw Marcie and Vinnie’s names. She pointed. “One of her last jobs. There may have been others.” A quick smile. “You—when you called her.”

  “I know.” It was a small list, but a decent place to begin.

  “You asked if I knew folks she had trouble with—like arguments.”

  “And?”

  She shook her head. “Off and on spats with Hattie Cozzins, her old friend. And—that scene with Willie Do. She didn’t like him.”

  I nodded and tucked the list into my pocket.

  I spent the next hour checking out the house, and Karen left me alone, busying herself in the kitchen, rifling through boxes, selecting items she’d carry to her apartment. When I walked into the kitchen, I spotted her idiosyncratic choices: a stained pot holder, Dutch boy-and-girl salt and pepper shakers, a chipped serving dish, a pie tin. The longer she emptied the cabinets, the lighter her spirits became. I heard humming at one point, a top-ten radio hit I vaguely recognized as an old Michael Jackson song. The man in the mirror…She was happy by herself, so I left her alone. Every so often I looked over, said something, but each time she frowned. Obviously I was smashing through some reverie she was enjoying.

  A waste of time, this survey. I discovered nothing unusual. A small cubbyhole desk yielded piles of bills and receipts, but nothing out of the ordinary so far as I could tell. Sadly, Marta threw little out, which could be a good thing for someone looking for clues, but not always. In my laptop I jotted down bank numbers and accounts. I entered names copied from letters, some from out of state. Casual acquaintances she met in Atlantic City and Vegas. A number for the bus company that ran tours to gambling centers.

  What secrets did this woman have?

  I pulled out drawers, ran my fingers across the bottoms, and Karen, entering the living room where the little desk sat, bit her lip. Breathing in loudly, she glared at me as though I were a surprise prowler. Quirky, she obviously had an invisible boundary I was always crossing, something that baffled me. She may have hired me, but she looked unhappy that I was rifling through a dead woman’s life. Then she went back into the kitchen and I heard cupboards opening and closing. A dish broke, and she swore.

  I walked through the basement, the upstairs bedrooms, the attic crawlspace. Nothing out of the ordinary—no secret vices, no hidden cardboard box sealed with duct tape. This was a conventional lady, by all accounts. She paid her bills faithfully and didn’t touch that hundred grand from hubby’s insurance. I found a huge carton of Christmas cards from years past, each year’s arrival bound by elastic bands and each placed back in the original envelopes. She’d saved them all. Hundreds. The words inside were standard and hardly personal—the platitudinous “Have a great Christmas” sentiment. Yet something bothered me, and eventually I went back to check the addresses—every card was from a man. Not one was signed with a woman’s name. Did she know women? Yes, obviously, there was Hattie Cozzins, for one. Her travel companion. But no cards in the pile from Hattie.

  On a side table, pinned between two bald-eagle plaster bookends, were a few old books, two volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed novels, as well as a three-volume History of the World from 1897, bound in faded red leather, an American Bible Tract, circa 1850, with broken spine. Slips of paper marked pages. A book on Scripture that contained a pull-out chart at the back, tracing the history of the Christian world from Creation to 1900, a documented span of four thousand years or so. Adam and Eve to—well, McKinley. I found a couple of worn nineteenth-century novels, with mottled gilt edges. The Wide, Wide World. The Gates Ajar.

  “Aunt Marta’s home-correspondence school,” Karen noted as she walked by me.

  “Bizarre collection.”

  “Church sales, probably. She didn’t like to read anything that disturbed her.”

  “I collect old books.” I examined the thick volume of The Gates Ajar.

  “Joshua Jennings wanted her to read classic literature.” Karen shook her head. “Him, the old teacher and collector. He valued old books over people. Imagine Marta reading, well, I don’t know—Plutarch? Lord, Shakespeare? She moved her lips when she read supermarket tabloids. She never did read anything. He would lend her volumes, but she didn’t want to read them. She only wanted to impress him. If she returned one with a smudge, he’d flip out. Not that he gave her the collectible ones. God forbid. Books were sacred.”

  “Books are sacred.”

  “I remember once she told me he was astounded that she’d never read James Fenimore Cooper. His favorite author. She said he yelled ‘Natty Bumppo’ at her, and she said nobody in their right mind is named Natty Bumppo. He wasn’t happy.” She chuckled at the memory.

  I laughed, too. “She started.” I pointed to the dining room table where I’d seen an unopened book resting on some newspapers. I went to get it and held it up. An exquisite volume. The Last of the Mohicans from an elegant, leather-bound set from the turn of the century. My hands lovingly handled it. A volume out of G. Putnam’s, bound in half-morocco, a silk ribbon market, unfortunately located on page two. A facsimile manuscript page.

  “This is classic Victoriana,” I told her.

  “Whatever.”

  “She didn’t get very far.”

  Karen glanced at it. “Yeah, she mentioned Cooper to me. ‘Impossible,’ she said. The first page put her to sleep.”

  I laughed. “I bet she never returned library books either.”

  “Joshua realized his home-correspondence school was a bust.”

  “So she had dreams of a life with Joshua?”

  Karen looked into my face. “My aunt could be a foolish woman, Rick. I tell you—she was too fond of Joshua—with that big house on the green, his—his patrician background, his kindness to her. She thought he cared for her, and I guess he did in his own way. She even thought they, you know, might marry and travel. He flattered her—teased.” A sigh. “She was foolish.”

  “That explains her depression when he died.”

  She shook her head back and forth. “Well, that started earlier when they had that fight. He told her not to come to the house. To stay away.”

  “That must have hurt her.”

  She bit her lip. “No woman wants a man to reject her.”

  “No man wants a woman to reject him.”

  “It’s not the same thing, Rick.”

  “How so?”

  “It just isn’t. Men don’t get it.”

  “But…”

  She turned away. “I don’t want this conversation.”

  The house yielded no surprises. I found nothing out of bounds in the closets. No hidden men’s clothing to suggest secret lovers, no rattling skeletons, no Victoria’s Secret catalogs, no taboo sex toys. Hers was a modest, decent life lived simply. No rose for Emily, this woman. There were no exotic foodstuffs in the kitchen cabinets, no international coffee flavors, no
low-fat cuisine in the freezer, no food processor. Maxwell House coffee. Dial soap. In a hall cupboard were five bottles of whiskey, rye and scotch, two unopened. The third was nearly empty. She used an old-fashioned coffee percolator, sparkling clean. Technology was ignored here: no answering machine, no cordless phone. She had an old VCR, broken, with a cassette of The Sound of Music resting on top of it. She had an old RCA TV in her living room, not a sleek flat-screen. Here was a doggedly conventional woman. There was nothing to break the pattern that caught your eye when you opened the front door—a sort of lower-middle-class life lived redundantly in all the rooms.

  But deeply religious. Ivy curled from the belly of the Infant of Prague statue on the TV. Gilded crosses adorned the walls. Glossy Russian icons of Jesus’ head, oversized and startling, hung on the bedroom wall. She was, I knew, a church-going Catholic. I’d found canceled checks for payments to the church, regular contributions to Catholic Charities, payments for memorial Masses for her dead husband. A Mass card from his funeral. Pamphlets for pilgrimages to shrines at Lourdes. A book on Our Lady of Fatima. Nothing offbeat here where conservative religion thrived.

  Except for a stack of pamphlets bound together with elastic bands. Manifestos from the Brown Bonnets, a vociferous, local charismatic Catholic women’s group opposed to abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, progressive Catholicism, and all-around good fun. A group that marched in Washington at pro-life rallies. They’d picketed Bill Maher when he performed at the Bushnell. These pamphlets bore Marta’s address label, with some numbers above it. I recorded the information.

  “Nothing to suggest violence hiding in a corner of her life,” I told Karen.

  She looked disheartened.

  “But there’s nothing to suggest suicide, either,” I added.

  No pills. No prescription drugs, no letters chronicling depression. No suggestion of a woman on the edge. It was the undemonstrative house of an old woman decidedly content, someone whose life was defined by periodic trips to gambling palaces with busloads of other women. Yes, a little fanatical when it came to religion, but she was, well—normal.