1 Breakfast at Madeline's (18 page)

John Penn. A headline from 1953:
"Tragedy in New Hampshire."

My fingers trembled as I hit the computer keys to bring up the article.
My Powerbook, which felt incred
ibly fast when I first bought it, now felt like something out of the Old Stone Age. Finally the article appeared.

Berlin, New Hampshire, January 23. In one of the worst tragedies in this state in recent history, a Berlin man killed his wife a
nd then himself early this morn
ing with his shotgun, as their eight-year-old son hid in a bedroom closet.

Policemen and neighbors at the scene were unable to offer any explanation as to why John Penn, a factory worker at International Shoes in nearby Gorham, might have committed this horrific deed. Louise Wentworth, the next-door neighbor who was awakened by the shots and found the bodies, says that John and Marian Penn were a quiet, unremarkable couple—"a typical family," she says. "Marian went to church every Sunday, and John loved his cross-country skiing. We always thought the skiing business was a little odd, but we sure never thought he'd kill someone."

Another neighbor, Dennis Olson, was
similarly baf
fled by the horrible crime. "Maybe it was just the weather," he said. "It's been blasted cold around here."

The young son, Donald, is temporarily under the care of a neighboring family.

During the next few days the
Times
ran two follow
-
ups. I guess horrific crimes were more rare in those days; if this happened now, the
Times
probably wouldn't bother. In the first follow-up, there were background interviews with coworkers and friends. In the second one they talked to the cops, who had gotten a
state
ment from the distraught young Donald.

Apparently, all week long Donald's father had been looking forward to going cross-country skiing.
Ac
cording to Al Wenningham, who called himself "the closest buddy John had, even though we weren't all that close," John Penn lived to go skiing, "the same way everybody else up here lives to go hunting."

Reading between the
lines, working at the shoe fac
tory offered little in the way of job satisfaction, and
there was no way out except on Sundays, when John Penn strapped on his skis and glided off alone into the snowy yonder and found peace.

Unfortunately, that Sunday, when his long-awaited day off came, there had been a freezing rain and the top layer of snow was so icy and crunchy that none of the usual ski waxes worked. So John went down to the basement searching for a special clister that he had carefully stashed away, which might possibly allow him to ski in this god-awful snow.

But he couldn't find it. His wife had rearranged the basement to store her canning supplies. As Donald lay in bed half-asleep, he heard his father storm upstairs and ask his mother furiously, "Where did you put my clister?"

In response, Marian said, "Shut up, I'm sleeping."

So John repeated himself, louder and even angrier. Marian snapped back at him. They began shouting. John yelled at her for ruining his life, along with his bosses at International Shoes. Marian yelled back. Donald, listening, huddled in his bed.

Then he heard crashing noises from the other room—they were throwing thing
s at each other. Mar
ian must have picked up a ski, because Donald heard his father yell, "Put that ski down!"

But she didn't. She
swung the ski at a wall or some
thing, and it broke in two.

The next thing Donald remembered was a shotgun blast. His father killed his mother with one point
-
blank shot in the face.

Donald ran to his closet and hid, just before John came in the room looking for him. John sobbed out his apologies for killing Marian, and promised to make everything all right again by killing Donald and then himself.

Then the closet door opened. John called his son's
name. The son lay still, not daring to breathe, beneath his old gray Army blanket.

Finally the door closed again. Donald wasn't sure if his father had seen him or not. For a while there was silence. Then a shot blasted out. Then more silence. Eventually Donald snuck out of his closet and went in his parents' bedro
om, where he found John and Mar
ian lying in bed together. As one of the cops quoted in the article put it, "neither of them had faces left."

I turned off the computer and sat there for a while in the dark. Then I went into the boys' room and hugged and kissed them as they slept. They both had warm blankets curled around them, just like Donald Penn, many years ago, on that deathly cold winter morning.

It was five a.m. and I was finally slipping into a troubled semi-oblivion when Gretzky came into our bedroom crying. I found out soon enough what the problem was: His pants were soaking wet.

For several months now Gretzky had been wearing "big boy pullups" to b
ed, sort of a cross between dia
pers and regular underwear. Usually they absorbed any bedwetting easily. But tonight he had so much peepee from holding it in all day that when he finally let loose he got flooded. "Honey, let me change your pants," I said.

"No!" Gretzky shouted, irate.

"But they're all wet—"

"No, they're not!"

"Sweetheart, they're full of peepee—"

"Hockey players don't make peepee!"

From the other side of the bed, Andrea broke in. "I can't stand this anymore. If he doesn't stop this hockey-players-don't-make-peepee business, I'll put him in diapers again!"

This horrible threat sent Gretzky bawling. "No! Nooooooo!" he howled desperately.

While Andrea cover
ed her ears with a pillow, I fi
nally talked the Great One out of his wet pants and back to bed. But then
Babe Ruth came in carrying yes
terday's sports page and demanding to know why the Mets were starting John Olerud at first base instead of Butch Huskey. Before we could get that issue resolved, Gretzky woke up again and ordered me to get up
this very minute
so I could go to the store to buy him a goalie helmet. When I told him it was only 5:30 and the stores were all closed, that didn't faze him in the slightest. "You can open the store yourself, Daddy, with a key," he explained impatiently.

Then Babe Ruth announced that if the stores were still closed, we shoul
d just go outside and play base
ball. So Gretzky angrily declared that we had to play hockey first, because he was younger. Rationally, I knew the kids were just acting out their frustration that I'd been so busy with my murder investigation, I hadn't been paying them enough attention. But I was too exhausted to listen to my rational mind, and I could feel a primal scream rising in my gut when I happened to look over at Andrea. Our eyes met, and for some reason we both burst out laughing.

Instantly the mood in the bed changed. Gretzky and Ruth dropped all their demands and decided to beat us up with pillows instead. Andrea and I would have gotten seriously clobbered except we had a secret weapon: Magic Tickle Fingers.

The Fingers were so
successful that the children re
treated to their bedroom to plot out a secret weapon of their own. Andrea took advantage of the battle lull to ask me, "So when did you get home last night?"

I hemmed, then hawed, then said, "Uh, I'm not sure. When did you go to bed?"

"Ten-thirty or so. I was beat. I told Dave he could just go home, since I figured you'd be getting back any minute. Hope you didn't mind my not waiting up."

"No, that's okay. I got in a little after 10:30." Which wasn't really a lie, strictly speaking; I mean, 11:45 is a little after 10:30.

"There's about a hundred messages for you on the machine," Andrea said.

I jumped up. "From who?" Molly? Gretchen? The mayor?

"They're all from your agent. I got sick of talking to him, so I turned the machine on."

I slapped my foreh
ead. Talk about engine trouble—
I had completely forgotten about my $750,000 deal. "What did he want?"

"He said to hurry up and express mail that contract back to him. The pro
ducer wants you to start immedi
ately."

Immediately. Well, hey, for three-quarters of a mil I could deal with that. Today was Saturday; I'd express the contract today, then receive a copy of the mutant beetles screenplay on Monday morning. At which point my month of Hollywood hack work would commence with instant fury.

Monday morning.
That left me forty-eight hours to solve The Penn's murder.

"Sorry the New York trip didn't go well," Andrea said, and massaged my back. I wanted to tell her about my confrontation with Gretchen, and how I'd gotten a copy of the application after all, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without admitting I'd lied about the train being late. Frankly, I
was getting sick of all the lit
tle lies I was telling Andrea lately. I thought about telling my wife what I'd really been doing the last two nights, even though I knew she'd be livid at all the risks I'd taken, when we were suddenly interrupted
by loud shouts of "Batman!" and our two superheroes raced in flailing their pillows fiercely.

This time not even Magic Tickle Fingers were enough to fight off the savage onslaught.
The
grown
ups were soundly and utterly trounced, and only the promise of homemade waffles allowed us to escape with our lives.

We had a nice couple of hours together, and I wish I could have brought my little warriors with me for moral support later that morning when I met with the grant panel at Madeline's. They were all waiting for me when I got there, and they all looked about as cheerful as Bosnian war refugees.

Even worse, Marcie was working the counter. I didn't want to deal with her, but I sure needed some java to pull me through this. So I went up there and pushed my dollar bill across the counter, and she pushed the Ethiopian back at me. Our hands never touched; in fact, we did the entir
e transaction without even look
ing at each other.

I surveyed the Grim People as I headed for their table. George Hosey
rubbed his eyes somberly, resem
bling Uncle Sam on a particularly bad day. Like, say, Pearl Harbor. Mike Pardou, the King of Spoons, was absentmindedly beating spoons against his cheek, but it didn't interfere with his hangdog expression. The man was definitely
not an advertisement for recre
ational drugs.

Steve the Novella Man sat next to Antoinette the Grant Queen, as usual. But he didn't look as shrunken as he usually did next to her, mainly because she looked pretty shrunken herself this morning. Her lanky six-foot frame slouched over the table, and her dreadlocks came dangerously close to falling into her coffee. I would have said something, but I was afraid she'd get insulted.

The only member
of the Grim People who was sit
ting tall and proud, looking in prime fighting mood, was Bonnie Engels.

"Hey, guys," I greeted them.

"Sit down," Bonnie said peremptorily. The other Grim People grunted.

"Thank you." As I sat down, Bonnie gave me the evil eye. Mike Pardou, meanwhile, began beating his spoons faster and louder—
clickety click clack clack
—as Ersatz Uncle Sam cleared his throat and said, "Listen, Jacob, we've been h
earing a lot of, uh, strange ru
mors."

"Uh huh." Hmm, pillow talk from Gretchen?

"It's like this, Jacob," Antoinette broke in, lifting her dreadlocks and shining her earnest chocolate-colored eyes on me. "We know you've made
it big and every
thing, and we're happy for you, but see—
Jesus fucking Christ, Mike, would you shut up?!"
she shouted.

The
clickety clack
suddenly stopped as Pardou dropped his spoons, stunned. The rest of us were stunned too, not just by Antoinette's outburst but by seeing Pardou without spoons in his hands. It was like seeing him stark naked.

Antoinette collected herself and continued. "See, Jacob, for the rest of us, we really
need
these NYFA grants. If they get taken away from us, word gets around. I can kiss g
ood-bye to the NYSCA grant I ap
plied for, and that means no Pollock-Krasner grant. Which means I get
shut out by the National Endow
ment for the Humanities, which means my teaching jobs dry up. Basically, my career goes down the toilet."

"Getting a NYFA grant from the state of New York enhances my credibility worldwide," seconded Ersatz Sam. "Even as far away as New Zealand."

"The thing is, I already called my mother and told
her I got the grant," Novella Man chimed in. "She'll be really upset if it gets taken away."

"I don't get it. Why would your grants get taken away?" I asked, genuinely puzzled.