A Superior Death (25 page)

“Denny will be home from school—oh dear. Come in.

Come in. I don’t think I have any Pepsi-Colas. That’s what young people drink now, isn’t it? Pepsi-Cola? tea? No . . . tea’s for us oldsters. . . .” Mrs. Castle stopped between the living room and the kitchen, unsure of beverage protocol.

“I don’t need anything,” Anna said gently. “I just came—” She had started to say “to ask you some questions,” but the phrase seemed too abrupt for such a fragile old person. “To visit,” Anna amended.

“Tea . . .” Mrs. Castle began again on the beverage question.

“That would be fine. Tea would be nice. I like tea.”

“That’s settled then.” Mrs. Castle sighed with relief, showed Anna into the living room, then disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

Anna began to revise her opinion of Denny-as-son. The inside of the house was neat and well appointed. The sparkling window glass and lack of cobwebs in high places suggested a spryer cleaning lady than Mrs. Castle. The room had been papered in recent years and the furniture, though worn, was of good quality and kept in good repair.

In such a neighborhood the dilapidated exterior could very well have been left as protective coloration to keep the old woman from being the envy—and therefore the target—of her neighbors.

An old-fashioned upright piano took up all of one wall of the living room. The top was covered with framed photographs. Anna studied them. An extended family was represented: lots of group shots with the very old holding the very young on their laps. A young Denny was in many, cutting watermelons, showing off a skateboard, always grinning. Then he disappeared. Photo to photo Anna watched Mrs. Castle growing old without her son. Then he was back; in his thirties now, the grin gone. This was the Denny Anna had known, the one who carried the world on his shoulders, who could not fit watermelons or skateboards into his work schedule.

A few snapshots tucked into the frames of more formal pictures showed Hawk and Holly. There was only one of Jo. She wore an Empire-waisted pink brocade prom dress, her hair, as always, parted in the center and stick-straight. A boy whom Anna didn’t know stood beside her, proud in a rented tux.

Jo was an enigma, Anna thought, seldom remembered but never gone.

Shuffling, slow, careful, Mrs. Castle came in with the tea things. Anna hurried to take the heavy tray. A short struggle ensued. Anna won and set the tea service down on a low coffee table. After the tea had been poured and the packaged cookies discussed, Mrs. Castle said matter-of-factly: “You want to talk about Denny. He’s dead, you know.”

“I know,” Anna replied, glad Mrs. Castle was lucid for the moment. “It’s his death I want to talk about. We’re trying to find out all we can about it.”

“So it won’t happen again?”

“Something like that.”

Mrs. Castle nodded approvingly. Anna sipped her tea and turned over in her mind ways to approach her question. “I was looking at your picture collection while you made tea,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Castle got up and carried her tea over to the piano. She was so small she had to look up to see the photographs. “I’m very proud of them. They are my family now.”

The way she said it made Anna wonder how many of them were dead. “I was looking at Jo’s pictures the other day,” Anna began.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Castle interrupted. She set down cup and saucer and stood on tiptoe to retrieve the picture of the girl in the prom dress. “This is it. It’s the only one left. I used to have more, but Denny got in one of his moods and took them all down one Sunday after church. He never gave them back. Jo sent me this one.”

Mrs. Castle brought it over to the sofa and held it out for Anna to look at but not to touch. “Who’s the boy?” Anna asked to be polite.

“I don’t know his name. He’s the boy who took Jo to the winter formal the year Denny wouldn’t. He could be a stinker sometimes. I think maybe Jo sent me this hoping Denny would see it and get jealous. That’s why I kept it out. I don’t think Denny ever did notice it, but I got kind of attached to it. Jo’s got a pretty dress on, don’t you think?”

Anna admired the dress. “I recognized Hawk and Holly Bradshaw in some of the snaps,” she said.

“They’re good kids. Wild though,” Mrs. Castle said sadly. “They came to visit me a while back.”

“When?” Anna realized she’d spoken too abruptly. Mrs.

Castle looked startled, as if her thoughts had fled.

“I don’t know really. . . .”

Anna worried she had frightened the old lady back out of a reality in which she’d not been too firmly rooted in the first place. She changed the subject, trying her original tack a second time. “Jo was showing me some pictures she had of Denny. One was particularly nice. It was Denny in a ship captain’s uniform.”

“That was my brother’s,” Mrs. Castle said, pleased either with the memory or with her ability to recall it.

“Do you still have it? The uniform?”

“Why yes! Yes, I do. Those kids wanted to play with it.

It’s with Denny’s old things in the upstairs bedroom. Do you want to see it?”

That was exactly what Anna wanted. She was grateful her prying seemed to give the woman some pleasure.

Denny’s upstairs bedroom had long been out of use for anything but storage and had taken on the dust-and-dead-flies smell of an attic. Old clothes hung on racks. Tattered books and ruined long-playing records were stacked along the walls. There were boxes of shoes and belts and a shelf of dusty vases. Mrs. Castle wended her way through these relics to a blue plastic and aluminum trunk—a cheap recreation of an old steamer trunk.

“Denny’s. He wanted to be a seafaring man since he was a little boy,” she said as she opened the trunk. “Oh dear.”

Anna came to look over her shoulder. The trunk was very nearly empty. Only a half-dozen books and a child’s cowboy hat remained. It reeked of mothballs.

“I was sure it was in this trunk.” Mrs. Castle’s hands began to flutter, her eyes to wander over the clutter.

“Was it here when you showed it to the kids—to Hawk and Holly?” Anna asked gently. “When they came to visit you.”

“Why yes! Yes, it was.”

“Maybe they borrowed it,” Anna suggested.

“No,” Mrs. Castle said firmly. “I would have remembered. They stole it. They’re wild, those two. They’re horrid bad children. They were playing up here and they took it. They’ll not play with any of Denny’s toys again until they apologize.”

Denny was once again alive in his mother’s mind. Anna was glad to leave it that way.

 

 

 

On the drive back the facts lined themselves up oppressively in Anna’s mind. Holly was not gay and could have been Denny’s lover. The bruise indicated that Denny had been wearing his diving gear; the bloody froth, that he had been breathing compressed air; and the knife, that he had dived the
Kamloops.
It was logical to assume he had been killed there. That meant he had been killed by another diver, an experienced one. He had been found in a costume Hawk and Holly had stolen. Anna had seen his gear back aboard the
3rd Sister.

She remembered the night aboard the
Belle Isle,
remembered Hawk’s tears on her throat, and wondered if he cried for his sins.

CHAPTER 17

C
hristina found Anna sitting in the glider under the white lilac bush in the backyard. A low fog had rolled in off the lake and, though it was July, the night was cold. Anna had draped one of Ally’s dinosaur-covered beach towels around her shoulders to ward off the chill. Hugging herself in an old Levi’s jacket, Christina sat down next to her and began rocking.

A popping noise came, as of distant gunfire. In the fog the sound was directionless.

“Somebody is getting off to an early start,” Anna remarked.

“Mmm.” They rocked in silence. The lilacs were long since blown. Glossy leaves shone black all around and overhead. Light glowed from the back porch, illuminating without penetrating the mist. “Ally’s preschool is having a Fourth of July picnic tomorrow down on the lake.”

“Can’t go,” Anna said. “I’m going back to the island. If it’s clear enough, I’ll fly. Otherwise I’ll take the
Ranger Three.
”

“Are you missing Zach?” Chris asked gently.

“Today’s his birthday.”

“I know.”

Anna looked at her friend. The smooth oval of her face was ageless in the diffused light: idealized. She looked like a woman from another time, a time before aerobics and Nautilus machines, when women were rounder and, of necessity, kinder. “I don’t make a big commemorative occasion out of it,” Anna said, irritated at being so transparent. “I just think of things.”

“Why don’t you call your sister?”

As Chris said it, Anna realized how much she wanted to talk with Molly. Childishly, she sat a bit longer lest Christina know how surely she had hit the proverbial nail’s head. “Do you see much of Roberta these days?” she asked.

“Mmmhmm.” Chris had a self-satisfied smile that made Anna nervous. It was selfish to hope Christina would never marry, never set up housekeeping with a lover, but that was what Anna wished.

“I don’t desert my friends because I find a lover,” Christina said quietly.

Anna stood abruptly. The glider clanked in protest. “I’m going to call my sister. I can hide more from a psychiatrist than a psychic,” she grumbled as she plowed through the fog toward the porch light.

Molly picked up on the second ring.

“Can you listen without a cigarette?” Anna demanded peevishly, not bothering to say hello.

“Nope.” A shush, a scratch, a sigh followed, proving that more than one of Mrs. Pigeon’s daughters could be stubborn.

“You’re on hold,” Anna said. “I’m getting a drink.” When she got back to the phone she could hear Molly’s laughter even before she put the receiver to her ear. It was a distinctive cackle, a “heh, heh, heh” usually associated with caricatures of dirty old men.

“Well,” Molly said as Anna’s presence crackled down the wires. “Now that we’ve both got one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel, what’s up?”

“There’s this guy—” Anna began.

“So far so good. Sex, adventure, romance. I like this story.”

“He’s seven or eight years younger than I am—” Anna pushed on.

“Better and better. Endurance, virility, flexibility, longevity. Does he have a baby brother?”

“I spent the night with Hawk last week.”

“ ‘Hawk’? Lordy, Lordy, to be just forty,” Molly cackled.

“Dammit, will you shut up and listen?”

“Sorry,” Molly said, suddenly businesslike. “What do you feel about all this?”

“Goddammit,” Anna exploded. “Nothing. Let me finish. Then I’ll feel something, okay?”

“Mmmm”—a yes murmured with tobacco smoke.

Anna counted to ten in her head, took a deep breath. “Erase, erase,” she said, their childhood code for a clear slate, a new start.

“Erase, erase,” Molly agreed. “So, you slept with a guy named Hawk.”

“Yes. It was okay. Kind of strange but okay. I could like him.”

“Like? Don’t go hog-wild, Anna. You don’t want to put yourself out on an emotional limb here. ‘Like’ could lead to ‘like pretty much,’ and that’s just two jumps from ‘real fond.’ You don’t want to rush into anything.”

“Do people really pay you a hundred and fifty dollars an hour for this?” Anna asked sourly, but she was smiling and let it show in her voice.

“Why? Do you think I’m selling myself too cheap? I’m thinking of starting an Inner Child Baby-sitting Service to bring in a little pin money.”

Anna laughed. “Okay. Back to me. Here’s the rub: It’s looking a whole lot like Hawk and probably his sister, Holly, committed the Denny Castle murder. Maybe a love triangle thing. Maybe to get a boat worth a quarter of a million. Maybe drugs.”

There followed a moment of stunned silence which Anna thoroughly enjoyed.

“Jesus,” Molly said finally. “No wonder you never watch the soaps. They pale by comparison.”

“Thank you,” Anna said with dignity. “Now, may I get to the confusing part?”

“Lord! Yes, by all means. Please do.”

“Given the givens—”

“Sex, drugs, and murder.”

“Given the givens,” Anna repeated firmly, “I want to talk with Hawk before I go to the FBI and feed him and his sister—and their only means of livelihood, their boat—into the bureaucratic meat grinder. Give him a chance.”

“Let me get this straight. You have fallen in ‘like’ with a sinister stranger you believe killed a man. Now you want to confront him face-to-face with his murderous deed. Have you picked out a windblown cliff or an isolated tower to go to all alone and unprotected in the dead of a dark and stormy night?”

“I get the point,” Anna said. She changed the subject:

“Tell me about gourmet suspenders.”

“Another mysterious bottle retailing for ten grand, another tasting, three more sessions on the couch. Anna, are you going to do this thing?”