Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_02 (16 page)

“And Mrs. Guthrie. Is that Mrs. Matthews’s sister?”

Amy frowned. “She’s the only one who’s rude. I called Mrs. Guthrie last week to see if she’d be in on her day and I woke her up. At ten o’clock in the morning. She was real hateful.”

I folded the printout, put it in my purse. “Amy, thanks for talking to me.” I took a step, then turned back. “If you remember anything else about that call, the one about the deli, please give me a ring. I’m staying at the Matthews house.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. I will I promise.”

Laverne kneaded my scalp with practiced fingers and the hot, soapy water tingled against my head. She rinsed my hair, wound a towel expertly around my head turban-style, and we walked back to her chair.

“You visiting here in town?”

“Yes. I’m doing some historical research in the area. My great-grandfather was killed in the Battle of Franklin.”

That satisfied her. Genealogy is a passion in the South.

I sat down and Laverne covered me with a peach gown. As she set to work, I looked around the mostly empty salon. “Pretty slow today.”

“Everybody’s at the Hollis girls funeral. It’s really too bad. Sure makes you realize money isn’t everything.”

The stylist at the next station was buffing her nails. “That’s for sure,” she chimed in. “So they all went to Walden School. So what? At least my kid didn’t walk into a lake. And I’ve heard there’s something really odd going on. Judy Holzer—she works over at the Braidwood Florist—she
says she heard it was suicide. Isn’t that awful? A kid fifteen years old.”

I must have jerked, made a movement or a sound.

Laveme paused. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I comb too hard?”

“No.” My voice sounded thin even to me. “No. I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t fine. She hadn’t combed too hard. I concentrated on relaxing, and suppressing, as best I could, the emotion that always threatens to engulf me when I see a child’s obituary. Bobby was twelve, only twelve …

Laverne picked up a handful of curlers. “Well, I think that girl was a little slow, Tammy. Maybe it was an accident. That’s what the family’s saying. I do Mrs. Hollis’s sisters hair and she said it was some kind of kid dare and poor little Franci didn’t know any better than to try and swim across that lake.”

“Franci Hollis,” I repeated. “Is that—” I broke off. I’d almost revealed myself, almost asked if this was the family on King’s Row Road. But I knew the answer.
“The poor Hollises,”
Cheryl Kraft had said. Oh, God, yes. The poor Hollises with friends and family gathering in the wake of a family’s bitter tragedy.

The beauticians were waiting politely.

And I shouldn’t know anything about King’s Row Road and its heartbreaks.

I cleared my throat. “What a lovely name. I’m so sorry. Children so often don’t think when someone makes a dare.”

“I used to see her at soccer games,” Tammy continued. “My Jack and the Hollis girl’s brother were on the Y team together.” She shook her head, her thick blond hair swaying. “Sure makes you think.”

I willed my muscles to relax. Forced them to relax. And managed, despite the pain, to focus on my task. “Bad things seem to happen all at once. Isn’t this the town where that
young woman was murdered out in her pool cabana?” I felt Laverne’s fingers slacken for an instant.

Tammy sat up straight. “I tell you, I don’t know what the world’s coming to! Patty Kay Matthews, the richest woman in town.”

“Was it a robbery?” I asked innocently.

Laveme tilted my head to work on the back curls. “No. God, it’s worse than that. They’ve arrested her husband—but I can’t believe he did it. My Billy worked on his car. Billy says no way did Craig Matthews shoot somebody. One time Matthews was going to leave his Porsche and Billy saw the gun in his glove compartment and he asked Matthews to take it with him. Billy said he’s never seen a man act so silly. Matthews didn’t even want to put his hand on it.”

“I know somebody who didn’t have any use at all for Patty Kay.” The blond stylist wriggled with excitement. “I saw Patty Kay at Kroger’s just last week and she came around one of the aisles and there she was face-to-face with Louise Pierce, her first husband’s wife, and you know what?”

Laverne and I both looked at her expectantly.

“Well, if
looks
could kill! Louise Pierce gave Patty Kay the meanest, hardest glare and she stalked right by without saying a word. Not a word. And the funny thing is, see, it was always Patty Kay who was mad because Louise got Stuart and Louise always went around looking like a cat with cream on her whiskers. But last week it’s
Louise
who’s furious. Now, I just have to wonder why.”

I wondered too.

“And after Louise stomped by, Patty Kay turned and looked after her. And she looked real funny—almost like she was scared.”

• • •

The sign hung a little crooked on the doorknob, a pasteboard clock face with movable hands. They registered eleven
A.M
. The legend informed:
OUT OF THE OFFICE, BACK SOON
.

I used my umbrella to fend off the light drizzle and strolled the length of Fair Haven’s Main Street. The restored brickfront buildings offered a charming assortment of shops. I admired patchwork quilts, wooden carvings, hand-wrought jewelry, and antique furniture and silver.

I walked back to Gina Abbott’s shop. Her display included a long swath of Manuel Canovas fabric with a floral design—bright pink peonies and stylized jade-green leaves—draped over an eighteenth-century gilt wood backless seat patterned after a Roman camp stool.

Gilt letters in the lower left pane of the window read simply:
GINA ABBOTT, DECORATOR
.

The light rain, persistent, elegiac, misted against the windows. I stepped into the recessed entryway. I tried the doorknob and was startled when it moved. Was it an oversight or was this indeed such a law-abiding small town that Gina Abbott didn’t bother to lock up? More likely, she’d forgotten. Whatever, I propped my umbrella against the wall and went in.

Her taste ran to earth tones—mauve, coral, sand, peach. The showroom was fairly small, but it afforded several enclaves for customers, comfortable chintz sofas and chairs grouped around coffee tables at a good height for studying catalogues and swatches and wallpaper samples.

I wandered toward the back. A door stood ajar. I pushed it wider.

Gina Abbott’s office was a jam-packed mess, but cheerful. Bolts of cloth, swatches of fabric, photographs, house plans, and stacked catalogues were everywhere.

The walls were bare except for a snapshot-laden bulletin-board.
I walked closer. I recognized four faces immediately. The tennis quartet was obviously of long duration. Lots of tennis pictures with Patty Kay, Gina, Edith, and Brooke when they were in their late twenties and early thirties. Sometimes their children were there. It didn’t take long to figure out which belonged to whom.

Brigit didn’t smile very often. But as a little girl, she was always stylishly dressed. Trust Patty Kay for that.

Elegant Brooke apparently had only the one child. Even when he was a little boy, Dan was as spectacularly handsome as his mother was beautiful, perfect bone structure, glossy black hair, wide-spaced blue eyes, even white teeth in a confident smile.

I recognized the freckle-faced, stocky girl who’d tried to get Edith’s attention at Brigit’s birthday party. And the red-haired boy who’d admired Dan’s dancing partner was obviously her brother. The little girl had an especially sweet smile, the boy a steady, inquiring gaze. Edith Hollis was usually the model of brightness, but every so often the camera caught that edge of surliness. Was it jealousy? Lack of confidence?

Most of the snapshots, of course, were of elfin Gina’s children. Gina’s daughter was the chubby blond girl who’d danced so adoringly with Dan Forrest. Gina’s two sons were wiry, short, dark, and exceptionally athletic. There were lots of photos of wrestling matches, swim meets, tennis tournaments. In contrast, her daughter was fair and plump and usually carrying a book.

“Who the hell are you?”

I hadn’t heard a sound.

I turned around calmly.

She’d come in through the back door. She stood just inside, water dripping from her apricot silk raincoat, her
bony face drawn into a furious scowl her sleek black hair damp against her head.

She reminded me of a very small cat I’d once had. Sophie didn’t weigh four pounds dripping wet. But let anything or anyone invade her domain, from a six-foot-six television repairman to a boxer dog, and she’d gather herself for combat. And mean it, all the way to her marrow.

“Mrs. Abbott?”

“You got it. This is my office. Who the hell are you and how did you get in?”

“The front door was unlocked. I didn’t mean to trespass. I’m Henrietta Collins, Craig Matthews’s aunt. I’m in town to try to help him. His lawyer, Desmond Marino, told me you were Patty Kay’s best friend.”

She yanked off her rain cap, tossed it toward a green jardiniere on a small rosewood stand.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry.” She shrugged out of the raincoat. “This has been a fucking awful day.” She flung the coat toward a coat tree and walked past me. Her face crumpled into lines of misery as she began to cry. She reached blindly for her chair, sank into it.

“I’m sorry. I’ll come back another time …”

“No. Wait. I’m sorry.” Gina snatched a handful of Kleenex, scrubbed at her face. Mascara streaked her cheekbones. “I keep saying I’m sorry. I sure am. I’m sorry as hell. For everybody. You ever been to a funeral for a fifteen-year-old?”

I felt as though I’d been carved out of ice, without a heartbeat, without a breath.

Not quite fifteen. Bobby was twelve years and four months and sixteen days old.

Some wounds never heal. Never. So yes, I understood Gina’s tears, and I understood, too, the fear, the soul-deep fear, that spurred her outburst.

Because if it can happen to a friend, it can happen to you.

As it did to me.

I could see Bobby’s face so clearly, even after all these years, sandy hair and laughing green eyes and a generous mouth, so much like his father’s.

I couldn’t answer Gina.

But she didn’t give me a chance.

The words came in an anguished torrent. “Why the hell can’t they tell you when something’s that bad? I told my kids, ‘Jesus Christ, come to me if you’ve got a problem. I don’t care what it is—a baby, cocaine, you’re gay, just for Jesus Christ’s sake,
tell
me!’” The tears trickled down her grief-ravaged face. “It doesn’t matter what it is. That’s what I tell them. We can handle it. But when you die, you die.” She clenched her small fists, pounded them against the desktop. “I’m so mad. So mad! I could shake Franci until her head pops off. But I can’t. Because she rode her bike to the other side of the lake on Friday and walked out into the water and never came back. And do you know why?”

My heart ached at the agony in her cry.

“Because of some stupid fucking
letters
, that’s why. That’s all it was, anonymous letters telling her she was ugly, a lesbo, and everybody knew it, that she was too stupid to go to college and she had a funny smell and was a four-eyed loser. Most of it was just stupid, silly childish crap, but it got nastier and nastier. Some of it was sickening. Stuff Franci couldn’t even start to understand. But she knew it was bad. And Franci was this uncertain, self-conscious, pudgy kid—and yes, dammit, she was slow—with thick braces and an awkward way of walking, up one day and down the next like most kids, and she couldn’t handle it and she couldn’t tell her folks because they didn’t talk about things like lesbians and maybe they’d believe it since
everybody else did. That’s what she told Chloe, My Chloe. And Chloe, the idiot child, didn’t tell me because she promised Franci that she’d never say anything to anybody.”

Franci Hollis, the girl they’d talked about at the beauty salon. The daughter of Patty Kay’s tennis friend, Edith Hollis. The sweet-faced girl in the film of Brigit’s birthday party.

Gina struggled to breathe.

I walked over to a water cooler, pulled down a paper cup, and filled it.

Gina took it gratefully. Gradually, her sobs eased.