Chez Cordelia (36 page)

My father nodded approvingly at me. Miranda said, “Aw, Cordelia.” My aunt got up and knelt beside me and stroked my hair. Horatio reached over to clap me on the shoulder.

“Tiny Tim Cratchit,” he said.

My mother looked down the table at me with tears in her eyes. “Don't mind Juliet, honey,” she said. “She didn't mean it. It's a good sign. Energy and resistance. It's an improvement, believe me. I'm just sorry—” She made a gesture of helplessness.

From the other room, I could hear Juliet sobbing more quietly, and Mr. Oliver's low, reasonable voice. I felt bad, now that I had everyone fussing over me, that my sister was in such a state, but I felt a certain triumph, too. It was good to be loved and petted by my family. Maybe, years earlier, I should have cried and poured out my soul. Maybe they wouldn't have scoffed, maybe they would have put down their books and listened to me.

Along with my exultation and the remnants of my anger (will my feelings toward my family ever be simple?), I couldn't help feeling some relief. If Juliet's outburst meant she was getting better, then I had to welcome it. I thought: I can exchange my own pride for my sister's health—but it wasn't a completely ungrudging transaction.

I won't say the spell was restored by my little speech. In fact, we were restless at the table after that, conversation was fitful. I knew that pretty soon people would begin looking at their watches and talking about the long drive home. But we were considerate with each other. There were small displays of affection, warm smiles, plans for future reunions.

We all kept our ears half tuned to the living room; after a long silence, we heard the astonishing sound of Juliet's laugh. I got up and peeked in, at the risk of alienating my sister, but she didn't notice. She was looking at Mr. Oliver. He was cracking walnuts for her, and she was giggling and eating them from his hand.

I reported this in a discreet whisper to my mother, and a low murmur was passed around the table: “Juliet's eating nuts.” It restored a little more of the spell, and by the time everyone stood up and asked for their coats, there was an easier feeling among us.

“It was a lovely, lovely meal,” said my mother.

“A wonderful dinner, Cordelia,” my father echoed.

When Juliet came up to me and apologized, I hugged her out of real affection for her poor bony self. She seemed to flinch at the contact—something hurt, the strength of either my squeeze or my affection—but she forced herself to squeeze back, and we leaned on each other in a sisterly way—I half drunk, she genuinely needing support. Then she went slowly down the path on Mr. Oliver's arm.

The rest of us hugged, kissed, called good-bye. I would have begged them to stay, but I wanted to keep my dignity, and my edge of victory over Juliet. I'd exposed myself enough. I was half ashamed of these calculations, especially because I really would have liked for some of them to linger on, but it was late, and I don't suppose I could have persuaded them. I went outside shivering, and saw them off in the blue December night, and when I returned to the house it still seemed, not unpleasantly, full of their complicated presences.

The next morning, I had a slight hangover and a bad case of loneliness. The Lambertis would be gone another two days. There had been snow during the night, and the house was spookily quiet under its blanket. I shoveled the paths, but when I finished that I was without duties, without occupation. It began to snow again, hard. I tried to settle down with a murder mystery—Martha had a collection of them on a bookshelf in the TV room—but I couldn't concentrate. What I needed was a good gossip, the hashing over of yesterday's dinner—Juliet's behavior and my behavior—with a sympathetic soul.

Calling Nina in New York would have been perfect, but Nina was unavailable. I had had a disturbing Christmas card from her. The card itself was all in German (“
Fröhliche Weihnachten
”), and it was postmarked Vienna, where Nina and Archie were living. The eminent piano teacher in New York had rejected Archie as a student. “She said he's got an immense talent,” Nina wrote, “but he'd gone too far in the wrong direction on his own and with mediocre teachers, and she didn't have the guts to take him on.” The teacher had, however, recommended him to a conservatory in Vienna she was connected with. Nina and Archie had flown there for his audition, he'd been accepted, and they had stayed. They'd found an apartment, and Archie was working hard.

The thing that bothered me about Nina's note, besides the fact that she was thousands of miles away, was its cheerfulness. “Vienna is all cafés and pastry shops and beautiful music,” she wrote. “Of course, I had to turn down the
Voice
job, after all, but I'm sure to find something here, once I learn German.”

I pictured her there, with her Brenda Starr hair pinned up, eating pastry and getting fatter, putting all her energies into wangling good breaks for Archie, Nina, whose business was words, in a place where all the words were closed to her. It would take years, I imagined, for anyone—except possibly my mother and Juliet—to become good enough at a new language to write it for a living.

There had been a time when I'd envied Nina's single-minded passion for Archie. Now, looking at her German Christmas card, with its saccharine nativity scene and its incomprehensible greeting, I was disgusted by it.

So, Ninaless, friendless, locked in by the blizzard, bored, still unsettled by the Christmas dinner with my family, I wandered around the house. I straightened the kids' rooms. Megan had taken with her to her grandmother's the beautiful-princess hand puppet I gave her for Christmas, but the Cookie Monster I'd given Ian was shoved under his bed. For the first time, it saddened me that Ian disliked me so thoroughly. I wondered if he sensed I was a threat to the stability of his life—a very different kind of monster from the furry fellows on
Sesame Street
.

I stopped at the door of the room where Paul and Martha slept, and looked in: four-poster hung with old crocheting, twin highboys, a worn and valuable Oriental carpet. I had done this many times—just peeked. I had never crossed the threshold. The beautiful room was enemy territory, full of hidden dangers. Even to stand there and look into it was bad for my morale—it looked so completely impregnable.

That bedroom fortress was bad enough. For the sake of my peace of mind, I shouldn't have looked through the Lambertis' pile of Christmas cards (kept in a basket on the coffee table), wondering who Al and Nan were, and David Lawrence who wrote, “Thanx again to you both—hope I can do the same for you sometime,” and the Northrup family, and Aunt Loretta and Uncle Pete … But I did look through them, season's greetings from the long chain of relatives and friends and clients and acquaintances coiled up on the side of Paul's marriage—and, on the other side, me. They haunted me all day, those ghostly well-wishers, who, when they heard Paul and Martha were getting a divorce, would cry, “The Lambertis! Why, they're such an ideal couple!”

For lunch, I polished off the plate of food Juliet had scorned the day before. I hadn't the heart to cook. But even straight from the refrigerator, the food was delicious, and that proof of my powers cheered me up. For dinner, I planned, I would make a perfect omelette—something I'd been practicing.

I was watching an old movie on TV (
The Spanish Main
, with Maureen O'Hara, who reminded me of Nina) when my mother called. I expected a little gossip, a few more compliments on the previous day's dinner, but she said, without preamble, “Cordelia, the police are on their way up to see you.”

I gripped the receiver with both hands and dropped into a chair. My knees were actually weak, and I felt, briefly, faint. The police. This was what I had been dreading all these months since I left Madox Hardware: the footsteps on the stairs, the knock at the door, the flashing of the badge, and the accusations.

“Cordelia?”

“What do they want to see me about?” I managed to ask. To me, I sounded sick and stunned, as if I'd just been punched in the stomach, but my mother didn't seem to notice.

“It's the murder of that Madox boy, where you used to work. Someone broke in and robbed the store last summer and shot him, and they've caught someone but they can't identify him; apparently, he won't cooperate at all. They've been investigating this for months, and now they're questioning all former employees. I don't know, it sounds vaguely incompetent to me, I should think the FBI has all kinds of methods these local police ought to know about. When Horatio was researching this sort of thing for his books it seemed to be a fairly simple matter, just identifying someone. After all, they
have
the man right there.”

As she talked, I began to relax. It wasn't me they wanted. It wasn't the trivet, or Mr. Madox's revenge, that was leading them to my door. And yet I wondered: wasn't it, really? What if they'd told my mother this story to spare her? What if they had a warrant with them for my arrest?

I didn't really believe this, but it worried itself into my brain while I waited, looking out the window at the colorless view. It had stopped snowing, but the road was still unplowed and looked slippery. Would they drive all the way up here in this weather to put a few routine questions to a former employee? I tried to think. Who knew about my shoplifting, besides Mr. Madox and me? Malcolm, but he was dead. Juliet and Alan. Alan was gone, in New York with his play, but Juliet … had Juliet talked to the police? I almost called my mother back to ask, but I saw how odd it would look and stopped myself. I could only hope Juliet, so sunk into herself, had forgotten the circumstances of my flight to her and Alan in New Haven. Mr. Madox, though—I imagined him nursing his grudge, being distracted from it by the death of his son, then returning to it, getting comfort out of it, mulling it over, and going to the phone, his knotty old hands shaking with rage as he dialed the police …

About three o'clock, a car pulled up. I had expected the flashing blue light, but there was none, and the two men who came up the path wore topcoats over suits. They could have been insurance agents, or a team of doctors making a house call. They introduced themselves as Detective Sherman and Detective Toscano. Sherman had light hair and sideburns, Toscano dark hair and a moustache. They smiled at me and called me “Miss Miller,” and said they were sorry to bother me. Keeping very calm, I asked them to sit down, and they perched side by side on the edge of the sofa, keeping their coats on. When Sherman reached into his inside pocket, I thought it was for handcuffs, but what he took out was a large photograph. He handed it to me and said, “Have you ever seen this man?”

It was Danny, of course, and as I took it and looked at it, everything became clear. Danny had robbed the store and killed Malcolm Madox. I felt sick and faint all over again; it was another punch in the stomach. Danny, I thought, you idiot, you stupid jerk.

“He's my husband,” I said. “Danny Frontenac.”

The two looked at each other, just briefly, with flickers of surprise, and then they concentrated on me. “We've been holding this man up at Connecticut Valley for almost four months,” Sherman said, while Toscano took out a notebook and a Bic pen. “He's refused to cooperate, won't identify himself, won't talk at all, even though it's been explained to him over and over that it's to his advantage to tell us who he is. And now—” He spread out his hands on his knees and sighed. “You tell us he's your husband and his name is Danny Frontenac.”

“Would you mind spelling that last name?” Toscano asked.

I spelled it for him, and said, “He's my estranged husband.”

Sherman sat back again and crossed his legs. He probably didn't realize it, but he was smiling, and so was Toscano. “And when did you see him last, Miss Miller? Or should I say Mrs. Frontenec?”

“Miss Miller,” I said, and frowned, pretending to think about it. They waited patiently while I worked out my position. I saw immediately that it was dangerous. Danny had robbed the store I was fired from. If I said I had seen him back at the beginning of September—it was just before the murder, I was pretty sure, that I'd run into him at the fair—if I admitted that, it would look like collaboration. And if I lied about it and they found out—if Danny told them he'd been with me …

I felt sicker and sicker, but I had to say something. “I'm trying to recall the exact date,” I said, smiling wanly. “It was in October, year before last. What's that? Fifteen months ago? I can't remember what the date was.”

“The date doesn't matter, Miss Miller,” said Sherman. Toscano wrote in his notebook, scribbling without looking. His eyes were on me. Sherman asked, “You haven't seen him in fifteen months?”

“No. He walked out on me. Just left, without a word.” I would dazzle them with my sorrows. “I never knew why. I have no idea where he went. I have no desire to see him again.”

They asked for more details: where Danny had worked, who his parents were, how long we'd been married. I gave them the address of George and Claire in Florida and told them about Danny's job at the shirt factory.

“Would you say your husband was …” Sherman screwed up his face as if trying to find an inoffensive word. “An unstable individual, Miss Miller?” he finished.

I remembered Danny when I saw him last, not fifteen months ago but last fall. I remembered his scraggly beard, and how he smelled, and his torn sweatshirt, and the look of a wild horse in his eyes. But I couldn't tell them that. “Oh, no,” I said. “Until he up and left me, he was completely stable. Mr. Average.”

Toscano turned over a page, and Sherman cleared his throat and pulled at his tie. “Okay. Good. Now. About you. I should tell you that this all looks, kind of, a little funny. Okay? I mean, you used to work at this hardware store—”

“I know,” I said quickly, to get it over. “It looks like I might have put him up to it. Is that right?”