Missing Mom (17 page)

Seeing that yawn, Clare whispered in my ear, “Oh! He’s
bored
! I want that man
dead
.”

At the time of his arrest, Ward Lynch had “voluntarily confessed” to Mt. Ephraim police officers but later, after acquiring a lawyer, he’d “recanted” his confession. Now, Lynch’s lawyer (who was looking grim and defiant, like the coach of a badly losing team) announced that his client would not be testifying. There was but one witness for the defense, Lynch’s grandmother Mrs. Ethel Makepeace, a stocky woman in her mid-sixties with ragged-looking tea-colored hair and a belligerent manner with even her grandson’s lawyer. On the witness stand Mrs. Makepeace declared shrilly that her grandson Ward had not only been staying with her for “all of May” in her home in Erie, Pennsylvania, but on that day, May 11, he’d been “always never” out of her sight for twenty-four hours. Lynch’s lawyer asked quizzically, “‘Always never,’ Mrs. Makepeace? Do you mean, ‘almost never’?”

Ethel Makepeace sneered at him. Her hair had an explosive look that contrasted with her creased, tired-looking face. “You know what I mean, mister, don’t you be putting words in my mouth, any of you. My grandson Ward did not plunder and kill any lady up here in what’s-it-called, I am here to swear on a stack of Bibles he
did not
.”

The judge ruled that charges against Ward W. Lynch were not to be dismissed and that the defendant was remanded for trial, the date for which would be set on another day.

The hearing ended. Ward Lynch in his glaring-orange jumpsuit was led away by guards, hobbling in shackles. Mrs. Makepeace had to be restrained by bailiffs, shouting: “What? What is going on? Where are you taking my grandson? I told you, Ward is
innocent
.”

Suddenly, I wanted to be with Mom.

I wanted to run away from everyone, to be with Mom.

We staggered out of the Chautauqua County Courthouse and into the startling sunshine of a day in early summer.

So exhausted! And this had been only the “preliminary” hearing.

On the pavement in front of the mournful limestone courthouse Clare and I were surrounded by well-wishers. Some of these were relatives who’d crowded into the small courtroom to show their support, others appeared to be strangers. But by this time I knew to pretend that I recognized faces, for probably I’d met these people at Mom’s funeral or Clare’s luncheon. I was learning that public grief is a social responsibility, you can’t hide your face like a child or turn away crying
For God’s sake leave me alone, I am so tired!

We were being told that it wasn’t likely that there would be a trial, since evidence was overwhelming against Lynch. Possibly his lawyer could try a plea of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity caused by methamphetamines but that wasn’t likely either, Lynch’s lawyer was a sensible person who’d never let the case come to trial.

“But maybe there should be a trial,” Clare said, “and let jurors decide. If our mother’s murderer should be executed.”

Weakly I said, “Oh, Clare. No. I don’t think I could endure a trial. I was only up there a few minutes and I’m wiped out and I don’t even want to think about it, ever again.
No
.”

“Nikki, you will do what you have to do. For Mom.”

We were headed for the parking lot at the rear of the building. We’d come in separate cars but I knew that Clare wanted me to remain with her and Rob for a while, before they drove back to Mt. Ephraim. I wondered if Clare had noticed Wally Szalla amid the crowd and if she was expecting me to introduce her to him. (“Your friend” Clare alluded to Wally, sometimes in a wicked mood, “Your married friend.”) And I knew that Wally, gregarious Wally Szalla who wanted everybody to love him, was eager to be introduced to my sister and brother-in-law.

Wally was never to know how my mother had disliked him. He’d have been heartbroken since he’d liked Gwen so much and had been devastated by her death.

Lately, Wally had been spending several nights a week with me in my brownstone apartment. Sharing me, as he said, with Smoky-the-cat. (Wally was mildly allergic to cat dander, we’d discovered. So Smoky was welcome in my bed only on those nights when Wally wasn’t there.) Our days were spent apart for Wally was enormously busy with the radio station and other responsibilities, he traveled frequently to Rochester, Buffalo, Albany and New York City. Since the so-called crisis of several months ago his wife Isabel had decided, yes she wanted a divorce, but on her terms, and these would be mean-spirited and acrimonious terms, but at least negotiations were moving forward now, finally. More and more often Wally and I were seen together if mostly in romantically dim-lighted inns and restaurants in the Chautauqua Valley and weekends out of town. “I’m your ‘other woman,’” I teased Wally. “The one you can’t bring home.”

Wally had said, “I’ve been expelled from that ‘home.’ It’s time for me to make another.”

I hadn’t wanted Wally to come to the courthouse that day. Not because I was ashamed of our relationship but because I was concerned that, if I broke down on the witness stand, Wally would want to come forward to comfort me. Wally was an emotionally extravagant and impulsive man who sometimes behaved in ways not in his own best interests.

Well, I hadn’t broken down. A coughing spell, but I’d managed to continue.
Nikki you were wonderful! You spoke so bravely
I could hear Mom insisting.

Outside in the bright sunshine my eyes were aching. Clare had slipped on her oversized dark glasses that were both stylish and a little sinister, white plastic frames and near-black lenses. We were in the parking lot now, Rob was jingling his car keys and asking if I’d like to have a drink with them, we all needed to unwind didn’t we!

In the corner of my eye I saw Wally Szalla on the sidewalk, hesitating. Waiting for me to acknowledge him.

Oh but I loved Wally Szalla! And yet.

Clare nudged me in the ribs: “Nikki. Your friend.”

In this way, without my needing to make a decision, the matter of introducing Wally Szalla to the Chisholms was decided.

So disappointed! Clare’s car wasn’t in the driveway, or anywhere in sight.

It was ten days later. Ten days after the hearing. Thursday morning, 8:38
A
.
M
. I’d driven from Chautauqua Falls to Mt. Ephraim to meet Clare at Mom’s house, to begin our task of sorting through her things, housecleaning, preparing the house to be sold.

Strange how calmly we spoke of these matters. Clare had a way of saying
Putting the house on the market
as if the house we’d grown up in was only just
the house
and not something more.

On the market
was a neutral matter-of-fact term. It was one of Rob Chisholm’s terms, brisk and businesslike.

Arriving at 43 Deer Creek Drive and seeing that Clare wasn’t here yet, I tried not to be upset. Not to be angry. Parked my car in front of the house. (Not in the driveway. Nowhere near the garage. Though I understood that the garage had been “thoroughly cleaned.”) The redwood-and-stucco ranch house with its flat graveled roof was looking forlorn and vacant. Someone had drawn blinds shut over the plate-glass “picture” window, like a large clumsy bandage.

The house where the lady was murdered
. So neighborhood children would speak of it, staring as they bicycled quickly past.

Thank God, Rob had arranged for a lawn service crew to mow the raggedy grass around the house and to clear away the worst of the weeds springing up in Mom’s flower beds. I knew that neighbors had been picking up newspapers and flyers from the driveway, which was kind of them, but still litter was accumulating.

It’s as if, in a neighborhood where there is an empty house, litter just naturally accumulates around it: blown into shrubs like confetti, wrappers and Styrofoam cups and advertising flyers in the stubby grass.

It wasn’t Thursday June 3 as Clare and I had originally planned but Thursday June 10. We’d had to postpone our meeting at the house because after the court hearing we’d both been sick for several days (“flu” was the catchall word, “a touch of the flu” as Mom would call it) but we’d had a definite plan for this morning.

Clare had even insisted on arriving before me, to open up and “air out” the house, that had been empty now for almost a month. “No problem for me, Nikki! I can’t sleep past dawn anyway.” There was the unspoken acknowledgment that stepping into our old house might be harder for me than for Clare.

Except: where was Clare?

She’d suggested that I arrive at about 8:30
A
.
M
. We would work through the day. Naively we believed that the task of “sorting through” our parents’ possessions might be accomplished in a day.

Mom had never gotten around to seriously sorting through Dad’s things, we knew. It hadn’t been a task either Clare or I had much wanted to help her with.

I waited for a few minutes, listening to WCHF FM on the car radio, some National Public Radio news, and a startling interlude of “Opera Highlights” (Maria Callas as Tosca), but Clare didn’t show up and so I called her on my cell phone.

Five rings. No answer. I wanted to cry, this was so frustrating. My brother-in-law’s genial recorded voice clicked on
Hello! No one can come to the phone right now but if you wish to leave a message
…

“Clare? Are you there? Please pick up, Clare. This is Nikki.”

As if Clare needed to be reminded who I was!

I tried to speak calmly. Since what had happened to Mom, my behavior with others was divided, not equally, between Calm Nikki and Gone-to-Pieces Nikki. I was having some luck keeping the Gone-to-Pieces Nikki private, now that Wally Szalla was more reliably in my life.

“Clare, I’m at the house. I guess I should start without you. I hope nothing is wrong over there. Give me a call, will you? You have my cell number.”

Actually it felt good to be angry at my sister. There is nothing like a wave of indignant anger toward a bossy older sister to dissipate panic.

I stuffed my cell phone into my pocket, got out and crossed the lawn. Vaguely I was headed for the front door.
Not the kitchen door! Mom’s tinkly little sleigh bells overhead
. But maybe I should wait for Clare, before I went inside. I’d brought plastic garbage bags, for trash. Clare was bringing more bags, plus boxes and cartons. We assumed that Mom had a store of garbage bags (in the garage) as well as boxes and cartons in the attic. And Mom had plenty of cleaning supplies in the house, as well as a new lightweight vacuum cleaner to replace the bulky old vacuum she’d been thumping and thudding around the house with for years.

Go inside. Use the front door. Hurry!

What was I afraid of, the house was certainly empty. The front stoop was littered with yellowed old flyers, newspapers. Though Gwen Eaton’s mail delivery had been discontinued, the mailbox beside the front door was stuffed with junk mail.

I began to toss things into a garbage bag, with a kind of fury. My heart was beating so strangely it felt like choked laughter.

It was 9
A
.
M
., and then it was 9:20
A
.
M
., and no Clare.

For today’s adventure in Mt. Ephraim, I was wearing comfortable old clothes. Not Funky-Chic Nikki but Grab-Bag Nikki. Sleeveless black T-shirt, khaki shorts, WCHF AM-FM hat pulled down over my now-flattened punk hair. I had to suppose that neighbors were aware of me, those who were home. Deer Creek Acres was that kind of place, you might describe as vigilant/concerned or plain nosey depending on your mood.

As an older teenager, I couldn’t wait to escape. But since what had happened to Mom, people in this neighborhood had been so warmly supportive, so genuinely grieving for Mom, I’d had to re-think my old feelings.

Clare was less certain. She was beginning to think that Mt. Ephraim was making almost too much of Gwen Eaton, so many people claiming they’d been her best friends. Clare had thought maybe we should go through Mom’s things at night, with the blinds drawn, in the hope that no one would see and come to bother us.

I told Clare no thanks! That sounded like a terrible idea.

Clare said she hadn’t been serious. Of course.

As Clare had said she hadn’t been serious, a flippant remark she’d made about Wally Szalla, after meeting him the other day in Chautauqua Falls.

So that’s Wally Szalla! He doesn’t look the type.

I was drifting about the yard picking up fallen tree branches. My legs felt weak and I was beginning to sweat. More and more I seemed to be feeling someone watching me.

The Highams were home across the street, no doubt. And there was Mrs. Pedersen next-door, her station wagon in the driveway.

Young mothers pushing children in strollers, in the street. Dogs trotting beside them. Nikki Eaton had been gone from Deer Creek too long for any of these young women to know me, but possibly they’d known Gwen Eaton.

The house where the lady was murdered.
They would not utter such scary words to their children yet somehow their children would know.

Schoolbuses had arrived and departed in the subdivision. There wasn’t much local traffic, delivery vans and repairmen. Each time a vehicle appeared on Deer Creek Drive I glanced up expecting to see Clare’s car, and each time I was disappointed.

Back of the house, the lawn crew had cut the grass in crooked careless swaths. Debris from a recent storm lay scattered everywhere and Mom’s flower beds were choked with weeds. Her purple and and yellow irises, her beautiful roses. We’d teased Mom about fussing more over her flowers than she did over us. (Though it wasn’t true.) Mom said, “You’re not stuck in one place like flowers. If you get thirsty or crowded with weeds, you can do something about it.”

I tried not to think how shocked Mom would be, if she could see how things were deteriorating.

Dad, too. He’d been the one to really fuss over the house, more obsessively than Mom.

In my room at the back of the house, sometimes I’d hear my father whistling as he prepared to mow the grass. (We’d never had a professional lawn crew. Most people did their own lawns in Deer Creek Acres.) Once, when I was about twelve, I squatted by my window and whistled through the screen like an echo, and Dad whistled back, assuming at first (as he said afterward) that it was a bird.

A bird! We’d teased Dad over that for years.

Poor Mom never could whistle. She’d try, pursing her lips as we instructed her, but all that came out was a feeble hissing sound. But Mom hummed and sang to herself, outdoors as well as indoors.

How they’d cared for this modest property, Gwen and Jonathan Eaton!

And now it would be sold. Placed
on the market
, in the hope that strangers might buy it.

The house where the lady was murdered
. In a town as small as Mt. Ephraim, it might be difficult to find these strangers.

Our backyard was defined by a four-foot redwood fence that had come to look permanently waterlogged. Probably it was rotting, and would have to be replaced. Mom had grown morning glories, climber roses, clematis and sweet peas in profusion on this fence. I was tugging at a willow branch that had fallen into the climber roses when I heard someone behind me.

“N-Nikki?”

I turned, startled. It was Gladys Higham.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to creep up on you, Nikki.”

My heart beat hard and sullen
Go away! Leave me alone!
but of course I forced myself to greet Gladys with a smile. I had to be polite, I was Gwen Eaton’s daughter.

Gladys was wearing a shapeless floral print dress, cotton socks and crepe-soled shoes of the kind Mom had worn. Her heavy legs were waxy-white. Except for her tight-permed bluish hair that fitted her head like a cap, she was looking slack-bodied, blowsy. Older than I’d ever seen her looking. She approached me hesitantly as if uncertain of her welcome.

“Oh, Nikki! I saw the car out front, I—I thought it must be one of you—you, or Clare.”

Gladys hugged me, and I tried to hug her back. I held my breath against the faint chemical smell of her hair.

“Nikki, dear, you’re
thin
. You are taking care of yourself, I hope?”

There was no avoiding conversation with Mrs. Higham. To deflect questions about me, I asked how she and her husband were, and Gladys told me. I asked after her children, and grandchildren, and Gladys told me. I was certainly sincere. Mom would have been pleased with me. I hoped that Gladys didn’t notice how impatiently my toes were twitching inside my sandals.

Now I was more disgusted with Clare than ever. Where the hell was she!

“—Walter was saying just the other day, ‘I suppose the next step is, the Eaton house will be sold. And no telling who will move in.’”

Gladys spoke anxiously. Her large pillowy sliding-down bosom heaved with a sigh.

“Well, yes. Neither Clare nor I would ever live here, it’s only practical to sell the house.”

“It is practical, yes! But so sad.”

Damned if I was going to apologize. My smile persevered.

“Your mother and father lived in that house for at least thirty years. I remember them when they were so
young
! Walter was saying, ‘It isn’t a good real estate market right now.’ Something about interest rates?”

Gladys spoke slowly, doggedly. Behind her bifocal glasses, her eyes brimmed with moisture. I dreaded this stout elderly woman bursting into tears, and making me cry, too; I dreaded her hugging me again, or even touching my arm. As in a nightmare I was forced to recall how desperately I’d run to her, into her kitchen. How I’d interrupted this innocent woman’s life. Those chittering canaries, parakeets. I’d upset them, too.

There was an intimate bond between Gladys Higham and me, I could not bear to acknowledge.

“Gwen just loved this house! All her growing things. She was just the happiest woman, you know, Nikki. I loved to hear her sing. She loved people, and she loved life.”

I murmured yes, that was so. But now—

“—except Japanese beetles, Gwen did not love. Oh, those nasty things, eating our rosebushes.” Gladys laughed, sadly. “‘Why did God make Japanese beetles, Gladys, do you know?’ she’d ask, and I said, ‘Same reason He made rattlesnakes.’ Walter, he’d say, ‘Same reason He made Bill and Hillary: to test us.’” Gladys laughed, shaking her head. “It breaks my heart, to see her irises in that state. And her American beauties, in that bed there. When my daughter Liddie had her trouble, you know, two surgeries in six months plus Dwight Junior falling off that railroad trestle and breaking both legs, it was Gwen who always asked after her.
That
was Gwen.”

“Gladys, I know. But now, if you don’t mind…”

“The funeral was lovely! So many flowers. And the music. And that minister spoke so wonderfully, I don’t agree with people who say he talks too much. I know, Clare doesn’t like him. I can understand that.” Gladys spoke quickly, as if making amends. The flesh of her upper arms was so white, and so terribly raddled, I had to look away. “And Clare’s luncheon, so lovely. What brave girls you are, you and Clare! Walter was saying, he’d never seen such a large party in a private house. So many people we didn’t know. Your sister’s house is quite something, isn’t it? The rooms are extra-big, and even the furniture. And that swimming pool in the back! Walter was saying, he wouldn’t want to pay taxes in that neighborhood. But I gather Rob Chisholm has a good job at what’s-it-called—Coldwater Electric? Gwen used to say.
I
never was one for swimming, like Gwen. People said she was the most wonderful—patient—instructor at the Y. Her seniors adored her! After your father passed away, you know, Gwen was at the pool every morning. She told me, ‘In the water you feel so free.’”

Politely I murmured yes. I’d gone back to picking up storm debris and shoving it into a garbage bag.

Glady’s chatter was a sincere form of grief. I supposed.

Mom hadn’t approved of Dad brusquely cutting off neighbors who tried to engage him in inane chatter. She’d scolded Clare and me for being obviously restless, in the presence of prattling elders. There is just no excuse for being rude to anyone, Mom believed. Because you never know.