Nora and Liz (27 page)

Liz willed herself not to move. “Hi. How are you?”

“Okay, I think.” Nora put her hand up to Liz’s cheek. “You’ve been so wonderful. I don’t think I could’ve gotten through any of this without you.”

“Yes, you could have. You’re stronger than you think, Nora.”

Nora sighed. “I don’t know. I never had to do anything like this before. I just wish you hadn’t been involved.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Father’s stupid accusation.”

“Oh, that,” Liz said, deliberately casual. “It’s annoying, but I guess the autopsy will clear it up.”

“Yes. But that’ll take a while.”

“Will it? But all they have to do is… Nora, you can’t want to talk about this!”

“It’s okay. I thought that, too, that all they’d have to do would be look in her stomach. But they have to take tissue samples, the medical examiner told me. And blood, I think. All that has to go to a lab to be examined. It could be as late as next week, he said. Or later, but he said they’d try to hurry it up.”

“Next week,” Liz said. “My brother’s coming then. At the end of the week. The weekend.”

Nora lifted her head, then kissed Liz lightly on the cheek. “I’m glad,” she said. “He’ll distract you from all this.”

Liz allowed herself to take Nora’s hand. “Maybe I don’t want to be distracted.”

“Surely you do!”

“From all the fuss, yes. But from you, no. In fact,” she said, marveling at her own certainty, “the way I feel right now, I don’t want to be distracted from you ever again.”

Nora was silent, but Liz could see her smiling in the little light that came from the cloudy moon. “Last night,” Nora said finally, “or really this morning, when you were holding me? I didn’t want to ever leave your arms. And sometimes when we’ve been talking, I’ve wondered how I used to manage just talking to Thomas or the
Hastingses
, or Mrs. Brice and Patty and Sarah.”

“You’ve been more lonely than you know.” Liz kissed her swiftly and then stood up. “But don’t jump to conclusions, please. You’ve been having such an awful time with all this. You can’t…”

“Think clearly?” Nora stood also, facing Liz. “I think I can, Liz. I think I can think clearly enough to know that I don’t want to stop being with you, that I don’t want this to end when you go back to New York.”

“Neither do I,” Liz admitted. “But…”

“Let’s just see where it goes, where we go. Meanwhile…” Nora put her arms around Liz’s neck and drew her close.

They slept in each other’s arms again that night, still chastely, or Nora slept; Liz alternated between staring wakefully into the darkness and gazing at Nora, noticing the moonlight playing on the curve of her cheek, the way the short ends of her hair curled damply at her temples.

They spent the next few days making funeral arrangements and sorting Corinne’s clothes and other belongings; Liz had been afraid that would be too painful for Nora to do so soon, but Nora had insisted. “I’m numb now,” she kept saying. “It’s really not hard. I’m surprised that it isn’t, but it isn’t.”

But after another sleepless night in Nora’s narrow bed, Liz reluctantly told Nora she thought she should go back to Piney Haven to sleep.

“Oh, no,” Nora protested. “Please don’t. Please stay.”

“I want to stay,” Liz said, taking her hands. “But if I don’t get some sleep, Nora, I won’t be any use to you.”

“Well—maybe you could sleep in the parlor? On the sofa? I don’t think it’s terribly lumpy. I’ll miss feeling you next to me,” she added shyly. “But it is a bit crowded, I know.”

“I’ll miss feeling you next to me, too,” Liz said stiffly, wanting to say more, but telling herself she shouldn’t, that this was not the time.

Nora slid her hands up Liz’s arms to her shoulders, then wrapped her own arms around Liz’s body. “I do want to be with you, Liz,” she whispered. “It’s just—I’m so…”

“
Shh
.” Liz moved back enough to put two fingers against Nora’s lips. “
Shh
. I know. It’s all right, Nora. It really is.”

***

Is it, she wondered later, alone in the parlor, staring out the window at the thick darkness. Did she really understand what we were talking about, what I was talking about, anyway?

Am I going to lose her?

Don’t be an idiot, she admonished herself, turning briskly to the sofa and snapping a sheet over it. You can’t lose what you don’t have.

And you’re being a selfish bitch to think the way you’ve been thinking when she’s so upset and sad.

***

Saturday morning before Ralph was awake, they took their coffee outside and sat in the rapidly warming sunlight, sipping slowly, silently, until Ralph’s voice boomed out from the house. It is going to be an impossible day, Liz thought, wishing it over, and Nora thought, This is the day of my mother’s funeral, thought it carefully, deliberately, as if testing her reaction.

But she couldn’t measure that, couldn’t imagine how she was going to react.

Louise Brice, in a neat dark gray suit with a silver and amethyst pin on the left lapel, settled next to her husband in a pew in the exact center of the church. “Look, Henry,” she said, poking him, “there she is. That Hardy woman.” She pointed to Liz, who was walking with Nora to the front pew in which Ralph had just been deposited by Sarah Cassidy and Patty Monahan, both rather weepy-looking; together, after settling Ralph, they moved to several pews back from the front. “Disgraceful,” Louise murmured. “That Hardy woman sitting with family. And I certainly don’t think a woman should wear pants to a funeral. And who’s that, I wonder? I didn’t know the
Tillots
had any relatives left. Oh, wait, maybe it’s one of those cousins who moved away all those years ago. My goodness, look, Henry, there are at least five of them!”

Two dark-suited men, one with a great shock of blond hair and the other, older, with a neatly trimmed goatee, took their places in the pew behind Nora and Liz. With them were two women, presumably their wives, the older one large and matronly, wearing a dark green dress in which she looked uncomfortably hot. The other, arm-in-arm with the blond man, tossed her head as she approached the pew, sending her mane of no-color straight hair cascading over her back; she leaned over and squeezed Nora’s shoulder and then Ralph’s. Behind the foursome came an elderly man, very solemn and stout, in a dark blue three-piece suit. He leaned over the back of the front pew to say something to Ralph, who, as Louise later said, “seemed too lost in grief or thought to respond.”

“How he can stand having that woman in the same pew is beyond me,” Louise whispered to Henry “The gall of her even coming!”

“Louise, let me get this straight,” Henry whispered back; he was already feeling hot and out of sorts and he wished, as he leaned toward his wife, that he hadn’t let her talk him into wearing a vest. “What you’ve actually heard is that Ralph accused Miss Hardy of poisoning Corinne. Right?”

“Exactly.” Louise snapped open her black leather handbag and removed a delicately scented handkerchief.

“Not,” Henry continued, surreptitiously loosening his tie a little, “that she’s actually been formally charged?”

“Well, no, not yet. But”—Louise mopped her damp forehead, releasing a faint trace of lilac cologne from her handkerchief—“I don’t think they’ve finished the autopsy report on poor Corinne. I imagine they’re waiting till after the funeral.” Louise nodded to Helen Whipple and her husband, who had just arrived, and then craned her head around to smile at the Davises, coming in with Roy Stark and Georgia Foley. The Davises sat humbly toward the back, but Roy and Georgia marched confidently down the aisle and sat in the third pew from the front.

“Who on earth is that?” Louise whispered, watching Roy. “He seems to be with Georgia Foley. But why?”

Her husband looked amused. “Someone you don’t know, dear? But how can that be?” Discretely, he opened his vest.

“I wonder what Georgia’s doing here; I don’t think she had anything to do with the
Tillots
. I hope she’s not going to pester poor Nora about selling the place, although I daresay it would be a good idea. Look how fussily Georgia’s dressed; who would wear a blouse with a fichu to a funeral?”

“Why, I don’t know, dear,” Henry said mildly, stifling a laugh; what in hell was a fichu? Sounded like a sneeze.

“Look how that man with Georgia is talking to the Hardy woman. I wonder if he’s a friend of hers. She doesn’t look very pleased to see him, I must say!”

Henry sighed and patted his wife’s hand. “Perhaps he’s just a nice sympathetic fellow or some young relative of the Davises. He and Georgia came in with them, didn’t they? The
Hardys
probably used to get their produce from the Davises, since the farm’s so close to the lake. Don’t speculate so, Louise, for heavens’ sake!”

***

The church was, in the end, only about a quarter full. The group at the cemetery (for even though the report on the blood and tissue samples had yet to be released, the body itself had been released for burial) was even smaller: Nora and Liz and Ralph; Sarah and Patty, both of whom were still teary; the cousins and the elderly man, who was a brother of Corinne’s; the
Brices
; the Cantors; Charles Hastings, who’d led the service, and his wife. The two
Neds
, who had come to the church out of mingled curiosity and politeness, lingered for a while on the church lawn, but did not go to the cemetery. The
Whipples
, the
Lorens
, Roy and Georgia, and a few others did, but they stayed in the background during the short burial service.

Once the casket had been put into the ground, and the closest relatives and friends had left, a little cluster of people remained around Helen Whipple.

“I feel so sorry,” Helen said, tugging at the hem of her black suit jacket and smoothing it over her ample hips, “for poor Liz Hardy, dragged into this whole sad business.”

“Well, I don’t know about being dragged in,” said Maryann Loren. “She certainly has gone on spending a lot of time at the farm. You’d think since she’s a suspect, or was, that she’d want to steer clear.”

“Honestly, Maryann,” Helen snapped, “I really do think that was a ridiculous accusation. Probably something Ralph made up in his demented state.”

“That’s possible I suppose,” Maryann admitted. “But one does still wonder.”

“What’s possible?” asked Roy, coming up to the group hand-in-hand with Georgia Foley.

“Oh,” said Helen, while Louise Brice studied Roy with mingled hostility and curiosity, “we were just guessing”—she looked sternly at Maryann—“about poor Mr.
Tillot’s
role in that silly accusation against Liz Hardy. Hello, Georgia!”

Georgia nodded, dropping Roy’s hand.

Roy looked very serious. “Maybe it’s not so silly,” he said slowly. “She does seem a bit odd, don’t you think? And I saw her at the
Tillots
’ the very morning after Mrs.
Tillot
died. You’d think she’d have wanted to stay away, given what people were saying.”

“Oh, come on!” Helen said angrily. “You can’t be serious. Why, I’ve known that girl since she was a child, far better than you, if you don’t mind my saying, and she’s not a bit odd.”

Roy bowed slightly. “You may be right,” he said. “I don’t know, of course. I like Liz Hardy, actually. I certainly hope you
are
right.” He inclined his head politely, saying, “Ladies…” and he walked away smiling cryptically, his arm linked in Georgia’s.

“Who is that unpleasant man?” Louise asked. “Some new flame of Georgia Foley’s?”

“I hope not,” Helen answered, looking after him with undisguised distaste. “He’s been around for a few months, filled in part time at the high school after that math teacher left, and lives out at the old Kincaid place. He’s too slick for me; I never did like him, even back when he first came into the post office. It’s him I’d keep an eye on, not Liz Hardy. I certainly don’t put any stock in what he said.”

“Yes, but as I said before,” Maryann reminded them pointedly, “if the
Tillots
do have money…”

“Oh, honestly, Maryann,” Helen retorted, “just what are you suggesting?”

“Motive, of course,” Louise Brice said, nodding at Maryann.

“It’s a horrible thought, I know.” Maryann appeared to shudder. “But Liz Hardy has been very friendly to poor Nora, who’s bound to inherit.”