Return to Dust (12 page)

She suddenly reached out and touched the back of my hand. “I'm not crazy. My family has problems—I mean me and Davey. We had a peculiar childhood after our parents got killed. We sink low and come back up.” She smiled, thin, wistful. “We're not crazy. My family is not crazy. Doctors do let us walk in the streets.”

When we left the restaurant, we lingered in the parking lot, for some reason not ready to leave each other. The day was bright with cold sun, those icy shafts of light that spike a lazy November afternoon. She started to leave, but turned back, grinning. “Doctors do let us walk the streets.”

Chapter Fourteen

I planned to spend the next day interviewing. I got up at five, jogged for a couple of miles in the early morning cold, bundled in old sweats and a pullover knit cap, and sat at the breakfast table with coffee and dry toast. I leafed through the folder Karen had given me, but nothing jarred. The insurance policy was typical, the other papers were familiar tedious documents from Social Security, federal and state governments, stapled tax returns from H&R Block, the usual conservative and mechanical portfolio of an average wary citizen. Everything in order. The insurance policy confirmed my earlier observation—if I proved Marta was
not
a suicide, Karen got a lot of money.

The only item I lingered on was the obituary of Joshua Jennings, a man I vaguely knew—and liked. I recalled reading that very obit in the local newspaper. The frayed clipping—it looked much handled, and I imagined Marta rereading it late at night—showed an old photograph when he was probably fifty or fifty-five, a head shot revealing bright intelligent eyes in a narrow, patrician face. He had that signature Van Dyke beard, but it was dark then. The last time I saw Joshua it was white—a pale murky white, a little unkempt and poorly clipped.

The article had appeared in the
Farmington Weekly,
so it was front-page and extensive. Jennings was a prominent local citizen, and one of the richest. The article talked of his long, distinguished career as a Latin professor at the equally distinguished Farmington Boys' Academy off the town green. It mentioned his retirement at sixty-five and his subsequent involvement with nearby Farmington College as advisor, lecturer, and adjunct faculty, teaching German and French courses.

“I like to keep my hand in it,” he was quoted as saying.

I remembered how Marta had used the same expression about her housekeeping jobs.

It mentioned his legendary philanthropy, his inveterate bachelorhood, his feisty presence at town council meetings, his membership on the Republican Town Committee, the Masons, and it mentioned his move six months earlier to Amherst, Massachusetts. He wanted a retirement village in the town he remembered fondly. It mentioned a surviving great-niece in New York City, whose apartment he was visiting when the massive stroke hit him. The niece requested contributions to the Boys' Academy where the school was already organizing a scholarship in his name. The article mentioned that all his assets—the reporter talked of a bequest rumored in the amount of over four-million dollars—were left to the boy's school. An endowment in his memory. He wanted a new library wing named in his honor.

I put down the article. Nothing untoward here, the only surprise being the amount of the bequest to the school. That was a hefty piece of change. Had Marta wanted that money? that world? that aristocratic aura? Joshua lived in a huge Federal brick colonial off the green, across from Miss Porter's School, and the old homestead had been filled with family antiques, leather-bound books, and quiet, inherited charm. When he moved out of state, most of his furniture and other possessions had been given to the college to benefit a scholarship fund.

A descendant of early founders, Jennings epitomized old-guard New England, Puritan glory filtered down through the ages into less reverential times. He'd also been an inveterate book collector, whose fine-tooled leather volumes were the subject of my own intense envy during my infrequent visits. He once showed me a volume of incunabula, kept behind lock and key in a document box he claimed once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Did Marta imagine herself the
nouveau-riche
mistress of that polished, sleek, understated world?

But Joshua wanted out of it—he'd been talking of quiet retirement villages for years. The house went on and off the market, always with excessively high asking prices, because, someone told me, he was ambivalent about leaving Farmington. He was in failing health. We all watched as he finally sold to Selena and Peter, and we celebrated with them. I'd actually gone to the celebration at the house. Their timing was right because Joshua had fallen, and he panicked. He wanted to get out. Joshua toasted Peter and Selena, who beamed. Joshua looked melancholic, but said he had no choice. A one-level home in Amherst, his bedroom set, the desk in his library, his rare volumes.

“Remember me,” he'd asked us, a poignant valedictory.

I phoned the newspaper to talk to the writer of the obit. I left a message on his machine. Could he please call me? I wanted the name of the great-niece in New York.

***

Marta's only woman friend, Hattie Cozzins, answered my knocking immediately, halfway through my second knock, as though she'd been standing behind the door. Eleven in the morning, she was dressed for a cocktail hour. She seemed out of breath, speaking in a faint, Marilyn Monroe whisper, her hand against her chest.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

It was a dumb question. Of course she was all right. We were doing old-time Hollywood movies here.
Some Like it Hot.

“Come in.” She pointed to a chair. “I thought you might be late.” I'd told her eleven o'clock on the phone. It was five before the hour.

She looked familiar, though I'd never met her. I realized I'd seen—well, her prototype, writ large. Years back on an early Sunday morning in Las Vegas, walking through the glitter casino on the way to the checkout desk, I spotted so many women like her: silver-strapped heels, tight reddish-orange cocktail dresses holding in a little too much flesh, the hair too-many times blonde so that it looked washed out and vaguely like straw, the overly made-up face with the eyeliner too deep and too indigo, the lipstick too coral and too smeared. I realized that Hattie was, alarmingly, a type. I know, if you push it, we're all types, but she was a cultivated
type
, hothouse variety.

“Marta was my best friend,” she was saying in a soupy voice. Without asking, she poured me coffee, handing me the cup. She already had her own, a trace of lipstick on the rim, and a burning cigarette in a Trump Casino tourist ashtray next to it. The coffee was hot and amazingly tasty.

I checked out her apartment. Filigreed lace on cascading, white curtains, on the oversized lamps, on walls. Frills, pink and white. Baby's breath clusters in faux-Hopi pots. A fluffy carpet, periwinkle blue, with candy-cane pink-and-white stripes woven through it. It looked as if an errant child had skipped through the room trailing melting, sticky candy. There were dolls everywhere—in cradles, clustered around plants and books and magazines. All of them stared at me with blank, unmoving eyes—the waiting room of a drug clinic. We were not alone there, I told myself.

“More coffee?”

I nodded. She made good coffee.

She was talking in that same breathy whisper, pausing now and then to taste the cigarette. I said very little, but that didn't seem to matter because she'd constructed an agenda, and she was hell-bent on running through it. She rattled on about their deep love for each other, their frequent vacations to gambling resorts—“How we did love those slot machines, we two old biddies on the bus tour”—their dinners together at Red Lobster, their lengthy late-night phone conversations. “Two women who refused to allow old people into our bodies.”

“You were supposed to go again.”

“What?”

“Vegas. You had tickets?”

She squinted. “Yes, as a matter of fact, we'd be flying out to Vegas right about now.”

The sudden realization startled her, though she had to have thought of it earlier. She stopped, and I noticed wetness in the corners of her eyes. Traces of mascara leaked down her wrinkled, powdered cheeks. Any more crying and this would not be pretty.

“I suppose my ticket is still somewhere in her house.”

She actually sobbed.

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“Why would she kill herself?”

Silence. Her fingers trembled as she lit another cigarette. “There must have been something she didn't tell me. We traveled together, we were friendly, but we really didn't confide
personal
things to each other. Even if we did talk for hours. Our friendship was, well, not one where we talked about—real things. One of those friendships that old people fashion out of—loneliness. I could see she was depressed…”

“Joshua Jenning's death?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“You're not sure?”

“Well, they
were
friends. Like all of us, though I was rarely invited to his home. Marta made sure of
that
. She didn't talk about it—really. We all buzzed about his dumb move, the stroke, and dying in New York. I mean—New York? Really? But…” She trailed off, her hands in the air, cigarette smoke above her head. She looked so sprayed together I feared spontaneous combustion.

“Karen thinks murder.” I said it flat out—to get her reaction.

I expected her to gasp, but instead she laughed, long and uproariously.

“I
know
. That girl can—amuse. Come on, boy. I can accept a suicide because I have no other choice, but murder?
Pull-ease
.” She screamed the word out. “Why in the world? Marta? Really? She cheated at cards—her only vice.” She stopped laughing. “Ridiculous. Simply ridiculous. Karen is off in her own world. Always has been. She and that Davey. Loopy, she is. Spend any time with her and you'll understand what I mean. Those poor kids have always been trouble.”

“Like what?”

“So much psychiatric care.”

“Even Davey?”

She leaned in, confidential. “You know, it's real weird. Marta didn't care for Karen, but was close to Davey—he was her favorite when he was a teenager. She doted on him. They were a pair, very religious together, the two trooping off to church. Devout Catholics. And then he goes from nice to nuts, if you know what I mean. And then they have a real blowout.”

“About what?”

“She wouldn't say. It was so bad she actually fainted on my sofa.” She pointed to the blue velvet monstrosity nearby, covered with spider-web antimacassars, and we both were quiet, as though Marta lay there still, fainting, gasping for breath, a nosegay held to her nostrils.

“No idea?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Tell me about the Brown Bonnets,” I said.

“The Brown Bonnets? That dreadful group of Catholic nuts. How'd you know about them?”

“I found their pamphlets in her house.”

“Nothing, really.”

“Marta supported them?”

“I don't think so. I know she mentioned them now and then. It was a recent thing, her interest in them. She was a devout Catholic, as I've said, a regular churchgoer. I mean, the woman liked her good times, don't we all, baby, but she was a prudish woman. A puritan in her own life, let me tell you. She liked to drink with the guys, dance the night away, especially the cruises we took on Carnival. But this was one proper lady.” She paused and took a huge drag on her cigarette.

“Like you,” I said.

She stared into my eyes—to see if I were mocking her. “Yes, exactly. Like me.”

“But she did have an interest in them?”

“About a half year ago she came upon this article in a newspaper about the Brown Bonnets, and she got their literature in the mail. She went to a couple meetings, but she knew I had little patience with that kind of fanaticism, so we never talked about it because I'd yell at her. They're the ones you see picketing Planned Parenthood in Hartford. They lined up with those placards with pictures of aborted fetuses. Just when you're driving by, headed for breakfast at McDonald's. Good God! Talk about losing your goddamn appetite! They tried to block the Robert Maplethorpe retrospective at Real Art Ways last year. Marta thought they were dedicated. That was her word. They wear these unattractive brown bonnets and carry Bibles, and scream at bishops about queers in the Mother Church. You know. Supposedly the Virgin Mary inspired them—talked to them from a tree in Albany, New York, or somewhere. Incredible.” She stared at me, wide-eyed, unblinking.

“A tree in Albany?”

“Maybe Buffalo. You know how the Virgin always appears in a tree—never at eye level. And always in Catholic neighborhoods. Like UFOs always landing in trailer parks. God's sense of humor, I guess. But I don't know if Marta joined them.”

“I don't know either. You didn't know? You were her friend.”

“I don't think so. She'd never confide
that
. Believe me. She couldn't like such people very long.”

“Tell me about Joshua Jennings.”

A shift in her expression, her eyes got smaller, her lips razor thin.

“Karen says Marta may have wanted to marry him.”

Hattie yelled at me. “They were
just
friends. I told you that. That's all. Marriage? Ridiculous.”

“Karen was guessing.”

“Nuts.”

I folded my hands in my lap, closed my eyes. “Karen thought Marta wanted the life he had. She wanted to be Mrs. Joshua Jennings.”

She spoke rapidly, all humor gone now, her spine rigid in the chair. “What life? An old and dying man. Years older. Sickly. Marta—well, she flirted with him—lord, she flirted with all the old coots—but he was just a friend and employer. We were all friends. Nothing more.”

Her voice was rising, and she stood up, turned away. Bothered now, alarmed at the idea that Marta and Joshua might have married, she gripped the back of the chair. Her oversized rhinestone ring caught the light. The fingers trembled.

“She wrote him in Amherst.”

Hattie turned to face me. Her chin quivered, her eyes flashed anger. “I know. Well, maybe there was something going on that I didn't know about. But Marta and I—we had an agreement about things. We didn't push over the line…”

“What line?”

“Into romance. Frankly, romance. A confession, Rick. The
one
line we drew in the sand. We knew it would damage all of us. You see, we all met on that college trip to Russia in 2003.”