The Last Annual Slugfest (9 page)

The Women’s Space Bookstore was next to the Henderson Tobacconist’s. I had expected the Tobacconist’s to be closed, with a black wreath on the door or a notice of Edwina’s death in the window of the town museum, which occupied a room to the right of the tobacco shop proper. But there was neither. Over the roof hung the lowest branch of a giant redwood, one of the Nine Warriors. Occasionally, when I read her meter in warm weather, Edwina would be sitting underneath it, eating her lunch. Once, she hadn’t been eating but was just staring up at the branches. It was the only time I ever saw her look peaceful.

I pushed open the door to the bookstore. It was empty but for Leila Katz, slumped in an overstuffed chair beside a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Women’s Space looked less like a commercial endeavor than a family library in a beach house. Bookshelves covered the walls, four thrusting out at right angles into the room. Armchairs were strewn around haphazardly, some clustered in groups of twos or threes, others tucked away in the niches made by the protruding bookcases. By the cash register was a sturdy wooden table, with thermoses of coffee and hot water, earthenware mugs, and, frequently, a platter of cookies or savories. The store was meant to be more than a place to buy books. Leila had made it clear that she wanted to have a gathering place for women.

When I read the commercial route in town, I stopped in here on my break—after reading Edwina’s meter—had a cup of coffee, a cookie, and slumped in one of the chairs with a magazine. But now there was none of the coziness that normally characterized the store. Leila herself looked small and tired. With the dark circles under her eyes, she resembled a raccoon wearing a short, curly wig.

“How late were you up?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Vejay,” she said, not moving in the chair. “Edwina was already dead when I got to the hospital, of course. But that didn’t mean there was an end. There was still plenty to do, papers to sign, autopsy to be arranged. I felt I couldn’t abandon her. It was ridiculous. She was already dead. It wasn’t like there was anything I could do for her. But I just couldn’t leave her there alone under a sheet.”

“You want some coffee?” I asked. “If there’s none in the thermos, I can run across to the café.”

“No. I made some. I’ve already had three cups this morning, and God knows how many during the night, but you can pour me another.”

I poured a mug and handed it to her, then poured another for myself. Sitting down across from her, I said, “You must have been quite close to Edwina.”

She considered that. “From the way I reacted last night, you’d think so. From the way we’d gotten on for the past few years, it was like we were Hatfields and McCoys.”

“But you were her closest relative.”

“I guess so.” She sipped the coffee. “That was good and bad. Edwina took ‘family’ very seriously. To her we were the village royalty. When I married Jeff, Edwina congratulated him on becoming part of the family; she considered him a sort of woodsy prince consort. No, not even that appendage-like; to her he was a full-fledged prince. She never referred to him as a nephew by marriage; to her he was a nephew proper—until he committed the unforgivable sin and opted out of the family. After our divorce, he simply ceased to exist for Edwina.” Leila took another sip of coffee. “Edwina had a very rigid concept of the way a Henderson lived. ‘That’s not how a Henderson behaves, Leil.’ Edwina always called us in the family by our first syllables—another of her eccentricities. I was Leil, my mother Mar. But that phrase—‘not how a Henderson behaves’—I’ll always think of that when I remember Edwina. It was her condemnation of virtually everything I did. Edwina’s proper Hendersons lived in very narrowly defined ways.”

“How did that fit with her being such a supporter of Pomo rights, preservation, and ecology?”

Leila nodded stiffly, and in that movement I could see a resemblance to her aunt. “Hendersons do charity. You’d think there was a fortune in the family, and we didn’t all have to work. What money there was, Edwina controlled, and she didn’t part with it easily. She deigned to give me a loan for college, and after I paid it back, she wouldn’t consider lending it again so I could open this store. If I hadn’t had a decent job after college, there would have been no way I could have afforded to be unemployed for a year, much less rent this shop, even from Edwina.”

“She owned this?”

“She owned the entire block—this, her tobacco shop, Fischer’s Ice Cream—all the shops. You can see why her tightfistedness grated on the family. It wasn’t even like she had anything to spend it on. Her big outlays were for painting her house every couple years, and occasionally redoing the facade of the weed shop. She certainly wasn’t spending it on Steelhead Lodge. That place could have fallen down before she would have put a dime into repairs. She was the typical slumlord with the lodge, and she would have died before—” Leila stopped abruptly, flushing. “She wouldn’t have wanted people to know that that ramshackle place was hers.”

“She was pretty safe. No one would ever have guessed.” I had a hard time suppressing a grin. The thought of Edwina Henderson owning that sagging, beer-sodden building was as ludicrous as her determination to hold the Slugfest in it.

I took a breath. Leila was a friend. She saved books she thought I would like. She told me about the best used clothing stores, and the secluded beaches. And at those times when the panacea of small-town living wore thin, and I had second thoughts about having left San Francisco and my career in public relations, Leila, who had had her own career in merchandising, was there to remind me why both of us had opted for the Russian River. And when, after the closeness of my first winter here, the winter people and Rosa had kept a wary distance, reminding me by the formality of their greetings that I had proven myself an outsider, Leila had set aside another volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary, or suggested we see a play in Santa Rosa. She’d told me about her brief, disastrous attempt at marriage when she was still fighting her attraction to women. “It took a year of living with Jeff to make me see that I really was happier with a woman. I guess I had always known that. But before then I had wavered back and forth,” she had said. And I had recounted my own divorce, and told her about my family who had moved so many times when I was growing up that now, as an adult, when I thought of a house we’d lived in I couldn’t remember which town or even which state it was in. “That’s why it was so nice to be a part of the winter people here,” I had said, then quickly changed the subject.

“With Edwina having been murdered,” I said, “it’s going to put you in an awkward position—you being her heir.”

“You think I’ll inherit this?” She laughed, a hollow sound. “Edwina wouldn’t leave this to me, Vejay, not if she could find someone else. I may have felt a burst of affection for her last night, but before that we hadn’t spoken more than ten words in months.”

I was relieved she brought the subject up. “How come?”

“You know how Edwina was. Either she was all gung-ho to have the state erect an historical marker and couldn’t understand that everyone wasn’t able, or interested, in driving to Sacramento to petition our assemblyman, or she was out checking the bark on the Nine Warriors to make sure no one had carved their initials there. Or she was busy getting an injunction. No one could get injunctions faster than Edwina. With me, if she wasn’t badgering me about a Henderson’s responsibility to the community, she was complaining about my shop.”

I waited.

“She said I was encouraging a bad element—that was her term—to congregate in Henderson. She was afraid that lesbians would be attracted to my store and find it so appealing that they would buy up every piece of property in town.”

“That’d be quite a commercial endorsement.”

“That’s what I told her. But you know Edwina had no sense of humor. And when she got an idea in her mind, there was no changing it. I tried reasoning with her, asking her what it was that she objected to about lesbians. It wasn’t like she had married, or had patience with men in general—ask Bert Lucci, he’ll tell you that. She certainly wasn’t opposed to assertive women. There was no logic in her prejudice against us, but I guess that’s what prejudice is. I tried for years to get her not so much to accept the fact that I am a lesbian, but to tolerate it. I never succeeded.”

“It must have been difficult to tell her to begin with.”

Leila leaned over and refilled her cup. “I don’t know when I would have been able to face that, but I never had to.” Seeing my puzzled look, she said, “I mean, I never had to decide on a time and place. Edwina has viewed me as a sexual miscreant since I was in high school. I had an affair then, with someone she found ‘unsuitable for a Henderson woman.’ It was the great scandal of the decade, entirely contained within the walls of Edwina’s house. No one knew but the family. Edwina was terrified that word would get out and the first family of Henderson would be disgraced. After that, no matter what I did, it was all downhill. She’d written me off. She made my life so awful that summer that I used to finish what I had to do at home and then sneak off to Angelina’s house. If it hadn’t been for Angelina, I don’t know how I would have survived.”

“Why
sneak
off?”

“Well, Edwina can be unreasonable. Even then I knew that, and I didn’t want to taint Angelina with my sin.”

“Well, who was this scandalous lover? Anyone I know?”

Leila sipped her coffee. “I’ve never told anyone. It was enough that Edwina knew. Edwina controlled the family money—what there was of it. She made it real clear what she’d do to me, through my mother, if I let people know. She showed me by taking out her indignation on Bear, my lover. Edwina did what she could to make Bear’s life hard. She did well. She had more influence than I would have thought possible. It was frightening to watch how she kept Bear from getting the right job or a promotion well-deserved. She kept her eye on Bear for five years after that. Every time an opportunity came up, she had just enough influence to put first choice out of reach. It was awful. I was terrified, and furious, and I couldn’t do anything. If I’d said anything, it would have just made matters worse.” She took a long drink of coffee. “You know, I’d almost put that out of my mind till now. It was a long time ago. But eventually Edwina let up and things got better for Bear—a good position, community respect. Now I wouldn’t say anything about our affair for Bear’s sake.”

I nodded. I also noted how carefully Leila had avoided mentioning the sex, or the real name of her lover. I wondered if the affair had been as hushed up as Leila thought. In a town the size of Henderson, very little was truly private knowledge. Rosa would know all about it. I also wondered if this affair could have any connection to Edwina’s death all these years later. “So that’s why you figured Edwina wouldn’t have left you her property?”

“That, and her fear that I would open a lesbian bathhouse, a lesbian erotic theater, and a restaurant where women do obscene things with food. Anyway, what she always told me was that she would leave her house and shop to the town as historical buildings. And whatever money she had would be an endowment for them and her town museum. So I don’t suppose anyone will really inherit anything.”

I put my empty cup on the table. “You must have thought about why she was killed.”

“I’ve spent nearly the whole night wondering about just that.” She finished her coffee, “I just don’t know. She could be an annoying woman—vindictive. But lately she wasn’t badgering anyone any more than usual. And she wasn’t enough of a nuisance to murder, certainly not like that. If I’d been told Aunt Edwina had been killed, I would have expected to find her bludgeoned in front of someone’s door, still clutching her clipboard. But this …” She swallowed hard. “It was so awful to see her like that. If you knew how appalled she would have been … and the pain of the poison … I stopped the doctor before he could tell me what it had been like for her.”

“Don’t you have any idea who might possibly—”

The door opened. Three down-jacketed tourists—clearly a mother and two daughters—walked in. “Mind if we look around?” the mother asked.

“Enjoy,” Leila replied without enthusiasm.

Eyeing a poster for a lesbian support group, the woman said, “We’re not …”

“It’s okay,” Leila replied. “The store’s for all women.” Pointing to me, she added, “She’s not, either.”

The three moved quickly to the farthest shelf. I looked at Leila. “No idea?” I repeated.

She looked as if she was about to speak, then decided against it. “Not that way, no. I can’t imagine anyone doing that.”

“Is this poetry that my girls should be reading?” the woman called.

Leila pushed herself up. “ ‘Erotic’ is on the shelf behind you. Garden-variety poetry is where you’re looking now, though I can’t promise you there won’t be any mention of breasts or orgasms in it.”

I stood up, exchanging glances with her. “What will you do now?”

“Survive. I’ve got to be here all day. There’s a feature writer from the
Chronicle
coming at six. She’s doing a piece on women’s bookstores. It’s the worst possible time for me to see her, but I can’t afford to scoff at publicity like that. It could make the difference between going further into debt and actually climbing into the black. So, even if I have to take uppers all afternoon, I’ll be here, ready to show her around the store, book by book.”

“Why don’t you get someone to cover for you now, so you can go home and take a nap? Maybe Angelina would …”

“Can’t do. I’ve got a colleague from Ojai dropping in some time this afternoon—a woman I have to see—and a customer driving up from San Francisco to get a copy of
Bodies Nearly Touching
that she can’t find down there. So I have to be here. Besides, Saturdays and Sundays are the days that pay the rent here. But after that, Vejay, I am going home and falling into bed, and I don’t plan to open my eyes till nine-twenty tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll look in this afternoon and see how you’re holding up.” I was tempted to offer real help if she needed it, but I caught myself. I had already promised all my help to Chris.