Third Degree (14 page)

“True,” she said, laughing, “but when something doesn’t feel right, you need to listen to your instincts.”

“But what if your instincts have been proven to be consistently wrong?”

“I know a thing or two about that, too, believe it or not,” she said.

I bet she did, what with the twists and turns her romantic life had taken over the years. We focused on our new drinks and the salads we had ordered that had arrived while we were talking. After a few minutes of disconsolately munching field greens, I brought up another topic if only to get my mind off Crawford and the fact that I might never see him again, let alone be with him again. “Tell me about Lydia Wilmott.”

Jane looked surprised. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Just curious. We met the other day but that was under very tragic circumstances, obviously. What was she like when Carter was alive?”

Jane chewed on that for a few minutes. “She was happy. She adored Carter. And they seemed to have a wonderful marriage.”

“But …” The specter of a caveat hung heavy in the air.

“But all I heard was her side of things. She always went on and on about how they were soul mates and perfectly suited to each other but I don’t think they spent that much time together. And she stays very busy with her volunteer activities so I always wondered if that replaced what she was missing from her seemingly perfect marriage.”

I had replaced what was missing from my seemingly perfect marriage with doughnuts. Volunteer activities? That was a route I had never considered. “Did you like Carter?”

“Hardly ever saw him,” she said. “But we did socialize a few times and he was just a very negative person with a lot of opinions. He spent a lot of time on that blog and his boat and didn’t do much else. That’s what leads me to believe that things weren’t perfect between the two of them.”

“Are they ever?” I asked. “Perfect?”

“Of course not. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think Lydia was completely happy. That’s all I’ll say.”

Made sense if you subscribed to the “methinks you doth protest too much” school of reasoning. If I thought about her blog postings, it made sense. Lydia was a woman trying to convince herself that everything was okay in Wilmottville when in fact she had a distant and removed husband who thought about nothing but his incendiary blog and his boat.

“He’s being buried tomorrow,” she added. “There’s a memorial service at the Unitarian church.”

I thought about that. I wondered if I could go and not feel like a rubbernecker.

Or if taking a sick day this early in the semester, before it had even started really, would give me a figurative black eye with administration.

It didn’t matter. I was going.

I got inside without being photographed, or so I thought, and slid into a back pew, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, black wide-rimmed sunglasses covering my black eye and, hopefully, my identity. I didn’t look out of place among the many well-heeled mourners who were all in chic black clothing and dark sunglasses. This is a village that really dresses for its funerals. I wondered how many of them were wearing girdle-topped panty hose like I was and in danger of losing consciousness from having their diaphragms cut in half. Lydia strolled in through a side door wearing her usual uniform of crisp white shirt, big, chunky, expensive-looking necklace, and dark sunglasses. The only thing different about her outfit was that instead of her usual size-two designer jeans, she wore a beautifully cut black pencil skirt that showed off her amazing figure and long legs. If her late husband was distracted and distant from
that,
he had been a complete idiot in life. She sat in the front pew with several other family members, her two young-adult children, and her frumpy and rather odd sister, Elaine, who thankfully had shed her sweatpants for the day and wore a black sack dress.

I was raised in a devout Catholic household so a Unitarian service, to me, was pretty simple and scaled back in its pomp and circumstance. A few Cat Stevens songs, followed by some generic prayers and a couple of speeches that made Carter sound like a cross between Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. I also noticed that there were hardly any tears shed; must have been some kind of lapsed-Protestant way of dealing with things. Even we Catholics were allowed to cry a little bit if the spirit moved us. But during this service, there was complete silence, nary a sniffle, and no evidence of moist eyes or cheeks.

After forty-five minutes or so, just long enough for me to determine that, yes, I would have to cut myself out of my girdle-topped panty hose, the ceremony abruptly ended, with Lydia standing in her pew and receiving the condolences of the assembled. I saw my neighbor, Jane, envelop Lydia in a tight embrace. I looked around but didn’t see Jane’s partner, Kathy, which I thought was odd; if a friend of mine had died—or even if it was the husband of a friend of mine—Crawford would be there. I thought about offering my sympathies, but figured that I already had, and didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself as I had a few days earlier when I visited the Wilmott estate. Instead, I moved out of the back pew as quietly as I had when I had entered and headed out onto the sidewalk, where I had the good fortune to run into Detective Madden, clad in one of her ubiquitous navy pantsuits.

She nodded at me, not unkindly. “Professor Bergeron.”

“Detective Madden.” I looked down at the pavement and caught sight of a very nice pair of navy pumps peeking out from under Detective Madden’s sensibly cut pants. Now that was a surprise. I figured her for a dowdy pair of loafers, but even though they were blue, you could tell that her shoes had set her back a few hundred dollars. “Nice shoes,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, a little surprised that anyone had noticed. Did she not know who she was dealing with here? I may not look like it but I can tell the difference between Payless and Via Spiga. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, just paying my respects,” I said, trying to sound casual and nonchalant.

“Go to a lot of funerals?”

“Not if I can help it.”

She pursed her thin lips together in contemplation.

“Listen. Can I be completely frank with you?” I asked.

I took her silence to be tacit acceptance.

“I saw the guy die. I felt it was only right to be here.” I stuck my little clutch purse high up under my arm in the hopes of soaking up a bit of the moisture that was present there. Why did I always feel like this lady was interrogating me? Maybe because she was?

She looked at me for a few minutes. “I guess that makes sense.” She looked around. “But Greg from the coffee shop isn’t here. George Miller isn’t here, either.”

“Well, he killed the guy so why would he?”

“Is that what you believe?”

I thought about Ginny Miller and her threats and her begging me to lie. “I don’t know. I’m not a medical professional. I just thought that was what everyone else was thinking.”

“Maybe. Is that what you think happened?” God, she was good at being cryptic. She reminded me of a therapist I once had who had promised to patch up my and Ray’s relationship and make our marriage as good as new. I left our tenth session with no husband, a bruised ego, and no self-esteem after enduring her vague musings and open-ended questions. Detective Madden might consider a new career.

“Again,” I said for emphasis, “I’m not sure. Isn’t that why you arrested George Miller?”

“Could be.”

That was enough of that. Sufficiently aggravated, I stomped off toward the parking lot and made my way toward my car. Before I got there, an overly coiffed blonde wearing lots of pancake makeup with breasts like giant cantaloupes got in my path and shoved a microphone in my face.

“You were there, right?” she asked, moving backward as I kept moving forward. “LeeAnne McDermott, News47 Westchester.”

Oh, yes. “The One to Watch!” Especially if you wanted inaccurate weather reports, extended rantings about traffic, and nearly naked news from toothsome anchorwomen not unlike this one shoving the microphone down my throat.

“I was where?” I kept an eye on the camera guy who was walking backward as well and in danger of stepping into a giant pothole. “Watch out!” I said, distracting both of them enough to run to my car, jump in the front seat, and lock the door. This would look fabulous hours later on their six o’clock broadcast when all of the nuns, Sister Mary included, were having their aperitif and realizing that the woman whose car window was being banged on was mine. I smiled as broadly as I could as the whole scenario played out, faked a cough for good measure in case I did end up on the news, and peeled out of the parking space, doing my best not to run over the camera guy now wedged in the pothole.

I screeched out of the parking lot, any attempt at being inconspicuous now ruined by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader masquerading as a news reporter and her inept camera guy. I sped up and came to a traffic light that turned red faster than I was expecting and I slammed on the brakes so as not to run the light. I sat a little straighter in my seat while waiting for the light to change and tried to bring my breathing back to normal. From the driver’s side window of the car I glanced at the cars lined up along Main Street next to the shops and restaurants. One car caught my eye and I looked closer.

Oh, hello, Ginny Miller.

Ginny stared back at me from the safety of her Subaru Outback and gave me a half smile that was basically indistinguishable from the snarl she usually wore. The only giveaway was that her lips turned up slightly at the corners. I gave her a little smile back and kept my eyes on the light, wondering why she was parked on the street across from the Unitarian church. What did she care if Carter Wilmott was being buried? The fact that he was being buried at all was because her husband couldn’t keep his ham-hock hands to himself. Surely she wouldn’t want to be seen within ten blocks of the place, but there she was, hiding in plain sight, and watching everyone come out of the church.

Rather than using common sense and going back home to hide from news cameras and overzealous reporters, I chose the nontraditional route. That included pulling an illegal U-turn in the center of town, in full view of Detective Madden, and following Ginny Miller to her final destination.

Which happened to be the Stop & Shop, a fortunate choice because I was out of milk.

I followed Ginny into the store with her completely unaware that I was tailing her. We meandered through the aisles, her picking up an item here or there and throwing it into her shopping cart, me keeping a safe distance while riffling through my bag for coupons. I was here, wasn’t I? Might as well get some shopping done. I stuffed a package of English muffins under my arm and continued toward the spice and “international foods” aisle, which was only international because of its selection of Goya bean products.

I rounded the aisle thinking that fajitas might make a tasty dinner, singing along to the Muzak version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and ran right into Ginny, who was lurking around the corner from where I had been. I slammed into her solid torso—had we been playing basketball, I clearly would have been charged with an offensive foul—and dropped my English muffins.

“Want to tell me why you’re following me?” she hissed while smiling at an elderly female shopper who was angling her cart past us, running over my toes in the process.

“Want to tell me why you were spying on Carter Wilmott’s funeral?” I asked, stooping down to retrieve my breakfast muffins and rub my sore toes.

“None of your business,” she said.

“It just seems weird,” I said. What was even weirder was that she was clad, once again, in her gym wear. I realized I had never seen this woman in any material other than spandex except for that one time she was in scrubs. Wasn’t she a nurse? Wouldn’t common sense dictate that she would be in scrubs more than occasionally?

“Why? You were there. That’s pretty weird when you think about it.”

I chewed on that. I knew that it was, obviously. But I would never admit that to Ginny Miller.

Ginny moved her cart a bit. “Are we done here?”

“I wish we were, Ginny, but I’d also like to know what you were doing on Carter’s boat.” I handed the same elderly lady who had run over my toes a can of black beans from a high shelf. She didn’t say “thank you” which I thought was extremely rude.

“Once again,” Ginny said, pointing at me, “same question for you.”

“I was looking for something.”

“Yeah? Well, me too.” She started down the aisle, passing the elderly lady now reaching up for a can of garbanzo beans and perilously close to bringing down the
GOYA? OH BOYA
sign. I hurried after Ginny, grabbing the beans and throwing them in the lady’s cart. I had a hard time keeping up with the yoga-pant-clad Ginny, who made haste down the aisle and into the main area of the store by the checkout lines. I skidded to a stop at the end of the aisle and called to Ginny. The old lady, now exhibiting remarkable agility, plowed into my rear end with her cart. I burst forward from the aisle into the middle of the store. “And you owe me an apology for pushing me into the river!”

The din of the grocery store evaporated into thin air and I realized that we now had about sixty pairs of eyes on us, from the elderly shoppers who had come in the minivan from the over-fifty-five complex down the road, to the cashiers, to the mothers with little children in line and making less of a ruckus than I was. Ginny turned to glare at me and gave me a warning scowl. I heard someone on one of the checkout lines whisper, “That’s Ginny Miller.”

Sadly, when someone whispered, “And who’s the other one?”, not one person knew the answer. Welcome to my world.

Ginny flushed deep red and disappeared into the frozen food section. Confident that I had caused enough trouble for the day, and convinced that I needed to get her alone to find out just exactly what she was up to and what she was looking for on the boat, I headed out of the store, leaving my English muffins behind a copy of
The National Enquirer
.

If I kept this up, I might find myself as the lead story in a future issue.