Till the End of Tom (18 page)

“Haven’t we met before?” Meredith Arbusson asked. She was speaking to Sasha, though they did not look as if their social orbits occupied the same universe. Meredith A., in a royal blue knit suit, pale cream silk blouse, and proper black pumps, awaited Sasha’s answer. “Perhaps at the . . .”

Sasha peered back. She was at least six inches taller than Mrs. Arbusson, and she’d chosen to wear an ankle-length brown velvet skirt with a burnt orange vest embroidered in gold thread, a green long-sleeved blouse, a chiffon scarf in blazing oranges and hot greens, and her favorite suede boots. I thought she looked great, and fittingly autumnal, but I was fairly certain Meredith Arbusson wouldn’t agree. Nor, of course, would she approve of my jeans and suede jacket. We didn’t belong here.

“I don’t think . . .” Sasha began.

“Perhaps at Sylvia and Donald’s?” Mrs. Arbusson said. “I know I remember you. I never forget a face.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t know a Sylvia and Donald.”

“I know, then—I volunteer most afternoons at the library, the main library. You know, after school, when the children are there. I was a librarian, once, and I suppose it’s in the blood, though I’m past working full-time, of course. Past working, in fact, but one does get bored, and I don’t play golf. Or bridge, so—”

“Meredith . . .” her husband said.

“Oh, Philip thinks I go on about everything too much, and he’s right. I absolutely do, but still—I must have seen you at the library, right? So many people there every day, I remember their faces, but—”

“Actually, I’ve been in England . . .” Sasha tilted her head, and moved slightly to the side of the woman. “Aha,” she said. “Were you—I don’t mean to cause you any pain, but were you at Tomas Severin’s funeral this week?”

Both Arbussons looked as if his name had indeed caused them grief, but they nodded.

“I sat next to you,” Sasha said. “Recognized you as soon as I saw your profile. We didn’t talk.” And she introduced herself.

This, then, must be the couple who’d been looking to see if somebody was there, somebody who should have been there but apparently wasn’t. I wished I remembered more precisely what Sasha had said.

“You were his friend?” Philip Arbusson asked.

Sasha nodded.

“My condolences.”

“And mine to you, too. You were there. Are you relatives, or were you his friends?”

“We knew him, of course,” Meredith said. “We knew all of them, from the time they were newlyweds and the children were born. Philip worked with Tomas Senior, years ago. He left the firm when this Tomas took over.” She looked as if she were still pissed about whatever had caused her husband to sever his ties with the family. “It’s been awhile. We came out of respect for his father’s memory.”

I wondered why they’d felt the need to make it clear to strangers that they had not come on behalf of the deceased or the deceased’s mother or wives. Confusing, but interesting, as was mention of “the children.” Whose? Hers? Or plural Severin children and if so, who and where were the others?

And then Sasha flicked me a glance—no more than a shift in her eyelashes, it seemed, but with it, she’d hit the invisible ball to me, and I knew that she’d hooked on to her memory of that day, too. It was a definite “dare you.”

“Absolutely lovely ceremony, didn’t you think?” I murmured.

“Ah, so you were there, too,” Meredith said.

I nodded. Who was to know?

“The crowd was impressive,” Philip said. “But of course, Tomas Senior and Ingrid were very social.”

“Beyond
being
social,” Meredith said with a brief laugh that didn’t seem all that happy. “Ingrid was the arbiter of what
was
social. If she bought it or wore it or ate it—then it was fashionable.” She sighed. “Oh, but that was long ago.”

“She’s still quite . . . stunning,” I said. On this, I was on firm ground. Her looks had stunned me. Even the memory of them left me light-headed.

Meredith didn’t seem to care. Ingrid was no longer arbitrating anything for her. But she looked like a woman who needed to vent about something, and I wanted to release that steam valve. I remembered Sasha telling me that she and her husband had talked about a missing someone, but I couldn’t remember if they’d said who it was, or even what sex the person had been. I thought female, but we’d also talked about Nina, and I was afraid I was mixing the memories.

“I hope this isn’t out of line,” I said, “and the truth is, I couldn’t see everyone who was there, of course. It was too large, except that I could see the family, and I paid my respects, and I wondered . . . well, you know . . . I had thought, given the seriousness of the occasion, that . . .” I shrugged. “You know.”

A teacher learns so much from her students. This was how they often answered test questions, saying nothing, hoping that by dancing around the idea, they’d find the outline of it.

It worked about the same way for me as it generally did for them, which is to say, not very well.

Meredith Arbusson stared at me as if I were an alien species.

Now my panic was authentic, so that my starts and stops were no longer faked. “Somewhat upsetting—if I’m right, that is. Of course, as I said, I couldn’t see, so many people there, but—” I was going to have to use a pronoun soon, a “him” or “her,” but which? Who was it that had been missing?

Meredith nodded, her lips tight. “I thought so, too, but I didn’t see her. I think she must be dead. I heard she was living a . . . hard life. In and out of trouble of one kind or another.”

A her! “Let us hope not,” I said. “Let us hope she found peace somewhere.” Let us please be told who this is and what she’s about and also why I was speaking in this horribly stiff manner.

“Of course,” Meredith said, her mouth curled and angry, “Ingrid behaves as if she never existed—and he was just as bad.”

It’s quite amazing what people think they hear, the way Meredith Arbusson thought she’d heard me say something tangible, something that proved I was intimate with the family and its history.

Sasha watched the exchange with undisguised admiration. At one point, her brows lifted, and she looked surprised. She’d remembered something more. “But of course,” she said with great emotion, “it’s also possible she’s still—or perhaps again—locked up.”

Locked up? Had Sasha told me that before? Where, in prison? Name erased from the family rolls because of a crime? Was she, perhaps, one of those rich young revolutionaries?

“No wonder she had to be committed,” Meredith said. “No wonder. The authorities should have been brought in a long time ago.”

Committed. I tossed the image of the Severin revolutionary. A mental institution.

“Meredith,” Philip Arbusson said.

She ignored him. This had obviously been bottled and left to ferment in her for a long time, and Tom Severin’s death had pulled the plug. “I found it disgraceful that she wasn’t even mentioned, even if she is away somewhere—even if she’s dead! Not during the ceremony, not even in the obituaries. If Tomas Senior had lived this would never have been allowed to—”

“Meredith, these people came here to look at this building. To rent it. Isn’t that so?” he asked me directly.

“I’m enjoying talking to—”

“But they must agree,” Meredith said. “And where’s the secret, anyway? It’s been a long time since I worried about making Ingrid Severin angry. Why shouldn’t I say that I find it monstrous that any mother could turn her back on her flesh and blood that way, could treat her so—”

“Meredith,” her husband repeated softly, urgently.

She applied the brakes with a long, deep breath. I knew that we’d hear no more, but Philip would, later on.

At that point, the agent bustled back to us. “Sorry to have had to leave you both in the lurch, but I had to be certain. Dorothy—” she waved toward the woman who was still at her measurements, “has decided to be married here.”

“Nice,” Sasha said. “So has Amanda.”

“Dorothy decided months ago,” Meredith said.

“Unfortunately,” the agent said, “her wedding’s the same date you’d proposed.”

“Wait a minute,” Sasha said. “We—”

“It is the only time Dorothy can be married, given her schedule,” Meredith Arbusson said.

I wasn’t in a mood to be pushed around by any more arrogant members of the social register. I was ready to stomp and carry on and inform them all that the same applied to me—the teaching calendar was not going to bend on my behalf. And all that though I didn’t want this place at all. But I was saved from making a fool of myself this one time, and saved from The Manse, when Meredith completed her sentence.

“She’s a reconstructive surgeon, you know, and she’s about to begin a stint with Doctors Without Borders in the Congo. So sorry we weren’t able to confirm the date till now, but it’s taken forever to be certain when precisely she was leaving, and—”

“I understand.” I kept my eyes on the polished inlaid floor, trying to look as if relinquishing this setting required a great deal of backbone and moral strength.

We shook hands, said how lovely it had been to meet, wished the bride well, and walked to the door with the agent. “I’m sure we can find another time for you,” she said. “Maybe a weeknight? Or next spring? I am so sorry. I truly thought she’d . . . I was positive . . . I told your sister—this morning was her deadline with us, and we’d heard
nothing.
Not a peep.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Honestly. My sister is amazing, and we will find a place. Or we’ll change the date and be back to you again.” I was elated. I’d made my escape without needing to be the guilty party. Not My Fault. I didn’t want it to show, so I managed a slight tremble in my voice, and felt I did a pretty convincing act of being brave despite adversity.

And for the rest of the afternoon, through lunch and bridal shower discussion and even through all Beth’s reassurances, based on nothing whatsoever, that we’d find another place, I controlled the bubbles of joy popping inside me as I replayed Meredith’s words. I didn’t know what precise relevance they had to anything, but I was sure they were important—why else such a secret?

Ingrid Severin had two children: a boy, Tomas, and a girl.

I hadn’t lost a Manse. I’d gained a daughter.

Seventeen

I wasn’t sure how Mackenzie would feel about my Sunday excursion. I had been supposed to make decisions and come home with a little checklist completed. Instead, I spread the joyous word that I hadn’t gotten what everybody else thought I wanted.

“You’re an odd bride-to-be,” he said. “For which I’m grateful.”

“You aren’t upset that we’re still in wedding venue limbo?” I didn’t wait for an answer because I knew he wasn’t. I decided on a quick meal of omelets—brides-to-be are busy people. I chopped onions and mushrooms and sautéed them while we spoke. “Beth, on the other hand, is practically in mourning.”

“You had a phone call,” he said. “A woman who refused to leave her name. She sounded upset.”

“A woman, not a girl.” My first thought was of strange miracles—that the mysterious daughter had contacted me. My second thought, closer to rational possibility, was that a student had called. “Nothing said about grades? Absence? Papers due? Did she say ‘so she goes’ or ‘whatever’?” I scooped the mix out of the pan and put it aside and poured the egg mixture in. I loved that first buttery sizzle.

“Woman,” he said. “Upset. Sounded tentative, unsure of herself. Talked in half sentences and let things dangle, like ‘I only wanted to . . . I guess it won’t . . .’ and she never hit the subject part of the sentence. I asked about your calling her back, but she said she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, and anyway, she would be gone the rest of the day. Ask me, she wasn’t being evasive so much as falling apart.”

I put the filling into the first omelet. It was nice that C.K. had paid attention, answered the phone, attempted to take a message, and even tried to analyze the lack of any hard data. I couldn’t fault him for that. But I really didn’t see the point of messages like that one. Why tell me about it, except to drive me a little crazier, make me a little more apprehensive?

“Sasha said we should cherchez la femme,” I said.

“A breakthrough at last.”

“Maybe that was
la femme
herself. Maybe Nina finally returned our calls.” I slid that omelet onto a plate and worked on the second one.

“I’d think that cherchez la femme theory would raise your feminist hackles. What does it mean? That every crime since Eve has a female at its core? If she didn’t actually do it, then she made him do it? And isn’t it usually because she’s been spurned?” He grinned. “Do people get spurned anymore? Or just dumped?”

“The late and oddly unlamented Tomas Severin was an expert spurner. Sasha would have experienced spurning, had he lived long enough to do so. He was not a model of constancy.”

The omelets were done, and quite beautiful to behold, and I went from mildly crazed to vastly contented. This was how it was supposed to be. Omelets, salad, a glass of wine, music in the background, and the guy.

He must have felt the same way, and he even suggested a lunch date—a pack your own food sort of lunch date—for the next day. His schedule was open, and I had no clubs or meetings at noon. Life was good.

I relaxed to the point where I forgot to obsess about the Arbussons and their amazing daughter, and about the Severins and their mysteriously missing daughter, and didn’t return to them until we were washing up.

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” I said. “The unmentioned daughter?”

Mackenzie doesn’t find as many things astounding as I do. Perhaps he’s seen too much, knows too much about human nature. He washed the omelet pan and passed it to me for drying. “Lots of families have squabbles and estrangements,” he said.

“I get the feeling it was a particularly nasty variety of that. Meredith—”

“My, but you develop relationships with great speed.”

“—was on a rant about how the authorities should have been called in long ago because of the way Ingrid treated this daughter. That’s extremely harsh, and Meredith’s a most staid-looking woman. She also said that had Tomas Senior lived, none of this—but she didn’t say what ‘this’ meant—would have happened. Unfortunately, her husband shushed her up, so there was no way to find out why she felt that way, or what was done, or whether anybody knew what had become of this daughter.”

“Is it important?”

“Couldn’t it be?”

He was silent for too long. A polite way of letting me know he didn’t feel a particular urgency about this information.

“Well,” I admitted, “most people think she’s dead.”

He nodded. “I keep thinking about Cornelius following Tom Severin.”

“I don’t think it’s such a big deal. They were together at the lawyer’s, so it doesn’t strike me as particularly weird if they were continuing on, each to his own destination, in the same direction. It’s not that big a city.”

“Simply seems he had the most motive and, if she’s telling the truth, opportunity. Edwards more or less agrees.”

“You spoke to the cop?”

“The cop?”

“I didn’t mean to insult the individuality of every member of your former profession. Saved time, is all.”

“I told you. At the funeral. We’re friends, after all.”

“You didn’t tell him what Penelope said.”

“Not yet.” Of course he hadn’t. We were private, not public, investigators.

“You didn’t tell him what Cornelius said, either, right? About Nina’s brother?”

He shook his head again. “Didn’t want to get the fellow in trouble if there’s no need. In the big scheme of things, his crime wasn’t that much—a little marijuana farm, for which he served his time. Let’s wait and see.”

“Wait—if Edwards said something about Cornelius, then he can’t think Zachary killed Severin.” My private black cloud dissipated. “Tell me I’m right.”

“Apparently you are. I only hope Owen’s right, too.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
went smoothly enough for a Monday, when teachers and students all have trouble being back in harness. Expectations are so high on Fridays, and we never are willing to remember how insufficient any weekend is to hold all our dreams for it.

But my students’ Monday morning grumpiness seemed minimal, and I had not a trace of Monday morning blues. I’d deflected The Manse, learned a little, and with one week between us and Tomas Severin’s death, and despite the confusion surrounding it, things were approaching proportion again. Even Rachel Leary looked as if she’d gotten some rest over the weekend. “I have more ideas for the eating disorders campaign,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”

I liked her optimism, which was catching, and the idea of calling it and thinking of it as a campaign. Who knew? We might actually make a difference.

And now, with the enormous relief of having Zachary off the list of suspects, I thought we should stop pretending that we had more investigating to do for Penelope and call it quits. The income was nice, but it was time to move on. Besides, the police were now directing their attention to Cornelius, so she had achieved her desired goal and, I suppose, so had we. We could eat our sandwiches and talk about it.

My lunch date arrived promptly at noon. I was waiting downstairs for him, so as to avoid the student messenger and the peculiar giddiness engendered by any suggestion of a private life on my part. Mackenzie said that he had a lead on Nina’s brother’s whereabouts, and if I wasn’t too busy after school, we could visit him then and have our second date of the day. And the good news was that we could bill for the after-school date.

His car was in the loading zone outside—the very spot where Cornelius, our prime suspect, had been afraid to break the law and park because all he’d had to unload were his grievances. I didn’t want to think about that.

“I had an idea,” Mackenzie said as we pulled away from the curb.

“Can’t be too exciting of a one. I have just under an hour.”

He grinned. “We have what—three days before your mother arrives for the shower?”

“I was in such a good mood, do we have to talk about that?”

“Yes,” he said with too much solemnity.

“Okay, yes, three days. She’s arriving and so is your mother. Don’t forget.”

“As if I could . . . but I thought of something that might let them ease up on us, at least not feel that you don’t want to get married.”

“You were eavesdropping!”

He glanced over at me and looked vastly amused. “Shocked? Listen, here’s a hot tip: When somebody is totally aware that there’s no privacy—so that she comments on it—”

“Somebody like my sister?”

“—then she’s right, and there’s no privacy. Got that? Not a great place to share secrets you don’t want the other person in the same space to hear.”

“She was whispering. Her back was to you.”

“I am a trained eavesdropper. Besides, I knew everything you said.”

I couldn’t remember what I’d said, and I told him so.

“Basically, you made it clear that you’re crazy about me and frankly, even though you were swapping confidences with your sister, isn’t it a little late for you to be embarrassed about my knowin’ that? I had, in fact, suspected it already.”

“Okay. Then what about our mothers, and when do I get to eat this sandwich? I am starving.”

“You can eat any time.”

“Lunch in the car is our intimate tête-à-tête?”

“No, City Hall is. We get our work taken care of there, then we can go up to the viewing platform and survey our city—and finish the sandwiches. Would that be sufficiently intimate?”

“Are we searching records? Going to court?”

“We are preparing our defense.”

I opened one of the sandwiches, turkey with mustard and Swiss cheese, and passed him a half while he circled, looking for a parking lot. Walking would probably have been faster. I knew that there was no way to defuse my mother once the rocket fuel was in place and the starter button pushed, but I thought it was delightfully innocent of Mackenzie to think he could do so, and learning the error of his ways was something he’d have to do on his own. “May I ask how?”

He found a lot, took the ticket, and pulled in. Only when the car was in a slot did he turn to me with the look Columbus must have had when first he spotted land. “We’re getting our marriage license.”

“Now? Today?”

He nodded.

“But—”

“Takes a few minutes, and no waiting.”

“How can you know if—”

“I’ve got friends in high places. Also in low and bureaucratic offices. There’s no blood test anymore, nothing except a few questions and proof you’re who you say, and it’s good for two months and it’ll be proof of our sincerity. Next time any of them start in on you, tell them everything’s taken care of already—and wave it around your head.”

Perfect. A marriage license to be used like garlic for vampires.