Till the End of Tom (23 page)

“I assume that. If for no other reason than that she wasn’t at the funeral.”

“But she was estranged—”

Meredith Arbusson nodded, almost impatiently. “Yes, yes,” she said, “but I think she’d have come.” She sighed and shook her head. “She’d have come, hoping that this time, her mother would speak to her, would acknowledge her. Might even accept her. She had this pathetic need that nothing seemed to squelch.”

What huge amounts of pain Ingrid’s self-centered worldview had created. “Had she tried before?” I asked.

“She sent letters and phoned. One day, when she was about fifteen, she showed up at my house and asked to use the phone. I was in the room when she called. She was polite enough, but they were still quite annoyed and rude. Ingrid asked her if she was still fat. That was that, and Shippy disappeared again. There’d been a car, a friend, waiting outside. I didn’t know what to do—to betray her trust by calling the police—and where would they take her? Her family wouldn’t accept her. But I still feel guilty about doing nothing.”

“What could you have done in that window of time?” I wondered whether the phone calls grew less polite as the years went by until they could have become the “you don’t deserve to live” calls Tomas had described to Sasha. Maybe Shippy wasn’t dead, simply elsewhere. A phone call could be made from anywhere.

I thought about Jay’s reference to the skeleton in the Severins’ closet. About legal cruelties. His ideas locked around this news of Skippy and felt a perfect fit.

“I assume she wouldn’t exactly grieve at Tomas’s death,” Meredith said.

Would she rejoice? Would she actually cause it, and then finally receive a share of the family wealth?

Without my voicing it, Meredith tossed doubt on that tidy supposition. “Her father left her the obligatory one dollar, and nothing more, and Tomas accepted that situation when he took the helm. She reappeared once again that I know of. There were probably other times I didn’t know about. But she phoned me that time, because she had remembered me as being kind, she said. Imagine! What a sad commentary on how few friendly voices there must have been in her life. I put her up for a few days and gave her some cash, nothing enormous, and she called her mother and—well, this is incredible, but all Ingrid said was, ‘How much do you weigh?’ And Shippy still weighed too much, so Ingrid hung up. I just wanted to shake that woman, shake her till her skinny bones rattled. Her daughter—by the time she came to see me that time, she’d been married twice, both times to wretched men—the kind of terrible men a girl who doesn’t believe anyone could ever love her would accept. She had nothing, nobody, not even a decent education. You should have seen her. She looked awful. I’m not talking about her size, but about her skin, her hair. She looked unhealthy, which she probably was.”

“Did she try to reach her brother?”

Meredith Arbusson nodded. “He refused to see her, too. And worse, refused to part with even a fraction of his fortune. I made her ask about the trust, and he informed her that the holdings were now virtually worthless. That the trustees had felt the company’s stock was too ‘risky’ at the time, and converted the shares into investments in other stocks that, alas, didn’t work out. I say he looted it, but she didn’t have the wherewithal to take him to court, and you know that Philip wasn’t going to let me get involved as some kind of third party. I did talk to her about getting counseling, and . . . she left. I never heard from her again.”

“I take it that she isn’t likely to be inheriting from Tomas,” I said.

Meredith Arbusson twisted her mouth. “Miracles happen,” she said, “and she probably could make a claim based on that looted trust fund—if she had it sufficiently together to think it through and hire a lawyer. Otherwise . . . seldom do selfish people miraculously give away their money, and I don’t think he’d leave her any because he didn’t have to.”

An echo of Zachary saying in essence the same thing about the college tuition being withdrawn because the law didn’t demand it. Apparently, Tom Severin didn’t do anything generous unless the law compelled it. Which meant—he didn’t do anything out of generosity.

“As odd as this sounds,” Meredith said, “I always felt, at least on the few opportunities I had to be close to the situation, that Tomas was afraid of his sister.” She glanced at me, as if to confirm how peculiar that was. “Guilt makes for strange relationships—and strange relatives, too!” She laughed at her joke more emphatically than I thought it deserved. “He knew what a rat he was, what a nightmare of a brother, what price his soul was paying for his mother’s favor, and how grossly unfair it all was. It turns my stomach, but then I try to remember that I am grateful to the Severins for showing me how not to raise children.” She looked at me. “I realized how easy it was to create a Tomas Severin, a boy who’s handed everything, unjustly praised and adored, and taught that he can dump people like his sister when it’s convenient. My children were also privileged, and I made it a point to help them have a focus in life that wasn’t like Ingrid’s, that wasn’t shallow and self-centered.”

“And you succeeded,” I said, “judging by the daughter who’s getting married.”

“Yes,” she said seriously. “She’s a good soul, and so are her brothers. But we were supposed to be talking about your wedding, weren’t we?”

“I meant to, but it’s getting late. If I could phone you if I really get stuck, I’d appreciate it. I won’t do it often, I promise!”

“Are you organizing your own wedding, the way my daughter is?” she asked.

I felt a whine begin in me. The lament of how I wanted to be in charge, how I did not want the overblown circus that was being forced on me, how I was barraged on a daily basis—

I stifled it. I was tired of feeling whiny and oppressed. “Yes,” I said, and I knew that this time, I meant it. I felt calm about it all for the first time. “Yes, I am. We are. My fiancé and I. It’s going to be precisely the way we want it.”

“Good for you,” she said. “Don’t let anybody push you around. It’s your wedding, not theirs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s been a treat talking with you.”

She pulled another cigarette out of her pocket.

“Have a lovely time at your lovely daughter’s wedding,” I said.

“And you, at yours,” she answered. I watched her inhale, exhale, smile, and nod. “After all,” she said, “it’s your—”

“Big day,” we said in unison.

In the land of the bride, cliché is king.

Twenty-one

O
ZZIE
’
S
office—our office—was only a few blocks away, across the Parkway, and for the short walk, I mentally sorted and filed, and tried to organize everything I had ever heard from any source that might pertain to the Severin family, and more precisely, to the skeleton in their closet, the sister who didn’t bark in the night. Shippy Severin.

She was nowhere and everywhere and too central to ignore, but I needed the advanced geometry that led to her and away from Zachary, and I needed some reason to believe it existed.

I walked in the rain, considering what this could mean. The one thing I knew about her habits was that she made phone calls and Tomas Severin had been upset about phone calls from someone whose voice he almost recognized.

And? And then?

I needed a whole lot more before I’d dare try to sell the idea of Shippy Severin to the police, or even to my one ex-cop himself. At the moment, everything about her was invisible, unknown—and omnipresent.

I walked upstairs to the office, glad to be out of the rain and looking forward to a respite of methodical clerical work that required minimal thought, routine actions.

And I would have done that. I’d settled in at the desk with a cup of hot water, and one of the tea bags I now kept in my desk, and I’d gotten as far as booting up the computer, when somebody knocked on the door.

Ozzie happened to be nearby, refilling his coffee cup with the house sludge. “What is this with you lately?” he growled. “This used to be a nice, quiet place.”

Right, I thought. Two knocks in two weeks. A regular madhouse.

Ozzie returned to his pebble-glassed-in cubicle, not bothering to consider the possibility the person wanting entrée might also want him. After all, it wasn’t pizza-delivery time yet.

I opened the door and beheld none other than Sasha Berg dressed in shaggy sheepskin against the elements—the Himalayan elements. Someone small and encased in a black hooded raincoat stood behind her. I must have stood there a beat too long, because Sasha, her Sherpa guide hood dripping onto her nose, raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to let us in?”

I opened the door wider. “Sure, but—what are you doing here?”

“The secretary at your school said this is where you’d be, and we spent all afternoon right around the corner, practically, at the Four Seasons, no less, m’dear, so I thought—”

By this point, she was inside, shaking her ankle-length sheepskin out. Turned right-side out, the way the sheep had worn it, would have kept more water off her. “This is Nina Severin,” she said. The little woman pulled off her hood.

I recognized her from Ingrid Severin’s house. That did not, however, explain why Tomas Severin’s final wife—the woman Sasha had told me screamed at her over the telephone—and the woman he’d been dating when he died would be socializing, let alone come a-calling on me together.

“Please t’meet you.” Nina Severin’s words seemed to swim more slowly than her lips moved. I had obviously been less memorable than she’d been that day at Ingrid’s.

“I’m sorry there isn’t a comfortable place to sit. Most people don’t actually come here.”

“I’ve seen detective movies,” Sasha said. “Damsels in distress come in, state their problems, hire the shamus, and get him in trouble.”

Nina nodded agreement. Her head seemed loose on the neck, and I wondered how much the two women had had to drink before deciding to drop in on me.

“When we’re in reruns,” I said, “and we return to the nineteen-forties, I’m sure foot traffic will increase. These days, most communication is done via phone or e-mail.”

Sasha poked me. “Don’t be such a stick. I wanted to see the place, and if I waited for a formal invitation . . .” She wandered, as much as one could, through the room, detouring around the empty, standard-issue desks and running a finger along the front of the steel file cabinets. She even paused to inspect the potted plant that in its shock at being in Philadelphia, and worse, in our negligent hands, had grown into a tough, straggly specimen, a sort of street-smart palm.

“Although,” Sasha drawled, “now that I have seen this place, I can say with assurance that it ain’t much. Goodwill discards plus computers. The new noir?”

The widow Severin giggled, then clapped her hand to her mouth.

“Is there some way I can help the two of you?” I asked.

“Didn’t you get my phone message?” Sasha smoothed her blouse, a candy-striped semi-transparent number that looked as if it had last seen the light of day when Eisenhower was president.

The petite woman wandered off to the corner, to put her raincoat on the clothes tree. “I got word that you had phoned,” I said.

“Aha!” she said, as if that sufficed.

“I wish you’d actually leave a message when you leave a message. I was in a terrible rush, and I had no idea what—”

“It was about her,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of Nina Severin. “It wasn’t like I wanted to blurt it out to some stranger. And that particular stranger, your secretary, didn’t sound that bright a bulb in the first place.”

“She isn’t. What about her?”

“The secretary?”

“No—her.” Sasha’s “her” was now approaching my desk, smiling. She raised her eyebrows and pointed to a chair, Mackenzie’s chair, actually, and I nodded and invited her to sit down. Sasha carried over a small bench that had been near the clothes tree.

“How can I help you?” I asked again.

“We’re here to help
you,
” Sasha said.

Nina Severin’s smile was wide and joyous. Talk about a merry widow. But she had every reason to be jolly, given her estranged husband’s abrupt demise. Instead of her plummeting into reduced circumstances, he’d plummeted into death and left her with all the money and no philandering husband. What could be better? No love lost—but he was.

If only Nina had been anywhere near the school last Monday. You didn’t need to be large to push somebody down the stairs. Of course, there was the question of Severin’s cracked cheek . . .

The widow Severin sighed expansively, then looked at Sasha, and giggled. A merry widow and a happy drunk.

“Nina was kind enough—or brave enough—to phone me,” Sasha said. “She felt . . .”

“Bad,” Nina said with an explosion of sound, as if “bad” were a rare, precise, and dangerous word. “I felt real
bad.
”

I waited, nodding encouragement.

“She’d been understandably upset, as”—Sasha leaned over and touched the smaller woman’s shoulder—“anybody would have been!”

They’d obviously bonded, but that didn’t clear much up for me.

“I was rude,” Nina Severin said. “Ruuu-ude!”

“To whom?”

“To Sasha! Just because she was dating my husband!” The sound waves she produced boomeranged back through the alcohol fumes and Nina exploded with laughter. “Hah!” she shouted. “That didn’t sound right, did it, but he was
always
dating somebody else. The man was engaged to somebody else while he was still married to me, for God’s sake. But when he was dating Sasha, he was cheating on the person he was cheating on me with and dumping me, too—that really made me mad.”

“I can only imagine.” If I wanted stories like this, there was always daytime TV. I could feel my smile hardening and becoming painful.

Sasha must have noticed. “That’s why Nina called and suggested we have a drink at the Four Seasons.”

“To apologize,” Nina said. “I’d been rude on the phone.” Then she smiled at me, and I could picture her in school, a good fifth-grader, handing in neatly written assignments, and beaming the same self-satisfied happiness upon her teacher. “I called her a bitch.”

“An English bitch,” Sasha said with great glee.

I did the teacher thing. “Thanks so much. I love hearing about people doing the right thing. Thanks for going out of your way to tell me about that. But now, I’ve really got a lot of—”

Nina frowned. “It wasn’t out of our way. We were just over—”

“When Nina was apologizing,” Sasha said, “she explained how she tended to make phone calls when she was upset, and she feels—”

“Bad,” Nina said. “Real bad.”

“—about several of the calls.”

“He made me really angry,” Nina said. “Grrrrrr! You understand that, don’t you? He was not a good man, or a nice man. Sometimes I think about the twins, and I realize their father’s dead, and that’s scary and sad for them, kind of, but you know what? They barely ever saw him. It’s going to take a long, long time before they notice that he hasn’t been around.”

“The phone calls, Nina?” Sasha prompted.

“Oh, yes. I called Ingrid and told her what a bad mother I thought she’d been, and how spoiled her son was. But she doesn’t understand half of what’s going on, so that might be why she listened so calmly. And one time, that pill Penelope—that’s what I call her, Penelope the Pill—she picked up the extension and told me I was a disgrace.” Nina giggled again. “I think she listened in a lot of times.”

“You called a lot?”

“I did it . . . a few . . . I made—I don’t know how many times I called.”

“And?” Sasha prompted.

She could have filled in the gaps herself and moved this process along, but then, she was the person who left messages that said nothing. She probably loved the suspense. “Remember?” she now said. “We decided to come tell Amanda because she’s trying to help figure out what happened to Tom.”

“Oh. Tom. Right. Well, there was this bad week,” Nina said. “I was upset. Tom had moved out, so I invited my brother to come over and he told me really bad things Tom and Ingrid had done. Things I hadn’t known. And I guess we had too much wine with dinner.”

We waited. “And?” Sasha and I finally said in unison.

“We got a little crazy and we both called him and said bad things and I’m ashamed of myself because now he’s dead. And we . . . well, we did it more than one time.”

“Tom? You phoned your husband—” She was the phoner? The one thing I was sure of—I’d thought—was that the mysterious Shippy had phoned her brother.

“My brother, really. He did the talking to my
estranged
husband who was cheating on the person he was cheating on me with, you remember. And in other ways, he had cheated other people, too.”

“I remember. Did you—did he—say something you’re sorry about?” I asked.

She nodded solemnly. “We phoned a couple of times. With Tom gone, Jay came over a lot.” She shrugged, as if making crank calls followed coming over as the night did the day. “Mostly, Jay talked, but sometimes I’d do this—” She lowered her voice. “Do you hear me?” she asked in a deep tone that was obviously fake, but could confuse a listener. “It was—it was a prank,” she said in her normal voice. “Just to scare him. Shake him up a little. He made everybody else miserable. Turnabout seemed fair.”

The threatening calls were made by his brother-in-law and his wife? Wouldn’t he recognize their voices? Or hadn’t he spent much time with Jay at all and perhaps hadn’t heard his wife’s strange ability to sound like a bullfrog.

I felt too tired to revise my thinking, and instead had to squelch a rush of annoyance that this inebriated woman’s confession messed up my only working theory. “What did you say to him, Nina?”

“Jay did the talking mostly,” she reminded me.

“Fine. What did your brother say?”

“We lost our manners, I’m ashamed to say. That’s part of why I feel so bad. That, and how I was with Sasha.” Her turn to lean over and pat her new best friend’s arm. “Anyway, it was prank stuff, nothing like a real threat.”

Tom’s final date, the other-other woman, sat near her, nodding support. Who had changed the rules of sisterhood? “You, Jay, whoever was talking, told him he didn’t deserve to live,” Sasha said quietly. “Right?”

Nina looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap, and she sighed and nodded. “That was a terrible thing to say because then, he died. “But Jay told me such things about him. At first, we thought . . . but we didn’t. We didn’t . . . we didn’t do what we could have.”

“Which was what?”

“We didn’t ask for anything. We could have. We could have promised not to tell people how he ripped off his own sister. How she deserved to inherit money but was homeless instead. Homeless!”

She was talking about blackmail. She and Jay hadn’t blackmailed her husband, and that was her mark of pride.

“All we did was
tease
Tom about it. Make it clear we knew something about him, and that it was rotten.”

“About what, Nina?”

“About the skeletons in his closet. About the ghosts of his past. About how we knew stuff, and he, well . . . he didn’t deserve to live. And I think once we said that maybe we’d tell people what we knew. We didn’t say anything specific. Just . . . once, I think, Jay said something like that the skeletons had come out of the closet before Hallowe’en.”

I remembered his saying that at the nursery. He was obviously quite fond of that turn of phrase.

Sasha looked at her. “What’s it mean?” Then she looked at me. “He didn’t say anything about that part to me.”

Maybe the specifics of some of the calls—the ghost and skeleton ideas—had been too frightening, too private, too specific and potentially dangerous for Severin to share with Sasha. Maybe he would have told me about it, had he lived. Maybe, in fact, that’s what he needed to talk about with someone.

“You mustn’t berate yourself because of what happened afterward,” I said. “The important thing is to move on.” I meant it literally—I had things to do—and I meant it emphatically, but once again, someone knocked on the office door.

“People obviously come here all the time!” Sasha said. “You weren’t telling the truth.”

“You were leaving, weren’t you?”

“Are you kidding? This is as good as a late-night movie. I want to see who comes in next, and why.”

I didn’t bother to protest. It still wasn’t pizza-delivery time, so I didn’t even look in the direction of Ozzie’s frosted door, but went to open the door.

“Good!” Carole Wallenberg said. “You’re here. I was hoping—”

“What is this,” Nina asked, “a Tom’s old wives convention?” Then she looked at Sasha and said, “Sorry! I don’t mean to leave you out or anything . . .”