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Catherine’s house was crowded with friends and family, and though a few people I recognized from the funeral stood talking in small groups, the only people I knew were Tamsen and Hannah and their sons.
Lili joined the women in the kitchen and I walked into the living room. Madison sat on the sofa with her grandmother, but I didn’t see Ethan until I glanced through the sliding glass doors to the back yard. He threw a worn tennis ball for Pixie. The little dog raced ahead and jumped up to grab it with her teeth, then trotted back to him and dropped it at his feet.
I stepped up to the doors to watch him throw it again, stopping beside a sandy-haired guy in his late thirties who stood there. It was sad to see Ethan on his own out there, while everyone else was inside sharing their memories, eating and drinking.
“Ethan’s been going through a tough time,” I said to the man beside me. “Poor kid. I wish there was more I could do for him.”
I turned to him. “I’m Steve Levitan. Went to college with Catherine and Doug.”
“Jimmy Burns. I’m, well, I’m a friend of Catherine’s.”
The boyfriend, I thought. His eyeglasses had broken above the nose, and were kept together with duct tape. My father had always said there wasn’t anything damaged that couldn’t be fixed with duct tape except a broken heart.
He wore khakis, a light blue shirt with a skinny black tie and light brown wool blazer with the George School logo on the breast. “I taught for a while at Eastern College, where I had a bunch of kids from George School.” I pointed to the logo on his jacket.
“It’s a good school,” he said. “I want Catherine to send Ethan and Madison there next year. But finances have been a problem.” He looked around at the house, the crowd. “Without the money from Doug, she’ll probably have to sell this house. Don’t know where the kids will end up.”
So Catherine hadn’t shared the five-million-dollar payout with him. Or maybe he was just making conversation.
“Catherine told me she met you in a writers’ group,” I said.
“I’m surprised she said anything. She’s been trying to keep our relationship quiet because she was afraid Doug would get angry. But I guess that’s all over now.”
“Catherine and I were in some creative writing courses together,” I said. “She mentioned you’re writing kids’ books?”
He nodded. “A middle-school series about two boys who get into trouble and use what they learn in class to solve their problems.”
“Sounds clever.” Catherine joined us as Jimmy and I swapped business cards. His was quite colorful, showing five book covers.
“I’m so glad you could come, Jimmy,” Catherine said, as she squeezed his hand. “The kids will be happy to see you.”
The three of us looked out to the back yard, where Ethan was now sitting on the ground, Pixie on his lap. “I should go out and see him,” Jimmy said.
“And I should rescue Maddie from her grandmother.” She turned to me. “Thank you for what you said at the service, Steve. Ethan and Maddie are going to need all the reassurance I can give them that their dad loved them.”
Jimmy put his arm around Catherine’s shoulder. “Let’s go find the kids.”
I said goodbye to them, and went in search of Lili. We left a short while later, and in the car on the way home, I told her about meeting Jimmy Burns, and that he at least pretended to be unaware of Doug’s life insurance.
“You are so suspicious,” Lili said. “Do you go around analyzing everything I say?”
“Only as it relates to murder,” I said. “And so far I don’t consider you a suspect for any unexplained deaths.”
“That’s good to know,” she said drily.
I took Rochester for a long walk around the lake to make up for being away from him all afternoon. He acted like he’d been a prisoner starved for fresh air the way he kept dragging me forward from smell to smell, wagging his tail and bouncing on the balls of his paws. Being with him made me feel better. I hoped Pixie would do the same thing for Ethan and Madison.
Lili left for her evening class, the last one of the spring semester, and I put some water up to boil for pasta. Rochester jumped up on me, reminding me it was his dinner time, too, and Jimmy Burns’ business card tipped out of my pocket.
I poured some chow for Rochester and looked at the card. Jimmy seemed like a nice guy, and I was curious to see what he wrote. I used my Kindle to download a sample chapter of Jimmy Burns’ first book, Making a Splash, and read while I ate.
As Jimmy had said, the two main characters were middle-school boys, Noah and Boogie, best friends who seemed to get into one scrape after another. The book was lively and well-written, and my impression of Catherine’s boyfriend went up another notch.
I was almost at the end of the free sample when Noah and Boogie began fooling around down by the banks of a river much like the Delaware, though it wasn’t named. Boogie confessed that he was really afraid of the water, and I wondered if Jimmy had spoken to Doug about his own fear. Then Boogie slipped and fell into the river.
Whoa. Shades of Doug Guilfoyle. I flipped ahead eagerly to see what happened and realized I’d come to the end of the sample.
One of the great things about e-books is instant gratification. After a couple of clicks, I had the whole book on my Kindle, and I went upstairs to read. Rochester followed me to the bedroom and jumped up on the bed as I plumped up the pillows for reading. He circled twice, and with a gentle thump landed beside me. His head rested on his paws and he stared at me.
“Okay, okay, I won’t ignore you.” I held the Kindle with one and with the other I scratched behind his big floppy ears until he put his head down on the spread and went to sleep.
Making a Splash was a quick read, and I enjoyed it. I was almost disappointed that there were no other parallel’s to Doug’s situation in the book. I was finished by the time I heard Lili’s car in the driveway and Rochester jumped off the bed and charged downstairs to bark a welcome.
I put a kettle of water up to boil as Lili greeted Rochester at the door. “How was your class?” I asked, after kissing her hello.
“I am so glad to see the end of this semester,” she said, as she collapsed theatrically on the sofa. “I’ve been talking to other faculty and it’s not just my imagination. Students this term are worse than ever before.”
“You say that every semester.”
The teakettle whistled, and I went into the kitchen to make Lili a big mug of green tea. It was her favorite way of relaxing after a long day. I stirred in a drip of organic honey from New Zealand, then carried it out to her.
She put the mug up to her nose and sniffed. “That’s heavenly,” she said. “What did you boys do while I was gone?”
“I read a book by Catherine’s boyfriend Jimmy Burns,” I said. “About a boy named Boogie who falls into a canal a lot like the one in the center of Stewart’s Crossing.”
“Boogie?”
I nodded. “It’s a nickname, obviously. But it reminds me a lot of Dougie, which is what we called Doug Guilfoyle at Eastern.”
“Boogie, whose name reminds you of Dougie, falls into a canal like the one Doug fell into.”
I nodded, and she sipped her tea. After a moment she asked, “Does Boogie die like Doug did?”
“That’s where the story changes. Boogie’s friend Noah runs down along the river bank as Boogie gets swept along in the current. Noah remembers a science experiment they did where they learned that wood floats because it weighs less than the amount of water it would have to push away if it sank. He sees a bunch of sticks on the ground ahead of him and he throws them into the water for Boogie to hold onto.”
“Smart kid. How does Boogie get out of the river?”
“Apparently they studied beavers the year before, so Boogie uses the sticks that Noah throws him to divert himself into a narrow channel, and then piles them up as a makeshift dam. Then Noah helps him climb out of the water.”
“Doesn’t sound like best-seller material to me,” Lili said.
“It’s pretty funny – lots of silly jokes and puns. It’s the first of five books he’s written so far in the series, so it must be doing well enough for the publisher to continue.”
“The timing is wrong,” Lili said, after sipping more of her tea. “If this is the first of five books it had to come out at least a couple of years ago.”
I shook my head. “He could have written the book ten years ago, and been inspired by it to help Catherine out.” I got up and started pacing around the living room. “What if Catherine met Jimmy while she was still living in Westchester, and she came to Stewart’s Crossing for him?” I asked. “She told us she’d moved here to be near her cousins, but that could just be a cover story.”
“Steve. Your imagination is working overtime tonight.”
I stopped pacing. “You’re right. I just keep thinking there’s something about Doug’s death I should be figuring out.”
“The only thing you need to figure out is what we can do to help Catherine and her kids,” Lili said. She reached out and took my hand.
“As usual,” I said. “You are right on target.” I kissed her hand, and then we went upstairs and I put that imagination of mine to a more productive use.
