I LOOKED AT CARLENE, trying to get a bead on her meaning. Did her question have to do with Evan, with their separation? But the haunting bit threw me—haunting implied a past mistake. That thought took me to the not-remembered Linda. Carlene’s eagerness to leave the subject of Linda shed doubts on her claims of not remembering her. Who could forget hair like that? Of course, the hair may have been different at the time—for all I knew, Linda had been a nondescript type until a midlife crisis led to her falling in with a creative hairdresser.
Perhaps Carlene was about to confess to a crime. Or she’d been an accomplice, a mobster’s moll. “Carlene, does this have anything to do with Linda?”
The rebuff didn’t surprise me. “Linda again? I said I didn’t remember her.” Then, smiling, she offered, “Sorry, I guess I’m being . . . fanciful.” Fanciful. A writer’s word. Anyone else would say “silly.” “You see, it’s for this book I started . . .” Carlene went on to describe the book, how the main character meets up with her past—a past she had hoped was, well, in the past. Carlene had talked about her upcoming book at the signing so I guessed that this was her third book. “I’m just collecting experiences, that’s all.” And with that, she left the den and proceeded down the short flight of steps to the kitchen, apparently forgetting her question about my own mistakes. I thought about Carlene’s conveniently falling back on her writing to explain her provocative question. I held to my suspicion that Linda had triggered this haunting business.
Carlene’s kitchen, with its barn-red walls, white cabinets, black-and-white-checkered floor, and black appliances was a study in elegance and simplicity, simplicity being the operative word. My own kitchen abounded with plants, refrigerator magnets attaching shopping lists and emergency numbers, cat dishes, cats themselves, and often pleasant cooking aromas. Carlene’s kitchen gave off a model house feeling. A round wooden table held a tray of refreshment paraphernalia and a Tupperware container of what looked like brownies. The notion that less is more can be inaccurate, and sometimes less is just less.
Curious about what was going on in Carlene and Evan’s private world I asked, “Carlene, how’s Evan these days?” The fact that it was their private world didn’t temper my nosiness. I waited to see if she’d mention the separation.
Not a chance. She only stiffened and said “fine” in a tone that brooked no further questions. I felt a twinge of guilt for asking. Terse or not, the woman could well be suffering—her behavior throughout the evening indicated that. Now, using more concentration than necessary, she filled a kettle with water, set it on the stovetop, and turned on the electric burner. No doubt she was preparing one of those odious teas she favored—tonics, she called them—claiming they promoted longevity and well-being. I’m all for longevity, well-being, and the whole shebang, but if it took downing one of her lethal concoctions to have it, I’d seriously reconsider. She took a white mug with a gold “C” identifying it as hers off the tray on the table and set it on the counter. Then she removed the cellophane wrap from a box covered with Chinese characters.
“Is that a new tea?” I asked. Not that I cared, but I thought it was a question she’d answer.
And she did. “Yes, I’ve never tried it, but someone suggested it.” She opened a drawer, produced a scoop, and measured loose tea into a strainer. Then she opened the refrigerator, grabbed a plate of apple slices and what looked to be goat cheese, used her hip to push the door shut, and headed for the dining room. “Do you mind pouring the decaf? The carafe’s right there.” Using her chin, she pointed toward the table before disappearing through the doorway.
Normally, I didn’t bother with such niceties as carafes and served guests from the coffeepot itself, but that was me. As I poured, I thought back to when Evan was my husband. Very much in love, or perhaps lust, we couldn’t wait until graduation from Rochester Institute of Technology and married while still in college. Then the “open marriage” craze of the early seventies appealed to him, but not to me. Since I had, even in that permissive era, eschewed premarital sex and pushed for marriage, I failed to understand why he thought I would embrace such a radical concept as open marriage. While I shed my prudish ways during our marriage, my commitment to monogamy, in or out of marriage, lasts to this day. After two years of grappling with the open marriage issue, in addition to others, I hightailed it to a divorce lawyer.
Once safely unmarried, I acted on a spirit of adventure and moved to Los Angeles, where I remarried not once but three times. Evan remained on the East Coast, taking a vow to abstain from marriage, open or not. We remained friends, keeping in touch over the years and miles. In between my own marriages, I entertained fantasies of remarrying him and living happily ever after, managing to forget why I’d divorced him in the first place. But his enduring commitment to the single life kept me from acting on my fantasies.
In 1999 I found myself a widow. Dispirited, I considered my options, one of which was another uprooting. My cousin Lucy Hooper, a recent widow as well, offered temporary living quarters in her home in Richmond. The fact that Evan had retired from his management job in Rochester after winning the New York lottery and taken a position as an adjunct business professor in Richmond provided added incentive to reverse the cross-country move I’d made a quarter of a century before. Perhaps we were meant to be together after all, his chronic marriage phobia be damned.
Evan responded to the news of my impending move with enthusiasm, saying it would be great to see each other often. I kept mum on my special plans for the two of us. One month after that conversation, on a bright and sunny day in April 2000, I landed in Richmond with my calico cat, Shammy, in tow. But my hopes were dashed. In the space of that one month, Evan had managed not only to meet but to marry one Carlene Lundy, the woman who now gave him short shrift.
Despite my disappointment, I chose to remain friends with Evan. Who knew how long this marriage would last anyway? And it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that in order to remain friends with Evan I had to be friends with his wife. And so I did, as much as anyone could be friends with the unforthcoming Carlene. As for Evan, except for the annual turkey dinners he and Carlene hosted in early December to usher in the holiday season before the rush of other parties, I rarely saw him. And yes, five years later I still lived with Lucy or, as I preferred to put it, we lived together. It put a whole different spin on temporary.
I watched as Carlene arranged plates and dishes on the dining table and, after casting a critical eye on the result, rearranged them. I shook my head and laughed to myself over such fussing. The simplicity of the rest of the house didn’t reign in Carlene’s small dining room. A carved pumpkin holding a riotous assortment of fall flowers and greens served as a table centerpiece. With the early October weather being so warm, the fall decor seemed out of place. I piled the brownies on a plate and put them and the carafe amid a display of smaller pumpkins, orange candles, baby squash, gourds, acorns, and scattered leaves. It looked like Martha Stewart had run amok.
What was going on with Carlene and Evan? Were they permanently separated or, in Evan’s parlance, on a “break”? Would the turkey dinner go on as usual in December? Maybe some of the issues that had plagued my marriage to Evan were raising havoc with the Carlene/Evan union some thirty years later. I remembered my chance encounter with Evan at Target the week before. I took him up on his offer of coffee at the Starbucks concession, where he told me about the separation, but not his second offer—dinner at Lemaire restaurant. Hard as it was to turn down dinner at Richmond’s most elegant restaurant, I didn’t date married men. And separated was, in my view, still married. Taking a so-called break even more so. So I’d collected my purchases and stood to leave, saying, “No, Evan. Thank you, but no. Not while you’re married to Carlene.” And I’d walked away. In truth, my fantasies of a reunion with a single Evan had dimmed to the point of extinction, so I couldn’t claim to be resisting temptation. Still, I regretted not sticking around to hear what had brought on this trouble in paradise—assuming that Evan would share such details.
Little did I know that in a very short time their paradise would become a lot more troublesome.
THE GROUP DRIFTED into the small dining room, a spirited discussion about Sudoku puzzles in progress. They loaded miniature plates with brownies and apple slices, some taking care to avoid the goat cheese. Annabel looked alarmed at Linda’s blow-by-blow description of her recent colonoscopy. I realized with something akin to despair that I’d reached the age where medical procedures and conditions were discussed in full and complete detail at every opportunity. Sighing, I fixed myself a cup of decaf but found the pitcher bone dry. I carried the creamer and my cup to the kitchen where Carlene poured water from the kettle into her mug.
“Carlene, do you have milk or half-and-half?”
She looked blank, then said, “Yes. In the fridge. Didn’t I put it out?”
Sarah appeared in the other kitchen doorway. “Carlene, there’re no towels in the upstairs bathroom.” Then she grinned. “Jeans work just as well.” She rubbed her hands over her thighs in demonstration.
“Oh, dear,” Carlene heaved a sigh. “Sorry about that.” She left her mug on the counter and went upstairs, presumably to locate towels.
We looked after Carlene’s retreating form. Sarah lowered her voice and asked, “Did you find out what was with her earlier?”
I hesitated and wagged my hand back and forth. I could only assess the “huge mistake” discussion as well as the Linda one as vague and unsatisfying. And even if I had something concrete to report, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Carlene in her own house. “Not really” was the best I could come up with to explain my conversation with Carlene.
“Let’s go down to the family room and I’ll show you a few exercises you can do at home,” I heard Kat suggest to Art. She walked, swaggered actually, through the kitchen to the family room beyond. A belly diamond winked at us over her jeans with thigh cutouts. Art, looking like a lovesick puppy, trailed behind her. Sarah and I turned to each other and laughed.
Sarah said, “The guy’s so skinny—I can’t see him lifting even ten-pound weights.” Art was on the lean side. His lankiness combined with his height and concave chest reminded me of a folding lawn chair.
Sarah asked, “What about Linda? What’s the story with her?”
I kept my voice low and my eyes on the kitchen doorway. It shouldn’t take Carlene long to find a towel. “Carlene says she doesn’t remember Linda, so she had nothing to say about her.” Not verbally, anyway. A phone sounded in the dining room and a second later, Annabel appeared in the kitchen, clutching a tiny phone to her ear. She smiled at us and walked down the steps to the family room.
I poked around in the refrigerator and finally located a small carton of 1 percent milk. I surreptitiously sniffed it before dumping some into my cup and the rest into the creamer. Sarah and I walked into the dining room and I resolved to do no more work. I saw Linda regaling Helen with an anecdote involving her dermatologist. A couple of minutes later Carlene, mug in hand, came into the dining room.
Sarah pushed up her oversized glasses and began. “Anyway, Hazel, I need your opinion about this nonprofit.” Sarah volunteered for a couple of local organizations. As I clocked in many volunteer hours myself, I was frequently consulted for my opinion about various groups. We chatted for a couple of minutes until I picked up the words “stem cell,” “misguided liberals,” and “Bush” behind me. Uh-oh, Helen on her soapbox. I turned to find her preaching to Annabel and Carlene.
“Oh, no, she’s at it again,” Sarah muttered. “She already worked that subject half to death tonight.”
Deciding to rescue them from Helen’s clutches, I held up a finger to Sarah in a wait-a-minute gesture. But Art beat me to it. Standing in the kitchen doorway with Kat, the body-building demo apparently over, he exhorted the “author contingent” to give progress reports on our work. I noticed Annabel’s grateful smile along with a flash of annoyance on Helen’s face. But, presumably remembering her manners, she smiled as she turned to Annabel and said, “You start, Annabel.”
“Oh, I’m on a brief hiatus from writing. But Sunset Over Monticello is due out in February.” Annabel set her police procedural series featuring Gloria Shifflett, a hard-bitten and hard-living homicide detective, in Charlottesville. I gave an update on my baby boomer sex romp. I didn’t look at Helen, who no doubt was fighting an urge to make faces at my subject matter.
The group’s real interest was in Carlene, as the new kid on our block in the publishing world. She had recently sent her second book, Graveside Death, to her agent. The story started with the murder of a widow at her husband’s graveside service. The widow had been, by several accounts, faking her grief.
“What are your plans for a third book?” Sarah asked. I remembered our earlier conversation in the den when Carlene alluded to a woman meeting up with her past.
Carlene picked up an apple slice and took a dainty bite before saying, “I’m thinking of setting it at the Fountain Bookstore. I need to run it by Kelly Justice.” Kelly owned the independent bookstore located in Richmond’s historic cobblestoned Shockoe Slip area.
“Tell us about the story line.” Annabel made “come on” motions with her hand.
“Well . . . it’s about a woman who’s been a fugitive for years. Not from justice, but from—love.” Carlene paused, perhaps for effect, then laughed and said, “And that’s all I’m telling right now.” She picked up her tea and tried to take a sip. When she grimaced, I thought maybe the new tea wasn’t a hit, but the problem was the temperature. She said “Too hot!” and set the mug back on the table.
“What gave you the idea?” Sarah asked amid a chorus of protests.
“Oh, Carlene, I saw the most glowing article about you,” Helen gushed. “I brought it with me tonight. Art, honey, bring me that magazine. It should be right by my purse.”
“Art, honey,” still standing next to Kat by the entrance to the kitchen, obeyed his mother. But he yelled back that he couldn’t find it. Helen called, “Well it must be there.” Helen started for the living room when Art came in waving a magazine.
“Oh dear. This is AARP. I told you to take the other magazine, the one on the counter.”
“This is the only one I saw.” Art stabbed the magazine with his finger. “Why don’t you ever make yourself clear?”
“You’re such an idiot!”
Art flushed. The rest of us looked at each other and shook our heads in dismay. This wasn’t the first time Helen had hurled abuse at Art while he ineffectually tried to defend himself.
Helen huffed and said, “Well, I’ll just scan the article and e-mail it to everyone.” Turning to Carlene, she touched her arm and said, “So sorry for the interruption. Sarah asked how you got the idea for your new book.”
Our attention returned to Carlene. She took a larger bite out of the apple slice and thoroughly chewed it before she responded. “It was a movie . . . a movie I saw years ago. I can’t remember the name of it or who was in it. And I’m not sure what made me remember it . . . Anyway, I thought it would make a good story.” She picked up the mug and walked toward the kitchen. “Excuse me, this tea needs some ice.”
“Fugitive from love,” Linda said, seeming to be trying out a foreign phrase. “What do you mean by that, Carlene?” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I detected a mocking tone in the question. The phrase did have a melodramatic ring. Recalling her huge-mistake question, I entertained the notion of Carlene being on the lam—lam from love? A huge mistake could get a person on the run.
Now Carlene paused and looked thoughtful, as if she was trying to figure out what she did mean. Finally, she settled on a weak “It’s hard to explain” and made no attempt to do so.
“I’m sure your story will be great, Carlene,” I assured her. “Are you keeping the characters from your first two books?”
“Yes, Minerva Mazarek and her dysfunctional family.” In Murder à la Isabel, a man had been crushed to death in Isabel, the hurricane that had devastated Richmond in the fall of 2003, when a tree crashed through his bedroom wall. The relatives suspected he’d been murdered before the crash and hired private investigator Minerva Mazarek to unearth the truth.
“Okay, that’s enough about me.” Carlene grabbed another apple slice. “Should I make another pot of decaf?” A couple of acceptances enabled Carlene to successfully escape into the kitchen and dispense ice from the gizmo in the refrigerator door into her tea mug. Then the phone rang and she disappeared from view to answer it. A second later she closed the pocket door.
Annabel now turned to Helen. “Helen, what did you decide about designing a website for Sam?” After taking a number of courses at a local community college, Helen had become a freelance Web designer and from all accounts did well, rapidly gaining a reputation in the area. In fact she designed Carlene’s author site for her class project.
Sarah pulled on my sleeve like a little kid, eager to resume our discussion about nonprofits. I tried to recall the name of someone I knew who volunteered for the one in question, but found the bombardment of conversational fragments around me—Cuban food, jewelry, websites, Richmond Symphony—distracting. I spotted Linda chatting with Kat and Art. Like me, Kat didn’t brook discussion of medical procedures, so I guessed Linda had to curtail her doctor-related tales. Apparently that was too much for her as she soon grabbed her jacket and purse, waved, said, “Nice to meet you all,” and left. I noticed she made no effort to look for Carlene—likely she felt hurt after being ignored by our hostess.
The rising decibel level in the dining room suddenly shifted to the living room, as everyone moved in there to sit. “People have way too many names,” Sarah cried. What was she talking about? I must have looked puzzled, because she explained, “Here I’m trying to process all these employer-matching contributions from the Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk. John Smith makes a donation but he submits it to his company as Albert Smith. And he’s just one of many. You expect women to change their names, at least their last names. I never did, mind you. But everyone these days goes by multiple first and last names, interchanging middle names. If they want their companies to match their donations, use consistent names. That’s all I ask.”
Annabel glanced at her watch and exclaimed, “Goodness, it’s ten o’clock,” and got up to leave. Looking around, she asked, “Where’s Carlene?” When I said I thought she got a phone call, Annabel looked uncertain, then shrugged. “Well, I have to get my jacket.” She tried to open the pocket door from the dining room to the kitchen, the one Carlene had closed earlier. But it stuck and Annabel had to jiggle it to get it open a crack.
Seeing the last brownie in the dining room—someone said they were pumpkin brownies—I looked at Sarah and said, “Want to split it?” At her eager yes, I started to ask, “Do you know who brought—” A shriek sent the group rushing en masse to the family room, this time through the door from the hall to the kitchen that Carlene had closed as well. We ran past Annabel, who stood at the top of the steps, still shrieking.
Carlene had taken her tea to the family room to talk on the phone. Now she sat slumped in her chair, hand draped over the arm. Perspiration and a deep flush covered her face, a bluish froth at her mouth. The mug lay upended on the floor, the tea soaking into the carpet. Kat checked Carlene’s pulse, setting off a cacophonous bangle-on-bangle tinkling that cemented my hatred of those danged bracelets from that moment on. A disembodied male voice yelled from the cordless phone on the floor next to the chair.
“Someone call 911,” I ordered, my voice dry and raspy. Kat shook her head, looking grim, saying there was no pulse. I covered Carlene with an afghan that Helen handed me. Or was it Sarah? It seemed like everyone was everywhere. An almond odor hung on the air. Either it was the tea or—cyanide? Did that mean I had the gift? I spotted a folded sheet of paper on the floor behind the chair. Even in the stress of the moment I remembered one warning drilled into me by the crime novels I’d read and that was not to contaminate the scene. I didn’t know if it was a crime scene but it didn’t hurt to exercise caution. The dim light did not lend itself to reading so I turned on a tabletop lamp with a tissue I found in my jeans pocket. Then I knelt on the floor and, using the same tissue, unfolded the note, and read.
Soon the place teemed with paramedics and police. In the ensuing pandemonium, I think I remember stricken faces, mouths making “O”s of horror, hands making signs of the cross . . . and the hope and prayer I felt sure we all shared that we would wake up and find this to be the nightmare to end all nightmares.
And then realizing that we would wake up. Unlike Carlene, for whom there was no awakening. Ever.