WHILE HELEN WAILED, LUCY looked at me in disbelief and Art broke into gales of laughter, doubled over, clutching his stomach. “I can’t believe you guessed,” he said one word at a time between laughing fits. “The big secret.”
I sat there, shocked at my own revelation. Apparently Evan had been born out of wedlock and given up for adoption. Why was I learning this for the first time? However long ago or short our marriage, it was information I would expect to have. Why hadn’t he told me? I looked at Lucy, holding my hands palms up in bewilderment. She mirrored my gestures.
Laugher subsiding, Art said, “I had to endure that goddamn Evan my whole life. Evan this, Evan that—”
“Arthur, watch your language!”
“Arthur” ignored his mother and carried on with his diatribe against Evan. “Evan summed up my childhood. The guy’s duller than dirt, but Mom thinks he’s the best thing since—I don’t know—sliced bread?”
I couldn’t disagree with Art. Why had it taken me so long to notice Evan’s dullness? Had my standards improved that much over the years? But his personality, or lack thereof, wasn’t relevant at the moment. I noticed that the gun now rested at Helen’s side and that she’d pulled her sweater around her like she was cold. Figuring her tears would divert her attention from me, I went for my pocket.
No such luck. “What are you doing now, Hazel?” A teary-eyed and sniffling Helen lifted the gun and aimed it at me. “What’s in your pocket?”
“Just tissues.” I pulled out several, taking care not to dislodge my phone in the process, and tossed them in her direction. “I thought you could use some.”
She cast a wary eye on the pile, perhaps suspecting—what?—an explosive? After gingerly selecting a tissue, she blew her nose with her free hand.
The incongruity of Helen’s gun and tears made an already bizarre situation more so. It was hard enough dealing with a woman who’d killed once and may kill again—a distraught killer added another level of danger. I needed to keep alert not only for an opportunity to contact Vince but to catch our two captors off guard.
Lucy, with a gentle voice, began, “So, Helen, you were fifteen when Evan was born?” When Helen nodded, Lucy prompted, “And you gave him up for adoption?”
Helen handed the gun to Art. “You tell the story, Art. I’m much too upset.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll tell it.”
“And don’t take your eyes off these two, especially this one.” She hooked a thumb at me, aka “this one.”
“Yes, Mother.” Art rolled his eyes like a long-suffering adolescent, but quickly warmed to the subject, a classic tale of the fifties: when teenage Helen got pregnant, her parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York where she was sequestered until her baby was born. Then, strong-armed by parents and social workers, she gave the child up for adoption.
“She went back to Syracuse but didn’t get along with her parents. She was seething from resentment at being forced to give up her baby. And she definitely didn’t want to go back to the same high school. So she moved to Rochester to live with her grandmother. The old lady doted on her only granddaughter, never denying her a thing. Mom finished high school in Rochester and enrolled in secretarial school. She’d cut off ties with everyone in Syracuse except for Carol Mobley, the one she mentioned earlier. That was only because Carol had relatives in Rochester, so she visited often. And Carol’s a persistent type; it’s hard to say no to her.
“Mom didn’t like being a secretary, so she drifted around a bit, doing this and that, until she wound up being a magician’s assistant. It wasn’t long before she married the magician, who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. That marriage lasted less than a year.
“So she went back to Grandma, who sent her to art school. She still moonlighted as a magician’s assistant, just with a different magician.”
That explained the pictures with the rabbit and the man with the top hat. And now that I knew Helen’s age, her being the young woman sporting a fifties-style hairdo made sense. “The magician’s assistant job sounds familiar. Did I know about that?”
Art said, “I told you at the lunch. You asked what jobs Mom had when I was growing up. One was doing magic shows for kids. And someone talked her into doing gigs as a clown.”
The first time Art had told me about Helen being a clown, I couldn’t fathom the idea because I’d thought Helen too refined and dignified. Now, despite the tears streaming down her face, I considered her too evil to be entertaining children. Lucy looked startled—I guess I’d neglected to share that tidbit of information with her.
Art said, “Anyway, Mom stayed single for a few years. She held down various jobs and painted in her spare time. She didn’t have to work, Grandma didn’t mind supporting her, but Mom was always restless. Then she met and married Gordon Woods and they had me.”
When Art paused, Lucy asked Helen, “Did either of your husbands know about Evan?”
“Not from me.” Helen blotted her face with one of my tissues. Again, she had her cardigan wrapped tightly around her and I saw that she was shivering.
Art snorted. “You sure talked about Evan to me.” Turning to us, he said, “Mom was obsessed with the guy. As for Dad, he was very bossy and controlling, but not abusive. Their marriage wasn’t a model of open communication. But he provided well for us and that was all she cared about. When he died he left her pretty well set. Not that you could tell from the way she lives, but Mom’s a born miser.” Art swept his arm in an arc to indicate the unappealing apartment, illustrating his mother’s tightfisted ways.
“If I didn’t have to support you half the time I could do better. You can’t even keep your dead-end jobs . . .” Helen trailed off.
Art opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He looked mutinous but also helpless. Interesting that Helen supported Art. But it made sense—he couldn’t be making much of a living wage at Walmart and he was frequently out of work. The book group never met at his place because he said it was too small. I pictured a mini version of his mother’s apartment with books stacked to the ceiling.
I didn’t want to digress into Art and Helen’s far-from-ideal relationship, so I kept to the matter at hand. I asked Helen, “So did you do a search for Evan?”
But Art maintained his role as his mother’s spokesperson. “She did. When Dad died in the early nineties, Mom started the search. She found out what she had to do and eventually, much to her surprise and delight, found him right there in Rochester.”
“That was quite a coincidence,” Lucy noted.
“Not really. She had Evan in Syracuse, which isn’t that far from Rochester. Anyway, she contacted Evan and they talked for a bit. But Evan was more interested in medical history than in chatting. Mom wanted them to meet, but he put her off. She called him a few times but he wouldn’t agree to meet. Finally he changed his number. She was devastated.” I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy . . . a very small pang.
Art carried on with the sorry saga. “She consoled herself by remarrying, but she still pined for Evan. He hadn’t told her anything about where he lived, worked, whether he was married—in short, nothing. She even considered hiring an investigator. As it turned out, she didn’t have to go the PI route. In a serendipitous moment she saw Evan’s name mentioned in an article about insurance fraud, the insurance company being Acer. The serendipity continued when she got a job there.
“As you can imagine she was in seventh heaven, getting to admire the object of her affection from a distance. They were in different departments, so never really met, just passed in the halls or cafeteria, greeting each other in the distant, polite way of strangers.” This more or less squared with what Donna McCarthy had told me. “This went on for three years until Evan took early retirement and moved down here to teach.
“In three months, Mom sold her house in Rochester and headed south, with me tagging along. Once here in Richmond she found out where Evan lived and got an apartment in the same complex. She called all area colleges and found him at Tanson Community College and promptly enrolled. She didn’t want to be too obvious and have Evan as a teacher, so she passed up the business courses and opted for computer ones. Down the road that would prove to be a good choice for her—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
I help up my hand. “Wait a minute. What about her husband?”
Art looked puzzled, like he couldn’t remember his stepfather. “Oh, him—they got divorced.” He continued, “Like in so many apartment complexes, especially an anonymous one like this one, the only way to meet people is in the laundry room. So she staked out that area for days until Evan finally showed up. She was no longer willing to admire him from afar; she wanted to establish a relationship, tell him they were mother and son. Problem was that she went about it all wrong. She started having him over for dinner on a regular basis. That went on for quite some time.”
Lucy asked, looking skeptical. “Wait a minute. You said that Helen had talked to Evan on the phone in Rochester. And worked at the same company. Didn’t he realize that he was now having regular dinners with the same woman?”
“Nope. When they met up down here, Mom told him she was from Rochester and had worked at Acer.” Art, unfazed by Helen’s tears, gave her an amused look. “She didn’t care if he recognized her from Acer, but that was unlikely—when we got here she transformed herself into the hot chick you see now. She used to look like a frumpy housewife.” Again, Art’s tale paralleled Donna’s.
“What she didn’t want was for Evan to find out that she was his mother, at least for a while. Since she went through a couple of name changes, that wasn’t a problem.”
When we looked blank, Art amplified. “When she first contacted Evan she was Helen Woods. By the time she went to work at Acer, she had remarried. After she divorced Mr. Riley she circled back to her maiden name of Adams.” Art gave an uneasy laugh. “And it helped that Evan wasn’t exactly, uh, sharp. At least not in my opinion.” When he slanted his eyes at me I spread both hands in a dismissive gesture.
Lucy asked, “So, Helen, did you ever tell Evan he was your son?”
She shook her head and remained silent. Try as we would to engage Helen in telling her own story, she just sat there, mopping up her tears and offering no more than a nod of assent here and there. But I detected a hyperalertness about her, a readiness to pounce if I stepped out of line. So Art continued to field our questions.
“One time when Evan was over for dinner she approached the subject in a hypothetical fashion. Like ‘how about if a mother had to give up her child for adoption and years later found him and wanted to be reunited?’ Evan said why not let things be—the mother gave the child up, so why the sudden interest?”
I said, “How devastating. And hardly the time to spring the news that she was a very interested mother . . . to him.”
“Yeah, she’d trapped herself and knew it. After that, she was really skittish and didn’t want to let him know. She resigned herself to being a mom-in-secret.” Art twisted his mouth. Helen’s weeping continued, unabated.
A tragic story, I thought, on so many levels. I felt acute frustration just thinking of it. Surely if Helen had told Evan the truth he’d have reconsidered his position. He was responding to a hypothetical scenario. When I asked if Evan had ever told Helen he was adopted, Art said, “Not to my knowledge,” and Helen moved her head from side to side. That figured. God forbid Evan should volunteer personal information. He and Carlene had been compatible in that department.
I asked, without even bothering to address Helen, “So, back to the dinners . . . How did they go? Did Evan think she”—here I glanced at Helen—“was interested in him, um, romantically?”
“Oh, no.” Art looked at Helen. “She didn’t want Evan to get that idea—she definitely wanted him as a son. In fact, one time she had a woman join us, someone from the building. She thought they’d be a good match.”
“And were they?”
Art rolled his eyes. “No. Neither seemed interested in the other. The woman dominated the conversation, mostly complaining about her boss.
“That’s when things backfired on Mom. Evan started to make excuses. More travel, more faculty meetings, more this, more that. And more obsession on her part. When he started seeing Kat she just about lost her mind.” I had a vision of Kat being invited for dinner and having a poisonous substance added to her plate. I shivered just thinking about the vengeance she could exact on Helen and Art.
“Then Evan suddenly moved. Here one day, gone the next. Mom was in quite a state and it was Easter or spring break or something, so she couldn’t just ‘happen’ to run into him at school. When she finally did he said he’d married a wonderful woman named Carlene and had moved into her house. Mom cajoled him into giving her the address so she could send a wedding gift. She invited both of them to dinner and he accepted. I guess he felt that marriage shielded him from her matchmaking efforts.”
Art continued. “They only came to dinner once. Mom kept on inviting them to dinner, but they turned her down every time. We did get invited to the turkey dinners and she lived from one dinner to the next so she could talk to her darling Evan. She crossed paths with him at Tanson but he was usually in a rush and just said hi. Probably trying to avoid her.” Art’s bitter look made me wonder if he’d spent his entire life longing for just a moment of the adulation his mother bestowed on his half brother. “She still wanted to reveal that they were mother and son but couldn’t work out how to do it.
“Somewhere along the line Carlene mentioned a mystery book group she’d started and asked Mom to join it. Naturally Mom jumped at the chance, dragging me along with her. Not that I had a problem with that. I’d always liked mysteries, but they were new to Mom. She figured that ingratiating herself with Carlene would keep her in the loop about Evan. It didn’t work. You know how unforthcoming Carlene could be.”
So that was why Helen belonged to a group that didn’t share her values—she hoped to keep tabs on Evan through Carlene.
“When she found out about Carlene’s plans to write a mystery, she enrolled in a Web design course at Tanson and talked Carlene into letting her design a site for her as a class project. She thought collaborating with Carlene would create opportunities to visit at the house. But again her plans were thwarted—Carlene wanted to review Mom’s work online and communicate by e-mail.”
I pointed toward the bedroom. “How did she collect all those photos of Evan in there?”
“Did you ever see the ones on the bookcase in their family room?”
When I nodded, Art explained. “She took them with her digital camera one time when Carlene was hosting book group. Since Carlene always had the group upstairs in her living room, it was pretty safe. Essentially, they’re photos of photos. And she cropped Carlene out of the wedding photos.” A notion of cropping being symbolic of killing occurred to me. I felt chilled.
From her stricken look, I guessed that Lucy had a similar idea. After a pause, she addressed Helen. “Helen, I have a question and I hope you answer it yourself. How did you . . . do . . . ?”
“I put cyanide in her tea.” Helen’s blasé response contrasted starkly with Lucy’s difficulty in even questioning Helen about how she killed Carlene.
Art quipped, “Straight out of the pages of Agatha Christie.”
I said, “Yes, but how—how did you manage it? How did you get the cyanide in the tea? Did you go in the kitchen while the tea was unattended? Remember, Carlene left the tea for a while to look for towels.”
“Mom didn’t do it in the kitchen.” I wished we could muzzle Art and get Helen to say more than the occasional word.
When Art didn’t elaborate, Lucy tried another tack. “Okay. Did she—” Now Lucy turned to Helen. “You go to the house earlier in the day and do, whatever it was you did, then?”
“Nope. She did it right in the dining room when the tea was on the table.”
“But how could that be?” I wailed. “We were all there, listening to Carlene, our eyes on her, and the tea was on the table in front of her. You must be awfully clever, Helen, because I didn’t see a thing.”
Helen smiled through her tears. “It was magic.”