12

As soon as she closed the front door, Cassie was hit with a powerful wave of ennui, as if the atmosphere of her home were weighted and pressing down on her, smothering the oxygen out of her system and sapping her energy. She leaned against the door and considered the stairs, which seemed to go on forever. Her legs didn’t feel as if they could make that climb right now.

Turning her head to look in the opposite direction, she saw late afternoon sunlight streaming through the kitchen windows, making a rosy rectangle on the unglazed tile floor. “I’m hungry again, I guess,” Cassie muttered. “I’ll get some of that soup, and then I’ll tackle the closet.”

Whether it was the soup itself or the act of preparing it, a demonstration that she, Cassie Jordain, was willing to live, she felt better after she ate. The doorbell rang as she was cleaning up, and Cassie’s heart sank. Standing with a pot in one hand and a dishtowel in the other, she tried to decide which was the more unwelcome experience: ignoring an insistent doorbell and waiting until well-wishers left, or opening the door to people she didn’t have the energy to entertain. The doorbell rang again. Suddenly drawn by the thought of someone on the other side of that door anxious for her welfare, Cassie set down the pot and opened it. Bishop Harris and his wife were just turning away.

They didn’t say anything about her appearance, but their eyes widened as she opened the door, and Sister Harris gathered Cassie up in a motherly hug, whispering damply, “Oh, my dear!”

They were an older couple, in their late seventies. He was a retired structural engineer, and they had lived and worked and raised their children in Montana, moving to Scottsdale following his service as a full-time mission president. Bishop Harris was of medium height and sparely built, with clear blue eyes and sharp features. Sister Harris was softer, less angular, with a halo of white hair framing a face that showed in every line, every wrinkle, her compassionate nature.

Bishop awkwardly patted Cassie’s shoulder. “We’ve come to see how you’re doing, but I need to talk to you about something, too. Mother, will you sit in the kitchen for a minute?”

“Is that all right, Cassie, if I go in there?” Sister Harris asked. “I don’t think I’d want anyone ordering someone into my kitchen, even if he was the bishop.”

Mystified, Cassie said, “No, that’s all right. Go ahead, Sister Harris. You and I can sit here in the living room, Bishop.”

When they were settled, the bishop fiddled with a rolled-up paper he was carrying as he regarded Cassie. “This has been hard on you.”

Tears welled up, and Cassie shook her head as she wiped her eyes on the dishtowel. “I’ll be all right.”

“Have you been out of town? Several people have come by. We tried to look in on you on Saturday, but you weren’t here. I wondered if you were traveling with your work.”

“I just finished a project. I have a seminar to teach at the end of the month, but until then I’m here in town.” She took a moment to wipe her eyes again. “I haven’t been ready to see people until today.”

“Are you doing all right?”

“I’ll get through this, Bishop,” Cassie said quietly.

“Would you like a priesthood blessing?”

Cassie considered. As she thought about it, she asked, “Can I ask someone else to do it?”

“Certainly. Your home teacher, perhaps. Or a friend. He needs to be a worthy priesthood holder. Who would you like?”

“Ben Torres. You’ll have to excuse me. I can’t seem to keep from crying.”

“Do you want me to arrange it?”

Cassie nodded, blowing her nose on the dishtowel.

“All right. I’ll do it. Now, what I came to talk to you about: Everything happened so fast,” Bishop said apologetically. “I had no more than met Brother Jordain, when I heard that you were married.”

“It was a whirlwind courtship,” Cassie said. “I’m glad we didn’t wait to marry.”

Bishop nodded. “The next thing I know, I’m asked to do his funeral. I only talked to him once.”

Cassie didn’t say anything. Her eyes were on the paper in the bishop’s hands.

He cleared his throat. “I got to thinking about him. Your husband. You said he didn’t have any family, but I knew he’d have a ward family somewhere—the folks who sent him on his mission. People who cared about him. I thought maybe they ought to know about him being gone. So, I called Salt Lake to see about his records.”

Cassie brightened. “Of course! Why didn’t I think about that?”

“I called just before the Church offices closed, and the lady was reluctant to help me right then. Wanted me to call back, but I convinced her to stay an extra minute and look it up. This is the only Chandler Jordain they have in the Church. It’s a fairly unusual name. There were several Christopher Jordains, and she tried to talk me into one of those, but I knew you said his name was Chandler.”

“Yes. I love the name! I had hoped . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she shrugged.

Bishop Harris cleared his throat again. Unrolling the paper, he handed it to Cassie. “The printers were off, so they didn’t do a printout. She just dashed off the name and ward. She put his age in, too. The thing about it is, Cassie, I don’t think this is your Chandler Jordain. It says he’s from Edmonds, Washington.”

“Washington! Yes, that works. I was remembering the W but was thinking it was Wyoming.” She looked at the three lines scrawled on the paper.

“It’s not a good copy. I’ve got an old dinosaur of a fax machine that I had in my engineering office in Montana. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to buy paper for it. But look there, on the last line. This fellow is eighty-three years old. It can’t be your husband.”

Cassie’s face fell. “No. Chan was thirty-three.” She sighed. “There’s an answer to all of this,” she declared. “I’ll find it when I go through his things, I know. I just haven’t been brave enough yet.”

“Do you need someone to be with you when you do that? Sister Harris could come and help.”

Cassie shook her head. “It’s something I’d rather do myself.”

“Is there anything else you need?”

“No. It was good of you to come by.” She held up the paper. “And thanks for this. It was a good try.”

“I think I’ll call and ask about one of those Christopher Jordains,” the bishop said, rising. “My father spent his whole life thinking his middle name was Michael. When he was fifty he sent for his birth certificate so he could get a passport and found out it was Mitchell. If your husband was an orphan, it’s possible that something like that could have happened.”

Cassie stood, too. “Yes. You’re right. Do you want this back?” When Bishop shook his head, she crumpled the paper and dropped it in a wastebasket before following him to the door.

“Are you ready, Mother?” he called.

“Coming.” Sister Harris emerged from the kitchen, wrapping some knitting around her needles and stowing the project in her purse. She again enfolded the younger, taller woman in her arms and hugged her tightly. “Bless your heart,” she murmured. “Bless your heart. Life is hard sometimes.”

“Yes it is,” Cassie whispered.

“I’ll get ahold of Brother Torres,” Bishop Harris said. “If he can, we’ll be by tomorrow evening. I’ll let you know.”

They said their good-byes, and Cassie closed the door behind them. Leaning against it for a moment she felt the grain of the wood on her forehead. Turning her head, she eyed the stairs. They didn’t seem nearly as long and steep as they had earlier. I can do this, she said to herself and walked purposefully forward.

She made it to Chan’s closet door on the momentum from that single declaration, but she faltered with her hand on the handle. The memory of that last week before they were married came flooding back. Chan had worked all Wednesday afternoon, moving the banker’s boxes of files that were stored in the left-hand closet, putting them on shelves he had built in the office. Thursday morning he had moved in most of his things, and she had slept with his closet door open that night so she could wake Friday morning to the sight of his clothes hanging there.

Cassie had opened the closet only once since the accident, and that was so Bishop Harris could put Chan’s luggage and briefcase away after he had driven the convertible from St. Alphonse to Cassie’s.

“I can do this,” she said aloud again and turned the handle.

The closet was pathetically empty. She hadn’t noticed before that he had so few clothes. Even if his suitcase were unpacked, which it wasn’t, the hangers would only occupy two of the available eight feet of hanging space. It made his occupation of her house and bed seem even more fleeting than it had been, and she began to feel the sorrowful malaise creep over her again.

As a defensive reaction, Cassie grabbed the suitcase and carried it over to the bed. Hefting it up, she undid the fasteners and let it fall open, bracing to have her heart wrung by the sight of her dead husband’s clothing inside. Curiously, it was like looking at any stranger’s suitcase. She picked up a plastic bag stuffed with dirty clothes and looked inside. A faint aroma of cigarette smoke drifted up, and she frowned, but then remembered marathon meetings of her own where smokers defied the rules and lit up, to the consternation of all abstainers. She had returned home with smoky clothes, too.

Carrying the dirty clothes bag to the washer, she discovered the load of clothes that Punky hadn’t turned on. She added Chan’s bag to it made a full load, then put in the soap and started the washer. Then she unpacked and put away the toilet articles and shoes. Just as she was stowing the suitcase in the closet, the doorbell rang again.

Cassie hesitated only momentarily before heading downstairs to answer it. On the way she rehearsed excuses for not receiving company, but when she opened the door she found Erin, the complex manager’s daughter. She was seventeen, with honey-colored hair and doe eyes. “This came for you earlier in the day,” she said kindly, handing a letter to Cassie. “I was there when the postman came by. He said you didn’t answer your doorbell, and I didn’t want you to have to go down to the post office for it, so I signed.”

Cassie looked at the fat, legal-sized envelope addressed to Mr. Chandler Jordain.

“Are you all right?” Erin’s dark-fringed eyes got big. “You’re as white as a sheet!”

“I’m . . . I’m all right. It’s just a bit unnerving to get mail for my husband. Thank you for bringing it to me. Will you excuse me if I don’t invite you in?”

The teenager’s usual incandescent smile was absent. “That’s okay. We just want you to know that we feel . . . real bad for you. If you need anything, just holler.”

“Thank you. I will.” Cassie closed the door and walked to the dining room. She pulled out a chair and sat, placing the envelope on the table in front of her. It was from Jensen and Sjoding, Yacht Brokers of Seattle, Washington. Taking a deep breath, she turned the envelope over, broke the seal, and pulled out the contents. The pages crackled as she separated the sheets and looked at the official language of ownership. It seemed that the week before they were married, Chan had bought a boat, a thirty-foot motor vessel named Red Swan, through Jensen and Sjoding. The cover letter stated that the boat was moored at Quarry Harbor. The key had been left with the harbormaster at Quarry Harbor as directed. If Mr. Jensen could be of any further help, Mr. Jordain should not hesitate to call.

Things were turning surreal. It was as if her universe had become unhinged and things were revolving in orbits that were all askew. A thirty-foot boat? And not a word to her about it? Did he mean it for a surprise? If the bill of sale was addressed here, he certainly wasn’t trying to hide anything. She glanced down at the ring on her finger, remembered the day at the zoo and the Cracker Jack box, and suddenly the planets were restored to their natural orbits. Chan must have been planning a surprise. How like him!

Buoyed by this thought, she gathered up the papers, took them upstairs, and left them on the bed. She went back to the task that had been interrupted and fetched Chan’s briefcase from the closet. Wondering why the prospect of pharmaceutical brochures and catalogues would make her pulse quicken, Cassie undid the latches and opened the lid.

“Holy Crow!” she said aloud, using Punky’s expression for the first time in her life. There were no catalogs, no brochures, no sample packs of the most recent wonder drug. The briefcase’s contents included some maps, a protractor and compass, a leather-bound day timer, a small cardboard box, and a snub-nosed revolver in a shoulder holster.

Cassie abruptly sat on the bed beside the opened briefcase. Frowning at the ugly, steel-gray killing tool, she felt her universe’s hinges slip again. When her field of vision started turning black around the edges, she realized she wasn’t breathing. She inhaled and exhaled several times until the ringing in her ears stopped and everything was full-screen.

Without touching the gun, she grasped the top corner of one of the maps and pulled it out, unfolding it over her lap to study. After a moment she realized that it was a navigational chart for use at sea. She quickly saw that there were three such maps in the briefcase, and each one detailed a different area of Puget Sound. Cassie bent over the unfolded chart again, reading the numbers sprinkled over the blue area and then checking the legend. “Depth at mean low tide in fathoms,” she read. How much is a fathom? Intrigued, Cassie carried the chart next door to the office, laying it on her desk while she got her dictionary out. A fathom was six feet.

Studying the chart, she was amazed at how many islands there were in that inland arm of the sea. More amazing was how many towns there were on the islands. She read the names: Cedar Cove, Shingle Bay, Quarry Harbor. Suddenly she realized she had heard that name before. Returning to her bedroom for the letter from Jensen and Sjoding, she checked. Yes. The Red Swan was moored in Quarry Harbor.

Back in her office, Cassie got down her atlas and turned to Washington state. Her heart lurched when she came to the city of Edmonds along the coastline of Puget Sound. She quickly retrieved the crumpled up paper from downstairs that Bishop Harris had brought and carried it back up to the office. Smoothing it out, she inspected the sheet and noticed something she hadn’t paid attention to before: a line of tiny, identical, evenly-spaced blotches marched down the heat-sensitive fax paper. All but one of them was unimportant, because they occurred where no writing was present. But one happened to be right where Chandler Jordain’s age was noted. Holding the paper under the light of her desk lamp, Cassie studied it intently. “Aha!” she said finally, breaking into a smile. It became obvious, the longer she looked at it, that the blip on the fax paper had made the clerk’s three into an eight. Chandler Jordain wasn’t eighty-three; he was thirty-three. This was her Chan. Her husband was from Edmonds, Washington.

As she folded up the charts and papers and put the atlas and dictionary back in their proper places, Cassie realized that she was hungry. Glancing out the window on her way back to the bedroom with the charts, she was surprised to see that it was dark. Peanut butter sounded pretty good right now, and as she put the charts back in the briefcase before heading down to the kitchen, she noticed the cardboard box sitting beside the gun. It was a little bigger than the box her checks came in, and it was made of heavier cardboard. Picking it up, she carried it down to the kitchen with her and left it on the breakfast bar as she fixed a sandwich. The hearty smell of the peanut butter made her salivate as she poured a glass of milk, and she took a bite before carrying her snack over to sit on one of the high bar stools.

As she chewed, she picked up the box and tried to undo the locking tab with her fingernail. It wouldn’t budge. The peanut butter knife was balanced on the edge of her plate, so she licked it clean and used it to pry the tab out of the slots. Another bite, and then she pulled the lid up to see what was inside.

Cassie just about choked. The box was full up to the top with new, crisp one-hundred dollar bills. “Holy Crow,” she said aloud for the second time that evening. The elation she had felt about finding out where Chan was from was devolving into unhingement again.

Cassie began to count the currency. When she got to one hundred, she eyeballed the rest of the stack and estimated that there must be three hundred bills in the stack. Thirty thousand dollars!

It suddenly occurred to her that she must have read the papers from Jensen and Sjoding wrong. Chan must have sold a boat, not purchased one. That would explain the money. Carefully, she put the bills back in the box, pressing them down so she could close it again. Knowing she’d never get the tabs to lock, she got a rubber band out of the drawer under the phone and secured the box that way while she trotted up the stairs again. She returned the package to the briefcase, and then checked the letter from the yacht brokers again. No. She had read it correctly the first time. Chan had purchased a boat.

But where did thirty thousand dollars in cash come from? And why would he be carrying a gun?

The phone rang, and it was Bishop Harris, saying that because of Ben’s schedule they would need to come in the morning. Was that all right? Would she be home around ten? Cassie said she would and felt a little better when she hung up the phone. Remembering her sandwich, she headed back to the kitchen to finish it, but stopped on the way to move things from the washer to the dryer. She was just about to get the clothes from the mortuary bag and run them through, but all of a sudden she was tired and didn’t want to cope with anything more today. It will keep, she thought as she closed the lid to the washer. Then she went down to her waiting peanut-butter sandwich.