CHAPTER SIX

Tampa, Florida

Sunday 9:30 a.m.

January 28, 2001

LATER, IN THE KITCHEN, I found George sitting alone with coffee and the Sunday papers.

“Morning, darling. I hope I didn’t wake you,” George said, without glancing up, as I made preparations to brew my café con leche. He looked relaxed and happy, unshaven, hair mussed, like a man at home on a Sunday.

Honestly, I thought, does nothing faze my husband? A man died downstairs last night and George seemed untroubled. I envied him his tranquility and I felt worse for Margaret.

I couldn’t imagine my life without George. I was sure Margaret felt the same way about her husband. I wouldn’t believe she murdered him, no matter what Ben Hathaway suspected. Ben has been wrong before. I willed him to be wrong this time.

“Actually, I’ve been out running. Are you the only one up?” I waited for the coffee and heated the milk in the microwave.

“Your dad and Suzanne went downstairs with a few of the others for breakfast. I decided to stay here and read the papers. Great news about your new sibling, huh?” he asked me, as he folded the front section over and looked up briefly.

“Sure.” I said, with all of the joy I usually display for trips to the gynecologist. “Wonderful.”

“You don’t like the idea of being a ‘big sister’ at the age of thirty-nine?” George turned his full attention to me now, in his concerned and compassionate way.

“Not really. Should I like it?” I snapped, a little more crossly than I had meant to.

“Sorry. No need to be so touchy.” He sounded wounded. George and I rarely had personal disagreements, although we argue issues all the time. And it wasn’t his fault.

I relented. “I’m sorry, too. I just haven’t quite sorted out how I feel about this yet. Can we drop it for now?”

He studied me a few seconds, then changed the subject. “This is a great story in the paper here today about how Americans are constantly reinventing themselves.” He pounded on the paper with his index finger. “Did you see it?”

I sat down at the table with him and looked at the story he’d pointed to in the front section of The Tampa Tribune. I read the headline aloud, “‘Change Your Identity, Change Your Life.’ Well, that would be one way to do it.” I sipped the hot coffee like a heroin addict shooting up. “Seems a little farfetched, though. Who would want to do that?”

“You’d be surprised. Jim Harper is making himself over into a husband and father,” he said. I had to concede, so I nodded. “Think of people who change their names for professional reasons, like actors and musicians. Or just because they don’t like their names, they’re too hard to spell or too hard to pronounce.”

He seemed like he was really getting warmed up. “Or maybe, they’ve done something illegal and they want to cover it up.” George sipped his coffee and grinned at me. “There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of reasons to change your life or your identity.”

“Maybe,” I responded, knowing there was more coming.

He waited a beat or two, like a stand-up comedian before delivering his punch line. “Like maybe your father has embarrassed you by marrying a woman half his age and getting her pregnant, and then showing up at your house when you have several hundred guests, to tell you the happy news?”

The absurdity of it all did make me laugh, a little. “I don’t think that would be enough to make me change my name and leave town, but it might be a motive for murder,” I teased.

George relented. “Read this article later. It’s quite interesting.”

To please him, I reviewed the Tribune article more carefully. A former member of the FBI wrote a book telling ordinary people how to hide their assets and disappear. He was traveling the country giving seminars on the subject and had been in Tampa yesterday.

Even with all the Gasparilla festivities, over 2,500 people had attended the guy’s presentation. The book had already sold over a million copies. Clearly, reinventing oneself was a more popular topic than I’d realized.

When Margaret came into the room, I set the article aside to read later and turned my full attention to her

She appeared rested. Although dressed in the clothes she’d slept in and with yesterday’s makeup smudged around her face, Margaret looked far from her best.

“I can’t really believe he’s gone,” she said to George and me, after we’d gotten her settled and fortified. The dry bagel she chewed slowly and washed down with coffee seemed to strengthen her somewhat, but she still seemed an exhausted and bewildered shadow of dear, kind, petite Margaret Wheaton.

Some lawyers have office wives who partner with them at work as their spouses partner with them at home. I had Margaret, my office mother. She cared for me, watered my plants, dusted my desk, kept me from working too hard and prohibited others from over scheduling my time.

Margaret even stood up to the CJ, my pseudo-boss. She chastised me for antagonizing him, but when she thought he was out of line, she stood right up to her full height and went toe-to-toe with the old despot.

From long experience, I knew Margaret had reserves of feistiness in her that would see her through her husband’s death, even if they weren’t apparent at the moment.

“We knew he was going to die, of course,” Margaret said aloud. “We’d been preparing for it for months. He had a living will, made sure we transferred all the titles to my name. He gave me everything he had. So we were ready.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I said nothing. Neither did George.

“We thought it would be the ALS. I’m glad he had a heart attack instead.” She sounded anything but ready or glad.

George reached over and covered her small hand with his large one. She stared at the plain gold band he wore on his left hand for a while. Fresh, quiet tears, started down her cheeks again.

“What can we do, Margaret?” I felt as anguished as she was. I’m not good at death. I don’t do funerals, wakes or memorial services, if I can avoid it. Death is a part of life’s circle, I know. I even sort of believe in reincarnation of some kind. But the loss and sadness the survivors feel when a loved one dies is just too hard to observe and revives too many bad memories for me.

Watching Margaret’s grief confirmed my belief that she had not killed her husband. Nothing would make me believe it. Not even a full confession. Hathaway was just wrong.

But Margaret had to know the theory the police were pursuing. So I took a deep breath and just said it. “Margaret, Ben Hathaway isn’t convinced that Ron just passed away.” She flashed me an alarmed glare that shook my resolve. “He’s checking that,” I assured her.

“But?” she asked, for she knew there was a condition.

I inhaled courage. “But he’s checking other possibilities, too. He has to. It’s his job.”

The alarm on her face resembled a small child watching a car speed toward her beloved cat lying in the street. “Other possibilities? Like what?”

George listened intently to my answer.

“Well,” I stalled. “Ben has ordered an autopsy to see what caused Ron’s death.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the law,” I said, as gently as I could. “They have to rule out other causes of death.”

“Like what?”

My discomfort grew as I tried to avoid explaining exactly what I knew Ben Hathaway believed and would try to discover. “Well, like maybe suicide or homicide.”

Now, Margaret’s expression was even more horrified. As if the car had hit her cat and splattered its body all over her face.

I would have said anything to wipe that look off her face. I backpedaled quickly. “I mean, not that that happened here. Just, that’s the reason for the law requiring an autopsy.”

Margaret shook her head, slowly, as if to say “No, no, no, no.” “Who would want to hurt Ron? He was the kindest man in Tampa. He didn’t have an enemy in the world. For all the years we were married, I don’t think he ever raised his voice to me, even once.” She kept shaking her head. “No. That’s not possible. No one killed Ron. It’s not possible.”

Real tears and sobs began again, then, and I helped Margaret back to bed. She collapsed into sleep almost immediately. As if the world was too much to face.

Grief is like that, I remembered all too well. It comes in great, overwhelming waves. And although grief subsides, like the tide, it comes again and again. My mother had been dead for more than twenty years. Yet, when I saw Jim Harper with Suzanne or worse, when I heard her called “Mrs. Harper,” fresh grief ambushed me again.

Margaret would be all right in a while, but she’d have bad times, too, for the next few months. Maybe for years. I hoped Hathaway would wrap this up soon so Margaret could deal with her grief and move on with her life.

Hathaway’s suggestion was outrageous, I thought again. The woman just lost her husband. She wasn’t a killer. I may not know everything, but I knew that much. Margaret didn’t have anyone to help her except me, now that Ron had died.

It’s not that I’m all that experienced with killing. But I knew Margaret didn’t kill Ron and I wouldn’t let Ben Hathaway try to prove she did.

Still, it nagged at me. Ben has been wrong before, but not that often. He’s good at his job. Tampa’s crime rate is declining and very few cases remain unsolved.

When I came back from Margaret’s room, I heard the front door to our flat open and Dad and Suzanne walk in, laughing and chatting, right past the kitchen and on to their room down the hall.

George chuckled, “Afternoon delight, hmmm?”

I hit him in the arm and he yelled, “Owwwwwww!” loud enough to wake the dead. We were both still laughing when a couple of our other house guests came in to join us.

We exchanged pleasantries for a while, spent the rest of the day being social, and tried, unsuccessfully, to forget Hathaway’s suspicions.