Chapter 19

It was tough getting to sleep that night. I spent hours tossing and turning, watching the clock, replaying the events of the last month over and over in my head. I’m amazed by how your life can change in an instant. One minute you’re happily partnered and begging your manager to get you a reading for a small lab assistant role on the Jill Hennessy coroner crime drama Crossing Jordan. The next moment you’re in a foreign country, suddenly alone and single and accused of murdering one of the shining stars of the West End theater scene. Finally I tired of staring at the ceiling and flipped on the television. I watched a four-hour late-night marathon of one of the more recent classic English sitcoms, Keeping Up Appearances, about a snooty woman overly concerned with taste, style, and etiquette. She tortured her mild-mannered husband and meek neighbors on her never-ending quest to improve her social standing and worked overtime to downplay her trashy, low-rent relatives. The hilarious adventures of the stuffy Hyacinth Bucket made me howl. And laughing helped wash away some of the tension that was keeping me awake, and I was grateful to the incomparable timing of Patricia Routledge, who played the lead role.

After I watched four straight episodes, my eyelids grew heavy and I was hopeful that I was about to drop off to sleep. I drew the covers up and settled into my mountain of pillows when the phone rang suddenly.

I was fully awake again. Sighing, I reached out and answered the phone. It was just after five in the morning.

“Hello?” I said into the phone.

“Jarrod, honey, it’s me, Mom. Am I calling too late? I get so mixed up with the time difference. It must be almost midnight over there.”

It was my mother, Priscilla Jarvis. When I thought about it, Mom was the American version of Hyacinth Bucket, especially when it came to torturing my mild-mannered father.

“Clyde, I’ve got Jarrod on the phone! Pick up the other line! I said pick up the other line! Oh, for heaven’s sake, his hearing aid battery must be low. Jarrod, are you still there?”

“Right here, Mom.”

“How early is it in Scotland?”

“I’m not in Scotland. I’m in England.”

“England. Ireland. Scotland. All the same to me. Doesn’t the queen own all of them anyway? So did I wake you?”

“Actually it’s not late anymore. It’s early. Just after five A.M.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have asked Clyde to figure out the time difference. He’s terrible at math. Clyde!”

I heard a click and the voice of my beleaguered father, Clyde Jarvis. “Hello? Hello?”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Son, how the hell are you? Are we calling too late?”

“It’s five in the morning there, Clyde!” my mother yelled in both our ears. “You added up the time difference wrong!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I was up anyway.”

“Damn. It’s after eleven at night here . . . and oh, I see what I did. I forgot to factor in daylight savings, and let’s see, do you add six hours for eastern time or central time?”

“Doesn’t matter. No worries. I’m up and about.”

“We have to be up early tomorrow. We’re driving to Orlando for a golf tournament,” my mother said. Both of my parents became avid golfers once they retired to Florida. Dad spent months teaching my reluctant mother how to play, and now she had a better handicap than he did. It was a major sore spot, and one we tended to brush aside to avoid raising his blood pressure.

“Son, we’ve been reading about you in the papers,” Dad said.

“Don’t worry, Jarrod, we don’t believe a word of what they’re writing about you. I think you should sue them for libel, don’t you, Clyde?”

“Who do you think did it, son?” Dad said. He was even a bigger conspiracy enthusiast and armchair detective than I was. It drove my mother crazy. When they would watch the old Murder, She Wrote reruns on A&E every night, during the course of the episode he would identify every major guest star as the culprit. First it was Lyle Waggoner. Then Jamie Farr. No, it had to be Shirley Jones. At the end of the show when the true killer’s identity was revealed, he would smugly turn to his wife and say, “See, I told you.” It bugged her so much she stopped watching the show with him and just focused on her TV Guide crossword puzzles.

“The police are not even 100 percent certain yet that Claire Richards was murdered,” I said.

“Oh, I think she was. And I think it was the boyfriend. Why else would he be so intent on bad-mouthing you in the press? He’s trying to cover his tracks by throwing the scent onto someone else,” Dad said.

“Clyde, just twenty minutes ago you were saying it was Minx the understudy,” Mom said with an aggravated tone in her voice.

“Too obvious. Hey, son, how well do you know the playwright ? No one’s talking about him.”

“You remember Wallace Goodwin, Clyde. He wrote for Jarrod’s show. We had him over for dinner once. Nice man, with the pretty wife,” Mom said.

“I just found out he was sleeping with Claire,” I said.

There was a pause before my mother practically spit through the phone, “I never liked him, never trusted him. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“He did it!” my father bellowed. “Case closed. Unless it was the director. I read an interview with him. Sounded pompous and full of himself to me. Wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. He could have done it.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Son, we could skip the golf tournament at Disney and come over there to help you solve this mess.”

“No, I’ll be fine. They haven’t arrested me or anything, and I’m sure they’ll figure it out soon enough.”

“Besides, Charlie’s there for moral support, right?” Mom said.

I was hoping the subject of Charlie wouldn’t come up. But I had sent an e-mail to my parents in Florida just after Charlie arrived to tell them he had surprised me by showing up unannounced in London, so they knew he should be with me at this very moment.

“No, Mom, he’s not.”

“But you wrote and told us—”

“I know, Mom. He was here. But he left.”

“Where did he go?” Dad asked.

“He broke up with me.”

There was a long silence as my parents slowly took in this news. My mother had never been fully comfortable with me being gay. My father was much more willing to accept it. But Mom adored Charlie, and if I had to be with someone of the same sex, in her mind I couldn’t have picked a better man.

“He went back to his wife, didn’t he?” Mom said. “I knew it. I always thought he was too manly to be gay.”

“Priscilla, that’s got to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” Dad said. He rarely raised his voice to my mother, except when it came to protecting my feelings. “I have two words for you. Rock Hudson!”

My mother worshipped Rock Hudson during her youth, and when he died of AIDS in 1985, after years of covering up his homosexuality, my mother took it hard. It was right before her own son landed on the front pages of the tabloids kissing another boy at the LA Gay Rodeo. That definitely was not one of her banner years.

“I’m sorry, Jarrod, I didn’t mean to say—”

“It’s okay, Mom. He didn’t go back to Susie. He left me for another man. One of the actors in the play. Akshay Kapoor.”

“He did it! I bet he’s the one who killed Claire Richards!” my father said.

“Oh, Clyde, Charlie didn’t kill anyone,” Mom said.

“Not Charlie! This Kapoor guy,” Dad said.

“What kind of name is Kapoor?” Mom said.

“East Indian,” I said.

“Oh, I hate curry. Upsets my stomach,” Mom said.

“Does he have one of those red dots on his forehead, son?” Dad asked.

I suddenly noticed a red light on my phone flashing. It was my second line. Someone was trying to call the room.

“Mom, Dad, I have another call.”

“Who would be so rude as to call you this early in the morning ?” Mom said.

“We did,” Dad said.

“Only because you can’t add,” Mom said.

“Can I put you guys on hold?”

“Are you kidding? Do you know how much this call is costing us?” Mom said. “Take your call, and we’ll talk later.”

“Love you, son,” Dad said.

“I love you too,” I said and they hung up. I switched over to the new call on line two.

“Hello?” I said.

At first there was nothing but dead air. And then I heard his voice.

“Jarrod, it’s me.”

Charlie. It was Charlie. I could barely speak.

“Are you there?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Jarrod, I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“I know.”

“I handled it badly. I was completely unfair to you.”

“I’ve been out of my mind, Charlie. You just disappeared. I thought something bad had happened to you.”

“I’m still trying to figure everything out,” he said.

“Are you really in love with Akshay?” I said, my mind reeling from finally having some kind of contact with my boyfriend.

The silence was interminable. And then, in a soft, pained voice, he said, “I think so, yes.”

“And you’re not going to tell me where you are so I can come to you and we can talk this out?”

“No, I can’t do that. Not yet anyway.”

“Charlie, this is crazy. Please, just tell me where you are!”

“I have to go now,” Charlie said.

“No, please, don’t hang up!”

“It’s probably best if you just fly home to LA. Make sure you give Snickers a big kiss for me. I miss him so much.”

“But not me,” I said.

“Good-bye, Jarrod,” Charlie said and there was a deafening click.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the now-mute TV screen as Hyacinth Bucket passed a junk heap of a car. A dog sprang out from the smashed window and barked at her, and the shock of it sent her hurling into the bushes. Normally I would be doubled over with laughter. But not today.

And then it hit me. Charlie had asked me to give Snickers a kiss for him. He said he missed him very much. There was only one problem. Snickers was a female Pekingese. Charlie of all people knew that. He was the one who took her into the vet to get her spayed per Bob Barker’s explicit instructions on The Price Is Right. He never would have made that kind of mistake. Who would get their own dog’s sex wrong? Was this some kind of tip-off? Was he trying to tell me something? I was only sure of one thing at this point. Something was seriously wrong with this whole scenario.