I overslept, waking in time to do no more than ready myself for the funeral. I straggled downstairs to make coffee, then shuffled back up, cup in hand, complimenting myself for mastering coffee without cigarettes for six straight days, and they hadn’t been the easiest of days.
This one wasn’t going to be any easier. I brushed my teeth carefully, concentrating on them, not the impending funeral. I’d seen death firsthand now, seen it on my living room floor. But I’d blurred it, pushed it as far away as I could all week, pretending it could be solved and sponged from my life. Last night I’d turned away from Mrs. Nichols’s grief and what it represented. Today, it would be solemnized and ritualized, and I would have to face it.
But later. Meanwhile, there were less significant problems to consider. Mackenzie wasn’t really insignificant yet, but his insufferable behavior had certainly reduced his stature. I would have to face him, too, but that was a face I could prepare. I practiced cold and haughty expressions in the bathroom mirror. The cat jumped up and watched me have a significant interchange with my reflection.
“Can’t talk, Mackenzie,” I murmured. “Must run now. Back to my real life, you know.” And of course, my very tone would remind him that I am an academic, a civilized woman whose life is not compatible with a flatfoot’s. “Good luck and good-bye, Mackenzie!”
The cat stopped in midwash. “I said Mackenzie, not Macavity, you dumb beast.” He resumed his toilette.
“Or,” I mumbled, dental floss between my teeth, “call me if you ever need help again, Mackenzie. Eddie’s information really broke open this case, didn’t it, though?”
I hoped it did. All I knew about Eddie was that he was a two-bit player in a semiprofessional group of actors, an intense, scared rabbit who followed me, then ran away. I didn’t even know his full name.
Finding that out intrigued me more than dental hygiene. I put down the flosser, risking gum disease. Maybe my accumulated plaque would bring me to an interesting, single, periodontist. It would please my mother.
I went to find the playbill.
It was still next to the bedroom telephone. I scanned it while I put on panty hose. No Eddie in the starring roles. Then I found it. He gave himself his full Edward, which seemed much too formal for his style. Edward Bayer. One of the minor players, part of the team of dull names.
I pulled on a navy turtleneck dress before it hit me. Before I heard it, instead of just seeing it.
“Edward Bayer,” I said out loud, stunned. “Edward Bear.” The real, the honest-to-Milne-given name of Winnie the Pooh.
I whirred around my room, pulling shoes out of the closet, running a comb through my hair, slapping appropriate, I hoped, makeup on my face. “Thank you, niece Karen, for endless evenings with that bear. I’ll share my good citizenship award with you.”
I glanced at the playbill again, then turned it over. Mackenzie’s various phone numbers, written in firmly blockish characters, faced me. Given his energy level last night, I was certain he hadn’t rushed out at dawn to sniff for clues.
“Take that, Mackenzie,” I said, punching my index finger into his telephone number. “So the big professional who knows his business examined lists of names, talked to everybody, and still found nothing. So I’m just an English teacher who should stop playing sleuth, am I?” I reached for the telephone.
Then I paused. Why waste my golden moment of triumph on the phone? I’d see him in less than an hour. And I wanted to see him. Wanted to watch his sleepy eyes open in wonder. Wanted to wait patiently while he searched for humble, apologetic words. I deserved to see it firsthand.
I practiced gloating while I walked to my car. A lot of things made sense now. Eddie was the reason for Liza’s lies about staying with me. She used them for both her mother and Hayden.
Eddie had been with her Sunday night. After the Playhouse performance. He called me the one in the middle. After him. Before the killer.
But why not Edward the Bear as killer?
I considered Eddie as a potential menace as I drove. He could be afraid, like all the others, that Liza had told me something important. But I couldn’t see the danger in talking to him at the cemetery, in full view of other people. He was a coward at heart. He wouldn’t do anything there. And for a coward to come forward that way, to promise to go to the police, which frightened him, must mean he had something important to say.
I was one of the first to arrive at the funeral home, and I was ushered to a seat near the front of the chapel. I looked around at the sprinkling of faces. Some were familiar. The pregnant high school friend was there, next to a beefy young man. Sarah Halvorsen sat alone, stiff and withdrawn.
“Early, aren’t we?” a familiar voice said. Sissie wore something dark and silky that whispered along with her as she slid in next to me. “Not many here. Why? Maybe too early, is all. Or she wasn’t as popular as she liked to…” I was not in the mood, never had been, for the woman’s soliloquy, but there was no polite exit.
“Exhausted,” she said, “rushing all the time. Too much, too much. Extra rehearsals, running around, the fair tomorrow night. And of course, I am still Petey’s mother.”
I have nothing firsthand to say about mothering, so I nodded and stayed silent. Sissie didn’t mind.
“Wherever are the Coles?” She glanced at her watch, and as if on cue, they entered, seating themselves across the aisle. Sissie waved. Hayden finally noticed, smiled, and stayed put.
“Poor man’s going through hell,” Sissie whispered. “I try my best to ease the pressure, poor Hay, but…” She shook her head and paused, surprising me while she waited for a response.
“You’re very close, aren’t you?” I murmured, looking around. Where was Eddie?
“Close? Almost family. Our parents had Sunday dinners together before we were born. Spent summers at Cape May together, celebrated holidays, were law partners…”
Sissie switched gears to her theater woes. “Really nervous about Sarah. Stick of wood. Wish the other hadn’t taken the country thing, but who knew? Could have finished the run and gone away. Said she would. Who could have known?”
It did no good to pay attention to her. My mind hopped back over her words, trying to sort them out. “The other” shouldn’t have taken that role, but then who could have finished the run and gone away? Not that same other. Liza? Liza had said she’d go away? “Who do you mean…” I began, but I gave up. Sissie wouldn’t clarify anything. She was good at talking, not at saying anything. I returned to my increasingly difficult search for Eddie’s dark head. The pews were filling with neighbors, actors, a sprinkle of polished faces that must have been from the modeling agency, and a group of well-dressed men who came up to Hayden before finding seats.
He greeted them politely, but after they’d moved off, he sat rigidly, running his hand across his collar, brushing imaginary specks off his lapel. His mother sat next to him like a monument.
The chapel became so full I couldn’t see more than a row or two behind me. I couldn’t even find Mackenzie, who was surely slouching in a rear pew.
A swell of solemn music announced the service. I felt a lurch of fear, a desire to run away.
“They asked Hayden to give the eulogy. Poor taste, I think. Declined, of course,” Sissie whispered.
I tensed up, afraid of what I was going to hear, of what I was going to have to learn, once and for all. But I needn’t have worried. The minister had no real knowledge of Liza, and his all-purpose, impersonal words were vague and meaningless, filled with tributes to the life hereafter and laments for those cut down before their time.
They didn’t penetrate the wall around my emotions. I was safe in my fortress, and I relaxed a little.
Afterward, we filed out slowly. I had to wait for all those behind me to leave, and by the time I edged out into the daylight, only a handful of people were around. A line of filled cars waited to leave for the cemetery.
“Oh, Miss Pepper! Can I ride with you? Please? I don’t have a car.” It was Stacy Felkin, the student who had idolized Liza. Her mascara again smeary, she blew her nose and looked up at me. “The other kids left already. They forgot about me.”
“Of course,” I said. Who could deny her passage? It wasn’t far from the truth to say that she was Liza’s one true mourner. “I’m parked around the corner.”
“Mornin’,” a voice drawled. “Or afternoon, to be precise.” His smile was open and guileless, his blue eyes bright. It became difficult envisioning him as the humbled wreck of my morning fantasies.
“Hello,” I said coolly. I introduced the detective and the student.
“I saw him at school,” Stacy said, blowing her nose again.
“Are you more rested today?” I asked C.K. It was hard to tell with this man.
“Ah, yes,” he said with another smile. “Slept twelve hours. I feel great. You ladies want a lift to the cemetery? My car’s right here.”
Stacy paused in her attempt to remove the smudges around her eyes. “You’d drive us?” she said, ready to adopt another hero on the spot. I didn’t want to be around to see how she’d adapt to Mackenzie’s shuffling, drawling style.
If the aroma of popcorn was still in the car, it was smothered by Stacy’s perfume, a musky scent reminiscent of Liza’s. We drove in silence through gray city streets and then into and through the dull-green park ringing the city.
Stacy’s pocketbook was drilling a large cavity in my hipbone. I pulled it out from between us and handed it to her. “Pretty bag,” I murmured.
She regarded it lovingly. “It’s like the one Miss Nichols carried. Almost.”
With every breath I inhaled a Stacy-mutated variation of Liza’s scent. Stacy’s hair was a scraggly version of Liza’s mane. Stacy’s peasant dress imitated one of Liza’s favorite costumes.
“And see what my mother gave me for my birthday?” Stacy fumbled at her neck. She held up a heart-shaped locket. “I asked for it three months ago. It’s like Miss Nichols’s. Almost.”
Mackenzie maneuvered the car through the cemetery gates. The gravesite wasn’t far away. I could see a group clustered around it, but no Eddie.
“I see the other kids, Miss Pepper,” Stacy whispered, although we weren’t close to the grave yet. “I can get a ride home from them. Thanks, sir.”
Mackenzie nodded, and she swished off. “Pepper?” he said, clearing his throat. “I, er, spent the morning going over Cole’s schedule for last Monday again.” He became engrossed in a cloud formation above us.
I couldn’t catch his eye.
“Hey there, big fellow,” I finally said. “Was that by any chance an apology? Are you suggesting that you’re not a full-time, supercilious, smug, self-satisfied—”
“I’m sayin’ I’m sorry. What are you sayin’?”
“That I accept your apology.” I was sufficiently touched to decide to tell him about Eddie without fanfare. “Listen, this morning, I—”
“Shh,” he said, gesturing toward the grave. “They’re starting.”
The circle made room for me, although I didn’t want it. I stared at Liza’s dark coffin, heard the minister’s ritualized words. This time, it didn’t matter what he said. The coffin, the raw oblong cut in the earth, were eloquent in their silence.
And then, at some point, it was over and Mackenzie, with the gentlest of touches, guided me back to his car.
I couldn’t speak. There seemed nothing worth saying, nothing comparable to the lesson just learned.
Mackenzie drove until he found a diner near the edge of the city.
“Coffee?” he asked, and I shrugged, then nodded.
When the steamy mugs arrived, when the clatter of dishes and murmur of voices pushed me back into the living, I finally found my voice again. “It got to me,” I said.
He nodded, and I knew then that it got to him, too, over and over again.
“How can you stand it?” I demanded, half-angry, as if he created the messes he lived with. “How can you face a lifetime of it?”
“I don’t know that I will. I started out a sociology major at Rice. Taking criminology courses now.” He shrugged and fiddled with his coffee spoon, made patterns on the paper placemat with its tip. “Maybe I’ll go into something less concrete than this, theorize about the causes of crime, work in a lab and analyze things. I’m not sure. Or law. I think about that, too. It’s the other end of the continuum. This seemed a good starting point, though….” He didn’t seem altogether comfortable with his vague future, and he wound up staring out the thick window beside him. “Spring’s gone all to hell again,” he said. “Looks like a bad black-and-white photo. No contrasts. No bright whites, just grainy gray.”
I looked out the foggy window along with him. “Landscape painters must save money around here,” I said, hoping to pull us both back onto more familiar ground, even if it was as antagonists again. “They only have to buy black and white paint. Can you imagine the history of art if, say, Renoir had been born a Philadelphian?”
“Or van Gogh,” Mackenzie said, the ghost of a twinkle back in his eye. “Painting this place. The gray-silver diner on its gray-white concrete blocks. Under a pale gray sky, above blacktop. He’d have cut off his hands, not his ear. But that brings us back to violence, doesn’t it? Isn’t there something else?”
“Yes. Yes, there is.” It was violence-related, or violence-born, I guess, but that needn’t be said. Mackenzie had long since redeemed himself, and I wasn’t going to bludgeon him with my revelation, just present it as a gift. “Big news, Mackenzie,” I said. “I know who Winnie the Pooh is.”
“I’m right proud of you. But so do I. And I know about Christopher Robin and Tigger as well.”
“No—Liza’s bear. Her Winnie. The charm, remember? That guy last night, Eddie Bayer, the actor. Edward Bear is Winnie the Pooh’s real name. Not only that, but Eddie Bayer was the person outside my house Tuesday night, but I scared him, he scared me, and you scared us both.” I sat back and waited for the round of applause and the expression of gratitude.
Instead, Mackenzie plonked down his coffee cup. “You knew this, but you didn’t bother to tell me?”
“I didn’t know about the name until I was getting dressed today. Then I put two and two together.”
He didn’t really have to applaud, but I certainly deserved a nod of approbation.
“And you didn’t say anything till now?”
“When could I? Stacy was in the car, and—”
“That lumpy little girl’s some kind of spy? Or do you think she’s our killer?”
“It didn’t feel right. Not then. Also, I was supposed to talk to Eddie at the cemetery. I didn’t want you to interfere. I was positive—I still am—that he knows something.”
“I’d rather not believe this. The first new link, the first maybe something, and you’re too miffed to share it. You were supposed to meet him there today?”
“I told you last night. I said he wanted to talk to me.”
“The way you said it, I didn’t think—”
“Mackenzie, you didn’t think at all last night. And what you did instead was enough to shut anybody up. In fact, you told me to stop playing Nancy Drew.”
“All right!” He drained his cup, bit his bottom lip, and stood up. “Let’s find him.” He put change on the Formica table.
“He doesn’t want to see us. Certainly not the police. He’s nervous about something.” I stood on tiptoe, almost, oddly annoyed that he still towered above me.
“He’s nervous? So am I. Why wasn’t he there today?” Mackenzie’s entire tempo had changed. He moved briskly, paid the cashier, pushed through the revolving door, and even spoke double-time. I had difficulty following him.
“He didn’t do it,” I said when I caught up. “Why should you think he did it?”
“I don’t. I told you he was working Monday. But now that I know who he is, what his relationship is—”
“Thanks to me,” I said, but he ignored me. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get a citizen’s citation out of this.
“He probably does know something. Certainly more than anybody else so far. I’m tired of this case. Tired of interesting gossip that adds up to zero. Come on.”
I sat quietly on my side of the car. C.K. Mackenzie and I probably had clashing biorhythm charts. Something was consistently and badly out of synch between us. If I offered ideas, I was playing girl detective. If I didn’t, I was withholding information. Ours was destined to be the shortest nonrelationship on record.
He backed out of the space and then jammed on the brakes. “Where the hell am I going? Where does he live?” He pulled out his pathetic notebook and thumbed through it. “Okay. West Philly. Not too far.”
“Let me explain myself,” he said after a while, his voice too conspicuously patient. “I don’t like being called a supercilious, smug, what have you. But I can’t close a case because somebody’s mama is overly enamored of her sonny boy. Or because somebody almost, not really, kidnaps you so nicely that it slips your mind for a day. So I don’t spend a whole lot of time on that kind of intellectual exercise.”
“I don’t see what you’re—”
“I’m still explainin’! Because, on the other hand, I am intensely interested in reality. Like how to decipher the name of a lover. Like somebody missin’ an appointment he took trouble to set up. Those are real things.”
I shrugged and slumped as deeply as the safety belt would allow.
“And another real thing is a murder.” He pronounced it “murdah,” so I knew his stress level was way up, and his practice at speaking like a native was meaningless. “Murdah is real. And this one was strictly amateur stuff—a first, desperate impulse, ah believe. So it could be anybody, but once they’ve taken that step, what’s to stop the next one? So that’s real, too. And dangerous. And not a game at all. You could get hurt real bad messin’ with it. Don’t you see the difference?”
“Not too well, obviously.”
He glanced over at me. “Oh, dammit, don’t look like that. Maybe I’m not bein’ fair. You’re new to all this. And, well, thanks. That was clever of you, the bear. I never would have caught on. Neither would Ray or anybody else on the case.”
“I’m sorry I waited to tell you about Eddie,” I said softly. It was hard saying any more. That primitive center of me still believed that saying things made them possible, and silence kept them from happening. But I forced myself ahead. “Do you think it’s going to make some kind of difference? To anybody?”
“I sincerely hope not” was all he’d say. The man was not comforting, but he was honest.