Her house had altered in the week since her husband’s death, and so had she. At first, we noticed only that the newspapers had piled up on the walk, and no one had hauled the empty trash bins back to the garage from where they leaned against each other on the curb. But then she met us at the door, a different woman.
The once immaculately coiffed hair now hung in lank strands, and when she pushed them carelessly back from her eyes, we saw dark rings under her arms. Those eyes that calmly observed us were still a deep, clear navy, but they evidently no longer saw a need for personal hygiene. Annie Reich had not recently bathed or changed her clothes.
“Come in,” she said to Geof, Ailey and me.
We stepped into a room in which Endust had not recently been sprayed. A magazine lay spread in the middle of the floor. There was a half-eaten cheese sandwich on the arm of a sofa and a glass of the omnipresent iced tea tilted precariously against the lower edge of a fireplace. Some of it had spilled, some time ago, leaving a dried, dark pool on the carpet The house, too, smelted—of things left in a refrigerator too long, of toilets not flushed at once. So, I thought, even she had a time of grief and forgetting, and sympathy began to well within me.
She led us again to the misnamed family room. Again, she brought sweetened iced tea, but the glass that held mine was dirty, and I set it aside. For a strange, suspended moment, we stared at her while she gazed back, placid as a nun, showing no signs of the mild dismay she’d expressed to me over the phone.
“Mrs. Reich,” Geof said, finally, “was your husband a sergeant in Atheneum McGee’s platoon in Nam?”
“Yes,” she said calmly. “How did you find out?”
“At church today,” I said, “McGee told a wild story about having been blown out of a cave in Vietnam. He said his sergeant had identified another man’s body as his, McGee’s that is. I wondered how McGee would have known that, if he was unconscious, as he claimed he was, not to mention having supposedly been blown yards away from the site of the explosion. The only way he could have known that was if he had watched it happen, or if he went AWOL with the help of that sergeant, or he found out about it later.
“I eliminated the first possibility because I didn’t think he would have been able to get near enough to know exactly what his sergeant was doing. That left possibilities two or three, both of which seemed to imply that his sergeant knew he was still alive. At that point, I remembered that the only record your husband had was a military one, and that you were from Springfield.”
I took a chance on germs and sipped the iced tea.
“This being Massachusetts,” I continued, “I thought you meant Springfield, Mass. But of course there are other Springfields, including the one in Illinois. Detective Mason confirmed for me that Atheneum McGee had, indeed, come to Poor Fred from there. So that placed him and your husband in the same city at the same time.
“Then I thought about your presence in church today. Why were you there, I asked myself. I couldn’t believe you were a member! And you don’t strike me as someone who would go out of her way to witness a spectacle. You sat in the back row. So did McGee. What’s more, he arrived at the church without a car. He didn’t take a cab. There’s no bus service out there on weekends. And the police failed to trace him to a local motel or hotel. So who took him to church this morning? Who put him up for the night?”
She didn’t volunteer the answer. Talking to her was like communicating with a slab of uncooked dough. She sat there, large and white and pasty, her chest rising and falling with even breaths. Her eyes were raisins, with the life dried out of them.
“I called you on a hunch,” I admitted, “but if it had been a horse race I would have put down money to win. You took him to church today, didn’t you? He stayed here in this house with you, didn’t he?”
She nodded that massive head, smirking a little.
Suddenly, she burst into speech. “Ansen told me that Atheneum and another man were caught behind the lines by ground fire. They holed up in a cave, just like he said, but it was only for a night before the platoon came back to get them. Anyway, the morning before the platoon came back, the other man stepped out of the cave to look around, and he stepped on a mine. Ansen said it blew his face off. When Atheneum saw what happened, he saw his chance to escape from duty. There wasn’t much left on the body to identify it as anybody human, so Atheneum threw down some things that would identify the body as his. Like they’d been blown off him, you know. So when Ansen came back through with the rest of his men, looking for them, he only found the one body. He said they were in a hurry, they were being shot at, I think he called it ‘strafed,’ and they couldn’t stop and check dental records.” She smiled briefly, but the joke was hers alone to enjoy. She made it worse by adding, “as if there were any teeth left to check. Anyways, Ansen thought it was McGee. Why shouldn’t he of thought that? And he thought the other soldier had been taken prisoner. That’s what he reported when he got back to base, and he believed it at the time.”
She shifted in her chair, as if moving into another gear. It must have been from park to first, because it sure wasn’t overdrive.
“Then a couple of years ago, after Ansen had been back from Vietnam for years, and we were living in Springfield, he ran into McGee again. Knew who he was right away. Atheneum tried to pretend it was all a mistake, that he’d been taken prisoner, and only barely managed to escape with his life. But Ansen figured it out, and McGee finally admitted the truth and begged him not to turn him in to the army.” She shrugged. “Ansen wouldn’t have done that anyway. What did he care? Why would he do that?”
I said, “So then your husband took the job here, at Liberty Harbor. And when he got here, he heard the story about how the property used to belong to a man named Lobster McGee.”
“Yes.” She wet her lips. “It was easy after that. I mean, Ansen knew McGee’s family was from around these parts, so he figured Atheneum might be a relative of the old guy. So he went back to Springfield and looked him up and told him about his great-uncle’s death. And the estate. Ansen said he’d back Atheneum’s story about Vietnam if Atheneum would give us a percent of his inheritance.”
Geof stirred to life on the couch. “So when your husband died, you took up the cause, is that right, Mrs. Reich?” His voice was blank, devoid of judgment.
“Of course,” she said, and a look of vexation crossed her broad features. Both men had failed her, and she was annoyed. I was trying to hold on to my sympathy for her, but it was a losing battle.
I snapped my fingers. “That’s what he meant, Geof! When Reich came to my office, he talked about some power I couldn’t fight! I thought he was threatening to vandalize the project, but it wasn’t that at all. He was talking about the power that Atheneum McGee had, as a rightful heir, to halt the construction of the project!” But then I turned back to her. “Why did he bother with that charade, Mrs. Reich? Why did he pretend to threaten us because of the death of your son?”
She sighed, as at a boy’s antics. “Ansen said we were going to have to live here, and he had to keep his job until Atheneum’s inheritance came through. Ansen didn’t want people to think we were after the money because of greed. So when Philly died, he saw a chance to make it look as if he was a grief-stricken father who was acting out of revenge. He thought people would be sympathetic to us, that he could keep his job that way.”
“But Mrs. Reich,” I said, “if Atheneum had brought an injunction to halt the work, your husband would have been out of a job anyway.”
“Oh no. My husband just wanted Atheneum to sue his relatives. It was my idea to sue the town and everybody else we could. Ansen was already dead, you see.” That smirk of a smile appeared again. “He couldn’t lose his job, could he? He was such a fool, Ansen was, caring about appearances the way he did.”
Ailey Mason, who had been silent up until then, looked insultingly around the dirty room. He had long before set down his glass of iced tea as if he didn’t want to drink anything she had touched. He said, “You don’t care about appearances, do you?”
“They won’t buy me a condominium in Florida,” she said tartly, then faced Geof. “I earned a share of that money. It’s still mine. I want it.”
Geof stood to go. Looking straight into her blue raisin eyes, he said quietly, “You don’t have anything coming to you, and if you did you’d have to climb over me to get it. If I could find charges worth bringing against you, I’d do it, but it’s not worth the time and expense. You haven’t asked a single question about McGee’s murder. Aren’t you interested at all?”
She stared dully back at him, resentment pinching the doughy face. “What good does he do me dead? What good do any of them do me dead?”
We left her there, in her own mess.