“Your stepmother keeps our social calendar,” my father said that afternoon when I rowed back out to the Amy Denise to ask him. “She would know. You had better ask her, dear.”
It was a more direct answer, by far, than he usually emitted, but that was only because I had asked it, with various permutations, no fewer than seven times. He stayed on the same wavelength with me long enough to inquire, “Why do you ask, dear?”
I saw the gray eyes go foggy and drift out to sea.
“Because,” I said clearly, “a man was murdered that week and I want to know if you have an alibi.”
“Do you know,” he said fretfully, “I have reached the point on this boat at which I do believe I would welcome a night at the Ramada.”
“Was that a joke, Dad?”
He focused briefly, “I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.”
I fixed him a martini, broke open a can of macadamia nuts, stuck a small roast in the oven and rowed back to shore. My back and shoulder muscles were developing nicely; at this rate I would qualify for the women’s Olympic sculling team in no time. From the nearest pay phone, I placed a credit card call to my stepmother, Miranda. Before meeting her, I had thought that only stepmothers in fairy tales had names like Miranda, but she was all too real.
“Hello, Randy,” I said. “It’s Jennifer.”
“Yes, dear,” she said brightly. Miranda was five years older than I. “Is your father there with you?”
“No, he’s . . .” It would take too much effort to explain. “Miranda, do you happen to have retained your social calendar from two years back?”
“Of course, dear.” She didn’t seem surprised at the question. But then, this was a woman who lived with my father, she had probably long since ceased being surprised at anything. “I keep all our records for tax purposes. I wouldn’t want the IRS to steal one dollar more of your father’s hard-earned money than they absolutely have a right to.”
“My father’s hard-earned money? Which money is that, Miranda?” I put my hand to my forehead. “I’m sorry. Never mind. Listen, if you can put your hands on the calendar, it would help Dad. I’ll explain later, if you don’t mind. Would you look for it now? I’ll wait.”
She dropped the receiver without a word—which was probably what I deserved—and was gone for several minutes. When she returned, she was polite as ever to her snippy, resentful stepdaughter. “Yes, dear, now what is it you need from the calendar?”
“Look up February, please.”
“I have it here.”
“Second week.”
“Um. Yes, here it is. Oh, don’t you remember, Jennifer? That was the week we were in Port Frederick for your sister’s birthday. Don’t you remember the mixup? She thought we were coming the following week, and when we arrived, she and her whole family had left for Puerto Vallarta. We stayed with you for a night, remember, and then you had to leave suddenly on business.” She managed to say all that in a sincere voice that gave not a hint that she knew perfectly well that Sherry had left me holding the bag, and that I had taken all I could before escaping on the first flight, and the first pretext, to New York.
How could I have forgotten that awful week?
“Please,” I said weakly, “don’t tell me you were in town that whole week. I thought you left right after I did.”
“Oh no, dear. Your father wanted to visit with his old cronies.” Her laugh started as a clear, bell-like sound, but then it cracked. “Only his old cronies weren’t so eager to see him.” She covered up that peek into reality by adding quickly, “Why dear? Is it important?”
I forced a laugh. “Life and death, Miranda.”
Her melodious laughter floated to me from California. I pictured her, fresh, tanned and voluptuous—and five years older than I—holding the phone in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other. “Oh Jennifer,” she trilled, “you’re so theatrical sometimes . . . like me. Someday, you’ll appreciate how much alike we are in some . . .”
“Thanks so much, Randy.” I swallowed. “And Dad sends his love.”
“Kisses to him,” she said. “Kissy, kissy to my Jimmy. Bye dear.” I hung up before I threw up. I already had a mother. I didn’t want another one who was young enough to be my sister. Besides, I already had a sister and she was too much for me as it was.
I leaned my shoulder against the wall of the phone booth. “Oh Dad.” I sighed. “Poor Dad. They’re gonna hang you in the closet and I’m feelin’ so sad.”
I wasn’t, however, feeling particularly civic-minded. If Detective Geoffrey Bushfield wanted to know where my father was the second week of February two years previously, he could just ask the man himself. That would make him sorry he’d ever inquired. I wondered if my father could so buffalo a prosecuting attorney and a jury that they would acquit him on grounds of self-defense. Theirs.
* * *
Before I left Geof’s office that morning, he and I agreed on a strategy that would probably get him fired if his superiors found out about it.
“Jenny,” he said, “I want to know what was happening in the lives of your committee members around the time that Lobster died. But if I ask them, or Ailey does, we may alert the killer that we’re digging back into Lobster’s death. You could talk to them without arousing their suspicions.”
“How will I start a conversation about events that happened two years ago?”
“You’ll think of something,” he said, unhelpfully.
Thus far, I had not. Maybe if I could recall what was going on in the world and this town on that long-ago date, I could devise some conversational gambits. I searched my mind, trying to remember the headlines of stories that had appeared in the February papers I had perused, but couldn’t. I had been concentrating on the search for Lobster’s obituary to the exclusion of everything else. Still in the phone booth, I sighed again. It looked as if another trip to the Times was in order.
I picked up the receiver and dialed again.
“Port Frederick Times,” said a male voice. “All the news you want to know and some you don’t.”
I laughed. “This must be the reception desk.”
“Speaking. Woodenly. That’s how desks speak.”
“I think you’re a splinter faction,” I returned, and he laughed. “This is Jenny Cain. I want to thank you for helping me escape the clutches of your reporters this morning.”
“All in the line of subversive duty.”
“I need another favor, uh . . . what is your name?”
“Timothy Isley.”
“Son of Hilda?”
“The same.”
“Well, Timothy Isley, I need to get back down to that basement to look up some additional articles, and I need to do it without being seen or recognized.”
“There is a door,” he said, “at the rear of the basement. We will station our troops there to admit you. Just say the secret pass phrase.”
“Which is?”
“Smoking causes cancer in laboratory rats and mothers.”
“She’ll love that, Timothy, but I’ll tell her.”
“Thank you. When should we expect you?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll post a guard.”
I hung up, feeling conspiratorial.
During the February in question, the United States was accused by a Pan American organization of shipping illegal arms to an embattled Latin American country; the yen rose in value against the dollar, the Italians installed two different governments, one at the first of the month and the second around Valentine’s Day; a Beirut businesswoman was kidnapped by terrorists who were variously linked to Israel, the PLO and the Red Guard; a blizzard closed the Denver airport for two days; and a Russian head of state died of ailments associated with old age.
“Hell,” I muttered to myself as, once again smeared with newsprint, I sat cross-legged on the basement floor surrounded by the news of many yesterdays, “Why am I going to all this trouble, when I could have used today’s paper just as well to find out what was going on two years ago?”
On the local scene that month, Hardy Eberhardt’s church sponsored a black leadership forum which was attended by nationally known figures. One of them, when asked about a supposed resurgence of the KKK, said, “These days, racist activity advances our cause, because most white Americans are appalled by it and ashamed of it. It plays into our hands because it produces guilt feelings that encourage white America to give us the next thing we want.” She was pictured with her arm linked with Mary Eberhardt who was described as “a leading local champion for minority rights.”
In the business section for February 12, I found Ted Sullivan pictured in his role as the newly elected president of the local board of realtors. That same day, the after-luncheon speaker at the Rotary Club was Webster Helms, expounding on “The Architect’s Role in Fast-Track Construction.” Web told the members that, “architects, engineers, builders, contractors and developers all have an important role to play in streamlining the design, engineering and construction process in order to save time and money while at the same time retaining the quality and integrity of the building. Fast track is the future.” He must have had the Rotarians nodding over their cherry cobblers. I wasn’t surprised to find Jack Fenton’s bank mentioned throughout the business sections that month, and the man himself frequently photographed as he shook variously grateful and beseeching palms.
In that same February, Barbara Schneider was sworn into her second term on a platform of economic revival; she also appeared in photographs of one banquet, two meetings and a ribbon-cutting. “We nearly lost this election to the high-spending Democrats,” she was quoted, as telling her partisan audience at the banquet, “but we will not lose the battle of the recession to them. This administration will pull this city out of the doldrums, or I will hear from you at the next election.” At one of the ribbon-cuttings, I spied the looming figure of Goose Shattuck and the smaller one of Web Helms, they having joined forces on the project as they did so often. Goose and Web were the odd couple physically and in temperament, but Goose got along with the persnickety little architect as few other builders could.
But it was in the police blotter for the twelfth of that month that I came upon the most interesting item by far; One Elizabeth Tower, forty-nine, had been picked up for DWI, booked and released.
“I’ll be damned,” I breathed. I reread the paragraph to see where she’d been arrested: on the highway overlooking the future site of Liberty Harbor. “I’ll be double damned.”
The only committee members who were not represented in the papers that month were Pete Tower and Jennifer Cain. Why, I asked myself, was Pete’s wife drunk that night? Where had she been, where was she going, what had she done, seen, heard, who was with her, was she alone? And why was she driving that highway, far across town from her suburban home, that night?
I returned the papers to their original stack once again, wheeled the step stool back to Hilda, thanked her again and made for the backdoor.
“Hello!” she called to me. I turned to find her peering at me through a fog of smoke. “A reporter was down here after you left the first time, wanted to know what you was here for. I told him you was mighty interested in one particular month of one particular year.”
I tried to keep my face from showing dismay.
“September,” she said. “Nineteen forty-five.”
I began to laugh.
“Took him three hours,” she said, “to rummage through all those back issues. Sure hope he found what he was lookin’ for, don’t you?”
“Hilda,” I said gratefully, “you give a whole new meaning to the Freedom of Information Act.”
“Thank you, honey,” she said, and coughed. She was still coughing when I closed the door on that stronghold of subversive activity in the basement of the Port Frederick Times.
Minutes later, I called Geof from yet another pay phone to apprise him of my latest activites.
“So I’ll start with the Towers,” I suggested.
“Good. Uh.” When he spoke again, he was trying to sound casual, but not succeeding. “Say, Jenny, I might take a run out to see your father this afternoon. Where’d you stash that dingy anyway?”
“I don’t think you can find it without me,” I lied. “Why don’t you wait until tonight? I’ll row you out there myself.”
“All right,” he said slowly, reluctantly.
“Later,” I said quickly. Much later.