Welcome to Murder Week
Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
FEbrUARY
The long-stemmed roses on the counter are technically beautiful, even I can see that.
But they’re also ridiculous, and not only because they’re too elegant for my kitchen with its warped linoleum floors and ancient, putty-colored refrigerator.
I lean against the sink and stare them down, trying to make the whole arrangement spontaneously combust. A gust of wind blows snow off the garage. The birds in the dryer vent rustle.
I put down my coffee mug and pick up the glass vase. Still in my pajamas and fuzzy slippers, I carry it along the snow-crusted path from my house to the cottage out back. It’s only eight fifteen, but Mr. Groberg opens the door fully dressed, his shirt buttoned smoothly beneath his cardigan.
I hold out the flowers.
“For you.”
“These are from the handsome fellow with the pickup truck and the dog?”
“That’s the one.”
I follow him into the kitchen. He sets the vase on the counter beside the chocolate babka his daughter sends from Brooklyn.
“What happened?” he asks.
“He got starry-eyed.” There’s nothing like romance to kill a perfectly good casual relationship.
Mr. Groberg gives me a familiar look of kind exasperation. He picks up a serrated knife and holds it above the babka.
“So, he likes you, he’s got good taste; is it a crime that he wants to take things up a notch?” He slices a piece, puts it on a napkin, and pushes it toward me. “You know, Cath, one of these days, you’ve got to—”
I put up a hand to stop him, to remind him of our unspoken deal. I don’t raise his rent, and I make him a hearty soup every week. He pays on time and doesn’t meddle in my personal life.
I don’t think of myself as an orphan—it sounds so nineteenth century, and also, at thirty-four, I’m not a child—but Mr. Groberg is as close as I’ve got to a relative.
The business that he started in 1972, Robert L.
Groberg Opticians, where I began working after school and on weekends when I was sixteen, is now mine.
He didn’t pass it down to me but let me work off a zero-interest loan with my salary.
Three years ago, after my grandmother died, leaving me alone in the old Victorian where she’d raised me, Mr. Groberg, by then retired, decided his house on the east side of Buffalo was too much for him.
The day he moved into my cottage, I felt like I’d won the lottery, and not because of the monthly rent.
I pull off a warm, gooey piece of babka, put it in my mouth, and pretend to swoon.
“If you talk to your daughter soon, thank her for me,” I say, as if I don’t know that his adoring daughters call every evening.
“Tell me you’re doing something extraordinary today,” Mr. Groberg says. “By which I mean, literally out of your ordinary.”
I wipe some chocolate off my lip.
“Can’t. It’s Saturday. I’ve got a list.”
Buy rock salt, change the batteries in the smoke alarm, match odd socks, make soup. I also should toss the shriveled plant in the front hall that I forgot to water.
“On a glorious morning like this, you should take a walk,” Mr. Groberg says.
Through the window, the sky is the bottomless blue of a cold winter day.
It’s profoundly reassuring when the seasons clock in and out as they should, a crisp golden fall giving way to piles of snow.
I don’t like warm days in winter the same way I don’t like unexpected visitors appearing on my front porch.
Change is fine, as long as it’s predictable.
“I’m doing the boxes today.”
“I see.” Mr. Groberg is too kind to state the obvious, which is that I vowed to tackle the boxes last week and also the week before. “It will take less time than you think, and you’ll be unburdened when it’s done.”
How could three cardboard boxes be so daunting?
They’ve been sitting in my back hall, unopened, since they arrived from Gainesville more than two months ago, a few weeks after I flew to Florida for the “celebration” of my mother’s life, a nonsensical ceremony of songs, bad poems, and chants under an ancient oak tree dripping with fuzzy strands of Spanish moss.
I wore mascara that day, which dismayed my mother’s friends, few of whom I knew.
They tut-tutted my “rookie mistake” and handed me tissues just in case. I didn’t need them.
“Here,” Mr. Groberg says, wrapping another piece of babka in a napkin. “Fortification.”
Walking back to my house, the babka cupped in my hand, I notice fat icicles hanging from the eaves. I should have been more diligent about cleaning the gutters. I remind myself that the contents of the boxes will be mundane, with few surprises. No cause for hope, no fear of disappointment.
One day when I was ten, my mother showed up unexpectedly at my grandmother’s house with a present for me.
Young enough to be excited by the substantial size of the box, I giggled as I ripped off the wrapping paper and cut the packaging tape, reveling in the way my mother watched me from the couch, leaning forward and smiling.
Inside the box was a badminton set—a net, four rackets, and birdies.
I wanted to put it up immediately so my mother and I could play, but the yard was flooded from days of rain.
“Tomorrow,” my mother promised.
The next morning, I ran downstairs in my nightgown, swinging a racket hard enough to make a satisfying swoosh against the air. My grandmother was drinking milky coffee at the kitchen table.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked, already sensing the silence of her absence.
“Gone.”
“On an errand?”
She sighed. “She left.”
I waited for her to say more, my stomach tightening from the truth. “She went to meet a new boyfriend at the racetrack in Saratoga Springs.”
It was a pattern I would come to know well.
I dodge the icy patch at the end of the path and open my back door.
Inside, I stand above the boxes, kick one lightly with my foot.
Whatever’s in here is not even for me; it’s what remained after my mother’s friends sorted and gave away her clothes and furniture and books.
But Mr. Groberg is right, getting this done will be a relief.
Maybe it will put behind me this strange state of not being able to celebrate my mother’s life or mourn her death.
I put down the babka to save for later and drag the first box into the kitchen to begin.