Chapter 3 #2
Word on the street, and by street I mean Bea, was that Walt had a secret lady friend.
Bea heard through the grapevine that he and this woman had been seen at a fancy restaurant.
Walt wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but we’d noticed a few changes here and there.
The question was whether or not he was keeping her secret because she was from Grimm Island and everyone knew her, or because she was an outsider and no one knew her. It was a pickle for sure.
The doorbell rang again and I opened it to Deidre. She stood on the porch, slightly out of breath, her tote bag over one shoulder. She wore a big straw hat over her wiry gray curls and linen overalls.
“I lost track of time,” she said. “I barely had time to wash up. I spent the afternoon in the garden. My tomatoes are doing beautifully. I’ll bring you some when I harvest. You could make a tomato pie.”
“I could be talked into that,” I said. “We’re out back tonight. I’ll open the garden gate for the others so I’m not running back and forth.”
“Good idea,” she said, getting a plate and helping herself to the little sandwiches on the sideboard.
“Can you believe this book? I found three factual errors in chapter nine alone. Three. And the author has a PhD. Some researcher. Took me five minutes with a Google search to show her theory was pure bunk.”
“Maybe she was absent the day they taught fact-checking,” Walt said.
“There is no excuse for sloppy sourcing. I’ve written her a letter. Which reminds me, Greta Carmichael has some lovely new stationery in her shop. I found some with little books on it.”
“Greta Carmichael is an insatiable gossip,” Walt said sternly. “Can’t say I care to patronize her shop, even though I support local businesses.”
“Yoo-hoo,” Dottie called out as she and Hank came through the garden gate and up the path.
They walked close together, Hank’s hand resting at the small of Dottie’s back. He looked pretty good for someone who’d gotten his skull cracked a few weeks back.
“Lemon bars,” Hank said, settling into a chair. “And finger sandwiches. Mabel, you’ve outdone yourself.”
“It was no trouble,” I lied.
“Wonder where Bea is,” Dottie said.
Hank snorted. “Speak of the Devil.”
Bea came through the garden gate like a whirling dervish, her coral caftan catching the early evening light. She carried a large beach tote that matched her caftan, and I could hear it clanking before she made it to the sunroom. She pulled out a bottle of wine.
“Let me get you a corkscrew,” I said.
“It’s screw-top,” she corrected. “No one has time for that cork stuff anymore. I brought Moscato if anyone wants a glass. I’ve got two more bottles in my bag. Mabel, why don’t you stick these in your wine fridge so they stay cold.”
I took the two extra bottles from her and mentally shook my head. Apparently it was going to be one of those kinds of book club meetings.
I brought an ice bucket out for the open bottle just in time to hear her say, “I ran into Patsy Hindman at the post office this afternoon. She told me she saw Lorraine Crowder sneaking out of Mitch Berber’s back door at the crack of dawn.”
“Lorraine Crowder has been dead for two years,” Dottie said.
“That’s what I told her,” Bea said. “Patsy sat in the pew in front of me at Lorraine’s funeral.”
“And?” Deidre asked.
“Patsy is an idiot,” Bea said with a snort. “She said it could have been Lorraine’s ghost. I told her that Lorraine couldn’t stand Mitch when she was alive, so there was no way she’d be bumping uglies with him in the afterlife.”
Dottie snickered.
“I wouldn’t put Patsy Hindman on a witness stand to identify her own husband,” Hank said. “Her glasses are two inches thick.”
Walt cleared his throat. “If we’re done gossiping, we should focus on the book.”
“We can do both,” Bea said, pouring herself another glass of wine.
Walt cleared his throat. “The book.”
This month’s selection was The Bellwood Murders, about a family of four found dead in their home in the mountains of rural Virginia.
Father, mother, two teenage children. For more than twenty years the official story had been murder-suicide.
Then a cold case team reopened it and proved the killer was a neighbor who’d nursed a grudge over a property line until it curdled into something unspeakable.
“The forensics should have caught it,” Dottie said, taking a bite of cucumber sandwich.
“Agreed,” Deidre said. “A botched case from the beginning. Pure incompetence from just about everyone involved.”
“The residue pattern was inconsistent with a self-inflicted wound,” Dottie continued, ignoring her. “The angle was wrong. I could have told them that standing in the doorway. Any first-year pathology student with half a brain and a measuring tape would have flagged it.”
“So why didn’t they?” I asked.
“Because a murder-suicide is tidy. Answers every question in one neat package. Victim and perpetrator, case closed. Nobody has to do the harder work of finding someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
“I saw it from the bench more often than I’d like to admit,” Hank said, reaching for a peach. “A DA builds a theory and everything that contradicts it goes in a drawer that never opens again.”
“What bothered me,” Deidre said, flipping to a page she’d flagged with a yellow tab, “was the children. The author treats them as though they didn’t exist outside of being victims. We learn everything about the parents.
Their finances, their marriage, their social standing.
But those two teenagers are barely mentioned as human beings. ”
“Of course they’re not,” Bea said. “Nobody ever pays attention to the children. Adults assume kids are furniture. They have their affairs and their screaming matches and their sordid little arrangements right in front of them, and then act shocked when the child turns out to know everything.”
She picked up her glass again. “I knew a family in Charleston. Very old money. The husband had been carrying on with the neighbor’s wife for years, and every person in their social circle knew. Every last one.”
“I think I know this story,” Dottie said.
“You don’t. This one was before your time.” Bea smiled. “The twelve-year-old daughter walked up to her mother at a garden party and said, ‘Daddy kisses Mrs. Jennings the same way he kisses you.’ In front of forty people and a bartender.”
“Lord have mercy,” Deidre whispered.
“Mother filed for divorce the next morning and took him for every cent. And every last person who’d known for years stood around clutching their pearls like they’d had no idea.” She finished her wine. “That’s what polite society does best. It watches and does nothing until someone forces its hand.”
“What I want to know,” I said, “is how the neighbor in the book lived next door for twenty years and nobody connected him to what happened. The property dispute was public.”
“Because he was liked,” Walt said. “Coached Little League. Served on the town council. Brought casseroles to the memorial service.”
“You know what I’ve learned in six decades of living?” Bea asked.
“That no one on this planet would believe you’re only in your sixties?” Walt asked.
Bea narrowed her eyes at Walt. We all knew darn good and well that Bea had paid tens of thousands in plastic surgery to look just that.
“No,” she said frostily. “I’ve learned to watch the ones who show up with casseroles. Nobody works that hard at being neighborly unless they’ve got a reason.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Bea,” Dottie said. “Not everyone with a casserole is a murderer.”
“I didn’t say they were. I said they’re worth watching. It’s like when Edgar Burrows’ wife died and all those women showed up with casseroles so they could put their name in his dating hat.”
“That was a mess,” Deidre said. “Poor man got all those casseroles mixed up and ended up with Junie Stevens. Makes the driest tuna bake you’ve ever tasted. Should have gone with Sandra McCorkle.”
“She does have a good hand with cobblers,” Hank said. “Made me a cherry one that would knock your socks off after Eleanor died.”
“Hmm,” Walt said. “She brought a lasagna after Margaret’s wake.”
“Well, you both dodged a bullet there,” Bea said. “She’s poor as a church mouse now. Invested every penny she had in her son’s startup company and he took the money and moved to Costa Rica.”
“He was always a bad egg,” Walt said. “Used to tie firecrackers to cat’s tails when he was a kid.”
The conversation unwound from there. They argued about forensics and legal procedure and the willful blindness that let a community ignore what was right in front of it for twenty years.
Bea and Dottie got into it over whether the wife had known, which turned into a sidebar about spousal intuition that Hank wisely stayed out of, and Deidre pulled three research papers from her tote bag that nobody had asked for but everybody ended up passing around.
These were the evenings I lived for. Not the books, though Deidre would argue otherwise. It was this. Five people who refused to look away from the ugly things, who’d spent their whole careers staring into the dark and hadn’t lost their nerve yet.
I let the discussion run until the sandwich tray was down to crumbs and the evening light through the screens had turned the garden golden.
Deidre passed around butterscotch candies.
July held on to its daylight like it had somewhere better to be, and the sun was still a half an hour from setting even though it felt like the evening should have been over by now.
When there was a lull in the conversation, I said, “I had a visitor this morning.”
“You mean other than our handsome sheriff?” Deidre asked.
I ignored the looks and powered through. “Yes. A woman named Josephine Wainwright Hale came to my door. Her brother was Dr. Henry Wainwright. He ran a medical practice here on the island for more than twenty-five years.”
“Henry was a good man,” Hank said.
“And an excellent physician,” Walt added.
“You knew him?” I asked them both.