A Curious Affair (3 page)

I turned and lifted a shoe so the dim light would shine on it. Looking over my shoulder I could clearly see the sunflower pattern stamped on my sole. What can I say? I have always had a thing for cute shoes, and even my rain boots are fashionable.

“And if my feet were that big I’d slit my wrists,” I said absently as I looked at the room again. Something was different from the last time I’d stopped in to see Irv. What was it that bugged me? I felt like I should be able to see what was different. What was missing?

“What’s in those jugs?” Tyler asked, jerking his head at the ceramic pots near the stove.

“Cherry cider. It’s worse than prune juice. I had a glass once and found out my colon had more moves than a Chinese acrobat. I truly thought I’d shi—uh, lose my intestines.” Then, before I could say anything else so crude, I managed to find the misplaced item in my mental catalogue of Irv’s artifacts. “The poker is missing,” I said. “He always leaned it up next to the jugs.”

“Poker?”

“The one Irv kept by the stove. It was this twisted black wrought-iron thing. Heavy, with a wicked point. It’s gone.”

“Well, hell.” The sheriff pulled out his radio and frowned at it. “I’ll have to get Farland Tulloc to bring up my bag and the camera. It looks like we might have a suspicious death. That news will get the mayor’s blood pressure up.” He didn’t sound like this fact distressed him. Maybe he had the good taste to dislike our mayor. I certainly did.

“Sheriff?” I asked tentatively.

“Yes? And please call me Tyler. It’s so much friendlier. We may as well be on good terms since it looks like we will have a lot to talk about, at least for the next little while.”

Oh goody.

“Your radio won’t work up here. You better come down to my place and use the phone.” He hesitated, perhaps as surprised at my suggestion as I was. “I’d call for you, but no one can understand me when my jaw is locked.”

“Your jaw is actually locked?”

It was my turn to sigh.

“Of course it is. Do you think I always talk like this?”

I must have also sounded really annoyed, because the sheriff blinked at me. He wasn’t smiling.

I said slowly, “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying? My jaw is locked. I have TMJ and I am in pain. I want to go home.”

Murphy looked contrite.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Marsh. In truth, I’ve only understood about half of what you’ve been saying. I thought it was just shock and cold”—and booze, but he didn’t say this—“and I didn’t like to make you repeat yourself when you are obviously struggling.”

“Oh,” I said, anger leaving me as quickly as it came. Either I was very tired or Sheriff Murphy had the knack of disarming me. “You can call me Jillian. ‘Mrs. Marsh’ still makes me think of my mother-in-law whenever I hear someone use it.”

“Gilligan?” he asked carefully.

“Jillian,” I said slowly, but with no more clarity. I sighed and turned my flashlight back on.

“Okay, we’ll get to it later,” Murphy answered peaceably, closing the door but leaving on the light. It would make it easier to find the cabin again. “Let’s get you home and I’ll find Farland and Dexter while you make tea.”

Dexter, aka Deputy Dawg, so named for his long jowls and perpetually gloomy disposition. There’s a rumor down at Caffeine Jill’s in Charleston that he’s had hemorrhoid surgery—twice. His ex-wife, Golden Sugarbrown, says they are wasting their time trying to deal with these small things and should just get to the point and remove his head, which was really the unnecessary and painful growth on his body. Goldie was a direct sort of woman. I didn’t think of Dexter as a hemorrhoid, but he had struck me as being about as dumb as a sack of nails, only not so potentially useful. It was no wonder they had hired Murphy instead of promoting Dexter, who was next in seniority in the department. Geniality was nice in a sheriff, but not as important as having a measurable IQ.

“Who says I’m making tea?” I asked belatedly.

“Oh, I really think you should. Nothing like tea to help a person get over a shock. We could both use a cup.” Murphy sighed and added, “I suppose I’ll have to get Animal Control up here to trap the strays before they tear this place down. No way the city will let this death trap stand when they’re forced to officially notice it.”

“I’ll take care of the cats,” I said quickly, thinking that things were about to get very complicated. Maybe in time I could convince the cats that they would
like
the animal shelter. It was a really nice one, and they would be out of the cold and wet. “Will they tear it down soon, do you think?”

“I should hope so, at least come spring. It isn’t up
to code and I doubt there was ever any building permit issued. Certainly no one inspected this dump after the wiring went in. I’m amazed it hasn’t burned to the ground and taken the whole mountainside with it. We need to get rid of it before we have homeless people move in.”

He had a good point. Not everyone would be as conscientious about fire as Irv.

“Do you know if Irving had any family?” Murphy asked. “We should try and contact next of kin. In cases like this, I always wish we could raise the dead. It would make things easier for everyone if they could talk.”

“I don’t know about Irv’s family.” I looked at Irving’s corpse, wondering if he’d speak to me if I talked to him. Raising the dead wasn’t that hard for me—all I had to do was remember them. The problem was that the ghosts who haunted me never answered questions—at least Cal didn’t. He never said if he knew now why he had died so young, or if he was happy where he’d relocated. He just repeated the same old loving things he’d always said. I’d learned that such fond memories belong to the bittersweet world of what-might-have-been, and I tried not to have them often, not for Cal and certainly not for Irving.

Anyway, that wasn’t what the sheriff meant. He wanted a corpse that could testify about its own demise. I couldn’t help him there. Atherton could point a paw, but Irv would never point an accusing finger at his murderer.

I changed the subject, and because I was pretty certain that Irv had been murdered and still had a fair amount of judgment impairers in my bloodstream, I asked directly: “Are you thinking murder for gain?”

Again, I got that strange look.

“You think his family bumped him off so they could move into the ancestral mansion?” He shook his head at Irv’s sorry cabin. “I was just thinking they might want to
know that Irv was dead. Maybe claim the body and spare the city the expense of his burial.”

“Sorry. Occupational hazard,” I lied. I couldn’t explain why, even to myself, but I realized that I had been thinking about murder for gain almost from the moment I saw Irv—and not murder for marijuana. “I guess that all writers have vivid imaginations, and we’d prefer a murder mystery.” I didn’t add that I wrote mostly nonfiction and had never had any such wild thoughts before that night. Murder didn’t happen often in Irish Camp—not these days, at least—and the idea hadn’t blossomed until Atherton put it there. And I couldn’t admit, even to myself, that suicide, not murder, was more what had been on my mind all evening.

Standing next to Tyler, so alive and so focused on the present, made me feel shame for my weakness and inclination to cling to the past. “Let’s go have some tea,” I said. If we went in through the garage he’d never see the living room, and the pills and booze all over the coffee table.

We grieve as we love; deep love, deep grief. How long should a person grieve a death? The healthy consensus—arrived at by people who have obviously never faced devastating loss themselves—is two years. But I think they’re wrong. You never really stop. You eventually move on; you have to. But the filter of Cal’s death will always color the way I see life, and it’s that way for many others too. We know who we are. We are members of a club who ever after suffer from a kind of pleasure-deficit disorder. We know that bad things really do happen, and that being good or having great insurance won’t protect you.

Cal’s death colors my dreams. I’m not going to take out my collection of nocturnal nightmares and heartbreaks and detail them for you; if you’ve been there then you already know what I dream about. And if you haven’t…well, you don’t really want to know—unless you’ve been trained for it and you’re getting paid one hundred and twenty-five bucks an hour. I don’t have the really bad dreams so much anymore. But that night
after finding Irv’s body I was worried enough about death dreams coming to call that I left the bathroom light on so I wouldn’t wake in darkness.

I did dream of Cal, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected—Thank you, dear Morpheus—and I was ready to face another day.

The poets have long insisted men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love. I disagree. I certainly wanted to die when Cal did—and probably would have, except the shame of what Calvin would say at my cowardice kept me going. And eventually my capacity to heal exceeded my heart’s low expectations. The sharpest pain finally blurred and my heart returned to pumping blood instead of slivers of icy fury. I regained much of my lost weight and I got on with a life that looked a great deal like my old one. No one on the outside, nor even I, ever suspected how not alright I really was. We all thought I was doing fine, considering that the glue that held my life together had come unstuck and I no longer had any purpose.

Until October and the lightning, of course. But I’m the only one who knows about the cats, so I have to excuse my few close friends for not guessing my true mental state.

Cal’s old mantel clock struck eight
A
.
M
. in tones of dignified but gentle gravity, a melodious voice wishing me a good morning. It was comforting to think that it was still standing watch in the midnight hours while I slept alone, and that it was there to greet me.

I slowly opened my eyes. Thick syrupy light filled the bedroom. I stared at the ceiling, bemused by the soft glow, at first not recognizing the sun. I actually turned my head to look out the window, something I didn’t normally do because it would banish Cal’s phantom presence, which sometimes slept beside me and stayed in the instants while I passed from sleep to wakefulness.
I treasured those bittersweet moments with a power that was probably unhealthy. It was in those moments that I could whisper to Cal the truth about how frightened and lonely I was, and say all the things I hadn’t dared to while he was ill.

Sunday is easy to identify because of the many church bells that regale the town, though my favorite of the gongs and rings come from the steam engines at Railtown. They run antique trains on weekends and holidays, weather permitting, from the old train station to an abandoned rock quarry on Red Table Mountain. That was the sound I was hearing on the edge of my fading dreams. Old ’97 was riding the rails.

For the first time in many long months, I didn’t roll over to check that Cal’s picture was keeping guard over me on the nightstand. My first thought that morning was not of him.

My old bathroom mirror has a flaw, a ten-inch band of distortion that makes things look bigger than they are. On me, it hits chest high. On Cal, it had been the stomach. Cal wasn’t vain, so we kept the thing around. That morning I actually looked into the mirror and really saw myself for the first time in weeks. Though it was all optical illusion, when I stared at my preposterously enlarged chest I found myself smiling like I used to.

Once dressed, I went downstairs and dutifully fixed breakfast. Lumpy oatmeal chased tasteless frozen blueberries around the bowl until they were both weary of the exercise of avoiding my spoon, but I finally admitted that I just didn’t feel like being healthy that morning and I dumped the congealing muck in the trash and headed for town. I hoped the bakery was open. I needed a
pain
au chocolat
from Le Bon Ton and some coffee strong enough to bolster me against both the rich pastry and the inclement weather bound to return that afternoon.

I didn’t realize it at that moment, but this small intended
rebellion against the healthy living we instituted at the onset of Cal’s illness was the second sign that I was becoming myself again. As portents go, it was a small one, but I should have noticed.

Once started, my defiance of healthy living continued, and I hadn’t rinsed my dirty oatmeal dish or put it in the dishwasher. My mother, who was a product of the 1950s when all you needed for happiness—society said—was the ability to make floors shine while keeping your dress clean and your hair tidy, and to make a creditable meat loaf (assuming you had sensibly married a man who brought home a regular paycheck), would have been appalled at my slovenliness. She had done her level best to raise me right, but had only half succeeded. I could cook and was tidy with my clothing, and had married a respectable man, but even on my best days I cared very little about my floors’ glossiness. And I felt better when the regular (okay, semiregular and often meager) paycheck was my own instead of my husband’s. A dirty dish in the sink wasn’t even on my radar. I hadn’t misspent my youth as my contemporaries had, but I suddenly felt hope for my adulthood. I was alive, wasn’t I? That meant that there was still time for a spot of rebellion and occasional high-cholesterol food.

As a rule, I don’t listen to the radio at home. The only way to get decent reception is to stand on the ottoman next to the stereo and hold a large pewter bowl over my head, acting as a satellite dish. And since the programming was completely predictable—I think the local station was playing the same taped show they had recorded last May—I didn’t usually feel it worth the bother. But the morning after Irv’s murder I decided to perch on the footstool, bowl aloft, and listen to the morning news.

I could have spared my arms and the ottoman’s sagging upholstery the effort. There wasn’t a word mentioned about the crime, not even that Irv had died. When they
got around to the high school basketball scores, the pewter bowl went back on the table and I grabbed a heavy sweater off the rack by the door. Experience had taught me that winter sun didn’t mean warmth.

A large-tailed squirrel was waiting on the doorstep with Irv’s cats when I opened the front door, and I blinked at the unexpected spectacle of this feline cast of Noah’s Ark on my deck. The fresh smell of winter morning spilled through the door and rushed past me, chasing out the odor of claustrophobic unhappiness that had been trapped inside by new weather stripping and my unwillingness to face the gray days. I can’t speak squirrel, but the emboldened freeloader who steals meals from the now empty birdfeeder made known his indignation at the long wait for grub. The cats were more polite but just as insistent. They were hungry, Irv was gone, and what was I going to do about it?

I closed the door behind me and stepped carefully through the agitated animals, looking for Atherton but not finding him.

“Stop! I’m sorry. I don’t have any food. But I am going to get some today,” I promised. For once the cats stopping yowling and seemed to mull this promise over, and I threaded my way through them. I moved slowly, both out of consideration for their tails and because I was a little afraid. To be honest, I don’t have a full-blown cat phobia, but I have never been entirely comfortable around felines.

“Look, you can’t wait here,” I said. “The neighbors will see you and call…” I stopped. I didn’t want to make Animal Control sound bad by using them as bogeymen. “Just meet me in the side yard in a couple hours, okay? I’ll be back soon—with food. And tell the squirrel to relax. He can have some too if he wants. I hear the kibble is delicious.”

I was proud of myself. I was demonstrating commitment
and doing different things, and I left without even turning on the computer to see if I had an e-mail from my editor. It wasn’t because I forgot to, either. It was because I knew it was probably there and I didn’t trust my reckless mood of happy exploration to survive the lure of an actual paying assignment.

I walked slowly, thinking hard but keeping it on the logical surface where there was less emotion. Have you ever noticed that our pasts come after us, sometimes limping or even crawling, but they always come? The choice is: kill or make peace with what ever ails you. Or keep running—but that only works short-term. I’d been trying the running thing since Cal died, but stuck in a hamster wheel of negative emotion, weariness, low-grade anxiety and above all, boredom—the trifecta of old grief that embodies habitual mild depression—I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had been stranded in some horrible status quo. I suppose that I had been fighting for mental health in my own feeble way. I’d even seen a shrink—before the cat thing—and he’d convinced me I needed to give myself credit for actually writing every day. I didn’t produce a lot, but I showed up at my desk every morning and wrote something. I’d even had the guts to scrap some stories that were just too sick to save, thus sparing myself the embarrassment of having my editor pronounce them DOA—I’d submitted far too many “stop drinking/smoking/eating junk food or you’ll get cancer and die” pieces. So, I was semi-okay.

At least professionally. For a while. But I wasn’t certain how long the permission slip for screwing off granted by Calvin’s death would allow me to stagnate, though. Even if my editor forgave me, my self-esteem was suffering. I couldn’t go on living off royalties forever, though I regularly thanked a whole pantheon of publishing gods for the biannual checks from my six-times-reprinted
cookbook,
Green Tea & Sympathy: Desserts for the Diabetic
.

My life is hard to explain to anyone who doesn’t have Writer’s Disease. You are probably wondering why I don’t just go out and get another job. It’s not that simple. I fell hopelessly in love with the idea of being a writer when I was seven and had a poem published in the school newsletter. The pages were creamy yellow, the ink a dark green—my words had never looked so beautiful. I was infected then with something akin to malaria. I
had
to write, had to see my words in print. There were periods of time when the need would disappear and I would go about acting like a normal person, but sooner or later the intense desire returned. And it didn’t matter that the pay was lousy and I was always distracted from what others consider real life.

Cal was likewise a young passion, and I was equally enthused about the idea of being his wife. Fortunately the two things had gone well together, and I knew I’d be great at both. I think it’s probably good to conceive your passions young before you know the odds against success. I was both lucky and unlucky that neither passion had faded. Writing isn’t what I do, it’s what I am. And so was being Cal’s wife. It became trickier, of course, with him being dead. Like it or not, unhealthy or not, I still saw myself as Cal’s wife.

But I was neither wife nor writer that morning. I had other, more interesting and urgent things to do. Like finding Irv’s killer. I was making my debut as an amateur sleuth.

In a big city, this kind of crime might be dismissed as impersonal, random. So much of crime is these days, especially drug-related, which this might prove to be. But things weren’t like that in Irish Camp. Like our politics, all crime here was local and personal. If you were killed by someone, it was someone you knew—probably really
well. Would the new sheriff, coming from Los Angeles, realize this, though? How much would I, or someone else, have to explain about how our town worked? I didn’t think that our short visit over a mug of tea the night before had adequately put him in the picture.

Irish Camp has a lot of hybrid businesses and business people. Some even make sense, since certain jobs are seasonal. Ed’s is where you go to hire a canoe and fishing guide in summer, and who you call when you need a snowplow in winter. Others are more curious. We have Rod’s Bait & Tackle and Notary Public. There is Mels’s Accounting, Storage Lockers & Towing. And my personal favorite, Paula’s Taxidermy and Taxes. I’ve avoided most of these places, but do frequent one: Two In Hand. It is a combination card store and porn shop. I go for the cards, I swear—though I did buy some gummy penises for a party I had for some writer friends a few years back. That ended up being a bit embarrassing. A friend of Calvin’s stopped by one afternoon and decided to help himself to the candy dish while he was waiting. Anyone but Lorenzo would have laughed, but he’s an old-school shrink and thought my offering guests gummy penises was an act of hostility. He just doesn’t understand the publishing business. Or writers. It’s probably why he couldn’t help me after Cal died. We never really clicked.

Anyhow, one of the town’s more famous Jill-of-all-trades lived up the hill from me. She had known Irv well and would—I told myself—want to know about his passing. If she hadn’t already heard. It would be amazing if she had not. Crystal knows everything about Irish Camp. She wasn’t exactly a hardcore gossip, but rather a central exchange for information for the different social groups that inhabit our town. Many people couldn’t get past the surface phenomenon of her beauty, but she was also very smart and had an elephantine memory. If only she could develop a sense of discretion, I’d tell her about the cats.

Cal hadn’t liked the way she gossiped, but I forgave her this flaw. Isn’t everyone just a little bit nosy sometimes? A bit of a voyeur? I am, my mother’s training notwithstanding. It’s a lot of why I write. I get to ask and then find answers to lots of unusual questions. And like all writers, I have my favorite resources when I need to do research. Understand, I’m no slouch at the answer game and can chase documents with the best of them, but when I want to know something about Irish Camp, I save myself a lot of effort and just go to Crystal Holmes. She’s a fourth-generation Gold Country inhabitant and knows where all the bodies—literal and otherwise—are buried.