Death by Hitchcock (4 page)

Chapter 9

Milo lay sprawled across the sofa in Louis’s office, eating popcorn and reading movie magazines from the 1940s. He didn’t hear Louis come in, didn’t realize Louis was standing behind him and peering over his shoulder.

“Hedy Lamarr, huh?” Louis said.

Milo spun around, twisting his neck awkwardly.

“Geez, Louis!  You scared me!  I thought you were downstairs closing up.”

“Hedy Lamarr a favorite of yours, Milo?” Louis asked good-naturedly, blithely unaware of the annoyance he had caused.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“She was really gorgeous,” Louis said, “I’ll give you that. Not much of an actress, though. Not for my money, anyway.”

Louis crossed the office to his desk, and busied himself working on the payroll accounts.

“Actually,” Milo muttered some minutes later, “there’s a girl in my Department who reminds me a little bit of Hedy Lamar.”

Louis’s head shot up.

“No foolin’? That’s great, Milo. You dating her, or what?” Louis asked cheerfully.

“I’ve been thinking about asking her out,” Milo mumbled, hoping his friend would encourage him toward this end.

“So what’s her name?”

“Mary. Mary Buttery,” Milo said.

“Life is short, my friend!
Carpe Diem
!” Louis said.  “Seize the carp! I’ll bet you a million dollars Miss Mary Buttery would love to go out with a brainy guy like you, Milo!”

Milo buried his head in the magazine, relishing this newfound feeling of confidence.

Chapter 10

“What a bitch!” Film Studies Professor Chaz Winner shouted, slamming the phone down on a glass coffee table. 

Running his long, delicate fingers nervously through his hair, Chaz sat slumped on a curving sofa in the sleek white living room of his new apartment.  Chaz stared numbly out the floor-to-ceiling windows, hardly noticing the stunning panorama of trees, the winding river, or the smoke gently puffing from chimneys in the distant hills.

Bunny Baldwin appeared from the kitchen. Pink lace undies and a matching camisole concealed little of her lithe figure.  A pink velvet ribbon held her long, glossy hair back from a high forehead and blandly pretty face.  Bunny glided into the room gracefully, silently, with the economy of movement a mountain lion would admire. Her delicate ears lay flat against her smallish head, and it was not much of a stretch to imagine her as a very tall Doberman Pincer.

“What’s up, babe?” she cooed, setting down a breakfast tray on the coffee table and curling up next to Chaz on the sofa.

“Susan is being unbelievably difficult,” he complained. “She’s so damn bitter about the divorce.  She’s determined to make things as difficult as possible for me,” he said, staring blankly ahead. “Now she’s saying the kids aren’t allowed to come over here.”

Bunny reached across Chaz, her arm lightly grazing his lap, and poured out two cups of coffee. She drizzled honey on a piece of toast and held it to Chaz’s lips.

“Now. Show me how you nibble like a bunny,” she said in a baby talk sort of way.

Chaz turned to face her. An expression of worn defeat made him look older than his forty years.

“Everything will work out,” Bunny said. “You’ll see. We’ll buy a nice house in L.A. with a big pool, and there will be plenty of room for the kids. Susan won’t be able to keep you from seeing them.”

“I don’t know   ” Chaz moaned. “Los Angeles is so far away from New Guilford
––it might as well be on the other side of the world. What if the kids don’t want to come and see me?”

Bunny smiled at Chaz with all the powers of allure she could summon. She twitched her nose playfully. A thin, pink camisole strap slipped from her shoulder and draped itself on her silky arm. Bunny shrugged her shoulders and giggled.

Mission accomplished. 

Presently, Chaz forgot about his wife and their contentious divorce, forgot about his kids, forgot about all of that
––and by the time the coffee had gone cold, he was once again feeling every inch the popular, hipster film studies guru he had worked so hard to become.

Chapter 11

Friday arrived.

Edwina walked into Earl’s Cafe, and spotted Detective Will Tenney right away, as if he were illuminated by a special lighting effect. An anxious feeling began to tiptoe over her, an unsettling sort of sensation she couldn’t name. Was it nervousness?  Why hadn’t he returned her last message? Edwina momentarily wondered if what she felt was somehow connected to the god of spring stuff Professor Cake had been chattering about? How confusing. Annoyed by these fragmentary thoughts, she tried to push them out of her mind.  

The old floorboards creaked wearily as Edwina approached the rear of the narrow coffee shop.  Proprietor Earl Dufresne, a retired tugboat captain, had decorated the place with framed magazine photos of life on the open sea, now yellowing and faded.

Will looked up.

“Hi,” he smiled.

Will’s face was suntanned and chapped from time spent outdoors. His earnest, gray-eyed gaze unsettled her, and she fumbled comically with her backpack and jacket, getting an arm caught when one sleeve got twisted in the backpack straps.   

“Hi,” she replied, hoping to appear unruffled as she managed to sort out her sleeves and straps.

Edwina flicked her long bangs to the side in a familiar gesture. Her face flooded with color from her Mr. Bean entrance. Although she was glad to see Will, a jumble of feelings started sword-fighting in her stomach. After a few awkward moments of conversation, Will took out his phone and began showing Edwina pictures of the house he was building.  This had the overall effect of a calming tonic. 

Set back from a dirt road in a clearing in the woods, with no other houses in sight, was a handsome two-story clapboard house with a field stone chimney.

“It’s beautiful,” Edwina said. “Have you moved in yet, or are you still staying in the tipi?”

“I finished staining the floors last night. As soon as they dry, I can move in,” he replied. “I was thinking I might keep the tipi for guest quarters. It’s actually surprisingly comfy. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and there are the most incredible sound effects when it rains.”

“Doesn’t the rain get inside? Isn’t there a hole at the top of the tipi that lets out smoke?” Edwina asked, intrigued by Will’s five o’clock shadow.

“Yeah, there is,” Will replied. But I installed a liner, and I rigged up a flap that catches the rain and diverts it behind the plastic sheeting liner. Works great.”

“How’s the house heated?” Edwina asked, studying the pictures.

“Central chimney,” Will said, reaching across the table to point out the stone hearth in one of the photos, “plus a woodstove, plus these solar panels. The tipi’s got a woodstove, too.”

“What color are you going to paint the outside of the house?” Edwina asked, scrolling slowly through the remaining photos.

“I haven’t decided, yet,” Will replied. “You should come up some time and have a look around. See what you think.”

“Listen,” he continued. “I’ve been wanting to explain something. I wanted you to know that the reason I haven’t been in touch with you lately is that my dad got pretty sick a while ago. I’ve been spending every weekend at my parents’ place in Vermont for the last few months. And the only time I’ve had to work on the house was either before work, or after I got home at night. Things have been kind of crazy.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” she said.

“He’s doing better now,” Will replied. “He had surgery, went through chemo and radiation. I’m glad I was able to be with my folks for the worst of it. He’s really doing a lot better now,” Will repeated, wanting badly to believe it.

The waitress filled their water glasses.

“Shall I give you folks a few minutes to decide what you want?”

“Thanks,” Will said.

He turned back to Edwina.

“What about you?” he said, a disarming smile appearing at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t recall hearing from you, lately.”

Edwina fussed with her napkin.  She could not think of an answer.

“Oh, you know
––work,” she replied, taking a sip of water.

“Well, anyway,” Will said quietly, “I wanted you to know why I hadn’t been in touch.”

A drop of water escaped from the side of Edwina’s mouth, and slowly dribbled down her chin.

“’Til now,” she replied, flicking it away.

Earl Dufresne sent two bottles of beer to their table, on the house, and Edwina and Will raised their bottles to him. The two talked about work, about colleagues. They exchanged local gossip
––the high profile philanthropist in town whose horsey wife remained childless but whose mistress was clearly pregnant. About the publicity-loving, landed gentry wannabe head of the local Historical Society––Jinxy Coles. Jinxy had a life-sized portrait of herself hanging over her Citizen Kane fireplace. Her enemies had videoed her at a party, delivering a drunken, racist rant, and posted it for all to see. 

The initially awkward re-entry between Will and Edwina was soon vanquished, Edwina’s nerves were gone, and the old familiarity of their friendship was palpable. Later that night when she would lie in bed reviewing the evening’s events, Edwina would hardly recall her nervous bumbling and fumbling when she first arrived at Earl’s Café. So much would happen to displace the memory of such trivialities.

In fact, a murder.

Neither Will nor Edwina, caught up as they were in conversation and laughter, was particularly aware of the time, until Will suddenly remembered about the Film Society. He hurriedly paid the bill, and they flew out of the café, calling their ‘good-nights’ to Earl from out the door.

“I have my bike,” Edwina said in the parking lot.

“I can put it in the truck. That okay?” Will said.

He hoisted the bike over the tailgate of his beat-up pickup truck. Edwina climbed into the passenger seat.  She buckled up and proceeded to enjoy the lofty ride
––so much higher off the road than a bike! She watched Will’s hand vibrate as it rested on the quivering gearshift knob. She wondered what unseen forces made the gearshift wobble and shimmy like that. She noticed the spatial patterns Will’s hand made as he shifted gears. It looked like a secret language. Maybe someday she would ask Will to teach her how to drive the truck.

Chapter 12

Spellbound
!

The Cushing Film Society’s annual Hitchcock Festival was a popular and much-anticipated event.  Barring major snowstorms, there was generally a full house each night of the festival. Like college sporting events, the film festival drew a nice mix of college crowd and other denizens of New Guilford together.  

Bunny Baldwin wasn’t remotely worried about getting a good seat in Hexley Auditorium that night.  Her spot was guaranteed by Chaz Winner––one of the perks of dating the Head of Department. Bunny was used to such special treatment. 

Bunny spent the afternoon at the apartment she shared with Mary Buttery, in the agreeable task of wardrobe maintenance
––culling through her clothes and deciding which ones to take to California when she and Chaz moved at the end of the academic year. Taking inventory of her wardrobe was a favorite pastime of Bunny’s––updating and organizing one’s things was, after all, the hallmark of a successful closet. Bunny valiantly did her best to ignore a persistent headache as she divided her clothes into three piles: 1) take to California; 2) put in storage; 3) give away.

Bunny soon came to the conclusion that moving to a new city on the west coast with a completely different climate from the northeast called for an entire, brand new wardrobe. Accordingly, most of her things ended up on the third heap. 

She swallowed two more headache tablets and tried to ignore the pounding pain by thinking about all the shopping she would do when she got to Los Angeles. Bunny’s lusty excitement at the thought of a shopping spree in her near future released endorphins in her brain, and her headache abated temporarily.   

Turning her attention to shoes with focused aggression, she tore the lids off box after box of boots and shoes, and ultimately deposited all of them onto pile #3.  Within minutes, she had relegated a closet full of expensive footwear to the give-away heap, and solemnly resolved to buy all new shoes when she got to California.

Feeling the full thrill of the purge, a wild-eyed Bunny scanned the bedroom. She pounced on a dresser in the corner that held scarves, belts, hats and gloves––the ‘accessory station’––and ripped open its drawers. 

Just then
, a text message sounded on her phone.

To all Film Studies Department Students––Please arrive early at Hexley Auditorium, by 6:15 pm for an important announcement before we open the Hitchcock Festival.

What a nuisance!
Bunny thought. 
The movie doesn’t start ‘til 7 and now I have to jump in the shower and get ready practically a whole hour early! Dammit all!

She dumped an armload of silk scarves on the floor. Stripping off her clothes and tossing them on the bed, Bunny caught an admiring glimpse of her bare bottom in the mirror as she stepped into the shower.