PW01 - Died On The Vine (3 page)

Of course I wound up going home with an angry old cat and a happy little puppy. Jack was silently astonished at the new addition, who even required midnight feedings until she got bigger. I named her Pollyanna, after the Glad Girl of children’s literature, and as Doc predicted, she grew into a monster.

Polly is now a long-legged, multihued creature with a stand-off coat in various shades of black, brown, and red. Her tail curls jauntily over her back in a northern manner and her ears start out standing up straight, until folding down just at the tips. The vet now speculates that her pedigree is “part shepherd, part husky, and part pony.” And true to her name, she is ninety-five pounds of galloping optimism.

We reached the river and Polly showed every sign of preparing to dive. “Polly, come!” I commanded, and she raced back to me and sat in front of me obediently, panting happily with her brown eyes shining. I gave the good girl a piece of freeze-dried liver, and then scanned the pines.

No sign of life yet. Eagles return to the same nest every year, unless a strong wind blows it down, not unheard of since the nests are as big as dog houses. That’s why nesting pairs are never satisfied with one nest, but also work on a second, an emergency backup home. Both the primary and smaller secondary nests were still in place from last year, and still awaiting the return of their tenants.

I hadn’t really expected them to be back yet. I called Polly to heel and started along the river to Julia and Bob’s house.

Julia and Bob Barstow are also retirees. They’re a bit older than Jack and I, in their early sixties. The two of them seem to have this retirement business down pat. Bob makes wooden toys in his shop and he and Julia sell them at craft fairs.

Julia and I have the same commonalities of interest that made Nancy my best friend a generation ago. Instead of tots in diapers, we had empty nests with grown children scattered around the country. Instead of fighter jock husbands, we dealt with retirees starting new and more laidback careers.

Julia also raises vegetables and an occasional litter of Labradors, so she’s a good source of advice for my new avocations.

I had Polly heeling smartly as we approached the house from the back. Julia does believe in well-behaved dogs.

Julia and Bob live in a sprawling woody type of house that looks like it grew out of the side of the hill. Huge sheets of glass looked down to the garden and the river beyond.

As Polly and I crossed the yard, I saw that Julia’s garden was already plowed. The soil looked utterly pristine, being warmed by the sun. The garden was huge, split into quadrants by two neat paths surfaced with shells.

My own tiny garden was still at the mercy of last year’s weeds, while I tried to decide whether to plow it myself or hire Buddy Haines to do it.

“Polly, heel,” I reminded the dog, keeping her to the path. I didn’t want to be responsible for paw prints in that immaculate surface.

Julia saw me from the window and hailed me with relief. “Cissy, thank God you’re here! This damn computer ate my letter! Come and make it spit it back out!”

“Be right with you,” I replied. I let myself into the house by the back door and wiped off Polly’s paws with the rag left in the mud room for that purpose. Polly and I went through Julia’s marvelous new kitchen and found our hostess just off the great room still fuming at her computer. Polly went over to join Beau, the World’s Laziest Labrador, on the sofa. She put her head on his back and heaved a loud sigh of contentment.

Unlike our house, Julia’s sprawling new ranch-style home was build around the Great Room concept. Dining in one area, conversation and general living in another, with a pass-through from the kitchen and Julia’s ‘office’ in a corner nook.

In the model home, this sort of office probably seemed a model of efficiency, with the built-in cabinets and desk space. As used by Julia, the cabinets never seemed to be closed, and inventories piled precariously atop ledgers. Somehow, Julia seemed to make enough sense of Bob’s toy business to keep the IRS happy. Or maybe they don’t want to tackle that mess either.

In the midst of the debris was a new personal computer, Julia’s Christmas gift from her daughter. My ambition is to get Julia knowledgeable and confident enough to transfer her records to the computer. A stack of floppies would be a definite improvement to the current décor.

Julia waved me over. “Come talk to this thing, Cis, it won’t listen to me.” Julia is small and busy, the kind of woman who looks good with gray hair. (If I thought mine would look that nice, I’d stop improving on nature, but I know better.) She dresses almost exclusively from the L.L. Bean catalog and today looked spiffy in a denim jumper.

“Scoot over,” I commanded, and took her place at the computer. “What are we looking for?”

“My letter to June. I left it right there last night,” she said, pointing to the computer screen accusingly, “and now it’s gone!”

I cruised through Julia’s file structure, discovering it to be as disorganized as the desk. Eventually, in a directory I had created called “Sales” (and which Julia never used), I found a file called “juneltr”.

I moved it to the directory named “Letters”, telling Julia, “It’s in the wrong directory, doofus.” My vocabulary has been enriched by my children.

“How did it get there?” Julia asked in amazement, as if the computer were playing tricks on her.

“You put it there. This is not a puppy. It only does what you tell it to do.”

“Well, that’s certainly not what I meant to do. I don’t know, maybe I’m too old for this.”

“It’s only been a couple months. This time next year, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.”

Julia snorted in disbelief. “Well, print that letter before it gets away. The main thing I want to be able to do with this machine is write letters to June, so she’ll know I’m using her present.”

I sent the letter to the printer. “You might appreciate this more if you’d had to spend a few years dealing with a slow, noisy old monster of a dot-matrix printer before you got this. When I got my laser printer, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

As I spoke, the letter eased smoothly and quietly out of the printer. “Some people just don’t know how good they have it,” I added.

Julia ran her fingers through her hair. “Now, don’t start with me, Cissy. I am trying. Come on and watch me with Mark’s present. I definitely have this one figured out.”

Ah, the cappuccino machine! We adjourned to the kitchen with our canine outriders following.

Over the hiss of the machine, we continued a debate which started at Christmas. Do our children’s gifts keep us young, or age us prematurely? I generally support the optimistic side of the argument.

“Last year when Danny got me that weight training equipment, it certainly made me feel old,” I pointed out. “But look here, I think it’s been more of a youth enhancer in the long run.” I showed off my biceps. We settled down at the butcher block table.

“What was Danny thinking with that gift, I wonder?” Julia asked as she filled our tiny cups with the frothy concoction.

“It was one of those 2 AM infomericals. I get sucked into them sometimes when I’ve been working late; they’re just a channel away from CNN. Those things are really seductive. I’ll bet you could run a late night infomercial in New York City and convince thousands of people that they really need a posthole digger.”

“Or sheep shearing equipment,” Julia offered.

“Or a camel saddle.”

“Or a cement mixer.”

“Thousands of uses!”

We both laughed. “Anyway, “ Julia concluded, sipping the cappuccino, “this is one gift that is definitely keeping me young. Ah, the gift of caffeine! So, what’s new with you?”

I thought she’d never ask! “You’ll never believe this,” I prefaced, and told her the story of the strange visit of Colonel Obadiah Winslow.

I had come prepared for Show and Tell and produced the picture that Winslow had brought, along with an old photo of Jimmy that I had dug out of an album.

Julia frowned thoughtfully, first at one picture, then at the other. Then she put them on the table side by side and frowned at them both. “Hmm. I wouldn’t exactly call this proof positive. Neither picture shows the ears very well. Too bad. I read somewhere that ears are very distinctive.”

Julia is full of tidbits and factoids that she “read somewhere”. I tend to use several grains of salt with them.

She looked up at me. “So. What if it’s true?” she asked in a businesslike manner.

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose your first husband is alive. Suppose this Winslow finds him and brings him back. Will you leave Jack?”

THREE

I was flabbergasted. “Leave Jack? Are you crazy?”

Julia shrugged. “I just wondered. Suppose the two of them were right here. Which one would you choose?”

“If Jimmy is alive, of course I want to help him all I can, but I’ve been married to Jack for almost half my life.” I could hear my voice getting louder and shriller. “He helped me raise my children, two of them Jimmy’s. Of course I wouldn’t leave Jack.”

“No problem,” Julia said placidly. She refilled our tiny cups. “I just wondered if you’d ever fantasized about What If. You haven’t told me much about your first husband.”

“It was all so long ago,” I explained. “We were only married four years and we were just kids. Looking back is like looking at a whole other life. Poor Jimmy never really had a chance to grow up.”

“And you met Jack after Jimmy died?”

“That’s right. I was working in the computer shop at his agency. Sometimes it still amazes me that a man like Jack, so quiet and orderly, would want to get involved with a frazzled young widow with two toddlers. It seemed like a miracle. It still does.”

I was getting misty-eyed. Polly padded over and put her head on my shoulder. When I’m sitting down, we’re eye to eye. I put my arm around her neck and gave her a big hug. “Yes, that’s a good Pol.” She settled down at my feet and closed her eyes.

“Okay,” said Julia briskly. “So do you believe this Winslow? Do you think he believes Jimmy is alive?”

“I don’t know. He may be conning me, but he certainly sounded sincere. I think he believes what he’s saying.”

“Although of course, any successful con man would have to sound like he believes what he’s saying. Otherwise he couldn’t con people.”

“I guess that’s true,” I admitted. “But whatever he believes or doesn’t, I’m still fairly certain that Jimmy is dead. I just don’t see how he could have survived that crash.”

“That’s interesting. You’re ‘fairly’ certain. Wouldn’t you say that you were previously completely certain?” I nodded. “So this Winslow does seem to have planted a seed of doubt.”

“Yes, damn him, he did. I’m wondering if I should tell Deb and Pete.”

“The kids? Whatever for?”

“Well, he was their father, even if they don’t remember him.”

Julia frowned. “Look, like you always tell me, let’s quantify this. Before you talked to Winslow, you were one hundred percent certain that your first husband was dead. What is your percent of certainty now?”

I thought it over for a moment and then hazarded, “Oh, I’d say about ninety-eight percent.”

Julia was surprised. “That’s a pretty tiny seed of doubt.”

“Well, I’d heard of Winslow before. He’s got a pretty flaky reputation. And he’s been on this MIA kick for years and years without any solid proof.”

“You’re the current events buff, not me. But I don’t think much of the fellow, just from what you’ve told me. Tell you what, you tell the kids when your percentage of certainty falls to around fifty or sixty percent. Otherwise, why upset them over something as flimsy as this?” She handed the photos back to me and took the cups to the dishwasher.

“You’re right. I’ll wait and see if Winslow comes up with anything else. It was just so weird, him showing up out of the blue.”

I stood up and Polly surged to her feet ready to join me. “I’ll be going to the library later to do a little research. Want to come along?”

“No thanks, I’ve got a lot to do. But swing by here and pick up some books to take back. I’ll leave them on the porch.”

“Sure.”

As Polly and I headed back through the woods, I stopped to admire as we topped a hill and got the first sight of the house. It was a big, white turn-of-the-century farmhouse with a wrap-around porch. The porch sported two rockers and a creaking wooden swing, making it our location of choice for after dinner lounging.

The house was only slowly acquiring the many conveniences of the Barstow residence, as Jack and I remodeled over the years. When we bought it, there was more to deal with that hideous wallpaper.

The double front parlors, for instance. I’ve always wondered what 19
^th
century families did with two parlors. I guess they were the equivalent of the 20
^th
century family room and living room, one kept good for company and one for everyday use. Now one parlor was incorporated into the great room, and the other was my book-lined and on-line study and office.

I just like the looks of the house – loved it the first time I saw it. There’s something very stable and Rockwell about it. Jack says it looks great on our wine bottle labels.