Return to Dust (16 page)

We started laughing.

Sitting in the car, I made a note to check Yale-New Haven Hospital, some local hospices, as well as follow up on the address the realtor had given me for Mary Powell in Manhattan. I summed up my observations on the laptop, while Hank texted everybody he'd ever met in his life.

“So what have we learned?” I asked Hank.

“We learned Marta's timing was way off. She was always one destination too late.”

“And then Joshua was dead.”

“She was even late for that,” Hank said.

“But I'm bothered by the niece, Mary Powell.”

“Why?”

“How does she fit into the picture? What's her story? So he located her through Ancestry.com or something, and she's all over the place.”

“Money.”

“Sounds like it. But why rent this place here? Was that Joshua's idea? Or was she planning on bringing him here all along?”

“She got a summer vacation out of it. Out of the city.”

“Did Marta know about her?” I asked.

“Joshua's a key, Rick.”

“Yes. All of Marta's behavior in her last days centered on her pursuit of Joshua, anger at him, despair, and so on. She was onto something. He held some key. He knew something. Or he had told her something. Or she wanted to tell him something. I feel he had the answer to her death.”

“Yet he died before she did,” Hank summed up.

“But he's the cause of her death, one way or the other. I know it.” At that moment Buddha talked to me.
The two do exist here because of the One.
I smiled. “Their deaths are one thing.”

“What?”

“Each one's death is reflected in the other.”

“He's in his grave.”

“And she's in hers. Everyone with an answer is dead.”

Buddha, again.
If One is all, the One is many.

“Maybe not everyone.” Hank stared into my face.

I nodded. “Someone knows something. ‘One is all. All is part of One.' I have to believe someone alive understood what happened between them. Out there.”

I pointed through a window at the chilly landscape.

Chapter Twenty

That evening, around five, I waited for Marcie and Vinnie on the sidewalk outside my apartment. Then the three of us strolled under umbrellas through the drizzly, raw twilight streets to Selena and Peter Canterbury's house for a small cocktail party. It was their first gathering since moving into the old Joshua Jennings homestead.

“Just a dozen close friends,” Peter had said.

I told Marcie and Vinnie about my colorful morning in Clinton. “So I finally got Mary Powell's number and I call it.”

“No answer?”

“Busy. All afternoon.”

Marcie smirked, “The trials of the modern PI.”

“It's…”

We stopped talking as the front door opened, almost on cue, and Selena stood there, a big grin on her face.

“I thought you weren't coming.”

“Actually I thought we were early,” Marcie told her, but Selena ignored her.

She took my hand and moved closer. I planted a kiss on her cheek and smelled hot whiskey breath. She wore the glazed look of an all-night reveler. Selena had started celebrating early.

Inside, she took our coats—hanging them in a hall closet larger than my kitchen—and directed us to a table with booze on it. Various members of the college faculty, glasses raised, waved to us. Peter was nowhere in sight, and Selena disappeared when the doorbell chimed.

The three of us stood in the center of the large living room, and Marcie whispered confidentially so that Vinnie and I had to bend into her, “It isn't the same. It can never be.”

I knew what she was talking about. The old Federal Colonial home had been Joshua Jennings' splendid and cherished retreat. An exquisite house, with all the mannered charm of hand-hewn beam and dark, weathered woodwork. The word
elegant
always came to mind. Twelve-on-twelve windows, feathery cream wainscoting, floor-to-ceiling black walnut bookshelves with rippled hand-blown glass. A vast pink-and-black Italian marble fireplace filled one sweeping wall, a late Victorian addition to the room, Joshua once told me.

Filled with pride and glory, he had often volunteered his home for college functions when it seemed appropriate to have them off campus—that extra swagger of class—an opening for the Farmington College Art Show, the cocktail party for the annual fund raiser, receptions for visiting luminaries—I once met Jimmy Carter there. Joshua loved showing off the place. Over the years all of us became familiar with the lovely home, thrilled to be invited into the stately rooms.

But Marcie's
sotto voce
remark was apt because it was no longer the same. Gone was Joshua's heavy Victorian ambiance: the overstuffed chairs, the tufted sofas with the embroidered antimacassars, the deep bookcases filled with leather-bound collected works of the likes of Bulwer-Lytton and Shelley and George Eliot and Wordsworth. French doors had opened to a sumptuous private library that housed Joshua's favorite books, including his valuable collection, among them his prized early editions of Cooper, safely locked behind leaded-glass doors. When I glanced into the closed room now, I saw empty shelves. It saddened me, that room so starved for books.

One man had lived in a twelve-room mansion. I heard that he used to quip, “I really need more rooms.” People didn't find it funny.

Joshua was forever selling the monstrous place, but his desire was only half-hearted until age and illness panicked him. The huge shell of a house scared him. We heard how he had fallen one night, almost toppling down the stairs, and that was it. A sprained ankle suggested worse problems in the future. I remember him hobbling on the sidewalk one day, and it was sad.

“Have to move,” he whispered to me.

Suddenly he wanted out. He'd taken a liking to Selena and Peter, especially to flirtatious Selena, and he'd suggested that they buy the homestead. Peter had no interest—imagine the heating bill in winter, he'd told me. They had little money, of course, but Joshua got realistic when he had the place appraised. The house needed too much costly renovation, its electrical system archaic, its plumbing medieval. The old windows invited the heat to escape. Joshua had a white elephant on his hands.

Yet Selena and Peter finally wanted it, which surprised all of us. They'd been married less than a year. Joshua pleaded—told them he'd work out a deal, a workable down payment, realistic payments, and he'd possibly hold the mortgage. Seductive, the idea. So they were hooked. After all, it was the Farmington showplace, and Peter and Selena loved the image. One night we all met there to celebrate the sale, myself included, invited because I was part of Marcie and Vinnie's inner circle, and Joshua toasted the new owners with champagne.

“I feel like a ton of bricks is off my back,” Joshua announced, a remark that made Peter twitch.

Selena got tipsy, Peter got nasty, and Joshua fell asleep.

We all knew it was a mistake. Marcie and Vinnie, close to the couple, had argued against it, warning. One time, at a college function held there in winter, pipes broke in the basement, the sound of rushing water thundered through the radiators, and we all went home.

Marcie had told Peter, “It's a land mine.”

Peter had became indignant. “Yeah, but we love it.”

Vinnie once hinted that Joshua was a cagey man, someone who suckered the young couple.

Young and foolish, they couldn't see beyond the wonderful ambiance. But once Joshua's old furnishings were gone, carted off to the college or the boys' academy, the huge rooms were suddenly cavernous and bare. They discovered the place needed major upgrading—not only the electrical and plumbing, but roofing and masonry repair. Walls were rotting, plaster flaking off—you could hear plaster falling in the night. The basement flooded regularly. Carpenter ants strolled across beams. Dry rot in the attic. It was worse than they had believed. The pretty shell disguised decay, lack of attention. The old-style wiring was dangerous and contrary. Bare bulbs hung in closets from frayed cords, and during thunderstorms, sizzling noises sputtered through the rooms. The sweet smell of run-amok electricity. It became, almost immediately, a nightmare. So I learned from a depressed Peter.

“She wanted it,” he hissed, blaming Selena.

Other times she blamed him, even as he stood nearby. She fell into a frenzy, he into passivity. The fought their battles royal in front of all of us. The house ended their honeymoon.

Standing in the living room, I was disheartened. Selena and Peter had so little cash, and the large yawning rooms looked vacant. They'd stuffed their sleek, newlywed modern apartment furniture into the house, and it didn't look right. Isolated pieces of cut-rate Danish modern clashed with the elegant—though woefully faded—rose-cream brocade wallpaper. Everything looked on sale. Yard sale. They were renovating a room at a time, starting downstairs, we'd been told, and most of the house was still locked up, devoid of furniture and life, the radiators turned off. The front living and dining rooms were habitable now, which occasioned this party. The breakfast nook, the treasured library, the solarium—all were closed empty shells.

“Ugly,” Vinnie mumbled to me. “They're unhappy here.”

Selena found me and handed me a scotch and soda. Of course she'd remember what I drank.

“Did you see what Peter did to the kitchen?” she asked, dragging me away, leaving Marcie and Vinnie standing there.

I nodded dutifully at the new kitchen. He'd simply refinished the old glass-fronted cabinets, replaced rotted wood, and laid a new tile floor. The tile looked discount-house variety, and temporary. Several squares were askew, slapped down willy-nilly. The house deserved better.

Suddenly Peter was with us, up against Selena. He shook my hand.

“Rick.” His hand swept across the room. “I actually learned to saw wood.” He pointed to simple trim above the kitchen cabinets. It looked uneven and poorly stained, something out of middle-school shop class, but I congratulated him. Here was a twelve-room decaying house, jolted back to feeble life on a shoestring budget.

As we walked back into the living room, Selena touched my sleeve. “I overheard someone gossip that Joshua had better reading taste than we do.” She was not smiling. Her lips were tight, her words slurred.

Buddha, I knew, wouldn't be happy:
Abstain from intoxicants that cloud the mind and the tongue.

“What do you mean?”

She stopped in front of the floor-to-ceiling black walnut bookcase in the living room, with leaded glass panes and ornate gingerbread trim. Inside were textbooks, paperbacks, academic journals, the kind of collection a professor's office was filled with. An instructor's den in a split-level frame house.

“In time,” I told her.

“We do know what it should look like,” she said too loudly. “We're not stupid people.”

I resigned myself to lying throughout the party, my only method of survival. “It's fine, Selena.”

But as the evening unfolded and a group of junior faculty apologized for leaving early—I knew they were headed to the XL Center for a Josh Groben concert—Selena became more manic. Admittedly, she looked stunning in a pair of snug black slacks and an oversized ski sweater. Southwest-style turquoise earrings picked up the muted colors of the sweater. Sitting down, she crossed her legs—I saw an ankle bracelet of similar turquoise stone. Or was it a tattoo? Nothing would surprise me. She caught me looking.

“Rick.” She stood and bowed. “I'm a walking craft show.”

“Very nice.” No need to lie that time.

Approaching me, she got serious. “You mean that?”

She had spilled a drink on the front of her sweater and the stain looked vaguely like the state of New Jersey. I thought of my adolescence.

She stood too close to me, her face inches from mine, and suddenly Peter shot over, maneuvering his body between us. I smiled at him, backed up to let my body language tell him he had nothing to worry about. He looked exhausted, as if he wished everyone would go home.

“Kitchen is nice, Peter.”

He frowned. “Yeah, sure.”

“I mean it.”

Selena interrupted. “We're almost done with the library.” She pointed behind her. That had been my favorite room, of course. Wall-to-wall bookcases with leaded glass panels, with beautiful wine-red mahogany crown molding, deep plush armchairs. But I knew Joshua's Italian Renaissance
Madonna and Child
—by a student of Raphael—was gone now. That lovely painting now hung, a spotlight illuminating it, in the boys' academy chapel.

“We'll have it ready for the college fall fund-raiser reception next week,” she added. “Tonight's a trial run. We want to keep Joshua's tradition going.” But the words came out haltingly, and she seemed surprised by her own slurred sentences.

When we'd dated—God, it seemed so long ago—she rarely drank. A social cocktail, if that. Usually something with an umbrella, a concept I never grasped. Yes, her quixotic mood swings alarmed me then, but never that much. Since her marriage I'd heard horrible stories. Quite frankly, she'd made a mistake. Peter, drone-like and manipulative in his own way, was no match for Serena's erratic intelligence and her wild, unfocused ambition. Peter's ambition centered on his career—Selena's crafty and shrewd behavior seemed simply manic.

I knew of one affair she'd had with a garage mechanic at the Texaco station on Route 10. One time Marcie swore she was driving by and saw them hugging while he was working on Selena's car.

“You're making that up,” Vinnie had accused.

But I suspected the story was true, in one form or another. Selena
had
changed. A stupid marriage and a monstrosity of a house had made her sloppy at the edges, and downright mean at the core. I knew there'd be a time when I'd find an excuse to avoid these inelegant cocktail parties.

I couldn't deal with her brazen flirtations, so often in front of Peter.

She was doing it now, playing with the lapel of my sports jacket. Peter watched, red-faced.

I thought of something. “Did Joshua ever contact you after he moved?”

Selena looked surprised. “No, why would he? The bastard. He took the money and ran.”

“He seems to have been manipulated by a great-niece.”

Peter looked puzzled. “I thought he had no relatives.”

I smiled. “So did he. But Ancestry.com changed that.”

Selena shot a look at Peter. “That woman.”

For a moment Peter looked baffled.

“What?” From me.

Then Peter spoke up. “Christ, yeah. In July we saw a woman parked in a car in front of the place. At one point she got out, walked up to the front door, peered into the windows.”

“But then she was gone,” Selena added.

“We didn't think anything of it.” Peter didn't look happy. “Do you think…?”

“His niece?” Selena asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

Selena leaned into me. “You got such a serious look on your face. Rick. Makes you look—sexy.”

Peter grumbled.

I was cruel. “Are you friends with Karen Corcoran?” I asked her. Selena's gift shop was near Karen's art gallery in the arcade.

Selena tightened. “No, not really.”

“We went to the movies Sunday.”

“How high-school date night of you,” she said sarcastically. No slurring now—harsh, direct. But she moved closer to me.

“How is she?” Peter wondered.

Selena sniffed, “At least you're not still working for her—that business with Marta. My God. I could think of a hundred better uses for an inheritance.”

“Oh, but I am.”

Selena gave a hoarse laugh and started hiccoughing. “Shit,” she giggled. “Now I'll hiccough all night.”

“Two weeks before she died,” Peter ignored his wife's noises, “we hired Marta to clean here.”

The news surprised me. “What?”

Now Peter looked sheepish. “My family was coming from Vermont to see the house and it was a mess. School was starting and all. She'd cleaned for everyone, knew the house. She was at the market, looking lost, so I asked her as a favor. She kept saying no, that she didn't want to return to this hateful house. I didn't know she had a problem with Joshua—had such a bitter feeling about the place. But she did it as a favor to me.”