Jean kept forgetting that she was supposed to be looking for any telltale reverse lights, and instead craned her head to take in all the sights. Contrary to its name, Riverwalk had no river, although it did have a large concrete pond in the courtyard, complete with a couple of ducks. Jean exclaimed over everything they passed – the grounds as carefully manicured as a golf course, the rolling greens that really were a nine-hole golf course, the tennis courts. It all had the slightly fake feeling of a better quality resort.
After they finally found a place to park, Jean claimed the packet the security guard had given them. Inside were a number of raffle tickets to be dropped off in fishbowls located throughout Riverwalk – at the therapy pool, movie theatre, ice cream parlor, air-conditioned pet kennel, and playground for visiting children. The more places you visited, the more chances you had to win prizes. They made plans to meet back at the car in an hour and a half, and Claire and Charlie set off in search of the clubhouse, where they had arranged to meet Nova. In the pocket of her shorts, nestled in a silk drawstring bag, Claire carried the diamond ring. She was conscious of its weight bouncing lightly against her thigh at every step.
“Yoo-hoo! Charlie! Over here! By the pool!” Her hand trailing cigarette smoke, a woman wearing a swim cap festooned with what looked like giant sequins leaned over a white fence to wave vigorously at Charlie and Claire, and then opened the gate to reveal a sparkling blue pool. She wore a purple, skirted swimsuit that exposed skinny tanned legs mapped with the blue-green squiggles of varicose veins. The swimsuit jutted forward in the bosom area in a way that was more hypothetical than realistic.
“You look wonderful!” Nova pulled Charlie into one-armed hug, holding her cigarette out of the way. No air kisses for Nova – she kissed Charlie firmly on both cheeks, then turned to Claire. “And who is this? Charlie, you haven’t been hiding something from me, have you? This couldn’t be your granddaughter, could it? My, she’s tall!”
Claire was surprised to feel herself flushing. While Charlie was easily old enough to be her grandmother, in Claire’s secret heart of hearts, she looked upon the older woman as her surrogate mother.
Giving Claire a quick smile as if to take any possible sting out of her words, Charlie said, “Not my granddaughter, I am afraid. I would like you to meet my good friend and housemate, Claire Montrose. Claire, this is Nova” - she stopped and turned to Nova, smiling apologetically. “I am not certain I know your last name any longer.”
“Oh, I went and did like all those women libbers used to say. Took my name back. It’s Nova Sweeney, just like it used to be when I was a girl. I didn’t want to go out of this world with some jerk’s last name on my tombstone.” With her free hand, Nova pulled off the swim cap, revealing hair a color that Claire was sure the hair dye package had described as platinum. Settling herself onto a white plastic lounge chair, Nova gestured with her cigarette toward the empty chairs on either side.
“So sit down and tell me how your love life is these days, Charlie.” Hooking her oversized purple sunglasses, Nova pulled them halfway down her nose. “Because mine stinks.” She turned to Claire. “When we were young, this girl could get any guy she wanted. She made me sick. All she had to do was crook her little finger and whoever she wanted would come running with his tongue hanging out.”
Charlie looked away, coloring a little. Claire realized she had never seen her friend look embarrassed. “I am not seeing any one at present.” It had been at least two years since Charlie had liked a man well enough to bring him home to meet Claire. The last one had been a retired bank president who had suffered an aneurysm a month after they began dating. Charlie had come home from his funeral dry-eyed, but still moving uncharacteristically slowly.
Nova blew a stream of smoke to one side. “Well, I’m still out there, as they say in the singles world. ‘WWF, honest, attractive, happy, healthy and physically fit, seeks soul mate, fifty-five to seventy. Enjoys dancing, dining, travel. Would like a pleasant man for LTR.’ That’s my current ad in Senior’s World. WWF stands for widowed white female, and LTR is long-term romance, in case you don’t understand the whadaucallits.”
“Acronyms,” Claire supplied.
But Charlie had focused on another part of the ad. “Fifty-five to seventy?” Her expression was mischievous.
Nova shook her finger at her old friend. “Don’t you go telling secrets out of school about how old I am, Charlie! I can pass for sixty, and I never let a man see my driver’s license. If I owned up to seventy-four, I would be rejected so fast my head would spin. Men have always wanted younger women. Always! Two of my husbands left me for girls young enough to be their daughters! By the time you get to retirement age, all the good men are taken. Or dead. Did you know that that census-thingy shows that when you each seventy-five, there are four single women for every single man? Four! And don’t think they don’t know it.” She leaned toward Claire as if imparting a secret. “At Charlie’s and my age, there are so few men around that we women are willing to accept some short fat guy who’s pushing ninety. Why? Because he’s a man, damn it! Someone to go out to dinner with, someone to talk to, someone to let you know you’re still pretty. Of course, if I had my druthers, I’d want someone younger, too. Not some old man who’s only looking for a nurse or a purse.”
Claire supposed that the need for companionship, love and maybe even sex never went away. Prior to Dante, Claire’s love life had been hit and miss at best. Listening to Nova, she just hoped that she wouldn’t be back in the singles game at eighty.
“So, Charlie, are you thinking of moving in here?” Nova lowered her voice to a conspiratorial rasp. “Let me tell you something, you might be better off living in the real world as long as you can. There are no men here. And those that are here have one foot in the grave already. Half of them are wheeling around those oxygen thinamoabobs. The other half can’t even get out of bed, let alone know what to do with a woman in one. I’ve decided all those gorgeous men in those pictures in the brochures were models they hired.”
“So why are you staying?” Charlie asked.
“I’ve got to be practical.” Nova stubbed out her cigarette and lit a new one as she was talking. “I know what you’re thinking – when has Nova ever been practical? But I’m all alone. I’ve got no one in the world. What’s going to happen to me if I get sick, or if I fall and break a hip? It might be two weeks before the mailman gets around to wondering how come my box stays full. But once you sign on for Riverwalk, you realize this is the last stop. If you want to look into the future, you don’t even need your glasses to see it. It’s as near as these old broads you see doddering around, too out of it to touch up their roots or get out of their house slippers. Even worse are the ones who stare at you from the windows on the second floor of that building over there,” she gestured at a structure on the edge of the property, “the ones they never let out. They look so sad.” For a moment, Nova looked like she was about to cry herself, but she took a hard drag on her cigarette instead.
Charlie said, “To be honest, I have not been thinking of moving here, Nova. I came because I wanted to ask you about something else.”
“What – you stopped by here to talk about old times?”
Charlie lifted one shoulder. “In a manner of speaking. Something has happened that made me want to ask you about Elizabeth. About what happened before she died.”
“Elizabeth?” There was a pause. “Do you mean Liz Ellsworth?” Nova offered them a confused smile. “Why, I haven’t thought about her in years.”
“You were her closest friend.”
“That was fifty years ago. Back when we were all young.” Nova looked down and slowly let a stream of cigarette smoke out between pursed lips. Her purple lipstick had bled into the little lines around her mouth. “Liz will always be young, won’t she? She’ll never know what it’s like to get washed up and worn out.” She looked back up at Charlie. “Why are you thinking about her after all this time?”
Charlie looked
over at Claire. “Could you show Nova, please, what you found?” As Claire stood up and took the silk drawstring bag from her pocket, Charlie said to Nova, “Remember the Lisacs’ wall, the one Tom was building the summer Elizabeth died?”
“Yes...” Nova let the word trail off. Her expression was hesitant, not as if she didn’t remember, but as if she didn’t want to go where Charlie was leading her.
“Claire found this where a chunk of mortar had fallen out. All covered in tarnish. I had some photos of Elizabeth, and we compared them. It is the same. I am thinking it has been there since Elizabeth died.”
Shaking the ring into her palm, Claire held it out to the two women. She had shined it up with silver polish, and it winked in the sun.
Nova began to shake her head. “It can’t be. Liz gave it back.” She reached out her hand, then stopped before she touched it and pulled back her fingers, like someone who had gotten too near a hot stove.
Charlie’s voice was low and urgent. “Did she tell you she gave it back to Allen? Did Elizabeth tell you that? I do not understand why she would lie.”
Nova put her hands over her eyes. “I – I don’t remember any more who told me.”
Charlie’s voice was low and urgent. “But the ring being in the wall - it does not make sense. The more I think about it, nothing makes sense. Why did Elizabeth break off with Allen, when she had been so eager to marry him? And then why did she kill herself? Claire finding this ring has made me doubt what happened. Austrid looked everyplace for a note, but there wasn’t one. Perhaps there was a reason there was no note. Maybe there was something more to her death than I thought.”
Nova turned her head to blow out another stream of smoke. “You don’t understand, Charlie. There was a reason Liz killed herself. And a reason she’d didn’t leave a note. She didn’t want everyone knowing her secrets.”
“What secret?” Claire asked.
Nova put a new cigarette in her mouth, even though one was still burning in the ashtray. She had to snap her lighter several times before the flame caught. When she exhaled, she turned her face away, but not before Claire saw a tear slide down from behind her sunglasses. Finally Nova sighed and said, “I guess it’s been fifty years. Who can it hurt now? Liz was very unhappy and she couldn’t see any way out.”
“Out of what?” Charlie tipped her head to one side.
Nova puffed furiously on her cigarette before answering. “She was pregnant.”
“Pregnant?”
“A week or so before she died, Liz came to me. She told me she was pregnant and that she had to get rid of it. She had tried taking hot baths and hitting herself in the stomach, but of course that kind of thing didn’t work. It never does. I told Liz she could go to Mexico, that there were doctors down there who make it as if she had never been pregnant. But it cost five hundred dollars. I’d been there myself once before. I told everyone I was taking a vacation and even came back with a little bit of a tan. If you went to Mexico, then no one back home would even know to gossip. But Liz said she didn’t have that kind of money. I would have loaned Liz the money if I had it, but I didn’t have it.” Nova took another drag on her cigarettes. Her voice was full of fifty years of remembered pain. “After she died, of course, I started thinking that I could have found a way to get her the money.”
“Oh, Nova, so you blamed yourself?” Charlie laid her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “But you did not have any idea of what she planned, did you?”
“Of course not. But I should have known that she was desperate. When she came to me, Liz was weeping so hard she could barely breathe. She just kept saying that she had sinned, and that any baby would be a monster. She was out of her head with guilt. I think she barely understood about sex, the poor thing.”
“Why didn’t they just move up the wedding?” Claire asked.
Nova shook her head. “They had it all planned, a society wedding, everyone would have known why. She couldn’t bear that, couldn’t bear that people would know. Liz was so ashamed.”
Charlie leaned forward. ““Then why could not Allen give her the money?”
Nova looked away. “It’s complicated. At the time I talked to her, Liz hadn’t even told him. She knew he would probably have to borrow it from Warren, and she couldn’t stand the thought of that, of other people knowing. And if Warren knew, it meant Austrid would too. Austrid only tolerated Liz on sufferance. Thought she was low class, just because her family was.” She sighed, blowing out a stream of smoke. “Whatever happened between Liz and Allen that night must have put her over the edge. Maybe he couldn’t think of a way to get her the money, or maybe he tried to tell her that they could wait, that no one would notice she was ready to pop when she walked down the aisle. Whatever happened, I’m sure she wasn’t thinking straight.”
Charlie said, “And she had been drinking. Her breath smelled like wine, and on the kitchen counter was an empty bottle.”
Claire looked down at the ring. “That still doesn’t explain why the engagement ring was in the wall.”
Nova shrugged. “Liz was drunk, hysterical. She must have hid it from Allen, knowing how important it was to his family. She must have wanted to punish him.” Nova pushed her sunglasses back into place, giving her the look of a purple-eyed bug. Claire decided the older woman looked like a praying mantis with a tan. “Why do you still have it? Why haven’t you given it back to Allen?”
“We can’t,” Claire said. “I tried to talk to him when I found the ring, but the neighbor said he and his wife were in Europe.”
“The neighbor was Howard,” Charlie interjected. “Howard Backus. Claire didn’t tell him about the ring.”
“Howard?” Nova put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, I haven’t thought about Howard for a long time. We used to have some fun. And even though he was such a flirt, underneath he was a real gentleman. One time he had to take me home from a party because I was absolutely blotto, and he didn’t lay a finger on me. Just kissed me on the forehead and left.” She leaned forward. “Say, is he still single?”
Charlie rolled her eyes. “I say hello in passing, but I have not exchanged two sentences with the man for years, so I have no idea about his personal life. I am sure you could call him up and ask him yourself. Is there anyone you are still keeping up with from the old days?”
“Not really. Well, I do see Frank here a lot. We say hello, but that’s about it.”
“Frank? Elizabeth’s brother?”
“Our little Frank has come into his own now. He’s quite the ballroom dancer – but then again, he doesn’t have a lot of competition. Believe it or not, he even has a reputation with the ladies. The management looks the other way when he visits, even though he doesn’t live on campus, because the women all like him so. Can you believe it? He got the cold shoulder from girls in high school, but now he’s the cock of the walk. Frank can get any woman in this place he wants.”
“Is he wealthy?” Claire asked.
Nova shook her head, her lips pursed around a delicious secret. “Frank can drive at night.”
Chapter 11
IMZ14U
“Frank can drive at night. That’s it?” Claire echoed incredulously.
“Honey, at our age, that’s a lot,” Nora said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “He doesn’t realize that this popularity of his will only last until he loses his driver’s license - or his health. No one is going to want to take a bus on a date. And no one is going to sign up with someone who needs to be nursed six months down the road.” Nova looked at her watch. “Anyway, if you want to talk to him, you can probably find him at the Top of the World Lounge. I’ll take you there – just let me change out of my suit.” She picked up her swim cap and pushed open a door marked “Ladies” in the small building next to the pool.
“So, what do you think?” Claire asked Charlie in a low voice.
Charlie shrugged. “She seems sure that Elizabeth killed herself. But I also wonder if perhaps there is something that she is not telling. Nova wa
s always good at keeping secrets. Which probably had something to do with her popularity with married men.”
A few minutes later, Nova emerged wearing a mauve blouse and purple paisley skirt. Her purple-tipped toes matched her purple high-heeled sandals. She took hungry puffs of a newly lit cigarette, leaving purple stains from her refreshed lipstick. “They don’t allow smoking in the lounge any more. Someday soon they won’t even allow smoking in your own private living quarters.” Despite the ridiculously high heels, she set off at a fast clip toward the buildings clustered around the artificial lake with its cement banks.
Propped up on an easel in front of the biggest building’s double doors was a poster saying, “Appearing Today in the Top of the World Lounge: Dance to the Music of the Tommy Thomason Trio – Featuring All Your Favorites from the Thirties, Forties and Fifties!” In the accompanying photograph, the trio’s three members wore matching tuxes, desperate smiles and bad hairstyles – one come-over, one bushy perm, and one mullet.
Two smiling women hovered near the entrance. Their gold blazers and navy skirts made them look like Realtors or stewardesses. They directed people to toss their entry tickets into the fishbowl for a drawing for the grand prize – a trip for two on Southwest Airlines anywhere within the contiguous United States. They had the particular obsequiousness that emanated from people who would get paid only if you were happy. And every sentence that wasn’t a question sounded like it should end in an exclamation point.
At the sight of Claire and Charlie, their eyes widened and their impossibly white smiles glowed even brighter. They tag-teamed Claire, leaving Nova and Charlie free to go inside. “How do you and your grandmother like our campus so far?” the brunette asked.
Before Claire could even begin to explain that Charlie wasn’t her grandmother and also wasn’t interested in moving in, the blonde said, “Did you know that we offer literally hundreds of activities? All your grandmother would have to do is bring herself!” And, Claire amended silently, her bank account. The fine print on the brochures said that Riverwalk cost residents up to $12,000 a month.