Confession

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  Instead of answering me, he pulled away from the curb and did a slow U-turn, heading us back in the direction from which we’d come.

  “I don’t like being lured,” he said.

  “But we’re here!”

  “Which is exactly where he wants us to be.” He drove back out of the entrance to the subdivision, then he looked over and smiled at me with a cocky half grin like the one I’d seen on his … son’s … face earlier that afternoon. “I can be provocative, too.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I flung myself back in my seat.

  “I can also be careful,” he added with a glance in his rearview mirror. “If I’m the bait, I want to know more about what it is he’s trying to catch with me. Before I go in that house, I’ll review the case against his father.”

  “What does he really want?” I murmured for the wind to hear. But Geof heard me, and he replied, “A psychologist might say that he wants to displace his anger and grief onto me. Think how pissed you’d be if you were seventeen years old and your parents killed themselves and abandoned you. You might want to take it out on somebody.”

  “I was nineteen.”

  “What?” And then he made the association: When I was nineteen, my mother was as good as dead—comatose in a psychiatric hospital—and my father ran away from home with his lover, the same woman who was now my step-mother mother and who had indeed been the surrogate object forsome of my unhappiness.

  “It took me about fifteen years to realize how mad I was at my parents,” I reminded Geof. “And when I realized it, I could have killed them.” That was hyperbole, of course. I meant it only figuratively.

  “You see?” he said. “That’s what I mean.”

  On the ride home, I looked repeatedly in the mirror, but I didn’t glimpse any more motorcycle-riding teenagers in black jeans and white shirts.

  We didn’t say much after that; he’d already depleted his supply of words, and I wasn’t ready to talk yet. When we got home, we both dragged around through the rest of the evening like exhausted, overheated hound dogs, and when we went to sleep—early for us—we curled up together like pups in a manger.

  Geof made one more stab at trying to get me to talk to him.

  “Your turn?” he mumbled, his nose touching mine on my pillow.

  “Tomorrow,” I lied and kissed the bridge of his nose.

  He was satisfied with that, too easily satisfied, I thought.

  We slept with the windows open, not knowing it was the last night we’d feel secure enough in our house to do that.

  5

  BY MORNING, HE SEEMED TO HAVE FORGOTten that we’d only had a monologue, not a dialogue, the day before. I encouraged his amnesia by bustling about and smiling a lot when we got out of bed, as if it were a normal Monday following an average Sunday.

  But at breakfast, I asked, “Is it a secret?”

  “Which?”

  Give me a break! I thought, but I hid my sarcasm behind my cup of coffee. “That you might have a son. Ron and Judy. David. What happened. You know.” I lowered my gaze to the kitchen table and pushed a crumb around on my white plastic placemat with my right forefinger.

  There was no breeze coming through our screens; the air was suddenly as still inside the kitchen as it was outside. I listened to the birds chorusing; the song they were singing was, “It’s too darned hot.”

  I looked up at Geof: He was caught in a still moment, paused in the tying of a plaid tie that he had put on over a navy blue shirt, which he wore with gray trousers and black loafers. Then he moved and spoke, his voice easy, casual. “David didn’t ask us to keep it quiet, did he?”

  “I don’t know what he told you.”

  “Nothing you didn’t hear, too.”

  “Oh.”

  The lieutenant looked great, I thought, certainly better than I thought I did in my bare feet, underpants, floppy T-shirt, and barely brushed hair. The past weeks had been full of luxuriously pleasurable days for me, because I was enjoying being temporarily unemployed—I was especially enjoying it in the mornings, Monday mornings most of all. I’d left my long-time job as director of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation, and I was walking, not running, toward future employment. Fortunate enough to remain financially secure in the meantime, I had been honoring that privilege by using it to take my time, skipping stones along the way, pausing to lie down in summer grass, splashing my feet in sweet pools of idleness.

  “Do we want to keep it quiet?” I asked him.

  “Why would we? Are we hiding something?” He shot the knot the rest of the way up to his collar and gave me an intimate, knowing glance. “Who do you want to tell, Jenny?”

  “I’m having lunch with ‘the girls’ today.”

  “I don’t give a damn who knows.”

  That sounded a shade defensive to me. I watched him lift his coffee mug, take the last sips from it, and set it down again. It was a brown ceramic one that he’d picked up at a garage sale, and it said in blue script that wound around it, “If I knew then what I know now, I’d know more now.” I stared at it for a moment, recognizing the irony of that particular mug in this particular moment. If we had known seventeen years ago, what we knew now …

  “What will the wise women say about me?” he asked, interrupting my reverie on his coffee mug. “You can tell me their verdict at dinner tonight. Am I guilty? Not guilty? Definitely not innocent.” He laughed. “How will they judge me?”

  Automatically, I said, “It’s not their right to judge you.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t often exercise their right to remain silent.”

  I had to smile at that: It was so true. My friends Ginger, Mary, Marsha, and Sabrina had opinions. Oh, my, did they ever have opinions. They had advice. They had lots to say about any conceivable topic, and they did not hesitate to say any of it.

  Geof leaned over to give me a quick kiss, then a longer one.

  “Don’t forget that Lee is coming over tonight,” he said on his way out the kitchen door. On the other side, he looked back in and spoke to me through the screen. “See you tonight. I love you.”

  Sergeant Meredith. With the files on the Mayer Case. Oh, yes, I remembered.

  “Love you, too.”

  His response, a moment later, was unexpected: “God-dammit!”

  I was so startled that I slopped coffee onto my toast. I threw a paper napkin onto the mess and ran to the screen door. “What happened, Geof?”

  “Don’t come out here!” He was bending over something on one of the cement blocks in the path that led from the house to the garage. “There’s a dead possum out here. Shit, what a mess.” He looked back up at me. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”

  I followed his advice and didn’t go out to view the corpse. Living in the countryside, we’d grown accustomed to dead creatures as part of the way of life, so to speak. I spared a moment of sympathy for the possum—which was not easy, as they had never struck me as being one of creation’s more adorable ideas—and padded barefoot to a window to stare eastward toward the ocean and the rising sun. I leaned on the windowsill and stared at the landscape I knew so well only to discover that it looked different to me than it ever had before. It didn’t look merely like a new day had dawned while we had slept. Instead, it felt as if a whole new world had come up with the sun that August morning: I had the unsettling feeling that all of my familiar landmarks had shifted in the night, as if the Washington Monument had inexplicably moved over a quarter of an inch, and Teddy Roosevelt had opened his mouth on Mount Rushmore, and Niagara Falls was now cascading onto the American side of the river.

  I heard the thud of one of our heavy plastic trash bin lids.

  Another thought, not very profound, crept in: Maybe I’d get Geof a copy of Dr. Spock for a fortieth birthday gift.

  “Very funny,” I said to myself.

  Lazily, I turned away from the east view back toward the kitchen dishes. I had lots o
f time to get them washed. Being unemployed had its advantages. When I worked for the foundation, it was my generally pleasant task to distribute money to deserving (we hoped) causes. Now, with time to spare, I was launching a dream that still wasn’t much more substantial than wispy clouds in the wide blue sky of my imagination. I wanted to start my own foundation with my own money and some of my friends’. That much, I knew. A foundation unlike any other, that much I knew, too. No “old boy’s” network. No stifling traditions of old-fashioned charity. Nothing to rein in our imaginations, nothing to stop us except our own timidity or the IRS. And that’s why my wise women met once a week for lunch, for they were to be the revolutionary core of my board of directors. Once a week, we met to figure out what else we needed to know, to do, to become …

  I heard Geof start the Jeep and back out of the garage, I watched him drive away, and I waved good-bye, although he couldn’t see it.

  Three hours later, I walked out to my own car.

  I raised the automatic door on the garage, and there it was … My baby. My new red Miata convertible. I’d traded in my good gray Honda Accord for this snappy little piece of pleasure. Hot damn!

  But halfway to Port Frederick, with my hair streaming out in a ponytail behind me, my little engine purring, and the sun beating down on my immaculate hood, I noticed something that hadn’t come with the car.

  “What’s that awful smell?” I said, conversing with the wind.

  A skunk by the side of the road? Decaying vegetation in a ditch?

  It stayed with me as I drove, growing stronger as the sun rose higher and the morning got hotter, until finally I thought I’d be sick to my stomach if I didn’t get rid of it. Finally I had to admit that it was probably coming from the front end of my car. Maybe, I thought, a stiff breeze will blow it away …

  That was all the excuse I needed to step harder on the gas pedal.

  “You’ve got a dead mouse under the hood, Jenny.” The owner of my favorite Amoco station wiped his hands on a red towel and made a face at me. “At least I think it used to be a mouse. Hard to tell once it’s got ground up by the engine, it’s just hair, skin, and bloody chunks.”

  I made a face back at him. Great, I thought. First, Geof’s dead possum, now this. Poor little guy. “It’s a real pain out where we live, Joe. Little furry things like to build nests in cars and eat things like wiring. Frankly, I was hoping they’d boycott foreign cars.”

  “Want to see?” He laughed at the expression on my face. “No? Okay. Pull it on up to the hose, Jenny, and we’ll wash it out for you. Good thing you came in soon, hot as it is today you’d have the smell of cooked mouse in your car for weeks. It’s damn hard to get an odor like that out once it gets into the upholstery and the carpet and everything. Not the sort of smell you want in your nice new car. How’s it runnin’, anyway?”

  Ten minutes later, the Miata smelled fresher.

  “Reckon it was Mickey Mouse?”

  “You’re a wicked man, Joe.”

  He laughed and carefully lowered my hood. “Mighta been Minnie, though.”

  I got back behind my wheel. A faint odor lingered, but maybe it was only in my nostrils, not in the car. I said, “Or maybe Mighty Mouse will no longer be able to Save the Day.”

  Joe gave me a reproachful look. “Now you’ve gone too far, Jenny. Mighty Mouse was always my favorite.”

  I waved my thanks and roared off toward lunch.

  Ordinarily, my buddies would have convened for lunch at the Buoy, which is our local historical pub. But this four-some included Mary Eberhardt, the mayor of Port Frederick, and Mary swore—well, no, I take that back, Mary never swore, Mary vowed, she predicted, she declared—that she would get irate phone calls from Southern Baptists if she was seen “carrying on” in a tavern. To which another of our group, Sabrina Johnson, always protested—no, Sabrina wouldn’t merely protest, she’d swear—“Well, what the hell are they doing up north if they’re Southern Baptists?” The fact that the mayor was wed to a prominent minister also carried some weight in our choice of eating establishments. And so, we’d settled on the dining room of the local Holiday Inn, a sly choice, we thought, as the locals didn’t frequent it. And so the mayor wouldn’t get castigated by her constituents, the psychiatrist among us wouldn’t run into her clients, the social worker wouldn’t encounter any of her unemployed, and the philanthropist and I wouldn’t know anybody either. It was anonymity we craved, in part so that we could gossip and cackle to our hearts’ content and also because we had revolutionary plans afoot. Just for starters, in my foundation, there would be no glass ceiling to keep any woman, anybody, from rising to the top. Maybe we’d have no ceilings at all, nor any walls, just fresh air, fresh thinking. I got jazzed all over again just thinking about it, about them.

  I drove faster toward the hotel, steering confidently.

  This foundation of mine—of ours—was going to happen.

  I sped the Miata into a shady parking spot and left the top down, hoping the interior would finish airing out while I was inside. Before I went in, I glared up into the branches of the tree above my car and spoke sternly to any birds who might be contemplating the prospect of dirtying my finish or my upholstery.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I warned them.

  6

  THANKS TO THE DEAD RODENT, I WAS LATE for lunch.

  When I walked into the coffee shop, my wise women were already seated at our regular booth, a semicircular one in a far corner. Out of all the women I knew, I’d picked them to head my foundation because they were intelligent, caring, daring women who, among them, knew just about everybody, every need, and every source of money in and around Port Frederick. What they didn’t know much about, though, was foundations, and so we were still at our very beginnings, which so far had consisted mainly of me educating them, my dear, eager pupils.

  On either side of me in the restaurant, as I walked toward my pals, there were strangers in short sleeves and shorts, all of them looking like tourists; happily, I didn’t recognize a single face. There were chef’s salads to the right of me, club sandwiches to the left, french fries all around, and many glasses of half-melted ice in sodas or weak tea. The price for our privacy was bland food.

  My long promenade up the center of the dining room gave me a chance to observe my friends as I approached them. On the far left end of the red upholstered booth was Ginger Culverson, known to the rest of us as Moneybags. She was the only one, besides me, who was bringing the resources of her own trust fund to the foundation we were creating. She was thirty-four years old, short, with pale skin and blue eyes and frizzy reddish brown hair, a lovable round face and matching chubby body. Ginger also possessed a nice round sum of three million dollars that she’d inherited from her father a few years earlier. Ginger didn’t work at much of anything except fixing her house up and figuring out ways to give away bits and pieces of her inheritance, so she was dressed casually, like me, in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. To look at her, you’d never have guessed she was loaded. We all thought she was adorable—earthy and sweet and generous, maybe to a fault—but unfortunately, Ginger didn’t see herself that way and neither had many men in her lifetime. Their loss, in our opinion.

  To Ginger Culverson’s left was Mary Eberhardt, known to us as Madam Mayor or simply the Madam, an appellation she tried desperately to discourage us from using in public. Mary was late fortyish, a tall, slim, black woman with short gray hak, who was given to dressing in prim dresses or suits, with low heels and small hats. Today it was a dotted swiss navy blue dress with white heels and—I guessed without ever seeing it—a matching white purse at her side. Mary had a certain rah-rah cheerleader quality that we tried strenuously, and totally without success, to squash.

  In the middle sat Sabrina Johnson, our brown beauty, thirty-eight years old, tall as the model and college basketball player she used to be, with her hair dyed to a shiny black and slicked back into a tight bun and dressed all in a shade of caramel that came so close
to matching her skin color that from a distance she looked as if she had come shockingly naked to the coffee shop of the Holiday Inn. Ivory earrings the size of my fists dangled from her lobes. She was a social worker with a slam-dunk wit. We called her Slick.

  Finally, on the right, there was Marsha Sandy, our resident psychiatrist and my best friend from forever. Marsha was my age, my height, but darker, calmer, quieter, more voluptuous and luscious looking, with big brown eyes that could hypnotize men and patients and a full head of thick dark brown hair. We called her Doc, none too originally, except for Sabrina who called her Shrink so that she could logically refer to Marsha’s patients as “the shrunken heads,” much to Marsha’s resigned bemusement. “So how are the shrunken heads?” Sabrina would ask each week that we met for lunch. And Marsha would smile, shake her head, sigh, and plead, “Show a little respect, will you, Slick?”

  I’d rather not divulge the nickname they chose for me.

  As I drew near to their booth, I saw Sabrina turn and whisper something in Mary Eberhardt’s ear, then I saw Mary look up at me and smile.

  “I love you guys,” I said as I slid in beside Ginger on the end.

  “See?” Sabrina said to Mary. “I told you.”

  The Madam looked at me and laughed.

  “What?” I demanded.

  Sabrina grinned. “I told Mary you were going to say something like that.” Marsha started to laugh, too, and I heard Ginger snicker beside me. “I said, Look, Mary, Jenny’s having a Hallmark card attack. She’s looking at the four of us, and she’s thinking how utterly bee-oo-tee-ful we all are and how incredibly wonderful we are, and isn’t she lucky to have us as her friends, and, I said, she’s going to say something mushy as soon as she sits down.”

  Mary reached over Ginger to pat my hand. “We love you, too.”

  “Thank you, Mary,” I said with a show of wounded dignity. “And screw you, Slick.”

  She laughed harder than any of them at that, but then she jabbed me again. “Did you drive up in your little blue roadster, Nancy?”