A Widow for One Year (64 page)

The principal story in
Missing Persons McDermid
details Sergeant McDermid’s efforts to find a runaway wife and mother. In this case, a woman from the States abandons her husband and child; the husband, who is looking for her, is convinced that his wife has run away to Canada. In the course of setting out to find the missing wife and mother, Margaret uncovers some unseemly incidents involving the husband’s myriad infidelities. Worse, the detective realizes that the distraught mother’s love for a previous child (who was killed in a plane crash) has made her run away from the fearful responsibility of loving a
new
child—that is, the child she has abandoned. When Sergeant McDermid finds the woman, who was formerly a waitress at the Flying Food Circus, the policewoman is so sympathetic toward her that she allows her to slip away. The bad husband never finds her.

“We have reason to suspect that she’s in Vancouver,” Margaret tells the husband, knowing full well that the runaway woman is in Toronto. (In this novel, the photographs of those missing American boys retain their place of prominence in the detective’s monastic bedroom.)

In
McDermid Reaches a Milestone,
Margaret—who has been “almost sixty, although she could still lie about her age,” over the course of two novels—
finally
becomes a sexagenarian. Ruth would instantly understand why Eddie O’Hare was particularly impressed by the third of Alice Somerset’s novels: the story concerns the return of a former lover of the sixty-year-old detective.

When Margaret McDermid had been in her forties, she’d been deeply committed to volunteer counseling of young American men coming to Canada to escape the Vietnam War. One of the young men falls in love with her—a boy not yet in his twenties with a woman already in her forties! The affair, described in frankly erotic terms, is quickly over.

Then, as Margaret turns sixty, her “young” lover comes to her— again in need of her help. This time, it is because his wife and child are missing—presumed kidnapped. He’s now a man in his thirties, and Sergeant McDermid is distracted by wondering if he still finds her attractive. (“But how
could
he? Margaret wondered—an old hag like me.”)

“
I
would still find her attractive!” Eddie would tell Ruth.

“Tell
her
—not
me,
Eddie,” Ruth would say.

In the end, the former young man is happily reunited with his wife and child, and Margaret consoles herself by once more imagining the lives of those missing American boys whose pictures stare back at her in her lonely bedroom.

Ruth would relish a jacket blurb on
McDermid Reaches a Milestone :
“the best living crime writer!” (This from the president of the British Crime Writers Association, although it was not a widely held opinion.) And
Missing Persons McDermid
was awarded the so-called Arthur for Best Novel. (The Crime Writers of Canada named the award after Arthur Ellis, which was the name adopted by Arthur English, the Canadian hangman from 1913 until 1935; his uncle John Ellis was the hangman in England at that same period of time. Subsequent Canadian hangmen took the name “Arthur Ellis” as their nom de travail.)

However, it was not uncommon that success in Canada—and an even more measurable success in her French and German translations—did
not
mean that Alice Somerset was similarly well known or even well published in the United States; indeed, she had barely been published in the States. A U.S. distributor for her Canadian publisher had tried unsuccessfully to promote
McDermid Reaches a Milestone
in a modest way. (The third of the three novels was the only one of sufficient interest to the Americans for them to publish it at all.)

Eddie O’Hare was envious of Alice Somerset’s foreign sales, but he was no less proud of Marion for her efforts to convert her personal tragedy and unhappiness to fiction. “Good for your mother,” Eddie would tell Ruth. “She’s taken everything that hurt her and turned it into a detective series!”

But Eddie was unsure if he was the model for the young lover who re-enters Margaret McDermid’s life when she’s sixty, or if Marion had taken
another
young American as her lover during the Vietnam War.

“Don’t be silly, Eddie,” Ruth would tell him. “She’s writing about you, only you.”

About Marion, Eddie and Ruth would agree on the most important thing: they would let Ruth’s mother remain a missing person for as long as she wanted to be. “She knows where to find us, Eddie,” Ruth would tell her newfound friend, but Eddie bore the unlikelihood of Marion ever wanting to see him again like a permanent sorrow.

Arriving at JFK, Ruth expected to find Allan waiting for her when she passed through customs; that she found Allan waiting with Hannah was a surprise. To Ruth’s knowledge, they had never met before; the sight of them together caused Ruth the most acute distress. She
knew
she should have slept with Allan before she left for Europe—now he’d slept with Hannah instead! But how could that be? They didn’t even know each other; yet there they were, looking like a couple.

In Ruth’s view, they looked “like a couple” because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them—they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever have imagined such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine
anything
that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious.)

“Oh, baby, baby . . .” Hannah was saying to her. “It’s all my fault!” Hannah held a mangled copy of
The New York Times;
the newspaper was in a lumpy roll, as if Hannah had wrung it to death.

Ruth stood waiting for Allan to kiss her, but he spoke to Hannah: “She doesn’t know.”

“Know
what
?” Ruth asked in alarm.

“Your father’s dead, Ruth,” Allan told her.

“Baby, he killed himself,” Hannah said.

Ruth was shocked. She’d not thought her father capable of suicide, because she’d never thought him capable of blaming himself for anything.

Hannah was offering her the
Times
—or, rather, its wrinkled remains. “It’s a shitty obit,” Hannah said. “It’s all about his bad reviews. I never knew he had so many bad reviews.”

Numbly, Ruth read the obituary. It was easier than talking to Hannah.

“I ran into Hannah at the airport,” Allan was explaining. “She introduced herself.”

“I read the lousy obit in the paper,” Hannah said. “I knew you were coming back today, so I called the house in Sagaponack and talked to Eduardo—it was Eduardo who found him. That’s how I got your flight number, from Eduardo,” Hannah said.

“Poor Eduardo,” Ruth replied.

“Yeah, he’s a fucking wreck,” Hannah said. “And when I got to the airport, of course I was looking for Allan. I assumed he’d be here. I recognized him from his photo . . .”

“I know what my mother is doing,” Ruth told them. “She’s a writer. Crime fiction, but there’s more to it than that.”

“She’s in denial,” Hannah explained to Allan. “Poor baby,” Hannah told her. “It’s my fault—blame
me,
blame
me
!”

“It’s
not
your fault, Hannah. Daddy didn’t give you a second thought,” Ruth said. “It’s
my
fault.
I
killed him. First I kicked his ass at squash, then I killed him. You had nothing to do with it.”

“She’s angry—it’s
good
that she’s angry,” Hannah said to Allan. “ Outward anger is good for you—what’s bad for you is to
implode
.”

“Go fuck yourself !” Ruth told her best friend.

“That’s good, baby. I mean it—your anger is good for you.”

“I brought the car,” Allan told Ruth. “I can take you into the city, or we can drive out to Sagaponack.”

“I want to go to Sagaponack,” Ruth told him. “I want to see Eddie O’Hare. First I want to see Eduardo, then Eddie.”

“Listen—I’ll call you tonight,” Hannah told her. “You might feel like unloading a little later. I’ll call you.”

“Let me call you first, Hannah,” Ruth said.

“Sure, we could try that, too,” Hannah agreed. “You call me, or I’ll call you.”

Hannah needed a taxi back to town, and the taxis were in one place, Allan’s car in another. In the wind, in the awkward good-bye,
The New York Times
became more disheveled. Ruth didn’t want the newspaper, but Hannah insisted that she take it.

“Read the obit later,” Hannah said.

“I’ve already read it,” Ruth replied.

“You should read it again, when you’re calmer,” Hannah advised her. “It will make you really angry.”

“I’m already calm. I’m already angry,” Ruth told her friend.

“She’ll calm down. Then she’ll get
really
angry,” Hannah whispered to Allan. “Take care of her.”

“I will,” Allan told her.

Ruth and Allan watched Hannah cut in front of the line waiting for taxis. When they were sitting in Allan’s car, Allan finally kissed her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Strangely, yes,” Ruth replied.

Oddly enough, there was an absence of feeling for her father; what she felt was
no
feeling for him. Her mind had been dwelling on missing persons, not expecting to count him among them.

“About your mother . . .” Allan patiently began. He’d allowed Ruth to collect her thoughts for almost an hour; they had been driving for that long in silence. He really
is
the man for me, Ruth thought.

It had been late morning by the time Allan learned that Ruth’s father was dead. He could have called Ruth in Amsterdam, where it would have been late afternoon; Ruth would then have had the night alone, and the plane ride home, to think about it. Instead Allan had counted on Ruth not seeing the
Times
before she landed in New York the following day. As for the prospect of the news reaching her in Amsterdam, Allan had hoped that Ted Cole wasn’t
that
famous.

“Eddie O’Hare gave me a book my mother wrote, a novel,” Ruth explained to Allan. “Of course Eddie knew who’d written the novel—he just didn’t dare tell me. All he said about the book was that it was ‘good airplane reading.’ I’ll say!”

“Remarkable,” Allan said.

“Nothing strikes me as remarkable anymore,” Ruth told him. After a pause, she said: “I want to marry you, Allan.” After another pause, Ruth added: “Nothing is as important as having sex with you.”

“I’m awfully pleased to hear that,” Allan admitted. It was the first time he’d smiled since he saw her in the airport. Ruth needed no effort to smile back at him. But there was still that absence of feeling for her father that she’d felt an hour ago—how strange and unexpected it was! Her sympathy was stronger for Eduardo, who had found her father’s body.

Nothing stood between Ruth and her new life with Allan. There would need to be some sort of memorial service for Ted. It would be nothing very elaborate—nor would many people be inclined to attend, Ruth thought. Between her and her new life with Allan, there was really only the necessity of hearing from Eduardo Gomez exactly what had happened to her father. The prospect of this was what made Ruth realize how much her father had loved her. Was she the only woman who’d made Ted Cole feel remorse?

The Standoff

Eduardo Gomez was a good Catholic. He was not above superstition, but the gardener had always controlled his inclination to believe in fate within the strict confines of his faith. Fortunately for him, he’d never been exposed to Calvinism—for he would have proven himself a ready and willing convert. Thus far, the gardener’s Catholicism had kept the more fanciful of his imaginings—in regard to his own predestination—in check.

There had been that seemingly unending torture when the gardener had hung upside down in Mrs. Vaughn’s privet, waiting to die of carbonmonoxide poisoning. It had crossed Eduardo’s mind that
Ted Cole
deserved to die this way—but not an innocent gardener. At that helpless moment, Eduardo had seen himself as the victim of another man’s lust, and of another man’s proverbial “woman scorned.”

No one, certainly not the priest in the confessional, would fault Eduardo for having felt that way. The hapless gardener, hung up to die in Mrs. Vaughn’s hedge, had every reason to feel unjustly done-in. Yet, over the years, Eduardo knew that Ted was a fair and generous employer, and the gardener had never forgiven himself for thinking that Ted
deserved
to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Therefore it wreaked havoc on Eduardo’s superstitious nature—not to mention strengthened his potentially rampant fatalism—that the luckless gardener should have been the one to find Ted Cole dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

It was Eduardo’s wife, Conchita, who first sensed that something was wrong. She’d picked up the mail at the Sagaponack post office on her way to Ted’s house. Because it was her day of the week to change the beds and do the laundry and the general housecleaning, Conchita arrived at Ted’s ahead of Eduardo. She deposited the mail on the kitchen table, where she couldn’t help noticing a full bottle of single-malt Scotch whiskey; the bottle had been opened, but not a drop had been poured. It sat beside a clean, empty glass of Tiffany crystal.

Conchita also noticed Ruth’s postcard in the mail. The picture of the prostitutes in their windows on the Herbertstrasse, the red-light district in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg, disturbed her. It was an inappropriate postcard for a daughter to send her father. Yet it was a pity that the mail from Europe had been slow to arrive, for the message on the postcard might have cheered Ted—had he read it. (THINKING
OF YOU, DADDY. I’M SORRY ABOUT WHAT I SAID. IT WAS MEAN. I LOVE YOU! RUTHIE.)

Worried, Conchita nonetheless began cleaning in Ted’s workroom; she was thinking that Ted might still be upstairs asleep, although he was usually an early riser. The bottommost drawer of Ted’s so-called writing desk was open; the drawer was empty. Beside the drawer was a large dark-green trash bag, which Ted had stuffed with the hundreds of black-and-white Polaroids of his nude models; even though the bag was tied closed at the top, the smell of the Polaroid print coater escaped from the bag when Conchita moved it out of the way of her vacuum cleaner. A note taped to the bag said:
CONCHITA, PLEASE THROW
THIS TRASH AWAY BEFORE RUTH COMES HOME.