All's Well That Ends (2 page)

Why would a murderer attend his victim’s funeral?

But since Sasha’s current craziness was a by-product of her sadness, I honored it and stood here, wishing I knew what I was supposed to notice beyond a clump of shivering red-nosed people.

Instead, I thought about the one attendee I couldn’t see, the one in the martini shaker. When I was in junior high, and Phoebe was Sasha’s stepmother, the things that initially made Sasha cringe with embarrassment amused me. I could afford to feel that way—Phoebe wasn’t part of my household, so her delusions of grandeur, her fantastic stories of her family’s past glories, her regal sweep of arm, her lorgnette (a family treasure, she insisted), her irrational aspirations for us: “Why not the stage? Why not become supermodels, movie stars, or roller-derby gals?” seemed colorful and exciting. I made my mother know that her drab pronouncements about how to live: study, do your homework, clean your room, were pitiable “bourgeois middle-class values,” a term I’d learned from Phoebe, of course.

The fact that my parents didn’t put me up for adoption during that phase is testimony to their saintly goodness.

Phoebe was bigger than life and her dreams were still larger.

She dwelt in the waiting room of an alternate universe populated by the glitterati because, she would remind us with a conspirato-rial wink, she was of “royal blood.”

When we’d barge in after school, as often as not Phoebe 9

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would be working on her never-finished family tree. Her grandmother had told her that
her
grandmother was the descendant of a king. Or sometimes, instead, of a “world-famous man.” The story had been handled so often, had tumbled through the generations like a long game of whispering down the lane, and as surely as it did in the game, it had acquired polish and spin with each retelling. For all any of us knew, the original message was that she was the descendant of the man who cleaned the king’s boots. Or simply, a very nice man who once caught a glimpse of a king. Add to it that grandma had been a tad senile, and fuzzy as to what principality or how far back that royal bloodline began.

Most people would laugh gently at their grandmothers’ romantic visions of themselves, and that would be that. Not Phoebe. She searched in vain for that missing golden link. I remember coming to Sasha’s house one afternoon and seeing notebook pages taped together covering the dining-room table. Each sheet had webs of lines, circles, and question marks. “A genealogical chart,” Phoebe had said. “Mine.” I couldn’t make head nor tails of it.

Phoebe’s pretensions drove Sasha berserk for about a year before the two of them reached détente. After that, they developed a lasting fondness for each other’s quirky, loveable selves, and that lasted long after Sasha’s father decided that this marriage, like all his others, had been a mistake.

I wondered if he remembered the good parts of his marriages, the attraction and the initial wedded bliss, and if he would have attended this memorial were he not in Spain, honeymooning with whatever number wife or fiancée this one was.

“Phoebe was never mean-spirited,” Sasha whispered.

True. She was silly. She was pretentious and possibly delusional. She was probably not the world’s best wife. She was a cluttered, distracted housekeeper, though an elegant, extravagant cook and hostess when she put her mind to it, and it now appeared she’d not been much of a businesswoman, either.

But not mean. Not ever.

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10

“If he does not shut up immediately,” she said, “I’m going to speak ill of the living. Loudly.”

Perhaps he felt the heat rising from his former stepsister. In any case, Dennis wound down, grudgingly admitting that his mother had been fun and had always been there in a pinch.

“And,” he said, “she made a mean martini, so here’s to you, Mom.” With a smirk, Dennis lifted the silver martini shaker he’d been clutching.

“Hear, hear,” the group said with little enthusiasm. Nobody looked directly at him, nobody gave the almost-obligatory encouraging smile that would normally be expected.

The cocktail shaker had been Phoebe’s requested resting place till her remains were emptied into the Wissahickon. All of this had been written out years earlier, along with the request that anyone mourning her should “carouse” on the banks. She’d wanted us to drink champagne from the crystal goblets she’d collected over the years, to toast her here, on Forbidden Drive, the spot where, apparently, she’d enjoyed a few romantic dalliances in her time.

She apparently forgot that Philadelphia has four seasons, and she envisioned us in sheer summer dresses, barefoot and dancing on the grass. She also hadn’t considered the park’s rules that forbid alcohol, let alone carousing. And while the official rules kept mum about our particular situation, I doubted that dumping charred human remains into the clear creek was permitted.

Launching Phoebe into a different existence therefore had a hurried, surreptitious air. Raising bubbling crystal glasses while walkers and runners witnessed it would have been too flagrant.

Raising empty glasses felt terribly wrong. Dennis had forged a compromise by using innocuous white Styrofoam cups and hiding the champagne in a duffel bag.

He now extracted a bottle and opened it, and then a second, pouring a small amount in each cup. I hadn’t heard of screw-top champagne until then.

“A toast to Phoebe,” Sasha said, but she said it too softly for 11

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the passing jogger to make note of it in the unlikely event that he had his MP3 player turned off and could hear.

“Safe journey, Phoebe,” people said.

The fizzing liquid Dennis was trying to pass off as champagne managed to be both too sweet and too tart, and after one sip, I tipped my cup over and hoped it was good for the dormant grass.

Dennis popped off the top of the martini shaker and leaned over the creek. I watched Sasha frown as she watched him. Ever since the terrible night she’d found Phoebe dead, she’d been blaming herself. I’d heard the refrain, and I could almost see it circle her skull like a roll on a player piano, the same tune over and over. She’d been away in England for too long while anything might have been troubling Phoebe. She’d been a poor correspondent. She hadn’t visited enough since she’d been back. She could have, should have, saved Phoebe.

Sasha’s self-flagellation was without grounds. She had indeed visited Phoebe as soon as she’d returned to Philadelphia, three months ago, and several times after.

Demonstrating how upset and confused she was, not only did Sasha accept responsibility for Phoebe’s suicidal depression, but she simultaneously insisted that Phoebe had not been depressed in the first place.

“She laughed a lot” was part of the loop going around and around in Sasha’s head. “She was
sad
about Nelson, but not depressed. I’m not sure that marriage was destined to last much longer even if he’d lived. She said he was a whiner. She said lots of things, but then—
wham
—he was gone. Sad, you see. Not suicidal! And look, she was dating again, she was optimistic, not depressed.”

Part of what bonded the two women was the irrational belief that the next man would be better, despite their own histories, which proved that the next ones were seldom as good as the ones before.

Sasha had even used her professional skills to help the hunt GILLIAN ROBERTS

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for number six by taking photos of Phoebe for an online matchmaking service. She’d needed new ones because all her portraits were in wedding attire.

She never got to see the photos. Sasha was delivering them the night she found Phoebe dead.

“Is ordering photos the behavior of a clinically depressed woman about to end her life?” Sasha had demanded. “Posing, preening, worrying about the lighting and how it would make her look?”

People are unpredictable. Maybe the need for updated photos and an online dating service would make you realize all you’d lost, and drive you into depression. I didn’t know Phoebe well enough to know if she’d been putting up a façade for Sasha’s sake, or if she was subject to rapid mood changes.

But my private opinion was that this was all about Sasha, who, being human, couldn’t deal with the painful irrationality of the situation.

Eventually, Sasha noticed the disconnect between what she’d observed and the guilt she felt over what had happened, and had found a way to reconcile them. Phoebe had not been depressed and Phoebe had not taken her life. If someone else had ended Phoebe’s life, then Sasha could feel pain, but not guilt.

Dennis uncapped Phoebe as, with perfect mistiming, the wind changed course and her airborne ashes caught a thermal and landed on Dennis’s expensive dark overcoat. All over it.

Retribution for that eulogy, I was sure.

Dennis scowled and brushed, which smeared but didn’t remove the gray blots, and he looked as if he was about to shout at his mother one last time. Instead, he took a deep breath, leaned low and shook out her remaining remains, turned away from the stream, left the silver mixer on the ground, and wiped his leather gloves clean before facing Sasha.

Because of Dennis’s flight schedule, there had been a lunch before the memorial service, rather than the more traditional 13

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gathering afterward. Now Dennis pushed up his smeared coat sleeve, checked his watch, and came over to Sasha. “Keep me in the loop about the house,” he said.

She nodded. He’d talked her into finding a realtor and disposing of Phoebe’s “treasures,” since he lived in Chicago while Sasha lived nearby and was sharing in the profits. To me that meant they should also share the work, but Dennis was Phoebe’s executor, and life was complicated enough without getting into this particular battle.

Sasha put her hand on Dennis’s sleeve. Her forehead had a long, vertical wrinkle down its middle. “Before you go,” she said,

“I’ve been wanting to ask . . . do you . . . did you wonder . . .

when you heard . . .” She took another deep breath and cleared her throat. “I don’t believe Phoebe would take her life that way.”

“She wouldn’t use pills and booze? Why not?”

He’d spoken too loudly, so that people nearby turned to watch. “I mean she wouldn’t commit suicide,” Sasha said. “It doesn’t fit her. She was upbeat, looking forward—”

“Wait a minute! What are you suggesting?” Dennis’s face darkened as if his blood had been rerouted and was pounding its way toward the skin.

“I’m not comfortable with the official version. Why would she—”

“Damn it, Sasha!” he said, his voice loud enough to scare the Daves, who’d approached to express condolences. “
You’re
not comfortable? This is not about you. For once in your life can you not be histrionic? You’re just like her—everything’s dramatic and oversized. You want headlines, investigations, your fifteen minutes of fame? Find it somewhere else. She killed herself.”

“And it’s just like you to want to believe your own mother killed herself. Why would she? She didn’t even leave a note.” At six feet, Sasha was as tall as Dennis, and with the high-heeled boots and enormous hat, taller still, so she held her ground. The hostility radiating off him would have floored a smaller woman.

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“She wasn’t one for writing,” he snapped. “Or for thinking things through. This was probably an impulse like so many others. That’s how she was, an emotional infant!”

Sasha was silent for a moment, very unlike her normal behavior. Then she said quietly, “Don’t you even want to know why I think that?”

“I’ve got a plane to catch.” Once again he checked his watch.

Sasha lowered her voice still more. “Are you at all sorry that your mother died?”

“Let me know what’s happening about the house.” He turned and walked away from us.

Two

It makes me angry and sad,” Sasha said over dinner. She had the silver martini shaker on the seat next to her, and she looked at it, as if Phoebe, alive, might still inhabit it.

“We are all angry and sad,” Mackenzie said. He’d joined us for the meal and looked almost as troubled as Sasha did. While we’d been bidding farewell to Phoebe, he’d spent Sunday on the phone with his parents, three cousins, and two uncles, who’d lost their homes to the devastating hurricane that had leveled too much of Louisiana, including his parents’ parish and the home he’d grown up in. No lives lost, which was the very good news, but three months after the catastrophe, everyone was still scattered, unsure about what to do—or what they could do—next.

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Their pasts had been eradicated; their futures were murky, and each day was progressively more difficult to wade through.

His mother, the usually buoyant Gabby Mackenzie, compared their situation to having Vaseline on your glasses while trying to read the fine print. Jobs lost, contacts lost, supplies lost, friends made into distant refugees or missing altogether, promises unkept, seasons passing. All the supports society had built were gone.

They’d never had much in the way of material goods. In fact, C.K. had said he hadn’t realized till he was out in the world that they’d been “something close to poor.” And now, they had still less. His father, Boyd, called “Boy,” had been a construction worker when young, then a partner in a country hardware store.

The fact that he couldn’t rebuild on his former site or supply the tools for others to rebuild was driving him up the wall. If, of course, there had been a still-standing wall to be driven up.

We’d offered the loft to them and to Cary Grant and Kather-ine Hepburn, their dogs. Either we and our sure-to-be-miserably-unhappy cat would share the space with all of them, or we’d give it to them for as long as they needed, and we’d find friends willing to house us for the duration.

His parents had politely—they were southerners, after all—

declined. Exile did not seem a solution to them, and they needed to be closer to where they hoped to rebuild their lives. One of Boy’s cousins had a spread of land with lots of room for the dogs up in West Monroe, and though that was too far away from home to be efficient, they could stay as long as they needed to. It was no solution, but the only available one. Mostly, they’d been on long forays close to home, staying wherever they could find shelter, working at rebuilding their store and life, and then retreating north to West Monroe.