All's Well That Ends (21 page)

But at least I had a sense of progress. It was important to see whether Merilee could be the “M” who’d visited the last night of Phoebe’s life. Her arrival would have been the surprise Phoebe mentioned to the neighbor because they’d been estranged. She would have anticipated the possibility of peace with her longtime friend.

As I crossed the square, I pulled out my phone and turned it on, meanwhile catching a glimpse of the knot of boys, Griffith at its center, at one of the corners. I felt very old, because nothing would have convinced me that it was a good idea to play a game—any game—outside when the temperature was somewhere in the 20s. I wondered if parents would sue us if their children wound up frozen to the pavement.

I headed up Walnut and glanced at the phone, which said I had a message. These days, my mother is also armed with a cell phone, and it has unlimited flat-rate long-distance capability. No longer can I predict when she’ll call. It almost makes me yearn for the olden days, when I only worried when the rates lowered after dark.

She’s no longer as worried about me now that I’ve achieved what is “safety” in her cosmos—i.e., I’m married. Nonetheless, what she’s done is smoothly shift into next gear. These days, calls touch on which of her lucky friends has become a grandmother.

If I remind her that she is already a grandmother to my sister’s two adorable children, she says I don’t understand.

These days, I often receive envelopes filled with clippings from magazines and newspapers about the joys of motherhood, and sometimes, pictures of admittedly adorable infants, with a note saying, “Just saw this and thought that’s probably what your baby will look like!”

I was surprised she hadn’t found and sent an actual biological clock that would let me hear my reproductive minutes tick away.

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But this message was not a familiar number, and definitely wasn’t my mother’s, so I walked along and listened first with interest, and then confusion.

“Vesta here, although I’m not sure we’ve met. Maybe you dialed wrong?” the voice said. “But if not, call me again. I’m home now.” Of course her “now” had been a few hours ago, but I dialed the number she’d left because it filled the chilly walk to Merilee’s store. By the time the phone rang at Vesta’s, I was moving away from the busy center of the city to where the stores dribble away as you approach the river, the railroad station, and Penn and Drexel’s campus beyond.

I reintroduced myself and asked her why she’d phoned me.

“You phoned me, miss!” she said sternly.

“I’m afraid—”

“No. You did. I recognize your voice. You left a message on my machine last night. What is it you want?”

I had to stop walking, and think, and then I remembered the call to Gregory McIntyre. It had been a man’s voice on the machine, but Sally had said he lived with his widowed sister. “Ms.

McIntyre? I was trying to reach your brother. I guess I didn’t say that in my message.”

“You certainly did not,” she said. “Because if you had, I wouldn’t have phoned.”

“Is it possible to speak with him?”

“Surely. But I better warn you, it’s a long-distance call.”

“That’s all right.” Like my mother, I had unlimited dialing.

Unlike her, I used the powers so bestowed judiciously. “Whereabouts is he now?”

“In Long Beach. That’s California.”

The far end of the country. Gregory was on the lam. “Sounds nice,” I said, swiping at my runny nose and stomping my feet for warmth.

“Nice for him,” Vesta snapped.

“I guess on a day like this, we’d all like to be where it’s warm.”

“But some of us are responsible human beings. Some of us 165

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have to make sure the pipes don’t freeze and the bills get paid.”

Her voice sounded as if she kept its harsh edge permanently honed.

Gregory might well want to get away from home for reasons that had nothing to do with Phoebe. “Could you tell me how to reach him?”

She did, spitting out each number and then repeating them, at my request, as my cold fingers wrote them on a notebook.

“Will he be there long?” I asked.

She harrumphed. “He has a
friend
there.” She made “friend”

sound like a shameful word. “He sublets a room from the friend, bargain price, so he said he wouldn’t be back until it was warm here again.”

“Do you happen to know when he left Philadelphia?” I asked.

“Of course I do. Who do you think had to drive him to the airport? Besides, it’s the same day he went last year. November fif-teenth. Mid-November through mid-March, that’s when he’s in Long Beach. Doesn’t even stay here for Thanksgiving.”

Gregory had left town two weeks before Phoebe died. The role he’d played in her life was as one bad date, and he’d played no role whatsoever in her death.

I thanked his sister, and moved on, thinking that escaping to California did not sound like the worst idea.

Both my nose and eyes were running, but I’d reached Merilee and Phoebe’s once-hopeful business, its façade festooned with a soft yellow metal awning (“Golden Retriever blond” Merilee had once told me with a straight face), which echoed the color of the Top Cat and Tails logo written in script on the front window.

The shop reflected its downhill slide. A sign—in what I had to assume was Labrador Retriever black—said: “Going out of Business Sale: Everything Must Go.”

I had a quick fantasy of cockapoos, parrots, and boa constric-tors rushing, slithering, fluttering, galumphing into the store to snatch up bargains. But not only were they nowhere in sight, GILLIAN ROBERTS

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even their doting owners were among the missing. The shop looked empty.

That included most of the shelves, so perhaps the bargain-hunters had already been here. Merilee, with the same suddenly-old-and-defeated look that I’d seen at the memorial service, sat in a slump behind the cash register. The accelerated aging process was a matter of muscles loosening—as if she was no longer interested in keeping her face together. The net result was that her hair looked borrowed from somebody much younger. A bell rang when I opened the door, and Merilee looked up with no expression.

Then she activated herself, wrinkling her forehead for only a second, then nodding recognition. “I know you,” she said.

“You’re Phoebe’s stepdaughter’s friend, aren’t you? You were at the memorial.”

“Sasha’s friend Amanda, yes. I was walking this way—I’m on my lunch break—and saw the store. You remember, I was in with Sasha in the autumn.”

She nodded. Her bulldog, today in a tartan jacket, sat on a nearby chair, snuffling.

“So I thought I’d say hello. Sorry to see that the store is closing,” I said. “Are you relocating?”

It was a mean question because I knew the answer, but I hoped my purported ignorance—my appearance as a new set of ears to hear her woes—might get her talking.

“Don’t I wish!” The bitterness in her voice was so sharp, my taste buds cringed. “This had the makings of a gold mine. Started off so well.” She shook her head as if her thick red hair would erase whatever had happened after that great start.

When she didn’t say more, I once again primed the pump.

“What happened?”

“Sasha didn’t tell you? I’m sure Phoebe told her her version.”

She looked startled, eyebrows raised. As if waiting for me to admit that I knew what had befallen her.

I’d never cared much for Merilee, and her accusations about 167

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Phoebe had done nothing to make me think more highly of her.

So I wanted to be clear that I hadn’t come into the shop as her sympathizer. I wanted to make her stop considering herself the center of the known universe, the reference point for all of life’s events. I knew it was an impossible task. Perhaps years on the couch could have done it, but not a lunch-break visit to her store.

Still, I used the only ammunition I had—and poor stuff it was—

which was to let her know that her story was not on everyone’s lips, that a person such as I wouldn’t know what had happened to her. Of course, by that I meant a lovely, upstanding, non-gossipy person, who had never felt
schadenfreude,
had never delighted even mildly in another person’s ill fortune. A good person. An ethical person.

I was not that person.

I was appalled by the thoughts prancing and striking poses in my mind, even though I was hearing them from a distance because I was so far up on my high horse. But even at that lofty altitude, my unbearable self-righteousness was audible.

Yes, it was way past time for Merilee to learn that other people had feelings. And yes, it was sad and stupid and maybe heart-breaking when your husband decided to swap you for a newer model. But you were breaking the rules of womanhood when you transferred all your fury to your longtime loyal friend and business partner, who had nothing whatsoever to do with your marital woes.

“What happened?” Merilee asked rhetorically. “I’ll tell you what happened. Your friend’s stepmother—”

“Former stepmother.”

“Whatever. They were still close, as if the relationship hadn’t ever ended, and whatever you want to call her, she ran this business into the ground. Never pulled her weight, considered herself the ‘idea’ person. I know that her husband died and all. . . .” She cocked her head to the side for a moment, granting Phoebe that distraction. “But even so, this was our business. This was my life’s blood—”

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This was hogwash. Merilee hadn’t thought of working until finding an “amusing outside interest” became the chic thing for women in her circle to do.

“—and the capital for it, which is pretty much missing now, was provided by my . . . by me.”

Not her. Her husband. She couldn’t even gulp out his title, and I felt my first flash of sympathy for the hell she was experiencing.

And then she managed to make me stop feeling anything for her. “It was money left to him, and it’s gone. And now she’s dead!” She made the words an accusation. “Kills herself ! That makes it pretty damn impossible for me to ever prove what happened to the money, and she wrecked my marriage through it, drove my husband into another woman’s arms, and look!” Her arms waved at the emptiness around her. “I had to sell the inventory for cost so I can get out before another rent’s due. And now—what do I have? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! My whole life . . .” She reached for a tissue and blew her nose.

The bulldog looked up at her, panting and drooling sympathetically.

Even when I was in junior high, still defining what it meant to be a woman, when Merilee would stop over at the Bergs, she’d seemed misplaced in time, one of those 1950s Monroe-wannabe baby-doll women. “Cute and helpless” died out shortly after the dinosaurs as far as I’m concerned, but Merilee didn’t seem to have gotten the news. Even “cute” all by itself had a sell-by date, and Merilee was long past it. But until recently, until the dumping, she had played the worn-out, threadbare role for all it was worth.

That helplessness included having her husband provide her with a hobby in the shape of a silly store. Now she reminded me of a child who is being punished by having her toys taken away.

I wasn’t going to encourage her bratty behavior. “Surely,” I said in as mild a voice as I could muster, “surely you don’t really think that Phoebe deliberately wrecked your business.”

And the angry child face flashed again. “We—I could have 169

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done well, made a success of this place and . . . and . . . it’s a clever store, and people are crazy about their pets. She stole the money—cooked the books—did something! Why else were we so in the red all of a sudden? And then—she could have admitted it. That’s all I asked her to do, admit it, but she stonewalled me!”

She looked as if she actually believed what she was saying, and it chilled me to think that.

“Merilee, think. Why did you ask her to be your partner in the first place? You needed her retail expertise. You had none. You went into the red when your husband stopped underwriting the place. You were never truly making a—”

“We were! I was! I could have! And why do you think he stopped investing in it? Because she was ruining everything!”

“She” meaning Phoebe? When the other “she” was out there, tapping her stilettos, waiting for the divorce? Merilee had rewritten history whole cloth until it fit her comfortably, and the most necessary part of the weave was casting Phoebe as the devil and the source of all her grief.

I was suddenly sure I was looking at “M.” “M” as in mad, misguided, and malevolent. Maybe she’d meant to talk with Phoebe during the first visit, convince her to return the money—

the money Phoebe had never taken, of course. And maybe she knew Phoebe had sleeping pills, or they were there—or maybe she used her own prescription. Maybe it wasn’t premeditated at all.

But the second visit had been more frantic, and definitely planned. She must have thought that now that the house was empty, she’d find proof of what Phoebe had done, if not a stash of money itself.

Merilee-the-Murderer wept at the many injustices life had dealt her.

I surprised myself by feeling another wavelet of sorrow for her because like the child she was emotionally, she had few resources of her own, a warped image of what the world owed her, and no real coping skills. I couldn’t imagine how she’d manage GILLIAN ROBERTS

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now that she was being forced to grow up. Maybe Marc could provide her with a big enough settlement to allow her to fill her days with weeping spells, such as the one I now waited out.

Or prison would become her big surrogate sugar daddy. No more decisions to make on her own. But no more pedicures, either.

The snuffles and wails threatened to go on forever. I looked at the remaining wares on the store’s shelves to fill the time and give me something to do.

“You want to buy something?” she squeaked. Then she blew her nose and cleared her throat. The weeping spell was put on hold.

“I have a cat,” I said. “But . . .”

“Prices are really low. Cost.” This produced a short renewal of the miseries.