In Death's Shadow (5 page)

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. With that . . . what did you call it, viatical thing?"

"Viatical. That's right."

"Who did you work with on that, Brian?"

Brian patted his breast pocket. "I've got his card . . . whoops, wrong suit." He flashed me a crooked grin. "The guy's Jablonsky. First name, Gilbert. Has an office up in Glen Burnie."

"Thanks," I said. "Maybe I'll look him up."

"You do that," said Brian. "The man's a prince."

I strongly doubted that any princes lived in Glen Burnie, Maryland, a five-mile-long corridor of chain stores, fast food restaurants, and car dealerships, punctuated by traffic lights at every single intersection.

"It was really worth it," Brian added thoughtfully.

"Cashing in her policy?"

"No, I mean the chemo. It was hard on Valerie, for sure, but it gave us another year together. Didn't it?"

"I'm sure Valerie never regretted it," I said, thinking of Miranda. I was one hundred percent sure about Miranda. Although the Stone marriage seemed strong, at least on the surface, Valerie had never discussed her relationship with Brian, so how she might have felt about her husband in the privacy of her own home was another thing altogether.

I squeezed his hand. "Where's Miranda now?"

"Kat is bringing her."

"Kat?"

"Katherine. Valerie's mom."

"From New Jersey? I read that in the paper."

Brian nodded. "Valerie's father is a judge up there." He dropped my hand and turned to face the others. "What am I going to say to all these people, Hannah? Tell me, what am I going to say?"

I touched his shoulder with the palm of my hand, letting it rest there for several seconds, feeling the soft, damp wool. "Let them do the talking. You just nod and say, 'Thank you.' Nobody expects any eloquent speeches from you, Brian."

Brian nodded. "Kat's been a godsend. She wants Miranda to stay with them for a few weeks. They've got ponies—" Brian paused, looking puzzled, as if trying to remember who he was and what he was doing there.

"I think that's a fine idea," I said. I'd never met Valerie's parents, of course, but unless they had just been let out on parole or were dabbling in satanic cults, Miranda might feel more secure with them than batting around a big empty house with a father who was, to put it mildly, distracted.

"There they are now," Brian said.

Valerie's parents—a handsome couple of the "I'm running for political office and you're not" persuasion—swept into the room and were immediately surrounded by a gaggle of sympathizers. The Honorable Judge was a handshaker. Mrs. Padgett nodded and smiled, nodded and smiled, like a bobble-head doll. A professional multi-tasker, she somehow managed to control a purse strap that wanted to slip off her shoulder, a wayward strand of auburn hair that, in spite of all the hair spray, tumbled over an eyebrow, as well as a squirming Miranda, whose right hand she kept firmly clamped in her own.

"But I have to
go
!" Miranda wailed.

Valerie's mother bent down and without disturbing her perma-grin, warned, in a hoarse whisper that somehow carried clear across the room, "Not
now
, Miranda."

Miranda's legs turned to cooked spaghetti. She hung, suspended, an uncooperative lump on the end of her grandmother's silk-clad arm.

I smiled, almost feeling sorry for the woman. "Looks like your mother-in-law has her hands full."

"Yeah," said Brian. "Guess I better go bail her out. Excuse me, will you?"

I laid a hand on his arm. "No. I'll go. You have other things to do."

Brian flashed a grateful smile and tipped an imaginary hat. "Thanks, Hannah. Later." He turned to trade a low-five with a middle-aged hunk who'd been hovering nervously at his elbow for a minute or two. The guy bulged uncomfortably in his churchgoing suit as if he couldn't wait to get home and trade it in for jeans and a T-shirt. I left Brian and the bodybuilder to trade fitness tips, and went to introduce myself to Valerie's mother.

Physically, Catherine Padgett was a hard-edged, more shop-worn version of her daughter, but there the resemblance ended. Mrs. Padgett, as it turned out, was more than willing to allow me, a perfect stranger, to take Miranda off her hands. With a vague, distracted smile she probably reserved for loyal retainers, she passed the little girl over to me, then immediately resumed the conversation I'd so rudely interrupted. I'd never met Ellen Moyer, the mayor of Annapolis, but I recognized her from pictures in the paper.

So don't introduce me to the mayor, you insensitive clod! I'm just the nanny
. I sent a half-hearted curse in Mrs. Padgett's direction—
May lipstick stains defile your teeth
—then turned my attention to her granddaughter, my knees popping audibly above the strains of "My Heart Will Go On" as I knelt on the carpet next to the child.

"Hi, Miss Miranda. Do you remember me?" I didn't want her to think I was some creepy stranger.

"Yeth. You're Mrs. Hannah."

"That's right. I came to your house one day and your mommy and your daddy and you and me all went running in the rain!"

Miranda nodded sagely.

"So, why don't I call you Miranda and you can call me Hannah, just like friends."

"Okay."

Switching into grandmother mode, I asked, "Do you need to go potty, Miranda?"

Miranda nodded, her ponytails bouncing like springs.

Kramer, Jr. pointed us in the direction of the ladies' room which, when we found it, was decorated in soft peach tones, a welcome relief from the relentless sea of blue. Miranda and I discovered that one of the two stalls was already occupied by a pair of slim ankles in bright red, high-heeled sandals.

I ushered Miranda into the other.

To my surprise, Miranda was wearing disposable pull-ups.

"Mommy's gonna buy me big girl panties," Miranda chirped as I boosted her up onto the commode.

"Wow," I said, trying to sound impressed. After two weeks of potty training, Chloe, at three, had already reached that milestone. I suspected she could have nailed it in two days flat, but Emily was bribing her with M&Ms, so the little scamp had drawn it out, milking the training for all the M&Ms she could get.

Miranda sat primly on the toilet, producing nothing but the tap-tap-tap of her patent leather heels against the porcelain. "Don't watch me," she said.

"Okay." I pulled the stall door toward me and held it closed while Miranda tinkled, waiting for the telltale rumble of toilet paper spinning off the roll. From the stall next door came an unmistakable sound. The owner of the red shoes was quietly retching.

"You okay in there?" I asked.

"Fucking clams!"

"Is there anything I can do?"

The red shoes turned, heels facing out, and a bright floral hem floated down, gently covering them. I knew the next sound, too: the dry heaves.

When I'm sick to my stomach, nothing feels better than a cool washcloth across my forehead. I was heading for the paper towel dispenser when I noticed Miranda had hopped off the toilet seat and was crouching on all fours, peering under the partition into the adjoining cubicle. "That lady's throwing
up
,” Miranda crowed.

"Go away!" the lady whimpered.

I tried again. "Are you sure there's nothing I can do?"

"Just get that damn kid out of here and leave me the fuck alone!"

I grabbed Miranda's arm and eased her gently to her feet. "C'mon, Miranda. The lady wants some privacy."

With one chubby hand Miranda tugged at her pull-ups. "What does fuck mean, Mrs. Hannah?"

I bent to help Miranda with her panties. "It's a very, very bad word."

Miranda smiled up at me slyly. "My mommy says I should never say fuck. Only bad people say fuck."

"Your mommy is right, Miranda," I said, fighting the urge to giggle. Whatever explanation Valerie had given her daughter, the child was clearly seeking a second opinion.

"Is that lady bad?" Miranda asked, pointing toward the occupied stall.

"No, the lady's not bad. She's just not feeling very well."

"My mommy gives me ginger ale," Miranda offered helpfully.

"Maybe somebody will give the lady ginger ale, too, Miranda," I said. But, I thought, it sure as hell ain't gonna be me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In olden days, a woman waved her sailor off with
a perfumed handkerchief and a kiss, then paced the widow's walk until his sails reappeared on the horizon.

Nowadays, we send them off with plastic bags full of Snickers bars and wait for a call on our cell phones.

But nothing has changed about the kiss. I planted a good one on Paul, then stood on the seawall and watched until
Northern Lights
was a tiny white triangle against the far, dark shore of Kent Island.

Then I went home to look for my life insurance policy.

I started with the Bombay chest in the living room where Paul keeps Important Papers—capital I, capital P. Frankly, I don't go there very often. It holds our old checkbooks, of course, so you'd think I'd open the drawer from time to time, but after I got cancer, I gave up balancing checkbooks. Numbers had never been my friends, and as it appeared that my days
themselves
could be numbered, I didn't want to spend a single one of them fooling around with numbers.

Besides, Paul can extract square roots in his head. He does our accounts on Quicken. And he
loves
his Turbo-Tax. "It's the most challenging computer game in the world," I've often heard him say. "If you play it right, you get money back. If you play it wrong, you go to jail."

H&R Block and I? We love that in a man.

I sat cross-legged on the rug, pulled open the drawer and began to paw through its contents. I found checkbooks going back to 1985, the deed to our house, titles to the cars; and in the back, held together by a green rubber band, were Emily's report cards from elementary school. In kindergarten, I noted, my daughter "played well with others." She still did, I mused. There was a lot to be said for that.

Why Paul would want to hold on to a deed to one square inch of land in Alaska from a 1950s Ralston cereal promotion was completely beyond me, but underneath our precious toehold in the Klondike, I found what I was looking for: a fat brown folder marked, in Paul's neat square capitals,
insurance.

Inside there were pockets for House, Car, and Life, and an empty, achingly optimistic pocket labeled "Boat." I pulled an accordion-like document with my name on it out of the "Life" pocket, unfolded and read it through, including the fine print.

If I died tomorrow, Paul would be a quarter of a million dollars richer. He could buy that boat, I thought, and a nice one, too, although I prayed he would wait a decent amount of time before allowing some
other
woman to lounge about the bow in her tankini like a hood ornament.

I tucked the insurance documents into my handbag, then wandered upstairs to put the rest of my outfit together.

What's appropriate when bartering with strangers for one's life? I decided on a lime green frock with splashes of white because it gave me a demure, slightly vapid look. I wiggled into some panty hose, then buckled on a pair of white-white sandals with two-inch heels and tottered over to the Imari dish on my dresser where I keep my hair ornaments. I selected a rhinestone-encrusted bobby pin and slid it into the cluster of curls over my right ear.

I was done.

No I wasn't. A vision of my life insurance policy poking out of that lumpy brown leather object presently masquerading as a handbag in my entrance hall sent me back to the closet for a small white clutch that had once belonged to my mother. I pulled out the spaghetti-thin strap that was tucked inside and suspended the bag from my shoulder. I minced over to the full-length mirror hanging on the back of our bathroom door to check the results. If my sister Ruth could see me now, she'd be laughing her caftan off: Mary Tyler Moore, circa 1965, on her way to make life miserable for Alan Brady.

I certainly hoped so.

I drive an old LeBaron, an orchid-colored convertible that I wouldn't trade for anything—unless a sweet deal on a vintage Mercedes 450SL happened to come along. Making the most of a beautiful day, I cranked down the top and let the wind run riot through my hair as I sped north on Ritchie Highway as fast as traffic would allow.

I had looked up Gilbert Jablonsky in the yellow pages and discovered he worked for an outfit called Mutually Beneficial Financial Services Group. MBFSG had offices in Bowie, Laurel, and Greenbelt, Maryland, but Jablonsky hung his hat in a building in Glen Burnie, not far from the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles.

Jablonsky's building, when I found it, was newly constructed of pink polished stone, rising smugly above the squalor of the neighborhood. If Jablonsky and Co. hoped they were setting a good example to which their neighbors would rise, they must have been sadly disappointed. A bank kiosk, a gym, a pizza parlor, and a store called Party City occupied an adjoining strip mall that might have been state-of-the-art in the 1970s. On the opposite side, a brushless car wash and detailing center had spruced up a bit with colorful murals and tree-sized potted palms, but it would take more than a good example, I thought, to get Manny to remove that wrecked car from the roof of his auto body shop.

I parked in the shadow of Manny's, gathered up my purse and cell phone, and, leaving the top down, went off to see whether the inside of Jablonsky's building would live up to the outside.

It did.

MBFSG had a suite of offices on the sixth floor, lushly decorated in peach, celadon, and cream. Framed prints from the National Gallery of Art decorated the walls, and, standing proud and tall in an oriental-style pot on the receptionist's desk, was a lipstick red amaryllis in full bloom.

"Is Mr. Jablonsky in?" I asked.

The receptionist considered me with cool, green eyes. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No," I admitted. "But I was in the neighborhood and was hoping I would catch him in."

"Who shall I say?" she asked, plucking a ballpoint pen from a MBFSG coffee mug—red with white letters—sitting next to her monitor.

I told her my name and she jotted it down on a yellow Post-it pad. "Have a seat," she said. "I'll see if he's available." She ripped the Post-it off the pad and wandered down a short hallway with the Post-it stuck to her thumb.

A few seconds later she was back, without the Post-it. "He'll see you now," she said, and ushered me into a small but attractively furnished office with a picture window overlooking the parking lot. If he leaned back in his chair, Gilbert Jablonsky could easily sail paper airplanes through the front door of Amore Pizza. Right now, though, he was on the telephone.

"I think we need to cut our losses on that one, Alex." Jablonsky stood and covered the mouthpiece with a beefy hand. "Sorry," he whispered. "I'll just be a moment." He nodded vigorously at something the person on the other end of the line was saying, but his eyes were all over me. "Please. Sit." He waved vaguely at a pair of upholstered chairs placed side by side, facing his desk.

I smiled.

I sat.

I arranged the skirt of my dress modestly over my knees, folded my hands on top of my handbag and gazed demurely at Jablonsky as he continued his conversation. His voice was deep and resonant, so resonant that I thought he could moonlight doing voice-overs. Darth Vader came to mind, or the voice of God in
The Ten Commandments
.

Gilbert Francis Jablonsky, Jr., CFO—or so it was engraved on the nameplate on his desk—was tall and tanned, with a generous shock of salt and pepper hair which he'd recently had trimmed, causing his ears to stand out like handles on a sugar bowl. He wore a blue and white striped long-sleeve shirt tucked into the waistband of slim, beltless navy blue trousers held up by a pair of pink paisley suspenders. He had neatly draped his jacket over a hook on a wooden coat tree near the door.

As Jablonsky talked—to someone in Florida about reverse mortgages—he paced. "Nuh-uh," he said evenly. "CJ.'s a big boy. Don't you think it's time he learned to pull his own chestnuts out of the fire?"

Apparently, Jablonsky didn't like what he heard, because he frowned. "Well, sir, just ask him to think it over and get back to me." And he hung up quietly without saying good-bye.

Jablonsky eased into his chair and leaned forward. "So," he said, turning his full attention to me at last. "What can I do for you, Ms., uh . . ." He glanced at the Post-it.". . . Ms. Ives. May I call you Hannah?"

"Sure," I said.

"Gil."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Gil. Please call me Gil."

"Oh, sorry." So far I was coming off as something of a dingbat.
Begin as you mean to go on
, Mother always used to say. "Gil," I began, trying it out. "Well,
Gil
," I continued, easing into my role, "I was talking to this friend of mine? And she said . . ." I flapped a hand." . . .well, never mind what she said, but she told me all about viaticals and, well, I've got this
life
insurance policy? So I—"

Jablonsky held up a hand. "Whoa! Back up a minute!" He smiled, revealing a row of straight, ultra-white teeth. "Most people have never even heard the term 'viatical,'" he commented. "I'm impressed. So, how did you find out about me?"

"My friend, Valerie Stone?" I said, lacing my fingers together and twisting them nervously this-way-and-that. "Valerie and I talked about it a lot. Before she . . . before she died."

"Valerie Stone," he repeated thoughtfully. The crease between his brows deepened. "Ah, yes. I remember Valerie well. Young. Very young. Such a pity."

I nodded.

"She had a child, too, didn't she?"

I nodded again. "Yes. Miranda. She's four."

"That's the hardest part about this job, Hannah. Losing my clients."

"But Valerie was sick," I reminded him. "
Real
sick."

"Most of my clients are." Jablonsky's chair creaked, protesting, into an upright position. He rested his forearms on the leather blotter and flashed me a solicitous smile, as if it had just occurred to him that I might be one of those moribund customers, too. "But," he added quickly, "as Valerie's friend you probably know that her death, regrettable as it may have been, was, all too sadly, inevitable. With the money we were able to negotiate for her, though, she was able to live out her last days in comfortable fashion." He paused. "
Very
comfortable fashion."

I blinked rapidly, fighting back tears that were all too real. "That's what I'm here to talk to you about, Mr. Jablonsky."

"Gil," he reminded me.

"Gil." I studied my thumbnails. "I've got cancer, too, you see."

Jablonsky sucked in his lips, closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side. "Damn," he said simply.

I fumbled for my purse, pulled out my policy and laid it on his desk, smoothing out the creases. "I saw what you did for Valerie and figured you might be able to do something for me, too."

With two fingers, Jablonsky slid my policy toward him across the desk. He folded his hands on top of it, making no move to read it. “Tell me about yourself, Hannah."

So I hit him with my whole medical history, skating just a bit over the question of my prognosis, which was probably much too excellent for his purposes, thank you very much.

Jablonsky made listening noises—
uh-huh, gee, um, oh-yes, I see
—at all the right places, and when I got to the part about how disfigured I felt after surgery, he closed his eyes, tapped his tented fingers against his lips and said, "That must have been rough."

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. You had to hand it to the guy:
great
bedside manner. Next thing you know, he'd talk me into letting him remove my appendix with his letter opener.

He raised an encouraging eyebrow, so I rattled on and on. When I ran out of steam, Jablonsky thanked me, then skimmed over my policy, flipping through pages at a furious rate, explaining the fine points of viatical settlements to me as he went along. "I see your husband is beneficiary."

"That's right."

"Should we bring him on board?"

"Oh, Paul's away on business," I cooed, "but if he were in town, he'd be sitting right here next to me." I patted the seat of the empty chair to my right.

In point of fact, if Paul
had
been listening, he wouldn't be sitting anywhere. He'd be flat out on the floor, having a coronary.

Jablonsky examined the last several pages. "Mostly boiler plate," he murmured, picking up a pencil, "but there are some goodies in here." He jotted something down on a pad of lined paper, then looked up at me with a sober smile. "We'll need a certificate from your doctor, of course."

"Of course." I nodded sagely.

"Then, depending on what he says about your prognosis, we should be able to do something very nice for you."

"Can't you tell me how much my policy's worth now?" I asked. "I'd like to surprise my husband when he gets back."

Jablonsky chuckled, as if I'd said something amusing. "I don't buy the policies myself, Hannah," he explained, "I'm just a broker. More like a matchmaker, really." He grinned. I swear to God, the guy practically
twinkled
! "What I do—with your permission, of course—is shop your policy around to the various viatical settlement firms I usually do business with. When we hear back from them, I'll call you in, we'll sit down at a table, look over the proposals and take the best offer."