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Authors: Ellen Pall

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“Oh. How nice for her.”
“If I can do anything for you during the day tomorrow—”
“No, I'll just …”
Juliet subsided in mumbles. Her glance fell on the
Monthly Museum
again, and she turned the page. A book by Alexander Rowland, jun., titled,
An Historical, Philosophical, and Practical Essay on the Human Hair
was reviewed. She was still reading the notice as she picked up the phone once more. Maybe she could guilt trip Suzy into coming.
 
 
But it was not to be. The next day, at an unseasonably early hour,
Juliet lugged a suitcase full of warm clothes, no-frills toiletries, and books (on the history of sheep farming, the English commons system, and the Enclosure Acts) down the stairs to her front hall. She set them beside Mrs. Caffrey's repacked vintage valise, sealskin coat, and carpetbag. (These belonged to Free Earth now, and Suzy had asked her to take them away. Sitting in her spare room, they were reminders of a painful episode: Apart from the emotional toll, Ada
had never paid her, the man who ran the online reservations service where she used to list her B and B had seen her name in the papers and dropped her, and other members of her co-op were looking at her funny.) Then she went into the kitchen to check that the gas was off (it was) and returned to the front hall. She put on her coat and hat, wrapped her scarf around her neck, picked up her own purse, and went into the kitchen to check that the gas was off.
It still was.
She turned away, reassured, and started back to the front hall. The phone rang.
Juliet cursed. She dithered. Could it be Suzy, agreeing at the last minute to come? She had claimed to have work to do all weekend; Juliet suspected she was mainly working on Parker Scutt, but discreetly refrained from pressing the point. But if she had relented …
Juliet picked up the phone.
“Just wondered how you were holding up,” Murray's voice said easily. “Skelton been leaning on you?”
He sounded unusually relaxed, and there were none of the usual noises of the squad room, or whatever you called it, behind him.
“Not since day before yesterday, thank God. Where are you? Don't you work on weekends?”
“Sometimes. Four days on, two days off, that's the schedule. Today's an RDO for me. Regular day off,” he translated.
“Oh. Well, enjoy it. Listen, I appreciate your concern, but I have my coat on. I was just on my way out—”
“Oh yeah? Where are you going so bright and early?”
“As a matter of fact, I'm driving up to Espyville.”
There was a brief silence before Murray, no longer relaxed, asked, “What for?”
Juliet explained that she had been named in Ada's will.
“Yeah, I heard about that. That's why I was wondering about Skelton. So what are you telling me, you're going up there to look at her books and papers?”
“Yes.”
“Jule, you can't play detective. We've discussed this. It's dangerous, and it's against the law.”
“I'm aware of that,” said Juliet, as icily as her babyish voice would allow. “Now, if you don't mind—”
“I mean it, Jule. I don't want you up in Espyville running around asking questions. Not that there's anything sinister up there. As a matter of fact, Skelton and Crowder just came back from a trip there yesterday.”
“They did? What'd they learn?”
“Nothing. Nothing to learn. Everything's shipshape in Espyville.”
“What's Claudia Lunceford's story?”
“Story?”
Juliet felt herself starting to sweat. Reluctantly, she unbuttoned the top three buttons of her coat. “You know what I mean. Why didn't Ada leave the house to her?”
“The question is not why didn't she. The question is, did Mrs. Lunceford know she wouldn't? And the answer is yes. There's been bad blood between them for years. Apparently Ada Caffrey was the type to make a new will every two or three months or so—liked to imagine rewarding her latest friends, Nilsson says, or sometimes cut out someone she'd gone sour on. According to him, Mr. and Mrs. Lunceford were never in any will of Caffrey's that he knew of, and he wrote plenty for her. They had no expectation of inheriting.”
“Hmph,” said Juliet. “They say.”
“They say. Everybody says. Listen, Jeff Skelton's no dope. He says the Luncefords are clean, they're clean.”
“Uh huh. And did he meet with Matt McLaurin?”
“Who?”
“The Free Earth guy, the guy who does get—Oh, forget it.” On the brink of taking her coat off completely, Juliet hesitated, then changed her mind. “Look, Murray, I have a rental car I said I'd pick up by ten. I really have to be trotting along.”
There was a long silence, so long that Juliet wondered if he had quietly hung up. Then, “I'll come with you,” he said.
“What?”
“Trot my way. Better yet, I'll meet you at the rental car place, so you can sign me onto the contract. Where is it? I can be out of here in ten minutes.”
“You want to come with me?” Juliet tried to think if this was a good or a bad thing. Now it was her turn to ask, rather curtly, “What for?”
She could hear his smile as he answered, “To keep you a little company, as my grandmother used to say. How long are you planning to stay?”
“Overnight.”
“So I'll pack a bag. Listen, tell me where to meet you and let me go, or I'll be holding you up.”
“I'm staying two days,” Juliet warned.
“Perfect. I have two days. Jule, I'm serious, where's the car place? If I'm coming, I gotta get going.”
Now Juliet was silent, thinking hard. A child who grows up in Manhattan enjoys many cultural advantages. She may play hide-and-seek among the sarcophagi at the Met. She may learn to know people of every hue, practitioners of a dozen religions, denizens of a hundred nations. If she is drawn to theater or dance or music, she will find some of the greatest exponents of these arts a mere bus ride away. But, unless she is very lucky, she will not learn to drive.
Juliet had not learned to drive until she was twenty-three and in graduate school at Princeton University. Since then, she had seldom had occasion to go more than thirty or forty miles from home on her own. She often didn't drive at all for six months or longer,
and she hadn't been behind the wheel of a car since last May. Though she had tried to pooh-pooh her own fears, the prospect of zipping alone along a couple of hundred miles of highway into the frozen north had thoroughly dismayed her. A driving companion was the obvious answer, but Ames had her family wedding, Suzy her urgent work, and Dennis might have misunderstood her to mean she wanted to sleep with him.
Murray, on the other hand, could be counted on to be all business. It was true that he would probably try to hinder her planned investigations. But he must be an excellent driver.
In all three of which suppositions, she would shortly be proven quite wrong.
Mrs. Caffrey Under the Microscope
For whatever reason, on the drive up, neither Juliet nor Murray
raised the subject of Ada Caffrey, the missing manuscript, or anything at all touching murder. Instead, from the George Washington Bridge to the town of Catskill, they discussed beauty: why it had fallen from favor with artists and art critics (and in which order), why it persisted, its appeal and significance.
Unfashionably, Murray was very much involved with beauty in his sculpture. The oldest profession, he said, was not prostitution but painting—think of the drawings in the caves at Lascaux. For at least that long, man had hungered for imagery to reshape experience, share, preserve, manipulate, and reproduce it in a new way. Juliet did not disagree, but she wondered if beauty was not more a matter of individual association than social consensus.
Their talk meandered on as the miles fell away behind them. What with one thing and another, Juliet had arrived rather late at the rental agency. The Intrepid that Ames had reserved for her was gone; so were all the other ordinary cars of similar size. All that was left were a couple of Dodge vans and a Jaguar S-type. The rental agents were sorry. They would be glad to call another agency for her if she preferred. In fact, they had a branch of their own over on the East Side, down in the thirties. If Juliet wouldn't mind waiting for a
few minutes, they could call over there and set her up. She could jump in a cab, be down there in twenty, thirty minutes, and hit the road an hour from now—well, say an hour and a half, tops.
She took the Jag. It was red. It was not unobtrusive, but it certainly drove smoothly. Now, in its plush, leather-smelling front seat, conversation flowed. Was beauty intrinsic in the object or truly “in the eye of the beholder”? Could it be called central to the business of life when a pebble in the shoe could instantly break its spell? Why did one culture and time prize shapes and colors another scorned? How much did the symmetry of the human form account for human ideas of shapeliness and completion? As an evolutionary matter, was it all about sex?
They looked out the windows—the day was cold but the sky blue and the surrounding, snow-covered countryside increasingly pristine—and found examples. Was the appreciation of beauty a kind of happiness? Or only a pleasure? Or was pleasure happiness? Each question suggested another, so that the miles slipped away and Juliet forgot for minutes at a time that she was impelling a large mass of metal at the rate of a mile a minute among hundreds of other such masses, any one of which would, should it happen to hit them or she hit it, shatter at least two lives and probably more. This was the first time she had really thrashed out an abstract subject with Murray, and she could not help but notice that he argued (though she did not care to say so to him) like a girl. He didn't want to score points; he didn't care if he was “right” or “wrong”; he gladly turned his attention from his thought to her emendation if the latter seemed more interesting or suggestive. Their discussion was almost all inquiry and hardly any conclusion. This was in itself a pleasure, and she asked herself if it was also, in some sense at least, happiness.
As they neared Albany, however, she gave in to nature and announced her urgent need to visit a bathroom. They pulled in at the New Baltimore Travel Plaza for a quick, barely digestible bite and a cup of coffee. It was after this brief stop that Juliet learned that
being a police officer does not necessarily make a person an exemplary driver. Back in the parking lot, Murray took the wheel, revved the motor, sped past the gas station, rolled down the on-ramp to the highway, and, gunning the engine, inserted the rented Jaguar into a tiny gap between a passing Cherokee Laredo and the pickup truck tailgating it. He did it with surgical precision, she had to admit, but for no reason in the world, since behind the pickup (she saw on looking over her shoulder) there were no cars as far back as the horizon.
“So what about poetry?” he took up, cheerfully zipping across the empty middle lane to enter the busier farthest left.
They had been talking about the appeal of beauty to the senses: music to hearing, painting to vision, and so on. Before Juliet could answer, he had cut back to the middle lane and shot up to eighty to pass a BMW that had been just ahead of him. He slipped back into the left lane, only a foot or two in front of the Beemer, which honked angrily.
“What sense does poetry appeal to?” he asked, with a glance at Juliet that she thought considerably too long for safety.
“Didn't they teach you in policeman school that you're supposed to watch the road?”
He looked at her again—again for much too long, in her opinion. “You worrying about my driving?” He laughed a what-will-you-think-of-next? kind of laugh. “Come on. Poetry. Think.”
Juliet closed her eyes—it felt safer that way—and thought about poetry. Of course, good poetry should appeal to the ear—as music had pitch, tone, melody, rhythm, so poetry had rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and rhythm, too, and ought to be read aloud. But the poetry she cherished did not only please her ears but also corresponded to an inner sense of justness or balance. Did those count as senses? She and Murray were still exploring the ramifications of this question some three-quarters of an hour later when a sign directed them off the thruway toward Route 30, the road to Gloversville.
Murray took the ramp at fifty miles an hour, then slowed with stomach-wrenching abruptness as they approached the toll booths. They went through (Murray insisted on paying, and she let him) and turned onto 131, the road that would bring them northwest into Espyville.
It had been two weeks since the blizzard in which Mrs. Caffrey had disappeared; in any case, that storm had come into New York City from the west, then blown out to sea, missing Espyville and the surrounding hundred miles or so. Yet there was plenty of snow, piled in tall banks on either side of the road and covering almost every other object in sight. As they passed through a thicket of dark firs, Juliet suddenly remembered Ada's poem in memory of Frederick A. The abundance of hemlock trees, she had learned from Ada, was part of the reason Gloversville had developed into a leather-working center; from hemlocks came tannin, an acid necessary for tanning animal hides. In the poem, Ada linked those hemlocks with the other kind, the poisonous plant. Juliet thought of suicide, then murder. She glanced a little uneasily at Murray's rather flat, bony profile. She hadn't told him anything about her suspicions (if such vague wonderings could be called suspicions) of Matt McLaurin, his “angry” poems, her thought that he might have known about the legacy, might have followed Ada to New York and killed her. Come to think of it, if Ada was in the habit of remaking her will every few months—and if McLaurin knew she was—he had had a fine motive for bumping her off promptly. Stop me before I bequeath again … .
But Murray, Juliet feared, would laugh at her. And indeed, compared to a real theory, she supposed her foggy guesswork was risible. Yet since he was here, how could she best make use of him? He was a trained observer; it would be a shame not to profit by that.
As they drove past Amsterdam, Juliet took out her cell phone and called Cindy Giddy. She sounded sober enough today. Maybe she hadn't been smoking dope yesterday, after all, but just a regular
cigarette; maybe she had a cold and was groggy on Nyquil or something.
Espyville lay to the north of Gloversville, and Mrs. Caffrey's place was on the northern end of Espyville, just south of the “Blue Line,” as the boundary to the Adirondack Park was called. Nominally a hamlet, Espyville was really farm country. Barns, silos, and low outbuildings of snow-covered sheep farms and dairy farms whizzed by on both sides of the road, the people and animals hidden, on this frozen morning, indoors. Juliet noticed a FOR SALE sign at Red Clover Farm, then another on Lazy Acre Stables. In fact, it almost seemed every second property had a broker's sign before it.
A pickup truck carrying a muddy Skidsteer passed them, then another laden with rattling milk containers. The sharp, fragrant cold, so different from that of the city, crept into the car despite the heat from the busy engine. As they turned onto County Road 12, where Mrs. Caffrey had lived, tears came into Juliet's eyes. P.O. Box 10, County Road 12, had been Ada Caffrey's mailing address.
The road curved around a pond, then rose slightly as it approached the mountains. At the first stop sign, they began watching the tenths of a mile on the odometer. The Giddys' mailbox appeared on the right just where Mrs. Giddy had said it would, two-point-two miles along. The driveway was plowed and sanded, and a clear path had been neatly shoveled from it to a small, gray, well-kept ranch house at the near verge of the property, a handsome, considerable place, with a pond visible off to the east and an aluminum-sided barn (shut up, but recently painted) a couple of hundred yards back from the house sitting amid a wide expanse of virgin snow.
“GIDDY-UP FARM” announced a painted board that swung by two chains from the bare branch of a tree in the front yard. Beneath it, a metal FOR SALE sign marked in grease pencil “250 ACRES + HOUSE” was stuck into the snow. She recognized the Giddys' own phone number written on it.
Murray pulled up in front of the wide, closed garage and shut off the engine.
“Sh'I wait for you here?”
She hesitated. When she had imagined getting her first glimpse of Cindy Giddy, she had seen herself on her own. She hoped Cindy would invite her in, chat with her about this and that, the trip up, the weather, and, eventually, Ada. Juliet would like to learn what, if anything, the Giddys had known of the reason for her trip to New York, where they had been on the day of the blizzard, and, more generally, what they knew about their elderly neighbor. Ada had told her that Tom had inherited the farm after his parents died, so he had probably known her for many years. Juliet also hoped to pick up a detail or two to use in portraying the Giddys' fictional namesakes.
But she couldn't sit in their cheerful, roomy kitchen, quaffing hot apple cider and gorging herself on Cindy Giddy's homemade biscuits, while Murray waited in the car.
“No, come,” she said. “Just—let me take the lead, okay?”
Murray gave a quick, slightly facetious bow of assent. They left the car and walked up to the red door together. The doorbell chimed a lengthy imitation of Big Ben. Juliet smiled. The bell, the neatness of the house, the well-shoveled walkway, the very name “Giddy-Up Farm” all bespoke a kind of rustic orderliness that accorded well with her own invented characters. It also answered her question about whether the real-life Giddys were hurting for cash; they might not be wealthy, but they were not poor.
The door opened to reveal a tall, lithe blonde somewhere in her late twenties. She wore red hip huggers and, despite the cold, a brief red top that left the gold ring in her navel unconcealed. Her pale hair, perhaps an inch long, made a glowing aureole around a slender, ivory face dominated by large, lazy, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, dark brown eyes. Her nose was straight, her lips full, red, and perfectly curved. Her long, bare feet, the toenails painted scarlet,
were thrust into open-toed, three-inch heels. One toe sported a silver ring.
“I'm Juliet Bodine,” Juliet heard herself say. She felt confused, off balance. Could this be Tom and Cindy's daughter? “Is Mrs. Giddy—?” she began.
“I'm Mrs. Giddy,” the woman said, glancing briefly at her. Then, slowly, she turned her sleepy eyes to Murray. The eyes awoke as she favored him with a long, frankly carnal look. “You can call me Cindy,” she announced.
Juliet blinked, confounded. How could Cindy Giddy be in her twenties? Ada had told her she and her husband had inherited the farm from his parents. Naturally, Juliet had assumed they were older. Much older.
“This is my friend, Murray Landis,” she said, rallying herself to recover. She had a similar sensation to that which she had had when first meeting Ada—that this person was an impostor, too unlike her imagining to be real.
“Hello, Mr. Landis,” purred the real Mrs. Giddy.
Juliet saw a flush darken Murray's olive complexion.
“If I could trouble you for the key to Mrs. Caffrey's house?” Juliet interrupted, wondering if she would even be heard above the roar of Cindy's engines. There would be no homemade biscuits here—at least, not for Juliet. “I'll be sure to bring it back tomorrow.”
“Whatever,” said Cindy, turning away and so offering her visitors an opportunity to admire the parts of her that had previously been hidden. They were admirable. She sauntered from the door and into the bright kitchen visible at the back of the house, apparently undisturbed by the frigid air the open front door was admitting. Even from the doorstep, Juliet could see that this Mrs. Giddy had never decorated the house. The living room, glimpsed to one side of the front hall, was done up in early Americana and warm plaids. The kitchen, straight ahead, was papered with a pattern of oversized orange
kettles. The air was very warm and definitely gave off a scent of dope.
Cindy disappeared briefly into the kitchen, then sauntered back, key in hand. This time Juliet noticed how large her pupils were.
“Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help you,” she said, offering the key (and the help) not to Juliet but to Murray. She held it in such a way that he was forced to reach within a few inches of her chin to take it.

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