Swan Song (24 page)

Margo and May exchanged grins. “Yep, that’s our John, all right,” Margo agreed. “Then what happened?”

“John got through to the police on his Bluetooth and asked for emergency assistance at the library. Then he put his foot down. Frankly, I was terrified, but he wove through that traffic like an Indy 500 driver,” May confessed. “We got to the library just as two cruisers arrived, no sirens, just as John had requested. And the rest, you know.” This last was directed to me, since I had accompanied John and Martin to the police station to make a statement and had more up-to-date information than the others. Everyone looked at me expectantly.

I looked at my pizza and pushed it away. I was exhausted, and my stomach was more in the mood for chicken soup than greasy pizza. Still, the group assembled around the table deserved the whole story as I understood it. Doubtless, there would be details to fill in, but I was in a position to outline the big picture to them.

“First of all, John was able to learn that the autopsy on Lizabeth Mulgrew showed she died of an AVM, an arteriovenous malformation, in the brain. It’s sort of a tangle of abnormal and poorly formed blood vessels. She apparently had it for a long time and spent some time in the hospital many years ago, when it ruptured. That’s when she met Renata Parsons.”

May looked puzzled. “She met a literary agent in the hospital?”

“She wasn’t an agent back then. She was a surgical nurse training to be an anesthesiologist. Anyway, after meeting Lizabeth, it turned out she was more interested in making money than in helping patients, so she switched gears and went into business for herself as an agent.

“Lizabeth also had a career crisis at about the same time, deciding she would rather write books than publish them. She figured her chances of success as an author were slim, so she hedged her bet by writing under a pen name and recruited Lizabeth to market her book and keep her secret, which she did for some years.”

“She surely did, if even Auntie May had no idea about Wilhelm Trague’s true identity,” Margo commented, and her aunt nodded.

I continued, eager to get my recitation over with so we could all go home to bed. “Anyway, that worked well for a number of years, and both Lizabeth and Renata did very well financially over the sale of several manuscripts to Random House until Lizabeth had another AVM crisis last year. That can happen at any time, so life gets very iffy. There are no guarantees.”

“There never are.” Strutter’s detached voice floated from the Spiderphone. “It’s a valuable lesson to learn, and most of us learn it a lot sooner than Lizabeth Mulgrew did.”

“So that must be what prompted her to have some fun, as she called it in her letter, with her final manuscript,” Isabelle mused.

“She must have sensed that another rupture would be the last one,” May added. “Poor Lizzie, not having anyone to share that with. But then, she was always an independent cuss and a loose cannon right to the end, as it turned out.”

I took a sip of water. “That’s when things went wrong between her and Renata. Lizabeth had become aware that Renata had been cheating her out of royalty income from her previous manuscripts, and she refused to sign a representation contract with her for
Swan Song
. Not surprisingly, the news didn’t sit well with Renata. She totally lost it, according to her brother Martin.”

“Wait a minute. Martin Schenk is Renata Parsons’ brother?” We could hear the astonishment in Strutter’s voice, followed by the sound of Isabelle breaking into improbable laughter.

“What is so funny?” Marian wanted to know, as did we all.

“Just when I thought this situation couldn’t get any more ludicrous …” Isabelle choked, but she dissolved into giggles again.

Instead of being offended, as I feared she might, May grinned wryly. “Ludicrous, yes. An excellent description, proving once again the truth of the adage, ‘There’s no fool like an old fool.’ I’m the living proof of that.” Her smile faded.

Margo rushed to her aunt’s defense. “We were all taken in, Auntie May, not just you. He had us all believin’ he was who he said he was.”

I hastened to add my assurance. “It’s not as if he’s a completely rotten person. Yes, he lied about his true identity, but he did what he did to protect his sister. Nobody believes he had anything but the best intentions toward you. He was aware of Renata’s growing mental instability and followed her to the convention to keep her out of trouble and try to persuade her to get some help. He saw Renata hammering on Lizabeth’s door in the wee hours and hung around in the hallway to confront her when she came out, but by that time, it was too late—or at least, that’s what he thought.

“When Renata burst out the door and ran, he saw Lizabeth arranged in her bed, what did he call it, almost ceremonially? He thought it might be possible that Renata had been responsible for her death, and in a way, she probably was. The stress and fear engendered by her barging into Lizzie’s room may very well have triggered the final rupture. While trying to erase any evidence of Renata’s presence, Martin found the letter stuffed under the pillow. Everything he did from there was in an effort to keep Renata from doing you harm, May. For the past week he pretended to be helping her find the flash drive so he could stay close to her and keep her from hurting you. That’s what he said at the station, and I believe him. I think John does, too.”

We all sat quietly for a minute. Isabelle’s voice floated ethereally from the Spiderphone, all traces of laughter gone. “I never thought he was a bad person, May, and I still don’t. He very naturally was trying to protect his sister from herself, but it’s clear to me that he would have moved heaven and earth to protect you from her, as well.”

We heard Strutter clear her throat. “What she said,” she agreed.

May thought this over and nodded to herself. “What will happen to Renata now?” she asked.

“Well, the good news is she didn’t actually manage to do anyone in, but she certainly had the intent. She stalked and harassed you, and Martin confirmed that it was Renata who tore up your house, so that’s breaking and entering and the associated property damage. Then there’s the matter of the illegally obtained gun, although lord knows that’s easy enough to do these days. So there are many possible charges, but John believes she will be released into Martin’s custody and subjected to a professional evaluation. Further action will depend on those results. Either she’ll be charged and tried, or she’ll be committed, one or the other.”

The two young people were subdued, watching and listening as the details of the story unfolded, but finally their youthful curiosity reasserted itself.

“So what happens now?” Duane asked, reaching for yet another slice of pizza.

“Yes, what next?” Becky wanted to know.

Margo, May, Marian and I exchanged weary glances. “Now we clean up this mess, get Marian safely home and take ourselves back to Wethersfield,” I suggested. After that,” I shrugged, “I guess it will be up to each of us to figure out what’s next for ourselves.”

For some reason the month of June had come to represent the beginning of a new year to us, perhaps because it heralded the full-on start of the prime real estate season. After that, we would be flat out, and there would be few opportunities to fritter away an hour on chitchat. So each June, if the weather cooperated, we would find an afternoon to take a break from the workday, share a cappuccino somewhere in the sunshine, and talk about our plans for the coming year.

Sometimes we gathered on the memorial benches clustered in front of the Keeney Memorial Cultural Center on Old Main Street, but an unusually warm spell motivated us to visit the Main Street Creamery & Cafe farther down the street. Not only were the ice cream, baked goods, coffees and other treats exceptional, but the owner had gone out of her way to create a comfortable and welcoming presence in our little town. Free water on the shady veranda was available for thirsty people and dogs, and lots of comfortable seats offered an unfettered view of nearby gardens and bird feeders. It had become a favorite Sunday afternoon stop for Armando and me during the summer months, and we looked forward to it reopening each year. On this Wednesday afternoon our large-ish group was able to appropriate most of the seating, at least until school let out an hour or so hence.

We had many reasons to celebrate, not the least of which was the settling of Lizabeth Mulgrew’s estate. Attorney Henley had been accused of, and confessed to, the wrongdoings to which Renata had alluded during our confrontation at the Hubbard Library, and the affairs of his clients had been reassigned to other members of the bar. As Lizabeth had specified in her letter to May, publication rights to her final manuscript—
Swan Song
, written under the pen name of Wilhelm Z.B. Trague—were given to May with royalties to be paid to a charity of May’s choice. If she decided to have her little publishing company, Romantic Nights, issue the title, all other proceeds would accrue to her as owner and principal.

So far, we weren’t sure if that was her plan. Since the happenings of February, May had been withdrawn and thoughtful and spent a good deal of time outside of the office with Isabelle, who had become a good friend, as well as her business partner. Clearly, something was afoot, and they would clue us in when they were ready.

“Yum yum,” Margo enthused over her cherry vanilla cone. “I always forget from one summer to the next how good this ice cream tastes. How’s yours, Sugar?”

I licked my no sugar, no fat, chocolate ice cream from a plastic spoon and smiled. “Delicious and totally guilt free,” I told her. “I’ll bet the kids aren’t having anything fat free.” I nodded toward Duane, Becky and Strutter’s son, Charlie, who were taking turns letting Charlie’s little sister Olivia sample their sundaes and banana splits. “Enjoy your efficient metabolism while it lasts, Olivia, because that train will stop running sooner than you’d believe possible.”

Strutter just laughed at me. “It’s great to see the four of them together again. The spring term at UConn lets out so early, it seems as if it was just Christmas break.”

“Yet so much has happened since then,” May mused. Isabelle shot her a questioning look and raised one eyebrow.

“Shall we break the news now?” she asked May.

“It’s as good a time as any,” May responded. “Let’s do it.”

Isabelle took a lusty slurp of her root beer float and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “Okay, you start.”

“Goodness, how much news is there, Auntie May?” Margo looked a little alarmed.

May reassured her with a smile. “A lot, but it’s all good. For openers, I have a new listing for Mack Realty—my house on Wheeler Road. It’s been totally cleaned up and repainted inside since the vandalism, but I simply can’t face redecorating and replacing the furniture and all that. Besides, I’m afraid the house doesn’t hold many happy memories for me any longer, not like the house your Uncle Douglas and I shared in Atlanta.”

Now Margo looked truly stricken. “Auntie May, you’re not leavin’ us and movin’ back to Atlanta, are you?”

“No, no. I’m sorry. I’m not making myself clear. I’m moving, but not anywhere as far as Atlanta. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time over at Isabelle’s comfortable apartment at Vista View, and she’s persuaded me that a similar unit will be just the thing for me, so convenient for when we work together. In fact, I put a deposit down on one this past Monday. I move in the first of July, so you’d better hurry up and sell the Wheeler Road house. I plan to pay cash for my new unit.”

My partners and I looked at each other in amazement. “Okay, that makes sense, and of course we’ll help you out, but does this mean you’ll be vacating the upstairs of the Law Barn? You did just say you’ll still be working together, right?” I asked.

“Your turn,” May said to Isabelle, and she picked up the narrative.

“We will be working together, but not in the intense way we have been as partners in Romantic Nights. We’ll get
Swan Song
onto the market, because that’s what Lizabeth wanted May to do, but beyond that … frankly, the small publishing business has lost its shine. Lizabeth Mulgrew was absolutely correct about that. With the proliferation of self-publishing programs glutting the market with a million bad books every year, it makes no sense to invest the time and money we do in producing top quality books. The new rule of thumb for majority of the reading public is ‘good enough.’ Tight editing and high production values don’t matter to most readers anymore, and they certainly won’t pay for them. The bottom line is, we’re unwilling to fight the tide of mediocrity any longer. Life is too short, so we’re moving on to more satisfying endeavors.”

Strutter looked totally unsurprised by the news. “Such as what?” was all she said.

May and Isabelle grinned at each other. “So many choices,” May murmured. “Our only problem is what to do first. Thanks to Lizabeth’s generous legacy to me, we’ll have the money to fund a significant charitable enterprise. We’re thinking about a foundation to educate children about truly helpful ways to interact with wildlife, especially birds and waterfowl. You know, get ‘em while they’re young. Go from class to class throughout the school system and tell them the facts so they won’t think they’re doing the birds a favor by throwing stale bread and bagels to them. What do you think about that, Kate?”

I beamed. “Thank you! I think that’s a wonderful idea, and I know you’d be good at it. We’ve all seen how the kids in your neighborhood look up to you.”

May nodded. “Yes, I’d miss having children around, and I’m hopeful that some of the other Vista View residents will want to help out. It’s supposed to be a retirement community where visitors of all ages are welcome, not an old fogeys’ home.”

Margo and I laughed. “With you on the premises, May, I think there will definitely be some changes made. What else?”

“I’ll continue to write my Ariadne Merriwether series, of course, but new titles will be spread farther apart than they have been. Isabelle and I discovered we both would like to take a cross-country road trip …”