Swan Song (25 page)

“Just like Thelma and Louise,” Isabelle giggled.

“And audit some classes on classical music and the great artists.”

“And learn how to construct crossword puzzles,” Isabelle put in eagerly. “I’ve done them all my life, so I know a lot about them. Merl Reagle was my idol. I just loved his puzzles. I wrote him a fan letter once, and he actually took the time and trouble to call me. Now that’s class. Imagine having one of my own puzzles appear in
The New York Times
one day.” Isabelle sighed with anticipation. “Of course, I’ll have to work up to that.”

Margo snorted. “Ya think?”

We all smiled at the thought as we finished up our ice cream. The four youngsters swarmed up to us, strong and feisty, enjoying the day and each other’s company. At that moment, I felt that anything would be possible for them, and I looked forward to seeing what the next few years would bring for each one.

Charlie Putnam, his eyes the same clear aquamarine as his mother’s, hoisted Olivia onto his shoulders as she shrieked. Perhaps because they were twelve years apart, there had never been anything approaching sibling rivalry between them. She doted on him, and he on her. “Okay if we take Olivia over to the pond to check up on the swans?” Charlie asked Strutter.

“Sure,” she said easily. “Just keep a close eye on her around the water, and be home by four o’clock. What’s the latest on the cygnet watch?” she said, addressing this last to Duane and Becky.

A couple of weeks ago, the two swans had separated during the day, for the most part, and it looked as if one of them might be sitting on a nest back in the marsh. If true, that would mean a swan family would once again be resident on the Spring Street Pond, but nothing definitive had been learned as yet.

“Don’t know yet, but either Goofy or Doofus—I still can’t tell them apart unless they’re standing right next to each other—swims around close to shore, begging for handouts like the bums the misguided human beings have turned him into, while the other one hangs back in the marsh.” Duane shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Even if the other one isn’t a nesting female, it will be nice to have a couple of swans in our feathered band,” Becky smiled. “This town could use a little diversity.”

Charlie slung one strongly muscled, brown arm around Duane’s shoulders and grinned at her. “Oh, I think we’ve got that covered, Beck. Look at us, a bossy white girl, a gay man and a brother.” He laughed out loud. “Come on, even if there aren’t any cygnets, I want Olivia to see the baby geese.”

“Goslings,” Strutter, Becky, May, Isabelle and I corrected him simultaneously.

“Wow, this is worse than sitting in a lecture hall,” he grumped, then turned and galloped off toward his disreputable, ten-year-old Honda, his sister giggling with glee as she hung onto his head. Duane and Becky followed, jostling each other like the children they still were, at least in our eyes.

“Speaking of offspring,” said Strutter, looking after them fondly, “what’s going on with Emma? Has she decided to move to Portland?”

It was my turn to smile, this time with pure relief. “No, thank heaven. She and the boyfriend have decided they’re not a good fit for the long haul. They had a lot of fun together, but that was about it, so she’ll be back in a few days.”

“You mean he turned out to be a dick,” said Margo, ever the romantic. “I thought this one was really the one.”

I frowned at her characterization, even though it was partially accurate. “It’s like my very first boss told me years and years ago after she watched me break up with one boyfriend or another. Gaither Lee Martin from Lubbock, Texas, she was, and for the two years I lived in California, she was my boss and mentor and mother all rolled into one.”

Margo and May turned affectionate eyes on each other and nodded in understanding. “So what was it she used to tell you?” May asked.

I thought for a minute to make sure I got it right. “She’d say, ‘Sugar, I like men better’n I like chocolate candy, but I could always take or leave ‘em both.’”

That produced a predictable laugh and ended our reminiscences on a high note. Reluctant to leave the birds and the sunshine, but beginning to feel the tug of our various responsibilities, we tossed cups and napkins and spoons into the trash and recycling bins and turned our steps back up Old Main Street to the Law Barn. It was a route we had traveled hundreds of times over the past decade and knew almost by heart, yet it never got old for me.

“What about Mack Realty?” Isabelle wanted to know. “What’s new and exciting for the new year for the three of you?”

As if they were somehow thinking the same thing I was, Margo and Strutter gazed around at the familiar buildings and gardens. Most of them were older than we were, and yet many of their histories and those of the people who occupied them were as familiar to us as our own. Old Main Street had become home to us in a way no other place ever could.

“It’s hard to put into words,” Margo said. “Every day brings the possibility of a new adventure, so I don’t really feel as if we need to make plans.”

“It’s familiar and new at the same time,” Strutter added. “Every client has a story, and we get to play a part in it, so it never gets old for me. I don’t think it ever will.”

“The events of the past few months have surely made that clear,” I agreed. “We all go through the same things in life, but each of us sees them a little differently. It helps to have good friends to give us new perspectives. Sometimes all the future takes is fresh eyes.”

“I hear that,” May smiled, and on that note, we let ourselves into the Law Barn and got on with the day.

A lifelong Connecticut resident, Judith Ivie has worked in public relations, advertising, and the international tradeshow industry. She has also assisted several top executives in corporate and nonprofit settings.

Early in her career, Judi authored three nonfiction books, as well as numerous articles and essays. In 2006 she broadened her repertoire to include fiction, and the popular Kate Lawrence mystery series, set in historic Wethersfield, Connecticut, was launched. All are available in trade paperback, e-book and audio book formats at a variety of online sites.

Whatever the genre, she strives to provide lively, entertaining reading that takes her readers away from their work and worries for a few hours, stimulates thought on a variety of contemporary issues and gives them a laugh along the way.

Learn more about Judi and her Kate Lawrence Mysteries at
www.JudithIvie.com
or contact her at
[email protected]
.

Sample another great mystery in the

Kate Lawrence series.

Drowning in Christmas

by Judith K. Ivie

“I wouldn’t ask you,” said my ex-husband, “but I’m desperate. I really need your help here.”

“No,” I said.

“Did you hear the desperate part, Kate?” Michael wisely refrained from whining, which he knew would only make me crankier. Instead, he allowed sufficient time to pass for his surprising request to replay in my mind. Yes, the man had to be on the edge.

I sighed heavily and closed my partner Strutter’s copy of
A Homemade Holiday,
which was supposed to be giving me great ideas on how to cook a Christmas goose. Something told me that my goose was pretty well cooked already. As ex-husbands go, mine was about as agreeable as they get, but this conversation sounded like big trouble to me. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the headache that began to throb through my temples.

“You know I don’t even attend weddings anymore, Michael, let alone organize one. Not now, not ever again. I endured enough family weddings, birthdays, anniversary parties, and holiday gatherings in the twenty-two years we were married to last me the rest of my life. I just send a lovely gift and decline the invitation. I’m done, through, finished. Am I getting through to you?”

“The fact that I’m even asking you should give you some idea of my state of mind.” Michael dropped his voice several decibels, the better to keep our conversation private from his present wife, I presumed. “Sheila already has her hands full with her teaching and the holiday pageant at the school, plus her mother will be spending Christmas with us this year.” He paused to let the full horror of having Sheila’s ditzy maternal relative as a houseguest sink in. “Having a wedding in this little apartment would be impossible under the best of circumstances, but right now …” He trailed off miserably.

Grudgingly, I admitted that he had a point. After years of working and saving, he and Sheila were finally on the verge of seeing their dream house, currently under construction on Lake Pocotopaug, become a reality. Having been lucky enough to sell their previous house sooner than expected in the current crummy real estate market, they were waiting out the final months of construction in a one-bedroom rental, not the ideal setting for a family wedding.

“So rent the church hall or the V.F.W. or a room at the community center,” I countered weakly, knowing that would never do. Schmidts were married at home. It was a family tradition with which I was well acquainted. Michael and I had been married in his parents’ living room nearly thirty years ago, and we had hosted our share of nuptials for cousins and nieces in our own home in the ensuing years. Still, I wasn’t caving in without a fight this time. I had quite enough on my plate already.

Michael regrouped and tried another approach. “We just need your house for the afternoon. Well, maybe the evening, too. There has to be a little party after the ceremony. You and Armando wouldn’t even have to be there, if you didn’t want to be. The caterer will do absolutely everything, including the clean-up. It’s just family and a few friends.” He played his ace. “Come on, Kate. I wouldn’t ask you, but you are Jeff’s godmother, after all. If you won’t do it for me, do it for him.”

That one hit the mark. When it comes to family ties, I’m notoriously unsentimental. I firmly believe that you can choose your friends, but your relatives are thrust upon you without your having any say in the matter. I have no great fondness for my mother’s and father’s numerous kinfolk, so I have aunties and first cousins I literally wouldn’t recognize on the street; but for Michael’s nephew Jeff, I have a soft spot. He’s the youngest of the three sons of Michael’s late brother and his wife, who were taken in an automobile accident several years ago.

Jeff’s quirky outlook and lightning-quick wit endear him to me, as well as to my son Joey and daughter Emma, above all of their less-interesting cousins. Besides, as Michael pointed out, I am Jeff’s godmother, however reluctantly I had agreed to assume that role upon his birth. I had performed my duties casually in the twenty-five years since, but now that Jeff’s parents were no longer among us, who else was there to help him out with his wedding? My heart softened.

I carried the phone and my coffee mug to the back windows of my freestanding condominium unit and gazed at the gray December landscape. My elderly cat Jasmine was perched on the back of the sofa. She stared fixedly at three wild turkeys pecking contentedly on the snowless lawn. No doubt they were grateful to have dodged a bullet now that Thanksgiving was safely past.

“When is this wedding in my house that I don’t have to attend supposed to take place?”

Sensing that he still had a shot, Michael brightened. “The twenty-seventh, which is the Sunday after Christmas. Jeff has to leave for North Carolina two days later, which is why he and Donna decided to move up their wedding date. The University offers housing for married graduate students only. Hey, you won’t even have to decorate, since even you must leave your Christmas stuff up until New Year’s Day.”

I ignored this slur on my holiday spirit. “Great. You do realize that Emma is bringing her new boyfriend here on Christmas Eve to meet us. Jared, I think this one is named, and I’m expected to do the whole Norman Rockwell bit. Chestnuts roasting, pumpkin pie, et cetera et cetera. She’s gone a little nuts over this guy, and she’s taking me with her. When you called, I was looking at recipes for roast goose.”

“You’re cooking a goose?” The disbelief in Michael’s voice was evident. Then, straying from the point as he often did, “Why not turkey?”

I considered my feathered friends, now making their leisurely way toward the marsh that bordered The Birches. They strolled the grounds of our Wethersfield, Connecticut condominium community daily and roosted in the surrounding trees at night. Before I’d come to live here, I hadn’t known that turkeys can fly. Now I regularly watched them helicopter up to their favorite branches as the sun slipped beneath the horizon.

“Too much like pets, I guess.” Truth be told, I wasn’t much looking forward to roasting a goose either. The things we do for our children. “So the situation is that I’m entertaining Emma’s steady on Thursday evening, and three days later, I’m throwing a wedding.” I sighed again. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and it was for Jeff and his absolutely darling fiancée Donna, whom he had been dating since high school.

I could almost hear the grin of relief breaking across Michael’s amiable face. “I’m telling you, this caterer is incredible. You won’t have to lift a finger, Kate. He and his staff will do everything … food, flowers, music, photographer. They bring everything in and take everything away afterwards. Sheila’s friend Millie used him for her daughter’s wedding last summer.”

The headache teased behind my eyes again, and I interrupted Michael’s rhapsodic litany. “Okay, okay, I get it. I won’t have to do a thing.”
Yeah, right.
“So send out the invitations, and let’s get it done,” I said rashly. “Now can I go to work, please?”

“You bet, sure! Thanks a million, Katie. You’re the best. We’ll talk again in a couple of days.” He was gone before I could take back my words.
Not that I would,
I amended my thoughts guiltily. I swallowed the last of my tepid coffee and watched the turkeys melt into the marsh, becoming one with the colors of the dried undergrowth. Now you see them, now you don’t.
Invisibility has its appeal,
I thought wistfully. At the moment, I was feeling far too visible, not to mention vulnerable, on several fronts.