Twillyweed (24 page)

Jake did as he was told. But as I took my leave, he held my eyes with such trusting devotion that I was overcome with guilt. Never mind, I told myself, grown-ups had business to attend to and this was Enoch's fault, not mine. I made it as far as the door and then made my mistake, turning for one last look at Jake's rumpled face, his broken ears that someone had once tried to trim then given up and so they hung like floppy, clobbered leaves. He'd dropped his gaze at the sound of the doorknob, knowing I was really off, and now his gaze held on to nothing, where it would be stuck for hours and then days, no doubt imagining that I'd been devoured by predators and would never come again.

Jenny Rose was alarmed to see me emerge with a bounding, colossal dog, a duffel bag, a doggy bed, and a whopper-sized bag of dry food. “What is it?” she cried in fright.

“He's part pit bull, part Irish wolfhound they tell me. His name is Jake.”

Wendell, utterly unafraid, threw open his arms in delight. He scooted over right away and patted the seat beside him. Jake tumbled in.

When we were well onto the Northern State and both boy and dog had fallen asleep, Jenny Rose said sternly, “You didn't tell your mum we've got the stones.”

“How could I tell her? She'd worry herself sick. She's got a stent, you know.”

“Yeah. It's bad enough she thinks you've got AIDS.”

“And now I've got to go get a blood test.” I squirmed in my seat. “That bastard!”

“At least you won't miss him now you're so mad at him.”

“That's true.” I shook my head in exasperation. “As if we don't have enough to worry about with the moonstones! What are we going to do?”

“Beats me.” She worried a cuticle with her teeth.

“Well, we've got to tell Mr. Cupsand,” I said. “That's the first thing.”

“What? And what if he's the one who stole the gems to start with?”

“Oh, don't be silly.”

She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the boy was still asleep. “Don't be silly? Listen to you!
Some
body stole them. Wendell got them somehow. You just want to go straight to Daddy, the male authority figure, so it's out of your hands.”

I opened my mouth to argue but I realized she was right. I said, “It could have been anyone. Wendell's teacher. A kid in school. Maybe we should go to the police.”

“Oh, that's smart. I'll be the first one they suspect. Working illegally. They'll send me back.”

“Hmm. Well, we've got to tell someone. We're in over our heads here.” We drove in silence. Then I said, “Maybe my mother's right and the statue is the real object of value. Then the stones could have been used to pay off the thief. If we find the thief, we find the buyer.”

Jenny Rose glared at me. “Who are we, Detectives Scott and Bailey?”

I gave her a hard look and she said, “Right. I'll make a list.” She ruffled around Morgan's glove box and came up with a ballpoint and paper.

I said, “Clearly, what we're looking for is a collector. Fine arts. That sort of thing.” Even as I said it, I thought of Morgan.

“That reminds me,” Jenny Rose said, “the day I pulled Radiance out of the drink, there was something suspicious about it. Come to think of it, she wasn't very grateful. And she had marks on her. I thought at the time I'd done them but the more I think about it, it doesn't fit. Now I'm sure of it. See what I'm saying? Maybe she's afraid of someone.”

Startled, I looked at her. “You mean like someone threw her in?”

Jenny Rose shrugged. “What the fuck do I know?”

Again I thought of Morgan Donovan. That day I'd met him, his wrist was hurt. I started to tell her then stopped myself.

“Well, what is it?” she said shrewdly.

I wasn't going to protect him, was I? If Jenny Rose and I were partners, we were going to have to be honest with each other. “I was just thinking Morgan's wrist was hurt that day.”

“Doesn't strike me as a thief, though,” she said and then she looked at me. “Oh, there you go thinking it's Glinty. Just because he looks so … what was the word Paige used?”

“Slippery,” I supplied.

She gave me a mean look. “He's just hot,” Jenny Rose defended him. “Dishy.” She struggled to find a word her old auntie would understand. “Hip.”

“Write down Patsy Mooney.”

“Oh, please. She wouldn't know a work of art from a coupon.”

“Look. If we're going to investigate this, we've got to think of everyone who had opportunity and motive,” I said.

“Well then, investigate Teddy.”

“Teddy?”

“Why not? He's always hanging around. What's he after?”

I tried not to laugh at the thought of wholesome Teddy as a criminal, but I remembered his bitterness toward Morgan. I didn't object as she wrote him down.

“Let's put on the list whoever was in Sea Cliff after the statue was stolen.”

“Right.”

“How do you want to do this?”

I said, “We can eliminate the two of us.”

“No. To be fair, we should head the list.”

I laughed. “That makes no sense.”

“But it's fair.”

I held my head, “Oh, fine. You and me.”

“Paige?”

I remembered the pen at Noola's, which I had little doubt was hers. What had she been up to at Noola's? “Yes. Put her down.”

“Oliver?”

“Sure. He could have done it. Everybody. And don't forget Glinty.”

“Uh! He wouldn't dare.”

Don't be so sure
, I thought but didn't say. I said, “Come on. Everybody in the pool.”

“All right, all right, I put him down.”

“Morgan.”

“Yes. I wrote his name.”

“Mr. Piet?”

“Ah, Mr. Piet. If anyone threw Radiance overboard, it would be him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he's always got it in for her. Telling her what to do—and she a grown woman! He thinks Twillyweed is like
Upstairs Downstairs
and she's the parlor maid.”

I felt sorry for Mr. Piet. Jenny Rose was so young. She couldn't know what it was like to have an unruly child.

“Nah,” she vetoed. “It wouldn't be him. He was off that day.”

“He still could have been out on the boat with her.” Suddenly, I thought of something. I said, “Jenny Rose, he was fishing, remember? He caught that weakfish we were eating that night!”

“That's right! Good thinking.”

I, who forgets why I've entered a room once I'm there, was happy someone thought so. “Put the heat up, will you?” I said. “It's freezing. And Radiance. Don't forget her. I wonder what the real reason she was out sailing was. Fishing! I thought she was a showgirl.”

“A
dancer
. She wants to be one of those girls in a line at Radio City. Jake, do move your paw. How can you be in the front and the back at the same time?” She put her head back and closed her eyes. “I don't know. I just don't know. Maybe the stones have nothing to do with any of them. You realize we have no idea what we're talking about?”

“What about that school bus driver?”

“Right.” She stopped fiddling with the control panel. “I'll throw him in. I can't stand him.”

“And the lady from the rectory.”

“Lassiter? Oh, I hardly think—”

“Just write her down. How many is that?”

“Oh, creepy. There are thirteen.”

I turned off at Glen Cove Road and we headed north.

Jenny Rose wrung her hands. “I think you're right. We'll have to have a talk with Radiance.”

“Now that she's back at her place, we'll go tomorrow while Wendell's in school. We'll say you want to check on her. See how she's doing.” I glanced at Wendell asleep in the back. “It could get dangerous.”

“Yeah,” her eyes lit up.

When we got back to Twillyweed, Jenny Rose carried Wendell in and I waved good night. We were concerned about the gems, but it was all still a kind of mad adventure for us. Had we known what evil lurked, I don't think either of us would have remained in Sea Cliff.

I took off up the steep hill, realigning Morgan's radio buttons to their original stations, then sat for a while in the car while Jake dozed and I watched the distant, dreamy lights across the sound, listening to Morgan's Jonathan Schwarts–style station with its old-fashioned ballads. I touched the dashboard, smelled the friendly leather seats. “Take good care of him,” I said to the car, letting Jake out to sniff around. I locked it up and walked to the cottage in the hurling wind, wondering enviously about Morgan's weather stick. When fine weather did come, I'd buy myself a little Hibachi and grill hot dogs, I promised myself hungrily. And tomorrow would be a good day, regardless. I'd put the cushions outside to air on the deck. I shivered and carried my stuff up the short walk to the cottage. Jake was delighted with everything. There's something about putting the key into the lock of your own digs. The door swung open and I stepped in. The place no longer smelled of dust and decay, but refreshed and lived in. The little kitten's head popped out of a sneaker. Jake bounded in and then, spotting her, froze. The kitten's fur stood up in a shriek along her little back. My heart stood still. At that moment it could have gone either way. I said a fervent prayer to St. Francis, who has a way with animals, put down a bowl of water for Jake, and said in as calm a voice as I could muster, “All right, you two, you don't have to like each other but we're going to all have to live together. So draw up enemy lines or have it out now—but somehow we're going to have to get along, got it?” More worried for Jake's eyes than I was for the kitten, I turned my back so there would be no show for my benefit and went into the bathroom. I held my ear to the door. There were no screams or flying fur as far as I could tell. I took a nice warm shower and slipped on my own cozy, flannel nightgown, relaxing immediately. But when I went outside, the kitten was standing up on the table, still as a statue with her tail straight up in the air. Jake had slopped the water dish but he hadn't settled down. He sat in a rigid pose, waiting, I supposed, to see what would happen next. Ignoring them, I opened the old burgundy phonograph and put a record on for company, took the slipcovers out of the washer, and threw them in the dryer. Then I put the curtains in the washer and tackled my next job, sorting through the piles of books and records, working into the night. Noola had wonderful records, Tony Bennett, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Dinah Washington, Ella in Berlin, Albinoni, Mozart, Claude Debussy, Keith Jarrett's
The Köln Concert
. I put that one on, loud, and wiped the rest of them down with a damp cloth and returned them to their sleeves. When my cell phone jangled from my purse, I almost didn't hear it. “Hello?” I shouted.

“It's me,” Enoch said. “How could you just take Jake without talking to me first?”

If he thought this was the way to start with me, he was very mistaken. I lowered the volume on the music and said, “Enoch, you left the dog alone in a dark house with no water—and he had to go! You told me you'd take him to work. When I let him out, he hardly made it out the door!”

He sighed. “Claire. We had a six alarm over in Jamaica. Terrible. Three people—”

“Oh. All right, all right. I'm sorry. But still, don't go blaming me for taking
my
dog when your job interferes with his well-being!”

“Well-being! He had to hold it in for an hour! Jesus!”

“Enoch, was there something else?”

“Well, are you all right?”

“I'm fine. I'm out on Long Island. I have a safe place to stay and there's nothing, really, you need to know after that.”

“Whose house are you staying at?”

I looked up at the shelves of dusty books. “Some old woman's house.” I didn't exactly lie.

“So what are you doing?”

“At the moment I'm cleaning out that old woman's jelly safe.”

“So now you're a cleaning lady.”

“Sort of.”

“Claire. This is ridiculous.”

“No more ridiculous than living with you under false pretenses.”

“I keep telling you. I'm not gay. It was so unimportant! Every guy—”

“No, Enoch, not every guy,” I said, my lips tight, thinking unhappily of Morgan Donovan and his loyalty to a pledge. “While I'm on my way to the city to get some go-nowhere, stupid job you put me up to so you could have unprotected sex with some man—”

“It wasn't unprotected sex. I wasn't having unprotected sex with anyone but you.”

Something about the way he said it rang true. “At least that.” I gave a guarded sigh of relief, my chances for survival improving.

“I'm sorry I hurt you,” he said.

“Look. I'm not hurt. Not anymore. I don't know what I am, but I just don't want to see you.”

He said nothing. He hadn't wanted this, didn't ask to favor men. But, I reminded myself, he'd brought this on himself. I was his cover. I remembered that long-ago man in the park jacking off every chance he got to a young girl at a lonely bus stop. A girl who'd felt too guilty to tell. Well, I was grown up now and I sure as hell wasn't going to spend the rest of my life as somebody's cover. “Look, Enoch, it's over. You and I both know it. Let's just get on with our lives.”

“You're just going to dump me?!”

His astonishment was so outraged I almost laughed. Finally, I said, “Look, I'll call you before I come back to Queens to pick up the rest of my stuff.” We hung up and I thought,
That's it. My days of devoting myself to inappropriate love are over
.
Finished
.
Basta
. A man with a yen for other men. A man engaged to another woman. A man still carrying a torch for the wife who'd left him! What was wrong with me? Well, whatever it was, I was done. I turned up the volume on the music. From now on I was off to a new start. And, as my ex-husband would say,
Let everybody else go get locked up!
So resolutely did I simmer, I never heard the door I'd never thought to lock creak open until Jake went berserk. He jumped up on it, knocking over one of Noola's pretty china vases, banging the door shut with such an intimidating cacophony of barks that whoever it was had to have run down the hill in a sissy fit. I didn't even think to be frightened as I picked up the pieces of china. I was more concerned I'd scared off Mrs. Dellaverna, or maybe a raccoon. Raccoon would be bad. I went to the door and opened it. I craned my neck but didn't see a soul. Whoever it was had dropped a lovely gray glove on the step when Jake had gone into protection mode. I picked it up and laid it on the mailbox till someone would claim it, went back in the house, and then, with an odd feeling, turned around and locked the door.