Twillyweed (30 page)

The
old days
. Ten years ago? I had to laugh. Someone like Glinty was just getting started. He had the whole world in front of him. For him, ten years was almost half a lifetime.

I remembered something. “What about Oliver's apartment in the city? That must be worth plenty.”

“
Phh
. That's not his. That's his fraternity brother's bachelor pad. Loans it to him. You know these good old boys.”

“God! This is too much.” I looked at him sitting there, whittling one finger with another. “Glinty, why did you tell me all this?”

He looked around with a hunched-over, furtive look and shrugged. “I don't like the air in the village right now. Dicey—with this murder and all. Better you should know.”

A party of five came into the restaurant, and an attractive young woman in heels minced out with menus to seat them. Glinty sneaked a look over his shoulder and stood. “Do me a favor, will you? Don't mention to Teddy I was here.”

I shot him a puzzled look. “But … didn't you come here to see him?”

“Uh-uh. I was following you.” He stepped away before I could reply and disappeared down the hallway. I went back to my food. By the time Teddy came lumbering back in, the place was filling up. He looked refreshed, as though he'd just washed his hands and face. He winked at me and got right over to some beefeaters in Brooks Brothers uniforms at the bar. I'd finished eating. Reluctantly, I stood. It was time to go. I thanked Teddy for the meal and walked outside into the humid air.

The sky was dark purple. I got in my car. Frowning, I leaned over and gave Jake a halfhearted stroke. In the distance there was thunder. I switched the radio on. Miles Davis, “Take Five.” I looked in the mirror. Morgan was rich! This was good, right? If that was the case, what reason would he have to kill anyone? He wouldn't have had to, would he? This was assuming someone other than her husband had killed Patsy Mooney. Something someone had said kept that idea in my head. What was it? Mrs. Lassiter. I remembered her saying she thought he'd have found someone else to torture by now. Meaning, I supposed, it had been quite a while since Patsy Mooney and he had been together. But no, that couldn't be right. He was seen in town, in Sea Cliff, just yesterday. No. It
was
him. The ex-husband is always the one. The cops weren't stupid. There was no need to worry. They'd catch him.

I took out my cell phone and called Detective Harms at the station house. He answered in a pleasant, no-nonsense way. I got right to the point, “I've found something I believe is pertinent to the Patsy Mooney case and was wondering if we could get together for a talk?”

“Sure. Who is this?”

“Oh. Hi. This is Claire Breslinsky. I'm staying at Morgan Donovan's house, the Great White? My niece—”

“Look, Miss Breslinsky, I'm on the other line. Why don't you come in tomorrow morning and I'll have someone take down your statement. How's that?”

“Good. Good. Ten o'clock?”

“See you then.”

It began to rain in a fretful, weary way.
Plunk, plunk
. And then I thought,
If Morgan is so rich, what would he want with me?
I put my wipers on, turned off the lane, and headed down the regular parkway to Sea Cliff in traffic.

Jenny Rose

That night, when the widening moon crept up into the sky, Jenny Rose sang Wendell to sleep as she straightened his room. She hadn't kept Patsy's death from him, but told him there'd been an accident. She told him quickly, as soon as she'd got him alone and realized Oliver hadn't told him a thing. She couldn't bear that sort of thing, dealing with a problem by not addressing it. It was despicable. It had been done to her as a child and she wasn't having it. No, sir. Patsy had died, she explained without fuss. That was why all the people were in the house. She'd had a terrible accident, she said. He'd taken it at face value, wide eyed and serious, and hadn't questioned her, she supposed, because no one ever bothered to explain anything to him. But then, later, when he lay there cuddling his favorite sailboat, he regarded her trustingly and said, “So, Jenny Rose, I won't have to eat my potatoes?”

She stopped tidying and walked over to him, sinking onto the floor beside the bed.

“Because Patsy says I never can leave the table until I finish up my potatoes. And now I don't have to?”

“That's right, sport.” She smiled gently. “No potatoes unless you want them.”

“And you're not going away from Twillyweed tonight?”

She gave him a fierce hug. “I'll never leave you unless it's all right with you!”

This seemed to mollify him. She sighed with relief. They'd gotten over the hump. The most important thing was she'd gained the little fellow's trust. She felt a kind of pride. Yes, for the first time in a while, hell, her whole life, she felt as though she were making a difference. “What song will it be, now, tonight? ‘The Summer Wind'?”

“No.” He made a satisfied wiggle into position under the covers. “‘You Are My Sunshine.'”

She sketched him while she sang the same absorbing verses over and over until he dropped off—she'd captured most of him in shadow, just a telling edge of him in light, and, pleased with what she'd done, she rolled the drawing up into a scroll. There was something about pain and sorrow that helped art, leaked the important stuff into your work, made it poignant. It was too bad, but there it was, true. When she was sure Wendell was deep asleep, she crept, shivering, past the yellow-taped basement door and up to her room in the turret. She opened the drawing and put it on the nightstand already splattered with paint, weighting the edges down with Patsy Mooney's left-behind seashells. Nothing would be the same without Patsy Mooney, she mulled. For the moment, Mr. Piet looked after them, and Jenny Rose had to admit he managed things very well. There would have to be a wake and a funeral when they released the body. She sucked in her breath. The poor old soul. She hadn't deserved to die that way. Glumly, she walked the series of windows around the turret and lowered all the slatted rattan shades she'd earlier raised up for her precious light, knotting them shut by their cords, one by one. Patsy Mooney had kept them down all the time. “Begonias don't like too much light,” she'd explained. Or had she known even then that he was after her? She remembered Patsy's darty little eyes as she'd assured her about the basement apartment,
No one will get you here.
Had she known then he was that close to finding her? Suddenly Jenny Rose stopped, hearing something. Was someone there? “Hello?” She cocked her head. But who would be coming up at this hour? Wendell? She checked that the monitor was on. So sensitive it was she could hear the soft drone of his snores. No, it wasn't anything, she was just nervous. Anyone would be. She opened her closet door and inspected her few clothes. There was one robe she'd had since she had been in the south of Turkey. She'd never worn it, saving it for a special occasion. It was an antique, gold-threaded wedding garment, a sort of coat. She'd bargained for it in the bazaar, drinking mint tea with shopkeepers who themselves wore long medieval robes as they'd sat around a smoking lantern. She stroked the course gold-woven thread and the slippery corroded lining, stained a bit with rust. She held it to her chest and twirled around the attic floor to no music—then stopped. She
had
heard something. Someone. A chill ran up her spine. But wait—maybe it
was
Wendell, upset from Patsy's death! She unlatched her door, flung it open, and stood at the top, peering down the whitewashed winding staircase. There was the smell of motor oil—and something green. From behind, a hand slipped into the waist of her shirt and another covered her mouth to stifle the beginnings of her scream.

It was Glinty. Couldn't he ever make a noise like a normal person? Her head fell back onto his shoulder and he rasped, “Jenny Rose. Don't you remember? 'Twas good, was it not?”

Not knowing if she was all right or not, she nodded her head yes. He let go his grip and maneuvered her into the room. He latched the lock.

“How did you get in?”

“
Ach
, that was easy. Any thief could get into this mad system of wobbly windows.”

She rubbed her neck where it always got kinked. “So it's a thief you are now?”

“No. I didn't say that.” He leaned his gangly body into hers and she could smell the pot on his breath. His eyes, rich with umbrage, burned into hers. “I'll not have you call me a thief.”

Reassured by his taking insult, she lowered her voice seductively, “What would you have me call you then?”

He laughed. Then he grew serious. He pulled her forgotten pair of underwear from his pocket and said, “The thing is … I can't stop thinking of you.”

She snatched the undergarment and shied away backward. “Look, I know you must think I'm this easy slut but, well, actually I was an easy slut, wasn't I? But—”

“Shut up.” He tilted his head and caught her mouth with his and sealed it off with the tip of his tongue. Locked together, they tangoed backward to her bed and fell onto it.

The light winked in the east above Glen Cove when Glinty finally moved to untangle himself. They were both still half awake. He licked the kink in her neck where it always bothered her and Jenny Rose groaned with pleasure. Magically, the kink had disappeared. She turned onto her back. “I'll be missing you when you sail off,” she told him, half sweetly, half reproachfully.

He looked away. “I'll not be going anywhere.”

“Will you not? Scotland won't call to you when this murder business is over? Or when you've made your fortune?”

“I hate Scotland,” Glinty confided. “It's the midges, mostly. They'll eat you alive.” He wiped his brow with the inside of his arm. “Don't look at me like that. I'm serious. I'll not go back. I've no one there. No. It's America I love.” His eyes twinkled. “Land of the free.”

She shot him a look. Was he being sarcastic?

He turned serious. “You feel the way I do, don't you? About us? Because I've got to know …”

“I do,” she admitted, surrendering, touching her heart with the tips of her fingers.

He ground his body into hers in sheer delight. “Now. Give me something,” he whispered.

“What?” she blinked.

“A token. Something with the smell of you.”

She smiled, a little love drunk, and burrowed into the pillow. “Take whatever pleases you.”

He stood up and climbed into his jeans. Holding her eye, he lifted the Turkish wedding robe.

“Not that,” she said with a pout.

“You said anything.” He raised a brow.

“Anything else.”

He opened her top drawer and came out with a silky black-and-yellow bra. “This?”

“It doesn't smell of me, dodo. It's clean.”

He moved toward her and clenched her arm behind her back, then looped the strap through his finger and traced it all across and around her limp body, behind her back and up between her legs then under his nose. “Now it does,” he said with a growl. He let her go and she collapsed into a heap. “I'll call you later,” he promised.

She watched as his slim, fluid body moved in the half-light. He was cruelly pale, his hairs black and in a fine marking down his narrow front and back. She wondered idly how she would get him to pose for her without insulting him. He finished dressing then stopped at the door and he opened the latch. “Oh,” he said, like it just came to him, “and when they ask you where you were at the time of the murder, just tell them you were with me.” He smiled at her tenderly. “Tell them I come to you in the night. That way they won't have you as a suspect.”

And as she heard the door latch click and he slipped with no sound down the winding stairs, her hand returned unconsciously to the kink in her neck. He might be her alibi—but so would she be his.

Claire

The unfamiliar ticking of the seven wall clocks I'd wound back to business woke me absurdly early the next day. I remembered Patsy Mooney and said a quick prayer for her immortal soul, then one that they'd catch her husband quickly. Whether he did it or not, it was best to know the truth. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and slipped into a cool white blouse and jeans. Jake sat ready at the door, impatiently moving from cheek to cheek.

“All right, I'm coming.” I laughed, looking around the tidy room. All was fresh and clean, and the flimsy white curtains rippled out horizontally. I don't think I'd ever liked a place so much. I grabbed a pale-pink cardigan I'd picked up at a garage sale and was crazy about. It was amazing to be able to go for walks on a beach I hadn't had to drive to. We took our time and luxuriated in the fresh breeze, then strolled over to the docks where there seemed to be a lot going on. Sailors are early risers and the dock was busy with folks scrubbing their decks and mending sails. My heart leaped a bit at the sight of Morgan Donovan sailing up to the dock.

“Ahoy,” he greeted me. Then, pushing his cap back, “Where'd you find
him
?”

“It's a long story.”

“Come aboard!”

I crouched on the deck to be at his level while petting Jake, “I can't. Have to go to the station house this morning.” I shrugged. “Time for my interrogation.”

“I'll take you.”

But I was shy now. He was rich. It was different. “I thought I'd walk.”

“I'll take you by boat.”

That stopped me. “To the station house?”

“Sure.”

“But it's too early.”

“We'll go the long way. Bring the dog. Here. Take my hand.”

Without thinking, I took it. It was as though we latched on to each other. I lowered myself on board, not caring who saw, and he helped me into a life jacket. I held my breath at the nearness. Getting Jake on was another story. He wouldn't come until he pretty much figured we'd leave him if he didn't hop aboard. Morgan and I laughed when he finally flounced, all fours, onto the glistening deck and slid to a safe spot near the mainsail where he huddled for the duration. Morgan went about untying knots, casting ropes, guiding us away from the dock. When we took off, I was surprised at how fast we moved. I leaned myself into the wind the way he did and we scooted away, the force of the wind taking hold and the mainsail filling. In one movement, he secured and coiled the halyard and we skimmed the bright water past a fleet of other boats. Terrified and thrilled, I held on for dear life. Morgan, a cigar butt in the corner of his mouth, eased against the rudder and lay back, at ease. I thought I'd never seen him so like himself, so … what was it? Happy. Before you knew it we were out far. It was beautiful. He lowered the sails and let the boat drift. I turned and faced him. He leaned across me and took hold of the tiller and tied it. There's nothing like the clean, sweet smell of a man. I felt like nuzzling my cheek against the reddish fur of his arm. But I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't. “This is heaven,” I said. “What's that over there?”