Vultures at Twilight (2 page)

Ada caught me looking and smiled, she leaned up and whispered, ‘This is the first time I've seen Evie's family in the flesh.'

‘I know.' My voice caught in my throat, relieved that she couldn't possibly know what I'd been thinking about, and not sure myself what these growing feelings toward my friend were all about. Not wanting to think it, but what popped to mind –
Lil, you've got a crush. Stop it! Focus, what was she saying? Something about Evie's family.
I nodded toward the tensed-up woman in front of us. ‘I kind of recognize her from some of Evie's pictures.' And it just struck me as sad. Lots of family who never visited, never wrote or helped with Evie's medicines or her cooking or her checkbook or her taxes, which she obsessed about endlessly as her mind drifted into Alzheimer's, losing pieces of herself with each passing day.

Ada was right; Evie – who was a good twenty years older than us, but who I'd known my entire life – had been lucky. Death was preferable. A chill shivered down my back. But lately, and certainly not helped by the horror of last night's auction, where a severed finger was discovered in a dresser drawer, I couldn't stop thinking about death . . . my death. Not that I'm in bad shape for fifty-nine. Aside from a couple teeth, my tonsils, and my uterus, Lillian Campbell still had her original parts. But sitting on the wooden pew, dressed in black and pearls, my still-natural blonde, albeit with a fair amount of silver, braided and up, and looking every bit Doctor Campbell's widow, death was on my mind. Not that I'm afraid of it; in fact I've always had a certain relationship with death – it's not a bad thing, just a part of things. Even now, it wasn't death that frightened me as I again pictured the bloody finger clenched between the pointy teeth of Mildred Potts' lapdog, but how it could come. Fingers don't just fall off and get stuffed into drawers. What should have been a fun night's entertainment had turned into something long and gruesome as Ada and I, along with over a hundred auction goers, had given brief statements to the local police before being allowed to leave. And now, less than twelve hours later, here I was at the funeral of a dear friend. It was too much, something evil had happened, and close to home; it frightened the hell out of me.

As the minister droned on about family and community, I stretched my neck and snuck a look at the assembled. It was easy spotting the players; Ada and I were experts.

As if reading my thoughts, she tilted her adorable chin toward me and whispered, ‘Those are her sons . . . Which one is the alcoholic?'

The woman in front pretended not to hear; I wasn't about to let her spoil one of our games. I carefully considered Ada's question, while studying the profiles of the three dark-suited men in the right-front pew. They had all come from out of state – two from New York and one from California. As I recalled, from many conversations with Evie, it was the latter who had bounced in and out of three marriages and at least as many drug-rehabilitation programs. ‘The tan one,' I offered, having made my selection.

‘I think you're right,' Ada agreed. ‘He has fleshy ears.'

‘I thought that meant a bad heart,' I said, trying to remember what Ada had told me about her latest medical prognostic tool: earlobe signs.

‘No, that's a creased lobe. They're very different. Although, he seems to have both.'

The woman in front turned. ‘That's it,' she hissed between clenched nicotine-stained teeth. ‘You two have no respect for the dead.'

‘I beg your pardon.' I stared her dead on. ‘We were both good friends of Evie . . . I can't recall ever having met you.'

She seemed taken aback. She squinted, appearing strangely constipated, was about to speak, and then turned away as Minister Ingram encouraged us to rise for a rousing, yet waspish, round of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful'.

As the service ended, Ada and I held back. We watched the mourners file past.

‘Cemetery?' she asked.

I glanced to see she had worn appropriate shoes, as had I. This had been the rainiest year on record for Connecticut, where our normally dry fall had seen torrential downpours at least two or three times a week. The ground was marshy and it wreaked havoc on footwear. So while I had a closet of shoes – and isn't it funny how so many memories can be tied up in a pair of Ferragamo pumps or cork-soled mules, bought impulsively in St Martin's on one of the few vacations my Bradley had agreed to take? – now, we both wore sensible rubber-soled walking shoes; mine black, hers dyed-to-match blue.

We watched as Evie's sons exited. I couldn't say why, but something about them piqued my curiosity. I wanted to see more, to know why none of them had called or spent time with their mother in the last years of her life. ‘Let's go,' I said, waiting for a break in the mourners and then stepping into the aisle. I made room for Ada, who at barely five feet is a head shorter than me. As I stood, I overheard the hushed conversation of the woman who had been in front of us.

‘She promised me that ring,' she said to her companion.

‘Yes,' he replied, ‘but that was when you were still her daughter-in-law.'

‘What difference does that make?'

‘Carla, if it's not in the will, you won't get it.'

‘It's not fair. After putting up with her bastard son for all those years . . . Well, it's one thing if she cuts me out, but if she leaves out Bobby . . . I swear I'll contest it.'

‘Where is he?' the man asked.

‘Soccer.'

‘But his grandmother's funeral? He couldn't . . .'

‘He hardly knew her,' she said defensively. ‘Besides, I asked him if he wanted to come.'

As I listened, I thought of Evie and of her beautifully kept two-bedroom carriage house in the sprawling retirement community of Pilgrim's Progress, where Ada and I also lived. I thought about her jewelry, and the sapphire and platinum cocktail ring she so loved. Her great aunt Martha had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday. I suspected that was the object of Carla's desire. In Pilgrim's Progress, which catered to retiree New Yorkers and aging inhabitants of Connecticut's gold coast, we all had our accumulated treasures. Where most of us had downsized, the things we chose to keep were steeped in memory, and frequently, value as well. At fifty-nine and sixty-two respectively, Ada and I were two of the younger inhabitants in the self-contained gated community with its five thousand cedar-sided condos spread across seven miles of exquisitely maintained park-like grounds. We'd both been less than fifty-five, the lower-age limit, when we'd moved in eight years ago. But our spouses, now deceased, had been considerably older. Her Harry by eighteen years and my Bradley by twelve. Younger spouses – almost always wives – were the exception to the age restriction, all of which was carefully spelled out in the tome-like
By-Laws and Rules for residents of Pilgrim's Progress
.

Here, we had our own stores and restaurants, our own ambulance crew, two world-class golf courses, health clubs and bus trips that left daily for Broadway and the Indian casinos. Pilgrim's Progress nestled on the outer edge of scenic Grenville, Connecticut, where I've lived my entire life, with the exception of four years in Northampton, Massachusetts at Smith College where I majored in English and harbored dreams of one day becoming a journalist. Pilgrim's Progress is a romantic approximation of what the ‘golden years', that greatest of fallacies, was supposed to be. But while designed with the ‘mature adult' in mind, Pilgrim's Progress or PeePee – as Ada and I had started to call it for some unfortunate reasons – did not extend its bounty to those who could no longer care for themselves. It was common – and heart breaking – to see adult children pack up their aging parents' homes and move them to a more ‘supervised' setting.

I shuddered as I thought about older friends and acquaintances that had slowly slipped into Alzheimer's, or had had strokes and been left unable to care for themselves. They'd been carted off to convalescent homes or down the street to Nillewaug Village, a pricey life-care facility. That would be the last we'd hear of them . . . until their name above a couple carefully worded paragraphs –
beloved wife and mother
– appeared in the obituaries.

I shuffled behind Ada and the other mourners toward the bright sun that filtered through stained-glass windows that I've looked at my entire life.

‘Did you hear that awful woman?' Ada whispered, pulling out a pair of stylishly large sunglasses as a crisp October breeze rustled the changing leaves.

‘Who?'

‘In front of us, the one who kept telling us to shut up. Poor Evie, do you remember how she'd show us pictures of her grandchildren? It makes me furious. They never visited; they never wrote. I hope she left everything to charity – serve them right!'

Not for the first time, I suspected that Ada's hearing was not as bad as she let on.

‘She was one of the daughters-in-law,' I commented.

‘The first one,' Ada said with authority. ‘Evie said she slept around. Admittedly the husband was a lush, but still . . .' We headed toward the parking lot and my white Lincoln. ‘Lil, you do realize this is the perfect car for funerals.'

‘The black was better.'

‘No. White is nicer.'

‘Agreed,' I said, flipping up the automatic locks. ‘Bradley always bought black.'

‘That's because he was a doctor,' she offered. ‘Black is more serious. But white becomes you.'

‘It's strange, but I can't imagine ever buying a different car.' I pictured Bradley, how he'd look in the driver's seat, tall and thin, or his face as he'd turn to me to ask something, his smile, how he'd sometimes – for no reason – take my hand . . . touch my knee. He'd been dead nearly two years. I felt so guilty when I traded in his last car, like I was somehow going behind his back. Ada had gone with me to the dealer. I was all set to just get the same thing in black, but she'd asked one simple question: ‘
Is that really the color you want?
'

‘I love your car, Lil,' she said as she nestled into the tan leather, the seatbelt's motor humming as it glided up to her side. ‘More importantly, I love it that you drive. I so regret having never followed though with getting my license.'

‘It's not too late. I'd be happy to teach you.'

‘No,' she said. ‘Although, it was one thing not driving in New York City, but out here . . .'

‘The offer stands,' I said, thinking how much I'd like to roam the countryside with Ada, get away from all of these dying friends and chopped-off fingers.

‘Let me think about it.' She gazed out her window as my cell chimed from my purse.

‘Do you want me to get that?' Ada asked.

‘Please.'

She fumbled through my black clutch, and retrieved the phone. ‘Unknown name, unknown number,' she said. ‘Should I pick up?'

‘Sure.'

She pressed the accept button. ‘Hello? Hello? Anyone there?' She waited. ‘Hello? That's odd, it says “call ended”.' She quickly pressed a couple buttons. ‘And no number comes up in the history. Strange . . . you've been getting a lot of these.'

‘I know, I just assumed it was a wrong number. But why would they keep calling?'
And why am I so nervous?
I flipped on the lights, and as the car in front of me started, I shifted into gear. ‘You know, Ada . . . you were right about Evie.'

‘That she was lucky to go when she did?'

‘Exactly. How much longer could she have stayed in her condo? I wonder if we did her a disservice by helping as much as we did.'

‘Lil, they would have put her away. She would have had to leave her home and all her things and share a room with some incontinent woman with no memory. People are always screaming in those places, they stink, and the nurses never come when you need them. We did right. Evie would have hated that . . . I'd do the same for you.'

‘I know,' I said, not wanting to cry. ‘What do you think they'll say when they find out we've been doing her checkbook and her taxes?'

‘We do it for enough of the others. Her books are perfect. The real fight is going to be over her estate. She had enough to make it interesting.'

I looked at Ada, with her startling blue eyes and short spry frame that seemed dwarfed in the bucket seat. She'd know to the penny what Evie had. And her finances weren't the only ones she handled. For the forty years she'd been married to Harry Strauss, she had kept the books. If Harry were alive, he might argue the point, but it was Ada's savvy that had turned
H.S. Strauss
, which had started as a family business on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, into a twenty-store discount clothing chain. When they'd eventually sold out, they'd realized a tidy profit. My silver-haired friend stayed on top of changes in tax law and investment strategies. She was forever twisting my ear and getting me to invest in favorite stocks, mutual funds, and bond offers. She was even able to get us in and out of a couple IPOs; neither of us was hurting for money. At times it bordered on clairvoyance as she insisted I liquidate almost all my stock and shift into bonds, just a few short months before the financial crash of 2008.

As an unadvertised sideline, Ada helped the majority of our bridge and Scrabble clubs with their finances. It was because of this that she was the first one to diagnose Evie's Alzheimer's.

‘How much longer do you think we could have kept her at home?' I asked.

‘Another year. Maybe longer.'

I kept a steady distance behind the car in front of me as we turned into the Grenville cemetery. ‘What about the will?' I asked. ‘Any idea?'

‘She never told me,' Ada said. ‘She said she had taken care of it; I wonder if she did. Especially once her memory started to slip. She said that after Bill died she had the whole thing changed. I have no idea how she left things.'