Big Foot Stole My Wife Page 13

  I was blinking as the bell above the door jangled and the rigid silhouette of my daughter passed in front of the window. Inez Thornton was Caron’s shadow, in every sense of the word. Not only did she trail after Caron like an indentured handservant, she did so in a drab, almost inanimate fashion that served as a perfect counterpart to Caron’s general air of impending hysteria. Inez was burdened with the lingering softness of baby fat, thick-lensed glasses that gave her an owlish look, and a voice that rarely rose above a whisper, much less rattled the china. On days when Caron was a definitive raging blizzard, Inez was but a foggy spring morning.

  And also, from this parting pronouncement, a treacherous bitch. “This, too, will pass,” I murmured to myself as I bent down over the devil’s own paperwork, determined to banish images of a splattered windshield until I could devise a way to convince a heartless sales department to restore my credit, however fleetingly.

  That evening when I arrived in the upstairs duplex across from the lawn of Farber College, Caron’s room was uninhabited by any life form more complex than the fuzzy blue mold on the plates under her bed. At the rate they were accumulating, full service for twelve would be available on her wedding day, saving her the tedium of bridal registration.

  I closed the door, made myself a drink, and sank down on the sofa to peruse the local newspaper for the article concerning Bambi’s father. On the second page I found a few paragraphs, thick with “allegedly” and “purportedly,” that related how Charlene “Charlie” Kirkpatrick, longtime friend of Michelle McQueen, had contributed to the untimely demise of Ethan McQueen. Ms. Kirkpatrick would be arraigned as soon as she was released from the detoxification ward of the hospital, and Ms. McQueen was refusing to be interviewed. Mr. McQueen was survived by his wife and daughter of the home, his mother in a nearby town, and a sister in California. The funeral would be held Monday at two o’clock in the yuppiest Episcopal church, followed by a graveside service at the old cemetery only a few blocks from the Book Depot.

  I put down the newspaper and tried to envision Bambi. It was too much like seeking to pinpoint one buffalo in a stampeding herd, which was how I’d described the denizens of the hallways of Farberville High School when I’d been coerced into substituting for doddery Miss Parchester, who’d been accused of embezzlement and murder.

  I gave up on Bambi’s face and turned on the six o’clock news. The death, accidental or intentional, was the lead story, of course, since Farberville was generally a dull place, its criminal activity limited to brawls among the students, armed robberies at the convenience stores, and mundane burglaries. Although the story struck me as nothing more lurid than domestic violence of the worst sort, the anchorman had a jolly time droning on while we were treated to footage of a bloodstained driveway and the battered hood of a station wagon.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs, interspersed with strident voices and bitterly sardonic laughter. Odds were good that it wasn’t Peter Rosen, the police lieutenant with whom I’d become embroiled after a distasteful investigation involving the murder of a local romance writer. He was unnervingly handsome, in a hawkish way, and invariably maddening when he scolded me for my brilliant insights into subsequent cases. We were both consenting adults, and indeed consented in ways that left me idly considering the possibility of a permanent liaison. Dawn would break, however, and so would my resolve to give up my reservations about marriage, about dividing the closet, about facing him at breakfast every morning, about assigning him a pillow, and about relinquishing my life as a competent, marginally self-supporting single woman.

  Caron stomped into my reverie, her eyes flashing and her mouth curled into a smirk. On her heels was a girl who was briskly introduced as Melissa-from-biology, who bobbled her head indifferently and allowed herself to be led to Caron’s room.

  “Can you believe Inez is actually spending the night at Rhonda’s tomorrow?” Caron said, slathering the sentence with condemnation. “I suspected all along that she was using me so she could cozy up with the cheerleaders. I felt sorry for her because she’s so nerdy, but that doesn’t like give her the right to—”

  Caron’s bedroom door closed on whatever right Inez had dared to exercise.

  Hoping that Melissa-from-biology was up on her tetanus shots, I made myself another drink, watched the rest of the news and the weather report, and was settled in with a mystery novel when I heard more decorous steps outside the door. I admitted Peter, who greeted me with great style and asked with the quivery optimism of Oliver Twist for a beer. His face was stubbly, and there were darkish crescents under his molasses brown eyes. His usually impeccable three-piece suit was wrinkled, and a coffee stain marred the silk tie I’d given him for his birthday.

  Once I’d complied with a beer, I curled up next to him and said, “You look like hell, darling. Were you up all night with this tragedy in the McQueen driveway?”

  He glowered briefly at the newspaper I’d inadvertently left folded to the pertinent page. “All night, and most of today,” he admitted with a sigh. “Not that we’re dealing with something bizarre enough to warrant a true crime novel and a three-part miniseries. The victim’s midlife crisis resulted in his death, the destruction of the lives of two women who have been best friends since college, and who knows what kind of psychological problems in the future for the daughter. Married men really shouldn’t have affairs.” One hand slid around my waist, and the other in a more intimate direction as he nuzzled my neck. “Neither should single men. They should get married and settle down in domestic tranquility with someone who’s undeniably attractive, well-educated, intelligent, meddlesome, and incredibly delightful and innovative in bed.”

  I removed my neck from his nuzzle. “If you tell me about the case, I’ll heat up last night’s pizza.”

  “Are you bribing a police officer?”

  “I think there are at least three slices, presuming Caron didn’t detour through the kitchen on her way to the library,” I countered with said child’s smugness, aware that the way to a cop’s investigation was through his stomach.

  He fell for it, and once I’d carried out my half of the bargain, he gulped down a piece with an apologetic look, wiped tomato sauce off his chin, and said, “Charlie Kirkpatrick and Michelle McQueen met in college, where they were roommates for four years. Both eventually married. Michelle stayed here, and Charlie lived in various other places for the next fifteen or so years. They kept in touch with calls and letters, however, and when Charlie divorced her husband five years ago, she moved back here and bought a house around the corner from the McQueens. Her son’s away at college, and her daughter’s married and lives in Chicago.”

  “And?” I said encouragingly.

  “She and Michelle resumed their friendship—to the point that Ethan McQueen began to object, according to the daughter. Charlie worked at a travel agency, and was always inviting Michelle to come with her on inexpensive or even free trips. They went to the movies, had lunch several times a week, played golf on Wednesday mornings, and worked on the same charity fund-raisers. Charlie ate dinner with them often, and brunch every Sunday.”

  “What was the husband like? Caron met him and dismissed him as a prissy-mouthed judge, but she’s of an age that anyone who doesn’t fawn all over her is obviously demented.”

  “He was a moderately successful lawyer,” Peter said. “He was past president of the county bar, involved in local politics, possibly in line for a judgeship in a few years. He played poker with the guys, drove a damned expensive sports car, patted his secretary on the fanny, seduced female clients, all that sort of lawyer thing.”

  “Including having an affair with his wife’s best friend? Have I been underestimating the profession?”

  “Michelle says she began to suspect as much about six months ago. She couldn’t bring herself to openly confront either of them, although she did break off her relationship with Charlie. Said she couldn’t bear to pretend to chatter over lunch when she was envisioning the two of them in
a seedy motel room. Last night her suspicions were confirmed.”

  “What will happen to Charlie?”

  “She’ll be arraigned in the morning. The prosecuting attorney’s talking second-degree murder at the moment, maybe thinking he can get a jury to go for manslaughter. There’s no question that Charlie Kirkpatrick was in a state of extreme emotional disturbance; the wife was able to give us a detailed picture of what happened.”

  Peter put down his plate and tried a diversionary tactic involving my earlobe, but I made it clear I wasn’t yet ready for such nonsense. Retrieving his plate, he added, “If the wife repeats her story on the witness stand, the prosecutor knows damn well he’ll lose. We already know Charlie had more than enough alcohol in her blood to stop a much larger man in his tracks, and she was incoherent. We’re subpoenaing records from her psychiatrist. What’s likely to happen is that Charlie will plead guilty to negligent homicide, a class A misdemeanor. She’ll receive a fine and no more than a year in the county jail, and be out within three months. If her lawyer’s really sharp, she may end up with nothing more annoying than a suspended sentence and a couple of hundred hours of community service.”

  “Not exactly hard labor in the state’s gulag,” I said, shaking my head. “If she and Michelle were so close for twenty years, why would she have an affair with her best friend’s husband? Unless she’s completely devoid of morals it seems like he’d be her last choice.”

  “The ways of lust are as mysterious as that charming little freckle just below your left ear,” he said. In that I’d gotten as much as I could from him, I allowed him to investigate at his leisure.

  Nothing of interest happened over the weekend. Caron continued to hang around with Melissa-from-biology, carping and complaining about Inez’s defection to the enemy camp. The general of that camp was Rhonda Maguire, who’d committed the unspeakable sin of snagging Louis Wilderberry, junior varsity quarterback and obviously so bewildered by Rhonda’s slutty advances that he was unable to appreciate Caron’s more delicate charm and vastly superior intellect.

  The extent of Inez’s treachery spread like an oil slick on what previously had been a pristine bay: spending Friday night with Rhonda, shopping at the mall the following day, being the first to hear the details of Rhonda’s Saturday night date, and actually having the nerve to tell Emily that she felt sorry for Caron for being a moonstruck cow over Louis.

  As for the tragedy at the McQueen house, less and less was found worthy to be aired on the evening news or reported in the newspaper. The station wagon was impounded and the driveway hosed down. The arraignment was delayed until Monday, while the doctors monitored Charlie Kirkpatrick’s condition, and the prosecuting attorney pondered his alternative. Michelle McQueen and her daughter remained inside the house, admitting only family members and a casserole-bearing group of Episcopalian women.

  Sunday afternoon I called my best friend, Luanne Bradshaw, and we talked for a long time about the McQueen case. Our relationship lacked parallel, in that I was widowed and she divorced; but we did agree that it was perplexing to imagine being so enamored of a mere man that one was willing to throw away a perfectly decent friendship.

  Monday morning took an ugly turn. Caron stomped into the kitchen, jerked open the refrigerator to glare at an innocent pitcher of orange juice, and said, “I want to go to the funeral this afternoon. You’ll have to check me out at noon so I can come home and change for it.”

  “Why do you want to go to the funeral? Bambi’s hardly a close friend of yours, and it didn’t sound as if you were fond of her father.”

  “Bambi is the editor of the school paper, Mother. Everybody else on the staff will be there. Do you want me to be the only one who Can’t Bother to be there for Bambi?”

  “Does this have anything to do with gym class?”

  She slammed the refrigerator door. “I am trying to show some compassion, for pity’s sake! After all, I do happen to know what it feels like when your father’s accused of having an affair and then dies. Everyone gossips about it. Poor Bambi’s going to have to come back to school and pretend she doesn’t hear it, but she’ll know when all of a sudden people clam up when she joins them, and she’ll know they’re staring at her when she walks down the hall.”

  It was a cheap shot, but a piercing one, and I acknowledged as much by arranging to meet her in the high school office at noon. I was by no means convinced the tyrannical gym teacher was not the primary motive for this untypical display of compassion and empathy, but it wouldn’t hurt Caron to suffer through a funeral service in lieu of fifty relentless minutes of volleyball.

  Peter called me at the Book Depot later in the morning to ask if I might be interested in a movie that evening. After I’d forced him to tell me that Charlie Kirkpatrick had been arraigned on charges of second-degree murder and then released on her own recognizance, I granted that I might enjoy a movie, and we settled on a time. I may not have mentioned that Caron and I were planning to go to Ethan McQueen’s funeral, but it was nothing more than a minor omission, an excusable lapse of memory on the part of a nearly forty-year-old mind. I was attending it only because Caron was not yet old enough to drive, and I was unwilling to sit in the car outside the church, I assured myself. And perhaps I was just a bit curious to see the woman whose best friend had killed her husband. Prurient, but true, and a helluva lot more interesting than the stack of muddled invoices and overdue bills on the counter.

  Nevertheless, I righteously waded through them until it was time to fetch Caron and go by the apartment to change into our funeral attire. After a spirited debate about which of us was to drive, the individual with the learner’s permit flounced around to the passenger’s side and flung herself into the seat with all the attractiveness of a thwarted toddler.

  “Are things any better between you and Inez?” I asked as I hunted for a parking place in the lot behind the church. There were so many shiny new Mercedes and Beamers that it resembled a dealer’s lot, but my crotchety old hatchback slid nicely into a niche by the dumpster.

  “Hardly,” Caron said, her voice as tight as my panty hose. “If she wants to spend all her time with Rhonda Maguire, I really don’t see that it concerns me. Melissa may be dim, but at least she’s loyal.”

  “Would it help if I spoke to her?”

  “That’d be swell, Mother. She’ll tell Rhonda and her catty friends, and I’ll Absolutely Die. There’s no way I could show my face at school ever again, and you can’t afford one of those snooty, genderless boarding schools for the socially inept.”

  On that note, we went into the church and found seats for the requiem mass for Ethan McQueen, who was, according to the obituary within a pamphlet, a beloved son, brother, father, and husband. The church was crowded, and the only view I had of the grieving widow was that of soft brown hair and a taut neck. There were a lot of high school students present, and I caught myself wondering how many of them had gym class in the afternoon. It was not a charitable thought, but the mass was impersonal and interminable, and my curiosity unrequited.

  “I can’t wait to get out of these shoes,” I said as Caron and I started for my car.

  Her lower lip shot out. “We have to go to the cemetery. Everybody else is going, including the creepy little freshmen with acne for brains, and I don’t want to be the only person on the entire staff of the Falcon Crier who’s so mean-spirited that—”

  I cut her off with an admission of defeat. We waited until the hearse and limousines were ready, and joined in the turtlish procession along Thurber Street to the cemetery. Parking was more difficult, and we ended up nearly two blocks from the canvas roof shielding the family from the incongruously bright sunshine.

  “Over there,” Caron muttered as she nudged me along like a petulant Bo Peep.

  I looked at the family seated in chairs alongside the grave. Bambi was familiar; I had an indistinct memory of a simpery voice and well-developed deviousness. Her mother was rather ordinary, with an attractive face and an aura
of composure despite an occasional dab with a tissue or a whispered word to Bambi and the white-haired matron on her other side.

  We took our position at the back of a crowd of students, most of them shuffling nervously, the boys uncomfortable in suits and ties, the girls covertly appraising one another’s dresses and jewelry. I was trying to peer over them to determine when the show would start when a hand tapped my shoulder.

  “Hi, Mrs. Malloy,” Inez whispered.

  “Inez, how nice to see you,” I said, then waited to see how Caron would react. She did not so much as quiver.

  “This is Emily Cartigan,” Inez continued with her typical timidity, blinking as if anticipating a slap. Emily nodded at me, arched her eyebrows at Caron’s steely back, and drew Inez toward the perfidious Rhonda Maguire and a neckless boy wearing a letter jacket over his white shirt and dark tie.

  I stole a peek at Caron, fully prepared to see steam coming from not only her ears, but also her nostrils and whatever other orifices were available. To my surprise, she had a vaguely triumphant smile as she gazed steadily at the dandruff-dotted shoulders of the boy in front of us.

  The graveside service was brief, its major virtue. Very few people seemed inclined to approach the family, and those who did spoke only a word or two before fleeing. I could not imagine myself murmuring how sorry I was that the deceased had been killed by his mistress, and suggested to Caron that we forgo the ritual and go home to change clothes.

  “I’ll be there later,” she said with a guileless look. “I want to stop by my father’s grave for a few minutes and see how the plastic flowers are holding up.”

  “You do?” I had to take a breath to steady myself. “That’s a lovely idea, dear. Would you like me to go with you, or wait in the car?”

  “No, it may take a long time. I’ll be home later, and then I’ve got to go to Melissa’s house so we can work on this really mindless algebra assignment.”

  She took off on a gravel path that wound among the solitary stones and cozy family plots enclosed by low fences, her walk rather bouncy for someone on what some of us felt was a depressing mission. As she reached a bend, she looked over her shoulder, although not at me, and disappeared behind a row of trees.