Confession by Nancy Pickard
The truth was, I could hardly remember it, I’d been so swept up in the idea that it had inspired, of doing something similar for Geof’s birthday. But I told Ken the photographer what he wanted to hear: “I thought so, too.”
His smile looked gratified, and my compliment seemed to lift his spirits enough to speed up our photography session again. I had a feeling it would be one of these later pictures that I would choose for myself, too; they would be the ones that showed some moisture, some genuine emotion, in the eyes of Ken’s subject.
Afterward, when we were all finished, I didn’t want to remove my glamorous finery. I knew my photos wouldn’t look any more like a professional model’s or a movie star’s than anybody else’s did, but for a few moments there, the magic had even worked on me, transforming my cynicism into something almost approaching innocence. I halfway wished I could leave my hair up and leave the makeup on my face. The only trouble with the birthday joke now was that if he laughed when I gave him the picture, I’d kill him!
I’d felt svelte, sexy, powerfully seductive.
An aphrodisiac, the whole experience was, charged, erotic.
I could hardly wait to get home to my husband, whom I would probably find puttering about the house in his old red shorts and nothing else …
When I walked out, I turned back to look at the sign in the window.
Illusions indeed!
Maybe partly because of that experience, on Sunday night, I had an extraordinary dream.
Just before I woke up on Monday, I dreamed that Geof and I were making love: I was lying on my back on our bed, he was seated, facing me. Suddenly, my consciousness, invisible, rose and entered his body so that I was looking out of his eyes, seeing myself, feeling what it was like for him to love me. I sensed his excitement, his sheer physicality and strength, his energy, and I felt how moved my husband was when he looked into my eyes. And then, suddenly, his consciousness was slipping into my body and turning around and looking out of my eyes, so that now he could see himself and experience what it felt like to me to love him and to be loved by him. I felt his sense of wonder as he saw through my eyes how beautiful he was and as he felt through my heart the power of my thankfulness for his very existence. And then our consciousnesses separated again, only to intertwine, lacing softly, rising above but remaining connected to the two loving, moving bodies on the bed.
I woke up with tears in my eyes, feeling stunned, not even sure at that moment if I had dreamed it or if maybe it had really happened.
“Jenny?” Geof was staring at me. “What’s the matter, sweetie?”
To his surprise and mine, my lips were trembling, and the only words I could get out were a rather choked “I love you.”
He brushed my hair softly away from my forehead. “Well, my goodness,” he said in a surprised and gentle voice.
With the appearance of that dream everything mundane began to flee from our lives like birds hurrying south, starting that very morning with the news from the police lab that the ramp from which Dennis Clemmons had plunged to his death had been sabotaged and that what had looked for almost a week like accidental death was, in fact, homicide.
Geof left hurriedly for work that day, which was perfectly understandable, appropriate, even normal, under the circumstances.
There wasn’t anything that I, however, could do about the news, and because I was unaware that it presaged a quantum shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary in our lives, I just went on with my day as if it were like any other.
25
EVEN THE WEATHER CHANGED DRAMATICALLY. That morning, Monday, the temperature outside dropped twenty degrees in three hours, from eighty-five to sixty-five, just like that, accompanied by a thirty-second hail storm and then driving rain that started about ten in the morning and hadn’t let up by noon, the tune when I had to be in town for my weekly luncheon meeting with my friends.
Driving rain seemed a highly unlikely concept to me as I navigated the highway with my windshield wipers on high.
“Nobody should drive in rain like this,” I muttered.
My headlights sliced a narrow path in front of me.
Even with the bad weather, however, I was early to the coffee shop at the Holiday Inn just to show I could do it. Ginger Culverson, Mary Eberhardt, Sabrina Johnson, and Marsha Sandy trailed in one at a time, greeting me and each other with little kisses and friendly pats.
“It’s official,” I told them as soon as we were all seated in our regular semicircular booth. “We are with child. If you like, but only if you all want me to, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what has transpired since last we met …”
Which I then did at their unanimous command.
“… but I promise that’s not all we’ll talk about today. Mary said something the other day that gave me an idea for a name for our foundation. How about the Angel Foundation?”
“Perfect!” exclaimed Mary, looking pleased.
“Brack,” said Marsha, sticking a finger in her mouth.
I was wounded. “You don’t like it?”
“How about calling it the Angel Food Cake Foundation?” said Sabrina. “That would be really sweet.”
“Ginger?” I appealed.
“I like it,” she said to the obvious astonishment of the two who hated it. “Because since I’m giving so much money to it, we can call it by its full name: The Ginger-Bread … and Angel Food Cake Foundation.”
That crack combined with Sabrina’s raucous snort of laughter put us all into hysterics.
“We’re off to a great start,” Marsha finally said as she wiped her eyes on her napkin. When she looked at the napkin she saw streaks of black mascara on it. “Hell.” She threw down the paper, then reached down to the floor, while we wondered what she was doing. We watched her bring up her briefcase, open it, and dig through it until she came up with a couple of stapled sheets of paper, which she thrust across the table at me. “Here, Jenny. Since we’re not paying any attention to business anyway, take this.”
“This” turned out to be a list of names, personal and businesses; phone numbers; and addresses.
“Those are the names of Judy Mayer’s answering service clients,” Marsha informed me. “When I was calling around for you, just checking up on her business … uh, practices … I ran into another doctor who was using her right up almost until the time she died. He told me that she sold her list to another service … and they’re the service I use now … and they gave me this list.”
There were many unlikely things about that explanation of Marsha’s—for instance, that she just happened to know another doctor who just happened to, et cetera, and also that her own answering service would hand over to her a supposedly confidential listing of customers. But that’s the thing about living in the same town all of your life: You know a lot of people or their children and they either know you or your parents, and if they know you well enough, they trust you … I mean really trust you, no questions asked … and connections just get made that way that might not for people whose lives and paths never cross. I didn’t even have to quiz Marsha, and neither did anybody else at the table; some things were just understood by the natives.
But not everything.
“When did she sell her service?” I asked.
“About a week before she died, was what my friend told me.”
“Hey,” said Sabrina, “it’s almost like she knew she was going to die!”
“You think so?” I asked our shrink.
Marsha was cautiously noncommittal. “I’d need more facts to support that hypothesis; I wouldn’t want to guess.”
I thanked her, although I doubted that the list she’d gone to so much trouble to obtain for us would prove to be of much help. But my best friend wasn’t through offering help, it seemed.
“Jenny,” she said thoughtfully, “has this boy of yours …” She stopped and grinned. “… of Geof’s had any counseling since his parents died? If he hasn’t, Geof might want to encourage him to get some;
“Marsha, I don’t think he wants a relationship with Geof.”
“I’d say he’s already got one, wouldn’t you?”
Reluctantly I said, “I guess so. But he’d never listen to us.”
Marsha, who knew a “yes, but” syndrome when she heard one, tactfully let the subject drop. I suspected she was satisfied, however, because she’d also let the idea drop into my brain where it might eventually root and grow into something nourishing. That was her hope. Personally, I doubted it.
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about this,” I complained.
“Oh, shut up,” Sabrina instructed me. “We can discuss foundations any old day, but it isn’t every day that I get to bring you a clue in a murder mystery. Nancy.”
Snickers traveled around the table, jumping over me.
“You asked me how in the world a middle-class wife like Judy could ever go live in a dump like that with a man like Dennis Clemmons, and I got to wondering about that myself. So just out of curiosity I went back to our real old files and I looked her up by her maiden name. And what I found out is that Judy’s own mother—Mrs. Baker—got state aid for years when Judy was still grade-school age.” Sabrina sat back, looking pleased with herself. “So my theory is that the reason she could do it is that she’d done it before. The thing of it is … and this will be news to you, Ginger”—Sabrina made a face at her—“but if you’ve been poor once, you may not ever want to be poor again, but at least you know it won’t kill you.”
“I’ve been broke,” Ginger protested. “I’ll have you know I lived on a commune in Idaho, and we had to grow our own food, and I waited tables in town just to make money to help buy tools and toilet paper. I’ve been poor!”
But Sabrina only snorted. “You still had a rich daddy back home.”
“Yes, but when I dropped out of college, he said he disowned me!”
Sabrina grinned maddeningly. “I guess not.”
Ginger, realizing she was arguing a point she couldn’t win, suddenly relaxed back against the booth and laughed. “It’s just so sad how we poor rich folks don’t get any respect.” Then she turned to me. “I had an idea for naming this foundation, Jen. Let’s call it the Concrete Foundation.”
The rest of us groaned as one.
Ginger smiled placidly. “Because it’s something solid to build on.”
Mary patted her hand kindly. “We get it, dear.”
“All right then.” Ginger faked a pout. “If you don’t like that idea, I’ve had another brilliant one.”
Sabrina exchanged glances with me: We couldn’t wait for this one.
“Instead of calling it a foundation,” Ginger said with an air of perky brightness as phony as her pout, “let’s call it a religion. We’d get better tax breaks, wouldn’t we, Jenny?”
“I don’t know, Ginger,” I said, laughing, “but we could sure think of some great names for it. The Church of Holy Charity …”
“St. Philanthropist,” Marsha chimed in.
“The Give Unto Others Cathedral,” Mary said.
Ginger beamed. “I just knew you’d love it.”
“Church of the Helping Hand,” said Sabrina. “Run by the Holy Down and Outers …”
“Stop!” I held up my hands to keep it from going on all day.
“But seriously,” Ginger said, “that’s what your stepson’s family did, and look how they avoided paying lots of taxes.”
“He’s not exactly my stepson. Excuse me for being picky. What do you mean, that’s what his family did?”
“I think he is your stepson,” Mary corrected.
“Mayer Construction Company,” Ginger said, answering my question. She looked at us as if amazed at our denseness. “That’s only what I call them because it’s so embarrassing to tell people my kitchen was remodeled by Jesus’s Carpenters.”
Three of us, the heathens, stared at her.
This was the sometimes infuriating thing about Ginger Culverson: whether she was aware of it or not, she kind of liked to spring surprises on people, as witness her bombshell on me about her little affair with Ron Mayer. If we’d said to her, accusingly, “Ginger! Why didn’t you tell us?” she’d have looked surprised, and she’d have said, “I’m sorry, I thought everybody knew that.”
But Mary, the minister’s wife, was nodding her head as if this wasn’t any surprise to her.
“Mary,” I said, “is that true?”
“Um-hmm,” she said as if agreeing that yes, it was raining outside.
“But it’s very hard to qualify with the IRS as a bona fide church!”
“Not if you’re a bona fide church,” she said equably.
“Are you telling me,” I said to Ginger, “that they called their construction work a … a religious … service?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
“And what do they call those big homes on their cul-desac?” I fumed. “Synagogues?”
“Jenny, I think they’re sincere,” Mary defended them.
“Madam, you think everybody’s sincere,” Sabrina jibed her.
“That is not true,” said our mayor with dignity. “I am, after all, a politician. I should think I can spot hypocrisy when I see it; and I certainly do see it—both at town council meetings and church on Sundays.”
“Whew!” Sabrina grinned. “Beg your pardon, Madam.”
“Well, those rascals!” I exclaimed. “Can you imagine… ?”
“Jenny, really,” protested Ginger, “Mary’s right, I think you are being entirely too cynical here. These people are truly religious, real believers. They work very hard, very ethically, and it just happens to be one of the tenets of their faith that a person who does that…” She couldn’t help it, she was starting to laugh. “… a person who does that gets his reward a little early.”
“Doesn’t have to wait for heaven?” Marsha suggested.
“No, I think you get a little heaven on earth,” Ginger said, then gave it up and laughed out loud. “What a racket, you’re absolutely right, and we’re paying for it with our taxes. Why, I’m going to report them to the IRS. I want my money back! For the work they did on my house! And then we can start our church and call it the …”
“Don’t … start,” I advised her sternly.
But Mary wasn’t happy with us. “I’m not sure you’re being fair,” she insisted in her diplomatic way. “If we only accepted the traditional, mainstream churches, we wouldn’t have freedom of religion, now would we? Some people just don’t believe in the regular way …” She trailed off, her words having grown uncharacteristically vague, and I had the distinct feeling she was thinking of someone she knew rather better than she’d ever known any of the strange Mayers: her own husband, Hardy, the doubting minister. We all got kind of quiet, watching Mary, and when her attention came back to us, she had changed the subject a bit. “You never know what’ll set people off down an eccentric spiritual path …” We lost her again, as Mary was seemingly distracted by watching other diners walking by.
I tried to rescue her. “Some event that catalyzes them, maybe.”
“Or traumatizes them,” Sabrina said.
“And transforms them,” Marsha offered, and we looked at her, figuring that as a shrink she knew more about such changes in the psyche than we did. “I’d be curious to know why the Mayers stepped off the traditional religious path onto this odd little trail of their own.”
“And why Judy left Ron for Dennis and took David with her,” I said, “speaking of catalyzing events. What was that one all about?”
“And why did Dennis Clemmons turn violent all of a sudden and beat her up,” Sabrina added, “when he apparently didn’t have a history of domestic violence,” and then quickly amended, “schmuck though he may have been in every other way.”
“And why did David wait as long as he did to come to Geof?” I threw in. “What catalyzed him at that moment?”
“And m
We were all silent a moment, considering.
“All right,” I said finally. “I give up. Why did they?”
But we didn’t have the answers to those questions, so we settled into our desserts and another quarter hour of discussing business, namely, exactly what kind of foundation was ours going to be? Private or community or a private fund within a larger community foundation or … what?
“It’s a good thing we’re not in a hurry,” I remarked as we paid up.
It was Sabrina who brought me up short on that opinion. “Maybe we are, Jenny,” she corrected me in a tone of voice so uncharacteristically serious, so stripped of her usual joking or cynicism, that the rest of us stopped everything we were doing and gave her our full attention. “Maybe what we’re going to do with this foundation will somehow help to prevent deaths like Ron and Judy’s …”
“Or childhoods like David’s,” Mary added.
I glanced down at my credit card so Sabrina couldn’t see how touched I was by her words; this was one time I didn’t want to let her make fun of any of us or of herself.
“Maybe so,” I said lightly and got up to go.
“Did we eat?” asked Ginger, sounding plaintive as she stared at her now-empty plate. “We’ve been so busy talking, I can’t remember.”
On the way out, I maneuvered so that once again I was walking alone with Mary Eberhardt. She gave me a sweet smile. “Find that treasure yet, Jenny?”
I tried to be tactful. “I think it’s still hidden several fathoms deep, Mary, or stuck way back in the cave. I’m sure we’ll recognize it, though, by the big angel sitting on top of it. I understand they put out quite a glow.” I smiled back at her. “Did Hardy tell you that Geof and I dropped by the church last week?”
She reached for my right hand to squeeze and hold. “Yes, and I was so glad you both did. Maybe you could tell that he needs his friends right now.”