By The Howling (2 page)

Charlotte was terrified, at least under all of that “let’s pretend” in her jolly surface dealing with her new life, that her mind would go before her body did. And maybe, just maybe, not remembering what she had done with the tea service was a signal of that happening already.

With a sigh Charlotte forced this gnawing fear out of her mind and headed for her bathroom—searching her mind as she moved on to wondering where she might have put her bath sponge. It didn’t help her one bit that she couldn’t remember what book they were supposed to be discussing at today’s meeting—and, on top of that, was quite certain she hadn’t read it anyway.

As it turned out, whatever book they were going to discuss that day was the last thing in anyone’s mind.

Chapter Two

Charlotte barely had time to dress, start the tea to boiling, and pull out the packages of cookies that looked deceptively as if they were home baked before she heard the bickering of the Vales on her front walk. Joyce and Todd had been in the village longer than most anyone else. They owned the local quaint B&B up River Street, with a dining room that claimed to serve the best crab cakes on the Eastern Shore—which indeed all restaurants on the Eastern Shore claimed. But at least a famous novelist had declared their crab cakes the best, so that’s what the travel magazines grasped upon to highlight in their little vignettes on the amenities of Hopewell on the Choptank. Nowhere is it mentioned, though, that Joyce was the famous novelist’s editor at Random House in her earlier life and that he was still so terrified of her that he would have endorsed anything she’d asked him to bless.

For Joyce, living in Hopewell had two attractions. The village had been an artists’ enclave that suited her literary interests after a career as a high-powered book editor for a major publishing house, but also this was a returning to her roots affair for Joyce. The B&B had been her childhood home. There was less of a rationale for her husband, Todd, to be here—much less. From the way he blustered around town and had his hat in every organizational ring, it was pretty clear that retirement and retreat hadn’t been his idea at all. And, although, a remarkable talent for abstract oil painting had been jerked out of him by the classes at the newly opened arts center, there was no hint that he enjoyed the prospect of spending his declining years in an enclave like this. Whereas Joyce’s pursuits had continued to be in the arts, even in semiretirement, Todd had headed up the fraud unit at an international-level cutthroat insurance agency, GML, and cutthroat business maneuvering was deeply engrained in his approach to life, even in sleepy Hopewell.

Charlotte had no idea how—or even why—Joyce had dragged him to the book club meeting. He usually avoided such things like the plague, and the way he was hanging onto her arm and yapping in her ear as they approached the cottage gave Charlotte the impression that he didn’t realize where Joyce was headed and just wasn’t finished with whatever fight they had started back at the B&B.

They were still arguing when they swept into the cottage. Rachel Sharp, the village doctor, was hard on their heels and immediately began rearranging the furniture in Charlotte’s parlor—which she had carefully arranged herself the previous evening so that there was a space for her to bring a dining room chair in for herself at the last minute that would be as far away as possible from the most comfortable wingback chair, where Charlotte knew that Grady Tarbell, a former professor,  of inane boredom, would maneuver his voluminous backside. The professor, who still taught something only remotely usable part time at the venerable Washington College in Chestertown up peninsula from the Choptank had been on the make for Charlotte since she had moved to Hopewell, and she had no interest in taking on a Sydney Number Two.

Somehow mousey Jane Cranford had slipped in when nobody noticed—which was so like Jane anyway—and had taken the wingback chair. Grady had brought in a dining room chair and plopped it right next to Charlotte’s Boston rocker, which, by the time everyone settled, was the only place left for Charlotte to sit. So, she remained standing and sort of hovered around pretending to be a hostess, when, truth be told, she didn’t have the first notion of what hostesses did. The other truth to be known was that Charlotte hadn’t sat in the Boston rocker for years, as she was afraid that it just wasn’t up to supporting her weight. And when Grady had invited her to sit for the fourth time, she said as much.

“I feel like a whale,” she declared, half hoping the image would cool Grady’s interest. “I was out on the river today in the Penguin and I felt like a whale in a tea cup there too—and if I sat in that rocker, I think I’d feel like a whale in a teaspoon on land—and I’d be more likely to capsize that than I was the Penguin.”

“You were out on the river in a Penguin?” Jane asked, and she said it in such a way that she implied it was a miracle Charlotte hadn’t slopped the water from the river up into the streets of Hopewell.

Charlotte turned a gimlet-eyed stare on Jane. It was one thing for Charlotte to talk about her weight; it was quite another thing for Jane to do so. Jane was so thin that the only way to be sure she was in the room was to view her straight on. Not for the first time, Charlotte resolved to run a name check on Jane. The book was that she had been a cabaret singer who had married a New York mobster of some wealth and eventually of several bullet holes and that Jane had retreated here with his money. But that story was very hard to swallow. Charlotte did have to accept, thought, that Jane was an accomplished landscape artist, because Charlotte had seen her paintings in Annapolis galleries before she’d ever seen Jane in the faded, scant flesh.

“Yes, she was, I saw her out there,” Todd Vale said. What he didn’t say, though, was how good she looked wearing the Penguin.

“Nonsense, Charlotte,” Rachel said, “you’re not fat; you’re just zaftig. And being twice as tall as the rest of us—”

Charlotte tuned out the rest of that statement, although it was nice to have a doctor coming up with an exotic-sounding name for it—and she’d never had a doctor say she wasn’t overweight yet. Perhaps she would change from the overpriced GP in Annapolis to Rachel’s care.

“Statuesque,” Grady chimed in. And if a professor of the arcane could manage a lustful leer, Grady Tarbell was doing it.

Charlotte swung away from that, and her attention dropped immediately into the bickering Joyce and Todd were doing.

“. . . and if you hadn’t had your eyes on the river,” Joyce was saying, “you’d have seen the silver walk off.”

“Walk off, nothing,” Todd responded. “You’ve just put it away somewhere and forgot that you did so or where it is. You did the same with that pearl necklace last week, and we still haven’t found—”

“I did not misplace it, Todd Vale.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Grady chimed in, talking more to the fireplace than to anyone else in the room—and as easily ignored by all assembled. “I went to look for my stamp collection the other day, and it wasn’t where I thought I’d left it. I always keep it right there on the top right corner of my desk in the study, right next to the statue of Newton I found in a dusty hole-in-the-wall antique store near Covent Garden. Of course I’ve always thought I spent a bit too much for that statue. Very interesting—and rare now—interwar stamps from Germany. I found one just like it in Cape May in the summer of ’87 for a lot—”

“I wish,” Joyce’s voice rose over Grady’s and she puffed her ample bosom up. “I’d never let you buy that retirement magazine that—”

“You are missing some silver . . . and some jewelry?” Charlotte asked, suddenly all ears and focused attention.

Rachel stopped midsentence in whatever she was discussing with Jane and whipped her head around, intent on what Charlotte had asked.

“Yes, disappeared right from on top of the buffet, silver chest and all,” Joyce said. “It’s getting so we’ll have to lock our doors here. I’ve reported it to David out at the sheriff’s office, and he said he’d come over with another deputy and—”

“We don’t need the sheriff’s office nosing around in Hopewell,” Rachel said sharply. “We can—”

“Where’s Susan? Are we going to start the discussion without Susan?” Jane cut in with a soft, thin voice that, nonetheless had the ability to brush aside everything else and command attention. It was times like this that Charlotte could actually believe that Jane had been a successful singer. Her voice had a “listen to me” quality to it.

“She’s already over at the arts center,” Joyce said, at least momentarily devoid of her concern about being murdered in her sleep. “She’s having some art brought in from Philadelphia—some museum-quality pieces. She said she thought it would be good to include with the works in the art show so that folks could see how well our art stands up to the real stuff—of course she’ll put your paintings between those and the others in the show, so no one is shocked by the transition from something Todd paints and something Monet paints.”

Todd gave his wife a sour look, but she just returned a beatific smile, and Charlotte had the sense of a “one for Joyce” mark being slashed on her parlor wall.

“Charlotte,” Grady said, “What’s that you are pouring the tea from? Why it looks like a plastic Aunt Jemima pancake syrup microwavable jug.”

Charlotte opened her mouth to speak, but a howl came out instead. Or, rather, in the place where she would have said something if and when she’d thought of something to say, a dog’s howl rose up instead from the front lawn.

“Sam,” Charlotte thought. “That husky could wake the dead with that howl.”

The howl drew Jane to the parlor window.

“There’s a police car over at your house, Joyce,” she said. “I think your cavalry has arrived.”

And with that, the weekly meeting of the book group broke up—having failed, not for the first time, to even identify, let alone open, whatever book they were supposed to be reading that week.

Chapter Three

The sighting of Officer David Burch’s police cruiser on River Street, pretty much the only street in Hopewell, if you didn’t count the stubby cross streets of Spring and the obligatory Penn, named after the founder of Maryland, cleared Charlotte’s parlor out. Joyce and Todd were the first to go, because the police car was parked in front of their B&B. Jane and Grady followed on behind, because Hopewell was the sort of town where everyone was in everyone else’s business.

Charlotte stood at the door and watched them file out suspect lineup style, and Sam squatted next to her front walk and watched them parade by.

After the exodus, Charlotte turned her attention on Sam. “What are you doing out and just sitting there for, Sam?” she said. “You know the leash ordinances here and yet you sit with a police cruiser nudged up to the curve just down the block.”

Sam just looked at Charlotte and turned his head this way and that, completely nonplused at his criminal activity and how close the long arm of the law was. He did hang his tongue out, though, and started panting.

“Is that it, boy?” Charlotte asked as she descended the steps at her front door, walked out into the yard, and knelt beside the husky. “You’re thirsty? That Susan doesn’t take very good care of you, does she?”

Sam whined in agreement.

“Well, come on, boy, we’ll see where your water bowl has gotten to.”

Returning from finding the bowl, turning it over and running water in it from the spigot, and putting it down by the Wells’ backdoor, where their caretaker, Susan, hopefully would find it and where Sam would be out of David Burch’s sight, Charlotte returned to her front door and did a double take when she reentered her cottage.

“Rachel,” she exclaimed. “You’re still here.” And Rachel, indeed, was still there and rocking gently in the Boston rocker.

“The deputy still over at Joyce’s?” Rachel asked.

Charlotte turned and scanned the street. “It seems so. I’m surprised you aren’t out there gawking with the rest of the town.”

“I’m sure I’ll get the complete scoop from Joyce later,” Rachel said. “I told her not to bother the police on her silver—I’m with Todd on it probably just having been moved when she dusted and her mind hasn’t caught up with her on what she did with it. Joyce can be a bit scatterbrained.”

“Yes, well,” Charlotte said as she sat down in the wing chair and poured herself a cup of now-tepid tea from the plastic syrup jug. She would have gone on to say something else, but she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t put her in the same stead with Rachel as the lightly dismissed Joyce. Picking the plastic jug up had reminded her that her own porcelain tea set was missing as well—and most probably because she had moved it herself without thinking about it. This was something she’d never have done in the department. This was a bad habit creeping up on her in retirement.

“What is it, Charlotte? You look concerned.”

“Oh, nothing, really. I think I’m just becoming absentminded, I think. Losing my edge—and not yet out to pasture for a year.”

Joyce was looking at Charlotte sharply. “Do you miss your work tremendously? Still keep a hand in it, do you? Go up to Annapolis now and again and check in the caseloads at the department?”

“Oh, no. Yes, I miss some aspects of the work, of course. Not the aggravation and the frustration of not finding solutions, of course, and not always being able to close the books. But I was ready for retirement; it’s just a matter of rebuilding my interests.”

Rachel relaxed visibly. “Well, you certainly have thrown yourself into those. Sailing. I cannot imagine what has possessed you to take that up so late in life.”

“I’ve always wanted to sail,” Charlotte said somewhat defensively. “But there was never time.”

“Ah, the universal answer of the workaholic no longer in a demanding job. Sailing’s a sport to start young if you want to be able to do it into retirement, though. And that’s your local doctor’s advice.”

“And very good advice it is, I’m sure,” Charlotte responded. “But it’s different with doctors, like you, isn’t it, Rachel? Never can retire can you? You just move to progressively smaller towns with fewer patients to make demands on you.”