On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) (18 page)

Thirty-Two

“Hester, I swear on a stack of Bibles,” said Dee. “Lou Latimer bragged to old Chet that he was threatened by the police in Minnesota with arrest if he didn’t do something about the statues he’d put in front of his house or mansion or whatever it is he lives in up there.”

“Dee, come on, has anybody in the park ever seen them?” said Hester.

“No, but remember Lou lives in the middle of nowhere on the shore of freaking Lake Superior in the summer, so how could anyone from Pleasant Palms actually see them?”

“Well, then people shouldn’t talk about something they don’t know for a fact is true.”

“But Lou, himself, keeps bringing them up. He told Chet and Chet told the Buchanans and Doris Buchanan told me that Lou said, ‘They are over ten feet tall and look so damn real, it’s scary.’”

Dee and Hester were sitting on the clubhouse deck the day before the big shuffleboard tournament, talking quietly, when Mrs. Florence and Rosario Domingo slowly walked up the ramp. Miriam Florence, at one hundred and two years of age, was the oldest person in the park, and Rosario, her young, Jamaican caretaker, stuck out like a sore thumb in Pleasant Palms. She was strikingly beautiful and close to six feet tall. She towered over Miriam, who seemed to shrink more every time Hester saw her.

Rosaria’s arm was draped gently around Miriam’s shoulders. Her long, black fingers looked like a giant tarantula nesting on the old lady’s white sweater. Hester couldn’t take her eyes off Rosaria, her gleaming skin, broad nose, full lips, her expression as calm as the surface of a dark pond. She wore a white cotton skirt that hugged her hips and a low-cut teal blouse that complimented her willowy neck. Her shiny hair was braided and coiled neatly around her head. She held her chin high, looked at Hester, and nodded, and the huge golden hoops in her ears jiggled.

Mrs. Florence was, rumor had it, the richest woman in the park; and, miraculously for her age, still had her wits about her. At least that’s what everyone assumed, because since Rosaria came to care for her, no one talked directly to Miriam Florence. Rosaria answered the phone, answered any questions personally put to Miriam, and told whoever might ask that “her” Mrs. Florence was indeed fine, thank you very much, madam or sir. Clearly, Rosaria now made all the decisions for Mrs. Florence, from the pair of golden flats the lady wore on her tiny feet, to the pink blush deftly brushed on what was left of the apples of her cheeks. Today the old woman smelled strongly of gardenias, and Rosario had dressed her in beige slacks, a lime green tunic, a white sweater, and a fluffy white hat. If you glanced at her quickly, she looked like a slice of key lime pie.

Rosaria settled Miriam into a rocker and pulled the sleeves of her sweater down so they covered Mrs. Florence’s impossibly thin wrists. She stood behind Miriam and gently rocked her chair, humming, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Miriam Florence might as well have been Rosario’s little baby.

Hester couldn’t help but stare at them. They looked so, well, content with each other.
Lucky Miriam, to have someone like Rosaria,
thought Hester as she was distracted by the flight of a flock of pelicans. Dee watched the pelicans too as she picked up her lament about Lou Latimer where she’d left off. “That Lou Latimer is playing with fire. The people up in Minnesota won’t stand for it. I’ll bet it’ll be on the national news. Hell, it’s probably already on YouTube.”

“Dee, I just don’t believe it. It’s ridiculous. Why would—”

“Shhh! Here he comes.”

Lou, the reigning shuffleboard champion, walked past the wheelchair ramp and bounded up the six steps of the deck two at a time. He was a bald, short, slight man with a flinty look about the eyes. He sat in the rocker next to Miriam and put his small feet on the railing. He had on sandals, and Hester’s eyes were drawn to his toes, the ugliest ones she’d ever seen. They looked like claws, except for his big toes which stuck out like thumbs.

Rosario kept humming, which helped Hester relax, and she began to plan dinner in her head as she stared at the empty beach and the rolling waves:
vindaloo, the recipe was in that “Curries without Worries” cookbook, now where—

“Bitch! Bitch! Mother fucker, pick up yo fuck’n phone! Bitch! Bitch! Mother fucker, pick up yo fuck’n phone! Bitch!”

“What in the hell?” Dee jumped up.

Lou struggled to pull his cell phone out of his pocket, while the disgusting ringtone blared, “Bitch! Bitch! Pick up yo…”

Hester shouted, “Lou Latimer, turn that off. That is disgusting, and we don’t want to hear it.”

Lou laughed and did nothing to stop the noise, but before Hester could say another word, Rosaria flew at Lou, grabbed the offending gadget from his hand, ran down to the water, and heaved it in.

“Call the police! Someone call the police! You saw her. That nigger stole my cell phone. She stole my cell phone.” Lou was out of his seat, his face beet red. He stomped his ugly-toed foot again and again. Infuriated, he yelled in Dee’s and Hester’s direction, “You saw what she did! You’re my witnesses. If you have a phone, you better call the police.”

“Are you kidding me?” Hester lowered the register of her voice like she used to when she was talking to one of her more defiant students. “That ringtone is offensive. You want the police; go back to your trailer and call them yourself. But if I were a cop, it would be you I’d be arresting.”

Rosaria walked slowly back up to the deck, looked straight ahead, and kept her eyes on Mrs. Florence. Lou glowered at her but said nothing.

If looks could kill
, thought Hester,
poor Rosaria would be dead
.

“None of you has heard the end of this!” Lou yelled as he clomped down the ramp.

Dee went over to Rosario and said, “We’re so sorry.”

“No mind to you, ladies. You didn’t do nothing wrong.” Rosaria helped Mrs. Florence to her feet. She put the old woman’s hand through her arm and patted it gently like it was the head of a puppy. Hester saw tears in Miriam’s eyes. They began to walk down the ramp. Rosario turned and said, “Ladies, no bother to me language like that. Me, alone, I might be laughing too, but not in front of my Mrs., here. No, not that in front of
my
lady.”

The next day at seven in the morning, the shuffleboard team met in the community room before the tournament for coffee and donuts. Lou’s absence was of immediate concern; they needed him to win. Lois Neiman tried to call him, but there was no answer. She went over to his trailer and banged on the door to no avail. Others fanned out around the park looking for the missing star, but he was nowhere to be found, and the first set started in fifteen minutes.

His car was parked next to his trailer. Desperate to find him, Ted Hunter and Jeff Mickleson jimmied Lou’s trailer door open and searched the place. There was no sign of him.

The team headed off to the shuffleboard courts without their best player. It was difficult for the Delray Pines players to hide their relief at the news. The Pleasant Palmers, however, were torn between dismay that something terrible happened to one of their own and anger that perhaps Lou had blown off the tournament on purpose. 

“How well,” Lois wondered, “do any of us really know anybody else anyway?”

They held the start off as long as they could, but Lou never materialized. In fact, days went by, his car still parked next to his empty trailer. When the park manager Harry Stout finally called the police, they didn’t want to take the case. Lou Latimer didn’t have dementia, did he? Well, then they couldn’t put out a Silver Alert.

The next day, though, an officer named Alvarez showed up and asked around about Latimer’s activities before he went missing. Eventually, he got to Dee, Hester, Rosaria, and Miriam. The four women and Officer Alvarez sat around a card table in the community room. Alvarez wanted to know if anything unusual happened that afternoon. Dee and Hester looked at each other and then at Rosaria, who was staring blankly at the policeman.

“Nothing happened, Officer. We were just sitting talking. Watching the birds. You know, that sort of thing.” Hester was nervous. She wanted to be truthful, but if she said what happened, it would make Rosario look crazy.

“What were you talking about?”

“Dinner, I wasn’t talking about dinner, but I was thinking about what I was going to make.”

“Did you talk to Mr. Latimer?”

“No. Dee and I were talking. Rosaria was rocking Mrs. Florence in her chair, and Lou was sitting next to Mrs. Florence.”

“What was he doing?”

“Nothing.”

Dee nodded in agreement. Rosaria eyes locked on Hester’s.

“Is that what happened?” Alvarez looked at Rosaria.

Rosaria was as still as a statue, her face finely chiseled obsidian with brown marbles for eyes. Alvarez shook his head, pushed his chair back, and exhaled. “Well, I guess that’ll do it for now.”

As the week went by, Hester’s conscience bothered her less and less. If she told Alvarez about Lou’s obnoxious cell-phone ringtone and how Rosaria ripped the phone out of his hand and threw it in the ocean, she would only stir up trouble for the loyal caretaker, whom many people in the park already avoided.
I would have done the same thing if I had the nerve,
Hester thought.
Lou got what he deserved, forget that thing on his phone, he called Rosario the “n” word.

Several days after the interview with Officer Alvarez, Hester was up before sunrise. She couldn’t stop worrying. All sorts of meetings were being held about the sale of the park. The once amorphous rumor was taking on a solid shape. Even Al was being sucked into the whirlwind of speculation.

Hester threw on sweats and flip-flops, and headed down to the marina to see if any boats were going out. The air was cool. The moon was gone already, but the sky was still speckled with stars. Hester could see the outline of someone standing at the end of the dock holding a bucket. The bucket was distinguishable because it was large and bright yellow. The person held it up and tipped it. Plop! Hester heard, but couldn’t see, something being dumped into the water. There was another bucket. The person dumped something out of it too. Plop! He or she, Hester couldn’t tell which it was, put the second bucket down.

Hester was curious. She kept walking. The sky lightened. It was a woman in a long grey dress. She was between the buckets circling her arms like pinwheels. Hester was about twenty feet away when she realized who it was and watched as Rosario stopped swinging her arms and spit right where she had dumped whatever was in the buckets.

Hester had a bad feeling about what might have been in those buckets. She backed away and left and went home and called Alvarez, and Dee.

Dee called back hours later. She’d been sleeping off a hangover—one Amstel Light too many, she confessed—but she was glad Hester called, because she heard something last night she was dying to tell her—Hester just wouldn’t believe it.

“Wait a minute, Dee, me first.” Hester cut her off and got right to the point about Rosaria probably killing Lou, probably cutting him up into little pieces, probably spending the whole night dumping his body parts into the Intracoastal bucketful by bucketful. She told Dee she called Officer Alvarez the minute she got home. She almost said one dead person on her conscience was enough, but stopped herself in time.

“Well, you might see things differently when I tell you what I heard from Joan Sampson last night. Joan and Hank Sampson are new here this season and from Minnesota, one town away from Lou’s. Anyway, last summer they go for a drive down this rural road with big houses set back on huge lots when Hank sees something that makes him slam on the brakes. Right by the road on either side of this big driveway, instead of urns or pillars or lions, are life-size sculptures of naked slaves, one male, the other female. They have on slave collars and chains, and they have scars from whippings.

“Then down here Hank and Joan are introduced to Lou at some party and after a few drinks he whips out a fistful of photos of the ‘magnificent sculptures’ he commissioned for his front entrance. The Sampson’s go into shock cause Lou’s sculptures are the exact ones they drove past. ‘Why, now I have a pair of my own,’ Lou says. Joan said she was sick to her stomach. She and Hank left the party and swore they’d never go to another party if Lou Latimer was going to be there.

“Hester, now tell me you aren’t surprised something horrible like this didn’t happen to that jerk Latimer sooner.”

Hester was speechless. She didn’t know if what Dee told her made her feel better, or worse, and she hadn’t clue what she’d say to Alvarez when he got back to her.

Thirty-Three

Hester went straight to Al’s office after finding out Nina’s mother died in the Twin Towers.

Why hadn’t she gotten that information ahead of time from guidance? It was their job, wasn’t it?

Al half listened to her, his eyes glued to the computer screen. Hester, curious to see what was so interesting, began to walk around his desk. He clicked the mouse.

“Nothing you’d be interested in, honey. Just putting out another fire out over that bus incident. Mr. Hudson wants to sue us for suspending his boy when that kid was the one mooning people out the back of the bus. The old man wants to know how we identified his kid. He’s calling it an invasion of privacy, and me, a pervert. Can you believe it? He thinks I made the kid pull down his pants so I could make sure it was him. Screw Hudson,” Al said as he leaned back in his chair and cupped the back of his head in his hands. “Anyway, I’m swamped right now, but, I hear you. Elsie and Lisa dropped the ball. What’s new with guidance?” He looked back at the computer. “I’ll talk to them and set something up.”

“Please, Al, don’t forget. I want you to schedule it so Lisa Lambert realizes this is serious. It’s important to me to find out what’s going on with Nina Tattoni. I really like this kid.”

“Come on, Hester, you like them all.”

“No, I don’t. Remember Humbolt and Pherson and…”

“That was decades ago. Now you’re a better teacher so you have better students, and you love them all.”

“Nina’s special.”

“What’s so special about this Nina kid?”

“I can’t really put my finger on it.”

“Cause she’s just like every other kid.”

“No, Al. She’s different. There’s just something about her.”

A few days later, Hester was early for the 10:00 a.m. meeting Al scheduled for her with Nina’s counselor. Lisa Lambert showed up ten minutes late with a Starbucks latte in hand. She sat across from Hester and avoided making eye contact. She studied the cover of Nina’s folder and sipped her coffee. It left a foam moustache on her lip. Hester watched her lick it off.

“Mrs. Murphy, I’m so happy you could make our little meeting,” she finally said.

Happy I could make our little meeting?
I’m the one who insisted on it, you moron
. Hester was about to lose her patience, but she controlled herself and said calmly, “Well, Lisa, I thought it was due time I got the facts about Nina Tattoni. She transferred in, in January, right after the break. Now it’s the end of February, and I’ve been told nothing about her extremely disturbing situation. Quite frankly, I think this meeting should’ve taken place before she…”

“Quite frankly, Mrs. Murphy, I think we should wait until Ms. Gunter gets here.” She flipped her long auburn hair off her shoulder and took another sip of coffee.

“Elsie doesn’t have to be here.”

“Yes, she does, Mrs. Murphy, because I invited her to join us, so I think we should just sit and wait until she arrives.”

So this is how it’s going to go. Mrs. Murphy? Ms. Gunter? Where the hell does she think she is? Buckingham Palace?
They were all on the same team, all in the same trenches, so why the high and mighty act? Hester felt like wringing Lisa’s scrawny neck. It wouldn’t do any good to complain to Al about her either. He hired her. Her resume was “top-notch,” and, according to him, she was just what the Sourland High’s Guidance Department needed.

Hester started grading papers. If you’re an English teacher, you don’t waste time on idle banter. Chatting with Ms. Lambert fit right into that category, so Hester ignored her and concentrated on one more attempt at analysis of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

“Hester Murphy, how nice to get together with you!” Short, square, department supervisor Elsie Gunter walked into the conference room.

“Not nice, Elsie, but necessary. Let’s cut the bull and get to the point—Nina Tattoni’s problem. Give me the facts.” Hester scooped up the essays and put them aside.

“Slow down, Hester. I explained all this to Al, and he understands completely. We are so overworked down here in guidance that it’s taken us this long to get to Nina’s folder. We were just about to e-mail you about a meeting when you pushed the panic button.”

Nice job covering your collective asses
, thought Hester,
and smart to have already done damage control with Al
.

Elsie sat down next to Lisa. “Look, Nina has had a tough time.”

“No kidding, Elsie, why do you think I’m here? I’ve got a sixth sense by now for sniffing out damaged goods.” Hester knew Elsie used to too. She’d been a damn good counselor, but becoming an administrator had changed her. The old Elsie would’ve been on top of a file like Nina’s, would’ve jumped at the chance to make a difference. But in her present capacity, it slipped by her and landed on young Ms. Lambert’s desk, where cluelessness or laziness, or both, were in abundance.

“From what her counselor at her old school told me, it seems her mother was living a pretty isolated existence, and there was no record of who Nina’s father was. ‘Father: unknown’ is how it’s listed in her file. Nina’s school didn’t find out about her mother’s death until a secretary happened to spot her picture in the
New York Times
obituary and showed it to Nina’s counselor. Nina hadn’t been to school for several days, so the counselor went to the Tattoni apartment and found Nina there alone. Nina told her she was fine. Her mother wasn’t there, but her grandmother had come to stay with her, but she was at work now. It seems Nina didn’t know her mother was dead, and the counselor had to break the news to her. She showed Nina the obituary. The girl read it slowly and studied the photograph the custodial company had submitted to the paper. ‘That’s not my mother. My mother was a stock-broker, and the lady who died…it says she was a cleaning lady. So, you see, it’s just someone who looks like my mother, and the company made a mistake.’

“It took a while to convince Nina that in fact her mother was the woman in the obituary. It was sad because Nina knew the Towers had come down, but she was hoping her mother was just lost or something. The school got Nina into counseling with other kids who’d lost relatives in the attack, but it seems nobody checked her story about her grandmother. Nina must’ve been alone in that apartment for quite a while. Think about it, she was only fourteen then, taking care of herself, no money, nothing, her mother dead. It’s just terrible.

“Then a woman shows up at her door and tells her she’s her aunt from Moretown, New Jersey. The aunt tells Nina that her sister, Nina’s mother, ran away fourteen years ago, and no one in the family had seen or heard from her since. She told Nina she saw her dead sister’s picture in the
New York Times,
and it said in the obituary that she had one daughter, and that’s how she found out about her. The aunt goes down to the school and raises hell about Nina being alone for days and nobody doing a goddamn thing about it. She threatens to sue, signs Nina out of her school, and brings her back here to Moretown and us.”

“What’s the aunt’s name?”

“Linda Connery. She lives on Delaware Ave. with her husband. I don’t think they had any kids, because we never had any by that name that I recall, but I know she went here back in the early eighties, because she said so when she enrolled Nina. She had Nina’s birth certificate, but no adoption or guardianship papers. She said they had a lawyer who was handling it.”

“Did you check Connery out?”

“I didn’t see any reason to.”

“Well, I’ll give you one. If Linda Connery is married, Nina hasn’t seen her uncle yet. Nina says when her aunt is home, which isn’t often, her aunt doesn’t talk to her. Nina claims her aunt acts like Nina isn’t there. Could be neglect. Linda Connery might not even be Nina’s aunt. She might be after money. Eventually the survivors might get some kind of settlement. Nina begged me not to tell her aunt what she told me, and that’s a red flag.”

Elsie was shaking her head. “Connery seemed so normal. No lie, Hester, the woman was together—nails done, makeup on, nice jewelry, expensive clothes.”

“Looks can be deceiving. I think we should contact child protective services to be on the safe side.”

“We don’t have any evidence, anything solid to go on. Did you see any bruises on her?”

“No. Nina didn’t say anything about getting hit.”

“Nina could be lying.”

“She didn’t give all the details, but she wasn’t lying about her mother’s death.”

“I’ll call her in and talk to her, and if I think we need to go further, I won’t hesitate to go to the authorities.”

Hester knew Elsie was right, but she also knew Nina probably wouldn’t tell Elsie a thing. 

“Thanks.” Hester shook Elsie’s hand and got up to leave. Lisa extended her hand, but Hester ignored it. Being inexperienced was no excuse for not doing the basics. Meet with new students, read the files. And at the meeting Miss Lambert might as well have stayed at Starbucks. She contributed nothing because she knew nothing, and she knew nothing because she did nothing. At the last minute, though, Hester decided to give Lisa a bit of guidance.

“As soon as you finish that latte, dear,” Hester said, “make sure you get Nina Tattoni into a bereavement group, pronto!”

Just what Sourland High’s Guidance Department needed, my ass
.