Skeleton Key (43 page)

“But you can't just stop doing it,” he said finally. “They'd kick us out of the house. It isn't our house. It belongs to the Fairfield Foundation.”

“I meant I was sick of the house, too.”

Martin rubbed his palms against his jeans again. There seemed to be nothing else to do. “I don't get it,” he said finally. “Where would we go? What would we do?”

“We don't necessarily have to do anything,” Henry said. “You could stay here if you wanted to. I could go on my own.”

“I couldn't handle this place by myself.”

“You could hire a helper. Get one of those boys who's always driving us so crazy. One of them would probably be more than happy to have a part-time job.”

“You don't want me along with you,” Martin said. “Wherever you're going, you don't want me to be there, too.”

Henry sighed. “It's not that I don't want you to be there,
too. I just want you to do what you want to do. That's all. I just want to stop going along to go along. I'm an old man. I want to do something fun before it's too late.”

“Fun,” Martin said.

Then he turned around and lifted the ladder off the ground. He snapped it closed and put it under his arm. These were familiar things he was doing, the things he did every day. This was the life he knew. Henry was crazy to be talking about fun.

“I'm going to go put this away in the barn,” he said, keeping his back to his brother. “You go do what you want.”

“Listen,” Henry said. “We can get Social Security in a few years. Do you realize that?”

“So what?”

“So it's enough to live on, some places. And we wouldn't have to stop working. We could flip burgers or something. There would be jobs.”

“Where?” Martin demanded. “In Waterbury? Why would I want to flip burgers in Waterbury?”

“Not in Waterbury. In Florida. We could go to Florida. I've got some money put by. We could buy a trailer, one of those things, or a little ranch house. They don't cost much in Florida. Maybe sixty or seventy thousand dollars in some places.”

“Nobody can buy a house for sixty or seventy thousand dollars,” Martin said. “You can't buy a garage for that.”

“Up here you can't. Down in Florida you can. I've been checking. Down in Palm Harbor, that's a place. And it's getting cold, can't you feel it? It's going to be cold as hell all winter.”

“It's always cold as hell all winter.”

“So you like that?” Henry asked. “Why? Why should we both be miserable for months at a time? Why shouldn't we go to Florida?”

Martin put the ladder down on the ground, on its side. The leaves were thick around his ankles. Somebody would have to come out here and rake. The raking would take all
day, and when it was done it would have to be done again. Then the snow would begin to fall, and somebody would have to shovel out the driveway and the walk. Him. He would have to shovel out the driveway and the walk, unless Henry did it, and Henry couldn't do it if he was in Florida.

“We've never been to Florida,” Martin said finally, as if that ought to answer everything.

Instead, Henry was hopping around from one foot to another, grinning like he'd just finished a bottle of whiskey.

“That's the point,” he said. “We've never been there, and it's warm, and we can go to Disney World.”

Disney World.

For the first time in his life, Martin Chandling thought he was getting a migraine.

By late on the afternoon of Halloween, everybody at the Swamp Tree Country Club knew what had happened with Sally Martindale. Everybody knew what the deal was going to be, too, because members had been eavesdropping outside old Mortimer's door all afternoon. Mortimer was not being particularly quiet in there—in fact, most of the time he was shouting. It was Ruth Grandmere who was keeping her head and being practical about things. If it hadn't been for Ruth, Mortimer would probably have had the police come right to the club and cart Sally Martindale off to jail.

“It was gambling,” Marian Ridenour confided to Peter Greer as she pulled out a chair to sit down at his table. “Can you believe that? She was taking all this money and going out to Ledyard to play the slots. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of it.”

“It wasn't hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Jennifer Crawford said, pulling another chair over to the little table. “It was only about ten thousand, and mostly she wasn't gambling with it. Apparently, she's been living out there in that huge house for months without enough money to pay
the bills. She'd had her heat shut off last winter.”

“Oh, I'd heard that,” Marian said. “Somebody said—I don't remember who—that she'd had to apply for heating assistance from the state. And yet Mallory was here, the whole time, trying to be a debutante.”

“Oh,” Jennifer said, “Mallory isn't going to be a debutante anymore. She's going to go to nursing school. Which is much more sensible, really, if you think about it. It never does any good to be unrealistic about your circumstances.”

Peter Greer had intended to be alone, but at the moment he found this particular conversation soothing. It was so—Swamp Tree Country Club; so—Litchfield County. It occurred to him that there were dozens of women in this small square part of the state who were perfectly sane, who did not think gossip and status were the bedrocks of life, and some of them were even rich. None of them belonged to the Swamp Tree. And yet this was what he wanted. This was what he had always wanted. He wondered what that said about himself.

“What do you think about it?” Marian asked him. “Are you just shocked beyond words?”

“Not really,” Peter said. “I suppose it was hard to keep up after Frank left.”

“Oh that,” Jennifer said. “Well, of course, nothing on earth could excuse Frank's behavior. But you have to wonder. You really do. You have to wonder if he had cause.”

“Why?” Peter asked.

“Well, because of this,” Jennifer said. “I mean, she couldn't have been very stable, could she? And Frank had to live with her. He'd have known something was wrong long before we would. Maybe he saw it happening. This breakdown, or whatever it is she's having.”

Peter cocked his head. “Her husband left her for another woman and stiffed her on the settlement so that she got practically no cash when she'd been used to living well, and you don't think that's enough of a reason for her to have a breakdown?”

“Well,” Marian said, “you've got to remember. She used
to have a job. She worked for Deloitte. And they fired her.”

“She came up for partnership and didn't make it,” Peter said. “Most people who come up for partnership don't make it.”

“Still,” Marian said. “You've got to wonder if they saw something, too. Now that we know, you see, it all begins to make sense. The odd things she did. Her peculiar behavior. And her behavior really has been peculiar.”

“She'd come to dinner at your house and then she wouldn't invite you back,” Jennifer said. “Ever.”

“She didn't have enough money to entertain,” Peter said.

Jennifer brushed this away. “It wouldn't have had to be anything elaborate. I never do anything elaborate myself. It's a waste of time. But anybody can afford a nice little buffet with drinks on the side. Really. She wouldn't have had to go to any trouble.”

“Champagne cocktails hardly cost anything at all,” Marian said.

Peter stood up. The waiter would be by in a moment, but he didn't want to sit still just this once. A champagne cocktail at the club cost four dollars. Even if you assumed the price was inflated, that was still not nothing at all.

He got to the bar and asked for another Perrier and lime. It was much too early to be drinking actual alcohol, but some of the women were doing it. They drank tall, fancy drinks with plenty of soda in them and thought of it as not really drinking. He got his Perrier and lime and looked back at them. Marian was wearing tennis shoes and white ankle socks. Jennifer was wearing a print skirt and a cotton sweater. They all got their clothes at the same places. They all looked alike. He loved that about them, that they were so much of a type, that they didn't bother much with individuality.

“Individuality,” Peter's first debutante girlfriend had told him, “is very middle-class.”

The doors to the bar were propped open with solid walnut doorstops. Peter looked up as Deborah Candleman came running through them, looking breathless.

“They're coming out,” she said to nobody in particular and everybody at once. “They're coming right down the hall.”

Peter didn't think a single person in the bar sat still. Marian and Jennifer were on their feet so fast, he didn't even catch them moving. The crowd surged at the doors and then out of them. The hall in question was in the back, and there was a back door there, and they didn't want to miss anything. Peter followed them very slowly, not sure what he wanted to do.

There was a window in the hall outside the bar. Standing at it, it was possible to see the other door, the one Sally Martindale would be coming out of, and the parking lot beyond it Peter stood at the back of the crowd and looked out on the leaves. The other door opened then and Sally came out with Ruth Grandmere's arms wrapped around her shoulders. Sally was staring at the ground and hugging herself tight She was taking steps so small, it was as if she were walking on bound feet.

“Oh, look,” somebody said. “Doesn't she look upset?”

“Well, she ought to look upset,” somebody else said. “Stealing all that money. She ought to look more than upset”

“She won't go to jail for it though,” the first somebody said. “They never do in cases like this. She'll just get to pay it back.”

“If she has it.”

“They'll work out a payment plan.”

“They don't want embarrassing stories about the club in the newspapers.”

“She didn't belong here anyway. Anybody could tell that. She was just a nobody from the Midwest somewhere and then she married money.”

Peter took a long pull on his Perrier and lime. Out in the parking lot Sally Martindale was trying to get into her car. All her muscles seemed to be stiff. She was having trouble folding herself into a sitting position. Her face was
white. Even at this distance, he could tell that her eyes were red.

“Oh, look at the crocodile tears,” one of the women said. “Isn't that just like her, the deceitful little cheat.”

Peter went back to the bar, and found his table, and sat down.

He was suddenly feeling violently sick to his stomach.

Bennis Hannaford had not meant to turn it into a neighborhood meeting, or an Armenian American convention, or whatever it had become. She had only wanted to have Father Tibor with her if she had to have a biopsy, and that was why she had called him and asked him to come. Now he was here, but so was Donna Moradanyan Donahue and Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian and even Sheila Kashinian, who had been driving the nurses at the nurses' station totally berserk for nearly half an hour. Sheila Kashinian wanted to redecorate the ward, in primary colors, to make it more cheerful for the patients.

“It really wouldn't
take
anything at
all
to get it
done,”
she kept saying, in that Philadelphia-accented grating caw of hers, loudly enough so that they could probably hear her down in surgery.

The good thing was, the doctor would only allow two people at a time in Bennis's room with her. That meant that Tibor and Donna were right here at her bedside, but the rest of them were down the hall. They would all want to come down and talk to her eventually, but Bennis thought she would deal with that when the time came. If she could deal with anything. She was washed out and weak. She was so exhausted, she sometimes dropped off in the middle of conversations she was having herself.

“I still say,” Donna was saying, “that we ought to call Gregor and tell him what's going on. He's not going to be at all happy to show up here and find Bennis in a hospital
bed when he didn't even know she was sick.”

“He knows she is sick,” Tibor said, in his very careful, thickly accented English. “I have told him that she has gone to see the doctor. I have told him that she has had an emergency and that he should come home. What else should I have told him?”

“You should have told him the doctors think she might have cancer,” Donna said.

Bennis turned over in bed. She wanted a cigarette. That was the truth. She wanted a cigarette so badly, she was almost ready to cry. More than that, she wanted to be able to breathe.

“Oh, God,” Donna said. “We've got her upset. Bennis? Bennis, listen, I didn't mean to upset you, I really didn't I just meant that Gregor really needs to know what the situation is. It's not fair to him—”

“Nobody knows what the situation is,” Bennis said, forcing herself to sit up. “They found a spot on my lung. They don't even know what it is yet.”

“Yes,” Donna said. “Yes, I know.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bennis said. “You don't have to be so damned optimistic about it.”

“I am optimistic about it,” Tibor said. “I have talked to God. That is my job. But I am not optimistic about you when this is over, because I do not think you will quit smoking.”

Bennis lay back down again. Quit smoking, quit smoking, quit smoking. How long had she been smoking? She couldn't remember. Since she left high school, she thought She'd started sometime in college. She rolled over on her side and curled into a fetal position. She needed more covers. She needed more blankets. She was so cold. She should have thought to get Tibor to bring something for her from home. If he was going to bring Donna with him anyway, Donna could have gone into Bennis's apartment and found everything that was needed.