Slightly Abridged (19 page)

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Authors: Ellen Pall

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“No.” Matt shifted uneasily, perhaps feeling cornered. Which he was.
“Is she with her mother?” Juliet suggested brightly. She had noticed he wore no wedding ring, but that meant little.
“No,” Matt said again.
Juliet flirted with the idea of asking pointblank who and where the mother was, but something, some hint of fragility in McLaurin, prevented her. Instead, she blundered on, “Wasn't she the one who found the hidden compartment in Ada's bed? She must be very clever.”
This time Matt said nothing at all. Was there something wrong with the little girl that her father preferred not to speak of her? Something about the finding of the manuscript that made the topic taboo? (Like, for example, that he knew what it was, followed Ada, and killed her for it?) His job at the insurance agency appeared to be fairly menial. How much did he need money? Was there a messy divorce in the works? Child support? Two households to maintain? Or was there just something plain weird about Matt?
“Does she like poetry? You must have been so excited when she pulled those documents out of the bed—what a moment!”
Matt shook his head. “I never saw them. Gina pulled something out of the bed and gave it to Ada, and that was that.”
“You mean, Ada never told you what it was?”
Matt's face darkened, but he only said quietly, “No. But I read
about it in the newspaper after she died. I wish Gina had never found the manuscript. Ada would be alive.” His voice had dropped to so low a pitch that Juliet could barely hear him. She scrutinized his broad, closed face. “Did you get over there yet?” he asked now. “Did you find her poems?”
“Oh. Yes.” Juliet reined in her thoughts and described the orderly pile in Ada's nightstand drawer. This morning she had taken them all to the Copy-Kwik in Gloversville, where she would shortly pick up two sets of duplicates. She had disliked leaving the precious manuscript there even for a few hours; but the pages needed to be hand fed, and she would have been late for the service if she had waited. She had slipped twenty bucks to the teenaged attendant to make sure they didn't get lost.
“I made a set for you. Should I drop it off at your place? You're near Ada, right?”
“Oh, please don't feel you need to bring them to me,” Matt said hurriedly. “I can pick them up. Just leave them at the Copy-Kwik.”
Juliet said it would be no trouble to drop the poems by—she had to go back to Ada's today anyhow. But the other flatly declined. He did not even say, “It's hard to get to,” or, “I won't be home.” He was also showing distinct signs of wanting to escape, glancing around him into the room, trying to sidle away from the table against which Juliet had pinned him.
In desperation she blurted out, “How did you find out Ada left her farm to Free Earth? Had she told you in advance?”
Matt's head tilted. “No. As I said on the phone, Mr. Nilsson called me,” he said. His tone was mild, but there was something stubborn in it, too, Juliet thought. Angry. Maybe he realized she was grilling him, suspecting him. Whatever it was, he muttered something totally inaudible, then turned his back on her and slipped into the crowd.
Following him with her eyes, Juliet saw that Murray had managed
to engage Tom and Cindy in conversation. The Giddys stood side by side, Cindy smoldering up at Landis, her husband watching them, slowly turning the paper cup in his hands. Juliet thought of joining them, then looked around for Chad Blynn—one of the few people here she would have known how to introduce herself to—and discovered he had gone. Indeed, after making a serious raid on the refreshments, many people had left already, while others were drifting toward the door.
Still deliberating whether she would help or hinder Murray by joining him, Juliet found herself set upon by two very elderly ladies she had noticed sitting in the back of the sanctuary. Both carefully coiffed and dressed, they introduced themselves as Mary and Margaret Flood, sisters, lifelong AdirondActors, and (most recently) Ada's fellow witches in the planned production of
Macbeth.
“We never read Regency romances,” Margaret Flood announced, after Mary explained that Ada had tried to share with them her love of Angelica Kestrel-Haven's books. “They're a little unsophisticated for us.”
Margaret smiled, as if their lofty disdain for Juliet's life work would naturally ingratiate them to the author. It was a smile Juliet had seen many times. For reasons that escaped her, people often thought she would like them better if they showed they were too intelligent to enjoy her books—as if the whole enterprise were some sort of insider's scam she (and they) practiced upon the brainless masses.
“Try reading one,” she suggested. “I'd be curious to hear what you think.” She was about to turn away when it occurred to her that the Flood sisters must know a great deal about the locals. Overcoming her pique she added, “I thought Matt McLaurin did a wonderful job today, didn't you?”
The Flood sisters agreed, though both thought more could have been made of Ada's career as a thespian. Juliet politely suppressed
the observation that, if they felt so, either one of them could have said something herself.
“I did hope she'd leave some money to the AdirondActors,” Mary whined. “We're always so hard up for money.”
“Ada mentioned to me that Matt had a daughter,” Juliet said, doggedly ignoring her. “Is there a wife, do you know?”
Margaret's eyes lit up and she leaned forward confidentially. The Flood sisters's lives were insured through Gallop Insurance. They had also wondered about this. No, there was no wife—not that they'd ever been able to discover. No wife, no ex-wife, no mother for Gina. Wasn't that strange?
“But—”
“He only moved to town a year or two ago, you see,” Mary put in, stage whispering. “No one here knows much about him at all.”
“And he won't say anything, either,” Margaret took up. “Not where he came from; not even exactly where he lives. Believe me, we've tried.”
Juliet believed them. A sudden movement at the corner of her eye told her that Cindy Giddy had torn herself away from Landis and was walking out of the room alone. Fearing to miss the chance of a word with her, Juliet hastily said good-bye to the sisters and followed.
Outside the parlor, Cindy turned down a hall, passed the front entrance to the Regency, and kept going. Finally, she opened a door and went in.
Ah, the ladies' room. Juliet felt a wave of gratitude to fate. She waited outside for twenty or thirty seconds, then entered to find there was only one stall. A wisp of smoke rose from behind its door, and the sharp, spicy smell of burning marijuana was in the air.
Juliet, surprised by Cindy's obvious lack of concern over who might catch her here, opened her purse and began to dig through it
for makeup and a comb. She didn't normally wear makeup, but she thought she had a stick of concealer somewhere in there, and maybe even a lipstick. Any pretext would do: When Cindy finally emerged, she would be in no position to ask Juliet what she was doing in the ladies' room.
A full two minutes went by before Cindy flushed the toilet (surely for show?) and sauntered out. She acknowledged Juliet with a dull, “Hello.”
“Hello. Let me get these things out of your way,” said Juliet, beginning to clear the sink of her odds and ends.
Cindy looked confused, then realized Juliet expected her to want to wash her hands. Or to pretend to want to wash her hands. She shook her head and raised a hand to push open the door.
“Oh, listen, I wanted to ask you about your house being for sale,” Juliet blurted out. Anything to keep Cindy from leaving.
“What about it?” Cindy's voice was sharper than Juliet would have expected, especially with the scent of grass still fresh in the air around them.
She smiled a propitiatory smile. “Oh, I just wondered. How much are you asking for it?”
“Why, are you planning to move up here?” Cindy smiled. Juliet thought there was something mocking in her beautiful, sleepy eyes.
“Well, not move here, maybe. But … it's a beautiful piece of property. It would make a good investment.”
“Oh, sure.”
This sounded mildly sarcastic, and Juliet had the distinct idea that Mrs. Giddy was too stoned to say more without laughing outright. For her own part, she was desperate to find a way to bring up the manuscript.
“I guess the area's pretty economically depressed, though,” she said. “Unless you find a hidden treasure, like Ada did.”
“Ada found a hidden treasure?”
Juliet looked at her carefully. “The manuscript. You know, the reason she came to New York. It was in all the papers.”
“Oh, that. Yeah, the manuscript.” Cindy's tone was scornful, as if she knew all that stuff about a valuable manuscript was phoney. Now Juliet felt confused.
“Did Ada tell you when she found it?” she asked bluntly.
“Tell me what?”
“What it was?”
“Did she know what it was?”
“No. But I mean—I just wondered if … She must have been pretty excited, something like that turning up out of the blue.”
“No, she didn't tell me about any treasures,” Cindy said. “She just said she was going away and would I watch the cats.”
Juliet said, “Oh.” She felt stupid, slow. Wasn't there something odd about Cindy's tone, her answers? Or maybe she herself had gotten a little high, just from being in here.
“Anyway, ask Tom about our place, if you're interested,” Cindy said, pushing open the door. “Maybe your boyfriend will buy it for you.”
“Oh, Murray's not my boyfriend,” Juliet corrected her without thinking, as she walked down the hall beside her.
Definitely, she had gotten a little high.
“Isn't he?” The other woman turned to look at her with undisguised interest.
“No, we're old friends. We went to college together.”
“Is he rich? What does he do?”
“Well, he's—he's an artist.”
“Oh. He must be pretty good at it. He drives a nice car.”
By now they had reached the doorway of the parlor, where only a handful of people remained. Murray was talking with Bert Nilsson, Juliet saw. Cindy also saw. She stood gazing at him, as if lost in thought.
“Well, it's not really his—” Juliet had started to correct her,
when Tom Giddy suddenly materialized behind them. He, too, had noticed the direction of Cindy's preoccupied gaze.
“We better get going,” he said abruptly. “I need to get back down to Harlan's by three.”
Cindy pulled away from the hand he tried to put through her arm. But she went with him, sullen but docile. Obscurely relieved, Juliet moseyed up to Landis, who was just saying good-bye to the elderly lawyer.
Juliet also said good-bye, smiling dreamily. She must get over this whiff of dope.
“Did you meet the Luncefords?” she murmured into Landis's ear, forcing herself to come down, sharpen up. If the Luncefords had been here, they were gone now. Only a few very old people remained and a couple of very young ones.
“Bert said they didn't turn up.”
“Oh, ‘Bert' is it?”
“He's quite a card,” Murray said, smiling. “We can still drop by at the Luncefords.”
“Can we?”
“Bert says they never go anywhere on Sundays. Sunday is Steve Lunceford's day to have his parents over for a family dinner. No law against ringing someone's doorbell.”
“There's a set of Browning I could offer her. It's a nice one, and the bookplates in it are inscribed Charles Jongewaard Case. Probably Ada's grandfather or great-grandfather. No reason Claudia shouldn't want that.”
A few minutes later, they left the Regency. On the way to the Copy-Kwik, they traded information gleaned during the refreshment hour. Murray had learned from Bert Nilsson that Ada wrote her current will after meeting Matt and becoming interested in the cause of Free Earth. Her previous will had named a girlhood friend, Emma Luth, as the beneficiary; but Miss Luth had died without issue some four months ago, leaving the bequest moot.
Not that Bert Nilsson thought Ada had much to leave, Murray added, as Juliet eased the Jaguar into a parking spot on Main Street. Once upon a time, when it had been a working orchard, the Case property would have brought a very tidy sum, he had said. But the place had long since gone (literally) to seed; and even if some visionary cared to try to restore it, a small operation like that in these days of corporate agriculture would more likely bankrupt its owner than enrich him. It was just land now; and land values hereabouts were, in general, extremely low. The larger the parcel, the harder it was to sell, and the higher the property taxes. Only working farms were eligible for tax breaks. As for the house, it was so dilapidated that to repair it would probably cost more than to tear it down and rebuild.

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