A Perfect Crime

29

In the kitchen, Francie tried the Dedham number, over and over, getting a busy signal every time. Murdered. In the cottage? Had there been an arrest? How? When? Why? Brenda had told her almost nothing. She called Rome, heard Brenda in Italian: “Questa e la segretaria telefonica di…” She left a message, ran upstairs, threw on some clothes. When she came back down, Roger was waiting in his crimson robe with a package wrapped in foil.

“What’s this?” she said.

“I made tuna sandwiches. Isn’t it customary to bring food?”

“Are you coming?” she said.

He spread his arms, like great red wings. “It wouldn’t be right,” he said. “My relationship was peripheral.”

But he walked her down to the garage. Their cars sat side by side, both in pools of wintertime snowmelt. Francie saw that his rear window was shattered.

“Oh, that,” said Roger, although she hadn’t said anything. “Some smash-and-grabber, it would seem, but nothing was taken. The alarm must have scared him off.” He handed her the sandwiches. “Don’t forget to offer my condolences.”

Francie drove west on Storrow. Not yet dawn, but incoming commuters were already on the road, a yellow stream of headlights paralleling the dark one of the Charles. Their world was no longer hers. Murder: all those questions and many others roiled in her mind, including the one she most wanted to avoid-what had Anne been doing at the cottage in the first place? Wasn’t there only one thing she could have been doing? And didn’t that mean she must have found out about what went on in that cottage? But how? Had Ned confessed? Something’s come up, he’d said. She’d asked, Something about Anne? And he’d said, Nothing like that. Work related. Therefore? Francie had no idea. And murder? Francie was lost.

She parked in front of the house in Dedham. The downstairs lights were on, silhouetting the stocky form of a snowman in the front lawn, a ski pole over one shoulder like a sentry’s rifle. Francie walked up the path, unshoveled but packed down by many footsteps going in both directions. Worse than lost, Francie, because at that moment, standing at the door with its Christmas wreath, she had the most unworthy thought of her whole life: Perhaps there would now be some future for her and Ned after all. Even with Anne’s wreath hanging there, Francie had that thought. What was she made of? She knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” said a woman almost at once, as though she’d been waiting by the door. Francie didn’t recognize her voice.

“Francie Cullingwood,” she said, and added, “a friend of the family.”

The door opened. A gray-haired woman in a quilted housecoat stared out at Francie with big dark eyes: Ned’s eyes. The woman didn’t have to tell Francie who she was.

“I’m Ned’s mother. You’ve heard?”

“Yes.”

The dark eyes gazed past her, into the sky, graying in the east. She shivered. “Come in.”

Francie went into the little hall. Everything looked the same: a stack of mail on the table, a few audiotapes, irises in a vase. Francie glanced sideways into the living room, ahead into the kitchen.

“Ned’s gone,” the woman said, as though reading her mind, and Francie thought, Does she know? Francie saw no sign of any such knowledge in the woman’s face, and besides, she hadn’t seemed to recognize her name. “The police came down from New Hampshire,” Ned’s mother went on, “and took him to do… what needed to be done.”

They went into the kitchen. “Tea?” said Ned’s mother. “Or maybe coffee? I suppose you’d call it morning.”

“Nothing for me.”

“I’ll have tea,” the woman said, going to the stove. “Keep moving.” She had trouble with the switches. “Why anyone would need such an elaborate oven I have no idea.” Gas ignited with a pop, settled down to a steady blue flame.

Francie tried to remember what Ned had said about his mother, recalled nothing. He almost never spoke of family life; she thought of the Chinese walls dividing different departments of Wall Street law firms in the interest of preserving the appearance of something or other. But didn’t his mother live in Cleveland? Weren’t they all from Cleveland?

“How did you get here so fast?” Francie said.

The woman paused, tea bag dangling in her hand. “I don’t follow you.”

“I thought you lived in Cleveland.”

“True. I flew in yesterday, to spend the holidays.”

He hadn’t mentioned that either.

“Holidays,” Ned’s mother said, coming to the table, cup clattering on the saucer. “Can you imagine?” Their eyes met and Francie sensed that this was the moment for tears, but none came. Big dark eyes, just like Ned’s on the surface, but much drier underneath.

“It’s a good thing you’re here, Mrs. Demarco,” Francie said.

The woman shrugged that aside. “There’s nothing good,” she said. “And it’s Mrs. Blanchard, actually. I remarried.” She sat down, sipped her tea; Francie remained standing. “What was your connection again?” said Mrs. Blanchard.“To the family, I mean.”

Francie hadn’t said. “Anne and I… ” Tears were on the way now, but hers; she stopped them, cut them off completely and at once, went on. “We were tennis partners.”

“Oh, yes, the tennis,” said Mrs. Blanchard. Tea slopped out of her cup, splashed on the table, dripped off the edge, stained her housecoat. She didn’t appear to notice. “As a friend of hers,” she said, “can you give me any idea what in God’s name she was doing-”

The phone rang. Mrs. Blanchard crossed the room and grabbed it off the wall before it could ring again.

“Yes? Are you all right, dear? What’s hap-no, nothing.” Her eyes shifted to Francie, sponging up the spilled tea. “There’s a visitor, that’s all.” She covered the mouthpiece, spoke to Francie. “What was your name again?”

Francie repeated it. The woman talked into the phone, raised her eyebrows, held it out for Francie. “It’s Ned,” she said. “He wants to speak with you.”

Francie took the phone. “Ned. Ned. I-” Mrs. Blanchard sat at the table, back to Francie, head still, still and alert. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything, Francie,” he said.

“Oh, but Ned, it’s so-”

“Don’t say anything to anybody,” he went on, and she realized she’d misinterpreted him; he hadn’t been referring to the uselessness of words at a time like this. “And don’t say Ned like that, not to anybody,” he continued. “You sometimes look in at the cottage as a favor to your friend, that’s an unavoidable fact, no hiding it, but nothing more, nothing about me, nothing about you and me.” Francie had never heard his voice like this, low and pressing, the words coming fast. “Do you understand?” he said.

“Not really.” She turned her back, hunched over, spoke softly and right into the phone so Mrs. Blanchard couldn’t hear. “I don’t see how it makes-”

“Is my mother there? Nearby, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Then shut up, for Christ’s sake. She misses nothing.” Francie heard a coin dropping into a pay phone. “But you’re wrong about what you were going to say, Francie. It does make a difference. Just think about it.”

“How?”

“Goddamn it. Why are you doing this? Don’t you care about me at all, Francie?”

She did, much more and without a doubt, but the thought of replying to the question at that moment sickened her. And she still didn’t understand what difference it made now if their relationship was known; also knew that she wasn’t going to find out, not with Ned’s mother in the room. She changed her tone for him, tried to approximate the tone she’d have used if she really had been nothing more than Anne’s tennis friend, but had no idea what that would sound like either. “Do they-do they know what happened?”

A pause, a long one. Then came a sob, thick and ragged. “She was slaughtered, Francie. Slaughtered. That’s what happened.”

Click.

Francie put down the phone. Mrs. Blanchard was on her feet.“He didn’t want to speak to me?”

“He had to go.”

Ned’s mother gave her a close look. She might have been about to say something, but at that moment Em walked into the room in her pajamas.

“Morning, Grandma,” she said, and then noticed Francie.“Oh, hi.”

“Hi,” said Francie.

Em brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Getting ready for another tournament?”

“No.”

The girl hit the button on the countertop TV, reached up in the cupboard for cereal and a bowl, put them on the table. On the screen, a commercial for pain relievers ended and two newscasters appeared at a desk. Francie was right beside the TV; she switched it off. Em and her grandmother both turned to her, understanding registering on the woman’s face, surprise on Em’s. Francie, unable to invent any explanation for her conduct, said nothing. She went to the fridge, opened it, said, “Two percent or nonfat, Em?”

“Two percent,” said Em, glancing at the dark screen of the TV.

Francie poured milk in her bowl. “How about some strawberries on top?” She’d seen them in the fridge.

“Sure.”

Francie took a handful of strawberries from their carton, washed them in the sink. Not a good idea, strawberries, because a strawberry couldn’t remain a simple strawberry, of course, but had to be red, ripe and full of life. Francie put them on a plate, set it before Em.

“Thanks,” said the girl, popping one in her mouth and placing the others one at a time among the cornflakes in a star-shaped pattern. She raised her head. “Mom up yet?”

Francie and Ned’s mother looked at each other; neither answered.

“Hey,” said Em. “What’s up, Grandma?”

“Maybe you’d better go,” Ned’s mother said to Francie.

“I’d like to help.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Ned’s mother. “Most considerate of you, but it’s a family matter.”

Francie turned to Em, but what could she say? Em’s mouth opened, strawberry-red inside.

Francie didn’t put up a fight; she left, now a coward on top of everything. She was outside on the walk, almost to her car, when she heard Em’s wail: piercing, unmitigated, unbearable-catastrophe beyond repair.

And she’d forgotten to leave the sandwiches, somehow still in her hand. She realized she’d loved Anne. It wasn’t too strong a word.