Occasion of Revenge

16

I had reached a crossroads, literally and figuratively. As my car idled at the stoplight at the intersection of High and Cross, I knew what I should do. I knew I should turn left and drive straight to the Chestertown police station. I knew I should park in one of the diagonal spaces out front, walk up the steps, push through the front door, approach the counter, and ask for Captain Younger. I should tell him we’d found the fugitive. We’d found our father.

But I didn’t do any of those things. I turned right and got out of Dodge as if the posse were hot on my trail.

It wasn’t the posse who caught up with me, though. It was my pesky good angel. Three miles out of town on Route 213, she took control of the steering wheel and forced me to swerve into the parking lot of Dunkin’ Donuts. I shifted into neutral with the engine still running. “We have to go back, Daddy.”

The victim had other ideas. “Take me home.”

“But you were kidnapped! We have to tell the police what happened.”

“You can tell the police whatever you want, Hannah, but I’m not going to press charges against that woman. She gave me back my life, and I’m grateful, even if her methods were a little unorthodox.” He sat in the passenger seat with his head bowed and his hands folded, as if he were praying. “I just can’t believe that Darlene is dead.”

I shifted into park, turned off the engine and, in the gathering silence, stared straight ahead through the windshield. I couldn’t bear to look at my father, to see his pain. “That’s one reason we have to see the police, Daddy. In a weird way, LouElla is your alibi.”

“Not now, Hannah.” He spoke so softly I could barely hear him.

“Daddy-”

“No!”

I should have known better than to try to pull rank on my father. My knuckles had been soundly rapped. After a few minutes spent staring hungrily into the window of the restaurant where doughnuts were being rearranged on large aluminum trays, I asked, “Do you have your wallet?”

“I guess so. Why?” He patted the bulge in his back pocket, reached in with two fingers, and drew out a battered tent of folded leather.

I felt my ears go red. “I left home without my purse, and I’m dying for some coffee.”

He handed me a ten. “Here. I think we could both use some.”

While he waited in the car, silently mourning, I went into the restaurant and bought us each a cup of strong black coffee. I doctored mine generously with milk and sugar, then with Daddy’s change, I used the pay phone to call Paul at his office with the good news. I tried to reach Emily, too, but she didn’t pick up on the cell phone. She was probably still busy with LouElla. Then I drove Daddy home and waited for what would happen next. Qué será, será, I thought. What will be, will be.

Fortunately it was Emily who first burst through our front door. “Where’s Gramps? Did you find him?” She plopped Chloe and the errant Tinky Winky down on the carpet and shrugged out of her coat.

“Yes! He’s upstairs. I tried to call you.”

“The battery went dead on the damn phone.”

I groaned. My fault. I hadn’t recharged it in months.

We sat on the sofa together and traded adventures. Emily told me how LouElla had clucked over Speedo like a mother hen, but that the dog seemed unfazed by his thorough (and completely unnecessary) flea dip. Emily had dropped both dog and master off at LouElla’s house, then beat it out of town, hell-bent for leather. Both of us wondered what LouElla would do once she found Daddy missing; her behavior was anything but predictable.

We kept Emily’s involvement in this escapade from Daddy, who was, not surprisingly, in a blue funk. First, we installed him in front of the TV and kept him supplied with cranberry juice, soda water, and twists of lime. Then, while I began preparations for dinner, Emily called Ruth and Georgina to pass the good word. When Paul came charging through the door twenty minutes later, he found Emily sitting at the kitchen table calmly spooning strained carrots into Chloe, and me stirring the chili.

“You are going to call the cops, aren’t you, Hannah?”

I nodded. “Soon.”

“What about LouElla?”

I had to think about that. By now, LouElla would have discovered that Daddy was gone. Maybe she’d assume he’d been beamed up by aliens. I should let her know he’d come home, but I didn’t care if her hair turned snow white with worry. How could she put us through that unnecessary suffering? Being loony tunes was no excuse.

It was very clear to me now how Daddy’s car had turned up at BWI: LouElla had driven it there herself. How she’d gotten herself from the airport to Chestertown afterward, I didn’t exactly know, but it had to involve a combination of trains and buses and, what with Maryland’s piss-poor public transportation system, must have taken nearly all day to accomplish. Unless she sprang for a cab. I’d let the police sort that one out. I had too much on my mind right now to lose any sleep over some stupid bus schedule or cabby’s trip log.

A bigger worry was that the news of Darlene’s death would send Daddy crawling back down the neck of a bottle of Smirnoff, but in a way he seemed strangely calm, as if Darlene were part of a life he had chosen to leave behind, a life dulled by alcohol and grief.

That night after dinner, we settled down in the living room before a roaring fire with a Tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies and mugs of hot coffee. I put some CDs on to play, lit the candles on the mantel, and sat back to admire the tree; multicolored pin lights twinkled in synchronized waves of red, blue, white, and green, while the ornaments sparkled and twirled.

Daddy sat like a lump for a while, then suddenly spoke, as if awakening from a coma. “I see now that I wasn’t really in love with Darlene. I felt sorry for her, I think, and for myself. She’d lost her husband and I’d just lost your mother…” His voice trailed off and he stared into the fireplace for a long moment, where the logs, still damp from the woodpile, were snapping and crackling in the flames. “Darlene had a lot of tragedy in her life.”

I didn’t think that was much of a reason to marry somebody. “Well, I’ll never forgive her for bringing you that bottle of booze in the hospital.”

With his lips pressed together, Daddy nodded. “Darlene wasn’t so blind she didn’t see that I had a problem; she just didn’t believe I was an alcoholic.”

“Why did she check you out of the hospital, then, before the tests came back?”

“She said she could teach me how to control my drinking, to cut back gradually.” His head sank back into the soft cushion of the chair. He smiled sadly. “Darlene always said a little beer or wine never hurt anybody.”

“Vodka isn’t beer,” I stated flatly.

“I know. It was LouElla who put me on the right track about that, who helped me realize that what I was doing was maintenance drinking. I’d have just enough vodka to keep from getting those monster headaches…” He closed his eyes and seemed to let the music wash over him. “Maybe Darlene just didn’t want to drink alone,” he mused.

What was it about my father, anyway? Had he stood on some street corner and shouted, Look at me! I’m needy! Darlene and LouElla had certainly had that in common-an attraction to men who required rehabilitation.

Using both hands, Daddy raised his mug slowly to his lips and spoke to me over the rim. “It’s like a veil has been lifted and I can see things clearly for the first time in many, many months. Even your mother’s illness seems like a dream to me now, almost like it didn’t happen to me, but to that person I was then. That guy whose brain was pickled in alcohol.” He smiled ruefully. “I feel guilty about that.”

“You have no reason to feel guilty. You were a rock to Mother. You never left her side.”

“I felt numb, Hannah, like my whole body had been injected with Novocain.”

“I know. I felt that way, too, when Mom died.”

“We all did,” Paul said.

Daddy rose and stabbed at the fire with a poker until sparks spiraled up the chimney. “We need to find out who killed her, Hannah.”

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. Mother? Killed?

I must have looked baffled because he quickly added, “Darlene, I mean. Promise me you’ll help.” He stood with his back to the fire, holding the poker in both hands.

“Of course I will.”

After several minutes, I picked up Paul’s crossword puzzle book, turned to the back, and began making a list of possible suspects. I was operating from an advantage, after all. I knew Ruth and my father hadn’t killed Darlene, so that left… who? I listed them in order. Darryl was my bet, or his sister, Deirdre. Darlene was hardly Mother of the Year, after all, and in spite of what Deirdre claimed, her estate must have been worth something. LouElla was a nut, but a caring, humanitarian nut. She might cheerfully cut down a terrorist with an Uzi, but poison a friend? Hardly. And Virginia Prentice? What could have been Virginia’s motive? By all accounts, she and Darlene had been only casual friends. One of the other guests at the party? I chewed on the eraser of my pencil. Begin at the beginning, Ms. Bromley would have advised. I started a second To Do list and wrote “Younger” at the top of it, then immediately drew a line through his name and reached for the phone.

The next day, when Captain Younger paid a house call, Daddy sat in his chair and, to put it bluntly, lied through his teeth. His interview with Chestertown’s finest was a masterpiece of prevarication.

– I committed myself voluntarily, Captain, for alcohol rehabilitation.

– If I had known you were looking for me, of course I would have telephoned.

– Held against my will? Absolutely not! I needed help and Mrs. Van Schuyler was there to give it.

– So soon before the wedding? Well, that was the point, wasn’t it, to be fit and sober for my wedding day?

– Of course Darlene knew about it! Encouraged me, in fact.

What an amazing collection of fibs! They belonged in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I just sat there, listening, my mouth flapping open and shut like a beached fish.

Younger wasn’t fooled, but he could hardly make an arrest. He knew Daddy had no involvement in the hit-and-run, and there was no apparent motive for him to kill his future bride. Far better to wait until after their marriage before bumping her off, if Daddy expected to benefit from what we found out much later was Darlene’s modest bank account.

Captain Younger went looking for LouElla, of course. We got this headline news from Virginia Prentice, when she telephoned to wish us a Happy New Year and say how glad she was to hear that Daddy had returned home safely. Captain Younger didn’t actually talk to LouElla, Virginia informed us, because LouElla didn’t answer the door. When Younger asked around the neighborhood, it turned out nobody had seen LouElla or Speedo for several days, and her car, an old Chevy station wagon, had disappeared, too.

If just the dog was missing, or LouElla, I would have worried. But the two of them together? They had to be OK. Speedo would see to that.

In my book, Darryl was a twofer. He had demonstrated a chronic need for money. He’d taken handouts from both his sister and my father. He’d had access to my father’s house. He’d been among the last to leave his mother’s party. Motive and opportunity. Maybe he’d decided to solve his financial problems for good by bumping off his mother before she could marry again. And you couldn’t convince me that Darryl didn’t have something to do with Ruth’s stolen credit cards.

I decided to visit the Edgewater post office. Before leaving home, I sorted again through the photos Emily had taken at Daddy’s engagement party. I found two good ones of Darryl; one staring grimly into the camera and another of his matchless profile. A little like mug shots. I tucked them into my pocket.

When I entered the spacious lobby of the new post office building, eight people were in line ahead of me. You’d think the Christmas rush would have been over. I killed some time by wandering around the lobby, studying the post office boxes, hoping to locate the one that Officer Younger told me was overstuffed. What a waste of time! None of the boxes had peepholes like in the old days, just blank, gray metal doors. With two customers still in line, I browsed through the various items for sale in the lobby shop, selecting two padded mailers, and when the last customer left, I approached the counter.

“These, please. And a book of stamps.”

The clerk slapped the stamp booklet down on top of my bags.

I handed her a ten-dollar bill and waited for the change. “I’m looking for someone,” I told the woman. “I wonder if you could help me.”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

I laid the photos of Darryl on the counter. “Have you seen this guy?”

She picked up the full-frontal shot of glamour boy and held it at eye level. “Maybe. We see so many people here it’s hard to be sure.”

“He might have applied for a post office box,” I suggested.

“Yeah! I remember now!” She tapped Darryl’s patrician nose with her finger. “He didn’t have his driver’s license with him the first time, and had to go back for it.” She pushed the picture back to me. “He’s cuter in real life.”

I smiled back at her grimly. “Oh, Darryl is cute all right.” I retrieved the picture. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

I left the post office thinking two things. Maybe I should tape Darryl’s picture up on the wall with the other FBI Most Wanted posters. And two, Captain Younger was going to get another telephone call from me.

Back home, I found Daddy sitting morosely at my kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, long gone cold. Ruth had dropped his mail off on her way to work and Daddy was sorting through it, his eyes looking tired and sad. Small wonder. He’d pegged the meter on his blood alcohol test and unless the judge let him off for good behavior, Daddy wouldn’t be driving anywhere for a very long time. But it wasn’t the suspension notice from the DMV I saw him staring at. It was a familiar blue-and-yellow folder from a local travel agent.

“What’s that, Daddy?” I asked.

“Cruise tickets.”

I realized at once what they must have been for: his honeymoon with Darlene. I stood behind his chair and placed my hands on his shoulders. With my cheek next to his ear I asked, “Where were you going?”

“To Cancún.”

“You should be able to get a refund.” I swallowed hard. “Under the circumstances.”

“I don’t want a refund.”

“So, what are you going to do with them?” I was a silly millimeter away from tears.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. I just don’t know.”