Soft Hearts, page 21
I matched her steps to the back of the kitchen, through a storeroom, and past a walk-in freezer to a door that led into pitch dark. When she flicked on a light, I realized I was standing in the equivalent of a loft apartment.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“This is where I unwind. You think I want to sit in the dining room and get harassed by my customers?”
“Are you saying you’re a misanthrope?”
“If that means ‘sourpuss,’ you’d be spot-on.”
She bade me sit on the comfiest sofa ever and plopped straight across from me.
“Now tell me everything. Did KayLeigh choke on an oyster and Allan had to give her the Hiney-Licky Maneuver right then and there?”
I gave her a play by play of my conversation with KayLeigh, Stephanie’s inhospitable entry, and the magnificent job Anna did embarrassing the hell out of me.
“That’s Anna,” Paige said. “Always on task.”
Then I related something else from the party: learning from Arch about Brad and Gail’s recent night on the town. “I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for their conversation. Of all the suspects in Wanda’s murder, I still feel they are the most suspicious.”
Paige rose and poked her head into the kitchen. “Mitch? Could you ask the wait staff to come back here for a second, please? And will you ask Vanessa to bring me one of those real estate guides from the lobby? Thanks, Hon.”
“You don’t have to go through all this trouble, Paige,” I said.
“Please, Harriet—call me Peg,” she said with a wink.
Paige’s voice turned serious a moment later was we were joined by two waiters and two waitresses. “Did any of you serve a couple here last Saturday who looked like this?” She held up a picture of Brad and Gail from the homes and land guide. “They’re kind of famous. You’ve probably seen their billboards.”
One of the waitresses raised a hand, “They were in my section. Did they complain about their service?”
“Not at all. Okay, you, Alissa, stay. The rest of you can go.”
Once the others had left, Paige asked Alissa conspiratorially, “What did you observe regarding this couple. Were they having a good time?”
“Having a ball.”
“What did they order?”
“The prime rib and scallops.”
“Really?” Paige flashed a raised brow of intrigue at me. “The evening’s token carnivore entree.” She returned her attention to Alissa. “Did you hear them talking about anything in particular?”
“Um, am I going to get into trouble?”
“Why would you get into trouble? Alissa, you’re the best server I have—just don’t tell the others I said so.”
“I’ll be sure to. Yes, I did hear them talking while I was serving the next table over.”
“You can do two conversations at once?” I asked.
“It helps. That way I always know if another table is needing me to come by, and I look like I’m reading their minds.”
“Impressive,” said Paige. “Please remind me to bump up your base salary.”
“Will do.”
“Now tell us what they said.”
“Well, the woman said, ‘Death happens to the nicest people sometimes.’”
“Oh, my,” Paige observed. “And…?”
Alissa paused. Paige frowned. “Come on, Alissa…”
“Sorry,” said the waitress. “I’m just trying to remember. And then the man said, ‘I just had to make sure that the timing was right.’”
“And then…”
“And then she said, ‘My dear, you acted not a moment too soon.’ And then they clinked wine glasses.”
Paige’s eyes became wide. “What did you think when you heard that?”
“I thought they were just sharing some sort of inside joke.”
“Sounds devious to me,” Paige said.
Me, too. I asked, “How did they act as they left? Did they seem nervous in any way?”
“A little self-conscious maybe. The guests at one or two of the tables recognized them and said hello.”
“How did they tip?” asked Paige. “Just curious.”
Alissa shrugged. “Not great. About fifteen dollars on a hundred-twenty-dollar meal.”
Paige smirked, “I guess some real estate agents think because they only get six percent, maybe everyone else should, too.”
“A twenty dollar entree isn’t the same thing as a million dollar home,” I said.
“That entree was thirty-six,” corrected Paige.
“Beg your pardon,” I said.
It didn’t matter. If a couple can murder a neighbor, they can certainly stiff a waitress.
Back home I played back every moment of the party in my head. I wish I could have been quicker with comebacks, but I was secretly delighted with myself for having confronted KayLeigh in the first place.
I was also invigorated by what The Rabbit Hat’s waitress had remembered of Brad and Gail’s private conversation. Added to the other detail I’d discovered—their final purchase, according to Margaret, of the Falls Lake home—I thought it fitting to call Darryl and inform him.
“I’ll confront them about it in the morning,” he said after my blow by blow. “Maybe they’ll slip up and say something incriminating.”
In the meantime, Darryl had another detail to report. One of his officers called the three largest orthopedic practices over the weekend. The police submitted Wanda’s name and found the practice that had treated her broken foot.
“Her records show she was prescribed Oxycodone. The pills in Trent’s pocket were produced around the time Wanda was prescribed them. You can tell from the blister pack.”
Another potential nail in Trent’s coffin.
“What about the threatening letter Angela found?” I asked. “Were you able to connect it to Trent?”
“The letter didn’t have any usable fingerprints. And we couldn’t match it to Trent’s handwriting. That doesn’t mean he didn’t write it.”
“It also doesn’t mean I didn’t write it,” I said. “I still think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Show me a better tree,” he said, “and I’ll gladly hug it.”
I hung up with Darryl feeling grumpy—but extra motivated. I turned to my laptop and googled the Norrises. I even paid forty dollars to see their criminal records, but all it revealed was a pair of speeding tickets, years old.
I went through the same process for the Fosters and for Skip Green. Nothing. I concluded that if Wanda really did have dirt on the people who had invaded her lawn, the Internet probably wasn’t where she found it.
I googled Wanda, too. The first listing to pop up was a website that students used to rate their professors. Wanda’s scores and comments from students were all over the map, from “boring as a hell — who cares about this English potry stuf??” to “such a kind and supportive teacher. Best class I’ve had at Tech.”
I noted that the most recent entries were consistently grim. “Continually AWOL from class, and when she’s there, constantly berates students. Don’t even bother with this one!” and “What a horrible person. What rock did she crawl out from under?” The scores for her final semester of teaching were in the basement.
The comments basically tracked what everyone else had testified to: a personality that had come apart, a disintegration.
I went to YouTube and did a search. After many dead ends, I finally found a video from a symposium on Romantic poetry from five years earlier, a panel discussion that Wanda was part of. The topic: “Are the Romantics Still Relevant Today?”
The moderator was a personality from a local public radio station. His first few questions were fielded mainly by the other two panelists who produced an impenetrable jargon. I had to remind myself that these were experts in their field who were presenting to other scholars, not to a general audience. Even the radio host—older, perhaps less enamored of literary theory—seemed to be getting a little frustrated as he turned to Wanda for the first time.
Moderator: Let’s back up a little. Why do we think Romanticism saw the success it did, when it did? Ms. Hightower, we haven’t heard from you. Any thoughts?
* * *
Wanda: Thank you. I’ll try.
* * *
Wanda was poised, calm, pleasant. She wore her signature elegant to-the-elbow gloves. Shyly, she pulled the microphone closer to herself.
* * *
Wanda: In early 18th Century England, unless you were landed gentry, you probably lived on a farm. You didn’t own the land your family lived on, but you worked it. You probably couldn’t read very well, and, even if you could, you didn’t have the time to read very much. In terms of what you chose to believe, you likely looked outside yourself for your opinions—to Church leaders, or to the educated owner of your land, because your own education was extremely limited.
* * *
However, late in the 1700s, factories began luring more and more people to the cities. Education for the average person became easier to come by. By the end of that century, books began being published at an amazing rate. Prior to that, authors would typically write from some authority—referencing Scripture, what passed for science, or citing the wise thinkers who came before them. The Romantic poets, however, shifted the central point of reference. They followed their own hearts and minds to see what they could discover. Appalled by the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of London, they looked for meaning in Earth’s natural beauty, in the mythologies of Greece and Rome, and in childhood innocence. In short, they searched for a purity in this world that they could locate and express through beautiful language.
* * *
Moderator: You make them sound almost religious.
* * *
Wanda: Not particularly religious, but certainly spiritual. The Romantics were the opposite of unbelievers. In fact, they were idealists almost to a fault who longed for connection to Spirit. As a result, we get John Keats’s shepherd-chief hero, Endymion, who chases a Greek goddess through four thousand lines of poetry, and a different sort of seeker, Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein, who attempts to bring a corpse back to life. In both cases, there is a strong curiosity about the supernatural and a fervent attempt to connect to something that transcends our suffering world. “Poetry as prayer,” you might say.
* * *
It might be helpful to remember that life two centuries ago was way more of a struggle. The average life expectancy in England in 1800 was forty—half of what it is today. Those who did live long lives invariably saw dozens of close friends and family die. Who wouldn’t wish to transcend such grief?
* * *
Moderator: I understand what you’re saying, but, honestly, I grew up thinking about the Romantics as sort of hippies before their time. You know, free love, opium, revolution…
* * *
Wanda: Yes, there was plenty of that, but I think theirs was a more legitimate impulse than the hippies. I mean, the 1960s bacchanal couldn’t last, right? Yesterday’s hippies have 401Ks today. The Romantics, however, sought a much more sustainable radicalization of the mind and spirit.
* * *
Moderator: Carpe Diem. “Seize the Day.” Seize every day?
* * *
Wanda: Yes, and experience eternity—by fully apprehending the world we live in.
* * *
The other panelists fielded the next few questions, but I found myself skipping ahead to Wanda’s next opportunity to speak…
* * *
Moderator: This symposium asks us to find the relevance of the Romantics in our modern era. But if everyone today is already an individualist, do the Romantics offer us anything today that we currently lack?
* * *
Wanda: I don’t agree that everyone today is an individualist.
* * *
Moderator: (laughing) I don’t see how you can hold that position, what with confessional blogs, incessant tweeting. Selfies.
* * *
Wanda: Taking selfies doesn’t make you an individualist. In fact, I’d say the opposite, that the people who do that are strongly lacking a sense of self.
* * *
Moderator: Can you elaborate?
* * *
Wanda: The tyranny of advertising and franchising has created a group-think and a terrible sameness. The Internet has collapsed into echo chambers, some of them diabolical. The advanced speed of media has destroyed reflection. Our comfortable lives have disconnected us from the Earth, idealism is scorned as naive, and anti-intellectualism has banished literature and philosophy to remote corners of our culture.
* * *
As a result, we don’t know how we feel, and when we do feel something, we work very hard to numb it with drugs, sports, sex, or some other distraction. We allow others to nurture in us a single emotion—anger—as a proxy for feeling alive. Absolutely we need the Romantics—today more than ever. We need them to help us feel fully human again and to inspire us to give expression to a range of feelings. We need them to wake us up to ourselves, because everything that is not acknowledged is lost.
The panel ended soon after that with more cryptic commentary by the other panelists.
Seeing and listening to a once very much alive—and so very well-spoken—murder victim saddened me. It also reminded me that I was no closer than before at understanding what had happened to Wanda in the last year of her life, much less what had caused her to become someone’s target. What was I missing? I listened to Wanda’s comments a couple more times before copying the webpage address and emailing it to Angela in case she had not seen it.
Everything that is not acknowledged is lost. I went over in my head all my conversations with those who had known Wanda, especially those who had been burned by her wrath. Surely the Norrises stood out. But I couldn’t totally rule out anyone else either—even Trent (the actor, the dragon) who had so much circumstantial evidence pointing his way.
I told myself to rest, but my mind refused. In our real-estate business, while Allan always schmoozed the investors, I would be the one who paid attention to the details, still following Glenda Murlowski’s painterly advice to apprehend detail, but in a radically different context. I might be out of practice, but I didn’t need Darryl’s pen and notebook to keep up with the details of this investigation. The picture was in my head. I went over that picture again and again, trying to find something that would crack this case.
It was past three in the morning before I managed to sleep. As if returning from another trip to Australia, I slept all the next day, leaving the bed on Sunday only to pee and eat. I awoke refreshed on Monday without a thought in my brain, as if newly born. Was this the sobering sleep that Freddy talked about?
I walked across the street where I found Lydia in her backyard attempting to garden for the first time since her stroke.
“Where’s Doris?” I asked, half expecting her to pop out from behind some bushes.
I expected some sort of hand gesture. “In…side,” Lydia said, haltingly but clear as day.
“Lydia! The therapy is working!”
Blushing a little, she returned to her task. I saw she had dug up a lime tree to put in a large pot. I remembered when she had planted the tiny tree this past spring as a birthday present for Charlie.
“In…side,” she said again.
“I’ll help you.” I brought the pot closer and helped her lift the tree inside it. Once I had done so, she said a third time, “In…side” and pointed to the house.
“Okay. I can help you carry it, but what about the worms?” I’d noticed that several wigglers had clung to the roots of the little tree and were now in the pot with it. Would they survive in that cramped space all winter?
As I lifted the tree again, Lydia bent down and carefully pulled the worms from the roots, placing the creatures back in the hole they’d come from. I thought again of the enterprise Lydia and I had helped to fund: a team of do-gooders going into Wanda’s yard, tearing it apart before replanting. Wanda, who had tried to explore Buddhism with Maxine and seemed to connect with the Romantics’ embracing of all life—even ugly life—might well have viewed our favor to her not only as an insult, but as a considerable violence against the nature in her yard.
Was a weed unworthy of life? And what of the many worms that cling to that weed’s roots? An experience like that might be traumatizing, especially for someone whose mental state was already quite fragile.
Inside, while Doris knitted in the front room, I hung out in Lydia’s kitchen a little while, putting together an easy pulled-pork slow cooker meal. I got the cooker started, then stood for a while just staring out the window, watching Lydia’s wiry, stubborn arms lifting mulch from a wheelbarrow and placing it around shrubs and flower beds to keep their roots warm. Watching her work relaxed me.
The speed of media has destroyed reflection.
My eyes came to focus on the window sill and a dead fly. Without thinking, really, I pulled a ziplock from my purse, brushed the fly into it, and zipped it up.
“Curious,” said a familiar voice.
I turned. “Darryl! What are you doing here?”
“I’m just someone who likes to people-watch. Folks do the craziest things, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
