Stoner McTavish, page 1
part #1 of Stoner McTavish Series
STONER McTAVISH
by Sarah Dreher
the first stoner mctavish mystery
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3S XHTML edition 1.0
scan notes and proofing history
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Contents
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|
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Copy write © 1985 New Victoria Publishers, Inc.
ISBN 0-934678-06-5
Library of Congress Number 85-60065
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the publisher.
PUBLISHERS,
Box 27, Norwich, Vermont 05055
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For Lis— who brings me memories for tomorrow
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CHAPTER ONE
I know what you need,” Marylou said.
“What?” It was muggy in the travel agency. Stoner’s hand stuck to the page as she angrily scratched out one tentative schedule and filled in another. The paper was limp as worn cotton.
“Love.”
“I don’t need love, Marylou. I need air conditioning.”
“Romance,” Marylou said, placidly spreading Boursin on a rye thin. “Passion, excitement, anguish.”
Stoner grunted. “These people are crazy. Can you imagine what Disney World is like in this weather?”
“You haven’t been in love since What’s-her-face?”
“Agatha.” Stoner rummaged in her desk drawer. “Did you take the United schedule?”
“No. How long has it been?”
“I had it this morning.”
“Since you were in love.”
“Not long enough,” Stoner said. “Are you sure you didn’t take it?”
“Two years? Three years. Much too long.” Marylou brushed at a crumb that had nested in her frilled blouse. “It isn’t healthy for you to go that long without being in love.”
Stoner shot her a glance of annoyance. “For heaven’s sake, Marylou, I have work to do.”
“It’s made you dull.”
“Thank you.”
Marylou sighed. “Moonlit walks along the Charles. Skinny-dipping at Crane’s beach…”
“It’s too hot to be in love, if I knew anyone I wanted to be in love with, which I don’t, so if you don’t mind I have to…”
“Dull, dull, dull,” said Marylou. “Have a cracker.”
Stoner threw her pencil down. “I don’t want a cracker. I don’t want to be in love. All I want is the United Airlines schedule.”
“Maybe my mother knows some nice available woman in Wellfleet.”
“Marylou…” She wasn’t in the mood for this. Murderous impulses stirred.
Her friend and partner looked at her sheepisly. “It might be cooler in Wellfleet than in Boston.”
“It might,” Stoner said evenly, “be cooler in Hell. The United schedule, please?”
“I don’t have it. Honest. You’ll have to call them.” She poured a plastic cup of wine for Stoner and one for herself. “They’ll put you on ‘hold’, you know.”
“What else can I do? United Airlines isn’t tuned into my thoughts.”
“And only marginally to our telephone,” said Marylou.
She dialled the reservation desk and was put on ‘hold’. Leaning back in her chair, she tapped the receiver against the palm of her hand and rocked furiously.
“You really should relax,” Marylou said seriously. “This isn’t good for you.”
“We have to make a living. This isn’t a non-profit organization.”
“It is in summer. You worry too much. We’re making ends meet.”
“Barely,” Stoner said. She took a swallow of wine and rubbed at her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Just once I’d like to have enough money to do something special for Aunt Hermione. Do you know, in the twelve years I’ve lived with her, I’ve never been able to do more than pay my own way.”
“Oh, Stoner, she doesn’t care about that.”
“I do.” She finished off her wine. “Look at me. Thirty-one years old and all I can do is ‘make ends meet’.”
Marylou refilled her glass. “My mother says this kind of thinking is normal at our age.”
“Somehow that doesn’t comfort me.” Stoner listened to the phone for a second. “Damn it, if they’re going to put me on ‘hold’, they could spare me the Muzak. I feel like I’m at the dentist.”
Marylou plucked at her skirt. “I think I’ve gained another pound.”
“I’m not surprised. You’ve eaten three bagels with cream cheese — whole bagels, not halves — and half a box of crackers since nine o’clock this morning.”
“Women cannot live on air alone, rich with pollutants though it may be.”
“And we went out for lunch.”
“Lunch was lunch,” said Marylou.
“Then don’t complain about your weight.”
“I can’t help my weight, it’s hereditary.”
Stoner shook her head helplessly. “Marylou, both your parents look like victims of chronic anorexia.”
“Nature abhors repetition,” said Marylou.
“One of these days,” Stoner said, “they’re going to carry me out of here, kicking and screaming, in a strait-jacket.”
Marylou considered her well-supplied bosom and frowned. “Do you think I’m repulsive?”
“Oh, Marylou, of course I don’t.”
The phone clicked and a breathy voice crooned, “Good afternoon. United Airlines. May I help you?”
Stoner covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “It’s her,” she whispered. Marylou dove for the extension on her desk.
“One moment, please,” Stoner said in a secretarial voice, and waited. Then she cleared her throat. “Hi. This is Stoner McTavish, of Kesselbaum and McTavish.”
“Oh.” The voice turned icy. “What can I do for you?”
Marylou convulsed silently and hung up. “I love it, I love it.”
Tilting back her chair, Stoner propped her foot against the edge of her desk and spent the next ten minutes untangling airline tickets. As she was finished, Marylou shouted, “Call back next week. We’re having sex-change operations.”
Stoner laughed. “Really, Marylou.”
Marylou dismissed United Airlines with a flick of her wrist. “So she hates women. I’ll bet she falls all over Crimson Travel.”
“What makes my day,” Stoner said, grinning, “is knowing I’ve ruined hers.”
“I have an idea. Call back and ask her out.”
“Never!”
“Why not?”
“She might accept.” Bracing herself, Stoner attacked the mail. As usual, it was all brochures. Three new resort hotels in the Virgin Islands, an All-American Las Vegas fly-drive vacation special (with free breakfast, casino tokens, and complimentary in-room cocktail), notices of Christmas cruises to Rio. “This is cute,” Stoner said, holding up a mimeographed sheet.
“What?”
“A dog-sled tour of the Arctic Circle.”
Marylou glanced up. “Maybe you should try it.”
“It’s in January.” She got up to file the folders in their appropriate niches.
“I was in love with you once,” said Marylou.
Stoner looked at her. “You?”
“During my polymorphous-perverse adolescence.”
“Marylou, I didn’t know.”
Marylou sighed. “It happened the first time I saw you. Remember the night my mother brought you home to dinner?”
Stoner remembered. It had struck her then as peculiar behavior for one’s psychotherapist. In the intervening years she had learned that nothing was peculiar for Dr. Kesselbaum.
“God, you were adorable,” Marylou said. “The way you hung back in the doorway in those faded jeans and workshirt, staring at your moth-eaten sneakers.”
“Moths don’t eat sneakers,” Stoner said, feeling herself blush.
“And when you finally looked up at me, with those green eyes, I thought Halley’s Comet had just struck the Boston Common.”
Stoner brushed her hair back in a nervous gesture.
“And you kept doing that. All evening. I remember every word you said that night. ‘This is very good’ — I believe over the Big Macs. ‘No, thank you,’ to seconds on fries. And ‘I’m sorry’ about twenty-three times.” Marylou tapped the desk with her pencil. “You know, I’ve always suspected Edith was trying to fix us up.”
“I thought you were straight,” Stoner said.
“I am now, but back then it was anything goes. She didn’t care what direction my impulses went in, as long as they went somewhere and stayed.”
“You never said anything.”
Marylou shrugged. “Anyone with two ounces of brains could tell a relationship with you would have to be serious. I wasn’t about to sign up for that.”
Stoner stood like a piece of abandoned luggage in the middle of the room and wondered what to do with her hands. “Do you — uh — I mean, are you still —”
“Of course not, silly. Do you think I’d have sat here for seven years, day after day, eating my heart out? I’d have trapped you in the coat closet and ripped your clothes off long ago.” She opened a bill with a silver letter opener. “Shit, the electicity’s gone up again. Anyway, I prefer men in bed, God knows why. Are you going to stand there all day?”
Earlobes flaming, Stoner lurched back to her desk and dropped into her chair. “I hope…” she said hesitantly “… I haven’t treated you badly.”
“No, love,
Stoner threw a pencil at her. It missed. “I have, too.”
“How?”
“I’m older.”
“Not discernibly. Beneath that womanly — and, I might say, still terribly attractive — exterior, there beats the heart of a spring lamb.”
That did it. Stoner got up. “I’m leaving.”
“You can’t. I’m coming home for dinner with you. Aunt Hermione said it was an emergency. I wonder what kind of wine goes with emergencies.”
Stoner’s stomach gave a lurch. “My parents are here.”
“Oh, Stoner, you know she would have warned you.”
“I suppose so.”
“Still and all,” Marylou mused, “it is strange. Your aunt hasn’t declared an emergency since 1970, when the cat ate the Blue Runners.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember? It was the night she taught me — and I use the term loosely — to play Mah Jongg.”
Stoner grinned. “She won ten dollars from you.”
“Your aunt,” announced Marylou, “is a sweet old lady. She is also a crook.”
Marylou turned back to her work. Stoner watched her. So Marylou had been in love with her, all those years ago. She wondered what she would have done if she’d known. Stoner sighed. She knew exactly what she would have done. Run like hell. Back in those days her lesbianism had terrified her even in its latent, embryonic stage. Brought to the surface, it would have sent her leaping from the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. Sex of any kind had frightened her then. Well, to be perfectly honest, it still made her uneasy. And then there were her parents, her mother alternately screaming at her and collapsing into hysterics, her father looking at her as if she were something dragged up from the ocean floor to leave evil-smelling stains on the living room rug… And no matter how much Aunt Hermione snorted her disgust at them and informed them they were lucky, their only child could have come home dragging an unwanted and illegitimate baby, and how would they keep that from the neighbors whose opinion they obviously valued above the happiness of their own daughter… But they reminded Aunt Hermione that Stoner was their daughter, not hers, and only seventeen to boot, and if they wanted to make her unhappy it was their right — not to say duty — and Hermione could keep her Beacon Hill nose out of their Rhode Island business, and what did she know anyway, having no children of her own, and never married, and that looked pretty strange, too, by the way, and if she knew what was good for her she’d stick to her palm reading and Blue Runner Beans, there were Places people like her could End Up and they weren’t exactly Country Clubs, either, so she’d better watch her P’s and Q’s… Which sent Aunt Hermione off into peals of laughter.
Sometimes it even made Stoner laugh, except after they’d slammed down the phone and Aunt Hermione was cut off, it wasn’t funny any more.
One night Stoner knew she had had enough. After all, when your mother repeatedly tells you you make her sick, you either give in, get out, or learn to ignore it. And Stoner had never been able to ignore anything, particularly if it was unpleasant — which Dr. Kesselbaum pointed out to her, not as a criticism, Stoner dear, but so that she would be careful to surround herself with benign environments and loving persons. But that night the air had sparked and crackled with violence and useless tears, and Stoner, not daring to let herself think about what she was doing, had done the only thing she knew. She had run to Aunt Hermione.
She packed what she could into an old knapsack, and waited until the house was quiet. Terrified, she crept down the stairs, stole fifty dollars from her mother’s pocketbook, and caught a bus to Boston.
At Park Square Terminal, her courage disintegrated. Aunt Hermione would hate her for this. It was cowardly, irresponsible, and unfair. She would send her away — or worse, send her back. She couldn’t face Aunt Hermione.
For two days she hung around the city, sleeping in the bus station, staring across the fall-stripped Public Gardens at her aunt’s brownstone fortress, haunted by the look of hurt in her little dog’s eyes as she pushed him gently back inside and closed the door. But finally, hungry, exhausted, her nerves ragged, she dragged herself up the steps and rang the bell.
“Well,” said Aunt Hermione, “it’s about time.”
Stoner looked up at her aunt’s soft, round face ringed with frizzed gray hair, and broke down. “Please don’t make me go back,” she mumbled.
Aunt Hermione pulled her forward in a lavendar-scented embrace. “Don’t be an ass,” she said, and wiped the tears from Stoner’s face with the sleeve of her house dress. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll make us a pot of tea.”
Stoner huddled cross-legged on the sagging love-seat that graced one corner of her aunt’s kitchen. Morning sunlight poured through lace curtains, spilling leafy shadows on the polished wood floor. Prisms in each window shattered the light into rainbows against eggshell walls. Wicker birdcages filled with trailing plants hung by the doors and over the sink and table.
“My sister was always a bitch.” Aunt Hermione puttered about slamming cupboard doors. She found some Danish pastries and shoved them into the oven. “Probably stale, but they’ll do. When did you eat last?”
“Huh? Oh, I… I’m not sure.”
“Something horrifying in a restaurant, no doubt. I tell you, Stoner, civilization has departed downtown Boston. I remember when you could get a gracious meal any time of the day or night. Served with style, mind you. Now look. Pewter Pots. McDonald’s, for the love of Heaven. Not even a decent Walgreen’s counter. The Parker House is an abortion. No wonder people act like cattle. I haven’t had a decent omelette in years.”
“Did you talk to them?” Stoner asked timidly.
“I assure you I complained long and loud, for all the good it does these days.”
“What?”
“I’ve called the mayor’s office, the planning board, the attorney general, even the governor. I might as well talk in my sleep.” She glanced at Stoner. “Oh, your parents. I told them you weren’t here. You weren’t, were you?”
“What did they say?”
Aunt Hermione planted her hands on her hips. “My dear, at my age I shouldn’t be subjected to what they said to me. Don’t, I beg you, ask me to repeat it in your tender ears.”
In spite of herself, Stoner smiled. The nutmeg odor of pastries reached her.
“Whoops!” Aunt Hermione flew to the oven and swept out the rolls. “Here you go.”
She handed Stoner the plate and a little tray with butter and a knife. “Tea in a minute. Those are good. Given to me by a client, a marvelous cook, pays me in calories.”
“How is business, Aunt Hermione?” Stoner asked politely, trying not to wolf her food and act like cattle.
“Booming. It’s the occult fad, of course. Suddenly having your palm read is fashionable. Personally, I prefer working with serious students of the Mysteries, not these fly-by-nights. Next year they’ll be opening savings accounts and voting Republican. Still, as my father used to say, make hay while the sun shines.”
The copper kettle sang. Aunt Hermione tossed several kinds of loose tea into a pot she had been warming, and poured in the water. “Strawberry, mint, and chamomile. You need bracing up.”
Stoner blushed. “I haven’t had a bath in three days.”
“Never be ashamed of dirt honestly come by,” said Aunt Hermione. She looked Stoner up and down. “A little sleep wouldn’t hurt, either.” She propped her elbows on the table, chin in hands. Her blue eyes were alert as a sparrow’s behind rhinestone-studded, plastic-framed glasses.
“So you finally did it. Stoner, I’m proud of you.”
“You are?”
“Though it took you long enough. Even a dog would have the sense to leave that house of horrors. I never could understand Helen, and not because she’s ten years younger than me. Of course…she’d have you think I’m a hundred years older and she was an accident of menopause. Always had to have her own way, wanted everyone around her to rearrange themselves to suit her.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Stoner said bitterly.
