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The Dearly Departed
Elinor Lipman


An unexpectedly joyful comedy of manners that encompasses amateur dramatics, drive-by shootings, political campaigns and golf.When Sunny Batten hears from a brusque, ill-mannered stranger that her beloved mother Margaret has just died in a freak household accident, understandably she thinks that things can't get any worse. But when she discovers that her cranky informant is the son of the man who died alongside Margaret, and that the pair, unbeknownst to their offspring, were engaged to be married, matters take a distinct downward turn.As even-tempered, reasonable Sunny and arrogant, wise-cracking Fletcher take their positions at the funeral, the eyes and ears of the sleepy New Hampshire town of King George are fixed upon them. What excites the graveside gossips more than anything is the mourners' identical, prematurely grey hair. Mere coincidence, or the inescapable workings of shared DNA?With its vivid evocation of small-town life and a cast of unwittingly hilarious characters, ‘The Dearly Departed’ will prompt as many belly laughs as it will tears – and leave you hoping for more despatches from King George long after you’ve turned its final page.









ELINOR LIPMAN

The Dearly Departed


A NOVEL







This book is dedicated to my son,

BENJAMIN LIPMAN AUSTIN




CONTENTS


Cover (#u23d34fd1-db70-5733-bcd1-a285a2f5eb36)

Title Page (#uae608fdc-f3b9-5928-847b-446e1e5f1dfc)

Dedication (#u87bc8e8a-5623-5312-ac4a-fc75dd5d903f)

Chapter 1: Come Back to King George (#ue8fb33b2-b4e1-5106-a067-3e6d62fe77b2)

Chapter 2: Meet You at the Lake (#u64aee8ff-0f4e-51d9-9d65-5f624ae2146f)

Chapter 3: You Should Run (#u9007ba74-8c28-56c6-a249-311fbae4ac53)

Chapter 4: Harding (#u815f9409-ec84-5c73-8a9e-bf90127c183d)

Chapter 5: King’s Nite (#ue453ba47-b306-5d76-abb8-e422cf7f4602)

Chapter 6: The Dot (#ub71a4f9f-8b02-505b-bb29-e66218cf9c79)

Chapter 7: The Viewing Hours (#ud80aa3ed-f0fd-5c2c-8510-fcedcca50296)

Chapter 8: Meanwhile, at Boot Lake (#uf164a97f-0b53-5f07-9c7b-ff05f62c3616)

Chapter 9: The Flight (#udcc86bd2-1cdc-564e-ae47-dc180994a0b5)

Chapter 10: Graveside (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11: After the Service, No Mourners are Invited Back (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12: How Long has this Been Going on? (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13: Checkout (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14: Fletcher and Billy (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15: Bungalow Blues (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16: Nobody Slips anything by Winnie (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17: Happy Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18: Fletcher Inherits the Bug (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19: Company (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20: The Missus (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21: Life is Simpler than You Think (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22: Advice (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23: Emily Ann Recants (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24: 9–1–1 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25: A Place to Stay (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26: No Hard Feelings (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27: Things are Looking up (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28: No Secret in King George (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29: The Member-Guest (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30: The Moms (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31: Deal (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER 1 Come Back to king George (#ulink_a958c8ee-a182-59a0-95e1-26c187ced9cd)


Sunny met Fletcher for the first time at their parents’ funeral, a huge graveside affair where bagpipes wailed and strangers wept. It was a humid, mosquito-plagued June day, and the grass was spongy from a midnight thunderstorm. They had stayed on the fringes of the crowd until both were rounded up and bossed into the prime mourners’ seats by the funeral director. Sunny wore white—picture hat, dress, wet shoes—and an expression that layered anger over grief: Who is he? How dare he? Are any of these gawkers friends?

Unspoken but universally noticed was the physical attribute she and Fletcher shared—a halo of prematurely gray hair of a beautiful shade and an identical satiny, flyaway texture. No DNA test result, no hints in wills, could be more eloquent than this: the silver corona of signature hair above their thirty-one-year-old, identically furrowed brows.

The King George Bulletin had reported every possible angle, almost gleefully. MARGARET BATTEN, LOCAL ACTRESS, AND FRIEND FOUND UNCONSCIOUS, said the first banner headline, BULLETIN PAPER CARRIER CALLS 911, boasted the kicker. An arty photo—sunrise in King George—of scrawny, helmeted Tyler Lopez on his bike, a folded newspaper frozen in flight, appeared on page 1. “I knew something was wrong when I saw them laying on the floor—the woman and a man,” he told the reporter. “The door was open. I thought they might still be alive, so I used the phone.” Inescapable in the coverage was the suggestion of a double suicide or foul play. Yellow police tape surrounded the small house. Even after tests revealed carbon monoxide in their blood and a crack in the furnace’s heat exchanger, Bulletin reporters carried on, invigorated by a double, coed death on their beat.

A reader named Vickileigh Vaughn wrote a letter to the editor. She wanted to clarify something on the record so all of King George would know: Friend in the headline was inaccurate and possibly libelous. Miles Finn and Margaret Batten were engaged to be married. Friends, yes, but so much more than that. An outdoor wedding had been discussed. If the odorless and invisible killer hadn’t overcome them, Miles would have left, as was his custom, before midnight, after the Channel 9 news.

Sunny was notified by a message on her answering machine. “Sunny? It’s Fletcher Finn, Miles’s son. Could you pick up if you’re there?” Labored breathing filled the pause. “I guess not. Okay. Listen, I don’t know when I can get to a phone again, so I’ll have to give you the news, which is somewhat disturbing.” Another pause, too long for the machine, which clicked off. He called back. “Hi, it’s Fletcher Finn again. Here’s what I was going to say. I’ll make it quick: I got a call from the police in Saint George, New Hampshire—no, sorry, King George. They found our parents unconscious. Nobody knows anything. I’ve got the name of the hospital and the other stuff the cop said. What’s your fax number? Call me. I’ll be up late.”

Sunny phoned the King George police. The crime scene, she was told by a solicitous male voice, was roped off until the lab work came back. Sunny pictured the peeling gray bungalow secured with yellow tape, its sagging porch and overgrown lilacs cinched in the package.

“Are they going to die?” she asked.

“Sunny?” said the officer. “It’s Joe Loach. From Mattatuck Avenue? We were in study hall together junior and senior—”

“I got a message from a Fletcher Finn, who said his father and my mother were found unconscious, but that’s all I know. He didn’t even say what hospital.”

Loach coughed. “Sunny? They weren’t taken to a hospital. It was too late for that.”

He heard a cry and the sound of her palm slipping over the mouthpiece.

“It was the damn carbon monoxide. It builds up over time, and then it’s too late. I’m so sorry. I hate to do this over the phone …”

When she couldn’t answer, he said, “I saw your mother in Driving Miss Daisy at the VFW, and she was really something.”

Sunny pictured her mother’s grande-dame bow and the magisterial sweep of the arm that invited her leading man to join her in the spotlight. It had taken practice, with Sunny coaching, because Margaret’s inclination was to blush and look amazed.

“You’re where now? Connecticut?”

She said she was.

“Okay. One step at a time. Nothing says you can’t make arrangements by telephone. Maybe your mother put her preferences in writing—people do that, something like, ‘Instructions. To be opened in the event of my death.’ I could walk anything over to the funeral parlor for you. In fact, remember Dickie Saint-Onge from our class? He took over the business. He’s used to handling things long-distance.”

“I’m coming up,” said Sunny.

“She and her fiancé didn’t suffer,” said Joey Loach. “That much I can promise you.”

“Fiancé?” she repeated. “How do you know that?”

“That seems to be everyone’s understanding. Her cleaning lady wrote a letter to the editor to set the record straight. Plus, there was a ring on the appropriate finger.”

Sunny cried softly, her hand over the receiver.

“Can I do anything?” he asked. “Can I call anyone?”

“I’d better get off,” she said. “There must be some phone calls I should make. I’m sure that’s what I’m supposed to do next.”

“Just so you know, the house is okay now. They found the leak and fixed it, the town did, first thing. You don’t have to be afraid of sleeping there. I’ll make sure that everything is shipshape.”

“I think my friend Regina used to baby-sit for your sister,” she said. “Marilyn?”

“Marilee,” said Joey. “She’s still here. We’re all still here. So’s Regina. You okay?”

“I meant to say thank you,” said Sunny, “but that’s what came out instead.”

“You’re welcome,” said Joey Loach.

Fletcher sounded more annoyed than mournful when he reached Sunny the next morning. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I would have thought you’d have returned my call.”

“You didn’t leave your number,” said Sunny.

“I’m sure you can appreciate that I wasn’t thinking about secretarial niceties last night,” he snapped.

“Such as ‘I’m so sorry about your mother’?”

“I didn’t know her,” he said. “And at the time of my call I believed she was still alive.”

Sunny quietly slipped the receiver into its cradle. It rang seconds later.

“My father’s dead because he was watching television with someone who had a defective furnace,” blared the same voice from her earpiece. “He was as healthy as a horse. How do you think I feel? And on top of that, some backwater police chief delegates to me the task of calling the date’s daughter.”

Forcing herself to sound composed and rational, Sunny said, “Are you the only child, or is there a humane sibling I can do this with?”

He paused. “Unfortunately, I’m it.”

“You don’t have to torture yourself with the idea that this was some blind date that went awry—that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time—because he was there every night. She was his fiancée.”

Fletcher said, “Unlikely. I never met her.”

“She had his ring, and the date was set.”

After a silence, he asked, “Were you invited to a wedding?”

“Of course I was,” Sunny said.

Reached by phone, the funeral director said he preferred not to stage a wake in a theater, even if it had once been a house of Congregational worship. Sunny heard his flimsy argument, which was grounded in what she felt was personal convenience, and answered in a shaky voice, “I think it’s what my mother would have wanted. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, and if it requires a little creativity and flexibility on our part, so be it.”

No one in King George had ever asked Dickie Saint-Onge for creativity or flexibility, so he rose to the occasion, promising to accommodate the loved one’s undocumented dying wishes: a coffin in a hardwood that was stained to resemble ebony, white satin interior, no variation on her hairdo, which should be styled by her regular hairdresser and not by some mortician. Sunny herself would get permission from the King George Community Players to have her mother buried in her Mourning Becomes Electra costume or the black dress she wore in Six Characters in Search of an Author. He would tell the town’s only florist this: no daisies, no carnations, no mums. Say that the daughter wants flowers cut from the vines creeping up her mother’s porch, in combination with the Russian sage by the mailbox. And if they aren’t in full bloom, find wisteria on someone else’s trellis around town. Everyone knew Margaret. Everyone loved her.

Fletcher announced that he’d be flying to King George on the morning of the funeral with an associate. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get away one moment before that, due to the campaign. Was there an airport nearby?

“Forgive me for not owning a copy of your résumé, but what campaign are we talking about?”

“Right now, a congressional campaign.”

“And you’re too busy to get away?”

“That’s not what I said. I’m coming up for the funeral.”

“On the morning of. In other words, your father died and your boss won’t give you a few days off?”

“Just the opposite: She very much wants to attend the funeral, but we can’t get away until Saturday morning, because there’s a state fair—”

“What state?” Sunny asked.

“New Jersey. Sixth Congressional District.”

“What’s her name?”

“Emily Ann Grandjean. She wants to be there,” said Fletcher. “For both of us.”

“How kind,” said Sunny. “Too bad she can’t spare you for a couple of days.”

“Every second’s scheduled. It’s brutal. Our election’s in September.”

“So I imagine that you won’t be staying very long after the funeral.”

“To what end?”

“To go through your father’s things and decide what you want to keep. Someone’s got to do his packing.”

“Packing?” Fletcher repeated, as if Sunny had said sharecropping. “You pay people to pack—moving companies pack. They can do a whole house in two days.”

“If it’s the cottage I’m thinking of on Boot Lake, it won’t take you very long.”

“Whatever,” said Fletcher.

“I’m going up tomorrow. You can reach me at the King’s Nite Motel,” said Sunny.

“Fine.”

“Do you know my name?” she asked.

“Sunny?”

“Batten,” she said, and spelled it.

The night she returned to King George, the local news reported that a motorist, after running the town’s only stop sign, had shot the chief of police. Sunny, watching on the motel television, first thought, Good—people in this town will have something to talk about besides my mother; and second, It’s him, Marilee’s brother, the cop. She crawled from the head of her bed to its foot for a closer inspection. Indeed, Chief Joseph J. Loach was Joey Loach, the kid who’d swaggered around the halls of King George Regional more than a dozen years before, the detention regular and goofball who could fold his eyelids up and inside out, now a hero wounded in the line of moving violations. Because his bullet-proof vest had saved him, Chief Loach was being presented a state-of-the-art model by the vest’s proud manufacturer, bedside. “I guess it wasn’t my time,” Joey told the reporter.

Mentioned obliquely in the hushed wrap-up: The perpetrator was still at large.




CHAPTER 2 Meet you at the Lake (#ulink_b73ce0ee-69ab-5572-b12f-1fc3dc8019d2)


Actress” in the obituary’s headline, especially without the modifier “amateur,” would have delighted Margaret Batten, who’d been stagestruck in middle age, recruited at the beauty parlor by the wife of the superintendent of schools. Might Margaret, she asked, consider a tiny but vital role in the King George Community Players’ fall production of The Bad Seed? Duly flattered and only briefly deflated to learn that she had no lines, Margaret threw herself into her first production—understudying, baking for the bake sale, and embracing the subculture that was the King George Community Players. She was a woman alone, a divorcee looking for a social life in a town of 1,008 year-round residents.

Sunny was in high school when the acting bug burrowed under her mother’s skin. They lived on the edge of the King George Links, a semi-private golf course, in a small house with rotting trellises, leased for a pittance under an odd historical footnote concerning a runaway slave and a host abolitionist, now moot and inapplicable. Still, it carried with it a legacy and the taint of a scholarship awarded on the basis of need. Historically, poor people lived in the gray bungalow, visible from the seventeenth fairway; their underprivileged children fished waylaid golf balls out of the course’s water traps. Margaret had qualified as a lessee under the unwritten widow-with-child clause: Sunny’s father was dead, or so the tale on the application went.

Margaret was not a habitual liar, but the little house had been vacant when she moved to King George. A real estate agent, sizing her up correctly as a single mother without means, said, “I know I’m shooting myself in the foot to let you in on this, but there’s this little house that belongs to the town …” Margaret asked to see it. The pine floors had been stripped of linoleum and left a tarry black; instead of doors, faded blue burlap hung from curtain rods between rooms, and the kitchen sink was a soapstone trough. But Margaret was a great believer in soap, water, ammonia, bleach, lemon oil, paint, shellac, wallpaper, and fresh flowers. She could see the small provincial print she’d choose for fabrics and the museum posters of lily pads and haystacks she’d frame for the walls. “How much?” she whispered.

“A dollar a day—and that includes utilities.”

“And you think I could get it?”

The agent confided, “They don’t check, so lay it on a little thick in the application. They like widows and orphans—the more the better.”

“I only have Sunny.”

The agent said, “I happen to know from personal experience that if they like you, they’re not sticklers.”

The truth would have been nowhere near good enough: Margaret had lost a husband in the most prosaic fashion, to nothing more tragic than an uncharacteristic slip—hers. She still couldn’t believe she had sinned and that the perfectly decent John Batten, who updated kitchen cabinets with laminates, had not forgiven her. It hadn’t even been a love affair but a temp job, a professional courtesy: The lawyers for whom she worked had loaned her and her shorthand skills to an out-of-town client running for Congress. He hadn’t announced yet; he told the newspaper that he was visiting primarily on business and, yes, maybe to shake a few hands along the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade route. And when he did, as Margaret would observe, it was with such penetrating eye contact and warm, two-fisted handshakes that the woman in his grip felt more attractive and interesting than she knew herself to be.

Pretty in a round-faced, wholesome way; short, with a generous bust and small waist, Margaret was in her mid-twenties and looked eighteen. Safe, her employers thought. Not bait. Harmless as a secretarial loan to a reputed womanizer. At the end of Miles Finn’s visit, after two days of depositions, he invited her to dinner, in a hotel dining room famous for its Caesar salads prepared at the table.

Thank you, but she couldn’t, Margaret said.

“A previous engagement?”

“I’m married.”

“I am too! This isn’t a date. I’m so sorry that’s what you thought. This is a thank-you for a job well done and a grueling two days of boring testimony. Dinner seems the least I could do.… Perhaps your husband would like to come along.”

“He’s on a job,” she said.

“Out of town?”

“Camden,” she said. “A school renovation. It’s supposed to open the day after Labor Day.”

She seemed torn, concerned about something other than the appearance of social impropriety. Her hands ran down the sides of her brown cotton A-line skirt.

“What if we made it for seven or eight?” he prompted. “That way you can go home and change into something for evening.”

She nearly curtsied with relief, and said, “I do have something new I was saving for a special occasion.”

“How old are you?” he asked. “I only ask because I’d like to toast my campaign.”

“I’m twenty-six!”

“Twenty-six.” He smiled.

He asked for a quiet table, away from other diners. Margaret arrived in what his wife would call a little black dress, poofy and crisscrossed with chiffon at the bosom, in very high heels that looked a size too big, and carrying a long, thin clutch purse with a rhinestone clasp; a heart-shaped barrette held her brown hair off her shiny forehead. She ate her Caesar salad and her veal rollatini with such earnestly exquisite shopgirl manners, refusing to speak until she had chewed and swallowed every morsel of food and washed it down with a ladylike sip from her water goblet, that he felt chivalrous, which, in turn, impelled him to invite her upstairs to have Kahlùa on his balcony. He wanted to flatter her; wanted this sweet-faced girl to feel that she had been an excellent dinner partner and that Miles Finn enjoyed her company. If he needed a secretarial pinch-hitter again—say, next month?—could she get away?

She shouldn’t have spent the night, shouldn’t have assumed that her heretofore nonpregnant state was her failing and not her husband’s; should have checked her good black dress for the long, prematurely silver hairs that John removed with tweezers and saved in an amber pill bottle. He filed for divorce, gallantly characterizing it as no-fault. Their two lawyers privately agreed upon a paltry monthly payment in lieu of a paternity test.

When no one had a good word for John Batten, the brute who divorced his sweet, pregnant wife, Margaret told her family, “It’s not what it appears to be. Don’t blame John. That’s all I’ll say,” and took her wispy-haired baby girl to King George, a town in the shadow of the White Mountains. Candidate Finn had recommended it unwittingly as the site of idyllic boyhood summers and a future retirement. John Batten moved his laminating business to a booming Phoenix and sent Margaret a wedding announcement ten months later. “She’s a keeper,” he wrote in one ecru corner.

Believing that the bungalow on the golf course would provide a month or two’s shelter, Margaret typed in the space allowed that she had been briefly married to a wonderful man, who had died an accidental death in a helicopter crash. In parentheses, she wrote that her late husband flew critically ill people, or sometimes just their hearts and kidneys, from the scenes of accidents to hospitals, from country to city, where teams of specialists met him atop hospital helipads. He had died in the line of duty, whereupon his organs and corneas were harvested and transplanted into no fewer than five near-death breadwinners. The committee for the Abel Cotton House had considered the poorly punctuated appeals of too many teenage mothers who came to interviews in cutoff jeans. Times had changed. Runaway slaves had given way to war widows, who’d given way to church-sponsored refugees with extended families. English-speaking applicants were scarce; people who would fit in were scarcer. With a house in suburban Philadelphia as her last address, an associate’s degree, a dented Pinto, a thin, sad gold band and diamond chip on her widowed left hand, and a little blond daughter, the soft-spoken Margaret Batten was the happy choice of every philanthropist on the committee.

The invitation to act with the Community Players brought changes for the better for Sunny: Her mother took her to the movies now that she had techniques to study, gestures to borrow, dresses to copy. Dusty blues and greens accented her eyelids, and her fingernails went pink. She began squirting hand cream into new rubber gloves by day and massaging her heels at night. Various upstanding professionals, including an optometrist and a pharmacist, took Margaret out for bites to eat after Thursday rehearsals.

Her fellow thespians uncovered a talent Margaret didn’t know she had, the ability to memorize lines more quickly than anyone else—not just her own, but the whole cast’s. “Photographic memory,” she’d apologize, unable to swallow the prompts when her fellow actors missed their cues. She understudied both leading ladies and ingenues, and finally had her break when the woman playing Mrs. Winemiller in Summer and Smoke needed emergency disk surgery. Sunny ushered at her mother’s opening night, and was both pleasantly surprised and disconcerted. Margaret became someone else onstage, gesticulating, enunciating, and projecting, in an accent that was all Blanche DuBois. Sunny thought she looked pretty at a distance with her face painted and her taffeta church outfit rustling, prettier than she looked in real life. The Bulletin’s freelance drama critic, who taught at King George Regional and had Sunny in driver’s ed, reported that “newcomer Margaret Batten brings an understated ardor and energy to the role of the minister’s wife.” It was a gift to an unattached, shy, forty-three-year-old woman in a town where everyone read the same newspaper. Men in the KGCP teased her. The crème de la crème of King George society, she liked to say, was opening its circle to her. The bachelor Players called her at home, asking for “Maggie.” Confidence changed the way she dressed, the way she drove—with a chiffon scarf tied around her neck, in Grace Kelly fashion—and the way she entertained. She rented a floor sander, polyurethaned the pine boards to a high gloss, and painted the front room in a color called Caviar. When the KGCP needed sites for their annual progressive dinner, Margaret energetically volunteered what she now was calling the Cotton homestead for the canapé course.

Confined to the stage, Margaret’s mild airs and new self-esteem were bearable, even lovable. Sunny knew what play was running on which nights and how to stay out of the refracted limelight. She would baby-sit costars’ kids; would paint scenery and post flyers on two dozen bulletin boards around town. But she refused to act—refused to answer even the desperate call for teenage daughters in Fiddler on the Roof and Cheaper by the Dozen. She studied, she caddied at the golf course that was her backyard, fished golf balls out of the brook that divided the eighth and ninth fairways and sold them back to the original owners at half price. Her mother allowed her to golf as long as she wore culottes and an ironed blouse and didn’t look like one of the ragamuffins who had preceded them in the peeling gray house. Margaret frowned on her daughter’s carrying other people’s golf bags—like a bellhop, she said; like beggars who dived off Acapulco cliffs for coins. Sunny helped her own cause by describing the nice doctors and lawyers, owners of the big houses on Baldwin Avenue, who let her play through and admired her swing.

Too many male caddies were impatient and contemptuous of the ladies’ league, but its members finally had an alternative. Sunny took them seriously. She knew the course, and dispensed tips that she’d picked up on loops with the assistant pro. When their husbands surprised them with new clubs for Christmas, the ladies offered their perfectly good woods and irons to Sunny.

It was a small town, but big enough for the theater fanatic and her mildly mortified daughter to coexist until Margaret played the president’s wife in Of Thee I Sing and came away with an idea for a moonlighting job: impersonating first ladies at private parties, trade shows, or ribbon-cuttings. Since the cameo sideline began, she had dressed as Mmes. Carter, Reagan, and Bush; had added Sandra Day O’Connor and Queen Elizabeth as the occasion warranted. Her appearance at an event injected a guessing game into the dull photo opportunity—this faux-pearled and eagle-brooched character was which woman in Margaret Batten’s repertoire?

“Please don’t do it,” Sunny would plead. “Please don’t let them put your picture in the Bulletin again.”

“But that’s exactly why they hire me—so someone reading about the event will say, ‘Oh my goodness. Look! A famous person came to the ground-breaking of the new branch. Isn’t that Barbara, hon?’”

“It doesn’t fool anyone. It’s not being an actress. It’s a sight gag. And then you leave and go to the supermarket, and my friends say, ‘I saw your mother yesterday at Foodland in a gray wig.’ Or, ‘She was wearing a necklace of shellacked peanuts. Must have been Rosalyn’s turn,’ with this look that says, Is she mental?”

“It’s theater,” her mother would say, “an acting job that pays—which makes me a professional. It’s your college fund. Besides, you of all people know I don’t care what the neighbors think.”

Sunny wrote to the long-absent John Batten every few months, and he wrote back. “Sincerely, John,” he signed his dull, typed letters on the firm’s letterhead. Neither correspondent invoked the terms father or daughter; Sunny did not accuse him of abandoning or failing her, because she understood without being told that there were complications that no one liked to discuss. Sunny studied her mother’s wedding pictures and puzzled over the groom’s dominant brown eyes and dark wavy hair, his short arms and thick neck. Artificial insemination, she guessed after reading a cover story on the subject in Time.

John’s wife and office manager, Bonnie, added a banal postscript to every letter—“8 straight days of temps over 100!” or “driving to San Diego to see the pandas,” which Sunny interpreted to mean: John and I have no secrets. I know whenever he writes to you. I protect him. Mostly, Sunny and John corresponded about golf, which he’d taken up in the Sun Belt. He hoped she was taking lessons, and Sunny told him no, but that she took illustrated books by Sam Snead and Ben Hogan out of the library and closely watched the best players at the club. He advised her which hand-me-down clubs, which compounds of steel and new alloys, she should keep and which she should put on consignment. He told her not to ignore her short game. She wrote back and said she was trying to spend an hour a day on the putting green. Was that, in his opinion, enough? “If you’re sinking those three-foot white-knucklers with some consistency, it is,” he answered. He never asked about Margaret, and Sunny didn’t ask about his wife. He didn’t call or send gifts or ask for custodial visits. “I never really knew him,” she’d explain to friends who asked about a father. Or, to close the subject: “He died before I was born.”

From Pennsylvania, Miles Finn continued to pay taxes on his New Hampshire property, an unheated Depression-era cottage with three dark rooms and outdoor plumbing. It was on a minor lake so ordinary and unscenic that one would wonder what inspired him to travel six hours to swim in black water and pee into a fetid hole. The crawl space housed an ancient canoe and an antique archery set; inside, there were moldy jigsaw puzzles, scratchy wool blankets, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed canvas chairs, mouse droppings, the occasional bat, and the empty gin and beer bottles frequently found in near-forsaken cabins.

Margaret aired out the place every spring, defrosted the shoebox-sized freezer as needed, kept clean linens on the bigger bed. If it was a quick trip to close a window before rain or to leave a welcome casserole, Sunny would wait in the car. The cottage, Margaret explained, belonged to friends from Philadelphia—“Finn,” according to slapdash strokes of white paint on a slat—who’d been coming to King George forever.

“Do they have any kids?” Sunny asked hopefully.

“It’s just one person,” Margaret said. “An attorney. I worked for him before you were born.”

It sounded right to Sunny that her mother would bring casseroles to an old, childless man who could afford nothing better than vacations at Boot Lake. Over the years, as Margaret headed off alone with her pail and sponges and a flush particular to this mission, Sunny adjusted her view of Mr. Finn. She sensed that the former boss had become a boyfriend—so typically charitable of her mother. Not that sex was involved, Sunny thought. Sex didn’t fit Margaret. It had to be a crush, durable yes, but no more fertile or reciprocated than the ones Sunny herself had on teachers at King George Regional or on golfers on TV.

Miles called it his retreat, and if any woman—first his wife, then subsequent girlfriends—voiced suspicions about his treks to Boot Lake, he would say, “If only you could see the camp. I don’t even bathe when I’m there. No woman would set foot in this dump. Of course I love it, but that’s a childhood thing. No one else will go near the place.”

He made the romantic terms clear to Margaret, semi-annually. He was married, with everything to lose personally and professionally. He wasn’t inviting love affairs or headlines.

He didn’t volunteer personal details unless she inquired: Yes, there’d been a separation. Yes, in fact, a divorce. Yes, he was dating in Philadelphia, but only when necessary; only when he needed presentable companions for black-tie events. They had sex quickly on her fabric softener-scented sheets during her lunch hour, and didn’t speak again until he called six months later with a jangle of quarters from a phone booth. “Guess who?” he’d say each time, and always she’d have a clever answer ready: An old boss? A charming dinner companion from Philly? Tomorrow’s lunch date?

For a long time, she thought she had no right to mind. Twice-yearly dates didn’t make her his girlfriend or his confidante. She wasn’t above this flimsy attention—she who’d broken her marriage vows and several Commandments. But eventually she joined the Players, and was lauded in print for her understated ardor. Now when he called from the road, Margaret was not being coy when she hesitated before answering his “Guess who?”

“Is someone there with you?” he asked.

“Miles? Oh, sorry. I wasn’t sure. How are you? Where are you?”

“I’m about twenty-five minutes from there, and you know how I am.” He dropped his voice. “Ready, willing, and able.”

She began to ask, as she sat on the edge of the bed, rolling her panty hose back up, if they could go out, if he could pick her up, if they couldn’t have something approximating a date. “I know what you’ve always said: ‘No calls, no letters between visits, no paper trail.’ But we never get a chance to talk. We could drive to Vermont, to an inn, then stay the night. Sunny can stay with a friend. We’re both divorced. There wouldn’t be a scandal even if we were caught.” She didn’t say, “You lost the election sixteen years ago. You’re a private citizen. No one knows who Miles Finn is anymore.”

He always answered the same way: Communication didn’t always have to be spoken, did it? Wasn’t what they had special and unconventional? Did she prefer a restaurant dinner to a passionate lunch?

If he asked about Sunny, it was from the polite distance of a man who had no reason and no desire to meet his occasional paramour’s child. On these trips—fish all morning, fuck Margaret at lunch without any wining or dining or conversation; nap, read, drink, sleep—he didn’t want to think about anyone but himself. His son, Fletcher, was a teenager, the same age as the girl. These visits wouldn’t last forever: Fletcher was asking questions, and Margaret was asking for proper dates. She’d even used the words “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea anymore.” Margaret, he gathered, had other men calling her among the locals. And soon a devoted, alternate-weekend father like himself, claiming to be tying flies and frying trout alone in New Hampshire, would have to invite his kid along.




CHAPTER 3 You Should Run (#ulink_b1b8c453-1cfd-584c-878b-657cd21c7211)


Fletcher knew that managing Emily Ann Grandjean’s congressional campaign would mean fourteen months of spinning, baby-sitting, and chauffeuring, followed by a loss of the most humiliating kind—a landslide victory for an incumbent who didn’t have to shake one hand.

And then there was Emily Ann herself. In an exploratory meeting, she demonstrated one of her most annoying tics: constant sips from a large bottle of brand-name water, then the ceremonial screwing of its cap back on once, twice, full-body twists as if volatile and poisonous gases would escape without her intervention.

They met in a conference room at Big John, Inc., the family business, founded by Emily Ann’s grandfather after he took credit for discovering exercise in the form of a stationary bike. Subsequent generations invented a rowing machine with a flywheel and, most recently and profitably, a stroller for joggers. Emily Ann’s three older brothers, whose tanned and photogenic faces anchored the annual report, went happily into the booming family business. But the baby sister made a fuss about striking out on her own—like those Kennedy cousins who went into journalism or the Osmond siblings who didn’t sing. Emily Ann went to law school, dropped out, went back, and at her graduation heard Congressman Tommy d’Apuzzo—beloved, honest, monogamous; a man for whom a district’s worth of highways and middle schools were named—urge the new lawyers to consider careers as public servants. “Where are the dreamers?” he cried, waving his arms. “Where are all the little boys and girls who wanted to grow up to be president? Are you all heading for Wall Street? To white-shoe law firms in New York skyscrapers? We need your energy and your idealism. Run against me! Challenge me! Provoke me! Defeat me!”

Only Emily Ann thought he meant it; only she thought a seat in the House of Representatives was attainable to a member of the Class of ’96. When she returned from her graduation grand tour (London, Paris, Venice, and the Greek Isles) she took a bar-review course by day. By night she found a campaign to work for. Conspicuously wearing outfits of Republican red and Betsy Ross blue, she volunteered for an earnest young firebrand running for the city council. She stood in for him at a Republican kaffeeklatsch after practicing answers and sharing aphorisms with a voice-activated pocket recorder.

“You should run,” said an elderly man by the dessert table as his wife dusted confectioner’s sugar off one of his veiny cheeks.

“Maybe one day,” said Emily Ann.

“Don’t wait too long or I might not be able to vote for you,” he said, chuckling.

“This evening,” she reminded him nobly, “is about Greg Chandler-Brown and his race, and about the bond rating of a dying city.”

“I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

“Emily Ann Grandjean.”

“Mrs. or Miss?” he asked.

“I’m not married.”

“Have a piece of fudge cake,” he said. “You could use a little meat on your bones.”

A year later, Mr. Grandjean was sliding a Big John catalog across the conference table to Fletcher, who had managed the last candidate to lose to d’Apuzzo, under budget and with dignity. “You look like you work out. Is there anything in here that appeals to you?”

Its glossy cover displayed the rowing machine that was the Rolls-Royce of Fletcher’s health club. Through some trick of digital photography, it appeared to be gliding past pyramids on the Suez Canal. Fletcher didn’t open the catalog; didn’t even touch it.

“No obligation. Absolutely none,” said Mr. Grandjean. “A thank-you for your time and attention today, no matter what you decide. And, please. It’s nothing to us. This is what we do. We assemble parts and turn a few screws and—presto—we have a bike.”

Fletcher turned the catalog facedown. Equally compelling was the back cover—a computerized stationary bike, titanium, featuring a built-in CD player and a Tour de France winner perched on its fertility-friendly seat.

“She can win the primary,” continued Mr. Grandjean. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

“When you run unopposed, you win,” said Fletcher. “But I’m not interested in being the campaign manager for a sacrificial lamb.”

Emily Ann snapped, “You’ve never heard of upsets? DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN?”

Fletcher folded his hands in front of him on the hammered-copper conference table. “Let me paint a picture for you: Yesterday, in the village center of a very staid Republican suburb, in a chic café named Repasts, I ate a sandwich called The d’Apuzzo. Not a sandwich meant to be an insult, like baloney or marshmallow fluff, but one named out of affection and respect and because it was what Representative d’Apuzzo ordered on his last whistle-stop there.”

“What kind of sandwich?” asked Emily Ann.

“Tuna club. Traditional yet popular. No negative symbolism there.”

“Your point being that a man who has sandwiches named in his honor is unbeatable?” she asked.

“When he’s a Democrat and it’s on a Republican menu? Yes.”

“Rather unscientific,” grumbled her father.

“Can I be blunt?” asked Fletcher.

Both Grandjeans sipped their water.

“Miss Grandjean would be a gnat on the campaign windshield of Tommy d’Apuzzo and nothing more. He wouldn’t respond to her speeches, he wouldn’t pay for ads, he wouldn’t campaign, and he sure as hell wouldn’t fly home from Washington to debate her. And the editorial writers? Forgive me—they’ll dismiss her as a rich girl without experience or convictions, looking for a career after law school.”

“That’s so unfair. I have convictions! I’m deeply committed to education—”

“Who isn’t?” he asked.

“And to cutting taxes and to term limits—”

“Every man or woman who’s ever run against Tommy d’Apuzzo has supported term limits. It ain’t going to get you elected.”

“This is about exposure, about building myself a base—”

“I just don’t think I’m your man,” said Fletcher.

Emily Ann gathered her water bottle, her Filofax, her pen and cell phone and said, “Then let’s not waste anyone’s time. A can-do attitude is the very least I would expect in a consultant.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” said Fletcher.

She walked to the door, the skinniest girl on the skinniest legs he’d ever seen. Mr. Grandjean motioned that Fletcher should stay behind. As the door closed, Mr. Grandjean’s fond, fatherly smile collapsed. “I’m going to ask you one more time to take this job. I’m going to name a salary that is the going rate plus—”

“Based on …?”

“A dark-horse congressional race.”

“Un-uh. Not interested.”

Mr. Grandjean screwed the cap back on his water bottle and looked thoughtful. “It’s September. The election is fourteen months away.”

“I know that.”

“Exposure for her is exposure for you. You can lose, and six months later I’ll tune in to MSNBC and see you opining about presidential politics with REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST superimposed across your tie.”

“Here’s my problem,” Fletcher said. “Tommy d’Apuzzo chairs two committees. He loves his wife and doesn’t fool around. His secretary is widowed, Native American, disabled, and loves him like a son. His kids went to New Jersey public schools, then to Seton Hall, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickenson. His father was a cobbler. His mother was a Freedom Rider. His dogs came from the pound. Everybody except your daughter knows it’ll take plastic explosives to unseat Tommy d’Apuzzo.”

Mr. Grandjean shrugged. “You must have a price.”

Fletcher scribbled numbers on his legal pad and slid it across the table.

Mr. Grandjean shook his head even before the notepad came to a stop in front of him. “Can’t do. It’s money out of my own pocket—a price I have to justify to her brothers.”

“Are they in or are they out?” Fletcher asked.

Mr. Grandjean shifted in his back-saver chair. “You know how kids are. They keep score—who got a new car and who got a used one; who got semesters abroad. On one hand, they resent this pissing into the wind; on the other, they’re glad to have her … gainfully distracted.”

“I’m getting the picture,” said Fletcher.

Mr. Grandjean wrote a sentence on the top sheet of Fletcher’s yellow pad, tore it off, folded it into the most elaborate and aerodynamic paper airplane Fletcher had ever seen, and sent it sailing across the table.

2,000 shares of Big John stock, it read.

Fletcher rose, and walked it around to the other side of the table. “For your signature.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what they’re worth?”

“I know what they’re worth,” he said.

First, he tried to drop the Ann and make her only Emily. The double name lacked authority, he said. It was too cute, too wholesome, too Miss America.

“Too bad,” said Emily Ann. She was not pandering to the small percentage of the electorate who cared about the sociological implications of a conjoined name. She was proud of it. It was her two grandmothers’ names. People were so superficial. Like that reporter for the Times-Record who was obsessed with her weight and her percentage of body fat—as if that had anything to do with her capabilities; as if anyone would even mention it if Emily Ann had been a man. When eating-disorder speculation became the only thing about Emily Ann’s candidacy that engaged the public, it was Fletcher’s unhappy task to pour Diet Coke into Classic Coke cans when she drank in public, to insist that she stop pulling the doughy insides out of her bagels, and to answer questions about the candidate’s preternatural thinness. She allowed herself to be photographed with her teeth around a clam fritter at a state fair, a sausage-and-pepper grinder at an Italian street festival, a knish at a B’nai B’rith brunch. But she didn’t consummate any of those acts; didn’t even sink her teeth into the first bite after the photographer’s flash. If there had been a position paper on her weight, it would have said: All the Grandjeans are fìt and rangy. Long and lean. Their veins show under the epidermal layer of their inner arms. Their faces are pinched and skeletal. It runs in the family. It’s not a disorder. Candidate Grandjean’s metabolism is incredibly efficient. If she appears to pick at her food, it’s because she eats six or seven small meals a day and never much at one sitting. She may look as if she’s been constructed of Tinkertoys, but that’s because she works out faithfully on a Big John SB2000. All rumors about anorexia, bulimia, and terminal illnesses are defamatory and false.

Worse, and just as he had feared, Emily Ann warmed to Fletcher. The first time she reached over and took a sip from his coffee in the van’s cup holder, he saw it as an overture, especially when he was faced with the two coral blots on the rim. “Hey,” he said. “That’s mine.”

“So?”

“It’s polite to ask first. Some people don’t like sharing.”

“Big deal—my lips on your cup. Do you get so annoyed when someone kisses you?”

He didn’t look over and didn’t answer.

“What a grouch.”

He was tempted to say, It has cream in it, which I know you’d never let pass your lips unless you are before a convention of dairy farmers.

“Doesn’t coffee have a diuretic effect on you?” she asked.

Pissing, she meant: urological. Personal. He wasn’t going to discuss the properties of coffee with this annoying bag of bones. “I don’t like lipstick on my cup because it tastes like perfume,” he said. “If you want your own cup, you should say so at the appropriate juncture.”

Emily Ann turned away and studied the scenery.

“Let’s go over some questions, Em.” When she didn’t answer, he asked if she was sulking.

“No I am not. I’m meditating.”

“Here. Be a baby. Drink my cold coffee. I wouldn’t want you arriving at the meeting with a long face.”

“You work for me,” she said. “I’m the candidate and you’re the hired help.”

Emily Ann reached down to the giant turtle-green leather satchel at her feet for her water bottle.

“Are you really thirsty all day long, or is it just a prop?”

“Neither. Everyone needs eight glasses a day.” She took her usual swig, like punctuation. “I won’t always be running for Congress. The question of who’s the boss and who’s the employee won’t be an issue after Tuesday, November ninth.”

Fletcher turned on the radio.

“Because we’ll be equals when this is over,” she said. “Possibly even friends.”

“Not advisable,” said Fletcher. “Lines get blurred.”

“Not that I need any more friends,” she continued. “And not that I intend to lose. I was only thinking it would be an interesting experiment.”

“What would?”

“The occasional informal meeting over a glass of wine, post-campaign: candidate and manager minus the occupational constraints.”

Fletcher took a gulp of cold coffee from the clean half of the rim.

“I sense you’re uncomfortable parsing feelings and emotions,” Emily Ann said, trying again, her bottle nestled in the crook of her arm.

“Correct,” said Fletcher.




CHAPTER 4 Harding (#ulink_c0fb82c5-7cfd-591f-a639-31aac384d388)


Every spring Nancy Mobilio, assistant headmaster of Harding Academy, found the school’s varsity golf coach at the center of the same tedious rumor: that he was having sexual relations with the school’s newest female hire. For compelling personal reasons—she was married to him—Mrs. Mobilio chose to ignore the latest groundless gossip, namely that Sunny Batten, who’d been recruited as j.v. golf coach, equipment-room overseer, and part-time health teacher, was this year’s crush.

Mrs. Mobilio was best known on campus for looking old enough to be her husband’s mother, a genetic swindle that fueled the legend of her husband’s roving eye. She was, in fact, only three years and eight months older than Mr. Mobilio, a difference barely worth noting, she felt; still, she dyed her once-dark hair and eyebrows an unbecoming gold and swam laps so religiously that her suits never dried. Truth or fiction, the rumors were humiliating. Real life and campus life blurred at boarding schools: Dorms were your home, colleagues were your neighbors, students were your baby-sitters. Alleged girlfriends emeritae were everywhere, rookies no longer, displaced by newer and fresher blood, untouchable job-wise thanks to rumors of romance.

So it was with well-disguised delight that Nancy Mobilio listened to a committee of three ninth-graders complain that Miss Batten couldn’t teach health to save her life.

“You should hear her,” said Ogden, who already wore the haughty look and out-of-season striped wool scarf of a future society hooligan.

“She calls us names,” said Hugh.

“Such as?”

“‘You little shits,’” Rufus provided. “That was today. Yesterday I think it was …”

“‘Jerk! You jerks,’” yelled Hugh.

“Tell her that other thing,” said Rufus.

Ogden unwound his scarf and cleared his throat. “The stuff we’re learning? In health? My father saw my notes over March break and he thought it was porno.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was the handouts she gave us on female anatomy. It listed the words and then the definitions.”

“‘Clitoris: Female organ of pleasure!’” Ogden shouted gleefully.

“That’s quite enough,” said Mrs. Mobilio.

“My father called her up to ask what the hell she was teaching us, and she said it was science,” Rufus continued.

“Do you know if your father called the headmaster as well?”

“I think he changed his mind because Miss Batten gave me an eighty in health and it was my highest grade.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Mobilio.

“Is she gonna get fired?” asked Hugh.

“We don’t fire teachers because our students complain about them. What kind of due process would that be?”

“Huh?” said the boys.

“How fair would that be? We ascertain that there’s a basis for your charges. Then and only then would we discuss it with Miss Batten.”

“She sucks as a teacher,” said Rufus.

“For the record, I hate that word,” said Mrs. Mobilio.

“Can we go now?” asked Ogden.

“Let me ask you this: Are you speaking for the class? Are you three voices or fifteen?”

“Fifteen,” they said in unison.

“And why did you bring this to me as opposed to, for example, Dr. Lucey or Mr. Samuels?”

Hugh, who’d made the honor roll one term, spoke for the delegation. “We talked about who to go to, and we decided you’d be the most interested.” His friends nodded. “Also, we figured you’d want to help.”

“’Cause that’s your job, right?” added Ogden.

Mrs. Mobilio was not popular; she was visited by students infrequently and flattered even less. “It is one of the hats I wear,” she murmured.

“Are you going to do anything?” asked Hugh.

“The term is almost up. Do you think you can live with this situation for”—she turned several pages on her desk calendar—“three more weeks?”

“Then are you gonna fire her?”

“I don’t have any such powers, and furthermore, I explained to you about fairness and due process here at Harding.”

“His grandfather’s a trustee,” said Hugh, pointing to Ogden. “Plus, his father and all his uncles went here.”

“They could’ve named the new science building after him, but he likes to give money away anonymously,” Ogden said.

“You’re crazy if you don’t call him,” said Rufus. “I think he’d love to know that a teacher called you a shithead inside the building he paid for.”

“Are you gonna talk to Miss Batten?” asked Hugh.

“She’s fucked,” Rufus mouthed to his roommate.

Hugh added, “I mean, she’s nice sometimes, but most of the time you can tell she hates us.”

“No one at Harding hates anyone,” said Mrs. Mobilio.

“They’re lying,” Sunny told her chairman, Fred Samuels, who was sporting his trademark bow tie and buzz cut.

“More than one reported it.”

“Who were they?”

“I promised I wouldn’t say.”

“Why?”

“The usual fears—that you’d find out and they may have to face the music.”

“Me?” asked Sunny. “I’m the music?”

Samuels picked up his pen. “I need to ask your version of events.”

Sunny looked down at her lap. She’d been called out of practice and was still wearing a glove on her left hand.

“They say you called them names,” he prompted. “They said epithets were hurled—”

“They used that word? Epithets?”

“I need to know your version of events,” he repeated.

“This is not a version—this is the truth: I came into class and someone had drawn a naked man lying on top of a naked woman on the blackboard, and both were waving golf clubs in the air.” She took off her glove and stuffed it into the pocket of her chinos. “Not to be confused with the man’s erect, anatomically correct shaft.”

“I see. And what did you do?”

“I erased it, and then I turned around and said, ‘You’re like real-life clichés of nasty boys in movies about prep schools.’”

“They said you swore at them.”

“I called them nasty, spoiled brats.”

“Is there any chance you used the words little shits or shitheads?”

“None.”

“And if they reported that, they’d be lying?”

“Correct.”

“Still—it’s unusual for students to go to Mrs. Mobilio and complain about a teacher not having any control over the class.”

Sunny said, “Mrs. Mobilio? That changes the complexion of this matter slightly, I would say.”

Mr. Samuels’s face reddened.

“Clearly, you grasped the significance of the golf clubs.”

“Hard not to,” he murmured.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I am not having an affair with Chuck Mobilio.”

“I was quite sure of that,” he mumbled.

“It’s a stupid rumor based on the fact that he coaches varsity and I coach the j.v. and we happen to share an office.”

Samuels put his pen down and lowered his voice. “Entre nous?”

Sunny nodded.

“Chuck may have had a dalliance or two in the past, before you came here. There may be a problem between him and Nancy in the trust department.” He put his fingers to his lips. “You didn’t hear this from me.”

Sunny pictured the covert Mobilio gaze, the too-long and too-frank stare with which he punctuated their conversations when he thought no one else was watching.

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” Samuels said. “I’m going to let you off the hook as far as teaching health is concerned—”

“Are you firing me?”

“No! I’ve already talked to some people in the offices—development and admissions—about administrative jobs there.”

“And you don’t think that relieving me of my duties is the same thing as firing me?”

Samuels shook his head. “You were hired principally to coach golf and move into the varsity slot after a one-year trial. I think the students admire you for that and at the same time appreciate that you were, shall we say, untested in the classroom.”

“Who’s going to teach health now?”

“Chuck.” He coughed into his closed fist. “Mobilio.”

“Great. Perfect choice, since mine are extremely small shoes to fill.”

“The school is honoring its contract,” Samuels said, his voice now cool and eye contact abandoned. “Golf ends on Friday, May twenty-seventh. Finals begin the following Monday. Graduation is June the second. I’m sure you can appreciate that we’re doing our best under the circumstances.”

“I’ll be gone on the third,” Sunny said.




CHAPTER 5 King’s Nite (#ulink_eaa89ee5-9eed-5902-a2a9-da8d793dd95d)


Mrs. Peacock couldn’t help looking pleased that the next of kin to a tragedy had checked into her motel. There was a connection, she explained: Her husband worked for Herlihy Brothers Fuel, and it was the two bosses, Danny and Sean, who’d fixed the fatal furnace. Volunteered. For free. Not that Miss Batten’s mother was one of their accounts. Not at all.

“That was very kind of them,” said Sunny.

“It’s good public relations. They’re smart in that way.” She ran Sunny’s credit card through her machine, once, twice, frowning. “Sometimes it’s the phone lines and not the credit limit. I’ll swipe it through again.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem.”

“We have a two-night minimum starting June first,” said Mrs. Peacock, whose gray hair had a pale lavender cast and whose coral beads matched her coral clip-on earrings.

“Fine.”

“Don’t think people weren’t upset about all of this happening in King George. First, your mother and Miles Finn, then, before we turn around, we almost lose our police chief. Another few inches and a bullet would’ve killed him, which makes me wonder what’s so great about bullet-proof vests if you consider all the parts of the body they don’t cover.”

“I’m in number ten?” Sunny said after a pause.

“Last unit. Don’t put anything in the toilet but toilet paper. Our septic tank can’t handle anything else.”

“Fine,” said Sunny.

“You can get a decent breakfast—eggs, toast, home fries, bacon, coffee—at The Dot.”

Finally, Sunny smiled. “Do the Angelos still own it?”

“Yeah. He’s sick, you know.”

“Do they still make those maple sausages?”

“I eat at home. You can’t smoke there anymore. Besides, I don’t like paying a dollar-fifty for a fried egg.”

“I’d better unpack,” said Sunny.

At 5,6, and 11 P.M., Joey Loach watched himself on three Boston TV stations looking worse than he realized and needing a shave. No reporter had asked him the question he feared—Why, in a one-horse town with no crime and no criminals, were you wearing a bullet-proof vest?

“Was I wrong?” he would have said. “Wouldn’t I be dead now if I didn’t arm myself every morning when I left my house?” For three years his vest had been a secret, purchased with his own money, a promise he’d made to his mother and the condition on which she had let him go to the police academy.

Elsie Loach was both inconsolable about her son’s near disaster, imagining the inches in either direction that would have left him dead or paralyzed, and triumphant that she’d saved his life. She wanted him to resign immediately. No one’s son should be a police officer! They should come from the ranks of orphans and middle-aged men whose mothers have passed on. He practically lived at the station, like a firefighter, like a lighthouse keeper, like a monk. She’d brought the braided rug from his room at home and a reading lamp for his bedside, which necessitated her acquiring and refinishing a solid maple night table from the rummage sale at Saint Xavier’s along with a bureau scarf that wasn’t frilly or stained.

Strangers assumed that she was thrilled to have Joey in uniform; exhilarated by the sight of him behind the wheel of his cruiser, pressed and clean-shaven, but she wasn’t. She turned off the news when she saw reports of police officers shot, killed, sued, eulogized. And now it had happened. A crazy man had shot Joey at close range as he ambled in his good-natured fashion up to the half-open window of—as best as he could remember—a Ford pickup with Massachusetts plates. They were out there—nuts and murderers; sociopaths who thought it was better to kill someone’s son than get a ticket. Marilee and her husband had safe jobs—day-care teacher at a state building with a metal detector and dairy manager at Foodland.

Worst of all, the murderer was at large. “He’s gone,” Joey had promised. “Even the stupidest cop killer would get out of town and not look back.”

“Maybe he wasn’t just passing through. Maybe this was his destination. Maybe he was out to get you.”

“I pulled him over! He shot me because he must’ve had drugs in the car or it was stolen, or there was a body in the trunk.”

“Promise me you’ll let the state police handle this. Let someone else go looking for him.”

“I’m not going looking for him, okay?”

“Will you spend tonight at home?”

He shook his head. She walked from the foot of his bed to one side. “Let me see.”

“No.”

“I want to see what he did to you.”

Joey pulled the thin cotton blanket up to his shoulders. “It’s black-and-blue. They told me to expect a few more shades before I’m done. But forget it. I’m not showing you.”

“Is it very painful?”

“No,” he lied.

She narrowed her eyes. “They said on television it was like getting beat up by a heavyweight boxer.”

“Nah,” said Joey. “Bantamweight, maybe.”

She opened the flat, hinged carton that held his new bullet-proof vest, picked it up by its shoulders, held it against her own chest, and said, “It seems so flimsy.”

“That’s the point—lighter; new and improved.”

“But strong enough to stop the bullets?”

“Definitely. More than ever. You’re worrying about nothing. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.”

“That’s not true! If you’re chief of police, you’re a lightning rod.”

“This is King George, Ma. This was a bad break, but it’s not going to happen again.”

“What if he’s never caught? How do I get to sleep at night knowing he’s out there?”

“You’ll sleep fine. So will I. In fact I’ve got a prescription for sleeping pills. I’ll give you one.” He folded the blanket to his waist. “Now I’m getting out of bed and I’m getting dressed, so you may want to leave.”

“I’ll wait in the hall. I want to speak to the nurses anyway.”

“About what?”

“I want someone besides you to tell me that the doctor discharged you.”

Joey picked up a cord and followed it to its grip. “See this? It brings a nurse in five seconds and I’ll tell her you’re harassing me.”

Mrs. Loach looked around the room. “Your uniform. Where is it? Can I mend it?”

Joey’s mouth formed a tight, grim line. He shook his head. “The FBI gets the uniform.”

Mrs. Loach backed up to the visitor’s chair and sat down heavily.

Joey tried again. “I think visiting hours are just about over. Besides, it’s polite to give the patient privacy when he wants to get out of bed and his ass is hanging out of his johnny.”

His mother’s eyes narrowed. “Why does the FBI need your pants if you were shot in the chest?”

“For lab work. Ballistics. Powder burns. You know the drill.”

“I wish I didn’t!” she cried. “I sit around hoping I’ll never get a phone call from the emergency room, and then it happened, like my worst fear come true.”

He sidled out of bed and walked backward to the bathroom. “It wasn’t your worst fear, though, was it, because I’m fine. The vest worked. I’ve made those phone calls to mothers—’There’s been an accident, and I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith or Jones, but your son didn’t make it.’ That’s someone’s worst fear. This is nothing. Day before last, I had to call the son of the man who died at Margaret Batten’s house. And then Sunny. She’d have been thrilled if her mother was merely in the hospital with the wind knocked out of her.”

“Margaret Batten,” murmured Mrs. Loach. “What a terrible thing.”

“You’re right about that, and it gets worse. Her daughter heard it secondhand from Finn’s son. I called him because she wasn’t home. But that didn’t bother him: He left a message on her answering machine. That’s how she found out.”

It had the desired effect: Mrs. Loach’s features reset themselves for a new course of misfortune. “That poor girl,” she cried.

Joey closed the bathroom door behind him.

“There was just the two of them,” she said. “And I always admired the way her mother fought for her. I hope I told her that. I must have at some point.”

“No doubt,” said Joey.

“Were you nice to Sunny?” his mother called.

“Of course I was.”

“Sometimes you can be brusque over the phone.”

“To you.”

“Did she go to high school with you or with Marilee?”

“Me.”

“She was the girl who golfed, right? Wasn’t there some hysteria about her playing on the boys’ team?”

“They had to let her play. They didn’t have a girls’ team and she was better than all of the boys.”

“It’s because of where she lived,” called his mother. “If you grow up next to a mountain, you learn to ski, and if you live next to a country club, you learn to golf.”

“What?” Joey yelled.

“Bad luck, as it turned out, that house by the golf course. And you know what makes it worse? They fixed the furnace in a half hour. Maybe less.”

“Who did?”

“Herlihy Brothers Fuel just showed up—not ten minutes after they read about it in the Bulletin. Sean and Danny both.”

“Who let them in?”

“I did! When no one answered at the station, they came by the house.”

“But, Ma—”

“No charge. They donated their services.”

“What about the police tape no one was supposed to cross?”

“The door was open. They know their stuff, believe me. They wear gas masks or whatever they’re called these days.”

“Ma! How many goddamn times do I have to tell you that you can’t let every Tom, Dick—”

“I’m leaving,” she said, “but only because you sound like yourself and can walk and do your business. Just promise—”

“No promises,” he yelled, followed by a muffled, “Ouch. Shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing!”

“I heard you say ouch.”

“I’m a little sore. It’s nothing. Just go. I’ll call you tomorrow. And stop making decisions about police matters. Nobody swore you in as my deputy.”

There was silence beyond the bathroom. Joey opened the door.

His mother’s face brightened. “Should I strip the bed?” she asked.

The hospital operator said that Chief Loach’s condition was not a matter of public record. Could she have the name of the caller?

“Sunny Batten.”

The operator gasped, then introduced herself as Danielle Thibault’s sister Celeste, two years ahead of Sunny in high school. So sorry for her loss. Every time she picked up the newspaper, it seemed, there was a tragic headline about someone she knew. Oops. Hold on.

Celeste returned. “Everyone’s calling about him since it was on the news.”

“You can’t say if he’s still there?”

Celeste paused. “I’m not supposed to. And get this: That’s a direct order from the FBI: ‘If anyone calls asking about Chief Loach’s condition, take down his name.’” Celeste’s tone grew conspiratorial. “A couple of women didn’t leave their names, but I knew exactly who they were.”

“Who?”

“Old girlfriends of his! Linda LaDue, Patty Timmins, for sure. Or it could have been her sister. They sound the same.”

After a moment Sunny said, “I did see him on the news, but I’m calling for official reasons.”

“Call him at the station. He should be back by now. Or run over there. Where are you calling from?”

“King’s Nite.”

“The office phone or the pay phone?”

“Pay phone.”

“Is there a light on in the front of the station—I mean, not just the porch light, but inside?”

Sunny turned and looked.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s there. Just walk over. The front door’ll be open. If he’s snoozing in the back, ring the bell on his desk. How long are you up here for?”

Sunny said, “Until I figure out where to go next.”

“Any chance you’d stay?”

“First I need a job,” said Sunny.

“Like what?”

“A change,” said Sunny. “I was teaching, which I sort of fell into. I think I might try something a little more exciting.”

“We have openings here,” said Celeste. “In fact they just posted ‘In-patient Pharmacy Technician.’ Heather Machonski’s taking maternity leave. Do you want me to pick you up an application?”

“Not just yet,” said Sunny.

“You probably want something out of doors, right? You were the big tennis player.”

“Golf,” said Sunny.

“I’d try the summer camps,” said Celeste. “Maybe they have camps for golfers—there’s one for everything else.”

“Maybe when my head is clearer,” said Sunny.

“Gotta get this. You stay strong, okay? Call me if you want to bounce any job ideas off me. In any event, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Sunny repeated.

“Your wake, hon,” said Celeste.

“Keep it on,” said Sunny as Chief Loach snapped off the television and jumped to his feet. “Joe—it’s me, Sunny. I made it back just in time to hear you were shot.”

“Shot at,” he said. “The bullets bounced off me.” He banged a fist against his ribs. “Kryptonite.” He winced. “More or less.”

“No damage?”

“Plenty,” he said. “I’m black-and-blue like I was worked over by an angry mob.”

“Should you be back at work so soon?”

“I’m it. There’s no one else.”

“When do you sleep?”

He shook his head. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: Nothing ever happens here—until this week, that is. I’ve been in this job for three years. I was on the Keene force for nine years before that, but I swear to God this thing at your mother’s house is the first time I had to put up my police tape.”

He stared at her hair. Finally, he pointed. “When did this happen?”

“Prematurely.”

“Like, overnight?”

“Not overnight. You haven’t seen me since graduation.”

“It’s nice,” said Joey. “Gray-blond, you could say.”

Sunny didn’t respond.

“So where have you been?”

“College. Then various schools, teaching.”

“How many?”

“Three: one in New York and two in Connecticut. Private schools, so I had to teach and coach and sleep and eat in one place, all for a pittance. I couldn’t find a good fit.” She backed up to the visitors’ bench and sat down.

“You okay?” he asked.

Sunny shook her head.

“Want a glass of water? Or juice? I’ve got a refrigerator in the back. Or I can pop a potato into the microwave.”

She looked up at the large, plain-faced wall clock: nine o’clock, and she couldn’t remember when or what lunch had been.

Joey asked, “Anything I can do for you?”

Sunny said, “I’m staying at the King’s Nite, and I don’t have a phone in my room.”

“Do you want to use mine?”

“I just thought you should know I was here if anything came up.”

“Did you want to go to the house tomorrow?”

Sunny closed her eyes, then opened them before she spoke. “Not unless I have to.”

“There’s nothing there that would upset you. I mean, sure—everything would upset you—the house where you grew up and then your mother dies there. But I meant everything’s in order. It’s not creepy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Who put everything in order?”

“I stopped by on my way back from the hospital to take down the police tape.” He shrugged. “Maybe I moved some dirty dishes to the sink.”

“Have I asked you if they had been there all night? I mean, I know they were, but did anyone figure out how long before they were discovered?”

“Mr. Finn picked up their sandwich orders at The Dot, so we know they were alive the night before. They must’ve been overcome between dinner and when the paperboy arrived. It wasn’t really important to pinpoint the exact time of death”

“I guess,” said Sunny wanly, “that you only have to do that if there’s a murder.”

“So they tell me.” Joey checked his clipboard. “Mr. Finn’s next of kin? Fletcher?” He looked up. “Has he been any help?”

Sunny said, “Not so far.”

“Is he here?”

“He’s coming up for the funeral, but he’s too busy to come any earlier.” She stood up and said, “I’m sure you’re busy, too.”

“Busy putting ice on my hematomas,” he said. When she didn’t respond, he added, “No one told me to do that, but it feels better when I do.”

“Did they catch the man who shot you?”

Joey said firmly, “They will, any second. Nothing to worry about.” He reached for his hat, grimaced in pain at the stretch. “C’mon. I’ll walk you back.”

“No. I’m fine. You’re working.”

“When’s the funeral?”

“Friday morning. The wake is tomorrow night.”

“Dickie been okay? Helpful and all that?”

Sunny shrugged. “He wanted the wake at the funeral parlor, but I insisted. He said he’d need a permit for the theater, but I said, ‘Give me the name and number of the custodian and I’ll make one phone call.’ It turned out it was his sister’s husband—”

“Roland LaPlante.”

“So that took all of thirty seconds.”

“Everyone wants to help. The whole town feels responsible.”

“Responsible?”

“Like someone should have noticed. Or if someone had invited them over for dinner that night, then when they didn’t show, they could have called…. Or maybe we should have made carbon-monoxide detectors mandatory.”

Sunny’s eyes filled.

“You gonna be able to sleep? The King’s Nite’s not famous for its Sealy Posturpedics.”

“Probably not.”

Joey walked over to a wooden coatrack, patted the pockets of a navy blue windbreaker, and came back with a bottle of pills. “How about if I give you one or two?”

“Don’t you need them?”

He held the amber vial up to eye level. “There’s four in here. I might use one or two. But then I’ll forget about them and they’ll expire.”

Sunny held her hand out. “It must be legal if they’re being dispensed by the chief of police.”

Joey laughed. “You remember what a genius and scholar I was in high school, right? Well, I went to medical school nights. Or was it pharmacy school? I forget. I’d better go check my diploma.”

Sunny didn’t smile. She said politely, “I think we were in study hall together but not any classes.”

“Because the only time kids like us got thrown together was in study hall. Or maybe driver’s ed.”

“But here you are,” said Sunny. “Chief of police. You probably visit elementary schools and tell all the students how to be good citizens.”

“I do. I’m good at it. I can make quarters come out of their ears, and I can turn balloons into dachshunds.”

“When I teach at that level,” Sunny began. “Actually, when I taught—”

“That’s it? Past tense? You’re done with it?”

Sunny said, “I had a one-year contract.”

The phone rang. Joey put his hand on the receiver but didn’t pick up. “Does that mean fired?”

Sunny said, “Maybe it’s an emergency.”

Joey rolled his eyes. “King George Police Station, Chief Loach speaking.” He closed his eyes and kept them shut as he recited, “Only in winter. After April thirtieth you can park on either side.” He hung up. “That’s what I do: I give directions and I answer the questions people would ask the D.P.W. If we had one.”

“Then let me ask this,” said Sunny. “Off the record, is there a place I could hit a bucket of balls where I wouldn’t run into anyone who knew I was doing it the morning of my mother’s wake?”

“Why not at the club?”

“I’m not a member, and I just want to hit a bucket of balls. Preferably within walking distance.”

Joey pointed. “Route 12A North—maybe a mile past the Creamery. There’s a little hut on your left shaped like a hamburger and a bun. Opens at nine A.M.”

“Thanks,” said Sunny.

“Seriously: I can call a half a dozen guys who are members and would be happy to take you out as their guest. Believe me, they’d understand.”

Sunny said, “I know those guys. No thanks.”

“I can drive you. It’s not exactly next door.”

“A mile’s nothing,” said Sunny. “A mile will feel good.”

“Watch the oncoming traffic,” said Chief Loach.




CHAPTER 6 The Dot (#ulink_45d46153-2a1f-54b6-b1ab-6bd4dc230aa9)


No-nonsense Mrs. Angelo, famous for adding figures in her head, who rarely climbed down from her stool at the cash register, did so to enfold Sunny in a bosomy hug. “It’s a miracle that you walked in here! We were just saying that we wanted to send some platters over; some sandwiches, some pasta salad, the tricolor rotini, and an assortment of cookies—we do anise and pignoli beautiful.”

“I wasn’t planning any kind of reception,” said Sunny.

“You have to invite people back to the house after the funeral. They want to be with each other.” She led Sunny to the booth next to the cash register, despite the fact that it was already occupied by a woman in a white tennis sweater and maroon velvet headband. The woman removed her reading glasses, folded them into hinged quarters, and offered her hand.

“Sunny? I’m Fran Pope. You don’t know me, but I directed your mother in Watch on the Rhine, and we are all just shattered.”

Sunny said, “Did you say Pope?”

“Like the pontiff. As in Pope Sand and Gravel. Your mother and I—”

“Are you Randall Pope’s mother?”

Mrs. Pope’s face brightened. “I certainly am! You know Randy?”

Sunny inhaled and exhaled before saying, “I was on the golf team with him. He was captain the year I joined.”

“Of course I knew that. Very small world. I think your mother knew the connection.”

“She certainly did,” said Sunny.

“I hope he was a good captain,” said Mrs. Pope.

Sunny said after a pause, “He was a good golfer.”

Beaming, Mrs. Pope said, “It was his spring sport, which you probably know. Football was his first love, and basketball was second. Mr. Pope was a football fanatic, but I liked the basketball games, because I got to watch them in a nice warm gym.”

Sunny opened a menu and said without looking up from it, “Your son found a dead carp floating in the brook—or what was euphemistically called the brook—and put it in my golf bag.” She plucked several napkins, one by one, from a dispenser and spread them on her lap. “At least I was ninety-nine percent sure it was Randy.”

Mrs. Pope blinked, took a sip from her cup, blotted her lips, and asked, “Did Bill Sandvik get in touch with you? Or Bill Kaufman? Someone was going to call you and ask if we—meaning the Players—could say a few words at the funeral. We thought either of the Bills would give a stunning eulogy.”

“That would be fine,” said Sunny. “I’m sure my mother would love it. Would have loved it …”

“Bill S. was her leading man a number of times and has a gorgeous speaking voice, but Bill K. is a freelance toastmaster. They may still be sorting it out.”

“Either,” said Sunny. “Or both.”

“Everyone was rocked by this tragedy. It touched everyone in town, directly or indirectly.”

“I’m beginning to see that,” said Sunny.

“Did you order?” Mrs. Pope asked her, accompanied by the snap of Mrs. Angelo’s fingers behind her. From the counter, The Dot’s one waitress barked, “What?”

“Winnie! Bring Sunny a menu.”

“Just coffee,” said Sunny.

“What if Gus scrambles you an egg or two?” asked Mrs. Angelo from her stool. “Or we have omelets now—Eastern, Western, or Hawaiian.”

Mrs. Pope confided, “When I went through this with my mother, I lost one dress size without even trying. And she died at eighty-eight. Not unexpected.”

“Still too young,” said Mrs. Angelo.

“Not in my mother’s case,” Mrs. Pope continued. “She was completely demented. But I know what you’re saying: You think you’re prepared, but you never are. And in your case, there’s an extra layer of tragedy—losing your only parent before you’re even …”

Sunny wasn’t sure where the unfinished sentence was supposed to lead. Her age? Her marital or professional status?

Mrs. Pope tried, “Thirty-three?”

“No, I was two years behind Randy. It’s the hair. People always think—”

“Well, of course! People are so unobservant. Your face is still the face in your yearbook picture.” She patted Sunny’s hand. “Mr. Pope and I take out a full-page ad in every King George Regional yearbook—Pope Sand and Gravel—so we get a courtesy copy.”

Sunny could see that Mrs. Pope, whose own hair was dyed a uniform chestnut, was counting the days until she could take the younger woman under her wing and advise her that gray is for aging hippies or the occasional over-fifty model whose silver hair is the very point.

“Tell me what I can do,” said Mrs. Pope. “There must be something I can help you with. Do you need a place to stay? Will the relatives need a place to freshen up?”

“I’m set,” said Sunny. “But thanks.”

“Randy lives on East Pleasant. You might know his wife.”

“I do.”

“It’s one of those cute stories: They didn’t like each other in high school—she thought he was conceited—three-letter athlete, tall, good-looking—and Regina was a few years younger and, from what I understand, a late bloomer. But then they ran into each other after he graduated from B.U., and she was back here from Rivier College, student-teaching—”

“I know the whole story.”

“I don’t know how well you knew him, but I can assure you that he’s matured into a fine husband and father. He’ll most certainly be paying his respects.”

“I’m sure Regina will,” said Sunny.

Winnie rounded the counter carrying a platter of English muffins, sunny-side-up eggs, home fries, and sausage flattened into a patty. “Couldn’t help it,” she said. “Gus heard you were here. He practically wept.” She checked to make sure Mrs. Angelo was out of range. “He thinks you’re taking a stand by coming here,” she whispered. “He’s really touched.”

“I’m taking a stand?” asked Sunny.

“The food,” Mrs. Pope explained. “Their last meal. It was take-out from here.”

“It was the last time anyone saw Miles alive,” said Winnie. “Until they ruled out food poisoning, we were sweating bullets around here, if you know what I mean. Even with all the hoopla about the furnace, business has dropped off—at least that’s my opinion. Guilt by association.”

“Then please tell Mr. Angelo that he’ll be seeing plenty of me, but I’m going to insist on paying for my meals,” said Sunny.

The waitress said, “Let him if he wants to. He had a lung removed and we like to give him his way.”

“Cancer,” Mrs. Pope translated.

“In remission,” said Winnie.

“Is he okay?” asked Sunny.

“We think so. It didn’t spread. Next Thanksgiving it’ll be five years.” Winnie knocked on the wood-look Formica, and Sunny seconded the motion.

She was waiting with her golf bag when the driving range opened at nine. After paying for the largest bucket of balls, Sunny walked past the rubber mats to the grassy area that separated the beginners from the experts. She began with short irons and worked her way up to her woods. An older couple arrived in matching cruise-line sweatshirts, stretched in tandem, then addressed each ball with their lips moving, as if reciting lessons. Even with her head down, Sunny sensed when their bucket was empty, when the husband had simply instructed his wife to watch her.

“You the pro here?” he finally called over.

“I wish,” said Sunny.

As she returned her empty basket, the man behind the counter asked, “Any interest in a member-guest tournament coming up next weekend in Sunapee?”

“Can’t. Thanks.”

“Up here on vacation?”

“No I’m not,” said Sunny.

For the wake, Regina Pope dressed her two-year-old son in miniature grown-up clothes—gray trousers, white shirt, red clip-on bow tie. He owned only sneakers, which would have to do—no disrespect intended. It was too warm for the little patchwork madras sports jacket, dry clean only, that completed the outfit. He was Robert, without nicknames, and to his mother, especially in his dress-up clothes, the most beautiful boy in the world.

Coach Sweet decided to skip the wake and make an appearance at the funeral. Or maybe the reverse. Milling around a coffin, he’d be obliged to speak to Sunny, while at the funeral he’d sign the book, hang back, and still get credit for doing the decent thing. He could call the guys who were still in town, and they could form a kind of honor guard—some goddamn ceremonial thing like that. Nah. It wasn’t Sunny who had died. It was her mother, the ex – legal, ex – medical secretary, who could rattle off her daughter’s rights chapter and verse. Mrs. Equal Opportunity. Mrs. Title Nine.

He’d send his wife.

When Dr. Ouimet hired Margaret Batten to fill in for Mrs. Ouimet following her gallbladder surgery, there was a conspicuous change in office routine: Margaret didn’t leave early or come in late; didn’t berate him for spending too much time with a patient; didn’t tie up the phone while refusing to add a second line. Margaret was calm where his wife had been rattled, and forgiving to the cranky and the sick. Insurance companies reimbursed him for services the first time the paperwork went in, and patients surrendered co-payments before they left the office. Dr. Ouimet convinced his unsalaried wife—whose gallbladder had been removed through laparoscopy, and whose recovery was all too quick—that they should gut and remodel the kitchen the way she’d been asking for years, and, yes, she could act as general contractor, however long that took.

He was shocked that Chief Loach didn’t call him personally to break the news. He should not have had to hear about Margaret across the breakfast table, his wife’s mouth forming the words of the Bulletin headline as if they were gossip rather than personal tragedy. He cried as he reread the story himself, then dialed Margaret’s home number, praying for a case of mistaken identity. He wept throughout the day to himself, in the bathroom, garage, and car. He couldn’t eat. He blamed himself: Margaret, who rarely took a sick day and never brought her personal medical concerns to work, had complained of a serious headache for the past few weeks.

“Are you taking anything?” he’d asked, not looking up from his paperwork.

“No,” she said.

“Well, there you go. We have a miracle drug called aspirin that you could try,” he’d said with a distracted smile.

All he could think to do was run a half-page ad in the Bulletin announcing that the offices of Dr. Emil Ouimet would be closed for one week out of respect to his devoted and beloved employee, followed by a stanza by Robert Browning that he copied from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

“Beloved,” said his wife. “A married man doesn’t use that word about another woman, especially a divorcee.”

“A widow. And I was speaking for my patients.”

She rattled the paper and asked from behind a page as frivolous as Living/Arts, “How long would you close the office if I died?”

“Don’t ask foolish questions,” he answered.

Even though the theater was only two blocks from the motel, Dickie Saint-Onge picked Sunny up in his stretch limousine. He asked her about pallbearers and, because calls had come in, about her mother’s favorite charity.

“I should know,” said Sunny.

“The ladies like the homeless, and almost all the men support the Shriners.”

“It should have something to do with the theater—maybe an award at the high school, a memorial scholarship.”

“For who?”

“I haven’t thought it through. Maybe a graduating senior who wants to study acting.”

Dickie took out a pocket notebook and made a notation with a miniature pencil.

“Don’t announce it yet,” said Sunny.

“What about pallbearers?”

“I did that,” said Sunny.

Dickie took her list and read it aloud. “Very nice,” he said. “I’ve used every one of them before. Dr. Ouimet called me and volunteered for the job. I was hoping you’d pick him.”

Dickie had a ring of keys, one of which opened the stage door after a half-dozen tries. He left Sunny in a dressing room, alone, sitting at a peeling vanity table, numbly surveying the pots of cracked makeup and dirty brushes.

“I’ve got to admit,” said Dickie as he returned, “I had my doubts about doing this off-site. But it looks like she was a head of state. And more flowers where these came from. You ready?”

“Is anyone here yet?”

“My wife and my mother,” said Dickie. “They come to everything I do.”

“Do I know your wife?”

“I met her at school in Albany. Her father’s a funeral director in Plattsburgh.”

Sunny stood up and quickly sat down again.

“You’re okay,” said Dickie. “I’ll be right there, moving people along, directing traffic. I’ve got Kleenex, Wash ’n Dri, Tic Tacs, water, whatever helps. Just nod and shake their hands. They usually do the talking.”

“It’s not that. I should have done this earlier. Isn’t that what people do—have a private good-bye?”

Dickie walked over to the vanity stool and helped her up, a boost from around her shoulders. “She looks like she’s sleeping. I promise. She looks beautiful, if I do say so myself.”

“Do I have a few minutes? Before anyone gets here?”

Dickie took a diplomatic quick-step away from Sunny. “Absolutely. I’ll ask my mother and Roberta to step outside.”

He looked at his watch, bit his lip.

“I don’t need long,” said Sunny. She left the dressing room, walked between the maroon velvet curtains that her mother had patched in her pre-leading lady days.

The coffin was parallel to the orchestra seats and surrounded by potted lilies. Margaret looked small and alone. Worse than asleep—unreachable, irretrievable. Sunny moved closer. She could see that her mother’s brown hair was parted on the wrong side and that her lips were painted a darker shade of red than Margaret had worn in life. The dress was out of season: black, V-necked, long-sleeved, and ending in a point at each wrist. It needed pearls, a locket, a pin, a corsage—something.

“Mom?” Sunny whispered.

The footlights and the lilies flashed white at the edges of her vision, and her knees sagged.

Roberta Saint-Onge, who’d been spying on Sunny from the vestibule, yelled for ammonium carbonate, for a cold, wet facecloth, for a chair, for help, for Dickie.




CHAPTER 7 The Viewing Hours (#ulink_9c8756eb-8ec2-5fc1-ba1a-ad056349ee9b)


With a firm hand on the back of Sunny’s neck, Roberta Saint-Onge repeated, “Head down. The head has to be down.”

“I’m okay,” Sunny murmured. “You can let go now.”

“Head between your knees,” ordered Roberta.

“You’re hurting me.”

“How long does she have to stay like this?” asked Dickie.

“However long it takes for the blood to drain back into her head.”

“It’s there,” said Sunny. “Let go, for Crissakes.”

Roberta did, petulantly, as if a referee had called a jump ball and repossessed the disputed goods.

“You’re still pale,” said Dickie. “You might want to touch up your cheekbones with a little color.”

“I’ll be okay,” said Sunny. “Give me a minute without the headlock.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered this,” said Roberta.

“I never fainted before in my life,” said Sunny.

“It’s a shock to the system,” said Dickie. “No matter how close you were or what kind of parent she was or how well or poorly you got along, you only have one mother.”

“She was a fantastic parent,” said Sunny.

“Of course she was,” said Dickie.

“We grew up around it,” said Roberta. “We’re both third-generation funeral directors, so sometimes we lose sight of the fact that it’s so much more than the corporal remains of an individual.”

“What she means,” said Dickie, “is that we understand very well that it’s someone’s mother or father or husband or wife, and we can empathize, but we’re professionals and we don’t have the exact same physiologic response to the death of the loved one as our client does. We share the sorrow, but at the same time we have a job to do.”

“Hundreds of little jobs that have to be performed seamlessly,” added Roberta. “Our goal is to be as helpful yet as unobtrusive as possible.”

Sunny rubbed the back of her neck and asked what time it was.

“It’s time,” said Dickie.

“You stay right here,” said Roberta. “Everyone will understand—”

“I don’t want anyone’s understanding! No one has to know I fainted.”

“Technically? I don’t think you actually lost consciousness,” said Dickie. “I think you got woozy.”

“I want to greet people standing up. It seems the least I can do.”

“There are no rules,” said Roberta. “We encourage our mourners to do what feels right to them and not to worry about”—she flexed two fingers on each side of her face—“doing the ‘right thing.’ For example, the fact that you’re wearing navy blue tonight, and it’s sleeveless? With dangly earrings? Well, why not? There used to be an unwritten rule that anything but black and long sleeves was wrong, but times have changed. If you’d worn red, we wouldn’t have said a word.”

Sunny got to her feet, gripped the back of her metal chair with both hands, and straightened her shoulders. “Unlock the door,” she ordered.

Those who couldn’t conjure a distinct recollection of Margaret made one up: Cora Poole, whose late husband owned Fashionable Fabrics, said she remembered, as if it were yesterday, Margaret and Sunny picking out a pattern and powder-pink piqué for Sunny’s senior prom dress.

“Are you sure?” asked Sunny. “I don’t think I went to the senior prom.”

“Everyone goes,” said Mrs. Poole. “It was a Simplicity pattern, and you trimmed it in pink and white embroidered daisies that we sold by the yard.”

“It’s coming back to me,” said Sunny.

Janine Sopp, L.P.N., said she was on duty the night Sunny was born at Saint Catherine’s and took care of her in the newborn nursery.

“But I moved here when I was two,” said Sunny.

“You couldn’t have,” said Mrs. Sopp. “I remember you had a high bilirubin count and we put you under the lights.”

“Then you must be right,” murmured Sunny.

Mourners testified to being present at all of Margaret’s performances, to clapping louder and longer than anyone else to spur multiple curtain calls. Endless Community Players—co-stars, seamstresses, scenery painters, ushers—formed their own receiving line. Sunny’s Brownie troop leader, pediatrician, children’s room librarian, the Abner Cotton board, the mayor, the superintendent of schools, and the mechanic who had serviced Margaret’s car all clasped Sunny’s hand between both of theirs. Invitations issued from every trembling set of lips: Would Sunny come to Sunday dinner? Care to play eighteen holes? Borrow the videotape of a dress rehearsal of Two for the Seesaw? Mr. DeMinico, still the principal of King George Regional, still dressed in shiny brown, still resting his folded hands on the paunch bulging above his belt, asked Sunny to attend commencement as his special guest.

Dry-eyed at last, Sunny said, “Perhaps you recall that I didn’t attend my own graduation.”

He squinted into the distance, nodded curtly at several alums. “Did you get your diploma? I think Mrs. Osborn mailed it the next day.”

“No,” said Sunny. “My mother went by herself and picked it up for me.”

“We called your name,” he said, “and even though we had asked everyone to hold their applause until the end, there was a lot of clapping.”

“So I heard.”

“In recognition, I guess you could say. If I remember correctly, your mother initiated it.” He glanced toward the coffin.

“That’s not the version I got. What I heard was that a couple of girls yelled, ‘Yay, Sunny!’ Something to that effect.”

“You may be right,” said Mr. DeMinico.

“Which of course meant that the boys had to boo—”

“Just the athletes.”

“All I did was make the varsity,” said Sunny. “All I needed was one adult to stand up for me, one adult besides my mother, who thought that maybe having someone with a single-digit handicap would be good for the team and good for the school.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” said Mr. DeMinico.

“Now? Or do you mean then?”

“I can’t turn back the clock. I meant now. On this occasion.”

Behind him, an elderly woman in a black picture hat complained, “There’s a long line. Some of us have been here since twenty to seven.”

“My fault,” said Sunny, and reached around to take the woman’s gloved hand.

“You don’t know me,” said the woman, “but I had the same standing appointment as your mother did for our hair—hers with Jennifer and mine with Lorraine—side by side.” Her voice quivered. “A lovely woman. Top-drawer. That’s all I need to say, because you know better than anyone.”

“Is Jennifer here?” asked Sunny.

The woman looked behind her, leaning left then right. “There she is. Jennifer! Come meet Margaret’s daughter.” She fluttered her hands. “Hurry up. She asked for you.”

Jennifer had radically chic and severe hair for King George, bangs short and straight, dark roots showing on purpose, blunt orange hair to her jaw. “I liked your mother a lot,” she told Sunny. “She could have switched to a Boston salon—a lot of the local actresses did that once they saw their name in lights. But not your mother. She even gave me a credit in the playbills. I’ll never forget that. She was as loyal as they come.”

“I know,” said Sunny.

“A brick,” said the elderly woman.

“I’ll be moving along now,” said the principal.

Jennifer reached up to touch Sunny’s hair. “You don’t get this from her,” she said.

Regina Pope was hurt to see a hairdresser summoned to the front of the line ahead of herself, but she understood: She had married the enemy. Worse, the enemy commander. Mrs. Batten had had to go to DeMinico with a season’s worth of Sunny’s scorecards and make her case. There was a federal law, she’d said, and she knew a lawyer. Sunny showed up at the next practice—all shiny new lady’s clubs and ironed culottes—to discover that no one had told the boys. Captain Randy Pope fashioned the unwritten rule: Make her life miserable. Move her ball. Drag your spikes in her line.

Sunny didn’t complain. Only Regina knew about the dead carp in her golf bag. Mrs. Batten would have cried, and Coach Sweet would have pretended to disapprove and would have made the boys stand in a row, like at a military tribunal, until one confessed. Over sandwiches in the drab green basement lunchroom, Sunny pronounced Randy Pope an idiot. She’d removed the rotting, stinking, dead-eyed carp and left it on the hood of his Tercel. In world history the next day, he repeatedly turned around, his mouth annular, his lips parting and puckering idiotically. Even Mr. Cutler, usually in the thrall of varsity athletes, told Randy to face front and stop doing whatever he was doing or there would be consequences. Regina thought Randy was cute—the top layer of his hair went blond around the middle of May—but she loyally took on her friend’s grudge as her own. At Senior Honors Day, Sunny received an award that a handful of women teachers had paid for themselves: a silver-plated loving cup inscribed to “Sondra ‘Sunny’ Batten, the graduating senior who, in the judgment of the faculty, breaks ground in the area of sports leadership.” The audience gave Sunny one of those slow-spreading, person-by-person standing ovations, and even though the winner appeared stunned as she shook Mr. DeMinico’s hand, her best friend knew that the look in Sunny’s eye had been not one of gratitude but of irony.

Four years later, Regina ran into Randy Pope leaving the Orpheus in West Lovell, after seeing a movie that Regina thought might be emblematic of a change in his worldview. It was Thelma and Louise, to which neither had brought a date or a friend. He invited her to a muffin house, where he drank herbal tea and told Regina he was embarrassed when he looked back at how he had acted in high school. As soon as she got home, she called her friend.

“Did he mention me specifically—I mean, the War Against Sunny?”

“I did. I said, ‘You certainly were a jerk when it came to Sunny Batten. What did she ever do to you besides beat you at match play?’”

“You said that?”

“More or less. A little more politely than that. But he knew exactly what I was talking about.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he was ashamed of himself, the old him. He said if there were such a thing as a time machine, he’d set it back to the first day you came to practice.”

“And then what?”

“He’d say, ‘Welcome to the team, Sunny. We’re all behind you.’”

“It’s an act! Nobody changes that much in four years, especially a jock. He thinks if he acts humble and admits to being a jerk in high school, you’ll fall at his big feet.”

“He looks different,” said Regina. “He has a goatee and a mustache. It looks a little Shakespearean. And he’s thinking of joining the Peace Corps. B.U. humbled him, and that’s a direct quote.”

“Meaning, he learned that swaggering around the halls of B.U. didn’t get him what he wanted.”

After a pause, Regina said, “I really think he’s different. Or maybe he’s not so different. I mean, how would we know? Neither one of us ever had a conversation with him in high school.”

“For a reason!” said Sunny. “He started the deep freeze. If he hadn’t started it, or if he had come around, it wouldn’t have been so painful.”

“Mr. Sweet should’ve helped. That’s what Randy said: ‘Too bad Coach didn’t threaten to throw us off the team.’”

“Maybe he’d like to apologize to me now,” said Sunny. “Maybe you could give him my phone number and he could call and say, ‘I’m sorry I painted a bull’s-eye on your back. Sorry I couldn’t be big enough to recognize that a girl could beat me in golf. Sorry I was the biggest asshole on the team.’”

After a pause, Regina said, “You sound so bitter. More so now than when you were living through it.”

“Not more bitter,” said Sunny. “Just more willing to say it out loud.”

She’d been invited to their wedding, but sent her regrets. Regina didn’t mail Sunny a birth announcement, but after six months wrote a note and enclosed a photo of Robert, bald, drooling, happy. If Sunny sent a baby present, Regina didn’t remember what it was. But here was her son, two years and two months, the only child at the wake, asleep on her shoulder, too heavy for a wait this long. Women in line whispered, “Look at the little angel. Look how big he is. Sound asleep. Good as gold. She was Sunny’s best friend growing up, you know. Regina Tramonte. Regina Pope. Married Fran’s boy.”

The line inched forward. Warm hands and cold ones clasped Sunny’s. Shapes and voices moved past her, and on to view Margaret. Some hurried by, crossing themselves, but most touched the ebonized wood of her coffin, touched her hands, mouthed good-bye, hurried down the steps of the stage and back up the theater’s center aisle.

“Sunny?” said the last person in line. “I hope it was okay to come.”

Then Regina folded her free arm around Sunny’s neck, and the baby was squeezed between them, and even Dickie Saint-Onge felt an unaccustomed lump in his throat.




CHAPTER 8 Meanwhile, at Boot Lake (#ulink_96e1e38e-9bd5-5e75-b620-b101e627b2fb)


Overheard at the filling station by a jittery teenager buying nacho chips and Dr Pepper: A man had died; a man named Flynn or Fin, who lived alone on Boot Lake.

The teenager had no money for gas and wasn’t going to pull any more stunts in this lifetime. “Boot Lake?” he asked the cashier. “I used to swim there. How far is it from here?”

“As the crow flies? Two miles. But you have to get back on 12A again, then west on Old Baptist Road, past the gravel pit.”

“Right,” said the kid. “Now I remember.”

FINN glowed white in the dark, stenciled on the black mailbox at the head of a dirt driveway. No lights, no signs of life. He’d hide the truck first thing in the morning. No big deal. He’d switch plates first—he was in New Hampshire now, Live Free or Die—and find an empty garage, a normal place, like it belonged to some old couple who only took it out for church. He nosed the Ford down the narrow road through scrubby bushes. It was a smaller cabin than he expected from the long private driveway, but nicer than you’d think for a dead guy who lived alone. New paint on the trim, light, maybe yellow. The siding at night was dark, stained by weather, wet-cigar brown. He found the spare key under a chunk of pink granite, sitting like a stool pigeon next to the door. You’re not breaking in when you use a key, he told himself. You’re freeloading. Taking shelter. Resting. Like Goldilocks. He wouldn’t steal anything, except maybe eat what was in the refrigerator. The guy was dead. He wouldn’t mind. He could think, borrow some clothes, maybe call Tiff.

Because he wasn’t breaking and entering, he’d leave things neat. He’d make the bed and wash his dishes. He could say if they found him, “Look—I didn’t take nothin’. There’s your TV, your computer, your VCR, your CD player, your microwave oven. I was just taking shelter. If I was going to steal anything, I’d have done it by now.”

Shower. Shave. Wipe out the sink after. Hope the guy had disposable razors; too fucking creepy to shave with a dead guy’s blade. Fish after sundown. Deep-six the gun. Watch TV. Hope the guy had cable.

Find out if anyone had I.D.’d him, and if the cop had died.




CHAPTER 9 The Flight (#ulink_c62f3a4d-114e-5e14-9c55-b4498f86ed7d)


Emily Ann diagnosed Fletcher’s bad mood on the flight as situational depression, richly deserved.

“Would you like to talk about your dad?” she tried.

“Absent father, lousy husband,” he snapped.

Emily Ann didn’t snap back. A man on his way to his father’s funeral deserved some latitude. “Do you think,” she began carefully, “that it’s doubly hard for you because of his deficiencies? Because you held out hope that someday you might become closer—like maybe when you had children of your own—but now that dream is lost, so it’s all the more painful?”




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