Lena had been born Hope Mayhew. Her mother sent out birth announcements saying: Hope Has Arrived. They loved telling me this story; they loved any story about themselves. Once they asked if I’d been close to my own mother, and I said my mother had died when I was young. This was true, and enough truth as needed, so when their faces clouded and they said they were sorry, I looked away and they asked me nothing more. I’d not have told them anyway. I had learned long ago that no one wants to hear the story of an ambulance in a driveway when a child gets home from school—--of a mother’s furious screeches that she only wanted to die, had been acted upon. It is the darkest story in the world.
But these two! Chattering like birds, fluffing their feathers. Of each other they could not get enough, and I learned how the young girl took the name “Lena” because she thought it was stagelike, and later Lochsheldrake because she’d been born in upstate New York not far from the town with that name. Lena Lochsheldrake. That’s who she was, in theater programs and on posters and spelled out with lights on the marquee. But her friends, the ones from the cast who came to see her in my home, always slightly shy and always polite, referred to her as Lena Lock.
According to the papers and police reports, Lena had hundreds of friends all over the country. This was before the days of Facebook, which would have undoubtedly added thousands more, but still, each friend had to be accounted for, and this took a great deal of time. One newspaper was not so friendly after a bit, and clearly had some connection in the investigator’s office, because reports began to appear that Lena Lock had quite a reputation, particularly with older men. This caused her mother Carina to be even more distressed, if such a thing was possible, and I’d have taken care of Carina had she not chosen to return home after the first few days, after the police released all the business in their rooms at my B&B—the clothes and jewelry and letters and stuffed animals, which Lena always took with her on the road. A man named Luther arrived, and Carina, poor stunned thing, climbed into his car with Lena’s belongings and drove away. I missed them terribly. I was stunned myself. Well, the whole town was.
It turned out that Carina Mayhew could not stay away from television, going on any station that would have her, saying her daughter was a darling girl with a heart of gold, and that in such a business as show business, a pretty, darling girl had admirers of all ages. Nothing could possibly account for the tragedy done to her, and it was done to her—this part the poor woman cried out again and again from the television studios. And after a while, Carina Mayhew got a famous woman lawyer who began to appear on these shows with her, saying that a blame-the-victim mentality had plagued women for years; that everyone should be ashamed. Ashamed. That lawyer was frightening looking, like an eagle with a wig of dark hair. Of course this lawyer was looking for libel suits and money, and poor Carina eventually became someone who people in town here lost interest in sooner rather than later. This is New England, after all, and incontinence is not a virtue. But I have not forgotten Carina. I have not forgotten Lena. Not for one day.
And the men—they could not forget so easily! I could see that. Certainly not the men who had seen Lena perform, not the men who had staged the show, not the men who had paid her rent in the past, or paid for trips to Europe with her mother (they called my home in such distress, these men, telling me things I should not know, did not want to know, but they could not forget her). And not the men, either, who had seen her walking down the street while she was in town, or in the restaurants, or at the stage door at night signing programs; and not the man who helped her with a costume change backstage and was the last to have had a “real” conversation with her before she returned to the spotlight in her sweet little dress and character shoes, and touched her rather flat chest in front of a full house and collapsed. The costume changer’s name was Kip and his proximity caused him to be the first suspect. Photographs of this young man sobbing on the front page of the morning newspapers didn’t help with his public image. (Speaking of incontinence.) And he was gay. There were, don’t not believe this for a minute, people in neighborhoods of Providence who thought that a gay man in the theater was as likely a culprit as anyone else; after all, weren’t there reports that some of these individuals had anonymous sex in public places, particularly at the YMCA? Oh, lives in town were destroyed before this whole thing was over. If anything is ever over. You decide that one.