Chapter 30
Joyce Cottrell’s life had not gone exactly as she planned it. By the time she was looking at her fiftieth birthday from the wrong direction, she had given up all hope of a lasting marriage and a family of her own. Her few relatives were all gone. Her phone almost never rang, and she rarely spoke to anyone save the people she worked with at Group Health on Capitol Hill. Her parents had left her the house she’d grown up in, but not quite enough money to get by on, and a career beyond making a home for the husband and children she’d expected to have had never been among the few plans she’d laid out for herself. She’d been married briefly but when she’d come home to her parents after Jim Cottrell left her six months after the wedding, a job hadn’t been high on Joyce’s priority list.
She had returned home to lick her wounds and pick up the broken pieces of her emotional life.
Now, almost thirty years later, she was still at it. Her parents, who had provided refuge during the long months when she was too ashamed of her failure even to leave the house, had finally died. Joyce’s few friends had long ago tired of her woeful tale of betrayal, and stopped calling her.
The years had stretched into decades, and though she eventually secured a job as a receptionist on the swing shift at Group Health, she had also turned slowly into a strange kind of recluse. While she rarely left her house except to go to work, trash did not build up in Joyce Cottrell’s house as it did in those of older recluses, nor did paint begin to peel, or furniture grow stained and threadbare. Joyce Cottrell kept her house meticulously clean, immediately redecorating any room in which paint began to fade, choosing colors and fabrics from catalogs, finally venturing forth to make her purchases only when the newly redecorated room was complete in her mind down to the last detail.
Over the years, she had become expert in stripping paint from old wood, paper from old plaster, and worn fabric from the excellent frames with which her parents had furnished the house. She had become even more expert in applying the new materials she bought on her rare shopping expeditions, and in time the house had evolved into an eclectic assortment of rooms, each of them reflecting whatever fashion had been in vogue at the precise moment Joyce had most recently decided to redo it.
No one, though, had seen the interior of the house in years, for whenever one of her neighbors—the only people who saw her with any regularity at all—asked if they might see what she was doing, Joyce would always protest that the house wasn’t done yet. Nor was it a lie: one or more of the house’s ten rooms was always in some stage of redecoration.
Joyce herself was in a steady state of redecoration, too, as she dreamed and planned for the glittering party she would throw when the house was finally ready, a Martha Stewart-perfect party to celebrate the completion of the redecorating and mark her reemergence into the social world. She spent hours and days imagining herself as the beautiful, charming hostess, throwing open the doors to her elegant home to hordes of admiring friends.
Unfortunately, Joyce had not developed the same knack with herself that she had with the house. Her figure could best be described as “full,” a circumstance that Joyce concealed as well as she could by wearing loose-fitting clothing in bright colors, and her hair was, at age fifty-three, even blonder than it had been half a century earlier. Joyce’s taste in makeup hadn’t changed since she was a teenager, running to the same bright lipsticks and eye shadows—a riot of reds and oranges, blues and greens—that she loved in both her clothes and her interior decoration.
People who chose to be charitable might have said Joyce Cottrell looked a little blowzy.
Those who chose not to be charitable could have said she looked like an over-the-hill hooker.
It was precisely what attracted the man to her.
That, and the fact that she lived next door to Anne Jeffers.