To Love and to Perish

TEN


WE MADE GOOD TIME, due to Cory’s lead foot, and arrived at Elizabeth Potter’s parents’ suburban Albany home twenty minutes later, just prior to eleven o’clock. The home was a 1920s colonial with a tall, pointy roof, white siding and green shutters. Its trim needed to be sanded and repainted, and their blacktop driveway lay cracked and in chunks, tufts of grass waving in the gentle breeze. A lone bedraggled pot of red geraniums decorated the front steps, which creaked as Cory and I mounted them. The garage door stood open, an enormous collection of junk inside, including what looked to be a wheelchair and a walker.

Cory hit the doorbell. No one responded. I hadn’t heard a doorbell ring on the other side of the door.

“I think it’s broken.” I rapped my knuckles on a pane of glass next to the door.

Moments later, a sixtyish woman in a pink velour jogging suit shuffled into the hallway. She squinted at me through the window and opened the door halfway. I noticed she had fuzzy pink rabbit slippers on her feet. One rabbit had lost half his ear. The other, his plastic eyeball.

“Can I help you?”

Cory took the lead, naturally. “Are you Mrs. Potter?”

“Yes.”

Cory held out the yearbook, face down, most likely because Brennan’s name was embossed in gold on the front cover. “Elizabeth’s mother?”

Mrs. Potter wrinkled her brow. “Yes.”

“Excellent. My name is Cory and this is Jolene. Elizabeth’s twentieth class reunion is coming up soon, and we’d like to speak with her. The alumni association is forming a committee to plan the reunion. We wondered if she might like to get involved.”

She opened the door up all the way. “Elizabeth lives in Binghamton now. I can give you her address and phone number if you like. You could call her.” Mrs. Potter sounded doubtful, as though calling Elizabeth wouldn’t do much good. “Wait here.”

She scuffed over to a table, extracted a sheet of paper and pen, and jotted down the information.

I accepted the piece of paper when she returned to the door. “Does Elizabeth have a family?”

Mrs. Potter rubbed her chest. “Married and divorced. Twice. She’s dating a boy now.”

I smiled as though that were wonderful news. “Do you think Elizabeth would enjoy working on the planning committee?”

“Honestly, honey, Elizabeth doesn’t even like to come to visit. This town has bad memories for her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know.”

Mrs. Potter nodded. “We kept it quiet. Elizabeth had a car accident after your class’s five-year reunion. It took her years to learn to walk again. She had to have all kinds of reconstructive surgery.” She pointed to the book in Cory’s hand. “She’s not that girl in the yearbook picture anymore.”

I tried to smile sympathetically. “Now that you mention it, I remember something about that crash. Wasn’t Brennan Rowe the driver in that accident?”

She stiffened. “It wasn’t his fault. He was a good boy.”

I exchanged a look with Cory. “I would have thought you’d be angry with him. Didn’t the police think he was driving under the influence?”

Mrs. Potter waved the suggestion off. “Elizabeth was asleep when the crash occurred, but she said none of them were drunk.”

Hard to know if her statement was true or if the “kids” had kept their vices hidden from their parents. “Does Elizabeth still see Brennan?”

“No, he moved away years ago. He sends a Christmas card every year, though.”

A dog barked and snarled behind us. Startled, I turned to find a miniature brown and black Doberman straining at its leash, held by a white-haired man in a navy jogging suit and white sneakers.

“Bill, this is …” Mrs. Potter broke off, frowning.

“Cory.” He shook Mr. Potter’s hand.

“Jolene.” Mr. Potter’s hand felt like ice. I wondered how long he and the dog had been walking, but now I knew who had eaten Mrs. Potter’s bunny slippers. The tiny monster looked ready to take a chunk out of us, too.

“They were looking for Elizabeth. Her twentieth class reunion’s coming up, and they wondered if she wanted to be on the planning committee. I told them I didn’t think she’d be interested.”

Mr. Potter eyed both Cory and me up and down. “Not likely.”

I gestured to his wife. “Mrs. Potter was explaining about Elizabeth’s accident. We didn’t know.”

Mr. Potter brushed by us, yanking the dog away from our ankles, and entered the house. “We don’t like to talk about that. What’s done is done.”

“Yes, of course. We won’t intrude on your time anymore.”

Nor would that be an option. Mr. Potter had closed the door right in our faces.

_____


Wayne Engle’s childhood home lay four miles from Elizabeth’s parents, a large blue colonial with black shutters, a red door, a three-car garage, and a white picket fence. The well-manicured lawn covered at least two acres, a covered in-ground pool visible in the backyard.

I glanced at Cory over the roof of the BMW as we climbed out. “We’re moving on up.”

He grinned in response. “It is the eastside.”

A woman around Cory’s age answered the doorbell. She had blond

hair and light brown eyes as well as a distinct resemblance to Wayne’s

yearbook picture. His sister? Again, Cory took the lead. “Hi, I’m Cory and this is Jolene. Is Wayne Engle home?”

“Wayne doesn’t live here anymore, not for years.” Her gaze swept over the two of us, measuring, assessing then dismissing.

“I see.” Cory waved the yearbook. “His twentieth class reunion is coming up. The alumni association is looking for volunteers to plan the event. Any idea if he would be interested?”

“I doubt it.” She moved to close the door.

Cory stepped forward. “Would you have his current address or phone number? I’m sure he’d at least like an invitation to the reunion.”

She hesitated.

I spoke up. “We’re trying to locate the whole class and make this the best-attended reunion ever.” With my smile, I tried to channel pep rally spirit, flying in the face of my true long and happy history of nonparticipation.

The blond frowned, perhaps not a school spirit kind of girl either. “He lives in Binghamton. He owns an insurance company, Wayne Engle Insurance. You could try him there.”

For the second time that day, a door closed in our faces.

“Friendly, wasn’t she?”

Cory didn’t seem phased by the woman’s behavior. “We got what we came for, maybe more. Don’t you think it’s weird both he and Elizabeth live in Binghamton?”

“It’s a big city, close by. I like it better than Albany. Maybe they do, too.”

Cory glanced at his watch. “Should we swing by his office on the way home?”

We’d driven across the state and approached Albany from the north this morning. It would be easy to return home to Wachobe from the south, driving through Binghamton and Watkins Glen on the way.

“We could, but it’s definitely weird for us to drive all the way there to tell him about a class reunion. We look like hometown cheerleaders here in Albany. But there, we’d look like fanatics, tracking down the man to discuss a reunion that’s more than a year and a half away, especially after his sister said he wouldn’t be interested. I think he would expect to get a phone call or a letter about the reunion, now that we’ve talked to her. If she calls him to say we stopped by his parent’s house, he’s going to be suspicious.”

“Okay. Let me think.”

Back in the car, Cory fiddled with the GPS, typing in Wayne Engle’s company name and city. The street address popped up on the screen and the system plotted a two hour and twenty minute drive for us. At least it was in the general direction of home. He repositioned the GPS on his dash and turned to face me. “I got it. Wayne Engle sells insurance. We sell cars. Cars and insurance go together.”

“That’s true, but how are we going to segue into talking about Brennan’s crash? How are we going to ask him why he wasn’t in the car at the time of the accident?”

Cory slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “I don’t know, Jo. We may just have to tell him the truth. He was Brennan’s best friend. Don’t you think he’d want to help him, if he could?”

“It’s hard to say. If he thinks, or worse, he knows that Brennan was drunk that night, he might not want to help him. He might want to see him punished, even if it is all these years later.”

Cory swallowed. “Maybe he knew Brennan was drunk, so he didn’t get in the car.”

“I hadn’t thought that far through it, but that makes sense. Imagine the guilt if you’re the only one who didn’t get in the car. Imagine the survivor guilt after learning Monica Gleason died in the crash. Imagine if he knew Brennan was drunk and did nothing to prevent him from driving those two girls home.”

The stricken expression on Cory’s face made me stop. His imagination was pretty damn good—what actor’s wouldn’t be? My words horrified him.

I laid my hand on his arm in comfort. “Then again, we don’t even know if he was supposed to be in the car. He could have a different story altogether. Why don’t we go with telling the truth and see what he says?”

Cory nodded and turned the key in the ignition.

I thought I’d reassured him, but as the estimated drive time on the GPS inched upward with each passing mile, I realized Cory was no longer in such a hurry to find out the truth.