I didn’t know what to say. I’d spent plenty of time agonizing about whether to stay in Busman’s Harbor or leave. This woman didn’t need platitudes from me.
We stumbled through the rest of the conversation. I put the copy of the photo back in the tote bag and she saw me out. I was amazed at the intimacy of her confession of unhappiness to me, a relative stranger. I didn’t feel warm and fuzzy toward her, but I could tell she was surely lacking for friends. I wondered if this was me in the future, friendless and bitter in a small town.
*
In a luxury of the off-season, I parked right in front of Walker’s Art Supplies and Frame Shop. Through the smudged front windows, I saw Barry’s head with its wild Bozo hair bent over the worktable. His daughter, Quinn, was on the other side of the shop, organizing shelves. I pushed open the door, listening for the jingle of the bell.
“Hi, Julia!” In her early forties, Quinn still had a bouncy, youthful energy. She was attractive, and now that I’d seen the photo of the young Fran, I could see a little bit of her mother around her mouth. But Fran was dark, and Quinn quite fair, a Nordic warrior princess, which normally disguised any resemblance.
“Hi, Quinn. Are you working in the shop again?” Quinn had been a fixture in the store when I was young.
“Doing some inventory for Dad. Can we help you?”
I wanted to talk to Barry about the past, and I doubted he’d do that with Quinn present. I couldn’t figure a way to ask her to leave, so I bought some pens and a six-pack of lined paper pads for the clambake office.
“Thanks, Julia!” Quinn said. “Great to see you.”
*
I was thankful to see Fran’s beat-up sedan in the Walker driveway when I pulled up in front of their house. When Fran came to the door, she was dressed in two layers of sweaters, a cardigan over a pullover. She waved me over the threshold, and I stepped into the front hall. The inside of the house wasn’t much warmer than the outside.
Unlike Sheila Smith and Deborah Bennett, Fran gave no sign that she’d been expecting me. I wondered why Caroline would have called Deborah and Sheila, but not Fran.
She led me into the dark living room and offered me a seat on their threadbare couch.
“I saw Quinn,” I said. “She looks great.”
“Looks better now that her awful husband’s out of the picture.”
What do I say to that? I pulled the photocopy out of the tote. “I came to ask you about this.”
She picked a pair of reading glasses up off a side table and put them on. “Well, look at that. There we all are.”
“The Rabble Point set.”
“The Rabble Point set and the cleaning lady’s daughter,” she corrected. “Look at me, all dressed up, thinking I was all that.”
“You’re with Michael Smith in this photo.”
“Barry came along much later. Michael and I were hot and heavy back when this picture was taken. Look at him. That hair. My word.”
“He still has it.”
“Not quite like he did in his glory days, but yes, he still has the hair. I about died when I saw him the other night.”
“So you recognized him?”
“Right away.” She continued to look at the old photograph. Her feelings about the past were harder to read than Caroline’s nostalgia, Deborah’s sadness, or Sheila’s anger. I couldn’t tell what Fran felt. Clearly, I was dealing with a real Mainer, not one of those emotional types From Away.
“What happened with you and Michael?” I asked.
“Distance, I guess. I stayed in Maine while he went to law school. But perhaps it was never meant to be.”
“Yesterday, Barry told me he didn’t know anyone in the restaurant that night, except Phil Bennett, who had come into the store a couple of times.”
She looked up sharply. “Barry told you Phil Bennett came into the store?”
“Yes. But what I want to understand is why you and Barry both lied to the police about knowing these people.”
Fran’s lined face relaxed. “We didn’t want to be involved. Barry’s a little paranoid. He likes to smoke a doobie from time to time, and you know how the cops around here are about that.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“Don’t be so shocked,” Fran responded. “We’re old. We’re not dead.” I laughed and she did, too, patting my hand as she did. “Poor Julia. So easy to get a reaction.”
By then, I was thoroughly confused. Was she having me on? That would be so like her sense of humor. Or was she serious? Did she and Barry still sit around smoking joints in their living room?
Fran took the reading classes off, making a further mess of her always untidy bun. When she laughed, the wrinkles in her brow turned to laugh lines and the years fell away. For the first time, I glimpsed the smart, funny woman from the photo.
“Fran, are you okay? Because the last couple of times I’ve seen you, you’ve looked exhausted.”