“Events,” she said cautiously. “Amanda speaking.”
“Hello, Amanda,” said the sandpapery female voice on the other end. “This is Grace Lucas.”
“Okay.” The name meant nothing to Amanda. “Can I help you?”
“You don’t know me,” Grace Lucas continued. She sounded a little off, possibly medicated. “I’m Garth Heely’s wife.”
Of course you are, Amanda thought irritably. When you had a job like events coordinator, there was always someone making your life miserable. At the moment, for Amanda, this someone was Garth Heely, an obscure local author scheduled to speak at the Senior Center’s monthly lecture series in November. A retired lawyer, Garth Heely had self-published three novels featuring Parker Winslow, a silver-haired sleuth who plies his trade at Sunset Acres, a senior living community with an unusually high murder rate. Amanda had read them all—it was her job!—and they were better than she’d expected, except that the killer in all three books turned out to be a person of color—a Jamaican nurse in Trouble in Sunset Acres, an Indian urologist in More Trouble in Sunset Acres, and a Guatemalan physical therapist in Mayhem in Sunset Acres. When she’d pointed out this unfortunate pattern—diplomatically, she thought—Garth Heely got immediately defensive, telling her he was fed up with all this PC crap you heard nowadays, everybody so focused on the color of everybody else’s skin, rather than the content of their character. Then he suggested that maybe she was the racist, lumping all non-white people into a single category, as if there were no difference between Kingston and Calcutta.
Have you ever been to Calcutta? he demanded.
Amanda admitted that she hadn’t.
Well, I have, he said. And believe me, honey, it ain’t a bit like Jamaica!
Amanda wasn’t surprised by his attitude of aggrieved innocence. It was something she’d gotten used to, working at the Senior Center. A lot of old white people acted like it was still 1956, like they could say whatever they wanted and not have to take any responsibility for their words. Soon after she’d gotten hired, she’d called out a couple of women for using the N-word in casual conversation—they were both knitting baby sweaters—and they’d looked at her like she was making a big deal out of nothing, since there were no black people within hearing range. There rarely were; Haddington was that kind of town.
Garth Heely wasn’t an out-and-out racist, just a prosperous, occasionally charming white man of a certain age, blind to his own privilege, predictably smug and condescending. The only thing that surprised her was what a diva he had turned out to be, considering that he was a writer no one had ever heard of, with an Amazon ranking somewhere in the millions.
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“I’m calling on behalf of my husband,” Grace Lucas said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to cancel his speaking engagement.”
Oh Jesus, Amanda thought.
Just yesterday, she and Garth Heely had butted heads about the flyers the Senior Center had designed to promote his lecture. He thought they looked boring—guilty as charged—and suggested that they be printed on several different shades of eye-catching colored paper, preferably pink, yellow, and light blue. Amanda explained that this wouldn’t be possible, since the Senior Center’s budget didn’t allow for colored paper.
“Hello?” Grace Lucas said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.” Amanda’s skin felt clammy beneath her dress. She’d only been working at the Senior Center for a few months, and the last thing she needed was to walk into Eve’s office and explain that the November speaker had canceled over a trivial dispute. “Please tell Mr. Heely that I misspoke. We’ll be more than happy to supply colored paper for the flyers.”
The silence on the other end of the line felt more puzzled than frosty. Amanda was about to add an apology to the offer when Grace Lucas finally spoke.
“Garth is dead, dear.”
“What?” Amanda started to laugh, then caught herself. “I talked to him yesterday morning. He was fine.”
“I know.” There was a note of quiet wonder in Grace Lucas’s voice. “He died right afterward. You were the last person to speak to him. He was still holding the phone when I found him.”
Oh my God, Amanda thought. I killed him.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Thank you, dear.” Grace Lucas gave a resigned sigh. “I just wish he’d been able to finish the book he was working on. He said it was going to be his best Parker Winslow yet. Now we’ll never know who the murderer was.”
Amanda wanted to ask if there was a non-white health care worker in the book—There’s your killer!—but she was distracted by an embarrassing feeling of relief, the knowledge that Garth Heely’s sudden death was going to be a lot easier to explain to Eve than a disagreement over colored paper would have been.
“I’m going to bury him in his blue suit.” Grace Lucas’s voice was dreamy and private, as if she were talking to herself. “He always looked so good in blue.”
*
Wakes and funerals were an inescapable part of Eve’s professional life, and she tried to approach them with a businesslike sense of detachment. She showed up in her official capacity, she paid her respects to the family of the deceased, and she went home. No fuss, no muss, no tears.
Tonight, though, she was a bit of a wreck. The news of Roy Rafferty’s death had upset her deeply, coming so soon after she’d banished him for exposing himself in the ladies’ room. She didn’t feel guilty about her decision—as an administrator, she’d really had no choice—but the memory of it still made her sick at heart. It seemed so cruel and pointless in retrospect, humiliating a sick old man who had only a month to live, not that she had any way of knowing that at the time. All she knew was that she’d inflicted pain on someone she cared about, and that always cost you something, even if you were just doing your job. It left you feeling dirty and mean, exposed to the laws of karma. It also made her wonder if she was doing the right thing by coming here.
A lot of the wakes she went to were woefully underpopulated affairs, a corpse and some flowers and a handful of bored spectators, no one even bothering to pretend that it was a big deal. Eve was relieved to see that this wasn’t the case tonight. The parking lot was packed, and so was the viewing room, an impressive line of mourners massed along the side wall, inching their way toward the open coffin. The turnout was a tribute to Roy’s lifelong ties to Haddington, his membership in a variety of civic organizations, and his long and successful career as a plumbing contractor, not to mention the fact that he’d been a genuinely nice guy before the dementia kicked in.
Instead of joining the procession, Eve slipped into a velour-cushioned chair in the second to last row of the viewing room, near a group of ladies who were regulars at the Senior Center. One of them was Evelyn Gerardi, the emphysemic woman who’d been the victim of Roy’s indecent overtures.