“It was a big night for him,” I said. “Land-office business, I bet.”
“Wouldn’t you think he’d have come straight here after getting the news that his father had taken up with a teenager?”
“Ma, we covered that. He’s a guy. They’re not good at that stuff. Then it snowed—all night, all for the good.”
“Call him,” she said. “Tell him I’m back at home, having spent the night with you due to inclement weather.”
I said, “You call. I’ve already left too many messages.”
Scraping and sighing, she said, “In the old days, everybody picked up. Your phone rang and you answered it, period.”
I slipped her big purse off her arm, fished inside, and came up with her cell. “Except in the good old days you didn’t get to make phone calls from your driveway. Here, call him. I’m going home.” I opened the car door, and just before climbing in, I pointed toward the house. “Notice that your terrible son shoveled your walks, front and back.”
“What if I do reach him?”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“What if he says something like ‘Dad wasn’t living at home anyway. It’s not that big a deal.’?”
“He won’t say that. I told you how upset he was, which is probably why he’s not picking up. Now go inside. Take a nice soak in the tub, read the Sunday paper. I’m around if you need me.” With my phone turned off, I thought.
“I might call him,” she said. “So just warning you.”
“Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”
“I meant your father. I’d enjoy giving him a piece of my mind. Do you know the saying ‘You can’t dance at two weddings with one tuchus’?”
“Now I do.” I turned the key in the ignition and was relieved to hear the engine turn over. I waved good-bye and tried not to think about the forlorn return wave in my rearview mirror. Five minutes later, as soon as I’d pulled into my driveway, my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Strenger, was hurrying down her back porch steps in a puffy down coat and unbuckled overshoes, calling, “Is everything all right?”
I said, “Yes—at least since I left twenty minutes ago.”
“I saw the cruiser in your driveway . . .”
“Oh, that—it was just Brian Dolan, a friend of my brother’s.”
“Off duty?”
“Well, no . . . on. But it was nothing. Well, nothing about me . . . some ancient history he was looking into.” Then, casually, as if an unrelated topic, I asked, “How long have you lived here?”
“Fifty-three years this month.”
“Wow. Very precise.”
“I know exactly because we moved in the week of the president’s assassination. Not a good way to start a new life together.” She must have sensed I was about to express my sorrow for such unfortunate timing because she said, “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. It’s been a lucky house for us: a marriage that lasted through thick and thin. Two handsome sons, five grandsons—would you believe that? All boys!—and if we were to sell it tomorrow, it would bring many times what we paid for it.”
Could she know what a pittance I’d paid for my little shitbox next door? I wondered.
“You said Donna Dolan’s boy was here about ancient history. Do you know which ancient history he meant?” she asked.
“Ancient history was my term. It seems . . . I don’t really know. Maybe”—and now this was Amateur Detective Frankel leading the witness—“it referred to deaths in the Lavoie family?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised! She lost all three of her husbands.”
“Lost?”
“Passed away. Who can live through something like that? And I’d heard—it was before I lived here—that she lost twin babies. No wonder a person can’t go on living.”
Except that she went on living until she was at least ninety, I refrained from saying.
“I wasn’t here yet when the first husband died,” she continued. “But the other two were accidents.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, unnecessary in the wide-open cold air. “I think they were drinkers. At least I heard awful rows. And the little girl—little then—used to come over to my house and just sit on my porch swing. Both of the stepfathers were falling-down drunk when they died.”
“Is that what you heard?”
“You’d think being drunk would relax their muscles and they wouldn’t get hurt, but they both died from the falls—three, four years apart. One I think went to the hospital but died there. Not a lucky house. Not for her, at least.”
“Was it the cellar stairs?” I asked.
“I hope you’ve carpeted them,” Mrs. Strenger said.
Nick was reading the Sunday paper at the kitchen table. I repeated as faithfully as I could, and rather breathlessly, the entire conversation I’d just had with our elderly next-door neighbor.
He listened, reflecting none of my astonishment at the house’s continuing bad karma, then said, calmly, “The wife pushed them. Clearly.”
I said, “I thought that, too! But wouldn’t that be the first thing the medical examiner would conclude when someone’s third husband died the same way as the second?”
“You should ask your friend the cop.”
“What about autopsies? Couldn’t they tell the difference between a push and a fall?”
Nick said, “I’d put Nancy Frankel on the case. It would take her mind off Tracygate.”
I said, “Was it too much last night—the Frankel family soap opera?”
“I tuned a lot of it out.”
“Good,” I said, but at the same time I wondered how much of our conversations, at home and at work, did he tune out. When he appeared to finish the section he’d been reading, Technology, I asked, “What about your mother? I never hear about her.”
“No longer with us,” he said.
“Sorry . . .”
“Cancer. Almost ten years ago. My father remarried—a woman he’d dated in high school, the one that got away.”
“Let me guess. They reconnected on Facebook?”
“Nope, at a class reunion—which I made him go to. He waited a very respectable amount of time before he even asked her out. They’re in love. It’s very cute, actually. She’s no genius, but it works.” He smiled. “Needless to say, I was his best man.”
“And this is where?”
“Chicago.”
“Where you grew up?”