6— DECEMBER 17, TUESDAY AFTERNOON
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. —Jean Genet
“I want to read about children. The things that happen to them and the things they do. Those novels of adult concerns — you know, the ones everyone reads about disloyalties and excess – I can’t find the heart in them. They all seem so much the same, so empty. As if marriage and its end were the most important events of life. Really. So, I like to read about children. Not children’s books, mind you... You do know what I mean?”
“I think so, Mrs. McNab.” Irwine tried to hold on to her unflinching gaze, but turned away.
“Call me Genie,” she said, her voice softening the way a teacher’s will.
“Do you mean like Lord of the Flies?” he asked her.
“Yes. Exactly. That’s just what I mean. Only there weren’t any girls in that story, which may be why it turned out so savagely.”
“Funny, I’ve always heard that girls are more ruthless than boys.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t ruthless. I said the boys were more savage.” Genie smiled secretively, then bit her lip: some octogenarian coquettishness. ” Boys lack imagination, ultimately,” she said, “which makes their wickedness rather predictable.”
Irwine stared at her, imagining the more than savage imaginations of these girls.
“Do you think you could find me some books like that, Don?”
“I don’t think we have anything, like that, in the library,” he said, then almost felt himself blush.
She waited with expectation, leaning forward across the kitchen table.
“Of course, I can check with the city library,” he mumbled. “I’m sure there’s something I could bring you.”
“Excellent,” she said. A motor buzzed on the middle of the word and set her wheelchair in backwards motion. “Would you like a cup of tea? Earl Grey?”
Irwine nodded and she whirled around, nimble at her custom sink. How long had she been at the Homes? Years before him. The husband dead in ’96 for he’d seen the stone in the Circle of Remembrance. She never came to the library, but they often passed on morning walks – her returning, him heading out – and once they’d had a conversation. She’d asked him to help her remove a piece of garden stone from the tread of her tire. Immediately, they’d discovered a mutual interest and knowledge in the waterfowl. Another time, later, she’d winked at him in the Sunday dining room.
“I hope you don’t mind – I heat the water in the microwave, but I’ll put the tea in loose. Do you still cook?”
As a matter of fact, Irwine hadn’t had his lunch yet: crushed walnuts and garlic; bread crumbs and milk to make a paste; stirred into hot fettuccini and served with parmesano and a large salad with biting vinaigrette.
“I won’t keep you long,” she said, moving the teapot, mugs, sugar bowl and creamer from a tray to the table. “I didn’t really call to ask you about books, but it’s not that I don’t want...”
She returned for the water and poured it very slowly into the pot.
Irwine was baffled by her, so he kept very still and waited.
“You see, there’s a mystery here, and I’d like you to help me solve it.”
Of all the things, thought Irwine, this was not one of them.
“I need you,” she said.
Need, he said, then, “Me? Mystery? Why?” He felt embarrassed.
“I feel I can trust you, Don. From the first I saw you, there was something. A certain something. Discretion, perhaps. A man who keeps to himself.”
Irwine squirmed and tried to lighten the tone. “A dour fat man with secrets,” he said.
“Who says all large men must be jolly?” she responded quickly.
“I’m afraid I make a disappointing Santa Claus,” he admitted.
“I don’t need a fairy, I need a sleuth. Wait here.” The motor on her chair buzzed again as she backed up then spun off to the living room.
Very stark living this room for a lady. A wingback chair, griffon-clawed before the TV. The TV itself set on top of an immense long low wooden cabinet with slender drawers. She tugged, and one rolled out with the click-click of bearings.
“I have a hard time with closets,” she smiled, catching him looking, “This was made originally for maps and pictures. In a museum. Storage. They were throwing it out because the drawers stuck. I had it refitted.
See?”
Irwine nodded. A very thorough explanation. No wonder the Homes folks didn’t gossip about her.
She pushed the drawer shut and motored toward him with a large black volume on her lap. She lifted it to the table with two hands.
“The fact is,” she said, “that I’ve known Marvel nearly my whole life.”
Irwine looked puzzled.
“Marvel, from next door. Mother to Cammy—she always called him Cammy—the murdered man. We grew up together in Toledo. Went to the same high school.”
She opened the scrapbook and without flipping through the pages, pointed at a formal photo of a wedding party.
“I didn’t know her that well. Her family had more money than mine. That’s why I was surprised when she asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. This was after the war. July, 1947. Look at those suits—same as today’s. Even the dresses don’t look too dated. But you’d never catch a bridesmaid wearing something like that on her head now, would you.”
Genie tapped the photo with her fingernail and Irwine chuckled. The headdresses were indeed preposterous.
“Of course, they were fashioned at a millenary and the very peak of fashionable. Copied from somewhere. I don’t recall. It’s tulle, you see, stretched over wire and connected to the little froth there on the crown. We thought they were angelic.”
Irwine leaned in to get a better look. The four women and four men were arranged in a garden outside a house. The steps leading to a porch were visible in the back, and the grass was so short it looked like herbivores had grazed there. All of the women held bouquets and all of the men wore glasses. Genie was one of two bridesmaids sitting on chairs, essentially framing the photo. He knew it was her. She sat as straight then as she did now. With the silly headdress drooping to either side of her dark hair, she looked fiercely ovine.
He suddenly sputtered. “The way it frames your face—that’s you, isn’t it? It looks like ears.”
“Precisely!” she hooted and Irwine felt a satisfying blush of relief. “I thought the same thing when I looked at this photo last week. I look like a sheep. Exactly like a sheep—and not even lamb, mind you.”
“Both those two back there...”
“That’s Marvel and her sister May.”
“This one, May, her ears are like a bear’s, but Marvel...”
“She looks like an angel,” Genie sighed. “They got it right for her, at least.”
“And this is Harry.” Irwin pointed at the tall, thin stooping man to Marvel’s left.
“Yes. She said they met in Missouri. She was working in an airplane factory in, I believe, Saint Louis. Maybe he was from there originally. I don’t know. I never met any of his family, and after the wedding, they left for overseas. The Philippines.”
She closed the album and tented her fingers above the cover. Irwine couldn’t help noticing that whatever had incapacitated her legs hadn’t damaged her fingers. They were plump and supple as a girl’s.
“It was time ago, and such a busy, happy time,” Genie said slowly. “Marvel’s wedding was a surprise, but there were so many weddings and it’s hard now to separate them in my mind. Even from my own. One dinner was so much like another, and many of the participants the same.” She pushed the scrapbook away abruptly and turned to face Irwine. “Six years ago, Marvel called me. I’ll never know how she found me —
Dick was still alive then, but it was his last year — and she wanted to know about the Homes.” Genie shook her head. “The Homes! Well, it wasn’t more than a couple of months and they moved here, but Harry, he went poorly immediately, and they both ended up assisted living. The apartment next door.” She jerked her long thumb at the kitchen wall. “And after Dick died, I had to move to assisted as well. More tea?”
Irwine shook his head. The first cup was already doing its work on his empty stomach.
“So, what’s the mystery,” he said, wanting and not wanting to come to the point.
“I think there’s a secret. A treasure. I think it’s a treasure. Marvel was always something timid. Even as a girl. Just like her mother. And her father, I remember him as severe. Harry was something like that too, and when he died, it was like the supports went out of her. It’s not that we were so close anyway, because Dick was sick too and all, but she wouldn’t even talk to me after, after. Until one day —poof!— she was changed. Like a different person completely. Not at all like herself. Talking and talking and she’d rub her hands together like this. I think she addled.”
Genie hit the control on her chair and slowly backed in the direction of the microwave and the sink. Irwine swiveled and watched her. When she reached the counter, she slowed, stopped, then came forward again, resuming her position at the table. Irwine raised his eyebrows.
“It’s hard to sit still sometimes,” she said with a lopsided smile.
Irwine nodded, but he didn’t agree. He’d like nothing better to sit still hour upon hour. If only she’d offer him lunch.
“So, I was saying, she changed. Talk, talk, talk and so restless. She had a box. She kept it on top of the TV. She was forever showing me that box and whispering that inside was the key. Sometimes she called it a map. Once—imagine!—she said there was a door inside—inside the box!—and to open it would blind her with the treasure of kings. What I want to know is, where’s the box?”
Irwine blinked. “You’re asking me?”
“It’s rhetorical. I know, rather, I presume you don’t know where the box is and, in fact, have never seen it.”
Irwine crossed his arms over his belly to hold down the rising roar, but also to contain his growing delight.
He was enjoying himself.
He was enjoying himself!
He shook his head and grinned.
“That’s the thing. I think the box was stolen. I think that Marvel’s son and daughter-in-law were killed for that box.”
“How do you know the box isn’t still in there,” Irwine jerked his thumb like Genie at the kitchen wall.
“I don’t.”
“Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to kill Marvel? Why wait until she was dead?”
“I don’t know.” She dropped her head and tented her fingers in her lap, biting her lip. Then, she looked up at him slyly. “I was hoping you could help me find out. Like I said, I need a sleuth.”
“You old fox,” he said to her, and when she smiled like a girl, he laughed out loud.
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