Still, it probably beat gin all to hell, and Stella was not about to dig into the schnapps, seeing as she’d gotten drunk as a skunk on the stuff one memorable evening during her senior year in high school and couldn’t even sniff it without wanting to run to the bathroom to throw up.
She took a deep breath and a healthy bolt of the whisky and shuddered as it went down.
And felt a little better, after she got her breath back.
“Okay,” she said, wiping her mouth on a paper napkin. She settled into a love seat near Natalya. “What gives?”
“Promise me you will not tell Chip about glasses.”
Stella blinked. Not what she was expecting. “Uh … what?”
“About reading glasses. He must not know.”
“Fill me in here, sister—you’re shacking up with the guy, you left your
husband
for him and all, and you’re afraid he’ll see you in your
specs
?”
“Is not just any glasses, you are not understanding. Is uh … how are you saying.” She took the glasses and handed them to Stella, who examined them closely, peering through the lenses.
“These are cheaters,” she said in surprise. “Magnifiers.” They weren’t as strong as Stella’s—she’d made her way steadily through the numbers at the drugstore and was now a solid +2—but they were, nonetheless, the sort of spectacles one didn’t generally need until one reached middle age. “Just how old are you, anyway?”
“I tell Benton I am thirty-six,” Natalya said miserably. “Chip, I am telling I am thirty-four.”
“And…”
“And I am forty-four years.”
At that, the leaking started up again, but this time Stella was a little too dumbfounded to react immediately. “Damn,” she finally said.
Natalya nodded. “My grandmother is having very good skin, still very little wrinkle on face. I am thinking I can trick Chip, but soon my eyes are beginning to get bad. What if he finds out? Handsome man like Chip, he is twenty-eight, he can have any lady is attracting to him!”
Natalya’s fears were so real, her trepidation so consuming, that Stella didn’t have the heart to point out that Chip was perhaps not
every
woman’s ideal, with his doughy middle and prominent Adam’s apple and rounded shoulders and awkward posture. “But he loves you, Natalya. I mean, look at everything he’s done for you. Giving you a home, taking Luke under his wing…”
Slicing up bodies and extorting money from his family,
she considered adding, but thought better of it.
“He loves the woman I am pretending him. But men get very angry about age lie. When Benton is finding out, he is calling me terrible name.”
“Wait. Benton knew…”
“Only when Luke is coming to America few months ago, when papers are coming with numbers on them. Benton is signing papers and finds out.”
A cold unease started in Stella’s gut and eddied out in growing circles. Benton found out Natalya’s true age. Benton, perhaps, threatened to tell her new lover when he discovered the pair carrying on. How far would Natalya go to keep that secret?
“Surely you haven’t been, you know, losing sleep over this,” she said. “I mean, with everything else the two of you have to worry about…”
Natalya shook her head vigorously. “Oh no, I am very worry, trying hard to trick Chip. I am exercise two hours with TV when he is going to work. I am putting on the makeup and doing diet.” She patted her flat stomach miserably, and Stella remembered how little Natalya had consumed since her arrival.
Oh, vanity—it was the undoing of many an otherwise smart and competent woman. Stella saw the starved and skeletal gals they had on the talk shows, the frail actresses stumbling hollow-eyed and pale through their roles, the singers whose ribs stuck out of their hoochie outfits as they strutted around in the music videos. Not to mention all the plastic surgery—
“Wait a minute,” she said. “The Botox—that wasn’t Benton’s idea at all, was it?”
Natalya’s mouth wobbled and fresh tears welled. “No, you are wrong. Is Benton who is saying I am looking too old with the wrinkles.”
“Well—I mean, other than the thing with your lips, you’re very … smooth.” Stella was not reassured by Natalya’s claim. If she’d been desperate enough to stay in this country—having traded on her looks, using a currency of lies—it suddenly seemed more than a little likely that Natalya might have taken drastic steps … especially now that Stella knew she kept secrets from Chip.
For a long time the two women sat in silence, each lost in her own thoughts. Fatigue and the steadily draining whisky—which Stella had to admit lost its burning punch after the first few sips and became, in its own way, almost pleasant—were conspiring to make her pass out. Chip wouldn’t be home until the wee hours, BJ was about to deliver the boys into safety, and there was nothing further she could do for now.
“Look here,” she said, figuring she had all the next day to decide if Natalya was a killer or not, “I think I need to head to bed.”
Natalya sniffed. “Before you are going, can I ask question, Stella?”
“Uh, sure.”
“You are knowing how to knit?”
Stella blinked. She did indeed know how to knit—she’d learned from her mother at the age of seven, and had knitted a couple dozen sweaters and scarves and mittens and hats before being bit by the quilting bug and putting her needles away. Since her widowhood, and reinvention as a purveyor of justice, Stella’d had no time for any of the needle arts, but she was pretty sure she could still kick crochet or cross-stich or needlepoint or, yes, knitting ass all over town.
“What have you got?”
There followed a sleepily pleasant half hour of sorting through the mess Natalya had made of eight skeins of Lion Wool-Ease Chunky yarn and a pattern printed from their Web site for a pair of cable-knit sweater vests, one large in Indigo for Luke, and one medium in Redwood for Chip. Natalya explained that she hoped to finish them by Christmas, which Stella figured was a reasonable goal if she could teach her how to cast on properly and straighten out her gauge.
She tried to harden herself against the woman sitting next to her with yarn looped around her wrists, who was almost definitely a cold-blooded killer, but in the end the pleasant clicking of the needles and tug of the yarn was impossible to resist, and they got a few nearly perfect rows of k2p2 ribbing done before Stella staggered to bed and slept like a baby until the ringing of her cell phone catapulted her out of a pleasant dream in which she was wrapped in a baby-soft sweater that the sheriff was slowly unraveling.
Chapter Nineteen
Stella grabbed the phone off the bedside table and was immediately deafened by the cacophonous racket of half a dozen voices doing an off-key approximation of “Happy Birthday.”
By the time it was finished, she was nearly vertical and, despite her irritation at being woken up, and her even greater irritation that she was another year older, grinning.
“Who the hell you got there with you?”
“Just me and Tucker, and Mom and Dad and Danyelle and the twins. Y’all run along now,” Stella heard Chrissy say away from the phone. “That’s all you’re needed for. Now git.”
“Well, I suppose that was kind of nice. Thank you, Chrissy.”
“That’s just the start. Soon’s you get back here where you belong, we’ll celebrate for real.”
“I’m trying. Believe me, I’m trying.”
“Really? ’Cause it sounds to me like you’re laying about in bed at nine thirty in the morning, when most decent folk are up and
productive,
like maybe running
businesses
for their lazy-ass
bosses
who are out of town on boondoggles.”
“Ain’t you just a little bit cranky.”
“Well, I didn’t get in last night until practically two and it was too late to bring Tucker home from my folks’, which meant I had to help Mom fix breakfast for the kids ’cause Danyelle’s fightin’ with Ed again, and then I got an e-mail saying I won’t get the Glue Baste-It I ordered until a week from Tuesday, which is exactly one fuckin’ week later than I need it for the appliqué class, not to mention I just found out Hoffman discontinued that tractor print what I promised Harriet Fofana for the backing on her husband’s birthday quilt and I’m tryin’ to find it on eBay but it’s got bid up to eighteen bucks a yard.”
Stella, even in her semibleary state, knew right away that Chrissy had rolled out the last few details merely as an obfuscation of the first. “Got in late, huh,” she said. “That mystery man a yours again?”
“What makes you say that? Maybe I went over to Tiffany’s to play cards. Or worked on the quilt I’m makin’ for Mom and Dad’s anniversary. Or, or, went to a movie or—”
“Until two in the morning? Yeah, uh-huh. You was at Tiffany’s, who I know for a fact just had her a new baby two months ago. Prob’ly readin’ verses from the Good Book and drinking chamomile tea, too, right?”
There was a pause, and then a dramatic sigh. “Stella, here’s the thing, I know you think of me as a big party girl and all, but I’m kind of maybe a little into this one. And I’ll tell you ’bout him, soon’s I know is he gonna stay around for a while.”
Stella couldn’t help noticing the unfamiliar uncertainty in the girl’s voice. Whoever she was making time with, he’d gotten much more of a reaction out of her than any of her recent string of lovers, who she usually went through with good cheer and a healthy appetite for variety.
“Chrissy, I doubt there’s a man alive who’d willingly leave your love trap,” Stella remarked and then took the high road before she could change her mind. “But I guess if you want to keep it to yourself, why, I ain’t got any business tryin’ to beat it out of you.”
“Mmm. Well, I got a little surprise for you. I went looking around to see what-all financial info I could find on Benton Parch, like you suggested. I found a few big withdrawals out of his checking account for the dates you asked about, back when he was bringing Natalya over to the States and then when her son came over, and also a couple other withdrawals I’m thinking were probably for the wedding, all that shit. It all added up to over thirty thousand, so if that’s what he wants to charge your nephew, I don’t know, might be about right.”
“It ain’t like he’s trading hogs,” Stella said hotly. “This is a woman we’re talking about, not somethin’ to be bought and sold, a fugitive from a—a cruel life, on her way to enjoying the freedoms of a United States citizen…”
“Uh huh. Save the Stars and Stripes, Stella, I’m with you on this one. Family of yours is family of mine and all that. Just giving you background. Anyway, your guy Benton is pulling down fifty-three thousand a year at Courtland Mills, a little more than Manetta, but then he’s one pay grade higher. I went back four years on his taxes, nothing special there. Kept up on his mortgage, paid regular on his Shell card, blah blah blah.”
“This is what you called to tell me?” Stella yawned, stretching luxuriously. “It ain’t exactly breaking news.”
“No, what I called to tell you, other than happy goddamn birthday, was that if you were thinking Benton was gonna buy an island or a Lamborghini or something after selling off the ManTees patent, you can think again. LockeCorp paid out exactly ninety-one thousand four hundred and eighty dollars, and I got records of a wire transfer of half of it into Manetta’s account within a week. Parch put a chunk of his half into savings, prob’ly so he’d have it for taxes, and it’s been sitting there pretty much ever since. Except for…”
Stella, who was quite familiar with Chrissy’s dramatic pauses, knew she would get no further until she played her part. “What, what, whatever could it be? Why, I’m all aquiver with anticipation, Christina Jaynelle—please tell me your amazing news before I expire from curiosity!”
That got her a disgusted snort. “You just got to take the fun outta every damn thing, don’t you? Okay, fine, I’ll just tell you and then I’ll go earn us both a living since you’re too busy to work at anything that actually
pays
. A month or so after he got all that cash stashed away, Parch went and spent a big chunk of it. First was a charge for eleven thousand dollars at Hawthorn Jewelers, 444 Broadway right there in Smythe.”
“No kidding?”
“The other was an insurance policy. Half a million bucks in the event of his death.”
“And don’t tell me—Natalya’s the beneficiary,” Stella said with a sinking heart.
“Nope. In the event of his death, all of his dough goes to one Alana Parch-Javetz.”
* * *
If Natalya had
spent the night planning and scheming to kill Stella because she was too close to the truth of Parch’s demise, she hid it well. Stella found her standing at the stove, humming and stirring something in a pan, something that smelled heavenly and buttery and set Stella’s mouth to watering.
Her reading spectacles were nowhere in sight. The sweater sleeve, however, was laid out carefully on the table, and Natalya had knitted several more reasonably neat and error-free inches.
“Look what I am doing after you are sleeping, Stella!” she said proudly. “Now I must hide it again. I put away before Chip is coming home.”
Stella clucked her admiration and helped Natalya stow the project in a big cardboard box labeled
KIRKLAND KITCHEN TRASH BAGS.
Then she enjoyed a plate of eggs scrambled with chives and dill and some of Natalya’s strong coffee. True to form, Natalya nibbled on some toast and ate one forkful of eggs. Stella noted that even if she pulled off the younger-woman ruse, she was likely to starve to death in the process.
“I need to go see someone,” she said, after rinsing her plate off in the sink. “How late will Chip sleep?”
Now that she wasn’t quite as convinced that Natalya had killed her husband, since another suspect was currently deflecting suspicion, she felt warmly toward the couple. She even considered telling Natalya it was her birthday but decided that should wait until she was sure there wasn’t going to be a big awkward scene if it turned out the woman was a murderer.
“Oh, he will be up before too long. Today he is helping me washing the windows. We are spring cleaning!”
“Okeydoke, then.”
As Stella drove through town and back onto the highway toward Madison, she made a few calls.