In Death's Shadow (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

In the days immediately following my first
marathon, I ran another marathon . . . of sorts. I vacuumed the house; paid the bills; tossed out my jogging shoes and bought a new pair, on-line, from LadyFootLocker.com; sanded and repainted the patio table in a color grandly named "manor green"; and helped Paul get ready for another famous race, this one from Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island. On a sailboat. Following a gala reception on Friday evening, Paul would step aboard
Northern Lights
with the rest of her crew, making sure every sail, halyard, sheet, line, and cleat on the old Pearson 37 was shipshape and ready for a perfect getaway when the starter's pistol sounded in Annapolis Harbor on Saturday at noon.

Wednesday morning I was down in the basement up to my eyebrows in laundry, doing my part, when Paul materialized behind me. "Do I have any clean underwear?"

I'd been rooting for a stray sock in the dryer and bumped my head on the way out. "Ouch!"

"Sorry, love."

I stood up, rubbing my head. "That's okay. I'll live."

"I'm packing and couldn't find any underwear."

"That's because it's all down here." I handed him a laundry basket. "Sort away."

Paul's idea of sorting was to paw through the basket and select items he recognized, leaving the rest—my permanent press slacks and knit tops, for example—in a tangled heap. I watched him lay waste to three basketsful before asking, "Do you need a duffel bag?"

"No. Just a pillowcase."

I rummaged through a basket on the dryer and came up with three. "Which do you want? Laura Ashley, Ralph Lauren, or Bart Simpson?"

He added a neatly folded T-shirt to his pile, rested a paternal hand on top, looked down at me and smiled. "Ralph, I think."

"Ah-ha," I said, handing it to him. "Designer luggage."

I watched with amusement as Paul slid three piles of clothing into the pillowcase, gathered up the open end and swung the pillowcase over his shoulder like a buccaneer, making off with his plunder. Sailor's luggage. A matter of pride with my husband. Anything that wouldn't fit into a pillowcase stayed home.

To tell the truth, I was missing him already. The house seemed so vast and empty when Paul was away, so I'd made plans to keep busy. There was my project at St. John's, of course. And shopping for drapery fabric with Emily. I might even take in a movie or three.

I'd gotten in touch with Valerie, too, confirming my promise to join her on Thursday for a run through the park, followed by lunch at Domino's. It'd be missionary work for Valerie, of course. She'd have to gear down, for one thing, running with me, like driving 40 in a 65 mph zone. As soon as they were posted, I'd checked the race results online. Valerie's time had been truly amazing: 212th in the twenty to twenty-nine age group. I was an embarrassing 1,394th in mine.

After Paul and his pillowcase set out for the Academy, I headed over to the St. John's College library, where I was wrapping up a long-term project organizing and cataloging the extensive collection of the famous mystery writer, L.K. Bromley. The author, a sprightly eighty-something whose real name was Nadine Smith Gray, had retired several years ago to Ginger Cove, an upscale retirement community just outside Annapolis. Since I began working on her collection, we'd become friends.

Presently I was tasked with tracking down Mrs. Bromley's short stories—most of which had appeared in
Collier's
and
The Saturday Evening Post
during the fifties and sixties—with the aim of reissuing them in a single volume. Working through Mrs. Bromley's literary agent, a taciturn New Yorker with a smoker's cough whose clients had mostly predeceased him, we'd identified several publishers, and he was now pressuring me for a proposal.

It had been slow going. We didn't have a title, for one thing. When I'd brought this up the last time we met for lunch, Mrs. Bromley had promised to think about it and get back to me. I was still waiting.

I grabbed a cup of coffee in the staff area of the library, then retreated to the quiet room at the southeast corner of the main floor that served as my office. Since she hadn't called me, I would call her.

"How about that title?" I asked the author after the usual pleasantries.

Mrs. Bromley moaned. "I'm simply no good with titles, Hannah. It's a sad, sad truth, but my publishers always picked them for me."

"There's a review here somewhere," I said. "It describes you as . . . just a minute." I scrabbled around in the folder marked
Reviews
. "Ah, here it is. 'She is the consummate wordsmith,'" I read, "'whose writing style always has touches of poetry even when her subject is greed, power, murder, and retribution—and, as in
Death Be Not Proud
, the story of one woman's search for justice.'" I paused. "I am
so
disillusioned!"

Mrs. Bromley laughed. "How about 'The Collected Short Stories of L. K. Bromley,' then?"

"Borrrrrr-ing!" I paused for a moment. "You are a writer," I chided. "Words are your business."

"They've dried up, I'm afraid. When I traded in my pen for a paintbrush, Hannah, something happened. I'm having a hard time even remembering names."

"They say the proper nouns are the first to go," I chirped, regretting the words the instant they fell out of my mouth.

"That's supposed to be reassuring?" She chuckled, so I knew she hadn't taken it the wrong way. "So, Hannah, what do 'they' say about looking at your wristwatch and calling it a clock. I did that yesterday." She sighed. "Even the common nouns are deserting me. Discouraging."

"Noun deficiency anemia?" I quipped.

She laughed. "Yes, you might say that. Perhaps I should take up crossword puzzles. Use it or lose it, you know."

I doubted Mrs. Bromley had time for crossword puzzles. For the past year she'd been teaching art classes at Anne Arundel Community College three days a week. This semester, I knew, it was watercolors. Her students adored her.

"Okay, Mrs. B. Let's use it," I prodded. "First, I think we've got enough stories for two collections. Thirteen stories each."

"Really?" she said. "I'm amazed I wrote that many."

"More," I told her. "This is just the cream of the crop."

We batted titles around for a while, each more ridiculous than the last, before settling on "Maryland Is Murder" and "Chesapeake Crimes," the Collected Short Stories of L. K. Bromley, Volumes One and Two, respectively. We laughed, agreeing that the publisher would probably change the title anyway, to something more sexy, like "Bra Full of Bullets," and put a cartoon of a French maid blowing smoke off a revolver on the cover, but at least I'd checked one more thing off my To Do list.

Around four o'clock I took a break and brewed myself a cup of tea. Tina, the student aide, had just brought a copy of
The Capital
into the staff lounge. She checked the show times for movies at Annapolis Mall, then slid the newspaper toward me across the table.

Sipping my tea, I scanned the headlines. I don't know why I bothered. The SARS epidemic was still raging in the Far East, U.S. and British forces were still under fire in Iraq. Construction was still tying up traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Depressing. With my cup to my lips, I turned the pages, checking the local news, gradually making my way back to the Letters to the Editor, which in our town were usually good for a laugh.

Since my recovery, I didn't normally read the obituaries. Too depressing, like Iraq.
Three years to live
, I'd think, if the deceased were older than me or,
Whoops, should have been dead five years ago
, if not. I hadn't any intention of reading the obituaries that day, either, but while skimming an article about a brave local dog that had lost his leg to cancer, a picture halfway down the right-hand side of the page caught my eye. A woman who looked a lot like Valerie Stone. Fuller face, though, and longer hair.

I stared at the picture, hard. I set my cup down unsteadily, sloshing hot tea all over the table.
It looks like Valerie Stone because it is Valerie Stone, you idiot!
I started to hyperventilate.

No, I told myself. It can't be Valerie. You just talked to her!

I folded the paper until I was staring at the headlines again. I counted slowly to ten, breathing deeply. Maybe I'd dreamed it.

But when I opened the paper to the obituaries again, there she was: Valerie Padgett Stone. On Monday, June 9, after a long battle with cancer. There was more, of course, about her father, the Honorable Fletcher J. Padgett of Saddle River, New Jersey. About the family receiving visitors on Friday at Kramer's Funeral Home. Something about in lieu of flowers that seemed to separate into individual letters that swam around the page, rearranging themselves like Scrabble tiles until they lost all meaning.

I blinked, eyes dry, too stunned, I think, to cry.
Valerie can't be dead! We're going running tomorrow!
I pictured Valerie as I'd seen her on Saturday, smiling at me and waving from the doorway of her beautiful new home, holding Miranda, who was sound asleep, in her arms.

Not Valerie, who could run a mile in six minutes flat. Not Valerie with her yoga-in-the-morning-Pilates-in-the-afternoon body. Not Valerie. No way. Valerie was in perfect health.

Still in denial, I scurried to my office and dug my cell phone out of my purse. I stared at the buttons for a while, then paged through my phone book until
val-cell
appeared in the lighted window. I'll call her, I thought. She'll pick up.

But deep down I knew she wouldn't. I threw myself into my chair and dialed Paul at his office instead. It wasn't until I heard his cheerful voice saying "Ives" that I came completely unglued. "Valerie died!"

"What? Hannah, calm down! I can't understand a word you're saying."

"It's Valerie!" I sobbed. "Valerie Stone is dead."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paul didn't want me to go to the funeral home
alone. Or so he said. Then he smiled with sad cocker spaniel eyes, like a boy whose trip to Disney World was about to be spoiled by an airline strike. No way / was going to ruin his precious sailboat race!

"Go! Shoo! Scat!" I said, flapping my hand at him for emphasis.

I wanted, no,
needed
Paul to be on his way. In the two days that had passed since we learned of Valerie's death, he'd been smothering me with attention. You'd think he'd been assigned to suicide watch.

"Valerie was my friend, not yours," I reminded him.

He opened his mouth to protest, but I closed it with a kiss. If he said one more comforting, oh-so-understanding thing to me about Valerie, I knew I'd break down and start bawling again.

"Besides," I added a moment later, reaching up to ruffle his hair, "it'd be embarrassing to have you moping about the funeral home with a bumper sticker pasted to your forehead that says, 'I'd Rather Be Sailing.'"

After Paul had set off for the Annapolis Yacht Club, I put away my cheerful smile and dragged myself up to the bedroom. I stared into my closet—could have been minutes, could have been hours—grieving over Valerie, worrying about Miranda, and wondering about Brian.

No one could make me believe that Valerie had died of natural causes. But if I followed that thought to its logical conclusion . . .

I shivered. The husband was always suspect. But what could Brian's motive have been? Valerie's insurance money was long gone: the house, cruise, and car were proof of that. Besides, Valerie had died on Monday. Didn't Valerie tell me Brian would be out of town that day?

I sat down, hard, on the edge of the bed. I frowned. That meant Miranda . . .

Please, God, don't tell me Miranda found her mother's body!
My eyes filled with tears for the third time since morning, and I scurried into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. In mid-splash I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and wished I hadn't. Puffy eyelids, bloodshot eyes with purplish pouches underneath. If I knew a makeup artist, I'd be using the emergency entrance.

My hair wasn't too bad, though. The week before the race, I'd had it cut in a wash-and-wear bob and highlighted, just for kicks. I fluffed it with my fingers. A wash and some mousse and I'd be ready to go.

If I ever figured out what I was going to wear.

Back at the closet, I pulled out a pants suit I hadn't worn since I quit the job in Washington, D.C. Charcoal gray. It matched my mood.

To keep my mind off the funeral home—
Please, God, don't let there be an open casket
—I rummaged through my jewelry drawer looking for something to brighten up my lapel. I have fifty boxes, I swear, marked
aurora gallery
. I opened the one labeled
cat pin
and thought, not for the first time, that I should own stock in that store. If something happened to me, Aurora Gallery would have to declare Chapter 11.

I pinned on the cat and added a pink paisley scarf.

I plopped back down on the edge of the bed, checked my watch. Five o'clock. The family had been gathering at Kramer's for over an hour. Who would I know, besides Brian? And Miranda, of course, if someone thought to bring her along. I suddenly wished I hadn't been so eager to send Paul on his merry way. With Paul along, at least I'd have someone to talk to.

I rummaged in the closet, found the Ferragamos I used to wear with the gray suit, and slipped them on. They pinched. I switched to a pair of Easy Spirit pumps. Wrong color. I retrieved my Clark T-straps from under the bed and eased my feet into them. Ah, much more like it.

I could have procrastinated away another ten minutes—a hat, perhaps? I had half a dozen hat boxes—proper round ones, too—stacked on the top shelf of the closet, but I chided myself for being so ridiculous.

It's just that I have a problem with funeral homes. Especially funeral services in funeral homes. Like sending a loved one off to heaven from the lobby of a hotel. Before my mother died, she'd insisted on cremation. There'd been a service at St. Anne's—Book of Common Prayer, Rite One—with Bach and Mozart on organ and flute. Two days later, at sunset, we'd taken Mother's ashes out on Connie's sailboat and sprinkled them over the Chesapeake Bay. If you have to go, it doesn't get much better than that.

I sighed, gathered up my courage and my handbag, double-locked the front door, and wandered up Prince George to the intersection with Maryland Avenue. I turned left, killing a few more minutes by browsing the shop windows, still trying to work out in my head what I would say to Brian. I wanted to know how Valerie had died, for one thing. It seemed tactless to come right out and ask, but then, my friends will say I've never let a little thing like tact stand in my way.

For more than a century Kramer's Funeral Home had been tucked away on Cornhill Street, one of half a dozen seventeenth century streets that radiate out from State Circle like spokes. Once a grand Georgian mansion owned by a wealthy colonial tea merchant, the house had been enlarged over the years to accommodate Robert Kramer's ever-expanding services to the dead, dying, and bereaved.

I entered the lobby and looked around. A rich, red oriental carpet. A mahogany highboy. A highly polished table, perfectly round, supporting a vase containing an elaborate flower arrangement the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I touched a lily. It was cool, slightly damp, and very real.

To my right, an ornate, carpeted staircase led up to the second floor, but a red velvet rope prevented anyone from actually venturing upstairs. I circumnavigated the table, looking for someone who could point me in the right direction, and then I saw it. One of those signboards on a tripod, black, with white snap-in letters that usually spell out things like Soup du Jour: Cream of Broccoli.

Today's special was Valerie Padgett Stone. Blue Room. With an arrow pointing to the right.

It was so bald, so matter-of-fact, so . . . final. I gulped for air, glancing around the entrance hall, looking for a place to sit down, but apparently Mr. Kramer didn't want me to sit down in his lobby because he'd provided no chairs. I breathed in, and out, then followed the arrow to a room that was, as the sign said, blue. Relentlessly so. Blue carpet. Blue chairs. Blue draperies. Blue walls. Even the Kleenex boxes were blue.

And in spite of the fact that the newspaper had requested no flowers, baskets of delphiniums, as deeply blue as the South Pacific Ocean and just as beautiful, were arranged against the far wall.

Among the flowers, on a stand in front of a blue and gold brocade curtain, sat Valerie's casket, made of rosewood and so highly polished that I could see in it the reflection of the blades of a ceiling fan as it rotated slowly overhead. I took another deep, steadying breath. The lid was open.

I froze in the doorway, dreading the next half hour.

"Welcome." The voice belonged to a tall guy loitering in the foyer immediately to my right. Because of his blond hair, I figured he was related to Brian. He extended his hand and I took it, covering his hand with both of my own. "I'm so, so sorry," I said. I didn't find out till later he was the funeral director's son.

"Have you seen Brian?" I asked.

Kramer, Jr. pointed.

Brian, dressed in a dark navy suit with a red and white polka-dotted tie, chatted practically forehead-to-forehead with a grandmotherly type wearing a pink A-line skirt, a matching sweater set, and a short strand of fat, Barbara Bush pearls. Her fingers dug deeply into his sleeve. I knew the type: she would prattle on forever.

"You might sign the guest book," Junior suggested. "While you wait."

Using a silver pen actually attached to the book by a chain—can't be too careful, those Kramers—I scrawled my name, and Paul's, on the top line of a new page. At least thirty people had signed the book before me; not a single name I recognized. They were scattered throughout the room now, sitting pensively on chairs, staring at their hands or the walls. Some were standing, clustered in groups of three or four, making small talk.

When I looked his way again, Brian was holding court next to the casket, talking to a young woman wearing a sleeveless dress with poppies splashed all over it. If I wanted to speak with him now, I'd have to go up there. Next to the body.

I hesitated, my hand clutching the back of a chair, the metal cold beneath my fingers. Now that I'd signed the guest book, perhaps I could slip away before anyone noticed me? Then Brian caught my eye, and I was doomed.

I weaved through the crowd to join him. "I'm so, so sorry, Brian," I said after he released me from a hug.

Brian turned to his companion. "Corinne, this is Hannah Ives, one of Valerie's friends."

Corinne offered me a wan smile and a limp hand before flouncing off to join a group of other twenty-somethings huddled behind the lectern. They looked disgustingly fit, like the aerobics instructors they probably were.

Brian rested his hands on my shoulders and studied me with dry, bloodshot eyes. "Why did she have to go and die on me, Hannah?" His voice broke and he croaked, "What am I going to do?"

"I know how hard it is," I said. "I lost my mother a couple of years ago and a day doesn't go by that I don't think about her. Sometimes I hear a joke and I pick up the phone to tell her because I know she'd laugh her head off . . ." My voice trailed off. "It gets easier to bear, over time, but the pain never goes away, Brian. I miss my mother terribly."

A huge tear rolled down Brian's cheek.

"Oh, damn! I didn't mean to upset you." I snatched three tissues out of a nearby box and handed them to Brian, who used all three to blow his nose.

"I wasn't there," he said, crumpling the tissues into a ball. He turned to his wife, lying motionless in her casket, and in a voice that was barely audible managed to choke out, "I wasn't there for you, darling. I wasn't there when you needed me."

Under the circumstances, there was no way I could avoid looking at Valerie, too.

Even in death Valerie was beautiful. She was dressed all in white: in satins, seed pearls, and lace. I cringed. It must have been her wedding gown. Her hands, as beautifully manicured as they had been in life, were folded at her waist, and between her fingers was twined a long golden chain with an engraved, heart-shaped locket on the end of it. I knew, without opening it, that the locket held pictures of Brian and Miranda, face-to-face, unaging, for all eternity.

I stared at Valerie's cheeks: plump, flushed, warm. Logically, I knew they weren't. Logically, I knew that if I worked up the nerve to touch her—as some of the other mourners had done—Valerie would feel cold as stone. Stone. I swallowed hard. This was hardly the time for puns.

Still, I couldn't persuade myself that Valerie was dead. She looked peacefully asleep, eyes closed, cheeks flushed, just as she had during our hospital stay.

Awake, Valerie had always been vibrant, bouncy . . . so, so . . . there was no other word for it, so
alive
. I found myself staring at Valerie's chest, willing it to rise and fall and feeling astonished when it didn't.

I was standing with Brian, praying silently, when I became aware of the music, wafting in from speakers carefully camouflaged within the decorative hexagonals of the wainscoting. Mozart, I thought, then a jarring segue into "You Light Up My Life." After a bit, electronic violins swooped and soared into "On Eagle's Wings." How Valerie and I would have laughed over that!

I reached out and took Brian's hand, squeezed it. "What killed her, Brian?"

"Her heart just stopped," he whispered.

"Her heart?" I couldn't believe it. "But Brian," I said, turning to look at him, "she trained. She could run a mile in nothing flat. How could a heart as healthy as that simply stop?"

"It was the chemo," he said, simply. "All those drugs, most of them experimental. They said it could weaken her heart. It was a known risk."

I remembered the consent form the hospital made me sign before starting my own chemotherapy, the catalog of warnings about side effects that ranged from aggravated hangnails to death. I nodded. "Oh. Yes. I see."

But I didn't see. How many people did I know of who were actually killed by their chemotherapy? Not very many.

And if chemo didn't kill her, who did?

Not Brian, surely. He was no longer the beneficiary of Valerie's life insurance policy, I reminded myself. Whoever bought it was.

Whoever bought it
. A frisson spawned of pure, cold evil shuddered up my spine.

"Brian, can I ask you something?"

Next to me, I thought I felt Brian stiffen, but his answer was disarmingly casual. "Sure. Shoot."

"Losing Valerie so suddenly like that reminds me that time is precious. I want to make the most of every minute I've got." I paused, waiting for Brian to finish shaking hands with a tweedy couple in their mid-seventies. "I've been thinking," I said after the couple had moved on. "I've got a life insurance policy. Not as much as Valerie's, I suppose, but it's gotta be worth something. Maybe I should do what you and Valerie did? Cash it in? Take a cruise?"