“Jack,” Charlotte said, surprised, “what are you doing here?”
I stopped what I was doing to turn back to them. I’d told Tom that Charlotte was perfectly preserved. Like jam? he’d asked. I’d merely shaken my head.
I knew Billie was thirty-six, and Charlotte had made a point of telling me she’d given birth to her only child when she was twenty. But there was no way Charlotte Attenborough was in her midfifties; she was sixty-five if she was a day. She wore her short gray-blond hair swept up in what boys from the fifties would have called a ducktail. She was at least five feet eight inches tall, but the ramrod-straight way she held her slender self, shoulders back, abs tight, made her look more like six feet. This night, she wore a midcalf, dark gray sheath-style dress. Despite its fashionable draping, her attire gave her the look of a drill sergeant.
“Well?” she said to Jack.
As if on cue, both of our family’s animals—a big, floppy, exceptionally affectionate bloodhound named Jake, and a long-haired feline named Scout—made their presence known at our back door. I’d called them to come in when I’d first arrived home, but neither had been interested then.
“I’ll let in the pets.” Jack leaped up from his chair and went to the back door before I could say, Careful, they’re going to be muddy!
Which, in retrospect, would have been a very good idea, but not nearly as much fun. Charlotte, who clearly did not like dogs, flinched when Jake came bounding in. She screamed when he jumped up on her and muddied her impeccable sheath. The thick mud on his paws might not have done so much damage to Charlotte’s dress if she hadn’t then shrieked, “Stop, you!” and tried to whack Jake away. Even though I called him and tried to snag his collar, Charlotte’s recoiling move made Jake want to be friends even more, so that he sprang up again on Charlotte, who tried to bat him away. “You stupid dog!” she cried. “Go away!”
Jake, who didn’t like to be called stupid, began whimpering, and again vaulted up on Charlotte, who had turned her backside on him, which meant Jake’s paws landed on the reverse side of the sheath, which I figured was now pretty much ruined.
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” I kept repeating. My godfather, who had tried less successfully than I had to contain Jake, slumped in defeat on a kitchen chair.
When I finally managed to snag Jake’s leash, I led him out of the kitchen. Scout the cat, who was much better at figuring out when he wasn’t wanted, had already slunk away. I managed to corral the two of them in the pet-containment area, where I gave them a perfunctory drying off with fresh towels that I kept in their little home for just this purpose.
Oh, Lord, but I wished Tom would come home.
“Well, Charlotte,” I said in my conciliatory voice when I returned to the kitchen, “again, I’m sorry. Would you like to see the contract?”
She was at our sink, where she was rubbing her muddied dress with a wet paper towel. When she faced me, her eyes were slits. “This is a disaster,” she said, and a cold finger of guilt ran down my spine.
“Dogs do get muddy when it rains,” Jack said, attempting mournfulness. “It’s, what do you call it? A force of nature.”
“Stop it,” Charlotte retorted. “I’ve been trying to phone you all day, too, but you won’t return my calls.”
Now Jack’s voice was genuinely mournful. “My best friend was found dead in a ravine, Charlotte.”
She turned to him, startled. “Who, Finn? What was he doing in a ravine?” Her tone implied that death could be avoided if one could but stay out of ravines. Jack just shook his head.
“It was a car accident, Charlotte,” I said in a low voice.
“Was anyone else hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“This is a tragedy,” she said to Jack. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks,” said Jack disconsolately.
Nobody said anything for a few minutes, and so I took a deep breath. “Now, Charlotte, here are the contract changes.” I handed her the sheet.
She perused the paper. “This looks fine.”
Charlotte kept glancing at Jack, who would not meet her gaze. I reflected once more on how much beyond me it was to know how or why these two had managed to keep a relationship going for a day, much less four months. Charlotte was elegant, perfectionistic, and expected to get her way, even if she had to pay for it. Her house in Flicker Ridge looked like a furniture showcase. Jack was generous, openhearted, and a slob, and the house he was renovating looked like a tornado had blown off the roof and thoroughly jumbled the interior…and no one had bothered to clean up since.
From the beginning of their odd relationship, I’d suspected that there was more desire to keep things going on Charlotte’s side than there was on Jack’s. He told me he’d been gentle, but firm, when she said she wanted him to stop spending so much time with Doc Finn. Doc Finn was his friend, and Jack wanted to go fishing and do…well, what ever his friend wanted. Charlotte had said he should want to spend more time with her.
Jack had demurred. But Charlotte had persevered. In fact, the previous month, she had confided to me that she expected to become engaged to Jack very soon. After a couple of weeks had gone by, I’d gently hinted around to Jack about this, as in, “Do you think you’d ever be wanting me to do your wedding reception?” He’d shaken his head at the suggestion, and told me he had no plans to get married again. His first wife had died of cancer before I’d known her. All this made me think that there were no nuptial festivities for Jack and Charlotte in the foreseeable future.
“I suppose that’s the cleanest I’m going to get it.” Charlotte had put the contract down and was working on her dress again. Now she turned away from the sink and gave me a forlorn look, as if the dog, and Jack’s unhelpfulness, had hurt her deeply, and I was supposed to do something about it.
But I didn’t know what to do. “So, Charlotte, what do you think of the figures?” I tried again.
“They’re fine.” But she’d spent only a moment looking at them. She pulled out her checkbook and wrote me a check. “Goldy?” she asked. “Can you be out at Gold Gulch Spa at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so we can do the walk-through, and you can figure out how to use their kitchen?”
“Sure,” I replied, although I didn’t feel too sure of it, frankly.
“Yes,” said Jack, “I’ll bring her.”
“That’s not necessary, Jack,” I said.
“Jack,” said Charlotte, attempting to be mollifying, “you don’t need to be there. I want to spend time with you, but not there, not tomorrow. If you need to grieve for your friend, then you should do that. Out at the spa, you’ll just get in the way, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart?
When nobody said anything, Charlotte said, “Will you call me tonight, Jack, if you need me?” He looked up at her hopefully and nodded. “Well then,” she went on, “I guess I need to go home and change before the fund-raiser.”
When the door had closed, I turned to my godfather. “Jack, you don’t have to take me out to Gold Gulch tomorrow. I can manage.”
Jack made his face blank, a practice I’d seen him do before. “No, but I want to go. To protect you from this Victor Lane character.”
“I don’t need protecting, thanks.”
“Uh-huh. Last time I looked, your first husband disproved that particular theorem.”
“Oh, Jack, don’t—”
“Now,” he interrupted, “tell me why Tom is investigating the death of my best friend.”