"Very good," I said.
"Thank you." He grinned. "Wine?"
"No thanks, I'm actually working. Mrs. Bromley?" I asked, just to be polite. Mrs. Bromley rarely drank before four in the afternoon, especially outside the home.
To my surprise, she nodded. "I do believe I will. A chardonnay, I think."
Davon brought a gallon jug of wine to the table and plunked it down. Using the blue crayon, he made a hatch mark on the paper tablecloth. "We're on the honor system here," he explained. "That's one glass. Just keep track and let me know."
Mrs. Bromley eyed the gigantic bottle, then looked at me. "Sure you can't help me with that?"
"Well," I said, signaling to Davon. "Maybe half a glass."
Davon returned with a glass for me and a round loaf of herb bread. "Hot from the oven," he said. I watched, stomach rumbling, as he drizzled olive oil onto an empty plate and grated fresh pepper and parmesan cheese into it.
When Davon left with our order-linguini with clam sauce and a Caesar salad to share-I tore off a portion of bread and dipped it into the olive oil mixture. "So, how's your art show progressing?" I inquired.
"Fine," she said.
"Need any help?" I asked around a savory mouthful of bread.
"No, my students are doing most of that."
Two tables over somebody named Tom was being serenaded by a dark-haired waitresses in a clear, high soprano. Happy Birthday, she sang, to the tune of "Ridi, Pagliaccio." A single candle stood in a piece of cheesecake on the table in front of the honoree. The flame wavered as the soprano really got into it, belting out the last il cor with such enthusiasm that I thought she'd beat the birthday boy to the punch and blow the darn thing out.
"She's so skinny," I commented, sotto voce, to Mrs. Bromley, "that if she turned sideways she'd disappear."
Mrs. Bromley looked up from her wine. "What was that, dear?"
"I said… never mind. It wasn't important." I reached out and touched her hand. "You seem distracted today, Mrs. B. Is everything okay?"
"Everything's fine," she said. She set her glass down on the table and pinched off a morsel of bread. "So, tell me about your new project, Hannah."
Unless I'd completely misread her, everything was not "fine." I'd never seen Mrs. Bromley acting so squirrelly.
Davon brought our linguini, and while we dug into it, I explained about my undercover assignment at Victory Mutual and my relationship with Donna Hudgins. "What I'm hoping to find, in the final sort, is a high number of policies that have changed from private ownership to corporate ownership, to companies like ViatiPro."
"What then?" she asked.
"Then I turn the information over to Donna Hudgins and her claims review people. They'll dig up the actual policies, look at the death certificates, and compare the time that elapsed between the signing of the policy and the death of the insured person."
Mrs. Bromley laid her fork and spoon across her dish and pushed her linguini, half eaten, to the center of the table. "I'm embarrassed to tell you that I wasn't entirely truthful with you the other day." Tears shimmered in her eyes. "I've been agonizing over whether to tell you or not."
“Tell me what?"
She picked up a green crayon and doodled little circles on the tablecloth. "I'm just a foolish old woman."
"That's the silliest thing you've ever said to me, Mrs. Bromley."
"It's true, I'm afraid. Why else would I have fallen for the sales pitch of that dreadful man?"
I had been leaning forward over my linguini, but I fell back into my chair. "Jablonsky?"
My friend laid down her crayon and nodded.
I couldn't believe it. If someone as level-headed as Mrs. Bromley had snapped up the bait, what hope was there for the average senior citizen when the likes of Jablonsky oozed under the door?
"I had two policies," she said, "so I sold one of them." She looked away from me, out the narrow slats in the window and into the parking lot. "I'm not going to tell you what I invested the proceeds in."
Now it was my turn to feel embarrassed. Here I'd spent days rattling on and on about the evils of buying and selling viaticals. It was as if I'd spent hours complaining about what a lemon my new car was, only to find out that Mrs. Bromley'd gone out and bought exactly the same model.
Mrs. Bromley looked so stricken that I moved quickly to soften the blow. "I'm sure it made sense at the time, Mrs. B. It's not like you're disinheriting your children or anything."
She turned to face me again, and I noticed for the first time a slight puffiness in her eyelids. She had been crying. "Now I'm either paranoid or losing my mind," she whispered. "A few months ago, I was playing croquet on the green at Ginger Cove."
"Yes?" Ginger Cove residents played an annual match with the students from St. John's College. St. John's usually got trounced.
"While I was lining up a shot," Mrs. Bromley continued, "I noticed this cable TV installer coming out of Clark Gammel's building." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "That was the same day they found Clark's body. I didn't make a connection between the two events at the time. But then, just last week, I could have sworn I saw the same man delivering an armchair to Building 8100." She paused and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Tim Burns lived in 8100, Hannah, and he died, too. He died the same day I saw that chair being delivered. And yesterday," she continued, her words tumbling rapidly over one another, "I saw a gardener working on the tulip beds just outside my building, and he looked a lot like that cable guy, too."
I'd never seen Mrs. Bromley so rattled, and it worried me. When my mother died, she'd been there for me. When my father disappeared into a bizarre alcohol rehabilitation program without telling anybody, she'd been my rock. I found myself a bit bewildered by the role reversal.
I watched a tear roll down her pale cheek. Nobody really notices the faces of people in uniform, I thought. Nobody, that is, except my friend, Mrs. Bromley, who in nearly half a century as a mystery novelist tended to notice everything. It would be a mistake to minimize her concerns.
Mrs. Bromley extracted her hand-I'd been holding it tightly-and bent to retrieve her handbag from the floor. She set the bag on her lap and slipped two photographs out of an envelope in the outside pouch. She laid the photos on the table in front of me. "I took these with my digital camera when I thought he wasn't looking."
The color was slightly off and the photos were grainy; they'd obviously been printed out on Mrs. Bromley's home computer. Although taken from a distance, they showed a lanky, broad-shouldered man wearing khaki pants and a dark green polo shirt, exactly what one might expect on a lawn care professional. In the first picture, the gardener was bent over, one foot on a shovel, frozen forever in the act of pushing the shovel into the ground. A ball cap obscured his face. In the second picture, the man had turned sideways but the photo was too fuzzy to make any sort of positive identification. He could have been any white male of that general height and build-Paul, or my father, even.
"Looks like a gardener to me, Mrs. B."
"But what if he isn't just a gardener? Residents have died at Ginger Cove recently, many more than one might expect. We were talking about it at dinner the other day."
"It could be a coincidence," I said without much conviction.
"Coincidence my foot! Clark sold his life insurance policy to Jablonsky. Tim Burns told me he was going to do the same. I know I sold the wretched man my policy." Her eyes flashed. The Mrs. Bromley I knew and loved was back. "What if," she murmured, so softly I had to strain to hear her over the hoots of Birthday Boy and Co. still celebrating at the next table. "What if Jablonsky is hurrying things along a bit?"
I tapped one of the photos. "This is not a picture of Gilbert Jablonsky."