“How well do you know Rosa Bond?”
“Tilton Bond’s wife? I’ve bumped into her once or twice at social events. Why?”
“It was Rosa who phoned me, and asked if she could enlist our services.”
“Our services?”
Dan grinned.“And when I say ‘our services’ of course I mean your services. You’re really starting to make a name for yourself as an investigative reporter.”
“Rosa Bond wants to hire me?”
“That’s what I understood. She didn’t want to talk on the phone, but I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it when she arrives…” He checked his watch. “In about ten minutes.”
“Rosa Bond is coming here?”
Dan nodded and got up.“I told her you’d be more than happy to place yourself at her disposal.” He gave her a smile and tapped his nose. “I have a hunch this might prove to be one heck of a story.” Just then, the door to the outer office opened and closed. The aged editor’s pristinely white beard waggled withexcitement. “I think that might be the lady already.” He took a slight bow. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Thanks, Dan.”
“I thank you,” said Dan, and quickly went to greet Mrs. Bond, or whoever it might be.
Moments later, the new arrival was ushered into Odelia’s office by Dan, who quickly retreated, but not before saying, “I’ll leave you in Odelia’s capable hands, Mrs. Bond.”
“Thanks, Mr. Goory,” said the lady, and took a seat in front of Odelia.
She was a smallish woman, with short ash-blond hair and a sort of squarish face. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had one of those kind faces, which gave the impression she was a good person at heart, and kindness always lends a certain beauty to a person, I’ve always thought, and this certainly was the case with Mrs. Bond.
“How old do you think she is, Max?” asked Dooley.
“Forty-something?” I said. “It’s hard to say, Dooley.”
“It’s always hard to say with humans,” my friend mused. “And I wonder why that is.”
“It’s because humans try to mask their real age,” said Harriet. “They always want to look younger than they actually are. And so they dye their hair and apply all kinds of creams to their faces, or even have operations like facelifts or nips and tucks.”
“Facelifts?” asked Dooley. “Why would you want to have your face lifted?”
“It’s actually not the entire face that’s lifted, Dooley,” I said. “Only the parts that hang a little, like the jawline or the corners of the mouth.”
“Oh, so they don’t lift the whole face?”
“No, only specific sections.”
He stared at the woman, who’d placed her purse on the floor and was gathering the courage to launch into her story. “But if they lift their faces, where does the part that’s been lifted go? Or do they simply lift it and then trim it at the top, like a hedge?”
“Sure, Dooley,” said Brutus with a grin. “They lift it and chop off the top part.”
Dooley looked horrified at this.“But… what happens to the bottom part?”
“The bottom part stays where it is,” said Brutus. “They grab them by the hair and simply pull from the top, see, then tie it off with a piece of twine and chop off the excess skin, and since the skin is then stretched out, the wrinkles all disappear like magic.”
“But that’s terrible!” said Dooley, as I could see he was picturing the gruesome procedure in vivid detail.
“And some of them do it more than once,” Brutus continued, relishing in his sordid tale.
“More than once!”
“Oh, sure. They have three or four or five facelifts in a row.”
“But soon there won’t be any skin left!” Dooley cried.
“And that’s exactly the problem with facelifts. Everything ends up in the wrong place. Their eyes are on their foreheads, their mouths are where their noses used to be, and their chins are where their mouths used to be. So they end up talking through their chin, blow their noses through their mouths and watch television from the top of their heads.”
“But that’s terrible!”
“Don’t listen to Brutus, Dooley,” I said. “He’s exaggerating.”
“I’m not,” said Brutus with a touch of indignation, but his grin was still firmly in place, which detracted from his righteous indignation, effectively nullifying it.
“So what can I do for you, Mrs. Bond?” asked Odelia, placing her hands on her desk and interlacing her fingers.
“I find myself in something of a pickle, Mrs. Kingsley,” said the woman, looking nervous as she launched into her tale.
“So you told Dan,” said Odelia, nodding.
“Before we begin, I wanted to ask if I can rely on your complete discretion?”
“Absolutely,” said Odelia. “Nothing of what you tell me will leave this room, unless you want it to.”
The woman nodded, satisfied.“The thing is that all of a sudden I find myself the victim of… well, blackmail.”
“Someone is blackmailing you?”
The woman nodded, and an expression of extreme concern slid over her face, the mask of composure slipping.“You see, before I married Tilton, I was married to another man—in fact I had a completely different life before I settled into the one I now share with my husband.”
“What do you mean?”
The woman seemed to hesitate.“Promise me you won’t tell anyone.”
“I promise,” Odelia said.
“I used to be married to a man named Clive Atcheson.” She gave Odelia an anxious look. “Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
“I don’t think I have.”
“This all happened nine years ago, in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I used to live at the time. Wilmington is where I was born, and so was Clive. You see, Clive used to run the local branch of Capital First Bank, and for a long time we were very happy. I married Clive straight out of college, and we settled down and had two kids very quickly. I was a stay-at-home mom for a while, and Clive made quite a career at the bank. We lived a good life, Mrs. Kingsley, and I can say that I was happy then. Very happy.”
“So what happened?”
“Clive robbed the bank.”
“He robbed his own bank?”
Mrs. Bond nodded.“One night he didn’t come home, and instead two police officers showed up, and told me that Clive had taken all the money from the big vault, and had disappeared.”
“My God.”
“And the worst part is that his secretary also disappeared. Janice Schiller. The police told me they figured Clive and Janice were having an affair, and were in it together, and had run off with the money.” She looked up, and a sad look had stolen over her face. “So you see, from one day to the next I discovered not only that my husband had been cheating on me with his secretary, but that he was a thief and that he’d robbed his bank.”
“So what happened?”
She shook her head.“Later the police discovered that Clive had rented a car and had driven it across the border into Mexico. And from there the trail went cold.”
“So your husband robbed the bank, then ran off to Mexico with his secretary.”
“Yes. He left me with two small kids, and with a lot of questions from the police, who didn’t seem to believe I wouldn’t have known what he was planning. They kept a close eye on me for the next couple of months, believing that sooner or later get Clive might get in touch. Of course he never did. He’s probably lying on some sandy beach somewhere, sipping cocktails and living the good life with Janice by his side. And since I found myself the subject of a lot of foul gossip, and my kids as well, I decided to leave my hometown. I changed my name from Wendy Atcheson to Rosa Gale, and we settled down here, far away from the place where I was born, and where my life had been shattered by a selfish thieving cheat. Then before long I met a man, this time a good and decent man.”
“Tilton Bond.”
“We hit it off, and I’m happy to say that we’ve been happily married for the past eight years.”
“So what about this blackmailer?”
“I got a phone call last night. A male voice I didn’t recognize. This man said that he knew who I was—that he knew all about my past, and if I wanted to make sure my secret didn’t get out, I could buy his silence by making a generous donation. Five thousand dollars seemed like a good start,he said.”