chapter 6
Ruth had a casual policy about opening up on Sundays-if you asked her, she’d say “noonish.” I had been cooling my heels outside Mother Earth for ten minutes before she appeared at the intersection of Main and Conduit carrying a bag of bagels from Chick ’n’ Ruth’s deli. I caught sight of her strolling down the street, munching on half a bagel, window-shopping as if she were a tourist with all the time in the world. Under her mohair shawl she wore a natural linen outfit in dark lavender which I thought would be more suitable for May than for January. The slacks flopped loosely around her ankles, casually rumpled, as if she’d been sleeping in them. Knowing Ruth, though, she’d probably paid extra for the wrinkles.
Customers weren’t exactly lining up at the door as if waiting to buy tickets to the next Star Wars movie-I was the only one, in fact-so I hoped we’d have time to talk before the tourists and day-trippers finished with their Sunday brunch specials and started wandering in.
Ruth finally noticed me. “Hannah! What a delight!” She stuck the bagel bag under her arm, sorted through a collection of keys on a large ring, unlocked the door, and stood aside while I walked ahead of her into the shop. Once inside, she jiggled the bag enticingly under my nose, but I turned it down. I didn’t have any appetite, and Ruth didn’t, either, after I told her a few minutes later what Georgina had said about Daddy.
Ruth nearly choked on her bagel. “Bullshit!” she exploded. A speck of cream cheese clung to her lip. She threw the bagel down on the display case so hard that it bounced, landing cream-cheese-side down on the glass.
Even though I shared her anger, I was surprised to find myself playing devil’s advocate. “What if-”
“Don’t go there, Hannah. Our sister’s delusional.”
“But-”
“Didn’t happen. Never happened.”
“Can you be certain?”
“OK. Supposing, just supposing it were true. Don’t you think it odd that Daddy would abuse Georgina but not either one of us? And we didn’t notice a thing.” She sat down with a grunt in the wrought-iron chair behind the counter. “Sexual abuse! I can’t even think it. Makes me ill.”
“Me, too.” I pushed aside an elaborate kinetic clock made out of brass and sat down on the edge of a display table near the front of the shop. “Georgina keeps asking about Sicily, as if the key to this whole mess lies in Italy somewhere. Tell me about Sicily, Ruth.”
Ruth thought for a few moments. “I was nine when we lived in Sicily; you were seven. Georgina was just a baby, toddling around after the maid, thumb in her mouth.” She stared out the window toward the street, her face grim, then looked back at me. “You know, Mom and Dad were hardly ever home. They were out doing the social, hands-across-the-sea sort of thing-receptions, cocktail parties-sometimes two in one night. Mom kept all the invitations in a scrapbook. Probably still has it somewhere.”
The chimes over the door jingled and a customer came in. Ruth suddenly noticed the wayward bagel, scraped it off the counter, and tossed it into the trash. I wiped the glass clean with a napkin while Ruth helped the woman pick out some natural bath salts especially designed to relieve stress. I could have used a few pounds of that just then.
“And besides,” Ruth continued as the chimes sounded as the door closed on the woman’s blue-jean-encased behind, “Daddy was often too drunk after parties to do anything more than fall into bed.”
I looked up in surprise. “I don’t remember that!”
“You were probably too young to notice.”
I considered what Ruth had told me. “Could he have done something during an alcoholic blackout?”
“Get real, Hannah. Georgina shared a room with the maid. A two-hundred-pound man crawling into bed with a toddler would hardly go unnoticed.”
My stomach lurched at the picture. I’d read about sickos like that in the newspapers. And my father was no sicko, I was certain of that. This had to be some ghastly misunderstanding. “What are we going to do about Georgina?”
Ruth turned a switch that started the water gurgling over the stones in a miniature rock garden. She shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
“Won’t Georgina have to prove Daddy abused her? And there’ll be no proof of that, will there, because it simply didn’t happen!”
I fell back against the counter. “I can’t decide which is worse-Daddy being arrested for murder or Daddy being branded a child abuser.” I pressed my hand against my chest, as if to contain my heart, which was beating wildly. “Oh, my God! Or both!”
“Frankly, Hannah, I suspect the police aren’t particularly concerned about the sexual abuse angle.”
“Why not? Isn’t it against the law?”
“Sure, but I seem to remember reading that sexual abuse has to be reported within a certain amount of time. The statute of limitations may have run out a long time ago.” She chewed thoughtfully on her thumbnail. “Besides, if something happened in Sicily, the jurisdiction would be military, not civilian. I doubt that police in the States could touch him; and Daddy’s long out of the Navy.”
“Whether it’s true or not, it gives Daddy a powerful motive to have murdered Georgina’s therapist,” I suggested.
“If it were me, I’d have been so angry that I’d want to kill Georgina.”
“I think he blames the shrink, not Georgina. You should have seen his face, Ruth. He was crushed by what Georgina said. Absolutely numb.”
“Don’t the police suspect Georgina, then?”
“I have no idea what she told them, but they must realize how much she depended on Dr. Sturges just to get through the day. I think they consider her a witness, not a serious suspect.”
While I perched uncomfortably on the edge of the table, Ruth began to move nervously around the shop, realigning bottles of herbal shampoo, folding and refolding batik wall hangings, standing incense sticks up in ceramic Japanese bowls of powdered lime. She held a match to one of the sticks and soon the pleasant odor of sandalwood filled the shop. “By the time I get back from Bali, the police will probably have arrested that therapist’s ex-husband or her spurned lover, or a vagrant maybe. Trust me. The whole thing will have blown over.”
I remembered how much I had wished the whole mess with Paul and that student had simply blown over, but it had never been satisfactorily resolved, and the doubt I had carried about with me like a heavy stone had nearly wrecked my marriage. Fortunately, Paul and I had moved beyond that a long time ago. Jennifer Goodall, the cause of so much unhappiness, was serving on some aircraft carrier in the middle of the Persian Gulf. She was the Navy’s problem now.
Ruth stood in the center of the store, her hands on her hips, glaring. At first I thought she was angry with me, but then I noticed she was staring at something behind me. “Oh damn. Just what I need. Here comes old S.H.”
“Who?”
“Old shithead. Brains in his crotch.”
“Eric?”
Ruth smirked. Eric was Ruth’s ex-husband, Eric Gannon, who still owned a half interest in Mother Earth. They had been married nine years when he began alleviating the painful onset of an early midlife crisis by taking a string of newer models out on test drives. The day Ruth realized he was of no more use to her than her Water Pik shower massage, she pitched him and his prize collection of 33⅓ records out on the street, but, being Ruth, kept the turntable he needed to play them. Eric had dyed his graying hair dark brown since I’d seen him last, but his face was young, unlined, and, despite it being January, incredibly tanned. Ruth, who had friends who kept her informed of Eric’s every move, would probably tell me that the bimbo du jour was some sweet young thing he met at the tanning studio out on West Street.