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Friday, September 13th (a very long day)
Pellegato Accounting was nestled between a florist and a bike shop on one of the streets across from the courthouse. Charlotte had called Diane while waiting for Helene to get Olivia settled in at the hospital, explained what was going on, and was grateful that she was able to drop by after regular office hours. One bonus of the late hour was being able to get a parking space right in front of the office’s window, which was outfitted with Venetian blinds with red cords, and slats alternately tinted cream and pale green, giving it the appearance of a giant ledger book. Diane actually did everything on computers, but the local Chamber of Commerce encouraged downtown businesses to use traditional visual signifiers, such as the red-and-white striped pole at Phil’s Barber Shop, and the giant nutcracker-style wooden soldiers that stood guard at the Toy Emporium.
The staff had already gone home and Diane herself unlocked the door, looking every inch not like a traditional accountant. She took Casual Fridays seriously, wearing pale purple jeans and a long deep purple sweater that set off her peaches and cream complexion and black short-cropped hair. Her high-top sneakers were purple, too. Only the horn-rim glasses suggested her profession, and they were the kind of assertive glasses that made Charlotte reach up to touch the reading glasses shoved into her hair like a head band just to make sure they were still there, and not, perhaps, left behind in the Jeep or at Helene’s. Diane gave Charlotte a hug, then held her at arm’s length and looked her over with genuine concern.
“How are you doing? How’s Helene’s sister? How’s Helene?”
“Helene is calming down, mostly. Olivia’s still unconscious. There’s bleeding in the brain, so the prognosis isn’t good, especially given her age.”
“Coffee? Tea?” Charlotte said thanks but shook her head no, and Diane continued. “That’s such a shock, somebody hurting an old woman like that, and just a few blocks away, and connected to someone you know.”
They moved from the waiting room to Diane’s office, where they sat down in the pair of armchairs in front of the desk. Charlotte rubbed her eyes, then forehead and the back of her neck. The strain of the day was catching up with her.
“You look exhausted. Is there anything I can get you? An aspirin? A smoke? Bourbon?” asked Diane.
Charlotte smiled. “That’s a great selection, Diane, but I’d better not. I don’t know that it’s exhaustion so much as a combination of shock and weirdness. Maybe even a little bit of fear, especially for Helene. I mean, we have no idea what actually happened there, who did this or why. It’s mystifying.”
“I would imagine the first question would be, who benefits?” said Diane. “I mean, that is, if Olivia dies. Do you think?”
“Her son, I would imagine. But he evidently hasn’t been around much, and I don’t think his own mother would use a bat on him.”
“Not unless he came in in the middle of the night and she thought he was a burglar.”
“She was still dressed in street clothes, and there were books scattered on the floor.”
“Sounds like a murder mystery. Complete with bloody baseball bat. That is, if she dies. Close enough. Or sounds likely.” Diane had picked up on Charlotte’s fear of the unknown, and her eyes were wide and bright behind her glasses. “So the police haven’t a clue?”
“They might, but if they do, they’re not telling us. I hate not knowing, you know? Makes me want to do something, anything!”
“Maybe something will come to light tomorrow, or you’ll remember a detail that will help the police.”
Charlotte smiled ruefully. “Yeah, right, like I’d make a good Miss Marple. I’m so observant I didn’t even see my own disaster coming.” She looked down at the office carpet, tracing the pattern with her toe. “Between coming to terms with what’s happened in my own life and now this, my head is in a whirl. Maybe it’s crass of me to be thinking about this when someone’s life is hanging by a thread, but I’m also afraid that now there probably won’t be an editing job. I was really looking forward to it, too.”
“Yeah, it’s crass, but we can do crass just between the two of us,” said Diane. “Your situation is serious enough to make it understandable.”
She handed Charlotte a folder that was lying on the desk, and went into accountant mode.
“The first thing I wanted to say, is that you’ve been a long-time client and I consider you a friend, so I’m waiving my fee until you make enough to pay taxes again.”
Charlotte started to protest, but Diane was having none of it. “Shut it. Don’t argue with me. It’s just between us. Here’s the budget, the numbers you need to work with. But those are just the numbers. Obviously there are different ways of going about reaching these numbers, and some will be more challenging than others. As we discussed before, the first thing is to sell your house as soon as possible, which will get rid of that mortgage payment, and the insurance and utilities, and of course those ridiculous property taxes. As you can see,” she pointed at a couple of different columns, “if you eliminate your housing-related expenses, you’ll have a much better chance of making ends meet with a reduced income. That will put you back in charge of your life.”
Charlotte felt her glasses slide down her nose and her heart sink when she compared the numbers. “You’re not kidding. Seeing it laid out like this really brings it home. I guess it is time to get hold of a real estate agent and have a moving sale.”
“Do you have an agent in mind?”
“No, actually. I used Bernie Bysell last time. He was so annoying. But I think he’s retired now.”
Diane laughed. “Why, didn’t you like being called 'sweetheart,' and 'little darling?'
“No!” Charlotte laughed.
“Actually,” said Diane, “Bysell Realty is still going strong, and there’s a Women’s Business Forum member working there, Lola McKennie, who everyone says is a very hard worker, very dedicated to getting houses sold quickly. She’s done the whole single mom thing, too, and I suspect she would be appreciative of your situation right now.”
“Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”
Diane hesitated and looked at the clock. “Would it be okay, Charlotte, if I give her a call right now? The Women’s Forum really encourages us to make at least three personal-contact referrals every month, and this one would count. The advantage in it for you is that you’ll get more priority than otherwise.”
“Sure, fine, that would be great. Glad to be of help.”
Diane made the call in her usual cheerful phone voice and Charlotte heard herself being referred to as a “friend,” and her situation as “a perfect storm,” and could make out a woman’s voice saying, “YES!” when Diane mentioned Lake Parkerton.
Diane looked over. “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning okay?”
Charlotte nodded, and was impressed by the speed of doing things this way. Diane confirmed the appointment, along with Charlotte’s address and phone number.
“You’re all set, then. Go home, Charlotte, take a long bath, have some wine. Time enough to deal with all of this tomorrow.”
Anticipation for a long bath and a glass of wine kept Charlotte going during her sunset drive back to Lake Parkerton, but after turning into the entrance gates and following the road that wound around the lake and up the hills, the many signs saying Foreclosure and For Sale brought her firmly back into the present. The national economy was supposedly on the upswing, but many local economies were just as bad as ever. One of the area’s biggest steel mills had been purchased by a foreign conglomerate right before the recession, but instead of expanding it as promised, the new owners shut it down altogether. Lake Parkerton was where many of the original company’s executives and upper management lived, and it was now showing the effects of the economic downturn. Several lawns were looking unkempt, and a few houses had gutters coming loose. The Velez’ house was still boarded up, officially the result of a kitchen fire, but Ernie next door swore it was an insurance scam. The parents of Ellis’ first boyfriend from junior high still lived two doors down from there, but Charlotte had heard that they were splitting up. He was a funny boy, who once said that her hair was the same color as the cottontail rabbit that lived under the far end of the deck. He had been sent to a military academy, and she wondered what would happen to him now. She drove around a tow truck that was loading up a repossessed Hummer. It just wasn’t the same place it used to be. Her own For Sale sign would be going up soon. She was going to have to tell Ellis, plan a moving sale, find more work—
Charlotte parked the Jeep in her garage and walked into the kitchen, thinking about something quick she could make for supper. Anything to put the events of the day—of the past few days, actually—out of her head and pretend life was normal again.
Normal, however, wasn’t particularly welcoming. First, there was the clutter: countertops crammed with jars of pasta and dry beans, spices, bottles of various flavored oils and vinegars, a dozen bags or boxes of snack foods, most half-full or almost empty, a large knife block, an unpacked box containing a darling new hand-painted pasta set (bought four months ago, right before they learned Ellis was going to Paris), overhead racks with dozens of pots and pans, some of them rather nice and some simply decorative, figurines of animal cooks, including a three-foot high one of a squirrel holding a spoon and a walnut, a stack of clean dishtowels and a pile of dirty ones, a laundry basket of clean unfolded towels and napkins, and several crockery jars holding spoons, whisks, spatulas, and such. What bit of counter space that was available was occupied by a dirty cutting board with the uneaten burnt bagel from breakfast. The sink had several plates and cups and last night’s wine glass because the dishwasher hadn’t yet been emptied. Then there was the pile of mail, mostly junk advertisements, several magazines and catalogs, five days’ worth of the newspaper as yet unread, two broken plates from months ago set aside to be repaired, and by the door three large garbage bags of old school papers and girlish things that Ellis threw out and Charlotte had yet to bring herself to throw in the trash.
No actual crime happened here, but the difference between her kitchen and Helene’s was not unlike the difference between Helene’s kitchen and Olivia’s, and this realization stopped her in her tracks. I’m turning into an Olivia, she thought. If I drop dead right now, other people would come in here and say, “Bloody hell!” She imagined Simon looking over her kitchen, and, if she was honest, her bathroom, bedroom, basement, and garage in slack-jawed amazement. And she wouldn’t have faulted him. And she thought, too, that if she died, poor Ellis would have to set aside time in her own life to deal with all this crap.
Her stomach growled. She grabbed a clean wine glass, a fresh bottle of pinot noir, and heated up a frozen diet lasagna dinner in the microwave while she looked for the corkscrew, which after ten minutes’ search was discovered under the pile of dirty towels. She took her dinner and the folder from Diane into the living room—like Olivia’s, the one room that wasn’t too bad—to get away from the mess. She settled into her usual corner of a tan Italian leather sectional and clicked on the gas fireplace with the remote. A sip of wine, then a bite of food—for prefab frozen lasagna, it wasn’t too bad, she thought. As she looked over the budget plan, however, she knew that convenience food wasn’t likely to be on future grocery lists, along with a lot of other things.
With only the light from the fire in the living room, Charlotte could look over the darkening lake through the clerestory windows and see the lights from houses on the other side. It looked like the Olewskis were having a party, or maybe it was their kids, it was a little too far away to tell for sure. She had seen a lot of them when she first moved here, as their daughter and Ellis were the same age, but as the girls drifted apart in high school, so, too did the adults. Next door to them was the Pannetti’s house, dark, foreclosed and deadly silent without the happy racket from their five kids. She had liked them a lot, too. At one time there was such vitality in Lake Parkerton, and all of a sudden it seemed there was nothing. Perhaps her only connection to these people was as Ellis’ mother.
Charlotte never admitted to anyone, not even Diane, her real reason for moving here: she wanted Ellis, who showed great promise even at the age of six, to have piano lessons with Helene Dalmier, one of the most well-regarded and well-connected teachers in the region. She’d heard that Helene had cut back on her teaching schedule, but still seemed willing to take students from Lake Parkerton. Charlotte had quietly gone with her instincts on this, because talking about one’s child’s “gift” was to invite all sorts of eye-rolling and talk about stage-mothering and such. It was a gamble, but it paid off. Ellis flourished under Helene’s calm but firm assurance, so different than Charlotte’s own style, which was more akin to putting out fires. Charlotte never wanted Ellis to know about the gamble, to feel guilty if it didn’t work out.
But now Helene was no longer in her grand house, which was one of the original fifty houses designed and built by Paul Dalmier and his associates when they founded Lake Parkerton, in a variation on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian style that featured pitched rather than flat roofs. The house-slash-studio he built for himself and Helene was the most striking, with two levels of glass windows facing the water. It was a pleasure to take Ellis to her piano lessons where Helene’s matching pair of grand pianos—which she referred to as “The Twins”—seemed to float in the sky.
The house, however, was not well-suited for an aging widow: 6,000 square feet of open staircases, multilevel floors, terraces, a steep driveway, and a long drive from doctors, hospital, drugstores, grocery stores, and other services. So Helene, with a graceful acceptance of reality, sold up and moved to the 1,200 square foot Elm Grove condominium two years ago, just down the block from her older sister. The Twins were now nestled together like a yin-yang symbol in what most people would have used as the living room.
Charlotte’s house was one third the size of Helene’s old house, but it was one of the original fifty; buying it gave her an instant introduction to Paul Dalmier, and in turn to Helene. She looked around at her own living room, from the wood-and-steel open staircase, to the baby grand piano, to the collection of art and sculpture and books, a room which was now full of contrasting areas of gold and darkness from the fireplace. She loved fireplaces, had never had one until she moved here—would she ever have one again? The wine in the glass glowed blood red. It was tempting to just lie here like she did the night before, for hours and hours until she fell asleep in a stupor under the soft silk-and-merino throw.
Charlotte’s thoughts this evening, however, hurtled through her brain in a random whirl: split-second images of Ellis hugging her goodbye at the airport, Olivia’s senseless body on the oriental rug, Jack handing her divorce papers, house-hunting in Lake Parkerton, the blood on the bat, Simon’s long legs in snug black jeans, Ellis at the state competition, Jack on their wedding day, Helene beaming at Simon, Olivia pointing at her with a bony finger and saying, “So what do you do?”
The notebook Olivia had given her the other day was on the coffee table. Charlotte picked it up and shifted her position to get more light from the fireplace. The first thing that caught her eye was the words written on the inside cover: Put the pieces together and bloom. Then she began reading the first page, which was dated several years ago. Some words were immediately clear, some became clear in context, and a few remained garbled, as if Olivia had given up trying to correct them. But Charlotte was able to understand that these opening paragraphs were written during her husband Ronson Targman’s dying days.
You call for him, and he will not come, you call for me and only part of me arrives. I go through the motions, wash your body as if I were washing the floor: wet, swab, polish dry, just another one of your soldier boys.... The pain seizes you and you blame me. They tell me that you don’t mean it, this is the dementia, but it is not, it is the same thing you have always said have always done....Now they can care for you and I walk away, they will wipe my spittle from your face, thinking it is yours....
The dark sentiment took Charlotte by surprise, yet she knew it shouldn’t have done so, after meeting its author. Was the entire notebook like this? She moved to the last paragraphs on the last page in the notebook, dated roughly six months ago, the writing marginally clearer:
Golden girl, I always knew you would end up in the same place as me, small and insignificant, alone alone alone.... What good do your glory days do you now? We’re just a collage of ticket stubs from journeys to other times. The fat conductor never cared how much you paid, he would only look you over and decide if he would collect your ticket or not, if he would let you ride. But there were no free rides, only uncollected deaths.
This was not the sort of reading she needed at the moment, and she tossed the notebook back on the coffee table.
Housework. Housework was her catharsis. She suddenly remembered that the real estate agent was coming tomorrow morning, as well, and at the very least she ought to get the kitchen sanitary. She switched off the fireplace, took her dinner things back into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, turned on the TV for company, and set to work, starting with taking the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and putting the dirty ones in, folding the clean linens and gathering the dirty, dumping the burnt bagel and scrubbing the cutting board, putting the trash bags in the large wheeled bins in the garage, and getting out a roll of new trash bags to tackle the junk mail and other papers.
Charlotte looked at the covers of the magazines and catalogs, their enticing headlines and pictures of perfect rooms and perfect outfits. The new reality that these things were no longer within her reach—or even her professional business to know about—suddenly made them abstract. The brown cashmere sweater with the fake fur collar on the cover model was as out of her price range as a ticket on the space shuttle. She found a notepad and wrote “TO DO” at the top. The first item: cancel subscriptions and mailing lists. It was one of the items on Diane’s budget plan. Canned laughter from the sitcom on the TV reminded her to add canceling the cable service, as well.
The refrigerator and freezer came next, tossing out expired food and putting the empty containers for the next dishwasher load in the sink. She made a decision not to buy any more food until she ate up everything she already had in the freezer, fridge, and pantry. That should save a few dollars on groceries and get the kitchen emptied out at the same time. The junk food, however, she sent straight to the trash. It was time to stop the pity-party food. Her jeans were getting tight, and it wasn’t like she would be able to run out and buy a new pair. It also made her feel guilty to have it around, because she didn’t let Ellis eat much junk food, no matter how much she begged for it.
There was still too much stuff on the counters: all the containers of utensils and dry goods, along with the toaster, the food processor, the large stand mixer, the blender, the coffeemaker, the microwave, and the many decorative things. Apart from the coffeemaker, most of it ought to go in the cabinets, she thought—or just go. But there wasn’t room, because the cabinets were full of old things she hadn’t used in years, and a large assortment of plastic containers. She recalled Olivia’s back porch, unusable because of the huge stacks of those containers and newspapers. That is not going to be me, I swear it, she thought. She moved all the containers into the recycling bin, collected the vacuum sweeper from the hall closet and used it to get the now-empty cabinet spotless, then moved all the appliances save the coffeemaker and the microwave into it. She did the same with another section of cabinet, and moved in the jars of dry goods and bottles of oil and vinegar.
That left the jars of utensils, the knife block, and the collection of animal cook figurines. She pulled out the only two knives she ever really seemed to use, and moved the block in with the appliances. The utensils could go in a drawer. That’s how Helene’s lovely kitchen was set up: everything stored in the cabinets and drawers. Her own four drawers, however, were full: one had the everyday flatware and another the good silver and serving pieces, but the other two were crammed with the miscellany every household seemed to collect: the junk drawers. Charlotte looked over the tape, scissors, envelopes, stamps, rubber bands, twist-ties, corks, matches, marbles, tiny pieces from doll clothes and puzzles, fast-food toys, miscellaneous spare parts for appliances she no longer had, recipe cards from friends and family, manufacturers’ coupons, and a mass of nearly unidentifiable objects that once had a designated purpose, now long forgotten. They reminded her of the jars full of such trivia in Olivia’s kitchen, only here they were unsorted. She took the drawers off their tracks and then over to the breakfast nook to sit and have coffee while she cleaned them out.
The TV was replaying the morning show from earlier in the day, with world news, bad news, economic news, mortgage crisis, political promises, and new diseases, interspersed with celebrity and sappy stories. Mixed in were commercials for cars, insurance, cell phones, and, for all she knew, magic wands. There was a story about some guy living with fifty things in a loft with beautiful windows. The simplicity of the space with its beautiful light caught her attention. Ten of his fifty things were in his closet. A small closet. A laptop. His well-fitting jeans and the laptop were expensive. No furniture, just some kind of roll-up bedding right on the floor. He called himself a minimalist, and he wrote a blog and some books about it. He said he was happy and free, and he looked it. Then came more commercials for cars, insurance, cell phones, and magic wands.
The morning show hosts were still talking about the guy with fifty things. The woman said it was weird. Elegant but weird, and couldn’t imagine any sane woman doing the same. The man said he couldn’t see his wife doing it, either, but thought a lot of men could, especially young men without kids or a house to worry about. The sports guy said he thought it was cool. The weather guy said, well, that might be okay in Southern California, but folks we have a big cold front blowing down from Canada next week and sure hope that one of those fifty things is a nice warm coat. Then a sports update, but Charlotte ignored it while trying to imagine herself living with only fifty things.
If, right at the moment, she only had fifty personal items to worry about, she would not be cleaning and sorting into the wee hours of the morning, particularly these five hundred pieces of trivia in two drawers on the breakfast table. She could “walk” from this house if she dared, like the Panettis did last year—just packed some bags, went to Argentina, and left everything else behind, from furniture to lawn mowers, for the bank to sort out. With only fifty things, she could live in a single room, like she did in her college dorm days, back when all she needed was a room of her own, simple and quiet, in which to do her work. Charlotte imagined what those things would be: her laptop, certainly, and her cell phone. A few clothes, grooming items, then cooking things, a decent bed—sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor like the guy on TV would not be doable for long—her favorite pieces of art, the photo albums, her favorite dishes, rugs, and—!
The so-called minimalist probably had a storage unit somewhere that he raided on a regular basis, Charlotte thought. It would be hard to know how to live with so few things, since she was attached to an awful lot of her stuff as well as her creature comforts. She’d just spent the last ten years, after all, writing about stuff, caring about it, having opinions about it, and making recommendations about it. But when she looked down at the jumble in the drawers, her brain hit the wall and she was overwhelmed by an almost life-or-death urge: No more.
She worked quickly, picking out a few things from the drawers that she knew were needed or used fairly recently, then dumped out everything else into a cardboard box. A quick wipe and sweep of the drawers, then in went the things she used the most. It was now easy to find and grab every single item, every spoon, spatula, scissors, knife, ball of twine, roll of tape. Everything current. She now had two entire drawers that looked like she wished life would be: comprehensible.
Charlotte gathered some more boxes from the garage and filled one of them with the cooking utensils she didn’t often use and the jars that held them. She filled another two boxes with the animal cook figurines, and recalled how she and Jack would pick them up at restaurant gift shops, resorts, antique shops, and flea markets. She had actually been tired of them for a long time, and they were a pain to keep clean, especially in a kitchen. She wiped down each one before it went into a box.
By the time her mind felt clearer and more settled, it was two in the morning and she’d consumed an entire pot of coffee. But she felt happier than she had in a long time. She grabbed the list and added to it: take all magazines and newspapers to the big public recycling bins at the grocery store, sort through the baking things and dishes in the upper cabinets, weed out the cookbooks. Then she added: Moving sale.
Charlotte looked at the clock again and realized that Ellis, in Paris, would likely be awake, and hopefully not in class or at practice. The conversation had to happen sometime. She decided not to say anything about Olivia, at least not until more was known. She smoothed out her hair; she was nervous about breaking the news to Ellis that she had to sell their home. Then she set up the computer for video chat.
It was a lovely morning over there, the sun through the dorm window illuminating Ellis’ cheerful face. Mother and daughter shared the same blue eyes, high forehead, long nose, and long neck, but Ellis had her father’s light freckled coloring and curly dark brown hair, which Charlotte thought so much more attractive than her own straight drab hair and sallow complexion. They caught up on the small things of life and school, with Ellis doing most of the talking, happy and excited. Charlotte swallowed hard, feeling a lump in her throat.
“Mom, what’s wrong? You look like you’re going to cry.”
“Oh, I just miss you, that’s all. It’s so quiet around here and I wish I could be there, too.”
“Why don’t you fly over, then? I have a long weekend in a couple of weeks and we can go all over Paris and shop and—” Ellis stopped as Charlotte shook her head in regret.
“I can’t, Ellis. Something’s come up, and it’s one of the reasons for the unplanned chat.” Charlotte went on to explain about the magazines shutting down, the finances, and the need to sell up and downsize.
Ellis’ reaction was better than Charlotte had hoped for—serious, but not crushed. “Mom, I think you’re doing the right thing. It’s a great chance for you to do something else with your life, too, when you think about it. I mean,” she wisecracked, “I’m Dad’s problem now, right?”
“Oh, you were never a problem for me, you kn