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A NOVEL
This book is dedicated to my son,
BENJAMIN LIPMAN AUSTIN
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: Come Back to King George
Chapter 2: Meet You at the Lake
Chapter 3: You Should Run
Chapter 4: Harding
Chapter 5: King’s Nite
Chapter 6: The Dot
Chapter 7: The Viewing Hours
Chapter 8: Meanwhile, at Boot Lake
Chapter 9: The Flight
Chapter 10: Graveside
Chapter 11: After the Service, No Mourners are Invited Back
Chapter 12: How Long has this Been Going on?
Chapter 13: Checkout
Chapter 14: Fletcher and Billy
Chapter 15: Bungalow Blues
Chapter 16: Nobody Slips anything by Winnie
Chapter 17: Happy Hour
Chapter 18: Fletcher Inherits the Bug
Chapter 19: Company
Chapter 20: The Missus
Chapter 21: Life is Simpler than You Think
Chapter 22: Advice
Chapter 23: Emily Ann Recants
Chapter 24: 9–1–1
Chapter 25: A Place to Stay
Chapter 26: No Hard Feelings
Chapter 27: Things are Looking up
Chapter 28: No Secret in King George
Chapter 29: The Member-Guest
Chapter 30: The Moms
Chapter 31: Deal
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading
About the Author
Other Works
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1 Come Back to king George
Sunny met Fletcher for the first time at their parents’ funeral, a huge graveside affair where bagpipes wailed and strangers wept. It was a humid, mosquito-plagued June day, and the grass was spongy from a midnight thunderstorm. They had stayed on the fringes of the crowd until both were rounded up and bossed into the prime mourners’ seats by the funeral director. Sunny wore white—picture hat, dress, wet shoes—and an expression that layered anger over grief: Who is he? How dare he? Are any of these gawkers friends?
Unspoken but universally noticed was the physical attribute she and Fletcher shared—a halo of prematurely gray hair of a beautiful shade and an identical satiny, flyaway texture. No DNA test result, no hints in wills, could be more eloquent than this: the silver corona of signature hair above their thirty-one-year-old, identically furrowed brows.
The King George Bulletin had reported every possible angle, almost gleefully. MARGARET BATTEN, LOCAL ACTRESS, AND FRIEND FOUND UNCONSCIOUS, said the first banner headline, BULLETIN PAPER CARRIER CALLS 911, boasted the kicker. An arty photo—sunrise in King George—of scrawny, helmeted Tyler Lopez on his bike, a folded newspaper frozen in flight, appeared on page 1. “I knew something was wrong when I saw them laying on the floor—the woman and a man,” he told the reporter. “The door was open. I thought they might still be alive, so I used the phone.” Inescapable in the coverage was the suggestion of a double suicide or foul play. Yellow police tape surrounded the small house. Even after tests revealed carbon monoxide in their blood and a crack in the furnace’s heat exchanger, Bulletin reporters carried on, invigorated by a double, coed death on their beat.
A reader named Vickileigh Vaughn wrote a letter to the editor. She wanted to clarify something on the record so all of King George would know: Friend in the headline was inaccurate and possibly libelous. Miles Finn and Margaret Batten were engaged to be married. Friends, yes, but so much more than that. An outdoor wedding had been discussed. If the odorless and invisible killer hadn’t overcome them, Miles would have left, as was his custom, before midnight, after the Channel 9 news.
Sunny was notified by a message on her answering machine. “Sunny? It’s Fletcher Finn, Miles’s son. Could you pick up if you’re there?” Labored breathing filled the pause. “I guess not. Okay. Listen, I don’t know when I can get to a phone again, so I’ll have to give you the news, which is somewhat disturbing.” Another pause, too long for the machine, which clicked off. He called back. “Hi, it’s Fletcher Finn again. Here’s what I was going to say. I’ll make it quick: I got a call from the police in Saint George, New Hampshire—no, sorry, King George. They found our parents unconscious. Nobody knows anything. I’ve got the name of the hospital and the other stuff the cop said. What’s your fax number? Call me. I’ll be up late.”
Sunny phoned the King George police. The crime scene, she was told by a solicitous male voice, was roped off until the lab work came back. Sunny pictured the peeling gray bungalow secured with yellow tape, its sagging porch and overgrown lilacs cinched in the package.
“Are they going to die?” she asked.
“Sunny?” said the officer. “It’s Joe Loach. From Mattatuck Avenue? We were in study hall together junior and senior—”
“I got a message from a Fletcher Finn, who said his father and my mother were found unconscious, but that’s all I know. He didn’t even say what hospital.”
Loach coughed. “Sunny? They weren’t taken to a hospital. It was too late for that.”
He heard a cry and the sound of her palm slipping over the mouthpiece.
“It was the damn carbon monoxide. It builds up over time, and then it’s too late. I’m so sorry. I hate to do this over the phone …”
When she couldn’t answer, he said, “I saw your mother in Driving Miss Daisy at the VFW, and she was really something.”
Sunny pictured her mother’s grande-dame bow and the magisterial sweep of the arm that invited her leading man to join her in the spotlight. It had taken practice, with Sunny coaching, because Margaret’s inclination was to blush and look amazed.
“You’re where now? Connecticut?”
She said she was.
“Okay. One step at a time. Nothing says you can’t make arrangements by telephone. Maybe your mother put her preferences in writing—people do that, something like, ‘Instructions. To be opened in the event of my death.’ I could walk anything over to the funeral parlor for you. In fact, remember Dickie Saint-Onge from our class? He took over the business. He’s used to handling things long-distance.”
“I’m coming up,” said Sunny.
“She and her fiancé didn’t suffer,” said Joey Loach. “That much I can promise you.”
“Fiancé?” she repeated. “How do you know that?”
“That seems to be everyone’s understanding. Her cleaning lady wrote a letter to the editor to set the record straight. Plus, there was a ring on the appropriate finger.”
Sunny cried softly, her hand over the receiver.
“Can I do anything?” he asked. “Can I call anyone?”
“I’d better get off,” she said. “There must be some phone calls I should make. I’m sure that’s what I’m supposed to do next.”
“Just so you know, the house is okay now. They found the leak and fixed it, the town did, first thing. You don’t have to be afraid of sleeping there. I’ll make sure that everything is shipshape.”
“I think my friend Regina used to baby-sit for your sister,” she said. “Marilyn?”
“Marilee,” said Joey. “She’s still here. We’re all still here. So’s Regina. You okay?”
“I meant to say thank you,” said Sunny, “but that’s what came out instead.”
“You’re welcome,” said Joey Loach.
Fletcher sounded more annoyed than mournful when he reached Sunny the next morning. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I would have thought you’d have returned my call.”
“You didn’t leave your number,” said Sunny.
“I’m sure you can appreciate that I wasn’t thinking about secretarial niceties last night,” he snapped.
“Such as ‘I’m so sorry about your mother’?”
“I didn’t know her,” he said. “And at the time of my call I believed she was still alive.”
Sunny quietly slipped the receiver into its cradle. It rang seconds later.
“My father’s dead because he was watching television with someone who had a defective furnace,” blared the same voice from her earpiece. “He was as healthy as a horse. How do you think I feel? And on top of that, some backwater police chief delegates to me the task of calling the date’s daughter.”
Forcing herself to sound composed and rational, Sunny said, “Are you the only child, or is there a humane sibling I can do this with?”
He paused. “Unfortunately, I’m it.”
“You don’t have to torture yourself with the idea that this was some blind date that went awry—that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time—because he was there every night. She was his fiancée.”
Fletcher said, “Unlikely. I never met her.”
“She had his ring, and the date was set.”
After a silence, he asked, “Were you invited to a wedding?”
“Of course I was,” Sunny said.
Reached by phone, the funeral director said he preferred not to stage a wake in a theater, even if it had once been a house of Congregational worship. Sunny heard his flimsy argument, which was grounded in what she felt was personal convenience, and answered in a shaky voice, “I think it’s what my mother would have wanted. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, and if it requires a little creativity and flexibility on our part, so be it.”
No one in King George had ever asked Dickie Saint-Onge for creativity or flexibility, so he rose to the occasion, promising to accommodate the loved one’s undocumented dying wishes: a coffin in a hardwood that was stained to resemble ebony, white satin interior, no variation on her hairdo, which should be styled by her regular hairdresser and not by some mortician. Sunny herself would get permission from the King George Community Players to have her mother buried in her Mourning Becomes Electra costume or the black dress she wore in Six Characters in Search of an Author. He would tell the town’s only florist this: no daisies, no carnations, no mums. Say that the daughter wants flowers cut from the vines creeping up her mother’s porch, in combination with the Russian sage by the mailbox. And if they aren’t in full bloom, find wisteria on someone else’s trellis around town. Everyone knew Margaret. Everyone loved her.
Fletcher announced that he’d be flying to King George on the morning of the funeral with an associate. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get away one moment before that, due to the campaign. Was there an airport nearby?
“Forgive me for not owning a copy of your résumé, but what campaign are we talking about?”
“Right now, a congressional campaign.”
“And you’re too busy to get away?”
“That’s not what I said. I’m coming up for the funeral.”
“On the morning of. In other words, your father died and your boss won’t give you a few days off?”
“Just the opposite: She very much wants to attend the funeral, but we can’t get away until Saturday morning, because there’s a state fair—”
“What state?” Sunny asked.
“New Jersey. Sixth Congressional District.”
“What’s her name?”
“Emily Ann Grandjean. She wants to be there,” said Fletcher. “For both of us.”
“How kind,” said Sunny. “Too bad she can’t spare you for a couple of days.”
“Every second’s scheduled. It’s brutal. Our election’s in September.”
“So I imagine that you won’t be staying very long after the funeral.”
“To what end?”
“To go through your father’s things and decide what you want to keep. Someone’s got to do his packing.”
“Packing?” Fletcher repeated, as if Sunny had said sharecropping. “You pay people to pack—moving companies pack. They can do a whole house in two days.”
“If it’s the cottage I’m thinking of on Boot Lake, it won’t take you very long.”
“Whatever,” said Fletcher.
“I’m going up tomorrow. You can reach me at the King’s Nite Motel,” said Sunny.
“Fine.”
“Do you know my name?” she asked.
“Sunny?”
“Batten,” she said, and spelled it.
The night she returned to King George, the local news reported that a motorist, after running the town’s only stop sign, had shot the chief of police. Sunny, watching on the motel television, first thought, Good—people in this town will have something to talk about besides my mother; and second, It’s him, Marilee’s brother, the cop. She crawled from the head of her bed to its foot for a closer inspection. Indeed, Chief Joseph J. Loach was Joey Loach, the kid who’d swaggered around the halls of King George Regional more than a dozen years before, the detention regular and goofball who could fold his eyelids up and inside out, now a hero wounded in the line of moving violations. Because his bullet-proof vest had saved him, Chief Loach was being presented a state-of-the-art model by the vest’s proud manufacturer, bedside. “I guess it wasn’t my time,” Joey told the reporter.
Mentioned obliquely in the hushed wrap-up: The perpetrator was still at large.
CHAPTER 2 Meet you at the Lake
Actress” in the obituary’s headline, especially without the modifier “amateur,” would have delighted Margaret Batten, who’d been stagestruck in middle age, recruited at the beauty parlor by the wife of the superintendent of schools. Might Margaret, she asked, consider a tiny but vital role in the King George Community Players’ fall production of The Bad Seed? Duly flattered and only briefly deflated to learn that she had no lines, Margaret threw herself into her first production—understudying, baking for the bake sale, and embracing the subculture that was the King George Community Players. She was a woman alone, a divorcee looking for a social life in a town of 1,008 year-round residents.
Sunny was in high school when the acting bug burrowed under her mother’s skin. They lived on the edge of the King George Links, a semi-private golf course, in a small house with rotting trellises, leased for a pittance under an odd historical footnote concerning a runaway slave and a host abolitionist, now moot and inapplicable. Still, it carried with it a legacy and the taint of a scholarship awarded on the basis of need. Historically, poor people lived in the gray bungalow, visible from the seventeenth fairway; their underprivileged children fished waylaid golf balls out of the course’s water traps. Margaret had qualified as a lessee under the unwritten widow-with-child clause: Sunny’s father was dead, or so the tale on the application went.
Margaret was not a habitual liar, but the little house had been vacant when she moved to King George. A real estate agent, sizing her up correctly as a single mother without means, said, “I know I’m shooting myself in the foot to let you in on this, but there’s this little house that belongs to the town …” Margaret asked to see it. The pine floors had been stripped of linoleum and left a tarry black; instead of doors, faded blue burlap hung from curtain rods between rooms, and the kitchen sink was a soapstone trough. But Margaret was a great believer in soap, water, ammonia, bleach, lemon oil, paint, shellac, wallpaper, and fresh flowers. She could see the small provincial print she’d choose for fabrics and the museum posters of lily pads and haystacks she’d frame for the walls. “How much?” she whispered.
“A dollar a day—and that includes utilities.”
“And you think I could get it?”
The agent confided, “They don’t check, so lay it on a little thick in the application. They like widows and orphans—the more the better.”
“I only have Sunny.”
The agent said, “I happen to know from personal experience that if they like you, they’re not sticklers.”
The truth would have been nowhere near good enough: Margaret had lost a husband in the most prosaic fashion, to nothing more tragic than an uncharacteristic slip—hers. She still couldn’t believe she had sinned and that the perfectly decent John Batten, who updated kitchen cabinets with laminates, had not forgiven her. It hadn’t even been a love affair but a temp job, a professional courtesy: The lawyers for whom she worked had loaned her and her shorthand skills to an out-of-town client running for Congress. He hadn’t announced yet; he told the newspaper that he was visiting primarily on business and, yes, maybe to shake a few hands along the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade route. And when he did, as Margaret would observe, it was with such penetrating eye contact and warm, two-fisted handshakes that the woman in his grip felt more attractive and interesting than she knew herself to be.
Pretty in a round-faced, wholesome way; short, with a generous bust and small waist, Margaret was in her mid-twenties and looked eighteen. Safe, her employers thought. Not bait. Harmless as a secretarial loan to a reputed womanizer. At the end of Miles Finn’s visit, after two days of depositions, he invited her to dinner, in a hotel dining room famous for its Caesar salads prepared at the table.
Thank you, but she couldn’t, Margaret said.
“A previous engagement?”
“I’m married.”
“I am too! This isn’t a date. I’m so sorry that’s what you thought. This is a thank-you for a job well done and a grueling two days of boring testimony. Dinner seems the least I could do.… Perhaps your husband would like to come along.”
“He’s on a job,” she said.
“Out of town?”
“Camden,” she said. “A school renovation. It’s supposed to open the day after Labor Day.”
She seemed torn, concerned about something other than the appearance of social impropriety. Her hands ran down the sides of her brown cotton A-line skirt.
“What if we made it for seven or eight?” he prompted. “That way you can go home and change into something for evening.”
She nearly curtsied with relief, and said, “I do have something new I was saving for a special occasion.”
“How old are you?” he asked. “I only ask because I’d like to toast my campaign.”
“I’m twenty-six!”
“Twenty-six.” He smiled.
He asked for a quiet table, away from other diners. Margaret arrived in what his wife would call a little black dress, poofy and crisscrossed with chiffon at the bosom, in very high heels that looked a size too big, and carrying a long, thin clutch purse with a rhinestone clasp; a heart-shaped barrette held her brown hair off her shiny forehead. She ate her Caesar salad and her veal rollatini with such earnestly exquisite shopgirl manners, refusing to speak until she had chewed and swallowed every morsel of food and washed it down with a ladylike sip from her water goblet, that he felt chivalrous, which, in turn, impelled him to invite her upstairs to have Kahlùa on his balcony. He wanted to flatter her; wanted this sweet-faced girl to feel that she had been an excellent dinner partner and that Miles Finn enjoyed her company. If he needed a secretarial pinch-hitter again—say, next month?—could she get away?
She shouldn’t have spent the night, shouldn’t have assumed that her heretofore nonpregnant state was her failing and not her husband’s; should have checked her good black dress for the long, prematurely silver hairs that John removed with tweezers and saved in an amber pill bottle. He filed for divorce, gallantly characterizing it as no-fault. Their two lawyers privately agreed upon a paltry monthly payment in lieu of a paternity test.
When no one had a good word for John Batten, the brute who divorced his sweet, pregnant wife, Margaret told her family, “It’s not what it appears to be. Don’t blame John. That’s all I’ll say,” and took her wispy-haired baby girl to King George, a town in the shadow of the White Mountains. Candidate Finn had recommended it unwittingly as the site of idyllic boyhood summers and a future retirement. John Batten moved his laminating business to a booming Phoenix and sent Margaret a wedding announcement ten months later. “She’s a keeper,” he wrote in one ecru corner.
Believing that the bungalow on the golf course would provide a month or two’s shelter, Margaret typed in the space allowed that she had been briefly married to a wonderful man, who had died an accidental death in a helicopter crash. In parentheses, she wrote that her late husband flew critically ill people, or sometimes just their hearts and kidneys, from the scenes of accidents to hospitals, from country to city, where teams of specialists met him atop hospital helipads. He had died in the line of duty, whereupon his organs and corneas were harvested and transplanted into no fewer than five near-death breadwinners. The committee for the Abel Cotton House had considered the poorly punctuated appeals of too many teenage mothers who came to interviews in cutoff jeans. Times had changed. Runaway slaves had given way to war widows, who’d given way to church-sponsored refugees with extended families. English-speaking applicants were scarce; people who would fit in were scarcer. With a house in suburban Philadelphia as her last address, an associate’s degree, a dented Pinto, a thin, sad gold band and diamond chip on her widowed left hand, and a little blond daughter, the soft-spoken Margaret Batten was the happy choice of every philanthropist on the committee.
The invitation to act with the Community Players brought changes for the better for Sunny: Her mother took her to the movies now that she had techniques to study, gestures to borrow, dresses to copy. Dusty blues and greens accented her eyelids, and her fingernails went pink. She began squirting hand cream into new rubber gloves by day and massaging her heels at night. Various upstanding professionals, including an optometrist and a pharmacist, took Margaret out for bites to eat after Thursday rehearsals.
Her fellow thespians uncovered a talent Margaret didn’t know she had, the ability to memorize lines more quickly than anyone else—not just her own, but the whole cast’s. “Photographic memory,” she’d apologize, unable to swallow the prompts when her fellow actors missed their cues. She understudied both leading ladies and ingenues, and finally had her break when the woman playing Mrs. Winemiller in Summer and Smoke needed emergency disk surgery. Sunny ushered at her mother’s opening night, and was both pleasantly surprised and disconcerted. Margaret became someone else onstage, gesticulating, enunciating, and projecting, in an accent that was all Blanche DuBois. Sunny thought she looked pretty at a distance with her face painted and her taffeta church outfit rustling, prettier than she looked in real life. The Bulletin’s freelance drama critic, who taught at King George Regional and had Sunny in driver’s ed, reported that “newcomer Margaret Batten brings an understated ardor and energy to the role of the minister’s wife.” It was a gift to an unattached, shy, forty-three-year-old woman in a town where everyone read the same newspaper. Men in the KGCP teased her. The crème de la crème of King George society, she liked to say, was opening its circle to her. The bachelor Players called her at home, asking for “Maggie.” Confidence changed the way she dressed, the way she drove—with a chiffon scarf tied around her neck, in Grace Kelly fashion—and the way she entertained. She rented a floor sander, polyurethaned the pine boards to a high gloss, and painted the front room in a color called Caviar. When the KGCP needed sites for their annual progressive dinner, Margaret energetically volunteered what she now was calling the Cotton homestead for the canapé course.