privacy. “Please open at eight,” I said, dialing the phone. “Please.”
The phone rang two, three, four times. I looked at the paper I’d taken from Agnes’s house and double- checked the number. No, I’d dialed correctly. I was about to hang up, when there was a click.
“Hunter Clinic, this is Brooke. How may I direct your call?”
“Um.” The pat little speech I’d prepared vanished out of my head, gone away as if it had never existed. I knew I should have written it down. “Good morning, Brooke. My name is, uh, Gloria Kuri.”
“Yes?” When I didn’t instantly respond, she went on. “Are you a patient here, ma’am?”
“Oh.” She started to say something, but I jumped ahead. “No, I’m not a patient. My sister was.”
“I see.”
“My sister was Agnes Mephisto. She died more than three weeks ago.”
“She did? I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.” It dawned on me that Brooke had no clue Agnes had been murdered. “It’s been hard on all of us.” I made a sniffling noise. “I was wondering . . .”
“Yes?”
I detected sympathy, and my rehearsed speech swam back. “Agnes didn’t want to trouble anyone with the details of her illness. She was so brave.”
“I’m sure she was. The patients here amaze me.”
When I’d come across an invoice in Agnes’s files from the Hunter Center, a little buzz had set off in the back of my brain. The Hunter Center. The Hunter Center . . . At home, a Google search had yielded the information I’d expected, but not wanted, to see. Due to privacy laws, I knew Brooke wouldn’t tell me anything specific, but maybe I’d find out enough. “We’d like to make a donation,” I said, “and we want it to go to research.”
“Lots of people donate to the American Cancer Society,” Brooke said.
“We were hoping to send a check to a more specific organization.” Agnes had been living with cancer. No wonder she’d been pushing so hard on the addition.
“Oh, I see what you mean. Let me see a minute.” I heard the sound of a keyboard tap-tapping away. “Mephisto, Agnes?” Her voice went quiet. “I probably shouldn’t say—you know how that HIPAA stuff goes—but I don’t see how this could hurt.”
“I won’t tell a soul where I got the information. Cross my heart.” And hope not to die.
“If I were you,” she whispered, “I’d send my money to the American Brain Tumor Association. And I’m really sorry about your sister. I know she didn’t have long, but this was really fast. She seemed like a nice lady.”
Brain cancer. Poor Agnes.
I sat at my desk and stared out at the golden autumn morning. A few leaves hung tight to tree branches, swaying slightly to and fro. They were bright orange leaves, more brilliant by far than any leaves I’d ever seen.
Oh, Agnes.
There were places to go and people to see, but I sat there for a long while, mourning a woman I’d never known.
Chapter 19
“Are you seeing him or what?”
“Shhh!” I tried to hush Marina. We were sitting at the kitchen table, and Jenna and Oliver were with Zach in the Neff family room watching Saturday cartoons, but if so inclined, little pitchers did indeed have big ears.
“Why?” Marina continued at normal volume. “Is he some big secret?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Dear, dear Beth.” Her voice took on a Southern drawl. “Ah can always tell when you’re lying.”
My fingers shot up to feel my earlobes.
Still in belle mode, Marina said, “He is remahkably handsome—yes, indeed, he is. But your brainy little head doesn’t turn at mere good looks. Or does it?” Her eyebrows arched.
“I knew him in kindergarten.”
“Yes, mah dear, you said so.”
“Quit with the Scarlett O’Hara bit, will you?”
“Ooo, Beth is a little uptight this morning.” Marina put her feet up on the chair next to her, an act she knew was guaranteed to make me edgy. “Problems sleeping? Maybe your pretty boy will come in handy, because I bet I know what you need. How long has it been?”
Some days it was best to ignore everything Marina said. “I owe you one for taking the kids.” Thanks to Richard’s unpredictable boss, I suddenly had my children two weekends in a row. Any other time I would have been delighted, but this weekend was different. “I’ll call tonight at bedtime. Come give me a kiss, you two!” I called, pulling on my coat and picking up my purse. There was a long drive ahead, and time was ticking away.
“Don’t go, Beth.” Marina’s face was serious. “Let me go instead. This is all because of me, and I shouldn’t be letting you fight my battles.”
In some ways she was right, but in other ways she was very wrong. It wasn’t because of Marina’s death threats that I was abandoning Jenna and Oliver for half the weekend; it was because of Agnes.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then I kissed my children and left.
Two hundred miles later, my cell phone rang. Normally I didn’t talk on the phone while driving, but since there were exactly zero cars to be seen on this particular stretch of U.S. 53, I decided to risk taking the call.
“Beth? This is Evan.” Static punctuated his words.
“If I hang up on you,” I said, “I didn’t hang up on you. There aren’t a lot of towers out here.”
“Where are you? Never mind,” he added quickly. “It doesn’t matter. I called because I want to apologize for the other day.”
“Apologize for what?”
“For acting as if I had any right to tell you what to do.”
“Ah.” Take that, Marina.
“You’re angry at me and I don’t blame you. We barely know each other, and I assumed control and did those guy things that make strong women want to swear off men forever.”
If he thought I was strong, he really didn’t know me at all.
“Let me make it up to you. How about dinner?” He named one of the fanciest restaurants in Madison. “Soft lights, a piano playing in the background, a bottle of wine. Just the two of us. What do you say?”
Or maybe it was time for the big test. “How about dinner at my house, instead?” I smiled, and warmth filled me from head to toe. “Just us—and my two children?”
Six hours after leaving Marina’s house, I was sitting in Gloria Kuri’s living room and sipping a mug of coffee strong enough to curl my toes—not my hair, though. Nothing was strong enough to curl those stick-straight tresses.
Gloria caught my glance at her living room decor. “I need to do something about them. Last week I got a new Oklahoma one and it’s messing up everything.”
None of Gloria’s furniture was placed against a wall; the couch, the overstuffed chairs, the coffee table, and the console television floated in the middle of the room. With the single exception of a wood fireplace burning bright, every bit of flat wall space was consumed by vintage postcards, and each one was mounted in the exact same type of frame.
“Got started collecting when I was a kid.” Gloria looked around. “That one there. The Wisconsin Dells ducks in 1954. You know about the ducks, right?”
I nodded. Once upon a time, my parents had trundled the whole family across Lake Michigan in a car ferry. My older teenaged sisters had been ostentatiously bored the entire trip, but my brother and I had loved the resort area and riding on the old army land-and-water vehicles.
“After the Dells, you branched out?” I asked.
