Chapter Fifty-One
T he home in which Christie Kinley had supposedly passed away was a large yellow colonial with a wraparound porch and French doors. Alice guessed the lot was about three acres. She wondered if her father’s money had paid for it.
The woman who answered the door was about her age. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail. She was wearing running clothes and had her car keys in hand. “Let’s go, Jenny. We’re going to the gym. Little Kyle’s going to be in the playroom, too. It’ll be fun. Sorry about that,” she said, lowering her voice to a conversational tone. “Getting a four-year-old in the car is a twenty-minute production.”
Alice let Hank do the talking, since he was the one with a badge. He explained that they were looking for background information about the previous homeowner, Julie Kinley. They believed she still went by her middle name, Christie.
“She passed away last year. We bought the house in the summer and only dealt with the real estate agent. I’ve got a forwarding address for her mail, though. It goes to her sister, I believe?” She reached for the black metal mailbox affixed to the front porch and slipped out one of the envelopes awaiting pickup. “This looked like junk mail from her gym, but I forward everything just in case. You can take it if you want.”
Alice saw a handwritten Brooklyn address on the envelope before Hank slipped it into his coat pocket.
“Do you happen to know the details of Ms. Kinley’s passing?” he asked.
“No, I think I’ve intentionally kept my ears closed to that kind of talk in the neighborhood. I don’t really want to know there was a dead person in my house. Silly, I suppose, but the house was all cleared out by the time we looked at it, and I like to pretend to think we were the first to ever live here. You might try Mrs. Withers next door. She’s lived here forever and is one of those neighbors who seems to know everything about everybody.”
Alice could tell that the woman didn’t consider that trait a good thing.
They could still hear the mom yelling at Jenny to “hurry it up” as they made their way to the next-door neighbor’s house.
Mrs. Withers was exactly what a nosy neighbor should be-a little plump with curly white hair, a kitchen that smelled like bread, and an ability to whip up mugs of hot cocoa, with marshmallows no less, for strangers who showed up without notice. She also liked to talk. A lot. And quickly.
“I always felt sorry for Christie. The cancer was like the icing on the cake, confirmation of that queasy feeling I had since I first met her as a teenager. It’s like some people are just born with bad karma. I always hoped that something would turn for that girl. When Gloria died -”
“That was Christie’s mother?” Alice was delighted at the woman’s loquaciousness, but found it difficult to get a word in edgewise.
“If you could call her a mother. She was always flitting around, chasing after this man or the next. That’s how she managed to have two daughters without ever having a man involved in any way except the bedroom, if she even bothered going to a bed. She was a groupie back in the sixties, you know.”
Alice and Hank both muttered the requisite “No, we didn’t,” but Mrs. Withers had plowed on without them.
“Oh, she would talk about those days like she was Neil Armstrong, walking on the moon. She bedded Mick Jagger once, according to her. By the time she moved here, Christie was fourteen years old and already headed to rehab, but Gloria was still at it. She’d go down to the city and try to pick up these has-been actors at their old hangouts. She was one of those gals who thought a woman’s only value was to land a man. She wanted those girls of hers to be famous, but never taught them a single talent or skill. In Gloria’s delusional mind, they’d get by on their looks. But then Gloria had her stroke about eight or nine years ago, and Christie moved back into the house to take care of Mia.”
“Mia is Christie’s sister?” Alice remembered mention of a surviving sister in Christie’s obituary.
“Yep, and Gloria screwed her up at least as much as she did Christie. When Christie moved back here, I thought maybe this would be her chance to have a better life, without Gloria hounding her about getting a husband locked down. It seemed like she might have gotten her head on a little straighter, but then she got the news about the cancer. Poor thing was too far gone by the time they caught it. ”
She finally paused, taking a sip of her cocoa as if they had been having an idle conversation about the relative merits of powder or liquid dish detergent.
Alice didn’t know how to ask the woman whether she was absolutely certain Christie had really died.
“I imagine that’s a difficult end to one’s life,” she finally said.
“Oh, it was horrible. You know, when Gloria went, it was from a stroke out in the yard shoveling snow. She just fell down and died. But we all had to watch Christie go. She got so thin because she couldn’t keep any food down.”
Alice looked at Hank, who also seemed disappointed. The deterioration this woman was describing did not seem like something that could be feigned.
“I think Christie knew when it was finally time for her to go. She rounded up a group of people at the house so she could be surrounded by friendly faces. She told us to make it a potluck so she could watch us eat.” She smiled at the memory. “Then when she was feeling tired, she called her best friend and her sister into her room to hold her hands while she fell asleep. She never woke up.”
“So you were actually there at the house when she passed?”
“Yes. I like to think it’s because Christie knew I always hoped for something better for her.”
“You mentioned that Christie moved back into the house to take care of her sister. May I ask if there’s something wrong with Mia?” Maybe she would know who might still hold a grudge about what happened to her sister as a teenager.
“Well, it depends by what you mean by something
“It just seems a little old to be living with her mother.” Even eight or nine years ago, when Gloria died, the daughters would have been around thirty years old.
“Oh, Mia’s a youngster. She only needed Christie to stay with her at the house for a few years, and then she moved down to the city, so Christie had the house on her own. You know, when Gloria moved in next door, she was just pregnant with little Mia. Christie was already messed up, so I thought maybe Gloria wanted a second chance. But then she goes and makes all the same mistakes with Mia, starting with that name. Mia Farrow and Louise Fletcher. I mean, naming your daughter after the crazy nurse in
“So, I’m sorry-Mia was born when?” The story was building in Alice’s head faster than she could process it.
“Well, let’s see… Gloria wasn’t even showing yet when she moved here in, it must have been 1985. The beginning of the summer. Early June, I think. She’d been having all kinds of problems with Christie. I said before she sent her off to rehab, but it was technically boarding school. Again, who knows how Gloria paid for that either. I never saw a woman other than a prostitute who found a way to pay so many bills without doing any other work than on her back. Oh lord, did I just say that?”
Alice knew precisely how Gloria had paid her bills. She needed Mrs. Withers to get back on track.
“Christie was sent away to boarding school?” Alice remembered Ben telling her that a girl at his party had gotten so wasted that her parents had sent her away to an all-girls boarding school.
“Yep, for girls only. I thought it might do her some good to be away from her mother, but she only stayed a year. You know, I even joked with Gloria that first summer that with Christie going away to boarding school, and Gloria having a little baby at her age, people might get the wrong impression.”
Alice looked at Hank, who spoke for the first time since the cocoa had been poured. “You mean the neighbors might gossip that Gloria’s pregnancy was fake, and that the baby was actually Christie’s.”
