deception all day, and perhaps I was just tired of deceiving.
“Twelve-fourteen Plantation Drive, Lawrenceton, Georgia.”
She kept writing steadily, and I shed an inaudible sigh of relief.
“It’s an hour later in Georgia, so I don’t know if I can get anything there today,” Cindy Bartell pointed out. “I’ll call first thing in the morning, and I’ll do my best to find someone who can deliver them tomorrow. Will that do?”
She looked up, her eyes questioning.
“That’ll be fine,” I said weakly.
“You have a local number?”
“The Holiday Inn.” She was past being pretty; she was striking. She was a good six inches taller than I.
“How’d you want to pay?”
“What?”
“Cash? Credit card? Check?”
“Cash,” I said firmly, because that way I wouldn’t have to give her my name. I thought I was being crafty.
I’d been watching the blond woman work on the funeral cross; I always like to watch other people do something well. When I looked back at Cindy Bartell, I caught her staring at me. She glanced down at my left hand, but of course my engagement ring was still zipped in my purse. “Do you have relatives here, Miss?”
“No,” I said with a bland smile. And I handed over my money.
I am not totally without resources.
As I picked up supper from a fast food restaurant and took it to the Holiday Inn, I wondered why I’d done such a stupid thing. I couldn’t come up with a very satisfactory answer. I hadn’t given Martin’s past life much thought, and I’d been overwhelmed with sudden curiosity. Surely prospective wife number two always wonders about wife number one?
I watched the news as I ate, my book propped up in front of me to occupy my eyes during the ads. It was a relief to be myself after pretending to be someone else all day. While I enjoyed imagining this or that in my head from time to time, sustained deception was another matter.
The knock at my door scared me out of my wits.
No one knew where I was except Amina, and she was in Houston.
I pitched the remains of my supper in the trash on my way to the door. I’d put the chain on. Now I opened the door a crack.
Cindy Bartell was standing there looking tense and miserable.
“Hi,” I said tentatively.
“Can I come in?”
I had some bad thoughts: “Rejected Wife Murders Bride-to-Be in Motel Room.”
She interpreted my hesitation correctly. “Whoever you are, I don’t mean you any harm,” she said earnestly, as embarrassed by the melodrama as I was.
I opened the door and stood aside.
“Are you…” She stood in the middle of the floor and twisted her keys around and around. “Are you Martin’s new fiancйe?”
“Yes,” I said, after a moment’s thought.
“Then I’m not making a fool of myself.” She looked relieved.
I thought that remained to be seen. There was an awkward pause. Now we
“As you know,” she began, “or I think you know?” She paused to raise her eyebrows interrogatively. I nodded. “So you know I’m, I was, Martin’s wife.”
“Yes.”
“Martin doesn’t know you’re here.”
“No. I’m here to buy his wedding present.” I indicated she should have one of the two uncomfortable chairs on either side of the round table. She sat on the edge of it, doing the thing with the key ring again.
“He told Barrett he was getting married again, and Barrett called me,” she explained. “Barrett said his dad told him you were very small,” she added wryly, “and he wasn’t kidding.”
“For Martin’s wedding present,” I said steadily, “I want to buy him the farm he grew up on. Can you tell me where it is? I haven’t told the realtor I want to see this one particular farm because of course she’ll know I want it for some reason, and Joseph Flocken won’t sell to me if he knows I’m going to give it to Martin.”
“You’re right, he won’t. I’ll tell you what you need to know. But then I’m going to give you some advice. You’re a lot younger than me.” She sighed.
“It’s a good idea, getting the farm for him,” she began. “He always hated someone else having it, someone else letting it fall into ruin. But Joseph always had it in for Martin, in particular, though he wasn’t too fond of Barby. I’m not either, for that matter. One of the disadvantages of being married to Martin is that Barby becomes your sister- in-law… I’m sorry, I promised myself I wasn’t going to be bitchy. Barby had a hard time as a teenager. The reason the blood’s so bad between the kids and Flocken- Martin’ll never tell you this, Barby told me-she got pregnant when she was sixteen, and when Mr. Flocken found out, he stood up in front of the whole church-not a mainstream church, one of these little off-sects-or off sex, ha!-and told everyone in the church about it, with Barby sitting right there, and asked their advice-so she got sent to one of those homes and missed a year of school and had her baby, and gave it up for adoption. And nothing ever happened to the kid who was the
What a dreadful story. I tried to imagine being publicly denounced in that fashion, and cringed at the thought.
“Okay, the farm is south of town on Route 8, and you can’t see the house from the road, but there’s a mailbox with ‘Flocken’ on it by the gate.”
I copied the directions onto the little pad the motel left in the drawer below the telephone. “Thanks,” I told her. And I braced myself for the advice.
“Martin has a lot of good qualities,” she said unexpectedly.
She was giving the good news before the bad.
“But you don’t know everything about him,” she went on slowly.
I had long suspected that.
“I don’t want to know unless he tells me,” I said.
That stopped her dead. And I couldn’t quite believe that had come out of my mouth. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He has to.”
“He never will,” she said with calm certainty. Then her mouth twisted. “I’m not trying to be bitchy, and I wish you luck-I think. He never was bad to me. He just never told me everything.”
I watched her while she stared into a corner of the room, gathering her strength around her, regretting already her display of emotion. Then she just got up and left.
It took everything I had not to get up and run after her.
The next morning I met Mary Anne Bishop at her office. I was in a brisk frame of mind. I asked her which farms we were to see today, looked at the spec sheets, and asked that we see the one on Route 8 first. Looking a little puzzled, she agreed, and off we went. I looked carefully at each mailbox as we passed, and spotted one labeled “Flocken” just before the farm we’d come to see, which we toured quickly. I paved the way by telling Mary Anne that the area felt right, but the farmhouse was too small. On our way back to town, I asked her about the road that led from the mailbox over a low hill. Presumably, the farmhouse was not too far from that. “I liked not having the house visible from the road,” I commented. “Who owns that property?”
“Oh, that’s the Bartell farm,” she said instantly. “The man who owns it now is called Jacob-no, Joseph- Flocken, and he’s got a reputation for being cranky.” But she pulled to the side of the road and tapped her teeth with a pencil thoughtfully.
