“I’m just finishing up here with-”
“Now.”
The woman closed her laptop and said, “That’s okay, I can come back later, Mr. Butterfield.”
“Sorry, Jenny,” he told her. “Why don’t you pop in tomorrow?”
She nodded, grabbed a jacket she had draped over the back of her chair, and squeezed past me to get out the door. I took her chair without being invited.
“So, Glen,” he said. First time I met him, I put him in his early forties. Five-five, pudgy. Mostly bald, a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Last time we spoke, you were trying to track down Sheila’s movements the day of the… well, I know you were extremely concerned. Have you gotten some answers to your questions? Achieved some sort of closure?”
“Closure,” I repeated. The word tasted like sour milk in my mouth. “No, no closure.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
No sense beating around the bush. “Why are there so many calls from you to my wife’s cell phone before she died?”
He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Not for a good second or two. I could see he was trying to think of something, but the best he could come up with on short notice was “I’m sorry-I-what?”
“There’s a slew of calls from you to my wife. Missed calls. It looks to me like she was receiving them, but didn’t want to take them.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I’m sure, occasionally, I may have had reason to call your wife about the course she was taking, she had questions related to the assignments, but-”
“I think that’s bullshit, Allan.”
“Honestly, Glen, I-”
“You need to know that I’m having a very, very bad day, which happens to be part of a very, very bad month. So when I tell you I’m not in the mood for bullshit, you need to believe me. Why all the calls?”
Butterfield appeared to be assessing his chances at escape. The office was so crowded, he’d never get out from behind that desk and through the door without stumbling over something before I could block his path.
“It was totally my fault,” he said. There was a slight tremor in his voice.
“What was your fault?”
“I behaved, I behaved inappropriately. Sheila-Ms. Garber-she was a very nice person. Just a naturally nice person.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“She was just… she was very special. Considerate. She was someone… someone I could talk to.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t really have anyone in my life, you see. I’ve never been married. I was engaged once, in my twenties, but it didn’t work out.” He nodded sadly. “I don’t think I was… she said I tried a little too hard. Anyway, I rent a room upstairs in a nice old house on Park. I have this job, and I like it, and the people here, they’re good to work with, but I don’t have a lot of friends.”
“Allan, just tell me-”
“Please. The thing is, I’m not accustomed to kindnesses. Your wife was very nice to me.”
“Nice how?”
“One night, I happened to mention in class that I wasn’t quite my usual self, that my aunt had just died. My mother died when I was only ten years old, and my aunt and uncle took me in, so she was very close to me. I said I had to leave class a little early, because I was going to stay with my uncle for a few days. He was never very good at looking after himself at the best of times, and now, well, I needed to make sure he was taking care of himself. We have a break halfway through class, and evidently Sheila went to the ShopRite, then she quietly took me aside and handed me this bag with a coffee cake and some bananas and some tea and said, ‘Here, that should get you through tomorrow morning with you and your uncle.’ And you know what she did? She apologized for the coffee cake. Because it was store-bought. Said if she’d known, before class, she’d have made something herself. I was so touched, by her thoughtfulness. Did she ever tell you about that?”
“No,” I said. But it did sound like Sheila.
“This is very hard for me to say to you,” Butterfield said. “I mean, it’ll just seem, I don’t know, maybe it’ll seem strange to you, but I was very much affected when she passed away.”
“Why all the calls, Allan?”
He frowned and looked down at his messy desk. “I made a fool of myself.”
I decided to let him tell it at his own speed.
“I told you, before, that Sheila and I had gone out for a drink one night. That was all it was. Honestly. It was nice, just having someone to talk to. I told her, when I was younger, that I wanted to be a travel writer. That I had this dream of going all around the world and writing about it. And she said to me, she said, if that’s what you want to do, you should do it. I said, I’m forty-four. I have this teaching job. I can’t do that. She said, take a vacation, go someplace interesting, and write about it. See if I could sell the story to a magazine or newspaper. She said, don’t quit. Try to do it on the side, see where it goes.” He nodded happily, but looked as though he might cry. “So, next week, I go to Spain. I’m going to do it.”
“That’s great,” I said, still waiting.
“So after I booked the trip, I wanted to thank her. I asked her out to dinner. I suggested she come early on a class night, and I would take her out. To show my gratitude.”
“And she said?”
“She said, ‘Oh, Allan, I couldn’t do that.’ I realized that what I had asked her for was a date. A married woman, and I had asked her for a date. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was so sorry, so embarrassed by my actions. I just… liked talking to her. She was so encouraging. She made me believe in myself, and then I did something so stupid.”
I still didn’t know what the calls were about, but figured he was just about to get to that part of the story.
“I guess I never felt a single apology was sufficient. I phoned a couple of times, said I was sorry. And then I was worried maybe she would drop the course, so I phoned her again, but she stopped taking my calls.” He looked crushed. “I thought, if she would answer just one last time, I’d make a final apology, but she didn’t. Someone reached out to me, and I ended up pushing them away.” He sighed. “It’s kind of what I do.”
“Do you think she intended to come to class that night?” I asked. “She never said anything to me about not going.”
“It’s kind of what I’ve wondered, too,” Butterfield said. “And she was really liking the course, and looking forward to helping you. The week before, she told me about her plans for a business of her own.”
“What did she say about that?”
“She wanted to run a business from her home, maybe set up a website where people could order things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Common prescription items. I–I told her I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. That the quality of the goods, it might be difficult to verify, and that if they didn’t do what they were supposed to do, she might open herself up to certain liabilities. She said she hadn’t thought about that, and she would look into it. She said she’d hardly sold anything so far, and if she had reason to believe the drugs were dangerous, she wouldn’t sell them.”
I got up and extended a hand. “Find lots to write about in Spain.”
I was almost to the Milford exit when I called the office.
“Garber Contracting,” said Sally Diehl. “How may I help you?”
“It’s me. You don’t look at call display anymore?”
“I just had a glazed donut,” she replied cheerfully, “and was too busy licking my fingers to notice it was you.”
I wondered if there was a way to find out from her where I might find Theo without letting her know I wanted to murder him.
“You hear back from Alfie?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I lied. “I was hoping to ask Theo a couple of things first. You know where he is?”
