equivalent of a hug.
“I know he loved you,” I said emphatically. “He told me he did.”
Charlotte quickly wiped her eyes, tucked the hankie into a pocket of her jeans, and began bustling around the living room. “Take these flowers to the church, would you please, Goldy? They’ll all be faded by the time I get back from the spa.”
And so I said I would. I had to roll the windows down to dispel the pungent, cinnamon scent of the stock in the bouquets. When I got to the church, neither Marla, Father Pete, nor the secretary was in evidence. Luckily, I knew the hiding place for the key to the heavy doors. I placed all the flowers in the sacristy, wrote a quick note to Father Pete, and drove slowly back home.
But again, the thought of going back into our house was not something I could bear. Tom’s car wasn’t anywhere in evidence, but I wouldn’t have expected him to be home yet.
I turned off the ignition in my van and looked disconsolately up at Jack’s house, much as Charlotte had stared at the wild birds on her deck. Without thinking, I reached into my sweatpants pocket and felt for the keys Jack had insisted I take in the hospital. Luckily, I’d also put the note in there that he had written.
If Jack was directing me to go into that mess he called a residence, or more properly, a residence being renovated, then what did he want me to find?
I suddenly and with unexpected vividness remembered Jack coming into the spa kitchen the previous night. He’d asked if he could talk to Boyd. Jack had wanted to talk to Sergeant Boyd, who worked for the sheriff’s department.
About what?
Well. I looked back at Jack’s house. There was no doubt that Lucas, whom I perhaps unfairly thought of as a materialist, would eventually have his way with Jack’s house. Lucas was the son, the heir. Marla had heard he needed money. So Lucas would probably get in, finish the renovation as quickly and cheaply as possible, then put the place on the market. This made me extraordinarily sad. I forced my mind to veer away from this line of thinking.
The problem was, I was having trouble breathing. I didn’t want to have anything in my mind. I didn’t want to feel anything.
I pulled out the keys Jack had told me to take, and without thinking about it, jumped out of the van.
Watery sunshine was breaking through the clouds. Finally. It felt as if we’d been underwater for a month. More sadness: now that it was finally nice, Jack wasn’t here to enjoy it.
A breeze shuffled through the pines and aspens as I hopped up the steps to Jack’s house, and I wished I’d worn a jacket or a sweater. But if I went back home, my nerve would fail and I would rethink the advisability of going into Jack’s house. I didn’t think it was illegal, but I certainly did not want to consult an attorney on the subject.
The key squeaked as I turned it in the lock, the mechanism itself infected with the humidity that had been our constant summer companion. I tiptoed into the house, and immediately felt as if things had changed. Things had changed? What things?
The interior was as disordered as usual. Jack had apparently left a few windows open, and the fresh scent of recent rain filled the air. Jack’s old sofa was piled with clothes and towels—a dump of clean laundry awaiting folding, probably. The end tables and coffee tables held precariously piled stacks of books and magazines.
I allowed my gaze to travel around the room, thinking the whole time: What’s different? What had Jack wanted me to see in here, if anything? If Jack had been so anxious for me to see something in his living room, then he should have been clearer about it—
Beside the door was a set of golf clubs in a beautiful leather bag. Golf clubs? The clubs and the bag looked brand new. But Jack had bursitis in both of his elbows. It had pained him, and he was always rubbing in this or that new anti-inflammatory cream.
Why new golf clubs? Had Jack bought them as a gift for someone? If so, for whom? Were they for Doc Finn, Lucas, or Craig Miller, as a wedding gift? They hadn’t been here when Tom and I had come over to visit the other night.
Jack could not possibly have thought he would be able to play eighteen holes, or even nine, as his aches would have made the outing disastrous. The bursitis didn’t bother him fishing, he always told me, just doing something strenuous, like…sports. And anyway, with whom would Jack have played golf? He and Doc Finn had engaged in fishing and drinking, not necessarily, as Jack had always said, in that order.
Then I saw something else that had not been there on any of my previous visits. A small gold travel clock was folded into the open position, on a tiny end table right in front of the picture window that gave someone looking out a view of our house. If somebody were sitting on the couch, that person would look right at the clock, and then to our house across the street.
Golf clubs, when he didn’t play golf. A travel clock, when he kept no clock in his house. Hmm.
Okay, I was anxious and grief crazed, and who knew what all. But I couldn’t help seizing on the idea that Jack had left the clubs and the clock here because he wanted me to find them. They were one of his puzzles, left for me.
Without thinking about it, I moved across to the table and picked up the clock. It was not telling the correct time, and when I tried to turn the tiny crank on the side, nothing happened. Without thinking, I folded the clock back into a square, and slipped it into my sweatpants pocket. I walked over to the golf clubs, and ran my hands over the golf bag, which was made of a lovely buttery yellow leather. Maybe it belonged to somebody else? But when I looked closely, I saw a price tag dangling from the bag’s handle.
I simply would not accept what other people might have said, that the clubs and bag and nonworking clock were evidence of mental decline on Jack’s part. I supposed it was possible he had bought the golf accoutrements, then remembered he didn’t actually play golf…and then had wanted to return what he’d bought.
As improbable as it seemed, I found myself returning to the puzzle idea. I began to remove one club after another from the bag. I didn’t know what I was looking for, or even if I would recognize it if I found it.
I had just put a five iron on the floor when I felt a slight movement of air behind me. I started to turn around, but I wasn’t quite fast enough. For all my worry and care about why Jack had given me his keys, I was rewarded with a glancing blow off the side of my skull.
My knees crumpled. My mind’s eye brought up my dear Arch and Tom. But then pain exploded on the side of my head, and I thought,
THE FIRST ODDITY facing me as I sputtered, blinked, and coughed uncontrollably was to figure out who was waving spirits of ammonia under my nose. This person had to be stopped. I screamed that I hadn’t blacked out, I was perfectly conscious, thank you very much. The ammonia disappeared.
The second problem had to do with my mother’s pet bird, a canary named George who’d lived in a cage in our New Jersey home while I was growing up. George the canary had not died, as I had been told, but had grown as large as a human and now was fully alive, leaning over me. What kind of badly scented alternative universe had I entered?
Eventually the big canary resolved into the avian facial features and yellow hair of Lucas Carmichael. Next to him were two policemen. I was looking up at them from a prone position on the floor.
“Would you please get my husband? Tom Schulz?” I asked one of the policemen, a fellow with sparse red hair who looked familiar. Then again, I’d just thought the son of my godfather was a canary, so maybe I did not in fact know this guy. Still, in as authoritative a voice as I could muster, I said, “Please call Tom Schulz. Right now. He needs to be here. Please,” I added again.
“Oh, Christ,” said the other policeman, who had dark, slicked-back hair and a youthful face. “Schulz? This is Schulz’s wife?” He looked down at me. “This isn’t Schulz’s house, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Lucas Carmichael.
I narrowed my eyes at Lucas. “Please tell me you weren’t the one who hit me on the side of the head.”
“I didn’t know it was you,” he said, his tone humble. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t recognize you from the back.”
While the policeman I had spoken to summoned Tom on the radio, the other one glanced up questioningly at Lucas.
