Mrs. Fletcher(23)

Oh Jesus, Amanda thought.

Just yesterday, she and Garth Heely had butted heads about the flyers the Senior Center had designed to promote his lecture. He thought they looked boring—guilty as charged—and suggested that they be printed on several different shades of eye-catching colored paper, preferably pink, yellow, and light blue. Amanda explained that this wouldn’t be possible, since the Senior Center’s budget didn’t allow for colored paper.

“Hello?” Grace Lucas said. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here.” Amanda’s skin felt clammy beneath her dress. She’d only been working at the Senior Center for a few months, and the last thing she needed was to walk into Eve’s office and explain that the November speaker had canceled over a trivial dispute. “Please tell Mr. Heely that I misspoke. We’ll be more than happy to supply colored paper for the flyers.”

The silence on the other end of the line felt more puzzled than frosty. Amanda was about to add an apology to the offer when Grace Lucas finally spoke.

“Garth is dead, dear.”

“What?” Amanda started to laugh, then caught herself. “I talked to him yesterday morning. He was fine.”

“I know.” There was a note of quiet wonder in Grace Lucas’s voice. “He died right afterward. You were the last person to speak to him. He was still holding the phone when I found him.”

Oh my God, Amanda thought. I killed him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Thank you, dear.” Grace Lucas gave a resigned sigh. “I just wish he’d been able to finish the book he was working on. He said it was going to be his best Parker Winslow yet. Now we’ll never know who the murderer was.”

Amanda wanted to ask if there was a non-white health care worker in the book—There’s your killer!—but she was distracted by an embarrassing feeling of relief, the knowledge that Garth Heely’s sudden death was going to be a lot easier to explain to Eve than a disagreement over colored paper would have been.

“I’m going to bury him in his blue suit.” Grace Lucas’s voice was dreamy and private, as if she were talking to herself. “He always looked so good in blue.”

*

Wakes and funerals were an inescapable part of Eve’s professional life, and she tried to approach them with a businesslike sense of detachment. She showed up in her official capacity, she paid her respects to the family of the deceased, and she went home. No fuss, no muss, no tears.

Tonight, though, she was a bit of a wreck. The news of Roy Rafferty’s death had upset her deeply, coming so soon after she’d banished him for exposing himself in the ladies’ room. She didn’t feel guilty about her decision—as an administrator, she’d really had no choice—but the memory of it still made her sick at heart. It seemed so cruel and pointless in retrospect, humiliating a sick old man who had only a month to live, not that she had any way of knowing that at the time. All she knew was that she’d inflicted pain on someone she cared about, and that always cost you something, even if you were just doing your job. It left you feeling dirty and mean, exposed to the laws of karma. It also made her wonder if she was doing the right thing by coming here.

A lot of the wakes she went to were woefully underpopulated affairs, a corpse and some flowers and a handful of bored spectators, no one even bothering to pretend that it was a big deal. Eve was relieved to see that this wasn’t the case tonight. The parking lot was packed, and so was the viewing room, an impressive line of mourners massed along the side wall, inching their way toward the open coffin. The turnout was a tribute to Roy’s lifelong ties to Haddington, his membership in a variety of civic organizations, and his long and successful career as a plumbing contractor, not to mention the fact that he’d been a genuinely nice guy before the dementia kicked in.

Instead of joining the procession, Eve slipped into a velour-cushioned chair in the second to last row of the viewing room, near a group of ladies who were regulars at the Senior Center. One of them was Evelyn Gerardi, the emphysemic woman who’d been the victim of Roy’s indecent overtures.

“So sad,” Eve whispered. “Such a shame.”

The ladies nodded in mournful agreement, murmuring that Roy was a sweetheart and a good father and so handsome when he was young. Eve turned to face the coffin, which was obscured by a wall of dark suits and somber dresses. She sat quietly for a while, trying to summon a mental image of the dead man—not the confused troublemaker he’d been near the end, but the gruff, garrulous man she’d gotten to know a decade earlier, a stocky guy with a silver-gray brush cut and an impish twinkle in his eyes. He always wore Hawaiian shirts on Friday—his favorite had pineapples and parrots on it—and he liked to flirt with the female employees of the Center, Eve included.

What she remembered best about him was the way he’d cared for his wife after the death of their oldest son, five or six years ago now. Joan had taken it hard—how could she not? Nick was still her baby, even if he’d been fifty-two years old at the time of his death—and it seemed like all the joy and vitality drained out of her after that. Roy began holding her hand in public, something he’d never done before, and treating her with immense politeness, pulling out her chair before she sat down, helping her on with her coat, checking on her in a soft and solicitous voice. That was the man Eve was here to honor, and she hoped the Rafferty family would accept her condolences without bitterness, and forgive her for the unfortunate role she’d played in the final chapter of his life.