Page 44 of Again with Feeling

“You’re right.” She cleared her throat, and a trace of her usual briskness came back into the words—but it was still only a pale imitation. “You’re right, Dash. I should have told you. I apologize. I think—I think I’ve wasted your time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I understand that you aren’t willing to take their claims at face value,” she said. “I understand that it’s your role to be suspicious. But I promise you, neither Neil nor Jane killed Richard. Certainly not so that, years later, they could get married, and Neil could, as you put it, take over Richard’s life. That’s simply not what happened.”

“With all due respect, Vivienne, I don’t think there’s any way you can know that.”

“Yes,” she said. “Well.” And then she cleared her throat again. “I apologize again for not revealing the full extent of my relationship with Jane.”

The pain in her voice, more than anything else, gave me pause. And there was something else too, a note I’d heard before, like she wasn’t ready to stop talking.

So, I asked, “What happened?”

It was a broad question, and I meant—well, I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant. Why did you both decide to marry men? Why did you have an affair? Why did it end?

Maybe Vivienne heard all of them. Maybe, after all those years of hiding, she simply wanted to talk.

“It was a different time,” she said, and that familiar matter-of-factness I knew from watching her on television was blended now with something more human. “We knew about homosexuals, but not in any personal way. On top of that, there was far less discussion, shall we say, about how women were supposed to feel in a relationship. I loved Neil. And Janeloved Richard. They were both smart, athletic, handsome, and charming. It all seemed straightforward—we’d get married, Neil and Richard would get jobs, and we’d go on living the way we had been, as best friends.”

I didn’t say anything. The distant voices from the sandcastle competition competed with the crash of the surf.

“And then I actuallydidmarry Neil, and…well, not to put too fine a point on it, but we discovered there was a long distance between a polite kiss on my father’s porch and, well, the act itself. Neil did his best, of course, but I knew from that first night it wasn’t going to work. We waited a respectable time, or what felt like a respectable time—we were children, so any time at all seemed like an eternity—and we divorced. My mother and father were furious, of course.” She stopped. “Have you met my father?”

“In passing. Would it surprise you that he didn’t want to talk?”

“Not particularly.” Her hesitation suggested a silent struggle, and then she asked, “How is he?”

I thought about that. “Ornery. He threatened me with a shotgun the first time he saw me.”

A bright, almost childlike laugh burst out of Vivienne. “That sounds like my father.”

“Candy says Neil is more his son than Richard.”

“By now, I imagine that’s true. He took to Neil from the first time they met; Neil came over to study, and my father recognized him from the basketball team. They were a match made in heaven.”

“Why was your father’s relationship with Richard so strained?”

She laughed again, but it was colder this time. “No, Dash, I’m sorry. My father didn’t kill my brother.”

“Everyone talks about how charming Richard was. Why didn’t it work on your father?”

“I suppose precisely because hewasour father; parents tend to know us in a way no one else does. Richard and my father…they were like oil and water. Once Richard became a teenager, they couldn’t agree on anything. I’m sure you know how it is. Part of that was simply the son asserting himself, trying to establish his own identity. Rebellion against the authority figure of the father and all that. But part of it was personality; at some point, I believe, Richard decided to push back, and once Richard decided something, there was no changing his mind.” Something about that tugged at the back of my mind—something about Richard, how he’d been fighting with everyone before he disappeared. But before I could try to follow up on the question, Vivienne continued, “Of course, it didn’t help that our mother loved Richard so much.”

“What do you mean?”

“Richard was the favorite. He could do no wrong. I’m barely a year younger, but you’d think I’d come from another family. Everything was Richard. It drove my father crazy, especially once he and Richard started fighting.” Vivienne stopped, and then she broke her own silence unexpectedly. “The only time she ever fought with Richard was when he married Jane. I honestly thought my mother would rather kill him herself than see him in the hands of another woman. She never liked Jane; she thought Jane was putting on airs, which, if you know Jane, is the last thing Jane would do. It only got worse after the wedding. When Richard…went missing, my mother was already sick. She stopped speaking to Jane the moment she heard Richard had disappeared, and she never spoke to her again.”

There was so much to follow up on, and I scrambled to pick the best question. “I heard Jane got cold feet before the wedding.”

Vivienne measured breaths came across the call. “And you want to know if we were already involved.”

“I don’t know what I want to know. I’m just trying to understand. If she and Richard were already fighting, or if he did something—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She inhaled sharply, as though trying to rein in her temper. “No, Dash. Nothing happened. And no, we hadn’t begun our…our affair, which simply sounds too tawdry. It began later. Neil and I were already divorced. One night, Jane came over. She was upset. Neil and Richard had been fighting.” I could hear her struggling to master herself, trying to summon up that Matron of Murder matter-of-factness, but her voice quavered. “Had been brawling like teenagers, as a matter of fact. By that point, Richard was fighting with everyone, but it was most upsetting when it was with Neil, of course. She didn’t want to go home. And I didn’t want her to go home.” For a moment, it was like Vivienne didn’t remember she was speaking to me. “She had rain in her hair, and she smelled like camellias.”

In the silence that came after, the sound of her painful, dry swallow came clearly across the phone’s tiny speaker.

“Did Richard know?” I asked.

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