“Was your group all women?” I asked.
She tried to remember. “I think a few members did bring their husbands, but most of those who attended were women. Almost always are.”
I expected as much. It was improbable Beryl’s killer had been among her admirers that November day.
“Did she accept invitations like yours very often?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Mrs. McTigue was quick to say. “I know she didn’t, at least not around here. I would have heard about something like that and been the first to sign up. She struck me as a very private young woman, someone who wrote for the joy of it and didn’t really care for the attention. Explaining why she used pen names. Writers who mask their identities the way she did rarely venture out
in public. And I’m sure she wouldn’t have made the exception in my case had it not been for foe’s connections with Mr. Harper.”
“Sounds like he would do most anything for Mr. Harper,” I commented.
“Why, yes. I ‘spect that’s so.”
“Have you ever met him?”
“Yes.”
“What was your impression of him?”
“I ‘spect he may have been shy,” she said. “But I sometimes thought he was an unhappy man and perhaps considered himself a bit better than everybody else. I will say he cut an impressive figure.”
She was staring off again, and the light had gone out of her eyes. “Certainly my husband was devoted to him.”
“When was the last time you saw Mr. Harper?” asked.
“Joe passed away last spring.”
“You haven’t seen Mr. Harper since your husband died?”
She shook her head and left me for a private bitter place I knew nothing of. I wondered what had really transpired between Gary Harper and Mr. McTigue. Bad business deals? An influence on Mr. McTigue that eventually made him less than the man his wife had loved? Perhaps it was simply that Harper was egotistical and rude.
“He has a sister, I understand. Gary Harper lives with his sister?” I said.
Mrs. McTigue baffled me by pressing her lips together, her eyes tearing up. Setting my glass on an end table, I reached for my pocketbook. She followed me to the door. I persisted, carefully. “Did Beryl ever write to you or perhaps to your husband?”
She shook her head.
“Are you aware of any other friends she had? Did your husband ever mention anyone?”
Again, she shook her head.
“What about anyone she may have referred to as ‘M,’ the initial M?”
Mrs. McTigue stared sadly into the empty hallway, her hand on the door. When she looked at me, her eyes were weepy and unfocused. “There’s a ‘P’ and an ‘A’ in two of her novels. Union spies, I believe. Oh, my. I don’t think I turned the oven off.”
She blinked several times as if staring into sunlight. “You’ll come see me again, I hope?”
“That would be very nice.”
Kindly touching her arm, I thanked her and left.
I called my mother as soon as I got home and for once was relieved to receive the usual lectures and reminders, to hear that strong voice loving me in its no-nonsense way.
“It’s been in the eighties all week and I saw on the news it’s been dropping as low as forty in Richmond,” she said. “That’s almost freezing. It hasn’t snowed yet?”
“No, Mother. It hasn’t snowed. How’s your hip?”
“As well as can be expected. I’m crocheting a lap robe, thought you could cover your legs with it while you work in your office. Lucy’s been asking about you.”
I hadn’t talked to my niece in weeks.
“She’s working on some science project at school right now,” my mother went on. “A talking robot, of all things. Brought it over the other night and scared poor Sinbad under the bed—–”
Sinbad was a sinful, bad, mean, nasty cat, a gray- and black-striped stray who had tenaciously begun following Mother while she was shopping in Miami Beach one morning. Whenever I came to visit, Sinbad’s hospitality extended to his perching on top of the refrigerator like a vulture and giving me the fish-eye.
“You’ll never guess who I saw the other day,” I began a little too breezily. The need to tell someone was overwhelming. My mother knew my past, or at least most of it. “Do you remember Mark James?”