Free Return to Dust by Andrew Lanh Page B

laughed. “I bet she never returned library books either.”
    â€œJoshua realized his home-correspondence school was a bust.”
    â€œSo she had dreams of a life with Joshua?”
    Karen looked into my face. “My aunt could be a foolish woman, Rick. I tell you—she was too fond of Joshua—with that big house on the green, his—his patrician background, his kindness to her. She thought he cared for her, and I guess he did in his own way. She even thought they, you know, might marry and travel. He flattered her—teased.” A sigh. “She was foolish.”
    â€œThat explains her depression when he died.”
    She shook her head back and forth. “Well, that started earlier when they had that fight. He told her not to come to the house. To stay away.”
    â€œThat must have hurt her.”
    She bit her lip. “No woman wants a man to reject her.”
    â€œNo man wants a woman to reject him.”
    â€œIt’s not the same thing, Rick.”
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œIt just isn’t. Men don’t get it.”
    â€œBut…”
    She turned away. “I don’t want this conversation.”
    The house yielded no surprises. I found nothing out of bounds in the closets. No hidden men’s clothing to suggest secret lovers, no rattling skeletons, no Victoria’s Secret catalogs, no taboo sex toys. Hers was a modest, decent life lived simply. No rose for Emily, this woman. There were no exotic foodstuffs in the kitchen cabinets, no international coffee flavors, no low-fat cuisine in the freezer, no food processor. Maxwell House coffee. Dial soap. In a hall cupboard were five bottles of whiskey, rye and scotch, two unopened. The third was nearly empty. She used an old-fashioned coffee percolator, sparkling clean. Technology was ignored here: no answering machine, no cordless phone. She had an old VCR, broken, with a cassette of The Sound of Music resting on top of it. She had an old RCA TV in her living room, not a sleek flat-screen. Here was a doggedly conventional woman. There was nothing to break the pattern that caught your eye when you opened the front door—a sort of lower-middle-class life lived redundantly in all the rooms.
    But deeply religious. Ivy curled from the belly of the Infant of Prague statue on the TV. Gilded crosses adorned the walls. Glossy Russian icons of Jesus’ head, oversized and startling, hung on the bedroom wall. She was, I knew, a church-going Catholic. I’d found canceled checks for payments to the church, regular contributions to Catholic Charities, payments for memorial Masses for her dead husband. A Mass card from his funeral. Pamphlets for pilgrimages to shrines at Lourdes. A book on Our Lady of Fatima. Nothing offbeat here where conservative religion thrived.
    Except for a stack of pamphlets bound together with elastic bands. Manifestos from the Brown Bonnets, a vociferous, local charismatic Catholic women’s group opposed to abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, progressive Catholicism, and all-around good fun. A group that marched in Washington at pro-life rallies. They’d picketed Bill Maher when he performed at the Bushnell. These pamphlets bore Marta’s address label, with some numbers above it. I recorded the information.
    â€œNothing to suggest violence hiding in a corner of her life,” I told Karen.
    She looked disheartened.
    â€œBut there’s nothing to suggest suicide, either,” I added.
    No pills. No prescription drugs, no letters chronicling depression. No suggestion of a woman on the edge. It was the undemonstrative house of an old woman decidedly content, someone whose life was defined by periodic trips to gambling palaces with busloads of other women. Yes, a little fanatical when it came to religion, but she was, well—normal.
    Karen was in a hurry to leave, snapping lights off before I could gather my jacket. In the driveway she confessed, “The place