Dying for Chocolate

We both stopped talking at once. There was a long silence while we looked at each other.

I said, “Do you want to talk?”

Someone buzzed the security gate.

“Julian!” I said with false enthusiasm and leaped up to check the camera, press the admittance button, and open the front door. Schulz’s car ascended the driveway. I darted back to the study to make sure the general was still asleep. He was. But the Mace was gone.

“You okay?” Schulz asked when he came through the door. “The seven of spades a trick or not?”

“Just chatting with Adele. We think the general is asleep,” I said with a false sprightliness that hopefully warned him, Be careful. Then I introduced him to Adele.

She pulled herself up into a regal stance, limped over to take his hand, and said, “Can we get you something?”

Schulz regarded me: Is this some kind of game? I said, “Go on in and sit down with Adele. I’ll bring you some coffee.” I made him a double espresso. It was fast and I wanted him awake so he could help me look for Arch. Also, I did not trust anything else one might eat in this house.

When I handed him his cup, I said, “Adele was just telling me she thinks Julian might have seen correspondence that put Brian Harrington in danger.”

Schulz’s eyes looped around the room. “Oh yeah?” he said. “What was that?”

Adele looked from one to the other of us.

She said, “You can never go back. You think you can, but you can’t. That’s what the general thought with all his experimenting, but Philip Miller just thought he was crazy. I knew he had it in for him, and he wanted so badly to go back. . . .”

Schulz raised his coppery eyebrows at Adele. He said, “Go back where?”

She said nothing, only glared at him, as if she were waiting for his own response to the question. But all he did was sip the coffee. I could hear the clock ticking the minutes away. My hands itched with anxiety for Arch. If the general had harmed Philip Miller, then why had Philip warned Brian Harrington? The coffee was not clarifying my mind.

Finally I said, “Perhaps you are as concerned about your son as I am about mine.”

Her eyelids flickered in appraising me.

She said, “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.”

I nodded. Schulz’s gaze traveled from one to the other of us.

He said, “Why don’t you tell us? We’re especially interested in the last couple of weeks.”

Adele ignored him. “You know,” she said to me, “a death is like a divorce in many ways. You are left alone, whether you like it or not. When you’re divorced, you can’t express your sadness. When you’re widowed, it’s not considered proper to express . . . anger. And in either case, the financial burdens are tremendous.”

I said, “You seem to have weathered the financial part okay.”

“Oh, you think so?” Adele raised her thin eyebrows at me, then flicked more invisible lint from the beige sweater. “I’ve seen the way men eye Sissy for her body. Imagine being sized up for your dollars.” She cleared her throat. “At least in Sissy’s case, when men tell her she’s beautiful, they’re not lying.”

“Did Brian Harrington say you were beautiful?”

She paused. She said, “Many times.”

I looked over at Schulz. His face had gone pale and was filmy with sweat. He excused himself quietly. Adele dismissed him with a wave.

I said, “Was this before or after he was married to Weezie?”

She looked at me, the corners of her mouth turned down. Water was running in the hall bathroom.

She said, “Both.”

I said, “Did he know Julian was his son?”

Her face and composure crumpled. She shuddered, rubbed her cheeks and pulled herself together.

She said, “He knew so little. There were things he chose not to know. He had a single purpose. To get the woman with the money or land to fall in love with him. He did it with Weezie and he did it with me.” As tears leaked from the edges of her eyes, she wiped them off with her index finger.

“You don’t need to talk,” I said. In fact, I wondered why she was talking about this to me at all. Where was Schulz? Was he in danger from the general?

“Yes I do,” Adele was saying. “It was a terrible rejection. Rejection! My God, that sounds like the way we used to talk in adolescence. I was thirty-one when I was with Brian. I felt all my anger, all my grief dissipate in that time with him. You hear about affairs. You think, oh, illicit sex.” She regarded me with disgust. “Sex is incidental.” She looked wistfully at the mantelpiece that had held the Waterford vase destroyed in the garden-explosion. “It’s being loved that we all want.” She sighed with a kind of moan. “Brian loved me. He wrapped me in love. All my anger, my grief over losing my first husband dissipated. And do you know what? I didn’t even feel guilty. I even thought Marcus Keely had had his heart attack so I could find Brian. My true love. Ha!” She cackled.

My gastrointestinal tract was doing flip-flops. I put it down to caffeine on an empty stomach. I wanted to get this over with, to untangle the past and find out what was going on in the present.