She poured, and I let her set the pace.It was her house and her story and she’d tell it when she was ready.She told me she’d never once set foot in my shop, that she did her own baking and took her tea at her own table and didn’t see the sense in paying four dollars to drink it in a room full of strangers, and she said it without any meanness, the way some women her age stated their borders and expected no argument.She told me her boxwoods had taken the heat hard this year and her gardener was useless and she’d half a mind to do it herself.
Then she set down her cup, folded her hands in her lap, and the social part of her face went somewhere else entirely.
“But you didn’t bring me scones to talk about my boxwoods,” she said.“You’re here about Henry.”
“I am.”
She didn’t answer right away.She set her cup down in its saucer and looked at me for a long moment, and something surfaced in her eyes that she didn’t bother to hide, something that had been waiting a great while for a door to open.
“In twenty-five years,” she said, “you are the first soul to sit in my house and ask me about that man on purpose.Do you know that?Not one before you.”Her voice stayed even, but her hands had folded themselves tight in her lap.
“Then I’m glad I came.”
“So am I, though I’ll want to know how much good it’ll do before I get my hopes up.I had them up once.”She studied me the way you study produce you don’t quite trust.“You’ll forgive me if I take your measure first.The last person I trusted with any of this was the law, and the law told me I’d watched too much television.”
There was a quiet to her that reminded me of Josephine— the same careful weighing, truth measured out in slow spoonfuls by women who’d learned not to spend it freely.
“You should understand something first,” she said.“I am not a gossip.But I know what’s going on in my own neighborhood and I always have.My binoculars have stopped more than one suspicious character and thwarted a home invasion when the Prescotts were visiting their daughter in Atlanta.”She lifted her chin.“But I never told a soul.Not because I didn’t know things.Because Harold told me if he ever heard my mouth running about the neighbors, especially about Henry Wainwright, he’d divorce me and take the children, and Harold was not a man who threatened things he wouldn’t do.”
“Why Henry especially?”
“Because Harold respected him.Henry caught Harold’s diabetes before it took his feet, and Harold never forgot it.”She picked at an invisible thread on her slacks.“So I kept Henry’s business behind my own teeth for twenty-five years, and I watched that fool Milton bury a good man as a coward, and I have hated it every single day.”
The garden ticked with heat beyond the glass.Somewhere out over the river a gull complained about something and got no satisfaction.
“You said you knew things,” I said.“About Henry.”
“I knew he had a woman.”
I kept my hands easy around the cup and my face arranged into nothing at all.“Go on.”
“Not for long.The last few months before he died, that’s all.”Estelle’s gaze drifted past me toward the front of the house, toward a window I couldn’t see from this room but that she clearly saw fine all the same.“We had a sewing room upstairs, faced the street.I’d sit up there of an evening once the children were down and the supper dishes were put away, and I kept a chair by the window and a pair of field glasses on the sill.Bird-watching, I told Harold.There’s a great blue heron works that stretch of river at dusk.”A dry pause.“Some nights the heron wasn’t the only thing worth the looking.”
“And what did you see?”
“Henry had those thin curtains on his bedroom windows.Sheers.You can’t see a face through them, but you can sure see a body, and you can count how many there are.”There wasn’t a scrap of apology in her gaze.“Charlotte had been dead five years by then, rest her soul.And I guess a man has needs after a while.”
“Could you see who she was?”
“I just got a glimpse of her,” she admitted.“Henry obviously wanted to keep their relationship a secret.I never saw her car, so he must have driven her there and then back home again once they were, you know, finished.And he only ever brought her after dark.I did see his car leave early one morning after one of her visits, before sunrise and before his housekeeper arrived.I got a quick look at her in the passenger seat.She wasn’t from Grimm Island, I know that much.I’d never seen her before.
“How many times did she visit?”
“I can’t be sure,” she said.“I only noticed her through his curtains twice.But in my experience a man doesn’t get a taste of honey and keep it on the shelf.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, but worked to keep my expression blank.
“But like I said, he was real sneaky with her, so she could have come and gone dozens of times when I wasn’t at the upstairs window.”
“You weren’t the only one who knew about Henry’s new lady friend,” I said.“I’ve had two others tell me he was in a relationship, but no one knows who she is.”
“She’ll turn up,” she said, seemingly convinced.“People only think they’re keeping secrets.But something I’ve learned in sixty-eight years of living is that someone is always looking, and someone always sees.”
Considering she was the neighborhood Peeping Tom, she wasn’t wrong.
“Was there anyone else who came to visit Henry?Maybe you saw someone who was out of place, or a conversation that didn’t seem right?”
“Henry was a busy man,” she said.“He knew everyone and everyone knew him.He not only did house calls and worked at the clinic, but he saw patients out of his home office too.”
