Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

front or something— maybe he was gay, I don’t know. But there were these good-night kisses, which were getting better and better until we were necking like a couple of teenagers.” She stubbed out her cigarette, again taking out her anger on it. “So when I pressed the point, he dumped me.”
    Neither of us knew what to say.
    “Dumped you.” I repeated finally.
    “He just quit calling. You know how that works.” She brushed hair away from her face, obviously trying to keep her dignity.
    “Were you mad?”
    “You mean, did I kill him? It’s pretty hard to work up that much excitement over someone you’ve never even slept with.”
    “Well, actually, I didn’t mean that. I was just wondering how much you had invested in him at that point.”
    She nodded before she answered. Rob looked at us as if we were speaking Albanian.
    “A lot, I guess. He was so charming and yet he seemed so sad. I’m a sucker for sad.”
    “I know what you mean. You keep wanting to cheer them up.”
    She looked at me and smiled. “Ah. A fellow neurotic.”
    “Did you meet friends of his? Double-date or anything?”
    “He knew everyone in town. You couldn’t go out with him without running into friends of his.”
    “But I mean close friends. Intimates.”
    “Intimates! I doubt Jason McKendrick knew the meaning of the word.”
    Rob said, “You don’t seem that sorry he’s dead.”
    She pulled on a cigarette, no longer angry, thinking things over. “Don’t I? I almost cried on the air tonight. I think it only gets to me when I’m alone. Are you going to the wake?”
    We nodded.
    “I guess I am too. The point of those things is to make it real— that somebody’s really dead.”
    When we left, I felt bereft myself and couldn’t figure out why. Rob said, “Creepy, wasn’t she?”
    I’d kind of liked her. “Was she?”
    “Oh, yeah, like a vampire. Dressed all in black. Anorexic. Killing herself with cigarettes. No wonder he wouldn’t have sex with her— it’d be like humping a corpse.”
    “And then there’s the night job.” I was beginning to realize she was probably a very depressed woman— what had looked like a failure to grieve was probably just her accustomed lack of affect. Well, that made two— Adrienne was no Little Miss Sunshine herself. And come to think of it, Rob had said she always wore black to the office. I wondered if they were into tattoos and piercing as well. And if that meant S&M. The culture changed so fast it was hard to know what went with what. For all I knew you wore pink polka dots to signify S&M these days.
    “Who’s next on the list?”
    “Let’s do another girlfriend. I’m dying to see if we’ve got a pattern here.”
    “How about Felicity Wainwright, the oncologist? What do you bet she’s just a bundle of giggles?” Felicity lived in San Mateo, which meant quite a little drive, so it was midmorning by the time we got there. Our plan to surprise people in their beds was rapidly falling apart.
    Her house was lovely— Spanish-style stucco, the house of someone who’d been well rewarded for fighting cancer. I wondered what the job was like. If most patients lived, it was one thing— if they didn’t, it must be one of the hardest jobs in the world. She was probably away, I realized; anyone who lived that stressful a life probably beat a retreat on weekends.
    But there were two teenagers on her porch, a boy and a girl, the girl eating yogurt and granola, the boy practically doing handstands to amuse her. And it looked as if it was working. She kept putting down her bowl and laughing, sometimes touching brow to knees, holding on to her ankles. She had light red hair that hung to the middle of her back in perfect curls, as if she had an expensive perm, but I was willing to bet she was just lucky. Lucky to have that hair, live in that house, be fourteen and in love. She probably didn’t own a single black garment.
    “Is this the Wainwright residence?”
    “Uh-huh. You want to see my mom?”
    I nodded.
    “Mo-om!” It was a piercing shriek.
    “Yes?”
    I’d been expecting a harried parent to rush out the door holding her ears. Instead, a woman rounded the corner of the house, wearing khaki capris and gardening gloves, which she was pulling off delicately, finger by finger.
    “Felicity Wainwright?”
    She nodded, wary.
    Rob said who he was. “And this is Rebecca Schwartz.” No more ID than that, which was fine with me. “I was a friend of Jason McKendrick’s. I