Scratch the Surface

thought that Uncle Bob still lived there.”
    “Why would someone dump a body at Bob’s doorstep?”
    “Why would someone dump a body at mine?”
    “You’ll know more about that than I will. I’ve never believed in interfering in my children’s lives.”
    “I don’t know a thing about it. That’s why I’m wondering about Uncle Bob.”
    Mary put her hands on the arms of the recliner and leaned forward. “My brother was a fine man until Thelma got her clutches in him. She could see he was going places, and she set her cap for him. She was always greedy, Thelma was. A sly one, that’s what she was. Did I ever tell you what she did when my mother died?”
    Ten thousand times. But having diverted her mother from sensational murder cases to Bob and Thelma, she said, “What was that?”
    “She stole my mother’s jewelry right off her body! After the funeral, right after, she went to the undertaker and got him to give it to her. My mother’s opal ring and her gold chain. Of course, I don’t believe in an open casket myself, but I had no say in it, and look how it ended up!”
    “A new argument for closed caskets. Worried about the family kleptomaniac? Shut that lid!”
    “What was that, Felicity?”
    “Nothing. Look, Mother, this business of the murder and Uncle Bob. I know you thought a lot of him before Thelma came along, but was there anything not quite on the up and up in his past? Anything that would lead anyone to... I don’t know. Anything I might not know about?”
    Mary closed her mouth and locked her jaw. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “A family secret.”
    “In our family?”
    “In our family. About Uncle Bob.”
    “You know, Felicity, the Depression was a terrible time for men. It’s hard for a man to worry about not having a job.” And easy for a woman. “So, Uncle Bob worried?”
    “There’s no real harm in rum-running. A lot of people did it.”
    “He was a bootlegger? Uncle Bob?”
    “Not a bootlegger, really. No. He just had friends at Seabrook Beach. It wasn’t bootlegging. It was just rum-running. He wasn’t much more than a boy, anyway. That’s how he got started in the liquor business.”
    “Mother, rum-running is bootlegging.”
    “It was a long time ago. And he gave it up, after all.”
    “Of course he gave it up! Prohibition ended!”
    Mary laughed hoarsely. “It wasn’t very profitable afterwards, was it? Hah! It wasn’t very profitable after that!”
     

 
    Felicity arrived home to find a message on her answering machine from a neighbor named Loretta who more or less ran the condo association. Loretta was a single mother with two young children fathered by two different men, neither of whom Loretta had married. As far as Felicity could tell, Loretta had somehow managed to grow up in the United States and reach the age of thirty or thereabouts without encountering the notion that society expected women to marry before having babies and frowned on those who violated the expectation. Loretta didn’t seem to defy the rules, nor did she seem to have liberated herself from them; she seemed not to realize that they existed.
    What puzzled Felicity and the other residents of Newton Park was not, however, Loretta’s startling openness about having given out-of-wedlock birth to two children with two different fathers. Rather, the mystery about Loretta was the source of her apparently boundless wealth. Frugality was anything but the norm in Newton Park, but even by the extravagant standards of the neighborhood, Loretta threw away money with abandon. Although her house had been brand new when she’d bought it, she’d immediately redone the entire kitchen. Dissatisfied with the result, she’d then had the second new kitchen torn out and a third one installed. When she’d decided that the medium beige of her house was a bit more yellow than she liked, she’d had it repainted in a shade indistinguishable from the original. She clearly had a job: She left the house early every morning and returned home in the evening, and her children were known to attend an expensive day care center. She was rumored to do something with computers, but it was hard to imagine what she could possibly do to earn what she spent.
    In any case, she generously hosted meetings of the condo association and dealt with neighborhood matters. According to her message, the Norwood Hill Neighborhood Association had sent a letter complaining about traffic, and Mr. Trotsky had