Наташа Купер: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

“Thank God,” Gail said, standing on tiptoe and craning her neck to see. “Something Mo-like at last.”

The first to leave was a guy nursing a bloody nose. He strode to the door, raging and humiliated, not looking at anyone.

Gail shoved me. “Go on. Find out who he is.”

“Me?”

“Don’t be such a wimp, Liza. You’re a writer now — go do some research.”

Reluctant to admit I was more at home in libraries than real life, I ran, and when I caught up with him, the man with the bloody nose was already unlocking his car — a brand-new Volvo. I did the first thing to come into my jet-lagged head: I thrust a handful of tissues at him and said stupidly, “Are you all right?” I have always despised people who say that when things are so clearly not all right, and the man with the bloody nose distinctly felt the same way. He glared at me and grimaced — showing his bloody teeth. He did, however, grab the tissues.

“Am I all right!” he snarled. “That arsehole hit me. At her funeral. What a brilliant time to meet her boyfriend! Oh yeah, I’m all right.”

He might’ve been quite fit if it weren’t for the blood and the fury. He fumbled the Volvo open.

I said, “Wait. You can’t drive like that. Some of us are going for a drink or a curry. Come with us.”

“I never want to see any of you arty freaks again. You and your stupid stunts are what killed her.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“North Camden Art Exhibition. Does that ring a bell?”

“I was in Toronto till last night.” Far away the sound of an ambulance rose and fell like a sigh.

The guy with the bloody nose said, “Moselle was not a tart. She did not take drugs.”

“What are you talking about? Of course not.” I wanted him to calm down but he wasn’t listening.

“She was my wife,” he shouted. He wadded up the reddened tissues and hurled them across the carpark. I was too stunned to say anything. The guy climbed into his car and started the motor.

“Wait!” I cried. “I didn’t know Mo was married. Who are you?” But he didn’t hear me. He just drove off, his tires screaming. He was Mo’s husband? And he’d just met her boyfriend? I stood for a second with my jaw hanging.

The others were waiting in the Garden of Remembrance, looking perplexed. The woman in the large black hat turned out not to be Mo’s mother after all. “But I am married to her father, dear,” she told Alastair. She was redheaded and stick-thin and she was hanging on his arm as if being the deceased’s stepmother entitled her to support. “Actually, I’m the third Mrs. Joffe, but I’ve never felt like a Mrs., so do call me Bekki.” The invitation seemed to be extended solely to Alastair.

Gail gave me an evil grin but didn’t intervene. The second man from the front row, the boyfriend, was nursing a bruised hand and a swelling eyebrow; otherwise he was quite fit, too. And that was no surprise: Mo always picked lookers. It was a characteristic we shared. Sometimes we even picked the same lookers, except she was better at catching them than I was — which was one of the reasons why I exiled myself in Canada.

The third Mrs. Joffe was saying, “You can imagine what a shock this has been, having to cope with all the arrangements on my own. Her father never leaves his precious air conditioning at this time of year. Weak lungs, you know.”

“Where’s her real mother?” I asked. I’d come all the way from Toronto, but her blood relations were absent. Poor Mo.

Bekki ignored me and informed Alastair, “Of course I tried to contact everyone in Moselle’s address book, but there was so little time. Maybe she’s abroad. She’s quite old now, you know. She was the first Mrs. Joffe, after all.”

Alastair threw Gail a silent plea for rescue, but she drew me aside instead. “Well?” she said. “Who was the guy with the bloody nose?”

“I don’t know his name, but Mrs. J. must: He’s Mo’s husband and—”

“Oh, Liza, no, you must’ve misunderstood.”

“No, no, he said—”

Gail pulled me even further away from the others. She nodded towards the boyfriend. “Don’t let him hear you. He’s devastated. He’s Woody, and Mo was married to him.”

“No way. My guy said he was the boyfriend.”

We stared at each other. Gail, who had been married for eighteen months, said, “Surely even Moselle couldn’t manage two husbands.” While I, who was not married, said, “How the hell did she manage to marry two men?”

“Sheer bloody talent, I suppose,” Gail said, in a tone of such sardonic scepticism that she drove all my feelings of desolation away with one puff. Maybe Alastair had told her more about the past than was wise.

“But Gail,” I said hurriedly, “bloody-nose husband said something about a North Camden Art Exhibition and it was us ‘arty freaks’ who killed her. What did he mean? I thought you told me she died of pneumonia.”

“Oh, Lord. Woody-husband said something about that, too. All I know is that Mo was exhibiting with the North Camden Arts Group. It’s a loose association of visual artists — NoCArGo, they call themselves. Mo was the only woman — surprise, surprise.”

“Aren’t any of them here?”

“I didn’t actually know them. You remember I wrote and told you Mo had gone into Installation? Well, she got in with a bunch of, I don’t know... Wankers describes it pretty accurately. Their first exhibition opened a week ago and that’s when Mo died.”

It started to rain and we all ran to the carpark. Alastair tried to organise us so that Gail and I would ride in his car. He failed because Gail had other ideas. Bekki and I rode in his car. Gail went with Woody-hubby. We were going to The Star of India for a curry wake. Gail was satisfied with the arrangement, but Alastair looked miserable. Bekki sat in front with him and every time she spoke she squeezed his knee with her jewelled claws.

To distract her, I asked quite bluntly about the two husbands.

“Well, dear, yes.” Bekki squeezed Alastair’s knee as if he’d asked the question. “I suppose I did know.”

I met Alastair’s shocked gaze in the mirror. It was the first he’d heard of it.

“But my stepdaughter was so melodramatic. We couldn’t make it over for the first wedding. We sent a cheque, of course, but Moselle was furious. She said she’d set her heart on us coming over for her big day. She said it wasn’t a proper wedding without her father giving her away.”

“So much for Mo’s feminism,” I muttered.

Bekki might not have heard me. “I’m glad now we didn’t make the effort,” she told Alastair, “because hardly a year later, we received an invitation to the second wedding. That was during the rainy season and my husband refuses to fly in the rain. He sent a cheque again. But you know how ungrateful Moselle could be. I assumed she’d divorced the first one before marrying the second. But unfortunately that detail seems to have slipped her mind.”

“So who are they?”

“Well, dear, the first one, I think, was Joss, who owns a house in Wentworth and pots of money. Quite a good catch, we thought, because however grown-up Moselle was, she could never manage to be self-supporting. Such a worry to my poor old husband. And all that artiness had to stop sometime. What’s attractive in the very young becomes such a bore in later life.”

“And the second one?”

“Oh dear me, what a come-down! I’m sure Woody’s a very sweet boy, but I’m afraid there was no money there. I’m told he has oodles of potential, but what good’s that? Dear, aren’t you driving a little fast?”

Alastair threw me a look of total despair and slowed down.