Valerie Wolzien - Death In Duplicate

Susan followed her hostess up the brick steps and into a large two-story marble-floored foyer. One of the biggest crystal chandeliers she had ever seen dominated the space. The owner kicked her muddy shoes off and tossed them into a corner where a few similar pairs lay as the dogs slid around on the floor’s slippery surface. She padded across the room in her socks. “Do you garden?” she asked.

Susan thought of the crew of men who appeared at her home weekly when the weather was good and trimmed, mowed, and filled her beds with annuals. “A little,” she said, although she was in the position of directing rather than doing any actual tilling of the soil.

“I love it. In fact, the opportunity to have a big garden was the only reason I agreed to buy this hideous McMansion.”

Susan looked around. “You don’t like this house?”

“Hate it. It’s too big, too pretentious, too formal, too… well, I could go on forever. But it’s my husband’s dream home and the grounds were exactly what I wanted. Tea or coffee?” she asked as they entered the kitchen.

“Coffee, please. This is amazing.” The kitchen was exactly what Susan expected from the outside of the house-large, filled with the latest appliances set in the midst of hand-painted and glazed tiles, granite countertops, custom-made cabinets, designer lighting. The back wall had been removed and a sunroom, lined with metal shelves, had been added on to the house. It brought sunlight into the room and displayed an extensive collection of bonsai.

“We lived in an apartment in the city for twenty-seven years. This was my only garden during that time. Now I’m expanding a bit.” She pointed outside and Susan realized that the backyard, easily two acres, was almost entirely cultivated. Hundreds of early small bulbs were blooming in the flower beds with the foliage from thousands of others pushing through the surface of the soil. Rose bushes had been cut to the ground to winter over and delicate shrubs were wrapped in burlap to protect them from the bitter Connecticut winter. Dried vines twined around rustic wood arbors and a knot garden was right outside the kitchen door.

“I’d love to see this in the summer,” Susan said.

“Perhaps we’ll get along this morning and I’ll invite you back in a few months. Although I must warn you that if you and Nadine were good friends, I don’t imagine we’ll be particularly compatible.” Daria was busy at the counter grinding coffee beans and Susan couldn’t see her face.

“I gather you didn’t like her,” Susan said, examining an elegant tiny split leaf Japanese maple.

“She was my next-door neighbor. I was determined to get along with her-and I did-but, no, I didn’t like her. She was too much like this house for my taste.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Pretentious. It was all show with that woman. Nothing underneath the surface, no root system.” She put a steaming coffeepot and mugs down on the table. “Have a seat. Cream?”

“No, black is fine.” Susan sat down and decided to be honest. “I didn’t like her either.”

“So why are you giving a eulogy at her memorial service?”

“Two reasons: the first is not one I’m proud of-I’m one of those people who has trouble refusing any request. And the other reason is that I’m… uh, interested in finding out more about Nadine and this was an opportunity to talk with people who knew her.”

“Why?

“She was my next-door neighbor too,” Susan began.

“So I think you’d be glad to get rid of her. If I was looking for her killer, I’d look at the people who live nearby-unless she had changed a lot since leaving here.”

“Why?”

“Oh, nothing horrible-unless you value your sanity and your privacy. The woman was an egocentric pest.”

“Did she come over and sit in your kitchen all day long too?”

“No, but only because I don’t sit in my kitchen all day long. When I’m home, I’m usually outside and the rest of the time I teach classes at various garden centers. But Nadine did seem to feel that I was just what she was looking for whenever I went out to work in my garden.”

“What do you think she was looking for?”

“An audience. When we first moved out from the city I thought she was lonely and I put up with her constant dropping in.”

“I did, too. I mean, when she moved to Hancock that’s the way it was.”

“And how long did it take for her to become irritating?” Daria asked.

Susan grimaced. “About a week.”

“Then you’re more tolerant than I am. I put up with it for three days and then told her I needed to be alone-sounded a bit too much like Greta Garbo to be believable-which might be the reason why she didn’t believe me and just kept on coming over. I finally just stopped paying any attention to her and went on with what I was doing. It was rude, but I didn’t think I had any alternative.”

Susan nodded. “That’s what I did, too. And then, when she died, I realized that I didn’t really know very much about her even though she had talked and talked and talked about herself. I guess I wasn’t listening.”

“It may have had nothing to do with you. She didn’t have much of a life.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Well, what did she have?”

“A husband, a house, a-”

“And that’s all they were for her-accessories. They weren’t serious interests.”

“You don’t think she took her marriage seriously?”

“Oh, I think that’s the one thing in her life that she took seriously. So seriously that when I read the article about her murder in the paper, I assumed Donald had killed her.” Daria walked over to the window and bent a copper wire coiled branch on a tiny evergreen. “Can’t say I would have blamed him if he had.”

“Why?”

“She was holding him back.”

Susan leaned forward. “Really?”

“Yes. He could have been one of the most successful businessmen in this state, but she quite simply was not up to the task of being the wife of someone like that.”

“Really?” Susan repeated.

“Absolutely.”

“Did he tell you this?” Susan was thinking that it sounded like something that might come from the inflated ego of Donald Baines.

“No, his mother did. She’s a remarkable woman. Do you know her?”

“We knew each other a bit years ago.”

“Well, I think she’s wonderful. A self-made woman. She’s smart and funny, a real people person. Not something anyone would say about her daughter-in-law.”

“Nor her son,” Susan added. “I mean, he does try, but there’s no warmth there, is there?”

“Well, Blaine is remarkable. Her husband left her when Donald was just a baby and she went to work as a secretary for some little real estate agency somewhere. She got her license at night and worked during the day, accepting the free rent of an apartment above the office as part of the payment for her job. She bought that agency less than two years after she got her license. That’s how well she did. She opened a branch office in a better community less than a year later and began Blaine Baines Executive Homes and Estates before Donald was ten years old! She was completely focused. They lived in that small apartment until Blaine Baines Executive Homes and Estates was making money-big-time.”

“You like her a lot.”

“I admire her drive, her determination, her energy. And Nadine possessed none of those qualities.”

Susan sipped her coffee and didn’t say anything. She was thinking about a woman who could move up from poverty and create a successful statewide business in less than ten years-and leave her son living in a tiny apartment the entire time. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising that Donald had married a woman with less ambition.