Before She Was Helen Read online

  Also by Caroline B. Cooney

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  Both Sides of Time

  Burning Up

  Code Orange

  Deadly Offer

  Diamonds in the Shadow

  Driver’s Ed

  Emergency Room

  Enter Three Witches

  Evil Returns

  Face on the Milk Carton

  Family Reunion

  Fatal Bargain

  Fatality

  Fire

  Flash Fire

  Flight 116 is Down

  Fog

  For All Time

  Forbidden

  Freeze Tag

  Friend at Midnight

  Girl Who Invented Romance

  Goddess of Yesterday

  He Loves Me Not

  Holly in Love

  Hush Little Baby

  I’m Going to Give You a Bear Hug!

  I’m Not Your Other Half

  If the Witness Lied

  Janie Face to Face

  Last Dance

  Lost Songs

  Mummy

  Nancy and Nick

  New Year’s Eve

  Night School

  No Such Person

  Out of Time

  Party’s Over

  Perfume

  Personal Touch

  Prisoner of Time

  Ransom of Mercy Carter

  Saturday Night

  Snow

  Stranger

  Summer Nights

  Terrorist

  They Never Came Back

  Three Black Swans

  Tune In Anytime

  Twins

  Unforgettable

  Vampire’s Promise

  Voice on the Radio

  Wanted!

  What Child is This?

  What Janie Found

  What Janie Saw

  Whatever Happened to Janie?

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Caroline B. Cooney

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Lisa Amoroso

  Cover images © rangizzz/shutterstock, brainmaster/Getty Images, s_maria/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  One

  Before she did anything else today, Clemmie had to check up on her next-door neighbor, Dom.

  Why Dom had moved to Sun City was not clear. He had never joined anything, attended anything, nor shown interest in anything. He just sat in his villa watching TV, playing video games, and smoking cigarettes. He owned the tiniest of the three attached villas, the one in the middle with no side windows and little sun.

  Clemmie lived on the left, and a couple she hardly ever saw owned the right-hand villa, using it as a hotel when they visited grandchildren in the area. When they arrived, which was infrequently, they used their automatic garage-door opener, drove in, closed the garage door behind them, and that was that. Nobody ever spotted them again. Clemmie wasn’t sure she’d even recognize them.

  It was agreed that Clemmie had the least rewarding neighbors in Sun City.

  Luckily, in her pod—the slightly creepy collective noun Sun City used instead of neighborhood—the little villas were tucked close together in heavily landscaped culs-de-sac, so Clemmie knew all her other neighbors—wonderful friendly people who hosted outdoor barbecues and took her bowling and carpooled when everybody went to a Panthers game. Clemmie knew nothing about football, but she was following the Panthers now because everybody else did, and Sun City was all about doing what everybody else did.

  Dom lived alone, and when he’d fallen last year, it took him a day and a half to crawl to his cell phone and summon help, so now he texted Clemmie every morning to let her know he was fine. She’d text back something cheerful like “Have a good day then!” although she found it hard to believe that Dom ever had a good day, since his only friends were the hosts of hostile political talk shows.

  But this morning, Dom had not texted, nor did he answer her text, and then he didn’t answer her phone call either. In spite of his COPD and arthritis, swollen ankles and weird splotchy complexion, not to mention all the beer he drank, plus still smoking in spite of his lung problems, Dom was actually in fairly good health. Still. Something must have happened.

  He’d given Clemmie a key to his villa for emergencies, after first extracting a promise not to tell anybody she had his key. It was not unusual for old people to get paranoid, so Clemmie did promise, but in fact, everybody would assume that Clemmie had a key, because you always gave your neighbor a key. Well, Clemmie certainly hadn’t given Dom one. The last person she would want in her unit or checking on her health was Dominic Spesante. Her across-the-street neighbors, Joyce and Johnny, had her key.

  Clemmie so didn’t want to go next door and find Dom dead. Or what if he had the flu, and she ended up taking him to the docto
r’s and picking up his prescriptions and buying his groceries and probably catching the flu herself? Although, of course, she had had her flu shot, and it wasn’t flu season anymore anyway, but it would be just like Dom to have a bug not warded off by last fall’s injection.

  It wasn’t that Clemmie was ungenerous. She loved to do things for other people—just not for Dom, who had no personality unless he was swearing, and then he had a regrettable personality.

  Clemmie sighed, opened her front door, gasped at the South Carolina heat even at nine in the morning, crossed her tiny front lawn to Dom’s, and rang his bell.

  There was no answer.

  She knocked hard on the glass part of the door. She couldn’t peek in because Dom had installed blinds over the glass. Still no answer.

  Clemmie considered crossing the street and getting Joyce or Johnny to go into Dom’s with her. Joyce and Johnny were in their seventies and not married but living together. They loved to say that. “We’re shacking up,” they would whisper, giggling.

  Joyce’s children were not okay with her decision to have a live-in boyfriend. The Oregon daughter thought Joyce should have moved to Oregon, and the New Hampshire son thought Joyce should have moved to New Hampshire. Joyce said her children just wanted free babysitters, and that was not what she was doing this decade.

  Johnny believed that his children didn’t even know about Joyce because he had kept his own Sun City house, which was half a mile away, and even kept the cleaning lady who still came every other Tuesday afternoon, and when anybody in his family visited, he just moved back in. Deception was easier than dealing with children still furious that Johnny had divorced their mother after forty-nine years of marriage, just prior to the big fiftieth anniversary party they had planned. Johnny’s ex-wife in Maryland was not doing well, still shocked at what had happened to her, and the children rightly held Johnny responsible. He wasn’t about to tell them that the move to Sun City and acquiring a new woman were the best things that had ever happened to him.

  But Joyce would refuse to come if Clemmie asked her to go inside Dom’s. He was too creepy for her, and anyway, Joyce would be getting ready for their card game. She and Clemmie loved canasta, which they played twice a week at the clubhouse. The clubhouse was what turned Sun City into a magic kingdom; you just walked in and joined anything you felt like: poker, mah-jongg, pottery, table tennis, acoustic guitar jams, wine-tasting groups, Ohio State fans. Right now, Joyce would be choosing a complex outfit and accessories and fixing her face, having already blown dry and curled her hair. As for Johnny, he played pickleball today and was probably already gone.

  Reluctantly, Clemmie inserted the key into Dom Spesante’s front door. Don’t be dead, she warned Dom silently.

  Her own unit was sunny and delightful, but Dom’s, having no side windows, was dark and unwelcoming. She poked her head in the door, sniffed the odd musty odor, and called, “Dominic! It’s me, Helen. Are you okay?”

  There was no answer.

  Clemmie took a single step forward. She had never been inside Dom’s, since she wholly agreed with Joyce that he was a creep, but she’d been in plenty of other middle units, so she knew exactly what the layout was. The miniature front hall was adjacent to the kitchen, dark in spite of the street-facing window in its tiny breakfast area because it did not get the morning sun. It featured white cabinets, a white counter, and white appliances, because Dom had not opted for the upgrades of granite and stainless steel.

  “Dom!”

  No answer. She peeked in the kitchen to see if Dom had fallen on the floor.

  Dom’s counter held a Keurig coffee maker, boxes of coffee pods, picnic-style cardboard salt and pepper shakers, and paper napkins still in their cellophane wrap. The dishwasher door hung open, revealing a few plates and glasses.

  Dom had not bothered to buy a table for the breakfast nook, opting for a stool tucked under the tiny counter, although Clemmie was pretty sure that he actually ate every meal in front of his television, with his plate or his takeout in his lap.

  He had no car, because the severe arthritis in his knees and ankles made it hard to accelerate or brake, but he did have a golf cart. A large, spiffy grocery store sat conveniently in the strip mall adjacent to Sun City, and since it could be reached by interior paved paths, golf carts never had to use a regular road and fight the cars. There were also a pharmacy, a bank, and a cut-rate hair salon in the strip. Clemmie doubted if Dom ever went to the library branch or the expensive gift shop, but there were four fast-food restaurants, so he could rotate Asian food, hamburgers, pizza, and barbecue. He tootled over once or twice a day and, no matter how hot it might be, kept the plastic sides of his golf-cart cover zipped, so he could be seen only in a blurry sort of way. It was a wonder he hadn’t cooked in there.

  Dom never accepted invitations to neighborhood cookouts and card parties. Friday evenings in their pod meant a cocktail party in somebody’s driveway—to which you brought your own folding chair and drink, and Clemmie loved how convivial and easy it was—but Dom didn’t participate.

  She breathed through her mouth to avoid the smell, which was probably just the odor of musty old man but seemed more pervasive, more pungent.

  The kitchen and hall opened into the living-dining room, very dark because Dom kept the heavy drapes closed. Clemmie almost never covered her own sliding glass doors because she loved to look out on her tiny screened porch and the trees beyond. She turned on Dom’s ceiling light, and the ceiling fan also came on, slowly rotating, the only thing alive in the whole place.

  A brown recliner and a tan sofa faced a huge television fastened above the gas fireplace, where the pilot light provided a blue flicker. A floor lamp stood next to a substantial coffee table, on which lay empty pizza boxes, a charger but no device, the TV remote, and an old-fashioned heavy, glass triangle ashtray, half full. There was no body sprawled on the floor, however, which was good.

  “Dom! It’s me, Helen!”

  No answer.

  The guest room was closest, so she poked her head in. It was a tiny space with a twin bed, made up as if somebody actually stayed overnight now and then. The poor guest had no bedside table, no lamp, and no dresser. It couldn’t be for Wilson, the only relative and, in fact, the only visitor Clemmie had met, because Wilson didn’t usually stay more than an hour. Clemmie gave him full credit for that hour, however, because she could hardly be around Dom for five minutes.

  Clemmie forced herself into the master bedroom and found the king-size bed unmade, wrinkled, and empty. The print of Dom’s curled-up body was overly intimate. The size of the bed was overly intimate too, because it implied that Dom sometimes shared it.

  Dom was also not unconscious on the floor of his walk-in closet or bathroom.

  It dawned on Clemmie that he had simply gone out on his golf cart and forgotten to text her, though why he wouldn’t answer his cell phone, she didn’t know. Perhaps he couldn’t hear it. Perhaps he was going deaf and didn’t even know because he so rarely spoke to or listened to other people. With his friend the television, he could just keep upping the volume.

  She walked through the back hall, exactly large enough to hold a washer and a dryer and be called a laundry room, and opened the door to the windowless garage. She flicked on the overhead light.

  All garages in Sun City held two cars, but Dom had only his golf cart. Even his doctors were in the medical building between the library and the grocery. If he needed to go farther afield, he waited for Wilson.

  Wilson was part of that crowd of young people with last names for first names, like her own grandnephew and grandniece, Bentley and Harper, which sounded like a law firm. Whatever happened to the sweet girl names? The cuddly ones ending in y or ie? Nobody nowadays was named Connie or Nancy or Janie.

  She wasn’t sure how Wilson was related to Dom. Not a son, certainly, because he didn’t call Dom “Dad.” Wilson was not particul
arly attentive. Not that Clemmie’s young relatives were attentive. She texted them every week or two so they’d remember she was alive.

  To her relief, Dom’s garage was empty, which meant he was okay; he’d just gone shopping.

  In fact, his garage was remarkably empty.

  Most people moved here with tons of stuff from previously acquisitive lives and then installed garage storage shelves on which dozens of cardboard boxes and plastic containers rested, full of memorabilia, Christmas decorations, extra china, former hobbies, seasonal clothing, and the million other things they refused to part with. Some men packed their garages with tools for woodworking or plumbing. Many garages were so full of stuff the owners couldn’t fit in one car, let alone two, and had to rent storage units in one of the massive facilities along the highway.

  Dom’s garage held his garbage wheelie, his recycling container, a broom, and to her amazement, an interior door. Not the door in which she now stood, which connected Dom’s garage to his house, but a door cut through the far side of his garage, which could only open into the adjoining garage of the third unit—the one belonging to the couple she never saw.

  All these times she’d thought Dom sat home alone… Had he actually zipped through his secret door and hustled over to eat with that couple, and they all hid behind closed drapes so nobody would know that Dom actually had friends?

  A thousand things were prohibited in Sun City. Sheds. Excess front-garden decorations. Doors painted colors other than black. Fences not approved by the landscape committee. More than two bird feeders. It was surely prohibited to cut a door between yourself and your neighbor. The door was oddly placed, because the bottom of the door was not level with the floor, but up six or eight inches, probably to avoid damaging interior wires or pipes, although what wires and pipes might be channeled along the garage floor she didn’t know. Normal, non–Sun City garages often had side doors, but there was no such variation on the Sun City housing and garage scheme. And yet she had never noticed this. A door in a garage is so acceptable that the eye does not analyze its presence.

  Clemmie went carefully down the two steps from Dom’s utility room (carefully because of her fear of falling) and into his garage, walked over to the peculiar door, and tested the knob.