Before She Was Helen Read online

  It wasn’t locked. Paranoid Dom didn’t lock his custom-made exit?

  She didn’t think the people on the other side were here, but if they were, perhaps Dom was visiting them right now. But no, since his golf cart was gone, he was also gone.

  She couldn’t think of their name. It was probably a year since she’d even waved at them. Forgetting names was a constant in Sun City, a precursor to senility, and everybody was quick to comfort each other: Oh, I always forget names! friends would cry.

  Clemmie went back into Dom’s house, out his front door, across his tiny strip of grass, and under the little front door overhang of the third unit. Marcia and Roy Cogland, she remembered, relieved. People hadn’t named their children Marcia or Roy in decades. It dated them. Nobody had ever named a daughter Clementine, so Clemmie’s name was both rare and dated. She rang the bell.

  If they came to the door, she’d ask if they’d seen Dom today.

  But nothing and no one inside stirred.

  She rang again, and then a third time, and if they did come to the door after all and asked why she was so persistent, she’d say, I thought Dom was here, and he’s very deaf, you know.

  Since the living rooms of Sun City houses opened onto backyards, not front yards, any residents who were up and about were almost certainly not facing the street. And because everybody here had invested heavily in drapes, plantation shutters, shades, and curtains, the three units across Blue Lilac, which were oriented to the east, kept their single front window covered in the morning. It was highly unlikely that anybody had spotted Clemmie’s perfectly ordinary activity of ringing a neighbor’s front doorbell.

  Clemmie went back into Dom’s, surprised and embarrassed by how much she wanted to open that connecting door.

  It would be breaking and entering, she thought. Well, no, it isn’t breaking, because the door is unlocked. It’s just entering. And I have a reason. I’m checking on Dom. And if they say, “But you knew his golf cart wasn’t there, so you also knew he was out,” I say, “Oh goodness, I just didn’t add that up.”

  You never commit crimes or misdemeanors, she told herself. You never even think of them. Do not trespass. Besides, the only thing on the other side of that door is another garage.

  Which would be less of a trespass: she wasn’t going into Marcia and Roy’s actual house.

  What if Dom came back on his golf cart just as she was peeking through his illegal door? She decided that she would hear him in time to skitter back to his house, although golf carts were very quiet and she probably wouldn’t, plus she was a little too rickety for skittering anyhow.

  She told herself she would just peek, not put a foot on the other side of the high and somewhat dangerous threshold, if you forgot it was there and tripped.

  She opened the unexpected door.

  The light from Dom’s garage illuminated very little in the Cogland garage, but Clemmie was never without her cell phone. Really, it was quite amazing that her first six decades had been accomplished without one: that she had once done library research instead of Googling, had owned a camera, had kept up with correspondence on carefully chosen letter paper. Who knew that a more satisfying telephone life—in fact, a more satisfying life in general—lay waiting inside a flat, slim rectangle of technology?

  Clemmie turned on the flashlight of her iPhone.

  The Cogland garage, its single exterior window covered by closed blinds, was literally empty. It didn’t even have the required garbage wheelie and recycle container. But that meant nothing, because the Coglands were here so rarely. They probably carried their garbage out with them, since garbage was picked up only once a week, and they wouldn’t be here to bring the containers back inside, and it was a definite Sun City no-no to allow your trash container to linger at the curb.

  A dozen steps across the garage was the door that would open into the Coglands’ utility room which, like the entire unit, would be the same as her own villa, just reversed.

  Since most people left home through their garage, not through their front door, they generally locked their house by lowering the garage door, and as a rule, they didn’t bother to lock the interior door. Clemmie stepped over the raised threshold of the illegal connector door, tiptoed across the garage as if somebody might hear her, and fingered the knob of the Coglands’ utility-room door.

  It turned.

  Go home, she ordered herself, and instead, she stepped into the Coglands’ house.

  Two

  The Cogland utility room was as empty as the garage: every cabinet door closed, no clothes basket near the washer and dryer, not even a jug of detergent on the shelf.

  A dozen more steps, and Clemmie stood in an utterly bare kitchen. No coffee maker, blender, or toaster sat on the counter. No salt and pepper shakers. The stove gleamed as if it had never seen a pot or pan.

  It was hot in the villa, but not humid. They must have had their air-conditioning set to come on now and then to keep mold from developing, but not really cool the house.

  In the living area, the sparse, bland furniture looked rented. There were no books, magazines, bowls, vases, or throw pillows. The flat-white walls were not disturbed by a single picture. There was not a television.

  They really did use this place as a motel. They didn’t fix meals and they didn’t hang out, which made the connecting door even more puzzling. What were the Coglands and Dom getting together for?

  And then perhaps the sun outside emerged from behind a cloud, because a prism of color suddenly danced on one bare white wall.

  Clemmie moved into the living area to see what had caused the rainbow, and there, sitting on a tiny round table in front of the sliding doors, was a glass sculpture like nothing she had ever seen. It was both a tree and a dragon, its tail curving like a powerful whip, its spine and claws also tree leaves on fire. It was a fabulous piece, organic and elegant, emerald green with spurts of gleaming red and gold. It was complex, with an arch of glass that could be a handle and another that could be a spout as well as the dragon’s head.

  She was dazzled by the tree dragon’s beauty. She stared at it, circling, seeing it at every angle, and then, reminded by the weight of her cell phone in her hand, took a photograph before she headed back into the Coglands’ garage. Stepping carefully over the illegal door’s threshold, she turned to snap a picture of that too, so she could share this weird story with Joyce and Johnny. Then she went back into Dom’s house, leaving all doors unlocked, just as they had been, left by his front door, and locked that behind her with the key he’d given her.

  Clemmie was exhilarated. Snooping in a neighbor’s garage was, sadly, probably the definition of adventure for a semiretired Latin teacher. It was also sleazy. Perhaps she would not tell Joyce and Johnny after all.

  She puzzled over the connecting door. If Dom didn’t want to be seen going to the Coglands’, why not go out his sliders? The three attached villas backed onto a deep woods (well, deep for a highly developed area; probably fifty feet) so there was no one from that direction to see. Hollies had been planted between each tiny patio, now grown so tall and dense that even if Clemmie were sitting outside, she would not see her neighbors’ movements. But Clemmie never sat outside, because her unit had a small, rectangular screened porch set into the building, and if she wanted fresh air, she sat there, and had no view of anything ever at Dom’s.

  Perhaps Dom was having an affair with Marcia. Perhaps Roy didn’t come most of the time and only Marcia came, and she and Dom had become a hot ticket. Fat, grubby, whiny, smelly, lurching Dom? Surely Marcia could do better. Besides, what kind of affair was only two or three times a year?

  Clemmie giggled to herself, looked down at her cell phone, and admired her snapshot of the amazing glass tree dragon.

  It was crucial to stay connected to her grandnephew and grandniece, or Clemmie would be stranded in old age with absolutely no one. Bentley and Harpe
r were uninterested in her life, which was not surprising, because how excited could people in their twenties be about some old gal’s card games? How delightful to have such a cool image to send.

  She forwarded the photograph to her other cell phone—her family phone—and from that phone, she sent a group text to the two grands. Attaching the photograph, she wrote, Look at my neighbor’s glass sculpture!

  Then she studied her to-do list. Every day, she took a fresh page from her Hallmark card shopping pad and wrote down her chores, club meetings, card games, commitments, errands, and grocery list.

  Clemmie was still teaching Latin part time at a county high school, so from late August to mid-May, life was satisfying, but over the summer, she could get frightened that her existence had dwindled to card games with strangers. The list gave her something to hang onto.

  Of course, her card partners weren’t strangers anymore; they were her best friends. But the fact was, people arrived in Sun City without a past and without acquaintances. They set about joining groups and making those friends, but in many cases—certainly in Clemmie’s—they never recited a history. “Oh please, too boring,” someone might say, and later you’d find out he was a famous cardiologist. “That’s so last year,” someone else might reply, and then you’d be told that she had been vice president of international affairs for some conglomerate, or else a drugstore clerk.

  Clemmie set her mug on the coaster on her coffee table and leaned back on her sofa, both cell phones in hand. Like everyone these days, she used the phone as a pacifier. One stroked one’s phone, opening the comforting apps of word games and weather, headline news, and Instagram. It was quite similar to sucking one’s thumb.

  Her family cell phone sang out the crazy cascade of notes Bentley had installed for her, and indeed it was Bentley, having received her snapshot of the tree dragon. Clemmie was thrilled to hear from him, because Bent had little use for his elderly aunt. If she ever ended up in assisted living or, God forbid, an Alzheimer’s ward, Bent was not likely to visit. Cool! he texted. But it isn’t a sculpture. It’s a rig for smoking pot.

  Clemmie’s jaw dropped. You smoked a drug out of that gorgeous glass? How? Where did you put your mouth?

  Harper texted seconds later. It’s beautiful, all right. Your neighbors are serious stoners.

  RICH serious stoners, added Bentley.

  The one and only piece of decor in Marcia and Roy’s entire home was a marijuana rig? She wondered now about the scent in Dom’s place. Was it in fact the scent of marijuana?

  Clemmie had not led a sheltered life, but pot was not among her experiences. She had read somewhere—she took three newspapers and glanced at headlines from three more on her smartphone—that aging baby boomers had returned to using weed, and it was commonplace all over again.

  Clemmie ran her mind over all the men and women she knew from pinochle, euchre, canasta, dominoes, line dancing, water aerobics, book club, pottery, beading, and pickleball, although she no longer played pickleball, having fallen once and twisted an ankle. She considered everybody she knew from Monday-night lectures and Tuesday-morning Bible study. She visualized every other couple and single in her own pod of twenty-one villas. All those people were smoking weed?

  Impossible.

  And if Dom and the Coglands were using pot, they didn’t need a door linking their garages to accomplish it.

  Bentley texted again—Bentley, who never sent a birthday or Christmas card or thank-you note. Which neighbor? he asked. The guy with arthritis? It probably helps him feel better.

  The guy with arthritis was Dom. She must have bored the grands with a list of Dom’s ailments at some point. She wondered if Bent remembered any of her complaints, and whether marijuana would actually help Dom’s arthritis or just cast a fog over the pain.

  She was fixing herself a piece of toast when yet another text arrived. She had never excited her grands this much.

  I did an image search on that glass, Bentley wrote. It’s stolen. It was made by a lampworker called Borobasq. Go to Instagram and read his posts.

  Clemmie’s mouth went dry, which happened now and then due to medications, but this time it was horror. The third unit’s sole accessory was stolen goods? She had been tiptoeing around leaving fingerprints in a place where neighbors completely unknown to her stored stolen drug paraphernalia?

  She had never heard of an image search. Was there an app where you plugged in your snapshot and the app ran around the virtual universe and located identical photographs?

  Clemmie tapped her Instagram icon, carefully entered the oddly spelled Borobasq, and sure enough, up popped a picture of the very glass she had seen while trespassing.

  This fellow Borobasq, who had an astonishing eighty thousand followers, was in a rage, using many WTF’s to describe his predicament. It wasn’t clear how the piece had been stolen. Perhaps he had outlined that in an earlier post.

  What was clear was that Clemmie’s grandnephew, Bentley, had already posted on Borobasq’s site: Your rig is sitting on a table in the house next door to my aunt. He had included her photograph of the tree dragon in the shaft of sunlight.

  Bentley had involved her in a theft.

  Borobasq of the filthy vocabulary now knew that he could find his stolen drug paraphernalia by coming to Clemmie’s. The police would be summoned to arrest the thieves. Dom would find out that she had crept through his unit, found his cut-through door, and used it. The Coglands, owners of stolen goods, would find out that she had trespassed in their unit, photographed their possessions, and ratted them out.

  Dominic Spesante had always sounded to Clemmie like a mob name. A name for somebody who offed people and abandoned their bodies in Jersey swamps. Did she want Dom for an enemy? On the other hand, would mob people name their son Wilson?

  But Clemmie was in possession of some strange knowledge. Last year she’d been standing in front of her little villa, wondering whether to grub out a particularly boring foundation shrub and replace it with her favorite bridal wreath spirea, when Dom’s garage door opened and out came his golf cart with its harsh backing-up beep. Dom always started lowering his garage door before he was wholly out, so that you always worried that the cart would get caught by the descending door. It occurred to her now that he didn’t want anybody to spot his connecting door.

  On that particular day, he had not zipped the cart walls up. A gust of wind blew a piece of paper from Dom’s hand, or from the seat next to him, into Clemmie’s yard.

  She reached for it, but it blew further away. She pounced; it eluded her. On the third try, she stepped on it, picked it up, and because she was a compulsive reader, read the address on the envelope.

  It was addressed to somebody named Sal Pesante. Very similar to Dom’s name, which was Spesante.

  S. Pesante.

  Was it possible that the name Spesante didn’t exist? That it was a condensed initial and real surname? She had been laughing when she handed the envelope back, not because of her uncoordinated leaps over the grass, but because—perhaps—both she and Dom were faking their identities here in quiet, bland Sun City.

  “What’s so funny?” Dom had snapped.

  “Life,” she had said.

  He glared, gripped the envelope and the wheel at the same time, and drove away. Of course she hadn’t told anybody about Dom’s possible other name and never would, because she was filled with admiration for anybody who could pull off the trick of living under a false name. She well knew how hard it was.

  Her family cell phone rang. An actual call, not a text. The only people with whom she used this phone were her niece, Peggy, who called monthly, and Peggy’s children, Harper and Bentley, who never committed actual live conversation.

  Clemmie did not recognize the number or area code on the caller ID. But then she didn’t know the grands’ phone numbers by heart, because she just tapped the little conversation bal
loon next to their names and typed a text without glancing at the number. And here in Sun City, where people came from all over the country and kept their original cell numbers, any area code could actually be somebody in her own pod. Except nobody down the street possessed the number of her family phone; she gave them her local cell number. The landline was for when she had to give out a number and didn’t want to: the newspaper subscription, the plumber. She thought of it as another line of defense.

  “Mrs. Lakefield?” asked a male voice she didn’t know.

  There was no Mrs. Lakefield, so this had to be somebody selling cruises or gutter guards. She used her stock answer, courteous but firm. “I don’t purchase anything over the phone, thank you. Please take my name off your calling list.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” said the man quickly. “It’s my glass you located, and I’m grateful. Can we talk about how I’m going to get it back?”

  Clemmie’s eyes felt hollow, as if something had drained away her mind. Bentley had not only posted her photograph; he’d given out her phone number to a total stranger? To a man he knew in advance had, to say the least, a questionable career? Clementine Lakefield never told anybody where she lived, let alone self-proclaimed drug dealers. “I didn’t post anything,” she told him. “My grandnephew did that.”

  “And I can’t tell you how thankful I am.” He had good diction, which mattered to Clemmie. And he knew better than to use a WTF out loud, so he wasn’t completely basement quality. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “You’re a total stranger. I can’t tell you anything.”

  The man’s voice became warm and comforting. “You are so right to be careful. I wouldn’t want my aunt or grandmother handing out her address to just anybody either.”

  Makers of drug paraphernalia had grandmothers? Clemmie would never have pictured that.

  He said, “I’d like to come and pick up the rig.”

  Clemmie had not felt this degree of panic in years. She sidestepped. “Why is it called a rig?”