Breaking Point

  BREAKING POINT

  by

  Jon DeMartino

  Chapter 1

  The phone rang as I reached for it.

  I sang a chorus of "Three Blind Mice" under my breath before answering. A private investigator has to appear busy enough to be considered competent, and yet not so busy as to be unavailable. When the farmer's wife had meted out her vengeance, I picked up the receiver.

  "Rudy Murdock."

  "Mr. Murdock, my name is Iris Wilson. I saw your ad in the yellow pages and I'd like to come to your office to talk to you." Her voice was pleasant, but compromised by the unnatural cadence of the words, as if she were reciting from memory. Maybe she'd even written it down. I've done that myself when I want to sound a particular way. Iris probably wanted to seem calm and sensible, not like the type of person she imagined would need a detective.

  "Sure," I said. "Let me check my book." That took no time at all. No book, no time. "How about tomorrow morning at ten?"

  "That'll be fine. You're in Oak Grove?"

  "Yep. Do you know where the old post office is on Main Street?" Main was one of only a handful of streets in the center of Oak Grove, which was rapidly turning into a bedroom community. Tracts of condos and apartments were being slapped up in and around the little town as fast as people from Iowa City to the south and Cedar Rapids to the north could drag their U-Hauls up and down the highway.

  Iris Wilson was familiar with Oak Grove and said she'd be here at ten o'clock Tuesday morning.

  I remembered that I'd been about to call Maxine when the phone had rung. She'd left a message a little earlier, probably while I was in the shower, and I'd almost forgotten to call her back.

  I dialed the number. She must have been sitting by the phone.

  "Hey, Max, what's up?"

  "Oh." I could hear her exhale. "I... well, I need to talk to you."

  "Ok, talk away." I leaned back into the chair and edged open a drawer for a foot rest.

  "No." There was that sigh again. "No. I have to see you. I'll come over. Stay right there." She hung up.

  I listened to the silence for a few seconds and then put the receiver back on the base. That was odd. Maxine was anything but her usual confident self. Maybe her latest hair color didn't turn out the way she'd planned. Last week, when I'd been down in Iowa City, she'd been a redhead, and I mean like a tomato. That hadn't seemed to bother her.

  A chilly tentacle of fear reached into my stomach. It dawned on me that my sister may have heard something new from her doctor. A year and a half had passed since she'd telephoned me back in Pittsburgh and explained that she had a lump on her breast, a tumor that required immediate surgery. The process had been frightening and emotionally draining, with the final decision being to remove not only the tumor but her entire breast. I'd flown to Iowa and spent a few weeks with her after the surgery, and through the first part of an abbreviated round of chemotherapy. Since then, she'd had no further complications and was now supposedly cancer-free.

  It had been the realization that I could be left without my big sister that had spawned my notion to relocate to Iowa. Max was the only mother I had ever known. Our real mother had died when I was only two years old. My memories of her were probably formed more from photographs, and from things that Max and my dad had told me, than from any real recollection of my mother. Maxine had been twelve years old when it happened and had taken over the household, picking me up at the neighbor's after school, cooking dinner, doing the laundry and keeping me in line as I grew up. Somehow she had managed to fit her studies into each day, too and had graduated near the top of her high school class. She'd gone on to college, too, and earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Pittsburgh over the next few years.

  Max had continued living at home and had kept house for my dad and me while she dated her future husband, whom she'd met at the University. He had been working on his PhD and teaching a few classes, one of which was called "American Writers, which would seem to be tailor made for my book-crazy sister. Just before she'd turned thirty, Maxine had married and immediately moved to Iowa City, where her new husband was offered a teaching position at the University of Iowa. I was twenty when they left. Home was never the same after Max was gone.

  No, I told myself. It's not the breast cancer. It's probably just some other, minor problem that she wants to discuss with me. I tried to put any other possibilities out of my mind while I awaited her arrival.

  Gray November clouds were visible through the square windows above my desk. The cold rain had slowed to a drizzle, a pace that seemed sustainable for the rest of this dreary Monday. I was in my padded desk chair, and now began practicing a professional swivel, facing first to my left, where my clients would be seated in one of the two red plaid chairs, and then back to the desk in front of me, where my phone and my notes were. A little more force sent me to the computer on the el shaped extension to my right. Most of the furniture had been acquired when I'd arrived in Iowa City last spring, a perfect time to buy used furniture in a college town. They tell me that if I'd waited until fall, all the good stuff would have been snatched back up by the same students who'd sold it off the previous summer. For once, Lady Luck had grinned at me. Usually it's more of a sneer.

  My home for the past five months had been in the twenty-eight by forty foot brick building that formerly housed the post office here in Oak Grove, Iowa. The city fathers had built a new one over near the highway and this place had lain empty for over a year before I'd bought it in July. The first time I saw the structure, I knew I wanted it. The walnut counters and built-ins, as well as the loosely defined interior spaces appealed to me. Of course, the idea of living in a post office was what really clinched it. I'd bought it almost immediately. That action alone had revived Maxine's age old mantra about my impulsiveness. I smiled as I remembered how easily Max could slip back into her "mothering" mode.

  From my office, I walked toward the front of the building, flipping up the hinged section of what had been the old postal service counter and stepping into the windowed expanse that stretched across the front of the building. I could hear the rhythmic honking of Canadian Geese and moved to the wide plate glass window to look out. A large double Vee of them, maybe a hundred geese or more, was visible against the monochromatic sky above Main Street. They maneuvered slightly for better aerodynamic formation, switching positions on the flanks. Across the street lay nothing but corn fields, so I had a perfect view of the wide horizon. The chorused "honk" of the male geese was answered in perfect timing by the higher pitched "hink" of the females, which may have been encouragement or possibly, criticism.

  While I pondered that, Maxine's old blue Oldsmobile slid into place and I pushed through the heavy glass door and held it open for my big sister.

  Once we were seated in the living room, I noticed that Max's eyes were the same reddish hue as her hair.

  "Ok, Max," I said with a bravado I didn't feel, "spill. What's the matter?"

  "I think Tal is cheating on me," she blurted out. Tal was Talmadge Heiser, now a professor of Literature at the University of Iowa and, as far as I'd known, Maxine's faithful husband of more than twenty years.

  At her words, the cold knot left my stomach and I released a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

  She went on, pausing to dab at her eyes with a tissue.

  "The day before yesterday, I found these in the pocket of his brown suit. “She handed me several wrinkled slips of paper. They were receipts. One was from a Des Moines flower shop for a cash sale. Fresh flowers that had cost Talmadge thirty five dollars. The second was also from Des Moines and was for a seventy-seven dollar dinner at a decent restaurant. The third, and this was the biggie, was from the downtown Marriott Hotel in, where else, Des M
oines, for a king-size suite that went for a hundred and ninety-five bucks. It had been paid for in cash and the date was November twelfth, last Friday.

  "He seems to be going to a lot of conferences lately and he comes home after I'm asleep and he appears distracted when he is home, like he's just tuning me and the kids out. I just thought it was his mood, until I found these. Now I feel like a fool. I don't know what to do." She was sniffling harder, but there was no sobbing, which was good. I never know what to do about that sobbing and shoulder shaking. And with Maxine it was so rare that I would really have been at a loss.

  I sat back on the couch. "I guess you want me to find out what's going on," I said.

  "Will you?"

  I didn't want to, but I said I would. If Max's husband could do this to her after what she had just been through, I wasn't sure I wanted to know about it. I wasn't certain there would be a safe haven for Talmadge Heiser if I did know.

  I changed the subject, for both our sakes, and we chatted about the weather, my new home and any other neutral topics I could think of. After Max had calmed down, she even laughed a little at one of my jabs about her hair color, firing back a remark aimed at my thickening waist. Feeling somewhat better, she was ready to go back down to Iowa City to start dinner for the kids, and, if he showed up, for Talmadge. When I hugged her, I wondered again how she and her husband even kissed without either of them getting hurt. The top of her head just touched my chin, and I was only five eleven. Talmadge was well over six feet tall. The thought of the contortions required to accommodate any sort of intimacy was beyond my imagination.

  As she was pulling out, Max slid the car back in near the building and I could hear the electric buzz of the automatic window. She called out to me, "And, Rudy, get a haircut. You're shaggy." She was definitely feeling better.

  After straightening up a few loose ends around the place, I washed up and walked a block south through the chilling rain to the Oak Grove Cafe. I had the lasagna special, with garlic bread and salad, and flirted with the waitress until I felt like walking back home to read a little before bed. Tomorrow I had two jobs to start and I realized that I hadn't been out to the lake to spy on Caroline for over a week.

  Chapter 2

  I gave up trying to sleep and crawled out of bed at seven Tuesday morning. It had been a fitful night, spent dreaming and thinking about Caroline Bennett.

  I'd met her in June of ‘82; three months after my dad had been killed. Caroline was in nursing school then, and was training in the Emergency Room of Pittsburgh's Southside Hospital. One Saturday afternoon I was brought in with some scratches from a fender bender near the hospital. She was nineteen at the time, and I was an immature twenty-one year old with a lot of questions still unanswered in the meaning of life category.

  Guilt was a big problem for me that year. I had been scheduled to work with my dad the night he was mugged at the garage. He owned "Vic's Parking Garage," a full block of concrete, three stories high, sitting right in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The night before, I'd been out drinking and didn't show up for work that Saturday. My dad was there alone when he was attacked and robbed. The thieves got less than three hundred dollars. My father had died in the hospital three days later. For a long time, I blamed myself for his death. That's bad enough at any age, but for me, at twenty one, the guilt and self-loathing created a web of darkness that almost consumed me.

  Over the next several months, Caroline tried to make me see that it was the muggers who had killed my dad, not me. Her assurance that there might have been two of us dead instead of one wasn't much consolation at the time. In my mind, I'd have killed the punks. Eventually, though, her commitment and the love she showed me drew me out of the darkness.

  She had a seriousness and sweetness about her that both calmed and excited me. Over the next four years, I discovered that "falling" in love really was like losing your balance and tumbling off the edge, leaving the rest of the world to get along without you. I'd had it bad for Caroline Bennett and had probably defined myself by her, as only the young can do. I was smart enough to know that she wasn't someone I wanted to lose. After the first two years, I'd asked her almost weekly, to marry me. She always replied that she loved me, but that she had something on her mind that she had to work through.

  Her love and support had kept me afloat for the next four years, though, right up until the day she told me the real reason she wouldn't marry me. She'd returned the ruby pendant I'd given her for Christmas the year before and left town the next day. That was September 10, 1986, and I'd heard nothing more about her until the phone call from my sister eleven months ago.

  After almost fifteen years, I was still meeting Caroline in my dreams. She was just as lovely as ever, and just as far out of my reach.

  I shook off the sleep in a hot shower, downed a cup of coffee and a bowl of Chex and headed for the lake.

  Lake McBride is wishbone shaped and lies in an almost perfect east-west position, with the point of the wishbone at the western end. There's a dam at that spot, where rising waters can spill over and flow back into the Iowa River. The northern branch of the wishbone is accessible from the small town of Solon, but I was interested in the southern section of the wishbone, which was just a few miles outside of Oak Grove.

  I drove north on Mahaffey Bridge Road, crossing the low causeway that divided the southern branch. A half mile past the causeway, I saw the now familiar wooden sign and made a sharp right onto a dirt road. The winding path seemed to parallel the lake most of the time and I occasionally caught a glimpse of the water through the barren trees to my right. After a mile, the road swept upward to the left and I was soon above the lake and, as I knew by now, exactly half a mile from Caroline's home. I pulled to the side under the familiar branches of a wind-damaged Blue Spruce and got out.

  Walking through the damp grass, I moved about twenty yards east and lay down behind a pile of dead wood that some obliging chap had stacked here a few years earlier. The logs were dry and smooth to the touch, several of Iowa's harsh winters having stripped them of their covering, leaving but a parched pile of tree bones. They had served me well the past few months, though. Below the rim of grass beyond the woodpile, lay a gently rolling valley. I rested my elbows on the ground behind the logs and focused my binoculars on a courtyard about a hundred yards down the slope.

  There was no one moving about yet, but there were lights on in one side of the brick building, where smoke puffed out of a stone chimney. Probably the kitchen, I'd decided. On the right side, a taller addition extended back and out of my view, disappearing into the trees. The door of the kitchen opened and a woman stepped out, as she had almost every morning that I'd been here. She carried a bag in her left hand and a broom in her right. Setting the brown paper bag against the brick wall of the building, she proceeded to sweep the stone courtyard, methodically sliding the wet leaves and twigs to one side and then off the flagstone and into the grass beyond. When she was satisfied, she leaned the broom against that same wall and retrieved the bag, which apparently was full of stale bread or other crumbs. Her right hand disappeared inside the bag and retrieved handfuls of the crumbs, which the woman tossed ahead of her onto the freshly swept stone of the courtyard floor.

  I had focused the binoculars on her face and, as always, had felt that familiar tug in my stomach. Her beautiful, soft brown eyes, the oval face, were the same as I remembered. It was her again. I felt as if the wind was knocked out of me, but I hadn't moved an inch. Caroline Bennett, my one true love, was only a few hundred feet, and several light years, away from me.

  Like a dumb kid, I lay there on the wet sod and stared at a woman I couldn't have. It seemed crazy that I thought I still loved her, but there it was. And I didn't know how to stop. I had compared every woman I'd ever dated to Caroline, and they'd all fallen short. I couldn't keep coming here and watching for some sign of her. I was probably going to have to do something about meeting with her or they were going to be hauling me o
ff to jail one day soon, as a stalker. Caroline turned her back to me and looked up at the morning sky behind the buildings. As she'd turned away, the sunlight glinted off the brilliant white of the soft scarf that was wrapped loosely around her head. A three-quarter length wool coat, gray in color, extended part way over her lighter gray slacks. A pair of dark, low boots completed the picture. She looked like the average American woman.

  If Caroline had been dressed in the traditional black and white habit of the Sisters of Charity, as I had expected her to be, it might have made it easier for me to accept her status as a nun. It certainly would have been an affront to my senses, and maybe would have shocked me back to reality. As it was, she looked as lovely as ever to me, in her gray coat and white scarf, her cheeks barely pink in the morning breeze. She pulled the wooden door outward and, carrying the broom and brown paper bag, disappeared inside the silent convent. I stayed there for a few more minutes, looking down at the cold brick walls of Saint Anne's. It really was a beautiful place, I thought. And I really was nuts.

  By ten fifteen, I was back at my desk, with Iris Wilson seated to my left in one of the red plaid chairs. To the untrained eye, my desk probably looked cluttered and unorganized. To me, it was all just where I wanted it. If I moved anything to a "better” place, it would almost certainly disappear and the only location my mind would retain was the one where it used to be. After almost forty years of living by my wits, I'd finally learned at least that one fact. Besides if I needed to spread something out on a flat surface, there was always the kitchen table.

  Iris had scanned the clutter on the desktop when she'd walked in. I'd seen her gaze move around the room, from the rows of books on the shelves to the piles of magazines that sat at various places on the chairs and floor. I guess the room passed inspection. She'd sat in the one vacant chair, and was telling me about her marriage and her recently deceased husband, Charlie.