Death in Reel Time Read online

  I read through several more entries, learning more about how many pints and quarts of things Celestine put by than I really wanted to know. She sprinkled in a little gossip and a few references to what was going on in Crawford. I scanned until another passage caught my eye:

  November 24, 1941

  Well, you’ll never guess, but we are to be movie stars. There is a man in town who is making a picture show about all us folks who live in Crawford and he says he will show it in the movie house when it is done and we can come see ourselves. I wish we’d got more notice so I could’ve made a new dress, but I’ll have to make do with one I’ve got because he’ll just be taking the movies for the next two days. Everybody’s all excited about it and that’s a right good thing since we’ve mostly just been scared and nerved up about the war here lately and not had too much cause to be lighthearted. Riley says we’ll go into town both days and maybe we’ll even get on there twice. He’s going to wear his good suit and his nice Panama hat one day and his regular old work clothes on the other. I told him I will wear good dresses both days; I’ve got no wish to be up there on that big screen in an old housedress and apron. Renny is going to wear the dress she wore when her and Johnny married. It is store bought and is a little batiste dress with a fluttery skirt and lots of ruffles on the bodice and it fits her little figure to a T. And I know Johnny will go dressed to the nines. He’s got a bit of the dandy in him.

  So maybe Olivia would get to see people she knew in the Crawford movie. And maybe one person she never had a chance to know.

  As promised, Tony had burned us each a copy of the movie, but with all that had happened we hadn’t had a chance to watch it yet. I decided that should be the first thing on the agenda tomorrow. Maybe a movie would be the thing to distract Beth for a little while—if anything could.

  nine

  TONY SET THE CRAWFORD FILM up for viewing on Olivia’s family room television. I’d prepared the night before by making copies of all the photos I could find from that time period among Olivia’s family artifacts. There were precious few. Olivia’s people were not avid photo buffs.

  There were six photos of Celestine and Riley Hargett from that time period. They were black-and-white, scalloped-edged prints that had faded with time but at least we’d know who we were looking for in the movie. There was a studio portrait of Renny, and several small amateur snapshots. In nearly all of them she was smiling a tentative, shy smile, standing with her feet together and her shoulders slightly hunched, looking like a little girl making her First Communion.

  Of Johnny Hargett there were only two likenesses from the period: one studio portrait and one almost worthless blurry snapshot.

  I’d scanned nearly all of Olivia’s photos since there were so few of them. In contrast to her wealth of diaries and letters, there was a dearth of images. Since this was essentially a pro bono job, Esme and I wouldn’t be scanning all of the family artifacts. Olivia had a computer and scanner and we would encourage her to scan everything and show her how to organize the digital images. It is tedious, time-consuming work we only do for our full-service clients. Likewise the scrapbooks. We’d teach Olivia techniques and help her organize the flow, but she’d be putting together her own heritage scrapbooks, and, in my humble opinion, that’s how it ought to be. Which unmasks me as a total hypocrite. Although it seems wrong to me to pay an outsider to do such a personal thing as recording family memories, I don’t mind at all collecting the hefty fees we get from full-service clients to do just that. Why, sometimes I tsk all the way to the bank.

  I dealt the photos out to Tony, Olivia, and Beth, though I wasn’t sure Beth was in any condition to recognize her own self, much less relatives from another era. She was pale, her movements jerky, her hair unwashed, and her eyes dull and hollow. I’d never seen her like this before. ’Course, she’d never lost a husband before.

  But she was struggling to put on her game face. I suspected it was more to ease Olivia’s mind than because she had the remotest interest in family history at the present moment.

  Olivia studied the stack of photos. She was happy to see the ones of her aunt and uncle looking young and vital, and she smiled sadly at the ones of her mother. When she came to the studio portrait of her father she frowned. “I’ve never seen this picture before. Is this him?”

  “Yes, that’s your father, Johnny Hargett. You’ve never seen this photo?”

  “Never,” Olivia said. “I’d remember. When I was little I used to ask what he looked like and I was told this”—she held up the blurry snapshot—“was the only picture we had.”

  “The studio shot was in one of the boxes from your aunt’s house,” Esme said. “It was inside an envelope.”

  “Why in the world would they have kept it from me?” Olivia asked, though I didn’t think she was expecting an answer. She studied the photo more closely. “He was very handsome, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was,” I said. “I think Daniel looks a bit like him.”

  I filled Olivia in on what I’d found out about her father, which was not much, and all of it bad.

  “Well, that tells me something, doesn’t it?” she said, pursing her lips. “Maybe he ended up in prison, for a long time, I mean. Is there any way to check that?”

  “I don’t think that’s the case, Olivia, at least not in this state. I’ll keep looking, but in the meantime, I’ve got to tell you that your aunt Celestine’s diaries are real treasures. She writes with so much detail about her daily life and about the people she knows. We’ve barely begun reading them, but after we watch the movie we’ll fill you in on what we’ve learned so far.”

  “I can’t wait to read them,” Olivia said. “I’ve wondered about those things all my life. I don’t suppose she’s let out any deep, dark secrets.”

  I laughed. “Not unless you consider her recipe for pepper jam privileged information.”

  “We’re all set,” Tony said, clicking the remote.

  “Should I make popcorn?” Beth asked, trying to bend her mouth into a smile, then wincing from the effort.

  “I’m a Jujube gal myself,” I said.

  “No food or drink,” Esme said sternly as she claimed a prize spot on the sofa.

  “Don’t expect a complicated plot,” Tony said. “Don’t expect any kind of plot. This is like you were talking about with the aunt’s diaries, except it’s a whole town’s memoir. Lots of details but not a whole lot of context, and there’s no audio.”

  A simple title, Crawford, 1941, lingered on the screen and I encouraged Olivia to do a running commentary on places and people she recognized while I jotted down observations that might warrant further research.

  The title screen gave way to the march of the schoolchildren. They’d lined up by class, younger kids first, and paraded across the camera’s focus field. Little boys in overalls or baggy trousers and girls in thin cotton dresses, all genders holding hands with no self-consciousness and clearly intrigued by the camera. Each class was led by a woman, almost all of them sporting wire-rimmed glasses and most with wavy hair pulled back and bundled at the neck. Some had kind faces and smiled at the children; others could have stopped a train dead on the tracks with a disapproving look.

  “Recognize anyone?” Beth asked her mother.

  “Some of the faces look familiar,” Olivia said with a frown, “but I can’t put names to any of them.”

  As the older kids trooped by there was bravado and swagger. Then came scenes taken around the schoolyard. I was amused to see that high school never changes much. There were fleeting shy smiles from the nerdy kids clutching their stacks of books in those pre-backpack days. Then there were the jocks, their striped baseball caps cocked at jaunty angles, mugging it up and demonstrating their mighty swings as they tested the bats and tapped at the sandbag bases. Then the camera literally caught the outsider kids out behind the school building. A girl pulled a cigarette from her mouth and smirked at the camera while a boy looped an arm around her neck and pressed his chee
k against hers.

  “I don’t believe it!” Olivia exclaimed.

  “What?” I asked, my pen at the ready.

  “That’s Mrs. Porter. She was my fourth-grade teacher. The woman was the prissiest, meekest little thing you’d ever want to meet. I guess she wasn’t always such a goody two-shoes.”

  “People change,” Esme said with a laugh. “I sure wouldn’t want you all getting hold of any high school movies of me.”

  We sat through a visit to the hardware store, where an eager young clerk standing by a chest-high refrigerator demonstrated some newfangled ice cube trays equipped with a handy release lever to a young woman who seemed mighty impressed. Men examined hammers with great earnestness, as if they were complex tools whose function was difficult to divine.

  Then the camera operator moved to the streets, catching anyone who came by on the sidewalk.

  “Popsicles were a major food group to these people,” Tony said as a small girl walked by licking the last vestiges of sweetness from a stick. “Oh, and they love this one. It’s in every single one of these old films.”

  A young man riding a bike came even with the camera operator and suddenly hoisted himself up and put his foot on the bicycle seat, his other leg held out behind him. He rode on by with a triumphant smile, then the action suddenly reversed and the rider went backward and came to a seated position on the bicycle.

  “They’d run pouring lemonade backward into the pitcher, or somebody going off a diving board, then back up again. Bloop.” Tony made a cupping motion with his hand. “I mean it’s funny, but not all that funny.”

  “You had to be there, I guess,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Tony said, “I suppose that was a high-tech yuck back then. When we were studying these we called them Triple P films—pranks, pets, and Popsicles.”

  “There’s Uncle Riley,” Olivia said excitedly, leaning toward the television. “Ah, look at him, so straight and tall and young.”

  “And Aunt Celestine,” Beth said. “She was so pretty when she was young.”

  “She was beautiful when she was old, too,” Olivia said. “Just more on the inside than the outside.”

  Esme leaned over close to me and murmured, “Uh-uh, Celestine did not like that comment.”

  The couple moved toward the camera and struck a pose, Riley with his arm around his wife’s shoulders. They looked at one another and the affection between them was unmistakable.

  “They were quite a team,” Olivia said, obviously lost in her own thoughts. “Whatever life threw at them they faced together.”

  The camera panned slowly to catch another couple and we all gasped. There in sepia-toned live action stood Johnny Hargett, his arm around the tiny waist of his new wife, Renny. She smiled shyly and looked up at him, but he was focused on the camera, his chest swelled, his grin cocky.

  Renny reached up to adjust a little hat that shielded her eyes against the sun and Johnny grabbed her arm and pulled her in tighter against him. She smiled, but as the camera lingered she rubbed at her arm and her smile faded. Johnny took a watch from his vest pocket and swung it by the fob in an arc. When it came to rest in his palm, he pushed the latch to open the watch cover, looked at it, grinned at the camera, then returned the watch to his pocket.

  Beth made a strangled noise, then got up from the couch, knocking a stack of magazines from the coffee table as she fled the room.

  “Oh no, what was I thinking?” Olivia said. “She doesn’t need to be watching happy couples right now.”

  “Should you go after her?” Tony asked, pushing the pause button.

  “No,” Olivia said with a heavy sigh. “Let her be. She’ll let me know if she wants me. She needs to deal with this in her own way.”

  We watched the rest of the movie, with dogged determination now, the banter squelched. There were no more sightings of Olivia’s kin, though she did recognize a few more townspeople.

  We went in to get Olivia started on the scrapbooks and I kept expecting Beth to join us after she’d regained her composure. But an hour went by and no Beth. Finally Tony came in, shuffling his weight from foot to foot.

  “I’m not sure what I should do,” he said. “We’re supposed to go film a segment with Charlie Martin this afternoon, but I think Beth must be sleeping or something.”

  “Let me go check, Tony,” Olivia said, jumping at the excuse.

  “I’d just cancel,” Tony said to Esme and me after Olivia had left the room. “But if I don’t get this done today it’s going to set me behind by at least another week. I’m already off schedule because of, well, you know, everything that’s happened.”

  “Do you have a deadline?” Esme asked.

  “Self-imposed,” Tony said, with an anxious glimpse toward the doorway. “I want to enter it into a couple of documentary festivals.”

  Olivia came back in and gave Tony a sorrowful look. “Tony, she’s not feeling well. She said to tell you she knows she’s letting you down and she feels terrible about it, but she just can’t do it today.”

  “I could pinch-hit for her if you’d like me to,” I said. “Not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good interviewer.”

  “Oh good,” Olivia said. “Yes, you go on with Tony and tell Charlie I’ve got some flower bulbs for him to put in for me when he gets a chance. ’Course, that’s just an excuse to get him to come to supper. If I have a little job for him he’ll come; otherwise he’d never get out to be with people. That’s got to be lonely for him.” She glanced toward the stairs again. “People aren’t meant to be alone.”

  ten

  AS WE WERE LEAVING THE house a wind off the lake put one of Olivia’s kinetic lawn sculptures in play, spinning a top wheel that caused the metal bits suspended from it to strike a bottom plate shaped like a clamshell.

  “Man, I love that thing,” Tony said. “It’s like wind chimes on steroids. And that sound is like nothing I’ve ever heard. It’s not a clang and it’s not a bong. You can’t call it a peal or a toll. What would you call it?”

  “An Oliviation!” Esme said.

  “That’s great,” Tony said. “Mind if I use it?”

  “You’re welcome to it, but I’ll expect a cut of your royalties,” Esme said.

  Tony laughed, but when Esme didn’t smile back a worried look crossed his face.

  “She’s yanking your chain, Tony,” I told him.

  “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” he said to Esme, more an accusation than a question.

  “Immensely,” she admitted.

  Tony stopped and hoisted his camera bag, adjusting the strap on his shoulder. He shielded his eyes against the late afternoon sun, and his eyes focused on the metal sculpture again. “You know,” he said, glumly, “I was having a great time with this project until Blaine up and got himself killed. I set out to make a positive film about this great small town where everyone gets along and people look out for one another and then, bam, one of its citizens gets murdered. Doesn’t really fit the theme. And even this,” he said, pointing to Olivia’s sculpture. “It’s great, and I know how she loves it, but when I interviewed her about her sculptures yesterday it seemed to make her sad. I don’t get it.”

  “She’s worried about Beth,” Esme said. “And she’s probably wondering if she’ll ever be able to do anything like this again.”

  “Oh man, I never thought of it like that,” Tony said, slapping his forehead. “I shouldn’t have asked her about it right now.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “These are things she faces every day. It may be even harder for Olivia than for most women in her situation. She was an incredibly strong woman, used to doing very active things.”

  “She’s still strong,” Esme said. “She exercised to keep herself in shape all during her treatments, much as she was able anyway. Woman can still lift and carry with the best of ’em. She’s just got no staying power. That’s what’s got her frustrated. She knows she can’t do this”—Esme motioned toward the oliviating sculpture—�
��until she can stay with it for more than a few minutes. But I believe she’ll get back there. She’s a determined woman.”

  Tony looked toward the driveway. “Uh-oh, I forgot. Beth usually drives when she goes with me. I’ve only got my motorcycle, but I’ve got an extra helmet.”

  “No, sir, that won’t do,” Esme said, before I’d had a chance to answer.

  I hadn’t relished the idea of hanging on to Tony as I choked on car exhaust and the October wind tried to strip the skin from my face, but I put up a protest just so Esme didn’t get the idea she could boss me around. Which, of course, she could and did on a regular basis.

  We took my car, dropping Esme home along the way. Tony gave me the directions to Charlie Martin’s place. It was what is known euphemistically in Morningside as a garden apartment, which meant it was tiny. I knew the place. The five units had been carved out of a fifties-era motor lodge. One of my college friends had stayed there for a summer while she worked in the pro shop at the country club.

  As we drove, Tony brought me up to speed on what they’d done in the earlier interviews and what he was looking to get today.

  “We’ve had three sessions with him, and I feel like we’re just this close to something really good,” Tony said, holding his finger and thumb a couple of millimeters apart. “Then he goes back into his shell. He’s a sharp old dude, and I mean that in the most respectful way. He’s seen a lot in nearly a century on planet earth. Be a shame not to capture his take on some of it for posterity.”

  “When does he freeze up?” I asked, wondering what subject matter I’d need to tiptoe around.

  “Questions about when he was young lock him up sometimes, but the stuff about the war always shuts him down if you’re not really careful about how you get into it,” Tony said. “Though it’s kinda hard to know if that’s him or Beth. She gets all edgy when they’re on that subject. She’s never wanted him to know about her grandfather and the big family scandal about him running away to avoid having to go. Like it would matter. It’s weird. She never even knew him.”