All's Well That Ends: An Amanda Pepper Mystery - Softcover

Gillian Roberts won the Anthony Award for Best First Mystery for Caught Dead in Philadelphia. She is also the author of Philly Stakes, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia, With Friends Like These . . ., How I Spent My Summer Vacation, In the Dead of Summer, The Mummers’ Curse, The Bluest Blood, Adam and Evil, Helen Hath No Fury, Claire and Present Danger, Till the End of Tom, and A Hole in Juan, among others. Formerly an English teacher in Philadelphia, Gillian Roberts now lives in California. Her website address is www.GillianRoberts.com–and she enjoys receiving fan e-mail at Judygilly@aol.com.
From the Hardcover edition.

One

She was the best of mothers, she was the worst of mothers. She had wisdom, she had foolishness. . . .”

Dennis’s words made me want to snatch the silver martini pitcher from his hand and smash him with it, even though that would make my behavior as inappropriate as his was. We were paying our last respects, except for Dennis, who was paying his final disrespects.

Inappropriate didn’t begin to describe posthumously clobbering the Dickens out of your own mother. I don’t care how literary Dennis thought he was—not that familiarity with the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities qualifies as anything special.

“It is a far, far worse thing you do than ever you have done before,” I muttered to Sasha. Unfortunately, that probably wasn’t accurate. To put it as charitably as I could: Dennis Allenby was a jerk.

He’d been a jerk in tenth grade when his mother was married to Sasha’s father. Twenty years later, age had not withered nor custom staled his infinite jerkiness. He had a reputation as a specialist in the nearly-illegal scheme, the loophole-finding arrangement, the deal that shamelessly preyed on the gullible.

His mother had been Sasha’s favorite stepmother. Despite the divorce, Sasha managed to maintain the relationship through three more of Phoebe’s marriages, and two of her own, until Phoebe’s untimely death two weeks ago. Sad, or ironic that having pledged five separate times to be with a man till death did them part, Phoebe wound up alone, dead by her own hand, with only Dennis as a sorry by-product.

I blocked out his drone, forced his voice to dissolve into the bright December morning, to be no more than the crunch of twigs underfoot, the occasional birdcall, or the murmur of the stream; although in truth, the water was silent. It was so chilly, it was probably icing up. So was I.

My chattering teeth helped drown him out. I looked around and could see that my irritation was shared. Maybe we could rush Dennis, push him into the creek along with the urn’s contents.

Sasha, dressed intensely in black, from the oversized broad-brimmed hat that wobbled and shivered with each wintry gust to her high boots, looked flamboyantly in mourning. But her face was set with anger, not grief. She opened her eyes wide, the better to glare at Dennis. “You see?” she hissed. “You see?”

She wanted me to see a murderer, but I saw only a middle-aged jerk.

I once again let my eyes travel around the group. On this bright winter day, about twenty people had gathered by the river to remember and honor Phoebe Ennis. The group included her cousin Peter, who hadn’t seen Phoebe in fifteen years but had memories so vivid that he’d made the trip from his home in West Virginia; four women who’d identified themselves in such a rush that I never got them straight; a woman who looked in her eighties and who’d identified herself only as “a former neighbor,” though of which time period and/or house she didn’t say; and near her, Phoebe’s flame-haired business partner, Merilee Wilkins, standing so rigidly she looked planted in the spot. I’d met her a while back when I went to Top Cat and Tails, the shop she and Phoebe owned. I was amused by the idea of a pet boutique, which probably shows what a shallow, uncaring cat-owner I am. But the admittedly funny sight of sale items such as a Halloween costume for a dachshund that made the pup into a hot-dog on a bun did nothing to make me take the place more seriously.

I went for entertainment value, not to buy, and apparently, so did too many others, because the business was about to fold. Merilee’s husband was withdrawing his financial support and, not coincidentally, withdrawing from the marriage as well. Somehow, Merilee blamed Phoebe for the weak revenues that she believed had led to her husband’s defection, and in her agitated state she’d accused Phoebe of larceny.

Judging by Merilee’s grim expression today, the bad blood between the women had stayed bad, which made me feel a twinge of sympathy for the otherwise annoying woman. There couldn’t be many things much worse than having a friend die in mid-quarrel. Surely both women hoped, if not expected, that they’d find a way through their anger, that they’d resolve their issues and restore the friendship. Now it was impossible.

Looking less profoundly upset, two men in their forties who had identified themselves in unison as “the Daves—we’re just her friends” stood at the back of the small group. Only one of Phoebe’s ex-husbands had attended, Max Delahunt, the fourth of “the Alphabet boys.” Phoebe’s love life had been frenetic, but her marriage partners turned out to be as systematic as if they’d been chosen by a file clerk. She’d wed, in order: Harvey Allenby, Charlie Berg, Bert Carnero, Max Delahunt, and Nelson Ennis. Among the wedding gifts for Phoebe and Nelson had been a set of towels that had the entire alphabet embroidered along the hem. “Pre-emptive monograms,” the gift giver called it. Nelson Ennis should have seen the writing on the towel and known he was a short-timer, and indeed, he didn’t make it to the getting- divorced stage. He was done in by an out-of-control motorcycle, barely a year into his marriage.

Phoebe probably would have found herself Mr. “F,” too, except that she ended the progression by killing herself.

Max’s son, Lionel “Lion” Delahunt, a slender, balding man, stood close to his father, looking pensive, representing along with Sasha Phoebe’s many temporary stepchildren. He was next to a man I didn’t know, but the teenager by that man’s side was a Philly Prep student, Mitchell “Jonesy” Farmer.

At lunch, before this ceremony began, Jonesy had told me he was here because it was his weekend with his father, and his father said it was the right thing to do. His father had known Phoebe, Jonesy had said grudgingly, and I assumed that meant the senior Farmer had dated her. I wondered if he’d been optioning for a position as next husband. Alphabetically, at least, he was appropriate.

There were a few other mourners I didn’t recognize. At least one, I suspected, was someone who’d been out for a walk, bundled in his sweats and parka, and had spotted something out of the ordinary and opted to join in for the novelty factor.

We stood in a glorious sylvan setting of trees and water, even if the stream wasn’t burbling and the trees were bare under the December sky, and we did our best to ignore the human traffic nearby. This part of the park was called Forbidden Drive, which sounds more exciting than it is. Cars are forbidden, but pretty much everything else is allowed, except, I suspect, what we were about to do. In any case, the bucolic silence, if you ignored Dennis, which I was trying my best to do, made Philadelphia’s stone and brick feel galaxies away. You don’t realize until you’re away from it how nonstop noisy a city is, a perpetual motorized grumble, air being pushed aside by crowds of people, gears churning.

But at this point, the idea of a city’s enclosed heated spaces trumped the beauty of our setting. I shivered, and my teeth chattered uncontrollably. I stomped from foot to foot and watched my breath frost and puff in the air, envying the joggers on the path behind us for the body heat they’d created. Sasha bent toward me, nearly blinding me with the brim of her hat. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” she whispered. “It’s so openly hostile!” Earlier, she’d said a few heartfelt words about what Phoebe had meant to her, as had almost everyone else who’d gathered here, including the Daves and even Ex-Husband “D.”

Not the man in the parka, not Jonesy or his father, not I, not Merilee.

Dennis had taken control of this event, although Sasha had planned and organized it. “I am the only blood relative,” he’d snapped. He was in a perpetual fury because his mother had included Sasha in her will. Not that Phoebe had much beyond a modest house, but however much it was, Dennis wanted it all, and his mother had said he could have only half.

He’d been in a sulk ever since he’d flown into Philadelphia. When he bullied his way into running the memorial service despite years of ignoring his mother, Sasha capitulated.

The fact that he’d saved himself and this performance for last was all the more offensive.

“You have got to find out where he was the night she died,” Sasha whispered. “Maybe he hired somebody. Maybe somebody else flew using his name and he was here before then. Maybe . . .”

She’d wanted me here for reasons of friendship, but also because after I finished my days teaching, I was training to be a private investigator. I had a long apprenticeship to go before I could get my license, and I meanwhile co-moonlit with my husband, C. K. Mackenzie, who was licensed because he’d been a homicide detective before opting for grad school. I did mostly clerical chores. You don’t get points toward your license for teaching high school English.

That didn’t matter to Sasha. She refused to accept the idea that Phoebe had committed suicide, no matter what the police said, and no matter that she had nothing beyond a gut conviction to support her theory.

So with her talent for ignoring the obvious, she’d begged me to observe—as if this were all a grade-B movie, and I was the obligatory cop lounging at the back of the funeral home. I didn’t even know why they were there in movies, let alone in real life. What did they expect to see? A killer suddenly throwing himself on the coffin and confessing? Villains twirling moustaches and chortling ov...