Woman of Mystery
When Joyce Donner moved to Puritan Falls, Tim Rooney could not believe that such a beautiful woman was unattached despite Jacqueline Astor, the real estate agent who sold Joyce her house, informing him that such was the case.
"The house is in her name only," Jacqueline told the unmarried high school teacher in confidence.
"That doesn't necessarily mean she's available. She might have a fiancé. At the very least, a boyfriend," Tim reasoned and then added, "or a girlfriend."
"I don't think so. She said she didn't know a soul in New England."
When Jacqueline pulled up in front of the quaint Cape Cod on Hawthorne Boulevard, Tim saw Joyce taking bags of groceries out of the back of her Subaru.
"Let me get those for you," he immediately offered.
"Thank you," she said, rewarding him with a captivating smile.
She then turned and greeted the real estate agent, who made a hasty introduction.
"Joyce Donner, this is my good friend, Tim Rooney. You mentioned that you were looking for someone to build a deck. He's a high school math teacher who does carpentry work in his spare time."
"Great! I could use a handyman to take care of a few things around the house if you're interested."
"I sure am."
Tim immediately regretted his obvious eagerness. Thankfully, Jacqueline stepped in to rescue him from embarrassment.
"You teachers are lucky. I wish I had the entire summer off."
"Would either of you care for some coffee?" the homeowner asked. "It's instant, but it tastes good."
The real estate agent looked at her watch.
"Maybe some other time. I have an appointment to show a house in ten minutes."
"Let me take you to the backyard," Joyce told Tim, "and maybe you can give me a quick estimate on how much a deck will cost."
Wanting to impress her, the math teacher quoted a price that barely covered the cost of supplies.
"I thought it would be a lot more than that," she said with relief. "Whenever you can fit it into your schedule, I'd like to go ahead with construction."
"School ends in two weeks. I can start then—weather permitting, of course."
"Fantastic!"
Joyce went to the kitchen, took a notepad out of her junk drawer and scribbled her cell phone number on a piece of paper.
"If something comes up and you can't make it, here's my number."
Nice handwriting, Tim thought foolishly as he folded the paper and tucked it into his wallet for safekeeping.
* * *
For the next two weeks, Tim Rooney found himself behaving like a lovesick schoolboy. Not content to simply count down the days until school ended and work began on Joyce's deck, every other day he took the long way home, driving down Hawthorne Boulevard in hopes of catching a glimpse of her.
If I were a less timid man, he thought, I'd pick up the phone and call her.
Boldness, however, was never one of his strong points. If it were, he probably would not be living alone at age thirty.
Tim was not sure who was happier on the last day of school: the teacher or his students.
"Bye, Mr. Rooney," several teens called when the bell rang after the final period of the day.
"Goodbye," he replied. "Have a good summer."
No sooner did the last of his pupils cross the threshold than Tim grabbed his briefcase, took his keys out of his pocket and headed toward the parking lot. For the first time since he began teaching at Puritan Falls High, he did not stick around for the annual lunch buffet the PTA provided for the teachers on the last day of school. Instead, he headed for Hawthorne Boulevard. When he saw Joyce's Forester in the driveway, he pulled up in front of her house.
His heart racing with anticipation, he got out of the car, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Moments before the door opened, Tim saw one of Joyce's blue eyes peering out through the peephole.
"Mr. Rooney!" she exclaimed when she saw him on the stoop. "Aren't you supposed to start on the deck tomorrow?"
"Tim, please. Yes, I am. I'm going to stop at Home Depot first thing in the morning to buy the lumber. I'd like to take some measurements first if you don't mind."
"Not at all," she said, opening the door wide.
No sooner did he step inside than Joyce quickly shut the door behind him. A moment later, he heard the bolt being drawn.
"You must be from the city," he teased.
"Why do you say that?" she asked defensively.
Oh, no, he thought worriedly. I've gone and said the wrong thing.
"I was only referring to your bolting the door. Most people in Puritan Falls leave their doors unlocked."
Joyce smiled, apparently not offended by his remark after all.
"It's a habit. Where I grew up, even the garbage cans and mailboxes were kept under lock and key. It'll take some time before I get used to living in a nice, peaceful, law-abiding town."
"I'm sure you'll find Puritan Falls is a wonderful place to live."
"I'm sure I will, but still, a woman living alone has to be careful."
"There's no Mr. Donner, then?" Tim asked, holding his breath as he waited for her to answer.
"No. I was married once, but he died."
Joyce lowered her head but not before Tim saw the misery in her eyes. It was clear that her husband's death was not a subject she wanted to discuss.
* * *
Joyce and Tim's first date—an unofficial one—occurred the following evening after Tim began work on the deck. At five o'clock, Joyce suggested he call it a day and invited him inside for something to eat. He washed up in the mud room and sat down to a three-course meal: salad, spaghetti with meatballs and chocolate mousse.
"You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble," he declared.
"I don't mind, honestly. It's nice to have someone to cook for. I usually just make myself a salad or heat up a frozen dinner in the microwave."
"Me, too. And then there are the take-out meals."
"Ugh! One look at a Big Mac or a Whopper and I gain five pounds."
Tim supposed she did not look at many hamburgers since her figure was quite slender.
Their second date—an official one—was the following Saturday. Tim took Joyce to the Sons of Liberty Tavern for dinner and then to see Shutter Island at the AMC Theater in the Puritan Falls Mall. The two continued dating after the deck was completed, and by the end of July, Tim was hopelessly in love. Only his shyness and lack of self-esteem prevented him from proposing marriage. Or perhaps it was a nagging doubt in the back of his mind that kept him from asking Joyce to marry him. There were still many things he did not know about her.
For one thing, she never spoke about herself and avoided even the most innocent questions about her past. He had no idea where she was born, where she attended school, if she went to college or where she had been employed. Also, Joyce was the only woman he ever met who did not have framed photographs on display, not even her wedding portrait.
Another peculiarity that bothered him was her unreasonable fear of someone breaking into her house. Not content to have her front and back doors locked with deadbolts and her windows securely fastened, Joyce also had an expensive electronic home security system installed.
Tim's concern led him to mention his loved one's odd behavior to his good friend Shawn McMurtry, an officer on the Puritan Falls police force.
"I don't know what she's so afraid of," he said one night over beers at Charlie's Bar, "but she keeps the place locked up like Fort Knox. I'm beginning to wonder if she has some kind of phobia."
"Maybe you should be talking to Lionel then, and not me," laughed Shawn, who found nothing unusual in Joyce's behavior. "Seriously, though, I doubt there's cause for concern. She lives alone. A great many women who are on their own are afraid."
"I understand that, but it's more than just her fear of living alone that bothers me. She never talks about her past—or much about her present life either."
"Ah, my, friend, you found a true woman of mystery."
When the police officer saw that the math teacher did not share his merriment, he patted Tim's back.
"If it worries you that much, I can do a background check on her."
"No, I wouldn't want that. I just ... I don't know. I've fallen in love with her, but I don't want to get too serious if there might be complications."
"Don't you see what's happening? You've been single so long you're afraid of making a commitment."
"That's not true," Tim objected. "I want to fall in love, marry and start a family."
"Look, we've been friends since we were kids playing Little League baseball. You were always ...."
Shawn hesitated, trying to think of a delicate way to express his thoughts.
"... too analytical. Personal relationships aren't algebraic equations or geometric formulae. There's no logic to them. Do you want my advice? If you love this woman, do what the rest of us do: take a leap of faith and hope for the best."
For the next several days, Tim pondered Shawn's words. He had always thought people divorced because they rushed into marriage without taking the time to really get to know each other. But he might be wrong. Maybe no one ever really knew another person well. Or maybe, it suddenly occurred to him, the joy in life came from the process of getting to know someone.
Damn it! I've been cautious all my life. It's about time I took a chance on something.
Tim promptly decided he would propose, and being a romantic at heart, he wanted to do it at Christmas time. The decision having been made, the high school math teacher was no longer bothered by the deadbolts on Joyce's doors or her reluctance to discuss her past. If she chose to be a woman of mystery, then that was her prerogative. He would be content simply to have her in his life.
Tim's newfound contentment was short-lived, however. One early September evening, while he sat on Joyce's couch watching television, he reached forward to pick up the remote and noticed the back of Joyce's hairline. Although the roots were barely an eighth of an inch in length, he could tell they were pale gold in color.
Why would a natural blonde dye her hair brown? Tim had never met a blonde who would prefer to be a brunette. At that moment, the doubts he thought he had put to rest were reawakened.
Joyce deliberately altered her appearance!
He subconsciously turned the disturbing discovery into a mathematical equation: Joyce plus disguise equals x. From this, he could draw only one conclusion: his beautiful woman of mystery had something to hide.
* * *
The following morning at school, Tim gave serious consideration to taking Shawn McMurtry up on his offer of checking into Joyce Donner's background but decided against it. He was a gentleman, after all, and believed only a cad would have the police check up on the woman he wanted to marry. Still, he saw no harm in doing a little online research himself.
When he got home from work, he went directly to his den and turned on his laptop. He stared at the red and yellow O's of the Google logo for close to ten minutes. The I'M FEELING LUCKY button seemed to taunt him as his trembling fingers hovered above the keyboard. Finally, he typed Joyce's name in the search field. With a feeling of doom, he lowered his right index finger and pressed ENTER.
For the next three hours, interrupted only by a brief bathroom break, Tim searched through Facebook and Myspace pages, personal home pages, newspaper archives and online directories, but he could find no one who matched the general description of his Joyce Donner. In today's world, it was conceivably possible, but not really very likely, that a person could escape mention on the Internet, even if only in a telephone directory.
Again, Tim performed another calculation to discover the value of the elusive x.
Joyce Donner must not be her real name.
At a dead end in his search, he went into the kitchen, put a frozen pizza in his oven and prepared a tossed salad. As he ate his bachelor's repast, he again thought of Shawn McMurtry's offer to look into Joyce's background. Would it really be so terrible? What if Joyce was a deranged killer or an escaped convict?
Were they the only two solutions that fit the equation? No. There must be a more innocent explanation. Tim thought for several minutes. After discounting the melodramatic option that she was a woman suffering from amnesia, the only alternative he could come up with was that Joyce might be in the witness protection program, living under an assumed identity given to her by the federal government. But even this alternative made him feel uneasy. What had she witnessed that necessitated such drastic measures? Did he really want to marry a woman who might be targeted by an organized crime family or an unscrupulous drug cartel?
The answer was no. He was a high school math teacher from a small New England village, a man who enjoyed reading, carpentry and watching Red Sox baseball. He had no desire to get too close to the seedier side of life. He would rather be a living bachelor, he reasoned, than a dead husband.
* * *
Having decided to terminate his relationship with Joyce Donner, Tim's only remaining problem was to end it in a gentlemanly, civilized fashion. He did not want to simply come out and tell her they were through since he could not give her a truthful reason for his decision. Instead, he decided a gradual break would be easier. The four nights a week he usually spent at her house decreased to three, two and then one. His explanation, when she asked for one, was that he was busy at school.
December came, and he spent Christmas break with his sister and her family in New Jersey, thus avoiding Joyce completely. When he returned to Puritan Falls on January 2, he found in his mailbox an informal invitation to a "welcome home" dinner for two to be held at Joyce's house. Guilt stabbed at him. Any other woman would have been furious if her significant other had abandoned her for the holidays, but not Joyce. She was different. She was the perfect woman in every respect but one.
And what if she is just what she appears to be? Tim wondered.
Maybe her name was Joyce Donner. Maybe she was just reticent when it came to talking about herself. And maybe her home had been robbed in the past, thus making her take extra precautions. The truth of the matter struck him with sudden and brutal force.
If she is Joyce Donner and I walk away from our relationship now, I would be making the biggest mistake of my life!
The math teacher groaned with frustration. It was like solving a quadratic equation and being left with x equals 0 or -1. In this case, they could not both be true. He had to find out who Joyce was, even if it meant going to Shawn McMurtry for help. But first, he would give it one more attempt on his own.
Without bothering to unpack his car, Tim went upstairs to his den and turned on his computer. The blue capital G of Google's logo seemed to urge him on as he typed MISSING PERSONS in the search field. He browsed through photographs posted by the FBI, the National Center for Missing Adults and several state agencies without any luck.
He was about to give up his quest and phone Shawn when he clicked on a link for the popular true crime television series American Fugitives. It was a long shot and one that he prayed would not bear fruit. The number of people being sought by local and state police departments was staggering. When he narrowed his search to women, the number was cut by more than seventy percent, but there were still pages of photographs to browse through.
After the seventh page, he stopped and got himself a can of Coke out of the refrigerator. When he returned to his den, he went on to the eighth page. He almost choked on his soda when he saw the face of the blond woman at the bottom of the array of photographs.
It CAN'T be!
He clicked on the thumbnail and stared at the enlarged image.
It IS!
Joyce Donner was actually Patricia Kerrigan, and she was sought by the Fairfield, Oregon, Police Department for questioning in connection with an open homicide case.
"Wanted for questioning," Tim read again. "It doesn't say she's a suspect in the murder, though. She's probably a witness. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm just grasping at straws now. If she were innocent, would she color her hair, change her name and move clear across the country?"
No, he decided; she wouldn't.
The next decision Tim faced was the hardest one he'd ever had to make in his life. Should he phone Officer Ralph Hamill of the Fairfield Police Department and inform him that Patricia Kerrigan was living in Puritan Falls under the name Joyce Donner? He rephrased the question. He did not like the word inform; it sounded too much like a black-and-white gangster movie. Notify was a better choice, one not associated with stool pigeons, rats and traitors.
Tim looked at the time on the bottom of his computer screen. It would be late afternoon in Oregon. Hoping to put an end to his nightmare of uncertainty, he took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Ralph Hamill's number.
"Whatever you do," the officer warned Tim at the end of their conversation, "don't let Patricia know you're on to her. In fact, stay clear of her if you can. She's dangerous. She already killed her husband and her two kids. She won't think twice about killing you."
* * *
The following day Tim returned to Puritan Falls High. Like his students, he was suffering from post-holiday blues. No one wanted to be there. No one was interested in learning—or teaching—math. The students, who had prayed for a snowstorm to extend their Christmas hiatus a day or two longer, were the lucky ones. They, at least, did not have to go through the day feeling like Judas Iscariot.
By the time the final bell rang at 2:45, Tim could not take the strain any longer. He drove past Joyce's house, wondering if the police had been there yet. As his luck would have it (no, Google, he wasn't feeling particularly lucky that day), she was on the curb, getting her mail from the mailbox. She turned, saw his car and waved.
"Hi there, stranger!"
Tim's heart sank. It would be extremely rude of him to drive by and not stop, so he pulled the car over and got out.
"I missed you!" Joyce cried.
Then she ran over to him and kissed him.
"I was hoping you would call me from New Jersey, but I know how hectic things get around the holidays."
"Yeah," he said uncomfortably. "My sister kept me busy the whole time."
"Anyway, you're home now. Come on inside, and I'll make us both some hot chocolate."
Tim hesitated a moment but then let her lead him up the driveway and into the quaint Cape Cod.
He was never seen alive again.
Those words echoed through his brain, sounding like the voiceover from one of those truTV crime dramas Shawn was addicted to.
"I have a delicious cranberry and marzipan stollen left over from Christmas if you'd like a piece," Joyce called from the kitchen as Tim sat in his usual spot on her couch.
"I've never had it," he replied, thinking his last meal ought to be a thick, juicy steak and not some German coffeecake.
"It's good. My mother used to make it every Christmas."
Tim's pulse quickened. It was the first time she had ever spoken of her past. What did it mean?
Joyce came into the living room a few minutes later, carrying a tray with two mugs of hot cocoa and two slices of stollen. As Tim put a forkful of the cake to his lips, he briefly wondered if it were poisoned. If Joyce suspected he had contacted the Fairfield police, she might want to silence him. That, or seek revenge on him for his betrayal.
What the hell! he thought. If it is poisoned, so be it!
Death was at least a way out of the predicament he was in, so he put the cake in his mouth, chewed and swallowed.
"Do you like it?" Joyce asked.
"Yes," he admitted, feeling no immediate ill effects.
"It's not as good as my mother's was, but then I suppose I'm biased. I think that's one of the things I miss most about her."
"You never talked about your family."
"I know, but I had my reasons. Now, I think I can trust you."
She stopped and took a sip of cocoa before continuing.
"There's so much I have to tell you, but it's difficult for me to begin. I wasn't exactly honest with you before. You see, I was never married ...."
Joyce's words were cut off by the sound of a car pulling into her driveway.
"I wonder who that is," she said.
A moment later there was a knock on the door, and a man's voice announced, "UPS."
"You've got a package," Tim said, rising to his feet. "I'll go get it."
Joyce's hand grabbed his. He turned and saw her face was ashen.
"UPS came by after lunch."
"There's nothing to be frightened about. The driver probably just forgot to deliver ...."
The front door suddenly flew open. Joyce had forgotten to use the deadbolt.
"Hello, Patricia," the man said, pointing a gun in Tim's direction, "it's been a long time."
Joyce trembled as she clung to the math teacher in fear.
The man then addressed Tim.
"You must be the guy who phoned me. You should have taken my advice and steered clear of her."
Joyce pulled away from Tim as though she had been burned.
"You called him?"
"The website said you were wanted for questioning in connection with a murder," he explained weakly. "Don't tell me this guy's not a real cop."
"Oh, he's a cop all right. He's also my former fiancé."
Tim looked from Joyce to Ralph Hamill and back again, unable to understand what was going on.
"I missed you, sweetheart," the cop said sarcastically. "It's so good to see you, but I don't like what you've done with your hair. I like you better as a blonde."
"You like me as a helpless creature you can order about, one you can beat when your sadistic tendencies get the better of you."
As though he had successfully found the value of x, Tim finally understood Joyce's peculiar behavior. She had been in an abusive relationship that necessitated a change in identity and relocation for her own safety. It was the one scenario he had not envisioned. She was not a fugitive at all; she was a helpless victim.
For the first time in his well-ordered, law-abiding, peaceful life, the math teacher from Puritan Falls High School acted impulsively. With no thought for his own safety, he lurched forward and tackled Ralph Hamill as though he were an opposing linebacker trying to take down Tom Brady. But moments before his body made contact with that of the police officer, he heard a shot and felt a sharp, piercing pain.
As his eyes fluttered closed, he illogically thought of the red and yellow O's in the Google logo and decided he was most definitely not feeling lucky.
* * *
When Tim Rooney's eyes opened again, he stared into the face of a police officer. But this time, it belonged to Officer McMurtry, not Ralph Hamill.
"Shawn?" he managed to say.
"Yeah, it's me, buddy."
"I'm still alive," he said with surprise.
"You're going to be fine. The bullet didn't hit any vital organs."
"And the guy who shot me?"
"He's not so lucky. He was killed with his own gun."
"Who did it?"
"We believe it was Joyce Donner."
"Is she all right?" Tim asked anxiously.
"We don't know," Shawn confessed. "She seems to have vanished. We want to question her in connection with the shooting, so we've issued an all-points bulletin."
"It won't do any good," Tim said, dejectedly, remembering that his woman of mystery had been on the verge of finally opening up to him when Ralph Hamill unexpectedly showed up. "Joyce Donner will cease to exist just as Patricia Kerrigan did. In a few days, she'll pop up in another place with another name and possibly another color of hair."
And she'll live by herself, he thought forlornly. She'll lock and bolt her doors and securely fasten her windows. And she'll continue to live in fear, not of an abusive fiancé but of the police. And it's all my fault.
Locks and deadbolts are good for deterring burglars. Unfortunately, they won't keep Salem out.
