The Last Annual Slugfest by Susan Dunlap Page A

salmon.
    “Here it is, another peculiar meal,” Marty said as he put my plate in front of me.
    “I thought waiters were supposed to be enthusiastic about all their fare.”
    “I deal in truth.” He grinned.
    In spite of the pie I had had at midnight, I attacked my eggs and kraut with vigor. The café was beginning to fill with grumpy tourists, still wrapped in jackets against the cold wind outside.
    It was just nine-thirty when I finished, the hour the Women’s Space Bookstore opened. I walked across the street.
    The Women’s Space Bookstore was next to the Henderson Tobacconist’s. I had expected the Tobacconist’s to be closed, with a black wreath on the door or a notice of Edwina’s death in the window of the town museum, which occupied a room to the right of the tobacco shop proper. But there was neither. Over the roof hung the lowest branch of a giant redwood, one of the Nine Warriors. Occasionally, when I read her meter in warm weather, Edwina would be sitting underneath it, eating her lunch. Once, she hadn’t been eating but was just staring up at the branches. It was the only time I ever saw her look peaceful.
    I pushed open the door to the bookstore. It was empty but for Leila Katz, slumped in an overstuffed chair beside a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Women’s Space looked less like a commercial endeavor than a family library in a beach house. Bookshelves covered the walls, four thrusting out at right angles into the room. Armchairs were strewn around haphazardly, some clustered in groups of twos or threes, others tucked away in the niches made by the protruding bookcases. By the cash register was a sturdy wooden table, with thermoses of coffee and hot water, earthenware mugs, and, frequently, a platter of cookies or savories. The store was meant to be more than a place to buy books. Leila had made it clear that she wanted to have a gathering place for women.
    When I read the commercial route in town, I stopped in here on my break—after reading Edwina’s meter—had a cup of coffee, a cookie, and slumped in one of the chairs with a magazine. But now there was none of the coziness that normally characterized the store. Leila herself looked small and tired. With the dark circles under her eyes, she resembled a raccoon wearing a short, curly wig.
    “How late were you up?” I asked.
    “I don’t know, Vejay,” she said, not moving in the chair. “Edwina was already dead when I got to the hospital, of course. But that didn’t mean there was an end. There was still plenty to do, papers to sign, autopsy to be arranged. I felt I couldn’t abandon her. It was ridiculous. She was already dead. It wasn’t like there was anything I could do for her. But I just couldn’t leave her there alone under a sheet.”
    “You want some coffee?” I asked. “If there’s none in the thermos, I can run across to the café.”
    “No. I made some. I’ve already had three cups this morning, and God knows how many during the night, but you can pour me another.”
    I poured a mug and handed it to her, then poured another for myself. Sitting down across from her, I said, “You must have been quite close to Edwina.”
    She considered that. “From the way I reacted last night, you’d think so. From the way we’d gotten on for the past few years, it was like we were Hatfields and McCoys.”
    “But you were her closest relative.”
    “I guess so.” She sipped the coffee. “That was good and bad. Edwina took ‘family’ very seriously. To her we were the village royalty. When I married Jeff, Edwina congratulated him on becoming part of the family; she considered him a sort of woodsy prince consort. No, not even that appendage-like; to her he was a full-fledged prince. She never referred to him as a nephew by marriage; to her he was a nephew proper—until he committed the unforgivable sin and opted out of the family. After our divorce, he simply ceased to exist for Edwina.” Leila took another sip of coffee.