The Last Annual Slugfest by Susan Dunlap Page B

“Edwina had a very rigid concept of the way a Henderson lived. ‘That’s not how a Henderson behaves, Leil.’ Edwina always called us in the family by our first syllables—another of her eccentricities. I was Leil, my mother Mar. But that phrase—‘not how a Henderson behaves’—I’ll always think of that when I remember Edwina. It was her condemnation of virtually everything I did. Edwina’s proper Hendersons lived in very narrowly defined ways.”
    “How did that fit with her being such a supporter of Pomo rights, preservation, and ecology?”
    Leila nodded stiffly, and in that movement I could see a resemblance to her aunt. “Hendersons do charity. You’d think there was a fortune in the family, and we didn’t all have to work. What money there was, Edwina controlled, and she didn’t part with it easily. She deigned to give me a loan for college, and after I paid it back, she wouldn’t consider lending it again so I could open this store. If I hadn’t had a decent job after college, there would have been no way I could have afforded to be unemployed for a year, much less rent this shop, even from Edwina.”
    “She owned this?”
    “She owned the entire block—this, her tobacco shop, Fischer’s Ice Cream—all the shops. You can see why her tightfistedness grated on the family. It wasn’t even like she had anything to spend it on. Her big outlays were for painting her house every couple years, and occasionally redoing the facade of the weed shop. She certainly wasn’t spending it on Steelhead Lodge. That place could have fallen down before she would have put a dime into repairs. She was the typical slumlord with the lodge, and she would have died before—” Leila stopped abruptly, flushing. “She wouldn’t have wanted people to know that that ramshackle place was hers.”
    “She was pretty safe. No one would ever have guessed.” I had a hard time suppressing a grin. The thought of Edwina Henderson owning that sagging, beer-sodden building was as ludicrous as her determination to hold the Slugfest in it.
    I took a breath. Leila was a friend. She saved books she thought I would like. She told me about the best used clothing stores, and the secluded beaches. And at those times when the panacea of small-town living wore thin, and I had second thoughts about having left San Francisco and my career in public relations, Leila, who had had her own career in merchandising, was there to remind me why both of us had opted for the Russian River. And when, after the closeness of my first winter here, the winter people and Rosa had kept a wary distance, reminding me by the formality of their greetings that I had proven myself an outsider, Leila had set aside another volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary, or suggested we see a play in Santa Rosa. She’d told me about her brief, disastrous attempt at marriage when she was still fighting her attraction to women. “It took a year of living with Jeff to make me see that I really was happier with a woman. I guess I had always known that. But before then I had wavered back and forth,” she had said. And I had recounted my own divorce, and told her about my family who had moved so many times when I was growing up that now, as an adult, when I thought of a house we’d lived in I couldn’t remember which town or even which state it was in. “That’s why it was so nice to be a part of the winter people here,” I had said, then quickly changed the subject.
    “With Edwina having been murdered,” I said, “it’s going to put you in an awkward position—you being her heir.”
    “You think I’ll inherit this?” She laughed, a hollow sound. “Edwina wouldn’t leave this to me, Vejay, not if she could find someone else. I may have felt a burst of affection for her last night, but before that we hadn’t spoken more than ten words in months.”
    I was relieved she brought the subject up. “How come?”
    “You know how Edwina was. Either she was all gung-ho to