Chapter 20

Mr. Donald T. McAfee, private investigator, had been prying into Edward Dalton’s past at Vivian’s request. Two days before Christmas she’d set up a meeting with Mr. McAfee in the Literary Reference section of the Wayne County Public Library. Someplace where Vivian had never been before and didn’t expect to see anyone she knew. They’d talked for twenty minutes, and then Vivian had suggested a special code to use the next time they talked on the telephone.

“You know,” she’d said to him in a proper library whisper, “because the switchboard operators sometimes listen in on the calls.”

Don McAfee was the same private investigator Wayne Building & Loan had hired to find Gilbert Ogden and Flora Parker, after their abscondance. Was that the right noun? Absconded, abscondance? It sounded right, but she’d have to check Charlotte’s dictionary.

As far as Vivian knew, Don McAfee still hadn’t found Gilbert and Flora yet, and she’d thought it’d probably be impolite to ask him about it. With all the newspaper stories of the Wayne Building & Loan robbery, though, she’d have thought he’d have more than enough clues to find those two.

Don McAfee and Vivian had agreed that she would wait to check in with him about the Edward investigation until after the holidays. When she’d telephoned him on January third Vivian had asked him just one question: “Do I need to come to your office?”

If Don McAfee had answered, “No,” Vivian would’ve known that the rumor about her husband had been a bunch of nasty nonsense, and she’d have had to set the record straight with one Betty Miller. But when she’d asked Mr. McAfee if she needed to come to his office, Mr. McAfee had answered, “Yes.”

Vivian had thanked him, replaced the receiver in its cradle, and stormed up the stairs to the bedroom to scream into a pillow. The Daltons’ pillows had had to be cleaned more frequently over the past few weeks, especially if Vivian hadn’t taken the time to wipe off her lipstick first. The pillow-screaming was the only outlet for her rage at life, which had increased tenfold since December fifteenth. Her nerves were raw and frayed at the ends, like some of the old jack cords at Bell that had worn away from the plugs from too much use and improper care.

The fact that Donald McAfee’s investigation had been a success meant that Vivian’s marriage, and most of her adult life, had been a sham. This was the thought that had been running on repeat through her mind for the two weeks after that call. One week of Vivian simply trying to understand what Mr. McAfee had told her, and another week of her valiantly trying to push the truth out of her mind. Maybe if she avoided meeting McAfee in person as she’d told him she would do (to see the proof, and to pay him), she could pretend it wasn’t real.

Vivian’s world had closed in on her and she was pretty sure nothing existed outside her brand-new little private hell. Her casual interest in anything outside her limited orbit of the house on South Walnut Street and the brick confines of Ohio Bell suddenly disappeared as the truth about her life sank in, colder than the January temperatures outside. She hadn’t cared that the library had just received some historic journal collection from one of the town’s founding fathers, she hadn’t cared that the hardware store was planning to move its location one block farther north, and she hadn’t cared that on January twelfth the first dial telephone was installed in Wooster, in Dr. Paul’s medical office. Wooster and its technological progress would eventually make Vivian’s job obsolete. If she’d cared at all, she’d have looked up “obsolete” in Charlotte’s dictionary.