Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online Page A

he hasn’t! I’m the one who’s going to pay for it. You don’tpay for anything by being dead. That’s when you stop paying for it.”
    “Honey, he’s dead! Really dead!”
    “And Denny, too! However it happened, you know, Craig is to blame. He’s the guilty party here. Nothing is ever going to change my mind about that.” The light turned and they stepped off the curb into Riverside Drive.

3
    T HE momentum of her daily life had carried Alice through the discovery of the bodies and past it, but when she unlocked her apartment to the ringing of the phone, she realized that the momentum was played out, and the real chaos of such an event as a semi-public double murder was about to crush them. For the time being she didn’t answer the phone, but unplugged it. Ray would be trying to reach her, and Noah or Rya, possibly Jim, certainly Detective Honey, and any number of others wondering where Susan was. Susan turned without speaking and shuffled down the hallway toward the bedroom, visibly fatigued. There would be so much business to attend to—the burials, the services, the parents and other relatives, so much talk on the phone to be gotten through. She followed Susan, and found her flung across the unmade bed. Afraid to push, she said, “What are you going to do?”
    “Sleep. Call the Mineharts first. God, I hate to make that call.”
    “Funeral home?”
    “Oh, Jesus.”
    “We’ve got to do all that stuff.”
    “I know.”
    “What are you going to do with them?”
    “His parents will want a complete funeral with priests in purple, open coffin—”
    “They can’t have
that.”
    “Oh, Lord. Catholic cemetery, black limousines.”
    “What did Denny ever want?”
    “The usual. Cremation over a bonfire with only his friends in attendance, then flinging his ashes to the four winds.”
    “Was he serious?”
    “We only talked about it once, five or six years ago.”
    “Is there any will or anything?”
    “I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open. I have to call them. Will you dial? If a child answers, then ask for Mrs. Minehart. I couldn’t stand hearing the voice of one of those kids.” Denny’s youngest sister was only six. Alice picked up the bedroom extension, plugged it in, and dialed the numbers Susan dictated. A youthful voice did answer, probably the ten-year-old. Alice asked for Mrs. Minehart, and when she came to the phone, anxious but polite, her voice clear and questioning, Alice gave the phone to Susan and left the room, closing the door.
    In the kitchen she put the teakettle on to boil, found her favorite china teapot and her favorite cup, and sat down to wait. After a few minutes, she got up, went into the bedroom where Susan was now asleep, and threw a blanket over the shoeless, prostrate form of her friend. Looking at Susan, she tried not to panic, tried not to imagine the shambles Susan’s affairs were now most certainly in. Of course there would be no wills, no insurance, no agreement on the final disposition of the bodies, of course there were debts, and not just illegal ones, of course there would be suspicion, and possibly trouble, from the police. All of this in addition to grief. Alice pulled the blanket down over Susan’s feet, and Susan’s head turned and her beautiful straight hair that shone like new pennies curved smoothly over her cheek. Grief would hit her hard, Alice thought as she went back to the kitchen,where, with her pot of tea and her window onto Eighty-fourth Street, she would sit in perfect silence for no less than two hours. Then she would plug in the phones again and answer the buzzer for the downstairs door.
    She thought she should make a list of practical matters, things like people to call and arrangements to make, items that had been flooding her mind all morning, each with its attendant mental note that she couldn’t forget that, but when she got up to get paper and to find a sharp pencil, every notion vanished, and she found herself staring out at