Following Polly by Karen Bergreen

Author:Karen Bergreen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429921251
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

I’m lounging on Charlie’s couch watching coverage of the memorial service when Charlie and Jean walk in the door. Jean rushes to me; she’s screaming.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

I try to calm her down, but she continues:

“Oh my God. I can’t believe it. Oh my God.”

“I know,” I tell her. “Weird, huh?”

“Tell me everything,” Jean urges me as she kicks off her Heiker pumps. Charlie, who has until this point been standing quietly in the doorway, goes into the kitchen to see if I’ve made him some lunch.

I have.

As Charlie is digging into his farfalle with butternut squash sage sauce, I tell Jean everything. I tell her about the following, and finding Polly dead in Otto & LuLu’s. I tell her about my near arrest and my escape. And then I tell her about my week of homelessness and subsequent rescue by Charlie.

“I can’t believe you’re staying here,” was all that Jean could whisper.

“The funny thing is,” I tell her, “after all I’ve been through in the last months, nothing seems weird.”

“That, my friend, is because you’re in shock. If weird were a play, this would be it.”

“So?” she asks as Charlie heads back into the kitchen.

“So?”

“Anything?”

“Yes, Jean, we’re making passionate love every night right after we strategize how to keep me from going to prison for the rest of my life,” I say.

“Nothing?”

“I don’t even think about that right now.”

“You liar.”

She’s right. I’m fibbing a little, but we could spend the whole afternoon examining and analyzing Charlie when we should be figuring out how to clear me.

“What did you learn?”

“Well, we were only there for a few hours, but I think Humphrey’s genuinely distraught over his wife’s death.”

“I agree,” Charlie says as he walks in the room eating from a batch of chocolate chip cookies I baked last night. I’ve silently been appointed cook-in-residence. Amazingly, I find myself loving it.

“But I don’t know if Polly would be so sad if this tragedy befell her husband.”

“Oh?” I ask, knowing that Jean was cheating on Humphrey with her young Chambers Street boyfriend.

“I don’t know,” Jean tells me. “I got a lover whiff from a lot of the guys there. For example, every star of the movie except for Preston Hayes stayed away from Humphrey. I didn’t see one of them express their condolences to him.”

“And he’s their director. I agree it’s a little strange.” I go into the kitchen to fetch us all coffee from Charlie’s trusty new coffeemaker.

“Yeah, I heard the same thing,” Charlie breaks in. “I was talking to Merilee, Polly’s former personal assistant, and she said that a lot of people were ‘close’ to Polly.” Charlie puts quotation mark fingers around the word “close.”

So that was the woman who had monopolized Charlie.

“That could mean friendship,” I tell him.

“It could, but in this case it doesn’t. I asked Merilee if Polly had a lot of friends, and she said, ‘I wouldn’t call them that.’”

“Sounds like Polly hasn’t changed,” Jean quips. “Did you get any names?”

“Nothing. I’m surprised she told me as much as she did.

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