My Darling Detective by Howard Norman

Author:Howard Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Housewarming

Some days, life felt pretty well organized. My studies were going all right. Martha and I had friends. Detective Levy Detects, much to Martha’s delight, had been renewed for another year on radio, of course in reruns. We had enough money to live on. We could stretch our budget now and then. But other days felt . . . I’m hardly a poet, so how to say it? Like when an orchestra is warming up. All of the disparate sounds—oboe, violin, bassoon, French horn, tympani—you can’t imagine how it will all turn into something beautiful.

One night in late August, when Martha was asleep and rain fell steadily past the windows, I sat at the kitchen table in her apartment and made a list: 1. Martha is pregnant. 2. My mother is still in the rest hospital. 3. The cold-case investigation trying to locate my real father Robert Emil is in progress—what happens if he’s found, what next there? 4. Library science midprogram exams are in a couple months. 5. I haven’t yet read all of the letters from Rigolet to Nora during the war—why so hesitant? 6. Figure some of this out!

Martha and I agreed we should wait to be married until after our child was born. “I don’t care at all about convention,” she said. “My parents are gone. I don’t have siblings. My aunts and uncles and cousins, distant as they’ve been, will be happy for me. They’ll want to visit eventually. Nora’s over the moon. So let’s just wait. You’ll have your degree and there will be a lot to celebrate. Usually in detectiving, when too much makes good sense, that’s when we dig deeper. But this all makes sense without having to dig deeper. I think we’re making the right decision, Jacob, don’t you?”

“Absolutely yes,” I said.

Martha packed up her apartment and moved into my family house. With help from fellow students in the library science program, and a few policemen and policewomen, this took just two days. Sitting for our first dinner together in the house, Martha looked around and said, “Maybe we can take some of the photographs down. But otherwise, how nice.”

On September 15, we had a kind of housewarming party. Morty Shaloom, from John W. Doull, and his wife, Maxine, stayed for hours. Michael Duvelle, Marcella Sylphide, and Deborah Chase, all students in the library science program, brought bottles of wine and some records for the turntable. The owner of the Wired Monk, Jennifer Holt, her husband, a wonderful watercolorist named Paul Amundson, the waitresses Bev Elliot and Trudy Page, and the waiter Thomas Finch all showed up. Jinx Faltenbourg and Margaret Plumly from the Halifax Free Library arrived early and stayed late. It was quite a feast, really. There was baked salmon with sesame seeds and dill, several rice salads, curried lamb stew (prepared by Margaret), baguettes, green salads, fruit salads, and Jennifer brought four cakes from the Wired Monk. Mrs. Hamelin and Mrs. Brevittmore brought champagne. (“Not a drop for

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