After she settled in behind her desk, she clasped her hands together and smiled at me across her desk as a pediatrician would smile at her patient. "Now then, Alex, let's get you started."
"I apologize if I misled you, Ms. Mil-Julia, but I'm not here to sign up for the service. I'm here to ask you about one of your members." I handed her my business card. "Ellen Shepard."
She didn't even glance at the card, much less take it. I laid it on the desk.
"I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "If I had known, I would have told you over the phone and saved you the trip. We are very protective of our clients' privacy, and I can't tell you anything unless you have Ellen's permission."
My shoulders sagged. I'd assumed she knew about Ellen. I don't know why. It's not as if someone had sent out announcements. Now I was going to have to tell her. I sat up straight in my chair and pushed that stubborn hair out of my eyes. "I have some bad news, Julia. About Ellen."
She turned her head slightly. "Oh?"
"She died. Two weeks ago."
An elegant gasp escaped from her lips as she touched her chin lightly with her fingertips. "Oh, my. I just talked to her last… oh, dear. What happened?"
"It appears that she took her own life."
Her hand moved to her throat, her fingers searching for an amulet hanging from a gold chain around her neck, some kind of a Chinese character. She found it and held on tight. "That poor, poor woman."
"Did you say you just spoke to her? Because I saw in her mail that you were trying to contact her. I had the impression you were having a hard time."
Julia, still holding the amulet, was considering my business card again and not listening. At least she wasn't answering.
"Ellen didn't leave a note," I said, "and when I found your name in her mail, I thought you might be able to help. I assumed that she was a client."
"Yes and no."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Let me tell you how our process works, and I think you'll understand." She let go of the necklace long enough to peel a form off a stack at her elbow and pass it across the desk. "When a client signs up at Boston-in-Common, we ask them to fill out this questionnaire, and then sit for a seven- to ten-minute video."
I looked at the form. A background check for a cabinet post couldn't have been more thorough. The questions were what I considered to be personal, some deeply, and I felt exposed just reading it.
"Information from the questionnaire goes into our database. We run comparisons until we find a match. The two clients, the matches, read each other's questionnaires and view each other's videos. If they both like what they see, we get them together."
"Did Ellen do the questionnaire and the video?"
"She sat for the video over a month ago, I think." Julia paged back in her desk calendar. "Yes, it was Tuesday, December 2. She brought her questionnaire with her when she came in. I made a match for her almost immediately. It wasn't hard. She was shy, but I found her to be very attractive and quite charming with a wonderful sense of humor."
"Would you be willing to give me the match's name?"
"Of course not. It wouldn't help you anyway because she never met him. I couldn't reach her to give her his contact information, which is why I sent the card. When she finally did call back, it was to cancel the service."
"Cancel the service?"
"Yes. She said something had come up. She didn't want her money back, but she knew it was not going to work out for her. She resigned her membership before she ever met one man. I was astounded because she had been so… so…" I waited, but she became transfixed by a spot on the desk, and it seemed as if her batteries had just run down.
"Excited?"
"No. I think determined is possibly more accurate."
"How much money did she forfeit?"
"Eighteen hundred dollars."
"Eighteen hundred? What do you get for that?"
Julia lifted her chin just enough so that she could look down her nose at me. "We are a very exclusive service, Ms. Shanahan. The fee is for an annual membership, and it includes one match each month."
I wanted to ask about guarantees and warranties and liquidated damages, but that would have been pushing it, especially since I wasn't here to plop down eighteen hundred clams. "Okay. So if you sign up and pay the fee, you're probably serious about meeting someone."
"We only accept candidates who are serious and"- she fixed me with a meaningful, clear-eyed, all-seeing look-"emotionally available."
I felt exposed again. Worse than exposed. X-rayed. The radiator in the corner, painted off white to match the walls, had kicked in and the office was filling with that dry radiator heat that I always found so uncomfortable. Finally she continued.
"I told Ellen I would keep her account active for a few months in case she changed her mind. She thanked me and told me to close the account."
"She was that sure?"
"Yes. She said she knew she would never be back…"
Her voice died and I watched Julia's face transform as Ellen's statement came back to her with new meaning. The lines grew deeper and she was now looking all of her sixty years.
"If you're agreeable, Julia, it would help me to get copies of Ellen's materials." I pulled out Aunt Jo's power of attorney and handed it to her. "As I said, I have authorization from the family."
She put on a pair of glasses, perused the document, and then looked at me over the tops of the lenses. "May I make a copy of this? I'd like to check with my attorney before I release anything, if that's all right." Julia was not a spur-of-the-moment kind of person.
"Would it be possible for me to wait while you did that? Maybe I could use the time to watch Ellen's video."
She took off her glasses, turned and watched the steady rain outside, and I thought she was considering my request. "You meet all kinds of people doing this work," she said, still staring, "and they all come in saying they're ready to change their lives. But it takes courage and so many of them don't have it. I thought Ellen did, which is why I was so surprised when she quit. I thought it had been a long, hard struggle for her, but that she was ready, and though I didn't know her well, I believed that good things were about to happen for her." She set her glasses softly on the desk and looked at me, her face still strong, but her eyes glistening like the wet windowpane. "I find this all very sad, Miss Shanahan, very sad, indeed."
I didn't know what to say and my voice was stuck in my throat anyway, so I just nodded.
A still photograph is perfectly suited to the memory of the dead. An image frozen forever, it captures the very essence of death to the living, the infinite stillness, the end of aging. I'd seen the pictures of Ellen, but when her video image came up on the bright blue screen and when I heard her voice for the first time, she came alive, alive in a way that made me feel the void where she used to be.
The first thing I noticed was her hair. I'd known it had been red, but the color was richer and deeper than I'd imagined, and under the lights it shone like polished mahogany. She wore it in a chin-length blunt cut that softened her square jaw. Her hazel eyes were riveted to a point just off camera, and she wore the same expression that we all do when we're at the wrong end of a camera lens-horrified. But even as uncomfortable as she appeared, I felt her presence. It was strength or determination or perhaps the sheer force of will it took for her to sit there and subject herself to something I knew I couldn't do. I was impressed.
"We'll start with an easy one, Ellen." It was Julia from off-camera, her blue-blooded Beacon Hill voice easily recognizable. "Why don't you tell us about yourself?"
"I'm originally from Fort Lauderdale. I went to college at the University of Florida, then graduate school at Wharton in Pennsylvania." I was surprised at Ellen's voice. It was almost husky with a tinge of a Southern accent.