A Novel Death (5 page)

I grasped her arm, shocked by its iciness. But the whole room was freezing, I realized, with the air conditioning running unchecked. Margaret, always worried about costs, would never have put it on this high.

"How's she doing?" the constable asked, though he could see exactly what I could. "I'm calling 911." Behind me I heard the click of keys on a portable phone and his muffled voice.

I kept my eyes on Margaret. The silky fabric seemed to be moving under my anxious palm, shifting just slightly, but it was impossible to be sure. "Margaret?" I whispered. "Don't give up; we're getting help!"

Then I looked up at the library ladder, at the riser that had splintered halfway up the wooden steps. Evidently it had thrown her off balance and pitched her backward. I hated those vertical ladders and avoided them whenever I could. Now I added them to my list of things to avoid, along with dark basements, open heights, and running out of money.

"Don't touch her!"

I jumped with fright at the voice.

As the cop knelt at Margaret's other side, I stared at his broad face and tight light brown curls. He had the bland look of a boxer outside the ring. And he was no more than twenty-four, my daughter Jane's age.

"You see it happen?"

"No. We found her like this. I tried to reach her by phone and couldn't and was afraid something had happened"

It was the abridged version.

Scooping up Margaret's wrist, he pressed his thumb against it expertly. Then he lowered his ear to her chest and listened. Straightening back up, still absently holding her arm like a plank of wood, he said, "Ambulance is on the way."

"Oh, good. Then she's not-is she. I mean, she's alive, don't you think? Or what ..." I was babbling.

"I didn't order a body bag, did I?"

My God.

"She have a history of dizziness? Heart problems?"

"I don't think so. But her sister-"

He shook his head. "Those ladders, they're dangerous. Go straight up, and-" With unexpected gentleness, he turned her head to the right. "Nasty gash! Look at that."

I didn't want to. "What's that under her head?" I pointed to a piece of tan cloth that I'd noticed when he moved her head.

"Looks like some kind of rag." But he was fixated on her wound. "She must've hit something on the way down. Old people, their skulls get thin."

"Old people! She's in her fifties."

He nodded as if I had just confirmed his thesis.

I sighed. Even at forty-three, I could have been his mother.

Time held us tautly; hours passed before I heard the sirens outside the shop. When I checked my watch, it had been three minutes.

I heard the constable open the front door and slam it again, then the murmur of voices. Two women in loose blue cotton tops and pants hurried over to us. The lanky redhead was carrying a large metal box. The smaller woman held a contraption that I realized was a folding stretcher, a long board under her other arm. As the policeman and I scrambled out of their way, one of them pressed an oxygen mask to Margaret's face. The other started an IV in the crook of her elbow. Then they unfolded the stretcher and laid it down beside her. As they started to ease her onto the board gently, coddling her loose limbs, I pressed my hand over my mouth. No one could be that limp and still be alive.

They carried Margaret through to the front room, and I saw the policeman hand a leather purse with its familiar Celtic brass clasp to the red-haired EMT. It seemed incongruous-like she would need to freshen her lipstick on the way to the hospital. But in the next minute, I realized that, of course, they would need her identification and medical insurance. Some days I was a few chapters short of a book.

The village constable held the door for them, and then turned back to me. "Poor lady," he intoned. "A very bad fall."

"I should go with her!"

The young policeman ignored both of us. When he finished making notes in a cramped black notebook, he motioned us onto the paisley loveseat by the fireplace. Then he sat down in the brown suede wing chair across from us, and prepared to write. "Names, addresses, phone numbers."

As the constable gave his information proudly, "Officer Randolph W. MacWharton," and a Port Lewis address, I noticed a brown streak along the tan marble hearth. It looked like coffee; but there was no way the latte could have flown four or five yards and landed there.

"How long will this take? I need to get to the hospital. I'm Delhi Laine." I didn't offer to spell my name, though I knew he would probably write it as Deli-or Delly-Lane. I mumbled my phone number and address. I hadn't forgiven him for his body bag comment.

"Okay." He looked down at his brass nameplate bar. "I'm Officer Alexander Kazazian."

He hadn't done it to be funny, but a laugh clogged my throat. It came out as a snort and he stared at me. "The victim is Margaret Weller?"

Victim? But I suppose she was considered to be the victim of an accident. "Yes."

"Next of kin?"

"I don't-she has a younger sister-had, but she died Thursday night."

"This Thursday? Of what?"

"Well-it's probably suicide. She was hit by a train and-"

"Oh, that one," he interrupted. "And this here is her sister?" He shook his head at the coincidence of it. "So you work here?"

"No! She has-had-a regular assistant. But I don't know his last name."

"Indian fella," Randolph MacWharton said brightly. "Didn't wear a turban or anything, but he had that dark skin and hair. Popular with the ladies."

"So why isn't he here?" Officer Kazazian spoke with a native Long Island twang, he-yer for here.

I shrugged.

"He live around here?"

"Probably near the university; he's a graduate student." I remembered the weird phone calls and added, "I think he lives with other people."

"Never gave him a ticket that I remember," MacWharton added regretfully.

"He may not work here anymore," I added. "He got angry and threw coffee in Margaret's face."

"Yeah? Nice guy." He wrote something down. But then he added, "That was some fall she took. Old people and babies, they got soft skulls."

Why did he keep saying that? "But what about the shoe that was pointing at her? And who put the cloth under her head?"

Both men stared at me. I sounded like Nancy Drew. "I mean, it's like someone was here afterwards. Maybe Amil came back and found her, but he ran off so he wouldn't be blamed." Leaving his glass Nike behind.

"Yeah, he should have reported it," Officer Kazazian conceded.

"But isn't leaving the scene of an accident a crime?"

He actually smiled at me, his eyes crinkling in his broad face. "Only if you've caused it, Mrs.-" he looked down at his notes, "Mrs. Lang."

"Laine. And maybe he did cause it," I said stubbornly.

"How?"

"I don't know. Maybe he yelled something and startled her. Or got on the underside and pushed her off"

"You can see where the step split. I'm writing it up as a Domestic."

A domestic accident. The words Margaret had used when she pointed to the coffee burn on her face.

"But the rag under her head," I persisted.

"Yeah," he intoned piously. "Landing on it probably saved her life."

Give me a break. My father, a Methodist minister, had had an arsenal of stories about World War II soldiers whose pocket New Testaments had deflected enemy bullets over their hearts, saving their lives.

"She was probably on the ladder dusting," Randolph MacWharton explained. "My wife uses my old undershirts."

There was no arguing with these two.

"I'll talk to this guy, okay?" Alex Kazazian conceded. "What's his name again?"

"Amil. A-M-I-L. Pronounced like, well, `a meal.' No last name."

Randolph MacWharton chuckled. "Like Dagmar," he said, earning a startled look from Alex Kazazian.

"Like Madonna," I translated. "Except he probably does have a last name. We just don't know it."

"And you don't know where he lives."

"I can find out. I know people at the university."

"It's probably in her office papers."

Of course. "Do you know where they took her? Port Lewis General?"

"With that head injury? Nah, she'll go to University Hospital, the Trauma Center. They've got the best stuff." He said it admiringly, as if it were a state-of-the-art sports store, and then snapped his black notebook shut.

"That's all?" MacWharton's mustache seemed to droop-an extra whose scene has just landed on the floor.

"You can keep an eye out for this Amil," the policeman promised, and handed him a business card. "Let me know if he comes back to work."

"Will do!"

As an obvious afterthought, he gave me a card too.

I glanced around The Old Frigate. Its wonderful atmosphere had disappeared; the room now had the flatness of a set created for the movies, unable to come alive until the actors stepped in. "So you think it was only an accident?"

"Someone falling off a ladder? Sure. I knew of a guy, he was cleaning out his gutters, and he missed a step coming down. Gone in an hour." Kazazian said it with satisfaction; not that the careless homeowner was dead, I hoped, but that it proved his point so nicely.

But as I left The Old Frigate, I still could not think of it as an accident. Two sisters, one dead, the other left for dead, within two days? What were the odds?

I wanted to go straight to the hospital, but I was already late for Patsy's party. And this was nothing she would understand. Even though we were sisters-okay, twins, but only fraternal-our lines of communication had come down in a long ago storm. If we had talked to each other more, she might have understood my concern about Margaret. If we had been truly distant, she wouldn't have cared if I made it to her annual party or not. But she had always taken it personally, even when Colin and I were in New Mexico or Peru for July, acting as if we had deliberately planned to be away.

My twin's full name was Patience Faith, christened when our parents were hoping to be missionaries to India and were encountering delays because of partitioning. I was named Delhi Agra after their chosen destinations. By the time my brother, David Livingstone, was born they had changed their focus to Africa. But they somehow never got there either. They remained in Princeton, my father a minister who was never paid what he was worth, my mother busy with good works. Except for their fanciful children's names, they were exactly what you'd expect. Actually, they probably would have done well in a foreign culture. They spoke bravely of David Livingstone's "alternative lifestyle" after he went to Los Angeles to make satiric horror movies and introduced them to a string of Tiffanys, Ambers, and Lee Anns.

I decided to make a quick appearance at the party, and then go to the hospital. But before turning the key in the ignition, I pulled out my phone and called the emergency room. They could tell me nothing about Margaret's condition, only that she had been admitted, and that I couldn't see her until she was out of the ER.

I had forgotten that there is no quick way through the Hamptons in the summer. Mired in traffic in Hampton Bays, I considered how I would tell Patsy about Colin. But there was really no way to make her understand. I barely understood myself.

Last October he had come into the kitchen where I was reading and handed me a copy of The Shenandoah Review. It was open to his latest poem; he leaned against the refrigerator, watching me read it. Despite myself, despite the fact that our relationship had fallen on some hard times, I felt flattered that he still valued my opinion. After all, he was adored by thousands-a large, bearded, hero-poet, a kindly Santa Claus to his classes, and an intrepid archaeologist.

This poem was in his usual style. Except that it was called "Separation," and the last line lamented, A man can't dance with a wife who hides his shoes.

I was wedged tightly into the wooden breakfast nook, with two burnt cake pans soaking in the sink. Hannah, the forgetful baker, was home from Cornell. Closing the magazine, I tried to calculate the time between his writing the poem and its publication. At least a year. Had he been planning this moment for a year?

I glanced over at his muscular arms and paunchy stomach. "You can't dance anyway."

It was mean. But what about the line about hiding his shoes?

A long-suffering sigh. "You take everything so literally, Delhi. It's childish."

But I understood the symbolism. "You could have discussed how you felt with me before announcing it to the world."

"You think I haven't tried? How many times have I complained that I was being buried alive? That I needed air to break free and find my voice again? My poetry is far more significant than just you or me. It's a gift I'm responsible to protect." He went on to lecture me about the fatal domesticity of his days, how being squeezed into the small-minded routines I created meant he could no longer soar.

It didn't make sense. His pathetic life consisted of archaeological digs, poetry awards, and home valet service. And whatever adoring graduate student barnacled herself to him for the semester.

"There's a reason Walt Whitman never married."