Bellweather Rhapsody (42 page)

Every sound, every smell, every color and texture rubs against her ears, her nose, her eyes. There’s a curtain to her right, tan with light blue stripes, and she can hear her roommate snoring. The air reeks of alcohol and plastic. There’s a droopy flower arrangement on a table at the foot of her roommate’s bed, several days old, mulchy and ripe. It’s so much. It’s so real. She’s going to cry. She’s so real she’s going to cry.

She remembers the cops as though they visited her in a dream, but she knows it wasn’t—it was here in the hospital, only this morning. A youngish man and an older no-bullshit sort of woman, she forgets their names. She remembers a brunette wearing scrubs dotted with purple and blue pansies, her nurse apparently, leading them in, asking Natalie if she felt up to answering a few questions.

“Yes,” Natalie rasped. Her voice was stuck. “Do
they?
Because I’m not sure what happened either.”

This was not entirely true. The drugs made it easier, but she knew she was going to tell a fuzzy, no-charges-to-be-pressed version of events as soon as she woke up, as soon as she remembered the look on that man’s face. That old man with the dangling bow tie who
knew
her, who looked into her and knew she was a murderer. Who shot her deliberately but also accidentally, and didn’t deserve to have his future taken away from him, however much future he had left, for what Natalie knew hadn’t been an act of malice or violence or even self-defense but of brokenheartedness. A twitch born of pain and frustration that had granted him a flash of second sight. Not that she really believed in that, but still. Fisher saw the Natalie that Natalie wanted him to see; the old man saw Natalie as she really saw herself. In gratitude for his honesty, Natalie had no wish to subject him to any further torment than he was already subjecting himself.

Viola, however—she was a different story.

“Viola Fabian left me for dead outside in the snow,” she said, “as payback for humiliating her. She’s my former mentor. She’s psychotic. And yes, I want to press charges.”

The cops glanced at each other but did not ask about Viola again.

“It was my gun,” she said. Best to drop the bomb. “How’s that for irony?”

“
Your
gun? Why would you—do you have a permit to—”

It was very funny, the way they took this information. They became all perked ears and narrowed eyes. Notes were scribbled down.
It doesn’t mean anything,
Natalie wanted to tell them,
other than that the universe has a sick sense of a humor and a love of symmetry.

He was confused, ranting, very upset, she told them. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Fisher Brodie spooked him, that’s all. The old man was raising his arm to fire so I pushed Fisher into the pool. I got hit. I’m lucky.

“Have you seen him today?” she asked. “Fisher?”

Not yet. They were heading to the Bellweather next.

“Tell him not to come here.” Her voice was stuck again. “I don’t want to see him.”

The nurse in the pansy scrubs is back. She comes quietly around the corner as though she’s sneaking up on a frightened kitten, and when she sees Natalie’s eyes are open, she smiles shyly.

“Hello, Mrs. Wilson. How are you feeling?”

Natalie glances at the fat IV bags floating above her like water balloons. “Super-awesome,” she says.

Her nurse grins. She’s so young she could be one of Natalie’s students.

They all could be.

“It’s not any of my business.” The nurse blushes. “It really isn’t, I know, but I just couldn’t help overhearing.” She twists her hands. “What you did was brave.”

Natalie stares at her.

“You pushed someone out of the way of a bullet. And
took
it. The way you told the story this morning, I knew you didn’t think you were a hero. But you are.” Her eyes are bright. “You should know that.” She smiles again, satisfied with having done precisely what she came to do. “I’ll be back in a little while to take your vitals.”

She’s gone.

Natalie wants to call after the nurse, to ask whether it makes her more or less heroic that she took a bullet for the man with whom she was committing adultery. Though she didn’t think of it in those terms, she didn’t—she really didn’t think at all, in the moment, other than
Fisher, what the hell are you doing, get out of the goddamned way
—and then—

She’s certain that someone has called her husband, notified her next of kin. That was her head’s reason for asking the police to tell Fisher to stay away. Because Emmett was surely en route, and Emmett was a good man who didn’t deserve any of this, least of all having to share the space around his wife’s hospital bed with her lover. What he deserved was the truth. Natalie intends to confess everything she’s done this weekend, every crime she’s committed and with whom, and whatever happens after that, happens. She hadn’t promised fidelity lightly. She knows what she’s done and how she’s betrayed him, but it would be a lie to say what happened between her and Fisher had been trivial, a fling, a nothing. And that’s her heart’s reason for telling the police she didn’t want to see him—she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to those four days in the Bellweather. She wanted to be brave and wise, the Natalie who climbed up on chairs and told an auditorium full of kids not to make her mistakes; to feel known, forgiven, the Natalie that Fisher fell in love with, for just a little longer.

She can’t imagine never seeing him again, never knowing what he does, where he lives, who else he becomes, and yet she can’t possibly imagine the kind of life they would have together. Though maybe that’s all life ever is. Unimaginable, until it’s happening to you.

She takes another long breath. Right now, here in this hospital bed, in the space between lives, Natalie allows her conscience to let go. To lay down the weight. To see how it feels to forgive herself, just see how it feels.

She’s lucky. She lived. She could even be called a hero.

Just for one day.

Fisher knocks on his door. Three short taps. The
Do Not Disturb
hangtag bobbles on the knob.

She opens the door an inch and steps back into the shadows. Fisher hasn’t spent more than twenty-five consecutive minutes—the time it takes to shower, shave, and gather clean clothes—in his room at the Bellweather since Thursday evening, but someone has. Room service trays are stacked on the desk. The bedclothes are rumpled, the pillows piled in a tower five high. She throws herself into the big armchair by the window and twists sideways, kicking her legs over one of the arms. The shades are all drawn. The only light creeps out in a slice from the bathroom.

Fisher doesn’t have time for this, not if he wants to get to the hospital before Natalie’s husband does (they’re certain to call for him, if they haven’t already). And yet he finds he can’t move. He has to say something.

“Did you do it?” he asks the girl in the armchair.

Jill Faccelli flattens her mouth.

“What do you mean?” she asks. “Do what?”

Fisher frowns. The suspicion has been coalescing in his brain all morning. Ever since Girl Hatmaker woke him with the news that the police found Viola Fabian dead, Fisher’s subconscious has been churning. Viola Fabian would never kill herself. Not that she didn’t have the mettle (she most assuredly did), she just wasn’t the type. And Fisher is one of two people in the world who knows that the theoretical motive is horseshit. For one thing, Viola Fabian could never feel guilt. For another, her daughter is alive and well and her mother had nothing to do with any of it.

Jill cut her hair yesterday, poorly, using a pair of sewing kit scissors and Fisher’s electric clippers. The better to disappear into a new life, she told him. She looks like a kewpie with mange.

“Your mother is dead,” Fisher says. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

Jill’s expression doesn’t change. She stares at him. This, in Fisher’s mind, is proof enough.

He sits heavily on the bed. He should have known. Well, he did know. As soon as he saw the postcard in his mail slot at Westing, tucked between a staff memo and a guitar catalog, missing both postmark and stamp, he knew something out of his control was in motion. But it was too, too intriguing to resist. In black capital letters, on the reverse of an image of the sun setting over the Statue of Liberty, were the words
DR. BRODIE, I NEED YOUR HELP. I WILL FIND YOU AT STATEWIDE. I HAVE NO ONE ELSE.

It wasn’t signed. His first thought was that it was a bizarre joke, a prank played by one of the more immature Westing students, but there was something about that turn of phrase—
I HAVE NO ONE ELSE
—that struck him.
Me neither,
he thought.
Aren’t we a pair.

And then Jill Faccelli knocked on his door after dinner on Thursday night. He had to look through the peephole twice before he accepted that, yes, the prodigal hothead who’d stormed out of his rehearsal was standing in the hall with a small black bag over her shoulder, shuffling her feet, arranging her expression into a mea culpa. He opened the door.

“Yes?” he said, naturally irritated and not hiding it.

The penitent face vanished.

“I told you I’d find you,” she said. “I have no one else, Dr. Brodie. I need your help to run away.”

Fisher had a password. A trigger phrase buried in his subconscious that unlocked uncharted corners of the person he knew himself to be, and Jill had spoken it aloud:
I have no one else. I need your help to run away
. He knew it was probably inappropriate, or at least highly frowned upon (Jill was only fourteen, definitely one of the youngest children at the festival), but he invited her into his room without a second thought. She nodded crisply, stepped in, and dropped her bag on the desk. Fisher saw the scuffed tips of a pair of sneakers and what might have been several changes of clothes.

She explained that she needed a room to hide in while she waited for the festival to end. Her mother had terrorized her for years, she said, and she couldn’t stand another second of it. Viola, if she wanted, could pretend to be normal, to be nice, even—Jill had seen her charm people as often as intimidate them—but she never kept it up for long. And she never bothered to pretend with her daughter. Jill’s life was
her
life, Jill’s music was
her
music, and Jill was afraid she would lose one or both of them if she stayed a minute longer. There was no way she was going to the police. Best-case scenario, she’d end up a ward of the state. Worst case, Viola would murder her for the embarrassment.

She wasn’t kidding. Fisher believed her.

“She talks about you,” Jill said, her eyes trained on his face. “She thinks you were brilliant and threw it away. That you had too much of a good thing too young.”

Fisher grimaced. “Ouch,” he said, because she’d hit the mark so squarely.

“I knew you’d know what it feels like to be trapped. And I hoped you’d help, because you also know what it means that this is the only chance I’m going to get.”

That’s why he was in the auditorium late Thursday—he’d given his spare room key to Jill, who was planning to disappear that night. He had no idea she was going to vanish herself so melodramatically; only later did she show him the false noose she rigged from a length of climbing rope, the orange extension cord she’d used as a prop. Jill had done her research on the hotel. She’d used all her powers of persuasion, all the considerable gifts she’d inherited from her mother, to come to the festival, to finagle a booking in the infamous room. She was a crazy opportunist, maybe just as crazy as Viola, but she was a bloody mad genius and deserved a chance to be free.

The only thing she hadn’t counted on was Fisher and his stunt with
Afternoon of a Faun.
She stormed out of rehearsal not because she wanted to create a scene (though in retrospect it worked out rather well for her), and not in protest of Fisher’s disrespect for his players. She ran out because she was furious with heartbreak. It was a final sign from the universe. A sort of cosmic
are you really sure you want to do this?
She could stay through the festival, she could abandon her escape and play the solos, those famously gorgeous solos for flute. Or she could prove she really, really meant it and abandon the music instead.

She chose flight. There would be other solos.

He let her lie low. He’d deliberately kept out of her way, insulating himself with plausible deniability. He spent all of Thursday night in the auditorium, stayed in Natalie’s room on Friday, and with the Hatmakers in whoever’s room
that
had been last night. He’d tried not to even think about her, about the runaway minor he was sheltering in his room, but there was something about Jill Faccelli that tugged on him. That harmonized with every cell in his body. She
was
him. He could give her the chance he never took. In hindsight, such an undertaking would have required more responsibility and involvement, and a bit more supervision.

“Was that your plan the whole time?” he says. “Or did you seize the opportunity when it arose?”

She kicks out her feet, knees hinged over the arm of the chair. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Where were
you?
” She raises an eyebrow.

“Getting shot at. If you must know,” he says.

Her legs stop moving. “Did anyone die?”

“Morbid little squirrel, aren’t you?”

She grins fast without thinking and snuffs it out. But Fisher has seen it, and God help him, in spite of everything, it makes him smile. “No. A man went mad and N—a woman was shot. I got tossed in the pool. Enough chaos even for the likes of you.”

He leans in closer.

“You ought to announce your presence to the police. But I’m not going to turn you in,” he says. The words are as much a surprise as the sureness: he isn’t going to turn her in for committing matricide, and he can’t say why, but he
knows.
He knows he’ll protect her; he knows she isn’t a danger to anyone now that Viola is gone. “I just don’t like being played a fool. You could have told me.”