Better Off Dead (40 page)

One of our guests of honor showed close on
the heels of Marcus—the janitor who had helped me escape the night
I broke into Brookhouse's office. He had been discharged from the
hospital a few days after the attack on his skull and had, indeed,
proved to be a remarkably hard-headed fellow. And well-labeled. His
name, it turned out, was Richard Moore Tuff. They sure didn't come
more tough than that man.

I was planning to have a little fireside
chat with Mr. Tuff once the after-dinner rituals began.

Hugo and his friends had also been invited
to the dinner. Only a handful of the fellows took us up on our
offer. The others were too shamed at the failure of their machismo
to show. Hugo was humiliated at having been so easily deceived—the
bikers were never found and may never be— but he perked up
considerably when Burly enlisted his help in deep-frying turkeys
for the festivities.

Together, they returned to the clearing by
the pond and filled a large metal drum with fresh peanut oil. This
was heated over a fire to bubbling levels, then one by one,
ten-pound turkeys were drenched in flour and dropped into the drum,
where they sizzled and fried to juicy perfection, the skin turning
crispier than any I had ever encountered and the inner meat more
tender than an Elvis love song. Bobby D. staked his claim to one
entire turkey as his portion. I agreed to give him half and
suggested he indulge his gluttony on the seven pies we had saved
for dessert instead. Fanny had been busy in Helen's kitchen all day
long, baking and mashing and stirring and, most of all, adding
butter to anything and anyone who stood still long enough for her
to slather it on. Maybe we could get a group rate on a cardiac unit
at Duke when dinner was done.

By the time early evening rolled around, we
were famished and primed for a feast the likes of which even that
well-used farmhouse had never seen. We pulled two tables end to end
in the enormous kitchen so that everyone could be seated together.
We made Helen sit at one end of the table, and endured Miranda's
insistence that she grace the other end as "the matriarch."

This was not the word that most of us would
have chosen to call Helen’s mother, if given a choice, but we
agreed graciously, despite the fact that this meant we all had to
stare at her ghastly stage makeup and the low-cut red evening gown
she had deemed fitting for the occasion. I think her get-up
confused the Mexican contingency, who were having trouble sorting
out whether it was a Thanksgiving or Halloween celebration they
were attending.

Within seconds, no one cared what Miranda
was wearing. For a very good reason: few of us had ever encountered
a deep-fried turkey before. It made Thanksgiving dinner a whole new
ballgame. My jaw ached from where I'd been whacked during the
showdown with Carroll and Brookhouse, but sometimes you just have
to swallow the pain and reach down where champions are born. I
ignored the throbbing and ate. And ate. And ate.

We chewed with astonished satisfaction. God
bless grease. And god bless this great part of the country that
still dunks its foods in it whenever possible.

"Did you know that seventy-two percent of
all sewage blockages caused by lard occur in the South?" Marcus's
boyfriend Robert announced as we munched.

Talk about your conversation starters. And
stoppers.

Burly burst out laughing. It was a sound I
had not heard from him lately. Bobby nodded sagely, then wiped his
greasy fingers on the tablecloth as a sort of coda to the remark.
Fanny delicately slathered more butter on her biscuit, while Marcus
beamed at his boyfriend as if he had just announced the cure for
cancer.

"That's interesting," I managed to say.

Miranda had a different reaction. She stood
suddenly, eyes wide, mouth open in mute appeal, arms
outstretched.

"For godsakes, Mother. Not now," Helen
snapped.

Jesus, I thought. What a ham. Lay down on a
platter and we'll serve you up.

The Mexican guys, who had never seen her
schtick before, were staring at her, eyes wide, looking frightened.
Hugo reassured them rapidly in Spanish.

Miranda turned a peculiar shade of red and
started clutching at her right side.

Bobby pointed a turkey leg at her like a
baton. "No one is in the mood for your fruity shenanigans," he
said.

Miranda dropped to the floor.

"For godsakes, Mother," Helen complained.
"Get up. We've all seen this act a hundred times before."

Miranda stayed down.

"Maybe she's really..." Fanny began, rising
from her seat, her face pink with alarm.

"I doubt it," Helen said, determinedly
plowing through her mashed potatoes.

Killer disagreed.

He ambled over to Miranda, sniffed her
body—and then began to howl.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on
end. I had never heard such a sound from that dog before. It was an
eerie wailing that held and wavered in mournful salute. And it was
enough to convince Burly that something was truly wrong.

"Does anyone know CPR?" he asked.

Marcus's boyfriend Robert leaped to his
feet, rushed to the end of the table and hoisted Miranda aloft. She
slumped like a giant marionette in his arms. He wrapped his arms
around her, placed a fist over her diaphragm, and began to
pump.

"She might be choking," he yelled as he
thrust his fist into her again and again, her body jumping with
each squeeze.

I didn't know how to tell him, but she was
as limp as defrosted lettuce and her gaze was as vacant as an empty
parking lot. My take: the lady was well beyond choking.

I looked around the table, my eyes locking
on Fanny's. Thankfully, she shook her head no. Fanny had not been
slipping Miranda too many Valiums.

"Oh, my god," Helen said, rising to her
feet. "I think she really is having a heart attack."

"I'm not giving up," Robert assured her. He
flopped Miranda forward, over the back of her chair, and began to
thump her on the back. On the third blow, Miranda's hair popped off
her head and flew onto her plate with a plop. The synthetic
tendrils splayed out against the mashed potatoes like the arms of a
particularly hairy octopus.

She was almost completely bald beneath her
wig. Bald and dead.

"Stop," Helen commanded him. "It's not that
she's choking. Let her down."

Robert laid her gently on the floor, placing
Miranda's head reverently on the edge of the hooked rug as a
pillow. The old lady's eyes fluttered, flew open, then rolled back
in her head. She did not move anymore.

Richard, the janitor, took over. It turned
out he had been a medic in Vietnam.

"She's dead," he said, checking all her
pulse points. "Looks like a massive stroke to me. There was nothing
anyone could have done. I'm sorry, miss." He directed this last
remark to Helen.

Helen was still staring, a napkin clutched
in her hand. "I thought she was joking," she said to us, sounding
neither unhappy nor angry. Just... surprised.

"So did I," I confessed. "So did
everyone."

We stood in a circle, looking down at the
body.

"We better call it in," Marcus finally said.
"Leave it to me."

"What should the rest of us do?" Hugo asked.
His friends looked as if they had been mildly electrocuted. Were
all American holiday dinners like this?

"I guess we may as well keep eating," I
said. "I mean no disrespect to Miranda, of course. Or to you,
Helen." I turned to her and waited for her response.

She was staring down at the body that had
been her mother, disbelieving, confused and, I suspected, relieved
somewhere down deep in her heart.

Bobby D. was blithely whistling "Ding Dong,
the Witch is Dead," driven by a subconscious impulse and without
even noticing what he was doing. A poke in the ribs from Fanny
silenced him.

"What?" Helen asked, looking up. "Of course,
keep eating. I'll handle it."

And so we ate. What else could we do? People
live and people die. The living must keep eating. We plowed through
the turkey and were starting in on second helpings when the
paramedics arrived. It was a formality, they had been warned in
advance, and they were there merely to convey the body to a funeral
home. Marcus had already taken care of finding the name of one
nearby.

"Come sit back down and eat, Miss Pugh,"
Marcus insisted, gently pushing Helen back to her place. "Your
momma is not going to come back to us if you sit down and finish a
piece of pie, but it might help you."

Good god, I hope she's not
coming back if we eat pie, I thought as I shoveled a second helping
of banana cream into my craw. With Bobby D. around to pack in whole
pies, we'd soon find ourselves in a remake of the remake of
Night of the Living Dead.

After dinner, we sat around the fire,
digesting, groaning, bragging about how much we had eaten, offering
phony condolences on Miranda's death and rehashing her spectacular
final exit. Once we had exhausted these topics, I steered the
conversation to what was really on our minds—a replay of my
adventures the night Helen had been kidnapped and a discussion
about what Ferrar would do in the weeks ahead to get to the bottom
of the mystery of who had killed Brookhouse and Carroll.

My money, of course, was on Richard Moore
Tuff.

The janitor was not buying it, and he wasn't
exactly subtle about it.

"Why is everybody looking at me?" he
demanded when I got to the part of the by-now familiar story in
which I recount how my rescuer blasted through the observation
glass with a shotgun and nailed Brookhouse dead center, so to
speak.

"You all don't think I did it," he said,
outraged. "Oh, no. Don't be pinning that on me."

I nodded soothingly. It was okay, I signaled
him. He was among friends. He didn't have to say a word. We would
never tell.

"Don't you be nodding at me," Richard
protested strenuously. "I am not shining anyone on. Yes, I am glad
those men are dead. No, it was not me who did it. I was not even
there. I was still at home on medical leave."

"You could have come back to the building,"
I said. "You had the keys."

"Who the hell needed keys, girl?" he
protested. "What with you breaking all the windows in."

"Well, if it wasn't you, then who was
it?"

"I suspect we are never going to know,"
Bobby D. predicted, with just a little too much satisfaction for my
tastes. "Justice was served. That's all that counts. Case
closed."

No, it wasn't closed. Not in my book, at
least. My curiosity counted, too.

Late that night, we all bundled up in our
hats and scarves, ready to trundle out to our cars, sated and ready
for sleep. Burly offered to wheel me out to my Porsche, something
he had not done in several weeks.

"How about you, buddy?" I said to
Killer.

Killer stayed firmly at Helen's feet.

"Uh, Casey," Burly said. "I think maybe
Killer may be staying here permanently."

I looked at my dog. My dog looked at me. His
basset expression had never looked more mournful. He flopped down
at Helen's feet, cast me a baleful look, and whined.

"Et tu, Brutus?" I asked him.

He barked his reply. Helen smiled at
him.

What could I do? "Take him," I said, with a
wave. I gladly gave him away, to tell you the truth. What good is a
dog who isn't loyal? I mean, isn't that the point of having one?
Besides, with all the tidbits Helen had been sneaking him, Killer's
gas had reached epic proportions. A pipeline straight from his ass
to a refinery in Texas couldn't handle the overload. I'd let Helen
figure out that little habit of Killer's on her own. But most of
all, she needed his company.

"Aren't you going to miss Killer?" I asked
Burly, after we had watched the others drive away down the country
road. The night was so clear that the sky seemed dusted with stars.
The air had a winter bite to it. "You're more used to him than l
am."

"Actually, Casey," Burly said, looking up at
the stars, "I'm staying here with him."

"What?" I didn't get what he meant.

"I'm staying here with Helen and
Killer."

"For godsakes," I said. "How much longer
does she need bodyguarding? Brookhouse is dead."

"No, Casey," he said in a firmer voice. "I'm
staying with Helen. I'm moving in."

"You're moving in with Helen?" I was
starting to get the picture. So was my stomach. My Thanksgiving
dinner began to churn. He wasn't... was he?

Burly looked at me, and without apology, I
have to admit. I sort of admired him for that. "Yes, I'm moving in
with Helen."

"And you and me?" I asked. "We're over?"

"In my sense of the word, yes," he said.
"I'm not like you in that regard. You can have a million boyfriends
and they probably all mean something to you. Me? I just want one
person. One person who needs me."

"I need you," I said, and my voice came out
much smaller than I expected.

"No you don't, Casey," Burly answered,
shaking his head. "You don't need anyone. Or, at least, you think
you don't need anyone. And that's what counts."

I let the silence lie between us while I
thought that over. "Why didn't you say something before?" I finally
asked.

"Like what? No one can tell you anything. It
wouldn't have done any good."

I heard his voice as if it came from a
distance. I was remembering all the little signs I had seen but not
registered: his speaking up for Helen, the glances, his not caring
about my flirting with Luke—what a joke to think he might be
jealous; he had probably been relieved. It had been balm to his
guilty conscience.

"I don't know what to say," I admitted. "It
doesn't sound like I have much choice."

"I'm sorry," Burly offered.

"But why?"