Bleeding Heart (28 page)

“Okay,” Tom said. “But why in the world would she want to murder him? She had a good job. She was responsible for Danny. Why put her life—and his well-being—in jeopardy? And what’s the connection between her and Mackenzie?”

“It has to be something to do with fracking, don’t you think? I mean, look at all these hundreds of viewings and bookmarks! Not a week went by when she wasn’t checking out the latest news. And she followed all these lawsuits like a hawk. Especially the disputes with EnergyCorp in Pennsylvania.”

“EnergyCorp?” Tom asked.

“Yes. That’s the name of the drilling company.”

“Bingo!”

“What do you mean?”

“I wrote several pieces on the major gas producers for my blog, remember? EnergyCorp is one of MKZEnergy’s subsidiaries.”

“I want you to call Erlander with this information first thing in the morning,” Tom told me after we’d talked the whole thing through a couple of times. We’d gone back up to the house. It had grown chilly, and we were sitting on the couch in the living room having a glass of wine.

“I can’t do that to Mara,” I told him. “I have to find her first. I need to hear her side of the story. All I have now are little bits and pieces of what happened.”

“That’s Erlander’s job,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Or the police department’s. It seems quite possible that Mara did poison Mackenzie. And in a totally premeditated way. She could have been planning this whole thing for almost two years! She could be dangerous, Alice.”

I put down my glass. I turned to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I know Mara. She’s a good, loyal person at heart. There has to be a rational explanation for this.”

“Oh, come on, Alice! We both know that seemingly good people can do really terrible things. I’m sure there is a rational explanation, but I doubt it’s one you’re going to like. Think about it: Mara took off in the middle of that search. She must have known what the police were looking for. She’s on the run—and I have a feeling that the last thing she wants is you coming after her. Let this go. Let Erlander take over.”

“No, it was that call that made her leave,” I said, correcting
Tom. “I’m sure it was a call from the hospital about her sister. Mara’s not running away; she’s going home.”

“Listen,” Tom said, “I know you’re worried about her. I know you really care. And it’s great to see you wear your heart on your sleeve for a change.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to know what you’re feeling,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “Though you’ve got to know by now how I feel about you. And what I want.”

“Tom—,” I said, sitting forward. “This really isn’t the moment to—” But he pulled me back toward him and into his arms. Then he started to kiss me, but not with his usual gentle consideration. This was real and uninhibited passion, and I felt myself responding to him as I never had before. He began to unbutton my shirt. His hands moved across my breasts, and I could feel my body arching toward him. But my thoughts kept turning back to Mara and the many secrets she’d been keeping from me. How long had she been planning to poison Mackenzie? Why? Where did she come from? How was I going to find her? Because no matter what Tom told me, I knew I had to track her down and get to the bottom of this.

“Alice?” Tom asked as I sat up abruptly.

“Eleanor would know,” I said.

“What?”

“I bet she’d know where Mara went.”

“Damn it, Alice!” Tom said, pushing himself off the couch. He stood, his back to me. He ran his hands shakily through his hair, visibly trying to get his emotions under control. He muttered something to himself, then turned and looked down at me, his mouth set in a grim line. “I think I’ve been pretty patient. I’ve tried to take into consideration what you’ve been through in your marriage and how you—”

“Oh, Tom, you’ve been wonderful,” I said, chagrined by my behavior. I was also startled by how distraught he seemed. “I’m so sorry that—”

“No!” he said, his voice rising. “No more bullshit! I need you to think about how you feel. I need you to decide what you want. I’m sorry, but I just can’t go on like this anymore.”

I
found Eleanor’s cell number the next day in the electronic address book on Mara’s computer. My call went straight to her voice mail. I left her a message saying that Mara had disappeared, and that I was worried about her.

“If you know where she might be, or have any information that might help me find her, please give me a call. I just want to help her—wherever she’s gone.”

It was Friday, always a busy day at Green Acres during the summer, and even busier now that I was all alone in the office. The season was winding down—Labor Day was Monday—and I was fielding a lot of calls from clients who’d soon be closing up their houses for the winter. There were fall cleanups, new plantings, and other end-of-summer projects to schedule. Despite my negligence during the months I’d devoted to Mackenzie’s garden, I’d been able to retain almost all of my clients. But I was taking nothing for granted. I couldn’t afford to. I was determined to keep Green Acres on an even keel and at the same time start paying back my family. So I made sure to telephone and talk personally—and often at
length—to everyone who contacted me. I tried to pick up the phone when it rang, but by midafternoon I was so busy, I had to let a number of calls go into voice mail.

I checked the machine around five o’clock and discovered that Eleanor had left a message asking me to get back to her. When I called, she gave me directions to her place in Pittsfield. I had a hard time hearing her over the high-pitched racket in the background.

“I can’t talk now,” she said. “Come by in an hour or so. I should be free by then.”

The directions led me to a two-family frame house on a tree-lined block not far from downtown. It was a working-class neighborhood. A couple of shrubs or trees sat in front of most of the homes, with the more expansive yards in the rear. A chain-link fence enclosed Eleanor’s backyard. I caught a glimpse of a swing set and colorful plastic toys as I parked my car. I followed the shriek of children’s voices around the side of the house. There were half a dozen kids, most just toddlers, playing in the makeshift sandbox that took up the back right quadrant of the yard. Eleanor sat nearby on a folding aluminum chair with a baby, deeply asleep, on her lap.

“Hey there!” I said, letting myself in through the metal gate.

“I’d get up,” she told me as I approached, “but as you can see, I got my hands full.” I sat down in an empty folding chair next to her.

“What you’re looking at here,” she said, nodding at the children in the sandbox, “is Granny Eleanor’s Daycare Center. It started with just my grandkids. But then word got out around the neighborhood. Some days I got almost a dozen little ones to look after—and some of them nothing but trouble.
Lamar!
” she shouted at a boy who’d just pushed another boy backward into the sand. “Stop that right now, or you’re going to get a spanking from me. And you know I’m not kidding!” She turned back to me, and said, “I told
their mommies that I’m a big believer in smacking fannies. If they don’t like it, don’t leave ’em with me.”

“Good for you,” I said. “And it’s great you’ve started your own business. You look a lot happier than the last time I saw you.”

She stopped smiling and shook her head. For the first time since I’d known her I thought she looked her age.

“That was a bad time,” she said. “A very bad time. I came at you with that knife. I hate to even think about it now. I was not in a good state of mind, and I’m really sorry about some of the things I did and said. Mr. M—well, he was not the person I thought he was. He caused me and my family a lot of pain. But he sure didn’t deserve what he got.”

“The police talked to you?”

“Oh, yeah. They’ve been here. Questioned my son, too. They keep sniffing around in our business. I’m pretty sure they’re hoping to pin it on one or maybe both of us. We live in downtown Pittsfield, right? Crime capital of the county. We probably fit right into their homicide demographic or whatever. But good luck with them getting anything to stick.”

“Don’t feel singled out,” I told her. “They’ve been after me as well. They even came and searched my office a few days ago. They told me they found what they were looking for. Whatever it was, I know it was in the area of the greenhouse I use for drying herbs. Though Mara’s been doing most of that work for me the last year or so.”

Eleanor turned and looked at me.

“I tried to get Mara on her cell after you called,” she said. “But her mailbox is full. What’s going on? You think she had something to do with all this?”

“I’m not sure,” I told her. “The detective asked me about digitalis—and the fact that it can be toxic. I assume the question
had something to do with Mackenzie’s death. Don’t you? Of course, you don’t have to tell me, but did Mara make the herbal tea you gave to Mr. M? I remember you telling me once that you thought it might actually be doing him more harm than good.”

Eleanor looked away across the lawn. There was a sudden lull in the children’s chatter, and I could make out the sound of stop-and-go traffic on Route 7 a few blocks away. Though only fifteen or so miles north of Woodhaven, Pittsfield was another world: urban and gritty, like so many postindustrial New England cities. Eleanor was doing the best she could, but still, being deprived of her job as well as her independence must have been a pretty hard blow. She’d lost so much ground in her life because of Graham Mackenzie. I could sense her debating how far she wanted to get dragged back into the mess surrounding his death.

“The detective asked me the same thing,” Eleanor said. “Whether I’d given Mr. M something made with this digitalis plant. I told him I didn’t know. Which was the truth.”

“But Mara did give you the tea, didn’t she?”

“I thought you wanted my help in finding her,” Eleanor said, shifting the baby, who was beginning to whimper, into a different position on her lap. “How is this helping to find her?”

“I’m just trying to make sense of what happened.”

“Well, I’d do anything for Mara and Danny,” Eleanor replied. “And anything to keep them from getting hurt. She’s had enough trouble in her life already.”

“She told you about her past?”

“No, not really,” Eleanor said. “Not about whatever it was that had made her so unhappy. But you didn’t need a divining rod to see that she’d been through hell, did you? I assumed it was something to do with Danny’s father—a marriage gone wrong, maybe some kind of abuse.”

“She’s been living in a trailer park in Columbia County,” I told Eleanor. “A woman there—the one who took care of Danny when Mara worked for me—claims that Danny’s actually Mara’s nephew, not her son.”

“Is that right?” Eleanor said, looking away again across the lawn where the shadows had started to lengthen. A woman appeared at the side gate and called to Eleanor:

“Sorry I’m so late, Granny. But I’ll take those troublemakers off your hands now.”

“Hey, Libby,” Eleanor said, keeping her seat as the woman let herself into the backyard. I got up to shake Libby’s hand after Eleanor had introduced me as a friend.

“Surely you can’t be Eleanor’s granddaughter,” I said.

“Oh, no!” she said, laughing. “We just all call her Granny around here.”

Two of the children left with Libby, and shortly after that a father stopped by for Lamar and the baby Eleanor had been holding in her arms. Then Eleanor herded the three remaining children into the house. I got up as she walked back across the lawn toward me.

“I should go,” I said. “You’ve got things to do.”

“Wait a bit,” she said, waving me back into the chair. She sat down again with a sigh. “I think you may be right about Danny. A couple of times, when Mara was out of earshot, he told me that he missed his mommy. Of course, I told him she’d be right back, but I could tell that wasn’t what he wanted me to say. I knew something was wrong—Mara was so secretive and sometimes Danny seemed so scared—but I figured it had to do with the bad marriage. Still, I could tell, she really loved that boy. That’s what a mother does, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Do you know why she had him?”

“No,” I told her. “But I got a call for her from a hospital in Pennsylvania yesterday. It sounded like an emergency, so I called back, and before I could explain who I was they told me that someone named Hannah had just died. I’m pretty sure that Hannah was Mara’s sister. Danny’s mom.”

“Oh, that poor little boy! Poor Mara! So she’s going home to be with her family.”

“She’s from Pennsylvania?”

“Yes. A small town in the middle of nowhere, according to her. Honestly, I never could understand why she left. She grew up on a farm, milking the cows and feeding the chickens. I could tell she was kind of torn about the place for some reason, but still, it sounded like a paradise to me. Such a beautiful, peaceful part of the world. But she said that things had been changing there the last couple of years.”

“Do you remember the name of it?”

“What do you want with her really?” Eleanor asked, giving me a hard look. “You going to turn her over to the police? I don’t know for sure what that girl did or why she might have done it, but I don’t want to see her in jail.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “At the same time, it was you who said that Mr. M didn’t deserve what he got. Nobody has the right to take another person’s life.”

“There are all sorts of ways of taking a life,” Eleanor replied. “You don’t have to kill someone to do it.”