Blessed Is the Busybody (28 page)

20

The ER at Emerald Springs General is one notch more comfortable than the trunk of a car. I spent the rest of Monday night in a curtained cubicle being awakened periodically, poked, prodded, and asked if I remembered why I was there.

As if I was going to forget any time soon.

On Tuesday, in my own bed, I slept with only the occasional break, one of which was spent pointing out a certain package nestled under the mattress so that Ed could return it to Roussos.

When I awoke on Wednesday morning, the pain in my head was more gentle roar than screaming tirade. Teddy was cuddled beside me, frowning.

I sleepily stroked her hair. “Hello. You look worried.”

“You haven’t been talking.”

I wondered how much she had been told. “Sometimes sleep is the only way to get better.”

“Are you finally better?”

“I think I am.”

“It’s taking too long.”

“I agree.”

“I have to go to school today. Daddy says so.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

“Can Jimmy come home with me after?”

“Probably not today.” I paused as my injured brain sifted through information. “Jimmy? The boy who was mean to you?”

“His hamster died. That’s why he was so sad.”

“Uh huh.”

“I told him we can do a funeral. His mother threw Bucky in the trash, but we’re going to pretend. It will make him feel better.”

I put my arms around her and pulled her closer. “There’s lots of time to think about seminary, but your father will nudge you toward Harvard.”

“I probably have to finish first grade.”

“ ’Fraid so.”

I was sitting up, testing what serious movement would do to the day’s prognosis, when Deena came in. She was dressed in her usual jeans and a leaf green fleece pullover. Her lovely hair was bare. I was encouraged.

“Hey, you’re sitting up.” She smiled.

“And doing it very well, I might add.”

“Daddy’s making you breakfast in bed.”

“That almost makes getting hit in the head worth it.”

“Did you know Harry was a bad person? Before, I mean?”

I considered my answer. I wanted to tell her yes, that people were predictable, and I had spotted Harry’s dark side the first time I laid eyes on him. I wanted her to feel safe with the people she knows, not worried that they, too, might turn into killers.

But I couldn’t lie. Deena would need the truth to make her way through life.

“I didn’t know. I saw a different man. Maybe the one I saw was at least partly real, and that’s why the other part was so well hidden.” I wondered what had happened to Harry, but Deena wasn’t the person to ask.

“Can people really be that bad and still be partly good?” she asked.

Where was Ed when I needed him?

“Never mind.” She knelt carefully on the bed and hugged me. “I know the answer.”

“Great. What is it?”

“Nobody really knows.”

I kissed her hair. “There’s some good news. Most of the people you meet will only be a little bit bad.”

“Did you really break Harry’s foot?”

“I don’t know. Did I?”

“He’s in a cast. How did you learn that?”

“Your grandpa thought I might need to know how to protect myself someday.”

I didn’t want to tell her now, but in the not so distant future, Deena was going to be learning self-defense techniques of her own. I was definitely going to see to it. I could see an entire karate class of Green Meanies working on their black belts. I was terrified imagining such a thing.

She left, and I pondered the image of my captor in a cast. Harry must have lived through Roussos’s shotgun blast.

I thought Ed would be my next visitor, but instead Lucy arrived with a tray of scrambled eggs, toast, coffee, and, from her voluminous Coach satchel, an order of crisp bacon in Styrofoam. She was dressed in black, as if she had anticipated worse than me sitting up. Her expression was surprisingly somber.

“Shhh . . .” she said, looking around furtively. “I got the bacon at Lana’s Lunch and it’s still warm. If you eat it fast, Ed will never know. The eggs and toast are from him.”

I dug right in, scruples temporarily on the wane. “How did you know bacon’s what I miss the most?”

“When we eat breakfast together, you look like you’re going to snatch it off my plate.”

“The bedroom smells like a smokehouse. Ed will know.”

“I’ll crack a window, but don’t worry, he won’t toss you out. He’s been absolutely beside himself.”

“You could fool me. Where
is
the guy?”

She opened the window beside my bed. From outside I could hear the call of a cardinal. “There’s some kind of committee meeting downstairs.”

“Charming. They’ll probably fire Ed because I crippled our secretary instead of coming to a peaceful consensus on the best way to handle his aggression.” I looked up. “What happened to Harry, Luce?”

She carefully lowered herself to the side of the bed. “He’s in jail. Broken foot, injured arm, cracked ribs.”

“The ribs are probably a punch bowl injury. It must have nearly killed him to lift me in and out of the trunk. Stay away from punch bowls on general principles, Luce. They’re lethal.”

She shook her head. “Detective Sergeant Roussos did some damage. Enough that Harry surrendered. How did Roussos only manage to hit him in the arm? With a shotgun of all things?”

“Cops shoot to kill. Anything else is too dangerous. But I guess Harry was too far away to be a good target. He just lucked out. I bet Roussos is a sharpshooter.”

“
You
lucked out.” She put her hand on mine. “Aggie, are you out of your mind?”

“What? For trusting a guy with a collection of handblown paperweights? For not thinking that the man who bought doll clothes for Teddy at the last rummage sale could be a murderer?”

“No, for not waiting until I got back into town!”

I grinned, and my head didn’t split wide open. Another very good sign. “Trust me, this was one gig you were lucky to miss.”

She was pouting, prettily, of course. “Well, I do have one piece of gossip. Good news and bad news.”

“Uh huh?”

“But you don’t sound interested enough.”

“Have I ever described my first labor to you? Starting with my doctor’s visit that morning?”

She held up her hand. “Okay, but only because you’re semi-incapacitated.”

“And . . . ?”

“I talked to Bob Knowles yesterday.” Another pause.

“Luce, it’s hard to keep with the ‘uh huhs’ and ‘tell me mores.’ Give me a break, okay? Just this once.”

“He’s decided to start a trust fund for Gelsey’s grandchildren. Nice sized, too.”

Maybe I’m just an emotional mess. Or maybe recovery from a head injury strips off all protective layers. But I teared up. Lucy rose and got me a box of tissues, usually my job.

“For a while I thought he was Gelsey’s murderer.” I sniffed and blew my nose.

“Don’t get too sentimental. When probate ends he’ll have more money than he’ll know what to do with,” Lucy said. “He can probably write it off somehow, since he’s vaguely related. But still, it’s a nice thing.”

“Now the family that wants to adopt them can afford to. The fund can pay for college.”

“That was the good news.”

“Oh, great.”

“Bad news next. He’s selling Book Gems.”

“What?”

“Bob’s moving to Cleveland. He wants to put this whole episode behind him. A family named Giovanni approached him. They already have their money on the table, but they have enough kids and cousins to staff the store. It’ll be a real mom and pop enterprise.”

At least Emerald Springs still had a bookstore, even if I was out a job.

Lucy read my mind. “You didn’t love working there. You know you didn’t. Business was too slow. You didn’t have enough say in what you were doing.”

“Maybe not, but I’m going to be looking for work again.”

“Well, I don’t think so.”

I looked up from my eggs. The bacon was history. “Why not?”

“Here’s the thing.” She touched her nose, as if it were some weird sort of totem. “I’ve bought the house across the street.”

“You did what? You already have a house.”

“Not for me. Good grief. You don’t think I’d want to live that close to you, do you?” She winked. “We’d never get anything done.”

“Then what for?”

“You and I are starting a business. This first house is on me. I bought it, but we’ll split the profits once we sell. Then we’ll buy the next one together. I’ll be on the lookout for houses that need TLC but not major overhauls.”

I wasn’t following this. “Buy, sell, buy? My head hurts. Take pity.”

“Aggie, you know how to make a house a home. You’ve done it a million times. You know what to fix up and what to repair and what to camouflage. We’ll haul out the junk, replace the countertops, paint the cupboards, buy new hardware . . .” She went on, regurgitating the points I’d made on the morning poor Jennifer showed up on my porch.

She finished at last. “We’ll hire somebody to do the work we can’t do ourselves. And when it’s all ready, I’ll sell the house at a good profit. And it will sell. There’s a market for houses buyers can move right into. You can work in your spare time. It’s a cinch.”

It made a crazy kind of sense. And already I could feel myself getting excited at the prospects. I love houses. I love seeing them come to life. I could work while the girls were in school. Heck, they could help me do some of the work themselves to earn spending money. If something came up, no problem. And, if we were really lucky, no one would stage a protest because I painted a bedroom yellow or planted landscape roses instead of rhododendrons.

There was only one problem. I was pretty sure I was going to be living in Boston.

I wasn’t ready to tell Lucy. Besides, she was busy taking my tray and folding back the bedcovers. “Time for a shower. Think you can manage? I’ll stay here to be sure you’re okay.”

“Can I change into real clothes?”

“Something comfortable.”

The shower felt good, although washing my hair wasn’t fun. I gently towel dried it and slipped into a black jogging suit and wool socks.

When I emerged Roussos was standing by the window talking to Lucy.

“Look what you’ve got,” Lucy said, holding out a bouquet of gold-tipped spider mums. “From the policeman’s own garden.”

“You look pale,” he said. Roussos looked uncomfortable, as if I might sink to the ground again and require some action on his part.

There was something about getting back between the sheets with Roussos standing there that bothered me. I chose a chair in the corner and lowered myself demurely.

I closed my eyes a moment. “My stars are aligned today. My horoscope says I will be popular beyond measure.”

He smiled. “We’re just glad you’re around to visit.

“You’re not going to start in on me, are you?”

“About what? Tampering with my case? Narrowly avoiding getting killed?”

“Just tell me you arrested Frank Carlisle. Or do I have to spell out his connection to Harry?”

“I’ll need to take your statement later today. But Harry’s been obliging. He’s hoping for some favors. Like us taking the death penalty off the table.”

“I’m opposed to capital punishment.”

“I more or less figured you were.”

“He told you he murdered Gelsey?”

“Said she put up a struggle. Called it self-defense.”

“He’s lying, and by the way, I’m not opposed to life in prison without parole. Not even for old friends. Harry killed Gelsey because she was going to tell the world Frank Carlisle had their daughter murdered. That was apparently a mistake, by the way. Jennifer’s murder, I mean. Sax was just supposed to scare her away.”

“Dubinsky is still going away for a long, long time, mistake or no.”

“What about Carlisle?”

“We’re making the case. When we’re done, he won’t be around to bother you or anybody else again.”

Lucy looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get going.” She held up the flowers, six huge, perfect specimens. “I’ll take these down and put them in water. If I can find out what’s going on downstairs, I’ll call you and let you know. I’ll ring once and hang up first.”

“I thrive on secret codes.”

Lucy bent over and kissed my cheek. “Don’t stay too long,” she told Roussos.

I looked up after she left, and Roussos was towering over me.

“The flowers are lovely,” I said.

He squatted beside the chair, so we were eye to eye. “You’re doing okay?”

“I feel better today.”

“You went through a lot. I think you should see somebody a couple of times, just to talk things out.”

I was touched. “Maybe I will.”

“Don’t try to tough it out. Work through it and get it over with.”

I managed a smile. “Thank you for coming to my rescue. You and Ed.”

“It was too close for comfort.”

“I’m glad you listened to your voice mail. I’m glad you took me seriously. I thought you’d roll your eyes and think I was a complete idiot.”

“I might have rolled my eyes. I don’t remember.” He smiled, too. It was an extraordinary sight.

“I . . . well, a lot of what happened is still kind of blurry. And maybe I’m not thinking too clearly yet. But I can’t quite figure out how you knew where to look for me.”

“You made it easy. If it hadn’t been for the clues you left, we might not have figured it out.”

“Oh. The clues.” I tried to think. My headache crescendoed.

“I don’t know how you had the presence of mind to knock over the salt shaker right on top of the newspaper photo of Carlisle. But it clicked big-time for me. I saw that little mound of salt right on Carlisle’s face, your husband saw the shattered punch bowl Harry was so worried about. He knew Harry’s roommate designed the service center complex. I realized you were leading us to the salt dome. It all made sense.”

“Sense . . .” I closed my eyes. “Good. Right.”

He squeezed my hand. When I opened my eyes, he was gone.