Brute Strength (24 page)

‘No,' she said flatly. ‘If you don't mind, I'd like to go to bed.'

I threw Steve a questioning look. He said nothing, but his expression told me that we'd discuss his thoughts out of Gabrielle's hearing. Everyone pitched in to get her resettled. While Rita waited with her, Leah brought in her suitcase, and Steve and I made the guest room bed, which Gabrielle had stripped that morning. As we worked, he said, ‘Holly, remember that what you said is true. Mount Auburn is five minutes away. We'll keep a close eye on her. If anything changes, we'll get her there.'

‘But what's wrong with her?' I demanded.

He shrugged. ‘She says she's just exhausted.'

‘I know that's what she says! But she looks terrible, and she seems a little . . . dopey. Confused.'

He nodded. When we went back downstairs, he tried his best to persuade Gabrielle to go to the ER. She absolutely refused. The only thing wrong with her, she insisted, was exhaustion, and the only thing she needed was sleep. I found our fever thermometer and took her temperature, which was 98.8, and I made Steve check her pulse, which was a little high, 103, but nothing to panic about. We gave in. As I followed Gabrielle upstairs, she leaned on the railing, and instead of having Molly stay in her room, she asked me to take care of her little dog.

‘She'll need to go out,' Gabrielle mumbled.

‘Of course,' I said. ‘We'll take care of Molly. Don't worry. She'll be fine.'

I wished that I could feel equally confident about Gabrielle. After Leah left, Steve, Rita, and I watched the Red Sox, but we checked on Gabrielle every twenty minutes or so. During the night, Steve kept getting up to look in on her, and I kept asking, ‘Is she OK?'

‘So far,' he'd say. ‘So far.'

TWENTY-NINE

O
n Sunday morning, Gabrielle admitted to having slept deeply. Still thirsty, she drank four glasses of orange juice. Otherwise, she was fine, or so she insisted, especially to Steve. Her face was no longer flushed, her eyes were bright, and she looked like herself again. Even so, she decided to postpone her departure until the following day.

‘We aren't going to say a word to your father about any of this,' she informed me as she loaded our breakfast dishes into the dishwasher.

Succumbing to Gabrielle's inevitable ‘we', I asked, ‘What are we going to say to him?'

‘That you're giving a little dinner party,' she said, ‘and you want me to stay for just one more day so I can help you with it. Well, it's not really a dinner party. It's just a little Sunday-night supper.'

‘Why think small? Since it's imaginary, let's invite forty guests for a fourteen-course meal with service à la russe.'

After checking to make sure that Steve wasn't in the kitchen, she murmured, ‘It's not quite that imaginary.' At normal volume, she said, ‘Now, I know I've kept you from that painting you want do on the side of the house—'

‘You haven't. The weather has. Today is beautiful, but the wood is still damp.'

‘You're just saying that, but I
would
like it if we could take a little walk.'

‘Of course! I'd love to.'

As it turned out, Gabrielle's true objective was to have a tête-à-tête when Steve couldn't possibly overhear us. She, of course, walked Molly, and I took Kimi. At the time, my choice of Kimi seemed almost random, but I realize in retrospect that I picked the dog most likely to inspire me to stand up for myself if this not-quite-imaginary dinner proved to be a hare-brained scheme that I'd want to veto. As I should have remembered, it would've taken the brute strength of all three malamutes combined to deflect my stepmother from her goal.

My suspicions began to arise soon after we stepped out of the house. As I started to turn left at the driveway and head down Appleton Street, Gabrielle said, ‘Let's take Concord Avenue. We can go down Sparks Street to Brattle. If we go down Appleton, we might run into Vanessa, and we don't want her tagging along.'

‘Any route is fine with me.' To the best of my knowledge, Kimi approved of the statement of polite agreement and didn't construe my pleasant neutrality as a sign that I was spinelessly buckling under.

‘Well,' said Gabrielle, ‘I've been doing some serious thinking.' She paused, possibly in the hope that I'd speak up, as I did not. ‘And,' she continued, ‘I've realized, among other things, that my little episode last night was . . . foreign. Foreign to me.'

For half a second, I entertained the horrible idea that Gabrielle had decided that far from having fallen asleep in her car, she'd been the victim of alien abduction. Were the guests at this mysterious dinner going to be her new extraterrestrial friends?

To my relief, she quickly said, ‘No, not foreign. Provoked. Deliberate. That's what I mean. Holly, I am not someone who falls asleep at the wheel. That's not who I am. No, someone tried to make me doze off on the highway. Just the way poor Fiona did.'

‘We don't know that Fiona fell asleep. We don't know what happened. Except that she had an accident. And that she died.'

‘Exactly. She died in an
accident
. A one-car accident. Or an
apparent
accident.' At a curb, where we paused before crossing Huron Avenue, Gabrielle said, ‘Molly, sit. Good girl! We don't want any car accidents, do we?'

‘Kimi, good girl,' I echoed, even though it was second nature to Kimi to sit before we crossed a street. When we reached the opposite side, I said, ‘Steve and I have talked about it. We're both . . . we're mindful, I guess you'd say, that Fiona left from our house. It's not as if we'd let her start out when she'd been drinking. She hadn't. She did take an antihistamine, but she was a doctor, and she must've known what she was taking. She had allergies. It must've been an antihistamine she was used to, something she took all the time.'

Instead of saying that she'd already thought of everything I'd just pointed out, Gabrielle said, ‘Well, yes. So when there were antihistamines in her system . . . they'd have checked, I assume. They would, you know, after that kind of accident.'

‘There must have been an autopsy. There had to have been.'

As if changing the subject, Gabrielle said, ‘I ate a bit of everything yesterday. Well, more than a bit. And then there's that picture of me with grooming spray in my face.'

‘You've lost me.'

‘Three incidents. The dinner before Fiona left. That picture, which was taken in the parking lot at the match in Newton. And yesterday at the armory.'

‘Yes?' I waited as Kimi lifted her leg on a tree. I'd been afraid that spaying her might decrease her political activism or possibly even moderate her extremism, but my fears were unwarranted and, in any case, senseless. I mean, would a hysterectomy make Germaine Greer start acting like Phyllis Schlafly?

With a smile, Gabrielle said, ‘You think I'm paranoid, but I'm not.'

‘I'm just having trouble following you.'

‘Those three incidents. Now, what do they have in common? Well, I'll tell you what they have in common: Vanessa.'

‘What?'

‘I know she's a friend of yours. But stop and think who was there all three times.'

‘For a start, you and I were. So was Steve. And there's no solid reason to believe that Fiona's accident was anything other than an accident. Well, there's reason to wonder, but there's no proof.'

‘Of course there isn't. Holly, the point was to have it
be
an accident, which it was. It
was
a car accident. Except that it was no accident.'

‘Gabrielle, I didn't know about your change of plans until yesterday morning. How could Vanessa have known that you were planning to drive to Maine last night? Unless you think that she always carries a supply of . . . whatever caused Fiona's accident.'

‘But she did know! She walked Ulla down Appleton Street while I was loading my car, and I told her.'

‘OK. But Vanessa wasn't the only person present all three times. Besides us, I mean. What about the rest of her family? Tom. Hatch. And Avery, especially Avery, at least according to you. If Avery really does have some sort of . . . unnatural affection for her brother, then she was the one with a motive to get rid of Fiona. And at dinner at our house and then again yesterday, she was hovering over the food.'

‘So was Vanessa. But I'll concede that at the match, Avery was the one I saw with a camera.'

‘I didn't see any of them with a camera.'

‘You were judging. After Ulla passed her CGC test, Avery took her picture with Vanessa and the evaluator. But the camera could've belonged to someone else in the family. I don't know. Something I do know, though, is that that's a woman who doesn't want her children far from home.'

‘What devoted parent does? Look at how happy all of us are that Leah's going to Tufts. We're elated! In a lot of ways, Steve and I are better parents to her than her parents are. All they're doing right now is blaming us because she's going to veterinary school instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge, the other one, so she'd end up as a professor of classics. They're more interested in what she could become than in who she is. And it's their loss. So, if Vanessa wants her children nearby?' In spite of my heated defense, I thought back to the morning when Vanessa had told me of Fiona's death. I clearly remembered that Vanessa had no sooner broken the news than she'd gone on to speak of rearrangements in Hatch's plan to go to California. ‘Tom,' I said. ‘If you're looking for motives, he's the one who'd just love having a doctor in the house. And you'd better believe that Tom's endless griping about his ailments doesn't get him far with his own doctors, so it would be convenient for him to have his grandson right there. Hatch couldn't just tell him that the only thing wrong with him was hypochondria.'We were on Sparks Street, almost at Brattle. My mind's eye had been on the people and the events we'd been discussing, but Gabrielle was in the here-and-now. ‘Don't they look like a couple!' she exclaimed. ‘Out walking the family dog.'

Catching sight of Tom, Elizabeth, and Persimmon, I hastily said to Gabrielle, ‘Look, don't mention any of your ideas to Steve, OK? You know how straightforward he is.' He'd probably decide that Gabrielle was delusional.

‘Oh, I don't think he'd say anything to her.' Waving merrily, she called out, ‘Good morning!'

Tom and Elizabeth waved back as they approached us. Elizabeth was wearing a navy woolen top embroidered with folk-art designs, and Tom had on a heavy tweed sport coat. No wonder they both worried about their health! I was comfortable in my short-sleeved T-shirt. In wool, I'd have felt feverish. The warm clothes or the exercise had made their cheeks pink and their eyes bright. As Gabrielle had remarked, they did look like a couple, and an especially healthy one.

I greeted both of them, and Persimmon, too, and then Tom said to Gabrielle, ‘I must have misunderstood. I thought you were on your way home.'

‘Oh,' said my stepmother in that confiding tone of hers, ‘I had a little change of plans.' Patting her throat, she added, ‘My thyroid acts up now and then.'

Tom and Elizabeth were, of course, as fascinated as if she'd just announced that she'd won a Nobel Prize. They all but congratulated her, and in response to their inquiries, she made little remarks about the trials of finding the ideal dose of medication. Happily, Tom, Elizabeth, and Persimmon then turned onto Sparks Street, while we continued down Brattle.

When they were out of earshot, I asked, ‘What's this with your thyroid?'

‘I was creating an opportunity,' she said proudly.

‘For what?'

‘For our opportunistic murderer to strike again.' After a second, she added, ‘That sounds a little melodramatic, doesn't it.'

‘Yes,' I said flatly. ‘And I do have to admit that I'm skeptical.'

‘Have you ever wondered what happened to Elizabeth's husband? What was his name?'

‘Isaac. Isaac McNamara. And what happened to Isaac was that . . . I think that all systems failed. He'd had some ordinary GI illness, some kind of stomach virus, but he recovered. Then all of a sudden, a few days later, he developed . . . kidney failure, I think. His liver was involved, too. I'm not sure. I was concentrating on trying to help. Getting the house key, taking care of Persimmon, making sure that there was food in the house. And when Elizabeth called to say that Isaac was dead, I couldn't ask for details. I'm not a ghoul, and it wasn't as if—'

‘Of course not. And then there's Tom's wife.'

‘Vanessa's mother? Gabrielle, you aren't accusing Vanessa of murdering her mother!'

‘I'm not accusing anyone, Holly. All I'm doing is, uh, enumerating unexplained deaths.'

‘They aren't unexplained. Well, Fiona's is, I suppose. But the others? We don't happen to know the explanations, but someone presumably does, and since most people die of natural causes, it's a fair bet that these people did, too.'

‘Well, guesswork will get us nowhere. We'll have to find out.'

I almost never sense the age difference between my stepmother and me, but our thoughts about how to find out how these people had died revealed the generation gap: I'd have trusted the web to reveal everything, whereas Gabrielle's plan called for asking subtle questions during what I persisted in thinking of as the imaginary Sunday supper. When we reached the Longfellow House and turned around, she began outlining the menu, and by the time we got home, she was ready to issue invitations and shop for food. Gabrielle's scheme called for leaving her thyroid medication in plain sight in the kitchen, thus giving Vanessa, Tom, Avery, and Hatch the chance to tamper with it. Furthermore, Gabrielle and I were supposed to collect information on how Tom's late wife and Vanessa's late husband had died. While we were at it, we were also to make unobtrusive inquiries about the exact cause of Isaac McNamara's death. I remained so doubtful about the enterprise that Gabrielle was forced to point out that her last plan, the consumer-satisfaction survey that she and Betty had cooked up, had succeeded, hadn't it? As Gabrielle phrased it, we'd tracked Eldon Flood to his lair. Although Flood Farm didn't seem to me to qualify as a lair, I had to admit that she was right. In the end, her faith in this Sunday-supper nonsense triumphed: I capitulated.