Crazy Lady (10 page)

Daphne leans across the table. “Just one good one will do.”

“Well, to start with she strikes more terror into my officers than she does the villains.”

“Really?”

Donaldson checks around before saying, “Bloody old battleaxe. Her husband died young and her son committed suicide, and I can't say I blame either of them.”

“I've met her,” agrees Daphne. “What happened to her boy?”

“Abuse,” mouths Donaldson. “She totally smothered him. He was still living at home in his thirties for God's sake; Peter Pan syndrome, couldn't grow up… you know the type.”

“Why suicide?”

Donaldson shrugs. “The only way out I suppose.”
Janet Thurgood hasn't been trying to escape from Trina's again, but with the possibility that Mike Phillips or Dave Brougham might show up at any time, Rob has been turned out to make room for her in the main part of the house. However, Trina is convinced that a police visit is imminent so she checks the basement suite.

Wearing dark shades and Kylie's Nike runners, she slips from room to room, keeping low. She flips open each door and jerks back as if expecting a shot, then she launches herself into the room and dives for cover.

“I've seen them do this in the movies,” she hisses over her shoulder to her daughter, who is standing at the bottom of the stairs pretending to stick her fingers down her throat.

Trina inches her way across the room on the floor and closes the curtains before turning back to Kylie. “Shh,” she hisses with her fingers to her lips. “The place may be bugged.”

Telephone, paintings, lamps, and a four-foot-high plastic flamingo all get inspected, though Trina has little idea of what to search for.

“Here's a bug,” calls Kylie, picking a dead spider from behind the television, and she gets a tart look from her mother.

“There's a police car up the hill,” calls Rick as he comes home from the office and catches Trina in the act.

“I know. They're after Janet.”

Rick laughs — he can't help it. “April fool.”

“That is not funny,” screeches Trina, almost convinced that there is a SWAT team hovering in the neighbour-hood, then Rick spots that Kylie is wearing Janet's brown head scarf.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting Janet away from here,” explains Trina, and then she reveals the plan that she has inveigled her daughter into by lifting all embargos. “Kylie is going to run down the street and around the block to draw fire.”

“No way,” says Rick, grabbing his daughter.

“Don't worry, Dad. Mum's paranoid as usual. There aren't any cops. Anyway, they wouldn't fire on an unarmed woman.”

“That lot would fire on their grannies if…” sneers Trina before realizing that her words are self-defeating. “But Ky'll be fine.”

The plan to move Janet to the home of Trina's enema-loving patient, Clive Sampson, was welcomed by the elderly man when Trina asked him.

“I wouldn't mind the company,” the septuagenarian readily admitted, and the fact that Janet was wanted by the police didn't faze him at all.

“I've done a few things in my time —” he started, but Trina stopped him.

“I'm sure we all have, Clive. But Janet is innocent, OK?”

Janet sits on Rob's bed caressing her crucifix as Trina outlines her plan. The homecare nurse looks into her charge's face as she speaks and notices that some changes have occurred since the first time she saw the terrified woman. Gradual awareness of her surroundings and some decent food seem to be softening her, although at the mention of the police the muscles of her cheeks harden and her eyes glaze as she focuses intently on the face of Jesus.

“Don't worry,” soothes Trina. “You'll be safe with Clive. He's a very nice man.”

Janet relaxes, although the transition seems to leave her in a deeper fog. However, a moment later, something in her questing eyes tells Trina that she is trying to look forward.

“We'll just wait until it's dark,” Trina is telling her when Daphne phones with an update on her meeting with Donaldson.

“I've got a plan,” Trina tells the Englishwoman excitedly as she picks up the phone in her bedroom.

“I remember the last one,” replies Daphne sourly, recalling the other woman's hare-brained scheme to raise
money for kidney transplants by pedalling a kidney-shaped quadricycle from Vancouver to New York. “It's downhill all the way,” the zany Canadian announced as they set off together on a practice run, only to end up imprisoned in a secret government establishment in the mountains of Washington State.

“No. This is a good one,” Trina carries on, undaunted, before explaining her intent to secrete Janet in a safe house and then infiltrate the sect.

The drive to Sampson's house is, as Trina explains to her passenger, in accordance with the tactics she has learned from her private investigator's manual: it is peppered with sudden U-turns, last-minute lane changes, and several close calls with red lights.

“If you so much as touch her or even breathe heavily on her I'll never give you another enema, understand?” Trina whispers harshly to the old man as soon as they arrive, then she turns to Janet with a smile. “You'll be safe here. But don't go outside, all right? Now, any medication. Do you take any tablets?”

“I stopped —” starts Janet, and Clive Sampson jumps in as he rummages into the pocket of his housecoat.

“I've got some you can have.”

“No tablets,” spits Trina, wrenching the package of Aspirins from the old man's fingers. “No tablets, no touching, or no enema. Got it?”

“Sorry, Trina.”

“How long?” asks Janet as she looks vacantly around the large room stuffed with overblown 1960s furniture that will never make it to Sotheby's or Christies.

“Just a few days, until I find out what's going on.”

Ten minutes later, with twenty blocks between herself and her patients, Trina phones Mike Phillips.

“What's going down, Mike?”

“Don't give me that innocent PI crap,” snarls Phillips. “What have you done with her?”

“Who?”

“The crazy lady… you know who. Look, this is getting serious. The DNA we got from the saliva on her crucifix matches.”

“That was only three days. I thought it took weeks.”

“Emergency… murder of a cop.”

“She didn't do it, Mike.”

“Says you.”

“She hasn't got the strength. He was probably a fat, beer-soaked, donut-challenged —”

“It doesn't alter the fact that she was the last one to see him alive,” Phillips cuts in before she goes too far. “We need to talk to her.”

“I'll let you know if I find her,” says Trina, then switches off her phone before he has a chance to reply.

Any residual warmth from the Mediterranean has been swept away by the mistral, and Bliss feels the cold as he sits at his desk culling more and more from his manuscript. Daisy hasn't shown up in days, and, despite what he told her, he is feeling a sense of loss.

The despairing neophyte author doesn't know it, but the heartbroken Frenchwoman has been slowly collecting things from around her house that are tied to him — cards, letters, sapphire earrings, a Tiffany necklace — and has put them in a shoebox. Now she knocks, holding the box in front of her, though whether she wants to ward him off or get dragged in she doesn't know.

She gets dragged in.

“I'm really, really sorry,” he says, but can't help adding that he has seen the woman again — just a glimpse, just the hair, the same familiarity, same vibes.

“Who?” asks Daisy, as if she doesn't care.

“The woman… the one who reminded me of Yolanda,” he says, but his voice fades as he realizes that
he is digging the knife deeper. Then he looks away, embarrassed by the fact that he cannot escape from a dead person. But was she dead? He saw her after the crash, bloodied and broken; he begged the doctor to help her, begged the medics for oxygen. He blotted out the carnage surrounding the crashed plane as he desperately focused on saving her life. But she was gone. He was given the news by Chief Superintendent Edwards himself.

Thoughts of Edwards further sour him as he pictures the poisonous little officer who stomped his way up the career ladder carrying a black book bursting with his colleagues' petty indiscretions. “Bloody Edwards,” Bliss muses under his breath as he recalls the way the man informed him that everything would be taken care of: Yolanda's funeral, her personal possessions, the plane, her aging father, her son. “All taken care of,” the snotty chief superintendent claimed, but no one ever considered Bliss's heart. Who would take care of that?

“Maybe you should look for her family,” suggests Daisy, still hoping that he will find a way to move on, to move back. “You must bring zhis to an end.”

“Closure,” he mutters, but he doesn't want closure. Yolanda is still there, still alive in his mind, as hot and vital as the first time they made love, jammed together in an airplane's toilet where they reached incredible heights as Bliss penetrated her with every inch of his passion and she thrust her pelvis into his groin with heart-thumping power.

“Sometimes I think it's better this way,” he confesses. “At least I can imagine that she is happy somewhere… that's all I want, Daisy. I just want her to be happy.”

Daisy gives a knowing nod. “Like
Grandmère
. Sometimes she thinks that
Grandpère
found someone else in Poland or East Germany. But she still waits. Nearly sixty years and she still waits.”

“Till death do us part…” he murmurs, regretting that he never had the opportunity to say those words to
Yolanda in front of a priest — but would it have made a difference? It may ease the pain a little to imagine Yolanda still alive and vibrant, but the pain won't end until his death. Or, if he is right about the tortured soul of the Man in the Iron Mask, the torment of his lost love will haunt him eternally.

Janet Thurgood still has some memories, worn thin by a regimen of tranquilizers and constant repentance. “You killed your baby,” she repeatedly tells herself as she paces her bedroom in Sampson's house while caressing her crucifix, but those were her husband's words, not hers.

“You smothered him: hiding him in cupboards, in the cellar, in the attic,” Joseph accused, then shook her, screaming “Why?… Why?… Why?” into her face. “You're an evil woman. You'll go to Hell. You'll go to prison,” he yelled at her, and weeks ran into months as she shrank away from the front door at every knock. Then, when he'd broken her, Joseph finally explained that everything had been taken care of.

“Thank you. Thank you,” she cried, throwing herself at his feet, but there was something missing. “Where is he?” she wanted to know. “Where is my baby?”

“He's dead, Janet. Don't you remember? You killed him,” Creston snarled, knocking her down again, and no matter how much she begged and pleaded, she never found her son's ashes or grave.

“It's better that way. I'm protecting you, helping you,” he claimed, implying, Because I love you so much, without saying so.

Janet's next pregnancy followed closely on the death of John. “I'll be more careful this time,” she assured her husband. “This one is yours.”

Bliss is staring at the lemon tree. His manuscript is now in ruins. He's lost his will and his way.
I need a new start
, he tells himself, willing one of the lemons to drop. Nothing happens, and he questions whether he needs to start a new book or a new life.

“I thought I was escaping,” he mumbles, then tells himself that no one escapes from life alive. Escaping from love should be easier, he thought, but it has become harder and harder. And he thinks of Daisy, trying so enthusiastically to win his heart when it was never there to be won.

Poor Daisy
, he thinks, then chastises himself for not foreseeing what might happen during the first few months when there was no magic, no fireworks, just a slow smoulder, then months of emails and long-distance telephone calls. The only fireworks were at the Liberation Day festival when the sky over the island of Ste. Marguerite was ablaze. But afterwards, Bliss fizzled as quickly as the last mortar. Memories of Yolanda put the fire out, although he didn't explain to Daisy, and he still has difficulty saying, even to himself, “I'm in love with a dead person.”

Is that unusual?
he questions, but he is living in a town full of grieving widows, women who, despite more than six decades in black weeds, are unable or unwilling to risk another relationship.

Why is that?
he wonders briefly, though he well knows that it's not just that they are waiting for the return of their lover; it is fear that they might find a greater love and dishonour the one they lost.

Would I want a greater love than what I had with Yolanda?
But he knows that road will drive him in circles.

Samantha Bliss is a London lawyer in her mid-twenties who has been tied to the legal profession since the day of her birth, when her father, Constable David Bliss, paced the
delivery room at St. Thomas's Hospital in full uniform, making the staff as nervous as he.

“Get over it, Dad,” says Samantha when her father phones from the South of France to say that he's broken up with Daisy over his longing for Yolanda.

“Easy for you to say. You've got Peter,” he replies, speaking of his son-in-law and ex-boss, Chief Inspector Peter Bryan.

“What d'ye want, Dad?” she asks, suggesting, I'm real busy.

I want the fireworks back. I want to look into her wide open eyes while we kiss and know that our minds are in unison — that she loves me just as much as I love her. I want to feel our hearts syncopating in harmony.

“I want her back,” is all he says, though Samantha is unsympathetic.