Crazy Lady (15 page)

“My patients of course,” she explained as if he should have guessed. “I usually get ones who are on their way out, and I always tell them they'll go to heaven — but I don't believe it.”

Trina has tried believing. She even goes to church occasionally. But she's too curious and too cynical to accept that her patient's sufferings are intended to ready them for their next great adventure.

“Why would a good and merciful God do that?” she has questioned many times as she sat at the bedside of tormented patients while they endured the agonies of a journey that has only one possible end.

However, Trina Button is not the only person with concerns about the immediate future. Her intrusion into the Canadian community has rippled across the Atlantic and sent Joseph Creston flying back to his London headquarters.

“I warned you this would happen,” spits John Mason, but Creston stops him with a hand.

“Browning can handle it. The important thing at the moment is to divert resources to other sectors and make sure all the books are straight.”

“And what about Janet?”

“The Canadian police must have her. The cop's wearing her scarf.”

“And Janet's talking?”

“She doesn't even know what bloody year it is.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“I hope there's none. Browning reckons he'll scare the cop off in a day or so. We'll re-evaluate the situation in a few weeks.”

Trina tests the door to her room for the ninth time. Her watch and her stomach tell her that it is morning — nearing 10:30 a.m. — and she is beginning to panic. Browning hears the handle, looks up from his computer to check the clock, and decides to give her another half an hour.

In St-Juan-sur-Mer, David Bliss paces his apartment with leaden shoes as he constantly turns over the situation in his mind and tries to convince himself that it is just a nightmare. He's even written a poem in the margin of his manuscript:

If this be a nightmare

Wake me soon

That I may not suffer

This intolerable torment.

But as the sun sets on a black day, he momentarily brightens with thoughts that Klaus may not want Yolanda back.
Didn't she say I was the best lover she'd ever had, far better than him?

What has that got to do with it? She must have loved him — she stayed with him for nearly three years.

A knock on the door tries to shake him from the depths. Probably Daisy, he thinks — still tear-filled, still trying — and he's tempted to ignore it, but the caller persists.

“Yolanda!”

She falls into his arms and he drags her inside. “He didn't care,” she blubbers. “What?”

“Klaus. He just said ‘Okey-dokey' when I told him.”

Don't rush, don't overact. She's fragile, be careful. “I love you,” he whispers in her ear.

“I know, and I love you too, David.”

“So, Mary,” says Browning when he eventually opens Trina's door. “Are you ready to begin your journey in search of the Lord?”

“Actually… not today,” she says as she pulls herself up to her full height and tries to march past him. He grabs her upper arm with powerful bony fingers and whispers menacingly in her ear.

“Hand over the tape recorder.”

“What?”

He squeezes hard. “Either hand it over or I'll have you strip-searched.”

“How did you…?” she begins, but notices that a posse of four of his wives are standing fierce-faced ready to carry out his merest wish.

“That's theft,” she protests as Browning snatches the recorder from her, but he just laughs.

“No, Mary. This is Beautiful. Everything here belongs to the Lord.”

Two minutes later Trina is walking the logging road back to Mountain Falls with Browning's warning, “And tell whoever sent you to use a professional next time,” ringing in her ears.

It's ten miles to Mountain Falls and her car, along a road that leads nowhere but Beautiful. She could try calling Rick on her cellphone but figures that it's better if he doesn't know so, as she slogs dejectedly through the silent forest, she sorts through what she has learned about Janet.

“Brainwashed,” she muses aloud, realizing how easy it could be for an insecure woman with low self-esteem to fall under the old charlatan's spell. “Men are so lucky as they get older,” she complains loudly as she scuffs at the loose gravel. “They just get wiser, more mature, and more women. Hah! Look at me: barely forty with stretch marks, wrinkles, and cellulite. I just get more flab and more stupid. International investigator, pah! International idiot. Browning wasn't fooled for a minute. Now what? Give up. ‘Never give up,' the PI manual says. ‘No matter how great the odds against you, never give up. There's always another way.'”

The rattle of an approaching vehicle turns her head.

“Our Lord Saviour thought you might want a ride back to town,” says the driver of the compound's mini-bus, a girl in a brown head scarf who doesn't look old enough for school let alone a driver's licence.

Trina hesitates.

“Come on,” calls the girl cheerfully. “He's a good man. He's just like God. He only wants us to do the right things so that we will be saved.”

“Have you been saved?” asks Trina as she squeezes into the rear seat alongside two skeletonized supplicants.

“Oh yes. We've been saved,” calls the driver over her shoulder, and they set off singing, “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam…”

“We're cleaning up the records for Beautiful,” Mason tells Joseph Creston at lunchtime, but the company chairman seems unconcerned.

“Browning called back,” he replies. “He's got it in hand. The cop ran. Just don't use him for a while.”

“OK, J.C.”

“Any news of where they're holding Janet?”

Mason shakes his head. “Early days. I've got the guy in Vancouver that Browning found working on it.”

“Good man.”

Mason's “guy” in Vancouver, Jody Craddock, is an excop turned private eye who is having no more luck at tracking Janet than the two RCMP officers assigned by Mike Phillips.

Neither Janet nor her host has any reason to venture into the street, and as Trina is the old man's only regular visitor it seems unlikely that she'll ever be discovered.

Clive Sampson may be fifteen years older and somewhat frailer than his guest, but company is company, and since the loss of his wife to cancer he has become addicted to solitaire and staring: the television, the floor, the walls, the ceiling — the depressing view has been much the same wherever he looked. Trina's visits always perked him up, but now, as Janet slowly comes to life, he bubbles with excitement over checkers and Scrabble, and he fusses over her like a new puppy.

Janet still meditates over her crucifix and chants religious incantations, but only when she's alone, and now that her eyesight has improved she is even starting to read.

“Trina should be back in a day or so,” explains Clive as he fishes a couple of ready-to-eat meals from the small freezer and pops them in the microwave. “She's a lovely woman.”

“I know,” says Janet, risking God's wrath by using the kitchen window as a mirror.

Without the head scarf she is less austere, although her pinched features, scraped-back hair, and glasses still give her the appearance of a girl's school headmistress. The ebony-rimmed reading spectacles, part of Trina's PI disguise kit, have brought the world into much sharper focus.

“When did you last have your eyes tested?” Trina asked, aware that Janet was suddenly more alert to her surroundings.

“Our Lord Saviour doesn't approve of adornment,” she replied and was tempted to give them back — but only for a second.

The newspaper cutting from Amelia Drinkwater's photo album has finally drawn Daphne Lovelace back to Dewminster and she sits in a corner booth of a High Street tearoom rereading the headline.

“Suspicious death at Creston Hall,” it states, but she knows that the line is a small-town editor's attention-gaining trick.

“What at first appeared to be the suspicious death of 6-month-old Johannes Creston, heir to the Creston Empire,” the article continues contradictorily, “has been ruled natural causes by Dewminster police and the Coroner.”

That tells me a lot
, thinks Daphne as she skims ahead.

“The child's father was in Zurich at the time…”

That rules him out then
.

“The mother, Janet Creston, (22 yrs. née Thurgood), put the baby into his cot as usual…”

Fair enough
.

“Doctor Symmonds of Dewminster, the family's physician, reports that cot deaths are not uncommon and suggests parents regularly check on their young during the night.”

I wonder if he's still alive
, Daphne is questioning as she orders a pot of Earl Grey from the waitress, then she inquires.

“Oh yeah, luv,” replies the women cheerily. “He comes in here some days. He only lives 'round the corner.”

“Actually,” says Daphne quickly getting up and slipping on her hat. “I think I've changed my mind.”

“Dr. Symmonds?” Daphne asks ten minutes later, having located his Victorian townhouse by the rectangle of wood that used to hold his brass nameplate on the wall adjacent to the black lacquered door.

“Yes?” he acknowledges and invites her in.

The aroma of cigar smoke commingled with mentholated liniment momentarily takes Daphne back to her youth and her father slouched in his Sunday evening chair after a day in the garden, and she hesitates while she imbibes the atmosphere.

“I guess this was your surgery,” she says, taking stock of the room with its old leather couch and wheeled fabric screen and recalling the days when she undressed and shivered in similar rooms.

“Before they opened the new clinic and replaced stethoscopes with a million quids' worth of gadgets that can't tell a tumour from a pimple on your ass,” he says sourly as he ushers her to his living quarters.

“In here,” he carries on, holding a door open, and she joins him in a high-ceilinged day room where he has been playing chess. “Do you?” he asks hopefully, but she shakes her head.

“Not for years. Although I used to.”

“Never mind. What can I do for you?”

Peter Symmonds screws up his face in thought and spends half a minute relighting a cigar when Daphne inquires about the Creston family's loss of baby Johannes.
“Sounds like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” he says as he vigorously shakes out his match. “Though to be frank, I don't remember the case.”

“It was a long time ago,” agrees Daphne.

“Quite.”

“Apparently they lost three.”

“Did they?” he asks while casually continuing with his game.

“You don't recall?”

“Three… no… as I say, it was a long time ago.”

“True,” admits Daphne, but can't avoid noticing that he's made an illegal move. “Should that go there?” she asks, pointing to the misplaced pawn.

Symmonds looks confused for a second as if trying to straighten his mind. “Oh, silly me; no wonder I never win,” he says, forcing a laugh as he rearranges the piece.

“So you don't remember then?” Daphne pushes one more time.

“Sorry,” he says and rises to let her out.

T
he sun has returned to Bliss's Mediterranean world, but he cannot stop himself checking and rechecking the figure in his bed, fearful that the beautiful mirage will vanish with the dawn.

If this be a dream

Wake me never

That I may not suffer

the pain of disillusionment.

He scribbles in the margin of his manuscript, telling himself that this is how his novel should end, realizing that it hasn't been only historical facts that have prevented him from finishing his book about the lovestruck man who incarcerated himself on an arid island to prove his love. He has been held back knowing that, in a way, he was that man; since Yolanda's apparent death, he has been wearing a mask. He has been hiding himself away, protecting his heart in the forlorn hope that one day she might somehow be resurrected. And now she is here, in his apartment, in his bed.

“David,” calls Yolanda softly from the pillow.

“I thought you were still asleep,” he whispers, lying beside her and stroking her face.

“I could you feel you watching me.”

“I can't take my eyes off you.”

“Are you real?” she asks, opening her eyes and peering deeply into his. “Are you real?”

“Of course.”

“I still can't believe it; I still can't believe they lied to us.”

“I know,” he says, slipping out of his dressing gown and sliding under the bedclothes, “but we're together now and no one's ever going to separate us again.”

“Promise, David,” she says exploring his body with her hands.

“I promise, Yolanda.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Of course. Today if I could.”

Instant marriage may not be in the air, but love is, as the happy couple stroll the promenade hand in hand. However, Angeline at L'Escale has heard Daisy's side and is less than welcoming as Bliss and Yolanda stop for a coffee and croissant.

“Hah! So now I suppose you stop zhe writing,” the waitress accuses acerbically without acknowledging Yolanda, and Bliss is forced to defend himself.

“Just for a few weeks, Angeline.”

But Yolanda picks up on the slight and barely waits till Angeline is out of hearing before asking, “What is the problem?”

“Nothing,” says Bliss and changes the topic. “So, why did you come here to St-Juan?”

“I have an apartment,” she replies, waving vaguely towards several harbour-side blocks. “I didn't lose everything after the crash.” But she makes no attempt to be more specific. He would like to see the place, but fears that, in a
way, Klaus is still there, unlike Daisy, who was never more than a visitor in his bedroom.