Dead Man's Bones (23 page)

I seized on something else. “You mentioned Andy,” I said. “Who is he?”

“My brother Harley’s son,” Florence replied. “He was such a lovable child, with so much promise. We all thought that he was the hope of the family. The only grandchild, you know. The only one who could carry on our father’s name.” Her old face crumpled, and her pale eyes, the color of water, filled with tears. “It was a tragedy,” she whispered raggedly. “Poor, sweet Andy. Such a terrible—”

“Florence,” Jane said sharply. Her stern shape appeared in the open door. “You shouldn’t tire yourself with too much talk.”

“Oh, but I was only—” Florence began, flustered. “I mean, I wouldn’t—”

“Please don’t, Florence,” Jane said sharply. “I told you about Doctor Mackey’s orders. She even wrote it on your chart. You’re not well enough to have a visitor.” Her glittering glance raked Ruby and me. “Let alone
two
.”

“I’m afraid it’s my fault,” Ruby put in, pushing her chair back and standing up. “But I asked at the nurses’ station, and the charge nurse said I could—”

“The nurse didn’t read the chart,” Jane snapped.

I thought of Helen Berger, with her precise and careful competency. “I really don’t think—” I began, but stopped. An argument would only upset Florence.

Jane stood aside from the door, with a gesture that plainly ushered us out. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a softer tone, “but I’m sure you can appreciate the situation. My sister not only has a fractured hip, but a delicate heart. Even the slightest upset makes her very ill. We’re all terribly worried about her.”

Florence lifted her head and began to protest. “There’s nothing wrong with my—”

“Now, dear,” Jane said, in the soothing tone one uses to a child. “Don’t excite yourself.”

There was a small sound from the bed. Before Florence turned her face away, I saw it again, that look of frightened helplessness, like a mouse cornered by a combative cat. But this time, there was something almost defiant about it, as if the mouse might be on the verge of fighting back. Good for Florence, I thought. It was about time she stood up to her sister.

Ruby bent over the bed and dropped a kiss on Florence’s cheek. “I’ll keep in touch,” she said softly, smoothing the straggly white hair back from the parchment forehead. “When you’re well enough, we can go on with our conversation. China and I would like very much to hear more about your family.”

“Get well soon,” I added.

Florence lifted her glance to us. “I’ll try,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. “And do come back, please.” Her glance darted to her sister, then slid away. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’d like to . . . to talk,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

“Florence!” Jane said. There was a sharp note of warning in her voice. And as we went out the door, she said to Ruby, in an even sharper tone, “I intend to talk to you soon about your performance in my play, Ms. Wilcox. I found it nothing short of disgraceful.”

Out in the hall, the door safely shut behind us, Ruby stamped her foot.

“What an old witch!” she exclaimed. “That Jane is nothing but a bully. Poor Florence hasn’t drawn an independent breath since she was born. And now Jane is trying to bully me!”

I frowned. “Did you get the idea that Jane doesn’t want her sister to talk to us? Wonder what that’s about?”

“You felt that, too, huh?” We began walking down the hall, Ruby’s yellow wedgies clicking against the tile. “I thought at first that Jane just didn’t want Florence to open the family closet and let the skeletons out.” She frowned. “But somehow I think there’s more to it than that, China. I’m going to ask the charge nurse about visitors. That business about the chart just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Andy,” I said, still turning Florence’s words over in my mind. “The little boy Cynthia Obermann played hide-and-seek with. What was the tragedy?”

“He got shot up in Vietnam and spent a lot of time in hospitals. He was around off and on for a while after he got out, but then he went off to California, and nobody ever heard from him again.”

“Oh, right,” I said, remembering what McQuaid had told me. “The grandson.” Ruby grew up in Pecan Springs and went to high school here, so she knows a great many people. “Were you acquainted with him?”

“Not really. He was older, and he lived with his family in Houston. But he visited in the summers, sometimes. I’d see him playing in the yard when I was riding my bike, on my way to the river to swim.” She shook her head. “You know, that house was spooky even then. Kids would run up and peek in the windows after dark. And people thought the Obermann sisters were weird—maybe because of the way their mother died.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Jumping off the roof is pretty bizarre. It would tend to make the neighbors wonder.”

Ruby’s laugh was subdued. “Are you free this evening? Want to do dinner?” She wasn’t looking at me.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t, Ruby. I’m here to make another visit.” I expected her to ask who I was visiting, and began to grope around for an explanation that wouldn’t bog us down in details about Alana.

But she seemed to be focused on her own distress. “That’s too bad. I wanted to talk to you about . . .” Her voice gave out and her face was gloomy. Not much sunshine here.

“About Colin?”

“How’d you know?”

“A wild guess.” I sighed. I didn’t want to talk about Ruby and Colin until I knew more about Sheila and Colin. Until I knew more about Colin, period. But that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, and in the meanwhile, Ruby was in love. She needed a friendly ear, or maybe a shoulder to cry on. “Want to have lunch tomorrow?” We usually try for Monday lunch anyway—it’s a good day to get together, since the shops are closed that day.

“Yes,” she said, sounding relieved. “My house? And don’t forget that we’re seeing Cass at four-thirty.”

“I haven’t forgotten, believe me,” I said. Ruby’s house. A good place for the kind of girl talk that might turn into a sobbing spree. “Noonish for lunch?”

She nodded. “Thanks for understanding, China.”

“No problemo,” I said, waving my hand airily.

I wished.

 
ALANA’S room was at the far end of the hall, behind a door with a crayon drawing of a black cat riding a witch’s broom. I tapped lightly. After a minute, Blackie came out into the hall, closing the door behind him. I almost didn’t recognize him, because he was wearing street clothes; khakis and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

“How is she?” I asked.

He lifted a shoulder and let it fall, not quite meeting my eyes. “Physically, she’s okay—or she will be when she gets over the discomfort. Getting your stomach pumped isn’t fun. Otherwise, she’s depressed. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk—not to me, anyway.”

“Have you found out how it happened?”

“She told the doctor it was an accident. She lost track of how much she was taking. But maybe she’ll tell you a different story. Who knows where the truth is.” His square jaw was working, and I suddenly felt sorry for him. Cops have to build a psychic barrier against other people’s pain. It must be very hard for them to acknowledge their own. But I could hear it in his voice when he added, “Go easy on her, will you, China?”

I gave him a wry grin. “You mean, don’t chew her out for being careless enough to mix drugs and alcohol?” I didn’t think she’d merely been careless. Women who drink the way Alana had been drinking the other night have a death wish, whether they know it or not. They can get behind the wheel and kill themselves. Or they can kill other people. Or they can go home and pop a handful of antidepressants.

“Yeah.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t chew her out, period. She’s got enough to deal with.”

Alana had a double room, but the other bed was unoccupied, its sheet and blanket stretched tight, the bedside table empty. A television set, tuned to CNN but muted, sat on a shelf on the wall, and a remote control lay on the table beside Alana’s bed, along with a pitcher and a half-empty glass of water with a plastic straw in it, a box of tissues, a kidney-shaped stainless steel spit-up pan, and a small lavender plant wrapped in cellophane—a gift from Blackie, perhaps. A clock hung on the wall, its second hand jerking around the dial in audible spasms. The chair Blackie had vacated, a metal straight-backed chair, sat beside the bed. A couple of magazines—
Texas Monthly
and
Cosmopolitan
—were lying on the chair.

Alana’s bed was cranked up to a half-sitting position. “I didn’t think you’d come.” Her voice was gritty, and she spoke with an effort—not surprising, since she’d had a tube down her throat. Her white hospital gown wasn’t exactly
haute couture,
and her hair, rumpled, was dull and lifeless. Her skin was gray, her cheeks hollowed. Her eyes had a haunted look.

I picked up the magazines and put them on the table. The words “My Friend Stole My Lover” were emblazoned across the
Cosmo
cover, beneath it, “I’ll never trust him again.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk the other day,” I said uncomfortably. I sat down in the chair. What else should I say? Should I apologize for not being there when she needed me? Or should I—

“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Blackie said you wanted to see me.”

She looked away from me, at the wall, at nothing. “I need to talk to you. About . . . about your husband.”

“My husband?” I couldn’t have been more surprised if she had said that she wanted to talk to me about the condition of my appendix, or where I planned to spend my retirement. “What about him?”

My question was answered by a long silence. In the stillness, I discovered that the second hand on the clock was not only audible but noisy,
tick-tick, tock-tock
, that it repeated itself on every beat, but that time itself had seemed to stop. Unbidden, unwanted memories rose up and began to click through my head, measured by the metronome of the irrevocable clock.

Tick-tick
. I remembered Margaret, the woman with whom McQuaid had an affair before we were married. Margaret had been dark like Alana, pretty like her, too. And young, oh so young.

Tock-tock
. I remembered McQuaid’s studied casualness when he’d questioned me about running into Alana at Bean’s, about the topics of our conversation. Was he trying to find out whether Alana and I had become friends, whether she had revealed anything about the two of them? Was he trying to guage my suspicions?

Tick-tick
. I remembered his irritation—no, it was more than that, it was anger—at the idea that Blackie might be romantically involved with Alana. I’d wondered at that. Now I wondered if I had been mistaken, if what I took for anger might have been a secret jealousy.

Tock-tock, tick-tick
. I remembered that old cliché, that one person can never truly know another. McQuaid has been my lover, and then my husband, for . . . what? Seven years? Eight? For a long time. But how well do I know him? Do I know what he’s doing when he isn’t with me? What he’s thinking when he’s silent? How he feels when I can’t read his feelings on his face? The fierce, sweet intimacy that binds us—does he share that same intimacy with someone else? With this woman, who, in one way or another, has tried to kill herself?

“Your husband is . . .” Alana’s words splintered the silence, like glass breaking against a metallic surface. She reached for the glass of water, sipped through the straw, put it back, tried again. This time, she got it out. “He’s . . . investigating me.”

I stared at her. “Investigating . . . you?” I asked blankly.

And then I understood. McQuaid’s other case. His questions to me about Alana’s undergraduate work. His trip to Louisiana—he’d flown to New Orleans, and then driven, most likely, to Baton Rouge. His refusals to answer my inquiry about the department’s slowness to fund her new program. She wasn’t a friend or a lover. She was the subject of an investigation.

“For résumé fraud?” I asked, in a voice that sounded almost normal.

“You knew.” Two red spots glowed on her cheeks. “He’s told you, then.”

I shook my head. “I guessed, just now. I knew the kind of case he’s been working on, but I had no idea that it had anything to do with you.”

I paused. The question, “Do you want to tell me about it?” was on the tip of my tongue. But did I want to hear? Would my listening to Alana’s story in any way compromise McQuaid’s case? Not in any legal way, of course. But morally? Ethically?