Death at the Wheel (3 page)

Julie nodded her assent. When he was gone, she looked at me apologetically. "He's such a doll. Reminds me of my own father. You're awfully lucky, you know, to have a nice family. And I know I shouldn't intrude on a family occasion like this," she said. "Your mother's been so kind to me... to all of us... and I couldn't face the idea of spending the day alone. Somehow the weekend seems so long."

"For me, it was the nights."

She smiled at her daughters. "These two keep me so busy that by evening I'm exhausted."

Camilla, who had opened a book she'd brought, snapped it shut and said, "The Easter Bunny forgot to come." Her voice was filled with the tragedy of the forgotten child. Her mother immediately began maternal efforts at distraction and offered to read the book. Camilla responded but her face remained sad.

I excused myself and went into the kitchen. "How long till dinner?" I said.

"Maybe half an hour. Why?"

"Camilla says the Easter Bunny forgot her. I was wondering if I had time to run down to the store?"

She was immediately part of the conspiracy. "Sure. If you hurry. And there's that huge rabbit that Todd won for Carrie. I wouldn't mind getting it out of the house. I can't believe I kept it this long. And I know I've got some nice baskets upstairs. You know... I don't think you need to leave the house. I've got jelly beans left over from decorating the cake and some chocolate rabbits and a couple other silly things I bought for you and Michael, which you guys don't need. Look in the bottom drawer in the study and see if there's still any of that Easter grass."

In a matter of minutes, two fairly respectable Easter baskets were assembled and filled, two stuffed bunnies in decent shape trotted out, and I was back in the living room, feeling a bit like Mary Poppins. "You know what, Camilla? I think the Easter Bunny left your baskets here," I told her. "At least, there's something that looks like Easter baskets out in the hall."

She bounced to her feet with the rubber resilience of the young and then stopped, waiting for her little sister. "Come on, Emma," she said, holding out her hand, "let's go see." Emma, tiny like her mother, but dark-haired as well as dark-eyed, crept cautiously off her mother's lap and seized her sister's hand. Together they trotted to the door and disappeared. The hall echoed with childish shouts and then they were back, clutching bunnies and baskets, their little faces shining.

Julie Bass took a drink of her wine and set it on the table with a trembling hand. "Thank you for doing that. You're so kind... I'm afraid I'm going to cry again," she said. "That seems to be what I do most of the time these days. You'd think after a while a person would run out of tears."

I'd said the same thing myself once, to my friend Suzanne, and I knew exactly how she felt. I sat down beside her and put an arm around her thin shoulders. She buried her face in my shoulder and cried. I rubbed her back and murmured soothing little noises, thinking about the unfairness of life. Even through the wool of her suit, I could feel her bones. She was so little she felt like she might break in my hands. Oddly, inappropriately, I wondered how any man could bring himself to make love to a woman so small and delicate. That's how we were sitting when Michael and Sonia arrived.

Michael took in Julie's tearstained face and the two little girls in Dad's lap. "What's this, sister dear?" he said. "Have you begun to take in strays?"

"Charity begins at home," I said. "This is Julie Bass. She's one of Mom's volunteers at the hospital. She's just lost her husband. Julie, my brother Michael. And Sonia."

Sonia, hanging back behind Michael, curled her lip as though she thought losing husbands was in very poor taste. She probably did think that. Generosity was not in Sonia's emotional vocabulary. She'd been remarkably cold when David died. Never called, never visited or invited me over even though they had lived quite nearby back then. She made no effort to greet Julie. Instead, she stroked her sleek hair and held her hand out in front of her as though admiring her nail polish. On the third finger of her left hand was a gorgeous emerald. Michael and Sonia had been semi-engaged forever and had lived together for years, but they'd never bothered with the formality of a ring before. This was serious.

I managed to convert my first reaction, "Oh shit!" into a sisterly expression of joy. "Oh, Sonia!" I said. "Does that mean? Are you and Michael?"

She actually simpered. There's no other word for that twisted wriggle. "Yes. Yes we are!" she said. "Can you believe it?"

If I could believe in the IRA and the PLO, I could certainly believe in Michael and Sonia getting married. In their own perverse ways, the two of them were made for each other. "Oh, Sonia," I said. "How lovely. Are you going to do the whole formal wedding thing ?"

"Of course," she said, smiling down at her ring. "And I do hope you'll be one of my bridesmaids."

I tried not to grimace. Sonia's taste made my teeth hurt. I could easily imagine Grecian dresses with one breast nearly bared—quite a sight when you're well endowed—or perhaps little Christian LaCroix puffy skirted minidresses with ballet tops or some sort of tribal dress complete with turbans. "I'd be honored," I said. Even though she doesn't like Sonia, my mother would be pleased. She was very disappointed when I didn't have a big wedding.

Julie got up and came over to admire the ring. I envied her grace. If our positions had been reversed, I would have run sobbing out of the room. Mom joined us and we all stood there making pleasant small talk about weddings. The scene had all the elements of a play. But who would write it? Albee? Shaw? Moliere? Perhaps Beckett. Call it
Two Widows and the Bride-to-be
or
Waiting for the Wedding.
It was definitely not Neil Simon.

I grabbed my wine and took a gulp. When I set it down, I saw Michael watching me, a knowing grin on his face. Knowing but incorrect. Michael is under the mistaken impression that I drink too much. I repressed the urge to stick out my tongue. "Congratulations, Michael. Do you have a date for the happy event?"

"Labor Day weekend," he said.

Appropriate, I thought.

"Dinner's almost ready," Mom said. "Has everyone been offered a drink? Sonia? Michael? And you've all met Julie?" We murmured our assents. "I'm afraid I don't have a high chair for Emma."

"It's all right, Mrs. McKusick," Julie said. "She can sit on my lap."

"Linda. Please. You must call me Linda."

So all of us, Mom and Dad, a.k.a. Tom and Linda McKusick, and Michael and Sonia, and me, Thea Kozak, and Julie Bass and her two sweet daughters, all sat down to Easter dinner, and it was a lovely dinner. Mom is one of the best cooks I know. Camilla ate three slices of ham, Michael took a mound of sweet potatoes big enough for a family of four, Emma sat on Dad's lap and carefully picked peas off his plate with her tiny fingers and fed them to him, occasionally eating one herself, Sonia spent the meal carefully cutting pieces of lettuce into smaller bits and even ate a tiny piece of ham—she's perfected the art of converting air into calories—and Julie Bass rearranged the food on her plate and didn't eat a bite. I was hungry and ate like a horse, all the while thinking that Scarlett O'Hara's mammy should have taken me into the kitchen and fed me beforehand so I could have made a more ladylike display.

The conversation bounced between wedding talk and attempts to make Julie feel at home. Mom sang Julie's praises. Julie responded politely with reminiscences about her own family dinners, kind comments about the food she wasn't eating, and the pleasures of happy family celebrations in general, while Sonia fretted about the difficulties of finding a caterer who could do low-fat cuisine. No one asked about my work, which I didn't mind, and the only question concerning Andre was an oblique insult from Michael about whether I'd gotten over my "men in uniform" fantasies. I said I hadn't. I didn't waste my breath explaining that detectives didn't wear uniforms.

Afterward there was a cake with seven-minute frosting, decorated with jelly beans, as well as a more adult Key lime tart. We got through dinner cheerfully enough, but when we sat in the living room for coffee, Julie Bass's quiet sadness filled the room until conversation was impossible. As before, she and Camilla sat on the wide sofa with its cheerful chintz covers, looking lost and forlorn, and Julie seemed too worn out to keep up a social facade any longer.

Only Emma was unaffected. She'd fallen in love with my father and was sitting in his lap looking at a book. Dad is one of those men born to be a grandfather. Too bad neither of his own children was obliging him.

Ever a workaholic, I could practically feel the clock ticking as I imagined the mountain of stuff that was waiting for me at home. Finally, I just had to go. I quickly said and did all the right things, kissed everyone good-bye, and let Dad help me into my coat. Julie Bass followed me to the door, held out her little hand, and, when I took it, clung to me like a trusting child.

"Could I call you sometime?" she said. "It might help to... to talk with someone who understands."

"Of course. Anytime. And I do mean anytime. Midnight. Four a.m. Whenever. Sometimes it helps just to know there's someone you can call." I wrote my home number on my card and gave it to her.

"You're so kind," she said. "I'm glad your mother invited me." I left her standing there, staring after me like an abandoned puppy watching its owner walk away, sad-eyed, innocent, and trusting.

I meant to go home, take my walk, and immerse myself in work, and that's what I tried to do. The walk on the beach part went okay, but when I got back to my desk, spread out my papers, and tried to make sense of the garbled materials the admissions director of Laidlaw School had sent me, I kept seeing Julie Bass's face. Wishing, though I knew better, that there was something I could do to make things easier for her, to soften the blow and shorten the period of mourning. She seemed so lost and helpless. So stunned by the unexpected blow life had dealt her.

We were in a busy phase at work, trying to finish projects for schools that wanted them before the end of the academic year in order to do some strategic planning before their faculties left for the summer. I didn't have time for maidens in distress and other good works, no matter how great the need. If that was heartless, so be it.

Irritated, I grabbed a yellow pad and started making notes.

The papers were such a muddle it was no wonder Laidlaw was having admissions problems. The admissions director, a cheerful, ruddy-cheeked old boy who'd gone to Laidlaw, worked for Laidlaw for forty years, and would willingly lay down his life for the place, was still back in the last century. The last straw was his avuncular habit, anathema in this age of sexual harassment, of patting young boys on the rump, a habit that he had carried over, without any thought of the consequences, to the young girls that Laidlaw was now admitting. Parents had been complaining and poor Mr. Cosgrove, bless his doddering old heart, didn't have a clue what the fuss was about.

The headmaster did, of course, but he suffered from another disability that runs rampant in independent schools: indecisiveness. He didn't want to do anything to hurt Cosgrove's feelings, like reprimand him or fire him, and Cosgrove was immune to more subtle remedies. It was ironic, really, that they'd decided to hire me to handle the problem, because they were paying me to tell them what they already knew: Cosgrove has to shape up immediately or you're going to have a lawsuit on your hands. Furthermore, I was going to follow it up by saying they needed to revamp their entire admissions system and begin looking for a competent new assistant director who could help them ease Cosgrove out the door.

Harsh, perhaps, but sometimes that's what EDGE, the consulting group I run with my friend Suzanne Merritt, is hired for—to provide people with paper spines when they lack backbones of their own. I worked efficiently for a couple hours, reading, analyzing, making notes, but then my eyes began to glaze over. I'm only thirty but sometimes I think old age is already creeping up on me. I used to be able to work so hard.

As the lovely April day sank gradually into purple night, I couldn't keep my eyes on the papers. Forlorn images of Julie Bass were coming between my eyes and the page. Something about her brought out my protective instincts. She seemed so alone and so utterly beaten down by her situation. I'd only known her a few hours, and I'm not a soft touch, so I wondered what it was about her that got to me like that. And as I sat and stared at the pages, I realized what it was.

She reminded me of Carrie, my lost sister. Julie had that same waiflike quality. I always thought of Carrie like that. Lost was a description that had fit. It was her sense of not belonging that had sent her searching for her birth parents and now she was lost forever. Viciously murdered. A tiny blonde in the midst of a family of dark giants, my adopted sister Carrie had, from the moment my parents brought her home, been able to twist me around her finger. I'd spent twenty-one years running interference for her and being her second mother. Not always consistently. I hadn't been there to keep her from getting killed. But I'd been there to find her killer. It was the only thing I could do for her.

I was annoyed with my mother for inviting Julie Bass and expecting me to help her. When someone's loss is as new as Julie's, there isn't much you can do, except make tea and soup, hand out tissues, and reassure them that it's okay to feel sad. Healing take time. But now I understood better why she'd done it. Like me, when she looked at Julie, she saw Carrie. And like me, she was still trying to do the right things, still trying to fix what couldn't be fixed. Conditioned by Carrie, we saw Julie broken down on the highway of life, and we had to stop and help.

 

 

 

Chapter 3