Death at the Wheel (42 page)

"I'll send someone, ma'am," he said in his police dispatcher's dispassionate voice. "If you'll give me your address." She gave it and he disconnected.

She stood a while, holding the bleeping receiver while the microwave cried at her like an unmilked cow, the mechanical world crying out for attention. The best way to forestall panic was to do something, anything to occupy her mind and keep out the awful thoughts. Call the neighbors. She tried them all. No one had seen anything. Everyone was sorry they couldn't help. And still no Stephen and no police. She'd finish the cookies. She turned on the oven and got out some baking sheets. Wait. She hadn't looked up stairs. Stumbling in her hurry, she rushed up the stairs and into his room, hoping, praying to find him there bent over a book. It was dark and empty, the only sound the bubbling from the fish tank.

She shut the door quickly on the emptiness and hurried downstairs to silence the microwave. She measured out a cup of sugar. Went to dump it into the bowl. Couldn't find the bowl. But she must have gotten out a bowl. Maybe she was losing her mind. Better her mind than her child. She couldn't bear that. Not again. Then she remembered. She'd left the bowl out in the yard. As she rushed to the door, something rustled by her ear, something in her hair. She snatched at it, dashed it to the floor, hoping it wasn't a bug. A leaf. She put a cautious hand up to her head, felt the leaves and sticks, and looked in the mirror.

She looked like a lunatic. Her face and shirt were streaked with mud and stained green from rushing through the bushes, from crawling around the culvert. Looking down, she saw that her shoes were green and muddy. Stephen would be upset, she thought, and then, who the hell cares. She opened the door and would have raced down the driveway to the mailbox, but there was a big man standing there, a cold-faced, red-haired stranger, holding her missing bowl.

"Lost something?" he asked.

Numbly, she took the bowl and tucked it under her arm. "Yes. My child. I've lost my child." It hurt to say the words.

"Detective Gallagher. May I come in?" His voice was gravelly and cautious. She knew instantly that there would be no comfort coming from this man. Over his shoulder she watched the Lexus coming up the drive, watched Stephen get out, his face set and terrible. She knew he was holding back the same fears she was feeling, holding them back and determined to master them. Stephen had little patience with weakness, with fear. Except when it was David's. There, through some resource that Rachel had never understood, he always found the patience and gentleness he needed.

She ran toward him, her arms out, seeking some reassurance that things would be all right. He stopped and stared at her. "Rachel, for heaven's sake, have you looked in a mirror? Have you seen yourself?" He sidestepped and headed toward Gallagher and the house.

"I wasn't thinking about me. I was thinking about him," she said, but Stephen wasn't listening. He'd shaken Gallagher's hand and was leading him inside. Rachel turned to follow and ran into an impenetrable truth, standing like a barrier between herself and the door. This was really happening. This wasn't her vivid imagination or an excess of worry. Not a dream or an irrational fear. While she was at the store buying sugar and peanut butter and listening to an old lady's complaints, someone had come along and snatched her child. Taken her son. Her David.

She collapsed on the step like a puppet whose strings are cut, arms folded tightly around her body to keep the pain from blowing her apart. Tears poured down her face, but she couldn't cry out or even sob. The horror of it stunned her into silence. She could only crouch there like some helpless animal while the realization pierced her like a thousand swords. This was really happening. David was gone.

"Rachel. Hurry up! We're waiting," Stephen called.

Heavily, gravid with grief, with fear, with the burden of a thousand maternal imaginings filling her mind, she pushed herself up and headed not inside, but down the driveway, down the road toward David's bike, toward her last tangible link to her son. She approached it carefully, as though an inanimate conglomeration of metal parts could be sensitive, and stood staring, her hand outstretched, reaching to touch it, to put her hand where David's had so recently been. It shimmered before her blurry eyes, proud and red.

"Don't touch that, please, ma'am." Gallagher stepped between her and the bike so abruptly she stumbled backward. She hadn't heard them coming.

Stephen caught her arm roughly and set her on her feet. "What do you think you're doing, Rachel? Come inside. The detective needs to talk to both of us," he said.

Rachel looked up into his tight, fierce face. "He must be so scared," she said.

Stephen's face softened and she saw the fear that matched her own. He put a supporting arm around her. "He must be. But don't worry, Rachel. We'll find him. We've got to find him." Together they went inside to talk to Gallagher.

 

 

 

 

 

Excerpt from

 

Death in a Funhouse Mirror

 

by

 

Kate Flora

 

© 1995, 2011 by Kate Clark Flora

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

I looked over the top of my book at Andre, asleep in his lounge chair, looking gorgeous and ridiculous in the tiny red bathing suit that had been the reason it took us from nine o'clock, when we woke up, until almost eleven to get from the bedroom out to the deck. It was the kind of suit I used to look at in stores and laugh, unable to imagine anybody wearing one. In fact, I had laughed when he came out of the bathroom wearing it, until he pointed out that my bikini bottom was even briefer. I disagreed, and we ended up standing in front of the mirror, hip to hip, comparing.

For us, getting that close is always dangerous. There are a lot of things we disagree about. He's a cop, a Maine state trooper, and I'm a consultant to independent schools. Sometimes I find him too rigid, too judgmental, or so distracted by his work—he's a homicide detective—that he's completely unavailable. He says I'm too impetuous, and too prim—an unlikely combination, if you ask me, but that's what he says—and I also have an incurable tendency to get wrapped up in my work. We don't live together. We don't even live in the same state, which may help us get along despite our differences, but when it comes to our physical relationship, we have no disagreements. So, even though we'd planned to have breakfast out on the deck and spend the morning reading, we'd gotten sidetracked.

Staring at that little bathing suit had naturally led to staring at his body. I'd always assumed those small, revealing suits were for slight men, or men with the exaggerated vee shapes of models. Andre isn't built like that. He has what I think of as a sturdy body. Not stocky, he doesn't have an ounce of fat, but he has a substantial presence, nice strong legs, and a comfortably hairy chest. It's okay with me. I like substantial men. I'm no peanut myself. If I were a frightened crime victim, Andre Lemieux is exactly the kind of cop I'd want to show up and protect me, strong and kind and comforting. If I were a bad guy, I'd sit up nights praying that he never came after me. There's something about the hard glare in his eyes, and a subdued anger that emanates from him, that tells you how much he hates the bad guys and makes you sure he'll get them in the end. I'd been on the receiving end of his inquisitorial technique when my sister Carrie was killed. I knew how tough he could be.

The "in the mirror" comparison eventually led to the conclusion that we had to take the suits off to compare them properly, and since we hadn't seen each other for three weeks, that naturally led to other things. We concluded with a frantic raid on the refrigerator instead of the genteel breakfast I'd envisioned, and now we were out on the deck of my new condo, where we could look past a patch of green lawn onto a delicious expanse of blue water, just like the real estate ad had promised.

Not that Andre was looking at anything. He'd arrived in the night, nearly comatose from exhaustion, announced that he'd finally arrested a suspect in his latest homicide and fallen asleep with his clothes on. Once we made it out to the deck, he hadn't even pretended he was going to read, just lay down in the chair, let me cover him with sunscreen, and asked to be turned in an hour. Andre the human steak.

I wasn't doing much better. My mind was so bleary from another frantic week of work that I had passed up the serious book I was reading and was dithering over a piece of bodice-buster trash. So far, the characters in the book had nothing on us. I kept losing my place and couldn't keep the players straight. All the women were bubbleheaded and gorgeous, even the ones who were supposed to be executives, and all the men were studly and smoldering. Their lives were so sexually supercharged no one could even buy a pair of socks without someone of the opposite sex staring intently at their trembling cleavage with knowing blue eyes. Their dialogue had been written by a third-grader. I stuck with it for a while, since my mother, who is no bubblehead, had suggested I'd like it, but familiarity bred contempt. I stuffed it under my chair and went around to the front to get the paper.

The headlines were the usual mix of financial scandals, the president's grandstanding in the international forum while the country went to hell, and the latest sensational murder. I often skip the front page, unless there's a story relating to education, but there was something about today's murder that caught my eye. A prominent woman psychologist, a so-called "founding mother" of the movement for introducing the woman's perspective into psychology, had been stabbed to death in Anson while she was out walking her dog. Gripping the paper, I dropped into my chair and read the story.

The woman, Helene Streeter, age fifty-three, had been on the staff of Bartlett Hill, a well-known private psychiatric hospital. Her husband, Clifford Paris, was head of the childrens' outpatient unit there. According to neighbors, it had been Ms. Streeter's custom to walk the family dog in the evenings after supper, often accompanied by Mr. Paris. When Ms. Streeter did not return from her walk, her husband had gone out looking for her. He had found her lying in the shadow of a hedge a few houses away. A trail of blood on the sidewalk indicated that she had crawled some distance before collapsing. She was rushed to Mt. Lucas Hospital, where she died from multiple stab wounds. A hunting knife, possibly the murder weapon, was found on the lawn of a house several blocks away.

The story continued, but I'd read enough. I folded up the paper with shaking, ink-smudged fingers and stuffed it under a pot of geraniums so it wouldn't blow away. Most stories of violence and death occur under circumstances so remote from everyday life that they don't touch us. We read them, tut-tut about the state of things, and move on. This one was different. I hadn't seen much of them lately, but I knew Helene Streeter and I knew Clifford Paris. Knew them pretty well. Their daughter, Eve, had been my friend in college, and my roommate for a few years after college, when I was busy being a reporter and a social worker, and she was getting her master's degree in social work. We lived together until she moved to Arizona. Back then, Eve's relationship with her parents had been strained. They still treated her like a child and she still carried an adolescent chip on her shoulder so big it sometimes blocked her vision, but she went through the motions of a dutiful daughter, and that included dinner with her parents. I often went along as a buffer.