Death in a Funhouse Mirror (37 page)

"What is that supposed to mean? That you have several other people out there asking questions who've come to the same conclusion, or that since I haven't been able to reach the conclusion you want me to, I am disloyal and unworthy and thus relegated to the scrap heap?"

"Exactly," she said.

"Exactly what? There were two choices in that question."

"You're on the scrap heap," she said. "This isn't some sort of joke, you know. My mother is dead. You can laugh about it. Cliff can go around being happy, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten. Maybe it would help if you could see some pictures. Maybe if you saw what he did to her, you wouldn't take this so lightly."

"Yeah, I noticed you looked as depressed as hell when you rode off on your bike today." Once I got started, I couldn't stop.

Eve had finally pushed the reject button, and for once, friendship, past loyalties and sympathy for her loss didn't override my impulse. "You're so fixated on your own situation you don't give a damn about anyone else. While you've been recruiting your sources to monopolize my answering machine, and while I've been scurrying around fitting in interviews with all those people around my busy schedule and my partner's wedding, I've had to chase away a midnight intruder with a knife and spent an evening in the emergency room after someone knocked me out, set my place on fire and burned up all my clothes. You aren't the only one with troubles."

"I had no way of knowing that."

"Except the only way people know anything about each other—by asking. Even if you were too distracted to trouble yourself with minor civilities, like noticing that I have a bandaged hand and asking if I'm okay, there's still the fact that I've done what you asked, and it hasn't been easy, believe me, hearing the things people have to say about Helene." I stopped myself, but it was too late. I'd gone too far.

"What do you mean? What are people saying about my mother?"

"She had an interesting personal life."

"They're lying, Thea. Lying. All of them. Which one was it? What did she say? I have a right to know."

"The people I've talked to believe they spoke in confidence. I can't tell you."

"You'd better tell me," she said, her voice shrill and rising. "They only talked to you because I asked them to. They were only supposed to talk about Cliff. Cliff and his relationship with Helene. That's all that was relevant. I can't believe they let themselves go and gossiped like that. Bitches. I want to know everything, Thea. I insist."

Now she had me yelling, too. "When I agreed to do this, you agreed to listen to what I had to say and consider it. Now I've t
old
you there's nothing. There's nothing which singles Cliff out. So they fought? Most people do. So she took a self-defense course? Lenora says that's because of a patient's husband. It could have been that husband. So Helene wouldn't give him a divorce? He still could have gotten one. This isn't the Dark Ages. People can get divorces even if their spouses don't want them to...."

"He didn't want a fight," she interrupted. "Have you told all this to the police?"

"Yes, I have... but listen..."

"Then why haven't they arrested him?"

"You aren't listening. Because they have no reason to, Eve. It could have been a case of mistaken identity. It could have been a stranger, or someone she'd been involved with. If she was scared enough to take a self-defense course, that suggests something ongoing, someone she was afraid of. Lenora says someone was following her; Cliff didn't need to do that. If she was afraid of Cliff, she could have just moved out. It could just as easily have been someone who threatened her, or one of her lovers, or Martha Coffey, Lenora Stern, Rowan Ansel, or even you."

I was trying to make her take a balanced view, to see how inconclusive her information was. "I don't know what else I can do, Eve. But you've got to see that I tried. That like you, I only want to make things right again. I loved your mother...."

She didn't take it that way. "I hate you," she said. "You're not my friend. How dare you accuse me... accuse our neighbors... her friends... suggest that my mother was a... I can't even bring myself to say it... it's obscene... filthy... indecent to even suggest. I never would have dreamed you could stoop so low, even to protect him. When are you going to stop seeing him through rose-colored glasses? No one stood to gain by her death the way he did. Would you see things my way if I was paying you? If I could offer you a fat consulting contract? My ever practical friend with her eye on the bottom line. I was a fool to suppose that our friendship meant enough to keep you objective."

I'd listened to enough. I didn't care if it was hysteria or grief. I was neither masochistic enough nor other-directed enough to take any more abuse. "I'm not the one who's having trouble being objective, Eve. I realize what I've told you is upsetting; I appreciate your frustration about not having your theory proved. I even admire you for being so determined to find your mother's killer. I was the same about Carrie, but what you're doing is trying to shoot the messenger because you don't like the message. You've got to face the facts, Eve. Your mother had a secret life—dozens of lovers, staying out all night...."

Oops. I'd let her get me so upset I was blurting out everything. Well, too bad for her. There was too much pretending going on. It was time for the truth. "Didn't you know about that?"

"That's a lot of bullshit. My mother wouldn't have..." she began. I hung up on her.

Her presence haunted me for a while. Images from our years together. Of her perched on the stool in Helene's kitchen, her head bobbing, her bright eyes fixed on me and Andre, shattered and helpless. The pain in her voice describing the way Helene had died. I was gripped by doubt. Was I being too hard? Judging her too harshly? Asking too much of her, so soon after the event? The "fixer" part of me wondered if I'd tried hard enough, but my common sense agreed with Cliff that she'd never listen to anything I said that didn't prove her point. It was time to let it go and get on with my own life. Eventually I was able to put her out of my mind and get to work.

When Cliff called to see how I was doing and reiterated his request that I stop helping Eve, I told him that was exactly what I intended to do.

Comfortable in gym shorts and David's baggy old sweatshirt, I curled up on my new sofa and immersed myself in refinements of the Bartlett Hill project. The sofa gave off a rich, leathery smell and felt wonderful against my skin. I felt sinful and self-indulgent as I dug my toes down into its buttery soft surface.

Tomorrow Lisa and I were going to begin a series of interviews designed to give us an inside picture of what the hospital was like. How it worked. How the staff perceived it. Later, we would expand the picture by getting the views of patients and former patients, where possible, of their families and referring clinicians, and then the views of potential referral sources. When I wasn't being scared that it was too different from what we usually did for us to do a good job, I was excited about the possibilities of the project. I take challenges very personally, thriving on them even when they're scaring me to death.

At ten I got the munchies, made myself a big bowl of popcorn, and decided to let Jack take his hat off. I made him keep the hat right beside him, and banished him to the cupboard as soon as I'd seen enough of him. Before I met David, I considered bourbon and popcorn to be one of the basic food groups. He'd changed all that. The man was constantly hungry, rail thin, and extremely grateful for every meal. Feeding him was always a challenge. No matter how much I cooked, or how much he ate, he was always ready for more, and never gained an ounce. For a few brief years I was a model of domesticity, if you can be considered domestic when you and your husband do the dishes together as fast as you can and then play two hours of killer tennis. David embraced physical activity with the same enthusiasm he had for food. We were a pair of lean, mean, fighting machines. After he died, I filled up all my time with work, and often forgot about eating entirely.

I immersed myself in a black-and-white movie in which the voluptuous Jane Russell sauntered around from dawn till midnight in strapless, skintight dresses, wondering how my clients would react if I showed up at 9:00 a.m. in a sarong. Vincent Price was using his big-game hunting skills to save Robert Mitchum when the doorbell rang. The same instincts which had warned me not to answer the phone told me who, among the many possible suspects, would be standing on the doorstep. Nevertheless, I peeked cautiously through the peephole and determined that it was not a foe before I undid all the locks. I opened it to Andre, standing on the doorstep, holding an armload of lilacs.

"Instant replay?" he asked.

"More like a twenty-four-hour delay," I said, throwing myself at him. "What took you so long?" Once again the lilacs did not get much consideration.

When we came up for air, after a kiss that would have met "Crash" Davis's standards, he murmured, "Bourbon and popcorn."

"Great detecting, Trooper," I said, "you want some?"

"I was hoping for something a bit more substantial, but I know what your refrigerator is like. And there's something else I wanted first."

"I might surprise you." His eyebrows went up. "About the refrigerator, I mean."

"Later," he said, putting his arms around me and waltzing me toward the bedroom.

"Did I show you my new couch?" I asked.

"What?"

"My new couch." I led him over to it. "Just run your hand over that leather."

"I'd rather run it over you."

"I was just sitting here thinking how good it would feel against my skin."

He shook his head. "Uh oh. Sounds like the lady has been neglected."

"And whose fault is that?"

"And you want to try out your new couch?"

"Well, the idea had occurred to me."

"Not to be too blunt or anything, but as long as I can get close to you, I don't care if it's in a broom closet." I started across the room. "Now where are you going?" he said.

"To turn off the lights, unless you'd like this to be a public performance. The curtains are at the cleaners. They were a mess after the fire."

He took off his shirt and dropped it on the coffee table, then undid his belt. "Ready when you are."

"You usually are," I said, smiling for what felt like the first time in days, and snapped off the lights.

 

 

 

Chapter 24

 

We had a midnight supper of steak and eggs and fried potatoes. Thanks to the miracle of microwaving I was able to precook the potato and defrost the steak while the grill warmed up and I sautéed the peppers and onions. Then Andre took the steaks outside and cooked them while I scrambled the eggs and mixed them with the veggies in one pan and fried potatoes with lots of fresh ground black pepper in another. I love fried potatoes so much it's a miracle I don't weigh four hundred pounds. Forget about fancy aftershaves. If a man came down the street smelling like fried potatoes, I'd follow him anywhere.

I was wearing my gym shorts and Yale sweatshirt. Andre was wearing a threadbare athletic shirt and cutoff sweats and we were truly an elegant couple. After a long winter being bundled up, all that exposed skin was almost too much, leading to a lot of not-quite-accidental touching and bumping. I was tempted to abandon the meal and drag him, like the cavewoman I am, back to my lair, but I exercised self-restraint, or maybe I just sublimated my desires onto the food. Neither of us approached the meal with finicky appetites. We washed it down with the champagne Andre had brought, accompanied by a mound of English muffins smeared with cherry jam.

Nothing like a little exercise to stimulate the appetite. The couch had felt just as good as I'd imagined it would, but maybe I was prejudiced by the fact that everything in the past two hours had felt pretty good. "So what did you think of the new couch?" I asked.

"Nice," he said, "real nice, if you don't mind sex on a surface that creaks like a saddle. It gave things a certain down-home, outdoorsy flair. Come on." He put an arm around my shoulders. "These dishes can wait till morning. We need to get some sleep."

"As long as it's just sleep."

"Scout's honor," he said.

A foolish rhyme I'd heard once popped into my head.

 

In sexual bouts,

And nocturnal rides,

The boy scouts,

And the girl guides.

 

My mind was definitely grade B tonight. By the time I'd finished filling him in on what had happened while he was hiding out in the wilds of Maine, and he'd shared the latest trials and tribulations in pursuit of the bad guys, there wasn't much night left for sleeping, but we made the best of it, curling up like two spoons and falling, in a warm, companionable way, off the edge of the earth.

When the alarm rang at seven, it took a lot of willpower not to shut it off and go back to sleep. Not surprising, given my choices. Here I had Andre, warm and sleepy, his handsome face relaxed and dark with his aggressive beard, one strong bare shoulder uncovered, inviting me to touch him, wake him up and see his ready grin, the warmth in his shiny dark eyes. At Bartlett Hill there'd be Cliff, charming, enigmatic and irritated with me, his greedy, mercurial friend Rowan, and the decidedly unpleasant Roddy Stokes. What a choice. I lingered in bed another ten minutes, avoiding the inevitable moment when my Protestant guilt would take over and march me to the shower, savoring the warmth, my contentment, my sense that here I was completely safe.