Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life (10 page)

“Thanks for saving my life. Honest.”

“She panicked when she realized we were onto her,” Barbara said.

“I wasn’t even onto her.”

“Really? Then what were you up to?”

“I was flirting with her,” I blurted.

To Barbara’s credit, she didn’t comment on that.

“Maybe her heart wasn’t in it—drowning you, I mean.”

“She came close enough,” I said. “If you hadn’t tackled her, I would have been fish food.”

“Maybe she let me rescue you. She can’t be all bad—she was nice to Feather.”

“She killed Melvin and Madhouse,” I said. “Empathy is all very well, Barb, but there are limits.”

“Whatever,” she said. “Paddle!”

Annabel surged out of the canoe and waded toward the thin strip of beach spiked with reeds. We bore down on her, Barbara with her double-bladed paddle raised high like an executioner’s axe. I yanked mine out of the water as we neared the shallows.

Annabel turned like any animal at bay, planting her feet and baring her teeth. Barbara brought the kayak to a splashy stop a couple of feet short of the shore. I leaped out of the boat, charged forward, tripped over a root, and went sprawling.

A sharp pain lanced my ankle when I tried to get up. Annabel rushed past me, leaped back into the canoe, and pushed off hard. Barbara swung the kayak around to bar her way. The canoe wriggled like a snake as Annabel tried to get by. I couldn’t do a damn thing but watch as the drama unfolded. On my ass in the dirt. Soaking wet. In my underwear. With my ankle killing me.

As the canoe slid level with the kayak, Barbara blocked Annabel’s shorter paddle with hers as if they were playing field hockey. Annabel dropped the paddle and reached for Barbara, her red-nailed fingers curled into talons. The women’s struggling bodies grappled the two boats together as they drifted away from shore. The linked boats developed torque and started revolving in place.

Their exertions rocked the canoe more and more wildly. The kayak remained stable, but Barbara’s balance was precarious. I looked around for a crutch and saw a sizeable branch only a couple of yards away. If I could get to my feet and into the water, I could help.

“Why can’t you leave me alone?” Annabel said, panting. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“I won’t let an innocent woman go to jail for what you did,” Barbara spat back.

“I did those women a favor! What a hypocrite that man was. Even namby-pamby little Honey deserved better. And I loved Feather. I brought her up. I would have helped her get away from that asshole she married, but she wouldn’t go.”

So now killing Madhouse was only doing Feather a second favor. I hoped Barbara wasn’t about to say so.

“You tried to drown my best friend.”

That would be me. I felt warm and fuzzy.

“Best friend!” Her voice dripped contempt. “I suppose you call yourself a feminist. You think your men are different. No men are different.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.” Trust Barbara to find the Al-Anon comeback. It was supposed to end the conversation, but Barbara, being Barbara, kept talking. “If Melvin was such a hypocrite, why did you get involved with him again? You were already divorced.”

“Ha! You think that makes a difference?” Annabel lunged forward and grabbed at Barbara’s hair. The boats rocked wildly.

Leaning heavily on the branch, I hopped toward the edge of the water. If I could get in deep enough to float, my injured ankle wouldn’t matter.

“So why did you go back to him?” Barbara struggled to keep her balance as she twisted her face away from Annabel’s questing claws.

“Would you believe me if I said he was good in bed?”

“There must have been more.”

“I’ve never met anyone with more charisma than Mel. I felt twice as alive when I was with him. You probably didn’t feel it. It’s this place! It damped him down. He wasn’t at his best here.”

Women! They can turn even a life-and-death struggle into a therapy group. They had forgotten me. I inched toward them.

“You may be right,” Barbara said. Another Al-Anon comeback. “Anyhow, what bed? You couldn’t be seen together. You had to go sneaking around in the dark.”

“I told him that! He laughed at me! And then he suggested that next time we make it a threesome with Little Miss Dishwater. He said she’d do anything he told her to.”

“So why didn’t you just push him over the edge?”

“I was furious enough,” Annabel said. “He was so arrogant! He said as long as he was around, I’d never be a bestseller or a TV star. But we’d been fooling around with the strap, and all of a sudden he went limp. I thought of pushing him over, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t!”

“You still loved him,” Barbara said.

“Oh, why am I talking to you? It’s this damn place!” Annabel flung herself on Barbara and wrapped her arms around her. They both wobbled. With a twist and a shove, Barbara sent Annabel hurtling into the water. She landed right on me. I went down, glugging. As I bobbed up, I saw Barbara still on board, crouched low to maintain stability and clutching the double paddle. She poked it at Annabel as if she were churning butter.

Annabel seized the paddle by the lower blade and clung to it, throwing all her weight into trying to topple Barbara overboard. One foot treading water, the other balancing in the muck, I yanked the paddle out of Annabel’s hand. Barbara spun the pole around and conked her with the other blade. Teamwork.

Annabel went down without a sound. Barbara leaped in after her.

“Barbara, what are you doing?” I inquired. “The fight’s over. She’s unconscious.”

“We don’t want her to drown,” she said.

“I’ve got her.” I cupped Annabel’s chin in my palm, keeping her nose and mouth above water. She floated, lax against my hip. “You could have stayed in the boat.”

“Oh.” After a moment of merciful silence, she said, “Did you see me throw her out of the boat? The canoe turned right over. Let’s get her into the kayak. Some things you never forget. Back in Girl Scout camp, I passed my tippy-canoe test with flying colors. For the test, you actually overturned it on purpose, then you had to get back in the boat all by yourself. Anyhow, I got her! Didn’t I tell you the Klepper is fantastically stable?”

“God grant me the serenity,” I said. “We did it together.”

Barbara thought about it for a few seconds.

“ ‘And when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.’ Okay, we did it together.”

We heaved Annabel into the kayak, stowed her in the stern, and flopped in after her. With exhausted dips of the paddle, we headed back around the bend. The beach was no longer deserted. Someone had lit a string of lanterns. Flashlight beams cut through the gathering dusk. But the sight I liked best was Jimmy paddling toward us.

“Jimmy!” Barbara shrieked. “It’s okay! We’re okay! We got her!”

“Hey, get down,” I said, “you’re rocking the boat.”

“How’s Annabel?”

“Still out cold.” Just as well.

Jimmy was making excellent time through the water, yelling like a Celtic savage.

“He was worried about me,” Barbara said happily. She doesn’t mind her menfolk fretting. She just doesn’t like anyone to rescue her.

Annabel began to stir as our two-boat convoy made its way to shore. I didn’t have enough juice left for another fight. My ankle throbbed. My paddling muscles ached. If Annabel tried to run, we were all far more likely to fall into the water than to succeed in stopping her. But I needn’t have worried. Callaghan waited on the beach with a couple of his minions. While they dealt with Annabel, Jimmy rushed over to pound me on the back and give Barbara a hug that squeezed the breath out of her.

“How did you get Callaghan to come?” she asked. “I was afraid whoever answered at the police station wouldn’t put you through to him and that if they did, he wouldn’t believe you.”

Jimmy grinned. He had that secret AA twinkle in his eye.

“I reached him at home,” he said. “I had his private number.”

It took me a while to recover. Apart from the near drowning and the sprained ankle, I was shaken by the final scene with Annabel. I had never thought I’d feel sorry for her. Honey felt the same.

“I came back up here,” she told me, “to see what I can do for her.”

“Not to see me?” I looked at her sideways, not sure what answer I wanted.

We sat on a big rock with our feet in the brook. The water was low after weeks of beautiful weather. Maybe none of this would have happened if it had rained more.

Honey laughed. She’d gained a lot of confidence in a short time. Now everyone could see that she was beautiful, like the girl in a Thirties movie who takes off her glasses.

“That too. But Annabel comes first, because she’s in trouble. You’re not in trouble.”

“You don’t know how amazing that is.”

Honey leaned her head against my shoulder and played with the top button on my shirt.

“Would I have liked you before?”

“I doubt it.” I didn’t like to think about it.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’ve been so sweet.”

Then we got mushy.

Barbara’s glee at my having needed to be rescued kept me from going completely soft. I let her tease me. I liked it. I didn’t even remind her more than half a dozen times that I’d participated in Annabel’s capture.

“Speaking of codependents,” Barbara said, “are you and Honey going to see each other in the city?”

“I love the way you circle about.” I grinned at her. “I’m not sure. Honey wants to go out to Nebraska to see her folks for a while.”

“You could go with her.”

“She says they’ll be shocked enough at how she’s changed from that sweet farm girl they knew. Anyhow, she needs a break from all this. Then we’ll see.”

“You can email,” Jimmy said.

“Thank you for sharing. We already thought of that. Barbara, what would the shrinks call Jimmy’s voice in my head?”

“Your geek introject,” she said. “So why didn’t anyone come when I screamed? Okay, we called, so it was all right, but that wasn’t until after I’d gone up against her by myself and brought Bruce in. I’m a bit pissed off about that. Here I had the presence of mind to scream, I didn’t even get embarrassed, and then nobody came.”

“I would have, pet,” said Jimmy, “but I didn’t hear you. I was miles away. Real
and
virtual miles.”

“I was busy drowning,” I pointed out. “I loved your screams. I’m deeply grateful that you screamed. But maybe they sounded playful from a distance.”

Underneath all the New Age earnestness, the Farm was nothing but a big goofy summer camp for grownups. People were always hooting or howling as they frisked around.

“I knew it was Annabel,” said Barbara. “I’m still not sure if she did it to get to the top. The reality show, the reputation, revenge because he got there himself by climbing on her back. Maybe she simply couldn’t stand him hurting her any more. You know: ‘You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t just shoot ‘em.’ Men!”

“Maybe it was a heart attack,” Jimmy said. “She did say he suddenly went limp.”

“Oh, Jimmy, you’re too nice. Bruce, tell him he’s too nice.”

“You’re too nice, bro,” I said. “You make the rest of us look bad. Anyhow, if he’d died of natural causes, the cops wouldn’t have been conducting a homicide investigation. Nah, she strangled him.”

“It could have been an accident,” he said. “A lovers’ quarrel. We talked about that, remember?”

“If one of you went limp,” Barbara said, “I’d stick around and do CPR, not get the hell out of there the way she did.”

“I know you would, pumpkin,” Jimmy said.

“I’ve already thanked you in fourteen different positions for saving my life,” I said. “Don’t be greedy.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m only saying Melvin’s death solved a lot of problems for her.”

“Okay, then why did she kill Madhouse?” Jimmy asked. “It increased her risk of getting caught.”

“He saw her,” I said, “and then tried to blackmail her.”

“She was doing the world a favor,” Barbara said. “She said so. I have to admit he wasn’t much loss.”

“He was a good cook,” Jimmy said. “If you were a vegetarian.”

“I have trouble putting the two Annabels together,” I said. “The prima donna in the tennis bracelet who was so nasty to Honey and Xena the Warrior Princess who said men are no good.”