French Polished Murder (26 page)

Oh, you don’t hear through your child’s ears or see through their eyes, though often if feels like if you just concentrated a little bit you ought to be able to. But you do feel as if your mind is in the two bodies at once and your imperative to live is then part of two bodies. Worse, the body that your senses are actually connected to is not the most important.

I used to admire, and still do, women who give their lives for their children. But I don’t know how much a choice they have. I know that at that moment, as much as my mouth went dry and I wanted to drive far away and call a doctor and Ben’s mom from a distance, most of all I wanted to grab my child and get him out of there, or at least make sure he was safe.

He was sitting there, huddled, his eyes enormous, holding on to Pythagoras who, in turn, stared at me with an expression that seemed to say, “This is another fine mess you got us into.”

I started edging around Ben who had resumed pacing. “Yeah, see, it’s why I have to go there and free them. Because they called to me. And I have to go. You can’t ignore your duty to the dead.” He looked up and repeated emphatically. “To the dead.”

I didn’t care. I’d reached E. I grabbed him and Pythagoras together in a bundle in my arms and started running hell bent for leather to my bedroom. I needed to call someone to come help, and I thought that it was more than likely Ben, in his seeming paranoia, would not let me.

I locked my bedroom door, and set E down. I registered a moment of satisfaction that Ben wasn’t trying to break it down. Given those massive shoulders of his, I doubted the Victorian hinges and lock would keep him out for long. But he wasn’t trying to do that, nor did I even hear him come close and knock.

I fished in my purse for my phone.

“Mommy, what’s wrong with Ben?” E asked. He continued clutching Pythagoras and looked forlorn and confused, as if it might have been something he’d done. He also still had raspberry stains all over himself, so Ben hadn’t bathed him.

Afterward, when he calmed down, I was going to try to pry the sequence of the morning’s events out of E. In retrospect I cursed myself not to have seen the beginnings of this in Ben’s phone call to me at my mom’s. But he had sounded really tired, but still almost rational then.

I wondered what could be causing it, as I dialed the first number that came to mind. If Ben were on some sort of medication, I would have assumed he had taken too much. But as far as I knew, he wasn’t. So what could have caused him to flip out so completely?

Ben was human, as much as he wished to deny it, but he had never been an unbalanced sort of human. In fact, when people talked of the man who kept his head when all around him were losing theirs, it was Ben they were talking about.

“Hello,” Cas’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts.

“Oh, thank God,” I said, realizing after the fact that it was his number I had dialed, and that I’d called his cell phone and not his work number.

“Yes? Dyce? What’s wrong?”

“Ben has gone crazy.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, Cas. He’s walking around the table in the living room and ranting about people buried under the trees and how terrible it is to have your mouth full of dirt.”

“What?” Cas sounded as if he thought that I had gone over the edge.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense. But that’s what he’s saying, and he seems to be hearing voices, and his eyes are all weird, you know, like there is something sly inside his mind, and . . .”

“Uh . . . Don’t do anything. I’m coming right over. Uh. I’d better bring Nick.”

“No,” I said, desperately. If this were something caused by a mini-stroke or something, I could just imagine what Ben would do to me once he came to his senses. He’d say I had let his prospective or perhaps actual boyfriend see him at the worst of possible times. “No, please, I’m sure Ben wouldn’t want—”

“Too late, honey. Nick is right here. I think I’d need a full squad of armed guards to keep him here.”

I heard something in the background that indicated Nick’s agreement.

“Whatever,” I said, giving up. “Just get here quickly, because he’s going crazy and I don’t know what to do and he doesn’t take drugs, so it has to have been a stroke or something. Oh, please, come,” I said.

And at that point, I heard the front door slam with a bang. Turning off the phone, I unlocked my door. The living room was deserted, and out in the driveway, I heard an engine start up.

“Oh, holy fuck,” I said, and before I knew what I was doing, I had picked up E, who was still holding Pythagoras, and taken off toward my own car.

I honestly don’t remember getting in the car, or get
ting E into it, with his seat belt buckled. All I remember is peeling out of my driveway like a bat out of hell.

Some part of my consciousness, way at the back, was aware that I might be giving E material for several years of therapy. Right at that moment, I couldn’t care less. I grabbed my phone from my purse and put it on the seat next to me, even as I did a one-handed left turn out of my street onto Fairfax, about the time I realized that I was in more trouble than I thought.

I’ve heard Fairfax is the longest, straightest street in North America. I wasn’t too sure about that, since I had heard the same claims for other streets in other parts of the country and suspected that other countries too were full of it—claims and streets both.

But I did know that Fairfax
was
the most heavily traveled, non-highway street in the city. It had been constructed, I’d once been told, by having oxen drag a broad log more or less in a straight line. The idea had been to create a street wide enough that two carriages could pass one another with ease.

Now it accommodated four car lanes, two in each direction, as well as having sidewalks in front of the mostly small, independent shops that lined each side. What this meant, at the best of times, is that I had to be careful when driving on it. More than once I’d gone so close to a car in the next lane, that my mirror had been flipped flat.

And that was at low traffic times. Now it was the lunch rush hour. There was little room to maneuver and the best way to change lanes is to have been born in the other one.

This wasn’t slowing Ben down at all. He forged merrily ahead, speeding up, changing lanes and, for a brief and glorious moment, driving the wrong way in the opposing lane. Which only convinced me more that he had gone completely mad. Normally Ben would have preferred opening his own veins as a sacrifice to a pagan god than risking a tiny dent or a hair-thin scratch on the impeccable panels of his cream-colored BMW.

The funny thing, I thought as I drove after him, taking risks I normally wouldn’t take and bullying my way into lane changes to a cacophonic sound of horns, was that he wasn’t hitting any other cars. My grandmother had a proverb that said something about the good Lord keeping the falling sparrow, the innocent child, and the madman in the hollow of his hand, and I guessed she was right. There were collisions in his wake—the sickening grind of metal on metal and a very decisive crunch, though I didn’t slow down enough to see who had crashed and where—but none of them affected Ben. He put his arm briefly out of his window and waved. Not at me. As far as I could tell he was waving at helicopters.

“Mommy, Mommy?” E whined from the seat next to me. He was strapped in, still holding Pythagoras, the cat’s frightened little face peeking out just above the belt.

“E,” I said, in my best voice of authority, “pick up Mommy’s phone and press redial.”

“What’s
redal
?”

“No, no, no. Redial. It says right there on the button.”

I made a dangerous lane change to catch up with Ben who had suddenly decided that he must be in the left lane.

“Mommy! E can’t read.”

“Why the hell not?” I asked. “You are three!” And then, as he started crying, I said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you’re a big boy and you do know your letters. Look for a button with a word that starts with
R
and has no number.”

He sniffled. “Oh.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see him pressing a button, then holding the phone to his ear.

“Mommy? Cas says what?”

Ahead of me, Ben took a right turn from the left lane—across a line of traffic that honked the hell at him—onto Sparrowhawk Lane.

“Oh, shit, hell, and damnation.”

“Mommy says . . .” E spoke into the phone. “Mommy says . . . Mommy says
bad
words.” In increasing desperation, I tried to find a way to turn onto Sparrowhawk, but couldn’t because, of course, the line of cars had closed in my way and I wasn’t a madwoman—though I was getting pretty damn close.

“I can’t do,” E wailed. “Mommy driving. Mad.”

At this point I’d lost Ben. Even if I made it into Sparrowhawk, which led to a pretty neighborhood street, likely he would have taken a random turn into one of the other small streets, and I would be completely out of luck.

On the other hand, I could turn ahead—there was a light and I could turn left at the left arrow—and pull onto a side street and think. And talk to Cas. “I’m sorry, Bunny,” I said, as calmly as I could, while I executed this maneuver. “Tell Cas that I’ll talk to him in just a second.”

I pulled onto Narrow Way, a street full of tall, two-floor brick houses, set in spacious gardens. It wasn’t as high rent as Waterfall. I knew that because they didn’t have lawns. But they had nice trees, and the houses themselves looked well kept.

I parked, then reached for the phone, which E gladly gave me. He started frantically petting Pythagoras, who looked like a cartoon cat. All four of his legs protruded from under the belt, and his face looked goofy. He didn’t seem like he was in distress, though. His face had that “I hope I’m not bothering you expression” it normally wore.

“Cas,” I said.

“We’re on our way to your house,” Cas said. “I take it that Ben’s no longer there? Because you’re driving somewhere? Judging by the honks?”

“Just got off Fairfax.”

“Are you the disturbance the traffic helicopters—”

“No,” I said. I felt suddenly very tired. “That was Ben.” I gave him a quick account of my friend’s adventures. “I don’t know where he’s going or why, but he’s not in his right mind, and I don’t know why.” I realized I was crying and felt fairly upset at myself for it, but there was no way of stopping. “I mean, he’s always been a nut, in a way, but not this kind of nut, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean. Nick and I were talking and it sounds from what you told us like Ben is on an hallucinogen of some kind. Would he ever—”

“Never,” I said. “He doesn’t even like pain meds, because he tends to have weird reactions to . . . Oh.”

“Exactly. Do you know if he’s taking anything? Headaches? Arthritis?”

“Not that I know.” I wiped my tears to the back of my hand.

“Uh. . . . If he gets picked up he might get booked on drug charges. It would be good if we could find him before that happens.”

“Yeah,” I said, bawling my eyes out. “I don’t want to call his mom. I don’t want her to get all worried for, you know, something I don’t understand.”

“Yeah,” Cas said. “Tell you what. Where do you think he’d have gone?”

“No idea,” I said. “He was raving on about those trees in front of Jacinth Jones’s house, but he can’t possibly have been headed there. I mean, if he was doing that, taking Colfax was insane.”

“Dyce, from what you’ve been saying, I doubt Ben is thinking logically at all.”

“Um,” I said. “We don’t have anything to lose, do we?”

“No,” Cas said. “I say we go to the house where Jones used to live, and see if he’s there. If not, then we start driving in a rational manner through the neighborhood, okay? Make a grid or something. But for now, the best bet is that house.”

“All right,” I said.

I looked over at my son. He was looking back at me, his eyes huge and full of tears. “Bah—Ben gonna be awright?” he asked, his pronunciation of Ben’s name momentarily returning to his very early age.

“I think so, sweetie. Should you have Pythagoras inside the seat belt? It looks like it would hurt to be strapped in that way.” It suddenly occurred to me that E should be in his car seat in the back. I hoped no policeman would stop me. At least no policeman I wasn’t currently dating.

“Peegrass likes it,” E said. And because he was sniffling and because the cat didn’t look any more bothered than usual, and also because I wasn’t sure what the cat would do if he were set loose in the car, I nodded. “Okay. We’re going somewhere now to see if Ben is there. If he isn’t, then we’ll have to figure out another way of finding him.”

“An’ if he ax murdered?”

“What?” I said, as I drove across Colfax and headed for Jacinth Jones’s house, which was about ten blocks away and a few turns, through side streets.