Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (3 page)

“I think you ought to consider the implications of the fact that all the people who belong to Fountain of Youth are female,” the academic said. “I think you ought to spend at least some time examining your responsibility, your personal responsibility, for the epidemic of eating disorders that is sweeping this nation.”

Magda was having a hard time accepting personal responsibility for standing upright. The pain was now so bad, she wanted to cry. The three women were looking at her expectantly. They expected her to come up with an argument they could counter with sociological studies or statistics. She couldn’t think past the point of finding some place to sit down. But what good would sitting down do? If taking the weight off her leg didn’t help when she was standing, why should it help when she was sitting?

“Excuse me,” she told the women. “I think I need to find the ladies room.”

The three women looked at each other, and then at her. Magda thought they thought she was probably having a hot flash. At any other time, Magda would have countered this assumption. She had never had a hot flash in her life. She didn’t think she was close to menopause, in spite of the fact that she was nearly sixty years old. Everything she had ever told these women about the Fountain of Youth Work-Out was true. It really did keep you young. It really did mean you didn’t have to get old unless you wanted to.

With her leg feeling the way it did, Magda couldn’t move very quickly. She had a hard time moving at all without limping, and she didn’t want to limp. Simon was standing with a group of men at the bar. Magda caught his eye and gestured toward the wall of French doors that led out to the terrace. It had to be wretchedly cold out there, but people had been making the trip all evening. Maybe there was a winter garden or a Christmas light display or something else that was supposed to be beautiful to look at.

Magda found the door in the wall of French doors that was open. She slipped through it and found herself looking at a dead black sky over a dead black yard, all the graceless-ness of winter without snow. She limped over to the low balustrade and sat down on it, glad that nobody could see her as she hobbled. The balustrade was even colder than she had expected it to be. She winced.

“Are you all right?” Simon asked as he came through the door.

Magda waved her left leg in the air. “I’ve got a pain in my leg,” she said. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what it’s from. It’s really incredible.”

Simon frowned. In his white dinner jacket, Magda thought he looked like a character in a novel by W. Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. Even his hair, which was gray and thinning, was thinning in just the right way.

“What
kind
of a pain is it?” he asked her. “The kind of a pain you get when you bruise yourself? The kind you get when you break a bone? What?”

“I’ve never broken a bone,” Magda said. “It’s not the kind of pain you get when you bruise yourself. I don’t know what it is, Simon. Maybe I pulled a muscle.”

“Is that the kind of a pain it is?”

Magda shrugged. “If it hasn’t gone away by tomorrow morning, maybe I’ll see a doctor. That’ll make you feel better. But I think I’m all right, Simon, I really do. I think I was just standing around in one place for too long.”

“I think you’ve got a tour to do in just a couple of weeks.” Simon was still frowning. “And the television appearances. And the ad campaign. We can’t afford to have you out of commission right this minute.”

“I know that, Simon. I’m not out of commission.”

“We can’t afford to have you out of commission permanently, either. Maybe you ought to see a doctor tomorrow even if your leg doesn’t hurt.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Magda stood up and leaned against the leg again. It felt a little better, except when she put all her weight on it. Then the pain started up all over again. She sat back down on the balustrade and tried to do some calf flexes. Those hurt, too.

“I wonder what it is,” she said absently. And then she laughed. “Maybe those awful women put a hex on me. Maybe that’s the only thing that’s wrong with me. They kept saying they thought I ought to quit.”

“Do you think you ought to quit?” Simon asked her.

Magda was surprised. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “I’d never want to quit. You’re never going to have to worry about that with me.”

Simon didn’t look like he was worrying about her. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking away from the house and into the cold black sky. Magda swung her painful leg in the air and stared at the back of his neck, at that place where the barber’s razor had cut too close and left the skin looking raw and red.

Funny, Magda thought. You’d almost think he wanted to get rid of me.

Why would he want to get rid of her when they were so close to getting everything they wanted, to going national, to being really important in the field? They had been together for over thirty years. Ideas like that simply made no sense at all.

Funny, Magda thought again, and then she found herself forcing herself to get up, to stand straight, to move without limping. For some reason she couldn’t fully understand, it now seemed more important to walk without limping in front of Simon than it had to walk that way in front of all those strangers at the party.

In all the years they had been together, Magda had never seen Simon as dangerous to her, or as a threat, or as someone she needed to protect herself from. Suddenly, he was all those things, and she didn’t think he would ever go back to being anything else. He still looked like a character out of W. Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene, but now he looked like the wrong one, the one that would be played by Sidney Greenstreet in the movie.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked her, turning away from his contemplation of the sky.

Magda gave him a big grin and told him she most definitely was.

B
Y THE TIME DESSA
Carter was able to leave work, it was so late she almost forgot about stopping in at Fountain of Youth to pick up the material she needed. If her way home had been in the other direction, she
would
have forgotten about it. She came out into the parking lot with her head pounding. Even after she was safely behind the wheel of her car, she could feel the grunt and whine of the machines from her neck to her ankles, like a pulse. Her car was a Pontiac Grand Prix that had been old on the day she bought it. Lately, it had developed radiator problems that kicked in whenever the heat or the air-conditioning was on. Dessa put her big cloth bag into the passenger bucket to her left and her forehead down on the steering wheel. She had started work at eight o’clock that morning and gone straight through, except for half an hour for lunch, all day. She had racked up enough overtime to pay for another week of having Mrs. O’Reilly in and a full-scale shop at the grocery store. She had started on the needle assembly line and ended up with stamping, because stamping didn’t take any skill and could be done when you were tired. Her shoulders ached and her fingers were raw and bloody. It was going to take three days just like this one to pay for what she wanted at Fountain of Youth.

I ought to give it up and just forget about it, Dessa told herself as she eased her car out of the lot and onto the darkened access road. Everybody always said there ought to be more lights on this road, but nobody ever did anything about it. There was a big sign at the entrance to the parking lot that said, “The Braxton Corporation—Better Medicine for a Better Future,” making it sound as if Braxton were a pharmaceuticals company, which it wasn’t. Braxton made “medical supplies,” like hypodermic needles and blood pressure cuffs. Dessa spent her life sitting in a small chair at a small table, wearing a surgical mask and surgical gloves and a surgical hair cap, trying to be sterile for $6.10 an hour.

The access road could take you straight to the Wilbur Cross Highway, or into New Haven itself. Dessa shifted her bulk nervously in the bucket seat and made her choice. She had been listening to the ads for a month now, on the radio and sometimes on very late night TV. “A New You for the New Year,” some of them said—or maybe it was “A New Body for the New Year.” Dessa never listened to radio or television with her full attention anymore. Whatever the ads said, they made her happy. Sometimes, in the still early hours of Sunday morning, when her father was tucked safely away in bed with the bedroom door locked and she had eaten her way through two pounds of Lay’s potato chips and eleven cans of Old El Paso guacamole dip, the ads almost made her feel as if she could do something to change her life.

In New Haven, Dessa drove carefully from stoplight to stoplight. She looked at the big Victorian houses on one street and the triple-deckers on the other and the gothic stone piles that belonged to Yale. Then she pulled into the driveway at Fountain of Youth and felt nothing.

Nothing.

Dessa cut her engine and got out of the car. She stood under the hot light of the security lamp that hung over the side door. She looked through the small window there and saw a tall young woman sitting at a tiny desk, typing something into a computer. The exercise rooms at Fountain of Youth were open to members every weeknight until eleven o’clock. That was in the ads Dessa had been listening to, too. That was how she knew it would be safe to stop in after work. I ought to learn to use a computer, Dessa told herself. And then she giggled. Learning to use a computer would get her just as much as learning to type had gotten her. Dessa could type very well, over ninety words a minute, but no one would hire her to do it. No one hired five-foot-six-inch, 340-pound women to do anything if they could help it, but especially not to sit in an office. The only reason Dessa had the job at Braxton was that her mother had had a job there before her. When Dessa had graduated from high school, her mother had gotten her right in.

Sometimes, when Dessa tried to talk to normal-size women in offices and stores, they either ignored her or looked her up and down the way cattle traders would have examined a mess of spoiled meat. Dessa was ready for this one to do something worse, like claim that there were no places left in the Fountain of Youth Work-Out workshop for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Dessa knew there were places, because the last thing she had done at the end of her workday was to call Fountain of Youth and ask.

To get in, Dessa had to ring a buzzer and show herself to a security camera. She held her big cloth bag up protectively in front of her body and wondered what she was doing that for. When the door clicked open, she pushed herself through it and squinted against the bright light. The tall young woman was looking straight at her without flinching. Nobody else seemed to be around.

“I called before,” Dessa said, wishing she didn’t sound so defensive. “About the beginner’s workshop? For the week between Christmas and New Year’s?”

“Oh, right,” the tall young woman said. The name on her little wood nameplate said Traci Cardinale. She opened the long center drawer of her desk and came up with a little packet full of papers in a brightly colored plastic folder. The folder had pictures of balloons all over it and the words “B
RING YOUR BODY TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH”
splashed bannerlike from corner to corner across the front.

“There you are,” Traci Cardinale told her. “Do you want to just take those home to read or do you want to sign up?”

“I thought I needed these to sign up.”

“If you’ve got a check for the fifty-dollar deposit, I can sign you up right now. I can just write you down in the book and your place will be reserved, and all you’ll have to do is show up bright and early on the Monday after Christmas, with exercise clothes and a pair of good running shoes. We always recommend running shoes. They have special aerobics shoes now, but as far as we can tell, they cost a lot of extra money and don’t do any extra good.”

Running shoes. Dessa hadn’t given a thought before this to what she was going to wear to a week of Fountain of Youth workshops. Exercise clothes. That meant leotards and tights. Maybe she should buy a Richard Simmons tape instead. Maybe she should just forget this whole thing.

“I’ll put the deposit down now,” Dessa heard herself say. “Do you have to have a check? Would you be willing to take cash?”

“We’d love to take cash,” Traci Cardinale said. “I’ll just have to give you a receipt. Oh, and you’ve got to tell me how you want to schedule the work-out classes. Buildup or smorgasbord.”

“I don’t understand…”

“With buildup, you do the same thing every day, but it keeps getting a little harder. Like five days of aerobic dance, say, or five days of step aerobics. With smorgasbord, you do something different every day, so you can check out all the different options and see what it is you like.”

“I’ll take that one,” Dessa said.

Traci dug into her desk again and came out with a thick ledger book. She opened it to a page Dessa could see was clearly marked in red felt pen, “C-to-NY-NH” and looked up expectantly.

“I didn’t get your name,” Traci said. “And I need your address and phone number. Do you live in New Haven?”

“I live in Derby,” Dessa said.

Traci looked sympathetic. “Nobody lives in New Haven anymore, do they? Unless they go to Yale. It’s terrible what’s happened to this city.”

It probably was terrible what had happened to this city, Dessa thought a few minutes later, sitting out in her car again, but she hadn’t really noticed it. She had had too many other things going on in her life. And since her mother had died, she’d had her father.

Dessa got her car back onto Prospect Street and then down the hill. She made the twists and turns automatically, knowing exactly where she was going in spite of the fact that she didn’t know the names of any of the streets she was traveling on. She went past the Yale Bowl and saw that it was not lit up. She went through the intersection that would get her to Orange if she turned left and onto the Derby Road. If she remembered correctly, there used to be an International House of Pancakes near this intersection when she was still in high school. She and her two best friends used to spend half of every Friday night in it, eating waffles with hot fudge sundaes and talking about which of the girls who wouldn’t talk to them was sleeping with which of the boys who called them names.