Skeleton Key (40 page)

“I think,” Mallory said, “that you're having a nervous breakdown.”

“If life were fair, I would have won today. I would have come home with a whole pile of money and I would have been able to put the money back, and there would still be enough left over, you know, to get us by. Because I really don't know what to do, Mallory. I really don't. We barely had enough to get through last winter, and now it's worse. I'm behind on everything. People call here all the time, the credit card companies, those people, they call all the time. You don't know what it's like. And I don't know what to do. And now this. I suppose they'll put me in jail.”

“I don't think so,” Mallory said. “Not as long as you pay the money back.”

“I can't pay the money back. It must be ten thousand dollars by now, counting today. Maybe even more.”

“You can sell the house,” Mallory said. “That will pay back the country club, and it will pay off the credit card bills, and it will leave you enough for another house—”

“A
smaller
house,” Sally said, feeling suddenly savage.
“A more
sensible
house. Just like your father wanted us to have. While he moved into a duplex penthouse on the Upper East Side and bought a place on the Vineyard for his sweetie pie.”

“Listen,” Mallory said. “This is not about my father. This is a crisis.”

“He caused the crisis.”

“Maybe he did. But you don't want to go to jail. And I don't want you to go. And there's no reason why you should. We can sell the house. We can get something smaller. We can make do. I can go to nursing school—”

“Your father will pay for—”

“I don't want him to pay for, except nursing school if he's willing. It makes perfect sense. It's a good field. If you specialize in surgery or crisis pediatrics you can make a pile of money. I can turn it into something else later. It's a start, Mother.”

“It's the kind of thing the girls I grew up with did, if they were considered bright. Nursing and teaching. The two main professions for lower-middle-class women.”

“You care too much about class.”

“The world cares too much about class,” Sally said. “What do you think would happen to us, if we did what you want us to do? Do you think we would still have any friends? People would mean well, of course, but it wouldn't last long. They'd get sick of our poverty and drift off. We'd be—alone out here.”

“We're going to be just as alone out here if you go to jail for embezzlement,” Mallory said. “You're not making any sense.”

“I kept thinking I could do it,” Sally said. “I went out there and I played the slots for hours. Hours and hours. I worked so hard. When I was growing up, it was a kind of truism. If you worked hard you got what you wanted. But it didn't happen this time.”

“I don't think working the slots is what they meant by working, Mother.”

“No,” Sally said. “I suppose it wasn't.”

Mallory went back to the stove. She was cooking dinner. That was good. Sally could use something to eat. She hadn't eaten for hours and hours. She hadn't wanted to waste the money, in Ledyard, on food.

When she was growing up, the purpose of her life had been clear: to get out, to get free, to escape. If she was going to end up right back where she started, then what had been the point of it all? Had she really had to come to Connecticut to see her daughter train as a nurse, or to live out her life in a little ranch house with a patio out back? Had she really come all this way just to be the person she could have been if she'd stayed at home? Life was a tunnel, that was what she thought Life was a black hole that sucked you in and kept you captive.

Mallory came to the table, bearing a small plate of fried chicken.

“You'd better call Mrs. Grandmere back,” she said. “It's not going to do you any good to postpone all this until tomorrow.”

Ever since Jennifer Crawford had come out to Margaret Anson's house to pick up Annabel in the Volvo station wagon that served as the family “country” car, she had been nattering—and all the time she had been nattering, Annabel had been trying not to listen. Now that they were at home, the nattering had gotten even worse. Jennifer fussed, that was the problem. Jennifer always fussed. At the moment, she was fussing about the state of Annabel's sweater, which she thought of as completely inadequate.

“In my day, sweaters were made of wool,” she kept saying. “I don't know who got this idea to make them from cotton. At least wool sweaters kept you warm.”

Annabel was warm enough. She was almost hot. Toward the end of the time she had spent at Margaret Anson's house, a woman who had identified herself as a doctor had
come along and made her drink two stiff shots of Johnny Walker Black. Annabel had had to swallow them in two swift single gulps, like guys doing divebombers in a bar.

“It's what they seem to have around this place,” the doctor had said cheerfully. “At my house, all we have is beer.”

Truthfully, Annabel couldn't quite understand why she wasn't drunk. She thought she ought to be flying. Instead, she was just a little hot, and desperately tired. She just didn't want to sleep. Every time she allowed her eyes to close, she saw Margaret Anson's face, in death, with the eyes bugged out and the neck at that uncomfortable tilt. She put out her hand again to touch the body and felt that it was already cold. What she couldn't get out of her mind was the really important question. She wanted to know if Kayla had felt like that, too, when she was dead.

“I've been thinking,” Jennifer said now. “Maybe we ought to go back into the city for the rest of the fall. You're coming out in the city as well as here. There's no reason why we shouldn't be in Manhattan.”

“I'm all right,” Annabel said.

“Well, yes, sweetie, I know you are. It's not that I don't think you're all right. It's me, really, I guess. I'm sure this has upset you enormously. It's upset me. And I suppose I don't really want to be around it while it's going on.”

“Maybe they wouldn't let me leave,” Annabel said. “Maybe I'm a suspect.”

“Oh, surely not, sweetie. You couldn't be a suspect. What an absurd idea. Nobody would think that for a minute.”

“That Mr. Demarkian thought it.”

“What?”

“Mr. Demarkian. The detective. He thinks I'm a suspect. I talked to him today. I don't see how you can blame him. I was Kayla's friend. I was right there where Margaret Anson was—was—” Annabel took a deep breath. “Dead,” she finished.

“I don't see what your being Kayla's friend has to do
with it. And as for Margaret Anson, well, let's face it. If that Mr. Demarkian is making a list of people who hated her enough to kill her, it would look like the Manhattan phone directory.”

“I want a cup of tea,” Annabel said.

What Annabel really wanted was a cup of tea with another shot of that Johnny Walker Black in it, but she wasn't going to ask for it. For all her fake IDs and raids on bars for St. Pauli Girl Light, she really neither liked nor approved of alcohol. She didn't really like the way people got when they drank, and she especially didn't like the way so many of the people she knew seemed to be unable to go a day without drinking. Even people her own age. There had been girls at boarding school who had kept flasks in their underwear, so that they'd be able to take nips off them every once in a while during the day. Annabel knew everything there was to know about buying liquor in secret in small towns near fancy schools, about getting the liquor back into the dorm without being seen, about drinking without getting caught at drinking. It came with the territory.

Jennifer came bustling over with a cup of tea. Annabel hadn't even heard the kettle whistle.

“Listen,” Jennifer said. “Even if they do have to think of you as a suspect, because police procedure is police procedure, you know. I understand how it is. Even if they have to do that, you could still come in and spend the fall in the city with me. You could go shopping. You could go to the theater. There would be something for you to do there. Unlike here. Where you're stuck. So to speak.”

“I wanted to call Tommy about the car,” Annabel said.

“The car?”

“The night Kayla died. I was out with Tommy Haggerty. He got drunk as a skunk and I left him in the bar and drove his car back here so that I could get home. It was parked in our driveway all that morning, Mother, for God's sake. It was fire engine red.”

“Well,” Jennifer said, “as long as you don't drive with
anybody who's drunk. That's all I ask. Just stay sober yourself or have a designated driver.”

“Yes, I know. But the thing is, I don't drive all that well in any case, and I clipped a mailbox. So the paint got scraped on the front near the headlights on the passenger's side. And I've been wondering if I should offer to pay for the repairs, you know, or if the fact that he made a mess of himself and forced me to find my own way home should be enough in the way of payment. And I still don't know what to do. But I've got to do it.”

“Now?”

“No,” Annabel said, feeling confused again. “No, I guess not. I don't know. I was just thinking about it.”

“I think you're in shock,” Jennifer said firmly. “You should put something serious in that tea. Enough honey to make it thick, that would work. Let me get you some honey.”

“I don't like honey.”

“I know you like to watch your weight, Annabel, but this is no time for it, trust me. This is a time to take care of yourself. I wish I had some chocolate in the house.”

“What were you like, when you were my age?” Annabel asked. “Were you like you are now? Were you different?”

Jennifer stopped in the doorway. It was a dramatic pause, but it was in character. The rest of the Litchfield County ladies would pause like this, too. We look a lot alike, Annabel thought, and then wondered why she'd thought it. Most of the time she believed that she looked nothing like her mother at all.

“What an odd question,” Jennifer said. “Of course I must have been different. I was much younger then. Let me get you that honey.”

When people died, their faces froze in place. They stared into the future and saw nothing. You could see it in their eyes. Someday, her own eyes would stare into the future like that and it would all be over.

Annabel Crawford had a terrible, gnawing feeling that she ought to do something about this, now, that she ought
to change herself in some way so that this wouldn't happen. If she wasn't careful, she would turn into her mother. If she wasn't even more careful than that, she would end up dead. The need to act was so intense and so immediate, she nearly leapt to her feet and ran around the room. Then she thought that that was not what was wanted of her, that there was something else out there that was up to her and needed to be done.

She just couldn't think of what it was she was supposed to do.

When Bennis Hannaford got to Gerald Harrison's office, the light was on in the two front windows, and there was a note for her on the door.

Ring twice so I'll know it's you. G.

Bennis rang twice, and then the coughing started again. She wrapped her arms around her chest and doubled over. By now, she had been coughing so often and so violently for so long, her lungs hurt whenever she started in again. Out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike coming into Philadelphia, she had once again thrown up blood. She was going to do it again, right here. She hacked and hacked, hacked and hacked. Just as she brought up a big splatter of red, Gerald opened his door.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, looking at the mess on the floor. “How long has this been going on?”

“The cough or the blood?”

“The blood.”

“Since yesterday.”

“What about the cough?”

“For a couple of weeks.”

“Come on in,” Gerald said. “In about two minutes, I'm going to make you go to the hospital, but for the moment I want to check you out.”

Bennis straightened up and stretched. It hurt to stretch.
It hurt to breathe. It hurt to have the hall light glowing over her head.

“He's going to say he told me so, you know that,” she said. “They're all going to say they told me so.”

“They ought to. You should have given up cigarettes ten years ago. You should never have started.”

“You think this is caused by cigarettes?”

“Yes, Bennis,” Gerald said patiently. “Whatever this is, it was probably caused by cigarettes.”

Bennis walked past him into the office. The reception room was carpeted in deep pile and decorated with huge plants—trees, really—in equally huge planters. The walls were covered with photographs of patients successfully treated. Nobody ever kept photographs of the ones who died. She wondered if Gerald would take her own photograph down off the wall if she died, and then she told herself to stop it. She was being morbid. She was being nuts.

In the back hall, Sheryl Lynne, one of the nurses, was fussing around in an examining room. She smiled politely at Bennis—Bennis was sure she just
loved
having to stay late, just so some Main Line postdebutante could have an examination after hours—and pointed the way into the room they were going to use. Bennis felt the cough welling up in her chest and tried to hold it back, if only to avoid the pain. It didn't work. She began to hack and hack again. She brought up more blood.

“Oh, my God,” Sheryl Lynne said.

“Go sit down,” Gerald said, coming up behind them both.

Bennis put a hand against the wall. She was so cold, she couldn't stop herself from shaking. The whole world seemed to be made of ice. The coughing had stopped but she didn't feel any better. She felt worse. She felt worse and worse all the time.

“Go sit
down,”
Gerald commanded her, giving a little push to her back.