The Immaculate Deception (2 page)

I tensed up even more as I approached the exit for the Dulles Toll Road. If I turned here, I might be able to make the next shuttle flight to New York. Or a few more miles down the road, I could squeeze onto the conveyer belt they called Route Sixty-Six, the road to the Nation’s Capital, Washington, and the misery of my parents’ house.

Before I had made up my mind, my cell phone rang out. I fumbled, unable to unhook it from my belt. I unlatched my seat belt and wrestled to get the phone loose.

Simultaneously, I heard a thud and then glass shattering. I shielded my face with my hands as a deer hurtled toward me. I felt the air bag inflating against me and the sharp stab of the antler piercing my right shoulder. I slammed on the brakes with both feet. The vehicle skidded to a lurching stop as the air bag deflated. Impaled on the deer, I was ejected out of the Chevy.

The buck and I bowled down a prickly embankment. The searing pain in my shoulder was alternately overwhelmed by the weight of the beast when he reigned on top. I felt the antler breaking loose from my shoulder just before my world somersaulted into darkness.

Hearing a thumping whir, I blinked my eyes open. I struggled, unable to move. Someone was holding me down. I focused on his thickly haired brown arms and then down to his blue latex-gloved hands.

“
She’s coming to.”

I screamed. Screams of fright, frustration and burning agony. Screams that I couldn’t hear.

“
Calm down, Miss. You’re gonna be all right. We’re flying you to Fairfax Hospital. We should be landing momentarily. What’s your name?” The man removed the oxygen mask from my face.

“
Ohhh…”

“
I’m so sorry, sweetheart. You’re really beat up. Can you tell me your name?”

“
Ohhh…Donna.”

“
Donna? Good. Do you know what today is?”

Teardrops spilled. I didn’t know. The rhythmic whoop of the helicopter distracted me.

“
It’s okay, sweetheart. You’ll be just fine. The trauma team will take good care of you.” He replaced the oxygen mask and wiped my tears with gauze.

~*~

Four days later, when my HMO deemed me no longer in need of hospitalization, through their healing by statistical curve, I was discharged on a sunny Monday morning. My bloody muddy clothes had been cut off me and destroyed. So I left the hospital dressed in scrubs and slippers, duly charged to my inpatient bill. I had to sign a form promising to pay for non-covered items such as the television, phone and scrubs.

I never even used the phone. Who could I call? Who would care about me? Not my family. They always had their own urgent crises. Clan emergencies. And I didn’t want to call. I didn’t want to hear any more bloated lies and bizarre accusations from Daddy. As if Momma would have killed Daddy. It would’ve been all over the news. I could hear the sound bites in my head.
Retired Secret Service agent Chloe Lambert Payne suspected in the murder of her blind helpless husband, the saintly doctor Nathan Payne.

An octogenarian volunteer helped me into a wheelchair and placed a plastic belongings bag and a fruit basket in my lap. The girls I worked with in the file room of the health insurance company had sent apples, oranges and bananas. That’s right. I worked for my own HMO and they still booted me out too soon. Fruit. They knew I was on the Atkins diet. No fruit allowed during the induction phase.

The wizened portly volunteer groaned and wheezed as he shoved my torture chair down the corridor. Why couldn’t the hospital invest in an ergonomic chair instead of this folding low-end ouch-maker?

We went down the elevator and he propelled me through the lobby to the curb. He waited until a taxi arrived and opened the back door for me. I stood, sore and stitched, on shaky legs. I eased into the backseat.

The driver asked, “Where to, lady?”

Where to? To the writers’ conference at the Hilton Hotel in New York, four days ago. To the red carpet, where I’ll stroll in my strapless champagne silk evening gown, with matching opera gloves, to accept my trophy and cash prize. To the appointment with the acquisitions editor of the romance publisher…

“
Lady, the meter’s running. Where to?”

I sighed New York goodbye, “One–two–four–oh–six Nixon Court, Southwest.”

Arriving at the Harrison Heights section of the District of Columbia, in front of a scaled-down imitation of George Washington’s colonial mansion at Mount Vernon, I dug my wallet out of the orange plastic bag of belongings retrieved from the wreckage. I paid the cabby and stumbled up onto the cracked sidewalk. Marijuana and charcoal lighter fluid steeped in the air. A pit bull barked ferociously from the chain-linked fortress next door.

“
Hi there.”

I turned around too quickly and gasped. My whole body pulsed in pain. Gloria Meddlestein stood across the street holding open the metal bars on her front door.

“
Hello, Mrs. Meddlestein. How are you?”

“
Where on earth have you been, Donna? I tried and tried to get you on the phone. Are you having problems with your line because of the storm the other day? Did the roads wash out? What happened to your face? Got another one of
those
boyfriends? You really should—”

“
I need to go in and see my parents now. I’ll chat with you later. Um…we’ll have tea.”

I climbed up the Zoysia grass hill, staggering on the crumbling concrete steps winding the way to my childhood home. A mildewy white gutter had torn loose from the two-story-high porch roof. It dangled over the front door. I winced as I ducked under it. I never knew that every muscle in my body was attached to my shoulder.

I pressed the yellowed doorbell button. And waited. I knocked. And waited. I tried to turn the knob and it did. I shoved the colonial red door open and stepped onto the slate landing.

“
Hello? Momma, Daddy?”

I shut the door behind me and agonized up the three cherry red carpeted steps to the living room. It hadn’t been vacuumed since I had done it on Christmas Eve. That was seven months ago. There was white furry dust on every stationary object. I dropped the fruit basket and orange bag on the floor between the white wrought iron railing and the comfortable oxblood leather tub chair in the living room. I searched the house.

My hospital slippers made a suction noise as I trudged through the sticky kitchen. A skillet with potatoes congealed in grease occupied the front burner of the electric range. The table was cluttered with grocery receipts, two aromatic black bananas, a nitroglycerine pill, toast crusts and grape jelly goo.

I moved into the adjacent formal dining room. The carpet was littered with crumbs, spills and dust. The French doors to the balcony were locked. The blinds hung shut. As were all the blinds and drapes in the entire house. Daddy had cataracts cut out of his eyes in 1972, before lens replacements were invented. He had no lenses to filter out the bright light, so he had to wear a wide-brimmed hat outdoors and dark bottle-thick cataract eyeglasses indoors. This had abruptly ended his career as an obstetrician/gynecologist at the age of fifty-eight. Some days his eyes went out completely and he couldn’t see at all.

I veered down the hallway. Daddy’s blue bathroom was empty. His bedroom was empty too, nothing but disheveled bedding and the plastic milk jugs he used for urinals.

Momma’s bedroom was vacant as was her lavender bathroom. Her mattress sported a deep depression on the side closest to the door, where she always curled up. The bed was made and loaded with throw pillows.

The third bedroom was empty. Postage stamps, pictures of their great-nieces and nephews, old bills and linens were strewn about the white and gold French provincial bedroom suite that my adopted sister Tammy left behind when she last departed the nest. She flew back during her divorces. Was it five now? No wait. Six. I forgot Abdul, the drummer in the President’s own Air Force band who seemed to be wealthy without a visible legal source of extra income. Perry and Daddy had always whispered Abdul was involved in a smuggling ring.

Passing back through the living room and down the three steps to the landing where I had arrived through the front door, I pivoted and opened the dark wood door to the basement. I listened to the grandfather clock down there, chiming twelve times. I switched on the light, not that it illuminated much with a twenty-five-watt bulb. I gripped the loose handrails on both sides as I maneuvered down the rust-colored sculptured carpeted stairs to the dark walnut-paneled basement. I looked around. Still no sign of either Momma or Daddy. I squinted at the clock, next to the rectangular stone fireplace. The face only had one hand on it. The small hand.

Everything was neat. Daddy usually vacuumed down here and always kept the place tidy. He refused to clean upstairs or do laundry. Probably due to her clinical depression, Momma wasn’t much of a housekeeper the past few years. I checked the sliding glass door behind the heavy cream-colored leaf motif drapery. It was locked, the stick was wedged in the track and the white steel grate was bolted into the white bricks of the house.

Momma’s red Corvette convertible was parked in the carport. The hatch to the outside attic was open. The exposed light bulb on the ceiling was lit. I switched it off and fixed the drapes open.

I checked the downstairs bathroom. It was empty. As I peered down the hallway, I spotted Daddy, on the floor, pinned under the deep freezer.

I rushed to him. “Daddy! Daddy!”

He turned his head and groaned.

“
Oh…Donna…”

I tried to heave the small freezer upright and screamed in agony. It fell back on me. I shoved it in place. Squatting down, I kissed Daddy’s forehead. “I’ll go call an ambulance. Where does it hurt?”

“
She…killed…me…”

“
You’re not dead.”

“
Your momma…killed me. She just didn’t…understand. I tried so hard to keep my promise to her. I gave you a good home.”

“
Daddy, you’re not making any sense.” I dashed to the phone in my old underground bedroom. I picked up the receiver on the blue rotary telephone and spun the emergency number, nine-one-one.

“
DC Fire and EMS, what is your emergency?”

“
I need an ambulance. A ninety-two-year-old male has fallen and was pinned under a freezer.”

The cranky female dispatcher demanded, “Your name?”

“
Donna Payne. The address is—”

The dispatcher cut me off. “We know the address. Is the patient conscious? Is there any bleeding?”

“
Yes, he’s talking. No blood.”

“
Is he breathing?” the dispatcher demanded.

Of course he’s breathing if he’s talking, imbecile. “Yes.”

I hung up and hurried back to Daddy.

“
Donna, make sure you find my veterans’ life insurance policy, it’s in the bottom drawer of my dresser. It’s forty thousand dollars and all for you. And up over the carport,” he gasped for breath, “there’s a few boxes. Unmarked. My memorabilia of your momma is in there. Your real momma. It’s worth a lot…to the right buyer. I don’t want the others to have any of it. They’ve gotten too much for too long.”

“
I don’t want your money, Daddy. Don’t talk like that.” I squeezed his arthritis-ravaged hand and rubbed his brown-spotted wrist. What was he talking about? My
real
momma? I knew he had two big boxes of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia in the attic. Did he think she was my mother? She died before I was born. The poor man was losing his mind. “What happened? What made the freezer turn over on you?”

“
She did it.”

“
Who?”

“
Your momma. She hates me.”

Would that be Marilyn or Chloe then?
He really made no sense. Perhaps he was hallucinating. He must be. I couldn’t wrap my mind around Momma doing such a horrific thing to Daddy. There had to be a rational explanation. I noticed he wasn’t wearing his cataract eyeglasses. He was legally blind without them.

“
No, Momma would never hurt you.”

“
Oh yes, she did. And she is as strong as a man too,” his voice cracked high.

My mother was eighty-three years old. Granted, she had been trained by the Secret Service to subdue men but no way was she in that physical shape at her age.

“
Daddy, I don’t understand. Why would she attack you?”

“
She demanded the money and I will never give it up.”

“
What money?”

He had a coughing fit. I knelt down to help him sit up, bracing his shoulders on my knees as I cradled his head against my chest. When he’d cleared his throat, he launched into a stream of tasks for me to attend to and he kept saying that after his death, I would get all the riches that he’d preserved for me.

He kept going on and on about his coffin stowed under the stairs. That always gave me the creeps. And I’d heard this all before. So many times he’d promised me money but the others always needed it and I never received a penny. I never asked for any either. Not since that day when I was sixteen and all excited about college.

I had wanted to attend George Washington University and major in journalism or political science. I’d get a newspaper job at
The Washington Post
and run all over Capitol Hill. Maybe even get on the White House press staff some day.