The Ninth Step (14 page)

“If it has to do with the baby, that’s medical, potentially deductible.”

He scooped up the envelope.

Helen grimaced. “You’re so thorough.”

“That’s me.”

Edgar took it to his desk in the nook just outside the foyer. The charts and graphs had been removed from the walls around his work area and carefully filed away, but Edgar’s desk remained obscenely neat and ordered.

Edgar sat down at the desk, counted to three, and there was Molly in his lap. He booted up the computer and began to methodically separate the mail, tossing the advertising circulars in the wastebasket.

From the kitchen, the microwave chirped to signal that it had completed its task.

“Edgar…”

Edgar smiled and got up.

Helen peered over the back of the couch. She could see the envelope in the stack. It was grimy and off-white compared to the others. She contemplated whether there would be enough
time to dash over to the desk and grab the receipt. How would she look if caught in the act? She decided not to risk it and squeezed Edgar’s hand warmly when he brought her the bag of popcorn.

Edgar logged into their checking account and issued a payment for the gas bill. Helen watched him. Her envelope was next in line to be paid or filed. Edgar picked it up and opened it. The receipt was in his hands. Helen could see the hateful words printed on the back. She could actually feel the twitch in Edgar’s wrist as he began to reflexively turn it over.

Helen cried out in anguish.

Edgar was on his feet instantaneously.

“What?”

“It’s the baby. It hurts.”

Edgar was kneeling beside her, rubbing her convex middle.

“No, not there. It’s my back. I think she kicked my kidney. Go to the bedroom and get me the heating pad.”

As soon as Edgar cleared the stairs, Helen was on her feet. She snatched the envelope and receipt off the desk.

She headed for the kitchen with it, changed her mind and dashed into the living room, Mitzi galloping behind her, excited by her owner’s excitement.

Helen tucked the envelope and receipt under the couch. She changed her mind again, scooped it up, and ran to the kitchen trash can. She shoved the damning note deep into the trash, ran back into the living room, and leaped onto the sofa seconds before Edgar returned with the heating pad.

What the hell was she thinking? He would notice the receipt was gone. He would ask her what had happened to it. He wouldn’t let it go.

Edgar tucked the heating pad under Helen and plugged it in.

“I want ice cream.”

“I’ll fix you a bowl. Just give me a second.”

“Is it butter pecan?”

“No.”

“I need butter pecan.”

Edgar sighed and Helen gave him her best puppydog eyes.

He put on his coat and picked up the car keys.

“You realize it’s ten degrees outside?”

“The baby wants ice cream. Butter pecan.”

Edgar sighed again and looked down at his feet. Something on the carpet glinted and caught his eye. He bent over to retrieve it.

“Hey, look, here’s that bulb.”

He held it close to his face and gave the bulb the old Edgar Woolrich once-over.

“I bet I can get that strand to work.”

He went into the kitchen, and Helen followed him.

“Can’t that wait till later? The baby needs ice cream.”

Edgar yanked the tangled string of lights from the trash can. Several pieces of trash fell out as he pulled on the strand.

Including the receipt.

Note side up.

In horror, Helen watched from the doorway.

“Honey, please? Now? Please?”

Edgar grumbled and scooped all of the trash back into the can. He kissed Helen’s forehead on his way out.

Helen retrieved the note and tucked it into her bra.

The earrings. She would tell him that she needed the receipt to return some earrings she’d bought that day.

But Edgar never asked. And nothing more came of it. Until two months later.

“So you’ve never been here before and you don’t have an appointment?”

“That’s right.”

“And you don’t have a pet?”

“You just tell Mrs. Woolrich that her driving partner’s here.”

From the treatment room passageway, Helen saw Kelly talking to her blackmailer and went with dread to speak to him.

Cornell smiled at Helen as though they were high school sweethearts reunited.

“Hey, Doc. How ’bout that ride you promised me?”

Very much conscious of Kelly observing this exchange, Helen said, “I don’t think I have time right now, Mr.… ?”

“Oh, let’s not do names.”

“Well, I really don’t have the time right now. Maybe later.”

“Didn’t imagine you would.” Cornell held up a sealed envelope. “I was just hoping I could get this to the post office. Maybe you could…”

Helen took the grimy envelope.

Cornell tipped an imaginary hat to both Helen and Kelly.

“Ladies.”

Cornell turned to leave, then turned back and added, “You sure are pretty.” And left.

Kelly turned to Helen and said, “Explanation.”

“I’m doing volunteer work with the homeless.”

“Names? Let’s not do?”

Helen shrugged.

“That envelope. No address.”

Helen realized that the envelope had no address or other markings—much less a stamp.

“The homeless are often also chronically mentally ill,” she explained, as though to a child.

Helen went to her office and tore open the envelope. On a scrap of paper inside was written:
$10,000.00.

Helen wanted a drink. She very much wanted just one drink.

In the pawnshop, Helen filled out a pawn ticket. She signed her name, pulled the wedding ring that had once belonged to Judy Woolrich from her finger, and slid it under the chain-link barrier behind which a bearded and tattooed man stood. The pawnbroker counted out a mound of hundred-dollar bills. He pushed the stack of cash under the barrier to Helen.

That night, Edgar held Helen’s naked hand and told her not to cry, that everything was going to be all right.

He picked up the phone and said to Helen, “Thank God I thought to have it laser etched.”

Helen’s stomach knotted, and she wondered to herself how all this stress would affect the baby.

“Yes. Thank God. You’re so thorough.”

Edgar spoke into the phone, “Yes, I’d like to report a theft.”

It was a warm day for February, with bright sunshine. At an isolated rest stop beyond the city, Helen and Cornell sat at a weathered concrete table. Helen nudged an envelope across the pitted cement surface toward Cornell.

Cornell ripped it open greedily. He frowned.

“Well now, that’s a long way shy of ten grand.”

He reached across the table and took hold of Helen’s wrist.

“I was gonna get my teeth fixed.”

Helen jerked free of his grasp and said, “I can’t help you. I have no way to get money.”

“Sure you do.”

“You don’t understand. His life is numbers. If I take money out of our accounts, he’ll know.”

“That sounds like a
you
problem, not a
me
problem. Sell something.”

“I don’t have anything left to sell.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. You got that brand-new SUV you drove up in. And that house you live in.”

“It’s not mine. I can’t just—”

“You’re married, right? Then it’s half yours.” Cornell smiled, struck by an insight. “And what’s half yours is half mine. Now that’s just good math.”

“If the point of me paying you off is to keep Edgar from finding out, then selling our house will more or less tip him off that something is very wrong.”

“Again, your problem.”

“This is insane.”

Helen got up and walked toward the parking area. If she hadn’t been so pregnant, she would have run. Cornell caught up to her and roughly grabbed her by the upper arm, turning her around. Helen jerked away, grunting with pain. They both stared at the angry red fingerprints now forming just below her biceps.

Cornell looked more hurt than Helen.

“I never—I never meant…”

“Well, you did. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

Helen was crying now. Partly because the pregnancy hormones left her emotions raw, and partly because she saw that Cornell was feeding into it. He looked greatly disturbed.

“I just figured you had money, that’s all. I like you. I thought you might like me too. Want to help me. That’s all.”

“Like you? You’re ruining my life.”

“We can help each other. You help me get money, I’ll help you… Keep your life from messing up. It don’t have to be ugly.”

Detective Poole and her partner were waiting at the counter when Edgar walked into the pawnshop. Poole was looking at a .357 Smith & Wesson inside a glass case.

“Nice gun,” Edgar said.

“You a gun buff?”

“Hardly. Never owned one. Never plan to.”

“Good. I don’t advocate gun ownership by private citizens.”

“Is this why—”

“Look, Mr. Woolrich, this isn’t my beat, you know that.” Poole seemed to be speaking more to the gun than to Edgar. “But the way I see it, we’ve got history. I know things have been bad for you. And to be honest, I haven’t missed our weekly
meetings. I was glad to get you out of my life. I was glad you moved on.”

Poole now looked Edgar in the eyes.

“But sometimes, people make bad decisions.”

Poole nodded to the pawnbroker, and he handed her a ring. Poole handed it to Edgar.

“You found it.”

“Yep.”

Poole nodded again to the pawnbroker. He reached his serpentine tattooed arms above his head to the closed-circuit monitor mounted on the wall. He swiveled it so that the screen was facing Edgar. The digital footage was already cued up, so the man just hit the “play” button on the security console.

The monitor showed a blocky, flickering video image of a woman pulling the ring off her finger. As the woman leaned forward to push the ring across the counter, her face filled the screen. The pawnbroker paused the video. There could be no mistake. It was Helen.

Detective Poole watched Edgar’s face undergo a series of changes. It was like watching a mime enact the five Kübler-Ross stages of death and dying: denial and anger, then bargaining and depression, finally settling on acceptance.

Edgar stared at Helen’s frozen image on the screen. And when he spoke, he spoke to that image.

“Yes, sometimes people do make bad decisions.”

Edgar turned to Detective Poole.

“Do they sometimes get a second chance?”

Poole nodded.

Helen grabbed the thick sheaf of bills from the ATM and made her way back to the car. She plopped behind the steering wheel, her belly pulling her down. She handed the wad of cash over to Cornell, who was busy rummaging through her purse. He stopped long enough to count the bills.

“That’s the daily limit,” Helen said.

“Like I said, I’m not out to hurt you, but you got a lot of thinking to do. About how bad you wanna keep that new husband of yours. Or what it would be like having your baby born in jail.”

Cornell got out of the car. Helen watched in the rearview mirror as he disappeared into the night. And farther off in the distance, the beckoning warm neon glow of a liquor store.

She looked down at her hands. They were shaking.

Helen knew that if it were not for the baby growing inside her, she would drink. She would drink and drink and drink until it killed this feeling. So she could escape it, even if just for one night, she could escape it.
What had she done? What had she brought on herself and Edgar?

She looked down at her hands again. They were shaking even worse than before.

Edgar came home to find the house empty and dark. The cats were mewing their hunger, and Mitzi was scratching at the back door.

Edgar checked his cell phone. There had been no missed calls. He checked the landline. No messages. Helen had not tried to contact him, and her cell phone had been turned off.

He looked up a number in the phone book and dialed it.

“Yes, I’m looking for meetings in the Mantissa Cove area.”

Edgar felt self-conscious walking into the church basement. The meeting was already in progress. Helen had more or less stopped going to meetings after her break-off with Martha.

An overweight, balding businessman was standing and speaking to the group.

“…So I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity…”

If Helen had been at this meeting, she would have recognized this man as the adulterer she and Martha had followed to a hotel and photographed.

“…I knew that even though I was powerless over alcohol, God is not. God is stronger.”

Edgar scanned the group and saw Martha in a green nylon tracksuit, sipping coffee from a lipstick-stained foam cup.

“…I guess I finally understood that stupid bumper sticker on my sponsor’s car. I let go and let God.”

In the church parking lot, people stood in small groups to talk and smoke cigarettes.