The Tolling of Mercedes Bell: A Novel (38 page)

Use this time wisely.

She applied makeup and outlined her eyes in black. Her final journey had commenced. A dirge played in her spirit. She had begun to see through the glass darkly and felt trepidation about what lay ahead.

She pulled on an indigo gabardine sheath and heels. She put on the gold earrings Jack had bought her in Florence in atonement for the brutal sex he’d visited upon her.

She applied blood-red lipstick. She put her hair up. She filled her costly red handbag, another consolation prize from Jack, and picked up the keys to the Alfa. He was all around her. He was on her finger, in her hand, on her person, in her mind, and in her blood, where he had left his dark surprise.

A
T PLANNED PARENTHOOD SHE LEARNED
more about HIV, and none of it was good. At least there would be no way for anyone to trace her test. The nurse wished her the best, but they both knew that the odds could hardly be worse.

She drove to Jack’s office. The bell on the front door of the suite tinkled as she entered. Melanie looked up at her in surprise.

“Hi. I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning.”

“I wasn’t expecting to be here this morning either, Mel. What’s happening?”

“Emerson’s with a client in San Mateo, and I’m not sure where Jack is.”

“I can tell you where he is,” she said. “He’s in the hospital with pneumonia.”

“What?”

“He collapsed at home this weekend and I took him to the emergency room. They admitted him right away. He’s under an oxygen tent being pumped full of antibiotics.”

Melanie was shocked into silence. Mercedes looked into her sweet face a moment longer.

“Mel, he’s very sick. They said he’ll be there at least two weeks.”

“Two
weeks?”
She looked horrified. “All that coughing—”

“Yeah. All that coughing.”

“But he’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”

“I wish I could say yes, but he has a big battle ahead of him. His oxygen level is very low.”

“No wonder he’s been so . . . ,” she trailed off, unable to say the word to Mercedes. “Oh, this is wretched! What can I do to help?”

“I need to find some things, and I’d like to start with his desk, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any idea how Jack pays the mortgage? I don’t even know the name of the bank.”

Melanie led her to the credenza in his office where he kept his personal files. Mercedes was welcome to search.

“I feel like such a numbskull. I’m not on any of his accounts and I have no idea how our finances work, other than what I pay for.”

“I’m sure it’s all straightforward. Since Rose left last year, he’s been handling all the accounting. I get the bills out every month, but he handles the money. I can sign checks on the operating account, in case he’s away and we have to pay a bill.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Mercedes, I just can’t believe this. And it was under our noses the whole time.”

“I don’t want to believe it. Germaine doesn’t even know. She gets back from Yosemite tomorrow.”

The sudden thought of Germaine as an orphan pierced her again. She shook her head to hold the emotion at bay. Then she turned to the business at hand.

The desk’s tidy surface, with opened mail stacked in organized piles, was belied entirely by its contents. The top drawer could hardly be opened, so jammed was it with papers. She took her time and sifted through them, searching for anything from a bank. Near the bottom there were photographs she’d never seen before.

The first was a photo of Jack as a very young man, perhaps in his twenties, posing with Damon. They were bare-chested, standing close together, with Jack’s arm around Damon’s shoulders. It looked like a picture Jack had taken of them with his other hand. Damon’s head rested on Jack’s shoulder; his beautiful eyes were full of love and sweetness.

She swallowed hard. There were other photos—Jack in a disco club, dancing with a man she didn’t recognize; Jack and Gabe in law school; photos with Martin, to whom Caroline had spoken before their engagement, and one of the groomsmen in a bar; another of them in a hot tub. A terrible panic set in. She closed the drawer and took a deep breath.

She forced herself to open the next drawer. There were checkbooks for two accounts in Janine’s name. With horror she realized she hadn’t even given a thought to poor Janine. Who would look after her now? Who would tell her about Jack?

The next drawer contained the ledger for the client trust account, another for the Soutane & Associates operating account, checkbooks bearing the names of various partnerships, and one for a personal checking account of Jack’s. Her mind was reeling. She would have to figure out how all this worked in order to keep things going while they decided what to do. Jack’s sudden death would be a cataclysm.

The deepest drawer of the desk was locked. She asked Melanie about it, but Melanie didn’t know where the key was. She had never been inside the drawer, and had no idea what was in it.

The credenza was full of tax records, bank records, household and credit card information for their household and Janine’s. Jack, the money manager. She found the payment coupons for the mortgage and was shocked by the size of the monthly payment, especially on a house Jack had allegedly owned for so many years. It was far greater than her gross monthly income. Her pulse raced when she scanned Jack’s checkbook. The house payment was dwarfed by the total amount of money leaving the account every month. Almost as much went to insurance companies, and more went to credit card companies. The numbers swam before her eyes. She put the checkbook in her purse. At least a house payment wasn’t due for some time, and his income seemed to be adequate for the amount of it— while he was working. She felt like a little girl turned loose in an adult’s world, where much more was expected of her than she was equipped to handle.

She sat back in Jack’s chair and looked at his silver-framed photograph of her and Germaine, which sat on the credenza. Jack, the family man.

She opened the top drawer again and took out the photos. Suddenly they all made sense. How could she not have realized? He had no pictures of previous girlfriends because there
weren’t
any. They were men. With a clunk, another piece fell into place. Emerson’s weird behavior was
jealousy.

Church bells began to toll in the distance. Someone had just gotten married or was about to be buried. She closed her eyes. The ringing of the bells took her back to their honeymoon, waking up next to Jack in Florence, the white curtain fluttering in the breeze, the bells clanging in a nearby church.

Her scalp prickled. The dream. Of course! It was Emerson in the dream with his arm draped around Martin, whispering into Martin’s ear, taunting her.

You think you’ve escaped, but you’ve walked right into it.

She looked down at the photographs in her hand. Dr. Sinclair must know.
Perhaps how he got it isn’t so important right now.
She dialed his office number, but he was with a patient. She left a message. She needed to stay focused, but now there were so many things to focus
on.

Top priorities: Germaine and survival. Today she needed to buy groceries for Germaine’s return, get the house in order, and go to the hospital. Then she needed to find the key to that drawer.

Tomorrow she’d speak with Darrel. Jack’s illness put all the burden of the Taylor case squarely on her boss’s shoulders. The new date for trial was only six weeks away. How she could assist in a trial with all this going on, she did not know, but she was getting ahead of herself. When two days had taken fifty years off her life, six weeks were an eternity.

Melanie stood up to give her a hug on her way out. She said she’d tell Emerson that Jack was in the hospital. She had already started rescheduling appointments and reprioritizing the mail.

M
ERCEDES DROVE TO THE GROCERY STORE.
Everything had a truncated feeling to it now. The number of times she would buy groceries was finite. It had always been so, but she had never been cognizant of it. The number of times she would drive her beloved Alfa was limited.

She wanted to slow down her mind, to stop taking things for granted, to get all of the negativity in her life away from her. Time was too precious. Everything was too precious. Feeling all this was an exquisite torture that she would never be able to convey to anyone; but at least she had lived long enough to realize it.

She pushed a cart into the produce department. The flood of colors and shapes that greeted her was breathtaking: orange, yellow,
ivory, red, purple, red-brown, tan, and greens of every hue, all vibrant. It was as though she’d never seen fruits and vegetables before. She noticed the other shoppers. They were all going about their business as though they were sleepwalking, except the toddler in the cart next to hers, who also appeared to be enchanted by the pageant in which he found himself. His mother fed him a small piece of banana, and he wiggled with pleasure, his tiny teeth gleaming like pearls. He slapped his hands together and squealed in delight.

Every carton of milk, every sack of flour, every bag of lentils, every object in sight was alive. The awareness of death was working some kind of magic on her. She felt fully, crazily, inexplicably alive as she had after she’d given birth to Germaine, fallen head over heels in love with Eddy, and first laid eyes on Jack. Whatever had she been waiting for? How could she possibly have been so unaware?

The very act of breathing was new. So was all this life around her. It was new because of its rapid and constant change. Every molecule, with expiration and birth embedded in its electrons, was fleeing past, dying and being born, dying and being born, dying and being born. And now that she was dying, she also was being born.

S
HE MADE THE HOUSE READY
for Germaine. She filled a big crystal vase with daisies and put them in the center of the table. She put the food away. She put fresh sheets on Germaine’s bed. Soon her darling daughter would be back. In this foreshortened life, everything true and beautiful must be freed from its hiding place.

Hiding places.
The key to Jack’s bottom desk drawer had to be in the house, and readily accessible. She must have seen it without realizing what it was. She remembered her frantic search for the name of Jack’s doctor after the seizure. She’d hunted through every drawer in . . .

She went to Jack’s bureau and opened one of the small drawers on top. Beneath the business cards and clutter in the back corner was a small gold key. She examined it carefully, wondering if it would fit the lock. She slipped it into her coin purse.