She was Dying Anyway

by P. D. Workman

  “Here is me and Clarence.” Vera started at the beginning, with what might have been an engagement photo of her and her husband. As much as Zachary wanted to race on ahead, he looked at their faces and their body language and tried to put together the story that they told without words. Vera took him through the births of the two girls.

  Zachary looked at them together, looked at them with their father. He was still suspicious of Clarence abusing the girls. That was the story he was accustomed to hearing. Robin must have had a good reason for killing him. Women didn’t just go around killing their fathers out of the blue. Had Clarence abused them as little girls? Had he been too strict? Molested them? Zachary wouldn’t have guessed it from the pictures. The girls were usually smiling or laughing. They didn’t seem awkward or afraid when Clarence was in the same picture.

  “What was Clarence like as a father?”

  “He was a good daddy.” Vera sighed. “I know he wished that he could have been home more to spend more time with them. He worked a lot when they were little. Long hours. They barely saw him during the week. Just on the weekend, when he got a break. And he’d be so tired he’d just fall asleep in front of the game on the TV.”

  “Did he get mad when they bothered him? Yell at them?”

  “Everybody yells sometimes. He was a good daddy.”

  Vera reached for her mug. Zachary handed it to her and watched like a hawk to make sure she was steady enough to take it and that it wasn’t too hot. He didn’t need her dumping scalding tea all over herself. When she’d had a sip, he took it from her and put it down on the side table.

  “And then when they were older, he didn’t have to work so much?”

  Vera was looking at pictures of the girls as they got older. Graduation pictures. Boyfriend pictures. The pictures of Gloria with Rhys, looking awkward and posed.

  “How did Clarence feel about Gloria getting pregnant? I’ll bet that was a shock.”

  “Well, neither of us was happy about it, I’ll tell you that. But shocked? No. Gloria was wild. She wouldn’t listen. Sneaked out at night. Who knows how much drinking and drugging she was doing. She wasn’t a nice girl. Not like Robin.”

  “Robin didn’t run wild like that?”

  “No. She was more careful. The older one is always the perfectionist. Tries to show Mom and Dad that they can do everything right. Gloria was never like that. She was always looking for her own way to do everything.”

  “But you took her and the baby back.”

  “How could we not? She couldn’t take care of a baby by herself. That child would have been abandoned in a garbage can or on the street. We had to look after him. And we hoped that she would learn to take some responsibility, get back on track. Turn her life around.”

  “I guess it worked,” Zachary offered. “She seems much better now.”

  Vera frowned for a moment, then her brow smoothed again. “Yes, she’s a very nice girl now. Very responsible. A good mom to Rhys. It took her a long time to get there, but she got herself turned around.”

  Zachary looked down at the page. Gloria with Rhys. Grandpa Clarence holding Rhys, laughing. A couple of random shots of Robin or Gloria by themselves. Robin and Vera making Christmas cookies.

  Zachary’s stomach tightened, thinking of Christmas preparations. He still couldn’t think about getting ready for Christmas without a feeling of panic.

  “How did Gloria and Robin get along, after Rhys was born? Robin was older, it must have been strange for her to have a little sister with a baby.”

  “Yes, they didn’t get along too well together.” Vera’s lips twitched. She was looking at the pictures, her eyes far away. “Robin was going through a difficult time.”

  “Oh?” Zachary glanced over at Kenzie. She sat quietly, listening to the stories, staying out of Zachary’s way and not attracting Vera’s attention. Vera might not have even been aware that Kenzie was in the room. “What was she having a difficult time with? I’ll bet it was boys.”

  Vera chuckled. “Robin never had problems with boys. She always had a boyfriend, and others waiting in the wings for her to break up and give them a chance. She was my social butterfly. Always getting ready for this party or that dance. She knew everybody in her school. She even ran for school president.”

  “She seems like a very capable woman. So what was bothering her? You said she was going through a difficult time.”

  “You know how it is.” Vera sighed. “When they go through puberty, things can get a little crazy. Teenage girls are so emotional. They can get quite unbalanced.”

  “What did she do?”

  Vera turned over the next page slowly. “It wasn’t one thing… it was a build-up over time. We just didn’t know what to do with her. She would get angry over the littlest thing. Hysterical tears. All kinds of drama. Everybody was out to get her. Nobody understood her. Everybody was talking about her behind her back.”

  “Was she just hormonal? Or mentally ill?”

  “There wasn’t anything wrong with her,” Vera assured him. “She’s a very nice girl and everything is good now. She just went through that little stretch as a teenager. It was hard for her after Rhys was born. Here was her sister getting all kinds of attention and Robin, the perfectionist, wasn’t getting any. We were too busy trying to raise Rhys and get Gloria onto a better track. We didn’t have any time to give to Robin.” Vera raised her eyes from the photographs and looked at Zachary. “It was a matter of life and death,” she said. “Robin didn’t understand that, but it was true. She couldn’t see that we were trying to keep Gloria from doing something that would harm Rhys, or harm herself. She thought Gloria was just being a bratty little sister.”

  “Did she… get any treatment? Counseling?”

  Vera turned the page. Rhys older in these pictures. Sitting in his mother’s lap. Sitting in Robin’s. A round-faced, smiley little toddler, beaming at the camera.

  “She needed some help,” Vera admitted. “She needed someone to talk to. It was hard for her. She didn’t understand that what she was going through was normal. Everybody has a hard time. Growing up isn’t easy.”

  “No. Is that what the doctor said? That she was just acting out?”

  “Oh, what do doctors know?” Vera asked irritably. “They put us off for years. There’s nothing wrong, it’s just hormones. Try these antidepressants. Try tough love. Make her do things for her sister. She tried. We all tried.”

  Zachary looked down at the pictures. Robin’s smiling face, carefully posed for the camera, gave nothing away. She had put up walls. She had tried, like Zachary had tried, to deal with the meds and their side effects and the doctors with conflicting opinions, and with parents who couldn’t understand what she was going through. And she’d put on a brave front and tried to pretend to be normal for everyone else. While under the surface, the anger bubbled away.

  Was it the first time she had been violent? All of the incident reports Zachary had were after Clarence’s murder. Had they been afraid to do anything before that? Afraid that if they reported Robin, it would ruin her life? So they kept ignoring it and sweeping it under the carpet, until everything exploded and it was too late to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

  “Robin fought with Clarence, didn’t she?” he suggested.

  “All kids fight with their parents. It’s part of growing up. They need to learn to be independent.”

  “She wasn’t a teenager anymore,” Zachary pointed to a picture of Robin. “She must have been out of school at this point. She should have been past all of the rampaging hormones and been settling down.”

  “She was trying. I know she was trying. She struggled so hard to be what everyone wanted her to be. The perfect student. The perfect daughter. The perfect worker. I told her she didn’t have to be perfect for me. It was okay for her to make mistakes and to let us know when she was feeling down. She didn’t have to be happy and gracious all the time for everyone.”

  “Wearing a mask.”

  “Tha
t’s what she said. She always had to wear a mask. She could never show anybody what she was really like underneath. Because it was too awful. I didn’t believe that. I knew she was mixed up. Things were messy inside. But she was my daughter. I knew she was a good girl. No matter how hard it was for her to do the right things, she was really a good girl inside.”

  Vera turned a couple more pictures. Zachary knew they would soon reach the end of the pictures of Clarence. Clarence most often was with Rhys. Fishing with him, doing woodwork or other kinds of handyman work. The boy obviously idolized his grandpa and spent as much time as he could with him.

  “Grandpa’s little shadow.”

  Vera nodded, a sweet, sad smile on her face. “Oh, yes. Grandpa’s little shadow. They were inseparable. I always said to Clarence, ‘what are you going to do when he has to go to school? How is he going to be able to go by himself when you spoil him all the time?’ He always just shook his head and said it would all work out in good time. Who knew how long he had to spend with his grandson?”

  Tears started to leak out the corners of her eyes. Because Clarence had been right. He had been right to spend as much time as he could with his grandson, because in the end, he was going to be taken away long before his time.

  “And then you came home one day, and you saw what Robin had done.”

  Vera didn’t disagree. She continued to dab at the tears, mourning her departed husband.

  “Did you know before then that she might hurt someone? Had she ever hurt anyone before that?”

  Vera sniffled. “Not… like that. She would get out of control. I knew it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t help it.”

  “And what would happen? She hit you?”

  Kenzie shifted in her seat, distracting Zachary’s attention. He darted a look over at her, and saw her wide, worried eyes. He pushed them out of his mind and focused on Vera.

  “She’d hit you,” he suggested. “Probably more than once. She’d left you with bruises.”

  “It wasn’t her fault. The doctor kept saying that if he could just get her medications right, she would be fine.”

  “She’d broken bones. You didn’t tell anyone?”

  “We said… they were accidents. And they were, because they were out of her control. She never meant to hurt anybody.”

  “And Rhys?”

  Vera shook her head slowly. “You have no idea what it was like trying to raise that boy. His mother running around all over town, acting like a little hussy. Coming home drunk or as high as a kite. So irresponsible. And Robin… she was trying so hard. She wanted so badly to be a good girl. She really did. But no matter what they gave her…”

  “It never worked.”

  “She didn’t deserve to be punished.” Vera blinked her big, dark eyes at Zachary. “Gloria said she should be punished for what she did. Put in prison. Gloria was the irresponsible one. Robin shouldn’t have to be put in prison when she was trying so hard.”

  “You all knew she was the one who had killed Clarence. You knew there was no burglary.”

  “We didn’t know what had happened,” Vera insisted. “We didn’t see it. We could only piece it together, we could only guess.”

  “What about Rhys? Was he a witness? Grandpa’s little shadow?”

  “He was in his bed, curled up tight in a little ball. Just stop it. Just stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “It was Robin’s voice. What Robin would say when someone was ‘driving her crazy.’ Chewing too loudly or fidgeting or doing something else she couldn’t stand. Rhys kept repeating it over and over. Just stop it.”

  Vera reached to turn the page. Zachary put his hand out to stop her from turning it. He wanted to hear more about that day. To understand why Clarence had died and why everyone had covered it up.

  Vera glared at him and with a force he hadn’t expected, pulled the photo album away from him and turned to the next page.

  “Poor little Rhys,” she said in a faraway voice. “He was so sad after Clarence died.”

  “He had to go to an institution.”

  “You don’t put a little boy in a place like that… but we didn’t know what else to do. He was falling apart.”

  “And Robin? Did you send her away?”

  She wasn’t in any of the pictures on that page, nor on the next.

  “I couldn’t,” Vera said. “People would know what had happened. We had to make things look normal. She was different after that.” Vera’s brows furrowed, and she shook her head. “She had changed.”

  “How had she changed?”

  “She wasn’t my sweet girl anymore. She wasn’t… innocent anymore.”

  Or maybe Vera had stopped seeing her as the little girl trying to be good and saw what she had become; a jealous woman who had to have everything her way. Who had taken her own father’s life over some petty bother.

  “You started calling the police when she got out of control.”

  “She was very angry about that. Stanley left her, said he couldn’t deal with it anymore. Up until then… I had thought she would settle down with him. She would get married and she’d have someone giving her all of the attention she needed. She would be out of the house and we could live in peace.”

  “You must have found something that worked eventually. The calls to the police stopped. Rhys came home and you were all living together again.”

  “It was a hard time.” Zachary was sure that was an understatement. “Making sure that Rhys was safe… Robin knew if she ever did anything to hurt him, she would go to jail. We didn’t talk about it, but we never left him alone with her. Never left her to watch him.”

  Zachary couldn’t imagine what it had been like for the boy. To have had to live in the same house as a woman he knew to be a murderer. Unable to tell anyone what had happened. He looked at the boy’s sad face in all of the pictures after Clarence’s death. Gloria had finally grown up and taken responsibility, but she couldn’t fix the damage that had been done. She lived every day with the knowledge that Robin had never been punished for what she had done. Then she was faced with the fact that Robin was going to die without ever being punished. Poisoning her must have seemed like such a small satisfaction. A few days of suffering, after all that they had suffered over the years. One tiny retribution; depriving Robin of her last few months of her life.

  Zachary wondered whether Vera knew what Gloria had done. Had Gloria told her? Had she watched Gloria inject the iron into the IV? Approved of it? As much as he wanted to know and to get a clear picture, that wasn’t the most important thing. It was more important to keep Vera talking. If she clammed up, there was no chance of finding out where Gloria might have gone with Bridget. Zachary studied the pictures as Vera turned the pages. Rhys’s growing-up years. Moving from boyhood to a gangly teenager. His face always worried or sad.

  There was a candid shot of him looking down, intent on something in his hands. Playing an electronic game or texting with a friend.

  Zachary’s sudden movement startled Vera. She looked at him, eyes wide as he dug the phone out of his pocket. “Did you get a call? I didn’t hear it ring.”

  Zachary shook his head. “Does Rhys ever send you messages on your phone? Maybe pictures or a text message?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  V

  era’s eyes were wide.

  “Rhys sent me a few messages,” Zachary said. He was working out the timeline in his head. The friend request from Rhys had come Monday after Zachary had been at the house. Rhys had come out to see his grandma while Zachary was there and had been hustled back away to his room. After Zachary had left, Rhys had tracked down Zachary’s social media account to connect with him. Vera must have told him who Zachary was and why he was there.

  Zachary looked at those first messages. Sad faces. First the basset hound and then the emoticon. Zachary had thought that Rhys was sad about Robin’s death. But Rhys had been sad a lot longer than that. He was sad about losing his grandpa. About the horrible
situation he found himself in, living with someone who might cause him harm if given the opportunity. Unable to make his voice heard and to be safe.

  When Zachary had said he was sorry about Robin’s death, Rhys had responded with a picture of his family. The three women together, with him posed in front of them. What had he been trying to tell Zachary? Not that he missed Robin and was sad she had died, but that this was how he had lived, trapped in a home built of secrets, lies, and abuse? How had he felt looking at that picture, with the women’s plastic smiles trying to hide what had happened all those years ago? Did Rhys remember what had happened? Or had they managed to erase that night from Rhys’s conscious memories, leaving him with just a feeling of dread and danger and deep unhappiness day after day.

  “You must miss her a lot,” Zachary had written back, not understanding, and Rhys had not responded.

  Were they already on the run? Was Zachary the one lifeline that Rhys had reached out to, hoping a private investigator would understand and be able to help? But Zachary had not understood.

  “What did he send you?” Vera asked, her head turned to try to see the messages Zachary was looking at.

  Zachary thumbed to the next message. Wednesday. The day Gloria had taken Bridget. Zachary held the phone where Vera could see the picture of the moving gif of a fat dog stuck in a toilet bowl. Help me.

  “Oh, look at that,” Vera said, with a catch in her throat. “Isn’t that funny.”

  But she didn’t say it like it was funny. Did she know that Rhys really had been begging for help? She had known the boy since he was born. She had communicated with him throughout all of his mute years and had probably seen similar pictures or messages. She had the insight into Rhys’s mind that Zachary lacked. She probably knew that, far from simply sharing a funny picture with Zachary, Rhys had been reaching out, begging for help.