by Jane Heller
I was nearly frozen with panic, overwhelmed by my own impotence, when I heard footsteps, then voices.
“Judy! Hunt!”
It sounded like Tom, I thought. But no. How could it be? He was home sleeping. And even if he weren’t, why would he come to the—
“Judy! Hunt! Can you hear me?”
It was Tom!
In the distance I could see him running toward us, along with four or five other police officers. Within seconds, they had surrounded Ducky, their guns pointed right at his head.
“That’s enough, Mr. Laughton,” Tom said as Ducky and Hunt were pulled apart.
I dropped the gun and ran toward Hunt, who cradled me in his arms and rocked me. He had a bloody lip and his left eye was beginning to swell. “I love you,” I whispered and rested my head on his chest.
Ducky stood by the lake, his hands above his head. His mouth formed an O and he seemed genuinely stunned by the dramatic turn of events.
“Don’t move, Mr. Laughton,” Tom commanded him. “We’re gonna do this nice and easy. Nice and slow.”
Tom moved slowly toward Ducky, handcuffs ready, his fellow officers poised to fire their guns if necessary.
Tom was inches away from Ducky and about to handcuff his wrists, when Ducky suddenly bolted and dove headfirst into the lake!
I screamed as the officers began firing into the water, the gunshots echoing over the vast, deserted golf course. It was deafening and I buried my head farther into Hunt’s chest. I didn’t want to look, couldn’t bear to. Let them shoot Ducky and take his body away, I thought. I’ve seen enough violence for one day.
After several seconds of gunfire, Tom instructed the officers to put their weapons down.
“We got him,” he said. “I saw him take a bullet on the side of the face. I would rather have brought him in alive, but he didn’t give us much choice. It was either watch him drown or shoot him.”
I lifted my head and looked out over the lake. It was nearly dark, and there was a fine mist over the water. It was a peaceful, tranquil sight that belied the horror of what had just transpired.
“So he’s dead?” I asked.
“Looks that way,” said Hunt. “The nightmare’s over. Finally.”
Tom told one of the officers to radio for the police divers. “Tell them to get here in a hurry. I want the body out of there before it’s too dark to see anything.”
He turned to Hunt and me. “You both okay?”
“I’m fine, but Hunt’s got a few scratches,” I said.
“Aw, it’s nothing,” said Hunt in his most macho voice. He could barely see out of his left eye, but he wasn’t about to complain. At least, not in front of Tom and the boys.
“Thank God this whole mess is over,” I said. “And thank you, Tom Cunningham, for saving our lives. But how did you know? What made you come to the club to look for us?”
Tom wiped his brow and replied, “About an hour after you left the hospital this afternoon, Arlene came out of the coma.”
“She did! That’s wonderful!” I said, hugging Hunt.
“Her doctor examined her and said something about how lucky we all were that she didn’t have any ‘retrograde amnesia’—just some residual neurological problems,” Tom continued.
“What kind of neurological problems?” I asked.
“Jude, let Tom finish,” Hunt advised. “The important thing is that she’s out of the coma.” He turned to Tom. “Were you able to talk to her?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “Once I got the okay from the doctor, I drove over to the hospital with a photograph of Brendan, hoping Arlene would be up to identifying him. When I got there, she was groggy, but she was very eager to talk to me. I showed her the photograph, and she said positively that Brendan Hardy was not the man who attacked her. I asked her if she could describe her attacker, and she said, ‘I can do better than that. I can tell you his name. It’s Ducky something or other. I met him at Judy’s club.’ I remembered that you said you were going over to The Oaks to play golf with Mr. Laughton. I thought I’d better come along—with reinforcements.”
“We’re very glad you did,” said Hunt.
“So Arlene remembered meeting Ducky at the club that day,” I said. “We were having lunch and he stopped by to say hello.”
“She remembered that—and his name,” Tom reported. “As the doctor said: no retrograde amnesia, something that’s not uncommon in patients who’ve made it through a trauma. She’s a trooper, your friend. She said to tell you that, aside from the fact that Mr. Laughton tried to kill her, she enjoyed staying at your house while you were in Florida and hopes she can come again.”
I laughed. “How did she react when she woke up from the coma and met you, Tom?” I asked with a grin. “You’re her type, you know.”
“What type is that?” he said shyly, lowering his eyes.
“Dark. Handsome. Rugged. Sexy. Just like all her favorite romance heroes.”
Tom smiled. “I’m just glad she’s all right,” he said. “I’m glad everybody’s all right.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Everybody wasn’t all right. Not exactly. Arlene did come out of her coma to identify Ducky as her attacker, but she was far from cured.
After Hunt and I left the club at about seven o’clock—we did not stick around to watch the police divers fish Ducky’s body out of the lake—we went straight to the hospital to talk to Arlene. We arrived, naively expecting her to be in tiptop shape all of a sudden—despite Tom’s remark about neurological problems—and discovered that, not only was she pale and thin and terribly weak, she was lopsided. It seems that the blows that Ducky had dealt to her cheek had created what the doctors termed “residual neurologic deficit.” The result was that the right side of her face drooped.
“They call it traumatic Bell’s palsy,” Arlene explained when she realized that Hunt and I were trying to act as if we didn’t notice. The truth was, she was quite a sight, particularly when she attempted to smile—one half of her mouth did, the other half didn’t—and the effect, combined with her nearly bald head, was rather ghoulish. “The doctor’s optimistic that the paralysis will go away in time,” she added. “But you know, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’m alive, and I have to be grateful for that.”
I took Arlene’s hand in mine and squeezed it. What a gal, I thought with admiration and envy. If half of my face sagged like that, I doubted I would be so philosophical about it.
“Can you ever forgive us for involving you in this mess?” I asked her.
“I invited myself to your house, remember?” she pointed out.
I nodded and felt my throat close at the very thought of what poor Arlene had been through. Still, if she hadn’t spent the night at our house and been able to identify Ducky, Hunt and I would be lying on the bottom of the lake on The Oaks’s famed golf course with bullet-holes in our heads.
“Do you have any idea how long you’ll have to stay in the hospital?” Hunt asked Arlene.
She shook her head. “They just told me that I’ll be here awhile,” she replied. “And that after I go home, I won’t be able to go right back to work, which really bums me out.”
At least you have work to go back to, I thought but did not say. It didn’t escape me that now that Claire’s case had been solved and the summer was over, I really did have to start job hunting.
“Well, if you have to be stuck in the hospital, the good news is that you’ll be stuck in a place that’s five minutes from my house,” I said. “I’ll be able to visit you a lot. And I know Tom Cunningham will too.”
Arlene’s face brightened at the sound of Tom’s name. Or should I say, half of it did. “Tell me about Tom,” she urged as she lay back on her pillows. “He says he came to see me every day since I’ve been here, but of course, I don’t remember.”
“Oh, he came to see you, all right,” said Hunt with a twinkle in his eye. “You’ve been his Sleeping Beauty, and now that you’ve awakened, I bet you’ll se
e a lot more of him.”
“He’s a terrific guy, Arlene,” I told her. “He’s a widower—his wife was killed early in the marriage—and the murder inspired him to become a cop instead of a lawyer, much to his father’s chagrin.”
“His father is William Cunningham, the head of Pubtel,” Hunt added.
“Oh?” said Arlene. Her eyes opened and closed, then opened again, and I could tell that her energy level was beginning to ebb.
“Yup,” I said. “It’s true.”
“Does that mean Tom can talk to his father about you and Charlton House?” Arlene asked. “Or maybe help you get a job in one of the sister companies?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Tom and his father don’t talk to each other. But look, the last thing I want you to worry about now is my employment status. You need to concentrate on getting well. In fact, I can see you’re getting tired. We’re going to go home now and let you rest.”
Hunt nodded in agreement and we stood together next to Arlene’s bed and said goodbye.
“See you soon,” I whispered, bending down to kiss the droopy side of her face. “Sleep tight.”
She smiled and I watched as her eyelids grew heavy. I guessed that by the time we were in the elevator heading to the lobby of the hospital, she was fast asleep. I prayed that her dreams would be free of murders and hospitals; that, instead, she would dream of Tom.
If I thought our lives would get back to normal once Claire’s murderer was laid to rest, I thought wrong. First came the media onslaught, as Hunt and I became the reluctant recipients of Fifteen Minutes of Fame. Once we gave our statements to the police, we were fair game, according to the reporters and television crews who pursued us as if we were the criminals. We agreed to talk to Time and Newsweek, as well as the “Today” show and “Good Morning America,” but refused to appear on “A Current Affair,” despite the obscene amount of money they were willing to pay us.
Second, there was Brendan’s trial. Obviously, he was no longer being held on suspicion of murdering Claire and attacking Arlene, but he had committed several other, albeit less violent, crimes: he had been stealing money from the members of The Oaks, thanks to all of his and Ducky’s kickback schemes, and he had been extorting money from his biological and very rich parents. A trial date was set for mid-October, and Hunt and I were being asked to testify for the prosecution, which we were glad to do.
Then, there were the visits from our family members, none of whom wanted to miss any of the excitement of our brush with celebrity. My parents flew up from Florida to spend a few days with us. Kimberley skipped her first week of school and camped out at our house, bringing along her new gerbil, whom she had named Madonna, after you know who. Even Hunt’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Impassive, stopped by several times, asking us how we were holding up, saying that they were proud of how we had brought a murderer to justice, wanting to know whether the big shots at F&F had made Hunt a partner yet, seeing as he had done something so heroic (they hadn’t).
And if all that wasn’t enough, on the tenth of September, I received some news that really took the cake.
In fact, it was cake that I was eating when the problem first came to light. A Sara Lee pound cake, to be specific.
Normally, I’m a snob when it comes to store-bought cakes, but my mother, who had not cut down on her cholesterol despite her cardiologist’s advice, had bought six Sara Lee pound cakes, insisting that they made terrific breakfast treats as well as delicious desserts. She had defrosted one of them and was heating up a slice in the toaster oven when I came downstairs for breakfast.
“’Morning, Mom,” I said, padding over to the coffee maker which, thanks to my mother, was already filled with fully-brewed java. I poured myself a cup and sat down at the counter.
“Good morning,” she replied, then looked at me, cocking her head to the right, then to the left, then sticking out her tongue.
“What on earth is the matter?” I asked.
“That’s what I was wondering,” she said, still giving me the once-over. “Stick out your tongue.”
“Why?”
“Just listen to your mother.”
I stuck out my tongue, which she inspected. Then she shrugged.
“It looks okay,” she said. “But your color’s terrible. Green. Like when you were little and you had worms.”
I laughed. “Thanks for the memory.”
“I’m serious, Judy. Do you feel all right?” she asked, laying her hand on my forehead to see if I had any fever.
“I’m exhausted, but otherwise okay,” I said. “There’s been so much going on around here lately, I guess I haven’t had much sleep.”
“Or much food. Now, have some pound cake,” she said, cutting another slice off the newly defrosted loaf.
“Pound cake? In the morning?” I said, making a face.
“Just taste it,” she insisted, removing her piece from the toaster oven, putting it on a plate, slathering it with butter, and pushing it in front of me. “Go on. Take my piece.” She placed a second slice in the toaster oven. “It’s good for you. Eat.”
I took one bite of the pound cake and felt a wave of nausea that nearly knocked me off the chair.
“Maybe I do have worms,” I said as I pushed the plate away and held my stomach.
“Either that or you’re pregnant,” said my mother.
“Pregnant? What did you put in your coffee, Mom, a hallucinagin? I’m forty years old and have never been pregnant in my life. I’d say that’s a stretch.”
“Maybe, but I’ve never known you to push food away.”
“It’s probably one of those twenty-four-hour viruses,” I said before I felt another wave, this one more intense than the first. “I think I’ll go back upstairs,” I told my mother, barely able to speak without gagging.
“Good idea. And while you’re up there, call your doctor. Your gynecologist. You may think you have a bug in your stomach, but if you ask me, you have a bun in the oven. A mother knows these things,” said Lucille Mills as she devoured the pound cake I had left behind.
In between trips to the restroom, which, over the next two months, came to be known around the house as “the retchroom,” I tried to remember the date of my last period. And when I really thought about it, I realized that I had skipped a period but had chalked it up to all the stress I’d been under. The same thing had happened when I was a senior in college and was crazed over final exams and the boy who had just jilted me for a perky little freshman he’d met on line in the cafeteria. But pregnant? Me? I had long given up on the idea that Hunt and I would ever have children of our own. For one thing, there had been my career; becoming pregnant would have put a crimp in my ability to focus on my work, I was sure. For another thing, Hunt already had a child, and while he’d never actually gone on record as saying he was against our having children of our own, he’d seemed content to lavish his paternal affection on Kimberley. And for a third, I’d always assumed I was infertile—“barren,” as Delia Tewksbury would have put it. I’d stopped using contraceptives years ago and decided to let nature take its course.
Had it taken its course? Was I pregnant at forty? It was possible, I knew. After our frustrating, seemingly endless drought, Hunt and I had been having sex again—lots of sex. It wasn’t completely absurd to think that during one of those torrid, overheated summer nights of lovemaking I had…we had…conceived a child.
The very thought made me feel both joyous and panic-stricken.
I considered going out and buying one of those home pregnancy tests, but what was the point? I didn’t trust them, the same way I didn’t trust telephone answering machines. Whenever I’d leave someone a message on their answering machine, I never believed they’d ever get it. Similarly, if I gave myself a home pregnancy test, I’d never know for sure if I was really pregnant. On the other hand, if Dr. Higginbottom, my gynecologist for the past five years, looked me in the eye and said, “Judy, dear”— he calls all his patients “dear,” which infuriates s
ome of them but doesn’t bother me at all because of the kindly, unpatronizing way he says it—“you’re going to have a baby,” I would believe him. I would not only believe him, I would run right out and buy the kid a nursery full of mobiles.
So off to Dr. Higginbottom I went, without telling anyone but my mother.
“I’ll be a grandmother—finally,” she said as I was walking out the door.
“Don’t count your chickens yet, Ma,” I called out. “They could be worms.”
“Not on your life,” she muttered as I closed the door behind me.
Dr. Higginbottom was a very nice man. He wasn’t one of those misogynist gynecologists who kneads your breasts just a little too hard while he’s searching for lumps or goes silent on you while he’s got his hands up your privates. No, Dr. Higginbottom was a friendly, chatty sort, his only obvious hang-up being that he was a kindly Connecticut country doctor who felt a great deal of rage toward his wealthier, flashier colleagues in Manhattan. For example, he was forever saying things like, “The big boys in New York would probably charge you an arm and a leg for a Pap smear and then send it to a lab that would screw up the results.” Or: “The big boys in New York keep you waiting for hours in their fancy waiting rooms but have no compunction about canceling your appointment if you’re five minutes late.” Dr. Higginbottom may have been a little too caught up in the My-stethoscope-is-bigger-than-your-stethoscope thing, but he was right about the big boys in New York more than he was wrong about them.
“Hello, Dr. Higginbottom,” I said when he entered the examining room, where I sat on the table wearing one of those impossibly uncomfortable disposable “gowns.”
“Judy, dear,” he smiled. “Didn’t we see each other a few weeks ago?”
“Yes, but I just couldn’t stay away,” I deadpanned.