Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  Virginia Booth refused to look at me, still unsure of me. Maybe she knew me better than Beth did—better than I knew myself. Maybe I shouldn't be trusted. But I wasn't going to sell myself to Virginia Booth. And anything I said would make me sound like a used-car salesman hawking a hot car.

  “It doesn't matter,” Virginia Booth finally said. “Everyone will eventually know the truth. It might as well begin with her.”

  Beth, growing uncomfortable in her kneeling position, stood and then leaned in to perch on the arm of Virginia Booth's chair. Beth never let go of Virginia Booth's hand as she began to speak again.

  “Muffie and I were never close. She was more her father than me. A carbon copy really. We were always at odds over one thing or another. Even at Christmastime, I never seemed to choose the right toys. Whereas I already had a collection by the time I was her age, she never liked dolls. She was nine that Christmas, and I had gifted her one of mine—a German bisque Kestner with real porcelain teeth. We'd had a cabinet specially built for what I thought would be the beginning of her own collection.” The longer Virginia Booth spoke in the past, the more her voice drained of its color until it was so pale and weak that it flattened into a dull monotone.

  “Muffie simply had no interest in dolls. As with everything else I tried…. She never had an interest in anything but her father's sports—especially the hunting. She was an expert marksman.” She looked at Beth. “You know the Whitmores' hunting plantation? She would go with Brent.” Finally humbled by her memories, she looked at me. “Brent was my husband. Muffle's father,” she explained.

  I didn't dare even nod for fear of breaking her spell of comfort.

  “Oh, but this is all so unimportant now, isn't it? So insignificant …” Her voice trailed off as the maid arrived with a tray of ice water in a crystal pitcher and water glasses etched with the family initials. She walked to the table in the middle of the room and, with the tray, pushed aside the stack of gardening manuals I had looked through earlier, then placed the tray on the table. She poured a glass and brought it to Virginia Booth, who released Beth's hand just long enough to take a delicate sip and then returned the glass to the woman's waiting hand.

  When the maid had walked quietly out, Virginia Booth began again, refreshed and emboldened, ready to share some cold hard facts. “I went to the boat. Announced, of course. I had called first. I would never want to… interrupt anything.” She clamped her eyes closed and breathed deeply, the thought of lesbian encounters making her almost physically sick. “But when I got there… they were like that… under the covers…” The tears she had been stoically holding back finally spilled into her lap. With her next words, her voice cracked.

  “Purposely, I believe. Muffie staged that scene to shock me. Oh, how much she must have hated me then. Never had I felt her hate so strongly as that moment. I had sued my own daughter—and lost.” She pulled her hand from Beth's. The rest of the story had to be told alone; even Beth would not be privy to the sorrow running through her veins and seeping from her poreless skin.

  “I don't think she had told Pat I was coming. It was Muffle's hate that bred that vengeful scene—the two of them in bed. Pat looked shocked. Embarrassed. But Muffie laughed at me. That's when my hand rose to whatever was in its reach. A glass vase. So very heavy. And I remember thinking it was not my strength that lifted it from the table, but my anger. My anger threw it. I threw it at them. A glass vase. I don't know that I meant to hit her… or either of them. I was so angry, so hurt; all the years of frustration and loss seemed to well up in that one minute of letting go… my hand around the thing closest to my reach… and then letting it go… and watching it fly across the room… as if it sailed under its own power, and hit, not Pat—who had ducked from its path—but my daughter Muffie, who had turned toward Pat, worried that it would hurt her. Muffie was worried about Pat while I watched the vase crack into the back of my daughter's head. She seemed almost to bounce-bounce across the bed as if she were a child playing on a trampoline. Or maybe that's what I thought I saw—my child jumping on a bed, laughing and playing. Maybe that's not how it was at all. Maybe what I really saw was what seemed to appear moments later when my head cleared of its fury. The bed awash with Muffle's blood and Pat screaming. Bending over my daughter and screaming. I ran out. Off the boat. I ran home, here, and sat quietly, waiting for someone to call. To tell me what I'd done and how to fix it. But no one called. I waited in my room, it seemed like hours, but no one called. Until Scott came. He came to me here, and told me…they were both dead.”

  She looked at me now full-face. “Can you tell me—is that how Muffie died? From me? From what I threw?”

  Instead of answering her, I said, “Is that all? You threw something at her and left? Just ran out?”

  She looked away. “I did. Just literally ran away from it all.” She might have smiled ruefully at that point. But she didn't. Instead she poked her head up as if she smelled a sudden odor. “I have to excuse myself a minute.” She looked at Beth. “May I? I'll be right back.”

  Beth took her elbow and helped her from the chair. She had been drained by her confessional; she was weak, and so much frailer than the last two times I'd seen her. Beth and I watched in silence as she trod unsteadily out on legs not ready for the burden she had taken on and then released to us.

  Neither Beth nor I spoke, both knowing that the time for comments would be later, after the police were called, after Virginia Booth was led away in handcuffs and escorted—not by her chauffeur or a maid—but by police officers to a Newport jail cell to await arraignment for the murder of her daughter on the family yacht.

  Beth turned her pale and worried face to the windows, walked to them, and stood looking out at the sage old sea that promised answers, but, of course, offered none. The ocean was just another mirage of wisdom—a body of water that so many gazed at, thinking that there lay the answers to all life's mysteries, when, in fact, all those pretty waves were only a calming solace after the bitter truths had already been uncovered. As much as I could, I empathized with Beth, as well as with Virginia Booth, who could have been Beth's own mother after too many gin gimlets, hurling a book or a shoe or a plate in anger, as we've all done, me more often than others, I admit, except this time the instrument in Virginia Booth's second of lost control was a heavy glass vase that hit, as luck would have it, the back of her daughter's head— Muffie Booth's head—and killed her.

  I joined Beth in her ocean vigil, watching waves trickle over the craggy shore. The French casement windows were open to the breeze. Why was there always a perfect breeze by the water—nature's oscillating fan set on “perfect flow”? Beth walked closer to the window, looking out and lifting her head to the clean salty scent while I remained where I'd been standing, but we both succumbed to the hypnotic undulation of the sea, until, like the sudden waking from a dream, Beth turned to me, and I read the question in her eyes: How long does a bathroom visit take, or a sip of brandy, or a brief telephone call in private to friends and relatives?

  Beth tilted her head at me and our eyes locked.

  Muffie and her dad's favorite pastime—those weekend trips to the hunting plantation to escape the smiling faces of those freakish dolls, the embodiment of her mother's disdain—the stifling confines of Virginia Booth's relentless disapproval, Muffie knowing that her struggle with her mother would continue until their deaths. And Brent Booth, Muffle's father, knowing sooner than Virginia Booth that their daughter was different, but accepting her nonetheless—offering her a father's unconditional love. Brent Booth rescued his daughter from all those pretty dolls that Virginia Booth used like punches, smashing them into Muffle's head like a command that Muffie simply wouldn't obey.

  “Oh my God,” Beth whispered.

  I rose to my feet. “Where would they be?” I asked.

  “Upstairs, in a locked cabinet.”

  Together we ran to the oak-railed staircase and up, Beth scampering and me striding two steps at a time.

&
nbsp; “Doogie?” Beth called. Then screamed louder, “Doogie! Doogie!”

  Beth was answered by the shot itself, ringing clearly through the upstairs hallway, and deafening even through the closed door of the Booths' upstairs study.

  I followed Beth to the heavy wooden door and pulled at the locked handle, while Beth talked through it. But no amount of Beth's pleading or screaming brought a sound from the silent room. I kicked, kicked, and kicked until wood from around the lock began to splinter free. Beth stood aside, wide-eyed, astonished at my strength. The same kind of mindless strength that Virginia Booth had used to hurl a glass vase at her own daughter. Passion fueled my legs, until the door finally gave way.

  The body that used to be Virginia Booth—a body now faceless from the bullet that had ripped it from recognition—lay next to an open cabinet from which one rifle was missing and lay at the feet of her blood-splattered body.

  Beth ran ahead to her. I was held back by a sudden déjà vu. I looked around this room at the white-shuttered windows open to a sparkling sea. The looming mahogany bookcases filled with leather-bound books, a few larger volumes splayed on round tables shining from the glow of low-lit Tiffany lamps. A puddle of Virginia Booth's blood worked its way toward the frayed ends of a rich-colored Turkish rug.

  But this is the wrong room. The room in my memory is small and dark; the shades are drawn.

  The shades were always down in my mother's room. She liked the darkness, especially at the end, when she began to shun the air itself as if it were keeping her alive against her will.

  I was downstairs alone. Why was the television off? It was too quiet in the house. It was the quiet that had first drawn me outside myself and into the lives of the two people upstairs—my parents in my mother's room. I heard the clicking sound first. A constant clicking sound. I was too inexperienced then to know the sound of a gun firing with no load. I followed the clicks to the foot of the stairs. Still waiting to hear a voice, his not hers, because hers had lost its sound long before that day. My mother's weak voice would no longer carry outside the tiny guest room where she slept all day next to a table cluttered with pill bottles and dirty half-filled water glasses.

  When the clicking stopped, there was a boring silence. I waited at the foot of the stairs, and might have returned to the television, but after the crack that made me deaf except for the ringing in my ears, I ran up the stairs, watching my feet hit the steps without sound. My father had gotten to the guest room first. Or had he been there from the beginning? He stood by the bed where my mother lay, blood dripping from her lip.

  There were my parents—both of them dead, but one still standing—my father, whose hand by his side held a shiny metal gun.

  “She was sick,” he said. As if that explained the blood on the headboard. “Go back downstairs and wait.”

  I sat in the living room until the doorbell rang and I was taken down the front steps of our house by a tall stranger. He crushed my tiny fingers in his large brown fist. He held my hand too tightly, but I knew as he talked to me that he was hurting my hand out of sympathy. He didn't know how strong he was, or how to comfort a little girl who'd just seen her mother shot and killed.

  And then another white space of time passed and I was roused from bed one morning in my aunt's house by my father, who was taking me home. It's as if everything that had happened in those empty white spaces of time happened in my absence. And maybe it did.

  “Shannon? Shannon!” Beth was kneeling at Virginia Booth's side. Nothing to be done, but she was dialing 911 while looking up at me. I was still standing at a distance by the door. “What's wrong with you?” she asked.

  “My mother,” I said. “This is how she died.”

  If Beth's eyes could open wider, they did. The call made, she tucked her phone into a side pocket and stood away from Virginia Booth's body. “Shannon?”

  “I think maybe my father shot her, but she was sick. I remember the smells in the room. Alcohol, disinfectant, and something else—like the smell at the morgue that day of the autopsies—that sweet smell of decay. And Lucky wasn't there,” I muttered.

  Beth walked to me and took my elbow, much the same way as she'd taken Virginia Booth's in the morning room to help her stand. Beth, holding me by that elbow, led me out and back down the stairway, where at the bottom, two of Virginia Booth's uniformed staff stood waiting for our pronouncement. Beth, still holding my arm, passed them and without looking back, said, “Don't go up. Wait in the kitchen, please.”

  Beth walked me to a chair and lowered me into it. She took a few steps back and stood in front of me, waiting some seconds before speaking, within which time we heard the approaching sirens. “What happened?” she asked me. “Your mother shot herself? And what does Lucky have to do with it?”

  I shrugged. “She was shot in the head, I think. The headboard was splattered red. She was sick all the time. I remember that. My father telling me she was going away soon. Cancer. The police took my father away for a while, because a black police officer took me to my aunt's house. My father never went to jail. I would know if he'd served time. And then one day he came back and got me.”

  “He did it? Your father shot her?”

  I shrugged. “I never wanted to know. I wanted to remember that she'd just died of the cancer.”

  “Why,” Beth said, “would you ever try that Cohen case? Why didn't you pass it to someone else in the office?”

  “I lost Cohen because I didn't think he was guilty. My heart wasn't in it—”

  “Your heart is never in your cases, Shannon. That's why you're so good at it. Bleeding hearts mess up the blood evidence at trial. You lost the Cohen case because your heart was in it.”

  Before I could respond to her statement, the knocking at the front door brought the two uniformed maids to us. They didn't want to answer the door without Beth's approval—Beth, who had now, by default, become the mistress of the house.

  “Open it,” she told them. “And take them in here first.”

  Police officers, one after another, lumbered into the room like salivating black bears snorting power in a pretty English garden. Beth remained seated, forcing them to hover around her, to lean into her hushed tones as she spoke softly of Virginia Booth's confession in this room by the sea, and then of her self-inflicted sentence in the study upstairs. The officers, taking Beth's cue—and the silent pleas of the elegant room—responded in whispers. Through a thick curtain of childhood memories, I watched Beth spread serenity like a blanket over a fire. But she was just the eye of this storm—the worst was yet to come.

  HEARTS, FLOWERS, AND NAKED DAISIES

  I FELT BETH DARTING GLANCES AT ME AS SHE drove back to Providence. She wanted me to speak but I couldn't. Virginia Booth's suicide had triggered my past, pervaded my present, and threatened to muck up my future, and I couldn't find the words to get myself jump-started again.

  “Are you okay?” she ventured to ask about half an hour into the drive. We were almost at the exit to Providence.

  I chose the safest present and ignored my past. “Do you think Virginia Booth may have killed Pat Boardman too?”

  Beth shook her head. “When someone like Doogie confesses, it's the whole deal. And don't forget, Pat Boardman's death was a different MO. A handgun killed Pat Boardman, not a glass vase or a hunting rifle. And I don't believe for an instant Doogie went on that boat armed with a gun and an intent to kill.”

  Beth's words seemed right, though I couldn't, at the time, have said why. My head was a jumble, and I spoke just to break the silence and comfort Beth, because I could feel her worry crowding me, removing the oxygen from the car. I opened the window and the climate-cooled air was sucked out into the humidity. “So who did this, Beth? Someone went on the boat after Virginia Booth left. And I know Scott was there after. He did this, didn't he? He killed his wife, and probably Leo Safer too.”

  “Shannon, are you sure that's what you want to talk about right this minute? The Boardman murders? There's nothin
g else closer to home on your mind?”

  “What's the point of rehashing my past? It isn't going to change anything. I only wonder… did my father start drinking after my mother died? Or was he a lush first… before he decided to off my mother?”

  “He didn't murder your mother, Shannon. If he shot her, it was euthanasia and you know it. Stop dramatizing it. You're sounding more and more like Marianna every day.”

  “Poor Mari,” I said. “She always gets a bad emotional rap from us. I'm actually gaining a new respect for her— the way she faces this emotional shit head-on. She sticks her head into her heart and mucks around in there until she gets it all cleaned out.”

  “Or at least tries to,” Beth added.

  “And I never give her anything but grief for doing it. Push it away, I always say. Jump right over the hearts and flowers. But sometimes getting over it means stepping plop in the middle of it first.”

  “But you knew what happened? I mean, this isn't like the movies, where you see Doogie lying there and it all comes back to you in a flash, right?”

  “I'm not sure. I would have been about four or five years old at the time. I think I remember it. I think I walked in right after the gunshot, but it could just be a faulty memory—the bloody headboard. Could be that I heard about it in whispers for so long that I just think I was there. Only my father would know that for sure.”

  Beth remained quiet, waiting for me to segue to the obvious. Would I seek my old man out and query him? She was probably thinking that I was on a rare emotional roll, and the less she interrupted me, the more I'd open up. But I was pretty much done with my past and was already working on the present to determine how it would adversely affect my future with the slippery Scott Boardman.

  “I wonder if Virginia Booth confessed to Scott when he went to her house that night. I wonder if he already knew all this… about Muffie Booth… and kept it from me. So what do I do now? Confront him, and see what he has to say?”