“What do you know that they don’t?”
“She won’t come back. There’s nothing for her to come back to.”
“You? Your sister?”
“That was good enough when we were young and needed her in order to survive. We haven’t needed her in that way for years, though, and somewhere inside her I’m sure she knows it. Nobody needs her with a strong enough need to keep her alive for their sake.”
“What about for her own sake?”
“That was never enough, not for her.”
“Yes,” he said, “it isn’t for some people.”
We sat silently then. I stared into my mother’s open, vacant blue eyes; Geof stared over the bars at me. She’d lost weight in a week, even with the tube that fed nourishment directly into her stomach. And she looked flaccid as a coma patient; maybe it was coma rather than catatonia. It hardly mattered; either way, she was far away from me.
“Where are you, Mother?” I whispered to the cold metal bars. “Is it warm where you are? Are you comfortable and safe? It’s okay, you know; don’t feel guilty about anything. It isn’t your fault, none of it has been your fault. I know you can’t fight anymore, I don’t blame you. You hung in there for so many years for Sherry and me, and once upon a time for Daddy. I know you’re tired and you want to rest. Mother, I just want you to know that if you want to go—it’s all right with me. I love you, no matter where you are or where you go. So you do what you need to do, and don’t worry about me. I know you love us, somewhere in there you do.”
I stood and leaned over the bars to kiss her forehead. My tears splattered onto her nose and ran down her cheeks so that it looked as if she were crying too.
Geof stood too and reached for me over my mother’s bed. He held me until I stopped shaking, and then he drove me home.
Chapter 25
We drove first to my parents’ house to water the plants and get me several changes of clothing. As Geof remarked on the way over, it might be safe for me to stay alone now that my birthday had come if not yet gone, but we couldn’t be absolutely sure of that.
“Besides,” he added lightly, “I hate to make a bed by myself.”
“I didn’t know it mattress to you,” I said and he groaned.
“That was a hit pillow the belt,” he said.
“No sheet.”
“Obscene language in public is a punishable offense.
“All right!” I laughed. “Truce!”
“Say uncle,” he demanded. So much emotion in so short a time had rendered us both a little goofy.
“Aunt,” I giggled.
“That’ll do.”
“Pun-k!” I yelled as I slammed the door and slogged, laughing, through the snow to the front steps. I walked in the postman’s several tracks, slurring them as I kicked my way home. Thin layers of snow had fallen in my absence, so the house had a freshly powdered if rather forlorn look about it. I fantasized that it was glad to see me. The evergreen bushes my mother had planted years before bowed low to me under their white load; icicles sucked determinedly at the eaves. Except for the tracks of the postman and those of a roaming dog or two, the yard spoke eloquently of no-one-home.
I climbed the postman’s footprints up the front steps and onto the porch, fumbled in my purse for my big brass key ring, the one I bought so I wouldn’t have to fumble in my purse for my keys. Geof whistled his leisurely way up the walk behind me.
The feel of the house key in my hand was like the feel of welcome-home, which is where I was rather glad to be, Geof’s company notwithstanding. I smiled happily to myself and looked up at the big front door of my parents’ home.
It was open.
Not wide open, but definitely ajar. The small pane of glass nearest the lock was broken. Funny, I’d never noticed how vulnerable my nice sturdy conscientious bolt was, and how easy it would be for a hand to reach in through the glass and switch the lock I had so carefully turned. I noticed now.
“Geof.”
He came’ running at the alarm in my voice, lifting his long legs high through the snow I had never shoveled. When he saw the door he said quietly, “Get back in the car, Jennifer.” It was impossible to see inside the hallway because of the curtains I had neatly closed before I left with the policeman several nights before. I watched Geof pull a gun I didn’t know he had from a holster I hadn’t known he was wearing. I didn’t have the slightest idea what kind of gun it was, but it looked as efficient as the man who owned it. He said, “Get in the driver’s seat. I left the keys in the ignition. Do not start the car. Wait five minutes. If I don’t come out this door, or if you see or hear anything that frightens you, drive immediately to the police station and tell them to get here fast.”
“I could run to the neighbors’.”
“They’re not home,” he said, proving how little I knew about how alert he was. “Go now, please.”
I went.
But only as far as my own car, where I quietly opened the trunk and reached in for the tire jack that was stored beside the spare. I set my purse in the trunk, which I left open, and walked back through the silent snow to the front porch. I waited there, off to one side, with the jack raised high in both hands like the racket of a tennis player at the net. It did occur to me that I must have looked pretty ridiculous and that I wasn’t all that sure what I thought I was doing. But I didn’t see any need to spend my five minutes unprotected.
Sooner than I expected, Geof stepped back out on the porch. He saw me just as he put his gun back in its holster.
“Expecting someone?” he said. “Maybe the villian running out the front door with me in hot pursuit?”
I dropped the jack in the snow and breathed again.
“You might have needed me,” I said defensively.
“I do need you.” He gestured for me to join him on the steps. I wondered why he wasn’t angry at me for ignoring his undoubtedly wise instructions. He seemed, instead, gentle.
I understood why when I stepped into the house.
“Bastards,” I whispered when I saw, and then my whisper turned into a banshee scream. “Bastards, bastards!”
“Yes,” Geof said coldly, rather like Edwin Ottilini before him, “yes, indeed.”
I’ve heard that bomb and burglary victims experience similar feelings of violation and fury, of fear and grief and helplessness. That may be so, but frankly, I think I’d rather be bombed, provided no one was home at the time. I wonder if it isn’t a little less excruciatingly personal when yours is only one of several devastated houses on the block and the hit was merely a vicious stroke of fate, not purpose. If you’re bombed, at least you can’t imagine the pilot and the bombardier had it in, personally, for you. They didn’t smile meaningfully at each other, six thousand feet up, and say, “Coming up on Jenny Cain’s house. Let’s annihilate it, old boy. Bombs away!”
There wasn’t any doubt that somebody had it in, as personally as possible, for me. The proof lay scattered about my parents’ house in tiny shreds of family photographs and scissored pages of favorite books; it snuggled in the cozy down that spilled out of the slashed cushions of the chairs and sofa in the den; it nestled evilly among the pieces of broken crystal in the dining room. My mother’s twenty Wedgwood dinner plates were neatly lined up in four rows in front of the hutch. Something hard—the heel of a shoe? the leg of a chair?—had carefully stepped down in the center of each one, smashing it to pulverized dust.
“This took a lot of time,” Geof said as he walked me through the house. He’d already called the station. I asked him if he’d thought to tell them to bring brooms.
We climbed to the second floor.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the damage to my room—clothes pulled out of drawers and closets, probably ruined. But I walked on down the hall to the only room my mother had known in her adult life besides various ones in various hospitals.
“Wait, Jennifer!”
But I didn’t.
I stood in the doorway of my paren
ts’ bedroom and stared.
“This took a lot of time,” I said finally, unconsciously parroting Geof. “Somebody certainly took a lot of time to do this.”
It looked as if a tornado of frenzied malice had ripped through the room. Clothes lay everywhere, having been yanked from their hangers and drawers and tumbled to the floor. But that wasn’t what had taken the intruder so much dangerous time, it wasn’t that task over which he or she had labored so painstakingly. There were in that room other marks of wickedness so painful to me that my eyes could only briefly register them and then skitter away … the last hooked rug on which my mother had been working was carefully and completely unraveled so that the colorful ribbons of material lay limp among the devastation … my parents’ wedding pictures which my mother had never removed from the room were still intact, but for their two heads neatly scissored from every single one of them … my Grandmother Cain’s eyelet pillowcases had been cut into ragged squares of dead lace… the funny little ceramic sculpture of a clam that my mother had made for Dad when he took over his doomed company was smashed into unrecognizable shards… my bronzed baby shoes, and my sister’s, were lined up side by side on the floor where somebody had defecated on them …
I turned blindly away from that awful room and ran back down the hallway, looking neither right nor left, nor at Geof who waited anxiously for me at the head of the stairs. I ran down the steps and out the front door. I plowed back through the snow to Geof’s car and I got in and sat in the driver’s seat and I stared out the window in the direction that was opposite of my parents’ house.
He followed me out. He opened the door on the passenger’s side and leaned in toward me.
“I’m all right,” I said to the window.
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so either.”
“You’ll be cold if you wait here.”
“I’ll live.”
“I’ll have somebody take you back to my house.”
“That would be good.”
“Jenny…”
“Actually,” I said to the window, “I’m too old to be living in my parents’ house. Even if they’re not home. And there’s no need to pretend I’m keeping it safe for my mother’s return.”
“Darling…”
“It’s time to move on.” My breath frosted the window so that I couldn’t see out of it. I said to the frost. “It’s time for me to move on.”
Geof closed the door gently as the police cars turned the corner of the street where I no longer lived.
Chapter 26
There weren’t any fingerprints, of course, except the ones that ought to have been there—mine, Michael’s, Ginger’s, etcetera. And whoever it was didn’t just happen to drop a telltale matchbook or leave behind a cufflink with a type of rare stone that was owned by only five people in the world, three of them now in prison and the fourth paralyzed from the neck down by a freakish tobogganing accident in Switzerland. Whoever it was didn’t leave any footprints, either. Whoever it was had either traipsed barefoot through the snow or had removed his shoes or boots at the door so as not to track traceable prints of mud on the rug.
Very clean, the one who hated me, and careful.
“I think we have to face that possibility,” Geof said that afternoon in his office at the station. It was small, neat and functional, giving not a hint of the sensuous side of him. He had, on second thought, had me delivered there—like a perishable package—instead of to his house.
The possibility he thought we had to face was the one that ran along the lines of somebody out there hating me.
“So maybe the one they’re out to ruin is Ms. Cain, here,” Ailey Mason said. “Maybe they were after her all along, and not The Foundation.”
“Oh, come on,” I protested. “They didn’t attack the others just so The Foundation would collapse and I’d lose my job!”
“Maybe,” Geof mused, “maybe you’re just a double victim, in a sense …”
“Just?” I said faintly. I’d wept for a solid hour in the women’s John at the police station; now I felt drained, calm and capable of murder myself.
“What I mean,” Geof said, “is that you’re a potential victim, A, because you’re one of the Big Five. But you’re also a potential victim, because, B, you’re the obvious living symbol of The Foundation.”
“I thought double jeopardy was illegal,” I said, still more faintly.
“Or maybe he was just plain frustrated because he couldn’t get at her to kill her at The Foundation,” Mason suggested. “Because she was always there with other people and because you, uh, protected her at other times. So he goes to her house to kill her and when she’s not there, he gets real pissed off. I can see that, yeah, I can see that.”
I rolled my eyes at Geof.
“He can see that,” I said. “He can understand how some homicidal maniac could get so angry at me for not having the courtesy to be home when he wants to kill me …”
“He didn’t mean that, Jenny,” Geof grinned. “Tell her you didn’t mean it that way, Ailey.”
Mason lit a cigarette and looked disgusted. He probably thought he looked blasé and sophisticated.
“What I want to know,” Geof said, “is when he broke into your parents’ house. Obviously, it had to be sometime between Tuesday night when you left and today when we got back from the hospital.”
Mason lifted a quizzical eyebrow that Geof didn’t answer. So Mason said, pompously, “I can determine that by the neighbors and the postman and the snowfall.” If there’s anything worse than a pompous ass, it’s a young one. This particular sample of the species proceeded to lecture his elder. “You know—today’s Sunday, so did the postman notice the door was ajar when he delivered the mail yesterday? I can narrow it down fast with easy stuff like that.”
Geof nodded seriously, managing to control his grin. Then he said, “Then I want to know the alibis for that time period for the people who knew of the existence of the Big Five list.”
For an instant, Mason looked like the young, overworked kid he really was. “Jesus, Geof,” he complained, “why don’t you just ask me to get alibis for everybody in Poor Fred?”
“Don’t make this harder than it is,” Geof said mildly. “Concentrate on the primary possibilities—the staff of The Foundation, the trustees, the directors of the charities, the relatives of the victims, and don’t worry about the secondary layer of people who might have known about the Big Five—spouses, friends, and so on. At least not yet.”
Mason grunted, but there was a measure of respect to the sound, if that’s possible.
Geof turned back to me.
“Now we need to talk about you, Jenny. Tell me who hates you, not that I believe for one minute that anyone could.”
Mason grunted again.
“Hate?” I felt uncertain with the word, much less the idea. “Well. I suppose I’ve made some people angry if they didn’t get the money they wanted from The Foundation, but I don’t think I’d say they hated me.”
“Okay,” he said patiently, and smiled. “Let me phrase it another way. Whose blood pressure rises at the sound of your name? Who, If given the chance to invite you to dinner, would not? Who, upon hearing you’d had a run of bad luck, would smile?”
I glanced at Ailey Mason. He smiled.
But it was my sister who stood in the doorway behind us and said, “You called?”
Geof glanced up at her and his mouth visibly dropped. Mason and I swiveled at the sound of her voice, and when the young cop saw her he rushed to his feet, dropping cigarette ashes down the front of him in his hurry.
She was a knockout’s knockout.
She’d tucked her silver-blond hair into a snug mink cap that matched her knee-length mink coat. Both were the color of bittersweet chocolate, a shade that dramatically framed her Swedish complexion. Her eyes were so big and blue you’d have sworn there were clouds passing through them.
She pulled off the cap, releasing a long lo
ose swirl of fragrance and hair. Mason released a short, tight sigh.
She slipped off the coat, revealing a multi-hundred-dollar cashmere sweater in a gold as soft and pale as antique coins. It clung to her as if it were afraid she’d lose it. Her slacks were the color of rich, moist real estate and just about as expensive. Her tiny feet in their tiny boots had walked-only on shoveled—if not hallowed—ground and did not drip snow upon the floor.
The vision parted her red wine lips to reveal beauty queen teeth. The vision smiled.
“You’re Jennifer’s sister, aren’t you?” Geof managed to say. “The resemblance is amazing.”
“You think so?” Mason said. I hoped some of the ashes that had spilled on his chest were still hot. He quickly stepped out of the vision’s way and offered her his chair.
She offered him her cap and coat to hold.
He took them like a votive offering; she took the chair like a birthright.
The vision turned to me and spoke.
“Happy birthday, Jenny,” it said. “How does it feel to be thirty years old?”
“Hello, Sherry. Right now, it feels about forty.”
“Looks it, too,” she said softly. “A policewoman called my home, Jenny, and asked me to come down here. What’s going on?”
“Sherry, I’d like you to meet Detective Geoffrey Bushfield and Detective Ailey Mason.”
“Bushfield?” She turned the sky-eyes on him. He managed, somehow, not to swoon. “Your name’s familiar, have we met?”
“We went to the same high school,” he smiled. “I think it’s a little more likely that I’d remember you than that you’d remember me.”
She nodded to indicate her acceptance of this probable truth. “Still,” she said, managing in the most ladylike way to examine him from head to foot. “I’d have thought I’d remember you.”
“Thank you.” He grinned.
“Sherry,” I said, having had enough of her irritating behavior, “someone broke into the house and destroyed almost everything in it.”
“What house is that?”
Generous Death Page 17