Don't Cry Now

by Joy Fielding

  Caroline handed her the phone. “I’ll be in the other room.”

  “You don’t have to leave,” Bonnie told her, grateful for the company, listening as the phone rang once, then twice, then three times. “I’m probably dragging her out of the bathroom,” she said nervously, letting it ring another six times before finally giving up, then trying again. “Maybe I dialed the wrong number,” she said, knowing instinctively she hadn’t, but trying it again anyway. “I guess she must have gone out for a few minutes.” After telling Bonnie she wouldn’t budge from the phone until she’d heard from her? Without putting on her answering machine?

  “Maybe she’s in the shower,” Caroline offered.

  “That’s probably it,” Bonnie agreed readily, patting her own unwashed hair. “And actually, that’s not such a bad idea. If you wouldn’t mind….”

  “Please, be my guest.”

  Bonnie rose unsteadily to her feet.

  “But finish your toast and juice first,” Caroline advised. “Something tells me you’re going to need all the strength you can get.”

  Bonnie stood under the shower’s hot blast and watched herself disappear in a cloud of steam. Not that there was much of her left to disappear. She’d lost at least ten pounds, possibly more, and her ribs protruded awkwardly from underneath her small breasts. Her legs looked like sticks, not much fleshier above the knees than below. Prepubescent, almost. Twiggy returns, Bonnie thought, with her haunted eyes and painted on lower lashes, her close-cropped hair, and her sunken chest. Maybe Twiggy hadn’t been naturally skinny after all. Maybe she’d painted on those exaggerated lashes because her own had fallen out. Maybe she’d adopted the boyish waif hairdo when her once lustrous locks had turned to straw. Maybe she’d been suffering from arsenic poisoning.

  Bonnie laughed, shampoo snaking its way from her hairline into her open mouth. She spit it out, laughed again, massaged her head with forceful fingers. I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair, she sang softly, then wondered why on earth she was singing. Her whole life was falling apart, someone was trying to kill her, she didn’t know whom she could trust, and here she was singing in the shower. The arsenic must have already seeped into her brain.

  She thought she heard something, waited until she heard it again, shut off the water when she realized it was a tapping at the bathroom door. “Yes?” she called out, wondering if she’d heard anything at all.

  “Bonnie,” Caroline called back, opening the bathroom door a crack, letting a gust of cool air inside. Bonnie felt it wrap around her torso, like a towel. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought I should call you right away. It’s Captain Mahoney—he’s on the phone.”

  Bonnie barely had time to dry off and get dressed before Captain Mahoney was at the front door. She told him everything, the words pouring from her mouth like boiling water from a kettle—the way she’d been feeling the last few weeks, her visit to the doctor, the results of her blood tests, the certainty that someone had been poisoning her, the uncertainty of who it was. “I found some rat poison under Joan’s sink,” she told him.

  “You were there?”

  “Yesterday.” She caught a glimmer of surprise, then impatience in his dark eyes. He fidgeted on the seat beside her, pretended to be studying the tall nude sculpture in front of the piano in Caroline Gossett’s living room. Caroline was teaching Amanda how to make papier-mâché in the basement. Lyle had disappeared first thing in the morning to play golf.

  “You touched it?” he asked, resignation clinging to his words like a stubborn tickle in the throat.

  “Yes.” Bonnie understood without needing to be told that her careless hands had probably destroyed whatever chance the police might have had of discovering fresh prints somewhere on its surface. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  He scratched the side of his head. “Everyone’s a detective,” he muttered.

  “Like my brother?” Bonnie asked, waiting for his response, receiving none. “Is he who he says he is, Captain Mahoney?”

  “Your brother is not a suspect in Joan’s murder,” Captain Mahoney replied cryptically.

  “Is he a police officer?” she pressed.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Couldn’t? Or won’t?”

  “Your brother is not a suspect in this case,” he repeated.

  Bonnie nodded. “Then it’s safe for me to contact him?”

  “It’s safe,” he told her, as grateful tears filled her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t know which way to turn.”

  “Looks like you turned in the right direction,” he said, eyes scanning Caroline’s living room.

  “I was lucky. Caroline’s a wonderful woman.”

  “Good friends are hard to come by.”

  “Oh my God, I forgot about Diana,” Bonnie said. “She must be half crazy by now.” She stood up, ran into the kitchen, grabbed the phone, punched in Diana’s number.

  Again the phone rang once, twice, three times. She was about to hang up, dial again, when it was suddenly picked up.

  “Oh good, you’re there,” Bonnie said, not waiting for Diana’s hello. “I called before, but you must have been in the shower.”

  “Who is this?” The male voice on the other end of the line was flat, expressionless, although vaguely familiar.

  A cold sweat broke out across Bonnie’s upper lip. Her breath caught in her throat, refused to budge. “Who’s this?” she asked in return.

  “Detective Haver of the Weston police,” he answered. “Who am I speaking to, please?”

  “Detective Haver?” Bonnie repeated, picturing the dark-skinned police officer she’d talked to at Amanda’s day care center after the incident with the blood.

  Captain Mahoney appeared at her side. “I’ll take it,” he said, and Bonnie handed him the phone without further prompting.

  She watched as Captain Mahoney’s eyebrows furrowed, shaping his face into a frown. She listened as his voice lowered almost to a rasp, heard him whisper, “Yes, I see. What time was that?” She saw him shake his head, balancing the phone between his ear and neck as he reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out his notepad, jotted something down. “Do you mind if I come out there, have a look around?” she heard him ask before putting down the phone.

  “There’s been a homicide,” he told her directly, as she grabbed for the kitchen counter.

  Bonnie could barely bring herself to speak. “No,” was all she could ultimately manage.

  “A neighbor just made a positive identification a few minutes ago.”

  “Please, no,” Bonnie said.

  “I’m afraid your friend is dead,” Captain Mahoney said solemnly. “She’s been shot.”

  “Diana was shot,” Bonnie repeated, refusing to believe the words she was hearing, the words she was speaking.

  “A single gunshot through the heart.”

  “Oh God. Oh God, no. My poor Diana.” Bonnie’s eyes traveled restlessly around the kitchen, stopped on the charcoal drawing of the mother and newborn child. She wanted to grab her own child and run, run as fast and as far away as she could. “Is there any chance it could have been prowlers? Or maybe Diana’s ex-husband? She was married twice, you know. Married and divorced. Maybe it was one of them, or someone else she knew. There was never a shortage of men around. I mean, this doesn’t have to have anything to do with Joan, or with me, does it? It could just be one of those awful coincidences, one of those perverse twists of fate. Couldn’t it?” Bonnie asked, desperately wanting this to be the case, although she knew it wasn’t so.

  “A neighbor saw a car screeching out of her driveway at around ten o’clock this morning,” Captain Mahoney said. “He got concerned, walked across the street, saw her front door was open, went inside, found her sprawled out on the floor of her living room.”

  Bonnie tried very hard not to picture her closest friend lying dead on her living room floor. It couldn’t be, she thought. There had to be some mistake. D
iana was such a complex human being, so intense and complicated, so full of energy and contradictions. It was impossible that someone could rob her of that intensity with anything as simple as a bullet to the heart. “Did the neighbor get a good look at the person in the car?” Bonnie asked.

  “No. But he did get a good look at the vehicle.”

  “What kind of car was it?” Bonnie asked, hearing the answer almost before Captain Mahoney spoke it.

  “A red Mercedes,” he said.

  “We’ve assigned several police officers to guard the house,” Captain Mahoney was saying later, although he had to say it several times before it finally sunk in what he meant. “They’ll be in an unmarked car a few houses down the road. As well, we’ll have someone out back, just in case. And we’ve put a tap on your phone should he try to contact you.”

  “Contact us?” Bonnie asked.

  “You never know.”

  “I know my brother didn’t do this,” Lauren insisted from her seat at the dining room table, her arms sprawled haphazardly across the table top, her head dangling loosely from her neck, like a marionette whose strings had been severed.

  They’d been sitting this way for what seemed like hours—Bonnie, Rod, Lauren, Nick, Captain Mahoney, Detective Haver, their bodies defeated, their arms and legs akimbo. Bonnie thought of another occasion several weeks ago, when another small group had been gathered around this table, only then it had been Haze instead of Detective Haver, Sam in place of Captain Mahoney. And Diana, Bonnie thought, picturing her friend, her eyes as blue as a tropical sea.

  “You know Sam didn’t do this,” Lauren said again, less forcefully.

  “Of course we have police watching the Gleason house as well,” Detective Haver continued. “In case they show up there.”

  It turned out Diana’s neighbor thought he’d seen two men in the car. Young men with long hair, he said, although he couldn’t say for certain the young men in question had been Sam and Haze. It didn’t matter. Neither Sam nor Haze had been seen since this morning. There was an all-points bulletin out for their arrest.

  “Why would Sam want to hurt Diana?” Lauren asked, although her eyes were blank and her voice was directed at no one in particular. “He had this huge crush on her. He wouldn’t hurt her.”

  Bonnie tried to block out the sound of Lauren’s voice by closing her eyes. If police suspicions proved correct and Diana had been sexually assaulted before she died, then Lauren was doing nothing to help her brother’s case. The medical examiner’s report would take at least several days to come in, but Captain Mahoney felt certain it would show that Diana had been killed by the same gun that killed Joan, and that she had been raped either before or after death. “Oh God,” Bonnie moaned, covering her mouth with her hand. It was all her fault. If it hadn’t been for her, Diana would be alive today. Hadn’t she dragged her friend into this mess? Hadn’t she called her from the police station the day she’d discovered Joan’s body, dragged her into Newton, even though she knew little about criminal law? Hadn’t she invited her to dinner, introduced her to Rod’s son? Sam, this is Diana. Diana, this is Death. “Oh God,” she moaned again, burying her head in her hands.

  Strong hands came to rest on her shoulders, their fingers massaging the muscles at the base of her neck. “I’ll be staying here tonight,” Nick said, his fingers applying just the right amount of pressure. “On the couch in the living room.”

  Bonnie nodded, looked toward Rod, wondering how he would react. But Rod said nothing. He sat at the far end of the table, staring blankly into space, seeming not to realize that Nick was even there, that his house was full of police officers, that there were more police outside. He was probably in shock, Bonnie thought, realizing he’d said almost nothing since she’d arrived home in the company of Captain Mahoney. Anger and outrage had vanished into horror and dismay. Diana was dead, the captain had told him, and his son was the prime suspect. He was also the prime suspect in both his mother’s death and the attempt to poison his stepmother. Rod had listened to all this in stunned silence, then retreated into the dining room to sit down. He’d been there ever since, not speaking, not moving, barely breathing.

  Bonnie wanted to go to him, to put her arms around him and tell him that everything would be all right, but something stopped her. How could she tell him everything would be all right when it might never be all right again? How could she comfort him when only hours ago, she’d thought he might be guilty of the crimes himself?

  “I should check on Amanda,” Bonnie said, rising to her feet, swaying, sitting back down.

  “I just did,” Nick reminded her. “She’s sound asleep. Which is something you should consider doing. I doubt anything will happen tonight, and those pills you’re taking are pretty strong stuff. You should be in bed. You too, Rod,” he said, shifting his focus.

  Rod said nothing. He continued staring at the far wall as if no one had spoken.

  “Daddy?” Lauren called. She got out of her seat, walked to her father, put her arms around him, hugged him tightly, as if trying to squeeze life into him, her lips grazing the side of his cheek. “Come on, Daddy,” she whispered. “I’ll help you up the stairs.”

  Rod allowed his daughter to lead him from the room. Bonnie watched them mount the stairs slowly, planting both feet firmly on each step before continuing on to the next.

  “You should really be in a hospital,” Nick said, turning back to his sister.

  “Not till this is settled. Not till I know it’s safe to leave Amanda.”

  “They won’t get far,” Captain Mahoney stated. “Two long-haired teenagers in a red Mercedes. Shouldn’t be too difficult to spot.”

  Bonnie shook her head, trying to imagine where they might be, where they were headed, why they would have killed Diana.

  Why? she asked herself again, the word making her head spin. Why any of it? Nothing made any sense. Sam might not have been the son of most people’s dreams—he had an earring in his nose and a snake in his bedroom—and he was withdrawn and angry, moody and shy. But he was also sweet and sensitive and caring and desperate to be loved.

  Was that what had happened? Had his need to be loved resulted in his misinterpreting Diana’s kindness? Had his pent-up rage surfaced when she’d turned down his awkward teenage advances? Had he raped her, then killed her to keep her quiet? Had her death been an isolated act of fury or part of a larger plan?

  Or was Haze the prime culprit? Was it his sperm they’d discover in Diana’s body? That was the easy part, Captain Mahoney said. If Diana had been sexually assaulted, DNA testing would easily ferret out the guilty party.

  “It’s almost over,” Nick told her.

  Bonnie nodded, praying he was right. She stood up, walked to the stairs, Nick right behind her. Captain Mahoney and Detective Haver remained at the dining room table. They would show themselves out when they were ready.

  “Dad would like it if you’d call him,” Nick said in the hall. “He’s been worried about you since your visit. He knows there’s all sorts of stuff going on, and I think he’d rest a whole lot easier if you’d give him a call.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that, Nick. I don’t know if I have the strength.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t waste a minute worrying about your strength,” Nick told her. “You’re one strong woman, Bonnie. If a shitload of arsenic couldn’t finish you off, I don’t think you have anything to worry about from a harmless old man who loves you.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was strong. “We can’t do anything about the dead, Bonnie. It’s the living we have to learn to pay more attention to.”

  His arms reached out toward her. Slowly, Bonnie collapsed into them, folding like a soft tissue. After several seconds, she raised her head, kissed the tip of his delicate nose. Then she turned and followed her husband’s path up the stairs.

  He was lying on top of the bed, Lauren removing his shoes, when Bonnie entered the room.

  “I couldn’t get him to get undressed,” Lauren
told her.

  Bonnie stared over at Rod, curled into a semi-fetal position on top of the covers, his eyes open, though seemingly unfocused. Bonnie tried to imagine what he must be going through. How would she feel, after all, if a police captain were to announce some years down the road that her child was a psychotic killer responsible for the deaths of two people and the poisoning of two others? “Are you all right?” Bonnie asked her stepdaughter.

  Lauren shrugged. “Do you think they’ll find Sam?”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  “I’m so afraid,” Lauren cried softly. “I’m so afraid they’ll shoot him.”

  Bonnie went to the child, took her in her arms. “Nobody’s going to shoot anybody,” she said. There’s been enough shooting, she thought. “I think we could all use some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Lauren returned to the bed, planted a gentle kiss on her father’s forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning, Daddy. You’ll see, everything’s going to be all right now.” She tiptoed to the doorway, stopped. “I love you, Daddy,” she said, then was gone.

  Bonnie crossed to the phone by the side of the bed, her fingers moving automatically across the dial. Several seconds later, she heard her father’s careful hello.

  “It’s Bonnie,” she told him. “Nick said you were worried about me.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been better,” Bonnie replied honestly. “What about you?”

  “Me? I’m fine.” He sounded surprised she would ask. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  “A parent always worries.”

  Bonnie smiled sadly, realized this was true. “Can I call you back in a day or two?” she asked. “Hopefully, by then, things will have settled down a bit…. we could talk.”