“You’re kind of mean,” Kevin said, as if this thought had dawned on him for the first time.
“She is, right?” Crawford asked, shoving a piece of toast into his mouth and washing it down with coffee.
“Listen, you two. I’ve seen two people die in the space of a week and I’m not in the mood to listen to your opinions of me.” I looked at Kevin. “Without me, I might remind you, you’re homeless.” I turned to Crawford but couldn’t think of anything to say. Because without me, he would probably have a very calm and serene life.
Crawford got up to pour himself a cup of coffee, stopping on the way to kiss the top of my head. He stood at the coffee-maker and turned to look out the kitchen window. “Hey,” he said, addressing Kevin. “Can you still do weddings?”
I gave him a look that telegraphed my reluctance to talk about the topic in front of Kevin, if at all.
“What?” he asked. “Just an innocent question. Hypothetical, really.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said as pleasantly as I could. I thought the big, fake smile on my face should have given him some indication of the tone, but apparently, it didn’t. He went sullen.
“Just wanted to know.”
Kevin watched the two of us discuss whether or not it was appropriate to talk about the topic of our possibly impending nuptials in front of him, his head whipping back and forth depending on who was speaking. Kevin knew about the marriage talk; he had been with us when Crawford had popped the question in his straightforward way. When all was said and done, though, Crawford and I still needed to “close the deal” officially, and Kevin hadn’t let us know if he could perform a Catholic wedding ceremony. My guess was no.
I had thought that since Crawford now knew the source of my reluctance, the conversation would have been toned down until at least after Labor Day. But homicide detectives ask the same question over and over and over again until they get the answer they want. Crawford, apparently, thought the same tactic would work in this situation.
“Hey, what’s this?” he asked, picking up the arsenic rock that I had assumed Ginny had taken with her the other night but which was sitting on my kitchen counter. He picked it up and examined it.
“Put that down!” I exclaimed. “It’s poison.”
He dropped it on the counter and stepped back.
“That’s the arsenic,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was still here. I should bring that over to Detective Madden.”
Neither of the men debated me on that point, so it was just a mere forty minutes later that I was sitting in the same room where I had been the week before, toying with the rock—now in a plastic bag—and awaiting her entrance. She walked in a few minutes later, notebook in hand, and regarded me warily.
“You have some information for me?” She was crabbier than usual. It hadn’t occurred to me until this very moment that she, like Mac the Knife, would be none too happy with the idea that the man she had arrested was not guilty of the crime and that she might look a wee bit vulnerable to her colleagues as a result.
I pushed the arsenic rock forward. She raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s arsenic,” I explained.
She picked up the bag. “Great. Thanks.”
“It’s probably the rock that Ginny Miller used to poison Carter Wilmott.”
“Probably.” Her expression was stony.
“Are you mad that it wasn’t George Miller?”
She leaned on the table, her knuckles supporting her weight. “Listen. I’m happy when justice is served. I did not want an innocent man to go to jail, who may or may not be innocent of everything,” she said, reminding me that we still had the issue of the explosive device on the engine to contend with. “But this,” she said, pushing the plastic bag toward me, “is going to cause a whole lot of trouble for the department and the ME’s office. Is that what you intended?”
I sputtered a little, caught off guard by her outburst. “Well, no. But yes. “ I took a deep breath and composed myself. “I hope you’re not insinuating that I should have kept this a secret.”
“I’m not insinuating that at all.”
“And are you completely sure that Ginny Miller was the one who was poisoning Carter Wilmott?”
Her look told me that that was a question I shouldn’t have asked, but I wanted to know how they knew. It was my assumption that Ginny’s suicide implied her guilt, but who knew? Carter’s death had opened a Pandora’s box of suspects from George to any one of the people he had maligned on the blog, including Tony and Lucia, not to mention Coffee Lover, who seemed really incensed that Wilmott didn’t like Beans, Beans. Madden didn’t want to answer but she did anyway. “Yes, I’m sure.” She stood up straight and picked up the bag. “Good day, Ms. Bergeron.” She walked toward the door and put her hand on the knob. “Make that ‘good-bye,’ Ms. Bergeron.”
Sometimes I know when to take a hint and today was one of those times. I hightailed it out of there and made my way to school, sorry that I had any kind of civic or moral compass at all. “Leave the detecting to the detectives,” I muttered to myself as I pulled into my reserved parking spot in the lot behind my building. It was something that I had been told over and over again, yet it had failed to sink into my brain as a reasonable course of action.
Dottie was reading a bodice ripper when I walked in. “Is that Fabio on the cover?” I asked.
She turned the book over and looked at the cover. “Maybe.”
“I always thought he was kind of handsome,” I said. As usual, my friendly attitude toward her made her suspicious and she kept her eyes on me as I collected the mail from my mailbox and shuffled through it while still standing at her desk. “So, how’s Charlie?” I asked.
She slammed the book down on her desk and gave me a hard look. “Okay, so what is this about? Why are you being so nice to me? And why do you keep asking me about Charlie?”
It wasn’t the first time I had misread a situation nor would it be the last. What I thought passed for innocent small talk had apparently raised Dottie’s hackles. “It’s nothing. I’m just curious about your relationship and how you keep it fresh after all these months of dating.”
“Fresh?” She snickered. “What? Are you watching Dr. Phil now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t talk like that. What gives?”
I leaned toward her desk and whispered. “Listen. It’s like this. Crawford wants to get married and I’m not sure.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms, happy to be in the role of relationship therapist. “Well, you were married to that cheating, lying asshole. I could see where you would have some issues.”
Lady, I own the market on issues, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I was struck dumb by her perceptiveness. “Right! Issues!”
“After what you’ve been through, it would be hard to trust anyone.”
“You’re right again!”
“I understand what you’re going through.” Satisfied that she had correctly assessed the situation, she picked up her book.
“Wait!” I said. “What should I do?”
She gave me the same look I give my most challenged students. “You should marry him. What are you? A moron?”
Though shocked that she had decided to impugn my character while giving me advice, I decided that she was right, as was Crawford. He wasn’t Ray and I wasn’t making a mistake, and getting married again was a blessing, not the blind cliff jump that I was making it out to be. I knew Crawford whereas I hadn’t really known Ray. Dottie was right. I was a moron.
It all came down to one thing: I missed my mother. I had already gone through one wedding without her and the thought of going through another one gave me a palpable pain in my heart. Her advice the first time had been off the mark and borderline devastating. By telling me to marry a man I was ambivalent about at best, I know that she was just trying to protect me from a life of loneliness without my parents and without any siblings on whom to rely. It took me a few seconds to imagin
e what she would think of Crawford and decided that she would probably have been as much in love with him as I was. When I thought about it that way, it all made sense.
Mentally, at least, I had “closed the deal.” When school was over for the day, I needed to make it official.
I started for my office, my head in a completely different place than it had been for the last several weeks. Although the pain of my mother’s loss was still there, I felt lighter in spirit. My head did seem like it was in the clouds, which could be the only explanation I had for nearly colliding with Father Dwyer, also on his way to my office. Any feelings of bonhomie that I had based on finally making up my mind were quickly squelched by the sight of our new chubby chaplain. He was dressed in full blacks—jacket, pants, clergy shirt, and black shoes. I rarely saw Kevin dressed like this so it was jarring to see Dwyer in full regalia.
“Hello, Father. Are you on your way to see me?” I asked. I opened the office door and motioned for him to go in before me.
“Age before beauty,” he said, chuckling while waiting for me to precede him.
Okay, what does that mean? “Ladies first” might have been more appropriate under the circumstances, but from the little I knew about this guy, I wasn’t surprised that he found himself more attractive than he found me. He settled into one of my guest chairs and took in the titles of some of the books on the shelves in my office.
“Lots of Joyce,” he remarked.
“I’m a Joyce scholar,” I said, resisting the urge to add “you idiot.” But I was feeling generous and figured that the hundreds of volumes related to the Irish author were not a dead giveaway.
Dwyer surveyed my office, his eyes landing on a bumper sticker that was taped to the side of my filing cabinet: “If God was a woman, the world would have been created in two days and everything would have matched.” The expression on his face told me that he didn’t think it was funny. I decided not to tell him that it had been given to me by his predecessor, Kevin. He brought his eyes back to me, looking at me as if I had a huge piece of spinach in my teeth.
Just to be sure, I ran my tongue across my teeth. All good there. “What can I do for you, Father?”
“Nothing, really. I just wanted to meet with you and get to know you a little bit. I’m meeting with all the faculty members individually to see what role, if any, they can play in the liturgical events here at St. Thomas.”
I held my hands up. “Whoa, there. Count me out. I’m not that good a Catholic to be involved in ‘liturgical events,’ ” I said, giving him the old air quotes. I wasn’t even sure what a liturgical event was. Did he mean Mass? If so, why didn’t he just say that? Oh, right. He was a tool. I was meeting a lot of them lately.
He didn’t look surprised. “That’s another reason for my visit.” I didn’t respond. I already knew that I’d be in trouble for (a) not going to church and (b) admitting it in front of the overzealous school chaplain. With Kevin, it was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. With Dwyer, obviously, it was going to be much different. “It would be in the best interest of our students if they could witness, firsthand, the reevangelization of our faculty.”
Since many of the faculty members were already nuns, I could only surmise that he was talking about me. And Dorothy Koppell, biology teacher and my next-door office neighbor and a devoted practitioner of Wicca. Oh, and of course, Rabbi Schneckstein, who was a part-time faculty member in the religious studies department. But he wasn’t going to get Koppell and Schneckstein, so I was a reasonable target. I held his gaze. “What exactly are you asking me to do, Father?”
He was clear. “Go to Mass regularly. Attend Holy Day of Obligation Masses on campus when school is in session. Volunteer with our campus God Squad.”
I held up a hand and ticked a finger off for each request. Going to Mass regularly was a choice I had yet to make and I wasn’t going to have him dictate how often I would go. Same for Holy Days of Obligation. As for volunteering with the God Squad, spending thirty or so hours a week with teens and young adults was about all I could handle realistically. They were also an extremely conservative organization given to protesting things on campus that I supported wholeheartedly, like the Gay-Lesbian-Transgender Alliance. It seemed obvious: having me volunteer with the God Squad wouldn’t be a good fit; was I the only person who thought so? I gave him a stern stare. “No. No. And no.” Fortunately, his response was muted by the ringing of my office phone. I looked down and saw that it was a call from Westchester County based on the area code that flashed on my caller ID. I picked up the phone and asked the caller to hang on without bothering to find out who it was. I put my hand over the receiver and asked Father Dwyer if we were done.
“No, we’re not done,” he said.
“Actually, we are,” I said, and opened the office door. “If you’ll excuse me? I have to take this call.”
Yes, I was going to burn in hell. But be pushed around by some puppet of Etheridge’s? That wasn’t going to happen. I sat back down behind my desk and picked up the phone. “Thank you for holding. This is Dr. Bergeron.”
“Alison? This is Mac.”
I had been expecting that the caller was a student who had yet to arrive at school but who had a question about the curriculum. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be having more contact with the county medical examiner. It had been my fervent hope and wish that I would never hear from him again, despite the fact that I found him charming. “Hello, Mac. What can I do for you?” A call from the ME never signaled good news, in my experience.
“This is highly irregular, to say the least,” he started. “But what the hell? I’m already in a pile of shit, thanks to you and your sleuthing skills.” He said it in the kindest way possible and I could picture the rueful smile on his face. “You can’t share this with anyone. Got it?”
He sounded serious. “Got it.”
“Here’s the thing. Your friend Carter?”
“Not my friend.”
“Just a figure of speech. Don’t get your panties in a wad.” He chuckled, presumably thinking about my panties and the uncomfortable wedgie that would result from them being in a wad. “Did you know that he had early-stage ALS?”
“ALS?”
“Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s a degenerative disorder. Because we had missed the poisoning in the initial autopsy, I decided to go back and test the remaining tissue for every possible outcome. And I got ALS.”
“I know what ALS is,” I said.
“So you know that it is most probably fatal. And that before it is fatal, it’s an extremely debilitating disease.”
I did know that. I didn’t know a lot about the disease, but I did know that it was one that caused much pain and discomfort before it took your life. “Why are you telling me this?”
He laughed. “Why? Because it’s germane to the case. And nobody else who’s involved seems to give a good goddamn about this new development, certainly not the village police for one. You seem more interested in what happened to Carter Wilmott than anyone else. I wanted to test a theory on you. Do you think that Wilmott could have poisoned himself? You know, to avoid what was ahead?”
I gave that some thought. I guessed it was possible, but probable? Not likely. I told Mac what I thought.
“I guess you’re right. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of Ginny Miller, I just didn’t see ‘killer’ written on her face. Maybe I’m getting long in the tooth. Maybe I’m losing my edge,” he said sadly.
“I don’t think you are, Mac. It’s just hard to imagine anyone who saves lives for a living taking someone else’s.”
“True enough, Alison. When all was said and done, though, he was a goner, plain and simple. Despite everything that transpired. And that’s just sad to me.”
I bid him good-bye and hung up the phone. Maybe that had been her motive all along: she just didn’t want Carter to suffer and had slowly poisoned him in the most humane way possible to spare him what lay ahead for him.
It didn’t m
atter, ultimately. Two people were dead, and whether one of them had met his maker because the other had good, albeit twisted, intentions was no longer an issue.
Twenty-Nine
Queen and Kevin had whipped up a delicious dinner of linguine with clam sauce and it was waiting for me when I arrived home. The entire way home I had thought about Ginny’s suicide and then Carter’s terminal illness. It made me wonder, though. Was Carter’s debilitating condition, as evidenced in the blog photos, from the poisoning or his disease? I eventually decided that I no longer cared, particularly if, like Mac said, no one else did. The case was closed and I could move on with things.
Like deciding how, where, and when I would be married.
I sat down at the dining room table with Kevin and Queen and dug into the linguine. “Hey, this is good! Who made this?”
Kevin, whose head was bowed over his plate in a silent grace, looked up. “It was a joint effort.” He unfolded his napkin and put it on his plate. “And don’t so sound surprised.”
“I’m not,” I said. “It’s just that it tastes way better than anything I could make.”
Queen sat in silence, picking at her dinner. Although we hadn’t spent a lot of time together, even I was perceptive enough to discern that something was wrong. I asked her if there was something she wanted to talk about.
Kevin gave her a meaningful look but continued eating his dinner.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“I’m going to move back home,” she said.
That didn’t seem like bad news to me but I played along. “Back to your parents’ home?” Without makeup, she looked young enough to still live at her childhood home so I assumed that she didn’t have her own place. I also knew that you would have to work a lot of Hooters shifts to pay for your own apartment in this area.
“No, with my husband.”
“You have a husband?” I blurted out, a piece of pasta leaving my mouth.
“And a dog,” she added.
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