“No, Joe,” I whispered, “it’s not that simple.”
“Why, sure it is. It—”
“No! You’re right about me: I like the truth. And this lie can kill you both. Maybe not right away, but little by little, as you warp the entire universe around this one fact you can’t stand to notice. Just look what that’s done to your daughter.” Softly, I said to Cecelia, “Chandler is a monster with a pretty face, Cecelia. I wish I could have spared you the kind of lessons he deals out, but if you’ve got to have them, then for God’s sake, learn from them. Speak, Cecelia. There was no one else in the house with you. There was no man, not Chandler, not Po, and not your father. Because after Chandler came, your mother was so scared and upset she called your father back and told him not to come that day, didn’t she?”
Tears formed in Menken’s eyes as he drank in his daughter’s face, knowing that the ease with which he touched her now might at any instant be taken from him.
“Joe,” I whispered sadly, “you’ll have to let her go now.”
Sorrow spilled past his eyelashes and down his face. His lips moved, mouthing the words: Please, Em, she’s all I’ve got, and then, finding his voice, he said, “Please, Em. Right, she was cheating on me, and I couldn’t let her do that. I struck her. I …” His voice trailed off miserably, uncertain, ashamed.
I reached out and took her hand. “Don’t let your father do this, Cecelia,” I said softly. “He’s a good man, a decent man. Don’t make him go to jail for you.” I touched her hair, that tousled halo of a fallen angel. A strand clung to my finger, holding me an instant longer, just as her need of me always had, and for that instant, I gave myself to Menken’s tender dream that we could save her from what she’d done. “Men don’t kill with poison, do they, Cecelia? No, that’s a woman’s trick, even a woman who’s still a child.”
Cecelia stood quietly for a long time, staring at some point on the far wall near the floor. Then she turned to her weeping father, her face crumpling up like a little girl’s, and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I only meant her to be dead for a little while.”
FORTY-TWO
IT took no small feat of engineering to get J. C. Menken, Cindey Howard, and Julia Richards all in the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel at the same moment. In fact, it took the assistance of a slowly recovering Mrs. Wentworth and a couple of lies, but it was worth it.
“You!” Cindey wheezed when she saw me. She turned to Mrs. Wentworth. “You said we were meeting—”
Mrs. Wentworth smiled. “I said diddly. Suck it up, Cindey”
Cindey wheeled next on Julia. “What are you doing here?” she burbled, as if Julia had no right to frequent a public place.
“I’m here to find out who killed Miriam,” Julia said flatly. “Or at least that’s what Em said.”
Cindey spun around to face J. C. Menken, seething. “You know the answer to that,” she spat.
Menken had turned gray underneath his tan. He looked warily at me. He had been the most difficult to persuade to come. It had been less than forty-eight hours since I had extracted his daughter’s confession, and it would be a great many years before we would be friends again, if ever. He had not wanted to see me. He had insisted angrily that he must stay near the phone, in case Cecelia needed him and was able to call from the juvenile psychiatric center where she was being held while the courts of Wyoming and Colorado decided her fate. Menken twitched, looked ready to bolt.
I said, “This is for you, Joe.”
Cindey began to bray, her voice louder than I had ever heard it. “I’ll tell you who killed Miriam, Julia! It was this man’s precious little darling! Yes! That’s true, isn’t it, Joe?”
Menken drew himself up with glacial dignity. “That is no secret, Cindey.”
“Hah! She won’t be allowed back in that fancy school of hers, ever!” Cindey retorted.
“Joe! Tell me this isn’t true!” Julia gasped, but Joe did not pause to answer her. His attention was focused on Cindey.
I said, “It is true, but it wasn’t her idea, was it, Cindey? You were the one who told her that cocaine could kill. You even suggested the hot chocolate, didn’t you?”
Cindey’s eyes glittered with triumph. “I may have told her to put some of Chandler’s powder in her mother’s cocoa if she wanted her to go away again … . But I only meant it as a jest. You can’t hang anything on me!”
Joe’s eyes had gone black as soot. They seemed to bore into Cindey. He said, very slowly and distinctly, “You are the sickest woman I have ever met.”
“Me?” squealed Cindey. “Me! I’m a faithful wife! I—”
I was about to say, No one gives you the opportunity to be otherwise, but just then, with the most exquisite timing I could have hope for, a flood of middle-aged and elderly women spewed out of a meeting room onto the second floor balcony. Betty Bloom and I had planned the event carefully, selecting the moment when the women’s society that supported the local symphony would be convening for their monthly tea. On cue, the party was just breaking up, and all those opinionated, gossip-hungry dowagers now sluiced down the grand staircase into the lobby, washing all around us like a tide of deadly jelly fish. Bringing up the rear, I saw Betty, flushing the stragglers ahead of her. She winked, clearly enjoying herself.
Joe’s eyes locked on Cindey’s. He thundered with anger, oblivious to the sea of nosy women who now churned around us. “What do you know of faith? You have no virtue! You’re a bitter, flesh-eating wart on humanity! You’ve envied my wife as long as I’ve known you. You’re a sad sight, Cindey. You couldn’t have the man you wanted in college, so you married Fred. You couldn’t have children of your own to manipulate, so you tried to poison my daughter’s feelings toward her mother. You—”
Cindey’s face turned a mottled bluish red. Her eyes rolled left and right, and her lips opened and closed like a fish sucking air. “So what if I did? She deserved it, hanging around with that—”
“That man who wouldn’t have you!” I said, pitching my voice toward the growing crowd.
Cindey spun in horror, taking in the faces of the women around her. “Lisa! Hilary! Don’t let these people …”
“Let us what?” I said. “Call a spade a spade? Hey, you’re the wife of a felon now. Oh, sure, you’ve been lucky so far; your husband’s arrest in Wyoming hasn’t made the Denver Post yet, but it will. And when it does, there will be detailed reporting about his embezzlement, his drug trafficking, and his blatant rip-off of investor’s funds. I’ll bet some of the women in this lobby had money in some of his spurious wells, didn’t you, ladies?”
Glances flew back and forth. Jaws began to flap, and a low rumble of unhappy murmurs grew into a yelping chorus.
“You can’t say that!” Cindey spat. “That’s libel!”
I tipped my head to one side and said, “So sue me. Madam, I’ve tried my best to feel sorry for you, but I’m just not that big.”
“Righteous!” caroled Mrs. Wentworth, who was finding her sense of humor as she warmed to the performance. “It’s about time we shook a little reality into this community!”
Gasping, Cindey turned to Joe, squinched her face up into a pathetic approximation of a pout, and whined, “Joe, how can you let them do this to me?”
J. C. Menken opened his mouth, and said simply, “Cindey Howard, I used to pity you. Now I hold you beneath contempt.” And with that, he turned on his heel and marched out the main exit from the hotel and onto the street.
I grabbed Julia by the elbow and dashed after him. We caught him at the corner of Seventeenth Street and Broadway, and then only because he had to break stride for a light. “Joe!” I hollered over the roar of accelerating traffic. “Joe, listen! Julia wants to tell you something!”
“I do?” said Julia.
Menken turned and glared at me.
I said, “Yes, Julia, you do. Okay, I told you I’d let you know who killed Miriam. Yes, it was Cecelia. It was Cecelia, but it wasn’t. That was what that whole scene was for i
n there, a chance to let Joe name just a little bit of the damage that Cindey has done to him and his family. Yeah, Miriam screwed up; she had an affair and she ran off to heal herself, but she came back when she’d grown up enough to love this man. This man here, Julia. This man who can quietly find it in his heart to love a woman who’s done all of that. Think about it, Julia.”
Julia’s eyes were on Menken. She was thinking.
I took a breath. “But even more, think about Cecelia. She’s made a mistake that will follow her all the days of her life, and no relationship she can ever have will be the same—not with her friends, her teachers, her lovers, or even her father here. She’s just a girl, and she’s all but ruined her life. But she can learn from her mistake, and hope to heal into a worthy woman, if there’s someone there for her, someone tough enough, mature enough, and smart enough to stand by her and guide her without being sucked into all her games. I’m thinking that someone might be you, Julia.”
Julia’s lips parted. Her eyes searched Menken’s face. His eyes had widened with naked pain, and hope.
I nodded. “You see? Joe can’t trust me anymore, not ever, and I never was the right companion for him. I’m too young, too full of my own problems, but you two go way back. I’m not saying you have to fall in love, but you can love each other as only two people who share this much can, and keep each other company while you help each other help Cecelia, y’know?”
FORTY-THREE
IN hands that couldn’t grow warm, I cradled the cup of tea Tina Schwartz had given me. Steam rose in curling columns, soothing my eyes from the biting Denver smog. “How did you know?” she asked.
“It was when I heard the nine-one-one tape. Or not exactly then, but I kept thinking about it, wondering what seemed to be missing.”
“And that was?”
“The voice of Miriam’s attacker. I couldn’t hear it. That’s because no one was there. You see, the sheriff withheld the true cause of death so he would know when he found a true eyewitness. That gave everyone the impression that someone strong enough to rough up a grown woman had pinned her down and forced her to consume enough cocaine to kill her. I’d always wondered about that. It’s terribly toxic stuff, but still, it’s damned difficult to force that much into someone who is fighting you. But Sheriff Duluth misunderstood the tape; he thought the killer was a big, fully enraged man. After all, there were signs of a struggle, and bruises all over her, indicating that she had in fact been pinned.”
“Then what did she die of?”
“Asphyxiation. She suffocated when she began to vomit while lying on her back.”
“Then it wasn’t really murder?”
“Only the original intent had been to kill.”
What I didn’t tell Tina just then was that as I lay in Chandler’s arms, I had finally faced how angry I was at my own mother, and in facing that, I had made room for seeing how right she was that I was frittering away my life. I’d had to see that by throwing me out on my own, she was doing me a favor, forcing me to grow up and take responsibility for myself at last. In facing my own capacity to simultaneously hate and cling to my mother, I had come to see what might have happened.
I said, “I love Cecelia, or I loved to think that I was her one true friend, the one in all the world who understood her. I wanted my love to heal her, to have her grow up in my own image, another little incurable romantic like myself, another sojourner after the truth.”
Tina smiled. “There are worse things to want for someone.”
“Yeah? What about a dose of reality? Wouldn’t it have been better for Cecelia if I had been a little tougher on her right along, maybe looked behind her manipulations and tried to see what was making her so angry? The kid was a mess, but I didn’t like to see that. I just wanted to feel good and noble about myself, for Pete’s sake.”
“Oh, I see. Now you’re a specialist on teenage behavior and addictions.”
“No, but …”
“Yeah, psychotherapists do this to themselves, too. Want to take responsibility for the failures of their patients.”
“But she was just a kid.”
“Right. A kid with a damned hard head and one hell of a temper. So let it go, if you can. Stay at it with good intentions, and keep the courage it takes to care about people, and you’ll learn what you’re really responsible for, and what you’re not.”
“Maybe.” I glowered. “Maybe I’ll just move to Alaska and mind my own business. I’ve had enough of other people’s problems.” I was getting tired of thinking about responsibility, and I let the conversation lag, wondering once more if it had been quite right for me to keep Cecelia’s appointment. I had told myself I was doing it for Tina’s sake, to let her know what had become of her almost client, but I knew in my heart of hearts that in fact I had just needed someone safe to tell the whole awful story to. “Wouldn’t it have tasted funny?” I asked.
“What?”
“The chocolate. I’ve never taken drugs.”
“Funny? It would have anesthetized her mouth in an instant.” Tina put a hand over her mouth in shock. “Then the poor woman knew what her daughter had done to her.”
“No, she didn’t know exactly. Like both Julia and Chandler told me, she was one of the great holdouts in college. She didn’t take drugs. She was hypersensitive. And that was the problem, really. There was a lot of cocaine in the chocolate, but she didn’t drink that much of it, only enough to get a ferocious buzz, Carlos tells me. What killed her was …” I buried my own face in my hands. “You can hear her on the tape, screaming, begging. She begged Cecelia. She begged God. She said, ‘Oh, God, please stop him.’ And yes, there was a commotion, as if someone was assaulting her. But that was her—Miriam. Throwing things. Banging into things. All her work to know herself, and in her last moment, she threw another fit!”
“Maybe it was just a reaction to the drug. So Miriam took a swallow of the laced chocolate and it was not enough to kill her, but enough to send her flying. Then what happened?”
I shook my head. “She begged her daughter to phone for help.”
“But the ambulance didn’t get there soon enough.”
“It’s a twenty-minute run even at top speed with sirens blaring.”
“And Miriam was having an unusually strong reaction.”
“Yes. She tried to vomit. She was so wound up that she hit her head on the headboard, hard. She fell back across the bed and started to thrash.”
Aghast, Tina said, “And Cecelia didn’t move to help her?”
I hung my head. “Cecelia thought her mother was having a seizure. She didn’t know what to do, so she just got up on the bed and held her down. I guess the vomit finally came, but she got it in her lungs and suffocated.” Tears burned my eyes. “The poor girl thought she was helping.”
“She made that call.”
“Yes, she called all right. And she washed and dried the cup she’d put the chocolate in. And burned what was left of Chandler’s little ‘packet.’ It hurts. It hurts to know that the little girl I cared so much about could be so cold.” I fought back tears, unwilling to cry in front of a stranger.
“Anger isn’t cold, Em.”
“I suppose she even faked the whole memory loss thing,” I said bitterly.
Tina looked at her hands. “Em, kids don’t feel things the same way adults do. And kids like Cecelia … well, we really don’t know what they feel, and in what sense they remember things. You’d be amazed how easily the mind amends things, rearranges them, attaches them to something else. Tells us we weren’t responsible. Tells us someone else did what we can’t bear to remember. And then there’s the matter of feelings. Cecelia may have been so busy not getting blamed for what she’d done that she’s never faced her guilt or loss.”
That struck a chord.
We sat together quietly for a while, I with my face in my hands. There seemed to be no hurry; I’d paid for a full hour, even though I wasn’t going to include it or any of the other expenses I’d run
up when I paid Joe back his thousand dollars. It just didn’t seem fair, or clean. Finally, I said, “I want to blame that idiot Po for lifting that packet of coke out of Chandler’s car and then leaving it in his truck where Celia could find it. Or that monster Chandler for—”
Tina shifted in her seat, her manner changing ever so subtly from an interested acquaintance to a trained listener beginning to steer the conversation. “Tell me more about that monster Chandler.”
Tears rained down through my fingers. “Tina, why did I go to that man! I mean—what, am I tired of living? I wasn’t sure he wasn’t the one who killed Miriam, not really! Do I have that little regard for myself? Am I crazy?”
“Define crazy.”
“Someone who doesn’t listen to her own best sense.”
“Then we’re all crazy most of the time.”
“But this is more extreme.”
“Yes.”
“What am I supposed to do? Forgive myself? Write it off as a walk on the wild side? The man is, after all, a criminal!”
“Nothing bad happened.”
“Nothing? Oh, sure, I got lucky this time, is that what you mean? I fly hell-bent into a storm, but no matter, I landed safely and got a nice foot massage,” I said bitterly.
“Weren’t you running from some pretty bad men?”
“To another? Hell, I could have gone anywhere else!” I gave in for a while to my tears, but at last I said the thing that so heavily weighted my soul: “How am I supposed to trust myself in the future?”
Tina leaned back and stared out the window. “Em, you ask so much of yourself. You want to know the answers to some of life’s toughest questions. You want to slay all the dragons. And you don’t want to take risks. Tell me what is wrong with this picture.”
“But other people aren’t this reckless.”
“No. But you kept your head and landed the plane. Then you had dinner in a public place, you phoned your friend in Denver for a backup, and, even if you were beginning to hope for something else in that man’s room, you had a good cry and then just had a good night’s sleep. Sounds like you needed both.”
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