Holly Blues

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  But what looked and acted like Sally, it turned out, wasn’t always Sally. Sometimes she was a character named Juanita, Sally’s other self. Juanita loved to party, dressed to kill, and spent Sally’s money as if the sky was the credit-card limit. Juanita emerged, it seemed, whenever Sally was under a great deal of stress.

  After we learned all this, McQuaid realized that he had met Juanita often during the few years that he and Sally were married, although the two of them were never formally introduced and he’d never known that this fragment of Sally’s personality had her own name. After their divorce, Juanita began appearing with greater frequency—we saw her several times, although we still didn’t know who she was. It wasn’t until we found out that Sally had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder that we could begin to make sense out of some of the silly, senseless, and dangerous things that Sally—or was it Juanita?—had done in the past.

  Ultimately, McQuaid learned that Sally was in treatment and that Juanita had finally (and permanently, it was hoped) gone away. We hadn’t gotten that information from Sally, of course. She has always been very secretive about what was going on in her life. The news had come from her sister Leslie, who lives in a small town north of Austin and whom we see and hear from on a regular basis. Not so Sally. In the past year, Brian had received only a birthday card from his mother. It didn’t have a return address, but it was postmarked in Kansas City, where—according to Leslie—her sister was working and living.

  To tell the truth, Sally’s prolonged silences aren’t a problem for me, since I’m not anxious to have my husband’s kinky ex-wife living in our laps. McQuaid doesn’t find it a problem, either, for Sally is a raw reminder of a very bad time in his life. It’s Brian who suffers. When he was younger, it was painful to watch his disappointment when his mother promised him something and failed to come through. Now he’s a teen and “cool to the max,” so he tries to pretend that he doesn’t care whether she remembers his birthday or calls to congratulate him on his science project. But he does. He cares, and he worries about his mother, although he knows there’s nothing he can do to change her. And when she finally does show up (usually without bothering to email or phone), he has to be even cooler. He has to keep from showing how much he cares—which probably makes her feel even less inclined to connect with him again. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

  McQuaid, bless him, tries to make a joke out of Sally’s occasional reemergence, calling her Sally-the-Bad-Penny and saying that she only turns up when she’s broke or in trouble. But it’s no joking matter. For a long time, he took the blame for the meltdown of their marriage, believing that it was his work as a Houston homicide detective that made Sally come apart at the seams. It was years before he could disconnect from the marriage and from his feelings of responsibility—and he still isn’t there, not yet, not quite.

  Personally, I don’t share his view. Being a policeman’s wife isn’t easy, I grant you. Plenty of law-enforcement marriages have wrecked on the reefs of raw nerves, frequent absences, and the constant threat of injury and death. But this was no excuse for Sally’s dramatic and frequent misbehavior, in my opinion. We’re all responsible for our moral choices, and it’s wrong of us to push the blame off onto someone else. In his head, McQuaid knows this, although deep in his heart, it’s a different story. He still feels at least partially responsible for what happened to Sally and believes that he has an obligation to help her get back on the right track. Get the picture? His heart wants to help and his head wants to tell her to help herself, which makes for some pretty powerful conflicts. And in this case, the conflicts produce anger, which is what he usually feels when they’re together—anger at himself, anger at her. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about this except to be as supportive as I can, even though the brutal truth is that I don’t much like Sally, or Juanita, or whoever she is. She’s made my husband unhappy, she’s opted out of her son’s life, and she causes trouble whenever she shows up.

  I hope you don’t think I’m not a compassionate person. I have as much sympathy for people in need as anyone else. But when it comes to Sally, I can’t summon up a huge surge of goodwill. I mean, here it is, Christmas. And not just any Christmas, but one of the most difficult we’ve faced. Sales at the shop are down. McQuaid is teaching part-time to patch together enough income to keep his P.I. firm afloat. Caitlin—fragile, vulnerable Caitlin—has only been with us for a couple of months, and we’re trying to help her recover from her many sad losses. And now, just in time to celebrate Christmas with us, here comes Sally-the-Bad-Penny.

  Please. Give me a break, Sally. Give us a break. Tell me you’re just passing through.

  I swallowed my feelings and managed a smile. “Looks like you’re on your way somewhere.”

  She gave a casual toss of her head. “Actually, I was thinking I might hang out here until after Christmas. In Pecan Springs, I mean. I’d like to spend some time with Brian.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “What’s it been since you’ve seen him?” Pointedly, I added, “Two years, isn’t it?”

  She shifted her weight. “Something like that. Gosh, I’ll bet he’s grown.”

  “He has. Two years is a long time in a boy’s life.” I leaned forward. “A very long time.”

  A burst of laughter and the scrape of a chair came from the tearoom, and Sally glanced over her shoulder. “Listen, China,” she said in a lower voice. “I wonder if we could talk.”

  Rats, I thought to myself. Here it comes. “What do you want to talk about?”

  She cleared her throat. “Privately. Not here.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Sally. I’m a working girl, and today is a workday. In about ten minutes, customers will be coming through that tearoom door, and I’d love to see them buy a thing or two. In the meantime, I’m trying to finish an article for the newspaper. If you don’t mind—”

  “After work, then.” Her voice thinned. “Look, China. I know how you feel about me. I know I haven’t always been a good mom to Brian. I . . . I know I’ve caused you and Mike a lot of unnecessary unhappiness.” She swallowed. “Please believe me. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”

  It’s always important, I wanted to shout. Important to you, that is. Brian isn’t important, McQuaid isn’t important, it’s always you, Sally. Just you. Or Juanita, or whoever the hell you are today.

  But I didn’t. Instead, I said, as evenly as I could manage, “Well, okay, then. I can probably take a break about three thirty or four o’clock. Want to come back then?”

  Her face cleared, and she smiled. “Yes, sure. Oh, gosh, China, thank you!” She turned to go. “Three o’clock. I’ll see you then.”

  “Don’t forget your duffle,” I said.

  She bent over and picked it up. It was obviously heavy. I hesitated, and then relented. “If you want to leave it here until you come back, you can stick it behind the counter. I don’t think anybody will bother it.”

  Her smile was broadly relieved. “Oh, thank you, China,” she said again. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  No, I’m not, I thought grimly. I am definitely not a lifesaver. And whatever it is you’ve come for, Sally Jean Strahorn, you are not going to get it.

  I was wrong. On both counts.

  Chapter Two

  McQuaid: A New Case

  Mike McQuaid leaned back in his office chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and frowned at the pile of exams on the desk in front of him.

  Social Deviance. He liked the course. He had met more than his share of deviants in this world, and he liked being able to explain, at least to himself, what made them tick. But one of the older professors in the department had taught the class until he retired last year, and he’d always made it far too easy. Unfortunately, that reputation still lingered. Droves of frat rats signed up for it, expecting a takeaway B, even an A, especially when they found copies of the quizzes—mostly short answer or multiple choice—in the frat files. But McQuaid didn’t teach the c
lass that way, and after the frats had flunked the first test on illegal drugs, a dozen of them had dropped the course.

  The drops weren’t a problem, as far as McQuaid was concerned, since they meant fewer poorly written papers for him to read. The department chair (who kept urging the faculty to generate more semester credit hours, so he could defend the department’s budget against the dean’s red pencil) had not been too happy. But then, Lyle (Lyle Ellis, the chair) hadn’t been too happy when McQuaid dropped back to part-time. He didn’t like the idea that an associate professor with tenure would leave the academic fold, jump the academic fence, and go off on his own.

  Which is what McQuaid had done when he left full-time teaching in the Criminology program at CTSU and opened his own private investigation agency. He liked the security of his faculty position—tenure was good, tenure was safe, the pay was fine. But paradoxically, it was the security that bothered him. McQuaid was a risk-taker. He liked going out on a limb, the thinner the better. He liked the challenge of digging into something new, something he’d never seen before, something with a lot of crazy pieces that didn’t fit, patterns that kept shifting every time he looked. The more deviant, the riskier, the more puzzling, the better he liked it. Teaching had been a challenge, but after a while even that challenge had gotten old, even when he factored in the impossible task of motivating the frat rats to actually learn something.

  McQuaid sighed, leaned forward in his chair, and picked up the exam on the top of the stack. He didn’t take many real risks anymore, not the way he used to when he was with Houston Homicide, back in the days when he and Sally were unhappily married. Being a private eye was . . . well, he couldn’t say it was dangerous. It was nothing like those wild and wooly P.I. novels, those old Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade books. And certainly nothing like the Spenser series, where the dead bodies, laid end to end, would stretch from here to Dallas. Most of McQuaid’s cases were undeniably tame: corporate bad conduct, fraudulent insurance claims, missing persons, and the occasional marital shenanigans. Not much chance of getting shot or knifed, as long as he kept his head.

  He read the first answer on the exam, gave it five points out of a possible fifteen, and went on to the next. He was trying to puzzle out a sentence—did this girl really mean to say that concealed weapons should not be “permeated”?—when the phone rang.

  It was Charlie Lipman, a Pecan Springs attorney and friend who often threw work McQuaid’s way. “Yo, McQuaid. I need to send somebody to Omaha to locate and interview an ex-employee on a business-to-business litigation case. Locating might be hard, but the interview shouldn’t take long. Are you my man?”

  McQuaid red-penciled a “3” in the margin of the girl’s answer. “I’d like the work, sure. But the holidays are coming up. Can this wait until after the new year?”

  “Sorry, ol’ hoss,” Charlie said regretfully. “Gotta get it done in the next few days. Depositions in the case are scheduled for January third. Reckon you kin do it?” Charlie grew up in the wealthy Highland Park area of Dallas and went to college in the east before entering UT Law. But in Pecan Springs, it pays to talk like a reg’lar Joe Six-pack, and Charlie (who was gearing up for a run at the state legislature) was as bi-dialectal as your average Texas politician. He spoke standard English before the bench and talked Texas the rest of the time.

  McQuaid looked at his calendar and thought about the family checkbook, which—as China had pointed out the other night—was in serious need of a substantial cash infusion. Sales had been slow at the shop this holiday season, and his caseload had been light in the last few months. A couple of background checks, several asset searches, and the surveillance of an ex-husband who claimed he was broke and couldn’t pay his court-ordered child support. (He could.) Part-time teaching helped to fill the gap, but not enough.

  “Yeah, I guess I can do it,” he said reluctantly. “As long as we’re only talking a day or so.”

  “Two at the outside,” Charlie said. “Tell China you’ll be home in time to hang the tinsel.” He chuckled. “Or tell her I’ll come and hang it for you. You know, I’ve still kinda got a thing for your wife. Smart gal. Purty, too.”

  “I’ll tell her.” McQuaid returned the chuckle. Charlie talked a good game, but China had handled him adroitly for years. “Tell you what, Charlie. I’m through here at the university as soon as I finish marking exams and turn in my grades. How about if I stop by the office and pick up whatever you’ve got on the case? I’ll head up to Omaha tomorrow, give it Thursday and Friday, and fly back on Friday night.”

  “You got a deal,” Charlie said cordially. “Hell, I’ll even throw in a little bonus, seein’ as how you’re doin’ it on such short notice. Use it to buy China’s Christmas present.”

  “Works for me,” McQuaid said, putting down the phone, and going back to the exam. He was still scowling at the second answer, trying to make out what the writer meant, when the phone rang again.

  “McQuaid,” he said shortly.

  “Hey, it’s me,” China said. “Are you busy?”

  “Hey, you,” McQuaid said and softened his tone. “No, I’m not busy. For my sins, I am reading exams, although if the rest aren’t any better than the first one, I may put the whole damn lot through the shredder and call it a day. This student thinks that carrying a concealed weapon should not be ‘permeated’ by the law because—” He picked up the paper and read. “ ‘Because it might go off accidental and shoot an innocent parson. ’ Innocent is spelled i-n-n-a-s-e-n-t.”

  China chuckled. “Innocent parsons better beware.” She paused, and her voice changed. “Guess who just left the shop.”

  McQuaid grunted. “I give up.” He hated guessing games, and China knew it. “Who just left the shop?”

  “Our favorite bad penny.”

  “Bad penny?”

  “Your ex-wife.”

  “Oh, jeez.” He threw the red pencil on the desk. “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish.”

  “Hell,” he said disgustedly. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. She seems to be masquerading as a hippie.”

  “Sally?” McQuaid barked a laugh. “A hippie?”

  “Well, she certainly doesn’t look much like her former fashion-model self. Wasn’t that Juanita? The one who liked to max out the plastic? Maybe there’s another personality coming through. Destitute Dottie. Hard-luck Hannah.” She sighed. “Sorry. I’m being tacky.”

  “Another one?” McQuaid muttered. “God help us.”

  He didn’t even want to think of the possibility. He had learned to dread Juanita’s appearances during the four years he and Sally were married. Sally had always said she wanted to be an actress, and at first he’d thought that maybe she was trying on some sort of role, complete with costume changes—expensive costumes, at that. Acting fit her. She was like a chameleon, taking on one persona after another. When he’d learned about the diagnosis—that multiple personality business—he’d been initially skeptical. But he had to admit it made a certain kind of sense. As far as he was concerned, one Sally was bad enough. Two were terrible. Three were unthinkable.

  “I thought you ought to know that she’s in town,” China went on. “She’s coming back here to the shop for a chat about three thirty or four.”

  He sighed. “Do you want me to be a party to this . . . chat?”

  “I’d love it,” China replied wistfully. “But somebody has to pick up Caitlin. She’s got soccer after school. And anyway, maybe it’s better if it’s just the two of us—Sally and me. You know. Girl talk.”

  “Yeah, right. Girl talk.” McQuaid suppressed a sigh of relief. He was glad to be off the hook. “Did she say where she’s staying?”

  “No.” China paused. “Her luggage isn’t exactly conventional. She has a duffle. Looks pretty full. Looks like she’s planning to stay awhile.”

  McQuaid slitted his eyes. Damn. “She’s up to something.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

&
nbsp; “Has she been in jail?” If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. There was that business a few years ago about a forged check. On another occasion, it had been a DWI.

  “If she has, she didn’t tell me. But she wouldn’t. Tell me, that is. Looking at her, though, I’d say it’s a possibility. A very distinct possibility.”

  “Tell her to go away.”

  “You have no pity, McQuaid.”

  “Damn straight. Tell her.”

  China sighed. “I would if I could, but I can’t. She’s Brian’s mother. She has visitation rights.”

  “Which she only exercises when it’s in her interest to do so.”

  “Of course. But that doesn’t dilute the right.”

  “I hate it when you talk like a lawyer,” McQuaid said testily. “I thought you were supposed to be on my side. And she could at least call before she shows up.”

  “I am on your side. Our side.” China paused. “Anyway, I’ll point that out—about calling, I mean, although it won’t do a dime’s worth of good. You know Sally.”

  McQuaid knew Sally, all right. Impulsive, unpredictable, unreliable Sally. Five-alarm-heartburn Sally. The one good thing she had done for him was to let him have the divorce without going after custody—and that was only because she was in such bad shape, psychologically, that her lawyer counseled her to forget it. The judge would never have let her have the boy.

  But if she’d been responsible for Brian, maybe she would have stayed out of trouble. Maybe Juanita would have stayed away—motherhood was not exactly her career path.

  Or maybe not. There was no way to know.

  China was going on. “Oh, and when you get home, please stir the corn chowder I left in the slow cooker. That’s what we’re having for supper tonight.” She paused. “I think there’s enough extra for Sally. I’ll get some bread out of the freezer, and we’ll have coleslaw. Oh, and there are some of Cass’ peppermint cupcakes left from today’s lunch—I’ll bring those.”