“You don’t understand,” I blither. “He’s got this gun; he’s going to shoot us, and he’ll shoot you . . .” This I reap-praise, trying to force the scene into focus. My voice winds down.
This setup is all wrong.
Kittredge has lowered his gun.
Mrs. Dexter is standing just fine without her walker.
A little lopsided, maybe, higher on one side than on the other, but okay.
Her purple suit sits only slightly crooked over one hip.
Maybe the suit sits crooked because that side of Mrs. Dexter is weighted down by her own gun. Bigger than Kittredge’s piece, a capable, blackish-silver firearm, held firmly in her right hand.
The gun isn’t pointed at Dr. Kittredge; it’s aimed at me. And at Rob, stretched out on the floor, and at my father, meek beside his coffin lid.
Mrs. Dexter points her gun mostly into the middle of my shirt and says, “I hate squawking women.”
My mind is racing with scraps of phrases like, “But I thought . . . ,” “I don’t understand,” “What has happened to you,” but I don’t say any of this, because I am beginning to get it.
Mrs. Dexter leans up against the door. She scowls and compresses her Red Queen face and does me over with what might be scorn, except that the Red Queen face always looks scornful.
Then she turns to Kittredge. “Patrick,” she says, “you always were an idiotic oaf. Stand up straight. Quit looking as if the world is imploding.”
I struggle with getting my brain around some new concepts.
Mrs. Dexter knows perfectly well what’s going on.
Correction: she knows perfectly well, and furthermore she’s in charge of things. In charge of Kittredge. She’s acquainted with him in a way I never imagined. She orders him around.
“What in hell,” she is inquiring of him now, “did you think you’d gain by slaughtering these people in a public place? A place that afterward will be full of blood and DNA and fingerprints? And you’re drunk. Drunk.” She makes it sound like fornicating with goats.
Her gun has moved to cover the whole room, which includes Kittredge as well as us. She seems good at that: getting the whole room in her sights.
“Lou, old girl.” Kittredge more or less hangs his head. I suppose he looks sheepish. His own gun hangs down at his side.
“You knew perfectly well,” she says, obviously just warming up into her tirade, “you were supposed to get them together. Quietly, unostentatiously. Get them out of here. Quietly. Out the back door. Not making a scene. God, you are an idiot.”
She must have been practicing invective in her private moments when the other old ladies weren’t around. She’s pretty good at it.
“Nobody knew,” Kittredge tells her. He pauses and attempts to think about this. “Well, hardly anybody.”
My father smiles happily. He’s pleased. “Nearly everyone is here now. We sound a bit cross, but that’s because we’re hungry . . . I have seen my coffin lid,” he confides to Mrs. Dexter.
She always appeared fond of him, and even in her new role as the Demented Witch of the West I expect her to say something like, “Yes, Edward.” But all she does is look at him speculatively and say to Kittredge, “I suppose we’d better take him separately. If we have the old man with us and they know that, then they won’t do anything stupid.”
Kittredge asks, “Huh?”
“Patrick, you moron. We take him and hide him and tell them that if they want him to live at all, even ten minutes ...”
Kittredge says, “Oh.” Then he adds, sounding pleased, “I could give him a shot. Knock him out.”
“Yes, Patrick, you could. That’s one of the things you’re still good for. And give yourself a shot while you’re at it.”
The new evil Mrs. Dexter is going to be harder to talk to than the evil Kittredge was. “You don’t need to take him,” I begin, sounding humble and plaintive. “We’ll be good.”
“No, you won’t. He’ll be good. When we have him, he’ll be very, very good.”
My stomach ties itself in a tight, gnarly knot, my throat starts to close up. I’m horrified by this prospect, but I still manage to try a new tack. One of the talking ones. “Listen, the doctor has made a major mess of this. Fifteen seconds after you leave here the entire police and fire departments of Del Oro County will come screaming up . . .”
Mrs. Dexter smiles. I used to think she had a nice smile, enlivening her crumpled, baby’s face, but now she looks extremely mean. “No, they won’t. Patrick is dumb, but not that dumb. He sent everybody home with a toxic-leak warning. Even the director; he’s out back looking for the leak. And the phones aren’t working. So let’s get ourselves out of here. Come on, get your act together.” She looks at me and glances in surprise at my feet. “You don’t have any shoes on.”
Well, it’s just one shoe that I’m missing. I took it off when I kept tripping over the lace. I sit down obediently to reshoe myself. Anything to delay action.
(Mrs. Dexter is still an old lady, even though a demented one. As an old lady, she thinks I should be wearing shoes.)
“Just tell me why you’re doing this,” I say, conversationally, using the calm tone of voice you might try with a rabid animal, “I’ve not been smart enough to figure it out. Why would you want to buy the Manor?”
“Oh, indeed,” For a moment she seems like an imitation of her Manor self. She sounds ironic. She wants to tell me about it. “Think. You’re smart enough. What makes land valuable in California? Not scenery, not location, not retirement homes for the love of God, not gold. No. None of the above. Oil. That’s it. Oil! Black gold.” She begins now to sound a little Messianic.
“And there’s oil under the Manor?”
“Oh, you betcha.” She’s quoting somebody with that You betcha. “Under it. Outside of it. Up into the hills.”
I’ve gotten to the shoelace-tying part of my dressing project. “How do you know?”
She relaxes slightly against the door. Apparently this is sufficiently important to her that she wants to explain it fully, even to me. “I was raised next door to this ranch. I am a niece. I should have inherited, and the old bastard just wrote me out. Wrote me out as if I had done something, and all I ever did was hang around and tell him how wonderful he was. But he never guessed that I knew about the oil. I was just a child, you know, but I overheard it all.
“I was a child, and Patrick here was a much younger child. A little Mexican child. Weren’t you, chollo?”
Kittredge glares at her. He is slumped against the wall, now looking very drunk indeed, with his gun dangling uselessly from a flaccid hand.
“Patrick wasn’t a relative. His real name is Patrick Guerrero. His father was our fence man. He kept the barbed wire mended. Didn’t he, Patrick?
“But his mama was Irish. Wasn’t she, chollo? That’s how he got to be Patrick. And now he’s going to be rich. A rich, stupid Mexican Patrick.”
I’ve reached the end of my shoe-tying now, but I quickly maneuver the knot loose and start over. “And that’s what Aunt Crystal found? The assay records?”
“Stupid, nosy, old bitch. I hate nosy old women. If people would just mind their own business. The assay place was the one you and your little boyfriend went to up in the woods. The hole was an oil-testing shaft, not a water well.
“That crazy old man,” for a minute I think she’s talking now about Daddy, but she adds, “my uncle. The rich are all crazy, did you know that? He decided he hated oil. Wouldn’t talk about it. Kept saying, ‘No oil here. Negative. ’ He did something to the county records—bribed or blackmailed—to get that drilling record erased. The only proof was some letters to his wife about how much he loved her and how much he hated oil and how he’d erased it from memory. So that’s what your nosy old bitch of an aunt found.”
“But,” I say, “but . . .” This is partly a delaying tactic and partly because I really want to know. Also, out of the corner of my eye I can see Rob beginning to stir. “What difference can s
ome old letters make? The oil is there, in the ground. Any geologist can prove that.”
“But the Manor sale is next week,” Mrs. Dexter says, sounding triumphant about this fact. “Nobody knows about that oil, and they won’t know before the sale, they’ll think the only value of the Manor is in the buildings and in the retirement home name. But what good is a retirement home with half the residents suing the board? We’ll bid, and we’ll bid low, and we’ll get the Manor.
“But we had to keep the fact of the oil out of it. And your nosy old aunt was determined. She was going to tell the Board. She caught on right away about the sale and the difference the oil would make. She was going to tell the Board and tell the library and the historical society and the San Francisco Chronicle. She got really excited; such a historical find.
“And if she did . . . well, you can figure it out. You’re smart enough. That was one of the things I hated about you. That you thought you were so smart. Poking your little nose into everything. Miss Smarty-pants.”
People aren’t reasonable, and I suffer a surge of anger that Mrs. Demented Dexter hates me. “You were okay about me saving your life,” I tell her.
“Saving my life? Did you really believe that?” She now gets specific, recounting the tale of how she practiced for that accident, about the glass and her bloody lip and how the whole thing was staged. “And I had to do it several times, chomping on glass and spitting it out . . . ugh. And all that time your dotty father . . . Nobody believed him about his opera on the beach, but just suppose he had those oil papers and was going to give them to somebody. Give them to Sisal or take them to the newspapers. You couldn’t tell with him. A loose cannon. I kept saying that. We had to get those papers out of him.
“Don’t move.” This command is for me. She’d do better to snap it at Rob, who is pushing himself halfway up and flexing his kung fu muscles.
“Listen,” I say. I tell myself, Keep talking. Deflect her attention . My adrenaline is on command; it takes over. “The person in Mona’s cloak. That was you?”
Mrs. Dexter swivels her gun into salute position. She giggles, an unlikely, scary sound.
“Why?” I ask.
“And you don’t have your walker,” I add. “Why not?”
She giggles some more. “Why? That’s what everybody is saying. Why, she asked, oh why? Sisal, the ice queen, the ice queen who found out too much, pleading with us, why, oh why?”
This lady is absolutely, seriously nuts.
There’s an indeterminate scuffle behind us. Some shoe-scrape, some panting breaths, and a stifled grunt.
By the time I turn around Rob is in midair with legs spread, in a kung fu leap aimed at Dr. Kittredge’s gun.
And Mrs. Dexter is reacting. And pretty damn quickly. She turns, not losing her balance, and fires from chest height, two-handed, hard and sharp. I hardly even sense her arms coming up into position. There’s a muffled noise and a burned-leather smell.
She shoots Rob.
Her aim is perfect. She gets him right in the middle of his blue denim shirt. He stops in midair and puts his hand over the shirt, which starts immediately to leak a great deal of blood.
In sections, legs, hips, chest, head, he settles himself on the floor.
“You stay where you are,” she says, pointing the gun at me.
Because I’m not about to stop, no matter what Mrs. Dexter is set to do next. I’m going over there and look at Rob, and find out whether he’s alive or dead.
Not that I’m particularly brave. Simply that I’m set to go and examine Rob, and I won’t be able to stop.
Fortunately at this point the Fates apparently make a decision not to clip my life-thread.
Sheriff Hawthorne looks just the same as usual. Rumpled, dandruffy, inefficient. But he, also, has hardware. He’s handling a big dull-steel gun as if he’s used to it.
“Don’t,” he says to Mrs. Dexter. He delivers that one syllable, don’t, also as if he’s used to saying it and has said it that way often.
Mrs. Dexter takes a second too long to think about it. She seems to be assessing the powers of the sheriff’s large dull gun as opposed to her shiny one. She looks transfixed, as if someone has aimed a bright light into her eyes. Then she raises her arms and fires, but a hairsbreadth too late; Sheriff Hawthorne has fired first. Her reaction is all with the arm and the wrist. She drops her gun and clutches her arm and her side and finally falls down onto the floor, not exactly moaning but breathing in that strangled way that’s almost moaning.
Maybe I was waiting for her to hold the gun dramatically to her forehead, close her eyes and whammo, but you can’t really do that with a shattered wrist.
Sheriff Hawthorne now points his gun at Kittredge and scowls at him, and Kittredge, slowly at first and then quickly, drops his piece and sits on the floor. He doesn’t breathe hard, like Mrs. Dexter. He says, “Son uvva bitch.” Then he adds to it. “Goddamn son uvva bitch.”
The sheriff ambles over, collects the guns, and stares down at Rob. He says, “Bleedin’ pretty good. I better not touch him.”
Which doesn’t stop me. I’m beside Rob now with one hand on either side of his face—I know enough, thank you, Sheriff Hawthorne, not to move him or adjust him in any way; I just have my hands lightly by his head—and I’m saying, “Okay, Rob, you can do it, hang in there, Rob, it’s over now. They’re on their way, the medics are coming; we’re getting help.” And a whole lot of other stuff that I forget as soon as it’s out.
Rob looks up at me, the standard Rob I’m okay look, and attempts to smile. I say, “Oh, shit.” I’m crying.
It’s a couple of minutes before the firemen and cops and trauma teams arrive.
“Lotta stupid stuff going on around here,” Sheriff Hawthorne is chewing gum when he remarks this to me.
Chapter 24
Rob is in the hospital for three weeks.
It is, of course, his own hospital, where he is very popular, so after he has had his first surgery and is out of danger his room is constantly full of me and Susie, plus interns, doctors, nurses, cleaning people, orderlies, switchboard operators. I sit by his bed reading Sophie’s World and losing my place in it. I try to read aloud to him, which is mostly a bust. Susie burns herb smudges, which is strictly forbidden, and she has to throw them out the window if someone comes by, as they always do. She invokes the Goddess and puts a fat little statue of her under Rob’s pillow. Rob has to have three operations, two for damage to muscles and blood supply and one for the repair of his shoulder. He will have a metal plate in his shoulder.
He says the metal plate will be better than his original shoulder was, although he will have a terrible time in airports. He had used that first shoulder too much for digging in Egypt.
I try to read to him from Sophie’s World about Nietzsche and the strong man being the only admirable kind, which Rob correctly says is a repellent theory, and Susie objects to on the grounds that love is the only quality that counts; the only emotion that lasts, the one that moves mountains. “ ‘If your sorrow be high as the hill of Hebron,’” Susie says, eyes shiny and obviously quoting something or other, “‘if your sorrow be wide as the river on the plain, love still will transcend it, love will ascend, love will bridge.’”
This sounds sappy when I write it down now, but hearing Susie say it and seeing how much it means to her, I don’t think it’s sappy. Also, I’m feeling sentimental. I stayed up three nights in a row when Rob’s case was really serious. I’m still recovering from that and am still scared by it. After Susie leaves the room in search of a bottle of Crystal Geyser without bubbles, I put my hand on his where it’s positioned on the white coverlet, and say, “Listen, Rob, dear—hey, bro, how about it, let’s get married when you get out of here.” I try to make my proposal friendly and loving and buddy-sounding, because I think Rob will be turned off by undue sentiment.
Something comes and sits on his face, a little flinch like you’d get from a cold washcloth. He puts his free hand on top of mine
, where it’s resting on his other hand, and says, “Carly, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I remove my hand from our hand-sandwich.
“We go round and round about this,” he says. “Let’s give it some air.”
I wait a while longer, and he continues, “You’re emotional because I’m in the hospital.”
Well, no argument there. “Okay,” I say, “yes, of course, well, natch. And so what? How’m I supposed to react? Jesus, Rob, do you have to be so fucking practical?” And I go out the door of Rob’s room and leave the field to Susie, who will come in later that day.
Rob reaches over in the middle of a waitress-monologue and tells me that he loves me. Go figure.
He’ll be out of the hospital the day after tomorrow.
Mrs. La Salle. We got together first by discussing Mrs. Dexter.
“I’m still not used to it,” I tell Mrs. La Salle. We’re in her apartment with the great Japanese prints and a new beige-and-gold shoji screen and some new copper-colored African lamps. Mrs. La Salle herself wears a hand-woven something with leaping fish on it. “I always liked your clothes,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “But not me.”
I don’t say, “I liked you fine. I just thought you wanted to marry my father for his money. And maybe were a murderess.” Instead, I say, “I suspected everybody.”
“But not Louise—Mrs. Dexter.”
“It was the walker,” I decide. “It made her seem vulnerable, and plucky. And innocent, some way.”
“Well, I knew about the walker.”
“You knew she didn’t need it?”
“I thought she only needed it part of the time. Turns out it was none of the time. She told me she used it for a while right after the accident and figured out then that it made a good cover, got her seats on buses. Then she decided that she’d use it whenever she needed a seat on a bus or some other perk that life wasn’t going to give her. That accident made her pretty negative about things.
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