“You bitch! You nosy bitch! You’ll be sorry you ever came down here! Get up!”
She pointed the weapon at me and waved. “Come on. Step over there. Move!”
I moved slowly, circling away from her, knowing that I couldn’t move far enough, and knowing that a .45 was powerful enough to blow half my face away. Just like Thea’s face.
“Stand there!”
I glanced down into the empty trunk. I was going to take the place of the junk that had been cleared out of it.
“Did you kill her?” I asked.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Well then, you’ll never know.”
She maneuvered into position, never taking her eyes from me.
“How are you going to justify killing me?” I asked, stalling for more time. I had to keep her talking.
“Justify? They’ll have to find you first. This trunk is going to the bottom of an old well on that farm upstate. No one interferes with my life. No one. Not Thea, not that fool in the wheelchair … and not you. I’ve worked too hard to—”
“You killed Flyin’ Home?”
She didn’t answer but instead lifted the gun and held it in line with my nose, steadying her aim with both hands.
I raised my arms like a traffic cop. “You think I came in here without a backup? I’m telling you: If I’m not back uptown within a few minutes, the police will be in this place in a blink.”
“Well, that simply means I have to move faster, that’s all.”
She hesitated for the briefest second to glance at her watch in the dim light, and that was the second I needed to grab the iron pipe. The lid of the trunk slammed down and I ducked to the floor as she pulled the trigger. The recoil was terrific, and in that second I was on her with the pipe, knocking the gun from her hand. It slid across the small space and we both dove for it. She got to it first, but before she could bring it up, my hands closed on her wrist and around her throat.
“Let it go! Dammit, drop it!”
My thumb pressed on her windpipe and she flipped the gun out of her hand and kicked me in the stomach, knocking the breath out of me. I was ready to kill her now. Where was the gun? I spied it less than a foot away, and we scrambled for it. My stomach felt as if an elephant had stepped on it. She slid away from me and came up with the weapon again. She was in a crouch now, and blind with panic. Her breath was coming in deep bursts. She looked around as if I were no longer there and ran toward the maze onstage.
I backed toward the dressing table and knocked over the lamp, smashing the bulb. She had the gun. I had the darkness.
The small light still shone from center stage but was too weak to reach beyond the maze. Everything was in shadow or darkness. I bent down and crept toward the stage, freezing each time I heard movement. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I tried to gauge where the next sound might come from. I took off my shoe and threw it against the panel farthest away, and the flash and roar of the gun followed.
The acrid smell of gunpowder drifted over me as I eased along the wall toward the flash. I heard her moving away on the other side. Then she stopped. There was no movement, no breathing, no sound. Where was she? I waited, straining to hear in the dark. Then I took another step and stopped when I felt the steel nozzle pressed against the nape of my neck. She had crept so close I could feel her breath.
“Well,” she said. “Thea wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Wouldn’t stay out of my life. I got rid of her and now you come along to stir things up again.” Her voice echoed in the silence. “But it’s not going to happen. This is it!”
She tried to steady the weapon with both hands but still trembled violently. I looked at her face in the dim light and saw a mask of madness. There was no room for dialogue, rational or otherwise. I braced myself for what was coming but it was a different click, sharp and small—like a switch—and lights flooded the entire theater in blinding brightness.
chapter twenty-eight
Teddi leaned against the far end of the panel, wide-eyed, struggling to catch her breath. Her face was drained of color and her arms hung limply. Then she moved toward us and stopped.
“Mother! What … what in heaven’s name—?”
She moved nearer, staring past me as she held out her hands.
“Give that to me. Please, please. Don’t make it any worse …”
I had been pressed against the panel with the weapon to my neck. When it dropped away, my heartbeat started to slow and the dryness left my throat. My tongue moved again but no words came. I began to shiver and realized that my outfit was soaked with sweat.
Marcella collapsed against the panel, and Teddi managed to get her to a chair.
“How? How?” Was all I could manage. I still couldn’t speak.
Teddi shook her head slowly. “I was on my way upstate. I knew I’d be gone for a week so I called Elizabeth for a last-minute check on things. When she told me you were at the theater to meet with me, I knew something was wrong and I turned back.”
I glanced at my watch and knew that Miss Adele, bless her soul, must have gotten on the drum as soon as I stepped out her door.
Teddi was leaning against the panel, studying her mother’s drawn face, wondering what to say, what to do.
Finally, she whispered, “Thea wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie? Wouldn’t stay out of your life? I can’t believe what I just heard.”
Marcella did not look at her but focused on some distant point that neither of us could see.
“She … she had started to blackmail me,” she murmured. “Wanted to be paid for her silence—”
“No she didn’t,” Teddi cut in. “I saw that letter and—”
Marcella whirled to face her and I was glad Teddi had put the gun in her handbag and out of her mother’s reach.
“You … you little sneak! You were reading my mail?”
“Not your mail, Mother. Just that particular letter that seemed to finally send you over the edge. You were always on edge, looking over your shoulder as if someone or something were shadowing you. As long as I could remember, you were running, running from one doctor to another. Pills and more pills. Neither Dad nor I could understand it.
“I couldn’t figure it out until that letter. It shook you so that you dropped it and ran to your bedroom to get your pills. I don’t know which ones or how many, but you were out cold in two minutes and that’s when I read it.”
A minute passed before Marcella found her voice. When she opened her mouth, it sounded as if she had swallowed sand. Her face was a complete blank, as if she had found one of the pills in her pocket and quickly consumed it.
“I was running. It was like running a marathon—no, like trying to stay a step ahead on a monstrous wheel. But it seems I wasn’t quite fast enough.”
She gazed at Teddi, then at me, and went on. “All that girl had to do was stay away. Let me live my life. That’s all she had to do!”
“That girl, as you call her, was your daughter,” Teddi said. “She was your daughter. Didn’t that mean anything?”
“She was a mistake. I had no intention of allowing a mistake to ruin my life. As far as I’m concerned, she never existed.”
“But why?”
“Because I didn’t need any reminders about who I’d been. I was concerned with what I could become, what I did become.”
Teddi eased into a chair opposite her mother and leaned forward, though she did not touch her.
“So you killed her? You killed her before I had a chance to get …”
“To get what?” Marcella snapped. “What did you want? Why didn’t you mind your own business?”
“Thea was my business, Mother. Just as much as she was yours. I decided to find her. When I did, I sent her one thousand dollars a month.”
Marcella sat up, leaning on the edge of her chair, her face swollen with anger. “You did what? You always were a fool. She would’ve bled you dry!”
“You’re wrong. I wasn’t buying her. I did
it because she was my sister. And once I knew her name, it was easy to have my banker access the rest.
“I found out where she lived and I was trying to find a way to approach her, to be her friend, and then to be her sister, but I didn’t move fast enough.” Teddi paused, shaking her head at the wonder of it. “You got to her first. Trying to protect yourself and your stupid secret! She was black. You and I are black. I don’t feel any different about myself now that I know. Why couldn’t you have—?”
Marcella waved her hand. Her voice dropped low, as if she were trying to warn a child whose fingers were too near an open fan, who didn’t know any better than to stick them into the blades. She spoke slowly so as not to frighten the child.
“Why couldn’t I have what? It’s easy enough for you to sit here and judge me. You are looking at life through the prism of wealth and privilege. Well, let me tell you: For a while I was able to do that also, but that didn’t prevent me from hearing a lot of my friends—rich, powerful, political—speak of black people in the most malicious, spiteful terms. Casual remarks privately made over private cocktails before stepping out to attend public fund-raisers for black causes. I know because I raised my glass right along with them. I heard remarks made in the presence of their own servants. As if the servants were invisible. Inhuman.
“My husband would not have married me if he had known. Your husband, a white Wall Street banker, would not have married you if he had known you had one drop of black blood, despite your blond hair and blue eyes. No. You would’ve ended up like your grandmother. Good enough to love but not to marry. I learned long ago that if you’re black, you cannot—you will not be allowed to live like a human being. As far as I’m concerned, not even in this time and place. I took Thea’s life to save my own. And yours.”
I watched Teddi lean back with her hand to her mouth, as if her mother had exhaled a noxious germ.
“Oh, no! You didn’t do it for me because I wouldn’t have had a problem.”
“Oh, I see. And now that you’ve discovered your history, I suppose you feel comfortable enough to really get involved with that jailbird?”
I saw Teddi’s eyes flash, but she seemed beyond anger and the tears did not come.
“I’m not hooking up with anyone. Kendrick and I had a long talk. He loved Thea very much and that’s that. And he’s not the jailbird. You are. You always were. But now you get to exchange one prison cell for another. For murder.”
I watched Marcella’s face crumble. The errant child hadn’t heard a word she’d said, so Marcella struck back hard, trying to get in a last, vicious blow. “Thea was a whore who wanted more than money,” Marcella cried.
Teddi looked at her impassively. “If your daughter went that way, it’s because you, and only you, sent her that way. All she wanted was for you to own up to her, to acknowledge her.”
Marcella leaned back and folded her arms across her chest.
“Well, I had no intention of doing that. She was never a part of my life, so it was easier to get rid of her. I called that bar and she met me out in the alley. I had planned everything. I even drove by there several times and I knew exactly what I was going to do.
“I wore the same clothes I’m wearing now and I carried the same gun—your father’s gun.”
She drew a breath and went on, sounding proud of what she had accomplished. I could not believe that anyone could be so blind, so filled with self-loathing.
“This hooded jacket,” Marcella continued, “glasses, dark makeup and in the confusion, I walked away from that alley to my car. I didn’t even run. I walked. There was that cripple in his wheelchair. He slipped away but not for long. I knew I’d find him.”
She turned to me then with a look that could keep a body frozen for years. “I saw you with him. You also got away once, but I knew I would see you again.”
“Marcella, you killed a man for nothing,” I said. “He didn’t see you well enough to identify you. You killed him for nothing. Just like you killed your daughter. Now here you are, facing some serious hard time.”
Marcella closed her eyes and brushed her hair from her face. Her careful makeup could not conceal the shock of revelation, and age seemed to creep through even as I watched her.
“You don’t understand. I have always faced hard time. And since it no longer matters, yes, that was my earring. Sometime later, I misplaced the other one and I can’t remember where … like the other part of my life, I can’t remember.”
She began to cry, but Teddi, leaning back in her chair, did not move. She simply watched.
I turned and walked up the aisle. There was a phone downstairs in the lobby and I dialed Tad’s number.
When I returned, Marcella was slouched in her chair and her face had again taken on a blank expression. Teddi was crying now and I wondered if her tears were for Thea’s lost life or for her mother’s.
I sat down next to Teddi to listen for the faint siren of the police, and I thought of Dessie, who, out of love, had struggled to do the right thing.
“Listen, Teddi,” I said. “There’s a beautiful picture of your grandmother I think you might like to have.”
“My grandmother?” She turned to look at me. “Of course I’m interested. Where is it?”
“Senator Michaels—ex-Senator Michaels—has it. Have your attorney contact him. Mention Thea’s bankbook and Michaels’ll have that picture in your hand in a matter of days. Right now, he can’t handle any more scandal, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll be glad to help you because Miss Adele wants a copy also.”
She nodded her head, as if coming out of a deep sleep. Her tears had dried and she seemed more composed.
“Is Miss Adele a relative also?”
“You might say that,” I murmured. “She can tell you everything you need to know. And she also serves the coldest champagne I ever tasted.”
chapter twenty-nine
When the American Airlines jet touched down and Alvin rushed through the crowd toward us, I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked taller, older, and more muscular. I watched his loping stride and wondered where his childhood had gone. It had been here just two months ago.
“Hi Mali! Grandpa! Kendrick, man, how you doin’?” He hugged us and stepped back to look at Kendrick. “Yo, man. Even your bumps got muscles. You musta been into some serious weights.”
Kendrick shrugged as we made our way to the baggage area, where Alvin scooped up his duffel. In the parking lot, we piled into Kendrick’s car and headed toward the Long Island Expressway. The charges against Kendrick had been dismissed when Marcella was arrested, but he wanted to tell Alvin the story himself. It wouldn’t sound right, he said, coming from anyone else.
But Alvin was still excited about his vacation and we let him talk. “Do you know that a Captain Bill Pinckney from Chicago and Captain Ted Seymour from the Virgin Islands are the only two black men to have sailed around the world solo? Seymour did it in 1987 and Pinckney did it in 1992 in a forty-seven-foot yacht.”
I was impressed. We were all impressed.
“Guess what I’m going to do when I finish college, Grandpa?”
Dad smiled. “You’re going to sail solo around the world. Why not?”
I said nothing. College was at least six more years away. Time enough for me to come to terms with my nervousness and with whatever he wanted to do with his life.
“So Kendrick, what’s been happening? What’d I miss?”
I sat back and watched the landscape of Queens flit by as Kendrick maneuvered through the traffic. He recounted the events in a straightforward way, and by the time we’d crossed the Triboro Bridge and had eased through a break to turn toward the Harlem River Drive, the story was over.
For several minutes, Alvin gazed out of the window. Then he looked at Dad, and at Kendrick, and turned to glance back at me. “I didn’t know love could be so much trouble.”
There was a short silence before Dad replied. “Depends, my boy. It all depends.”
“
On what?” Alvin asked. His young face was clouded with concern.
When no one answered, he shook his head. “Well, all I can say is: That solo trip ’round the world is lookin’ better and better.”
This time we really had no answer, but Kendrick managed to smile as he lowered the window. The noise of traffic rushed in as we came off the drive at 135th Street and headed home.
“Wait and see, Alvin. Wait and see,” he smiled.
about the author
GRACE F. EDWARDS was born and raised in Harlem and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel, In the Shadow of the Peacock, was published in 1988. Her first mystery, If I Should Die, debuted in May 1997.
If you enjoyed Grace Edwards’ A TOAST BEFORE DYING, you will not want to miss any of the mysteries in this critically acclaimed series.
You’ll find the next mystery featuring Mali Anderson, NO TIME TO DIE, coming in hardcover from Doubleday Books in Summer 1999, at your favorite bookseller. Don’t miss it!
A Toast Before Dying Page 20