by Jan Burke
“A crime team?”
“An investigator, a criminalist, whoever else they want to call in. And a coroner. A suicide is a reportable death. I’m sorry, Kaylie; it’s the way I have to handle it. Let’s go inside.”
She let him lead her back into the kitchen. He closed the door to the garage and felt her relax a little as it clicked shut. The kitchen was bright and gleaming, its white-tiled counters scrubbed, the white linoleum shining. The second hand on a round, plain-faced, battery-operated clock ticked away the time with small, jerking movements. On a dish drainer below it, two plain, white dishes, a wine glass and two sets of silverware were drying. On the kitchen table, a red vase held a wild assortment of summer blossoms, mostly roses.
“From your garden?” he asked.
“Yes, I brought them in today. Can I get you something cold to drink?”
“Thanks, that would be nice. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“You’re leaving?”
Looking at her troubled face, he felt another surge of anger toward the man in the garage. Hell, and he hadn’t done so well by her himself; left her waiting around with her husband’s corpse for several hours.
“Just for a minute. I’m just going to go out to the car; I’ll be right back. You’ll be all right?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Hot as it was outside, it was actually cooler than in the house. The stench from the fire was all that kept him from asking Kaylie to talk to him on the porch. He called in on his radio; Emma, who was feeling guilty about not taking a better message from Kaylie, called him back and told him that she had tried to get the county people to cooperate, but it would be at least an hour before they could get anyone out to him. He gathered up his clipboard and forms.
On his way back to the house, he noticed the air conditioner in the bedroom window. He wondered why she wasn’t using it.
• • •
They sat at the table, drinking lemonade, both silent for a time. He decided that he would get the business end of all of this over and done with, so that he could spend the rest of the time he waited with her as a friend, not an officer of the law.
“I need to ask you a few questions, Kaylie.”
She nodded. “Go ahead. It’s all right, Jim.”
She was tense again, he could see. He didn’t want to make this any harder on her than it already was. Slowly, he told himself. Take it slow and easy. “Did your husband go to work out at the college today?”
“Yes. He was at the college most of the day. He has a full schedule for summer session. I’m not sure exactly when he got home—I was working in the garden this afternoon. But I heard the phone ring and came in to answer it; Joseph had already picked it up. That was at about five o’clock, and it looked like he had just walked in not too long before that.”
“He was dressed like he is now?”
“Yes, that’s what he had on. I think Lillian called before he had a chance to change.”
“Lillian? His daughter?”
“Yes. He talked to her. I—I know there’s never any one reason for these things, but the call seemed to upset him.”
“Why?”
She looked away. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s my fault, not Lillian’s. I don’t think I ever made him very happy.”
“Kaylie.”
She looked back at him.
“Don’t do that to yourself. Please.”
She said nothing for a moment, then sighed. “You’re right, of course.”
“Tell me about the phone call.”
“Lillian called to say she was pregnant.”
“That upset him?”
“I know it sounds foolish, but you have to understand Joseph. He was so afraid of growing old. That’s why he had those affairs with his students.”
He looked at her in surprise.
“Yes, I knew about them, it’s a small town, Jim. I got ‘Dear Abby’ clippings in the mail whenever she ran a column on cheating husbands. Or some anonymous ‘friend’ would call me and tell me that she had seen Joseph going into a motel outside of town.”
“Good Lord.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“It doesn’t. I don’t think he saw himself as being much older than his students. Working at the college—well, all I’m saying is, the news that he was going to be a grandfather really shook him up.”
“Did he say anything to you about it?”
“No, not much. But he didn’t change his clothes or go on with his usual routine. He started drinking wine, so I hurried and made dinner, trying to get him to put some food in his stomach. But he kept drinking throughout dinner. I should have known something was wrong then. But when I hinted that he should stop drinking, he became quite foul-tempered. I didn’t feel like putting up with it, not in this heat. So I went back out to the garden. I spent quite a while out there—maybe if I had stayed with him . . .”
“Kaylie, don’t. None of this is your fault.”
She was silent for a time, then said, “I’m sorry. You must have other questions.”
“Not too many more. Had he been depressed or anxious lately, other than tonight?”
She reached toward the vase and absently touched a petal on a yellow rose. “I guess it doesn’t do any harm to talk about this now.”
He waited.
She plucked the petal and held it to her nose, then let it fall to the table. “He didn’t talk to me much, Jim. Not about anything. But recently he had started taking Valium. I don’t even know the doctor who gave him the prescription.”
“Do you know when he last took any?”
She shook her head. “The bottle is in the bathroom. Do you want me to get it for you?”
“No, that’s okay, I’ll take a look at it in a minute. Did you see him again after you came in from the garden?”
“No—I mean, not alive.” She reached up and took another petal from the rose. “This is the part I feel the worst about,” she said softly. She looked over at him, studying him.
What is she looking for?
She dropped the petal, reached for another one. “I didn’t know he was out there. I was out in the garden, then cutting flowers and arranging them in this vase. I thought he had gone out, or that he might have gone to bed early. Then I heard the explosion over at the refinery, and I stood out on the porch and watched the flames for a little while. I turned on the radio and listened to the news about it, listened while I washed dishes, cleaned the counters and mopped the floor. Then I went into the bedroom, where it was cooler. I can’t say I was especially surprised that Joseph wasn’t there. I go to bed alone quite often. Sometimes he comes in late.”
Jim found himself staring at the door to the garage.
“I didn’t go out there until much later,” she rushed on. “I had some laundry to do. That’s when I found him. I came back inside and called you—I mean, called the sheriff’s office.”
Emma had logged the call in at about nine, when things were still hopping from the fire. “So the last time you saw him was about when?”
“I guess it would have been about six-thirty.”
“And do you know what time it was you came in from the garden?”
“A little before sundown; before eight, I suppose.”
He looked at his watch. It was just after one o’clock in the morning; the refinery had been burning since eight-thirty. The man could have been out there in the garage for a long time. In this heat, even the coroner might find it difficult to set a time of death very accurately. He did as much of the paperwork as he could, then asked if she would mind if he looked around.
She didn’t object, but asked him if it would be all right if she waited back in the bedroom. “It’s cooler in there,” she explained.
Remembering the air
conditioner, he understood.
He looked over the living room and the professor’s study. If Joseph Darren left a suicide note, it was not on any of the clean and tidy surfaces of either room. There was, in fact, nothing very personal in them. Next he looked through the bathroom. Towels and washclothes neatly folded on the rack; chrome on the fixtures shining, toothbrushes in a holder, toothpaste tube rolled from the bottom. No thumbprint on the bottom edge of the medicine cabinet, like you’d see in his own house.
All the contents were in well-ordered rows. The medications were lined up, labels facing out. Nonprescription on one side, prescription on another. The Valium bottle was there, half-empty even though it was recently refilled. Maybe the professor had considered pills before he decided to stick with family traditions.
The other prescriptions were mostly leftover antibiotics; none past their expiration dates. There was only one made out to Kaylie. Premarin.
Premarin. Where had he heard of that before? He stretched and yawned. Premarin. Oh, sure—his mom had taken it. Estrogen, for menopause.
Menopause? Kaylie? Maybe she needed it for some other reason. She was only forty, for godsakes. Some women went through it that early, he knew. But Kaylie?
Well, if she was going through it, she was. It didn’t really bother him. No children, but at forty, maybe she didn’t want to start a family. Hell, she was going to be a grandmother. Step-grandmother.
He felt a familiar sensation. Tugging at a mental thread.
Something had bothered him, earlier. In the garage. The light being on? No, he could understand that. She wouldn’t turn it off, not with him in there. She walked in, saw him hanging there, probably was so shaken she ran back out and didn’t venture back in.
But she had ventured back in. He knew then what it was that had bothered him. The dryer. Lord Almighty.
He leaned against the sink, suddenly feeling a little sick to his stomach. What kind of woman washed a load of laundry in the same room where her husband was hanging from the rafters?
Slow down. Slow down, he told himself. It was weird, no doubt about it. But not necessarily meaningful. Maybe she cleans when she gets upset. The house was so immaculate, it was almost like being in a museum.
He would just ask her about it. He walked to the bedroom door and knocked.
“Come in,” she called.
He opened the door. This room, unlike the others, was slightly in disorder. The bed was rumpled, although made. An old-fashioned walnut dressing table held a silver mirror and brush and comb, a few lipsticks and other make-up items, a couple of small bottles of perfume and a small cluster of earrings, as if she had been sorting through them, choosing which pair she would wear. Photographs of a couple he recognized as her parents, long dead now, took up most of the rest of the space on it.
Two walnut nightstands, apparently part of the same set as the dressing table, stood at either side of a white, wrought-iron bedstead. The one nearest him was bare of anything but an alarm clock. The one on the other side, nearest Kaylie, held a skewed pile of women’s magazines. On top of the magazines was a familiar-looking volume. Their high school yearbook.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window. She hadn’t turned toward him, and now, looking at her profile, he saw not Kaylie Darren but Kaylie Lindstrom, the girl he had known in high school. She wore no makeup, no earrings, no perfume. This room was more her room than any other, and the fact that she had shared the bed she sat on with a man as cold and empty as that other nightstand seemed grossly unfair to Jim Lawrence.
She turned toward him, looked at him and smiled a quick little smile and said, “Am I in your way? Did you need to look around in here?”
He couldn’t make himself ask her what he needed to ask her, at least not yet. So instead he said, “Why don’t you use the air conditioner?”
“It’s broken,” she said with resignation.
“Let me take a look at it,” he said, striding toward the window.
“It’s broken,” she said again.
“Broken things can be fixed,” he said firmly. He bent down to take a look at it, pushing the switches and buttons on the side panel. Nothing.
“Can they?” she was saying. “Surely not all of them. That thing has been broken for years.”
He turned back to her, inexplicably irritated by her lack of faith.
“Did Professor Joseph Darren ever even try to fix this thing?”
Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled again. “No, he just went out and paid someone to put in this ceiling fan. He thought the air conditioner was too noisy anyway.”
“That ceiling fan doesn’t do much to cool it off in here,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his Swiss Army Knife.
“No, it doesn’t. But it was cool enough for Joseph,” she replied, watching him open the knife to a screwdriver implement and start to remove the panel.
I’ll just bet it was cool enough for him. The professor apparently had ice in his veins. But was it cool enough for you, Kaylie? His thoughts were brought up short when he pulled the panel away. The problem with the air conditioner wasn’t difficult to find. The power cord had been disconnected from the on/off switch terminals. Deliberately.
That son of a bitch.
“Jim?”
He was too angry to reply. He followed the cord back toward the bed.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at her, hearing the alarm in her voice. He must have frightened her somehow. He realized he was scowling and headed right toward her. Did Joseph Darren stalk toward her like this in anger, hurt her? He took a breath.
“I’m just going to unplug it. Your—” He stopped himself. He needed to get a grip. He had just been about to tell her of Joseph Darren’s deception, and here she was, not a widow for one full night yet. “—your air conditioner is going to be easy to fix. I’ll need for you to get up for a moment and let me move the bed away from the wall. The outlet is behind the bedstead.”
She was looking up at him again, in that way she had looked at him several times this evening. What are you looking for, Kaylie? Tell me. Her lips parted, almost as if she had heard him, and she clutched at the sheets beneath her.
He waited.
“Jim—” she said, but then looked down, away from his eyes. She stood up and walked away from the bed.
“Kaylie?”
She shook her head, still not looking at him.
He shrugged and reached for the bedstead, and heaved it away from the wall. He bent to unplug the air conditioner, and stopped short. There were footprints on the wall behind the bed.
Two footprints, to be exact. From the soles of a woman’s athletic shoes. A little garden dirt, perhaps.
Two feet, toes pointing up, slightly apart.
He looked at Kaylie, then back at the footprints. He bent down. While the wooden floor under her side of the bed was dusty, something had slid along the floor under his side. He looked more closely, and saw white paint chips missing off one slightly bent rung of the bedstead. The paint chips were on the floor, in the area between and beneath the footprints. He gripped the top of the bedstead, thinking of the single wineglass, picturing her beneath the bed, bracing her feet against the wall, straightening her legs as she pulled . . . the way the direction of the rope marks on the neck would match up with a suicide-by-hanging. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, it was all still there before him. He slowly straightened.
“He came home one day about twenty years ago and announced that he was going to get a vasectomy,” he heard Kaylie say behind him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He bent down again and unplugged the air conditioner cord, then walked back to the window.
“He had decided that I wasn’t going to have any children. He had his child. Lillian. Did you know that child hated me
? Not so much anymore, but it was awful when she was growing up. I don’t think she would have hated me so much if Joseph hadn’t told her that I was the reason he didn’t marry her mother. He lied. To me and to Lillian and to God knows how many other women. He lied all the time.”
“Yes, I know he did,” Jim said wearily, and knelt to begin replacing the wiring Joseph Darren had undone.
“Today he told Lillian that she should get rid of the baby.”
The screwdriver stopped for a moment, then went on.
• • •
He finished replacing the panel and got to his feet, looking out the window at the smoke, which had turned the moon blood red.
Without looking back at her, he knew she hadn’t moved. She stood there, silent now.
“Kaylie, I’m an officer of the law.” For the first time, his chest felt tight as he said that.
“Yes,” he heard her say.
He walked over to the outlet, plugged the air conditioner in, listened as it hummed to life, giving off a dusty smell of disuse.
“You fixed it!”
He looked over at her, at the way her face was lit up in approval and admiration.
“Yes,” he said, and moved the bed back against the wall.
• • •
He walked back to the air conditioner, adjusted its settings. He closed his eyes and bent his face to it, letting the cool air blow against him; felt it flattening his eyelashes and buffeting his hot skin.
“Kaylie.”
“Yes?”
“Go turn the clothes dryer off.”
• • •
She hesitated, but then he heard her leave the room, heard her going out into the garage. He looked out the window and saw the headlights of other cars coming toward the house. He stood up straight, lifting his fingers to his badge, feeling the now-chilled metal beneath them.
Fifteen years as a deputy sheriff, only to come to this.
• • •
Why tonight, he wondered.
A Fine Set of Teeth
I saw Frank drop two cotton balls into the front pocket of his denim jacket and I made a face.