Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  She sighed and said in a voice that reeked of patience, “If you overheard me saying something about others, it would have been about all the other suicide victims I’ve seen in my career.”

  She seemed so calm and believable that it confused me and made me feel very uneasy.

  “Cordi, I think you should go back to your room and lie down for a while. You need to calm down.”

  I did need calming down, that was for sure, but I also wanted to talk to Bradley. To throw Ella off, I headed down the hallway toward my room and met Jacques coming in the opposite direction.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “You look terrible.”

  “You have to arrest Osborn,” I said. “He did it. And while you’re at it arrest his father, too. They’re both guilty.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Jacques as he grabbed me by the arms.

  “Bradley,” I said. “He’s Osborn’s son.”

  Jacques looked taken aback.

  “Don’t you see? It was Bradley who killed Mavis. He knew about his father’s research. He knew Ecteril worked for memory loss. He must have been frantic when the research was halted. They both must have been. Father wanting the son to get better. The son desperate to get better.”

  “So he stole some from his father?” asked Jacques.

  “He was afraid to have ECT, even though it stood a good chance of helping him. He was a writer. Like Hemingway he was afraid he’d lose his memory.”

  “So why not just take the drug? Why give it to Mavis?” We’d been over this territory before.

  “He must have known it had killed at least one person. He needed to know if it was safe and not just an aberration. So he weaseled his way into her good books by pretending to be a Scientologist and convinced her to take the pill.”

  “How would he have known that it was a potential killer?” asked Jacques.

  “Maybe his father told him, to explain why he was stopping the research.”

  “So he used Mavis.”

  “Bradley told me he was terrified of ECT and I saw him give something to Mavis just before she had another ECT. I’m sure it was Ecteril and she took it after she spilled her juice. I saw her put her hand to her mouth.”

  “How do you know it’s not the father?”

  “Because he was genuinely surprised when I told him Mavis had remembered her juice-stained T-shirt. He knew ECT affected her memory and when this particular treatment didn’t, he must have asked why. That’s when he must have known she’d received Ecteril, and the only one who could have given it to her, besides himself, was his son. He must have been horrified.”

  “What if Bradley didn’t know Ecteril was a killer?”

  I was getting impatient. Jacques was asking too many questions, instead of doing something. He was a cop, after all. I ignored him and said, “Bradley was scheming to use Austin as his next guinea pig.” And I told Jacques what Martha had overheard in the men’s washroom. It jibed with what Bradley had said about trying again.

  “And you have to arrest them,” I said.

  “Why me?”

  Did he really have to ask that question? “Because I know you are law enforcement of some kind.”

  He’d relaxed his grip on my arms but he hadn’t let go, and suddenly he pulled me to him in a big hug and whispered in my ear, “But on what grounds, Cordi? We have no proof.”

  I tried to pull away from him, but he held me tightly, and then our lips touched in a gentle kiss that suddenly got legs. But I had work still to do. Surely he saw that? I was too excited about solving the case to do anything but squirm out of his arms.

  “I have Osborn’s files that reveal he put Minnie on Ecteril,” I said. “That will give you grounds. I’ll go and get the flashdrive and give it to you. Then you’ll see.”

  He tried to hold me back, but I was on a mission.

  “It was always you, and only you, that I was interested in,” he whispered as he let me go.

  He looked sad, but I had no time to deal with that right now. I brushed past him to my room before he could say anything more. No one was there. I went to my bedside table and pulled out the drawer to get the flashdrive. But the drawer was empty. I looked everywhere, but there was no flashdrive. Had I left it somewhere? I was trying to straighten out all the thoughts in my head when Ella came in to tell me Ryan was here to pick me up. It seemed too early for Ryan but I got my coat and put on my boots and walked down the hall.

  Jacques materialized by my side and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Did you take care of the Osborns?”

  “Not to worry,” he said. “Everything’s just fine.”

  But he didn’t look as though everything was fine. He looked worried, as though there was something wrong with me. And the sadness was still there. Why is he sad? I wondered.

  I could see Ryan waiting in the seventh-floor lobby and I was itching to tell him everything. Jacques walked me to the elevators and Ryan gave me a hug. Then we stood and waited for the elevator. “Where’s Martha?” I asked.

  “She’s coming,” Ryan said, and then the elevator doors opened and I forgot about Martha as my world shattered before me.

  As I stared at the woman stepping out of the elevator I was presented with two equally unappetizing and repugnant possibilities. One: some or everything that had happened before the elevator door opened had been a delusion; or two: I was hallucinating right now.

  Either way I was in trouble, because the woman on the elevator was Mavis.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I stood transfixed as she smiled at me and walked on by as if nothing had happened. There were cries of “Mavis, you’re back!” and people gathered around her. I was aware of Ryan standing there open-mouthed, watching Kit give Mavis a hug. He turned to look at me and what he saw galvanized him into action. He took me by the arm and led me into the elevator. When I turned and before the doors closed, I saw Jacques looking at me, his face contorted in surprise. I could feel my own face expressing the shock I felt and I tried to hide it, but judging by the look on Jacques’s face, mine was worse than I thought. And then the elevator doors shut and I felt like I was being spirited away at the denouement of a book.

  We sat in Ryan’s car in the parking lot for twenty minutes waiting for Martha, and Ryan kept looking at me, trying to read my mood, I guess. We hardly spoke until Martha finally arrived and got in the back seat. Ryan wheeled the car out onto the street and headed west.

  “So she’s alive,” he said.

  “Who’s alive?” said Martha.

  “Mavis,” said Ryan.

  “But I thought she was dead,” said Martha.

  There was a painful silence.

  “Mavis never died,” said Ryan.

  “Am I delusional?” I asked.

  There was a godawful long silence before Ryan said, “Sometimes.”

  “If I was delusional, why did you go along with me?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” said Ryan.

  “I meant Martha,” I said. I turned to look at her.

  Her smile was sickly as she said, “Because I believed you.” She gave a half laugh. “You always said I was gullible. But you made perfect sense, as long as Mavis was dead.”

  Perfect sense. I thought back to what Austin and Osborn had said about things being logical, as long as the premise was right. Dear God, had I really got the premise wrong, or was this moment in time the wrong one, and my days in hospital the right ones?

  The evening was the longest one of my life, because Ryan’s wife had invited some friends over and I had to try to make small talk. Ryan wanted me to stay the night — he said he’d persuaded Dr. Osborn to let me stay the night — but when I learned that, I was adamant about going home for a while. The fact that nothing was as it seemed, was tormenting me. My heart lurched when I thought of Jacques. Was my relationshi
p with him a delusion, too, or was it real? Martha dropped me off and tried to invite herself in, but I just wanted to be alone. I watched her tail lights as she drove out of the circular driveway and onto Douglas Crescent. I turned away then and walked into the alcove that I share with my neighbours, and there he was, sitting on my doorstep, Jacques.

  He stood up as I came through the archway. We stood there eyeing each other like two friends after a fight, except we hadn’t had a fight. We’d just had the total implosion of my mind, if I could believe what I’d seen at the hospital and what my brother had said, and if I did, it meant that I didn’t know if Jacques was really my lover or not. I felt vulnerable, scared, and unwanted. And then Jacques opened his arms and I melted right into them, like a hand to a glove.

  We didn’t speak and we didn’t make it to my bedroom. We barely made it through the front door before his hands found the buttons on my shirt and the belt to my pants, his lips found my mouth, then his hand my breast, in a cascading journey of love and desire and sexual astonishment. And his strength was wildly exciting because, in that moment, I knew he would never hurt me. I was deliciously lost in the moment.

  We were lying on my sofa in that surreal afterglow, my head on his shoulder, his arms encircling me. I could feel his chest rise and fall in a hypnotic rhythm that might have put me to sleep if I hadn’t been thinking about Mavis.

  “Why did you humour me?” My head rose and fell with his chest.

  Finally he said, “You were believable. It was all highly plausible, if Mavis was dead.”

  Martha had said the same thing.

  “And besides, why would you lie?” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “You had nothing to gain by saying Mavis was dead when she wasn’t. So she must have died. But I started to suspect something when you told me I was an undercover cop.”

  “You’re not?” I said, trying hard to keep my mind from sliding out of control.

  He squeezed me and said, “If I was an undercover cop, which I’m not, I’d have to be the worst one in history because I let you do all the work.”

  I realized then that he had never actually said he was or wasn’t a cop.

  “Why didn’t you say you weren’t a cop?” I asked.

  “Pride. You seemed so excited that I was a cop.”

  “Why would you continue to help me solve the murder, then?” I asked, waiting to poke holes in his arguments.

  “Because until I saw Mavis today, I wasn’t sure that you were delusional. You seemed so normal. I thought I was helping you. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  He kissed the top of my head and then in a whisper said, “And because I am falling in love with you.”

  I felt a sudden rushing sensation in my head and a prickling heat all over my body. He squeezed me again and I squeezed him back. I felt I should say something into the growing silence, but “I love you, too” sounded too much like an afterthought.

  At last I said, “You believed me about the subway and the bridge.”

  “It was logical, based on the assumption that someone was trying to kill you. But nobody was.”

  “But I was pushed onto the subway tracks and over the bridge.”

  “They must have been dreams, Cordi, or particularly vivid hallucinations.”

  I thought back to the morning after my fall from the bridge. There had been no marks on me, even though there should have been, and the coat I had left behind, rolled up in a ball in the ravine, had been hanging in my closet the next morning. Had the police been a delusion, too?

  “And the morgue?” I said.

  “That was real. I wanted to know if you were right.”

  We lay in silence for a while until I said, “But I saw Bradley give something to Mavis just before she had an ECT. It was the Ecteril.”

  “It was a candy,” said Jacques.

  How many other candies had there been? I wondered.

  “But you’re not a delusion,” I said.

  “No, never was, never will be.” We lapsed into silence.

  After a few minutes he said, “We can get you more help, Cordi. We can beat this, whatever it is.”

  As I lay there with my head snuggled on Jacques’s shoulder, I felt a sudden spasm of anger and all my misgivings suddenly evaporated. What had happened to me had been real. I was right. I knew I was right. It had all happened exactly as I remembered it. It wasn’t Mavis I had seen on the elevator. It was someone who looked like Mavis because Bradley had given his father’s pill to Mavis to see if it worked, and she had had a stroke and died. Ella had tried to cover it up, thinking that Dr. Osborn had killed Mavis. And then she had tried to kill me when it looked like I was going to expose Osborn. It was all so obvious, looked at from my point of view. Why didn’t anybody else see it?

  I was right.

  And everybody else was wrong.

  Weren’t they?

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my two sons, Tim and Jesse, for always being there for me and who read and critiqued an earlier draft of Crazy Dead. Thanks to my sister, Dorion, for having my back. To Sandy — just because. And thanks to K.G. and J.K. for helping me through some tough times, but times that made this book possible. And to my parents, who never gave up on me.

  Thanks also to the team at Dundurn!

  Copyright © Suzanne F. Kingsmill, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Project editor: Kathryn Lane

  Copy editor: Maryan Gibson

  Design: Courtney Horner

  Cover design: Laura Boyle

  Cover image: © ilia-art/iStock

  Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kingsmill, Suzanne, author

  Crazy dead / Suzanne F. Kingsmill.

  (A Cordi O’Callaghan mystery )

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3552-1 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3553-8 (pdf).--

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3554-5 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Kingsmill, Suzanne. Cordi O’Callaghan mystery.

  PS8621.I57C73 2016 C813’.6 C2015-908158-0

  C2015-908159-9

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

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