Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  “No. This is a good one,” Trina carries on, undaunted, before explaining her intent to secrete Janet in a safe house and then infiltrate the sect.

  The drive to Sampson’s house is, as Trina explains to her passenger, in accordance with the tactics she has learned from her private investigator’s manual: it is peppered with sudden U-turns, last-minute lane changes, and several close calls with red lights.

  “If you so much as touch her or even breathe heavily on her I’ll never give you another enema, understand?” Trina whispers harshly to the old man as soon as they arrive, then she turns to Janet with a smile. “You’ll be safe here. But don’t go outside, all right? Now, any medication. Do you take any tablets?”

  “I stopped —” starts Janet, and Clive Sampson jumps in as he rummages into the pocket of his housecoat.

  “I’ve got some you can have.”

  “No tablets,” spits Trina, wrenching the package of Aspirins from the old man’s fingers. “No tablets, no touching, or no enema. Got it?”

  “Sorry, Trina.”

  “How long?” asks Janet as she looks vacantly around the large room stuffed with overblown 1960s furniture that will never make it to Sotheby’s or Christies.

  “Just a few days, until I find out what’s going on.”

  Ten minutes later, with twenty blocks between herself and her patients, Trina phones Mike Phillips.

  “What’s going down, Mike?”

  “Don’t give me that innocent PI crap,” snarls Phillips. “What have you done with her?”

  “Who?”

  “The crazy lady… you know who. Look, this is getting serious. The DNA we got from the saliva on her crucifix matches.”

  “That was only three days. I thought it took weeks.”

  “Emergency… murder of a cop.”

  “She didn’t do it, Mike.”

  “Says you.”

  “She hasn’t got the strength. He was probably a fat, beer-soaked, donut-challenged —”

  “It doesn’t alter the fact that she was the last one to see him alive,” Phillips cuts in before she goes too far. “We need to talk to her.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find her,” says Trina, then switches off her phone before he has a chance to reply.

  Any residual warmth from the Mediterranean has been swept away by the mistral, and Bliss feels the cold as he sits at his desk culling more and more from his manuscript. Daisy hasn’t shown up in days, and, despite what he told her, he is feeling a sense of loss.

  The despairing neophyte author doesn’t know it, but the heartbroken Frenchwoman has been slowly collecting things from around her house that are tied to him — cards, letters, sapphire earrings, a Tiffany necklace — and has put them in a shoebox. Now she knocks, holding the box in front of her, though whether she wants to ward him off or get dragged in she doesn’t know.

  She gets dragged in.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” he says, but can’t help adding that he has seen the woman again — just a glimpse, just the hair, the same familiarity, same vibes.

  “Who?” asks Daisy, as if she doesn’t care.

  “The woman… the one who reminded me of Yolanda,” he says, but his voice fades as he realizes that he is digging the knife deeper. Then he looks away, embarrassed by the fact that he cannot escape from a dead person. But was she dead? He saw her after the crash, bloodied and broken; he begged the doctor to help her, begged the medics for oxygen. He blotted out the carnage surrounding the crashed plane as he desperately focused on saving her life. But she was gone. He was given the news by Chief Superintendent Edwards himself.

  Thoughts of Edwards further sour him as he pictures the poisonous little officer who stomped his way up the career ladder carrying a black book bursting with his colleagues’ petty indiscretions. “Bloody Edwards,” Bliss muses under his breath as he recalls the way the man informed him that everything would be taken care of: Yolanda’s funeral, her personal possessions, the plane, her aging father, her son. “All taken care of,” the snotty chief superintendent claimed, but no one ever considered Bliss’s heart. Who would take care of that?

  “Maybe you should look for her family,” suggests Daisy, still hoping that he will find a way to move on, to move back. “You must bring zhis to an end.”

  “Closure,” he mutters, but he doesn’t want closure. Yolanda is still there, still alive in his mind, as hot and vital as the first time they made love, jammed together in an airplane’s toilet where they reached incredible heights as Bliss penetrated her with every inch of his passion and she thrust her pelvis into his groin with heart-thumping power.

  “Sometimes I think it’s better this way,” he confesses. “At least I can imagine that she is happy somewhere… that’s all I want, Daisy. I just want her to be happy.”

  Daisy gives a knowing nod. “Like Grandmère. Sometimes she thinks that Grandpère found someone else in Poland or East Germany. But she still waits. Nearly sixty years and she still waits.”

  “Till death do us part…” he murmurs, regretting that he never had the opportunity to say those words to Yolanda in front of a priest — but would it have made a difference? It may ease the pain a little to imagine Yolanda still alive and vibrant, but the pain won’t end until his death. Or, if he is right about the tortured soul of the Man in the Iron Mask, the torment of his lost love will haunt him eternally.

  Janet Thurgood still has some memories, worn thin by a regimen of tranquilizers and constant repentance. “You killed your baby,” she repeatedly tells herself as she paces her bedroom in Sampson’s house while caressing her crucifix, but those were her husband’s words, not hers.

  “You smothered him: hiding him in cupboards, in the cellar, in the attic,” Joseph accused, then shook her, screaming “Why?… Why?… Why?” into her face. “You’re an evil woman. You’ll go to Hell. You’ll go to prison,” he yelled at her, and weeks ran into months as she shrank away from the front door at every knock. Then, when he’d broken her, Joseph finally explained that everything had been taken care of.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” she cried, throwing herself at his feet, but there was something missing. “Where is he?” she wanted to know. “Where is my baby?”

  “He’s dead, Janet. Don’t you remember? You killed him,” Creston snarled, knocking her down again, and no matter how much she begged and pleaded, she never found her son’s ashes or grave.

  “It’s better that way. I’m protecting you, helping you,” he claimed, implying, Because I love you so much, without saying so.

  Janet’s next pregnancy followed closely on the death of John. “I’ll be more careful this time,” she assured her husband. “This one is yours.”

  Bliss is staring at the lemon tree. His manuscript is now in ruins. He’s lost his will and his way. I need a new start, he tells himself, willing one of the lemons to drop. Nothing happens, and he questions whether he needs to start a new book or a new life.

  “I thought I was escaping,” he mumbles, then tells himself that no one escapes from life alive. Escaping from love should be easier, he thought, but it has become harder and harder. And he thinks of Daisy, trying so enthusiastically to win his heart when it was never there to be won.

  Poor Daisy, he thinks, then chastises himself for not foreseeing what might happen during the first few months when there was no magic, no fireworks, just a slow smoulder, then months of emails and long-distance telephone calls. The only fireworks were at the Liberation Day festival when the sky over the island of Ste. Marguerite was ablaze. But afterwards, Bliss fizzled as quickly as the last mortar. Memories of Yolanda put the fire out, although he didn’t explain to Daisy, and he still has difficulty saying, even to himself, “I’m in love with a dead person.”

  Is that unusual? he questions, but he is living in a town full of grieving widows, women who, despite more than six decades in black weeds, are unable or unwilling to risk another relationship.

  Why is that? he wonders briefly, though he wel
l knows that it’s not just that they are waiting for the return of their lover; it is fear that they might find a greater love and dishonour the one they lost.

  Would I want a greater love than what I had with Yolanda? But he knows that road will drive him in circles.

  Samantha Bliss is a London lawyer in her mid-twenties who has been tied to the legal profession since the day of her birth, when her father, Constable David Bliss, paced the delivery room at St. Thomas’s Hospital in full uniform, making the staff as nervous as he.

  “Get over it, Dad,” says Samantha when her father phones from the South of France to say that he’s broken up with Daisy over his longing for Yolanda.

  “Easy for you to say. You’ve got Peter,” he replies, speaking of his son-in-law and ex-boss, Chief Inspector Peter Bryan.

  “What d’ye want, Dad?” she asks, suggesting, I’m real busy.

  I want the fireworks back. I want to look into her wide open eyes while we kiss and know that our minds are in unison — that she loves me just as much as I love her. I want to feel our hearts syncopating in harmony.

  “I want her back,” is all he says, though Samantha is unsympathetic.

  “It’s been more than three years. I thought you were moving on. What about Daisy? What started this again?”

  The blonde woman at the boulangerie, he knows, but he doesn’t bother to explain. “A woman with Yolanda’s eyes,” he says, and then realizes that he didn’t actually register her eyes at all, that he doesn’t even know what colour they are.

  “Just get on with the book, Dad,” says Samantha. “It’ll take your mind off her. Or take a trip,” she continues. “Get away for a bit. Go somewhere exotic.”

  “Exotic,” he mutters as he scans the palm trees, the snow-capped mountains, and the cerulean sea. “Where, Hawaii?”

  “Yeah. And take Daisy.”

  Poor Daisy, he thinks as he puts down the phone, and he’s tempted to call her. But where are the fireworks? The ones he has seen only once in his life — in a briefing room at a police station in the port city of Hoek van Holland, when he and Yolanda looked into each other’s eyes and both knew instinctively that there could never be anyone else. They may have danced around each other for a few days, but they ended up in each other’s arms as surely as day turns to night.

  The wintry sun reflects brightly off the coastal mountains surrounding Vancouver as Trina prepares for her trip north by scavenging her and Kylie’s closet for something flowing. She doesn’t want tight, doesn’t want to show off lumps and bumps that might be considered irreligious. I could go for the burka look, she thinks as she discards outfit after outfit, and considers running something up on her sewing machine. In the end she goes with a couple of printed cotton full-length skirts and several demure polo-neck sweaters. Janet’s head scarf tops off the ensemble as she checks herself in the mirror, then she hurriedly wipes off all her lipstick and mascara.

  “There,” she says, “plain as a pimple. God should be happy with that — but will Rick?”

  The sun is sinking over the island of Ste. Marguerite yet again, and Bliss sees his novel sinking with it. “God, why is it so hard to write?” he questions, still looking for the masked man to give him renewed inspiration as he watches the famous prisoner’s home fade into the twilight. “It was easier winkling confessions out of diehard rapists and murderers.”

  A ruffle of cool breeze ripples across the bay and makes him shiver momentarily. He pulls his coat around him and is readying to return to his apartment when a feeling of presence bores into the back of his head. But he has been here before; has felt the vibes of love — always love, and always at sunset — and he knows that it is a trick. Yolanda’s spirit is still alive in his mind, refusing to leave him, refusing to let him live: “Still thinking of you; still loving you.”

  It could be the Man in The Iron Mask, he tries convincing himself, but knows it’s not, knows he’s been abandoned as much by his three-hundred-year-old mentor as he has by his great love.

  The creepy feelings continue to wash over him, and he is tempted to turn but doesn’t want to risk disillusionment. I’m going mad, he tells himself as he stares at the prison that is slowly evaporating into the gloom, then a cough so slight it might be in his mind spins him. But he can’t look at the blonde-haired woman who is already turning away.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles in embarrassment, and she keeps walking. “Sorry… very rude.”

  “I saw that woman again,” he tells Daisy when he meets her at the bar L’Escale for an evening drink, but she’s heard enough of Yolanda.

  “Just imagination, Daavid,” she says dismissively. “It is like a parent wiz a lost child who spends their life running after strangers because of zhe hair.”

  “I know,” agrees Bliss. “But it’s not just her hair…” He pauses, realizing that, in truth, it is only her hair; he hasn’t consciously examined any other features. “Maybe you are right.”

  Marie, the floury baker’s wife, adds to Bliss’s consternation the following morning as she greets him on his way into the boulangerie. “Ah. Bonjour, monsieur,” she cries as she rushes to the door to peer up and down the street. “You have just missed someone.” Then she drops her voice conspiratorially. “I zhink you have a fan.”

  “Not yet,” he replies with a chuckle. “But who knows. One day when my book is published.”

  “And zhe writing. It is good, no?”

  Now what? How long will you keep up the pretence? “It’s all right,” he says with a shrug as he orders his usual, and he is halfway out of the door before Marie calls after him.

  “But zhe woman who asks for you.”

  He turns. “Woman?”

  “Your admirer. She ask what you do. I say, ‘He is most famous number one English writer.’”

  “Thanks,” he says, laughing. “And she say, ‘OK.’”

  “Just OK?” he queries, irrationally deflated.

  “No, I zhink she say ‘Okey-dokey’ like no-good damn Americans.”

  “Yolanda always said…” he begins, then drops his bag and takes off.

  She’s gone, whoever she was, and as he races around the tight, twisted, medieval lanes that were built in the time of donkey carts, he easily convinces himself that he is being utterly stupid. But it doesn’t stop him, and he pushes on through the bustling market in the heart of the town, scattering customers in his path and knocking over a basket of olives.

  “Va te faire foutre!” screeches the stallholder, but Bliss tunes out the offensive insult as he dashes on.

  “It’s obviously a coincidence,” he tells Samantha by phone ten minutes later, seized by a compunction to confide in someone and not wishing to further upset Daisy. “I mean, lots of people must say, ‘Okey…’” he is adding as he leans over the balcony, gazing down at the garden. “Oh shit!”

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “A lemon.”

  “A lemon?”

  “It just dropped off the tree.”

  “Sorry, Dad. You’ve lost me.”

  Bliss tries explaining about the woman, but Samantha finally loses it. “Dad, for fuck’s sake, will you just put her out of you mind and get on with the damn book.”

  “Language!”

  “Well, it’s bloody ridiculous. You’ve got to move on.” “Is that you, David?” inquires Daphne Lovelace a few minutes later, after Samantha has threatened to block all further calls and have him arrested as a dangerous lunatic.

  “Yes,” he replies, though his mind is somewhere else as his elderly English friend gabbles excitedly about her plan to take up writing.

  “I was hoping for a few pointers,” she says.

  “That’s all I need — competition.”

  “No. Nothing major like yours. Not a global bestseller. Just a history of Dewminster’s important families.”

  Bliss catches on. “And you really think that the chocolate guy will fall for that?”

  “One of the advantages of age, David,” she titters. �
�I’ll just dress like a dowdy old fogy and pretend to be a bit slow.”

  “You don’t need me, Daphne Lovelace,” he tells her, then, with his mind totally absorbed by the strange woman, he quickly ends the call and focuses on the newly fallen lemon as he tries to picture Yolanda. The slightly bulbous nose and the single deep dimple come easily to mind, as do her perfectly formed teeth, then her smile, shaped by a pair of sweet rosy lips that most men would kill for, and finally her body, one that most women would die for.

  With the image formed he tries to cross-match with the woman he’d glimpsed on the promenade in St-Juan. He draws a blank; he’d barely taken any notice beyond the hair.

  What the hell am I doing? he asks himself, realizing that Samantha is right. I should be locked up. She’s dead you fool. Get over it. Get back to your novel.

  But writing is far from Bliss’s mind. It’s as if the masked man has stopped communicating, so the only thing to do is to get back into the Château Roger to try to pick up the trail from the woman that the château was originally built to impress in 1687. An hour later, armed with pad, pen, and flashlight, he walks the twisty hill that winds around the Château Roger’s perimeter fence, looking for a spot where he can pry apart the rusty iron railings.

  The Château Roger, eaten by time and swallowed by the encroaching undergrowth, is like a decayed maharajah’s palace in the Punjabi jungle. The edifice was built by a man of great passion, much like the Taj Mahal was, but it has slipped ignominiously through the historical records because of the builder’s failure.

  How different things may have been if he succeeded, Bliss thinks as he surveys the cracked marble steps leading up to the enormous canopied front door, and he can’t help but reflect on the fact that history is always recorded by the victor and no one writes about the losers with any relish.

  But was it the man’s fault, or was it the château that blighted his chances? Bliss doesn’t need his manuscript to recall the plaint he has attributed to the island’s most famous inhabitant: Every day, ma chère amour, I watch my most magnificent château, Le Château Roger, rise on the promontory across the bay from the Isle Ste. Marguerite. Soon it will be ready, and then, my sweet heart, it will be my gift to you as a symbol of my great love. Reject me not, I beg of you, for I have asked the king to have me incarcerated incognito in the island fortress until you accept my endowment and release me by your love.