by G. H. Ephron
I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I ran as fast and as hard as I could, head down, and caught Angelo behind the knees with my good shoulder, barely aware of the pop of protest in my right ankle. The gun exploded, inches from my head, and Angelo went down. I heard a thud as the gun bounced across the porch, discharging again before coming to rest.
Angelo kicked himself free of my grip and struggled to his feet. Annie ripped the scarecrow’s pillowcase off her head and dove for the gun. She grabbed it and lay sprawled on the porch, pointing the gun at Angelo. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot!” she shouted.
But Angelo didn’t see or hear her. He knelt beside Maria and screamed, “Maria!” his voice floating away like the sound of someone calling down an empty well. Maria Whitson lay in a spreading pool of dark red blood. “Maria,” he cried, resting his head on her chest.
The darkness was filled with Angelo’s sobs and the rasping sound of Maria’s ragged breathing. I crept closer, thinking there might be some way to slow the bleeding.
Maria’s face was pale, the whites of her eyes seemed to glow. She stroked Angelo’s head but she stared at me.
“Dr. Zak,” she whispered.
I could hear sirens in the distance. I leaned closer. “Don’t move,” I told her. She started to speak again. I put my hand on her moist forehead. “Just lie still.”
I stared at her, seeing my wife’s face staring back at me as the sirens like the scream of a faraway teakettle grew louder, closer, wailing up from the river. Her eyelids fluttered and the light seemed to fade behind them. “Help is on the way. Hang on. Just a bit longer.”
“Not this time,” she whispered and closed her eyes. “This time I got it right.”
33
THE FRONT of the house was lit up like a movie set with police gathering evidence and cameras flashing. Even though the place swarmed around me, I felt alone and apart. The ambulance bearing Sylvia Jackson screamed away into the night. I shifted back into the shadows. I wanted to close my eyes but didn’t want to risk what I might see. I focused on the pain in my shoulder and the throbbing in my ankle to help me stay anchored in the moment. I reminded myself that I was alive. So was Sylvia Jackson. So was Annie. Stuart Jackson would soon be released. This time, I hadn’t been making tea.
I sat in the dark and grieved for Maria Whitson, for her family. It all seemed so unnecessary. I watched as the EMTs wasted their efforts trying to revive her. When they declared Maria dead, Angelo tried to wrench a gun from the nearest police officer. They wrestled him to the ground. Handcuffed, he went limp. Maria was gone. The puppeteer had dropped Angelo’s strings. His flat, mirrorlike gaze met mine as he disappeared into the back of a cruiser. Just like Angelo, I’d been her pawn. And though the clues were right in front of me, I didn’t put them together in time to save her from herself.
Annie took off for the police station, reluctantly leaving me sitting on the lawn, icing my ankle. I wanted to go home — to go home and just be there, doing nothing in particular.
I jumped at the touch on my shoulder. “You okay?” Detective MacRae was standing over me.
I shrugged. “It’s just a sprain. Where’d you crawl out from?”
He ignored it. “On my way to dinner when Annie’s call came in.” He held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me to my feet. The ankle hurt like hell when I put weight on it. “Need a lift?” I must have looked surprised because he added, “It’s the least I can do.”
Leaning on him, I limped over to his car. He opened the back door and I gingerly lowered myself onto the seat and scooted back, pulling my injured foot in last.
“Ice and elevation,” a voice instructed. The face of Nurse Carolyn Lovely peered at me from the front seat. “And stay off it for awhile.”
“You and Mac?” I asked.
“None of your business,” she said crisply.
MacRae got in and started the engine. I sat back and watched bits of Cambridge go by through the dirty windows.
“I owe you an apology,” MacRae said when we were stopped at a light.
“For what?” For which of the many insults, I wondered.
“For getting in your face all the time. I couldn’t believe all those accidents were a coincidence.”
“You were right about that,” I said. “They weren’t.”
“And you thought I was involved in this, too, didn’t you?”
“Well,” I hedged. “I guess I was suspicious of you, and Carolyn, too.”
“Me?” She turned around.
“Well, you were so hostile. I mean, I’ve dealt with hostile nurses before, but—”
“Doctors,” she spit out the word like it was bad-tasting medicine. “You had no business sniffing around Sylvia Jackson. She needed rest and therapy. She didn’t need you.”
“Right,” I said. “So Stuart Jackson should serve a life sentence so Sylvia Jackson doesn’t get inconvenienced? After all, when you find a wife with a bullet wound in her head, and an ex-husband with a camouflage fatigue hat in the closet, why keep looking?” The self-righteousness temporarily numbed my ankle.
“Nine times out of ten,” Carolyn Lovely muttered.
“Hey, truce!” MacRae interjected. “You had your job to do. I had mine. Carolyn had hers. If we all just did our jobs, the world would be a better place.” A philosopher. “One good thing about all this—I’m glad I was able to start to square things with Annie.” He must have caught my baffled expression in the rearview mirror because he went on, “She called me. When you were in the house talking to Angelo, she called from her car. Said she knew I wouldn’t give her a hard time. And I didn’t. I made sure a bunch of squad cars and a couple of ambulances got over here pronto. Means a lot to me, her trust. Forgive and forget, that’s what I say.”
Forgive, maybe. “If it’s any consolation, she knows she’s not being fair. But it’s the kind of hurt that takes a long time to heal.”
By the time he dropped me off, it was late. I knew Gloria and Kwan would still be at the hospital, waiting for news.
Gloria didn’t say anything right away, after I finished telling her what happened. I heard the muffled sound of her blowing her nose.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I can’t believe it,” she said finally. “It makes me so angry. Why did it have to end this way?”
“I’m right there with you.”
“Do you think she deliberately tried to hurt me?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“But why?”
“When you said she was faking her weight, she thought you knew she was faking the rest of her symptoms, too.”
“Was she? I can’t believe it was all a sham.”
As usual, Gloria put her finger on the question I’d been asking myself. Maybe Maria had been faking, from the moment she deliberately overdosed. Maybe every one of our interactions were little soap operas of her own invention. But I didn’t think so. I prefer the version I gave Gloria. “She faked a suicide attempt in order to get herself admitted. Dosed herself with the drugs — she knew just how much to take. And maybe she faked the delirium. But once we started working with her, she let her guard down. And we might have been able to help her. I think, to some extent, we did help her. But when she started to question her memories of abuse, it was too much to reintegrate. If Uncle Nino was innocent, then how could she live with what she’d done? She couldn’t level with us. She’d gone past the point of no return.”
When I got off the phone with Gloria, I sat in the Morris chair in my living room, put up my foot, and tried to relax. But I couldn’t get comfortable. I didn’t want to go to bed. I needed to be somewhere else.
I limped into the kitchen and took a couple of aspirin. Then I tucked a bottle of Zinfandel under my arm and dropped a corkscrew in my pocket, took down a glass, a candle, and some matches, and dragged myself up to the top floor.
The night streamed in through the windows of the studio. I could easily make out the silhouettes of Kate’s pots
against the windows, her workbench, her wheel. I put the candle on a table, struck a match, and lit it. I opened the ’96 Turley and poured myself a glass. The liquid looked nearly black.
I sat on the little settee and swirled the wine in the glass, held it under my nose. I closed my eyes and inhaled. The wine had a hint of blackberry. I took a sip and savored the burning down my throat, the explosion of fruit up the back of my nose. I leaned back and stared into the little pool of light cast by the candle, watched the circle of light dancing on the ceiling.
I imagined Kate, standing at the work table. I raised my glass. A toast: To love. I drank. She raised her glass to me. To life, I heard her voice say.
I was still there the next morning, the bottle empty, the candle burnt down to nothingness. I was awakened by the faraway sounds of the doorbell ringing and someone banging at the front door. The minute I moved, I was reminded of my mangled ankle. By the time it was better, the river would be ice. I wouldn’t be able to run on it for weeks. The prospect was depressing.
Going down the stairs was more laborious and painful than coming up, and the insistent ringing and rapping at the door didn’t help. “I’m coming!” I bellowed.
I pulled the door open to reveal the anxious faces of Annie and my mother. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” they asked in unison. My mother added an accusatory, “And you didn’t turn off the porch light last night. I’ve been worried sick.”
“I was upstairs. You can’t hear the phone up there.”
“You’re hurt,” my mother said sharply. “You have ice?” she asked, shifting into Florence Nightingale mode.
“Yes, I have plenty of ice.”
Then I noticed Annie was holding a bunch of daisies. It made me grin like a little kid.
My mother didn’t miss that, either. “Well, next time, don’t forget to turn off the light. I’ll be home if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Zak,” Annie said. My mother reached up and gave her a little hug and a kiss on the cheek. Annie kissed her back. “You’re a peach,” she added.
“Call me Pearl.” My mother beamed. Then she disappeared into her side of the house, but not before I caught a glimpse of a figure hovering in her doorway, someone shortish and bald. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning and already my mother had a visitor. I tucked away the thought. It would be something to torment her with at some time in the future.
“Coffee?” I asked Annie.
“Definitely,” she said and followed me into the kitchen.
I assembled a pot of coffee and when the smell of the first hot water hitting fresh coffee grounds filled the kitchen, I asked, “Have they released Stuart Jackson?”
“They will. As soon as they’ve compared Angelo’s thumbprint with the one found on the steering wheel of Sylvia Jackson’s Firebird. And I’d be willing to bet that the gun Angelo was waving around turns out to be the one that killed Tony Ruggiero.”
“Who could have guessed that a car accident would set all of these events in motion in the first place?”
“What car accident?” Annie asked.
“Two years ago. Angelo hit Maria or she threw herself in front of the car — take your pick. If she hadn’t been misdiagnosed, she would never have sought Dr. Baldridge’s help. If she hadn’t seen Baldridge, I doubt very much if she would have had flashbacks of abuse. If she hadn’t had those flashbacks, her hostility toward her uncle probably wouldn’t have turned murderous. And I’ll give you three guesses how Syl met Tony.”
“The same accident?”
“Syl was the claims adjuster. Tony, the kind and helpful Uncle Nino, does his niece and her husband a favor by making sure that their car gets taken care of. And in the process, he meets the seductive Sylvia Jackson.”
“Binding her fate to his,” Annie said. “She really is quite something, don’t you think? She exudes—pheromones.”
I poured two cups of coffee and we both drank it black. It was strong, aromatic, acidic.
“I’ve been wondering,” I said, “how exactly did you manage to wind up on the porch?”
“I hid in the garage until you went inside. Then I ran out to the car and called Mac. After that, I wanted to be close to the house—in case there was something to hear. So I crept up and hid in the bushes. That’s when I realized that the dummy was wearing my uniform. It seemed like a sign.” Annie had the same outfit on this morning. A plaid flannel shirt and jeans. But they fit her a whole lot better. “I’m glad it’s over,” she said.
“For us, it’s over. But not for her.”
“You mean for Syl?” Annie asked. “I agree. It’s got to be hell to get on with your life when you don’t know, for sure, what your past is about.”
I nodded. When Sylvia Jackson woke up, she’d need to change lenses, switching Angelo from angel to villain and Stuart from villain to fall guy. “On the other hand, she may adjust with a minimum of emotional whiplash. For once, her defective memory is a blessing. And even with all that’s happened, I suspect Stuart Jackson will be there for her.”
I knew it wasn’t over for the Whitsons either. Here was a fresh horror for them to absorb — the pain of losing Maria compounded by the realization that she’d been responsible for her uncle’s death. I sighed. “Poor Maria Whitson.”
“Poor Maria Whitson was ready to kill you!”
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “She saw Angelo take aim at you. Then she moved, right into the line of fire.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize he’d shoot.”
“She knew. She knew Angelo better than she knew herself. She’s been trying to kill herself for two years, and maybe it’s what she said — she finally got it right. I think that car accident damaged Maria Whitson a lot more seriously than her doctors realized.”
“In what way?”
“Before that, she was already perched on the borderline, fuzzy about the difference between her own acts and fantasies. She felt guilty all the time about her thoughts, about things she hadn’t done. But that car accident pushed her over. I think it breached the part of the brain that helps us distinguish between external and internal reality. And then the therapy she got didn’t help. What she needed was a therapist who could rebuild the wall between fantasy and fact. What she got instead was someone who took a wrecking ball to what was left of it.”
Annie nodded. “It’s as if she started out being a person who felt like she was guilty and turned into a person who was guilty.”
“Exactly. When the boundary between reality and fantasy went, so did the one between innocence and guilt.”
“Boundaries,” Annie murmured, fingering the petals on one of the daisies.
“We should put those in something.” I limped down the hall to the foot of the stairs and stared up. Two flights up and two flights down.
“Let me go. Just tell me where,” Annie said.
“Up two flights, top of the stairs.” My voice turned hoarse. No one but me had been up in Kate’s studio since she died. For two years, until just a few weeks ago, I hadn’t been able to go there myself.
Annie put her hand on my shoulder. I hardened myself against what I expected to see in her eyes. But when I looked, I found amused impatience, not pity. “For goodness sakes, we can put them in a coffee can,” she said.
I shifted aside. “Two flights up. There’s a bunch to choose from. Take your pick.”
Annie came down a few minutes later carrying one of Kate’s vases in one hand, two wineglasses in the other, and the empty bottle tucked under her arm. “Thought you’d want these down here eventually,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said, staring as she set the glasses on the counter. “Where were the glasses?”
“One was on the floor by the couch. The other was on the potter’s wheel.” She looked at me curiously. “You okay?”
“Here, I’ll take them.” She handed me the glasses. I sniffed one, then the other. Both smelled of blackberries. I set them on the windowsill. “I’ll wash t
hem later,” I said to no one in particular.
“Got a scissors?” Annie asked.
I rummaged in a drawer full of odds and ends and unwrapped a garden shears from a tangle of twine. Annie cut the ends off the stems of the daisies and put them into the vase she’d brought down. It was white porcelain with a pale blue and green border, the very last one Kate finished. Annie filled the vase with tap water and set it on the counter.
“It is a lovely thing,” she said, stroking the surface with her index finger.
“Yes,” I said, standing behind her and inhaling the sweet, slightly fruity scent that was Annie. “It’s a very lovely thing.”
PRAISE FOR G. H. EPHRON’S
AMNESIA
“First of a welcome new series.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Absorbing and interesting — [An] excellent read. If you like psychological crime, or if you’re interested in new writers, or if you just like well-drawn and well-plotted books, then please do read Amnesia.”
— Hand Held Crime
“Amnesia is that rare combination of great novel and perfect title. Psychologist Peter Zak comes across as a haunted protagonist, asked to delve into a female crime victim’s amnesia when his own most fervent prayer would be to have the condition himself, so he could forget the murder of his wife. G. H. Ephron’s effort seamlessly weaves these threads of mental affliction into a solid mystery plot. Don’t miss the debut of what promises to be another wonderful series set in Boston.”
— Jeremiah Healy, author of Spiral and The Stalking of Sheilah Quinn
“Amnesia is a well-plotted debut novel that will give its readers good insights into the work of forensic psychologists (and possibly make them glad they’re in other lines of work). You’ll be hearing more from G. H. Ephron.”
— Philip R.Craig, author of Vineyard Blues