by Joan Hess
“I couldn’t say. I wish they’d let Wharton straighten things out. He may not grasp this mysterious system, either, but he is familiar with the accounts. Until this year, he did all the financial reports that are essential to ensure our nonprofit status.”
“Why didn’t he do them this year?”
“Agatha Anne said that Becca had assumed responsibility for them. Becca was such a talented young woman, and so very adept at everything she tried. At her request, I taught her how to bake bread, and the next week she brought us a delicious loaf of whole-grain and a jar of homemade raspberry jam. I warned Dick that he’d better watch his waistline.” She chuckled at her wit.
I wished her a pleasant afternoon, then wasted the remainder of mine drawing a map of the Blackburn Creek development. The result resembled a serving of spaghetti. I was wondering if I had a jar of tomato sauce in a kitchen cabinet when Luanne called.
“I’m at the lake,” she said. “Jillian hasn’t returned. No one has seen or heard from her for over twenty-four hours. Dick’s been calling the house in town every ten minutes, but there’s no answer. Could you please drive by, and if her car is there, make sure she’s okay and call us?”
I agreed, locked the store, and drove across town to the opulent neighborhood, entertaining myself with a fantasized scenario in which Anders and Georgiana frolicked under the sheets while Jillian, dressed in black like Anders’s beloved mormor, stood at the foot of the bed and sternly lectured them in Swedish.
Jillian’s car was parked in the garage, but there was no ominous hose attached to the tailpipe. I rang the doorbell, then pounded with my fist. If Jillian was inside, she was not in the mood for company. I jammed the button and pounded for a while longer, then circled the house, peering into windows for a glimpse of her. The interior looked exactly as it had the previous day—elegantly inhospitable.
I returned to the back of the house, where I was less likely to be observed by nosy neighbors. Reminding myself that I was there at Dick’s behest, I picked up a rock from a flower bed and smashed the glass pane in the door. I carefully reached through the shards and unlocked the door, then replaced the rock as best I could and entered the kitchen.
“Jillian?” I called. “It’s Claire Malloy.”
The coffee cup was now in the dishwasher, its rim pristine. The plate on the coffeemaker was cool to the touch. The pizza that had been in the refrigerator was gone, and it seemed as if a few items had been shifted. None of this was newsworthy, since it was obvious that Jillian had returned to the house sometime after the bail hearing. Anyone who’d heard her father accused of two murders might have found solace in pepperoni pizza.
I quickly searched downstairs, then called her name as I went to the second floor. I was met with resounding silence. Jillian’s room showed little evidence of occupancy, but I doubted it ever did. A toothbrush was damp, however, and two sensible shoes were visible under the bed. I heard a quiet hum and tracked it to her computer atop a shoddy student desk. Small greenish lights indicated that parts of the system were running, but the screen was black except for a pulsating oblong no wider than a quarter of an inch at the top of the screen and a row of numbers and letters across the bottom. My understanding of computers was comparable to that of remote-control beepers.
I left the computer to do whatever it was doing and went across the hall. Dick’s bedspread had been smoothed. There was no glaring indication that anyone had been in the adjoining bathroom and dressing room. I continued down the hall, opening doors, calling Jillian’s name, and growing increasingly nervous. Hide-and-seek is a game best left to children; had I known I’d be forced to participate, I would have told Luanne to call the police. Or called them myself.
Holding my breath, I opened the door to Dick’s office. No one leaped out of a corner to confront me. Luanne had mentioned smelling cigarette smoke. Now there was a trace of acridity in the room. I approached the desk, then stopped as the hairs on my neck rose. I looked over my shoulder at the portrait of Becca.
It had been savaged. A blade had crosshatched her face to such a degree that there remained only thin slivers of canvas. Red spray paint obliterated the golden hair and blue gown. The word “Murderer!” had been written in sloppy block letters on the wall beside the painting. The paint can lay on its side by the baseboard.
I stumbled backward, catching the edge of the desk to steady myself. The vandalism was obscene, laden with hate. I forced myself to lean forward far enough to touch a dribble of paint, then gulped as I stared at my fingertip. It looked as if a lab technician had pierced it with a lancet. The stinging sensation was a product of my imagination, but nevertheless vivid. An image of Captain Gannet’s smirky face crossed my mind—he would love this.
Abruptly, I wanted to talk to Peter, to let him take charge of the entire mess. It was no longer a scintillating puzzle. It was nasty. Someone was out of control. There was a telephone on the desk—and new additions, I realized. Amid the papers and journals was an amber plastic pill vial, the lid beside it. A glass of water had formed a white circle on the wood veneer.
And on the floor behind the desk was sprawled Jillian Cissel. I dropped to my knees and touched her flaccid hand. She was unconscious, her skin clammy, her breathing shallow and labored. I abandoned any concern for preservation of evidence and called 911. The dispatcher answered immediately, and once I described the scene, told me to cover her with a blanket and wait for the medics.
I found a blanket in the hall closet and did as instructed. Nothing about her demeanor had changed, although mine had taken a turn for the worse. I remembered that the front door was locked, and hurried down to unlock it and leave it ajar. As the seconds crawled by, I felt as though I should be doing something for Jillian. I went into her room to get a pillow, then went over to the computer and frowned at it. The white oblong blipped blithely. The series of characters in the lower right corner of the screen read: Doc 1 Pg 2 Ln 1" Pos 1".
“Document number one, page number two,” I said under my breath. “Where’s page number one?”
I examined the keyboard, then tentatively pushed the key marked with the numeral one. It appeared in the upper left corner, and I noted a change in the bottom line. We had advanced to Pos 2". The space bar advanced us to Pos 3", and a key marked Delete returned us to Pos 1" as the numeral vanished. Nothing happened when I tried it again. I looked elsewhere for a key that might take me to the first page of the document, carefully erasing my errors.
A key with an arrow pointing upward sent the cursor racing. I jerked my finger off the key as lines of characters came into view, leaned forward, and read them with a growing dread.
The document read: “On the night of August 29, 1991, my father murdered my mother. He pretended to get drunk at the party, but witnesses said he did not drink excessively. He invited my mother to swim, then held her beneath the water until she was dead. His fingerprints were not on the brandy decanter because he was careful to wipe them off before he handed it to her for the last time. He does not know I saw this from a window in the living room. He did it because he wanted to marry Becca, but then he became obsessed with jealousy and murdered her, too. The morning of her death she told me that he had threatened to kill her and she was afraid. He does not deserve to look at her portrait. I cannot go on. Jillian.”
I heard voices below.
An hour later, Luanne and Dick arrived at the emergency room. She sat down beside me while he strode to the nurse’s station, conferred briefly, and then went into a curtained cubicle. He emerged seconds later with various medical personnel. A Farberville police officer joined them.
I told Luanne what had happened, adding that the paramedics had begun emergency treatment for barbiturate poisoning in the office. “The sleeping pills,” I added, “came from a year-old prescription with Becca’s name on it. There’s no way to determine how many Jillian took.”
“How could she do such a terrible thing?” Luanne said, dazed and pale, her eyes on the group in the
corridor, her fingernails biting into her palms. “I should have gone by the house this morning when I got back to town. I knew she was upset, but I had no idea she was this deeply disturbed. To make those wild accusations and destroy the portrait like that and then…”
I shivered as I remembered the aura of hatefulness that had pervaded the office as I stared at the portrait. “Something must have caused her to erupt, and a totally different personality took over. We all misjudged her, Luanne. You can’t blame yourself for what happened.”
She began to cry. I found a tissue in my purse, patted her hand ineffectually, and wished I could overhear what was being said in the corridor. Dick’s forehead was lowered and his expression stony. The doctor and nurses returned to the cubicle, and the police officer led Dick around a corner. We sat amid a swirl of nurses and technicians, speeding gurneys, garbled announcements on a PA system, insistent telephones, and members of the walking wounded. A woman with a screaming baby was hurried into a cubicle. A sullen teenage boy with a gash on his cheek was instructed to sit in the waiting room. A frail elderly couple came in and were led through another set of doors. A pasty young woman plied a vending machine, cursing steadily as she fed it change.
Luanne blew her nose and stuffed the tissue in her pocket. “Was there red paint on Jillian’s hand?”
“On her right index finger and thumb. There was also a faint dusting on her blouse where the spray had drifted on it.” I surreptitiously rubbed my finger against the armrest of the chair. As if in response, the uniformed officer stepped into view, gave me a hard look, and then disappeared. A bad sign, I thought.
This was confirmed shortly thereafter when Lieutenant Peter Rosen came into the emergency room and headed down the corridor. He did not acknowledge my presence, but he would. It was as inevitable as the yearly greeting from Publishers Clearing House.
I mentally recreated one of my lists. Jillian had stayed at the house in town on Saturday night, or had claimed as much. She returned to Turnstone Lake on Sunday afternoon shortly after Dick was arrested. She’d been unnaturally emotional that day—but she’d insisted her father had not murdered Becca. She locked herself in her room the following day. After the bail hearing on Tuesday, she drove away, and she’d not been seen until I’d discovered her a full day later. What had provoked her to change her mind about Becca’s death, and why suddenly had she offered the damning testimony about her mother’s death?
Her motive for destroying the portrait seemed weak. Jillian might have been oblivious to some of Becca’s less enchanting traits, but she certainly had never spoken of her with appreciable warmth or affection. Or with any great animosity, for that matter.
Luanne stood up as Dick came across the waiting room. “How is she?” she demanded.
“Unconscious. Her stomach’s been pumped. They’ve got her on a respirator and an IV. They’re worried about kidney failure.” He sat down and rubbed his face with both hands. “Why did she leave that message on her computer? I didn’t pretend to be drunk that night; I was staggering by the time we got to the house. Is it possible I was so drunk that I don’t remember going down to the water with Jan…and holding her down? If so, I’m a monster. Jillian must have been driven crazy by the thought she’d inherited some genetic flaw.”
“Of course you’re not,” Luanne said, “and you didn’t kill anyone. It was dark and Jillian had taken powerful medicine that made her groggy. She must have seen someone else.”
He gave her an agonized look. “If you have any sense, you’ll walk out of here and never speak to me again. The women in my life don’t fare too well. Except for my mother. She’s still alive and healthy, but maybe that’s because she lives three states away. God, I’d better call her, and Sid and Agatha Anne.” He went to a pay phone and began to punch buttons.
Peter glanced sharply at him as he stopped in the doorway and issued instructions to the uniformed officer. He crossed the room and said to Luanne, “You can remain here with Cissel, who will be taken into custody if he attempts to leave the hospital. An officer has been assigned to stay with him. When he finishes his call, tell him that his daughter has been moved to IC.” To me, he said, “Let’s go.” It was not an invitation.
“I’d like to stay with Luanne and Dick.”
“I’m sure you would, but we’re going to the PD. Someone’s driven all the way across the county, and he’s very eager to talk to you. So am I.”
“How lovely to feel needed,” I said as I squeezed Luanne’s shoulder and followed Peter out the door. The hairs on his neck were bristling in a way I found alluring, but I failed to say so. It would remain to be seen what else I would fail to say to him—or to Captain Gannet. Among my virtues is a good deal of contrariness.
13
I called the hospital before I left the police station after what evolved into a three-hour marathon of questions and demands that I repeat my story forward, backward, and any other conceivable direction. Luanne told me that Jillian remained in critical condition, and hemodialysis had been required. Pneumonia was possible. Dick refused to budge from a chair beside her bed and had not spoken except to refuse coffee or food. She did not want me to come, so I went home.
Lulled by the static from a test pattern on the television screen, Caron slept on the sofa. I smiled at the incongruity of the one-earred teddy bear under her arm and the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the floor. I turned off the set and shook her shoulder. “You didn’t need to wait up for me. Go on to bed.”
“I didn’t wait up for you,” she said as she sat up and squinted at the dark screen. “I was watching a dirty movie on cable.”
“And fell asleep in the middle of it?”
“It wasn’t nearly as dirty as Rhonda said it was. No one stuck any dandelions in any pubic hair, and all the full frontal nudity was of the girl. I thought this was the age of sexual equality.” She shot me a look meant to imply I was in some way responsible, then said, “I had to use my own money to order a pizza. The delivery boy was a real hunk, but I didn’t have enough for a decent tip and he positively sneered at me. I wanted to Lie Down And Die. Where have you been?”
I gave her a synopsis of the previous six hours. “I’ll go by the hospital in the morning and see if there’s anything I can do.”
“Like donate a kidney?”
“Like offer to sit with Jillian while they get some breakfast,” I said, reminding myself that my daughter was pink and healthy, if also smart-mouthed and developing an alarming interest in all things pornographic. Dick Cissel’s daughter was on a respirator, with needles in her arms, monitors attached to her body, and an ambiguous prognosis.
Caron staggered to the hall, then stopped. “Why did she go buffleheaded and slash the painting and try to kill herself?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Then maybe she didn’t.” Yawning, she retreated to her bedroom.
I was still thinking about Caron’s comment as I brushed my teeth and changed into a cotton nightshirt. Gannet and Peter had been regaled with every last particle of information that I possessed (if not every theory I’d toyed with), and they’d seemed as unable as I to discern the provocation for Jillian’s explosive behavior. Gannet was delighted with the new accusation on Jillian’s computer screen. He had arranged for Anders and Georgiana to be picked up and held in custody until he could interview them, but gloatingly had pointed out they’d been in the house the day before the hearing. It was highly implausible that they would have returned after I’d confronted them; they were more apt to be worried about what I’d told Dick. The truth was that I hadn’t told him anything, but Luanne might have. In any case, Jillian had been in residence. They would have had more titillation trying to stay one bed ahead of the Dunlings.
Outside, the wind rose and thunder rumbled in the distance. I watched the shadows on the ceiling for a long while before I fell asleep. For some reason I couldn’t define, I kept thinking about how my science fiction hippie had come into the store without my knowle
dge. How long would he have been a part of the background before I realized he was there?
Rain fell fitfully as I drove to the hospital at eight in the morning. Agatha Anne and Sid were in the IC waiting room when I stepped off the elevator. She wore a suitably somber skirt and blouse, and only the essential jewelry. Sid wore what I supposed was the official pedodontal ensemble: white trousers, a pink shirt, and a pink-and-white-striped bow tie. Perhaps the overall effect was meant to dazzle his patients into submission. I decided he resembled a well-known diarrhea remedy.
“How’s Jillian?” I asked.
“She’s still critical,” Agatha Anne replied, assuming the appropriate “we have a crisis” voice as well as the attire. “There have been no negative developments, so that’s encouraging. Luanne went down to the cafeteria to get some coffee. Dick is sitting by Jillian’s bed, staring at her.”
“Like a zombie,” added Sid. He didn’t look all that animated himself, but they’d probably been at the hospital most of the night. “Now that Claire’s here to keep you company, I’m going down to the lobby to call the office and have them start canceling appointments. I need to be here in case”—he swallowed unhappily—“there’s something I can do for Dick.”
Agatha Anne patted my arm as I sat down on the plastic couch. “It’s so lucky that you went to the house yesterday evening. If the poor girl had been left undiscovered, she wouldn’t have had a chance.” She dabbed away a tear with a monogrammed handkerchief. “We’ve known Jillian from the day she was born. She’s always been so serious and aloof, and I never suspected she was capable of—of what she did last night. She adored Becca, as did all of us. Luanne said the portrait was desecrated to the point it can’t possibly be restored.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” I said. Luanne apparently had briefed them; I waited to see if she would mention the damning message left on the computer screen. She chose a new topic.