Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  “I’ll phone you later,” Carole said. “This is obviously a bad time. You’re busy. Besides, it isn’t urgent. Everything’s okay for now. I only wanted to explain. I was a little over the top earlier.”

  “I told you that you don’t have to explain anything.” Zachary looked and sounded sullen. “You shouldn’t.”

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  “It isn’t me, is it?” Nina asked from her chair. “Don’t tell me you’re leaving because of me? Be angry with Brooke, if you need to be angry with anybody, but not—”

  “Who is Brooke?” I felt as if I was “it” in an obscure game, the object of which nobody had told me.

  “Tom’s wife after me,” Carole said.

  “Before me,” Nina said. “So I never knew you or did you any harm, Carole, and you know it.”

  It was fascinating watching Nina wind herself up into a fury based on nothing, a petite tornado packing massive destructive power.

  Carole’s nostrils flared. “I never said—”

  “Really,” Nina said, “if you think about it, we’re family. One big family. My twins are Zachary’s half brother and sister. Think about it! Not that you’ve ever acknowledged that.” Nina’s whirlwind imploded, and she was almost visibly sliding down an alcohol slicked route into profound self-pity. “You never brought Zach over to meet them, you—”

  “Who ever invited us, who ever remembered, I wasn’t—”

  “Mom!”

  “Jeez.” That from Sasha, who probably didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, but who’d lost her buzz and glow. “Maybe we ought to—”

  “As if I were a floozy, just because he’d been married before—”

  “And married still when he met you, don’t forget!” Carole shouted. “And why are you here, anyway? The police didn’t haul you off!”

  “Mom! They didn’t haul me—I called them.”

  She wheeled to face her son. “As if I could forget that stupid fact!”

  “I’m here because my new friend Sasha thought I should tell Amanda—”

  “And I’m here to talk to her, too. This isn’t all about you, Nina.”

  “Okay, everybody. Stop it! One person at a time and no—” I wasn’t shouting, and I was proud of being able to control the urge to shout, but I needn’t have been, because shouting might have been effective—I surely wasn’t.

  “What were you going to tell her?” Carole demanded.

  Nina sat farther back in her chair. “I already told her, and I don’t have to tell you anything. Certainly not if you use that tone of—”

  Sasha stood up to her full six-foot-plus-heels glory, her arms in their see-through candy-stripes spread wide. “People,” she said. “People. This isn’t a war zone. Nina came here to clear something up.”

  “What?” Carole demanded. Each of her sentences was followed by a mournful, “Mom.” Zachary sounded as if he was in hell. He’d been rejected by the police, which I was sure he saw as humiliating, and now his mother was committing the mega-sin of the parent of an adolescent: making a scene in public. He looked touchingly pitiable, a big, good-looking teen with a plaster cast on one arm, an expression of exquisite agony on his face, and body posture suggesting a desire for invisibility.

  “I’ll explain,” Sasha said. “I got Amanda involved in all this—in Tom’s death—because he told me he’d been getting threatening phone calls.”

  “Calls?” Carole said.

  “Mom!” Zachary’s “Mom’s” were a metronome failing to regulate her flood of words.

  The note had said “Calls. Amanda Pepper.” Maybe it was grammatical, after all. He was seeing me about the calls. But why the Philly Prep part?

  “What’s this with the calls?” Carole said, once again ignoring her son. “My son does nothing—nothing!—and the police question him and—and you made calls?”

  “If you’d listen for once . . .” Even with her arms now lowered, Sasha was sufficiently commanding to cut short Carole’s tirade.

  I told myself to be considerate, to understand how distraught Carole Wallenberg was, but understanding why something is happening doesn’t necessarily make the event bearable.

  “Everybody’s upset,” Sasha continued, “but nobody’s blaming anybody else for anything.” She turned to me. “Are there more chairs? It’ll feel better if we’re all sitting down.”

  She had a future in mediation. “I’ll get them,” I said. Every Tuesday evening, Ozzie had a poker game at the office and the table, chairs, and chips were kept always at the ready. My visitors fell oddly silent while I retrieved two chairs from the utility closet. Sasha had somehow convinced them that nothing would or could proceed until everyone was properly in place.

  I unfolded the chairs, with Sasha directing, saying, “There. Put that one right there, so nobody trips over anybody else.” Zachary and his mother sat down while I returned to my desk chair and realized that we’d formed a rough circle. I thought this was clever of Sasha except that I didn’t feel so much part of a round table discussion group as part of a kindergarten class, and I had nothing to show-and-tell.

  Carole cleared her throat. “I came here to explain, and now’s as good a time as ever because I want to get this over with. Finished. Chapter closed.”

  “Mom!” Zachary said. “Not now. Not with other people—”

  “I already told the police, so what difference does it make who else hears? I’m not ashamed about anything I did.” She folded her hands across her chest and looked like somebody who was profoundly ashamed and badly braving it out.

  “What?” I finally had to ask. “What is it you want to say? Feel free.”

  “Zachary wasn’t telling the truth,” she said. “About what he did to his father. But you knew that.”

  “I thought so and hoped so,” I said. “And I certainly hope you have a way of proving that.”

  “I did. I do. I told the police, which is why they kicked Zach out.” She paused, looking defensive and satisfied. And Zachary definitely looked as if the police had humiliated him by not believing he was a killer.

  “And, ah, you told them . . . about . . . ?”

  She might have responded, but at that moment, the door opened, this time without benefit of a warning knock. All heads swiveled to see Mackenzie. “I interrupt something?” he asked. “Group therapy? A séance?”

  “This is C. K. Mackenzie,” I said to the group. “I work for him, after school. He’s the actual licensed PI.”

  “He’s also her fiancé,” Sasha murmured, though I wish she hadn’t. The women, even warring Nina and Carole, called time out to consider Mackenzie for a moment, then toss me an appreciative look. I’d done well in the mate-hunting sweeps.

  “This is Nina Severin, the late Tomas’s widow,” Sasha said, “and this is Carole Wallenburg, the late Tomas’s first wife, and their son, Zachary. You know me, so that about does it.”

  Mackenzie’s got a fine poker face, even when there’s no game on. Not as much as a blink when Zachary was named, though here was the very problem he’d promised to “work on.”

  “Carole was explaining why Zachary’s confession wasn’t—”

  “Confession! He didn’t do it!” Carole Wallenburg was back to full-speed and full-volume. “You have to have something to confess—it was a fabrication. A well-intentioned dumb lie; he was protecting me, he thought, but a dumb lie all the same.”

  Mackenzie glanced my way. “Join us,” I said. “I’ll get you a chair.”

  He knew perfectly well where the chairs were, but I was sure he’d follow me over to the closet, where I could do a quick fill-in about Shippy Severin.

  He did follow, but before I could whisper a word, he spoke softly and quickly. “They’re here, Manda.”

  “Obviously.” I tilted my head toward the group. “But they won’t be long. As soon as—”

  “Not them. The Mafiosas.”

  “No. Not for three more—”

  “Nonetheless, they’re here, wait
ing for us. At our home. It appears there is panic in the land, fear that you and I are not giving sufficient attention and gravitas to the issue of our future, to our life together, to—”

  “The shower isn’t till the end of this week. They said they weren’t getting here till Thursday.”

  “They consider this an emergency. They consider their little convention an intervention. For your own good.”

  “Before they have me committed?”

  “Think of it this way. It’s a sign we won’t have in-law problems. Our mothers are getting along famously. They colluded. They plotted. They planned this. All of that without a single sour note. Not many families can make that claim.”

  “Did you know? Were you in on—”

  “Absolutely not. My mother phoned me when her plane landed an hour ago, and she’d already hooked up with Bea, and Beth was en route to the airport herself.”

  “Beth knew.” Ambushed by my sister. “But not now—I can’t possibly—”

  He nodded again. The room wasn’t all that large, and we’d been moving, slowly, back toward the circle as we spoke.

  “And what do you have here?” Mackenzie whispered. “It’s very Nero Wolfe-ish, isn’t it? You’ve gathered the suspects—”

  “They gathered themselves.”

  “Are you ready to point the finger yet?” Mackenzie beamed a guileless smile at me and set up his folding chair, joining our circle. Actually, he had no choice. Our desks were out here, so the chances of his getting any work done while the show-and-tell circle carried on an arm’s length away were nil.

  “Should we bring you up to speed?” I asked.

  “If you weren’t doing that, then what were you whispering about back there?” Sasha demanded.

  I smiled at her and didn’t answer and hoped she interpreted that to mean something wild and sexy. I hoped even more that she didn’t know the Marriage Mafiosas had descended because I hoped she hadn’t been part of their conniving. “First,” I said, “Nina came here with Sasha because she thought we should know she and her brother made the phone calls Tom found worrisome.”

  “You made them?” Mackenzie asked. “You could have saved a lot of legwork and time if you’d—”

  Nina looked down at her hands again, a chastised little girl. Then she looked up and shrugged. “What does it matter? That’s all we did. Stupid crank calls, like in junior high. Big deal, big deal . . .” Her eyelids were at half-mast, and she had the only semi-comfortable chair.

  “We weren’t talking about that anymore,” Sasha said. “Carole was saying how Zachary—oh, you explain, Carole.”

  Her eyebrows rose in the center, and she looked under enormous strain, but Carole seemed determined. “You have to understand: I have never been as furious with Tom as I was a week ago,” she said, “and I’ve been angry with him more times than I want to remember. But this time—his own son, his firstborn’s college tuition, and he’d promised. He’d laid it down like a challenge, and it was so easy for him, petty cash for him, too. This was pure spite. Meanness. And right after he’d said all this, I saw a little notice in the paper about an award he was going to be given. For good works, and the article said something about his distinguished career, his patrician roots. It was like a slap in the face.”

  She looked as if she might orate on Tom’s offense forever, she was so filled with its outrage, but to my relief, she stopped abruptly, and looked around as if seeing us for the first time, and when she spoke again, it was softly, with little inflection. “It made me want to do something—anything—to wipe the smug expression off his face. Not to kill him, for God’s sake, but to make him feel the way he made Zachary feel—like dirt, like trash, like less than nothing. And right around then, Zach’s piece about drugs had been published, and of course I’d seen it and read it as he wrote and rewrote it.

  “I daydreamed about Tomas drugged, staggering down the street, vomiting, being incoherent and picked up or ignored as a drunk. I obsessed about it. It was the only revenge I could think of. And it seemed so easy to arrange. It’s easy to make GHB in your own kitchen, and it was easy enough getting the makings, so I did it. I know it was wrong, and—”

  “Really stupid to tell the police,” Zachary said. “Now—”

  “It’s better than what you told them! At least mine was the truth. I’ve hired a lawyer. We’ll see. I made it. I had it. I tried to meet him for lunch, because I knew he’d have a couple drinks and that would make the drug more powerful. But he had a date, couldn’t. Didn’t want to meet me anyway, to tell the truth, so I told him something. News that I didn’t think he wanted to hear about . . . someone’s whereabouts. Someone he was afraid of. He met me because he thought I knew more, but I didn’t. Still, there he was. And that’s all there was—I bought our teas and dropped the stuff in his, we talked awhile, and I went my way and he went his and I never saw him again. I knew he never drove into the city. Took the train, so he wasn’t going to get behind the wheel and hurt someone else. Other than that, I had no idea where he’d go, but I hoped it would be embarrassingly public, that was all.”

  So much for the mystery of the drugged tea, and the whole cause and effect chain that was linked in my mind. There were no links, only an enraged mother out for a humiliating revenge.

  And her son. “You knew?” I asked quietly of Zachary.

  He swallowed and looked at his mother.

  “I didn’t think he possibly could,” Carole said. “I never wanted him to. But he’d been looking for something—”

  “The laptop,” Zachary muttered. “I needed to use it.”

  “I’d taken it with me that day, and when he pulled it out of the backpack, he saw the chemicals. Never said anything.”

  “Until I heard—until afterward—I thought they were for some experiment in chemistry.”

  Which, in a way, they were.

  “And then, when you put two and two together,” Mackenzie said, “you—”

  “Thought I’d killed his father!” Carole seemed astounded by this, although she’d quite blissfully admitted to drugging the man. “I would never—no matter what.” Then she deflated somewhat. “I was careful with the dose, enough to humiliate, to disorient. I assumed he’d have had alcohol with lunch. I even figured that in. But I understand.”

  “And that’s why the sudden confession,” I said to Zach.

  “I thought—once they knew about the drug, I thought—I’m a kid, I used to get in a lot of trouble, they’d go easier, they’d believe me. And if it didn’t really make sense what I said, then they’d let me go and not look our way anymore. I mean, who was going to think of my mother?”

  Deceitful, but clever, actually. He was a smart kid.

  “Zachary, what actually happened?” I asked. “The absolutely true story this time.”

  “Like I said. I saw him go by, followed him in, found him in your room, thought—well, you know.”

  I wouldn’t make him confess his hopes again, make him feel again the pain of his father telling him that his presence at Philly Prep had nothing to do with Zachary. Really, that nothing about his father had much to do with Zach.

  But my mind did register the third part of Severin’s message. Calls. Amanda Pepper. Philly Prep. And that Carole had told him somebody’s whereabouts. The note started to make sense.

  “He went out of the room,” Zach said, “and I followed him, and I kept trying to get him to talk to me, just talk to me, but he was acting strange—now I know why, but I didn’t then. I thought he was drunk, and I guess that made me angrier. I said things, angry things, and he grabbed my arm and held it down while he lifted his other hand, like he was going to hit me, so I swung out—to protect myself, to push back his hand, but I used my free arm—and the cast, it smashed into his face, and he shouted and backed away and sat down, hard. I didn’t know what to do—call an ambulance or what? But he shouted that I should get away from him, stay away from him, so I did. I left.”

  “Zach, I understand you said you
heard shouting at the time. Did you mean your dad?”

  Mackenzie astounded me. I was sure he’d dismissed and trashed that idea when I told him about it. I would love to be able to check out the filing cabinets in his brain.

  Zachary shook his head. “Somebody else. Somebody downstairs shouting like ‘What’s going on? Who’s up there?’ You know, the regular stuff. That’s why I took the back stairs, so they wouldn’t see me.” He was supporting the arm in the cast with his good hand, and he looked down at it, as if it had a life of its own.

  “So Nina and Jay made calls,” I said, trying to get a timeline.

  “Do I have to tell the police?” Nina said.

  “I will,” I said. “And they’ll probably get in touch with you, to verify it.”

  “That’s all we did, though.” She looked smaller and smaller with each word. “It was stupid saying things about skeletons, but we were angry. It was a bad time. He’d . . .”

  “Dumped you. Everybody knows, Nina. And frankly, there’s no shame in being dumped by Tomas Severin. But what do you mean by ‘skeletons’?” Carole looked on alert. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s only that I heard . . . my brother said . . .” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe it does,” Carole said. “Because on the phone, before we met, I told him I’d seen a ghost. A ghost he knew.”

  I thought about Carole’s life, where she might have been. On campus, in the lab where she worked as part of her tuition grant. Carpooling. I thought about Tom Severin’s note again.

  “Ghosts and skeletons, oh my! Halloween’s really in the air!” At least Sasha was having a good time.

  I’d had it. “How about trying something new?” I asked. “How about if just this once, everybody told the truth? So far, not one person in this whole mess—not one!—has considered doing that.”

  “I never lied!” Carole said.

  “I never even spoke to you before today!” Nina said, sitting back and hugging herself.