Dead Man's Bones

by Susan Wittig Albert

  I held my breath for the count of three, and then said it anyway. “Blackie, why you?”

  There was a silence. “Because,” he said. More silence. “Because she’s in trouble.” After a moment he spoke once more, so low I could barely hear him. “And because I care what happens to her.” He broke the connection.

  I distrust two-bit psychologizing, which often reduces multilayered emotional situations to an oversimplified and formulaic explanation. But this situation seemed pretty clear, on the face of it, anyway. Alana, rejected by her colleagues, lonely and friendless, needed somebody to stand by her. Blackie, rejected by the woman he had loved, sad and vulnerable and lonely, needed to be needed. All the ragged, hurting pieces fit together. It was a perfect match.

  Perfectly toxic, that is.

  I took my apprehension out to the garden and put it to work cutting red clover blossoms and leaves, for tea. According to the weather forecast, we were due for some rain, and I wanted to cut the herbs before they got wet.

  THE sky was growing dark in the northwest when I left to go to the hospital late that afternoon, but the rain still hadn’t arrived. I had told McQuaid only that I was going to see Florence Obermann. He didn’t like Alana, and he had made it clear that he wasn’t in favor of Blackie’s getting involved with her. He wouldn’t be delighted to know that I was about to get involved as well—and for that matter, neither was I.

  Then why are you doing it? my hardheaded, lawyerish self wanted to know, as I started the car and drove off.

  Because Blackie asked me to, my softer, more compassionate side replied, with (it must be admitted) a touch of smug superiority.

  Bullshit, my lawyer side hooted sharply. You’re doing it because you’re curious about the woman. Confess!

  My softer side, recognizing that there’s no arguing with a lawyer, shut up.

  THE Adams County Hospital has two contrasting architectural components, the two-story main building and a one-story wing that was built in the late 1950s with a bequest from Herr Doctor Obermann. It is called, naturally enough, the Obermann Wing. The main building is built of red brick and set back from the street behind a row of sweeping live oaks. It has a mannerly, gracious look about it, unlike the tacked-on wing, a long, narrow stucco affair that angles off from the main building like a broken arm in a plaster cast, bent at the elbow. The hospital board has planned to build a second matching wing when they’ve raised the money. Rumor has it that the Obermann sisters have promised to donate a million dollars after the first million has been raised—a promise that may never be fulfilled, since nobody’s stepped forward yet with that first million. In the meantime, the space is occupied by a lawn and an herb garden, maintained as a public service by the Myra Merryweather Herb Society.

  There are fifty-plus patients’ rooms in the Obermann Wing, which sports gray walls and a gray floor waxed to a glossy sheen. To liven things up, the corridor was decorated for Halloween, with crayoned pictures of witches and pumpkins lovingly drawn by Pecan Springs elementary school artists, and sheafs of decorated cornstalks in the waiting area, along with a grinning skeleton—a veteran of a medical school classroom, most likely—with a stethoscope dangling playfully around his neck. More dead man’s bones.

  I stopped at the desk, where Helen Berger was on duty again. “Hi, Helen,” I said. “I’d like to drop in on Miss Obermann for a few minutes.”

  Helen looked up from her chart, peering at me over the tops of her glasses. “Oh, hello, China,” she said. “She’s in 107. Ruby’s there now, I believe.”

  I hesitated. “Okay for both of us to visit?”

  “Sure—for a little while, anyway. If she seems tired, one of you might leave.” She put the chart down and poked her pencil into her brown hair. “Oh, by the way, you haven’t forgotten that you’re giving the talk at the November herb guild meeting, have you? What’s your topic?”

  Helen is an active guild member and as competent an herbalist as she is a nurse. Last year, she presented a slide show and talk on toxic plants. Most of her audience were surprised to hear that lantana, yellow jessamine, and Mexican poppy—our native prickly poppy—are poisonous to animals and humans. I suppose her interest comes with being a nurse.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said. “I’m going to talk about native dye plants.” I sighed. “If I can get the time to dye some sample skeins.”

  Helen rolled her eyes. “Time,” she said, “it’s always in short supply, isn’t it?”

  I went to see Florence first. The witch on her door wore a jaunty hat and bore a child’s inscription, “Happy Halloween, from Janna J.” The door was ajar, and I saw that the private room was as nicely appointed as a hotel room—the privilege of the wealthy, I thought, or perhaps the prerogative of the hospital benefactor’s daughter. You wouldn’t want the blue bloods to mingle with the riffraff, especially when they’re sick.

  And Helen had been right—Ruby was there, sitting beside the bed, looking like Little Miss Sunshine: yellow tunic, yellow leggings, yellow wedgies, and a flowing yellow scarf tied around her carroty hair. A walking Happy Face.

  “Oh, now I have two visitors,” Miss Florence said, with evident pleasure. “How nice of you to come, Ms. Bayles. And thank you for the flowers.” She waved a thin, dry hand toward the vase on the windowsill. Her voice was trembly, and her face was almost as white as the sheets of her hospital bed.

  “I’ve just come from the matinee performance,” Ruby said with a bright smile. “We’ve been chatting about the play.” She held up the Saturday Enterprise, which had been enthusiastic about the new theater and the performances, if not about the play itself. “I read her Hark’s review.”

  Florence made a little face. “I’m afraid my sister didn’t like the way Max Baumeister played Father. But I thought it was him, to the very life. He was always so . . . well, so formal, you know. To tell the truth, Mama used to say he was—” She giggled and lowered her voice as if she were telling a secret. “Stodgy. We loved him, but he was stiff as a board.”

  “Men were very formal in those days,” I said. I smiled and put my hand on Ruby’s shoulder. “Did you like the way Ruby played your mother?”

  “I’ve already told her I thought she was perfect,” Florence said, smiling. “Somehow, she managed to catch my mother’s sense of fun. I remember especially how much Mama loved playing hide-and-seek with Andy when he was a little boy. She was a child herself, always laughing and giggling.” She paused, puzzled. “My sister didn’t portray Mama that way—I know, because I read the script. What made you decide to do it like that, Ruby?”

  Ruby smiled a little. “To tell the truth, it was a strange experience. The more I played her, the more I understood her—understood what wasn’t there in the script, I mean.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice. “Jean Davenport and the others, they thought I was making it up, but I wasn’t. It was almost as if . . . as if your mother were speaking to me.”

  Ruby ducked her head self-consciously, and I knew what she wasn’t saying out loud. She had gone inside Cynthia Obermann. She had made some sort of psychic connection with the woman and gotten some insights about her character—and she didn’t want to say so because she was afraid that Florence would think she was weird.

  But maybe this isn’t as far-out as it seems. Doesn’t a good actress have to become the person she plays? Doesn’t she have to reach down and find that character within herself, somehow? Ruby had reached down into herself and found Cynthia. And Florence was confirming that she had gotten it right, in spite of the constraints and limitations imposed by the script.

  “Mama was an . . . unusual woman,” Florence said in a halting voice. A shadow passed over her face, like a remembered pain. “Father was terribly stern with her, of course. He had to be, because sometimes she couldn’t control herself. She went too far. And then she . . . she—” Her voice trembled, and she turned her head away.

  I patted her hand, knowing that she was thinking about her mother’s death and not
quite knowing how to respond. What do you say to someone whose mother jumped off the roof of the house?

  I seized on something else. “You mentioned Andy,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “My brother Harley’s son,” Florence replied. “He was such a lovable child, with so much promise. We all thought that he was the hope of the family. The only grandchild, you know. The only one who could carry on our father’s name.” Her old face crumpled, and her pale eyes, the color of water, filled with tears. “It was a tragedy,” she whispered raggedly. “Poor, sweet Andy. Such a terrible—”

  “Florence,” Jane said sharply. Her stern shape appeared in the open door. “You shouldn’t tire yourself with too much talk.”

  “Oh, but I was only—” Florence began, flustered. “I mean, I wouldn’t—”

  “Please don’t, Florence,” Jane said sharply. “I told you about Doctor Mackey’s orders. She even wrote it on your chart. You’re not well enough to have a visitor.” Her glittering glance raked Ruby and me. “Let alone two.”

  “I’m afraid it’s my fault,” Ruby put in, pushing her chair back and standing up. “But I asked at the nurses’ station, and the charge nurse said I could—”

  “The nurse didn’t read the chart,” Jane snapped.

  I thought of Helen Berger, with her precise and careful competency. “I really don’t think—” I began, but stopped. An argument would only upset Florence.

  Jane stood aside from the door, with a gesture that plainly ushered us out. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a softer tone, “but I’m sure you can appreciate the situation. My sister not only has a fractured hip, but a delicate heart. Even the slightest upset makes her very ill. We’re all terribly worried about her.”

  Florence lifted her head and began to protest. “There’s nothing wrong with my—”

  “Now, dear,” Jane said, in the soothing tone one uses to a child. “Don’t excite yourself.”

  There was a small sound from the bed. Before Florence turned her face away, I saw it again, that look of frightened helplessness, like a mouse cornered by a combative cat. But this time, there was something almost defiant about it, as if the mouse might be on the verge of fighting back. Good for Florence, I thought. It was about time she stood up to her sister.

  Ruby bent over the bed and dropped a kiss on Florence’s cheek. “I’ll keep in touch,” she said softly, smoothing the straggly white hair back from the parchment forehead. “When you’re well enough, we can go on with our conversation. China and I would like very much to hear more about your family.”

  “Get well soon,” I added.

  Florence lifted her glance to us. “I’ll try,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. “And do come back, please.” Her glance darted to her sister, then slid away. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’d like to . . . to talk,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Florence!” Jane said. There was a sharp note of warning in her voice. And as we went out the door, she said to Ruby, in an even sharper tone, “I intend to talk to you soon about your performance in my play, Ms. Wilcox. I found it nothing short of disgraceful.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lavender. In the Victorian language of flowers, this herb represented distrust. The allusion is based on the old belief that the asp, the small, venomous, hooded snake which killed Cleopatra . . . habitually lurked under a lavender plant, and it was highly advisable to approach a lavender clump with caution.

  Claire Powell

  The Meaning of Flowers

  Out in the hall, the door safely shut behind us, Ruby stamped her foot.

  “What an old witch!” she exclaimed. “That Jane is nothing but a bully. Poor Florence hasn’t drawn an independent breath since she was born. And now Jane is trying to bully me!”

  I frowned. “Did you get the idea that Jane doesn’t want her sister to talk to us? Wonder what that’s about?”

  “You felt that, too, huh?” We began walking down the hall, Ruby’s yellow wedgies clicking against the tile. “I thought at first that Jane just didn’t want Florence to open the family closet and let the skeletons out.” She frowned. “But somehow I think there’s more to it than that, China. I’m going to ask the charge nurse about visitors. That business about the chart just doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Andy,” I said, still turning Florence’s words over in my mind. “The little boy Cynthia Obermann played hide-and-seek with. What was the tragedy?”

  “He got shot up in Vietnam and spent a lot of time in hospitals. He was around off and on for a while after he got out, but then he went off to California, and nobody ever heard from him again.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, remembering what McQuaid had told me. “The grandson.” Ruby grew up in Pecan Springs and went to high school here, so she knows a great many people. “Were you acquainted with him?”

  “Not really. He was older, and he lived with his family in Houston. But he visited in the summers, sometimes. I’d see him playing in the yard when I was riding my bike, on my way to the river to swim.” She shook her head. “You know, that house was spooky even then. Kids would run up and peek in the windows after dark. And people thought the Obermann sisters were weird—maybe because of the way their mother died.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “Jumping off the roof is pretty bizarre. It would tend to make the neighbors wonder.”

  Ruby’s laugh was subdued. “Are you free this evening? Want to do dinner?” She wasn’t looking at me.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t, Ruby. I’m here to make another visit.” I expected her to ask who I was visiting, and began to grope around for an explanation that wouldn’t bog us down in details about Alana.

  But she seemed to be focused on her own distress. “That’s too bad. I wanted to talk to you about . . .” Her voice gave out and her face was gloomy. Not much sunshine here.

  “About Colin?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “A wild guess.” I sighed. I didn’t want to talk about Ruby and Colin until I knew more about Sheila and Colin. Until I knew more about Colin, period. But that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, and in the meanwhile, Ruby was in love. She needed a friendly ear, or maybe a shoulder to cry on. “Want to have lunch tomorrow?” We usually try for Monday lunch anyway—it’s a good day to get together, since the shops are closed that day.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding relieved. “My house? And don’t forget that we’re seeing Cass at four-thirty.”

  “I haven’t forgotten, believe me,” I said. Ruby’s house. A good place for the kind of girl talk that might turn into a sobbing spree. “Noonish for lunch?”

  She nodded. “Thanks for understanding, China.”

  “No problemo,” I said, waving my hand airily.

  I wished.

  ALANA’S room was at the far end of the hall, behind a door with a crayon drawing of a black cat riding a witch’s broom. I tapped lightly. After a minute, Blackie came out into the hall, closing the door behind him. I almost didn’t recognize him, because he was wearing street clothes; khakis and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  He lifted a shoulder and let it fall, not quite meeting my eyes. “Physically, she’s okay—or she will be when she gets over the discomfort. Getting your stomach pumped isn’t fun. Otherwise, she’s depressed. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk—not to me, anyway.”

  “Have you found out how it happened?”

  “She told the doctor it was an accident. She lost track of how much she was taking. But maybe she’ll tell you a different story. Who knows where the truth is.” His square jaw was working, and I suddenly felt sorry for him. Cops have to build a psychic barrier against other people’s pain. It must be very hard for them to acknowledge their own. But I could hear it in his voice when he added, “Go easy on her, will you, China?”

  I gave him a wry grin. “You mean, don’t chew her out for being careless enough to mix drugs and alcohol?”
I didn’t think she’d merely been careless. Women who drink the way Alana had been drinking the other night have a death wish, whether they know it or not. They can get behind the wheel and kill themselves. Or they can kill other people. Or they can go home and pop a handful of antidepressants.

  “Yeah.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t chew her out, period. She’s got enough to deal with.”

  Alana had a double room, but the other bed was unoccupied, its sheet and blanket stretched tight, the bedside table empty. A television set, tuned to CNN but muted, sat on a shelf on the wall, and a remote control lay on the table beside Alana’s bed, along with a pitcher and a half-empty glass of water with a plastic straw in it, a box of tissues, a kidney-shaped stainless steel spit-up pan, and a small lavender plant wrapped in cellophane—a gift from Blackie, perhaps. A clock hung on the wall, its second hand jerking around the dial in audible spasms. The chair Blackie had vacated, a metal straight-backed chair, sat beside the bed. A couple of magazines—Texas Monthly and Cosmopolitan—were lying on the chair.

  Alana’s bed was cranked up to a half-sitting position. “I didn’t think you’d come.” Her voice was gritty, and she spoke with an effort—not surprising, since she’d had a tube down her throat. Her white hospital gown wasn’t exactly haute couture, and her hair, rumpled, was dull and lifeless. Her skin was gray, her cheeks hollowed. Her eyes had a haunted look.

  I picked up the magazines and put them on the table. The words “My Friend Stole My Lover” were emblazoned across the Cosmo cover, beneath it, “I’ll never trust him again.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk the other day,” I said uncomfortably. I sat down in the chair. What else should I say? Should I apologize for not being there when she needed me? Or should I—

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Blackie said you wanted to see me.”