Wayne jumped up from his place on the floor. “There’s plenty of food,” he growled awkwardly to Clara. “Like to stay and eat?”
“Waynie!” Vesta objected. “I said I want the spy outa here!”
“I’ve already eaten, but thank you, Wayne,” Clara murmured cheerily. She gave his hand a sympathetic pat and left.
I’d be cheery too if I could leave, I thought enviously, as the door closed behind her.
“Mom!” Wayne whispered urgently as he stomped over to Vesta’s chair. “Clara Kushiyama was born in America, same as you. She’s never spied for Japan. She’s never even lived there! And even if she had, you have no business insulting her. I’ve told you that. Kate’s told you that. Why do you keep insulting her?”
“Keep your big fat ugly nose out of it,” Vesta replied casually. “It’s between me and Pearl.” She waved her bony hand dismissively and looked down at Harmony.
“But—” began Wayne.
“I want my ‘New Age’ tea now,” Vesta announced. “Harmony, be a good girl and go put the kettle on.”
Harmony set her untouched plate on the floor and left to do Vesta’s bidding.
Vesta dropped her own plate down beside Harmony’s. “Somebody clear up this mess,” she ordered and leaned back in her easy chair.
I started to get up, but Ingrid gently shoved me back onto the couch. “I’ll be glad to clear,” she whispered enthusiastically.
“I’ll help you,” I offered and attempted to get up again.
This time Dru shoved me back down. “You just relax,” she trilled. “We’ll take care of it.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again as Dru took my plate. I knew it could be dangerous to argue with women of a certain age bent on exercising the best of good manners.
Harmony reappeared as Ingrid took a stack of plates into the kitchen. Harmony’s face was tuned into an indistinct smile which wavered in and out of focus.
“I make Vesta tea every night,” she announced shrilly. “I get the herbs at the health food store and mix them myself. They’re all organic, right? Valerian, skullcap, chamomile, stuff like that—”
“And a little grass once in a while,” Vesta broke in. She looked around the room as if daring someone to criticize her. I wasn’t about to take her up on it. Now that Shady Willows was no longer over-medicating her, she was doing a good job on her own. “Harmony’s my own home-grown organic expert on the New Age,” Vesta added. “All I know is old age.”
Harmony giggled dutifully. Dru chuckled a little on her way back from the kitchen.
“Herbalism is a real art form,” Lori put in, bending forward encouragingly. “You have to be truly intuitive to create the right mixtures for the right people.”
“No, you don’t,” shrilled Harmony, glaring now at Lori.
Lori’s head jerked back. Her beaded earrings bobbed. “I just meant that you must be a very creative—”
“It’s my job and you can’t have it!” Harmony cried out. Her eyes were round with distress.
“Mom just meant—” Mandy began.
“Shh, sweetie,” whispered Lori, standing up. “We’ll just go help with the dishes. Okay?”
Ace pushed himself up off the couch as Lori and her daughter headed into the kitchen. “So, what say we have some real drinks?” he suggested heartily.
Harmony sat down again at Vesta’s feet, her face resuming its usual blank expression as her hands resumed their trek between the amulets around her neck and the ones imbedded in the fringes of her jacket.
“I’ll take a Scotch,” said Trent, his deep voice reassuringly steady.
Other voices began calling out their orders. As Ace ran around writing them down on a little notepad, I slithered my way over to sit by Wayne on the floor.
“Can we go now?” I whispered in his ear.
“Just a little longer,” he whispered back.
“Pretend?” I mouthed.
“Pretend,” he mouthed back and kissed me sweetly.
“Kate!” shouted Vesta. I jerked back mid-kiss. “You like all this New Age, hippie stuff. Wanna try some of my tea?”
“No, thank you,” I sang back cheerily. I had tasted her “New Age” tea once. It may have been both herbal and organic, but it tasted liked brewed sweat socks. Even Harmony didn’t drink it.
“Anyone else?” Vesta asked the room at large.
No one responded in the affirmative. They had obviously tasted it, too.
“Bunch of fucking wimps,” she said and grinned. I let out a deep breath. She was happy.
The teakettle shrieked. Harmony leapt up and ran to the kitchen with Ace in her wake.
Once Vesta had drunk her tea, cup after pungent cup from her special, lavender-enameled teapot, the evening went much more smoothly. Conversation resumed. Ace told jokes and proposed toasts. Plans to visit Mount Tam, Stinson Beach and Sausalito were discussed. The only recurrence of Vesta’s earlier hostility was when she replied “feces” to Lori’s earnest inquiry concerning her astrological sign.
An hour later, I was squinting through the lens of Dru’s camera at the four Skeritt siblings. Ace had his eyes crossed and his tongue sticking out. Vesta was making rabbit ears in back of Trent’s head. Dru tilted her face and winked flirtatiously.
I pushed the shutter button down. Click.
Ace put his arm around the two women. Trent leaned his head into the viewfinder. Click.
The two men stood behind their sisters. Vesta put her hand over her heart and frowned. Damn. I lifted my finger away from the button. Was it fake heart-attack time again?
“I don’t feel so good,” Vesta said. “Maybe we oughta call it a night.” She was sweating, that was for sure. I’d noticed the drops of perspiration sliding off the end of her nose as I looked through the viewfinder. But she’d had a good workout that evening. At least her tongue had. And rage can be a very strenuous emotion. I looked over my shoulder at Wayne.
“Okay, everyone,” he said quietly. “Time to go.”
The Skeritts assembled to leave in an embarrassingly short amount of time.
Vesta had one more shark’s smile for us all at the door. “I’ll have more surprises tomorrow,” she promised. “It’s my birthday. Be here by nine. Now get outa here.”
We got out of there. All but Harmony, who stood next to Vesta in the doorway as they waved us away into the cool night air.
Wayne was unlocking the Jaguar door when I heard a clear voice ring out somewhere across the darkened grass of La Risa Green.
“Why do you put up with it?” asked the voice. It was Gail. At least I thought it was. It was too dark to see her across the grass. And there was more feeling in her voice now than before.
“Vesta was very good to me as a child,” came a high trill back. Dru. “She’s had a difficult life, honey. More difficult than you may realize.” A car door slammed.
“Oh, Mother,” Gail protested. “You’re too good—” Another door slammed and all was silent. Then an engine started.
Wayne and I had our own, brief conversation as he drove south on Highway 101. He reminded me that Vesta’s parents had thrown her out of her home when she became pregnant with Wayne. That her life had been miserable. That the beatings she had given him had sprung from that misery. That he just wanted her to be happy.
I gave him a long, hard look.
“I understand the things that happened to her weren’t my fault,” he countered. “Understand it intellectually—”
“But emotionally it’s a different story,” I finished for him wearily. “I know.”
He turned his wounded face back to the road and didn’t say another word for the rest of the drive home.
My cat, C.C., greeted us at our door with her usual yowl of disapproval. Wayne gave her a pat and shuffled down the hall to the bedroom. My answering machine blinked at me anxiously, filled with messages it needed to disgorge. There were a few business calls, a quick message from my friend Barbara, and another rambling one from my war
ehousewoman, Judy. She wanted me to call her. Probably about her divorce, I guessed. When you run a small business with a handful of employees, you get to be dictator, therapist, teacher, referee and mother all rolled into one. Just for starters. Not to mention lawyer. Somehow Judy and her husband, Jerry, had gone from a trial separation to filing for divorce awfully fast. Now Judy kept asking me for legal advice.
I punched out the first two digits of her number.
“Kate?” murmured Wayne from behind me.
I turned.
“Sorry,” he growled, looking down at his feet.
I put the telephone receiver back in the cradle and wrapped my arms around him.
“Hey,” I mumbled into his chest. “We made it out alive. Let’s celebrate.”
And we did.
The phone rang at eight the next morning. I picked it up, expecting Barbara or Judy.
“I can’t wake her up!” someone wailed.
- Four -
“Wait a minute!” I ordered the receiver. Adrenaline-fueled scenarios of disaster pumped through my mind. “Who is this?”
“It’s not my fault, is it?” the voice replied in a whisper. “I didn’t do anything bad, right?”
“Who is this?” I repeated, trying to infuse my voice with a calm I didn’t feel. “Who can’t you wake up?”
“Maybe the visitors got her,” the voice went on, so faint I could barely hear it above the pounding of my own pulse. Visitors? The Skeritts were visiting. Or maybe…
“Harmony?” I guessed. “Is that you?”
“It’s not my fault!” she wailed. Now I was almost sure it was Harmony on the other end of the line. And if it was Harmony… Damn. I took a deep breath as the imagined scenarios became more specific. And more frightening.
“Who can’t you wake up, Harmony?” I asked in a slow, steady voice. “Is Vesta all right?”
“I don’t know!” she shrieked. “I’ve been good, right? I just did what she told me—”
“Kate?” came Wayne’s deep voice from behind me.
I put my hand over the mouthpiece and turned to him. He frowned a question at me.
“Harmony, I think,” I whispered. “She’s not making sense—”
He nodded and stuck out his hand for the phone. I hesitated for an instant. What if something really were wrong with Vesta? Could he handle it?
“It’s okay,” he told me.
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I decided to believe him anyway. I handed him the phone.
Ten minutes later we were dressed and in Wayne’s Jaguar, doing eighty up Highway 101. He hadn’t made any more sense out of Harmony’s words than I had. But at least he was sure that it had been Harmony on the phone. And he was more than convinced that we needed to check in on Vesta. Immediately.
I watched his grim profile as he drove. I hoped Vesta was all right. I would even forgive her if this was another one of her jokes.
“Shouldn’t we call 911?” I asked.
His eyebrows went up. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Didn’t think of it.”
“Me neither,” I admitted. “Not till now.” I wriggled inside my seat belt uncomfortably. What if Vesta needed an ambulance?
“We’ll call from the condo if we need to,” he promised, and tromped the gas pedal even harder.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. We had to get inside the condo first if we were going to use the phone. And while it was true that Harmony had opened the door when we’d arrived, it was also true that she’d left the chain lock securely in place. And there was no way either Wayne or I could squeeze through the two-inch crack between the door and the doorjamb.
“It’s not my fault, right?” Harmony shrilled. Parts of her face kept appearing and disappearing through the crack in the doorway. A wide, bleached blue eye, the flash of crystals and crosses on an ear lobe, blond bushy hair. I even caught a glimpse of her hand around the neck of the wooden baseball bat she had carried the night before.
“Slide the lock open, Harmony,” I ordered in the smoothest voice I could muster. Wayne and I had been issuing alternating versions of this order for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a minute or two. I even wondered for an instant if I could stick my hand through the crack and unloose the chain. Not likely, I decided. That was exactly what the damn things were designed to protect against.
I put my face closer to the crack. The amulet-embedded fringes of Harmony’s leather jacket danced before my eyes. The smell of sweat, leather, dope and patchouli drifted my way. But this time the sweat predominated. It was a heavy, sour sweat, the kind fear can produce. Or maybe she had just slept in her clothes all night. I drew my head back.
“Mom?” Wayne called out. “Mom, are you in there?”
“She won’t talk to you, man,” Harmony informed him. “She won’t even talk to me.”
“Is Vesta sick, Harmony?” I asked.
There was a short silence. I pressed my face up to the crack in the doorway once more. It looked like Harmony was nodding her head. “Vesta was really sick last night,” she finally answered. “Throwing up all over the place around one in the morning—”
“Mom!” Wayne called out again, louder this time.
“It was awful, man. Just awful,” Harmony went on, her words coming faster and louder. “I asked if she wanted a doctor, right? She said… she said…”
“What did she say?” asked Wayne. His deep voice seemed ready to explode with the effort of keeping it even.
“She said she’d had enough of doctors, right? And she said she’d had enough of me.” Harmony’s voice cracked, and I thought she wouldn’t go on, but she did. “She told me to get out. So I went and slept in my car. I had to, right? That’s what she told me to do. I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”
“No, you did just fine,” I assured her. “Just fine.” I took a deep breath and tried to remember the tricks I had learned while working in a mental hospital some two decades before. “How is Vesta doing now?” I asked in a steady, low voice.
But Harmony didn’t seem to hear me. I caught a glimpse of her round blue eye staring through the crack in the doorway; then she started up again.
“Vesta kept talking about ‘New Age’ and ‘organic’ and ‘herbal’ and stuff. I think she mighta meant the tea, right?” Her voice grew shrill. “But I made the tea, right? Just like always. I get the herbs at the health food store—”
“How is Vesta doing now, Harmony?” I repeated in a louder tone of voice.
“I let myself back in at eight,” she told me. “Vesta’d given me a key before, right? But she’s real sick, man. She won’t even talk to me.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “I think the visitors got to her,” she breathed.
“If you let us in, we can protect you from them,” I whispered back, hating myself for the necessary lie.
“I got my bat,” she assured me. “No one can hurt me.”
“But you’re tired of holding that bat, aren’t you, Harmony?” I said slowly. Softly. “Really tired. It would feel so good to let it drop—”
“I… I’m scared,” she interrupted.
“Of course you are,” I told her, keeping my voice steady though I wanted to cheer. It was the sanest thing she’d said yet. “You can’t help but be scared, Harmony. Let us help you. Now, slide back the chain—”
The crack in the doorway closed for a moment and I thought I’d lost her. But then I heard the chain slide in the lock. And the door was open.
I wasted no time pushing my way through. Harmony stood aside, but she held her wooden baseball bat high and trembling in the air.
“Put down the bat,” said Wayne, his voice soft and reasonable. He put his hand out. Harmony lowered the bat slowly, then handed it neck first to Wayne. He dropped it on the floor next to Vesta’s water gun.
“Thank you, Harmony,” he said solemnly.
“I’ll be back in a second,” I whispered and trotted across the living room, toward the stairs that led to the bedroom area.
The smell hit me first. I gagged, then put my hand over my mouth and nose as I felt across flocked wallpaper for the light switch. I will not throw up, I told myself and took shallow sips of air through my fingers as my eyes adjusted to the bright light.
I saw the swirling gold and ivory shades of the flocked wallpaper first. And the four-poster bed. And then, Vesta. Her legs were tucked under her silken gold bedspread, but her upper body was twisted and sprawled out over the side of the bed as if she had reached for something and collapsed, her black hair pooling on the plush golden carpet alongside splashes of vomit. I closed my eyes and took another breath through my fingers. When I opened them again, I noticed her lavender-enameled teapot leaning on its side in the long, thick threads of gold wool inches from Vesta’s outstretched hand.
The room began to shimmer. Only it wasn’t the room, of course. It was me. I took a deep breath. That was a mistake. I clapped my hand over my mouth again. What if she was still alive? What if she needed help? I forced myself to step closer and saw the side of her face, gray and contorted through the veil of black hair. I held my breath as I stepped forward and reached down to check for her pulse. The skin on her arm was cool. The good news is she doesn’t have a fever, I thought hysterically. I pressed my fingers to the inside of her wrist. The bad news was she didn’t have a pulse either. Not one that I could find, anyway.
But what if she wasn’t dead? An ambulance, I told myself. I need to call for an ambulance. Then I heard Wayne’s heavy footsteps on the stairs.
I was at the doorway in three long steps and out in another, all dizziness forgotten. Wayne stood a few yards down the hall, his grim face looking as if he already knew what awaited him inside the bedroom. Maybe he did. Maybe Harmony had finally told him.
I put my hand up in warning as I walked to him. “Go back downstairs now,” I said firmly. “Call an ambulance.”
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