Greg opened the French door and we all stepped out onto the deck and watched Pip and Percy race around their grassy yard.
“Thanks so much, Janet. It was a relief knowing Pip was safe and well cared for.” Greg smiled, but there was a weight to his eyelids and a weary roundness to his shoulders.
“Yes,” piped up Giselle, “it’s good to have him home.”
Greg’s mouth tightened and he seemed to study his toes for a moment. Then he took Giselle by the elbow and steered her through the house and out the front door. I tagged along, unable to stop watching what looked like a bad accident in the making. Greg grabbed a suitcase-sized purse of brown and black plastic patchwork from atop an antique chest in the foyer, shoved it into Giselle’s hands, and guided her onto the front porch.
Giselle turned back toward the house and shrugged her sleeve back into place. “I thought I might stay and make you some dinner, hon.” Giselle took a baby step toward Greg and tilted her head coquettishly.
“No thanks.” He closed the door, flipped the deadbolt, and turned toward me. “Sorry.”
I sneezed into my elbow. “Nothing to be sorry about.” I sneezed again. Apparently I was allergic to Giselle.
Greg pulled a box of tissues from a drawer in the antique chest and held it toward me. “Come on in and have some iced tea.”
“I really can’t stay,” I protested, but I followed him to the kitchen.
He let the dogs in. Pip slurped up an enormous drink from a stainless steel bowl in one corner of the room, then settled himself, dripping happily, onto the gleaming white ceramic floor. Percy put his left front paw on my knee and pulled the right one up under his heart. What could I do but scratched his curly white chest? Greg put two glasses of iced tea on the table and settled into the chair across from me. “I do appreciate you taking care of Pip. Thanks.”
“Are you doing okay, Greg?
“Yeah, I guess. Trying. It just doesn’t seem possible that Abby’s gone, you know?”
“I know.” Though I’d never been widowed, I did know about loss and disappointment.
Greg put his hands on the table, turning his wedding band around and around with the thumb and finger of his right hand. “I miss her.”
That took me by surprise. How could he miss her if he was leaving her—had already left, in fact? But then, the human heart walks a winding path. It occurred to me that it could be all for show, although I didn’t get that vibe from him. But anything was possible.
“Give yourself some time.”
“Yes. Time. There’s always too much of the kind we don’t want, isn’t there? And not enough with the people we love.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I couldn’t think of anything useful to say, and knew in any case that words don’t hold the lonely terrors of loss at bay as well as simple human presence. After a few moments I asked, “So, are you staying here now?”
“Where else would I stay?”
Well, this is embarrassing, whispered Janet Demon. Let’s see you get out of this one. I couldn’t help wondering, not for the first time, where that little voice was before I stuck my foot in things.
26
I was trying to backpedal after implying to Greg that he shouldn’t be living in his own home. “I, uh, someone told me you and Abigail were separated.”
“Who said that?”
Ho boy. “I must have misunderstood. I’m so embarrassed!”
Greg followed my gaze to the two new brass door locks on the counter. “My project for the afternoon.”
“Lose your key?” My mouth was set on “blurt.”
“No.” He made it almost a question. “Oh, I see. You thought we were separated and figured she locked me out.” My cheeks warmed up a tad. “No, that’s fine. I can see where you’d think that. I actually did move out for a couple of weeks in March. We were having the floors refinished.” I glanced at the mirror-like finish beneath our feet. “I’m deathly sensitive to the solvents. I got a room and Abby and the dogs joined me there every night once the workmen left and she finished training.” I thought back to what Connie had told me and began to grapple with the obvious fact that someone was a big fat fibber.
Silence hung between us for a moment, the next obvious question unasked. If Greg was in fact having an affair, could it possibly have been—or still be—with Giselle? Greg turned weary eyes toward mine. “You’re wondering what Giselle was doing here, answering my phone and my door.”
“Well, I, uh …”
“Yeah, I know. Good question. I’ve been asking it myself. She was in here when I got home. Abigail gave her a key last fall.” The hand of sorrow squeezed his face, but he fought it off and won back control. “We went to the Border Collie nationals and Giselle came in to water plants and feed the fish.” His delivery gained speed. “So I came home from walking Percy this afternoon and here she was. Says she just wants to help. She and Abby were friends so maybe she really feels she needs to step in for her sake or something, see that I’m eating and wearing clean clothes, I don’t know. But I tell you,” he sat back in his chair and ran his fingers through his brown hair, “that woman drives me nuts.”
“So you’re changing the locks?” Excellent plan, I thought.
“I can’t have her showing up here whenever she wants. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but it’s my house.” I wouldn’t argue with that. “I guess I’ll tell her I don’t know who all has keys, so I need to make the house more secure since I’m gone a lot. Does that sound reasonable?”
“Perfectly.” If Giselle were stalking me, I’d consider an armed guard and a brace of guard dogs reasonable. I thought about the witchcraft books on the seat of her car and wondered whether they included recipes for toxic brews. “The police wouldn’t let me take Abigail’s things home from the fairgrounds, you know. Her chair and crate and a few other things. Did you get them back?” I was gazing at Percy, who was lying in his open crate on a little synthetic wool pad, curly feet twitching in dreams.
“Not yet.” He smiled toward his contented little dog. “Pip never uses a crate at home, so that doesn’t matter. Poor Percy would be lost without his, though.” The Poodle opened his eyes at the sound of his name, and Greg’s comment gave me an opening.
“Good you didn’t take him to the show.”
He nodded, still gazing at his dog. “Yeah, that was a fluke really. I went to work that morning to cover for one of the other pharmacists, but we got our dates mixed up. So when she showed up at work, I went straight to the fairgrounds to watch Abi …” He gagged on the final syllable, and we sat in silence for a few moments until he’d collected himself. Then Greg walked me to the front porch.
“Thanks again, Janet.” He gave me a hug, and when we broke apart his eyes were glittery.
“Call if you need anything. Even just a friendly ear.” He promised he would.
I turned the key in the ignition and glanced into the rearview mirror. The ubiquitous Yugo crouched in the street four lots down with the engine running. It looked like a giant reptile, unblinking in the sun, lying in wait. I couldn’t see the driver’s face for the glare on the windshield, but a heavy black-clad arm rested on the frame of the open driver’s-side window, and a malevolent energy stirred the air.
27
I decided to swing by Mom’s place before I went home. I tried to see her about once a week, but I’d let my filial duties slide a few extra days. She spent most of my last visit scolding me yet again for marrying Chet a quarter century ago. Not only did he not go to medical school like Neil Young, but he abandoned me. The fact that he did that when I gave him the boot for being a lazy, lying cheat seemed to elude her.
Mom came out the back door wearing blue and yellow striped capris and a white silk blouse with an imposing lace jabot. The buttons were one off, and the right tail of the blouse hung lower than the l
eft.
“May I help you?”
“Mom! It’s me, Janet!”
“Janet? Oh dear, I didn’t know you without my specs.” She giggled and slapped her thighs with both hands.
“Mom, you’re wearing them.”
She reached up and wriggled her glasses, leaving them slightly askew. She giggled some more. “So I am!”
I followed her into the kitchen, where my head nearly exploded as a miasma of pine-scented cleaner enveloped me.
“So, Mom, you been cleaning?” I flipped on the exhaust fan, propped the back door open, and raised the double-hung window as high as it would go.
“Cleaning? You think I need to clean up?”
“No, Mom, I wondered if you’ve been cleaning this morning.” What I wondered was how she could breathe in there.
“No, I don’t think so.” I searched her eyes, but the woman I’d known all my life was nowhere to be found.
Nor were the accouterments I’d come to expect as part of her home, the home of my childhood. The kitchen counters were stripped bare and sparkly clean. The blue ceramic canisters were gone. Mr. Coffee was gone. The Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar that we’d picked out together when I was eight? Gone. Toaster? Gone. The tea kettle that always sat on the back burner of the stove wasn’t there. The kitchen table, too, was clean and bare. The wooden napkin holder, the ceramic salt-and-pepper fawns, the restaurant-style sugar dispenser, even the red-checkered vinyl cloth. All gone.
“Mom, where is everything?”
“What?”
“Where is everything? All your things? From the counter and table?”
“Looks better, don’t you think, Marsha?” Marsha was Mom’s sister. She died a decade ago with her faculties intact, but her heart, not so much.
“Mom, I’m Janet.”
She focused hard on my face. “Oh, Janet! It’s so nice to see you.”
I didn’t know whether to cry or run away. Pending a decision, I opened the refrigerator. The milk was fine. All five gallons. The napkin holder was wedged in beside a quart of cottage cheese with an intact plastic seal around the lid and a use-by date a week gone. There was a bag of carrots on the bottom shelf. Next to the salt-and-pepper fawns. I grabbed some fuzzy green cheddar and Swiss from the butter bin. Mom sat at the table, humming and playing with the lace of her jabot. I dropped the cheeses into the garbage can under the sink and said, “Mom, I need to use the bathroom.”
Chemical warfare had been declared on the bathroom as well. The weapon of choice here was chlorine bleach. I turned on the exhaust fan and cranked the small window open a few inches. She’d stripped this room to its bones, too. No towels on the racks. No soap in sight. Even the shower curtain was missing.
I opened the linen closet and was face-to-face with Little Red Riding Hood. I lifted her head and cape with not a little trepidation, and peered into the jar. Several cookie bits in the bottom, plus two bars of Ivory soap, a half-squished tube of toothpaste, three disposable razors, several packets of sugar, and a bottle of aspirin. I took two of those and swallowed them with a handful of tap water.
I went to the bedroom, picked the phone up off the floor (the night table was stripped), and dialed my brother’s number. Bill works from home when he isn’t flying around the world doing whatever it is he does. I’ve never been quite clear about Bill’s “consulting” business.
“Mom?” Bill’s caller I.D. was working.
“It’s Janet.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Have you been in here lately?” I described the scene. Bill said he was in the house on Sunday and everything was normal. Even Mom, if I could believe Bill. “Well, it’s not normal now. She can’t stay here alone. She’s going to gas herself.”
He didn’t reply.
“Look, I can’t take her home with me. I teach tonight.”
He grumbled, but said he’d be right over.
28
I went back to the kitchen. Mom was down on her knees fooling around with the contents of a cabinet. “Whatcha doing, Mom?” I leaned over and took a look.
“Oh, Marsha! How nice to see you!” She reached out and patted my leg. “I’ve been stocking up. The price of oil is going to go up, you know. I read it in the paper.”
The cabinet was loaded with oil. Industrial-size bottles of corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil. Two huge cans of olive oil, extra virgin. Whenever I see that term, I think of Agnes Baumgartner, a self-righteous little priss in every class I ever took in high school. Agnes, her pinched little face scowling over her buttoned-up white collars, was an extra virgin if I ever saw one.
“Mom, when did you eat? Shall I make you something?”
Her face lit up. “Cookies! Let’s bake cookies!”
“First I think you should have something nutritious, okay?”
She slumped into a chair and leaned her cheek on her fist. “Okay. But I’d rather have cookies.”
I opened the cupboard where she normally kept canned goods. The top shelf was bare. The next one down was crammed with condensed tomato soup. Say, sixty cans. “Mom, how about some tomato soup?”
“I don’t like tomato soup.”
“Great! Be ready in a jiffy.” I pulled out a can and found a can opener and a whisk.
Mom was at the table folding and stacking sections of paper towels as she pulled them one by one off a roll, and humming fragments of something I couldn’t quite piece together. My temples throbbed in time with my rambunctious thoughts. What did Detective Stevens want? What were we going to do about Mom? What was that song she was humming in spurts? What, or who, killed Abigail Dorn? And the question that slipped like a noose around my mind—am I really a suspect?
One problem at a time, Janet.
“So, Mom, Bill’s coming over. Maybe you should stay with him for a few days.”
“Oh, yes! I could help with the baby until Julie’s on her feet.”
Who in the heck are Julie and the baby? I bet Bill and his partner, Norm, didn’t know them either.
I set the soup on the burner, and went back to checking out the cupboards. The shelf below the tomato soup was a hodgepodge of pastas, rice, coffee filters, dried beans and peas, an Englebert Humperdinck cassette, lentils, couscous, oatmeal, wheat germ, an unopened pantyhose egg, three packets of zinnia seeds, and a humongous bag of popcorn. I backtracked to the stove for some therapeutic soup stirring.
She’s Come Undone. That was it. Perfect.
I opened the cupboard where the plates and bowls had lived since I was a little girl. Empty. “Mom! Where are your dishes?”
“Oh, I was tired of those old things. I gave them to Goodwill.” Or maybe they were in the furnace room. I fought off the urge to beat my head against the edge of the cabinet, kept looking, and eventually found a ceramic mug among the soup cans.
“Soup’s on!” I set the mug of soup and a spoon on the table and watched Mom tuck a paper towel into her collar. She tried to pat it flat against her chest, but the lace jabot fought back.
She slurped a spoonful of soup. “Mmmmm! Delicious! I love tomato soup!”
She was finishing off her third mugful when Bill banged in through the back door. “Hi, Mom. Janet.” He glanced around the kitchen, eyes wide.
“George, you’re home early.” George was my father. He died of a heart attack in the middle of a Montana trout stream nineteen years ago.
“Mom, it’s me, Bill.”
“Oh, Bill!” She wiped tomato soup from her lips. “How was school?”
Bill and I adjourned to the living room and I filled him in while he tidied the cushions on the sofa. He finally ran out of excuses and promised to keep an eye on her until morning. “But this has to be temporary. I can’t watch her every minute. And I leave in two weeks for Thailand.” He was in full “all about me�
� mode by the time he got to his travel plans.
“You want some cheese with that whine, Bill?”
He glared into my eyes for a moment, then asked, “What’s up with you?”
My overtaut tether snapped. “Well, let’s see, my mother is losing her mind, I watched someone drop dead last weekend, and I’m apparently under suspicion for tampering with evidence. Otherwise I’m just dandy.”
“The Aunt Ellie woman at the dog show? I wondered if you were there.”
I nodded. He sat me down on the couch and heard the whole story.
“Look, if you need a lawyer, call Norm.”
“Norm’s a real estate attorney.”
“He’ll know who to call. You can’t just pick a criminal defense attorney from the phone book.”
My heart did a little tango as my brain screamed criminal defense?
Then Bill shifted our focus back to Mom, his tone softer. “It’s time we get serious about other options.”
“Right.” A mix of emotions the size of a St. Bernard plopped onto my chest. “Listen, I need to get going. I’ll call you when I get home from school tonight. Check out the cupboards while you’re here.”
Mom was at the sink, washing the mug. “Gotta go, Mom. Love you.” I kissed her cheek.
“Okay, dear. Have fun. Be home by eleven.”
29
I got to the Firefly Coffee House at 3:32. The place was quiet, so I figured I could do a little work before Detective Stevens arrived. I set my laptop on the table, bent to pull my notes from my bag, and dropped my favorite gel pen. I scooched down sideways to retrieve it. Big mistake. I slipped off the chair and gave myself a mild uppercut with the edge of the table, making my left leg straighten reflexively and scuttle the pen across the floor and under the legs of another table about ten feet away.
Drop Dead on Recall Page 9