by David Bell
But there was something about the whole thing I didn’t understand: who was this woman who thought she would be named in my mother’s will?
Chapter Nineteen
I managed to grade a few papers at the Grunge. My mind wandered every chance it got—to Paul’s state of mind, the break-in at my apartment, the woman calling about the will. I wondered how anyone functioned in the world when dealing with a crisis. And I answered my own question: you just do it. You do it because you have to.
I’d called Detective Richland back after talking to Mom’s lawyer. Richland seemed thrilled to hear from me, as if I’d called to offer him a year’s supply of tooth pain. He didn’t give me a chance to mention the break-in. He was on his way to a meeting—could I come by the station around noon?
“Sure,” I said.
And he hung up.
Which is how I ended up at the Dover police department after leaving the Grunge. It was a deceptively cheerful-looking little building constructed out of red brick in an almost Colonial style. Despite its classic appearance, it had been built only a decade earlier thanks to a property tax increase that most of the citizens of Dover still complained about. They wanted the police to do their jobs—they just didn’t want to have to pay for it or give them any additional space.
An officer greeted me at the front desk, then buzzed back to tell the detectives I was here to see them. Detective Post arrived in a matter of minutes and led me down a short hallway and then through a roomful of desks where officers in uniform and plain clothes pecked away at computers and talked on phones. Post turned back to me and said, “We can go into the conference room. It will be quieter.”
A heavy oak table dominated the center of the conference room, and the thick carpet and heavy drapes absorbed most of the noise. When Post closed the door behind me, it felt as if I’d been sealed in an airtight chamber. We were the only ones in the room. Detective Richland was nowhere in sight, and I asked about him.
“He’s out on another call,” Post said. “We’re covering a lot of cases, so we divide the labor.”
I didn’t say it out loud, but I didn’t miss him.
Post pointed to a small table in the corner of the room. “There’s coffee,” she said. “Or I could get you a soda.”
“I’m good,” I said.
We both sat down near the end of the table closest to the door. Post carried a manila folder, which she placed in front of her but didn’t open. Post wasn’t wearing a jacket, and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows as if she was about to do some serious work.
“I hope things have been going okay for you,” Post said.
“Aside from my mother dying and my apartment being broken into, things are fine. Oh, I forgot that my brother is the prime suspect in the murder of my mother.”
“What about your apartment?” Post asked.
“It was broken into last night,” I said. “I thought that’s what I was here to talk about.”
Post looked puzzled. “Tell me about this.”
“Two of your officers responded to my house,” I said. “I told them about Mom’s death, and that you and Richland were investigating.”
Post took a deep breath. I could tell she was trying to project calm and professional cool. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a little notebook.
“I’ll deal with the communication issues later,” she said. “Can you tell me about this break-in?”
“They really didn’t tell you?” I asked.
“I mostly work with men,” she said. “What happened?”
So I told her about coming home, the still, quiet night. I told her about passing the man on the stairs, the one in a hurry who apparently wasn’t coming from any of the other apartments. I told her about the shattered lock and the ransacked apartment, including the violated medicine cabinet.
“The cops who were there chalked it up to meth heads or something like that,” I said. “But none of my electronics were missing. Granted, they might be worth up to three or four dollars on the open market.”
“Junkies don’t make those distinctions,” Post said.
“Exactly.”
“Still, we’ve had a lot of these break-ins lately, especially around campus. The meth heads and even just your garden-variety burglar think college kids have a lot of money and are careless with their things. They tend to leave doors and windows open and their toys just lying around. And a lot of that is true.”
“I’m a grad student,” I said. “I’m poor.”
“They also don’t understand that distinction,” she said.
She scribbled in her book. I waited. She kept scribbling, so I said, “Don’t you think it’s odd that my mother is murdered and then all of a sudden someone is breaking into my apartment? Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“But why your apartment?” Post asked. “Why not your mother’s house?”
“Maybe they did break in there,” I said. “I haven’t been back in days.”
Post looked at me, the wheels in her head turning. Without saying anything else, she stood up and left the room, taking the notebook and folder with her.
I waited. I stared at the bookshelves filled with law enforcement manuals and textbooks. Quite possibly the world’s most boring collection of books. Post came back a minute later and closed the door again. She sat down.
“I sent a car to check your mother’s house,” she said. “Just as a precaution.”
“So you agree with me. This break-in at my house isn’t just a random crime.”
“Was anything missing?” she asked.
“Nothing that I could see.”
“Any important papers? Photos? Anything relating to your mother?”
“I didn’t check that carefully,” I said. “To be honest, I was too freaked out to stay. I haven’t been back yet. They’re putting in a new lock.”
“Make sure it’s a dead bolt. And get a chain.” Post tapped her pen against the notebook a few times. “I still think it’s a long shot this would have anything to do with your mother’s death. Like I said, we get a lot of this kind of crime. If they just ransacked the place, it’s not significant.”
“It’s significant to me,” I said.
“I understand. It’s a violation. It’s unnerving.”
“If I hadn’t stopped to have dinner with my uncle, I might have been home when that man came into the apartment.”
Post watched me for a moment. She made a little noise in the back of her throat. It sounded like “Hmm.”
Someone knocked on the door. Post rose and opened it. She stuck her head out, nodded, thanked the person, and came back into the room.
“Well,” she said. “Your mother’s house is fine. Our patrol car checked it out. No sign of any break-in or vandalism.”
I felt a little deflated hearing that news. It was almost as if I wanted there to have been a break-in at Mom’s house—then the one at my apartment would have made more sense. It would have all been part of a whole, something that started to form a coherent picture.
“Detective, if this break-in at my apartment is related to my mother’s death, then doesn’t that prove that Ronnie didn’t do it? How could he be locked up in Dover Community and break into my place?”
“I wanted to talk to you about your mother a little,” she said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “How could my brother be in the hospital and involved with that break-in?”
Post smiled without showing her teeth. “I think you’re probably letting the emotion of these two events cloud your judgment. It’s very likely you were just the victim of a random break-in. I can show you the charts we have to track these things. Break-ins in that area are up about twenty percent this year. Someone—or a group of people—is doing it. We’ll find out eventually, but it won’t be connected to your mother’s death. As for your brother, I can tell you that it’s moving slowly because your brother hasn’t been as cooperative as we need him to be.”
> “Cooperative?”
“I know,” she said, holding up her hand to fend off my objections. “I’m not unsympathetic to all the issues associated with him being in the hospital.”
“You can’t just dismiss them as ‘issues.’”
“What I’m saying is, if you have any ability to talk to him, to get him to open up a little to the doctors who want to speak to him, then maybe things will move along more quickly. I don’t like the idea of a guy like your brother being cooped up in a hospital either. But we need to find out more from him. We all have the same goal here: to solve your mother’s murder.”
Her words took the slightest edge off my anger and frustration. Not all of it—just a bit. It was remarkable what treating me as a human being could do.
“I’ll try to talk to him,” I said. “He doesn’t listen to me. He’s all doped up. They medicated him yesterday because someone upset him.”
“I heard about that,” Post said.
“Do you know who that woman was?” I asked.
“No. Do you?”
“No. That’s just it. What’s going on here? A strange woman shows up at my brother’s hospital room and sends him into a fit of hysterics. My apartment gets broken into. And then—” I stopped myself. I realized my voice was getting louder. Post looked at me with the calm condescension usually reserved for mental patients. “I’m going to get some of that coffee,” I said, getting up and walking over to the other side of the room.
The act of pouring it into the cup and adding sugar, then stirring and watching the dark liquid swirl around in the cup soothed my nerves just enough. I came back to the table and sat down. Post gave me a moment. I sipped the hot liquid. Despite the generous amount of sugar I added, it still tasted bitter.
Post said, “It’s been a few days, and we were just wondering if anything else had come to mind about your mother. Any problems she might have been having. Any relationships that might have been a source of trouble for her.”
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” I said. “I don’t know who would hurt my mother.”
“Anything at all? Money problems? Something else?”
“If there’s been a rash of break-ins around town, what’s to say Mom’s death wasn’t the result of one of those?”
“You said your lock was splintered and your apartment ransacked?” Post asked. “You saw your mother’s house the other night. There’s a difference there, right?”
I didn’t answer, but I understood. My attempt to make a connection between the two events, to stretch a link so far between two dissimilar events, made me seem amateurish and desperate. I wanted Mom’s death to make more sense than it did, but I couldn’t. And neither could Detective Post.
“What about your father?” she asked. “He’s deceased, right?”
“He died almost five years ago.”
“Was there anything about him that might be relevant to your mom’s case?” Post asked. “Any unresolved problems? Any issues?”
“My father?” I said. “That man didn’t have any issues. He was peaceful and easygoing.” I felt myself smiling just thinking about him. “I got along with him much better than with Mom. I guess Mom and I were too much alike in a lot of ways.”
“Did your mother date anyone since your father died?” Post asked.
The question—no, the idea of the question—almost made me fall out of my chair. “Date someone? My mother?” I laughed, and the expression on Post’s face didn’t change. “No, she didn’t date anyone. You wouldn’t ask that question if you knew my mother at all.”
“But you didn’t know everything about your mother,” Post said. Her voice was flat. She didn’t add any “gotcha” inflection. She didn’t need to. She had, indeed, made her point and proven my argument to be vulnerable.
But I wouldn’t be so easily swayed, at least not on the point in question. “I don’t think my mom even dated any other man before my dad. I know, I know—we all find it hard to think about our parents as sexual beings.”
“It can seem like parents didn’t have lives before their children were born.”
“My mom especially,” I said. “I know you didn’t know her, but she was so… closed off to the world. So rigid and uptight. She didn’t let anybody in. I don’t know how my dad ever got through to her.”
Post leaned back in her chair, stretching her thin body out and trying to adopt what might look like a more casual posture. Was she trying to suggest we were just two girls chatting? That I could tell her anything? Anything at all about the murder of my mother?
“You never really told us about this argument you were having with your mother,” she said. “Things were chaotic that night, of course. But could you tell me what it was about?”
I told her about Mom’s insistence that I promise I would always be there for Ronnie and always take care of him. I explained that Mom’s biggest fear was what would happen to Ronnie if she were ever incapacitated or died. “My uncle says Mom was really worried about it because she was getting older and my uncle is getting older. I guess she saw me as the last, best hope.”
“So what was the fight about?” Post asked, still not getting it.
Or was I the one not getting it? I thought the problem was clear as day, but apparently the detective still didn’t understand.
“I didn’t make the promise,” I explained. “I just didn’t.”
Post raised her eyebrows. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Her expression said it all.
“I would think you would understand,” I said. “If you’re trying to have a career, you can’t be caring for someone. Not someone like Ronnie.”
“Some people would say family always comes first,” Post said.
“I know, but we had family. My uncle… and my mom was fine then. It’s not like she knew—” Post and I locked eyes. Again, she didn’t reveal anything. She let me reach the conclusion. “She couldn’t have known anything was going to happen to her. Could she?”
“There’d already been one incident with your brother,” Post said. “One serious enough to warrant the police being called.”
I didn’t know where to look. I let my eyes wander around the room, past the stupid books, the coffee machine, anywhere but on Post. What she was suggesting didn’t make sense. If Mom felt her life was in danger from her own son, why would she insist on making me a participant in his long-term care? She’d be endangering me as well. Right?
Unless…
“She might have thought, or hoped, I wouldn’t turn him over to an institution or something like that. She must have thought a family member wouldn’t do that.”
“Would your uncle?” Post asked.
“Never. He loves Ronnie. He’s better with Ronnie than I am.”
Post didn’t respond. She tapped her pen against the notebook a few times, a slow metronomic beat. She waited. Was she keeping something from me? I wondered.
“Do you know something about this I don’t know?” I asked. “Did Paul say something to you about all of this?”
Finally, she said, “Your mother apparently didn’t tell you about a lot of the things that were going on in her life. She kept these things to herself.”
“So?”
“So I’m just saying that if there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing this job, it’s that people possess an infinite capacity to surprise.”
“Are you trying to suggest something?” I asked.
“What I can tell you is that your brother remains a suspect in your mother’s death.” She flipped her notebook shut. “As far as issues between your uncle and your mother, or between you and your uncle, those are for you to figure out.”
Chapter Twenty
That afternoon, after my class, I went to Dover Community to see Ronnie. When I arrived, a nurse intercepted me and told me I couldn’t go in because a doctor was examining my brother. I had never seen the nurse working there before, but it seemed like every time I went to the hospital a different one was working.
There must have been an unlimited supply. I had hoped to see Janie. A friendly face was always welcome.
“You can come back later if you want,” the nurse said. “Or you can wait.”
“How long?” I asked.
“It could take an hour or so.”
I thought of the bag in my car, the one filled with thirty ungraded essays. I needed to tend to them.
Then the nurse said, “Your uncle went to the cafeteria. You could go wait with him if he’s still there.”
• • •
I selected a tea bag and added hot water to my mug. I grabbed more than enough sugar packets and paid. Paul sat alone at a table in the corner. The day had turned overcast as a cold front passed through, bringing with it a hint of fall. Mom and I both loved autumn, even the cool gray days. Sometimes I liked those best of all.
Paul had a newspaper spread out on the table, and he smiled when I approached and took the seat across from him. My face must have betrayed my feelings because right away he asked me what was wrong.
“Is it something with Ronnie?” he asked.
I put my tea down on the table. “I was at the police station with Detective Post.”
“Oh,” he said. “Was it rough?”
“I’m trying to understand some things.”
Paul took off his reading glasses and laid the newspaper aside. “Anything I can help with?”
In that moment, I didn’t like him. He seemed too helpful, too fatherly. I had a father and a mother. They were both gone, but I had them. I remembered them. I didn’t want or need someone else to fill that role. Not right then. I wanted to know the answer to something.
“Did you tell Mom to send Ronnie away?” I asked.
To his credit, he didn’t try to tap-dance around the question. He held my gaze and answered without hemming or hawing.
“Yes,” he said. “I did, right after Leslie had to call the police about him.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “I felt that Ronnie was having some problems—emotional and anger management problems—that would best be addressed by professionals in a controlled setting. It didn’t have to be permanent, but I thought that intervention was needed.”