by Jane Haddam
Frannie walked all the way over to the picnic table, leaned against it, and looked out the windows.
“He drove me in from the bus stop, you know. Tim did. The night he was killed.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“He was a very nice boy. Man. Whatever. He seemed very young.”
“Everybody says that about him, yeah. That he was sort of innocent.”
“I think he had a secret,” Frannie said. “That’s why people get killed, isn’t it? Grown-up people, anyway. Children get killed just for being children.”
What was this about? It was like being in a room with a hypnotized person. No. It was worse. Nick wanted to go to the table to get his food, but all of a sudden he didn’t want to get that close to Frannie Jay. His erection was a distant memory.
“I don’t think you ought to worry too much about Tim Bradbury,” he told Frannie. He isn’t your responsibility. You didn’t even know him.”
“That’s true.”
“The police are supposed to worry about him. And Demarkian.”
Frannie Jay swayed a little, and blinked.
“Oh,” she said, in a much more normal voice. “I have to get out of here. I just came down for some—”
“Mineral water,” Nick finished. He whirled around and opened the refrigerator door again. There were dozens of fat-bellied green bottles of Perrier on the bottom shelf. He took out two.
“Here you are,” he said. “Perrier. Specialty of the house.”
Frannie Jay looked at him as if he had gone crazy. Then she came back across the kitchen and took the bottles of Perrier out of his hands.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he told her.
The bottles had the kind of caps you had to pry open with a can opener. Maybe Frannie kept an opener in her room for just that purpose.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I’d better go. It was nice talking to you.”
“It was nice talking to you, too.”
“I have three more step classes this afternoon. I’m going to be a wet noodle by the time I’m done.”
“I’ve got three more classes, too. I don’t worry about watching my calories while I’m working at this place.”
Frannie gave the last bit a smile as lame as the comment itself, said “Bye,” and went out the kitchen door. Nick Bannerman leaned back against the refrigerator doors and closed his eyes.
Now that Frannie Jay wasn’t acting crazy anymore, his erection was back. It was big and hard and solid, and any minute now he was certain it was going to hurt.
2
DESSA CARTER KNEW SOMETHING was wrong as soon as Mrs. O’Reilly picked up the phone in Derby. She could hear the sound of heavy thudding against wood and Mrs. O’Reilly’s labored breathing. In spite of her heaviness, Mrs. O’Reilly was almost never short of breath. She was a rock of a woman, as she put it herself. Rocks did not have physical limitations. As soon as she heard the thudding, Dessa Carter stiffened. She had actually been feeling pretty good before that. It was step aerobics day on the smorgasbord. Dessa was surprised to find that she liked step aerobics. She was tired and achy and hot. She felt heavier than she really was. Yet she still felt better than she had a couple of days ago. There was something to this exercise stuff. It made her mentally light.
The thudding was rhythmic and strong, unyielding and brutal.
“I’ve got him locked in the bathroom,” Mrs. O’Reilly was saying. “It was the best I could do. He broke the coffee table.”
The pay phone was just off the foyer, in a little utility hall with a locker room in it and a cloakroom with a revolving coatrack but no attendant. At least, Dessa thought, I’ll be private here. None of the women from her class was anywhere near this hall at all. The foyer was empty, too. If Dessa leaned back a little, she could see the place where the balcony railing had fallen apart. Someone had boarded it up with a piece of plywood.
“He doesn’t sound like he’s calming down,” Dessa said.
“Oh, he’s calming down,” Mrs. O’Reilly told her. “It was a lot worse half an hour ago. I didn’t have him locked up then. And he’s stronger than you think.”
“I know how strong he is.”
“You’re going to have to find a nursing home for him. You can’t keep on with him the way he is. I can’t keep on with him.”
Dessa pressed her forehead against the shiny metal front of the phone. She had never been so hungry in her life. Never. She craved a grocery bag full of Mars bars, sticky sweet, sugar rush. She wanted to go down to Taco Bell and eat three ten-packs of tacos. She wanted to make herself a huge pot of mashed potatoes and smother them in butter. She wanted all the food on earth, right now, this minute, and then she wanted to lie on the floor of her own bedroom and feel the pain in her stomach until it got so bad she passed out.
“You can’t leave now,” she said, in a hoarse voice she barely recognized. “Not today.”
“I’m not going to leave today.”
Dessa relaxed a little. “I can’t find him a nursing home this week,” she said, forcing herself to sound reasonable. “It might take months.”
“You can’t hold onto people when they’ve changed,” Mrs. O’Reilly insisted. “He isn’t the father you knew when you were a girl. He’s an addled old hulk with a disease. He needs twenty-four-hour-a-day nurses. You’re not doing him any good keeping him here.”
“I know.”
“He’s going to hurt somebody someday. Me or you.”
“I know that, too.”
“He’s going to get out of this house when we’ve got our guards down and go wandering around the neighborhood and get murdered for his watch.”
“I wouldn’t mind putting him in a nursing home, Mrs. O’Reilly. It’s not that I don’t like the idea that’s the problem.”
“We all want to be loyal to the parents who brought us up,” Mrs. O’Reilly interrupted. “When they have to go into nursing homes, we think we’re abandoning them. You won’t be abandoning him. He’ll be better off.”
Will he? Dessa asked herself, but she knew the answer to that. He wouldn’t be, because she couldn’t afford to put him any place that would be better off than he was at home. She couldn’t afford to put him any place at all. She wanted to reach through the phone and grab Mrs. O’Reilly by the neck. She wanted to throttle the woman. Of course she had looked into nursing homes. Of course she had. The good private ones were out of the question, but as it turned out, the state facilities were out of the question, too. First, they’d told her, her father would have to “exhaust his assets,” meaning sell the house and anything else he owned and use the money to pay nursing home bills. Then she would have to “sever any proprietary or custodial interest” she had in him, meaning declare him a ward of the state. Then, and only then, would a state facility have him. It would have him for good. She would have no legal standing to complain about his care, if it was bad—and from what Dessa had seen, it was likely to be bad. She would become a nonperson in the life of this man, this man—
“Miss Carter?” Mrs. O’Reilly was saying.
Dessa could see it, thrown up on her memory like a movie on a screen: the backyard in the days when the neighborhood had been a good one, the bright hard sunlight of an early afternoon, the thick greenness of the midsummer heat. Her mother, alive and whole and young, setting plastic knives and forks out on the red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth spread across the round metal outdoor table. Her father—
But she couldn’t see her father. It had been a long time, Dessa realized, since she had been able to remember her father clearly at all. She could remember things he had done, the wood swing set he had built her, the blue suit he had bought just to wear to her high school graduation, so that he wouldn’t have to appear in work clothes and embarrass her. She couldn’t remember him. Her mother, who had been dead for years, was still fresh in her mind. Dessa sometimes thought she could still smell her mother’s lavender cachet in the big bedro
om at home—although that was impossible; the smell of her father’s illness blanketed everything. Her father blanketed everything. Her father, as he was now. What he had become had obliterated everything that he had been.
“Do you need me to come home?” Dessa asked Mrs. O’Reilly.
“I don’t need you here. I can cope. I just don’t know how much longer I can cope.”
“What about tomorrow? Are you going to need me there tomorrow?”
“You take your time with your exercising,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “I know this is important to you. I was just talking about the long run. You have to think about the long run.”
“Fine.” Dessa was finding it easier to breathe now. She didn’t have the faintest intention of thinking about the long run. Not here. Not today. “I’m going to go have my lunch now. You keep him locked up as long as you have to. I’ll come right home at the end of the day.”
“Take your time. Do what you have to do.”
“We’ll talk the whole thing through as soon as I see you. Is there anything he can hurt himself on in the bathroom?”
“We took the razors out months ago. We took the scissors out.”
“Yes. Yes, I remember that. It ought to be all right, then. Just do the best you can.”
“I always do the best I can.”
“I know you do. You’ve been a godsend, Mrs. O’Reilly. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“You’d have managed. God always sends us the strength to do what we have to do.”
God is in a nursing home, Dessa thought. God has Alzheimer’s disease. God is dead.
“He’s stopped pounding now,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “I’m going to go listen at the door. If he’s fallen asleep, I’ll open up.”
“Good.”
“It’s not as bad as that time before. I don’t think I’m going to have to tie him up.”
“That’s good, too.”
“God only knows what those social workers would think, if they saw him all tied up. People don’t understand what it’s like anymore, caring for the old. People don’t care for the old. They dump them in hospitals and walk away.”
“Yes,” Dessa said, even though this made absolutely no sense to her. Didn’t Mrs. O’Reilly want her to dump her father in a hospital, or the next best thing to a hospital? Wasn’t that what they had been talking about for the last five minutes? Dessa thought of her father tied to the bed that time, the harsh sound of his voice in the dark room, the stink of him as he soiled himself over and over again, the craziness.
“There was another one in the papers today,” Mrs. O’Reilly continued. “Old lady left in the emergency room at Yale New Haven. Left in her wheelchair. Name unknown. Address unknown. Relatives unknown. People just take them out and drop them off and never look back again.”
Oh, Dessa thought. That’s what she’s talking about. Granny dumping. “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “We’ve only got an hour to eat lunch, and I’m starving.”
“I’m sure you are. All that exercise. It works up an appetite.”
It was really supposed to suppress your appetite, but Dessa didn’t want to go into it, not with Mrs. O’Reilly on the phone, not with her father locked in the bathroom.
“I really have to go now,” she said. “Do you want me to call you back? Maybe at three?”
“There’s no need. If I have an emergency, I can call you.”
“All right. All right then. I’ll see you tonight.”
Mrs. O’Reilly was making mewling polite little sounds, the kinds of sounds that could keep this phone call going forever. Dessa said a firm good-bye and hung up. Then she stood stock-still in the hall and stared at the phone she had been talking into. She felt weak. In the old days, pay phones were in booths with seats in them. Why weren’t pay phones like that anymore? She knew the answer to that. Her father wasn’t the only one who was crazy. Everyone was crazy all the time now. They fed on each other.
Dessa pushed away from the phone and went down the hall into the foyer. She was too aware of how her flesh jiggled and swayed against the stretchy fabric of her leotard. It made her feel as if she were wearing body armor. Oddly enough, she wasn’t hungry anymore. The idea of going up to the dining room and facing a salad bar brought her close to despair. What she really felt was fear. I can’t handle this. I can’t stand this. I can’t do this, she thought, but she was too close to paralysis to be hysterical. She could see it stretching out in front of her for years. Her father, who was only seventy-two. That house, sinking into the landscape of crack parlors and pimp hotels the neighborhood had become. Mrs. O’Reilly.
Dessa was crossing the foyer to the curving staircase when Traci Cardinale appeared on the balcony. Traci walked up to an unbroken piece of balcony rail, seemed to make a determined effort not to be afraid of it, saw Dessa, and waved.
“There you are,” Traci said. “I was wondering where you’d got to. I went to the dining room, but you weren’t there.”
“I had to make a phone call.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to have done you any good. Come up and have lunch with me. You really have to keep your motivation in place around here, or the whole program falls apart.”
“My motivation’s all right, I think,” Dessa said. “My body seems to be on the verge of collapse.”
“That’s just your muscle tissue breaking down so that it can build itself up again,” Traci said earnestly. “That’s a very good sign. Come on to lunch.”
Dessa came on to lunch. She still wasn’t hungry, but she liked to listen to Traci talk.
Traci was always so positive about everything.
3
UP ON THE SECOND floor, Christie Mulligan wasn’t at lunch yet either. She was standing on the closed top of the toilet seat in the last stall to the left of the vanity mirrors in the members’ lavatory, trying to see her reflection in the polished glass of the small window near the ceiling. Tara and Michelle were out by the sinks, talking to each other. The small window was open, letting in streams of cold, raw air. Christie had her leotard pulled down around her waist and her bra off. She had her fingers on the wrong place in her left breast and she was kneading. It hasn’t gotten any bigger, she kept telling herself. Doesn’t that mean something? It means I must be right and the doctors must be wrong. The tests were false. The results were mistakes. Something went wrong at the laboratory and her medical card got mixed up with somebody elses’s.
“I think the whole bunch of them are weird,” Tara was saying to Michelle. “Especially that Virginia What’s-her-name. I think she’s psychotic.”
“I like Dessa Carter,” Michelle said. “And I like Greta Bellamy.”
Christie let her fingers relax. It was no bigger than it had been, but it hadn’t gone away, either. Maybe it was some kind of cyst. Maybe it was a strange form of bruise, an interior black eye, swollen and painful. Except that it didn’t hurt.
“I like Gregor Demarkian,” Tara was saying. “He’s the only person I’ve met since I got here who is the least bit interesting. Everybody else thinks tofu paste is a food.”
“Tofu paste is a food,” Michelle said.
“They’re like those kids at school who get so green, they’re practically frogs. Brazilian tree frogs that live in the rain forest, specifically. When we get out of here tonight, I’m going to go down to Happy Jack’s and buy myself a pepperoni pizza. Large.”
“I like that police detective,” Michelle said. “Tony Bandero. I think he’s very reassuring.”
“I think he’s a jerk,” Tara snorted. “He’s less like a cop than he is like a con man. I mean, I can just see him, can’t you, playing that walnut shell game down on the Green?”
“No,” Michelle said. “He reminds me of our police chief back in Waterville. He’s—avuncular. That’s the word. Like he’s got everybody’s best interests at heart but he’s a little embarrassed to show it.”
“Tony Bandero wouldn’t be embarrassed to show off his dick at high
noon in front of the Congregational Church. Christie, are you all right?”
Christie felt the wrong place one more time. It should be getting smaller, she thought. When was it going to start getting smaller? When was it just going to go away? She grabbed her sports bra and started to struggle into it. When she had it pulled all the way up, it made her chest look flat. She gripped the top of her leotard and started to pull that up, too.
“I’m fine,” she called out to Tara. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Hurry up, or we’ll be reduced to having nothing but Slim Jims for lunch. Instead of tofu paste and raw carrots.”
Tara would prefer the Slim Jims. Obviously. Now that her leotard was pulled up, Christie found it easier to see herself in the window. She thought she looked very elegant, thin and ethereal, better than she ever had before in her life.
“Here I come,” she said, stepping down off the top of the toilet seat. She opened the stall door and joined Tara and Michelle at the sinks. She looked at herself in the mirror and confirmed what she had thought when she had seen herself in the window glass. She did look thin and ethereal. She did look better than she ever had before in her life.
Tara didn’t seem to agree.
“Jesus Christ, Christie,” she said in disgust. “If I didn’t see you eat, I’d swear you were starving yourself to death. What are we trying for here, the Siege of Sarajevo aesthetic?”
It will go away, Christie told herself.
She didn’t say anything in answer to Tara at all.
SEVEN
1
THERE WAS ONE GOOD things about the kind of publicity that made you out to be a sage and an oracle, the man who had the answers to everything: most people wanted to believe it. Gregor Demarkian thought of that as he sat eating a hot turkey sandwich in a little restaurant on Chapel Street that faced the Green. One of Philip Brye’s clerks had dropped him off there, by request, when Gregor had finished at the medical examiner’s office. Gregor hadn’t wanted to go back to his motel. The idea of being stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, with no access to anything that was going on in town, made him shudder. On the other hand, he wasn’t ready to do anything serious. He wanted to think—and the best place for that was his apartment back on Cavanaugh Street. Barring that, he thought anonymity would be a good idea. Tony Bandero wouldn’t be able to find him sitting in this rickety chair at this rickety table next to this polished window. That is, if Tony Bandero was actually looking for him, which Gregor tended to doubt. The danger for Tony, as far as Gregor could figure out, was that now that Gregor was here, he might insist on doing something.