Last Run

by Hilary Norman

  Yet in spite of the flowers and herbs, there was an absence of the cosiness Grace might have expected in this woman’s house, which only seemed to compound her new sadness for Lucia, emphasizing her solitary state, her lack of family. Everything neat and in its place, the antithesis of the Lucca-Becket household, making Grace more thankful than ever for the rich overcrowding of home.

  ‘Tea,’ Lucia said, leading the way into her kitchen. ‘My special.’

  ‘Let me help.’

  ‘No,’ Lucia said. ‘I’m better keeping busy.’

  ‘I know that feeling,’ Grace said.

  She looked around at more white surfaces, softened only by herbs, the air lightly fragranced with their myriad scents, and she recognized a few, those she used in her own cooking: rosemary, sweet basil, mint, thyme, and saffron perhaps, though she was less sure of that, and coriander and . . .

  She shook her head, cut away from the compelling aromas back to Lucia, who had filled an old-fashioned white enamel kettle from a spring water dispenser; Grace was accustomed to Lucia insisting on using bottled, not tap water to make her herb teas when she was at the office.

  ‘The first time I’ve been able to make you a true tisanci,’ she said, turning on the gas beneath the kettle. ‘Very simple, of course, if you’re using leaves or seeds or flowers; just pour boiling water over and steep.’ She nodded towards a white cooking pot standing on a low light beside the kettle. ‘If you’re using harder seeds or berries, or sometimes bark, it takes longer to release the oils.’

  ‘So many scents,’ Grace said. ‘I’ve been trying to identify them.’

  ‘Some you never could,’ Lucia said, ‘unless you were a herbalist yourself.’

  ‘I hadn’t quite understood – ’ Grace looked around, took in the shelves of small white porcelain apothecary jars, the mortar and pestle on the worktop, the scales – ‘how important this was to you.’

  ‘It’s just a hobby.’ Lucia indicated the white table and chairs. ‘Please, Dr Lucca, take the weight off your feet. I’ll bring the tea across in a moment.’

  ‘I thought we’d got past this,’ Grace said gently. ‘Please call me Grace.’

  ‘Old habits,’ Lucia said.

  It was a relief to sit down, though Grace felt that the tension still building inside her would only begin to be eased once they started talking properly.

  She knew, already, that she would not have to push hard.

  ‘You know.’

  That had said it all, or had at least begun the process.

  However much Lucia might or might not know about the things Kez had done, whatever the help Kez had spoken of to Cathy might have involved, Lucia was almost ready to talk.

  Needed to talk.

  All Grace had to do was wait.

  Saul was awake and agitated again. His drug levels had been decreased, partly to prevent future dependency, but his stress levels were inevitably rising again, and he was running a slight fever.

  ‘Nothing to be concerned about,’ Lucy Khan had told David when he’d come in a while ago, and had peered at him critically. ‘You’re looking very tired, Dr Becket. Couldn’t one of the others take over for a while?’

  ‘Sam and Cathy are both still out of town,’ David had said. ‘And I’ve told Grace to take things a little easier for a while.’

  He liked Lucy Khan a lot, but he didn’t know her well enough to share their new family emergency.

  ‘What about Saul’s girlfriend?’ Lucy Khan had persisted.

  ‘Terri called me an hour or so ago,’ David was glad to tell her something positive. ‘She’s on her way back to Miami.’

  He had given Saul that piece of good news as soon as he’d come into his room, and it had certainly helped, but David could see in his eyes that nothing less than Terri’s and the rest of his family’s physical presence in his room would convince him that they were all truly safe and well.

  Given that David felt much the same himself, he couldn’t blame Saul.

  It had begun, Lucia was telling Grace, with a cat.

  ‘You hear, don’t you, that these things start out with animals.’

  These things.

  The words alone made Grace feel abruptly sick, brought the reality of what she now realized she was going to hear sharply, horribly into focus.

  ‘Kez was staying with me here in this house,’ Lucia was saying, ‘when it happened. She was very upset – I’d never seen my niece so upset. Yet the fact that she blamed the creature rather than herself should have been an early warning – what they call a wake-up call these days.’

  They had moved, with their teacups, into the sitting room, where Grace had noticed a group of photographs on a lamp table in the corner, some of Phil Busseto, and some of a baby girl with curly dark hair. Not Kez.

  Christina, the daughter, she supposed.

  ‘Why did you never tell me that you had a child?’ she asked gently.

  ‘Because I’ve never been able to bear the pain of talking about Christina.’

  ‘And was your niece named for her?’ Grace saw no purpose in prevaricating. ‘Was Tina your pet name for Kez?’

  Lucia shook her head. ‘Kez was born Kerry, as you probably know, to Phil’s sister Gina and her husband Joey Flanagan. Kez was what she called herself as a small child, and after that everyone used it.’

  ‘And Tina?’ Grace was fascinated now.

  ‘Tina – ’ Lucia’s small smile was sad – ‘was my fantasy.’

  The candour of her admission both surprised and impressed Grace.

  ‘Tina Busseto.’ The first hint of tears had sprung to Lucia’s brown eyes. ‘My “good” niece. A fine young person.’

  ‘The kind of person,’ Grace ventured, ‘Christina might have become.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Lucia said.

  ‘You used to say that Tina lived in Naples.’

  Lucia nodded and sipped her tea.

  ‘The photograph,’ Grace said, ‘that used to stand on your desk in the office.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucia said. ‘That was taken in our apartment in Naples.’

  ‘Of you and Kez?’ Grace wanted to be certain.

  Again, Lucia nodded. ‘She grew up over there with Gina and Joey. And then after Joey died and Gina didn’t really want to be a mom any more, Phil and I took over the payments on the Naples apartment, and paid for a housekeeper, and had Kez over to stay with us as often as was practical.’

  ‘Lucky for Gina to have you,’ Grace said. ‘And wonderful for Kez.’

  Or maybe not, went through her mind.

  ‘So that was how you found out,’ Lucia said, ‘about my being her aunt. From the photograph.’ She paused. ‘You opened my drawer – you must have, to see it. You’d never have remembered, otherwise.’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘I’m sorry for invading your privacy.’

  Lucia shrugged. ‘I should have taken it away. I wonder why I didn’t.’ She paused again. ‘Maybe I wanted you to know.’

  ‘Maybe you did.’ Grace looked down at her shoulder bag. ‘I brought the photograph with me, in case you wanted it.’

  ‘You keep it,’ Lucia said. ‘You never know, you might find a use for it.’

  They sat for a few moments in silence.

  ‘It went on from there.’ Lucia returned to the past. ‘You know how it can be; the more you do for some people, the more they expect. Gina was like that. We put Kez through school and encouraged her with her running, and then later, when she went to Trent, I helped her get her own place in the Grove because Gina had gone off with another man by then and Phil was dead.’

  ‘But you still kept the Naples apartment.’

  ‘Because I knew by then,’ Lucia said steadily, ‘that Kez needed it.’ She paused. ‘She always went there afterward. Like a creature going to a burrow to lick its wounds.’

  Afterward.

  The word and its implications and, even more, Lucia’s unnatural calmness, the total absence of any pretence or denial, jarred Grace’s own co
mposure, fragile as it was.

  ‘I know that Kez did terrible things,’ Lucia continued. ‘But I always felt that she was wounded, too.’ She paused. ‘Is your tea all right, Grace?’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Grace drank some, hardly aware of its taste, just sipping it to be polite, the way she often did. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I said Tina was my fantasy niece and that’s true, because of course she never existed. Yet there was a kind of crossover between Tina and Kez, with them “sharing” that Naples apartment, and of course I loved them both.’ She sipped her own tea. ‘I did love Kez, with all my heart, but I knew she was a bad person.’

  ‘From what little Cathy’s told me,’ Grace said gently, ‘she was unwell.’

  ‘No doubt about it,’ Lucia said. ‘She had this sickness – I looked it up in your books, read all about a disorder – body dysmorphic disorder – that seemed to describe her problems.’ She sighed. ‘She thought she was ugly, you know.’

  ‘I wish you’d talked to me about it,’ Grace said. ‘If Kez did suffer from that, it’s a very cruel syndrome. Some people suffer from it in relation to specific parts of their body – often the face, sometimes the whole body.’

  ‘Not too many go around killing people because of it, though, do they?’

  Grace said nothing.

  ‘Silence,’ Lucia said. ‘Standard psychologist’s reaction.’ Her smile was very wry. ‘This must be hard for you. You’re being very kind, considering.’

  ‘You’re my friend,’ Grace said.

  ‘Kez did a terrible thing to Saul,’ Lucia said.

  ‘But she did it, not you. And as we’ve already agreed, Kez was very sick.’

  ‘I’ll bet your husband doesn’t feel like that,’ Lucia said.

  ‘Perhaps not yet,’ Grace said.

  ‘Perhaps not ever,’ Lucia said.

  One of the parts of the process Sam knew he was going to have to go through was seeing a shrink – and not his wife.

  He had killed a woman. Whether or not it was finally decreed just or wrongful, he had still caused Kez Flanagan’s death. Cops in such situations, whether they readily admitted distress or not, were, for the most part, well looked after. They would be seen by the appropriate physicians or psychologists, partly for their own good, partly for the purposes of reports that would either sit on their files or, on occasions, be used in a court of law.

  Sam supposed that a shrink was probably a good idea. He could not imagine returning to work without resolving at least some of his self-doubt. Was not certain, any longer, about his fitness for his job.

  A man trusted with a firearm had no business acting as he had. No real doubt in his mind about that, even if he had done it because he had believed Cathy in grievous danger. Especially since he thought that, given the identical set of circumstances, he would probably do the same again.

  But if that made him unfit to be a policeman, was he any more fit to be a husband and father? Was a man who’d done what he had, but who felt no real shame, entitled to bring new life into the world?

  The prospect of going home – when they let him – unnerved him because going home would mean spending real time with Cathy. Not just snatched moments; swift supportive exchanges in the presence of, or hiding out from, other police officers and attorneys and counsellors.

  All too soon there would be no one left to suppress the hate that had to be living, had to be, quiet but primed in Cathy’s heart. Because no matter what she had said so far, Sam had wiped out her lover.

  Far worse than that, he suspected, her love.

  And how could she truly forgive him for that?

  ‘The day it really began,’ Lucia said, ‘was the day her father died.’

  Up until then, she said, no one – just the cat – had lost their life. There had been fights, Kez had got into some trouble because of her temper, but no one had been badly hurt. No one had been killed.

  ‘Until Kez walked in on Joey while he was making love to Lindy Jerszinsky – his and Gina’s next-door-neighbour – and Lindy laughed at her – sneered at her, Kez told me. And Kez always had this problem with being laughed at, you see.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘Cathy told me that much.’

  ‘Did she tell you what Kez did to Lindy?’ Lucia shook her head. ‘I didn’t think so.’ She was silent for a moment, and very still. ‘She took a pair of scissors from her mother’s dressing table and she stuck them in that woman’s mouth, all the way in.’

  Grace felt sick.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lucia said. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t. . .’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘You need to talk.’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ Lucia said. ‘And then Joey had a heart attack and died, and Kez went to the phone and called her Aunt Lucia.’

  ‘Not her uncle?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Kez never confided in Phil, always in me. She always seemed to know I was the one who would help her.’ Lucia shook her head. ‘I knew what a huge decision I was making. I know now that it was the wrong decision, but back then, with this poor little girl crazy and covered in blood it seemed like the only thing to do.’

  Grace waited a moment. ‘And now, all these years later, what do you think you should have done differently?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know,’ Lucia said wearily. ‘If I’d known someone like you, told them, they’d have had to call the cops – same thing if I had called Dr Becket – and that would have been the end for Kez.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Grace said.

  ‘You think?’ Lucia was ironic.

  ‘What about Gina?’

  ‘She’d have had hysterics, thought of herself, not Kez. Whereas I’d already betrayed my own daughter by letting her die – I knew I could never let down another child depending on me.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Grace said.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Grace felt intrigued, despite herself. ‘So what did you do, Lucia?’

  ‘I called Phil. He’d once done time for fraud, you know. He’d been squeaky clean ever since, but he still knew people back then, and he knew how important Kez was to me, so he kept Gina out of the way and paid to have the whole scene taken care of – I don’t know how, never wanted to either.’

  The intrigue was all gone now. Grace felt chilled to the bone.

  ‘But Phil told me after that if Kez ever did anything bad again, anything at all, it would be down to her and her mother, nothing to do with us.’

  ‘And Gina never found out?’

  ‘Only about Joey’s heart attack,’ Lucia said. ‘Lindy Jerszinsky had “gone away unexpectedly”, or whatever Phil’s pals had arranged. I don’t think Gina ever had an inkling of what was happening inside her daughter’s head. And as Kez grew up and went on having her . . . episodes . . . she knew better than to tell her mother, and it was always her Aunt Lucia she turned to instead.’

  ‘But Phil had said never again.’ Grace paused. ‘So what did he say the next time Kez came to you for help?’

  ‘He died,’ Lucia said.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Terri was back in Miami, exhausted and drained, but needing, more than anything, to see Saul before she could think of going home to rest.

  His expression when he saw her walk through the door was enough to heat her right through, enough to lighten her load, ease her fatigue and make her certain – if there had been any real question – that she had done the right thing by helping Cathy and avenging him.

  ‘Hi, baby,’ she said, light and bright as if she’d come from a shopping trip, bypassing his dad, going straight to the bed, gladder than she’d ever been in her life to see anyone. No doubts left about how much she loved him, she knew that now, though she was not certain that Saul, when he could speak again, would agree with her actions.

  Not an eye-for-an-eye type of guy, her Saul, nor likely to appreciate her having put herself in danger, especially not for his sake. Maybe for Cathy’s sake, he might go for that – or maybe he might just
understand how it had been for her, simply because he loved her. That much, anyway, was clear in his eyes.

  The rest of them, his family and Internal Affairs – anyone else who didn’t approve of or understand what she had done – could all go hang.

  Lucia had made more tea and invited Grace out on to her deck, and now they were sitting on neat white chairs near the glasshouse, not far from where the sleek speedboat was moored.

  Its name, Grace now saw, neatly lettered, was Christina.

  ‘It’s a relief,’ Lucia said, ‘to talk.’

  ‘Talk as much,’ Grace said, ‘or as little as you want to.’

  ‘I’ve learned over the years that people can’t, for the most part, be trusted. Kez knew, instinctively, early on, that she couldn’t trust her own mother.’ Lucia paused. ‘I learned that I couldn’t trust my husband.’

  ‘But Phil did so much to help Kez,’ Grace said.

  ‘Only the first time. The next time he refused.’

  She could have coped with that on its own, Lucia told Grace. She did cope, felt that she had no choice but to help Kez by herself, though it cost her, physically and emotionally as well as financially – not that the money bothered her; she’d have found that, somehow, even if she hadn’t had enough to manage.

  ‘But Phil wouldn’t leave it at that,’ she went on. ‘He said we had to go to the police, turn Kez in. He said it was his decision to make, after all, because she was his niece, his sister’s kid, his family.’

  A breeze sprang up, enough to ruffle their hair and stir the palms and ripple the water, gently rocking the Christina.

  ‘I couldn’t let that happen,’ Lucia said.

  Grace sat motionless. She had believed in coming here that the very worst thing she might discover was that Lucia had aided and abetted her niece by shielding her in some way.

  Worse was on the way, she realized now, much worse.

  ‘I couldn’t betray Kez,’ Lucia went on. ‘Partly for her, but also – ’ she gave a wry shrug – ‘believe me, I know how irrational this sounds, but partly because I remember feeling as if Christina wanted me to help her cousin.’

  Grace said nothing.

  ‘So that was that,’ Lucia said. ‘I knew what had to happen. It was only a question of how.’