A pale and bulky man who looked like a refrigerator with red hair was steered in by a small lump of a woman who spoke around him, in the general direction of the desk. “He’s hurt. He was with the guys, and you know how they fight when they have a little too much to drink, and—”
The red-haired man tilted forward and smashed down onto his face.
“That’s what I mean,” his little pilot said calmly.
The woman behind the desk buzzed someone.
The elegant man in tails turned to our group. “Now we all know that old joke. First prize: a week in Philadelphia. Second prize: two weeks in Philadelphia. Third prize: three weeks. But I ask you, what precisely did we win? The booby prize?”
His cadaverous companion still sniffled about her impending end.
The film student/critter consultant also looked concerned. “I’m getting vibes from my babies. They need me. I have to get back to Connecticut,” she said.
“Babies?” The man in tails pronounced the word as if it were foul. “How many do you have?”
“Dozens!” the young woman said, perking up. She was definitely the happiest person in the emergency room. “Not people babies,” she chortled. “Critters.”
“Is that like varmints?” the receptionist asked.
“Nonhuman companions. That’s what the language Nazis call them these days.” The sophisticate in the tuxedo raised an eyebrow.
The girl in black blinked and wrinkled her forehead. “Critters,” she said in a small puzzled voice. “Doggies and kitties. I have this gift.”
I didn’t want to hear what the man in tails would make of her telepathic talents. Luckily, Sybil Zacaharias once again erupted and averted doggy-shrink redux.
“This whole business is completely and utterly ridiculous!” she said, quite loudly. “Disgusting, too. I’ll bet Lyle did this out of pure spite. Poisoned his own damn self and set it up to look like it was one of us. It would be just like him, especially now that I know he was losing his job.” She chuckled, a bit madly. “That’s what those stupid, saccharine invitations should have said: It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to.”
Her son looked at her as if she were a mutant life-form.
“Get it?” she asked.
“No offense,” my mother said, “but that’s a bit…hardhearted, don’t you think?”
I was still plodding through the form when a young Asian woman in a white jacket came out holding a clipboard. “I’m Dr. Lee,” she said. “And you are the…poisoned?” She looked at us, one by one. “What is it you’ve taken?”
We shrugged.
“Why do you think you were poisoned?”
“Because a man at the party we were at said he was.”
“Said?”
“Then he died. Or something. He certainly got sick.”
“And we ate the same food.”
The emergency room doctor, or resident, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, probably wishing for a nice, comprehensible knife fight or heart attack. “What, please, are your symptoms?” she eventually asked.
Janine cut to the chase and begged for a stomach pump while the dancer and a grumbly male voice overlapped one another with dire signs and my mother dithered, saying she actually felt fine, and Sybil Zacharias said the words patently ridiculous at least twice.
The doctor put up a hand. “One at a time!” She pointed at me. “What are your symptoms?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any.”
She scowled. Then she asked each of us in turn the same question. Aside from boredom, hunger, and being pissed off, the worst we came up with was shortness of breath, dizziness, and nausea.
“Those could all be symptoms of anxiety, which is understandable if a man has collapsed near you.” Her voice was flat and precise and not particularly enamored of us. “I want you all to take seats.”
Janine—theoretically close to death by now—elbowed her way to the chair nearest the swinging doors. “And then?” she asked.
“And then you will sit on those seats. If you develop any symptoms whatsoever, we’ll try to help you. But in the absence of any knowledge of what was ingested—if anything, by anyone—and with no symptoms, no distress, I cannot authorize gastric lavage, which is an invasive procedure.”
“I demand my rights!” Janine was back on her feet. “I pay taxes! We should have gone to a different hospital. This place has no respect!” Her husband seemed to be shrinking inside his ill-fitting suit. I kept imagining a male and innocuous version of the Wicked Witch of the West puddling down into nothingness. Since his outburst back in the dining room, he’d contented himself with no more than baleful glances.
“It is not your civil right to have a tube put down your esophagus,” the doctor said.
“But the police sent us here to—”
“If the policeman who sent you here has a medical degree, then have him join this hospital’s staff and I will definitely defer to him,” she snapped.
Poor Mackenzie. He’d meant well.
Janine continued to sputter. I wondered what rule of nature had decreed that there had to be an obligatory jerk in any random assemblage of people. I further wondered if Janine was aware that that was her function.
“You want an uncomfortable, gratuitous tube down your throat?” the doctor asked imperiously. “You want to have water pumped through you and out so that your stomach contents land in a bucket over and over again until the water runs clear? Do you know how you’ll feel afterward, let alone during?”
“I know how I feel right now,” the man in tails said. “I feel excellent! I feel marvelous! I can walk, I can breathe—Lord, Lord, a miracle!”
“Sit down.” The doctor’s emotionless voice now seemed writ in capitals. “Furthermore, just so you’ll understand: if the poison—if indeed there was ever a poison—is a corrosive, then lavage is contraindicated and potentially dangerous because the tube could perforate your tissues.”
Sybil looked horrified and even more outraged than she’d been.
“Tell me, precisely, the dead—the ill man’s symptoms,” the doctor said.
In a depressed voice with no affect, Terry Wiley listed Lyle’s symptoms with the professional precision of a high school science teacher. “Leg cramps—possible muscle spasms, sore throat, shortness of breath…” And on, including the rapid onset of both Lyle’s symptoms and collapse.
The doctor nodded.
“Food poisoning?” the dancer said in a squeaky, terrified voice.
“I can’t stop thinking,” my mother said. “What if my—”
“Shh!”
“But maybe the doctor would know if it’s possible for whipped cream to—”
“They’ll need to run tests,” the doctor said. “This man’s symptoms sound extreme. A purgative of some sort, perhaps. But if it’s food poisoning, and you’ve been eating the same foods, then by now somebody else should show real symptoms. That is generally how we recognize food poisoning, by the numbers of people getting ill.”
“But I have symptoms!” Janine insisted, immediately huffing and gagging, although for the last few minutes she’d been asymptomatic—too preoccupied with her right to be purged to have time to be ill.
“Otherwise, it could be something he ate earlier in the day, something nobody else had. Or it could be a stroke, or a heart attack, or a convulsion of some sort. There is no point second-guessing.”
“But!” Janine half rose.
“Sit down and wait!” The doctor turned on her rubber heels and went inside.
We didn’t all always stay seated, but we did wait. No matter how desperate you may ever be for something to do on a Sunday night in Philadelphia—don’t consider your neighborhood emergency room an option. At one point a brunette in hard labor was wheelchaired by. Her medical crisis, if not the woman herself, was at least cheery. But with that, the evening peaked. Three minutes later, a new entry was rushed in—something gory surrounded by police.
“Gunshot,” the admissions woman s
aid. “Crack, I bet. Crack or booze.” But the next entry in the night’s sweepstakes was neither. Two men braced a third, who slumped between them, an apple-sized lump on his head. “We were playing Nintendo,” was all they said by way of explanation.
A woman limped in, one arm dangling and a massive shiner puffing and discoloring half her face. “Fell down the stairs,” her male companion declared like a challenge. Eau de drunk filled the air.
And so it went. There may be a million stories in the city, but the ones that wind up in the emergency room are depressingly similar.
The elegant man in tails stood and bowed to the admissions clerk. “One hell of a party,” he said. “Hate to tear myself away, but hey, I appear to be not dead, and if I’m alive and intact, this is the last place I want to be. Are we dismissed? Discharged? Do we have to fill out some more forms to get out of here? We’re in a hurry to return to our wild whirlwind evening, you see. Our bus and further questioning awaits.”
She looked at the rest of us. She buzzed the doctor behind the swinging doors on an intercom. It appeared that none of our hosts this interminable night was eager to stay with us for long. We were out of there.
“Do you think they’ll let us finish our meals now?” asked the man in tails who’d made all the anti-Philadelphia remarks.
Janine bonked him on the head, hitting him—accidentally, I assumed—with a clunky bracelet cuff, a formidable business that looked made of chain mail and that behaved like a small saw. The poor man had to stay behind to be sewn up, and, perhaps, call his lawyer.
One should never antagonize a whiny woman who has been thwarted in her quest for a stomach pump.
Eight
Even from inside the van, several things were obvious as soon as we pulled up to The Boarding House. Our cool welcome at the hospital had not been unique. All the other vans had also been turned back with their revelers’ stomachs unpumped. Second, since we were all still alive, albeit grumpy and hungry, it seemed probable that none of us had been poisoned. Third, our places in the bed and breakfast had been usurped by the city’s finest, which meant that the party was emphatically over, and only the bureaucracy lingered on. And finally, since the process outside and inside seemed to indicate that an investigation was under way, it appeared Lyle Zacharias had not miraculously recovered.
The bedraggled guests avoided the rain by huddling in the vans until it was time to open umbrellas and dash out and under The Boarding House’s bright green awning and identify themselves to the police waiting there.
Locking the hotel door a little late, I thought. They might as well let us in now. We’d done all possible damage earlier, long before they’d arrived. All we could do now was drip on whatever evidence we hadn’t already obliterated. But the police nonetheless kept party guests outside the crime scene, and dutifully requested vital statistics, individual accounts of Lyle’s collapse, and whatever other gossip people felt compelled to share. Only after the drilling was payment given—their own searched purses and suitcases, as well as permission to leave the premises.
The out-of-towners who’d been booked into The Boarding House looked especially distraught. Wet, dripping, and now homeless. This was not going to help our city’s tourism business.
I looked out the rain-smeared window of the bus, watching a woman’s gown hem wick up an entire puddle.
I waited while guests moved out from under the green awning like long-legged turtles under the domes of their umbrellas. Finally it was time for my mother and me. We raced to the awning and our policemen and recited our names, addresses, and visions of the night’s events.
I heard my mother convey an amazing body of irrelevant details, such as each guest’s marital status and the geographic locations of their grown children.
“Yes, ma’am,” her policeman kept saying to her, long after I was finished. “Thank you, but I think we have everything we need. Now this address here, that’s Boca Raton, right?”
“That means mouse mouth,” she said. “Boca Raton.”
The policeman’s expression was untranslatable.
“In Spanish it means mouse mouth,” she said.
“Yes’m. Florida, isn’t it? I was wondering if you had a local address as well, that’s all.”
She wrote Beth’s phone and street numbers on the form.
“Please don’t leave town without notifying us,” the policeman said by way of farewell.
“Why?”
He played deaf and ignored her. I pulled at my mother’s arm like a two-year-old. She moved a few steps, then stopped and asked again. “Why? Why can’t I leave town without telling the police?”
“It’s routine,” I said. “Don’t you watch cop movies?”
“They didn’t say anything like that to you!”
“He meant it for both of us.”
She clenched her hands. “It’s something about me.”
“You’re being silly, Mom. Paranoid.” The rain pounded on the green canvas above us. “Let me take you home.” But as we walked by the front door, I heard suspiciously Southern vowels and my pace slowed. Mackenzie himself was on the scene. Seeing him would be the one good thing about tonight, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him to meet Bea of Mouse Mouth or vice versa.
“I demand to know what that policeman was insinuating,” my mother said. “I’m from Florida, yes, but I’m a citizen, too! I—” She stopped herself short because Richard Quinn had completed his taciturn tête-à-tête with the police and had noticed us.
“So,” he said to me, “are we—this Lyle business makes it…but—you know, tomorrow?”
“What about it?”
“The restaurant.”
Slowly, the brain gears and levers cranked up. The prom site. “I think so,” I said.
I could almost feel the strain as my mother tried to translate our klutzy syntax. Was this good or bad for her daughter? Was this, in fact, anything at all?
“I’ll be around,” Quinn said. “They told me not to leave town.”
“Ah!” my mother said. “You, too!”
Quinn smiled somewhat uneasily. He rubbed his chin, as if checking his shave. “Six okay?” he asked. I nodded.
“See you then.” And he loped off.
My mother smiled with delighted miscomprehension. A man, a time, a meeting—it must mean a date. The distress of being a possible murder suspect evaporated in the balmy warmth of the idea of my having an assignation with Richard Quinn—or, frankly, anyone. “Nice young man,” she murmured after he had blended into the rain.
I looked at her sharply. I don’t mean to be an ageist, but although fifty was a splendid age, it was not one generally equated with youth. And who had any idea of whether he was nice or not? Did my mother automatically equate nice with available?
“And obviously interested in you,” she added.
“He’s opening a restaurant. On the water, with a big room to rent for parties upstairs.”
“How lovely,” she said. “Much more stable than acting, too.”
“This is not what you think. This is about business.”
My mother waved away my words. “Age becomes irrelevant once you’re a grown-up,” she said. “Don’t you agree?”
What was this grown-up business? A euphemistic reminder that I was getting old? My thirty-first birthday was imminent, true, but surely that was not old. Or grown-up. Grown-ups do not obsess about the meaning of every little phrase their mothers utter. “You know the expression too stupid to come in out of the rain?” I asked her. “Let’s go home.”
“Perhaps we should use the powder room before we set out,” she said in true motherly fashion.
“Perhaps not. It’s a crime scene, Mom. That’s why they’re interviewing everybody outside. I don’t think we can just bop in and ask to use the facilities.”
Talk about ambivalence. I really wanted to hear Mackenzie’s bayou-dusted sentences, but considering my mother’s misguided ecstasy when Richard Quinn mentioned seeing me again, what excessive, mo
rtifying behavior would greet a man who had demonstrated actual interest in me for nearly a year? As bad as this evening had already been, it was possible for it to skid even further downhill. “We’ll stop for coffee somewhere else, okay?” I said. “Somewhere clean and crime-free and with a bathroom.”
She agreed and we both poked our umbrellas out in front of us and opened them. I’d manipulated her out of the danger zone.
But as observed by a famous philosopher—one of the Beatles, I believe—life is what happens while you’re making other plans. I was so busy congratulating myself, I barely heard him say, “That you? You’re okay, then?”
My mother heard, however. “Me?” she said. “Oh, God, is that a policeman? Is he talking to me? He isn’t wearing a uniform, but he’s in there, so—”
I could no longer pretend not to hear. I turned and faced him. “Hi, there,” I said. “I’m fine. We all are, it seems.”
My mother applied her elbow to my rib cage. I felt it all the way through the down. “Oh, right,” I said. “This is my mother, Bea Pepper, and this is, ah…Detective Mackenzie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry it has to be under these circumstances. My job’s not too…sociable, unfortunately.” Light blue eyes fixed on her, he continued with more of the same, his voice soft and soothing as a summer night.
My mother apparently found looking at Mackenzie as pleasing an experience as I did. Her face softened into bedazzled appreciation.
Having conquered her, Mackenzie switched personas. The once and future cop was back. That balanced out the long lean frame and abundant charm. “By the way,” he said, “was Roy Beecher on your van? The man who owns this place?”
I shook my head. “Why?”
“He’s missin’. Last seen, took off for cigarettes. Never came back.”
I remembered the leave-taking, but I was surprised that he hadn’t returned. He’d been so protective of his daughter. Besides, permanently disappearing in pursuit of cigarettes was a husband’s ploy, not a father’s.
“Daughter’s in a bad way.”
Physically, Lizzie gave an impression of so much life and vitality—scrubbed fair skin and red curls popping out of the bandanna head cover—except, it appeared, she wasn’t fully inhabiting herself at all. “She seems really fragile.”
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