With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  Mackenzie belatedly noticed the rain and chill air. “Whyn’t you come in?” he asked. “Dry off. Warm up. Besides, you’re good with kids. Maybe she’d talk to you more easily than to us. Can’t make any sense of her.”

  We entered a building where somebody had just died, where even now sobbing could be heard, but my mother, ordinarily a sensitive woman, suddenly lit up and beamed. “You’re Chuck!” she said with delight. “Chuck Mackenzie. I didn’t realize!” She cooed, she simpered. “I’m thrilled to finally meet you! Mandy has told me so much about you.”

  Behind her back I shook my head. I hadn’t. Not even that his name wasn’t Chuck. It’s difficult knowing a man for nearly a year and not yet knowing his given name. It’s impossible to explain to my mother, so I had one day declared him Chuck. I thought he’d be so offended, he’d break down and confess the real name, but he only laughed. The no-name business has become a joke between us—but I knew it wouldn’t amuse Mom.

  “An’ Mandy’s told me lots about you, too.” The faux Chuck maneuvered her into The Boarding House living room. “An’ I sure hope we can clean up this ugly business fast so”—I couldn’t believe it; he was using TV cop dialogue on her—“we can spend time together under less taxin’ circumstances real soon.” His accent was being troweled on so that his words were thick liquid honey.

  “Oh, my.” My mother had been lobotomized. “Please—your work is so important, you must get back to it!”

  Mackenzie made a good show of reluctance about the prospect of leaving her.

  “So Roy Beecher didn’t put himself on any of the vans, then?” he said to me. “Didn’t think so. Accordin’ to his girl, he didn’t eat dinner, anyway. Too jet-lagged.”

  “Is that Lizzie I hear?” I asked.

  Mackenzie nodded. “Actin’ real odd. Not hysterical, really, but distant, disoriented.”

  “In shock, perhaps?” my mother said.

  Mackenzie shrugged and nodded at the same time, wordlessly conveying agreement and confusion at the degree of shock, perhaps.

  I remembered Lizzie’s peculiar reaction to seeing Lyle sprawled on the dining room floor. And then there’d been the odd scene in the kitchen before dinner, when she seemed to slip out of gear. “Does she have a history of epilepsy?” I asked. “I once had a student whose attacks were like a needle getting stuck on a record. Maybe Lizzie—”

  “That sweet child.” My mother stood up. “What a dreadful thing to happen. Her reputation and her career at stake—this certainly isn’t going to help anything. Let me see if I can be of any use.

  “Mom, listen, you aren’t supposed to—” But Mackenzie nodded at her.

  “Maybe she’ll tell you her doctor’s name,” he said, “or tell us if there’s some medical condition. She gets crazy when we suggest takin’ her to the hospital. Won’t leave until she finds her father.” My mother left the room, her cheeks flushed with purpose.

  “What’s going on?” We both said it the second she was gone.

  I deferred. “I can’t get a straight story,” he said. “Maybe fifty straight stories, but who am I to—”

  “How come you let everybody leave? The police didn’t ask all that many questions. Wouldn’t you want to know where—what—whatever it is that you always want to know?”

  Mackenzie ran his fingers through his salt and pepper hair. It’s a good thing it’s curly and rearranges itself or he’d look like a spiked rock star at the end of the day. “We have their names,” he said. “We have their accounts of what they saw and heard. But even though I’d like it to be like an English country house mystery, too, with all fifty of us sittin’ around comparin’ accounts, don’ see how we can. Fifty witnesses…” He shook his head. “Fifty witnesses, when I don’ even know what they witnessed, what to ask about, whether there even was a crime, or whether whatever somebody tells me is a lie and a cover-up. I’ll tell you, if I were goin’ to murder someone, I’d do it just this way. It’s a mess. An’ even if we knew what to ask more’n we did, we don’ have the manpower to do it. The President’s in town.”

  “Right. Fund-raiser.”

  “So we have fifty people we don’ know what to ask, an’ a missin’ man, a kid on some weird trip, and an old lady—”

  “Oh, Lord—Aunt Hattie? She was hysterical when we left. Screaming at Lizzie, blaming her for Lyle’s death. I know she’s distraught, Lyle was her very life, but all the same…”

  “Under sedation now,” Mackenzie said. “Couldn’t get a worthwhile syllable out of her while she was awake. Had to take her to the hospital. I hope she’s strong enough to pull out of it.” His sigh was enormous. “So you tell me, Mandy. What happened? What’d you see?”

  I tried to remember everything potentially relevant, although everything I said had already been told to the patrolman outside, and nothing I said was what we needed to know. All I’d seen were the aftereffects.

  “Should have been the best night of his life,” Mackenzie said. “Instead, it was his last.”

  “Those aren’t necessarily contradictory ideas, you know.”

  “You mean Housman’s poem?”

  “And people complain about cultural illiteracy. Can you imagine?” “To an Athlete Dying Young” was a favorite of my students. The issue it raised—whether it was better to die at the moment of triumph or to trudge on through a life where “glory does not stay”—intrigued adolescents, who love the idea of going out in a melodramatic blaze, and never intend to age, anyway. But postadolescent, graying Mackenzie still remembered it well enough to paraphrase:

  “Now he will not swell the rout

  Of lads that wore their honors out.”

  Although he was a cum laude graduate of Rice University and some pretty effective schools before that, I always pictured him memorizing poems from a chalk slate in a one-room shack down in the bayous of Louisiana, and the image, false as it is, touches my heart. Nonetheless, this particular poem was inappropriate. “Lyle was hardly a lad, Mackenzie. Nobody calls a man of fifty a lad.” Why did I have to keep reminding people that fifty was a considerably grown age?

  “Did anybody leave at any point?” Mackenzie asked.

  “What? When? Leave where?”

  He looked disappointed. It was a breeze for him to leap from Housman to homicide, and he expected me to follow without a stumble.

  I felt insulted, but I plodded on. “Leave what?” I asked. “The living room? The dining room? The building?”

  “All of the above.”

  “I do wish somebody had told me there was going to be a murder. I would have paid more attention to what was going on around me and less to how much I didn’t want to be there in the first place.” I recited what I did remember, although I didn’t know if what I said was in any way relevant.

  “Very helpful,” he said when I was finished. “Let’s see if I got it.” He tried to imitate my mid-Atlantic accent. He sounded like a Southerner with a sinus condition, and I would have laughed had I been in a more humorous mood. “Just about everybody got up and milled around between courses—and maybe also left the room. And”—he pushed hard on the final d, talking Yankee—“and everybody was in and out before dinner, too. That it?”

  “I told you. I didn’t know to be on red alert.”

  His expression made it clear that he’d have noticed and remembered each detail no matter how tedious the evening.

  “These questions,” I said, “and the fact that nobody except Lyle was affected—it was deliberate, then, wasn’t it? He was poisoned.”

  He shrugged. “Tha’s the assumption. We’ll know soon enough. Took samples of everythin’ edible, even candy and gum in people’s bags. If it was poisonin’, we have a head start, which is unusual. Don’t customarily know what people ate, or else we can’t get actual samples.”

  “I can’t imagine you’ll find anything in that food—or why didn’t anybody else get sick?” We walked toward the back of the building. “How do you justify having these men here—especially
with the President in town—investigating what might not be a murder in the first place?”

  “I’ll find some way, but the real justification”—he made that word gorgeous and somehow sexy—“was I was worried about you.” He looked at me so directly, it felt like an embrace. I was glad my mom wasn’t in the room. His genuine concern had the same effect on my central nervous system as his southern elision had on my mother. The same effect his southern elision had on me, now that I think about it.

  “Real worried,” he said. “But maybe I overreacted.”

  “The emergency room people were not amused.”

  “Pity. You’d think they could use a laugh, an’ there is definitely somethin’ comic in a passel of people dressed to the nines charging the stomach pumps—or am I warped?”

  “Not warped, but a little overprotective, perhaps.”

  “Protective,” he grumbled. “Not excessively so. Besides, when a guy says he’s poisoned, then crumples up and dies, there’s enough presumption of a crime for me.” He looked relieved, as if he’d just this second finally found a solid rationale for his actions.

  The dining room had yellow crime-scene tape across its entry. I wondered what anybody expected to find or prove at this point. A few steps ahead, on the other side, the kitchen was similarly proscribed. We went into a small bedroom behind it, once probably meant for the kitchen maid, now seemingly Lizzie’s.

  She sat on an old-fashioned and unpretentious white chenille bedspread. My mother sat beside her, offering an ignored glass of water, and a blue-uniformed officer across the room leaned on a chest of drawers. I had the feeling nobody had moved in a long while.

  “I want my father,” Lizzie whispered as we approached. Her normally fair skin looked spectral, as if the blood had been drained off, with freckled punctuation marks in high relief. Her hands were folded on her lap, on the white apron she still wore.

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up in a moment,” my mother said, continuing to hold out the glass of water, as if it were a cure-all.

  I stayed at the doorway. Lizzie looked as young and vulnerable as the kids I teach. Only four or five years out of high school, she looked defeated as well. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked softly.

  She turned her head in my direction although her eyes seemed unfocused.

  I went closer to the bed and took her hand in both of mine, unsure of what to say.

  “Did you see?” she whispered. “All down there on the floor, on my floor, at my feet, all…” She shook her head and bit at her upper lip. “I can’t breathe, I…” She pulled her hand out of mine and put it to her temple. “Head hurts, and my stomach…” She whimpered, hands still to her head. “All down there on the floor. Like that.”

  Mackenzie looked at me, raising his eyebrows, his chin pushed forward. I read the expression easily. This is how she’s been, he was signaling. What do we make of it?

  I truly didn’t know. I wondered if Lizzie had always, or at least of late, been unbalanced, although I doubted that her father would have left the hotel in her control while he flew off had she always behaved this bizarrely. Tonight had pushed her off the edge. Maybe she needed to be taken somewhere for psychiatric help. “What happened is terrible,” I told her, “but nobody blames you.” Except Aunt Hattie, I silently added.

  Lizzie’s sob was heartbreakingly thorough.

  “What’s the name of your family physician again?” I asked, taking unfair advantage of her misery.

  “Dr. Burlinghouse?” she asked. “What about him?”

  Mackenzie looked as if I’d found the cure for the common cold. I stored that look away for future use.

  Thank heavens Lizzie’s doctor had an unusual name. Now if only he was in town and not on vacation, and willing to accept middle-of-the-night phone calls. I looked up. My mother had disappeared, and I knew she’d gone in search of a telephone book.

  “Miss, um, Chapman,” Mackenzie said, “we’d be glad to take you to the doctor, and I’m sure Miss Peppah here would go along and—”

  “No!” The wail was stretched tight with impending hysteria. “Don’t make me leave! Don’t take me away! Please!”

  I looked at Mackenzie, wondering if he found her responses as peculiar and inappropriate as I did. My firsthand crime-scene experience was distinctly limited. Perhaps people often became semicoherent and regressed to near-infantile speech and behavior.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Mackenzie said to her.

  “I didn’t do it!”

  “Do what?”

  A worried line appeared between her golden-red eyebrows. “My father knows I didn’t.”

  “What?” Mackenzie asked again.

  “What?” Her eyes were wide and fearful now.

  “Didn’t what?” he said. “What didn’t you do?” They sounded like a bad Abbott and Costello routine, and we were getting nowhere.

  “I didn’t…I don’t know.” She slumped and became almost slack-mouthed, as if her brief burst of confused energy had drained her. Shaking her head, the confusion line between her eyebrows etched even more deeply, she retreated into a remote semistupor.

  My mother returned with the Yellow Pages. But she returned by a side door.

  “Mom?” I said. “Where were you?”

  “The phone book was in the kitchen. There’s a door that leads directly in here.”

  “Did you notice that yellow police tape on the kitchen doorway?” I asked.

  She looked insulted. “Of course. I didn’t disturb it. I crawled underneath, very carefully. Anyway, I have Dr. Burlinghouse’s number.” She handed the information to Mackenzie, who looked about to say something, but apparently decided against it. He went into the hall instead.

  My mother jerked her head, signaling me to come close, which I did, afraid of what she’d say out loud otherwise.

  “The tarts are gone,” she whispered.

  “You told me before.”

  “Not just the ones on the plate, although even that plate’s gone. But the tin, too. The entire tin. They suspect me.”

  “Mom, they took everything. Just to be sure. Relax.” If I wasn’t careful, there’d soon be two women keening on the bedspread.

  I heard dialing at the nearby front desk, and then Mackenzie’s soft voice. “Have him call soon as possible,” he said. Burlinghouse was elsewhere.

  “I never meant to,” Lizzie said. “I never meant to!”

  “Of course you didn’t,” my mother said, as if this were the most normal of conversations. “And in fact, you didn’t mean to and you didn’t. Do it, I mean.”

  “Didn’t I?” Lizzie asked as Mackenzie reentered. “So what? My head hurts. I’m so mixed up.”

  Me, too.

  I tried for a reality check. I was of no use here; Dr. Burlinghouse would be found without me and would provide pharmacologic relief; Mackenzie would continue to be otherwise engaged; I had to teach at dawn, and my mother and I were behaving like obnoxious guests, overstaying our welcome.

  Which I said, more or less, trying for a little levity.

  I wrapped my down coat around me, poised my umbrella at the ready, and made my exit, my mother trailing one step behind. Mackenzie, our alloted portion of the city’s finest, escorted us. Then he detained me for a second. I thought he was going to compliment me on extracting the doctor’s name. I thought he might say how happy he was that I had not been poisoned. I hoped he might say that he’d be over later, waiting for me after I dropped my mother off.

  But what he said was, “Listen. Thanks for the help.”

  “Is there a but waiting in the wings?” Of course there was, but I wanted to give him a chance to retract it.

  He didn’t. “But—no offense, all right? I need to make sure that this is the end of it for you. No Nancy Drewing. No Jessica Fletchering. You have this tendency—”

  “Thanks for the warning, officer, but I don’t have anything to do with this, and I don’t want to.”

  “Good,” he said. “Keep that i
n mind. No Miss Marpling, either.”

  And that was all he had to tell me.

  I didn’t want to think of what the city’s worst might be if this was what it considered its finest.

  Nine

  Next morning I FELT HEADACHY and queasy, which seemed distinctly unfair and definitely unearned. There had been no overindulgence whatsoever. I had post-traumatic shock disguised as a hangover.

  Entering the school office was not much of an upper at the best of times. I emptied my mailbox of assorted inane messages and flipped through them. Next to me, Harvey Porter, a part-timer teaching psych while he finished his Ph.D. dissertation, did the same, histrionically. Harvey works a twenty-six-hour day and radiates pure irritable tension for at least twenty of them. Our low-quality mail wasn’t helping his mood.

  Junk today, yesterday, almost always. Nagging reminders and make-work from the principal, or his handmaiden, Helga the office witch. But it was bad form to dump it into the wastebasket before pretending to look it over, so I glanced through.

  A notice on Day-Glo orange paper was headed important!!! It seemed staff was to be ever-alert and prevent false alarms. I had no idea how we were to do this, since the gongs inevitably were set off while class was in session. In fact, emptying classrooms was their entire point.

  Another wasted piece of paper reminded us that seniors in danger of failing were to be notified by mid-April, and in writing. Pro forma. Nobody whose tuition was paid in full failed to graduate.

  A slick brochure described an exciting, sure-to-entice grammar text, but alas, even if the hype were true, we had no budget for new texts this year.

  My professional journal had arrived, bulging with breakthroughs in the teaching of our native tongue. As usual, I felt an idiotic, unjustified flare of hope that this issue, at long last, would contain the magic secret that actually worked.

  “At least there aren’t any bills,” Harvey said as he rather violently tossed the entire contents of his mail slot into the trash can. And, swinging a hand-knit scarf over his shoulder—teenage girls love his affectations—he left.