With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  “Thank you. Thank you both.” After I hung up I put my elbows on the kitchen counter and held my heavy head with both hands to avoid having it fall off.

  Cindy knew Lyle had plagiarized, and Lyle knew that she knew. And he also knew that given his lack of talent and ideas, the pilfered work was his one chance. He’d managed to get out of his partnership, to keep his stolen jewel all for himself, except that Cindy knew and was going to ruin his one chance with her ethics. And they fought about it. Quinn said so. And so had Lizzie, who’d said that her mommy had cried and cried.

  And nothing at all had been an accident, particularly Cindy Zacharias’s death, which had been murder, impure and not at all simple.

  * * *

  I found myself riding up the elevator in Hattie Zacharias’s building without any memory of the drive to Society Hill or the process of parking my car. I had been on automatic pilot while my mind coped with questions, poorly sorted facts, and unreadable meanings. If Cindy had been murdered, then…why couldn’t I follow the logical string to its end, to Lyle’s murder?

  One thing was for sure: if Cindy had been murdered, then Hattie’s complicity was even more detestable.

  The old woman was evil. As for Lyle, the thought of him revolted me.

  Lizzie, poor child victim, knowingly or not, had evened the scales. An eye for an eye, a poisoned son for a murdered mother.

  Lyle Zacharias had been tried and found guilty and already executed, and the case was, for all intents and purposes, closed. All that was left was to help Lizzie legally and emotionally.

  The elevator stopped on every floor. The building seemed exclusively tenanted by elderly and slightly infirm people who entered and exited with measured movements. I tried not to be impatient, but I was eager to get up to the apartment and out of there. Hattie now felt like pollution.

  But I wouldn’t be satisfied until she told the truth. I wanted her to publicly clear Lizzie of the burden of guilt. Nobody could make up for what had already been done, but somebody had to start undoing its long-term effects, and Hattie was the only somebody left who could.

  My problem was deciding how I was going to convince a woman whose entire life had been dedicated to protecting, to pathologically overprotecting, the boy and man she’d mothered, to discard a twenty-year-old lie and to posthumously tarnish forever that same man’s memory and name.

  And I had to do it quickly, too, or my mother and I would be late for dinner, which would mean real trouble.

  * * *

  Maria, the housekeeper, opened the door. She stood at the entryway looking as impassively sullen as she had earlier in the week.

  “I’m here to pick up my mother,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Mrs. Pepper. Bea?”

  More nothing.

  “In there.”

  She didn’t care, and eloquently but wordlessly conveyed that while she moved aside to let me in.

  At least friend Alice didn’t appear to be in residence.

  My mother was on an easy chair at right angles to the sofa, where Hattie was again swathed in her foamy soft afghan. She looked different than she had on Monday. Not better, but more relaxed. Resigned, perhaps. Accepting.

  Maria silently entered and stared at me. “Coat.” It was almost a grunt.

  “I’m only staying a moment,” I said.

  My mother raised her eyebrows. “Five minutes, perhaps, Mandy?”

  We were disappointing each other. I was not behaving politely by her lights, nor she by mine. Nonetheless, I conceded. I pulled off my coat and handed it to Maria.

  Both Hattie and my mother sipped from teacups. At Hattie’s urging, I settled onto the armchair across from my mother’s, at the other end of the love seat. Within seconds the silent Maria returned, put a teacup in front of me, and filled it with an aromatic liquid.

  “It’s a blend,” Hattie said. “My favorite herbs and spices. Lyle had it made up for me.” She blinked rapidly several times, then took a deep breath and nodded, as if to reassure herself that she was once again composed.

  My mother and she seemed in the middle of some inconsequential collective memory. Something about a picnic twenty-two years ago. I only half heard them. My mind still seethed with accusations I wanted to hurl at the old woman.

  Tell her, my brain would flash so heatedly I could feel myself flush. Then I’d almost shiver and ask myself, Why? To what purpose? She’s old and she’s already lost him. Besides, it would be best to tape the confession or have a witness present. And then again, the banshee howl of: because I want to tell her right now that I know. Because I want to stop the lies!

  Lyle, lies. Not much difference between the words.

  “And how was your day?” my mother suddenly asked me with a wide, social smile. “Everything okay?”

  She wanted to include me in this stupid happy chat. Maybe I should ruin it by honestly telling Hattie in particular how my day had been.

  My mother looked worried about me, vaguely hurt. Tea talk was required, so she, who found silence not only rude, but unnatural, rushed in with words to hide my social failings.

  Across the room the mask grimaced at me. Balinese, I thought she’d said. Powerful, but unsettling. The Queen of Hearts, Hattie had called it.

  There were an awful lot of hearts involved, weren’t there? Ace of Hearts, and this mask, the Queen of Hearts. The queen of hearts who made the tarts, perhaps. Ah, no. My mother was the one who made the tarts.

  The jingle stuck in my brain again, and worse, I heard the rhyme in my niece’s revolting rap-style Mother Goose.

  The queen of hearts she made some tarts all on a summer’s day.

  Not summer, though. The dregs of winter. Out, out, damned rhyme. Why wouldn’t it cease and desist?

  The knave of hearts he stole those tarts…

  The mental prickling became nearly unbearable.

  The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.

  Okay. I needed help. I was on overload, bogged down with unrelated quotes and infantile rhymes. I needed the human equivalent of downloading.

  “Mandy, is everything okay?” my mother asked.

  That was her social equivalent of Final Warning. “Just tired,” I said. I gave in. I would actively converse. “Actually, something funny happened to me. Funny in retrospect only. You know my class is making a play out of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and there’s this line in it about how whatever you are absolutely certain about is never true. So I’ve been absolutely certain lately that an unknown kid was out to hurt me.”

  My mother gasped. She is a good audience and a superior parent. Being annoying does not cancel the other traits out.

  “I’d gotten these papers, see. And then last night, a pickup truck followed me and I was really scared, but it turns out…” I felt inappropriately agitated, a sensation somewhere between annoyance and apprehension. My foot fidgeted and I was momentarily confused. “But you see,” I rushed on, “none of it meant what it seemed to mean. Nobody wanted to hurt me—it was all a mistake!”

  I knew that I’d missed the point, told the story badly, but too many electrical impulses were fighting for space in my brain. Nothing was coming through clearly, except the agitation.

  Hattie looked at me oddly, as did my mother.

  “Well, see,” I said, “the boy who’d been following me didn’t want to hurt me. In fact, he thought I was in trouble with my driving and he was trying to protect me. Isn’t that funny? None of it was what it appeared to be!”

  The words echoed. Hattie pulled back more deeply into the sofa pillows. My mother continued to study me, her forehead wrinkled.

  “I told it wrong, didn’t I? Don’t worry. The point is, nobody wanted to hurt me even though the one thing I was absolutely certain of was that somebody was after me. But Oscar Wilde was right—it wasn’t true.” I shivered. The words hung in the air between us, like cobwebs.

  Impolite, I belatedly realized, to joke about my paranoid fantasies in the
house of a man somebody had truly wanted to hurt. “Sorry,” I said softly.

  But. The images, the poems, the knave, the play, the tarts and Lyle, Lizzie and the movie poster, all still spun in flinty tracks in my brain.

  I felt on the verge of hysteria, afraid I might topple with the smallest push, and the anxiety that had been pulsing through me since I began my story manifested itself the way it usually does, with awesome, cavernous hunger. There was a large crystal candy dish on the coffee table in front of us. It held a pyramid of what looked like bourbon balls—dates and nuts and other yummies soaked in liqueur and rolled in confectioner’s sugar. A pop in the mouth, a quick energy rush, perhaps even serenity. “May I?” I asked Hattie.

  “Of course,” she said. “Have two.”

  My mother looked surprised. I expected warnings about spoiled dinners and sweets before meals.

  But even better than forbidden fruit is a forbidden rum ball.

  I thought of Lizzie—falling to pieces, but managing to keep those pieces fat-free. Unlike her, I gave lip service to dieting and lip action to ingesting. In that, I was kin to the dead Lyle. If he hadn’t added gluttony to his list of sins, if he hadn’t broken his diet resolve and gobbled that tart, he’d still be around. But who cared? He was a louse. He’d gotten his just desserts. Literally.

  I defiantly popped the candy in my mouth. “Delicious,” I said.

  My mother looked relieved. “I’ve been trying to contain myself, but if you’re having one, then I’ll indulge, too.” There is nothing a woman likes better than another woman with less self-control than she has.

  I watched my mother choose her candy, but I did so from a peculiar distance. Everything around me had receded and miniaturized and grown dim, and all I could hear clearly was the deafening echo of my thought a few seconds back.

  Lyle had been dieting. He’d been loud, insistent, adamant about it.

  Why would anyone expect to get to him through an extra dessert when he’d said he wouldn’t touch it?

  Because he was a chronic liar, that’s why.

  No. A chronic liar would be too hard to anticipate. That knave of hearts had stolen that tart, all on a winter’s day. It and its poisoned mate had been meant for someone else, just like the collection of clippings in my mailbox had been.

  Oh, God, was I going crazy? Basing a theory on Mother Goose and a high school student’s misplaced assignment?

  “Mandy?” my mother said, but I shook my head. I had to think. Had to.

  Assume, then, that nobody intended the poison for Lyle. That answered the question of why the killer hadn’t waited until Lyle went home with his tin of tarts and ate the poisoned one at random.

  It also made me disoriented and light-headed.

  “Marvelous candies,” my mother said. “Taste homemade, too.”

  “They are. I’ve had quite a few myself. That little cook from the place we had the party—The Boarding House, Lizzie? She made them. Brought them over to me minutes before you got here, Bea. A condolence gift, she said.” Hattie spoke mildly.

  The room pulsed, colors and textures bursting from the walls then sinking into them. Lizzie couldn’t have brought candies or anything else here one or even two hours ago, because she’d been with Mackenzie and me since right after school.

  And there it was. Simple once I stopped looking at it from a fixed position.

  Nobody had wanted to kill Lyle Zacharias, but somebody—Hattie Zacharias—had wanted to kill Lizzie.

  Completely identifying with Lyle, Hattie had just as much to lose as he if and when Lizzie Beecher Chapman unearthed her buried memories. Hattie had found out who the girl was early on, as soon as Lizzie said Roy Beecher’s name. Hattie had known, and had seen the girl’s bizarre reaction to the sight of Lyle. Had recognized the danger in that dawning recognition and had determined to squelch it.

  “She’s a good little cook,” Hattie now said in that same bemused and distant voice. “That’s probably why she’s so plump. Frankly, a fat girl is a bad ad for a restaurant. Like a warning, don’t you think? She should get another job.” She laughed, wheezing over her nasty humor.

  And that was the last part of the puzzle. Hattie had no way of comprehending how resolute Lizzie was about shedding pounds. Hattie must have been sure that, left alone with the tarts, Lizzie—in just the way Roy had—would at least nibble at them. So she packed them so full of poison, there was no surviving a tart.

  How odd that she’d been sure Lizzie would cheat, but had believed her pride and joy when he insisted that he was counting calories and wouldn’t touch the tarts until the next day. He’d been a liar and conniver in every corner of his life, but he’d kept his promises to her—the travel and the luxuries—and that was all she chose to notice. “If he says he’ll do something, he does it,” she’d told us. She’d believed it. And in the end her own blindness and dishonesty about him did her in, because after all his enormous crimes, one tiny infraction, and one large sweet tooth, killed the only thing she loved.

  I felt no pity or sympathy. “Mom,” I said, “we have to—”

  Hattie looked at her watch.

  My mother surprised me by standing up without protest. “I apologize,” she told Hattie. “I barged in without a warning, and I’ve taken up too much of your time. You take care now.”

  “Glad you came,” Hattie said. “I’ve been lonely. Alone all day, except of course for Lizzie, but she only stayed awhile. Mostly was here to drop off the—”

  “That isn’t true. Lizzie wasn’t here at all,” I said. “Get up, Mom. We’re leaving right now.”

  “Mandy!” my mother said.

  Hattie seemed more amused than insulted. She checked her watch again. “Of course she was here. While Maria was at the store. Look.” She pointed, rather vaguely, toward the table. The Boarding House’s business card was tucked into the bottom of the pyramid of candies.

  “You’re making it all up. You probably have lots of those cards from planning the party. It means nothing. Besides, why are you even saying this? What’s the point?”

  “Now, Mandy,” my mother said gently, “why would Aunt Hattie make up something silly like that?” She was treating me like a child who had misbehaved, chiding my bad manners. Soon I’d be sent to my room for rudeness to my elders. My hackles went up.

  “Hattie knows the point, which is that Lizzie knows things Hattie doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “An awful lot of knows in there, Mandy. Could you explain again?” my mother said plaintively.

  I looked instead at Hattie. “Lizzie remembered it all. You must have read about adults suddenly remembering buried childhood traumas. Something triggers it, and like that—” I snapped my fingers.

  Hattie made a choking sound, fluttered her hands, and breathed in raggedly.

  “You’ve upset her,” my mother said. “Poor dear. Hattie, please excuse Mandy, she’s cranky and—”

  “Mother!”

  “I have to—” Hattie sounded winded, exhausted, frighteningly so, and there was a terrible sense of familiarity about her behavior. Deja death.

  “Have to make call,” Hattie said, struggling to shape the words. “Explain.”

  “Mother, whatever this is about—we have to get out of here.”

  “But if she’s ill—”

  Hattie winced as she lifted a portable telephone from the end table and punched three numbers.

  She might be calling information, but I doubted it, and the only other three-digit code I knew was 911, Emergency. Hattie winced, half closed her eyes, put her hand to her throat, and shuddered. “Help,” she said into the receiver. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m poisoned. Poison candy. Help.” She hung up.

  I hadn’t been getting it. Not well enough. Poison candy.

  My mother’s mouth was half open, and slowly her eyes moved to the candy dish and then to me.

  The feeling of impending death is by and large indescribable, probably for logical, Darwinian reasons. After all, w
hy get verbal when you won’t live to use the words? I stood gape-mouthed and wordless, straining to hear an approaching siren outside, many floors below. I heard nothing.

  I was going to die. Killed by candy, my weapon of choice. By a nervous habit of stuffing my mouth when anxious. In fact, if the terrible truth be known, I was now so overwhelmed with near-hysteria that the temptation to grab another poisonous bonbon was close to irresistible.

  “Don’t want to live,” Hattie gasped. “Won’t.”

  I was finally galvanized into action. I grabbed the portable phone and dialed 911 again. “Three stretchers,” I said. “Two more of us ate the poison.” After I hung up, I panicked—they wouldn’t come, would write it off as a crank call from the terminally insane. Maybe they’d be right.

  I felt fine, I reminded myself. I was still alive. It had taken Lyle a solid half hour or more to die. Within the hour, I thought Mackenzie had told me. There was time. Hattie had a long head start on us.

  “Lizzie’s fault,” Hattie whispered hoarsely.

  “Yours.” The mind boggled. She was calmly murdering my mother and me, not to mention herself, while framing somebody else.

  “Loved him.” Her eyes welled over. “He saved me. Gave me everything.”

  I bent over and pulled Lizzie’s card out from the candies. “They aren’t going to find this. Even if we all die, I won’t let you do this to an innocent person.”

  She shook her head and looked as smug as a woman in obvious pain could. “Don’t need card. Told Maria and called Alice. Said how nice Lizzie was. Alice such a gossip. Police believe them.”

  Alice would adore being the official bearer of bad tidings. “She told me how kind that dreadful Lizzie was to her,” she’d say. “Snake in the grass, if you ask me. Poor old dear. I was Hattie’s bosom pal, you know.”

  Mackenzie was already predisposed to believe Lizzie was the murderer. Would he readily accept a second murder from her?

  Would he ask Maria and Alice precisely at what time the rum balls had arrived so that he’d spot the lie? Or would he be too overcome by my death to think rationally? I wasn’t sure which scenario I preferred.