Zero at the Bone

by Mary Walker

  Sophie stood up and went back to her chair. She picked up her needlepoint. “No. It’s a dumb idea. You can go in a few days.” She sat down hard on the chair and studied her canvas.

  “I have to go now. Please, Sophie. Just a half hour alone with her would do it. Then I can come back here and be a good patient. I’ll sleep and eat and make a good recovery. But I have to do this first. Please.”

  Sophie pushed her needle in and jerked it through the canvas.

  “Sophie,” Katherine pleaded, “we’ll be back here before they even miss us. Come on. Let’s just wait until the hall is empty and go.”

  “Oh, there’s no problem getting out of here,” Sophie said, “but how do you plan to get past Janice Beechum?”

  Katherine smiled. She’d hooked her. Her heart began to pound with excitement. “We’re resourceful. We can cook up a plan together. You know her, Sophie, and she wouldn’t be suspicious of you. Could you distract her somehow? Keep her downstairs. So I could slip upstairs. Maybe you could excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and leave a door unlocked for me?”

  Sophie rubbed her chin for a minute. “Well, she’s a passionate needlepointer. She works at it in the kitchen at night. Maybe I could get her to show me a stitch or something and you could sneak up to Gram’s room.” She threw her canvas onto the floor and stood up. “Oh, God this is absurd, Katherine. We sound like kids at summer camp. We’re grown women. We can’t do this. If she sees you, she’ll call Daddy and he’ll be furious.”

  Katherine looked her steadily in the eye. “Well, that would be just awful—to make Daddy mad.”

  Sophie stared back angrily, then let her face relax into what was almost a smile. “Just awful,” she said. She walked to the small closet next to the bathroom and rummaged around in it. She pulled out a heavy aluminum cane and her wrinkled trench coat.

  Katherine stifled a groan as she sat up and swung her legs off the side of the bed.

  Sophie turned around and tossed her the coat. “I know I’m going to be sorry for this,” she said. “Hell, I’m already sorry.”

  * * *

  The pointman had been slumped down in his car watching the hospital for hours. His head was still hot with shame. “If it’s worth doing, sonny, it’s worth doing well,” his mother had always said. He should have taken the antivenin from the refrigerator and thrown it away. No. They would just have flown some in from Houston or Dallas. Snakes were too unreliable, insufficiently aggressive.

  Sluggish creatures really.

  From now on he’d use a more certain method. No more trusting to chance. He fingered the .45 automatic tucked into his belt, under his leather jacket. Enough fooling around. The remaining three he’d waste the way he knew best—efficiently, with a bullet to the brain.

  At least he’d given her a good scare, a few nightmares, locked in there with the bushmasters. And her afraid of snakes anyway. He smiled thinking about it. She wasn’t going to die from the snakebite the way he’d planned, but at least she’d had a little taste of what it felt like.

  It was important she should know how it felt. It was her family that had treated his daddy like some dead dog to put out with the garbage. He’d make her see how wrong that had been, make her admit it.

  He couldn’t be bought off like his mother. No way. He was a man who carried out his threats. Not some little weasel who backed off when the going got tough.

  And no little setback was going to stop him. No sirree. He was a force of nature. Like Brum.

  “When you fall off a horse, sonny,” his mother had always said, “get right back on so you don’t lose your nerve.” Well, there wasn’t much chance he was going to lose his nerve. He was getting right back on.

  He should do it right now. Just go up to her room and do it. If the cousin was still there, waste her, too. She was part of that family. It would serve her right, the fat bitch.

  He pulled his lucky charm out from under his shirt and ran his fingers lightly over the flat head. He needed to calm down. He was a good worker. He wouldn’t fail. But he was hyped up from all the waiting. He needed to do something, to get rid of the tension.

  He pulled the door handle and started to push the door open when he saw something that made him shrink back and slump down in the seat again.

  Un-fucking-believable. There she was right now. Coming out the main door. What the hell! She was wearing a long raincoat and limping with a cane. How could she be out so soon? God, she must be tougher than she looked. Who would think it to look at her? Looks so hoity-toity and self-satisfied, but there she is. And there’s that cousin of hers picking her up. In a BMW. Look at that. You can see she hurts the way she gets into the car.

  Hell, I wonder where they’re going.

  When the BMW headed west on Fifteenth Street, he started the car and followed them, staying far enough behind so they wouldn’t notice. The BMW took MoPac north and exited on Windsor. When it turned right on Woodlawn, the pointman began to feel an excitement in his loins. God, they’re going to the old crone’s house. Sure they are. This is too good to be true. He could get two at the same time. What a break!

  Then only one to go.

  His work would be done.

  His duty fulfilled.

  21

  IT was a blessing she hadn’t been able to get a shoe on her swollen left foot. Socks made for greater silence on the uncarpeted wood stairs. Leaning her weight on the banister, she climbed painfully, one step at a time, the cane stuck under her arm. Slow progress, but quiet. One slip and Janice Beechum in the kitchen would hear, even though the television was on and Sophie was fulfilling her part of the bargain by talking loud and steadily.

  Before she was halfway up, her arms and shoulders shook with the strain. Each time she bent the left knee, a stab of hot pain shot through her leg, up into her hip and abdomen. She gritted her teeth and kept climbing. Thank heavens it was just one floor.

  This was certainly not how she had fantasized her first visit to her grandmother—sneaking in at night dressed in a wrinkled trench coat and dirty socks. But she was going to meet Anne Driscoll, finally.

  For better or worse.

  At the top of the stairs, a tiny cloisonné lamp on a mahogany table lit the landing. Katherine stopped and leaned against the wall, panting and trembling. When she’d caught her breath, she turned right, and supporting her weight on the cane, hobbled along the hallway. First door on the right, Sophie had told her.

  The door was open.

  The large bedroom was dark except for the glow of a single night-light and the meager rays from the hall spilling across the hardwood floor. In the center of the room stood a hospital bed like the one Katherine had just gotten out of. A rolling tray-table next to it was covered with bottles and vials, a pitcher and some glasses.

  At first Katherine thought the bed was empty. But when she looked again, she saw that a very thin body, covered only with a white sheet, lay there, so still it made Katherine hold her breath. As she stood in the doorway, she sent up the first prayer she’d said since she’d stopped going to Sunday school at age nine. Please don’t let her be dead. If I don’t get to talk to her, I’ll never know for sure. And please don’t let her be comatose. More than anything in the world I want to talk to her. Just a half hour of lucidity. That’s all I ask. It’s my history and I have a right to it.

  She entered the room, one tiny step at a time, careful to make no sound that might be heard below. The room was overheated and smelled strongly of furniture polish. Leaning on her cane for support, she walked slowly toward the bed.

  When she was about six feet away she caught the glint of light on an open eye, large and luminous. She stopped, suddenly panicky. What if she’s frightened and she screams? What if the shock brings on another stroke? In her haste to get here, she hadn’t thought it through.

  Katherine raised her index finger to her lips and held it there as a plea for silence and calm.

  The head on the pillow turned slowly in her direction until both
eyes were visible in the glow of the night-light. There was no trace of fear or panic in the eyes; they studied her, fixed her, absorbed her into their depths. Then they narrowed slightly, as if displeased with something.

  Keeping her finger to her lips, Katherine took one step forward. Then another. And another. Until she was looking down on the very alert, sharp-chinned face of an old woman. The left side of the woman’s mouth drooped slightly. Her thin white hair was drawn back tight into a hair net, and the skin was blotched and wrinkled, but Katherine recognized the straight, delicate nose and the large gray eyes. Just like her mother’s.

  The gray eyes continued to assess her.

  The sheet moved and an arm, thin and trembling, emerged and crept slowly upward. A long index finger extended and pressed against lips in an exact replica of Katherine’s gesture.

  Katherine closed her eyes. Thank God. This was Anne Driscoll and she still had her wits about her. Katherine leaned her cane against the bed and lowered herself to sit on the edge. There was so much she wanted to say that for a moment she couldn’t speak at all.

  “I’m Katherine Driscoll,” she whispered finally.

  “I know.” The voice was faint but surprisingly firm, coming from such a frail body. “I can see. You look exactly like your mother. Why did you take so long to come? Every night I spit out the sleeping pill she gives me and wait.” She spoke out of the right side of her mouth; the left was immobile, frozen into a downward arc. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “I was bitten by a venomous snake yesterday at the zoo. A bushmaster.”

  The gray eyes closed for several seconds, then opened wide. “We need to get out of here. Cooper hired Beechum to keep me from seeing you or making the changes I planned to…” Here she had to stop and draw some long shuddering breaths. She lifted her hand to ask for time, then let it fall weakly to her chest. Talking was clearly a strain.

  Katherine filled in the silence. “Cooper has been misusing foundation money, too,” she said as she reached into her coat pocket for the photographs to prove it.

  Anne Driscoll stared at her as if she were a slow child. “You mean that thing about selling zoo animals to the game ranches?” The hand that rested on her chest raised slightly in a dismissive gesture. “I know all about that.”

  Katherine sucked in her breath. Nothing could have surprised her more. “You know?”

  “Of course. Your father told me and showed me the photographs the day we made the bargain about you.” Her words were clipped and businesslike, even though the voice was weak.

  “Bargain about me?”

  “Of course. You’ve come for the money, haven’t you?”

  Katherine felt her head spinning. “What money?”

  “The hundred-thousand-dollar advance. For you to run the Driscoll Foundation. Your father must have told you about our bargain.”

  “My father’s dead. He was killed at the zoo three weeks ago. Murdered. Before we had a chance to talk.”

  Anne gasped and tried to sit up, but the energy required seemed too much for her. Her head fell back to the pillow as if it were too heavy a weight for her to lift.

  “Tell me about the bargain with my father,” Katherine said.

  “He agreed not to make a scandal with the pictures he’d taken if I would agree to fire Cooper and make you foundation director. And pay you a hundred thousand dollars—as your first year’s fee. He insisted that you get it in advance. Your father thought he was blackmailing me, but I liked the idea.”

  She stopped to catch her breath. “I’ve been waiting for him to come back. Lying here wondering all this time. He was going to bring you along so we could discuss foundation plans. I should have known something had happened to him. He said he’d be back in a few days and he’s—was—a man of his word.” She stopped and gasped for air.

  Katherine felt like a cartoon character with a light bulb suddenly flashing above her head.

  Of course. I’ve been so slow.

  It all fits.

  The money. In his letter he wrote that it was available immediately, not that he had it. He didn’t have any money to give, so he blackmailed Anne into giving it. And what she would do in return—the thing that only she could do—was to be director of the Driscoll Foundation. Because it had to be headed by a family member.

  Anne was talking again. “My mistake was telling Cooper what I intended to do before I did it. He hired Beechum and they stopped letting anyone in to see me and they won’t bring me the newspaper or let me use the telephone. He thinks I’m dying. This medication they force on me is supposed to help me along, I suppose, keep me drugged up until I die.” Her nostrils flared. “But I’m not going to. We’re going to get out of here.” She stopped and studied Katherine’s face for a few seconds, breathing deeply, her thin chest rising and falling under the sheet. “Cooper didn’t kill him, did he?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it has anything to do with Cooper and what he’s been doing at the foundation. Travis Hammond was murdered, too, the day after my father.”

  Anne flinched as if she’d been slapped. “Travis, too,” she murmured.

  “And someone tried to kill me yesterday at the zoo by locking me in a room with the bushmasters. And there have been warning notes—to my father and to Travis, to Alonzo Stokes and to me.” She lowered her head closer to her grandmother’s. “The notes speak of revenge—an eye for an eye. I think it’s because of what happened thirty-one years ago, the night my mother and I left Austin.”

  Anne turned her head away and stared at the wall. She locked the fingers of both hands together over her chest, as if she could prevent some secret of the heart from escaping.

  Katherine pushed on. She would dig it out now. “It’s important for me to know what happened. I’ve lived with these secrets all my life. I know it must be horrible for you to remember, but please talk to me about it.”

  Anne kept her eyes fixed on the wall and tensed her fingers.

  “I think I already know most of it, anyway,” Katherine said. “About Donald Stranahan. All I need is for you to confirm it. And to fill in some of the blank places.”

  Finally Anne turned to face her. “Katherine, there is no good to be gained from going into this. It seems we’ve all been punished adequately already for old sins. This is best left alone.”

  “No. It’s past the point where it can be left alone.” Katherine’s voice shook in spite of her efforts to control it. “Alonzo Stokes is in danger. And I am. Goddamn it, my father died for this. Travis Hammond died for it. I’m in danger of dying, too, and I want to know why.”

  Anne looked her in the eye. “Not now. The best thing is to get out of here. I want to be admitted to a hospital tonight, get the drugs out of my system. Then we can talk. I need to be alert.” Her voice swelled into the authoritative tone of a woman used to giving orders. “And I want to talk to an attorney. Immediately. Since Travis is dead, John Crowley will do. I’m going to make sure Cooper doesn’t get another cent from me and has no power over my affairs. He will regret this every minute of his life.”

  Katherine was amazed at the strength of will in such a frail body. She had no doubt Cooper would regret it all.

  “Yes. Of course,” Katherine said. “I’ll arrange it right now. But first I want to know what happened. Some of it I remember. And some of it I’ve worked out. Let me tell you what I think happened.” She tried to engage Anne’s eyes, but the old woman refused to look at her.

  “My mother was having an affair with one of my father’s co-workers, Donald Stranahan, wasn’t she?”

  The right side of Anne’s mouth trembled. The other side remained frozen in its downward curve. “Your mother…” she began. “Your mother…”

  “Was promiscuous,” Katherine finished for her. “I know. I lived with her for eighteen years. And Donald Stranahan sounds like the kind of man she never could resist—an irresponsible, hard-drinking cowboy. I think maybe my father came home and found them together. And somet
hing very bad happened.” She looked at Anne for confirmation, but Anne’s face remained blank.

  “I think Donald Stranahan got bitten at our house, not at the zoo. And I think you persuaded Alonzo Stokes to cover it up. In return he got a curatorship. A new reptile house. And unlimited funds to build his collection. Right?”

  Anne shook her head. “Katherine, there’s no point in going on with this.”

  Katherine was unable to stop. It was rolling now and she was aboard. “Am I right? Did it happen at our house?”

  Anne said, “It’s all just speculation. Why dig—” She stopped suddenly and her eyes grew wide with alarm.

  Katherine thought she heard it, too—a creak on the landing.

  They both turned to face the open door.

  A dark shape blocked the doorway.

  A guttural whisper filled the room. “For Christ’s sake, tell her, you old crone. Tell her what she wants to know. She’s going to die for it, she should know why.”

  The man wore jeans and a black leather jacket, open over a white shirt. Something dark hung around his neck. Strands of blond hair surrounded his head like a spiky halo backlit by the lamp in the hall. He closed the door behind him quietly and stepped into the glow of the night-light. Katherine saw the glint of glasses and the thick lids magnified into sleepy folds. He held a big gun close to his body.

  “Danny,” she said in astonishment. It was as if the obsequious family lap dog had suddenly turned into a snarling mastiff.

  He shook his head hard, as if he were trying to dislodge something. “No. Not that weakling sycophant. Sycophant.” He repeated the word slowly as if he were savoring the syllables. “Call me by my rightful name. Donald. Donald Stranahan, Junior. Or pointman. Take your choice.” He pointed the gun at Katherine. “Come on. Take your choice.”

  Katherine whispered it. “Donald.”

  “That’s good,” he crooned. His lips pulled back from his teeth, baring them to the gum line. It was the first time Katherine had ever seen his teeth. She had thought he kept them covered because they were bad, but now she saw that they were perfect—beautiful, even, white teeth.