Drop Dead Lola

by Melissa Bourbon

  She stopped and peered at us. Her expression changed the second she recognized him and started walking again, quickly and right into his arms.

  He gently patted her back before she stepped back. “My mom told me you’d been around,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come to the funeral. I wanted to, but I was out of town and couldn’t get back in time.”

  She nodded, her expression solemn. “It’s okay. It was a good turnout. He would have liked it.”

  After a few seconds of respectful silence, Jack introduced me.

  “You’re the one looking into Phil’s death,” she said.

  “I work for Camacho and Associates. Jack brought your mom there. She’s convinced your brother didn’t take his own life.”

  “She’s right, he didn’t. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t the type to do that. He didn’t get emotional or depressed. He just kind of barreled through life, doing what he wanted.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly. There was no judgement in her voice.

  “I spoke to your dad yesterday. He doesn’t see it the same way as your mom?”

  “My dad and my brother—” She stopped, choking on the word. “My dad and my brother, George, they both think Phil did it. But why? There’s no good reason—not that there’s ever a good reason—but he didn’t have a reason to feel hopeless or desperate. Everything was good. He was engaged, he was starting his own business. There was no reason to kill himself.”

  “You knew he was engaged?”

  She nodded. “He told our dad and me and George. He was waiting to spring it on mom. Silly, really, but he wanted to make it an announcement.” She made air quotes around the word announcement.

  That still struck me as odd, but I had to let it go. “I had an appointment to talk to your mom—”

  “We’d like to see the note Phil left,” Jack said.

  “And we’re looking for his cell phone,” I added.

  “—but she’s not answering,” Jack finished.

  “We can’t find his phone,” Anne said. “Whoever did this to him took it.”

  That is exactly what I’d been thinking.

  Anne pulled a keyring from her purse and flipped through the bundle until she found the one she was looking for. “She probably ran a quick errand,” Anne said. She inserted the key in the lock, turned the knob, then ushered us inside.

  She flipped on lights as she led us through the main living area and into the kitchen. I walked slowly, looking at the collection of family photos. There were framed high school graduation pictures of three kids hanging on the wall—two boys and one girl. Philip, George, and Anne. Anne hadn’t changed much, but she looked older now. More mature. Philip and George both looked baby-faced, and the resemblance was strong between the three. The photos on the console table showed each child from infancy to adulthood in a chronology of their lives. The Haskells were proud of their children.

  On the wall above the collection of photos was a large horizontal print depicting the history of the Haskell and Boyden families. One side, the Boydens, showed Marnie’s family, while the other side gave the details for Tim’s. The whole thing was very elegant looking, the artistic tree printed in gold on a cream-colored background. Each line held a name written in beautiful calligraphy. I wondered if my mother would like the Falcón and Cruz family ancestors memorialized like Marnie had done for her family. Posiblemente. I tucked the idea away in my mind for a future Christmas gift.

  I followed the thread of Tim’s family first. It went as far back as his great-grandparents on both sides, traced aunts and uncles, and ended with the union of Tim’s parents: Stacy Janovich and Tim Haskell, Senior. The final lines showed the birth of Tim and his brother, Trent, with Trent’s family trailing off to the right. Marnie’s side of the family tree was more complete and went back to her great-great-grandparents. She’d chosen to show the union between the Boydens and the Haskells, via her marriage to Tim, on her family’s side. It ended with their three children, with spaces below for the eventual grandchildren that would come. I felt a pang of regret for Marnie. The spaces that might have included Gemma, and then hers and Philip’s children would never be completed.

  I came back to the moment when Anne called, “Mom?”

  When there was no answer, she shrugged. “I’ll call her in a second. Want something to drink?”

  Both Jack and I declined. “Do you know where the note is that Phil left?” Jack asked.

  She closed her eyes for a second as she took a bolstering breath. “I do. Hang on.”

  She went back the way we’d come, through the living room and down a side hallway to where the bedrooms had to be. Less than a minute later, she was back, a small fabric-covered journal in one hand. She opened it, fanning through the pages until she found what she was looking for. A folded piece of lined paper was tucked inside. She took it out and even though I was the investigator, she handed it to Jack.

  On a different day, and under different circumstances, that might have irked me, but today and under these circumstances, I understood.

  “I’m going to call my mom,” Anne said as Jack and I went to the kitchen table and sat down to read the note. She walked to the living room, stopping in front of the window to look outside, her phone pressed to her ear. Even from where we sat, I could hear the faint ringing of Marnie’s phone. Anne had the volume turned up full blast.

  “No answer,” she said, her back still to us. “I’ll try again in a minute.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Truthfully, I was happy to have a few minutes to read the note without either Anne or Marnie Haskell in the same room. Every moment of every day had to be excruciating for both of them.

  Jack spread the note out in front of us. It had been ripped from a spiral binder. There was a perforated line, but the ragged edge hadn’t been separated from it. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting—a nicer sheet of paper? Stationary? Whatever I’d had in my mind, it wasn’t the haphazardly torn lined paper with two brief lines scribbled onto it.

  I never meant to hurt anyone.

  Mom, Dad, Annie, George—forgive me.

  Jack and I looked at each other. His expression mirrored mine. We were both dumbfounded. Nothing to Gemma. This note did not explain anything.

  I heard the phone ringing again. Dios mío, the woman was going to go deaf—or maybe she already was—if she kept her volume up that high. I cocked my head, listening. It wasn’t coming from Anne’s cell phone. “It’s coming from over there,” I said after a few seconds. I pointed to the door I presumed led to the garage.

  Anne’s head whipped around when she heard me. “What did you say?”

  The ringing had stopped. “Call the number again,” I said.

  She pressed redial as she came back into the kitchen. A moment later, we all heard the faint sound of a ring tone. Anne dropped her hand to her side, barely holding onto the phone. “Mom?” she called. She started toward the door, slowly at first, then suddenly she was running. “Mom!”

  Jack and I were right behind her, the three of us racing through the door Anne opened, then jerking to an abrupt stop and breaking into fits of coughing. The engine of the car was on, exhaust pluming from the muffler.

  Marnie Haskell sat slumped in the front seat.

  Jack turned and slammed his hand against the garage door opener. The belt drive kicked into gear, rolling the door up and releasing the carbon monoxide that had clouded the space. Anne flung open the passenger door of the car trying to get to her mother. I raced around to the driver’s side, reached in, and turned off the ignition, hauling Marnie out. Jack appeared by my side, catching her under the arms and pulling. “Call 911!” he yelled.

  Anne was in shock, standing still as a statue, but Jack’s voice propelled her into action. She fumbled for the phone she’d dropped.

  Jack and I hauled Marnie out of the garage an
d into the fresh air.

  I knelt down next to her to check for signs of life.

  “Is she breathing?” Jack asked.

  Oh God. Her skin was cold and clammy. Her lips were cherry red. What did that mean? “Barely,” I said, then I bent over her and began breathing oxygen into her mouth. I laid my hand on her stomach, snatching it away again when I felt how distended it was. This was bad. Beyond bad.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered Anne’s voice as she spoke to emergency services. “They’re coming!” she told us.

  I heard her give the address, then tell the operator what was happening. I tuned out her voice and stayed focused on Marnie.

  “Okay, here it is,” Jack said. I glanced up to see him scrolling through something on his phone. He said, “Keep doing CPR until the paramedics gets here.”

  The seconds seemed to creep by. My heart was pounding double time, as if it were beating for Marnie, too.

  “They’re coming!” Anne said. She ran to the end of the driveway, looking for the ambulance.

  Finally, I heard the faint sound of a siren. It grew louder, the high-pitched sound blending with the sound of blood pulsing through me.

  I saw the ambulance stop in front of the driveway from the corner of my eye and the next thing I knew, a man was beside me. I backed away and he took over. “There’s a pulse,” he said to his partner, a thirty-something woman with dark hair pulled into a bun and wire-framed glasses. She crouched on the other side of the uniformed man who’d taken my place in attending Marnie. They worked efficiently, like a well-oiled machine, and not thirty seconds later, they’d strapped an oxygen mask on Marnie, had her loaded on a stretcher into the back of the vehicle.

  “How long was she breathing the carbon monoxide?” the woman asked Anne.

  Anne’s face was drawn. Pale. Full of fear. “I don’t know.”

  I provided the only information we knew for sure. “We were here about ten, maybe fifteen minutes before we discovered her.”

  Anne climbed into the back of the ambulance with her mother and they drove off, lights flashing.

  “She has a pulse,” I said. “That’s got to be good. She’s going to be okay,” I said. I hoped.

  Jack stood beside me, raking his fingers through his hair. “Why would she do that?”

  Of course I had no definitive answer to that question, but the obvious reason was depression from losing Philip. People gave up, feeling hopeless about ever recovering from their loss. Survivor’s guilt was a real thing, as we’d seen in the news so often after school shootings. How did you get over such a horrible loss?

  I slipped my arms around his body and hugged him. My head rested in the crook of his neck. I could feel his heartbeat, feel his distress. We stood there on the driveway, holding each other for another minute, then we separated and headed back into the garage.

  I walked around the car, bending to look into the driver’s seat. The keys still hung in the ignition. “We can’t touch anything else,” I said. Whether it was suicide or attempted suicide, it was considered unnatural, so the police would investigate.

  Jack immediately understood. “Right,” he said.

  The idea that Philip’s death had been made to look like a suicide was front and center in my mind. Marnie Haskell was the whistle-blower. She was the one convinced it wasn’t a suicide. If she were right, her raising questions put her in danger. I hope she recovered, for her own sake and for that of her family, but also so she could shed some light on what had happened out here in her garage.

  We went back inside to take another look at the suicide note. “Is it his writing?” I asked Jack.

  “I have no idea. Phil and I were childhood friends. I don’t remember his writing.”

  “I’m going to keep this safe,” I said. I folded the note and tucked it into an empty pouch in my purse. The truth was that I wanted to find a sample of Philip’s writing to compare it. I assumed the police had done that, but I wanted my own confirmation.

  Jack didn’t object. I suspected that he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Can you call Anne? See how Marnie’s doing?” I asked.

  He pulled his phone from his back pocket and dialed, then put it on speaker. A few seconds later, he was talking to Anne, asking how her mother was.

  “They’ve moved her to a pressurized oxygen chamber,” Anne said.

  I raised my eyebrows at Jack. I’d never heard of that, so I looked it up.

  “A pressurized oxygen chamber is used with severe cases of carbon monoxide poisoning,” I read aloud. “You breath pure oxygen in a high air pressure room. It replaces the carbon monoxide in the blood with oxygen. It says it helps protect the heart and brain tissue.”

  There was nothing left to do at Marnie Haskell’s house, so we left, hoping against hope that the oxygen would be enough to help Marnie recover.

  We got back in the car and I drove, without thinking and without a word to Jack, to the hospital. He was lost in his own thoughts, but wasn’t surprised when I parked and he realized where we were. He looked at me from the passenger seat and nodded. “Good.”

  We got directions from a woman at the information counter, then made our way to the waiting room where Anne was. Her head was bowed and she held the hand of the man sitting next to her. “Anne,” Jack said.

  She raised her head and recognition hit her pale, drained face. She stood, took a few wobbly steps toward us, then fell into Jack’s arms.

  “I’m sure they’re doing everything they can,” he said softly.

  The man Anne had been sitting next to stood. “You may have saved her life,” the guy said. I recognized him from the photos at the Haskell household. This was Anne’s brother George.

  Anne stepped back and Jack’s arms dropped to his sides. “God, I hope so,” Jack said.

  “She’s going to be okay,” Anne said. “The doctor seems…optimistic.”

  “No he didn’t,” George said. “He said she’s in bad shape. We just have to wait.”

  I hoped Anne’s take on the doctor’s optimism was a good thing. They didn’t tend to give false hope. Still, I decided I’d stop by St. Francis later to light a candle for Marnie Haskell.

  Jack put his hand on my back. “George, this is Dolores. She’s with Camacho and Associates, a private investigative firm here in Sacramento. Your mom hired her to look into Philip’s death.”

  George brushed a strand of his wavy dark hair from his forehead. “About his…What about his death?”

  “Your mom has some questions about…how Philip died.”

  “He was selfish. He hung himself, leaving our parents and us to pick up the pieces,” George said. “That’s how he died.”

  His anger was fresh and intense. Not something I wanted to touch at the moment, so I tried to redirect the conversation. “Were you close to your brother?” I asked him.

  “When we were kids, sure. The last few years, nah.”

  “Did something happen between you two?” I asked.

  He paused for a second before he answered with a clipped, “We didn’t see eye to eye on things.”

  Anne dragged the tissue she held under her eyes. “Politics. Religion. You name it. But he was still your brother,” she said to him.

  George’s chin began to quiver slightly, but he gritted his teeth, getting it under control. This man did not like to show emotion, that was evident. He and Philip may have been oil and water, but they’d been brothers and George was clearly grieving. “So our mom asked you to look into it,” he said, referring back to Philip’s death.

  “She did.”

  “And?”

  “I just started,” I said. Even if I knew something, I wouldn’t have shared it at this point. It was too early.

  “Nothing so far makes you think it wasn’t suicide?” Anne asked.

  I shook my head noncommittally, bu
t asked, “Why do you think your mother isn’t convinced, though?”

  George grunted. “That’s easy. Phil was the golden child. She can’t believe he’d kill himself, or hurt her. She has to explain it somehow.”

  Was it just me, or did George have a chip on his shoulder about his brother? A quick glance at Jack and his rise of one eyebrow gave me my answer. It was not my imagination.

  Anne sank back down onto one of the blue upholstered hospital chairs. She rested one elbow on the arm then rubbed her fingers against her forehead and temple. “This is like a bad dream. I just want to wake up.”

  George moved close to his sister and put his hand on her shoulder. “We have to believe she’s going to be okay, Annie.”

  She gave a wavering smile and nodded.

  A scared voice boomed from down the hallway. “Where is she?”

  We all turned to see Tim Haskell barreling into the waiting room. Anne jumped up and ran to him. “I got here as fast as I could. What happened?” he demanded.

  She gestured to us as she spoke. “We found her in the garage. The door was closed. She was in her car with the engine running.”

  His eyes were wide and scared, the color drained from his face. “Is she…What do the doctors say?”

  Anne told him what she’d told us, that Marnie was in the oxygen chamber, but that she was in a coma. And that the doctor was hopeful.

  His voice trembled as he spoke. “How did you know she needed help?”

  “She called me last night. She wanted me to come over to meet the detective. I…I don’t understand. Did she want me to be…to be the one to find her? Was it a cry for help?”

  For the first time, Tim Haskell registered Jack and me standing there. “She didn’t tell me you were coming over,” he said to me.

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.

  “I told you to drop it. Philip killed himself. That’s it. You were not supposed to encourage her. Why? Why did you?” He sounded angry now, as if I’d done something wrong. As if I’d been the one to lock her in the car in the garage.