Aurora 07 - Last Scene Alive (14 page)

I shook my head. I would not make a living as a reporter for any amount of money. No one could pay me enough to sit in a motel parking lot just in case someone should stick his head out of a door long enough to be photographed or interviewed.

I still had my hair up and I was wearing dark glasses, a rudimentary camouflage move. I scooted up the stairs to a room on the second floor, not even glancing out over the railing to see if I was being observed. I had noticed Shelby’s car parked two slots down, and that was one big relief. Shelby had rented the room I’d just entered under his own name, and left the key at the desk for me.

I called up to Robin’s room. Shelby answered.

“He’s ready,” Shelby said when he recognized my voice. He sounded amused.

“Okay. The door’s unlocked.”

Shelby hung up; he was a man of few words.

In less than two minutes, the door swung open, and Robin walked in dressed in Shelby’s blue padded Pan-Am Agra winter jumpsuit. It was what the men out in the plant wore when the temperatures dropped. Shelby was not as tall as Robin, but he was wider, and the poor fit was not so noticeable. The day was just barely cool enough to make the heavy garment reasonable.

“Can I take it off, now?” Robin asked. “It’s cutting me in a, uh, tender area.”

“Sure, take it off till it’s time for us to leave,” I said, trying not to smile too broadly. I hadn’t figured that Shelby’s suit would be too short in the crotch for a long man like Robin. I perched on the end of the bed to watch.

“I see that smile,” Robin said, his voice muffled by his attempts to take off the jumpsuit while he faced away from me.

His nice clothes were somewhat rumpled by the experience, and his hair was disheveled, but he emerged from the heavy jumpsuit looking relieved. “I’ll put it back on before we go.

You’re sure your friend doesn’t mind doing this?”

“Not as long as he gets his jumpsuit back. I owe them two hours babysitting now.”

“That doesn’t seem too bad. I’ll help.”

“You won’t be around,” I said. “You’ll be back in Hollywood.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

He sat beside me on the end of the bed, and what you might call a significant silence fell. I was scared to look up at him, but eventually I just had to.

But I couldn’t ask him what he meant.

He kissed me.

I can’t say it was totally unexpected, but it was still a sort of shock. I hadn’t kissed anyone since Martin died. And I hadn’t kissed Robin, of course, in many years. But there was a familiarity to it, a kind of renewal, instead of the shock of something new.

Maybe because we were in a motel room, and I didn’t have anything of my former life around me, maybe because I had that pleasant zingy feeling that I’d put one over on a lot of people with my plan to sneak Robin out for an innocent dinner at my mother’s, maybe just because I hadn’t had sex in a hell of a long time, but I went up in flames. It was all I could to keep from grabbing him and throwing him to the bed. This was not my usual style. I was trembling with the effort of suppressing my reaction to his mouth.

“Roe?” he said, almost whispering.

He had put his hands on either side of my face.

“A little more,” I said.

“Aren’t we a little mature to be making out?”

“You want to go sit on that chair over there?”

“Oh, hell, no.”

“Then mind.”

“Let’s lie down as our next step,” he suggested.

“Okay.” I scooted up on the bed after kicking off my shoes, and Robin did the same.

“It’s a lot easier to kiss you when we’re lying down,” he observed, after a minute or two.

“I had noticed that.”

“Let’s do that some more.”

So we did. It was like being teenagers again. We were thoroughly frustrated when I called a halt to the proceedings. But I just couldn’t take that step. I just wasn’t quite ready. Though God knows, my body was.

Robin vanished into the bathroom, and reappeared a few minutes later, looking more relaxed. He wedged back into the jumpsuit. My blouse was buttoned and tucked, and I’d put on my shoes.

“Is your mother just as formidable as she was a few years ago?” he asked, watching me brush my hair, which I’d taken down. With a little help. I carefully pinned it in a knot.

“She’s softer around the edges. Marriage and having grandchildren by way of John’s kids has really fulfilled her.” I was still enjoying the pleasant sense of having been naughty.

“Remind me to take you to a motel room more often,” Robin said as we trotted down the stairs and scrambled into my car. No one called out to us. The jumpsuit and the hairstyle evidently were enough camouflage. “If we’d stayed a little longer, maybe I could have had my wicked way with you.” He had jammed a baseball cap over his telltale red hair, and I turned my face away to hide my smile. Every man I knew wore a cap at some time or another and looked quite natural, but not Robin. He looked like an ostrich dressed up for Halloween. I was relieved when he pulled it off when we got into downtown Lawrenceton.

The scene at my mother’s house was chaotic. John’s two sons and their wives and their children made the two-story four-bedroom seem positively tight. I had always liked John: warming up to his sons Avery and John David had taken a little longer. They’d been a little wary of my mother and me, too. The fact that John and my mother had signed a prenuptial agreement that was very clear on who got what when they passed away had been a great help, and my mother’s cordiality and courtesy had won over her new stepdaughters-in-law.

Melinda, Avery’s wife, was braiding her toddler’s hair in the foyer when I stepped in. Her infant, Charles, was in one of those portable carriers, which was on the floor where she could keep an eye on him. Charles was awake and watching his mother and sister with wide eyes.

“Hold still, Marcy!” Melinda was saying, her temper obviously at the breaking point.

Marcy, of course, picked the entrance of a stranger (Robin) to spring into her worst behavior.

“No!” she shrieked. “It hurts! Daddy do it! Daddy do it!”

“No, your daddy’s busy. I’m going to braid your hair,” Melinda said firmly. My respect for her mounted. I would have gone searching for Daddy instantly.

“Melinda, this is my friend Robin,” I said, when Melinda’s hands had begun dividing Marcy’s fine brown hair into three parts.

“Hi, Robin! I’d shake your hand, but I’m busy right now. I think your mom is in the den, Roe.” Melinda’s fingers flew, braiding like hell while Marcy was standing still.

“Hey, Aunt Roe,” Marcy said, looking up at us. She eyed Robin. He must have seemed huge to her.

We located my mother in the den, as Melinda had said. She was serving glasses of wine, but she put the tray down so Robin could give her a small hug (nicely calibrated on Robin’s part).

Then there was a round of handshaking among the men. John had recovered from his heart attack, but he was thinner and didn’t move as quickly as before. He was still a handsome man, and he’d passed his looks to Avery and John David, tall brown-haired men with blue eyes.

They were golfers like John, and they were both confident men who did well at their chosen careers. Other than those similarities, they were quite different, and their wives weren’t anything like each other.

Avery, Melinda’s husband, was an accountant. Avery was very traditional, and people who weren’t also completely buttoned down were somewhat suspect in his book. He’d never been really sure about me. Melinda herself, though pleasant, was none too bright. But she seemed to have this raising kids thing down pat, and she was active in community work.

John David, the younger brother, had been a wild child. There was still a gleam in his eyes that said he was anticipating the unexpected. His wife, Poppy, had also made a name for herself as a teenager, but now she seemed quite settled into her role as a suburban wife and mother.

She still enjoyed an evening out every now and then, and I would not have put money on either of them maintaining fidelity during their marriage, but I liked both of them quite a bit. Their new son, Brandon Chase Queensland, was the most placid baby I had ever encountered.

As I might have predicted, Avery questioned Robin cautiously about his means of making a living, his future plans, and his upbringing. John David wanted to hear stories of the famous people Robin knew, and instantly treated Robin as if he was my acknowledged companion.

“Not too surprising, since you have a hickey on your neck,” my mother murmured into my ear, and I jumped a mile.

“Oh, hell,” I said, clapping a hand over the spot she touched with one cool finger.

“Everyone’s already seen it,” she said with a shrug. “You and Robin seem to have picked up where you left off.” My mother’s graying brown hair was beautifully styled, as always, and her tailored blouse and gray slacks were as informal as she got.

I took her arm and we stepped into the dining room, which so far was empty of Queenslands.

“The only thing is,” I said, with the frankness you can only show your family, “I think about Martin and I just feel so guilty.”

My mother took a deep breath. Her eyes looked old, suddenly. “You listen to me right now, Roe. Your husband is
beyond
all that.”

I sucked in my breath.

“Martin—yes, while he was here he truly loved you—but Martin has
passed beyond
those emotions that plague living people—jealousy, possessiveness, selfishness. He’s not here, he doesn’t worry about worldly things any more, and he should not affect your decisions.”

I was silent—mostly from the shock of her frankness— as I pondered my mother’s pronouncements. “You’re sure you believe this,” I said, half-asking a question. “Because you know . . . Martin, as he was, would rather have killed Robin, and maybe me, too. . . .”

“And that wasn’t Martin’s best side,” my mother said calmly. “But these things are no longer his concern.”

That idea caused a painful ache. It detached my life even further from Martin’s. And yet, I could not deny that I felt a lightening of my heart, as if the fact that it was still emotionally tied to Martin’s had been dragging it down.

“You are the best mother I’ve ever had,” I said, and my voice came out shaky. She laughed, and I laughed, and I gave her a hug, and then she went back to her company. “Melinda, have you got that girl’s hair braided?” I heard her asking as she went into the living room.

A mumble from Melinda, then Marcy’s voice, shrill and piercing, “Is that big man with Aunt Roe a giant?”

The whole house seemed to hold its breath for a second before laughter came from at least three different rooms.

“She had Huntington’s chorea,” Sally Allison said. This was big news, and Sally relished big news.

It was eight in the morning, and I’d just finished getting dressed for work when the phone rang. Sally had called to ask me the same questions Arthur had asked me the day before: had I noticed Celia Shaw exhibit any of a list of symptoms?

“Yes, yes, yes,” I had answered. I detailed once again what I had observed. “Now, what does that mean?”

When Sally told me, I was just as ignorant. “What is that?”

“It’s a disease, a horrible hereditary disease of the central nervous system,” Sally said. She sounded almost awed by the horror of it.

I would have expected a certain amount of zest to Sally’s words; after all, reporting on the horrible was her bread and butter. But whatever Huntington’s chorea was, Sally truly thought it was awful.

“So, what’s the bottom line?”

“The bottom line is inevitable death with your mind reduced to vegetable status. You have no control over your body at all.”

“Oh. Oh, gosh.” That hardly seemed adequate, but then I didn’t know what would.

“There can be lots of symptoms, and it can progress at different speeds in different individuals. Mostly, you begin showing signs in your thirties, and though it may lie almost still for a few years, it begins sinking its teeth into you.”

“Oh, that poor girl.” I wouldn’t wish such an end on my worst enemy, and Celia had hardly been that.

“Well, actually, she was somewhat older than her official bio says,” Sally told me.

“I kind of guessed that.”

“Yeah, she was at least thirty. That’s still young for Huntington’s to have manifested itself, I gather, but it happens.”

“Do you think she knew?”

There was a long silence.

“Maybe,” Sally said. “Maybe she ... I don’t know. If she began wondering why she was getting so clumsy—I think she must have known something was wrong, if not exactly what.”

“What about her mother?”

“That’s it. I called the town where her mother died, as listed in her bio, and though Linda Shaw committed suicide, fairly advanced Huntington’s was found at the autopsy.”

“Oh, my Lord. That’s awful.”

“But, we have to ask ourselves,” Sally said wisely, “is her mother’s death related to Celia’s murder at all?”

“How could it not be?”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

I held the phone away from my face and stared at it. “Sally, are you serious? The mother has Huntington’s and dies young, a suicide. The daughter has Huntington’s, and dies young, an apparent murder victim. No connection?”

“You didn’t realize she was ill. I don’t know who did. Maybe the people around her all the time were well aware something was wrong with her—our old friend Robin Crusoe, for example. Wouldn’t someone as smart as Robin Crusoe realize his girlfriend had some severe problems? Wouldn’t her self-proclaimed best friend Meredith know? Wouldn’t you at least suspect something was wrong if you saw me begin to make involuntary movements, begin to show unusual clumsiness? Maybe say something completely off the wall?”