Caught Dead in Philadelphia (17 page)

I doubted that. I think fear should be a rare and unwelcome intruder, not an invited guest. I avoid horror movies and terrifying novels, and I cannot understand how haunted houses and chambers of horrors could be considered attractions. But I had used up my cowardice allowance at the Ferris wheel. The old fish store didn't look too big, so I sighed, decided that this was more likely to be short and boring than anything else.

Karen, jumping up and down with eagerness, took my hand and we entered the black-painted door.

“AHEEYAH!”

That was hello in Magic Maze talk. It was also a new sort of instant aerobics. I waited until my heart resumed something like its normal pace and tried to adjust my eyes to the black void.

“Welcome,” the electronic voice crackled. “The Magic Maze of Mystery needs more victims. Try to find your way through. Just try!” The voice found the idea hilarious and convulsed into delirious shrieks.

My eyes did not adjust. There was nothing to adjust to. This was the darkness of the blind, total and impenetrable.

“Where are you, Karen?” I whispered. We had dropped our hands with our opening screams. I put my hands out to find her. “Oh, excuse me!” I pulled my hand back from the spongy touch of someone's generous bosom. But no one answered. I put my hand out again. The Maze was lined with soft, padded walls. And they were close together, so that miles of pitch-black corridors could fit inside a little fish store.

I should have chosen the Ferris wheel.

“Karen?” I said, taking a step. My foot sank into dark softness. The floors were also padded, alive, yielding, and terrible.

I hated the place. I yearned for the former fish market, for white, gleaming cases and silvery skins and hard fluorescent lights. I lost my bearing with no solid walls, no solid earth, to step on. “Karen?” I repeated. My voice was muffled by the padding, drowned out by another scream on the sound system.

The Maze was hot. Padded and stifled and musty. “Karen?” She had disappeared into the stuffing.

“Here,” a small voice whispered. “Here.” I took two more tentative steps on the unsure ground and bumped into her. She took my hand, and step by step, arms outstretched, we made our way around a corner.

“BOO! I'LL GET YOU!” The recorded voice wasn't nearly as frightening as was the total absence of light.

Karen finally remembered that she hated the dark. “I don't like this,” she whimpered. “Carry me?”

I theorized that one pair of legs, even carrying a little girl, could speed up this trip. The going was difficult with only one free arm and Karen's legs bouncing against my thighs. The padded floor felt far away. I couldn't remember where my legs ended.

We turned and twisted along, hopefully not backtracking. Karen controlled herself, whimpering softly until wet, wormlike tendrils dripped across our faces. At that, she screamed, directly into my right ear.

“It's spaghetti!” I shouted, pushing us around yet another turn.

“GGGRRRRRRHAH!” shouted a furry gorilla, illuminated in a burst of green light. “YEEEOWRL!”

“You're Nicholas's father!” Karen screamed. “You aren't scary! You aren't! You aren't a gorilla at all!” Nevertheless, she put both her hands around my neck in a stranglehold. “Run!” she shouted.

But I couldn't, not on the soft flooring, not with my heavy burden. “Karen, we must be near the end of this place. Could you walk the last few feet? Please?”

She sniffled, braced herself, and let me put her down. Her grip on my hand was like a vise. Between Sissie's claws and the fork a while ago, and Karen now, I figured I was going to have to discard that hand by the end of the evening. We moved even more slowly as Karen fumbled along, moving only after she had tested the ground several times.

“YEEEK!” the walls screamed.

“I don't like this place,” Karen said again and again.

“We're near the exit.” There was no sign that my assumption was correct. I had no idea where I was heading, or if I was merely retracing my steps. I groped along the side wall, formulating complaints to the people who'd designed this terrifying and dangerous place.

Then suddenly, my hand missed, cut through empty air. No wall. Nothingness. I groped in the other direction. More nothingness. I lost all sense of direction and felt lost in an enormous void. Where were its edges? Where was the way out?

“YEEEE!” the building said. “YEY-YAH-HEHEHE-HE!” It didn't stop, so that I was deafened and dislocated. My breathing accelerated as I fought off panic, my free arm flailing, my whole body frozen in place, afraid to move and fall, become lost—

And then a red burst of pain exploded in the dark. Something heavy hit my neck. I screamed—but the invisible speakers outdid me. I lurched forward, dropping Karen's hand, struggling to regain my footing and not to cry.

“I hate this!” Karen screamed, but I could barely hear her.

“YOU'LL NEVER LEAVE MY MAZE!” the electronic maniac screamed.

“Mommy!” Karen wailed.

What in God's name had slugged me? That couldn't be part of the tour. There was something or someone nearby, and I had no idea of the size of our arena or the location of my attacker. My impulse was to curl up, hide, become too small a target.

“I want my mommy!” Karen repeated.

I was afraid to say anything at all.

“YEEEEEAH!” the walls screamed.

There was no way to avoid whatever had cracked me on the neck, and I couldn't stand there in the dark. I groped and stumbled until I found Karen, who screamed and then grabbed on to me. I pulled her, propelling us in the direction I hoped was forward.

And directly into a solid mass of flesh that pushed back, hard.

“MYSTEREEEE!” the walls screamed.

“What the—” a voice shouted.

“MOMMY!” Karen continued.

A large hand grabbed me, pulled me, pushed me. For the second time in my life—and in the week—I instinctively raised my knee.

I heard a groan.

The hand fell away.

“GET ME OUT OF HERE!” Karen screamed, filling the dark, filling my mind.

“DON'T SCREAM!” I answered, rationally or not, and I ran forward blindly, tripping on the mushy padding, pulling both of us down.

I heard heavy breathing.

“GET UP!” I screamed.

And then I saw the three-sided slit of light that had to mean a door. And finally, a dim red light above it that spelled safety, E-X-I-T.

“Run!” I shouted. “That way!” And despite the spongy footing, we galloped to the back door.

I didn't stop until I was outside on the firm cement behind the Maze, surrounded by parked cars and streetlights. It was a fish store in a shopping center, I told myself. But it had been all my childhood nightmares boiled in a cauldron until it condensed into those noises, the lost floors and walls and sense of direction, the menacing stranger. It had been the whole last week, bound up in a dark package that held nothing normal, nothing solid, and nothing that made sense.

“Let's find your daddy,” I said, but the back door opened, and now that I was back in a normal world, I wanted to see what manner of monster emerged.

It wasn't a monster. It was the Hunchbacked Clown of Notre Dame. A strange doubled-over figure in bright patchwork pantaloons and whiteface craned its neck in my direction. “Mandy!” it said from its crouched position. “What are you doing here? Christ, you wouldn't believe what happened in there.”

I stared at Gus. My neck still hurt. It felt as if somebody had wanted to break it.

“I bumped into somebody,” he said, “and Jesus…”

I guess I should have confessed, explained, but I was physically sore and mentally troubled. The vague, enormous fear I'd had inside the Maze had diminished into a hard little question mark.

“Why were you in there, Gus?” I was going to require a fantastic answer. Like me, Gus was not the type to consider using up a break from his work for a dash into a midnight-dark padded cell. Unless he had seen me, followed me, almost managed to break my neck.

“Petey,” he said with a sigh.

“What's that? Code?”

“That's that.” A young blond boy came out by himself, smiling.

“Petey!” Karen exclaimed with delight.

“Sissie asked me to take him through,” Gus said slowly, wincing. “I don't know why I agreed. I wish I could rub where it hurts.”

“I stayed in all by myself,” Petey Bellinger said.

“That was fun, wasn't it?” My hypocritical niece's voice was blithe.

“Yeah,” Petey said. “Want to do it again? I wasn't scared, but some people screamed.”

“They must be babies,” Karen said with scorn.

“I didn't think you'd be out this soon.” The appearance of Sam was like a lighthouse beam in a storm. He no longer appeared dull, predictable, unexciting. Or rather, he was all those things, and they were wonderful. The action-packed life was not for me. I was in pain. I no longer trusted my friends. I felt ill and confused and over my head, and I didn't want to stay at this party any longer.

“Gus Winston,” Gus said, introducing himself.

“Ah, yes, Mandy's friend.” Sam shook Gus's hand.

I didn't know anything anymore. I felt much younger and less worldly-wise than Karen, and I wanted a night-light and a bedtime story that ended happily.

Fifteen

C.K. was dishing chips and hot dogs when we joined him. “How's it going?” he asked casually, oblivious of anything but his munchies.

I waited until the gang drifted away after purchasing jelly beans, chocolate chip cookies, and more soda. “This is not where the action is,” I hissed. “Or have you changed careers, Cyril?”

“Wrong, and did somethin' happen?”

“Yes! Or, well, I don't know. I thought so, but…” It had been a dark, empty building, an open space without walls. It could have been what Gus said it was, an unfortunate collision of two people desperate to get out. I didn't want to implicate Gus any further. On the other hand, my neck still hurt.

“Why don't you go enjoy yourself now?” Beth said, dancing over to her protégé. “We're closing soon, anyway. Go on, now; you've done more than your fair share.” She beamed up at Mackenzie and he bowed, wiping a strand of coleslaw off his watch.

“We'll see you at the auction,” he said, and Beth nodded happily at the way he was blending right in.

I told Mackenzie about the Maze and about my lamentable fortune-telling session with Sissie. “I'm a lousy detective,” I admitted. “I didn't learn anything new, except about the possibilities of my pulse rate. Aren't I supposed to be hearing things that will clarify everything?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “That's how it always goes. You start talking about the meanin' of life, and somebody says, ‘Why, I was thinkin' the same thing while pouring boiling water on a fellow's face yesterday.'”

“The field's not exactly narrowing, is it?”

“Nope. Still the big three, I guess. Cole's here, by the way. Over where they're setting up the auction. He agreed to play auctioneer a long while back, and he's fulfillin' his contract. Everyone back at the food booths seems to think that makes him some kind of saint, the way he's holdin' up and hidin' his grief.”

I realized how many parts of my body were either exhausted or in active pain. “C.K., I'm carnivaled out,” I said. “Why don't we go sit on the chairs in the auction area—we can observe the suspect and rest the feet.”

Mackenzie didn't put up a fight or insist that he hadn't yet ridden the Ferris wheel or visited the house of mystery. We walked between the booths and the balloon men toward the supermarket.

“Sissie said my heart was more strongly developed than my mind,” I told him.

“And I thought palm reading was bunk.”

The auction area was a study in motion. I watched a plump lady in purple crease, then place a leaflet on each and every folding chair.

“Shall I tell her she's doomed, Claudius?” I whispered.

“Nope to both your questions. She's happy.”

But she wasn't for long. A renegade breeze, perhaps left over from March, waited until she was done, then raced across the chairs. The airborne programs flapped aimlessly, then, like a flock of pigeons, settled to earth in a haphazard pattern.

“Nothing's going right!” the lady shrieked, dashing from spot to spot, clutching her wounded papers. I collected a few dozen myself and handed them to her.

“
Now
what can I do?” she wailed.

“Why not hand them out as people arrive?” I suggested.

She looked at me with awe, ready to grant me the Nobel Prize. “Of course,” she said, visibly regaining her will to live. “It's just been too much. Half the items arrived late. Janine forgot the gavel, and now it's cold and windy. I wonder if it'll rain and ruin everything. These things shouldn't be in April, but all the schools have June fairs.”

The wind had died down, but not away. My blouse no longer felt like adequate cover. I smiled at the woman as she thanked me again, and I looked for Mackenzie. He was studying a large, ornately framed painting that rested against a folding chair.

“Are you, ah, going to bid on that?” I asked.

“Why would someone get rid of this?” he asked, making me very nervous about our aesthetic compatibility.

“Because it's hideous?”

“Sure,” he agreed, “but who'd ever let this monstrosity into his house unless it was an ancestor's portrait? And then, who'd sell it off? And who'd buy it? Now that's a real mystery.”

I was acutely bored with his vague musings. “Speaking of which, you promised you'd tell me what you talked to Sam about.”

“You haven't puzzled it out?”

“No. I was busy getting threatened and pushed around in the dark. Go on, nameless, explain.”

He put the ugly painting back in place, and pushing his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker, he stood, rocking slightly on his heels, looking disappointed. “You had all the relevant facts, you know. You told me Sam had gone to Franklin and Marshall. And you knew our friendly auctioneer went there for three years and had been Sam's fraternity brother. He transferred to Penn his senior year.” He waited, then sighed. “You still don't get it?”

“Skip the gloating, okay?”

“It's hard, but I'll try. What you said this afternoon is true. Our man was the kid with the good citizenship badges. In a lifetime of completely predictable, safe behavior, his transfer is the single exceptional act. Why, after three good years, leave a college your family endowed? Anything out of character bothers me, so I tried checking it out. But Cole left voluntarily, spent the summer making up nontransferable courses, and then completed undergraduate school roughly on time.”

“So far, it's less than mind-bending.”

“Sorry. But use your common sense—there has to be a reason for leaving, and if there's no official one, then you look around unofficially. Like to his fraternity brothers. You kind of handed Sam to me on a platter, and I thank you.”

“Miss! Oh, Miss, if you aren't busy,
could
I
possibly
ask you to fold the rest of the fliers?” It was my friend in purple, so flushed with confusion that her cheeks clashed with her clothing. “It wouldn't take much time, and I'd be so eternally grateful.”

While I tried to think of a believable excuse, and I pondered how much eternal gratitude was worth, Mackenzie signed both of us on. We walked over to the folding chairs, sat down, and began creasing and stacking, to the enormous relief of the purple woman.

“You were saying…” I said once we were alone with our programs. I waited. I tried again. “I handed Sam to you on a platter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And…?”

“And I am grateful.”

“No!
More
, Mackenzie. Why are you grateful?”

“Because he was helpful, after some judicious prompting. Then, based on what he remembered, I called the school again and was able to ask specific questions and get answers.”

I shivered from either the damp breeze or from unwelcome anticipation. Whatever the news was, it was definitely decades old, yellow, and cracked around the edges. And I remembered Sam saying that the old times Mackenzie had asked about couldn't be called “good.”

“There was a hush-hush campus scandal during Hayden's junior year,” C.K. said. “A senior was caught in flagrante delicto and he hanged himself.”

“That's why he did it? Sam said he never knew why. But that's no reason. Even before people admitted it, people did have sex. Why kill yourself over it? And F&M isn't some fundamentalist Puritan school. One of my most liberated friends graduated from it, and she said—”

“She wouldn't have been able to say anything about F&M back when Sam and Hayden were there. It was all men then.”

“Oh. And the sex partner wasn't imported from the outside world?”

Mackenzie nodded.

“So the dead boy had been with…?”

“A fraternity brother. The man who found them tried to shut down the whole fraternity first.”

“And are you saying that the other man was—”

“Well, the school wouldn't say. After all these years they're still sensitive about the revolting way the episode was handled. The man who found them acted as if a major crime had been committed. Suggested—although it was more like blackmail—that the senior reconsider his life and not corrupt the Air Force with his kind of preferences. It was right before graduation, the kid's parents were on their way to school, and the man wouldn't let up. The kid went over the brink. The current dean was still upset about it. Kept reassuring me that, even then, those attitudes were not representative of the college.”

“And the boy's partner? Did they say anything?”

“Only that he was younger. He transferred to another school.”

I smoothed down the programs, creasing and recreasing one of them. “Driving someone to suicide for something that's nobody's business, that hurt nobody. It's so ugly,” I said.

“It probably threatened to become uglier. The junior, I assume, was the son of someone famous. The ex-governor of the state.”

“But if nobody but that warped old man knew about it—”

“Obviously, people knew. A suicide can't be ignored. He left a note. Somebody found it. And the transferee was a badly shaken, lonely boy. He might have confided in a friend. A good friend.” He stopped folding his fliers and looked at me. “A good friend who then becomes such a constant companion, everybody assumes she'll marry him.”

“Still, even if Sissie knew, she's known all along. Why dredge up the story now?”

“We don't know that anyone did. But there might be other stories. And even if we all say a man's sexual preference is irrelevant, do you think it is, even today, to the electorate? Don't be an idealist—think of what just one story like that could do to a man's political ambitions.”

We sat there quietly. I don't know what Mackenzie's mind was doing, but mine was pawing through the ragbag, pulling out remembered scraps and patches and trying to stitch them together into a pattern.

The purple lady saw only my inactive surface. “Finished?” she burbled, lifting the pile. “I can't
tell
you how grateful I am.”

We both nodded humbly.

“But if you've a smidgen more time,” she said, “we are still in such desperate need of help. Of course, we're grateful for all the donations, but people do not understand about bringing things in on time and tagging them, and—” She stopped, stammered a bit when she met Mackenzie's clear blue gaze. “Well,” she said, “would you—could you carry some things up onto the platform?”

“In a minute, Ma'am,” Mackenzie said, and once again the “Ma'am” soothed a savage breast. “But if you'll give us just a minute or so alone, we'd 'preciate it. You know how it is.”

“Of course!” She backed off in a purple haze.

“I could hear you thinkin',” he said to me. “What'd you decide?”

“How does this sound? Hayden needs a wife for public relations purposes. He's getting too old to be unmarried and not suspect. Sissie, who understands the game, is willing to play, but she's still tangled in her marriage and off limits. Enter Liza, who has been pushed her whole life to be like the people her mother works for and worships, and who is impressionable. And then, before they marry, Sissie realizes she is no longer married and no longer rich. She nags at Hayden, but it doesn't work. So Sissie works on Liza and last Sunday they quarrel when Sissie plays her strongest hand. She tells Liza that Hayden's marrying her for political reasons, that she's a patsy, that Hayden doesn't like her or any woman. Tells her the college story or another one.” I stopped, very tired.

“Go on, you're doing fine,” Mackenzie said.

“But why isn't it fun when the puzzle comes together?”

Mackenzie just shrugged.

I forced myself on. All the little shreds had made a picture, but it was shabby and instantly stale. “Liza is playing her own game on the side with Eddie, but she doesn't like the idea of being used herself. Upset, she goes to Eddie after the show and tells him. And then—from then on it must have been all Eddie, C.K. And Eddie was scared by the murder and decided to come to me. But, by then, it was too late.”

Mackenzie had made the mistake of looking toward the platform, and the purple woman was now gesticulating to us to come help. Mackenzie waved back at her in his dear, dumb way. “Why was Eddie scared?” he asked.

“The blackmail. The mother lode. The money thing. It would have been like Liza to make a scene and move away, go back to her original plan of moving to New York. I even think she told Sissie that, and Sissie thought the engagement was over. But Eddie must have suggested using the information. Blackmailing Hayden. So Liza went wandering around to think this through, wound up at my house and…”

“Yes?”

“…called Hayden, and he killed her.”

“Suddenly you don't like the idea? You sound disappointed, but isn't that what you've been pushing for?”

It wasn't anymore. I didn't want the killer to turn out to be a victim as well. I didn't want it to be somebody running scared for years for no reason.

“You know,” Mackenzie said, “Liza phoned Sissie that morning, too. Maybe she returned the call, heard that her tidy little scheme wasn't going to work that neatly. If Liza destroyed Cole, Sissie would still be out one rich husband. Maybe they quarreled.”

“Do you think Hayden ever loved Liza?” The question, unanswered, depressed me more than anything else. Had everything been based on a face-saving nothingness? Wasn't passion involved anywhere?

“Who knows?” Mackenzie finally said. “Who is ever going to know? Maybe he hoped he did. Or maybe it was just politics.”

“What happens now?”

“I don't know. Wouldn't it be nice to believe in the old drawing room technique? Call them all into the food booth after the auction and recite the known facts, thereby forcing one of them to confess?”

“All? Isn't it either Hayden or Sissie?”