Mallory raised her arm and grabbed some sagging tricep with a look that said
Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.
She said, “This coming from someone who can still wear sleeveless tops. I hate you.”
I thought of a short time ago when I had turned the lights out on an army veteran a third of my age. “I hate myself. It’s just not me. Can this be hormonal?”
Mallory smirked. “I’m sure you haven’t had a hormone for some years now. I’m not sure about the limp, but there must be reason for the anxiety.” She had a husband at home who couldn’t move and she was asking about my anxiety. “Gemma-Kate?” she asked.
Nice when you get close enough you can communicate so easily. “Gemma-Kate,” I answered. “Oh, Gemma-Kate.”
“Have you talked to Carlo?”
“Carlo is smitten.”
“Does that bother you?”
Not till this moment, actually. Is that what friends are for, to make you think in ways you wish you wouldn’t? If so, who ever pays a therapist? “Did you just say you think I’m suspecting Carlo is capable of having an affair?”
Not much shocked Mallory Hollinger, but this did. “With Gemma-Kate?”
“No, no, no. With someone else closer to his age.”
I expected her to scoff, but she said, “Women can have platonic friendships, but I’ve always thought that men’s friendships with women have a sexual-attraction component, even if they never follow up. Does he have female friends?”
I thought. “You,” I said. I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” she said. I could tell she thought that any man having the hots for her was a given. She seemed to consider pursing her lips but decided against encouraging the wrinkles.
Another piece of wisdom Mallory had once shared with me: No matter how people treat you, you can tell their essential goodness by how they treat a waiter. That and always finish the wine. The waiter had appeared to pick up the mysteriously empty blue-cheese-and-garlic plate.
“Please don’t go, dear,” Mallory said to him, touching his arm lightly with her fingertips. “We’ve been nattering too long and taking up your table. We should order.” She chose the Southwest chopped chicken salad, dressing on the side.
I ordered the same salad because facing the choices in the menu was just more stress and I suddenly couldn’t take it. Weird, for a person who had worked undercover in a Mexican drug cartel to be intimidated by a menu. The waiter left, and Mallory said, “Maybe eating a little something will make you feel better. Now what else is bothering you?”
I told Mallory everything, about finding the toad, and the fact that Gemma-Kate had lied about being responsible for the Pug’s getting poisoned, and whether it had been done on purpose.
“She said she didn’t know the toad was poisonous until she looked it up on the Internet.”
Mallory shrugged. “I thought everyone knew.”
“I didn’t. But it still makes me wonder.”
I expected Mallory to kid me out of it, to make a joke about watching too many movies about wicked children, but she just nodded and listened while I talked about all the little things about Gemma-Kate that had brought me to my current state. I was beginning to wish she would make a joke. But all I was hearing was “mm,” “ah, yes,” and “I
see.
” Like Carlo, she was giving me lots of sympathy but no solutions.
“What does Carlo think?”
I told her about my conversation with him, and how, while he was supportive, he didn’t see the situation quite the same way I did. “He’s way too rational.”
“You can’t blame him,” Mallory said. “You know the classic comment about the man two blocks over in the neighborhood who suddenly shows up as a mass murderer.”
I laughed. “He was such a
quiet
man. Never gave nobody trouble. And then they find the bodies in the ice chests.”
Mallory said, “Maybe you should get advice from an expert. Is there someone here you could talk to? Maybe have her assessed? I can give all kinds of advice on physical concerns, but I’m out of my depth with psychology. Owen and I are boringly normal.”
I had a minor aha moment when the face of an old friend popped into my mind. “There’s an old buddy of mine from the Bureau. He hasn’t retired yet so I can track him down at the office. He even met Gemma-Kate in the past when I was living in D.C. and she came for a visit. I’ll see what he recommends.”
“If anything. Breathe, darling. You’re holding your breath.”
I took another huge lungful and welcomed the waiter, who brought our salads and emptied the bottle into our glasses. Mallory waited for him to leave before asking, “Do you think you could be depressed? Situation you can’t control, that sort of thing?”
I scoffed and picked up my fork to start eating, but my fingers cramped again so that I couldn’t handle the fork properly. I put it down and, with my hands under the table so it wouldn’t be noticed, bent my fingers this way and that until the cramp eased.
We both paused our talk long enough to pick with interest through the salads looking for the good stuff, kalamata olives, poached chicken, red peppers. My hand cramped again, and I eased it out as I had before. If this was stress-induced, the wine didn’t seem to be doing much good.
Mallory dipped the tines of her fork into the dressing on the side of her plate and speared a piece of avocado—fewer calories that way. If she noticed the problem I was having with my hands, she chose to ignore it.
“Can I give you one piece of advice?”
“What’s that?”
“If you think Gemma-Kate has behavioral problems, you might want to keep her away from Peter. Maybe that wasn’t so brilliant on my part after all.”
“What have you heard?”
“Nothing terrible. I checked with Lulu after he and Gemma-Kate went out, when you seemed concerned. Not enough to even mention until now. Beer drinking, wrecking the car—you can sort of tell from his mother. She looks as tense as you do. Maybe it has to do with having teenagers around. They induce stress.”
I remembered the chipmunk woman. Mallory was right. She looked as if she’d always be on alert.
“They haven’t gone out again, but I’ve overheard her talking to him on her phone. She sounds so different from when she talks to Carlo or me. Almost like another person.”
“Well, that’s to be expected. Remember that boy in
Leave it to Beaver
? ‘My, what a lovely apron that is, Mrs. Cleaver.’ She’s probably more herself with another young person, whatever ‘self’ is. I imagine we all do it. But I still would discourage … oh…” Mallory’s fork seemed to have suddenly grown heavy.
“What?”
“Nothing. Crazy thoughts.”
“So when did that ever stop you from talking?”
“The way you’ve … no, trust me, lunatic stuff. I’ve been watching TV too much.”
“They call that the
CSI
effect,” I said. “I think that’s Jacquie Neilsen’s problem, too.”
My phone rang and, thinking it was the vet, I answered without looking at the caller.
“Brigid? It’s Jacquie Neilsen.”
“Hello, Jacquie,” I said, watching Mallory mouth silently
Speak of the devil.
“What have you found out?” Jacquie asked.
“Honey, it’s only been a day. I don’t have any information yet, but I’m going to see the death investigator this afternoon, and I promise to call you back, okay?”
“Okay.” She disconnected.
“What were we talking about?” I asked.
“Your husband, your poor health, and your crazy niece. But enough of me. Let’s gossip about the Neilsens.”
I told her I didn’t know any more than I had the day before, but would let her know what I discovered after talking to the death investigator and medical examiner.
“That sounds
so
interesting. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Like what?”
“Seriously, we could be one of those buddy teams, only women.”
Mallory was clearly joking, but I thought about other buddies who had died on me and it didn’t seem so funny. I said, “No.”
“Okay, maybe we’re a little long in the tooth, but still.”
“I’ll think about it.” No.
We finished our salads and split the check. When she watched me sign my credit card bill, I felt self-conscious under her concerted gaze and wondered if she was curious about my tipping. On the way out she watched the way I walked again and invited me over to her place, “so I can give you something that might help.”
I drove my own car so I could head straight home afterward. The road to her place was steep and curvy, and as I went around a bend I had to jam on my brakes for a man crossing the road.
It wasn’t just a man. He stopped in the road about ten yards from my car and turned to face me. I saw Carlo. I saw him smile his usual bad-boy smile. Then I saw his flesh drop away, turning the smile into the grin of a skull. No matter how capable I had ever been of reacting to unforeseen dangers, I was powerless. I watched, half mesmerized and half horrified, as he continued to become a skeleton from the top of his head to his feet before completely melting into the asphalt, leaving nothing behind.
I have a tendency to imagine terrible things. On occasion those things have been not imaginary. But this time was more real than anything I had ever imagined. Yet I was certain I had not seen something real. Not real, I said to myself. Trick of the light. Mighty fancy trick of the light.
That was small comfort as I found my fingers stiff around the steering wheel, lungs hyperventilating, heart pounding so hard I could almost feel my tongue throb. My underarms felt damp, something particularly notable in ten percent humidity. It took me several minutes to calm down, and then I continued very slowly up the road, telling myself I had not just seen the future.
When I got to the house the door was open and no one around. No one to ask what took me so long, which was a good thing because I didn’t want to make Carlo’s skeleton any more real by discussing it. I walked in with the idea of looking for Mallory when I felt a sudden cramp in my gut and veered off to the guest bathroom.
It appeared I was doing more now than vomiting. I hadn’t felt this way since I tried mixing Benefiber with my vodka because I found alcohol constipated me. Was it all tied together, another symptom of whatever ailed me? It isn’t attractive to mention the runs, I realize, but I’m trying to recount everything that happened even if it didn’t seem significant at the time. I washed my hands and opened the door of the cabinet under the sink looking for air freshener. Found something called neutralizer in a fancy bottle you don’t buy at Walmart. I looked at the bottom where the price sticker had not been removed and noted that it was $79.95. Thinking that I had bought cologne that cost less than that, I spritzed myself as well as the room.
I put the bottle back where it belonged and took a second to see what else was in there. This time I saw a neat assortment of extra toilet paper rolls, a can of Scrubbing Bubbles, one of those pumice stones that rub away the lime deposits we get from the water, and a small collection of shampoos and conditioners from exclusive hotels. I guess even the rich take them. I wondered how old they were and when the last time was the Hollingers had been able to do any traveling.
I shut the cabinet door and, what the hell, while I was at it I looked inside the medicine cabinet too. There was the same array of over-the-counter antihistamines, aspirin, unused toothpaste, and in the hope-springs-eternal category, an unopened tube of topical estrogen near its expiration date. Note to the premenopausal, that’s used for vaginal dryness. For all the talk of our husbands, Mallory and I seldom talked about sex. Most of the time I purposely avoided the subject because I assumed that Owen wasn’t having an erection these days and I didn’t want to make her feel bad. I doubted Owen would come around before the expiration date, and wondered if Mallory might ever take a lover. I thought of Adrian Franklin.
There was also a bottle of antidepressants, recently prescribed by Tim Neilsen. Looked like she was taking some of that. Antidepressants instead of estrogen, sedatives instead of sex. She must have kept all this in the guest bathroom because Annette was too often in the master bath and Mallory wanted to keep her own medication private. Whatever gets you through the night, my friend.
When I left the bathroom and saw no one in the kitchen, I found my way to the most likely place, Owen’s room.
Mallory was leaning over the bed, her hands gripping a bag over Owen’s throat. Annette was on the other side of the bed injecting something into Owen’s IV port. Mostly I can remember Owen staring at me, all his heart in his eyes, a man panicked but unable to say or do anything about it. A sound like a clogged vacuum issued from his tracheotomy.
I heard the women speaking in urgent tones, no yelling and running, just an intensity that was unmistakable. Annette was clearly in charge and giving direction to Mallory, but the conversation went back and forth as if they had both been here before. They were focused on Owen while Owen was focused on me as if I meant life. With the feeling that my effort was a part of it all, I strained to hear the snippets of the commands and responses that passed between the women.
“—cleaning his trache—”
“—suction him?”
“Nothing—started bucking the vent.”
“—fighting the bag, too.”
“Keep going. Maybe anxiety, this will help.”
“Come on, Owen, calm down.”
“Blood pressure.”
Mallory glanced at the monitor quickly, as if taking her eyes off Owen’s suffering would mean his sure death. “One-eighty-four over one-sixteen.”
“Calm down, Owen, you can do this.”
“When did you clean—”
Annette started to answer, “I was just,” then ignored what she might have felt was a useless question and focused again, finishing up administering whatever she was putting into his IV. “Blood pressure.”
Mallory glanced again. “One-ninety-six over one-twenty-one.”
The vacuum sound coming from the hole in his throat grew louder.
“Pulse.”
“One-twenty-six.”
“Come on, Owen. Don’t fight it. Gimme that bag.”
Mallory stepped away and let Annette take over administering oxygen by hand. After what seemed like a time in which he had to have died, Owen’s eyelids fluttered and shut. The sound eased and stopped.