The Deep End (17 page)

Joanne pulled down the covers of Eve’s large four-poster bed. “You’re leaving out the best part,” she smiled, watching as Eve crawled under the blankets without removing her housecoat. “The part where we met with my grandfather’s lawyer, and he asked you a few questions, and you couldn’t get your left hand straight from your right, and the lawyer finally exclaimed, ‘If you want
to win this case, keep that girl
out
of court.’” Joanne laughed. Eve closed her eyes. “Can I get you anything before I go?”

Eve opened one eye. “There’s a
People
magazine somewhere,” she said. “You can just lay it on the bed.”

Joanne looked around but saw nothing. “You have a new cleaning lady or something?” she asked. “I’ve never seen this place so neat.”

“My mother’s been ‘fixing,’” Eve said. “Maybe Brian took it. Look in his office.”

It was always a strange experience, being in Eve’s house, Joanne thought now, as she walked along the hallway to the front of the house. Everything was the reverse of what it was in her own home, a disconcerting mirror image to which she had never been able to adjust. Brian’s office, located to the right of the hallway, was the larger of the two front rooms. In her own home, the larger of the two rooms was located on the left and was occupied by Robin. Joanne took a brief glimpse around the study, curious but reluctant to snoop. She wondered when Brian worked in here—he was so rarely home. Her eyes fell casually across the top of the large cluttered desk. There were lots of papers, a police manual, and a few books, but no
People
magazine. For a second, Joanne debated leaving Brian a note asking him to call her, but decided against it. Eve had said she would tell Brian about the threatening calls she’d been receiving and she probably already had. Obviously, he didn’t think there was anything for her to be concerned about or he would have contacted her. As Eve kept saying,
everybody
got obscene phone calls. She had
nothing
to worry about. She walked out of the room, worried nonetheless.

Across the hall was the smaller of the two front rooms, the room that Eve and Brian had been reserving for a nursery. Joanne approached the doorway and looked inside. Six months ago the room had been a pink-and-white dream, decorated for the little girl the amniocentesis had revealed was due at the beginning of May. After years of frustration, a baby was finally expected, her name selected, the appropriate merchandise assembled. Now the room lay empty, the white crib dismantled, the ruffled curtains removed, the musical mobile stuffed back in its box, only the delicate pink-and-white-striped wallpaper giving any indication for what purpose this room had been intended. Joanne was about to turn away when she saw the
People
magazine lying overturned on the floor by the curtainless windows. Quickly, she tiptoed across the pale pink carpet to retrieve it, then immediately returned to the hall. What was the magazine doing in here? Did Eve come here to brood? If so, it was time to do something else with the room, Joanne thought, deciding she would mention it to Eve in as gentle a way as possible. But when she approached Eve’s bed, she saw that Eve was already asleep, and so she laid the magazine gingerly at the foot of the bed and as silently as she could, left the house.

“W
hat do they think is wrong with you?” the short, wiry woman with auburn streaks in her already dark hair asked Joanne shakily. Joanne estimated the woman’s age at thirty, though it was hard to tell as she had one of those faces that was old before its time and perversely young after it. She took note of the plain gold band on the appropriate finger of the woman’s trembling left hand, and lowered her magazine to her lap.

“I’m waiting for a friend.” Joanne smiled amicably, eager to return to her magazine, though, in truth, she was too restless to read.

“What’s wrong with her?” the other woman pressed, obviously eager to talk despite the slight tremor in her voice.

“They don’t know,” Joanne replied. “She’s in X-ray.”

“I’m waiting to go for X-rays,” the young woman nodded. She seemed unbearably fragile. “Something’s wrong with my stomach,” the woman continued almost under her breath. “I’m a little scared.”

“I’m sure everything will be all right,” Joanne said, uncomfortably conscious of the platitude, hearing Karen Palmer’s voice through her words.

“I don’t know,” the woman continued. “I have this … kind of a … lump.”

Joanne returned her magazine to the cluttered Formica table beside the green vinyl sofa on which she was sitting, her thoughts on Eve. “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about,” she heard herself say. The woman tried to smile but Joanne could see that she was close to tears. “What’s your name?” Joanne asked, more as a means of delaying that eventuality than through genuine interest. She shifted her legs, bare beneath a simple blue cotton dress, prying her thighs away from the sticky vinyl.

“Lesley. Lesley Fraser. Yours?”

“Joanne Hunter.”

Once again Lesley Fraser nodded, rubbing her hands together anxiously in her lap. “I’ve got three little kids, that’s why I’m so frightened. They’re so little, you know, to be left without a mother …”

“Hey, hey, slow down,” Joanne interrupted quickly, “who said anybody’s going to be left without a mother? Even if worse does come to worst, and they do find something there that shouldn’t be, that doesn’t mean you’re going to die.” The image of her own mother flashed before Joanne’s eyes. “They’ll just take whatever it is out, and you’ll be fine again. Haven’t you been reading about all the incredible advances that medical science has made in the last few years? It’s in all the magazines.” She pulled a
Time
magazine from the top of the Formica table and casually flipped it open. She couldn’t remember whether there had been anything in it about the wonders of medical science or not.

“Pretty scary, huh?” Lesley Fraser said, nodding toward the magazine.

“Scary?” Joanne asked, not sure what they were talking about until she actually glanced at the opened page of the magazine in her hands. “Crime,” the headline read. “Long Island’s Suburban Strangler.” Joanne quickly closed the magazine and dropped it back onto the table.

“Oh well,” Lesley Fraser said, trying to laugh, “I guess if one thing doesn’t get you, something else will. It just goes to show you how little control we actually have over our lives.”

Joanne didn’t feel up to dealing with the implications of this remark. Instead, she looked nervously around at the anxious faces surrounding her in the crowded waiting room. “The odds are with you,” she said to the young woman beside her.

“I know the odds,” Lesley Fraser told her. “My mother died of cancer.”

“So did mine,” Joanne replied automatically before thinking that it was probably not the most comforting thing to say. “The odds are with you,” she repeated with quiet strength.

“Well, if it doesn’t kill me physically, it’ll sure slaughter us financially,” Lesley Fraser went on. “We don’t have a lot of money. How can you save anything with three kids? My husband works two jobs as it is. I don’t know how we’re going to cover all the medical bills.”

“Worry about one thing at a time,” Joanne told her, and a slight laugh managed to escape the woman’s mouth before her eyes suddenly spilled over with the long-threatened tears.

“I’m so scared,” the woman whispered.

Joanne reached over and took Lesley Fraser’s hand, saying nothing.

“Lesley Fraser,” a young woman wearing a green lab coat over a white uniform called from the doorway, her eyes squinting at the chart she held at arm’s length in front of her.

“Here,” Lesley answered, raising her hand as if she were in a classroom.

“This way,” the nurse instructed, pushing open the door.

Lesley Fraser jumped quickly to her feet, though once there she seemed unable to move.

“Good luck,” Joanne said.

Lesley Fraser nodded. “I hope everything goes well with your friend,” she said. In the next instant she disappeared through the door to X-ray.

Joanne stared at the empty doorway, her mind curiously blank. What do you think about all day? she had once worked up the courage to ask her dying mother, and the woman, who spent every day lying on her back staring at the ceiling, had stared back at her through once vibrant eyes and answered, Nothing. It’s strange, isn’t it? she had said, to lie here day after day and think about absolutely nothing.

Snapping back into the present, Joanne realized she was staring at the elderly woman across from her. The woman shifted in her seat uncomfortably, turning her head away from the intense scrutiny to which she felt she was being subjected. Joanne lowered her eyes, searching for something to do with her hands. Absently, she began rifling through the magazines on the table beside her, careful to avoid the latest issue of
Time
, and finally selecting a copy of
Newsweek
that she had already glanced through and knew to be safe. She flipped through the pages. noting that there
was
an article on several recent medical breakthroughs. She tried to read it, but she wasn’t really interested in any such medical miracles. They had come too late to help the people she had cared about. Much as she wanted to be optimistic, the image of her mother, ever hopeful herself and protective of her daughter until the end—don’t you worry, baby, everything will be all right—kept intervening. Joanne dropped the magazine unceremoniously back on top of the pile and retrieved yet another, her hand passing across the top of the
Time
magazine, feeling it pull against her palm like a magnet.

After several seconds, Joanne’s arm—acting as if it had a life of its own—reached over and picked it up. Carefully avoiding the Crime section, Joanne turned to the Cinema page, read through three caustic reviews of movies she would never see, then flipped to the Books section and did the same. She noted the plays reviewed in the Theater section, wondering absently if Robin and Lulu might be interested in either of them, and then checked the People page for the latest carryings-on of the rich and famous, before finally checking in on Milestones to see who had married, given birth, divorced, or died. As usual, most people listed occupied the final category. Joanne then deliberately closed the magazine, checked her watch, and wondered what was keeping Eve. The last time Eve had undergone these tests, she had been finished much faster. Had they discovered something? Joanne reopened the magazine. She knew, even without looking, what she would find. “Crime,” the headline read. “Long Island’s Suburban Strangler.”

Joanne gasped loudly despite herself, attracting the unwanted attention of the elderly woman across from her, who regarded her with ill-concealed annoyance.
Feeling almost guilty, Joanne’s gaze fell back across the column, feeling the woman’s eyes on her now, as if she were waiting for further interruptions.

Joanne forced herself to calmly read through the collection of dispassionate facts: the three murdered women were all residents of Long Island; they were middle-aged and married, all with families; one worked outside the home, the other two did not. There was no rational motive for the murders, none but the most superficial of connections between the victims. All had been sexually molested before being killed.

Joanne’s eyes reached the bottom of the page and she once again gasped. The woman across from her got up and moved to the other side of the room. Photographs. Three little squares at the bottom of the page containing the faces of the murdered women.

Joanne studied the pictures carefully. There was nothing particularly memorable about any of the women, she realized quickly. They looked like the suburban housewives and mothers they were: pleasant, attractive, but not beautiful; two blond, one brunette; ordinary women who led ordinary lives. The only extraordinary thing about them had been the manner of their demise.

Police were issuing the usual warnings for women in Long Island to be extra careful, not to open their doors to strangers, to report any prowlers seen lurking in the neighborhood to the police. Other than that, a frustrated police force admitted there was little they could do. The responsibility, they stressed, rested with women to take all necessary precautions. The police, virtually clueless, the article concluded, were despairing of catching the Suburban Strangler before he caught his next victim.

Joanne’s eyes returned to the photographs at the bottom of the page. She felt ashamed of her objective appraisal, seeing her own picture—which one would they use?—squeezing its way onto the page to take its place beside the others. Would people be so quick to dismiss her as pleasant, attractive, ordinary? And wasn’t it interesting, she found herself thinking, that the police considered the matter to be women’s responsibility and not their own?

“Let’s get out of here,” the voice announced firmly from somewhere beside her.

“What’s the matter?” Joanne asked, springing to her feet, the vinyl reluctantly releasing her thighs with a loud sucking sound, the
Time
magazine bouncing off her knees to the floor, as she hurried to chase after Eve.

“The bastard,” Eve was muttering as she found the exit stairs and began her quick descent. Joanne chased after her, feeling an almost overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t they been through this same scene weeks earlier?

“What happened?” she cried, hearing only the clacking of Eve’s heels in response. “For God’s sake, Eve, you’ll fall and break your neck if you don’t slow down. Wait a minute. What happened?”

“Where’s the car?” Eve demanded as soon as they reached the street.

“In the parking lot where we left it. Will you tell me what happened in there?”

Eve marched toward the parking lot, stopped abruptly, and turned to face a startled, worried Joanne. “That bastard,” she muttered again, about to turn away.

Joanne grabbed the sleeve of Eve’s white linen jacket. “Would you please stop running and swearing long enough to tell me what went on in there?”

Eve took several deep breaths in a conscious effort to calm herself down. “Do you know what that asshole had the nerve to say to me?” Joanne shook her head, eager for Eve to continue. “He had the nerve to tell me that my pains are all in my head.”