Helen Hath No Fury (16 page)

“Out?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Again?”

I nodded again.

“Tonight?”

Another nod.

“In the rain.” Not a question, but I gave him one final nod.

“Damn.” He picked the first dropped shoe up. He didn’t ask where or why, possibly because he was too tired for any more words. He merely shook his head slowly as if in disbelief and got himself ready.

“You pass,” I whispered. “You permanently pass. No more tests.”

O
F COURSE
I
EXPLAINED, IN GREAT DETAIL, AFTER
I ended the conversation with Susan. I explained what all I thought I knew, and I explained it top speed, partly to cover up my nonanswer when we saw that the sky had fallen yet again and we were in monsoon mode.

“Where’s your raincoat?” he asked as we were leaving.

“The umbrella will do,” I said. It was only a little bit broken. “Anyway, the kid, Ethan, got me to thinking about …”

I watched his reaction. I waited for him to disbelieve, to stop me and correct my logic, but he couldn’t. And didn’t try. Instead, he seemed concerned—about me.

I felt a tenaciously held set of reservations—a series of nearly transparent scrims that I’d carefully placed between us—fall. They were gone. Disappeared. And there Mackenzie was. Clear as day.

He was no longer “the other”; he was a part of whatever I was.

I kept that late-breaking news to myself. The timing seemed off for a man who so recently rhapsodized about our lack of binding ties.

“I
T MAKES ME SICK
,” I
SAID AS WE SETTLED IN A BOOTH
at the place Denise had specified. It was sparsely populated, with a lone man at the bar, and possibly others at
the back, in booths, although I couldn’t see them. They should be home, anyway. The rain was tropical, torrential, not at all the spring showers that bring flowers. This deluge smashed blossoms, flattened them to pulp.

The slick interior seemed designed for a life other than mine and even, perhaps, an era other than this one. Recessed lighting skimmed blue velvet seats and brushed stainless tables. A pianist played Cole Porter tunes, and I yearned, for the first time in two years, for a cigarette. It seemed a requirement of places such as this. Spare time and a hat with a veil that covered the top half of your face, leaving your mouth free for martinis and kisses.

“This place bothers you?” Mackenzie asked.

“I’ve never felt close to Denise, or overly fond of her, but she seemed okay. Not a bad sort. Ambitious, but then so are lots of my friends and there’s nothing wrong with that. But to have your ambitions warp you that way. To …” It made me shudder. Or else it was the air-conditioning.

I could talk about it easily because I was with Mackenzie. Not that I could bear picturing myself a damsel in distress, waiting to be saved, and not that I believed he was my personal superhero, able to protect me from life’s insults. But there was no getting around the fact that a tall, healthy male specimen of cophood was a plus on the arm.

Denise would have to do only what she said she was going to do—speak with me. Say what was on her mind, if anything besides walloping me was. If or when she tried to sneak behind me with a bat, or push me into traffic, or do much of anything, she’d get herself arrested and hauled away.

So I could settle into the evening, almost watch it reel by and admire it for what it was.

“You don’ want to know about it, is that it?” he asked softly. “About Denise. About what people can do.”

I considered this, and then I nodded. “Ignorance might not be bliss, but it sure beats looking at everybody—I mean everybody now—suspiciously. Being a little afraid all the time.”

He nodded.

“That’s what’s getting to you about your job, isn’t it?” I asked. “That bad feeling about humanity in general.”

Carefully, overly carefully, he wiped a bead of sweat off his glass of beer. “After all these years, my view of the world … I don’t think it’s accurate. In fact, I know it isn’t. It’s skewed, bent from lookin’ at the rotten pieces of the puzzle all the time. But all the same, it’s what I see, pretty much.”

“You used to talk about law school. Or science—forensics, some such,” I said. “How does that sound now?”

He nodded. “Both worth thinkin’ about, but it’s a hard call with lots of factors to weigh. Includin’ you, of course.”

“Being weighed isn’t my favorite thing,” I murmured, and he smiled. “I think I could get used to places like this, though. Why don’t we hang out in them more often? There’s something about it that makes you want to talk about stuff. About life. Big stuff.”

“It’s called cryin’ in your beer.” He downed the last of his uncried-in beer and signaled for another.

I ordered another glass of wine and an assortment of tapas.
“In vino veritas?”

“Possibly. But it’s more who we are this particular night. Bars, cafés, whatever are only spaces, like the commons were supposed to be. The parks. Places to gather and become a community. Whatever kind it is. Sometimes, the only sounds in bars are mating calls. Lots of times, it’s all
about lies large and small. You and me, we talk here, but we talk at home, too. And in delis and restaurants and parks and in the car …”

I couldn’t help smiling at him. Despite Denise and the reason I was here, I was enjoying myself. I felt worldly, on the town, out of my normal walls and spaces. “We’ve become fogies,” I said. “Homebodies.”

He shrugged. “Nice, isn’t it?” He looked at his watch. “Where is she?”

“She’ll be ducking out of another of his endless appearances. It’s exhausting just to read his schedule, to think of how many times he must say the same thing. It must be hell on wheels to stand or sit there and smile at the same drivel, time after time after time. I couldn’t do it.” I envisioned Roy Stanton Harris, elegantly dressed, charming, disarming with the combination of classic features and deep dimples that flashed when he smiled. It was no mystery how and why a young girl like Helen—or anyone—could fall for him. I just couldn’t understand how a grown, independent woman like Denise could tolerate his politics, let alone so absorb them that she could kill a friend and nearly kill a second one for their sake.

“What you couldn’t stand, Denise seems willing to kill for.” He checked his watch again. “We’ll give her a few more minutes. It’s nice here, anyway. She has good taste.”

“Except in husbands.”

Husbands. Silently, I repeated the word. Tasted it. Tested it. The man at the piano played “Always.” Too corny to believe, except I suddenly thought: why not?

Why not now?

A good man is hard to find. You’ve found one.
My mother again! She’d tracked me down.

Or was it me?

In any case …

“Mackenzie,” I blurted out, “will you marry me?”

He had just raised his glass to his lips, and he sprayed out a light fan of beer. And laughed out loud.

My skin burned, then iced over. The future—including what had been a perfectly fine status quo—crumbled.
I asked him to marry me! The guy spouting bad marital statistics. The guy who’s never mentioned the word, except negatively. Was I out of my mind?
“Scared you, didn’t I?”

“Of course,” he said.

“I was only—”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“—joking.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re retracting the offer? I’ve heard of short engagements, but this is ridic—you were toyin’ with my affections? Not nice, Amanda, not at all.”

“Yes?
You said yes? You meant yes?” I heard the squeak of disbelief in my voice. I’d lost my martini sophistication midproposal.

“You anticipated otherwise? Hoped I’d say no?”

“You’ve been preaching the happy nonmarried life as if it were the received word of God. What else would I think?”

“This is the weirdest—what are we disputing now? But still—if that’s what you thought I felt—why’d you ask? Just to make me feel—”

“No, because I—”

“Wanted me to say thanks a heap, but no? Wanted
me
to be the problem?”

“Are you saying I am?”

“Of course. You’re the high priestess of single. Every time your mother tiptoes near the subject of marriage, you erect new barricades, write new manifestos against it. What else would I have thought? Didn’t want to rush or push you where you didn’t want to be.” His voice was
kind, bemused, entertained as if he’d been watching a good show for a long time.

I felt a goofy smile force itself on my face. He laughed again, and then he raised his glass. “A toast,” he said. Then his smile froze, he cocked his head, and he put his glass back down. “Hold on. Have to be sure. This has not been exactly a Hollywood version. Amanda, given our ability to poorly communicate, tell me so that I have it straight—what, precisely, would we be toasting? What was it you asked?”

“I … I … we … want to get married?”

He nodded gravely. “Tha’s what I thought. And I said yes, and you said you were kidding, and then we—so I’m askin’, are we on or off?”

On or off. I couldn’t believe that prepositions would determine this most major of life changes. Shouldn’t it be something grander? Something more heroic?

“On,” I said. We clicked glasses.

So it was like that. Betrothed while waiting for a murderer to show.

The solitary drinker at the bar had been watching us, and he nodded and smiled, rather wistfully, I thought, as we toasted each other. Then he settled his tab and left.

“What happens next?” I asked Mackenzie.

He kept grinning. “Beats me,” he said. “I’m new here myself. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

And as if that
ear
had miscued someone, ours were assaulted by shouts. The outside door was pushed open, and the man who’d just left stood there, shouting above the drum of the rain pouring on the awning. “Help! Call an ambulance! There’s a—” At this point he probably realized that a certain level of histrionics wasn’t necessary. He could deliver his news indoors. He stepped in and closed the door.

“There’s a woman outside on the ground. I shouted, but she didn’t budge. I touched her, she didn’t move.”

“It’s probably old Bets,” the bartender said. “Damn. She gets herself into a stupor and falls down and gets pneumonia—”

“This isn’t any homeless lady. Call the police!” The bartender was already punching numbers on his phone.

Mackenzie was shaking his head. I could almost hear the thoughts inside:
This is the last thing I wanted tonight.
Insult added to injuries. Nonetheless, he was on his feet and in gear. “I’m police,” he said, producing his badge.

It wasn’t going to be Old Bets outside, I knew. I followed Mackenzie, hanging back a few steps, but I was the one who could identify the body. If it wasn’t Old Bets.

It wasn’t.

Even though I’d known it as soon as the man first shouted, I still couldn’t believe what I saw. Couldn’t fit Denise, sprawled and bleeding on the sidewalk, into the jigsaw puzzle I’d completed. I looked up, past her into the wet and empty street, past that to the empty sidewalk on the other side.

Denise wasn’t the killer. I’d been wrong. She hadn’t killed Helen or attacked Susan. My carefully constructed puzzle picture fragmented again.

Around us, sheets of rain, blued by the sign outside the bar, cascaded down the awning and off, making a wet crime-line barrier.

Who?

Anybody, the rain hissed as the night yawned around it. It could be anybody. You’re back to square one.

I
WAS BEING WATCHED, OR WE WERE
. I
LOOKED ACROSS
the street and saw a ragged man emerge from a doorway, newspaper his defense against the downpour. I felt a surge of hope—he could have seen what happened.

But even as I raised my arm and shouted, “Hey!” he lifted a sleeping bag and took off.

Mackenzie had been kneeling next to Denise’s body. He stood up. “I feel a pulse.”

I took a moment to be relieved. “That man”—he was turning the corner at this point—“he saw what—”

Mackenzie put his arm on mine. “I saw him when I first came out. He was asleep,” he said. “Our noise woke him up and he cursed us. Incoherently.”

The whine of a siren interrupted him. “Why don’t you wait inside?” Mackenzie said. “That’ll be the paramedics. I’ll be two minutes.”

I nodded and went and ordered a brandy. I brought the untouched plate of tapas over to the bar, then pushed it away. I sat nursing my drink and thinking about what a ridiculous question I’d been asking with my “if not Denise, then who did it?” Even that incoherent homeless man across the street would have taken no more than five seconds to answer that question.

Mackenzie came in, asked me to order him a brandy,
too, excused himself for five minutes, then came and sat next to me on one of the plush blue-velvet barstools.

“It’s Harris, then,” I said. “I was only wrong in thinking he wouldn’t get his own hands dirty. He’d know everything because Denise would have told him.”

“Maybe not.”

“Maybe not know everything or maybe not that he did it?”

“Either or both, plus maybe you weren’t wrong in thinking he wouldn’t. Might be time to take a deep breath, drop back, and reconsider the whole thing. Look at it from a new vantage point. Start instead with the business of the husband, the missing money, the mysterious absence,” Mackenzie said.

“The missing husband Ivan? What would he gain by doing that?”

“The money, maybe. And Roxanne.” Mackenzie shrugged. “I always thought he was a more likely suspect than anybody else. The spouse, you know.” He put both hands up. “I’m not sayin’ a thing against marriage. Just that you always look at the spouse first. And most often, last.” He sipped again at his brandy, and I did the same. I could feel the fumes warm their way down my body.

“Jiggle your thinking out of the way it’s been directed,” Mackenzie said. “Think in terms of Denise, not Helen. Maybe we’ve got all of this backwards. What could Denise have known or owned that made this person think she had to be stopped at any cost? What felt like life-or-death to this other person—another person who is not, by the by, her husband.”

“Why not? It has to be him.”

Mackenzie shook his head no, looking sad that he had to do so. “It lacks logic. Why would he hurt her? He wouldn’t. Not ever. She’s an asset.”

“Not if she was going to tell me that he killed Helen.”

“Tell you.” His tone was noncommittal.

“Yes. Me. It was something important.”

“Well, then, you could be right. Except you aren’t.”

I leaned close and enunciated each syllable, trying to be as obviously superior to him as possible. “Given that you found my theory convincing one small half hour ago, how can you
possibly
say with such
consummate
authority that this
small
revision, which does not change
any
of the principal ideas, is beneath consideration?”

He grinned. “Very good, your elegance! I can see how you might easily terrorize small children and the semi-literate, but I, despite being humble, have my own ways of knowing things, too, even words, and am not easily terrorized by a fine vocabulary and syntax.”

“Avoiding the question, aren’t you? Why is that? Because you don’t have a sane answer?”

“You’re going to regret your supercilious tone,” he said in a mild voice and with just a trace of a smile. “I didn’t avoid the question, just the hurt the answer will cause your ego, is all. The thing of it is, I talked to Roy Stanton. I myself can provide his alibi.” He leaned back, basking in his superiority and almost toppling off the barstool, which for the nastiest slice of a moment would have pleased me mightily.

“When? What about? What does any of this have to do with—”

Mackenzie gestured toward the back of the bar. “Five minutes ago?”

“I thought—”

“I was answering a call of nature, when in fact, I was making an unnatural call. To turn a phrase, if I dare do so in your august presence.”

“Continue. We are mildly amused.”

“The man had to be informed that his wife has been in a serious accident.”

“Accident? You mean whoever attacked her didn’t mean to? The heavy object slipped out of his hand and onto her head?”

“Don’ know it’s male, Amanda. Or was that a sexist, knee-jerk response?”

“You’re right. The attackperson’s heavy object slipped.”

“I had to tell Roy Stanton his wife was seriously injured. An’ where they were taking her. He sounded unable to comprehend a word of it.”

“That proves nothing. He must be a good actor to say the things he does with a straight face.”

“The thing is, before I could get to him, I had to go through two other people, then wait, because Roy Stanton was windin’ down, concluding his talk. I myself heard the applause, which went on forever. Way excessive. My guess is that Denise sneaked out at the start, thinking she’d be back by its conclusion and nobody would notice.”

My shoulders sank so low, they rested on my pelvis.

“The man talks for too long.”

Damn. Double damn. The ominous dark crept in still more, a frightening straitjacket waiting to be snapped around me.

“Furthermore, if I were to check back, which I surely will, if ever there is a clear and proven homicide, he will turn out to have been out in front of a thousand people when Helen fell.”

“That was midday.”

“A luncheon speech, or at least a meeting, you’ll see. He’s running hard and nonstop. As for Susan? You don’t really believe the guest of honor, the candidate himself, could walk outside of an enormous fund-raiser and excuse himself to bean somebody up the street, do you? Know how many tagalongs there are? Aides and confidantes and yes-men and well-wishers and people like
Susan and … even if
99
percent of them were gone, his car would be right in front of the ballroom, waiting. He would not have been able to escape notice.”

He was right, I was wrong, but I didn’t like that at all. It is sometimes difficult behaving like an adult. “I feel as if … I feel endangered. Three people in my book group now. That can’t be coincidence.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“It’s … it’s pretty …”

“Terrifyin’.”

I wouldn’t have been able to say that word out loud. Almost one-third of the group seriously, if not fatally, hurt. Who was next? Why? “What could anybody have against us? What could we possibly know or have done that could so infuriate someone? We’re ordinary women. We don’t even have that much in common besides loving books.”

Mackenzie was shaking his head in that sad-but-true fashion of his. “Only way to find out is to ask,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for a real truth-telling session. Instead of each one comin’ to you with her version and her bit, maybe everyone has to do what you were tryin’ to. Toss their knowledge into a public, open pot. See what emerges. Answer hard questions.”

“And meanwhile, the official investigators will do what?”

“Officially investigate,” he said. “Startin’ with yours truly.”

“We won’t survive this, will we?”

“You and me? Why not?”

I flashed him a look. “I meant the book group. As a group. Once people ask Roxanne about having an affair, or Clary says the thing about the missing money, or Wendy talks about the aborted deal, or Tess obliquely refers to Helen’s problems …” I couldn’t go on.

“You seem curiously out of the loop,” he said. “You and Susan. The snoops.”

“I dread telling Susan.”

“Rough, comin’ on the heels of her attack.” He held up his snifter, visually measuring just how long he could make the last sip of cognac last.

“Undoubtedly, but I meant something else. She’s mixing up real life and fiction, and she makes predictions, or warns against things, because of the way things happen in books. Maybe it’s that blow to her head. But she was right this time. When I told her Denise wanted to talk tonight, she said that meant Denise would be killed.”

“Denise isn’t dead.”

“Yet? That’s good news, but that’s luck, or chance. The basic thing’s come true, and the point is Susan. It’s too creepy that life is mixing up fiction and reality even worse than Susan does.”

“You won’t call her, then?”

“Of course I’ll call her.” I exhaled so forcibly the cocktail napkin rose from the bar and fluttered. “I’ll call everybody.” There wasn’t any need to start a telephone tree. There were so few of us left to call.