Suspicion of Betrayal (9 page)

Dangerous, to want him so much.

You have my ring on your finger. Don't try to take it off.

How could I? When you look at me like that . . . When you touch me . . . I could never leave. I have no strength, none. This never happened before. Never. Not with any other man. You fill me completely. I am floating on the tide at full moon. Pulled under and swept away. Swept away. Crazy for you. Crazy.

In the distance she heard ringing. A telephone somewhere. Gradually she came awake and glanced at the clock: 12:37 am
There was a moment of knowing. The old man was dead. Anthony was calling to tell her.

She fumbled for the receiver, dropped it, then brought it to her ear. Her eyes were still closed. "How is he?"

A silence.

She cleared her throat. "Anthony?"

Then a voice like metal scraped across piano strings.
HelloGailConnor.

Still groggy, she struggled to sit up.

Hellobitch.
The hideous clanging resembled a laugh.
Timetodie.

"Who are you?" Suddenly awake, heart pounding, she automatically clutched a handful of sheet at her heart. "Why are you doing this?"

Goingtogetyou. Timetodie. Howdoyouwantit?

"Go to hell." Gail saw the pale green light of the disconnect and jabbed it.

Within moments the ringing resumed. Gail turned on the light and squinted at the display, pay phone.
The same as last night? She couldn't remember. This time she left the number in memory.

She turned off the ringer. For a few seconds there was silence. Then a muffled jangle came up the stairs from the extension in the living room. She threw back the blanket and stood up, staring at the open door to her bedroom, the dark hallway beyond. She thought of calling the hospital, asking for Ernesto Pedrosa's room, then dismissed that idea. She couldn't disturb Anthony when he was waiting for word from the doctors.
Come home, I'm scared.

The phone rang again downstairs, then went silent. In her room the display showed the same number as before, but the message light remained dark.

She thought of the argument with Peggy Cunningham. Peggy might have confronted her son with Gail's accusations. Might have punished him. Might have sent him to his room, where he sat fuming. He would look out the second-floor window and see her car in the driveway.

"Oh, stop it," she said aloud. "He's only fourteen years old."

She hastily put on jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to check all the windows and doors, and turn off the ringer on the extension. She sat in the dark in the living room, listening for noises. Her mind spun with visions of a face at the window. If Anthony was here, he would go outside with his pistol. Gail did not own a gun.

She dialed 911, heard it ring once, then hung up. The police had better things to do.
Yeah, some woman got a phone call and wants us to drive by and see if Freddy Krueger is hiding in the bushes.

The ringer was off. What if Anthony called?

This is stupid, she told herself. Someone playing a joke, nothing more. She turned it back on, then went upstairs and turned on the phone in the bedroom as well.

It was past two o'clock in the morning when the call came through. Gail was wide awake. She saw MERCY HOSPITAL
on the display and picked it up.

Anthony told her the old man's heart rate was irregular. They had him on medication, and the doctors were deciding what to do. .

"Tell him I love him," she said. "And Digna. Be sure to tell her."

"I will," he said.

"I love you too, Anthony."

"I'll call you in the morning. Go back to sleep.
Te quiero.''''

FIVE

“I
wouldn't say I'm
worried."

"Well, I'd be worried. You should notify the police. Promise me you will."

"I promise, Mother. If it happens again, I'll call them."

Gail had come to her mother's house to sit on the terrace, read the Sunday paper, and be fussed over.

A gust of wind off the water teased Irene Connor's sun hat, and she caught it and pressed it firmly on her head. Bright auburn curls framed her face, and her sunglasses were a conscious joke—hot pink frames with little flamingos at the corners. Karen had bought them for her in Key West. Extending her arm, Irene aimed the brass nozzle of a hose toward the periwinkle around the base of a palm tree.

"It's so
hot,"
she said. "Look at that poor plant, how droopy. I was just out here yesterday." Flat four-petaled flowers bobbed and swayed in the stream of water.

"My grass is dying," Gail said. "We just laid it, and it's turning brown. The roofers broke some sprinkler heads. They're still not finished with the job, and there are broken tiles all over the place. And they flattened that alamanda bush you gave me."

"They did? Well, I'll just bring you another one. Good heavens, it's hot today. What's the rest of the summer going to be?" Irene gave the hose a jerk to free it and turned the sprayer on an arrangement of bromeliads, filling the pinkish centers with water. A small gray lizard scrambled out on Z-shaped legs and darted into the philodendron. "What I think," Irene said, "is that the person is someone you know. Why else would he disguise his voice? Did you hear any kind of accent?"

"Not that I could tell, just that horrible metallic scraping noise. And last time it was a robot. What next?"

"I hope there is no
next.'
' Irene said.

At this time of year the days were long, and the sun could bite till late in the afternoon. Outdoors, if one moved slowly, and wore shorts and a light, sleeveless top, it was possible not to get too sweaty, but Gail could feel the dampness on the back of her neck. The sea breeze gave some relief.

Half to herself, she said, "Someone whose voice I would recognize."

Irene bent down to inspect a leaf. Something had been chewing on it. "I think you ought to tell Anthony."

"I started to yesterday, but he was so tired. He'd been up all night. Then I forgot, and when I did think of it, he was on his way to the hospital again."

"Poor Mr. Pedrosa. I feel so sorry for Digna. I'd like to go by and see how she is. Do you think that would be all right?"

"Absolutely."

Gail had gone to see Anthony's grandfather yesterday afternoon, and would probably go again today. She had done little more than look in on him and sit with Digna for a while. Ernesto Pedrosa needed a pacemaker, his doctors had said. It would fit under the skin, a relatively simple procedure. The operation was scheduled for Tuesday. He had the best care available, but at eighty-four years of age . . .

"Anthony spent last night at his grandparents' house so he could take his grandmother to early mass. I haven't seen him to talk to since Friday night. He said he'd come by tonight for a while."

"Why don't you have dinner here?" Irene suggested. "Does Anthony like fresh asparagus? We could have a cold platter. I've got some lovely smoked turkey, if you don't mind leftovers."

"Oh, Mom, thanks, but we don't have time. He can't even stay the night with me. This is so hard, living apart. I hardly ever see him. If Dave wasn't putting everything I do under a microscope in court, I would ask Anthony to move in. Karen would just have to accept it."

Irene made a sly smile. Her lipstick matched her glasses—bright pink. "Separation isn't all that bad. Think how exciting your first night will be. Remember that scene in
Gone With the Wind!
Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs—"

"He had to. She wouldn't let him touch her. So all the way up the stairs, she's beating her fists on his chest. Rhett, Rhett put me
down!
That's not our problem."

The laughter bubbling across the yard seemed too big for such a small woman. In her bright yellow gardening clogs Irene stood barely five-two. Gail had heard people call Irene Strickland Connor "cute," and they tended to dismiss her opinions. Gail thought that her mother liked it that way: She could sneak up on them. She had the organizational acumen of a CEO. Since the death of her husband, Gail's father Edwin, Irene had devoted herself to fund-raising for local cultural organizations.

When Irene gave a sharp tug on the hose, the reel on the back wall spun out more of it. A fine, cooling mist made silvery beads on the elephant ears and dripped from the red ginger plants, the cycads, and crotons. The grass pulled in moisture with a soft ticking sound. A gray striped cat watched them from a concrete bench under the cassia tree, which had come into bloom with pink flowers.

Gail's parents had moved into this one-story house just north of downtown Miami thirty years ago, and it looked the same now, with its brick facade and row of white columns across the front. The aluminum awning windows from the sixties had never been changed, and the Florida room still had its polished terrazzo floor. On Sunday mornings after church, Irene would sit on the porch by the pool, work the crossword puzzle, sneak a cigarette, and have her juice with champagne. She could look out past the seawall, past the little islands in the bay and see the skyline of Miami Beach in the distance. Pelicans and seagulls glided by. Boats hummed up and down the intra-coastal waterway like heavy bees. The air was perfumed with orange jasmine and gardenia.

Gail had not lived here since going away to college at eighteen, but the word
home
always brought her these images. For Karen the house in South Miami was still home, and for Anthony it was his grandparents' mansion on Malagueña Avenue. Gail wondered how long it would take before the three of them felt a similar affection for the house on Clematis Street.

Irene took off her hat and fanned her face. "You know, I think the phone company has a service for tracing calls. But if it goes back to a pay phone, you still wouldn't know who did it, would you?"

"What's so weird is that there's just this disembodied voice that isn't even human, and he doesn't seem to
want
anything. I hung up quickly each time, so he didn't have a chance to say much. I wonder what he'd say if I stayed on the line."

"Don't give him the satisfaction."

"I almost want to listen so I could know
why.
It makes me feel so powerless. This person invaded my home, scared the hell out of me, and there is nothing I can do about it."

"Hang up, that's what you can do."

Gail followed her mother on the mildewy keystone that made a path to the side yard, where she grew her orchids. Hazy shafts of light came through the trees. Irene twisted the adjustment on the nozzle to mist an immense dendrobium with a cluster of stems four feet long. It had grown in that particular live oak tree as long as Gail could remember, and every spring it produced a half dozen spikes of white blossoms touched with pale yellow.

She had come to her mother's house to review plans for the wedding, but the files were still waiting in a box in the living room. Gail sat down on the concrete bench and petted the cat, who flopped over and exposed his belly for more.

"Mother, come with me to pick out a wedding dress. Anthony's cousins recommended a shop in Coral Gables." At the hospital today she had talked to Elena about it. Gail had felt bad for rebuffing the suggestion before, and worse for not having accompanied the rest of the family to the hospital the night Pedrosa collapsed. She added, "I need someone on my side, or else I'll spend too much."

"Well, don't expect me to put on the brakes. You should buy something that will knock his socks off."

The cat pushed its nose against Gail's hand, and she gave it a good scratching, feeling its throat rumble with purrs.

The spray went slowly across the row of miniature orchids hanging on the wood fence in little clay pots. "Darling, would you like to have my mother's earrings? You know—something old, something new. And this is the old part, not the borrowed. I want you to keep them."

The earrings were curves of diamonds set in platinum. Gail's grandfather, John Strickland, had gone all the way to New York by train in the thirties to buy them at Tiffany's for the woman he loved. Her father had refused to let her marry this young man with no prospects.

Gail said, "I have lusted for those earrings for years! But no, I can't keep them. They're yours."

"I never wear them. They're more classical, anjj they never suited me." Pointing the hose at an immense staghorn fern, she asked Gail when she planned to go shopping. "Not Tuesday, I hope. I have a meeting with the florist. But I could rearrange it. So just tell me when."

Gail had forgotten about the florist. "How much money do you have left out of what I gave you?"

"Well ... I'm not sure."

"Mother. Please don't tell me you're using your own."

"What if I am? The flowers are from me, and that's that." She aimed the sprayer at giant maidenhair fern cascading from a tree, and a rainbow shimmered in the mist. "Aside from the neighborhood boy, who can you think of that has a grudge? Who's angry at you?"

Gail had explained what had happened in the gazebo, how she had yelled at Payton Cunningham. She shrugged. "Dave might be angry, but this isn't his style."

"I like Dave Metzger. Maybe he'll come to his senses. How is that going, by the way?"

"On hold till we see the psychologist and he makes a report. What do you mean, you like Dave?"

Irene's pink-flamingo sunglasses turned toward her. "Well, I do. Dave isn't a bad person. He's just making a mistake. I can't turn my feelings on and off."

"Sorry," Gail said.

An arc of water reached across the grass to the Boston fern along the fence. "You're worried. I can tell. You're pale and you hardly touched your breakfast." Irene looked at her. "You aren't pregnant, are you?"

Gail laughed. "No."

“It's too bad you and Dave only had one."

"Mother—"

She kicked at a weed with one yellow plastic clog. "I am eternally grateful, Gail, that I had two children. You know. Things can happen in this world."

Gail's sister, Renee, had died last year—viciously murdered. Irene did not mention her often, but Gail knew that the pain would never go away.