The Last Blue Plate Special (40 page)

“And I don’t want to,” I finished the litany. “Not even for you, Roxie.”

Her hand clamped over my wrist then, hard.

“I want to dance with you,” she whispered, and I said okay, and we did. Roxie leading, the whole dance floor to ourselves,
Garth telling the truth from a jukebox. Not a step missed, not a turn two degrees short, no failure to anticipate each move
exactly, and the next, and the next. Sometimes words only snarl like thread. We went home to her place after that, saying
nothing. She walked Brontë and came back, and we didn’t talk, the dance still in us, all night.

In the morning she only said, “There’s got to be some way to make this work, Blue,” and left for her job.

I watched her drive away and said, “There is.”

She’s in Philadelphia now for her interview. When she comes back, if she’s decided to take the job, I’ll tell her I’m going,
too. I’m not going with her, I’m just going. Then we’ll see what happens. I’ve already picked the hex sign I’m going to paint
on my shed.

Kara Eldridge was located at Disneyland with both children the day after her husband’s death. They were staying at a nearby
motel and there was no mention of either a cousin or a job when Rathbone filled me in, and I didn’t mention them to him, either.
Kara declined to make arrangements for her husband’s funeral, so those arrangements were made by the County of San Diego and
he was buried quietly in a pauper’s field with only a handful of strangers, Wes and Annie Rathbone, and me, in attendance.
Wes had brought me the blue willow plate from the shack, one of the early English ones, a real collector’s item, and I laid
it atop Thomas Eldridge’s coffin before the winch creaked and he was lowered into the ground.

“That’s from your mother, Tommy,” I said, and then we left before they began to backhoe the dirt in.

Annie Rathbone had decided on the new floor over breast surgery and was planning a big party for as soon as Wes finished the
job.

T. J. Eldridge’s body was autopsied the night of his death, and a significant amount of MAOI was found in his stomach along
with partially digested tomato soup, baloney, and several ounces of aged cheddar cheese on which the digestive processes had
failed. The kind labeled “extra-extra sharp.”

Representatives of both the FBI and the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office determined that the death was a suicide
despite the absence of a suicide note, and complex analyses of T. J. Eldridge’s motives up to the moment of his death were
generated, published, and discussed on talk shows all over the country. The official cause of death determinations and the
analyses which followed were largely dependent on my comments during interrogation late in the night after Eldridge’s death.

“Yes, his behavior suggested that he knew he would die and intended to kill himself when he ate the cheese,” I confirmed their
theory over and over.

“Yes, it does seem that he returned to the line shack, the scene of the only happiness he’d known as a child, to commit suicide
amid bizarre magazine pictures of owls and dragons and mountains of rotting corpses that represented his twisted, murderous
psychology.”

Certainly these pictures could be regarded as “trophies” consistent with the FBI’s profiling of serial killers, although,
of course, I was a social rather than a clinical psychologist and so these things were beyond my expertise. But I did have
an interesting photograph taken by Eldridge as a child. A fluke, really, I’d picked it up at the very same gallery where Dixie
Ross was going when she died. But it did suggest, didn’t it, that Thomas Eldridge had handpicked all his victims, including
himself?

The signature, I said, “Greave.” See how the letters are the initials of all the intended victims? Grossinger, Ross, Emerald,
Ashe, Van Der Elst, and at the end, Eldridge. The media had a field day with that, especially after the FBI discovered that
Eldridge had consigned his collection of photographs to the exhibit organizers a month before the first death, when all the
target surgeries were scheduled but had not yet been performed. It seemed clear that Eldridge had both selected his victims
and planned to kill himself when he signed his photos with an anagram of initials of the intended dead.

Actually, it was BB who noticed the coincidence as we sat on the floor that night beneath the picture with its spidery signature.
And of course there are no coincidences, only jokes told by a universe of which we are only dimly aware. I didn’t tell the
authorities that Thomas Eldridge couldn’t possibly have known the names of his victims and woven their initials into that
signature. I didn’t mention that I thought the signature was merely a message. A message to a world over which he finally
lost control when his wife got a community college degree in computer programming. A world in ruin because women are destroying
the natural order by failing to obey men. “Grieve!” he was probably urging poetically. But T. J. Eldridge was a lousy speller.

I also didn’t mention that Kara Eldridge had prepared the tomato soup and baloney sandwich that contained the lethal quantity
of MAOI found in Eldridge’s stomach and bloodstream, as well as the aged cheese which naturally contained more than enough
tyramine to, when it hit his stomach and could not be oxidized, elevate his blood pressure until an artery burst in his brain.
I didn’t mention that Isadora Grecchi had helped Kara Eldridge get the education that would end her dependency on her husband.
Nor the fact that Grecchi, a physician with a long history of clinical depression, had earlier in her possession two different
types of MAOI medications, one of which she had given to Kara Eldridge for the purpose of killing T. J. Eldridge in the same
way he had killed his victims. I failed to mention, finally, that Kara had been in contact with Isadora just before Eldridge
ate his tomato soup and baloney sandwich. Kara had agreed to call one last time before leaving town in a rented van with her
children.

“It’s done,” I imagined Kara would have said to Isadora in that phone call. “He’s dead.”

There didn’t seem to be any point in mentioning any of it to anybody.

The Last Blue Plate Special
is a work of fiction and any similarity between its characters, settings, and events and anything occurring in real life
is purely coincidental.

Several real people did graciously offer advice and expertise, however. I would like to thank them. Any mistakes herein are
mine, not theirs.

First, huge thanks to psychology professor Horace Marchant, Ph.D., for the weird idea, tons of arcane references, and his
heroic willingness to vet an entire book in e-mails.

Thanks also to Dr. John Alexander for technical advice on cosmetic surgery; to Steve Davis, M.D., and Alan Abrams, M.D., J.D.,
F.C.L.M., for technical advice on both general and forensic psychiatry; and to Gaylynn Speas, M.D., for technical advice on
anesthesiology.

The expertise of Gene Riehl, FBI-retired, law professor Marilyn Ireland, and editor Sara Ann Freed is deeply appreciated as
well.

Abigail Padgett

San Diego