The Man on the Washing Machine (29 page)

Tim Callahan's name produced a small article about the riot at the Adelphi Club and when I dug a little deeper more familiar names popped up. Including the name of the Adelphi Club president who was mishandling the protests and who had fallen from grace with a resounding thud. Omigod. I started to hyperventilate—if I could find connections on the Internet, anyone could! And if they
began
their search with the Adelphi Club, it wouldn't take long for the same familiar names to surface.

Lucy had been pestering me for most of the time I'd been upstairs. She needed dinner and she needed to go outside. When she abandoned me I knew she was minutes away from destroying something as payback for my neglect, so I snapped shut the laptop, called Lucy, and hurriedly opened a tin of her favorite beef and bacon food. I mushed the vile stuff around in her bowl with some dog biscuits and put the dish down, expecting to hear her nails on the floor as she charged down the hall. When I didn't hear her, I called her name again, surprised that I should have to. Perhaps my inner turmoil was affecting her. Maybe she didn't feel much like eating, either.

I returned to the bedroom. “Lucy, where are you? Dinner's on.”

But there was no answering patter of footsteps. At least, not in the house. I went back through the kitchen and into the utility room. The door was ajar and I heard her flopping down the stairs. I remembered the backward kick I'd intended should close the door but obviously hadn't. I called her again, but she ignored me. I locked the back door (lesson learned, finally) and started down the stairs.

I followed her into the garden. Nothing was going to happen, I told myself nervously. There were too many lights on—too many people on the other side of their windows and doors. Kurt. Sabina. Helga. Davie. Haruto. And my best friend, Nat.

I'd have to flip the start and end points of my Internet search to be certain; I'd have to double-check, but somehow I knew.

“Lucy!” I hissed. “Lucy! Where are you?”

I searched in a random pattern across the darkened garden, calling her name and checking under her favorite shrubs until I found her. She gave me a welcoming lick in the eye when I snatched her up, and then wriggled in her eloquent way to tell me business had not been taken care of.

“Hurry up,” I muttered at her, looking around anxiously. There were moon shadows in the garden and Lucy's white fur was dim in the gloom under an azalea bush. She was a small, humpback oval, like a guinea pig or a molded cream cheese salad. She rustled furtively and I looked away into the darkness to spare her embarrassment, and check once more that we were alone. The garden melted into a series of shapes, each blacker than the last, like hills rolling into the distance. I could see the shape of the toolshed near the vegetable garden. To my left, the frame of the children's swings looked like a gibbet, and the lights in the buildings were like holes in black velvet. I heard the occasional snatch of laughter, saw the shadows as people passed behind their lighted drapes. Lucy's steps crunched lightly on the path. I looked toward the sound and called her name. “Lucy! Stay close!” She looked back at me suspiciously, her cataracts glittering in the moonlight like opals.

I don't know when I realized someone was there, or how long he had been standing in the dark, waiting for me to turn my back. Suddenly he was there, a few feet from where I had been staring into the shadows. In my highly sensitized emotional state, the silhouette looked terrifying; shapeless and malevolent. I took a step backward. The intense black shadow stepped toward me.

“Who's that?” My voice cracked. Terror and misery closed my throat in a helpless squeak.

The shadow flew at me in a flying tackle like a headlong dive. I turned to run, tripped, and flung myself into someone else. I automatically raised my fist at the second attacker's head and lashed out. The keys arrayed around my knuckles connected, and I heard a heavy grunt. I aimed low with a furious piston-action kick and felt it connect. He bellowed like an animal and leaped at me. I raised jerky arms to ward him off and his partner cannonballed into me from behind, lifting me and flinging me to the side. I fell like a stone and heard something in me crack. For a suspended, fluid moment I thought I was dead—except surely death didn't hurt so much. And then, outlined above me in the moonlight, I saw Nat vault over me.

There was a bewildering, fierce, piglike grunting and the ugly, squelching slaps of bone hitting flesh, and two voices snorting incoherent threats. A voice snarling “Fuck you!” And then the sound of a scream and staggering footsteps and someone crashing heavily through the shrubs. Nat, panting and heaving deep, tattered breaths, was leaning over me. The moonlight glinted on a blade.

“Theo?” Nat said faintly. Still fearful and not quite comprehending what had happened, I struggled to shimmy backward along the ground. The torn sleeve of my sweater hung loose around my elbow. In the light from the moon, blood ran down my bare arm. I looked up at his terrified face, heard the soft, feathery fall of the knife from his hand. I couldn't breathe. Shallow gasps were absurdly painful. Ribs. He'd cracked my ribs when he threw me sideways; knocked me out of harm's way, out of the killer's path.

Familiar voices shouted, “What's going on out there?” “What's happening?” Footsteps pounded toward us. Nat's eyes fluttered, then rolled, and he fell on top of me.

Caught between relief and agony, I almost laughed. He'd seen the blood in the moonlight and fainted. I pushed him aside, took an experimental, painful breath, and rolled him over. He flopped inelegantly, still out cold and damn near breaking my legs with his weight. I checked myself for wounds, but couldn't tell where the blood had come from.

“Theo! Thank God! What the hell's happening?” Haruto's voice was shrill, his face taut with agitation. He knelt down beside me on the grass. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” I gasped.

“Hey! Somebody—a little help!” Astoundingly, Ben's voice came from the lower reaches of the garden. I now realized I'd been hearing disjointed swearing and more slaps and squelchy thumps.

Haruto leaped to his feet. He shouted something and disappeared. I sighed, winced painfully, and gave Nat a nudge.

“C'mon, Nat. Rise and shine.” But he made no sound and didn't move. I looked at his face again, and leaned over him in alarm. He looked like a ghost.

“Nat!” Every move I made was excruciating, but I tried to shake him anyway. In my own body the action set off a series of inner crackings and grindings and agonizing catches of breath, but it didn't rouse him. I dragged my legs painfully out from underneath him and lifted his head into the crook of my arm.

“Nat, can you hear me?”

His eyes fluttered slightly and a faint smile came to his lips.

“What's wrong? Are you hurt?” He'd seemed okay; winded, I thought. And he always fainted when he saw blood. It had been that, at the last, which persuaded me of his innocence.

Nicole's killer had no fear of blood.

He half opened his eyes. He looked almost sleepy. I saw his eyes shift, and he made a weak, uncoordinated gesture with one hand. I followed it and unzipped his black Windbreaker. It was warm and damp. My head swam as I pulled the jacket aside. There was barely enough light for me to see the big seeping dark patch nearly covering the front of his yellow cashmere sweater. The sweater I liked. The one that made him look so handsome. Dear God.

I looked up frantically and shouted at random. “Somebody! Somebody call 911!”

“They're already on their way,” Sabina's voice said from somewhere in the gloom. And suddenly, the electric lights in the trees sprang on looking horribly festive and giving me enough light to see everyone, looking like a chorus in a semicircle around the pietà at center stage.

“Call them again! For God's sake, he's dying!” My voice cracked. She came over cautiously, took one look, and her eyes met mine in horror.

“I'll call again. Put pressure on the wound.” She wriggled out of her own jacket, bundled it into a makeshift pad, and pressed it more or less in the middle of the seeping, expanding red stain. “I'll tell them to hurry.” She got off her knees and turned away with her phone already at her ear.

“It's okay, Nat. It'll be okay,” I whispered. He smiled at me faintly and said something I couldn't hear. I bent my head lower.

“Love you,” he said faintly.

“I love you, too. Don't die, Nat, please don't die.”

“No.” He looked thoughtful, as if he was deciding whether further speech was worth the effort. “Nicole and Derek … partners. Yes?” He paused for my nod of understanding. “Rhino horn … for medicine … help people … make a fortune. I didn't know.”

“I understand. Don't talk, okay?”

His eyes slowly closed and he was quiet for more than half a minute. I looked around anxiously, and was startled to see Helga, drooping and apparently unconscious, being held up between Ben and Haruto. I started to ask them what the hell had happened to her, but I turned back when Nat groaned softly. He licked his lips. “Thirsty,” he said.

My eyes filled with tears. “Don't talk, Nat. Don't say any more.”

He moved his head from side to side and his unfocussed eyes wandered, perhaps searching for something. “Sabina stole your gun … I took it from her.” Another long pause. “When it disappeared … I thought it was Derek. He thought I … killed Nicole in a jealous fit.” He made a wheezy laugh, which turned into a painful cough and he was silent for a moment.

“Derek said maybe drug dealers killed Nicole. Told me about the horn … Not illegal he said … p-politically incorrect … I helped him move it.” He closed his eyes again and lay quiet.

“I heard you,” I said brokenly. I couldn't finish. Couldn't tell him I'd heard the faint musical tinkle of his pendant in my garage, just before he—or someone—knocked me unconscious.

I heard a siren coming closer, and red flashing lights bounced off the shapes in the garden. Nat opened his eyes again. “It sucks,” he said clearly. He closed his eyes. I angrily shook him. His head jerked flaccidly. I called his name. “Nat! Nat! Don't go!”

Hurried footsteps, and then a stranger's hand reached for the pulse point in his neck and rested listening fingers there for the space of a few long seconds. Someone unlocked my rigid arm from around his head. Derek came running out of the darkness, shoved aside someone who grabbed at his arm, and skidded to his knees at Nat's side.

I was helped to a bench and I sat numbly and tried to breathe while competent hands felt me all over impersonally, pressed a couple of ribs, which yielded in a curiously inappropriate way, and fixed an oxygen mask around my face. I was aware of a jumble of voices explaining the general carnage to a mixed crowd of police and firefighters and paramedics. More police were on their way. Inspector Lichlyter. And the coroner. I looked over to where Nat lay with his face half in shadow and his eyes closed. He was so handsome. And I loved him.

I heard a snarl and looked toward the sound. Helga was now tied at the wrists and ankles with straps of some kind. Belts, I thought wisely, and felt dissociated from everything. She was still groggy, fighting against the restraints, glaring around her with hatred. She shouted at me, her mouth uncontrolled, lips flecked with saliva. “I hate you!” I shrank from her frenzy and the lack of reason in her eyes.

I sought out the comfort of familiar faces in the crowd. Staring with open mouths at Helga. At me. I could see the questions, the accusations, forming in their eyes. Ben stood off to one side. He didn't look as if he had any questions at all.

“Not Nat, not Derek,” I said brokenly.

He shook his head.

Not Nat, I thought with relief. Before I came down to the garden I'd almost worked everything out. Derek was the man Professor D'Allessio meant he'd seen at the compost pile the night Nicole was buried; it was Derek he had telephoned to demand an explanation. It was Derek who had taken the offensive and shouted at Ben when he, too, stumbled across his desperate attempt to hide Nicole's body. Because, love apparently being stupid
and
blind, he thought Nat had killed Nicole. And Nat thought Derek had shot at me with my gun. Their attempts to protect each other had caused most of the subsequent confusion.

But my on-line search had finally given me the key. It was Helga who had pushed Tim Callahan from a window; cut Nicole's throat with the lost machete; who had stabbed Professor D'Allessio; and tried to kill me.

A sob forced its way out of my throat. I had been afraid, so afraid it was Nat. Helga's guilt came as a terrible relief, mixed with a sort of stunned incredulity that so many of us were apparently the objects of her hatred. What the hell had I ever done?

Inspector Lichlyter's red jacket appeared in front of me. I heard her say: “How is she?”

I didn't look up.

She crouched in front of me. “Okay?” she said gently. My eyes filled involuntarily with tears. I nodded. She stood up and squeezed my shoulder then dug around in her shoulder bag and closed my fingers around a lace-trimmed handkerchief. Time passed. I heard Sabina telling how she had heard me scream and come running out. I didn't remember screaming. And Ben was explaining to someone that he was too far away to stop the attack. He had heard it, and tackled Helga as she ran away.

“And I helped him,” Haruto said, “and we managed to knock her out—my God, she fought like a tiger—and, well, I guess that's it.”

“You'll feel better out of that crowd,” one of the paramedics said as he helped me over to a pull-down seat at the back of the fire truck that had arrived, somehow, without me noticing. The paramedic had bright blue eyes. I concentrated on breathing, and the oxygen did help. But it didn't help everything. I couldn't help crying for the man I had been afraid would be my murderer. My best friend. My rescuer. And then I noticed paramedics still working urgently over Nat. Very urgently. They wouldn't do that if he was dead—I stood up and saw them shift him onto a stretcher and put him in the back of the ambulance.