The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (8 page)

“But … if you starve yourself—… doesn’t that mean that you don’t love yourself?”

“Doesn’t matter. You can never love yourself enough to make up for the indifference of others. Look at poor Warburton shoveling it in. She can never fill the void inside her with food. And the more she eats the more powerless she becomes.”

Elizabeth looked down at her plate, at the congealing mashed potatoes and slabs of roast beef drenched in viscous brown gravy. She wasn’t hungry any more. She wondered how Emma O. could manage to eat so heartily, given her obsession with beauty, but perhaps it would be rude to challenge her on that point.

After a moment’s pause, Elizabeth said to Rose, “I’m new here, so I’m not sure if it’s the done thing to ask people what they’re in for.”

Rose Hanelon gave her a pitying smile. “You’re officially crazy, my dear. Now you can ask anybody anything you damn well please.”

Before Elizabeth could put this new freedom to the test, however, Emma O. finished her gelatin, and asked, “You had a session with a shrink today, didn’t you? Which one?”

“Kindly old Dr. Dunkenburger,” said Elizabeth.

Emma looked as if she were about to say something, but
then she shrugged. As she got up to refill her water glass, she muttered, “I have Dr. Shokie. Fat lot of good he is.”

“I hope you’ll be in group with us,” said Lisa Lynn. “You really get to know people in group.”

“I don’t think I’ll be doing group therapy,” said Elizabeth carefully. “You see, I’m not really—”

“Crazy.” Rose beamed at her. “Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

“Not at all,” said Elizabeth, thinking fast. She didn’t want to offend these people, who would be her friends, even if it was for only a month. A month could be a long time. “I was going to say that I’m not able to be helped. My husband is dead, and talking about it is not going to bring him back.”

“Yes,” said Lisa Lynn. “But the therapy is for you. Not for him.”

“They’ll insist on assigning you to group,” Rose told her. “It’s a standard part of the treatment here, so you might as well come to ours. We have a session after lunch. Warburton is our group leader.”

“Well …” said Elizabeth, “I’m not sure.…”

Rose Hanelon gave her a wolfish grin. “You’d better come to our group. We’re the cool people.”

T
he PMS Outlaw gig had a lot in common with the cocktail party circuit in her old life, thought P. J. Purdue. A lot of lies were told over many little drinks, phony compliments passed, and one way or another somebody was going to get screwed. And then as now it was all strictly business.

She sipped her drink, watching Carla bat her eyes at an owlish young man with a stained tie and a briefcase in his lap.
Carla was a natural at the pickup con. She acted as if she had been doing it all her life, which perhaps she had. Growing up poor with a succession of unofficial stepfathers, Carla had learned early on that love was not something you ever got for free.

One way or another you pay your way in life, Carla often said. Being pretty is the cheapest way to go. Purdue wouldn’t know about that. Early on she had opted for smart, which wasn’t as cushy a ride as pretty, but it sure beat the hell out of “desperately nice and sincere,” always a popular choice among women. The meek shall inherit the earth, all right, thought P. J. Purdue. One heaping spoonful at a time.

Carla was indeed a beauty, but she’d needed some guidance from Purdue to dress the part for the caper of the day. Teased hair and raccoon eye shadow were all right for roadhouses, but razzle-dazzle wouldn’t do the job in a rock-bed Republican country club.

They had found the place by reading the local newspaper, which had given up carrying world news altogether, so hopeless was the prospect of competing against the big-city dailies that everyone subscribed to for “real news.” The purpose of the small-town publication was to keep track of the community’s weddings, births, and funerals (not necessarily in that order); to chart the activities of local government; and to chronicle the social scene for the area elite. All pretense of national coverage had vanished from the pages of the local twice-weekly: it had given pride of place on page one to the country club golf tournament, as if wars, tornados, and presidential elections were things that happened to other people.

Carla was working alone at first. Two women on the prowl would raise too many eyebrows in a staid private dining room.
No one had questioned their entrance, though. They walked in, well dressed and confident, as if they had arranged to meet someone. “Don’t trouble yourself about us,” Purdue told the waiter as she commandeered a table. “He’s late. We’ll keep an eye out for him.” Purdue could manage more well-bred hauteur than the average duchess. It had served her well in courts of law, but it was an even more useful talent when possessed by a fugitive.

Carla was wearing the little black dress they had bought at a department store sale in a mall two states back. Her only jewelry was a single strand of pearls, which happened to be real because Purdue, who had inherited them from her grandmother, had been wearing them on the day of their original getaway. Well-cut black dress. Blonde hair. Pearls. Now if only she could get the patter right.

Carla had moved away from the nervous-looking young man. Bad prospect. Conveying this message to Purdue with the briefest of glances, she sauntered with deliberate casualness toward an older man in golfing clothes, who was sitting alone at a table. His face was not visible, but he kept spearing forkfuls of chicken salad from behind an open
Wall Street Journal
, and from the look of his blue-veined hands he was well past sixty. Still young enough to dream, Purdue thought approvingly.

She held her breath as she watched her partner’s initial approach. Sloe-gin smile, soft voice, one well-manicured hand gesturing toward the newspaper. Good … good … After a few more moments of smiling conversation, Carla slipped into the chair beside the golfer. Now she assumed a pose of rapt enchantment, saying very little, but looking as if the old duffer’s remarks were pearls of wisdom. Things should go off without a hitch
now. Carla had been accepted in her role, and the old fellow would remember her as a sparkling conversationalist, as people usually do when you allow them to do all the talking.

Purdue turned her attention back to her drink. She didn’t want the mark to catch her staring at him. She wondered how long it would take Carla to get down to business. Purdue sipped her vodka martini, wondering idly why she derived such pleasure from the fleecing of their victims. There were other ways the pair could have supported themselves, even illegally. They could have sold phony gold-mine stock to greedy investors, or wheedled lonely senior citizens out of their life savings with bogus investment scams by telephone. Purdue had not even considered such ventures. There was no satisfaction for her in bilking gullible fools whose only crime was ignorance. She wanted the shallow men, the self-styled Romeos, the ones who thought they were the predators. Purdue recognized her own satisfaction in the humiliation of these men as a species of rage. Where had it come from, though? Was this for Daddy, who thought that the honor roll was nice but not good enough to compensate for the fact that the teenage Purdue was not a pretty, giggly blonde? Was it for every boy who made fun of her in high school, and for every loathsome blind date she had endured in college? Well, no matter. She would show them all.

She looked up in time to see Carla smiling and nodding in her direction. She leaned over and whispered something in the businessman’s ear, and he grinned and reddened slightly. Then the two of them got up, and, hand in hand, they approached Purdue.

“I’d like to introduce you to someone very special,” said
Carla. “This is Sam Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins is a banker.” She giggled as she added, “I don’t know when I’ve met anybody more captivating!”

Carla gave a little smirk when she said the last word, and Purdue looked startled, thinking of the handcuffs stashed in her evening bag, but a glance at their prospective victim reassured her. Mr. Jenkins suspected nothing but a unique and delightful evening of fun. Well, it would be memorable, they’d guarantee him that.

“It is indeed a pleasure to meet you,” said Purdue, extending her hand. “My name is Hill. A. P. Hill. I’m an attorney from Virginia.”

“She’s a criminal lawyer,” said Carla Larkin, and they laughed merrily at the wordplay that Mr. Jenkins would come to appreciate only later.

G
roup therapy at Cherry Hill was held in a sunny first-floor room whose curtainless windows overlooked an expanse of green lawn. Metal folding chairs stood in a semicircle, facing a chalkboard mounted on one cinder-block wall, while above it a plate-size Seth Thomas clock measured the minutes of the session.

Following her new friends into the room, Elizabeth chose a seat near the window with a good view of the flower beds, in case listening to other people’s troubles became tedious or threatened to distract her from her own sorrow. Elizabeth did not plan to contribute anything to the afternoon’s discussion herself. She felt that since bereavement was an indisputable, incurable fact, it did not qualify as a mental imbalance. Besides, her grief was too private to be shared, but she congratulated herself on being a good
sport by coming along to group therapy to provide an audience for the others.

She counted the chairs. Judging by the number provided, twelve people would be participating in the session, which would practically guarantee an argument. Even among sane people, in a group of that size at least one person always takes the outrageous position just to antagonize the rest. Elizabeth already knew four of the other six women present: Rose, Emma, the beautiful Seraphin, and the fidgeting, still hyper, Lisa Lynn. One by one, four men straggled in and took their seats, leaving one empty chair.

One trim, dark-haired young man in jeans who appeared to be in his mid-twenties sat down next to Elizabeth. “Hello!” he said with a shy smile. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“No. I’m new here.” Elizabeth smiled back at him before she remembered that this was not the place to cultivate new male acquaintances. For all she knew this personable young man could be a recovering ax murderer, or a raving psychotic. Still, she thought, looking at the other three patients, he seemed the most agreeable one of the bunch. Besides him, the other men in the discussion group were: an elderly fellow in a bathrobe who stared at the floor; a portly, red-faced man who kept beaming at everyone; and a scowling young man who kept tapping the floor with his foot. Given the choices, Elizabeth decided that on first glance she could consider herself lucky to be sitting where she was—later on, she thought, as details of the men’s individual disorders were disclosed, she might revise both her opinion and the seating chart.

“Name’s Matt Pennington,” the young man was saying. “First time in group?”

Elizabeth nodded, wondering what sort of small talk one made when all you had in common was insanity. “First time. Yep. It’s a little unnerving, the thought of opening up to strangers.”

Matt smiled. “Who else can you open up to?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Elizabeth. “I’m of Scottish heritage. With us it isn’t encouraged at all. Ever.”

“I’m having electric shock treatment.”

Elizabeth gasped, picturing lurid Hollywood scenes of snake-pit asylums. “Is it voluntary?” she asked. Because if electric shocks were a standard, compulsory part of treatment at Cherry Hill, she would go to her room right now and start packing.

“Did you come here voluntarily? I mean, the cops didn’t drag you in here for assaulting somebody, or anything?”

She shook her head. “I checked myself in for depression. Situational depression, that is. I mean, things are really as bad as I think they are. It’s not all in my head.”

“Oh, well, ECT—that’s what we call shock therapy these days—is certainly used to treat depression, but it wouldn’t be done without your permission. Might help you, though. You should consider it.”

Elizabeth shuddered. “I did,” she said. “For a tenth of a second. No way.”

“It isn’t too bad,” Matt insisted. “You’re not awake for it. You’ve probably seen the old snake-pit movies about mental hospitals, but ECT is certainly not torture. The way my doctor explained it to me is: your brain gives off electrical waves, and shock treatment is one way of trying to stabilize those waves. The funny thing about it, though, is that it plays tricks on your memory. Short-term memory, I mean. Like—I cannot for the life of me remember what I had for breakfast.”

“Oatmeal, I expect,” murmured Elizabeth, turning away. All but one of the patients’ chairs were now occupied, and the clock said 1:29. Class would begin at any moment.

As promised by Emma O. and Rose, Nurse Warburton appeared presently, clipboard in hand, and took her place as the mediator of the discussion group. She began by introducing Elizabeth and prompting the group members to call out a greeting to her in discordant unison. That alone would prompt one to feign a recovery, Elizabeth thought. She managed a feeble smile and a stifled wave in response to the halfhearted chorus of hellos.

“Tell us about yourself, Elizabeth,” Warburton prompted. She didn’t sound very interested, but apparently a novice speech was expected of newcomers to the group.

Elizabeth wondered whether she ought to stand. No, she decided. If you can’t dispense with formality even when you’re crazy, what’s the point of it all? Still sitting in the metal folding chair, she said, “I’m Elizabeth MacPherson. I’m a forensic anthropologist, and I’m here for depression.”

“No wonder,” said the old man in the bathrobe. “A forensic anthropologist—ycch! You work with human remains, don’t you? That would send anybody up the wall.”

Elizabeth stared at him openmouthed. She hadn’t expected such rudeness, even if the man was crazy. He looked seventy, and there was an unnatural smoothness to the skin of his face which suggested that at some time in the past he had undergone skin grafting operations, probably as a treatment for burns. He was not badly disfigured, but he did look unusual enough to warrant curious stares from strangers.