With Friends Like These... (28 page)

Raffi looked up at the ceiling. It wasn’t all that much above his head and there was no need, except to avoid me. Then he looked down, uncomfortably. If he’d had a cap, he’d have been clutching it in his hands. His expression was suddenly solemn.

Dear God, a confession of undying crushhood. I wasn’t up to this. Not today.

“Miss Pepper,” he said, in a voice that lacked all his usual buoyancy and charm. “This is really hard to say, but, um, there’s something I…” He shook his head. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to… I’m so…”

“No need,” I assured him. “Besides, the other students will be here any minute. It will keep, won’t it?” I thought that had the proper brisk and oblivious quality to it.

Maybe so, but it didn’t stop him. “I couldn’t sleep all last night,” he said. “I kept thinking about you, about—”

“Raffi, I really…so much to do. This isn’t a…” I busied myself erasing already clean boards. I could not face an early morning declaration of love from a boy who was made mostly of knees. I didn’t have the psychic energy to coddle his ego, protect him, the way I knew I would have to. Should do. I couldn’t spare time to save his face while I was still trying to save my life.

Some other time, please, I silently begged.

“Couldn’t stop thinking of what we’d done,” he said.

“Come again?” I stopped erasing. “We? You and I?” This was no longer innocent, was it? What fantasies was he entertaining?

He shook his head. “Me and Bart and Les.”

I didn’t correct his pronoun placement. I was too busy trying to follow what he’d said and where he was leading.

“Last night. On our way back from The Scene, we saw you. Honestly, we were trying to say hello, that was all.”

“You?” My formerly clenched bottom jaw went slack. “You?”

“Bart really. He was driving. He has a pickup.”

“You?”

“Bart. We thought you’d turn around, see us. I waved a few times, too, Miss Pepper.” He rubbed at his forehead and looked as if he might faint. “And then, well, I don’t like to say this—it’s not that I’m criticizing you or anything, but your driving is kind of…you’re lucky you’re not a teenager, or the cops would be on your case. We thought maybe you were, well, maybe you’d been out and had one too many, or…so we followed. Thought to stop you. Help.”

I could only shake my head.

“So anyway, then I thought maybe Bart was scaring you with the honking and all, and I kept saying it, but he didn’t stop. So when we were stopped, I got out of the car, so I could tell you, and, well, we saw. That was pretty fast to take a corner, and no offense, but it was a one-way street. The other way. You’re really lucky no cop was around.” He bit at his bottom lip. “Well, anyway, me and Bart and Les, we want to help pay for the repairs because we think maybe we scared you. Accidentally, of course.”

“Scared me?” I hoped the squeak in my voice would be mistaken for incredulity. This was going to cost me, but all of a sudden it wasn’t Raffi’s face that needed saving. “I’m just a horrible driver, that’s all. You had nothing to do with it.”

He rewarded me with the goofy smile. It was all I could do to refrain from hugging him and dancing him around the room in a waltz to blissful relief, but the one thing I didn’t need at the moment was a further complication.

Mackenzie had found himself with two free hours and was at my door like a minor miracle when I arrived home. “I am so glad to be alive!” I said. “So glad to see you!”

He seemed startled, but only mildly so. Perhaps it was the norm for females to greet him with hysterical glee. We sat in my living room sipping cinnamon-spiked tea, and I blathered about the student, the psychology project, and my pursuers last night.

He shook his head and had to be talked out of finding some obscure crime—unintentional terrorism was his suggestion—Raffi et al could be charged with. As for the packet of clippings, “That manila envelope is goin’ through maybe every known test on earth,” he said. “An’ if not, then it’s already been filed as potential evidence.”

I envisioned the poor child’s homework entombed in a warehouse amongst thousands of crates, right next to Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant.

The doorbell rang. “Tell whoever to go away,” Mackenzie muttered. “We need time. Alone.”

I agreed. “One sec.” But I’d forgotten the invitation I’d issued. “Lizzie!” I said when I opened the door. “Ah, Lizzie.”

“You said I should come over.” Her red hair was too curly and full of life to seriously sag, but it looked as if it were wilting, and her face resembled inadequately baked puff pastry.

“I thought that once I knew, the fear, the pictures, would stop, or clear up,” she responded when I asked how she felt. “Instead, it’s like an itch, an almost thing in my brain, a bad, hurting tickle, but when I try to see, it goes to fog. I nearly, nearly remember—and even that scares me.”

“Well, then”—Mackenzie slowly extracted himself from the sofa—“sounds like we could all use some fresh air. Nothin’s as scary in daylight, is it? Let’s find a place and have an ice cream soda, maybe.”

“No ice cream for me!” she said. I was amazed. She could do TV spots, become the guru, the idol, of the waist watchers. Make a fortune. “Hi, my name is Lizzie and I’m a dieter. Last night I found out I murdered my mother when I was a preschooler, and I’m having headaches and confusion about the past, and problems about the present, too—a man died Sunday of food that came out of my kitchen. The police suspect me of murder (again!) and business, need I say, is distinctly off. But friends, none of this stops me from dieting.”

On second thought, nobody would believe it. Neither did I. I felt myself mentally back off from her before I spoke. “Then coffee, maybe. And a change of scene, definitely. A brisk walk.” She still looked fuddled. “Or are you tired? Did you walk all the way here?”

She shook her head. “Took the bus. Two buses. I hate to drive in town.”

The three of us ambled out. Talk about ambivalence. I honestly wanted to ease this young woman’s discomfort, but I had gotten the distinct feeling last night in the restaurant that the finalists in the Great Culprit Search were the Pepper team and the Beecher team. Them or us. My mother, possibly acting on the behest of my father, vs. Roy, on behalf of or with Lizzie. And when you got right down to Mackenzie’s beloved triad—method, opportunity, and motive—they spelled, literally and figuratively, MOM.

So most of me wanted to comfort Lizzie, but some of me simultaneously hoped that en route she would have a revelation and acknowledge that even without knowing the facts of her life, she had been so upset by the sight of Lyle Zacharias that she had taken poisonous seeds her father brought home from Vietnam and put them in his tarts. It would provide such an efficient finality to this unhappy string of events.

And, with the cloud of suspicion removed from their heads—and this was of major importance—the senior Peppers would go home to Florida. Soon.

But of course I felt oppressively guilty about even having those impulses. The only other hope seemed a chance encounter with Sybil or Richard Quinn or Tiffany or Shep McCoy or Terry and/or Janine Wiley, during which some one of them felt an overwhelming need to confess the deed. All of this, of course, had to happen on this walk, while Mackenzie was in tow, because I was sick and tired of tossing theories his way only to have him disbelieve or undermine. He had to be an eyewitness.

We passed a group of Mennonite women in white mesh caps. They wore thick dark capes below which calico hems and black stockings showed. They sang hymns through chattering teeth in front of a newspaper box with an ad for 1-900-hot-hot-Sex. The tableau seemed no stranger or more incongruous than anything else lately.

We made small talk, interrupted now and then by Lizzie’s need to poke at her new history, like a tongue at the raw socket of a newly extracted tooth. “The old lady—Harriet Zacharias—she knew who I was at the party, didn’t she?” she said at one point. “When I said my father’s name. I thought she was crazy, but now I understand and I feel so ashamed.”

Mackenzie and I said the obvious, feel-better things, knowing full well they couldn’t make a dent in her pain.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” I said, attempting with absolutely no grace to change gears. Truth was, the air was cold and damp, with only the steely light of a distant sun. “No rain, snow, clouds, or wind,” I explained.

“Good weather by default,” Mackenzie said. I smiled at him for trying. Lizzie remained preoccupied.

We looked for a new distraction and found it in the store windows, with which we busied ourselves, overpraising, overexcited about everything, from old junk now called Americana to an electric can opener to the ugliest pair of shoes I’ve ever seen.

And while Mackenzie and I did our back and forth, Lizzie seemed lost on a distant planet. She, too, stared into windows, but seemed not to comprehend what she saw or what we said. Everything had to be carefully repeated and translated for her.

We walked for perhaps a half hour in this curious and unsatisfactory way. “There’s a sandwich place over there,” I finally said, pointing catercorner across the street. I didn’t know what Lizzie wanted, but I was increasingly tense about her, and food is my automatic tranquilizer. “That okay?”

She didn’t respond. I turned and saw, first, Mackenzie, watching her, and then Lizzie, who stood in front of a video rental store, staring up at a movie poster in the window. It was placed high, so that cassettes and daily rates could be displayed below it. Lizzie’s normally pale skin was ashen, bloodless. Her mouth was slightly open, as if paralyzed halfway to a scream; her unblinking eyes were fixed on the poster, and her breath came in frightened-sounding gasps.

I looked at what held her in thrall. It was the variety of poster my eyes skitter across. Most of the space was taken up by the great overdeveloped back of a man whose white shirt strained across him. His shoulders were enormous, stretching almost all the way across the poster. The angle was from below, so that he loomed and towered and intimidated. The one hand of his that we could see held a gun aimed at the head of a whimpering, cowering woman at his feet. She was, I assumed, begging for mercy. Another woman, in the distance and quite small in the odd perspective, stood with her hands in the air, screaming.

Precisely the sort of movie I run from, no matter how the antifemale sadism and brutality is justified, no matter how Justice triumphs in the end. I don’t want those images and ideas transferred into my brain.

Even the poster, designed to titillate and attract, was sickening. It made me feel small and helpless and impotent, like the infantilized women it depicted. Like a child, a baby, a victim.

It was having an even more dramatic effect on Lizzie. Her breathing had become still more uneven and rapid, and she herself more agitated. She shook her head and her hands moved aimlessly in small half circles, tiny motions of holding something at bay.

“I think,” Mackenzie whispered, “some of that fog of hers is maybe liftin’ for real.”

From a movie poster? From that movie poster? And then I thought about how insignificant it made me feel.

“I saw,” she said in a low, frightened voice. “I saw.”

“Saw what?” I asked softly. Mackenzie and I, without consciously planning it, had stationed ourselves one on either side of her. If she toppled, she was safe.

“Him.” Her eyes were still on the enormous back and forearm of the murderous man.

I saw him. She had said the same words, over and over, the night Lyle Zacharias died.

“He did it.” She lifted her right arm to point directly at the poster.

I thought we’d been talking about Lyle’s death. I’d thought wrong.

“Ah.” Mackenzie’s voice was a purr. “And you saw, didn’ you? An’ somewhere, y’always knew you’d seen, isn’t that so?”

Lizzie nodded, listlessly. “I saw.” Her voice shrunk, became higher, whinier, more childish. She was down to the diminutive size and ground-level perspective of the invisible viewer in the poster. “He hurt her. She cried. Gratty cried, too.”

Gratty? But Mackenzie skimmed right over that. “Who is she?” he asked in that soft voice that allowed for and accepted anything whatsoever. “Who was hurt? Who cried?”

“Mommy!” she called out. “My mommy cried!” She put her hands to her face, covering her eyes, shaking. “I saw!” she cried from between her fingers. “He killed Mommy—Mother. My mother. I didn’t do it, the way my father said! I didn’t, but he told everybody! He lied! Lyle lied. And she lied!”

“She? Mommy?”

“Oh, God—” Lizzie was wild-eyed, dizzy from her brain’s back-and-forth time travel across two decades, across the entire span of her life. “I did know her. I called her Gratty,” she said, sounding adult again. “Hattie plus Grandma, I guess.”

“Hattie was there? She saw, too?”

Lizzie nodded. Her eyes welled over. “I feel sick, but not surprised. When he told me last night, some part of me felt like it already knew. Knew there were lies. Knew that I didn’t shoot her.”

“Maybe you always knew more than you realize even now,” Mackenzie said. “Sunday night, you said that you’d seen him and that you didn’t do it. Several times you said it. An’ that was three days before your daddy told you what had happened years ago.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t understand, because I didn’t know I knew. Maybe that little bit came out all by itself.” She shook her head, her features pensive again.

Mackenzie’s face had set, and I feared his brain had done the same. “She doesn’t mean she knew,” I said. “Not consciously. Not the way you’re implying. Do you, Lizzie?”

“I don’t know. Why’d I say those things if I didn’t?”

“You once knew, long ago, but then you blocked it out. That’s the same as not knowing.” Mackenzie glared at me, but I shook my head in annoyance. She didn’t realize where he was leading her.

“But now,” she said, “I wonder if I always, on some level…as soon as he walked into the kitchen, I felt sick.” I remembered, too, how she’d been when Lyle put his finger up in a mock pistol position. He’d been trying to remember my mother’s name and cocked his hand like a gun. And Lizzie had become nearly catatonic.