Dead at Breakfast (13 page)

“Good morning, dear,” said Hope fondly. “And Cherry! How nice to see you.”

Buster hadn't spent so much time under a roof with his mother in decades. It was disorienting to find her helpful. He ventured, “Cherry needs to settle somewhere until we can . . .” He didn't know how he should finish the sentence.

“Yes of course,” Hope said, turning to Cherry. They had heard what had happened to her in the night, as had everyone else in the inn. The word had radiated from the kitchen staff outward from the moment Beryl had come in to work. “We'd love to have you join us, Cherry. Chef Sarah is going to give a manly lesson in knives and butchery this morning, and we don't think we need to learn about that.”

“Makes me sick,” said Cherry. With a look of gratitude toward his mother, Buster slipped out.

“Me too,” said Maggie. “I remember in biology when they made us dissect a cow's eyeball. You had to hold it still with a fork. I still can't even think about it.”

Cherry looked suddenly so ill that they dropped the subject. She really was under terrible strain, poor little thing.

“Are you good at jigsaw puzzles?” Maggie asked.

“Don't know,” said Cherry.

“Of course you don't, you haven't been wasting your life the way I have. Well come sit, and I'll explain my methodology.”

“And if you don't like it, you can sit with me and knit. Do you know how to knit?”

Cherry shook her head. She'd never in her life encountered grown-
ups like these, except to wait on them, one way or another. Grown-ups with indoor pastimes other than drinking beer or watching the tube.

“Well look at you!” said Maggie, approvingly. Cherry had methodically collected all the variegated greenish-black pieces, and had succeeded in putting two together.

“Oh I hate you,” said Hope. “I've been at this for hours and I haven't fit a single thing in. This puzzle is too big. I'm going to look at the picture.”

She turned over the box the puzzle came in, which Maggie had turned upside down to defeat temptation, and showed Cherry the picture they were trying to form.

“You mean you had that all along?” Cherry asked. What
was
it with these people? It was already, like, impossible, all these millions of pieces, and they were making it
harder
?

“Maggie is a purist but I'm not,” said Hope. “Let's stage a rebellion. See, here's where your pieces are going to go.” She pointed to the leaves at the top of the mast of the
Ship of Fools,
and Cherry bent over to peer closely at the image. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen. There were a lot of, like, medieval people in a little sort of round boat that only an idiot would go to sea in, and a skinny nun and an ugly guy with a shaved head were trying to bite some round bread or something that was hanging between them even though there was food on the table (table? In a rowboat?) while these other people, naked, were in the water trying to get in or get the food.

“That's the picture we're making?” was the politest thing she could think of to say.

“Yes,” said Maggie. “It's Art. Don't you like it?”

Cherry hated it.

“Good girl,” said Maggie. “We don't like it either, but it looked as if it would be fun to work on.”

“When it's done will you frame it?” Cherry asked.

“We hope we won't be here long enough to find out. But no, we'll take it apart and leave it for the next people.”

Cherry thought she better not say how stupid this struck her to be, but in the meantime, she was quite liking the sorting and fitting. She spotted another piece of “her” part across the table and went back to scanning for more.

“We met your nice sister yesterday,” said Hope.

Cherry was surprised. “Brianna?”

“Are there more of you?”

“Oh. No, just me and Brianna. There was a brother before I was born, but he died.”

“I'm sorry,” said Maggie. “But your parents must have been very happy when you were born,” said Maggie.

“I don't think so. They got divorced when I was two or something.”

“Oh. I'm sorry,” said Maggie again.

“Yeah, it sucked,” said Cherry, and there was a silence, during which Cherry found another match among her leaf pieces.

“Buster and Brianna are close, I understand,” said Hope.

Cherry looked up. “You know Buster?” She had heard this lady call Buster “dear,” but she thought that was just like Sandra at Just Barb's, or the cashiers at Walmart, who called everybody “dear.”

“He's my son,” said Hope.

Cherry didn't mean to show her astonishment, but she did. This was Buster's
mother
? Buster, who was a cop and lived in a trailer with her sister?

“So, we're concerned about you,” said Hope. “And I hope you'll let us know if we can be any aid or comfort.”

Cherry's mouth went oblong and she began to cry.

Hope instinctively moved to Cherry's side and put a hand on her shoulder. Cherry flinched.

“I'm scared,” she said. There followed a storm of crying, great gouty sobs, as if her insides were trying to get out. This child hadn't found a lot of sympathy in her life, Maggie thought. She'd seen people cry like this and be lying through their teeth, but still.

“Of course you are,” Hope murmured. “Who wouldn't be?”

Cherry went on being buffeted by the storm of her own tears.

“Do you know why they took you last night?” Hope asked. “Did they tell you?”

Cherry managed to say, “They just kept asking me why I was there, watching the fire that night.”

“You were there?”

The girl nodded and wept.

“You'd gone home, but then you came back?” Hope asked.

Cherry nodded again. “My dad's a fireman. So.”

Hope and Maggie's eyes met briefly.

“Whenever there's a fire, you go?”

“If I'm home, and I hear the call go out.”

There was a silence. Hope handed Cherry a packet of tissues from her knitting bag, as the sobs were finally subsiding. Being listened to instead of badgered was having a calming effect. Cherry mopped at what was left of last night's mascara, mostly on her cheeks, and blew her nose.

“How do you hear the call?”

Cherry looked puzzled by the question.

“On the scanner.”

“You have a police scanner?”

“My mom does. In the kitchen.” As if to say, don't you?

“Is she connected to the police in some way, your mother?”

“No. You just have them to, you know. Know what's going on.”

“Does your mother go to fires too?”

“Not unless it's someone she knows. I go to see my dad. To see he's all right. And, like, to
see
him.”

“Ah,” said Hope. “I hope you explained that to the police last night.”

Cherry shook her head dismissively. “They weren't listening to me. They were just like ‘Why did you do it?' Over and over.”

Both women knew this wasn't good. Everyone in the inn knew she'd resented Mr. Antippas, and had a blowup with Mr. Gurrell. Still, the police couldn't really think that this scattered little thing could have . . . did they? Could she have?

“Does your father know? That you come to watch him fight fires?”

Cherry shrugged.

“You never talked about it?” Hope asked.

Cherry shook her head. “He's real busy.”

“Has anyone called him? Does he know what's happened to you?”

“He wasn't home.”

There was another silence. Cherry said resentfully, “They kept going, ‘You like fires, don't you?' and I'd go like ‘
yeah
, in
fireplaces
. . .'”

“Dearie,” said Maggie, “have you ever been in trouble before?”

Cherry looked at the puzzle. She said, “No,” crossly, as if this should be as obvious as having a police scanner in the kitchen, but Maggie knew instantly she wasn't telling the truth. You get good at seeing the tells after forty years of dealing with schoolchildren. She wondered what was on Cherry's record, and whether it would hurt her.

Abruptly Shep Gordon was in the room, followed by two large square men in uniform from the state police. The quiet space, full of sunlight, was confusingly and all at once full of men and noise. Someone yanked Cherry to her feet and barked, “Hands behind your back!” Handcuffs were clicked into place. Shep Gordon blared,
“Cherry Weaver, you are under arrest on suspicion of criminal arson, and homicide. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

Hope and Maggie watched, stunned, as Cherry was marched out of the room, with a burly uniform on each side holding her shackled arms. In a moment, they were all out in the parking lot, surrounded by shouting, flashing, clamoring reporters. Cherry had her chin tucked down to her chest and her eyes shut as she was dragged through to the waiting sheriff's car.

Buster had appeared beside his mother.

“They wouldn't let me warn you,” he said. He could see that both his mother and call-me-Maggie looked disoriented, as if a television show had suddenly come to life in the middle of their living room.

“But was that necessary? Three big men? Handcuffs? She's scared to death and as big as a minute!”

“I guess that's the way they do it,” said Buster. Clearly, he wasn't happy. Shep was a big deal in his world. But there was Brianna. And the terrifying Beryl. And his own instincts. Cherry was a screwup, no question, but she wouldn't do something like this. She wouldn't know how.

“What's going to happen now?” asked his mother. “Does she have a lawyer?”

Does she have a lawyer. What twenty-three-year-old has a lawyer? Oh, wait, yes, there were quite a few who did, probably. He'd had one himself, that time in Tucson when he was about Cherry's age. But no, Cherry didn't.

“No.”

“She better get one, fast. Don't you think? Does the family have any friends who practice?”

In Hope's world, everyone had a family lawyer, if only for drafting wills and trusts. Really, half the people you met at dinner were lawyers it seemed. Her son-in-law was a lawyer.

“I don't know how she can pay one,” said Buster. “I think her mom's house is under water, since the crash, and anyway . . .” Buster saw a look pass between Maggie and his mother.

Maggie said, “Will the court appoint someone?”

“They will. I guess.” He didn't look as if he thought this was going to be much of a bulwark between Cherry and the shit slide thundering toward her.

“What's the evidence against her?” Maggie asked him.

“I don't really know,” said Buster.

“Well, can you find out?” asked Hope. They both looked at him with identical gazes, the looks of adults in authority waiting out a child who just claimed that his homework was torn from his hand by a mighty wind.

He thought of Brianna. Brianna might have things to say about her family when she was alone with Buster, but faced with any threat from the outside world, you didn't want to mess with her. She was the one who had really raised Cherry after their dad left. And let's face it, if Shep Gordon and Carson Bailey thought they had enough to indict, Cherry was fucked, and so was he. He was going to have to risk pissing off
somebody.

Hope and Maggie had taken a table for two in a corner of the dining room for lunch. They had a lot to talk about.

“You know I could pay for a lawyer,” Hope said. “She deserves a decent defense, no matter what she's done.”

“She hasn't done anything criminal,” Maggie said.”Unless she's a sociopath, and I don't think she is.”

“I read they're more common than you think. One person in twenty-five, I think it was.”

“I don't actually doubt that, I just don't think Cherry Weaver is one of them.”

“But you don't think I can offer to get her a lawyer?”

“I do not. Brianna is Buster's girlfriend, not his wife. If you treat her like a daughter-in-law, you're getting between them in ways that won't be good. You can't offer. If they ask, that's different.”

They fell silent and looked up politely as their server put bowls of wild mushroom bisque before them.

“But I don't want to stand by and see her railroaded.”

“Neither do I.”

“Because it isn't nice and it isn't fair, and if they do that, we'll never find out what really happened.”

“
There
you go,” said Maggie. “We'll wait for Buster to get back to us, and until then, I'm going to call Jorge.”

“And I'm going to call my old friend at the
Boston Globe
.”

“I didn't know you had a friend at the
Globe
.”

“Before I knew you. Investigative reporter. He always said he could find out anything he needed to know with three phone calls.”

The Memory Neighborhood at Ainsley Nursing was built, according to the most modern ideas, in the shape of a doughnut. The hole in the middle was an outdoor patio where the inmates could smoke and feel the sun on their faces when there was sun. The rest was a soothing circular loop, carpeted in a cheerful royal blue, designed to give comfort to the “wanderers,” patients who felt a restless need to be going somewhere else, who would however be lost and terrified if they actually succeeded. Along this circle route, everything was familiar, all furniture and colors the same, with just enough variety to give a sense of process or progress if you were on your way along it. Here on the left was a space with seating and a television. Now on the left was a nook with a piano. Followed on the left by a crafts area, where confused people could pass the time by sticking buttons onto cards, or doing little projects with glue and sparkles, and here, on the left, was a door to the outside, except the outside was in the
middle and not a route to somewhere else. You could go out this door, and cross the outdoors and go in that door on the other side, identical to this one, and be in a place very much like the place you just departed from. Along the outside of the doughnut were the patients' bedrooms, and the necessary service areas, a little kitchen, the meds closet, the shift supervisor's office. Also, of course, a door to the actual outside of the building that could only be opened with a code punched onto a keypad. The code was beyond the residents. It was 1234.