Dead at Breakfast (14 page)

The day nurse-supervisor at Ainsley Nursing, Hazel Littlehawk, had heard the news about Cherry's arrest from her husband who worked with the K-9 unit for the state police. Cherry Weaver was being photographed and fingerprinted over at the Ainsley Jail, but Hazel kept the news to herself until Brianna Weaver finished giving lunch to the new resident, who had bitten the aide who tried to feed her oatmeal this morning. Brianna had discovered that the new resident liked to sing although she couldn't talk, and was doing better with her. They were doing “You Are My Sunshine” for the eleventh time around spoonfuls of applesauce.

When Mrs. Harker had been fed, washed, and toileted, and was quietly settled in the dayroom watching a
Hollywood Squares
rerun, Hazel took Brianna into the little closet that served her for an office.

Brianna hadn't realized how much she had hoped that somehow Cherry was going to be scolded for being a flake and a potty mouth and sent home, until she learned that any such possibility was extinguished. This was really happening; her sister would be indicted for criminal arson and homicide. She could be down at Windham for the rest of her life. She was probably in a cell somewhere right this minute, without her phone, or her own clothes or . . .

“What am I going to do?” she asked Hazel.

“You're going to get her a lawyer, and you're going to keep her spirits up,” said Hazel.

Brianna didn't know Hazel very well, but knew her reputation as a hard-ass, fierce about the time clock and a stickler for regulations. She looked at the woman's broad flat face, her dark impassive eyes, and considered for the first time that Hazel's path to her present position had probably not been strewn with rose petals.

“How do I get a lawyer?”

“Can anyone pay? Your mom? Your dad?”

Brianna didn't really have to answer. Hazel knew what Brianna got paid, and had a pretty good idea that no one in the background had won the lottery.

“Your church?” Hazel asked. Brianna just shook her head. The only time they ever went was when they were little and all the children in the village got presents from the Baptists on Christmas eve if they could recite a Bible verse. Her mother had been raised Methodist, but the congregation had dwindled to such a tiny number that they couldn't pay a minister or keep up their pretty nineteenth-century meetinghouse. The building had been sold to rich Episcopalians out on the coast and moved down there, with its steeple following the sanctuary on a flatbed truck. There was nothing left now but the graveyard with her grandmother in it, all by itself at the side of the road. It had an iron railing, and a tall pointy monument to the veterans of some war, but she didn't know which one. Once in a long while one of the farmers with relatives there would trailer his mower over and cut the grass.

“My sister-in-law just graduated law school,” said Hazel. “She passed the bar last month. She wants to do family law, but while she's getting started, she has some time. Might take the case pro bono.”

Brianna, still in her uniform, parked her Subaru in the parking lot of the Rite Aid, and found her way to the back door of a long, low concrete building across an alley that housed a pet supply store.
Precious Paws fronted on the High Street. The room at the rear, with no proper address and no parking space, had not been designed to be rented out, but most likely was intended for a manager's office for the front of the store. Evidently the dog raincoat and fish food business wasn't booming, any more than anything else in this economy except liquor and lottery tickets. The only indication that Brianna was in the right place as she walked over the patch of weeds outside the steps was a cheaply printed business card that read
CELIA LITTLE, ATTORNEY AT LAW
, taped on the inside of the glass of the storm door that had been left in place since last winter. Or forever.

Was this a good idea? With so much at stake?

Standing on the concrete step, trying to make up her mind, Brianna finally decided that at the least, Celia Littlehawk had seen the inside of a criminal law textbook way more recently than the only other attorney she knew, the eldercare lawyer who served some of the clients at the nursing home. He was brash and creepy and had a broad Massachusetts accent. She could of course let the court appoint somebody, but she distrusted this notion instinctively. What would you get, some lazy hack who couldn't get a better job in Portland or Augusta? She didn't have a lot of faith in public servants.

She knocked.

Celia Little was expecting her. She was shorter, broader, and a good deal younger than Hazel, and her straight black hair was cut in a no-nonsense bob. The room was spare and paneled in the kind of fake wood wallboard you could buy at Home Depot by the sheet. Ms. Little had a metal desk with a laptop open on it, a rolling office chair, a wastebasket, a chipped wooden bookcase holding legal textbooks, and a small blue upholstered love seat that was all too clearly de-accessioned from the Memory Neighborhood of Ainsley Nursing. Brianna knew why, when she accepted Celia's invitation to
sit, and the foam of the seat greeted her weight by emitting a faint exhalation of urine. Brianna wished that before she had opened the door, Celia had exed out the screen on her laptop that was still displaying an ongoing game of solitaire.

Celia took out a fresh legal pad and a ballpoint, and began taking down information. She was brisk and businesslike, and Brianna found herself wishing her well; it seemed to her that Celia was performing a role-playing exercise from her Business Practices course. She didn't ask any of the questions Brianna expected, like how she was going to get paid. After a while, she took out her cell phone and called Shep Gordon's office. She introduced herself as Cherry Weaver's attorney, and said that she would like to see her client. There was some waiting, then some uh-huhs on Celia's end, then she turned to Brianna and gave her a smile and a thumbs-up.

“I don't want her questioned without me there,” she said confidently into the phone, and hung up. “They'll let us see her in half an hour,” she said to Brianna. “Why don't you go buy her a toothbrush and anything else she might need before tomorrow, and I'll meet you at the jail. You know where it is?”

Brianna did.

The Ainsley Jail was a relatively new structure serving the whole of Webster County. It had a large parking lot, fairly empty at the moment as these were not regular visiting hours. The building was wide and low, made of institutional yellow brick, generally designed to depress. Inside, the ceilings were low and covered in acoustic tile, the floors a nasty brown linoleum, and the walls were lined with putty-colored ceramic tiles. Brianna was told to hand over the toiletries she had brought and sit in the waiting area, while Celia was taken through a locked door to meet her client.

Cherry looked like a whipped dog when she was brought out. She was wearing an olive-drab jumpsuit, and every line of her face and
posture of her body conveyed fear and misery. The guard showed her to a small table with two chairs in a hallway. Nonplussed to be given no more privacy than this, Celia stared at the guard, still standing beside Cherry, until he walked to the end of the corridor and disappeared around the corner.

Celia explained that Cherry should hold nothing back, that everything she told her lawyer was held in confidence, and that she would do her best for her.

“Do you have any questions?”

Cherry was staring around her, at the grim tiles on the walls, the streaky linoleum of the floor, and at her own bare goose-bumped arms. This wasn't at all like TV. She asked, “Are you a real lawyer?”

Celia said she was, and asked Cherry to explain the facts of the case. As Cherry talked, a halting, back-and-forth stream of details, self-justification, and outrage, Celia took notes in a fluent Palmer script that Cherry found impressive. In her school they didn't learn cursive. The richer kids had computers and typed; the rest printed. When she had run out of questions, Celia asked, “Would you take a lie detector test?”

Cherry looked up from her bitten nails, seeming startled. For a long moment, she didn't say anything.

“Are those like . . . legal?”

“Legal, yes. They can be very helpful, although they are not usually admissible in court. Never mind, though. If you'd rather not, it's better not to.”

“No, it's fine. I'll take it.”

“You don't have to. It was just a question. Let's leave it for now.” She put her legal pad back into her briefcase and rose. Cherry got up too, and immediately, the deputy reappeared from around the hall corner.

“Stay here,” said Celia. “I'll send your sister in.” Cherry sat back down, and watched Celia walk away down the hall, free as air.

T
he Citation the
Poole sisters booked
for their return flight to Los Angeles was a bigger plane than they needed, but it was fast, and they didn't want to wait for the Embraer Lisa usually asked for. Mr. Gurrell had driven them to the private aviation terminal at the Bangor Airport, where the pilots, clear-eyed young men in crisp uniforms, greeted them kindly, took their luggage from Gabe's car, and loaded it into the cargo bay. Glory's clothes were packed in a Black Watch plaid canvas suitcase some guest had abandoned at the inn sometime in the 1970s. Mr. Gurrell stood on the tarmac at the foot of the steps onto the plane and shook first Lisa's hand, then Glory's. He couldn't say, one more time, how sorry he was for their losses, so he didn't. They said whatever they said to him from behind their large sunglasses, then turned and climbed aboard, Lisa moving painfully but carrying her dog, and Glory behind her with their hand luggage. As Gabe drove out of the terminal parking lot, he passed the hearse from Morrison's arriving with Mr. Antippas's casket. He didn't wait to watch it being loaded into the cargo hold with the suitcases.

For the Poole sisters, the flight across the country had never seemed longer. Lisa sat with Colette in her lap and her huge sunglasses on, looking out the window, as the plane lifted smoothly off the airstrip
and banked south. Below, the state of Maine seemed a wilderness of greenish-black evergreens, as if it had barely been settled at all. When she'd arrived six days ago, she'd had a husband and four children. Today she had a dead step-daughter, a broken nose, and an ankle that would never be right, and what was left of her husband was traveling with the luggage.

She was still on oxycodone, because she hated pain, but she didn't like the way it made her feel. It was constipating and it wasn't right to be less than completely present at such a moment in her life. She didn't like the way her thoughts seemed liquid, flowing into one another, as if all time was present and always had been. She knew that there had been times, really important ones, when she'd let life happen to her. She'd somehow found herself married to a man she had meant only to enter a few rooms with because they made a beautiful couple. She thought he was going to be eye candy, but he turned out to be more like a mangle, powerful and determined to a degree she hadn't experienced before. She hadn't really thought of herself as a mother; she had thought she would be someone herself, do something, turn heads and cause talk, maybe start a fashion business or write a best seller. She had meant to marry a rich American with a trust fund and a degree from the Harvard Business School, not whatever Alex had turned out to be.

But Alex didn't just
think
his life was going to be a certain way, he
knew,
and when she found she was part of his certainty and tried to wiggle loose, he slept with her sister. Why that had led to her marrying him instead of . . . that piece seemed to be gone. But she didn't want this one to be. She was a widow. Widow. A sleek, golden-tanned widow, with a suitcase full of silk and suede clothing and her husband right next to it, all his big American dreams in the dark, in a double-wide box. Beautiful, lithe, powerful young Alex—he had wanted to be called Alec, one of the few things he wanted that never happened. Immigrant on the hustle, and such a
marvel to watch, how quickly he learned, how he impressed men with ten times his privilege and education, got them to invest in him, and proved them right. The way women watched him when he crossed a room, even after he'd started to balloon, he moved like a dancer and made you think about what he'd be like in bed.

She knew that the dead come to you in dreams, especially when they've been wrenched from life unprepared. She didn't want to miss that. She didn't want Jenny to try to get to her and find a scrim of drugs keeping her out, as so much had kept her out in life. Wasn't that just Jenny exactly, a soul so full of want, right outside, able to see what she was trying to get to, but always behind glass, kept out by something invisible but obdurate. Crying. She was like a spirit, banging at the windows, crying but not making a sound. She felt that Jenny was crying, and she wanted to be open to her if, finally, she could help.

Colette began to wiggle on Lisa's lap. Glory, who had taken one of Lisa's oxycodones, she was a nervous traveler, was her excuse, didn't notice at first. Usually she was more attuned to what the dog needed than her sister was. More attuned to what Alex Antippas needed too, for that matter, though her interest in that was long behind them. Behind them, beneath them, literally at the moment beneath their feet, but beneath them in all ways. She shouldn't have crossed that line with him, but then if she hadn't, she'd never have known for sure that she shouldn't. She, Gloria, had always been a tuning fork, vibrating in response to what emanated from other beings, and something in Alex had been calling to her, unmistakably. It was her problem with men, insofar as she had a problem with them, that she knew exactly what they were thinking, what they wanted, when they were lying, when they were coming on. They
didn't
like it, as a rule. They didn't like being known. Women did, usually. Men thought it was a trick, rather than her strength
as a woman. She wondered, if she'd had children of her own, if they would have adored her for her ability to really see them, or resented it, as men did. Most men. Not Alex, but he had been unusual. Very unusual. Not necessarily in good ways, but they had recognized something in each other. And now, he was a charred lump.

She had not infrequently wanted him dead. Didn't like how he treated people, especially her sister, and also minded that he'd chosen Lisa and not her, even though he admitted Glory was better in bed. And now he
was
dead, and something unexpected and unpleasant had happened: she remembered she had once been in love with him.

Why was Lisa trying to get up? Oh the dog.

Glory said, “Stay, I'll get her.” She rooted around in the dog bag for a Wee-Wee Pad, and put it down in the aisle between them. Colette jumped down from Lisa's lap, squatted, and emitted a puddle of a size to indicate that Glory had intervened at the last possible minute.

Colette hopped back to Lisa's lap while Glory took the sopping pad into the bathroom and put it in the trash. She washed her hands, while checking her makeup in the mirror. She looked like hell. She had run out of her own shampoo, and the stuff the hotel gave you left her hair looking like something you'd scour a pan with. And her roots were showing. She'd brought her color formula with her in case she had to get a touch-up before she got home, but obviously
that
hadn't happened. The light in these airplane bathrooms was horrible; it looked as if she had two black eyes. God it would be good to sleep in her own bed.

But there was much to go through before that happened. The press would be at the airport. The people from Forest Lawn would be there to take Alex away. He would be buried beside Jenny; he had barely outlived her.
If
the lawyer had managed to buy the plot they wanted. Had that happened? She couldn't remember. It
was good that at least her sister wouldn't have to get off the plane soaked with dog piss.

She slept a little. She woke and wondered if, when they stopped in Denver to refuel, she would have time to pop into the airport and have her nails done. But no, they'd be out at the private terminal, where there weren't any services. She'd just have to remember to keep her hands away from her face when they got to L.A., if the photographers were there, and she was sure they would be. Jenny's press agent would never be able to resist tipping them off.

One thing she could say, this terrible week had been great for her career. She was booked on morning talk shows three days this week, and the producer of her old cable show had been calling to talk about a special on grieving. Her stylist was collecting wardrobe for her, and her hair person would come to the house tomorrow evening. She was planning to stay with her sister for the next few days, or until she was sure Lisa could cope. Jenny's manager, the scumbag, had arranged for a star-studded “Celebration of Artemis's Life” at the Staples Center for Monday, Columbus Day, when the whole world would be home from school and work and able to tune in. Taylor Swift was coming. Lady Gaga was in Europe but had sent a tribute video. Cissy Houston would sing a gospel hymn, and read a prayer for Artemis and Whitney. Maybe she could spin the grief special into a series. She could do a couple of shows on addiction and recovery, and at least one on the perils of child stardom. She knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Britbrit's press rep. Brit would be a great get, if she could pull it off.

And when were they going to bury Alex? They'd been ordered not to have him cremated, as if he weren't half-cremated already, until the toxicology reports were definitive. They still didn't know what had killed him. Maybe they never would, it wasn't exactly NCIS up there. That deputy sheriff, Bubbah or whatever he was called, she'd known kids like that. Poster child for ADHD, hadn't
anyone up there heard of psychopharmacology? He couldn't sit still, he was always tapping or jiggling something, he was always in the wrong place, looking the wrong way. Cue the Ritalin fairy. How many times had he asked her if she was sure her sister hadn't left their room the night of the fire. Left their room? Lisa could barely leave her bed. Glory had been afraid she was going to have to call housekeeping for a bedpan for her, as if anyone had one of those in the linen closet anymore. Except actually, a place like that inn, a great monument to life in 1885, probably did. They probably had hot water bottles.

Someday, if it was ever all right to laugh about any of this, she could do a very funny imitation of the great detective, solemnly asking, “When were you born? Do you know what time? Can you find out?” It would make a marvelous skit. She was good at imitations too, a great mimic.

Gabriel Gurrell, who hadn't been off the grounds of the inn since a brief trip to the drugstore in Bergen Falls Wednesday morning, was not rushing his trip back from Bangor. He'd been in crisis mode since the smoke alarm went off early Thursday morning, and he needed the silence. For some reason a song from his youth kept playing on the jukebox in his head: “Mama said there'd be days like this, there'd be days like this, my mama said . . .”

Except Mama had not remotely told him there would be days like this, let alone a week like this. He felt as if he would start gibbering and making obscene gestures if he didn't get some quiet, a hot shower, and a proper night's sleep. What had made him imagine that running a country inn in some rural backwater was going to be a peaceful life?

His insurance agent wasn't calling him back. “Family emergency,” his girl said. The guy was quick enough to pick up the phone when he was selling.

No. No. No, he wasn't going to think about his fire insurance, or rebuilding, or whether he could keep the rest of the hotel open during the construction, and if so how? Welcome to peaceful Oquossoc, where the shrieking of power saws and the crashing of hammers start at seven in the morning and don't stop until three? Welcome to historic Oquossoc, where every guest receives a construction-grade set of ear protectors at check-in?

What were the chances he could get a contractor to wait until nine in the morning to make noise?

None. No chance. The workday started here at seven whether you had cows to milk or not. Electricity might as well not have been invented, the workday was the same as it had been when it was rise with the sun and go to bed when it gets dark.

Stop. If he couldn't stop running around this hamster wheel, trying to answer questions that had no answers, he would go mental.

He'd danced to “Mama Said” one summer at Rehoboth Beach when he was . . . fifteen? Mid-1960s? With that girl with the Jean Seberg haircut, whose father raised chinchillas. His sister Jean had a huge collection of girl-group 45s that she kept in their pristine paper sleeves, in a little square sort of suitcase for carrying records to parties. They were filed in there like legal briefs.
C
for the Crystals,
D
for the Dixie Cups,
S
for the Shirelles. His sister had a battery-driven record player too, and one night he had liberated them from her room in the little screened cottage they rented for two weeks in the summer, and been the hero of the beach party. Mama said there'd be days like this. Will you still love me tomorrow? “Rockin' Robin.” Tweedleytweedleydee. Tweedleydeedleydee. Robin was the girl's name. She showed him which star was Betelgeuse. Sand between his toes and in the cuffs of his blue jeans. Firelight. Rolling Rock beer.

What his mother actually said, when his sister found that the needle on her record player was ruined and there was sand in most
of her tenderly-cared-for record sleeves, was, “Oh Jean, he didn't mean to. Pour me another one, will you, hon?”

To her two fatherless children, the two weeks at Rehoboth was a beach vacation. They could do everything they wanted to do on foot or on bikes. To Doris Gurrell, it was two weeks in a gin bottle. Gabe had never, before or since, known a person who took such deep pleasure in getting blotto, day after day, starting with beer for breakfast. The rest of the year she worked two jobs, made sure the children had clean clothes and a hot meal at night, and only took a drink or two on weekends. When he was growing up, he had dreaded the thought of his mother retiring. What would there be to keep her from drinking all day every day until she died? But she had surprised them. When she retired, she gave up drinking altogether, took lessons in dancing the tango, and married one of her elderly dance partners. He took her on tango cruises to Nassau and the Bahamas every winter and left her very well provided for when he hung up his last pair of dancing shoes.

Gabe was working at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara by that time, and he was so relieved to know that he didn't have to worry about taking care of his mother any more that he impulsively married a girl he didn't know nearly well enough, as it turned out. The marriage ended abruptly, two years in, when he learned she had had an abortion without telling him and had no intention of having children. How had he happened not to have discussed this topic before that euphoric week when rushing down to City Hall with this beautiful creature had seemed like such a good idea? Youth was a condition defined by the fact that you don't know what you don't know until it's too late.