Death in a Funhouse Mirror (18 page)

"It was very inconsiderate of you to insist on seeing him the day after the funeral," he said petulantly. His whiny, nasal voice made me want to cover my ears.

I couldn't understand how Cliff had ever hired Roddy. According to Eve, no one else could stand him. Eve's dislike bordered on hatred and I could see why. He had a supercilious nastiness that infused every transaction. Today he'd kept me waiting ten minutes before telling Cliff I'd arrived just for the sake of making me wait. Dealing with Roddy made it easier to understand how you could come to hate someone so much you didn't feel badly about doing horrible things to them. His appearance didn't help. He was plump in a way that made his pinkish skin seem bloated. His pale, receding hair rose in tufts from his high, domed forehead and straggled untidily down over his collar, reminding me of a troll doll. His large mouth was loose and wet, his glasses loomed over his tiny nose, and he didn't smell fresh. His one virtue was that he adored Cliff and zealously guarded him from intruders.

"He insisted on the meeting," I said. "Can you tell him that I'll call him tomorrow?" I was reaching for the doorknob when the door burst open and slammed into me, literally knocking me across the room. Rowan Ansel, clutching a blooming zebra plant, gaped at me, his fair skin turning bright red.

"Oh goodness, Mrs. Kozak," he said, "I'm so sorry. Are you all right?" Behind the desk, Roddy watched him with a look so venomous poison practically oozed across the floor. Ansel put the plant down and crossed to where I was leaning against a desk, rubbing my face, feeling slightly stunned. He took me firmly by the arm and steered me to a chair, setting the briefcase I was still clutching on the floor beside me. "Where did it hit you?"

"Here," I said, pointing to my cheek. I could already feel it swelling. A knife edge of numbness ran down my face, with pain radiating out on either side. Another line of pain ran down from my right shoulder to my breast. "And here." My first thought wasn't about broken bones or nerve damage, it was Suzanne's wedding. Wouldn't it be great to stand up in front of a church full of people looking like I'd been punched in the face? And ruining her wedding pictures? "I'm okay, really. It was just a bump." I tried to get up. Being fussed over makes me uncomfortable.

But Dr. Ansel, having creamed me with a door, wasn't going to let me go until he'd made sure the damage wasn't serious. "Roddy, can you go down to the staff kitchen and get some ice, please." It wasn't a request. It was a command, and Roddy showed his displeasure by making a great deal of noise getting out of his chair and stomping to the door. Ansel watched his departure with a look of intense distaste. It was clear there was no love lost between the two of them. A lot of tension left the room when the door closed.

Ansel bent over me and probed my face very gently with his fingers. Then he slipped his hand inside my shirt and began doing the same thing to my shoulder. I stiffened involuntarily when he did. "Relax," he said, smiling for the first time. "I'm a physician." I tried to relax, but his concern was making me nervous. I just wanted to gather up my things and get out of there. Gently he felt my shoulder and my collarbone, his face thoughtful, observing my reactions as he explored. "Mmm," he said, finally, withdrawing his hand and straightening up. "Feels okay. I can't be sure nothing's broken—you'd need an x-ray for that—but there's nothing obvious."

Roddy came stomping back with a Styrofoam cup of ice, which he stuck in my face and rattled loudly. Ansel pushed his hand back. "Don't be so thick, Roddy," he said, "see if you can find a plastic bag or some wet paper towels or something. She needs to put the ice on her face, she's not going to take it for a walk." Roddy left again in search of a plastic bag.

"I'll just give this plant to Cliff and we can go back to my office," Ansel said. "It's not very restful around here, is it?"

"Don't bother him," I said. "He's asleep."

"Asleep?" he said, as shocked as if I'd said Cliff was dancing a jig.

"He fell asleep in the middle of our meeting."

"You're kidding," he said, then recognized that I might find that offensive. "Is he okay? I mean, it's just not like Cliff to just fall asleep in the middle of the day." It was obvious he wanted to see for himself, to reassure himself that Cliff was okay.

"Yes, he's okay. He was just terribly tired. And the stuff we were discussing was hard for him. I think it wore him out."

"He falls asleep on you and then I smash you with a door. We're not treating you very well around here today, are we? Look, we'll go down to my office. You can lie down and put some ice on your face. If you do it right away, you should be able to prevent some of the swelling."

That seemed like good advice since the last thing I wanted was a swollen face, so I let what I would call "practical vanity" beat my urge to flee and let him lead me down the corridor to his office. He carried my briefcase and clutched my arm like he expected me to collapse at any minute. Halfway down the hall we met Roddy, clutching a plastic bag. Ansel took the bag and the ice and ushered me into his office. He quickly removed two stacks of books from the couch and gestured for me to sit down. Then he dumped the ice into the plastic bag, wrapped a handkerchief from his pocket around the bag, and gave it to me. He moved the two throw pillows to one end and thumped them. "Lie down, put your head here, and then rest the ice on your cheek for at least twenty minutes."

Reluctantly, I slipped my feet out of my shoes, curled up on my side with my head on the pillow, and pressed the improvised icepack against my stinging cheek, wincing at the initial pain. I closed my eyes and slowly counted to ten, waiting for the ice to start having a numbing effect. "I can see you're uncomfortable. You want to get out of here as quickly as possible, don't you?" he said. "Is that because you can't stand being taken care of or because Eve has told you that I'm an ogre and should be avoided?"

I started to say something, but he stopped me. "Never mind. You don't have to answer that. I was just thinking out loud. I'm sorry. It would be unfair for me to keep you here because I want to be sure you're not suffering some shock from a sudden blow like that and then ask you troubling questions."

He knelt beside the sofa, studied my face and then felt my hands. "You're cold," he said, getting his jacket from the back of the door and draping it over me. Then he went to sit behind his desk, obviously ill at ease.

His first guess was right. I felt ridiculous curled up on a stranger's couch being fussed over because of a little bump from a door. Well, it hadn't been such a little bump. The ice had numbed my face, but my shoulder and chest still throbbed. Not something that needed medical attention. I just needed some aspirin and a hot bath. A bath, I thought sadly, that was a long time away. I still had too much to do today. But Dr. Ansel ought to be able to scare up a few aspirin. The sooner, the better. I felt vaguely stunned and enervated, tempted to just close my eyes and nap.

I sat up and set the ice down beside me. "I've got to get going," I said. "Could you get me a couple of aspirin?"

"Of course. But I wish you wouldn't go. Twenty minutes with the ice really would be better than ten." He smiled, a sweet, self-deprecating smile. "I know you think I'm being a fussy and old maidish, but I'm not. I admit it, I do feel horribly guilty for crashing into you like that, but it's quite sensible to watch you for a while. Sometimes people think they're fine and they go marching off all pumped up with adrenaline and then later, when the chemical rush subsides, find themselves dizzy and unstable and shaken." He tapped his fingers together nervously. "I'm just being cautious."

Okay, he'd convinced me. I could spare ten more minutes if it meant he'd feel better. I put the ice back on my face and curled up on the sofa. This time I didn't close my eyes. I was taking no chances with old man sleep. Instead, I studied the lair of this man Eve believed had led her father astray.

Everywhere else I'd been at Bartlett Hill had been decorated in early chocolate-and-vanilla pudding—yellowing white walls and utilitarian brown woodwork—but Ansel's office wasn't dark and dim at all. Three walls of the office were white and the fourth was a bright apple green. There was a dhurrie rug on the floor with lots of bright green and rose and sunny yellow. The sofa I was lying on had a bright flowered slipcover. On the walls were two large pastels of summer gardens, and behind his desk, on another wall, were four smaller pastels of a river at sunset. "Nice pictures," I said. My face hurt when I talked. It reminded me of the first, last and only time I'd ever been punched in the face. At least this time my nose wasn't broken. I have such a facility for looking on the bright side.

"Thanks," he said, "I did them."

"I especially like that one." I pointed at a picture of a lone canoeist about to enter a ribbon of gold laid on the water by a sinking sun. "It reminds me of the river behind my parents' house."

He got up and took it down off the wall. "I'd like to give it to you, if you'll take it. Just a little thing to say I'm sorry."

"I couldn't," I said. "It's too much. Besides, it was an accident. I know that. You don't owe me anything. And it looks so nice there with the others."

He stood there, awkwardly holding out the picture. "Is it that, or has Eve convinced you that I'm a bad person, and you shouldn't take things from bad people like me?" There was a trace of bitterness in his voice.

"Are you a bad person?" I asked, wondering why he cared what I thought of him and why he believed Eve's influence was so important.

"I'm a gay person," he said, setting the picture down. "In the minds of a lot of people, that makes me bad. Maybe I am bad. I had an affair with a married man. Not that that's so unusual." A smile as faint as a whisper crossed his face. "But usually that's something women do, isn't it? Having an affair with the boss. I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit I felt bad about it. I felt wicked. Sometimes completely wretched. But Cliff was irresistible and I didn't resist. I didn't reject him and send him back to his astringent marriage. I saw him and I wanted him and I yielded to temptation. I didn't give much thought to how Helene might feel. Cliff said she didn't care. I accepted that at face value because that's what I wanted to believe."

He sat down behind the desk, pushed the picture away so that he had room for his elbows, and dropped his chin into his hands, watching me. He looked like a kid talking to his mother at the kitchen table, but what he was saying was anything but childlike. "You've known Cliff for a long time, haven't you? So you know how good he can make a person feel. How special. How central. And I'll bet you know how compelling and irresistible that kind of attention is. Who wouldn't want that?"

It was obviously a rhetorical question because he didn't wait for an answer. "So I took what I wanted. So what? That's what everyone does. At least he was honest with her. We weren't going behind her back. Then she decided she didn't like it and asked him to stop seeing me."

I abandoned the ice pack and sat up. The only reason I was staying was to be sure I was calm and together before I went on my way, and because Ansel had seemed to need reassurance. There was no way I could relax and recover while listening to true confessions, even if this was precisely the sort of snooping Eve wanted me to do. I could tell I didn't want to hear what Ansel had to say. "I appreciate your frankness, Dr. Ansel, but I really don't want the details about your relationship with Cliff. It's none of my business."

"Hold on a minute," he said. "I'm sure Eve has filled your head with venom, with inflammatory stories, about how I induced Cliff to betray her mother. She's probably even shared her nasty little theory that Cliff, or Cliff and I, killed Helene because she was opposed to our relationship. It's bullshit, you know, pure and simple."

I opened my mouth to protest, to remind him again that I didn't want to hear it, but he waved me off angrily.

"I've got a right to be heard," he said. "Unresolved Oedipal stuff, Cliff says. Eve's always been insanely jealous. Even jealous of her own mother. Naturally she'd be upset by our relationship—Cliff's and mine. I've tried to talk to her about it. She won't even listen. She says I disgust her. Stupid girl. It must be such a burden for Cliff, having a child like that. I've tried to be nice to her but she won't warm up no matter what I do. And Cliff is so blind..."

What arrogance, I thought, calling her a child. He was closer to Eve's age than to Cliff's. If he approached her with this attitude, no wonder she disliked him. It was hard enough to deal with a parental affair without all this pseudohonest and condescending openness. "Dr. Ansel, please, I..."

He wasn't listening. He was lecturing. "Cliff needed me as much as I needed him," he said. "Helene was a strident, manipulative bitch. She didn't want to be a wife or a companion to Cliff, to share his life, not anymore. She didn't care if he was happy, she only cared if she was happy, but she would never have let him go. She wanted the semblance of a marriage, the protective shell of monogamy, even if she didn't want the reality. It gave her a security that freed her to concentrate on her real interests." He stared out the window.

I followed his gaze to the reddish green, fan-shaped leaves that were sprouting on the tree outside. It was spring, and they would be growing larger every day, the red fading away, leaving only a rich, true green. It was the time of year to be outside, reveling in the beauty of the world, letting the warm wind caress my skin, breathing in the rich earthy smells. A very physical time of year. And my very physical man, Andre, seemed to be about to take a hike, while all the other people I was spending my time with seemed to want to talk only about murder and death and sex and school problems. Right now, I'd even have welcomed a little of Suzanne's wedding talk. At least weddings were happy occasions. I'd certainly gone wrong somewhere, to be in this situation. Either that, or the gods really had it in for me.

Dr. Ansel, who earlier had seemed to have some facility for reading my mind, had withdrawn into a world of his own, continuing his confession, or whatever it was, oblivious to anything I might be feeling. "Their sexual relationship became nonexistent long before I even met Cliff. Any claims she may have made that they had to stop having sex because of the dangers of sleeping with a bisexual man were just a pretext. A sham. Helene wasn't turned on by monogamous sex. It wasn't dangerous enough for her. She was like a female tomcat."