Death in a Funhouse Mirror (38 page)

When I finally did try to get up, Andre threw a strong arm around and pulled me back against him. "Prisoner," he muttered sleepily. "Can't leave."

"I'm a working girl," I reminded him. "Gotta go."

"Mmmm. Yeah. You work just fine," he said, nuzzling my neck.

"Don't start with me, Lemieux," I protested. "I absolutely, positively must be at work at nine."

"I'll be quick."

"If that was what I wanted, man, I could find it on any street corner."

"So I'll be slow."

His hands were doing irresistible things to me, and with a sigh, I resigned myself to the inevitable. "But you'll have to make breakfast."

"No sweat," he said. And sure enough, when I'd showered and found the only serviceable summer dress that hadn't been incinerated, the table was set, a slightly bedraggled pot of lilacs in the center, and he was just pouring my coffee.

"You'd make someone a fine wife," I said.

"Sorry, not my thing. I'm into women."

"So I've noticed. What's this thing?" I pointed to what looked like a large dried fish lying on a plate.

"Smoked alewife. Cute little thing, isn't it?"

"That's not quite how I would have described it. What does one do with it?"

"One eats it. Like kippers, or smoked whitefish, or..."

"Or maybe we could save it for another day. I'm not sure my public is ready for an interviewer with smoked fish breath."

"I'm hurt," he said. "That is a token of my undying love and affection."

I scrutinized the thing. It was flat, with dried, wrinkled, yellowish skin, sunken eyeballs and a bony, gaping jaw. "Yeah, I'd say that's a fair characterization. Your undying love and affection, as demonstrated recently, was sort of flat, unresponsive and unappealing."

"No one, madam, has ever been so critical of my John Thomas before."

"Thought all you cops called it your Johnson. Anyway, lest we get confused here, I was not referring to your anatomy, I was referring to your behavior."

"If I promise never to do it again?"

"You'll do it again." I think we'd both learned something from the past week: the way to true love—or in our case, the way to a lasting relationship—was not going to be linear or smooth. There'd probably be more of these little glitches and maybe it wasn't such a bad thing after all. No one ever said life was going to be painless. "I think this is a relationship which is fated to have ups and downs. Right now I don't care."

"Maybe you're right," he said, snatching the last muffin from under my fingers. "Neither one of us is easy to live with. Whether you call it pigheaded or just strong-willed, we both want things our way and we're both sure we're right. We both tend to lock up our emotions to keep people out. We both need a lot of time alone...."

"You make us sound like twins."

"No. You're a better cook. I'm neater. You're more willing to talk about things once you get going. I'm more controlling. I tend to tell you what to do. You're willing to give me more space, but I think we're connected by a bungee cord. Sometimes it's going to be stretched to the limits, but we'll always bounce back."

"Pretty poetic, mister. Can I assume from this we're ready to resume our commitment of an unspecified nature?" He nodded, and we left it at that. Gratifying as it was that he was finally willing to talk, we didn't have the time. Love in the fast lane, that was us. "Is there anything else around here to eat besides the fish?" I asked.

"You'd like it if you tried it." I made a face. "Guess you're out of luck, then,” he said. “We ate it all last night. I can give you some more coffee, though. You know that's as much as you usually get. Unless you want popcorn."

"I'll pass. I assume when I get back you will have vanished like the morning mist?"

He nodded. "I'm afraid so." The bantering tone had gone out of his voice. Neither of us was eager to face another separation. "The bad guys just keep shooting each other, stabbing each other, and killing their kids, with no consideration for me."

Unfortunately, it was true. Even in supposedly peaceful, idyllic rural Maine, the level of violence was rising. People were shot, stabbed or drowned to keep them from revealing information about minor robberies. They might not be killing each other over jackets or high-tops yet, but the value of human life was definitely diminished. The State of Maine needed Andre Lemieux as much as I did, in a different but compelling way.

"I could come up for the weekend." A generous offer. Usually he came to me because he was the one with energy left on Friday nights.

"It's a deal. Bring a pot roast. And one of those great key lime pies? And homemade cinnamon rolls?"

One of the ways to this man's heart was definitely through his stomach. Ironic, though, that a modern woman like me should keep ending up with men who loved me for my body and my cooking. "What about my mind?"

"Okay," he said, "bring that, too. I'm sure we'll find a use for it."

I almost threw the fish at him, but he might have thrown it back, and not only would a game of fish toss waste time I didn't have, I had no more clothes to wear, and I wasn't sure the denizens of Bartlett Hill would react positively to an interviewer daubed with a large smear of smoked fish. I lingered until the last possible moment, knowing I'd have to drive like a maniac to get there for my first appointment. "You remember the alarm code?" He nodded. "And lock the door behind you."

He walked me to the door, his face gloomy. "Please don't take this the wrong way." He hesitated. "I know you didn't like it when I said this before, but I'm going to say it again. I'm glad you're giving up this inquiry for Eve. You shouldn't feel guilty about it, either. You did your best, I know, and I also know how much you hate to leave things unfinished, especially where friends are involved. Leave it to Florio. He's a good detective."

"They invited us for breakfast on Sunday. I think he was heartbroken you didn't show up. He liked you a lot."

"Probably likes you, too."

"We fight a lot."

His grin was wicked. "Why am I not surprised?"

"Cuz you know me so well, honeypie," I said, nuzzling his neck. "Don't worry, I'll be careful. No missions, causes or crusades. Eve was driving me crazy anyway. I'm gonna be a serious working girl until Friday and then I'm going to drive straight to you."

"You'd better. I'll be worrying. Seriously. I don't like the idea of being so far away when someone's hanging around who wants to hurt you. Promise you'll be careful?"

"Don't go all mushy on me, Andre. I like my men cold and hard."

"I think you mean warm and hard." He leered in a perfect imitation of his would-be friend Tiny Anderson, the three-hundred-pound car salesman, and closed the door. I trotted off to the car, keys out, jammed them into the ignition, and roared off like I was at Monte Carlo. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I'd had a decent evening and a decent morning. I didn't know if that was a good sign or not, but I was going to be too busy to worry about it.

They were mowing the grass at Bartlett Hill and the air smelled good. Lisa was waiting beside her car, watching the clouds blow by. "I should be taking my baby to the park on a day like this. Look at me. Pencil poised, my ruined figure squeezed into the only skirt I can zip, about to leave all this loveliness behind and begin stalking the dark corridors of mental health." She offered me a stack of papers. "I stopped by to get these. Charlotte came along and had a fit because she couldn't stay in the office and play."

This was no time for her to have an attack of maternal guilt. I needed her help. "Dark corridors indeed! Don't let the client hear you say that. They believe their work leads to enlightenment, insight, and clarity. Besides, if you stayed outside, you'd only get frustrated. Just as you were beginning to bask in the sun and relax, Charlotte would need to go home for a nap, or drop her pacifier in the mud, or the top would come off her bottle and cover both of you with apple juice."

She looked at me suspiciously. "How do you know so much? You've never been a mother."

"I haven't spent my life in a cave, either. What time do you need to leave?"

Her smile was impish. "I have to deliver some milk around noon, but after that I can come back until five. I was going to get a sitter, but Josh's mother insisted she wanted to watch Charlotte. I'd be a fool to turn down an offer like that."

It was good to have Lisa back. Clients loved her and she was a speed demon when it came to work. Despite her complaints about her ruined figure, today she looked very nice. Her suit was stylish without being showy, a short black skirt topped with a fitted magenta jacket detailed in black with shiny black buttons. One of the buttons was smudged. "Looks like you've got cereal on your button."

"If that's all that's wrong, I'll be lucky. I'm thinking of opening a business kind of like a diaper service that would deliver a week's worth of colorful dusters, kind of like the lab coats doctors wear, to working mothers, so they can get dressed for work, slip one of these on over their clothes, mother like crazy, and then slip it into a discard bin outside the door on their way out. Presto, leaving them with clean clothes. Once a week, the driver picks up the old dusters and leaves you a new batch. There is nothing more humiliating than walking around thinking you look like a million dollars and then discovering that all the while you've had a long white trail of baby spit down your back."

"A laudable idea, but only if you promise to wait until we've done these projects."

"Not to worry." She shook her head and her dark, precision-cut hair flew out and settled neatly back into place. I felt a twinge of envy. My hair has never, even for a moment, been neat. "The last thing I want is to be my own boss. I'd make me work too hard. You know what I mean?"

I did.

Cliff was waiting in his office with a schedule. Today he seemed to have regained his enthusiasm for the project. He welcomed Lisa with a warmth and interest that quickly had her glowing. Over coffee, which Roddy served without scowling or spilling on us, we discussed how to proceed. "Would you prefer to be assigned a room, and have people come to you, or would you rather interview people in their own offices?" Cliff asked. "I assumed their offices, but we could change that."

"Where do you think we'd be likely to get better responses? People are always happier if you go to them. It makes them feel more in control. The question is whether, if they are in their own offices, they might also be reluctant to divulge information because they're so used to protecting privacy and keeping things confidential in those settings. What do you think, Cliff?"

"You've made a good point," he said, "but this is also a time-sensitive institution. Many of the people you'll be interviewing have busy schedules. It would help if you could go to them. Let's try it that way and see how it works. If, after today, you think we should change the method, we can. Now, here are your schedules, and Roddy has marked the locations in blue on these maps, so you should be able to find your way around. If you don't mind wearing them, these name tags will let you move more freely."

We each got our schedules, maps, and plastic badges that identified us as consultants. We also got a conference room to use as our headquarters, a small, airless, pale yellow cubicle which smelled of bad coffee and rotting apple cores. "Nice," Lisa said, inspecting it. "I wonder if he expected us to do our interviews in here?"

"Not exactly full of ambience, is it?"

She pulled out a chair, sat down, got up, tried another one, rejected that, and finally found a third that seemed to satisfy her. "Broken. Both of them. Do you suppose this is some kind of psychological test? I'll bet that's a two-way mirror." She pointed at the wall, where curtains were pulled back to reveal a gray, mirrorlike slab of glass. "And I hate being watched." She got up and closed the curtains. "Well, boss. Any last instructions before we have at 'em?" We went over the things I'd identified last night, agreed to meet again at 4:30 to review the day, and then Lisa left to begin her interviews.

My first interview was with Rowan Ansel. Deliberate, I was sure. As long as he didn't hit me with any doors, and I kept the conversation focused on Bartlett Hill, it should be okay. No confessions. No conversations about Helene's death. No discussions about Eve. This was strictly business. I took a deep breath, located the questionnaire with his name on it, and marched down the hall to his office.

 

 

 

Chapter 25

 

Lisa and I conferred at the end of the day, declared our progress satisfactory, and parted company with a commitment to meet again the next morning. She looked a little guilty when she told me that she could only work half the day. "It's Josh's mother. She promised to watch Charlotte even after I explained I was committed for three whole days. I know I told her that and I know she nodded when I asked if she was sure she could do it. But at lunch when I went to nurse Charlotte, my mother-in-law informed me that she was only available until noon tomorrow because she always plays tennis on Tuesdays." She sighed. "I called my babysitter, but she'd already made plans. She can take her on Wednesday, though. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I think this is part of a plan to keep me from working."