Deathwatch - Final (11 page)

She threw it back in my face. "Who's going to take care of us, Stuart? I heard Ruth telling you to ask my father to send us to school." She began to pant a little with her anger. "She's gone now," Ellie shouted at me, "and I can't go to school and you know that my father drinks. You came here to help us, why don't you help?" Her eyes were rolling slightly; they'd gone the dark blue gray of granite and she fixed them on me.

"Your father's dead." It came out unexpectedly, not the way I'd have chosen to tell the news at all. And certainly, given the training I'd had--scant as it was--nothing like the consoling way one was supposed to take on with families of the deceased. And certainly not twelve-year-old girls. Abby gasped.

"What! What?"

I was still hunkered down, seemingly glued to the spot. "Regina gave him--I don't know--some drug. One or another."

"That's impossible Stuart!" Abby put in. "Ellie and me we've been together every minute."

"He's dead," I said again.

"Besides, Abby said, "after they stopped that horrible argument, we made a pact to fight her off."

Her eyes met mine; I shrugged. The facts contradicted her.

"Maybe she doesn't need us to come through anymore," she said slowly, her voice tinged with bitterness and fear.

"What'll you do, what'll you do," Ellie said, clasping her small hands together. "They'll think
you
did it!"

Something in her voice, something in the way she averted her eyes, or the way she'd been so aggressive when I'd come on them in the garden. Something. I looked at her sharply. Her round, heavy moon of a face was hidden in her hands, but I had a quick mental vision of Ellie suddenly ‘coming to’ in her father's bedroom, the horror of his death sinking in, the needle dropping from her trembling hands, her body tumbling forward. In my mind's eye I saw her catch herself by snatching at the bedcovers. I heard Regina whispering darkly in her mind,
Mother's here, don't worry, darling. They won't suspect you. They'll think it was him.

I'm glad he's dead, Ellie had said fiercely. He made me a cripple—he and Stuart.

Calmer now, Ellie dragged her near-dead weight to the wheel chair, its polished wooden seat and caned back glaring at her from the corner of the room where Regina had left it.

I thought about Ruth's warning. Some people can't live with unrequited love. Was this Ellie's way of paying me back? I felt my stomach cramp.

Ellie was conjuring her mother, and whatever pact the girls made, she ignored it.

- 25 -

I
mpossible. We've been together every minute
. Abby's word's percolated through my mind, and on the way to fetch the coroner, I wondered about it. Much of my own day had been "lost" to me. I remembered waking in a kind of mental fog, and could not recall such simple motions as getting out of bed to pee, dressing myself, or shaving. The only thing I remembered was finding myself at the window two or three times looking out at the twins. If I couldn't account for my actions, maybe Abby had lost track of time, too. Or maybe, I thought anxiously, she was right, and Regina no longer needed either of the girls to come through.

I slowed the horse two blocks in from the main street, stopping in front of a tall brick house with a shabby wooden porch. Ewing Eberhardt, the coroner, met me at the front door.

"Trouble over to Saunders's?" he asked, one hand lightly riding the door jamb. He knew me by sight--the result of the small town errands I'd run in Ruth's place over the last six months. His face said I was better known by reputation as the freakish twins' schoolmaster.

"Andrew," I nodded.

"Just give me a minute to get my bag and we'll go back together. You can tell me the details on the way."

"There's not much to it," I said.

He gave me a hard look, then disappeared down the dark throat of the hallway. I stayed on the porch mentally collecting the fragments of my scanty story.

He followed me to the buggy and as he climbed in on the opposite side, his black leather bag in hand, I saw something I'd never noticed about him before. He was missing the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand. Now with the sun winking off it, I saw that he wore his plain gold wedding ring on the right. Wing cleared his throat, waiting for me to begin. He was a quiet man given to slow, deliberate movements, and I wondered if he was continually compensating for whatever accident had cost him the missing flesh.

"Andrew's lying in his own bed," I said. "There's an empty bottle--"

"I know he was a drinker," Wing said, "but a man his age, you'd more likely find him tumbled at the bottom of his cellar steps." His eyes met mine again, and I found myself simultaneously wishing I'd thought of staging just such an accident and hoping my face hadn't registered the thought.

"He had cirrhosis--I'm sure of that."

Wing shrugged and went on. "Pretty hard to kill yourself drinking--even on a bender."

"Sometimes he fiddled with the drugs in his supply cabinet," I lied, suddenly pulling the syringe from my coat pocket and handing it over. "I didn't want the girls to catch on--it's bad enough as it is...."

The instant I mentioned the girls, I felt my blood pressure skyrocketing. What would Eberhardt think? No one knew we'd performed the surgery; worse, Andrew was dead, Ruth and Gabriel, gone. I felt my face going hot, red. I peeked to see if he was looking me over--

Wing merely eyed the syringe critically, sniffed around the glass plunger. "No smell of almonds; no smell at all, really. Colorless whatever it is," he said turning the syringe up to the light. "’Cept this drop of blood that's coagulated here, near the tip."

He indicated the place by running his finger up and down, but he was careful to maintain an invisible path more than a half inch away.

"Gener’lly speaking, people that inject themselves do it without drawing blood."

"If they're not drunk or clumsy with the drugs," I said. "And the needle's bent."

"Looks like somebody stepped on it." His face was as tight and unforgiving as a vise screwed close to the limit.

"I found it under Andrew's hand. He probably dropped it on the floor," I said, "when he lost consciousness."

 He carefully folded a scrap of paper from a small leatherbound notebook around the bloody syringe, then he dropped it inside his medical bag. "We'll see," he said. "We'll see."

- 26 -

I
watched Wing Eberhardt double the flesh-colored rubber tubes of his stethoscope and fold the contraption into his satchel. Andrew's corpse had taken on greater rigidity and his face was the color of a stage vampire in the glare of the gaslights.

I'd already watched him take Andrew's body temperature and he'd come prepared—not like what you’d expect from a semi-rural coroner--putting his hands on Andrew's knees or lower thighs to determine warmth or coolness. Eberhardt was more thorough than that; even making small incisions and inserting the probe of his thermometer into Andrew's organs.

"He's registering 78 degrees in the liver, fatty and packed in viscera as it is. That's pret’ near to room temperature. He's been gone more than 14 hours is my guess," Wing said. He was hunting up and down Saunders's long body for the needle mark. "You told me he took drugs on occasion, injected himself. Never asked you or anybody else to do it. That right?" He gave out a small grunt.

"Yes," I said, glancing down at my folded hands and not knowing where else to look. I'd told him that Ruth and Gabriel had left for New Hampshire. Another alibi gone. "I've seen him glazed to the eyeballs, and I believe--"

"There's no signs of any puncture marks--new or old--here." Wing's eyes were focused in the unmarked innocent flesh of Andrew's elbow. "I'll just have a word with the twins, if you don't mind," Eberhardt said.

"They're just children--" I blurted out.

"All the same, I believe I'll see if they know something you don't."

I nodded miserably. I went to the doorway of Andrew's room. "Abby! Ellie!" I called, my voice echoing in the empty hallway.

Eberhardt looked at me then as if I'd gone round the bend. "What on earth are you callin' em for?" His face was flushed dark red with annoyance.

"I...you asked to talk--"

"And I'll go downstairs to the kitchen or the liberry or into the nursery. Man alive, think I'd make cripple girls walk to me, walk in the room where their father is lyin’ dead?"

"Down here," Abby's voice rose from the depths of the library.

And I followed Wing Eberhardt down the stairs.

***

Ruth's words,
she can't come through unless they're separate
, roiled in my head. And yet, I thought to myself, this was Regina's scheming handiwork: The girls sat on a low hassock, arms about each other's waists. The irony wasn't lost on me: Even though Ellie's waist was twice the size of her sister's they'd managed to squeeze into the doubled green sack of the same velvet gown they'd worn the very first night I'd seen them. I found my eyes darting to the hem, but their feet were concealed. No one would've guessed Ellie was missing her left leg.

"Dr. Eberhardt," Abby said shyly, and she dipped her chin toward the boat shaped neckline Ruth had fashioned to accommodate two heads, two sets of shoulders when the girls had been attached.

"Young misses," Eberhardt nodded at the pair. "I guess you know your pa is passed on," he jerked his right thumb toward me.

"Mr. Granville told us," Ellie whispered. She took a hanky she'd been clotting into sticky white dough inside her fist and dabbed her eyes. "What happened?" she asked, and when she raised one brow, I saw Regina--the goddamn bitch, the double goddamned bitch--slyly peeping out from the girl's face. I saw her dark jade eyes leering out beneath the fringe of Ellie's pale pinkish lashes.

Eberhardt's hands were on his hips. His eye swept over Ellie's protruding belly, and I saw--as clearly as if he'd said it out loud--that the word motive had just clicked into place in his mind.

I knew in that moment I was lost, I knew Abby was lost, Regina was in control. Ewing Eberhardt was a bright man but he was a country coroner, and there was nothing in his experience--in his concept of what could or might be--that would ever let him see what was really happening.

Her arm tightened about her daughter's waist, the fingers squeezing the soft flesh I so wanted to caress gently, the force of her demon's mind squeezing the words down the child's throat, and I heard Regina Cahill Saunders speak again.

"We're orphans now. Ruth's gone. And Gabriel. Who'll take care of all of us? who?"

I saw Wing blanch. "There, there, Miss Ellie," he said.

"The wake, the funeral, what'll we do? What'll we do?" Abby began to rock and moan.

"Was it the drink?" Regina asked slyly through Ellie's puffy red lips. "He liked his liquor of a night," she said.

It would've taken a stronger man than Ewing Eberhardt to tell a twelve-year-old girl the facts. He couldn't do it. And whatever his suspicions about me--and I was sure they ran deep--he wasn't going to tell the girl her father's murderer was standing free and easy in the family drawing room.

"There'll be an inquest. That's the usual...when a man of 48 is found...in his own bed. It won't be me doing the tests--everything I collected will be sent on to Albany. They've got the proper equipment to investigate all possibilities." His brown eyes lit on me, but he left the rest unsaid. Then he went on. "I've covered Andrew with the bedsheets, and I'll call in John Madison and Sons to wake him."

"They're best? We'd want the best," Abby said, staring at her hands in her lap.

"We were so young...we can't remember...when mother died...." And here the false Ellie snatched at her sister's unsteady hand and clenched it tightly in her own. "You see, Dr. Eberhardt, we don't even know who our family uses--for this kind of thing."

"I'll call John Madison," Eberhardt said again.

And in my mind's eye I saw two scenes simultaneously. The rough hewn planks of the gallows, a black cotton hood fitted with a jerk over my head, and the heavy canvas fabric of a dirty white strait jacket scratching the exposed flesh of my chin. My arms were painfully secured in opposing directions, a stream of yellow urine poured down my inner thigh.

I heard a snorting sound erupting out of my mouth and nose. It was inexplicable to them, I knew, but I was hysterical. I would be accused of murdering Andrew, I was certain of that. There were only two roads out of Hyde Park, New York for me. Death or prison. I began to laugh.

***

Gabriel's telegram came the day before the funeral:

Ruth failing fast. deepest regrets for girls' sorrow,

But impossible for me to come.

"We do not die--only sleep a while, wait for judgment"

I wondered who the last line referred to--Ruth? Andrew? Regina? It didn't matter, he was my last hope and he would not be there to take up for me. The autopsy confirmed that Andrew's liver was riddled with cirrhosis. But it was the massive overdose of morphine that killed him. There was no point in delaying the burial; with the facts in, Ewing Eberhardt felt he could afford to postpone the inquest a day or two.

I knew I had to act quickly, but I had no idea what action to take. Should I leave? Fleeing would only make me look guilty. But if I did, should I go alone or take one or both girls with me? Would Ruth's warning come true, would I be ferrying Regina out of the house, a stowaway concealed deep inside Ellie's or Abby's mind?

In a small town gossip spreads more quickly than a greasefire. I was trained to observe closely, I would watch how the mourners acted around me. Then my thoughts broke off except for the obsessive round that was like the hollow peal of a death gong: The funeral will tell. Andrew's funeral will tell.