I've Got You Under My Skin (4 page)

6

R
od Kimball signed for the certified letter and opened it while his wife, Alison, was busy filling a prescription. When the customer left she hurried over to take it from him.

“Who’s sending a registered letter?” she asked, her tone worried, as without breaking stride she took it from him, turned, and went back to the pharmacy area of their drugstore, giving him no chance to warn her of the contents. Dismayed, he watched as her face flushed, then paled as she read the two-page missive. Then she dropped it on the counter. “I can’t go through that again,” she cried, her voice trembling. “My God, do they think I’m
crazy
?”

“Take it easy, love,” Rod cautioned. Trying not to grimace with pain, he slid off the stool behind the checkout counter and reached for his crutches. Twenty years after the hit-and-run accident that had crippled him, pain was always a fact of life for him. Yet some days, like this one, cold and wet in late March in Cleveland, Ohio, it was more severe than others. Pain was etched into the lines around his eyes and the resolute set of his jaw. His dark brown hair had turned almost completely gray. He knew he looked older than his forty-two years. He hobbled over to Alison. Across the counter from her, his six-foot body towering over her petite frame, he felt an overwhelming need to protect her. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said firmly. “Tear up that letter.”

“No.” Shaking her head, Alison opened the drawer beneath the counter and shoved the letter into it. “I can’t talk about it now, Rod,” she said.

At that point the jingling sound that signaled the opening of the door told them that a customer was coming into the store, and Rod made his way back to the checkout counter.

He had been a rookie quarterback for the New York Giants when he and Alison were married. He was raised by a single mother who worked as a caretaker for an invalid to support him. His father, a hopeless alcoholic, died when he was two. The sportswriters were unanimous that a brilliant career was ahead of him when he had signed his first big contract. He and Alison were both twenty-two then, and he had been crazy about her since kindergarten. In fact, when they were in kindergarten together he had announced to the class that he was going to marry her someday.

Alison’s family had never had any money. Her father was the produce manager in a grocery store. Alison went to college on a mix of student loans and working part time. She had lived in a modest section of Salem Ridge, not far from where Rod Kimball had lived. She had missed out on a scholarship to graduate school.

He officially proposed the day he was offered the big contract with the New York Giants. That was two months after Betsy Powell’s murder. An important part of the proposal was that he knew Alison wanted to go to medical school and then into research. He promised to pay for her education, to tiptoe around the house when she was studying, and to delay having children until she obtained the degree she wanted so badly.

Instead, three weeks after the wedding, he had been in the accident, and Alison had spent the better part of the next four years at his bedside helping him to heal. The money he had saved from his one season with the Giants was soon exhausted.

At that point Alison had taken out more loans and gone back to
school to become a pharmacist. Her first job came about because her elderly childless cousin had hired her to work with him in his drugstore in Cleveland. “Rod, there’s a job for you as well,” he had said. “My assistant is leaving. She does the ordering of everything except for the drugs, and she handles the cash register.”

They had both been glad to get out of the New York area, where they always seemed to encounter speculation over Betsy Powell’s death. A few years after they moved to Cleveland, the cousin retired and they took over the store. Now they had a wide circle of friends, and no one ever asked them about the Graduation Gala murder.

The nickname “Rod” had come about because in his college years on the football field, a sportswriter had commented that he moved as fast as a lightning rod. After the accident, Thomas “Rod” Kimball had managed not to let that nickname become a source of bitter irony.

The morning was fairly quiet, but in the afternoon business was brisk. They had two part-time assistants, a semiretired pharmacist and a clerk who stocked the shelves and helped at the cash register. Even with their help it was an exceptionally busy day, and by the time they closed at 8 
P.M.
, he and Alison were both bone tired.

By then it was raining hard, a cold driving rain. Alison insisted that he use the wheelchair to get out to the car. “We’ll both be drowned if you try to use the crutches,” she said, an edge in her voice.

Many times over the years he had sought the courage to insist that she leave him, that she meet someone else and have a normal life. But he had never been able to bring himself to utter those words. He could not visualize a life without her now, any more than he could have visualized it all through his growing years.

He sometimes thought of an observation his grandmother had made long ago. “In most marriages, one of the couple is more in
love than the other, and it’s best if it’s the man. The marriage will have a better chance of going the whole way.”

Rod did not need to be told that with Alison, he was the one who loved the most. He was almost sure that she would not have accepted his proposal if he had not offered to send her to medical school. And then, after the accident, she was too decent to walk out on him.

Rod didn’t let himself drown in that kind of speculation often, but the letter today brought back so much—the Graduation Gala, the pictures of the four girls plastered all over the newspapers, the circus the media had made of their wedding.

When they reached the car, Alison said, “Rod, let me drive. I know you’re hurting.”

She was shielding him with the umbrella as she opened the door, and without arguing he slid into the passenger seat. It was impossible for her to hold the umbrella and fold the wheelchair at the same time. He watched regretfully as the rain pelted her face and hair until she was finally settled behind the wheel. Then she turned to him. “I’m going to do it,” she said. Her tone was defiant, as if she expected him to argue with her.

When he said nothing, she waited for a long minute, then started the engine. “No comment?” Now he detected a slight tremor in her voice.

He was not going to tell her what he was thinking—that with her long brown hair wet on her shoulders, she looked so young and so vulnerable. He knew she was frightened. No, he thought. Make that terrified.

“If the others agree to take part in the program and you don’t, it wouldn’t be good,” he said quietly. “I think you have to go. I think
we
have to go,” he corrected himself quickly.

“I was lucky last time. This time I may not be so lucky.”

They were both silent for the rest of the trip. Their ranch-style
home, designed to accommodate his disabilities, was a twenty-minute drive from the pharmacy. They were spared any further exposure to the downpour because a door from the garage opened into the kitchen. Once inside, shaking off her wet raincoat, Alison sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands. “Rod, I’m so scared. “I never told you but that night when we all went up to bed all I could think of was how much I hated Betsy and Rob Powell.” She hesitated and continued haltingly, “I think I was sleepwalking that night and I might have gone into Betsy’s room.”

“You thought you were in Betsy’s room that night!” Rod dropped his crutches as he pulled a chair closer to Alison and eased himself into it. “Do you think there is any possibility that anyone saw you?”

“I don’t know.”

Alison pulled away from his embrace and turned to face him. Her large, expressive light brown eyes were her dominant feature. Now with tears streaming from them, they looked haunted and defenseless. Then Rod heard a question he never expected to hear from his wife’s lips.

“Rod,” she asked, “isn’t it a fact that you have always believed that I killed Betsy Powell?”

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Are you absolutely crazy?”

But even to his own ears, he knew that his protest sounded hollow and unconvincing.

7

“
W
ell, have you made up your mind if you’re going?”

That was the question Nina Craig heard as she pushed open the door of her condo in West Hollywood. Oh God, she’s in one of those moods, Nina thought, and bit her lip to keep from making a sharp reply to her sixty-two-year-old mother. It was five-thirty, and it was clear to her that Muriel Craig had started her private cocktail hour well before her usual five o’clock with a pitcher of apple martinis or a bottle of wine.

Muriel was still in her nightgown and robe, which meant that whatever time she had woken up, it was in the cloud of depression that so often enveloped her. It’s going to be a long night, Nina thought resentfully.

“No response from the Academy Award winner?” her mother asked sarcastically as she refilled her glass from the almost empty bottle.

Ten years ago Nina had given up the hope of becoming a successful actress one day and had joined the guild for extras, the background people who worked on a day-by-day basis. Arriving at 5
A.M.
, she’d spent all day on the set of a film about a revolution and had been one of the hundreds of extras who held up banners. The set was in the desert near Palm Springs, and it had been mercilessly hot.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mom,” Nina said, trying to keep her tone even.

“Why not go? Three hundred thousand dollars is pretty good money. I’ll go with you. I wouldn’t mind getting an in-person look at good old Robert Nicholas Powell again.”

Nina looked at her mother. The hair that, like her own, had once been a natural deep red was now dyed a bright fire-engine shade and looked harsh against Muriel’s face. Years of smoking had left deep lines around her lips and cheeks, and her skin was mottled with brown spots. Her shoulders slumped as she leaned forward on the couch, her two hands encircling the glass.

It was hard to visualize the beautiful woman who at one time had been one of those rarities, an actress who worked steadily.
She
had talent, Nina thought bitterly, not like me. And now look at her!

Don’t you go into all that again, Nina warned herself. It’s the end of the day, and you’re hot and fed up with everything. “Mom, I’m going to shower and get into something comfortable,” she said. “I’ll join you for a glass of wine when I get dressed.”

“Take the three hundred thousand.” Her mother spat the words out at her. “Use it to buy me my own condo. You don’t want me living with you any more than I want to be here.”

Muriel had followed Nina to California after the acting jobs became fewer and fewer in New York. A year earlier, she had barely escaped being burned to death when her carelessly dropped cigarette had ignited the carpet in the living room of her apartment in a two-family house in Los Angeles. The people who owned the house where she had rented had refused to let her return after the damage to the apartment was repaired. “The same thing could happen in the middle of the night,” the owner told Nina. “I’m not taking any more chances.”

Her mother had been living with Nina for almost a year now.
Now she, too, worked as an extra, but too often did not feel up to responding to a potential job.

I can’t take it much longer, Nina thought as she closed and locked the door of her bedroom. In her mother’s present frame of mind, it would not be unusual for her to follow Nina in to continue the discussion about the letter from the producer.

The room was cool and inviting. White walls, polished floors with white throw rugs on either side of the bed, narrow apple-green draperies at the windows. The white bedspread was accentuated by apple-green and white pillows. The four-poster bed and matching dresser were left over from her ten-year marriage to a mildly successful actor who had turned out to be a serial cheat. It was better that they had not had any children.

They’d been divorced for three years. I’m ready to find someone else, Nina thought. But I can’t while I’m stuck with my mother. Who knows? I still look good. If I go on that program I might be able to parlay it into getting back into real acting, or even one of those reality shows. I can be a mad housewife with the best of them.

What would it be like to see Claire and Regina and Alison again? We were such kids, Nina thought. We were all so scared. The cops kept twisting what we were saying. Mom gave the performance of the year when she was asked if it was true that she had been seriously dating Powell before he met Betsy. “I was dating at least three people at that time,” she said. “He was one of them.”

That’s not the way I heard it, Nina thought grimly. Her mother blamed her for introducing Betsy to Powell. She blamed me, and blamed me, and blamed me, Nina thought. It was all I ever heard from her. I ruined her life.

Muriel had turned down the part that would have made her a star because Powell didn’t want her to be locked into a contract
when they got married. Those were the exact words he used: “When we get married.”

She’d thrown them at Nina often enough over the years.

Nina felt the white-hot anger that those memories evoked wash over her. She thought of the night of the Graduation Gala. Her mother had refused to come to the party. “I should be
living
in that house,” she had said.

Betsy had made a point of seeking Nina out. “Where is your mother?” she had asked. “Or is she still a sore loser about Rob?”

I’m glad no one heard her ask me that question that night, Nina thought. It wouldn’t have looked good when Robert Powell discovered his wife’s body the next morning. But at that moment, if I had had that pillow, I would gladly have held it over her face.

I had much too much to drink that night. I don’t even remember going to bed. I don’t think I showed it, because no one mentioned it, including that nosy housekeeper who said that she thought Alison was drunk.

When she and the others got there Powell was collapsed on the floor, and the housekeeper pulled the pillow from Betsy’s face.

Her mother was turning the handle of the door. “I want to talk to you,” she called. “I want you to go on that program.”

With a supreme effort Nina managed not to show how angry she was as she called back, “Mom, I’m stepping into the shower. It’s all right. I
am
going to accept that offer. I’ll be able to get you your own place.”

Before I kill you,
she added silently. And then wondered again what else she hadn’t remembered about the night Betsy Powell was suffocated.