Life Sentences (18 page)

Daisy could feel her heart pounding
in her chest as she collapsed on top of her motel bed. C-A-G. Roy Gaines's
words kept echoing inside her head. C-A-G
repeated a hundred times…

She'd published an article in
Science Now
called "Genes and
Fate." In it, Daisy had posited that, although a person's genotype
determined everything from eye color to inherited diseases, we were
not robots programmed by our genes. Citing the work of Matt Ridley, she'd
explained that
how
a person dealt
with his or her stress could affect the entire immune system, since it
was now believed that stress was responsible for switching on or off certain
genes. Both the body and the mind had influence over genes.

In her article, Daisy had used
Huntington's as an example of the ways in which destiny could sometimes
not be altered. No amount of medical intervention or vitamin pills
would stop Huntington's disease from manifesting itself. If the gene
repeated thirty-nine times, you'd get the disease at age sixty-six. If
it repeated forty-one times, you'd get the disease at age fifty-five.
Any more than fifty repeats, and you were doomed to develop! Huntington's
in your twenties. A terrible fate.

Genes also played a role in intelligence,
but not personality. A study on the genetic influence of mental ability
showed that over 50 percent of memory capacity could be attributed to
genes. But whether a person was passive or assertive, easygoing or
temperamental, had mostly to do with environmental factors. In her article,
Daisy concluded that genes, for the most part, did not equal destiny.

Now she stared at the ceiling from
a prone position on her motel bed. There were several messages waiting
for her on her answering machine, but she couldn't summon the energy to
play them back. Her eyes were open, but she felt as if she were dreaming.
She tried to shake off today's nightmare, but the harder she tried,
the more vivid it became. She told herself to get up, but her body refused
to cooperate. "Come on, Lazy Daisy. Do something."

She got out of bed and found Anna's
diary in her suitcase. She cracked the binding and studied Anna's minuscule
handwriting:
"
Momster
&
ifite
,
awf
stuff,
bitt
n
wrd
.
Cnt
w8
gt
outtahere
."
Daisy translated the passage
to read:
"Mom and I had a fight, awful
stuff, bitter and weird."
Or maybe
"bitter words."

"I
can't wait to get out of here."

She kept reading.
"March 24: So many wolf spiders in the
house today! I found this HUGE one in the bathtub and freaked out. I killed
it with my shoe, smashing it over and over again until it was nothing but
dust. Then I scrubbed out the bathtub with bleach and Ajax, and soaked it
in Lysol and sprayed it with Raid until I couldn't breathe. It totally
creeped
me out."

"April
3: I hate my life. I can't wait to leave. I hate this fucking town! I
hardly ever sleep at night anymore, but even when I manage to catch a few
hours, I'll sleep past noon the next day. It's not like I'm full of
grooviness
or anything, going to all these wild parties
and staying up late every night and having
lotsa
groovy fun. No, I'm so boring! I stay inside and eat cookies. I'm dead
tired half the time. When am I ever going to catch up on my sleep? Maybe
when hell freezes over. I'll have some cheese and crackers with that whine…"

"April
12: 50 more days, and I'm
outta
here! Mom was so
awful today, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I got stoned and drove downtown
for some reason. Then I parked and got out and walked around Main Street
for a while. It's so pretty there. I walked up and down until everything
seemed to fly right past me at a very high rate of speed. The sun was beating
down so hard against the brick walls of the buildings it had the effect of
creating these weird visual hallucinations, these optical illusions
or something. I kept staring at this one particular window in front of a
bar, and my mind started to whirl and dance. It was doing things with the neon
signs, creating these liquid animations. I must've stood there forever,
f and finally I went in, had a few drinks, got dizzy and drove back home.
Wouldn't you know it, MOM WAS STANDING ON THE PORCH WAITING FOR ME!"

Daisy's eyes began to droop. So
far, nothing in her sister's diary was going to be of much help to the police.
Like a cheating mystery buff, she skipped the middle part and turned to
the very last page. Written on June 2, just a few days before Anna had
flown off to L.A., she had written
:
"
i
CDr
. E. H.
Hiltsn
&
cnt
w8!"
Daisy
shot up in her chair
. "I'm going
to see Dr. E. H. Hilt soon and I can't wait!"
Finally, they had a
name to pursue.

She got on the phone and called
the 411 operator, but there was no Dr. E. H. Hilt listed in Edgewater.
As a matter of fact, there was nobody by that name in the entire Vermont
phone book.

Next she called Los Angeles information
and asked for Dr. Hilt. There was no such person listed in Los Angeles County,
either. She dropped the diary on the bed and reached for her bottled water,
took two aspirins, then noticed the diary had fallen open to a specific
page in the middle of the book. A page with Anna's signature written
all over it. There were doodled daisies and smiley suns, but mostly there
was Anna's cramped, girlish signature-once, twice, three times… ten altogether.
Only it was her first name combined with a different last name.
Anna
Hildreth
.
What was that supposed to mean? Was it code for Hubbard? No, wait. Hubbard
was Cup, short for Cupboard, as in "Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard."
The girls together were
DNA
(Daisy
and Anna), but individually, they were
Banana Cup
and
D-Cup
(Banana from Anna Banana, and D-Cup from Daisy Hubbard or Cup). And their
mother was simply L.

Hildreth
must be code for something.
Then again, it could signify nothing at all. Anna's fondness for wordplay,
when combined with her increasing paranoia, often had little to do
with reality. It all depended.

Feeling like an empty sack, Daisy
packed her sister's diary away and picked up her cell phone. She would've
done anything to avoid making this next call. She lay inert on the bed
and listened to the
flatline
of the dial tone,
wondering what she was going to tell Lily. She couldn't begin to explain
how surreal her day had been, how cut-out-of-cardboard everything seemed.

Lily picked up on the third ring.
"Hello?"

Daisy took a deep breath and said,
"Hi, Mom, it's me."

There was no response. She could
sense her mother reeling in her emotions, girding herself for the worst.

"It wasn't her," Daisy said.

"Oh my God." Lily sobbed
with relief.

"Mom?"

"Thank God."

"Mom, I don't think…"

There was a long pause.
"What?"

"I don't think this means that
Anna is okay."

"Daisy," her mother said.
"You have to believe in something."

Jack found Daisy in the bar across
the street again, seated at a knotty-pine table perfect for solo drinking
and self-pitying reflection. He ordered a beer and sat down beside
her, then stared at the stubborn,
slotlike
set of
her mouth.

"Watch it," Daisy said.
"I'm drunk enough to insult you."

"I think I can handle
it."

She was working on a pack of cigarettes
and a large red wine. Her third, by the looks of things. "I've been
sitting here nursing my rage," she told him. "And tomorrow I'll
be nursing a walloping hangover."

He swallowed some of his beer.
"What you're experiencing," he said, "is perfectly normal.
It's what you have to go through."

"Oh fuck you."

The sun coming in through the plate-glass
window warmed his face and arms. "Good," he said. "Let your
anger out."

She smiled, tears springing to her
eyes. She quickly wiped them away and said, "Can I ask you a personal
question, Jack?"

"Sure, go ahead. Now that
we're on a fuck-you basis."

She gave him a sad little smile.
"What makes you cry?"

"Me? Nan. My tear ducts shriveled
up a long time ago."

"I'm serious."

He leaned back in his seat, creating
a pocket of distance between them. "My little girl makes me
cry," he said, and she looked enormously sorry she'd even brought it
up.

A tender lull kicked in.

He watched Daisy drink her wine
and smoke her cigarette. Then he said, "Gaines wants to talk to
you."

Her eyes glazed over. "Forget
it."

He glanced around the bar at the
license plates nailed to the walls, the pineapple-yellow jukebox in
the corner, a small group of women with their feet hooked around the
rungs of their stools, their leather pants darkly gleaming. He wondered
if the motorcycles outside belonged to them. Girls in packs. Foster's
on tap. The silver disco ball was spinning around, sending flashes of mirrored
light dancing across the walls, a touch of nostalgia for the
stayin
' alive
seventies.

"He'll only talk to you,"
Jack said.

Daisy shook her head. "I
can't go through that again."

"I don't blame you. You've
shown exceptional courage this past week, Daisy. Exceptional fortitude.

There'd be no dishonor in declining
the invitation. No dishonor at all."

She frowned, her lips so full and
wet they were sexually distracting. "What would I have to
do?" she asked.

He wasn't expecting this.
"I'd take you over to the prison, where you'd sit behind a pane of
Plexiglas and communicate through a handset. I'd be in the next room,
monitoring your every move. Security is tight. You'd be in absolutely
no danger."

She gave him a hard look.
"Not physically anyway."

"It's a lot to ask."

She leaned forward, carrying the
weight of the world on her face. Her eyes had that hundred-yard stare.
"Did she suffer much? My sister?"

Jack did what he had to do. He lied.
"She was probably unconscious in seconds."

"Honestly?"

"Yes."

This seemed to satisfy her. 'Tell
me about the woman in the grave," she said. "The one with the
curly white hair."

"Irma
Petropoulous
?
She had five grandkids and a drinking habit. She was well on her way to
cirrhosis of the liver. Her daughter reported her missing about a year
ago."

Daisy blew out a thoughtful plume
of smoke, then tapped her cigarette in the ashtray. Her tongue was purple
from the red wine. It was the histamines in the wine that gave you such a
walloping hangover. Jack had read about it somewhere.

"And there was a prostitute?
Katja
somebody?"

"From Minnesota originally.
She came to Hollywood to be a movie star, wouldn't you know it. Her mother
contacted the LAPD six months ago."

"She didn't live in De Campo
Beach?"

He shook his head. "
Katja
cruised Sunset Strip, spreading goodwill and disease
wherever she went. Turns out she had a full-blown case of AIDS. She weighed
less than ninety pounds when she disappeared." Remnants of anger
slipped into his voice. "Colby
Ostrow
had a
sister in the Valley and a nephew and niece who loved him."

She nodded sadly.

He swallowed the rest of his beer.
He liked it here. He wanted to idle away the afternoon with her, forget
about the case. Forget about the variety of horrors man visited upon
man. She looked so lovely in the lavender light. He liked her plainness,
her honesty, the lack of paint on her face. She was like some rare, beautiful
flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk.

"I found something in Anna's
diary," she said. "Something that puzzles me. She had a doctor's
appointment before she left home last June. Only there is no Dr. Hilt
listed in the Vermont phone book. He doesn't exist, as far as I can tell.
I think it might be code for something else. Anna likes word games. She
enjoys toying with the meaning of things."

"For example?"

"Waste product."

"Excuse me?"

"Instead of saying, 'When the
shit hits the fan,' she'd say, 'When the waste product hits the air-circulating
rotational device.' 'Oh shit' becomes 'oh waste product.' Ugly curtains
are 'cretins.' Mom's the
Monaster
."

"So what's 'Dr. Hilt' mean?"

"I have no idea." She stared
at the drink in her hands. I "Anna could be too enigmatic for her own
good sometimes."

There it was again-past tense. Daisy
Hubbard was beginning to accept the inevitable.

They sat staring at one another.
Then she reached out and touched his face. It was an awkward moment,
both innocent and dangerous. He closed his eyes, giving in to the coolness
behind the lids. Her hand smelled slightly sweet. Slightly tart. He opened
his eyes and said, "This is not unlike stepping off a cliff."

"It's funny. I trust you."

He lowered his gaze. He wasn't sure
she should trust \ him. He'd come here for the express purpose of persuading
her to talk to Gaines. Now he realized he could be playing into the bad
guy's hands, delivering her like a j lamb to the slaughter. "Look,"
he said, "I'll handle this thing without you, okay?"

"No," she said.
"I've changed my mind. I want to do it."

"Daisy…"

She stood up. "Let's get it
over with."