Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons (18 page)

Finally, Tanesha opened hers and said, “It’s funny, but I don’t think you’re in any danger except from the cops. I don’t see any enemies. But how can that be?”

Moonblood said, “I’m getting one of my weird advice things. Go home and look in your kitchen. Does that mean anything?”

“Dirty dishes.”

“Could ‘kitchen’ be a metaphor?” I asked. “Let’s see. A place where there’s food. A restaurant. A sort of back room in a house— maybe in the head? Something on a back burner?”

Moonblood shook her head. “My stuff is much too literal. If I got kitchen, it probably meant that. So do me a favor— go home and look in your kitchen, okay?”

Chris smiled. “I’m so depressed I was going to have some ice cream anyway.”

Rosalie said, “Chris, I get the feeling the answer is connected with something in the past.”

I was disappointed. How smart did you have to be to figure that out?

Chris said, “You mean like a fight with someone? Something like that?”

“I don’t think so.” She closed her eyes again. “It’s not the distant past, either, but it’s long past in your mind.”

Ivan nodded. “I’m getting, like a floor under a bed with dust mice all over it. And maybe one old shoe.”

“Like I swept it under the rug?”

“More like you just forgot about it.”

“Oh, great. So my right course of action is remember it.”

Everyone looked downcast.

“You mean that’s
all
.”

We were quiet. Disappointment filled the room like the buzzing of a fly. Finally, Rosalie spoke, looking at me. “This stuff is bits and pieces, like mosaic tiles. If we could get a whole picture…”

“…we could win the lottery,” Ivan and Moonblood said together. I gathered Rosalie had mentioned this notion before.

“I just want to say one other thing,” Tanesha said. “I asked if you needed to look out for danger. And I got that whoever set you up wasn’t really malicious.”

“They murdered somebody!”

“I mean toward you. You know … at least you don’t have to worry about anything from that quarter.”

On the way home, Chris grumbled mightily. “Some friend, right? They just happened to set me up because— what?— I was handy? Well, isn’t that just great— no enemy.”

“You always said you didn’t have one.”

“Now I wish I did.”

There’s no pleasing some people. As for me, I thought I got a great reading. It had definitely made a believer out of me, especially that funny thing Moonblood said, once I figured it out. Julio and I had joked about moving to some midpoint between our two towns. Half Moon Bay would be just about right.

Rob was in my office when I arrived the next morning. “I've been doing a little spadework.”

“Want some coffee?”

“Yeah. Now listen—”

“Caffeine first, okay?”

Kruzick loved nothing better than serving coffee to clients. It was all we could do to keep him from wearing a little French maid’s uniform with biscuit hat for the task. And half the time, despite our best efforts, he affected a falsetto accent while pouring anyway. All very amusing,
une petite
role reversal,
tris charmante
. Except that he made inhumanly egregious coffee. We’d tried everything, including watching him through each step, and he got no better. We went through about ten kinds of coffee-makers till we finally found one that, for some reason, seemed to click with him. Now his coffee was close to drinkable. He insisted on pouring it into a china pot and serving it in thin cups with saucers.

This morning, in answer to my request, he arrived tray in hand, carefully lined with a starched white napkin, and he wore an embroidered apron. “
Cafi pour m’sieu et mam’selle? Madeleine?
” He had a plate of cookies on the tray.

“Alan, I appreciate the service, but the bunny dip really isn’t necessary.”

“
Oh, pas probleme, mam’selle. Nous aimons a plaisir.
”

See what I have to put up with? Why can’t Mickey go out with a nice doctor?

When the drug had started to work (about the third sip), Rob blurted his news: “I found out Adrienne’s mother committed suicide about six months ago.”

“That poor girl must have been through hell. No wonder she’s so depressed.” I paused and thought about it. “What do we know about the suicide? Had she been ill?”

“I can’t find out anything. Adrienne’s dad clams up on the subject. I talked to him this morning.” He stopped and sipped for a minute. “Well, I might as well tell you the whole thing. I found out about the mom from the famous Danno— you know the ex-boyfriend she keeps talking about? She’d called him a few times, and he finally called her back. But he got nervous because he couldn’t reach her either at Jason’s or her dad’s, so he called the
Chronicle
and finally the call got to me. Anyway, he let it slip about the mom, but he didn’t know the details; so I went over to the hospital and found Mr. Dunson there— what’s his name?— Fred, I think. He wouldn’t talk to me.”

“What do you mean wouldn’t talk to you? He said ‘no comment’ or flipped you off, or what?”

“I mean, he just sat in a corner with his head down and wouldn’t acknowledge I was there. Finally, I got worried, thinking, what with his wife dying and now his daughter in intensive care, maybe he’d gone off the deep end or something. So I started saying was he okay, and he really had to buck up— don’t throw up now….”

“No, I think that’s nice.”

“…and he went ballistic on me. Started yelling it was none of my business and to butt out of his life. As you can imagine, all hell broke loose in the hospital. White-coated people came from miles around, and he got this look, like a cornered fox— I don’t blame him, it must have been terrifying. Maybe he thought they were going to lock him up or something, I don’t know, but it was abundantly obvious he felt the time had come to leave, and he wasn’t sure they were going to let him. So he knocked me down to clear a path.”

“Knocked you down?” My voice was a little weird, but I thought I was going to be all right.

“Yeah, he just came out and hit me…. Hey, what’s wrong?”

Rob had been so engrossed in his story, which I think he more or less perceived as funny, that he hadn’t noticed the lower half of my face trembling or my funny voice. By now I’d teared up, and great, embarrassing trails of saltwater were making their way down my face.

“Look, I’m okay— it didn’t hurt a bit, honest.” He paused, trying to figure me out. “Rebecca? Hey, I didn’t know you cared.”

“It’s not you. It’s just so sad— first the mom and now maybe the daughter. And that poor man half out of his mind about the whole thing.”

“Yeah, well, he drinks, too.”

But I was sunk in the Dunson family drama, and sobbing.

“Hey. Hey, hold on a minute.” He looked nearly as confused as when Adrienne had cried and needed him to hold her. But he had the sense to gather me up without being prodded. “It’s okay. That’s a good girl. Cry all you want. That’s a baby.” If I weren’t in such a state I would have fallen off my chair at the realization he even knew these phrases. Perhaps he’d been dating a mother with a baby.

Finally, when I was starting to get a grip, he pushed me away, as he had Adrienne, and looked me straight in the eye, assessing. “Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong. This isn’t like you. You’re raw. That’s why that story got you, because your hide’s thin.”

Hide was a good word in the circumstances, one Dr. Freud would have approved of; that was what I couldn’t do anymore.

I tried to muster bravado. “I’m scared, that’s all.” I spoke as if it were nothing. “I had a breast biopsy yesterday.”

His face was a picture of confidence shattered: one minute I was strong, healthy Rebecca, the next I was a broken victim. His voice was a croak: “You have…” long pause “…cancer?”

“The test results aren’t in. But I’ve got a lump, and I’m scared. I’m a little weird.” I said again, “That’s all,” and wondered if that would satisfy him, if he would change the subject.

He said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” nearly whispering, incredulous.

“I just felt like it was more than anyone could deal with right now. Chris’s career depends on my being strong. I didn’t want to be a liability.” He looked utterly unbelieving. “I don’t know! I just couldn’t talk about it. It was too close to the bone to hand over to another human being— and it was killing me not to do that. You see how I am. It was nuts.” I let that stand for a second and then I blurted, “Don’t you have any secrets?”

He just stared, alarm in every cell, every bit the trapped fox Dunson had been. I didn’t let him off the hook.

I said, “Come on, you know mine. Don’t you have one?”

In a moment he recovered enough to say, “You don’t have to change the subject. You can talk about it.”

But I was thinking about that look, the trapped-fox look, and what it meant. He’d never told me he loved me, I thought, never told me good-bye when I broke away, never said he’d miss me.
Never anything
, I thought.
Does he have feelings? Are they his secrets?

I thought I’d hit on something. I knew he had feelings, some of them for me— I could tell by the look on his face when I said the B word. But never, never was I going to hear it from Mr. Rob I’m-a-self-contained-unit Burns. The thought of it made me cry again. Through what was left of my formerly tough hide, just a veil of thin, thin skin, I seemed to be absorbing everyone’s pain.

“Beck? Beck, what is it?” The silvery mane of my father— and the rest of his head— poked in the office. “Daddy!”

“I— uh— I guess I should have called.” He looked acutely embarrassed, and then angry. “Rob, what’s going on here?” He spoke like some medieval king challenging a knight who’d made his daughter cry. The last thing I needed was time travel to the twelfth century.

“Dad, this is none of your business.”

Like a dog paddled for something it doesn’t understand, Rob stared at the floor. My hero. “Hello, Isaac.” My father gave him the glare that had been turning witnesses to jelly for nearly half a century. In a moment, Rob would confess on the stand: “I did it! I killed Rebecca with my little hatchet.”

I wanted to yell at them both. I turned to get my coat and in the process heard Rob say, “I was just leaving.” I shrugged into the jacket, turning back to Dad, seeing Rob’s back. He didn’t even say, “See ya,” having apparently forgotten my existence.

“Come on, Dad, let’s take a walk. Suddenly I need a whole lot of air.”

My father was nearly seventy. Was he too old a dog to learn anything? Probably, but I felt stepped on; surely feminism began at home.

I was so angry I didn’t speak on the elevator ride, and only when I felt a blast of cold air (in San Francisco we have it even in August) did I speak. “You know what that felt like? Like not being in a room at all. You had no right to accuse Rob.”

“I didn’t accuse him.”

“The hell you didn’t! Your voice did, and the question did. Whatever was going on in there was between Rob and me, not Rob and you.”

“You’re my daughter.”

“I’m an adult. Also, what was going on was not your business. But be that as it may, if you wanted to stick your nose in, I was the person to address, not the other person because he happened to be male.”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“My point exactly. I’m not two, Dad. I can protect myself.”

“Well, it looked like you were doing a piss-poor job.”

Dad, it had nothing to do with Rob. I was upset because I might have cancer.

I couldn’t say that now. As inappropriate as it was for Dad to try to protect me from Rob, it would have been great to have some paternal comfort about The Thing. But I couldn’t ask now. I’d gotten up this head of righteous indignation that said, Don’t mess with me, I'm strong. I couldn’t switch gears in mid-tantrum.

In the end, it was better, I guess. I had hated being treated like some teenage princess by my very politically correct father, but now that that was over, the anger it left in its wake felt a lot better than feeling sorry for myself.

We walked in silence for a while, me huffing with righteousness and Dad thinking it over, I guess. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Beck. I won’t do it again.” But his blue eyes twinkled. “Maybe.”

“Okay.” I put out my hand. “Truce.”

He sighed. “I thought I’d finally passed Feminism 101.”

“Just don’t open any doors.”

He laughed. Mickey objected to this, though I didn’t. I said, “What made you drop by, anyway?”

“I wanted some of Alan’s fabulous coffee.”

“Bleeagh. Well, I’m glad to see you. I wouldn’t mind getting your opinion on McKendrick and Chris.”

It was probably what he’d come to talk about anyway. The story had been heavily covered by all the local media, but aside from a polite call the first day, both my parents had pretty well kept their noses out of it. Which was a great thing, especially in the case of Mom. But Dad was the best lawyer in town, and since I had access to a free opinion, I was going for it.

He said, “Are you sure she didn’t do it?”

“What!” I couldn’t believe my ears. Chris was family.

He patted the air, okay-okay. “Just checking. You’d have some intuitive feeling if something didn’t ring right.”

“Do you rely on intuition a lot?” I hadn’t told him about Chris’s little psychic problem.

He looked shocked. “All the time. Don’t you?”

I pondered. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what mine says now— or maybe it’s just common sense.”

“What?”

“Chris knows something.”

It was all I could do not to say, ‘How dare you question her? How could you?’ Instead, I said, “She says she never even met McKendrick.”

“Well, then, I’d believe her on that. But it wasn’t coincidence her car was used. How could it have been? Someone had to follow her to that movie.” (I’d made the Raiders meeting a movie so as to keep her secret, yet make clear she didn’t have a decent alibi.)

“All she’ll say is she doesn’t have any enemies.”

“Famous last words. Look, she probably knows something she doesn’t know she knows. Could it be that?”

“I think it could. But what?”