With Friends Like These... (29 page)

“I had nightmares for years,” she said. “A bald, bearded man and a gigantic noise and screams and redness.”

“Dreams are one thing, but you didn’t consciously know, because if you did—”

“Appreciate it if you’d cease tellin’ her what she remembers or knew,” Mackenzie said to me.

His summons to cease and desist shut me up long enough to let my central nervous system absorb the shock of what Lizzie had said. Because while revelation via movie poster is not quite orthodox, I believed her the instant the words were out. And I knew Mackenzie had, too. Our only differences were about what to make of its nuances.

Lyle Zacharias had killed his wife, and Hattie had witnessed it. An accident he could have explained, should have owned up to. Instead he took the easy way by lying and soiling a child’s life. Sickening. Lyle Zacharias was one enormous lie. He had stolen a lot of lives, cheated and rearranged and destroyed, unconcerned with the damage he left in his wake. What was it to burden an orphaned little girl with—whether or not she consciously knew it—a matricide she hadn’t committed?

“Lizzie,” Mackenzie murmured, “Mandy here has to head elsewhere, and I’m not of a mind to leave you alone, so why don’t you come along with me? I think maybe coffee and food would help. Plus a good long talk.”

“Only coffee?” I said softly. “You promise?”

Lizzie was still mesmerized by the poster. I didn’t think she could hear us.

Mackenzie nodded, all blue-eyed innocence. “Coffee,” he said. “What are you insinuatin’?”

I couldn’t tell if I was looking at Mackenzie the compassionate friend or Mackenzie the complete cop. I reminded the man, whichever one was facing me, of Lizzie’s right to a lawyer and due process, should the need arise.

“Well,” he said, drawling the word out into multisyllables, “I was plannin’ to skip the lawyer and rely on the rack. It’s real good for confessions, ’specially when you add a good lashin’, and the fingernail-puller-outer gizmo, too. Just love to hear them scream, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

He shook his head. “I try real hard to find out the truth, and I try real hard to do it legally. Thought you knew me by now. Oh, boy, do we need time alone.”

It was the badge. Wherever it was, in his wallet or home in a drawer, it had the power to blind me. I apologized again.

“Accepted,” he said. “What I think we all do now is move on.”

So we did. He and Lizzie across the street to the coffee shop, and I off for dinner with the folks.

I went in pursuit of my battle-scarred car and tried to puzzle out the day. Once again I’d gotten what I’d requested. Something akin to a confession, witnessed by Mackenzie.

Why, then, did I feel so rotten about it?

* * *

What an anticlimax! From the high drama of revelation to…dinner in the suburbs. Ah well, perhaps I could cut short my mother’s inevitable nuptial nagging by telling her, finally, how close her neck had been to the noose all week. And for the family at large, I’d have the painfully dramatic story of Lizzie and the movie ad.

That would have to wait until Karen was in bed.

Karen. Damn. I had to return to my house. My niece had been feeling overlooked and miffed since the appearance of her sibling. Assuming that the interloper in question, Alexander, was too new to notice inequities, I’d been bringing Karen special treats when I could. For today I’d bought a superdeluxe minisuitcaseful of felt-tipped pens. And I’d left it home.

The gift-wrapped box was on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it and glanced at the clock. Seconds to go till five, when traffic moved toward critical mass.

Macavity welcomed me with an anxious trot to his empty food dish, but he couldn’t hold my attention. My clock-glance had swept on and caught the blinking semaphore of the phone answering machine. I will consider myself fully adult when my pulse no longer quickens at the sight of a waiting message, when I actually learn from the sheer force of experience that the message will not be news that I’ve won the lottery or been granted the MacArthur Genius Award for undeveloped, unsuspected potential. Or anything else very exciting, to be honest.

But as of now, rationally or not, my heart still flutters at the possibilities in that winking message light.

This possibility turned out to be my sister. My heart de-fluttered. It appeared that my mother had taken the train into town that morning, planning to spend an entire day at the Philadelphia Flower and Garden Show and be back at Beth’s by five. “But she called to say she wanted to visit Hattie Zacharias afterward, and that maybe you could pick her up on your way out here. Could you? Call me so I’ll know you heard this message.”

I called. I agreed. It wasn’t relevant that Society Hill was the opposite direction from the Main Line and Beth’s Gladwyne house, or that now, for certain, the downtown streets would be impassably clogged.

I had some time, and my mother was notoriously slow at closure, anyway. Her leave-taking speed record had been clocked at twenty-nine minutes from the first good-bye to her actual exit. Might as well feed the beast who was still methodically, nervously, rubbing against my ankles. “Calm down,” I told him. “This is not the day you starve to death. And why don’t you eat kibble if you’re so hungry?” Useless rhetoric on my part. Macavity considers dry food an occasional hobby, not a meal.

I plopped the remnants of today’s canned delight onto his plate and felt a misplaced maternal rush as his purr reached all the way up to my ears.

My sympathy for Hattie Zacharias had dissipated given what Lizzie said. I mentally ran and reran the scene with the gun discharging and killing Cindy Zacharias while both her daughter and Lyle’s stepmother watched in horror. I pitied everyone at the grisly scene. But I could not forgive Hattie for collusion and lies, for sparing Lyle embarrassment by burdening a near-baby, already traumatized by loss, with matricide. And I didn’t care if Lizzie did or didn’t know the facts until recently. They were there, buried in her brain. She was expending valuable energy in keeping them buried. Besides, other people believed the deception and thought of her in the wrong way. She had carried the burden even if she hadn’t known what was weighing her down.

I picked up my bag and pulled out my car keys, but the fatal scene played nonstop in my mind. Only the faces weren’t the smiling ones that might precede a pure accident. They were upset, strained, and I had a sense that somebody had told me they were that way, but who?

It couldn’t be anything Sybil had said, because she’d never known Cindy. Janine had only alluded to Cindy by mentioning her husband’s attraction to redheads. And all I could remember from Terry Wiley was praise of Cindy’s kindness and goodness. Maybe I was making the whole thing up, rewriting the script to suit me as I liked. I erased the phone message, reset the machine, and said adieu to the cat.

Then I remembered. Richard Quinn had said it. He wasn’t a man I’d think of when dealing with words, so I was nearly at the door before it came back. He’d thought she was too emphatic about being holier than thou. Argued the last time Quinn was with them, right before he left the partnership.

Right before…the inside of my brain felt like a pinball machine, small hard pellets pinging against the skull, spinning off in new trajectories. Right before Quinn left the partnership, meant…

I rushed back to the kitchen divider. “Excuse me,” I told Macavity, who was washing up after dinner. I opened the cabinet behind him and pulled out the telephone directory. U-V-W. Wiley. Too many altogether. Wiley, T. Wiley, T.B. Good Lord! Why would anybody want to be known by those initials? Tessa—Telford—Thea—I knew he taught at South Philly, but did he live in the city? Was his number listed? Theodore—Terrence—Eureka!

“Please,” I whispered into the receiver. “Be the right Terry. Please.”

It was. Or almost. “May I speak with Terry?” I asked after I heard Janine’s whine even in her hello.

The whine metastasized after I identified myself. “What do you want with him?” she demanded. Her voice threatened to short-circuit the phone wires. “I thought I told you—”

“I need to ask one quick question.”

“About what?”

“About—About something that came up on Junior Journalism Day.”

“Look, lady.” Her voice, like her skin, was muddy.

“It’s important.”

She inhaled loudly, as if steeling herself for a repulsive and difficult task. “Terrrrrreee!” she screamed, so close to the receiver that it was deafening. Did she think the man was here, with me, on the other end of the line? “Phone!”

Sometimes you get quick peeks into other people’s lives. Just a word or two, like those she was shrieking, and you know too much about the anger that dusted every surface of their life.

Another phone lifted somewhere in their house. Janine made no effort to pretend she was hanging up. Her aggrieved breaths were quite audible. “Hello?” Terry Wiley’s anxious voice said. “Who is this?”

“Mandy Pepper. Remember me from Junior Journalism Day?” That was for her benefit, not his.

“Of course. Nice to…” And then, maybe, he decided it wasn’t all that nice hearing from me again, after all.

“Remember you were talking about…um…” The hell with it. Let Janine have a fit. There was no way around the name. “Remember how you said that Cindy Zacharias—” I heard an angry gasp from the second receiver. So did Terry. Before he could say anything, I plowed ahead, “—was a good friend of Janine and yours?” I hoped that placated her. “And that she was the kind of person who cared about people and about what was right? Isn’t that what you told me?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember what words I said. But sure, she was like that.”

A person who cared about what was right. He had said that. And Quinn had said she was self-righteous about it. And that Lyle and she had been fighting right before he left. Before Lyle terminated the partnership. On the eve of Ace of Hearts, which Terry Wiley had written back in high school.

“Why?” Terry asked. “What does it matter?”

“What I need to know is this. Did Cindy—” Another ridiculous gasp from Janine. Twenty years after the object of her husband’s infatuation was dead, she was still in a state of perpetual outrage. “Did Cindy Zacharias know that you were the real author of Ace of Hearts?”

Heavy two-receiver silence before he spoke. “She’d seen the original, yes. My version. Found it on Lyle’s desk. She saw the resemblance, even if the jury couldn’t, later. But of course, by then, the original was missing.”

“Thank you. Thank you both.” After I hung up I put my elbows on the kitchen counter and held my heavy head with both hands to avoid having it fall off.

Cindy knew Lyle had plagiarized, and Lyle knew that she knew. And he also knew that given his lack of talent and ideas, the pilfered work was his one chance. He’d managed to get out of his partnership, to keep his stolen jewel all for himself, except that Cindy knew and was going to ruin his one chance with her ethics. And they fought about it. Quinn said so. And so had Lizzie, who’d said that her mommy had cried and cried.

And nothing at all had been an accident, particularly Cindy Zacharias’s death, which had been murder, impure and not at all simple.

* * *

I found myself riding up the elevator in Hattie Zacharias’s building without any memory of the drive to Society Hill or the process of parking my car. I had been on automatic pilot while my mind coped with questions, poorly sorted facts, and unreadable meanings. If Cindy had been murdered, then…why couldn’t I follow the logical string to its end, to Lyle’s murder?

One thing was for sure: if Cindy had been murdered, then Hattie’s complicity was even more detestable.

The old woman was evil. As for Lyle, the thought of him revolted me.

Lizzie, poor child victim, knowingly or not, had evened the scales. An eye for an eye, a poisoned son for a murdered mother.

Lyle Zacharias had been tried and found guilty and already executed, and the case was, for all intents and purposes, closed. All that was left was to help Lizzie legally and emotionally.

The elevator stopped on every floor. The building seemed exclusively tenanted by elderly and slightly infirm people who entered and exited with measured movements. I tried not to be impatient, but I was eager to get up to the apartment and out of there. Hattie now felt like pollution.

But I wouldn’t be satisfied until she told the truth. I wanted her to publicly clear Lizzie of the burden of guilt. Nobody could make up for what had already been done, but somebody had to start undoing its long-term effects, and Hattie was the only somebody left who could.

My problem was deciding how I was going to convince a woman whose entire life had been dedicated to protecting, to pathologically overprotecting, the boy and man she’d mothered, to discard a twenty-year-old lie and to posthumously tarnish forever that same man’s memory and name.

And I had to do it quickly, too, or my mother and I would be late for dinner, which would mean real trouble.

* * *

Maria, the housekeeper, opened the door. She stood at the entryway looking as impassively sullen as she had earlier in the week.

“I’m here to pick up my mother,” I said.

Nothing.

“Mrs. Pepper. Bea?”

More nothing.

“In there.”

She didn’t care, and eloquently but wordlessly conveyed that while she moved aside to let me in.

At least friend Alice didn’t appear to be in residence.

My mother was on an easy chair at right angles to the sofa, where Hattie was again swathed in her foamy soft afghan. She looked different than she had on Monday. Not better, but more relaxed. Resigned, perhaps. Accepting.

Maria silently entered and stared at me. “Coat.” It was almost a grunt.

“I’m only staying a moment,” I said.

My mother raised her eyebrows. “Five minutes, perhaps, Mandy?”

We were disappointing each other. I was not behaving politely by her lights, nor she by mine. Nonetheless, I conceded. I pulled off my coat and handed it to Maria.

Both Hattie and my mother sipped from teacups. At Hattie’s urging, I settled onto the armchair across from my mother’s, at the other end of the love seat. Within seconds the silent Maria returned, put a teacup in front of me, and filled it with an aromatic liquid.