Death Qualified Part 39

"Ways you haven't even dreamed of yet. But the way you've found is a good one. You've banked your fires with ice water, and it shows. You go into court with that look of disdain, that suffering-martyr pose, that air of having been deeply offended and betrayed, you'll be saying, there's her neck, slash away at it."

She stared at him speechlessly; he stood up and walked out of the room without looking at her again.

It started to snow that evening by seven. Nell and the children were having a living room picnic. She had spread a blanket in front of the fire; they roasted hot dogs and had potato salad, and later roasted marshmallows. Then they stood on the front porch and watched immense, lazy snowflakes drift to earth.

"I hope it snows this deep," Carol said, holding her hand at waist level.

"Where's our sled?"

"In the garage. We'll find it tomorrow if there's snow on the ground," Nell said.

"Maybe it'll be deep enough to ski," Travis said.

"I.

better see if the skis need wax or anything."

When they were all chilled, they went back inside and roasted a few more marshmallows and talked about snow.

Doc Burchard stood on his deck with the snowflakes falling around him, wis.h.i.+ng, exactly as Carol and Travis were wis.h.i.+ng, that it would get deeper and deeper until the world was buried under a mountain of snow. He went back inside where Lonnie was making their dinner. She had to run, she said; it might start getting slippery soon.

He told her to go ahead; he would finish and clean up later.

Doc and Jessie ate without a word. He had not spoken to her all week, they were both well aware. When they were done, as she was preparing to wheel herself out of the dining room, she said, "Lonnie says that Clive wants to marry Nell right away, adopt the children and all. Isn't that nice?"

He looked at her with hatred.

"How long have you known?" he asked. His voice sounded harsh and strange to his ears.

"From the beginning, probably. I didn't make a note of the date."

"And never said a word, never let on. You treated her like a friend all that time."

"Oh, well, you know it didn't make a bit of difference.

Not a bit. Not until she was a widow, anyway. Many widows would like to marry doctors.

Haven't you found that to be true, dear?"

"Aren't you afraid to let me prescribe your medicine?"

he whispered.

"Aren't you afraid I might let you slip in, the bathtub, or accidentally knock your chair off the deck, down into the river?" She laughed and pressed the b.u.t.ton on the arm of her chair. The mechanism hummed, and the chair turned smartly and headed for the door.

"You'd better call Lonnie back," he said in that strange new voice.

"I'm taking a few things and going to town. I won't be back for several days, not until the snow is over, at the very least."

She turned to regard him from the doorway.

"You're such a fool. Little boy running away from Mama, and so very angry. You're a complete fool." She sped down the hallway toward her room. The humming of her wheelchair was the only sound in the house.

Not town, he thought then. Not town. To Nell's house, but not this early. The children would still be up. Methodically he began to clear the table. Later, later. He looked down at his hands; the plates he carried were rattling because his hands were shaking so hard.

Lonnie Rowan was rocking, watching television, and dreaming. Her house was not as clean and neat as any of the others that she took care of, Jessie's, or dive's, or Frank's, but no one ever saw it but her, and it didn't matter.

Her rocking chair had been her father's, and during his lifetime she had not dared move it even an inch from its place near the wood-burning stove. He liked things where he put them, liked to reach out his hand and take what he knew was there without having to look first. Now she s.h.i.+fted the furniture frequently and never put a book or magazine down in the same place twice. Sometimes, before she sat in the rocker, she would make a shooing motion with her hand, as if to make him get out. All the furniture was his and her mother's; she had never bought a stick of furniture in her life, never needed more than the house provided. But things were changing, she knew; things changed.

All those years he had said, "Now, Lonnie, don't you worry your head about the future. My little girl's going to be all right. You can trust the old man to see to that."

Then he was gone and the bills were her bills, and the future was here. She rocked and hummed under her breath, her face turned toward the television, an old black-and-white one that he had bought back in the sixties. But she was not seeing what was on the screen. She was examining a different future. In this one, she lived in the little house on Nell's place, and Nell and Clive and the kids lived in the big house, the way it was supposed to be. Her lips tightened, then relaxed again. They would go back to wherever they had come from, and Nell would be in the big house where she belonged. Nell and Clive, with no black people for miles around, the way it was supposed to be.

She, Lonnie, would do for them, cook for them, keep the house clean, do a little gardening.. .. She had watched how the kids were around their grandparents, full of laughs and jokes and hugs and kisses. That's how they would be with her, she had decided. She was a virgin; when she was still young enough to marry and have a family there had been her Ma to take care of, and later her Pa, and the years sped by. And the years sped by.

There was no one for her, nowhere to go, no one to turn to. If she ever was going to have a family, she had come to realize, she had to make it happen.

She had watched Clive turn into a b.u.mbling, tongue-tied boy as soon as Nell was free, and she understood that he would marry her; he would make that happen somehow.

And she would go with them, to the little house. She had watched him fussing with a bunch of flowers, a gift for Nell, and she had said scornfully, "Oh, she'll say they're nice enough, and they are. But you take her this plate of gingerbread for the kids, and see how she acts."

After that he had carried her cookies, her cakes, her pies to Nell and the children; their love gifts, he had said, and blushed.

She jerked awake and sat straighter, tried to get back into the fantasy, but it seemed to swim out of reach now.

Why would they welcome her? She heard the mocking question in her father's voice; it was how he always had mocked her when he drank too much.

Nell wouldn't welcome her, she admitted finally. Nell thought she was too gossipy, and Nell had got pretty mad when Lonnie voiced what everyone was saying over renting out her house to those kinds of people. Not Nell, she said to herself, but Clive. He liked her; he listened to her gossip and even asked questions. He knew that if she said it, it was so; she repeated things but she didn't make them up, and he respected that. But why would he welcome her into the little house? She rocked slowly, thinking hard.

Grat.i.tude, she decided, and the idea made her palms ooze sweat.

It meant that she had to tell on Jessie, and that meant that Jessie would cut her off without a backward glance, without a thought. She knew that b.i.t.c.h, and that's how it would be. Jessie and Doc were her main source of income.

If she lost them, she would starve.

"Will you stop carping about money?" her father had yelled.

"I told you, my girl won't end up in the poorhouse.

I'm taking care of it!"

She rocked harder and harder. No poorhouse, not these days. Just out on the streets, sleeping under bridges, eating out of garbage cans. She began to cry softly out of frustration and fear, out of indecision. If Jessie and Doc split, she thought, they would move back to town, Jessie back to her sister, or her brother, somewhere away from here, and she would be out of that job anyway. But they probably wouldn't split up. They had had this kind of long silence before and patched things up again.

Her tears stopped and she got to her feet. A cup of cocoa, a bath, maybe something would come to mind about what to do, how to make certain Clive would want to hire her and let her live in the little house when he and Nell got married.

At ten the wind started to blow. Funneled through the river canyon, it whistled and howled and screamed, let up, and started again at a higher pitch. The television news featured the weathermen who grinned and acknowledged that they had been wrong again. The Pacific storm had been forecast to come inland up in Was.h.i.+ngton state, but here it was coming in hard and strong. Rain in the valley, heavy at times. Snow in the mountains, a foot in the pa.s.ses overnight, blizzard conditions, a real Pacific storm front, the first of the season.. ..

A gust of wind backed some smoke up in the fireplace.

Frank added another log to the fire. Fight wind with wind, he muttered to himself, make a good strong updraft. He could hear Barbara in his study; his printer stuttered to life, stopped again, and she stamped out and upstairs. She had not settled in one spot for more than half an hour all evening. She had not spoken a word all evening, had looked through him in a disconcerting way when he spoke once or twice. He knew that look, that stamping around, that fretful stop-and-start routine, and he tried to keep out of the way, denying himself his own study that night, making coffee if the pot seemed too light when he lifted it, setting out crackers and cheese once, but mostly keeping as quiet as possible in the living room.

At twenty past eleven the phone rang. Frank scowled at the machine with its blinking green eye and did not get up to take the call. He detested answering machines. Now the light became frenzied and a hoa.r.s.e voice said, "If you want the truth about the murder make Jessie tell what she knows." The machine clicked, and the green eye winked at him one time a second as he sat without movement.

Finally he went to the table that held the machine, sat in the chair by it, and played the message back, listening intently. He started to play it again, and this time became aware that Barbara was inside the doorway, also listening.

"Just came," he said, and they heard the message an other time.

"Recognize the voice?" she asked.

"Nope. Used the old trick of talking through a towel or something. What do you think?"

"I don't know. Everyone goes over there to her open houses on Thursdays, don't they? Could have been any one of her guests or Lonnie, or Doc himself."

"Probably not Doc. Not his style. Lonnie? Maybe, but she wouldn't want to choke the only real goose she has, would she? As you say, a lot of people turn up over there."

Barbara went to the machine and removed the tape.

"Let's stash it away in a safe place. G.o.d, I wish this creep had spoken up earlier, before Jessie took the stand."

Prank was thoughtful for a few seconds, then shrugged slightly.

"How I always thought of Jessie is that she's like a queen bee. All the other bees go out and gather the pollen and nectar, whatever it is that bees crave, and take it home. People take Jessie every tidbit, every sc.r.a.p of gossip, rumors, announcements. She always knows exactly what's going on. She could have heard just about anything."

Barbara started to say something, when the doorbell rang. Frank went to open the door, and there stood Mike Dinesen, dripping wet, carrying his gym bag, grinning like an idiot. Barbara never had been so glad to see any one.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

nell admitted Doc into her house and stood aside as he took off a poncho that covered him down to the floor. Where it dripped, rivers were born on the foyer floor.

"I had to see you," he said. He looked frozen.

"Come in by the fire. Do you want something, coffee, tea?"

He shook his head, longing to touch her, to hold her, be held by her. The barrier was his handiwork, he knew; she never had distanced herself, never had denied him anything he needed. They walked into her living room; he drew near the fire.

"Nell, can you forgive me?" he whispered after a minute.

"You haven't done anything."

She sat on the couch and drew her feet under her, pulled an afghan over her legs. She looked like a precocious child.

"I'm going to leave her," he said then.

"I can't stay with her, not now, not after what she did, tried to do."

"We must have hurt her terribly," Nell said softly.

"I.

didn't realize."

He began to move about the room with jerky, short steps. He straightened a lampshade, touched a pillow on one of the chairs, moved Travis's sweater from another.

His motions were abrupt, too quick, too nervous. All that energy, Nell thought watching. All that pent-up energy.

"I'll leave her," he said.

"Next week. She'll go to Ted's house, or to her sister down in California, someplace. She has money, all the money," he said with bitterness.

"She keeps reminding me that we live in her house, eat her food, drive her cars."

Nell knew all this. He had told her often that he couldn't leave Jessie, his debt to her was too great, he had too much pity, she needed him.. .. Jessie had put him through medical school, had set him up in practice, had bought the house they lived in. Nell watched him without interrupting When he finally stopped his restless pacing, touching, and straightening and came to a halt before her, she shook her head.

"You do what you have to," she said in a low voice.

"But don't pretend it's for me, or because of me. Remember when we knew Lucas was coming back? You asked me if I'd let him in my bed again, and I said no. I lied. If he had come back the way he was the last time I saw him, laughing, happy, the Lucas I always loved, he would have been welcome in my bed. I would have been the way I was with him from the start. What we had, you and I, I don't know what to call it. Not love, not like it was with Lucas. I don't know what it was with us, but it's over.

Don't leave her for me, but for yourself if that's what you want."

A flush spread across his sharp face, and he wheeled about almost wildly. At the fireplace he looked at her again and cried, "I don't believe it! You said you love me. You can't change like that from one day to the next!"

"You told me to leave," she said.

"I didn't want to, but you made me leave, and it was a good thing. The best thing. I needed you and you said to go away. Not one day to the next. Months, Doc, months. I learned something then. I learned something. I don't need you. I don't need anyone. I can stand by myself!"

He shook his head, shook away her words.

"It's Clive, isn't it? Jessie said wouldn't it be nice if you and Clive got together finally. He's waited so long, and I thought what a good idea, to lull any suspicions she might have, to let the world see you with a man who was available, to make them all forget I even lived. We couldn't meet, not if people might be watching, and I thought yes, you and Clive, for now, for a short time. He's no good for you, Nell. He's a.... I don't know. Too rough. Too physical, not a real idea in his head, not a thought. Can you talk to him? Can he talk about anything that isn't woods and trees?"

She refused to look at him, to see him at all. She could feel her face tighten, and then tighten again.

"Stop it," she said in a furious voice.

"What did we have? Twenty minutes, an hour now and then. Did we talk? Did we comfort each other? All we ever had was s.e.x, and we were both so lonely, so ... empty. But that's not enough!"

"You've found someone younger with a bigger c.o.c.k to stick between your legs. Is that it? You used me. My G.o.d, I wouldn't have thought it possible! You were using me all those years!"

She jumped up and flung down the afghan.

"We used each other, maybe. It was safe. I told you from the start that I didn't expect you to leave Jessie. I didn't expect anything from you except what we had, and that's done with. I'm sorry, Doc. You'd better go now before I start to cry or something Please, just go away!"