Last Scene Alive

Chapter Nine

  "She had Huntington's chorea," Sally Allison said. This was big news, and Sally relished big news.

  It was eight in the morning, and I'd just finished getting dressed for work when the phone rang. Sally had called to ask me the same questions Arthur had asked me the day before: had I noticed Celia Shaw exhibit any of a list of symptoms?

  "Yes, yes, yes," I had answered. I detailed once again what I had observed. "Now, what does that mean?"

  When Sally told me, I was just as ignorant. "What is that?"

  "It's a disease, a horrible hereditary disease of the central nervous system," Sally said. She sounded almost awed by the horror of it.

  I would have expected a certain amount of zest to Sally's words; after all, reporting on the horrible was her bread and butter. But whatever Huntington's chorea was, Sally truly thought it was awful.

  "So, what's the bottom line?"

  "The bottom line is inevitable death with your mind reduced to vegetable status. You have no control over your body at all. "

  "Oh. Oh, gosh. " That hardly seemed adequate, but then I didn't know what would.

  "There can be lots of symptoms, and it can progress at different speeds in different individuals. Mostly, you begin showing signs in your thirties, and though it may lie almost still for a few years, it begins sinking its teeth into you. "

  "Oh, that poor girl. " I wouldn't wish such an end on my worst enemy, and Celia had hardly been that.

  "Well, actually, she was somewhat older than her official bio says," Sally told me.

  "I kind of guessed that. "

  "Yeah, she was at least thirty. That's still young for Huntington's to have manifested itself, I gather, but it happens. "

  "Do you think she knew?"

  There was a long silence.

  "Maybe," Sally said. "Maybe she . . . I don't know. If she began wondering why she was getting so clumsy - I think she must have known something was wrong, if not exactly what. "

  "What about her mother?"

  "That's it. I called the town where her mother died, as listed in her bio, and though Linda Shaw committed suicide, fairly advanced Huntington's was found at the autopsy. "

  "Oh, my Lord. That's awful. "

  "But, we have to ask ourselves," Sally said wisely, "is her mother's death related to Celia's murder at all?"

  "How could it not be?"

  "It doesn't have to be. "

  I held the phone away from my face and stared at it. "Sally, are you serious? The mother has Huntington's and dies young, a suicide. The daughter has Huntington's, and dies young, an apparent murder victim. No connection?"

  "You didn't realize she was ill. I don't know who did. Maybe the people around her all the time were well aware something was wrong with her - our old friend Robin Crusoe, for example. Wouldn't someone as smart as Robin Crusoe realize his girlfriend had some severe problems? Wouldn't her self-proclaimed best friend Meredith know? Wouldn't you at least suspect something was wrong if you saw me begin to make involuntary movements, begin to show unusual clumsiness? Maybe say something completely off the wall?"

  "Yes," I said reluctantly. And you're not even my best friend, I added silently.

  I just didn't want to believe that Robin had to have realized that something was up with the woman he'd been sleeping with. But I had to face the facts.

  "I just don't see why anyone would kill her. So, she's sick. It's not her fault, and it's not catching, am I right?" I began doodling with a pencil on the pad I kept by the phone in the kitchen. Robin had said he didn't think he was going back to Hollywood. So where would he go?

  "No, it's not contagious," Sally said, as if the very idea was stupid. "It's hereditary. "

  "And it came through her mom. So, who's her dad?"

  "No one knows. Linda Shaw didn't list anyone on the birth certificate, but her sister, the one who raised Celia, said Linda was not promiscuous, so she would have known, presumably. And furthermore, the sister says the guy was out in California with Linda when she died, from what Linda would say when she called. "

  "So finding him would provide a lot of information. "

  "At least. Maybe he and Celia had been in touch, who knows? She didn't talk about her family life to anyone. "

  I could see why. A tough way to start your life, with no dad and a doomed and distant mother: I couldn't even imagine it.

  "But what was the actual cause of Celia's death?" I asked. "Surely someone killed her?"

  "Oh, she was smothered with a pillow," Sally said, almost as an afterthought. "After being drugged with some tranquilizers, probably ground up in her coffee. Maybe she was already unconscious when she was smothered. Maybe she didn't even know. And then, a little later, someone brained her with the Emmy. There again, she didn't know. "

  But maybe she had, my morbid imagination insisted. To be too drowsy to defend yourself, to feel the pillow against your face, to want air so desperately . . . I shuddered, and tried to think of something else. A lot had been happening to Celia's body. "So she was dead when she was hit with the Emmy?" I asked, just to hear it again.

  "Yes. She was killed three different ways. The pills, the smothering, the statue. "

  "That was sure a quick autopsy. "

  "Since there's so much media interest, she got moved to the head of the class," Sally said cheerfully.

  I found this all too depressing. I was just beginning to take a lighter look at my life, and I could not bear to be pulled down. I'd woken up looking forward to the day ahead - a mindset I'd once taken for granted - and I was selfish enough to want to hold on to the feeling. I had brushed my hair back in a ponytail, then rolled it up into a ball and pinned it, topping the whole with a bow low on my neck. I was wearing rust-colored pants and a light sweater, tan with rust-and-green patterns on it. My tortoise-shell glasses coordinated. Before Sally had called, I had been feeling a distinct glow.

  It was difficult to believe that my whole balloon of happiness had been inflated by the simple fact that I'd given a man an erection. But when I tracked my new attitude down to its source, this was what I found. Well, what the hey. I'd settle. It wasn't the erection per se. It was the fact that I still had it. Okay, granted, to excite the human male was fairly easy (sometimes just the state of breathing was enough). But Robin had standards above that, I told myself stoutly. He'd had a high-powered agent, he'd had women in Hollywood (where beautiful women were a dime a dozen), and still, yours truly had excited him. I had a suspicion that if I examined my line of reasoning I would find many flaws, but that wasn't the kind of mood I was in.

  I was determined not to brood on Celia Shaw's terrible end. I told myself briskly that Arthur was on the case and he was a good detective, and I should leave it at that. I took another rotation in front of the mirror, deciding that my bottom looked real good in these pants. I dabbed on some perfume. I'd managed to cheer myself up to my former level by the time I breezed through the employees' entrance into the library, slung my purse into my little locker and pocketed the key, and collected my usual pile of memos and mailings from my pigeonhole in Patricia Bledsoe's office.

  She looked up from her computer, gave me a brisk nod, and returned to her work. I nodded right back, and began flipping through the medley of garbage that was my daily tree consumption. Lying between memos from the regional director about how many hours of course work were required to keep one's library degree current, and the seasonal reminder detailing the symptoms of head lice, was a plain dime-store envelope (in these days, you should call it a plain Wal-Mart envelope, I guess) with a folded sheet inside. I never got personal mail at the library. Only my name was written on the outside, in neat block capitals.

  "Patricia, who brought this in?" I asked, holding it up so she could get a look at it.

  "I don't know. It was on the floor by the checkout desk this morning, P
erry said. He brought it back here," Patricia said. She didn't seem too interested. As usual, she was ironed, starched, aligned, and every other straight-and-narrow adjective I could recall.

  "Well, hmph," I said. I put everything else down and borrowed Patricia's letter opener, which seemed to irritate the woman. Tough. I tapped the letter out of the envelope; a plain sheet of five-by-eight white lined paper, torn from a tablet.

  It said, "You Whore she's not even buried and your after her boyfriend. "

  I stared at it as if it were a poisonous snake. I wanted it to go away, or to say anything other than what it actually said. I took a deep breath and tried to think what to do next. An almost irresistible impulse seized me, told me to rip the paper to shreds and burn those shreds. I didn't want to admit to myself that someone had directed words so venomous to me, much less admit to anyone else that I had received such a message. But Duty is practically my middle name - well, maybe Conventional, or Law-abiding -  anyway, I had to call the police.

  Of course, the cop who answered the call was Arthur Smith.

  He held the paper with a pair of tweezers as he read it. His face remained blank. "This is very interesting," Arthur said, in a voice that would've sounded genuinely detached if I hadn't known him so well. He asked Patricia the same questions I had about the letter's provenance, plus about twenty more, all designed to elicit any detail she might have omitted.

  It was interesting to watch Arthur with Patricia. She answered his questions clearly and in detail, but she never looked directly at him, and she didn't elaborate. It was like she was counting out the words she had to use to get her message delivered, and that was the number she would utter - that many, and no more. To my alert eyes, Patricia looked absolutely relieved when Arthur drew me from her little office into the employee lounge, which was deserted.

  "You've been with the writer with the stupid name?" he asked.

  He knew quite well who Robin was.

  "Depends on what you mean by 'been with,'" I replied. "If you're talking biblical, that's none of your business. But my mother asked him over to dinner last night, and we had to sneak him out of the motel so the reporters wouldn't follow. So, yes, I've spent time with him. I've known him for years. " It was remarkable how defensive I sounded for someone without a guilty conscience.

  "Who knew this?" Arthur was nothing if not tenacious.

  "Any of the movie people at the hotel, I guess," I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. "My family - my mother and John's family, that is. And Shelby helped me get Robin out of the motel, so Shelby and Angel knew. " I detailed the little plot to Arthur. It all sounded silly today, though yesterday it had seemed to make perfect sense.

  "A lot of people," Arthur said. He looked at the letter again, frowning. "I don't want to alarm you, Roe, but you should do some thinking. The last woman who dated Robin Crusoe got smothered. Now you've gotten a nasty letter. "

  I was flabbergasted. "There's a great distinction between being killed and getting an anonymous letter," I said, trying to sound tart and undaunted. But I was turning over what he'd told me, and I was dismayed; and that was what Arthur had wanted, for whatever reason.

  "What was the name of the secretary?" he asked me, out of the blue.

  "The lady you just met? Patricia Bledsoe," I said.

  "Is she new to Lawrenceton?"

  "Comparatively. She's lived here maybe a year. "

  "She have family?" he asked idly.

  "She's got a son, Jerome. He's in the fifth or sixth grade, I think. "

  Arthur stared at the wall of her office as if it would open to reveal Patricia Bledsoe. He shook his head as though whatever he was trying to recall just wouldn't pop into his head, a feeling with which I was all too familiar.

  "Where's she from?" he asked, as if he were losing interest.

  "She never talks about herself. " That was a remarkable thing all by itself. "I only know from seeing her application that she moved here from Savannah. "

  "Savannah. Okay, let me get this back to the station, send it off to the crime lab. You get any other mail like this, you call me right away. You did the right thing. " He sounded a little surprised.

  "Yes, I know," I said, taken aback by all this unnecessary chatter. This wasn't like Arthur.

  "I'd stay away from Robin Crusoe," he threw over his shoulder, which was far more Arthur-esque. Suddenly, he turned around, marched over to me with purpose in every step, and kissed me. I could not have been more surprised if he'd unzipped his pants. Stunned and unhappy, but anxious not to hurt Arthur's feelings - we'd hurt each other enough over the years - I endured the pressure of his lips, my hands hanging limp at my sides.

  Then it was over, and he stepped back, giving me a baffled, angry look that I didn't know how to interpret. He walked out without looking back.

  Arthur was like a dog with a favorite old bone, I decided as I wiped my mouth and set my mind in the right mode for work. He couldn't quite forget about it, and he couldn't quite abandon it. He kept digging it up and chewing on it, then putting it back in the ground.

  That was where our long-ago affair should stay; dead and buried.

  Mondays are always iffy at the library. Some Mondays are just dead; people are running errands and shopping and picking their work week back up after the weekend. But then, we have regulars who finish their library books on the weekend and come in Monday for a new supply. Teachers are fond of assigning term papers on Monday, and there are kids who come in to check out all the available books on a certain subject so they'll be sure of a resource.

  This Monday was one of the quiet ones. Of course. I really wanted to be busy, to take my mind off the confusing events of the past week, but the most exciting thing that happened was catching a twelve-year-old girl trying to sneak out a copy of a new magazine that featured a cover article about her favorite boy band. I caught her on the way out the door, explained her options to her, and gave her a Kleenex when she started crying. Josh Finstermeyer of the overdue books saw me standing with the weeping girl, and hid behind the stacks to see if I'd stick bamboo under her fingernails. He clearly regarded me as the devil incarnate. I had to confess, it sort of gave me a thrill to be considered so formidable.

  Tracy, the young woman from Molly's Moveable Feasts, came in. She waved to me while giving me a brilliant smile, and settled in a chair to read some newspapers. I guessed nothing was happening at the movie set yet.

  About ten minutes before five o'clock, Robin loped through the glass doors. His long legs ate up yards of carpet like nobody's business. His hair was more of a mess than usual, and he was wearing khakis, a sharply pressed shirt obviously fresh from the laundry, and an old corduroy jacket. All he needed was a pipe clenched between his teeth, or maybe a golden retriever on a leash.

  I was shelving books and, after he located me, he followed me as I trundled the little cart.

  "When do you get off today?" he asked in a low, library voice. He pressed his hand against my back at my waist and left it there, while I put a Lauren Henderson book back on the shelf. His hand felt very warm. After a second or two, I began to feel a little warm.

  "At five," I said, glad to hear my voice come out cool and controlled.

  The next book on the cart was Linda Howard's, and she was on the top shelf. I stretched up as far as I could and still could not quite slide Ms. Howard into the right slot. Robin stepped closer to help, and after the book was in place, he stayed right behind me . . . in fact, so right behind me that he was sort of nudging me.

  "Robin," I said, a little question in my voice. Spooned, that was what we were. My curves. . . his - oh.

  "Mmmm?"

  "The book is where it's supposed to be. "

  "And?"

  "You should move. "

  He sighed. "If I must," he said, and stepped back a little.

  I smiled at the books in fron
t of me. "I assume you had a purpose in coming to the library?" I resumed rolling the cart. I may have headed down a deserted row. In fact, there was nothing to shelve at all in this area.

  "I heard there was a very strict librarian here," he said innocently.

  I half-turned to give him a look, my eyes wide. This was a whole new ball game, one I'd never played. Hmmm.

  "Oh, yes, very strict," I said, trying to sound calm and assured. I wasn't sure where this was going, but I found myself quite interested in finding out.

  "One who might punish me severely for having an overdue book," Robin said.

  "Have you been talking to Josh Finstermeyer?" I blurted.

  Robin looked disconcerted. "Who's he?" he asked.

  "That boy in the corner who's trying to hide behind the shelves. "

  Robin looked as if he was having trouble suppressing a laugh. "Robbing the cradle, are we?"

  I sighed. "Can we get back on track here?"

  "I don't know; if Josh Finstermeyer is your beverage of choice. . . "

  "Robin!" I growled. I felt that everyone in the library was watching us, and I was right. Perry was taking a gander, as was young Josh, to say nothing of Tracy, who'd lowered her newspaper to stare. I felt my face turning red.

  "I have two overdue books," Robin said, his face suddenly serious. His voice was soft and significant. I looked up at him. "Two," he emphasized. He waggled his eyebrows.

  "That's. . . very bad. " I narrowed my eyes. For the first time in my life, I wished I had a riding crop. I would flick it against my boot.

  He bent down to my ear. "I turned down the corners of some of the pages," he whispered.

  "You do need to be punished. At length," I said. I raised my eyebrows to make sure he'd get it. "At length," I repeated.

  He was a little pink himself.

  "Maybe you should come to my room tonight," he said, very low. "To collect my fine. "

  I decided to escalate.

  "Why not now?" I said coolly. I glanced at the clock. "I'm off work. " I gave him a challenging look.

  His eyes widened behind his glasses. He ran a hand through his hair, which looked as if he'd been doing that all day.

  "Can you hold this mood on the drive out to the motel?" he whispered in my ear. Very close.

  "It's entirely possible. " My house was a lot closer, but I knew without considering the idea closely that my house was out. I cast a blessing at him for not suggesting it.

  "Then let's go. "

  "I'll go clock out. "

  "You remember my room number?"

  "Yes. "

  "I'll be waiting for you. "

  "You'd better be," I said, in my stern librarian persona.

  "Ooooh," he breathed, giving me a look that let me know for sure he was into this.

  I clocked out and retrieved my purse in record time, and was getting into my car in the employee parking lot behind the library when I saw Tracy approaching. Oh, heck, no! I was in a mood, and I didn't want to get out.

  I decided if I were behaving uncharacteristically, I'd just go all the way. I pretended I didn't see her and pulled out of the parking lot when she was just a few feet away.

  I had other fish to fry.

  Robin, probably as uncertain as I was, was still fully dressed when I knocked on his door. But he had lit some candles and drawn the curtains tight.

  "On your back, miscreant," I said sternly. I had always wanted to say "miscreant. "

  There was delight in the crooked smile, quickly smothered by a very well assumed expression of fear. "It was just two books," he pled, stepping out of his shoes and socks and lying on his back on the bed. Yep, he was excited, all right.

  "That's two books too many," I told me. "You have to learn your lesson. " With an expression of severity, I began unbuttoning my blouse. "What's the worst punishment you can think of, you. . . scofflaw?"

  Robin winced, and I could tell I would pay for that one, later. "The worst punishment," he said thoughtfully. "The worst punishment would be to have to perform sexually, again and again - with only the briefest breaks for naps and food - for a small naked woman with . . . " His eyes widened. I'd taken off my bra. "Oh, boy," he breathed.

  I climbed on the bed and straddled him. As I looked down at him, his eyes darkened. I took his glasses off and put them by mine on the bedside table. "Can you think of anything that would make that punishment worse?" I murmured, bending down to him. My lips were an inch from his. My hair fell around his face.

  "I would be forced to make you come twice for every one time I do," he said, his voice rough and deep.

  "Then I guess you better get started. "