I found a wheelchair folded against a wall in the master bedroom. It was a simple contraption made of aluminum, with wide bands of black vinyl to support her rear end and her back.
Always the curious type, I pried it open and sat down in it. It was amazingly comfortable, especially at the small of my back.
I found a hand brake, released it, and then began to experiment with rolling myself around the blue and gold vinyl floor. I quickly discovered that the wheelchair was lightweight and easy to maneuver, but I was a beginner and awkward. I rolled forward, backward, turned a couple of circles. It was fun if you didn’t have to be there. I began to understand children’s wheelchair races in hospital hallways, wheelchair basketball, and Special Olympics events.
I rolled to what was obviously her side of the bed, where there was one of those hospital trays that’s on a rolling stand that can be pushed aside. How disabled was Judy? I wondered. It didn’t take a trained detective to deduce that her legs hadn’t worked well if at all. But I didn’t know about the rest of her.
I made my own body go limp and heavy below my waist. It actually took some concentration to do it, but finally my pelvis seemed to melt into the vinyl seat and my ankles felt weightless.
What about her arms and hands, did they still function?
I thought about the railings I’d seen in the bathroom and the knobs and drawer handles, all at her wheelchair height, and decided that she still had use of her upper body. So, trying to use only my muscles above my waist, I pushed the hospital tray off to the side.
As I did that, the wheelchair scooted backward. Oops. I located the brake again, and after rolling closer to the bed, I set it. Now then. How did she get herself up into bed? It was closer to the ground than ordinary beds, but still … I didn’t see anything to grab onto except a dark blue bedcover, and that might only pull me onto the floor …
Placing the palms of my hands on the armrests of the chair, I pushed until I stood on the metal footrests, and then I just kept up the momentum until I fell face forward onto the bed. Ouch. Damn. My head landed on something hard. When I fished around in the covers, I discovered a television remote control box. If I were disabled and my husband left that thing lying hidden in the covers, I’d kill him.
I couldn’t stop even to rub where my head hurt, because I was starting to slide backward off the covers. Quickly, I grabbed handfuls of anything I could get hold of: cover, blanket, sheets, mattress cover, mattress, and tugged and pulled until I had three-fourths of my body on the bed, which was by now, of course, completely torn up. I rolled over onto my back and used my elbows and my head to inch myself around until I lay properly, parallel to the sides of the bed. Then I could use the palms of my hands again to push myself upright until I was sitting, propped against the headboard. My T-shirt was up around my neck, I was breathing like a whale in labor, and I was chipping sweat and exhausted. But it was all worthwhile for one reason, at least: There at the side of the bed was an eight-by-ten color photograph of Judy, inscribed, “With All My Love,” to her husband, and she looked gorgeous in it.
I was astonished at that sight of her. The Judy I recalled from high school had been a basically plain girl, but evidently, she’d grown into greater beauty. I picked up the photo to examine it and observed: movie-star makeup, anchor-woman hair, white fur off the shoulder, showing a lot of rouged cleavage and a tremendous smile for the camera. Ah-ha. It was one of those “glamour” photos from one of those studios that claim they can transform any woman into Lana Turner. Judy’s eyes even glistened as if with real emotion for the camera. And there I had it: my idea for a very funny, very private surprise present for Geof’s fortieth birthday. As he was always saying, you never knew what might turn up at a murder scene.
“What in God’s name are you doing, Jenny?”
Quickly, I put the photo facedown on the bed beside me. On the back of it was the name of a studio: Illusions. I looked over at Geof, who stood in the bedroom doorway, staring at me in disbelief.
“Hi. I was just wondering what it felt like to be Judy.”
He shook his head. “This is so like you, Jenny.”
“I’m not going to ask you what that means. Geof, why do you suppose he shot her in a chair in a doorway? Don’t you think that’s a strange place to do it? Why wouldn’t he just shoot her in here when she was sleeping and she wouldn’t know what hit her?”
He stepped into the room. “Maybe she wanted to know.”
I started to hike myself up straighter with my arms until I remembered I could use my legs. I drew them up and hooked my arms over my knees, thinking.
“Why’d you turn the VCR on?” he said.
“I didn’t!” But when I looked where Geof was pointing, at a big screen set in a built-in entertainment center in the wall, I saw that there was a red light glowing on the VCR box. “Maybe I punched it by accident.” I fished around in the covers for the remote control gizmo, but when I found it, I held it up so Geof could see that it wasn’t one that controlled the VCR, only the TV. He was on his way over to turn off the machine when I said, “Geof, wait.”
He stopped and looked back quizzically at me.
“Don’t go anywhere-, don’t touch anything,” I commanded him as I clambered out of the bed. “I have to go to the car for my purse.” I left him spreading his hands in bewilderment and saying, “Now?”
It was only a few minutes later when I said, “Just don’t ask me where I got this, not yet.”
I pushed the videotape that I’d stolen out of David Mayer’s backpack into his parents’ VCR and tried to figure out how to get it to play. Geof walked up behind me, studied the machine for a few seconds, and reached over me to punch a series of buttons.
“Men,” I muttered gratefully.
We heard a soft thud and then a click and a whir, and then an image appeared on the television screen.
“Jesus Christ,” Geof exclaimed.
It was Judy Baker Mayer on the film, and she was seated in a chair in a doorway—some other doorway, not the one in her own dining room—and her mouth was moving and tears were falling down her face, but we couldn’t hear any of it.
“Where did you get this, Jenny!”
“Turn it up!” I left that job to him as I raced back to the bed and sat down on the end of it. “Then come here!”
Geof fiddled with the buttons again, and suddenly a woman’s thin voice filled the room, a voice filled with misery.
“… confess,” she said, caught in midsentence, “to the fact that my husband, Ronald Mayer, Jr., is not the biological father of my son David. I confess to fornication. I confess to adultery. I confess that I lied to my husband about the parentage of my son. I confess that I am a liar and a whore and a thief.” Between each dreadful, condemning sentence she drew a ragged breath, which she let out in a ripple of crying that looked as if it must dreadfully hurt her throat and her chest. Tears coursed down her face, and now and then she put a hand to her cheeks to rub them, but always her eyes came back to the camera as if pulled to it by a magnet, and every terrible word was spoken directly to us who watched her. “I confess my sins to my husband and to my Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept the penance of my guilt, and I beg their forgiveness.”
For long seconds, there was nothing on the screen except for the sight of her face as the camera caught her in a spasm of weeping that crumpled her face and shook her whole body. The tape ended there, being less than a minute long.
Geof replayed it and replayed it and replayed it.
“What did she mean she was a thief?” I said.
“And what sort of penance did she mean?” Geof asked.
The second time through, he pointed out a fact that I had noticed right away, which was that she was seated in a doorway that was not in her own house. There was no furniture behind her, only a white wall. We couldn’t see much of the chair she was sitting in, just a rounded corner on either side of her shoulders, and it was yellow vinyl, like a kitchen chair. That time through the
tape, we pointed out to one another that she was wearing the clothes she was killed in. The third time through the tape, Geof noticed that her hair appeared to be the same length, style, and color it was in the crime-scene photographs. What I didn’t say to him, because it seemed cruel even to think it, was that the woman on the tape resembled the glamorous woman in the photograph beside the bed only in the way that a plain and empty canvas resembles a painted one. Finally, we both thought we heard another voice, just a hint of it, right at the end, just before the tape ended. It sounded to both of us as if the other voice said something like “good.” The voice wasn’t condemning or harsh; it was soft and comforting and sad, so soft, in fact, that neither of us even heard it through Judy’s crying until Geof suggested that we try listening to the tape with our eyes closed to see what extraneous sounds we might pick up.
“Who is that other person?” I demanded when he finally rewound the tape for the last time and took it out of the machine. “Is it the person who was working the camera? And why, for heaven’s sake why, did she tape this confession? If Ron didn’t know those … facts … and he saw this tape for the first time, this might be the motive that would explain why he killed her. It could be the motive that finally convinces David that his father really did do it.”
“Where the hell did you get this tape, Jenny?”
I said peevishly, “I just knew you’d ask that.”
“Yeah, I’m a perceptive devil. I like to ask those subtle little questions that wouldn’t occur to anybody else.”
Like Judy before me, I confessed.
And sure enough, he looked as upset and disturbed as I’d ever seen him look. But, it turned out, that his distress wasn’t directed at me. “Don’t you see, Jenny? We were led to this tape. We were led to this house, where the air conditioner was thoughtfully turned on for us and the VCR was already turned on and ready to play for us. David wanted us to come here that first day we met him. David has already seen this video of his mother, don’t you see? He has seen it, and he still thinks his father didn’t kill her. He wanted us to see it, too.”
I looked around at where we were, sitting on the bed of the man and woman who had died in the other room, and I thought of their son preparing this scene for us.
“I want to go home.”
“Right now?”
“Right now, Geof. I want to go home.”
“All right.” He looked confused, but he caught me in a firm embrace, and I responded immediately by wrapping my arms tightly around his waist. “You’re shivering. Are you cold? What’s the matter?” Then he laughed at himself. “I ask stupid questions sometimes, don’t I? Don’t mind me, I’m just a hardened old cop who doesn’t have enough sense any more to be bothered by terrible things. I’ve had the top layer of feelings scraped off of me until I’m all calluses.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, holding him tight. “I’m just a coward.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” he replied with feeling. “And you’re right about this place: It’s grim and scary and sad. Let’s go home.”
But on the way out, he stopped me at the doorway of one of the bedrooms. “David’s,” he guessed.
It was stripped bare, as if the occupant had packed all of his belongings and taken them away with him. Only the bookshelf contained clues that a child had ever lived there: encyclopedias on one shelf, used school books and a pile of notebooks on the next shelf, and a couple of small teddy bears stuffed in each comer of the top shelf, like soft forgotten bookends.
I tried arguing with him in the Jeep on the way back home.
“David couldn’t have known I would look for him and follow him from school, Geof. He couldn’t even have been sure that I’d take the tape just because he left it in the backpack.”
“He doesn’t have to plan every step,” Geof argued back at me. “He only needs to be alert and imaginative and flexible enough to take advantage of the right moments. So he happened to have the tape with him—and why not, for safekeeping? Didn’t you do the same thing when you felt you had to keep it with you in your purse?—and you show up, and he sees a chance, and he takes it.”
“He couldn’t know I’d steal it.”
“No, but he could keep trying until he got it into our hands.”
“Why not just hand it to us?”
That silenced him for a couple of miles. Finally, he said, “I think it’s about control. His control over us, his control over his own life that’s out of control. It’s about a kid playing a deadly serious sort of game, and he’s the game master, and we’re the pieces he wants to move around on his board. And one of the hallmarks of a good player is preparedness from which spontaneity can spring. And the goal is to see if he can move us into place to make the final logical leap to the game’s conclusion.”
I absorbed that for a while before I said, “Nobody wins.”
“You don’t know that, Jenny. We’ll see.”
“Nobody wins,” I insisted.
“You’re just upset.”
I stared at his profile. No shit, Sherlock!
“I’m sorry,” he hastened to say next, “There I go again, saying something stupid. Of course you’re upset, any normal person would be. I’m just not normal, that’s all. I shouldn’t have said that to you.”
“It’s hot,” I said. “We’re all cranky.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
Not upset? I thought, glancing at him. Who are you fooling, Sherlock … yourself?
At three o’clock that morning, the telephone on Geof’s side of the bed rang and woke us. He grabbed it, as he always does, because he’s the only one of us who gets calls commanding him out of bed in the middle of the night. But this time, he said into the receiver, “Just a moment.” Then he handed it to me, speaking in such a calm voice that I was immediately alerted to trouble: “It’s some doctor at Baptist Hospital.”
“What?” I sat up against my pillow and grabbed the receiver from him, thinking, My dad? No, he is in California. My sister? My brother-in-law, my niece or nephew? Please, no.
“Who’s this?” I demanded.
“Ms. Cain? I’m Dr. Stephanie Rogers, the resident on call at Port Frederick Baptist. We have a young man named David Mayer who has been in a motorcycle accident. He’s not badly hurt, so don’t be worried, but I’d like to admit him overnight for observation, just to be sure there are no internal injuries or concussion. The problem is, Mr. Mayer says he doesn’t have any insurance and he can’t pay for his treatment. He’s not quite up to holding a phone against his face, so he asked me to call you. Are you his mother?”
“No,” I said grimly, “I’m not his mother.”
“Oh. Can you help him?”
A certain acidity crept into my tone as I replied to the doctor: “I’ll have to find my checkbook first, and then I’ll be right down.”
“Who?” Geof asked as I handed the receiver back to him.
“Your son.”
15
I GOT OUT OF BED AND STUMBLED TOWARD the bathroom. Geof turned a lamp on behind me, and a thin band of light illuminated a narrow path for me. I heard an agitated rustling of sheets and his pillow.
“What about him, Jenny? Is he all right? Why did they call us?”
Spoken like a true father, I thought sourly, as I threw a T-shirt over bare skin and reached for underpants. From the bathroom, I called back into him, “They didn’t call us. They called me.” I told him what the doctor had said; by the time I finished talking, I was hair-combed and tooth-brushed and ready to leave the house.
“Why you? Why not me?”
Geof was sitting up naked in bed, looking completely non-plussed by this whole turn of events. It unnerved me a little to see him that way; I wasn’t used to this, I was accustomed to living with a police lieutenant who remained cool under any line of fire. But not, evidently, when the “shots” were being fired by his own child. Alleged child, I reminded myself.
I shrugged, just barely holding onto my spousal forbearance
. Outside the locked windows of our bedroom, the wind was blowing as if maybe we’d get some rain soon. Suddenly I craved the feeling of that wind against my face, my arms, my legs. I wanted to get out of this closed-in, locked-up house. “Maybe after this afternoon, after our motorcycle ride, he feels like he knows me better.”
“No.” Geof looked forlorn, or maybe it was only a lack of sleep that I thought I perceived. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me. He’s taunting me with the fact that, he hates me.” He looked up and started to get out of bed. “You don’t have to do this, Jenny. This is my job. You stay here.”
“As you were, Lieutenant.”
“What?” He was halfway out from under the covers. “Why?”
“Geof, if we weren’t both so tired, we wouldn’t be coming up with these cockamamy theories about why he called me instead of you. If we were thinking straight, we’d remember that you think he’s playing some kind of control game to lead us where he wants us to go. So let’s play it his way for a while longer.”
“A kid doesn’t have a motorcycle accident on purpose!”
“Geof, we don’t know what this kid would do on purpose, do we? And you’re the one who said that a master game player takes his advantages wherever he finds them.”
“Shit, you know I hate it when you defeat me with my own logic. All right, you win. But I’m following you in the Jeep.”
“Fine,” I said shortly and left the bedroom to go look for my keys.
“You’re a saint, honey!” he called after me.
“Fuckin’ a,” I muttered.
“What?” he yelled.
“What the hey!” I hollered back at him. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Baptist was the smallest of the three hospitals in town, also the most expensive. That figured, I thought. I pulled into the trauma center parking lot right next to David’s motorcycle a few minutes ahead of Geof. I hadn’t quite waited for him to start his Jeep before I roared off in the Miata, and I’d slaughtered the speed limit coming into town. Well, hell, who was going to give me a ticket—the cop in the next car? By the time I reached the outskirts of Poor Fred, my engine was running cool and happy and so was my psyche, thanks to the wind and the night and the music on my cassette player.