Generous Death
When I stepped outside, I was shocked to see how late in the day it was. It didn’t seem possible. Time should have been standing still instead of racing toward four-thirty already. By the time I got through rush hour traffic and reached the hospital, it would be dark. I hated to make the drive back alone at night even under the best of circumstances. Of course, there was no guarantee I’d be back before morning—Mother might linger so that I’d need to spend the night or even the next day at the hospital. I wished I had a toothbrush with me. I wished I had Geof with me. I wished I felt less drained from the emotional traumas of the last two days. I wished I was driving my own car and I wished I didn’t know the terrible things I knew.
I switched on Baby’s radio to a classical station, more for its calming than its cultural effects. But the selection on the air was a cacophonous screech of hyperactive violins. I fiddled with the dial, but couldn’t find anything more soothing than a winter storm forecast on one station and a jazz trumpet on another. I turned the damned thing off.
“Well,” I said to the car, “it’s just you and me and the night, Baby.” If it snowed hard, I would particularly miss my front-wheel drive. But if the storm came in off the ocean, as forecast, it would bring humidity that might turn to ice, and there’s no car in the world that can handle our ice storms.
“How about a hurricane, God?” I muttered. “Just to top things off, put some icing on this miserable cake.”
I was delayed by rush hour fender-benders and a malfunctioning stoplight. By the time I finally pulled through the stone gates of Hampshire Hospital, it had started to snow. The yellow that glowed from the windows of the hospital should have been the archetypal warm beacons in the night; they looked sallow and cool instead, and anything but welcoming.
I walked quickly past the volunteer on duty at the information desk and onto the elevator. The hospital had that busy, purposeful air that hospitals get around feeding time. Nurses’ aides rolled food carts clatteringly down the long halls. Somewhere, from some room, an old man yelled that he was “hungry, dad blame it!” There is, at least, that sort of freedom within the prison of senility. A male attendant pushed “4” for me and then proceeded to stare fixedly at my feet all the way up. “It’s a perfect day for bananafish,” I said to him in parting. As the elevator doors closed on him again, he was still working it out in his mind, having evidently never read Salinger. I glanced down at my feet. They were cold and drippy from the snow, but they looked all right to me.
Sometimes, I thought, it is certainly hard to tell the players from the fans.
I waved a small hello to the nurses on duty at the desk. They looked surprised that I’d got there so fast, though I thought I’d been fearfully slow.
The door of my mother’s room was closed.
I stood in front of it for a moment and stared at it much as the attendant had stared, probably unseeingly, at my feet.
“Are you Mrs. Cain’s daughter?”
A young male patient appeared at my shoulder and companionably stared at the door with me. He couldn’t have been more than twenty; he might have been the young shuffler I’d seen on one of my earlier Sunday visits. He had brown hair that someone had neatly brushed for him and body odor. He looked as thoughtful as Einstein.
“You do not usually come to visit during the week,” he observed.
“No,” I said.
“Usually you come on Sundays and you do not often arrive this late at night.”
“That’s true. She’s dying.” I had a feeling he’d understand better than some people.
“That is true,” he agreed seriously. My words sounded odd coming out of his mouth. “As are we all. Do you know, I have noticed that very many of the people I know tend to die. I wonder sometimes if it has anything to do with me.”
“I don’t think so,” I said gently. “No, I definitely think that is not the case.” I could have told him that very many of the people I knew tended to die, too, but that it didn’t have anything to do with me.
He nodded his chin deep into his chest.
“Well, at least that is one good thing,” he said with great dignity. He shuffled off. I opened the door of my mother’s room. Someone had turned off the lights. That made me angry. I didn’t think she should die in the dark.
I flipped the light switch.
Chapter 30
God damn you to hell!”
The curse hit me just as the lights came on. My nerves were already pretty well shot, so it didn’t take much more than those hissed words to throw me back against the wall But the shock to my eyes was greater even than the shock to my ears.
As I had expected, my mother lay like death on the bed.
As I had not expected, someone sat in a chair pulled up to the far side of the bed. That someone had jerked her head violently when I entered the room. Now her platinum hair lay tangled on her shoulders; her blue eyes were rimmed in ugly red and they stared at me with the hopeless, dreadful stare of someone who had just glimpsed the black hole of her own soul.
My sister.
She repeated the curse. It occurred to me that I’d never before had the experience of someone saying “God damn you” and meaning it. It was chilling. Before I could react with anything more than a shudder of surprise, she bowed her pale head on the bed and took up where she had obviously just left off—sobbing.
“Is she dead?”
The pale head rose again and the haunted eyes glared at me over the covers. “Cut it out, Jennifer, you don’t have to play your little game anymore.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I was getting fairly angry myself. Our mother lay dead or dying, and Sherry wanted to play hate-your-sibling games. I walked quickly into the room, past the door of the private bath, toward the bed to see for myself.
Mother was breathing softly and easily.
Perhaps, out of compassion, I should have been sorry to see that “she lived. But I wasn’t. I was overwhelmingly, selfishly overjoyed. Her death was one blow I wasn’t prepared to absorb that day. “She’s alive,” I think I whispered, awed and grateful. “Oh, Sherry, Mother’s alive!”
My sister stood up so abruptly she knocked her chair over backward. “Of course she’s alive!” she hissed. “You call my house and you say she’s dying, just to get me out here because you knew what it would do to me …”
“Sherry, I didn’t…”
“Well, I don’t care if she dies, do you hear that, I don’t care! Why should I care! Who ever cared about me? You don’t know, you don’t know what it was like. You went off to college and left me alone with a crazy mother. Dad left me, you left me, she left me. And they hated us, people hated us. You don’t know, you don’t know what it’s like to go to high school with kids whose fathers are out of work because of your own dad. You weren’t there, you don’t know …”
She was, without one single doubt, as hysterical as they come, but also as close as I’d ever seen her to getting down to bedrock. I stood paralyzed, waiting for her hysteria to wind down.
It never had a chance. As her voice rose to a scream of anger and anguish, nurses came running to calm her down. They couldn’t have this kind of behavior in their hospital, though I wanted to tell them it was more healing than many pills they dispensed. In the best melodramatic tradition, two attendants held her while a nurse shot her with something that knocked her to her knees in a split second. I’d always wondered if hypos could really work that fast. For a tempting second I wondered if they had a second dose handy for me.
“We’ll take her to a private room, Miss Cain,” a nurse informed me disapprovingly. “Does she have a husband we should call?”
Numbly, I gave them the information they wanted and I watched the attendants lift my sister and carry her gently from the room.
I also told the nurses that I had received a phone call from the hospital telling me my mother was dying.
They said in shocked tones that it wasn’t true and wasn’t it simply awful how some people co
uld play such cruel practical jokes? Would I like them to call the police and lodge a complaint?
I turned away from them and gazed out the window of my mother’s room and saw that the night was very much upon us, as well as the blowing snow that pinged like sleet against the glass.
Then I looked down at my peaceful mother and realized that I had been wrong about what I’d told Geof that day in the carriage in the park in New York. What’s your passion? he’d said and I had told him it was The Foundation. But it wasn’t. If I had a passion in life, it was caring for and about this woman who had loved me until her body had betrayed her mind into forgetting such abstractions as love—and daughter.
“Yes,” I said to the nurses, “it might be a good idea to call the police in Port Frederick. Ask for Detective Bushfield, would you please?”
They left me alone in the room.
It took me a slow-witted minute to comprehend that being alone in that hospital was probably not a very smart idea, not smart at all. A thrill of fear-propelled me quickly toward the door the nurses had left slightly ajar behind them. I ran toward the comfort and safety of the lighted, populated hallway.
As I passed the closed door of the private bath in my mother’s room, it opened quietly, swiftly.
Before I could react, I saw the warning of the absurdly tiny barrel of the absurdly tiny handgun. It looked for all the world like a child’s toy, but it wasn’t.
“Shut the door,” said Allison Parker, the esteemed director of the Welcome Home for Girls, “and turn off the lights.”
She pointed the gun in the direction of my mother’s head. I did as I was told.
Chapter 31
Allison Parker? I was stupefied. It was so unlikely, impossible, unbelievable that I wanted to laugh. I wanted to reach out my hands and say “Very funny, Allison, now give me the toy gun.”
For a moment, we just stood and stared at each other in the faint glow of a night light, installed for the safety of patients whose bladders called to them in the night.
She smiled. I didn’t.
“How nice of you to come when you’re called,” she said, just as if I’d responded to a request for a pound of tomatoes and a gallon of milk for “her girls.” As always, she looked about twelve years old, but a mean twelve. It couldn’t be Allison Parker; I knew who the murderer was and it wasn’t she!
“Did you kill them?” I said. I was damned if she’d hear my voice shake.
Her smile was a nasty parody of the one with which she welcomed gifts and visitors to the Welcome Home. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” she said. I’d heard her say that very thing any number of times to her teenage charges, but never with so much steel behind it. “We’re going to leave this hospital separately. You will walk out first. If anyone asks, you will say you are going to the cafeteria. You will not mention me because I will have this gun pointed at your mother until I see you drive around and flash your lights twice.
“You will wait for me in your car. You will not try to escape because if you do, I will immediately come back up here and kill her. I’m afraid I took a bus out, so I’ll have to ride with you, Jennifer.”
“Where are we going?”
She laughed.
“Your sister made it plain where you’re going,” she said, “but that’s for later. First, you’re going to your car. I’ll give you two minutes to do it. Any longer and she’s dead.”
One hundred and twenty seconds gave me barely enough time to walk quickly down the hall, run down the stairs rather than wait for an elevator, open and start my car, drive around and flash my lights. It didn’t give me enough time to write a note, whisper for help, call the police or fumble my keys.
She opened the door for me.
My muscles tensed with the knowledge that I could throw myself at her and her gun. But she anticipated my martyrdom.
“No, no, no,” she simpered and leveled the gun once more in the single direction where I was most vulnerable: at my mother. “Your time starts now, Jennifer.”
I stepped into the bright hallway, quickened my pace and didn’t look back. I could almost appreciate the irony of the fact that I might, after all, never see my mother alive again. It also occurred to me that the situation had the makings of a good news/bad news joke.
The good news was that it wasn’t Simon after all.
The snow that had sounded like sleet was sleet. Baby was already lightly iced, causing the door to jam for a heart-stopping moment until I finally and frantically jerked it open. There weren’t enough of my one hundred and twenty seconds left to scrape off the windshield, so I had to drive blindly to the side of the hospital where I knew my mother’s room was. I flashed the headlights.
In the time it took Allison to join me, Baby’s massive heating system had warmed the interior of the car and melted the outer ice sufficiently for me to see to drive.
I knew the winding two-lane highway would be a slick sheet of danger. With any luck, I thought grimly, maybe we’d slide off the road into a tree, conveniently killing her without harming me. Such is the stuff of futile fantasy. I did not dare to instigate a crash because, on the ice, there was no guarantee the car would land where I wanted it to. If we plowed into a ditch—and I did survive the crash—I could freeze to death before the road crews discovered us in the morning.
I decided to try to navigate the roads so that we got wherever it was that Allison wanted us to go alive, and then I’d figure out my escape. I’d always wondered how I’d react if a rapist, say, kidnapped me and forced me at gun or knife point to drive him somewhere—would I acquiesce and hope for the best or would I fight?
Well, I had the answer to that question if not to some others. I wasn’t about to let her kill me. She’d have to claw for the opportunity. As she and her deadly little friend climbed into the car, I was no longer merely frightened. I was also mad as hell.
How dare she.
“Which direction?”
“Port Frederick. You’re going home for the last time, Jennifer Cain.”
“Screw you.” My peripheral vision told me she looked a little surprised; she must have expected me to be more intimidated. It was a stupid thing to say, of course, though it felt wonderful to say it. I knew I shouldn’t put her on her guard by acting aggressive; I should play the meek victim so she’d be surprised by my attack when I finally made one. I was starting to feel sure of myself, as if all future surprises would be on my side.
More fool I.
However, my delusions of power steadied me during the hazardous, half-blind drive back to town. Maybe I should have tried to get her to talk, to establish a rapport with her, as they say, but I’m no psychologist.
I just drove.
She just silently pointed the gun, and smiled that dreadful parody of her Welcome Home smile.
I surmised that Allison had killed Florence Hatch to get the bequest for the home and secure her own job … the other killings must have been a cover for that sole intent. There was probably some simple explanation for how she lured Mrs. Hatch to her death, but I couldn’t figure out how Allison managed to kill Arnie Culverson at the museum or how she—wiry but tiny—had the brute strength to manhandle Minnie Mimbs at the church.
But what puzzled me most was the feeling of, well, overkill. Surely she didn’t have to kill four people just to camouflage one murder. It seemed like a lot of unnecessary trouble and danger to me—even given Allison’s reputation as a workaholic. Maybe, in the best classic tradition of last-minute braggadocio, she’d tell me all about it before she shot me: The good news is I’ll tell you how and why I did it, the bad news is these are the last words you’ll ever hear.
“Turn left.”
We’d reached the outskirts of Poor Fred. My shoulders ached from the effort of keeping Baby on the road, my eyes stung from the strain of squinting through the falling snow. But I did as I was told through several left and right turns. She was clever to keep me guessing block by block—I couldn’t devise a plan of es
cape if I couldn’t think more than half a block ahead at a time.
My worst moment was the one when I realized that Geof didn’t know I had rented a wreck, much less what make or model. If he sent the police out for me, as he surely would, he wouldn’t know where to look or what kind of car to look for. That moment of dreadful awareness was so bad I lost my concentration and very nearly drove us into a ditch after all.
All things considered, I wish I had.
We reached our destination.
As directed, I rolled Baby over the snow into the dark parking lot, stopped the car near the door and turned off the motor. I stared straight ahead at the building to which Allison had brought me—the Martha Paul Frederick Museum of Fine Art.
What in the world?
Maybe she was going to duplicate her murder of Arnie Culverson, using me as leading lady? Like hell she was. I knew this building as well as I knew The Foundation offices and that was one small fact to my advantage. I intended to use it for all it was worth.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” she said once more. I stared at the building. The only lights shone from the south entrance—the staff door—where the night guard kept watch. At intervals he would roam the building—inside and out—looking for just such intruders as we. I certainly hoped he found us.
“Look at me.”
I made my movements calm and deliberate.
“My, aren’t we displaying grace under pressure,” she sneered. “I’ll enjoy seeing that famous poise crumble. And it will.” She laughed. “Oh, it most certainly will.”
“Please …” I made the mistake of saying.
“Please?” Her eyes glowed as if I’d said the magic word and won the money. “Oh no, Jennifer, I’m the one who always says please, aren’t I? Please and thank you and oh, I’m just so very grateful and oh, aren’t you sweet to be so generous and thank you, thank you, thank you!” Her small, high voice rose in pitch and volume with each bitter, sneering phrase until it filled the car with bile.