Color Me Dead

by Mary Bowers

  Adam had used himself up, and Frane was speaking now, but in the heavy atmosphere in the room, I didn’t bother to listen to the tired formula used for an arrest. I looked at Adam, and he seemed like a man in a fog. He reached down for his water bottle – an ironically cartoonish one with a bright Van Gogh cover – and took a long drink, then stood up.

  “I’m ready now,” he told Frane.

  But they never made it to the station. When Adam began to convulse, Frane dialed 911 and drove to the nearest health facility, a little doc-in-a-box that wasn’t much help. He died the next day in the hospital, with Carmen at his bedside.

  The water bottle. That last, long drink.

  Should we have stopped him? Should we have known?

  Had I known?

  I prefer not to think about it.

  Chapter 29 – Peace Again

  Adam must have known what was going to happen at that meeting. He’d been prepared, just in case. I didn’t really think it all through until later, but it didn’t surprise me to find out he’d written a confession and will.

  Just when he wrote the confession nobody can be sure. Frane said he didn’t make it a computer document, because if he later decided to destroy it and deny everything, well, computer files are forever. You can delete something, but you can’t really erase it.

  But I don’t think so. I think he wrote it on paper with a pen because he wanted to do it slowly, quietly, with implements he could feel in his hands. The way people have written for centuries. Not with invisible kilobytes stored inside a glowing box.

  Maybe he’d written it all out as a way of dealing with it. Maida had been dead for less than a week when Adam died, but it read as if he had started writing it right after Grant’s death. He couldn’t have scribbled it all down that last morning, when he found out that Detective Frane wanted to see him, Carmen and Joy. He was busy all morning with the shoot for Orlando Sizzles!

  And the pages he wrote didn’t look hastily scribbled. The handwriting was neat, the phrasing and punctuation correct, the description of events sequential, unfolding like a diary. He hadn’t hidden it away. It was found in the middle drawer of his desk – the one, with the pens and erasers. One of the first drawers that would be pulled out in a search.

  He hadn’t been sure of his rights to his property, being a confessed murderer of two people, (he blamed himself for Grant Rosewood’s death, too), but to whatever extent he could, he left everything to Carmen. And he made it abundantly clear that part of his intention in writing a confession was to affirm that Carmen had nothing whatsoever to do with her mother’s death, and in fact, never knew about his affair with Maida.

  Adam’s confession didn’t, in fact, affect his estate, since he hadn’t been convicted of anything at the time of his death. So Carmen inherited his gallery and whatever equity remained after his loans were paid. She promptly closed it.

  “I’m an artist,” she told me later, “not an art dealer.”

  The shock of all the revelations seemed to bring Joy and Carmen closer together. Initially, I’d had my doubts about their working as a team, but when I saw them at their studio about a week after Adam’s death, there was a calm between them. I knew then that they would work well together.

  The Armor Plating of Our Peace was gone by that time. I didn’t ask about it. Maybe Joy had declared it finished and had it transported to the mall; maybe she had sent it off to the scrapheap. Who can say when a work of art is completed? Only the artist, and I think Joy wanted it out of the yard as much as Carmen did by then.

  By contrast, A Soul in Agony caused a sensation, helping Joy graduate to the big time. But she and Carmen continued to share a studio, though by then, even Carmen admitted that what she was doing was too charming and pretty to be taken seriously as Art. It sold like hotcakes, though.

  As she walked me to my SUV one day, late in the summer, Carmen casually remarked, “Uncle Hank asked about you the other day.”

  “Oh, yeah? What did he say?”

  “That he’d been right about you, that day he told you to watch over me. He hasn’t had any of those dreams since. I wonder what it was that he caught onto about you. In spite of all his rigid ideas, I think he still believes in magic.”

  I turned to face her. “I’m glad we’re still friends. After all, I presided over one of the worst days of your life.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Of course we’re still friends. I need a little magic in my life.”

  We left it at that.

  Treena never did another episode of Orlando Sizzles! The two segments she already did for the show – the one at Orphans of the Storm and the one at Paranormal SWAT – were the extent of her career as a TV host, as far as I know. I still see her on the local channels from time to time, though, doing commercials for a local car dealership. For one of them, she even wore the blue dress that Rollo desecrated.

  It shocked the heck out of me when Jesse got his job back. Having them both conduct interviews at Artwerks turned out to be an apples-to-apples screentest, and Jesse blew Treena away. And, as Lily’s boss put it, “It’s a lot harder to find solid on-screen talent than it is to find a faithful woman.” Well, maybe in TV-Land, I thought, but not in my world. As they say, that’s showbiz.

  One morning, about a month after the Maida Rosewood affair, Lily came to Cadbury House for a visit. She was cagey about why she was in town, but I know she spent some time with Ed and Dobbs. I don’t think she’ll ever talk Ed into another reality show, but she always manages to surprise me. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see.

  Michael and I settled Lily down on the veranda with iced tea – the lemon trees weren’t bearing anymore by then, so we hadn’t made lemonade – and had a good long talk. It was another of those foggy mornings, and the view over the river was shrouded in mystery. The little island, not far from the breakwater, was just a green smear within a gently rolling white mist.

  Inevitably, the talk turned to what had happened to Maida.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Lily said to me, “why you wanted Jesse at that meeting. Or any other time, for that matter. At that point in time, I still considered him dead weight.”

  “I still hadn’t washed him out completely. A mistress is a pretty iffy alibi. I guess you could almost say I was hoping it was him, because I still didn’t want to believe it was Adam, even though I knew it was. But when I saw Jesse again, I realized he was too much of a narcissist to ever risk being charged with murder over a mere mistress. And I thought having more witnesses couldn’t hurt. With only Joy, Carmen and Adam there, they could have stood together and denied saying anything, if there was a confession.”

  “You asked a lot of leading questions,” she said.

  “I had to. Adam needed to be drawn along.”

  “I think we were all drawn along. The way you described that night – with Maida slipping into her lingerie and having all those feelings – you described it all just as if you’d actually seen it. It sounded like a vision.” She looked directly at me with her light brown, doe’s eyes. “Was it?”

  I shrugged. “I was just filling in the blanks. Whoever killed Maida had to have come to her house to do it, and according to Detective Frane, she hadn’t made or received any calls after talking to Carmen. So either she already had a date at the unlikely hour of four in the morning, or it had to be somebody close by. Who else but Adam?”

  “But you seemed to see it all so clearly.”

  “Whether or not I had all the details right, that had to be what happened. Adam had already made it clear that after Grant’s suicide, he couldn’t bear the sight of Maida. He must have been lost, though, no matter how he struggled to resist her. And she was found in lingerie. Why did she put it on? She wanted him to see her like that, she pictured his reaction, she aroused herself until she had to go to him, even at the risk of being humiliated. But first, she called me, hoping I could tell her whether or not he’d reject her. I don’t think she ever suspected he’d go so far as to kill her.
”

  After a quiet moment, Lily said, “You look like you’re seeing it now, all over again.”

  I shook my head, not saying no, just trying to clear it. “By the way, Lily, I never had a chance to tell you how clever I was about delaying Treena at Don’s Diner. You know, while you did the shoot with Jesse at Artwerks.”

  I told the story with all the embellishments I could manage, making Lily laugh. Michael already knew the story, but he laughed all over again at the good parts. When I’d finished, I think we all felt refreshed, and I was determined not to talk about Maida or Adam again.

  “I hope you left generous tips at the diner after all that,” Lily said when I’d finished.

  “I tried. DeAnn and Don both told me to just stuff the money into the Orphans of the Storm collection jar at the check-out counter. They’d had fun, too. Don said he’d always wanted to throw the pans around and make a lot of noise, which surprised me. He seems like such a quiet guy.”

  “Well, now that he’s got that out of his system,” Michael said, “he can go back to being the quiet man behind the pass window. But if he ever starts feeling the strain, he knows what to do.”

  We went back to peacefully gazing at the fog. It was beginning to lift by then, and I began to be able to see the horizon line where the strip of barrier island ran between the river and the ocean.

  After about five minutes, apropos of nothing, I murmured, “Paranormal SWAT?”

  Lily gave me a foxy look but said nothing.

  “Or just Dobbs?”

  “Oh, a little of both,” she finally said.

  “Ah. I thought so.”

  Michael and I smiled at one another, thinking how cute the young things were when they were fumbling around falling in love.

  I might have gotten it all wrong, but just then, surrounded by a fog that muffled the outside world away from us, I let myself be happy for the little darlings, and held out my hand to Michael, even happier for us old darlings.

  The End