Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  She covered her mouth. “Sorry.”

  “Are you sick? Do you want me to leave?” I said.

  She looked back at me, narrowing her eyes as if she didn’t understand what I was saying.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “Should you lay down?”

  Without answering, she stared at the bathroom door.

  I wondered if the suitcase belonged not to Selena but someone else. And if that someone might be hiding in the bathroom.

  Keeping an eye on her, I leapt up and threw open the bathroom door. There was no one inside, not a mother from Pennsylvania nor a cousin from Tahiti. I closed the door behind me and checked behind the shower curtain. Empty there too.

  I came out of the bathroom, and Selena seemed unfazed by my behavior.

  Standing in the middle of the room now, she wore the strangest blank expression.

  “Selena?”

  She turned her head toward where her phone lay on the bed, took a step, and her body crumpled to the floor.

  “Selena!” I yelled.

  She lay facedown without moving.

  I dropped beside her and rolled her onto her side.

  Her eyes didn’t open.

  I shook her gently.

  She still wouldn’t wake.

  Her mouth opened, and a rust-colored flow puddled onto the carpet.

  I snatched my phone from my bag and dialed 911.

  After I told the 911 operator where to find us and made sure Selena was still breathing and lying on her side where she couldn’t choke, I turned to her desk.

  From the sound of the plastic when she’d stood here and the way she’d thrown her head back, I was sure she must have taken something.

  I opened a couple of drawers before I found a sandwich bag of white pills.

  Was she on something for her mood? And if so, why didn’t she have a prescription bottle?

  If she hadn’t come by these pills legitimately, the drug might have been tainted with something that had made her sick. Or she might have taken too much.

  The pills were too generic looking for me to identify.

  Next, I went for her phone.

  The screen was locked.

  She’d silenced it twice and looked uncomfortable doing it. I didn’t want to pry, but if this had anything to do with Renee’s death, I had to know. And I wouldn’t know until I pried.

  I took a bet that the phone was protected with facial recognition, pressed a button, and held it up to Selena’s face.

  Bingo. I was a wizard.

  Her last two calls were from Tom. No last name. Tom Truman?

  I thought of his wife’s suspicions about him when they talked outside the Achilles room the night before. Plus there’d been the name Truman on Bennett’s office calendar and the enormous footprints outside Clyde’s cottage window.

  Was the eavesdropper a literal peeping Tom? Had he been at the cottage because Selena was there? Watching her? Or waiting for her? And why?

  We had only minutes until the ambulance got here. I put Selena’s phone in her pocket and took from mine the hairs I’d found in Clyde and Renee’s room.

  I stretched a couple of blond strands out beside hers. The color matched well enough.

  But they were too long. Unless she’d had a haircut in the last two days, they couldn’t belong to her. I sat back, mystified.

  I heard a siren outside before much longer, and I met the paramedics at the door, handed them the bag of pills from Selena’s desk, and told them everything I knew.

  I was allowed to ride in the ambulance as it sped her to the hospital, but when they took her back to a room, I had to stay behind in the waiting area. It was strange to be back here after only a few days.

  In half an hour, they let me go back and see the patient. The door was propped open. A nurse at the bedside took Selena’s temperature and made notes on a chart.

  Selena was pale, kind of greenish, but otherwise looked normal, sitting up and texting. Cords stretched from her to a couple of screens nearby. Their regular beeping was probably a good sign, but it unnerved me like the shriek of an alarm clock. Eek. Eek. Eek.

  She spotted me standing inside the door. “Oh, hey. Thanks for calling 911 or whatever.”

  “Yeah. Glad to. Are you feeling better?”

  “I’m fine.” Selena was especially calm, considering what she’d just been through.

  “Do your parents know you’re here?” I asked.

  Before she could answer, a voice behind me said, “I’m glad you were with her.”

  I nearly jumped out of my skinny jeans.

  Clyde came out of the adjoining bathroom. His sleeves were turned up, and a coffee stain marked the front of his shirt. I imagined him holding a mug in one hand and answering Selena’s call with the other.

  “Hey, Dad, don’t freak out, but I’m in the ER,” she would’ve said.

  Exactly the kind of call I was used to making.

  Selena’s attention turned to her father. An almost physical anger bonded them across the room.

  I seemed to have interrupted their latest battle.

  Selena lived more than five hundred miles from Clyde, but if she had wrecked her car just to stick it to him, as Autumn had said, then maybe Selena hadn’t done a great job of individuating from him.

  Individuation was a hundred-dollar word I had learned in therapy. (I may have overpaid.) Jung talked about it as the process of merging the conscious and unconscious minds. When it came to controlling parents, individuation was more about a child’s process of defining the self apart from the parent, often by delineating boundaries.

  I backed toward the door, positive that my presence was unwelcome. I would probably hear them outside the room anyway.

  “Don’t leave, Ivy,” Selena said. “You’ll miss Dad yelling at me again.”

  Clyde shook his head and huffed. “You’re playing with fire, little girl.”

  “I’m not a little girl.” Selena jabbed the words at her dad. “You’re just mad that I did something without your approval.”

  “And look where it landed you.”

  “I have anxiety!” she shouted. “I have to take something for it. You want me to just ignore it and pretend it will go away?”

  Oh, I could see it now. The pills probably caused the apathy I’d seen from her, and the prickly attitude was likely a defense mechanism. I felt for her. This thing we shared was all too common.

  He stepped toward her bed and aimed his finger at her like a pistol, firing off each word emphatically. “I want to know what happened. You did this to get back at me, so at least do me the favor of telling me what I did this time.”

  “Oh, right, like I overdosed on purpose.” She threw a hand in the air. “Why is everything always about you?”

  “Listen, we all have passive-aggressive moments.” He’d shifted his tone now. It was softer, conciliatory even, but a sorry attempt to hide his anger. “And it’s not surprising, given the way your mother handles conflict—”

  “No. You’re the one who justifies hurting people to make them do what you want. What you think is best for them.” Selena turned onto her side away from him, or as much as she could with the cords attached to her.

  “You’re not thinking straight.” He stood, his upper lip snarled. “I’ll come back when your pills have worn off.”

  She pushed herself up halfway to sitting. “You can’t deal with the world leaving you behind. You can’t deal with Mom leaving you. Is that why Renee had to die? You couldn’t control her either? And what will you do when you finally realize that you don’t own me?”

  “That’s enough!” Clyde ushered me toward the door. “Ivy, wait outside for me.”

  Bossy, I thought, but I left just like he’d said. I needed to stay on the man’s good side.

  We were finally getting somewhere. He seemed in a mood to talk, and if so, I might finally find whatever was at the bottom of his story.

  I played around with my phone in the hall, hoping I might hear some
thing of their father-daughter exchange.

  Surely, if Selena’s mother were in town, she’d have been here now too. Unless she had some reason to hide from everyone—say, if she was guilty of a crime. I kept thinking about that suitcase in Selena’s room. It seemed like Selena had simply been looking at the bathroom because she felt sick, nothing to do with a visitor.

  In a few minutes, Clyde slipped out of Selena’s room and headed for me. He couldn’t stand still, jamming his hands in his pockets and looking like whatever he had to say was stuck in his throat.

  “So do you really think she OD’d on purpose?” I asked. “Or was this purely accidental?”

  He stared darkly as if a threat were waiting down the hall. A fluorescent light flickered over his head. “I need to make Selena safe.”

  It was like he hadn’t heard me. “Clyde.”

  He glanced at me.

  “Help me make sense of this,” I said. “Was there something wrong with the pills she took, or—”

  “They weren’t on my insurance.” He shook his head. “She couldn’t have gotten them from a doctor. I don’t—yes, there’s probably something wrong with them.”

  “So she won’t say where she got them?” I said.

  “She’s—” Clyde stopped speaking as a doctor passed us. “No, she won’t say. I don’t know if she’s protecting someone else or herself.”

  “Or if whoever gave her those pills was trying to hurt her?”

  He crossed his arms and clenched them until his hands went white.

  “Or hurt you?” I said.

  “I …” His face contorted.

  “Are you hurting … for money, Clyde?”

  I’d hoped to catch him off guard, but he merely looked confused.

  “Divorces are expensive, right?” I said.

  He turned away by a degree.

  I reached into my bag, pulled out the book of Browning poetry, and thrust it at his stomach.

  He started as if waking up and looked back and forth from me to the book. The muscles of his face contorted as if from fear, and he stepped back. “What is that?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you, Professor.”

  He shook his head but still wouldn’t take it from me. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Is it yours?”

  “No!” He threw up his hands.

  “It’s about time to fess up, don’t you think?”

  “Confess? To what?”

  “I think I can find out who did this. But you have to come clean. Tell me what you know.”

  He took the book from my hands gingerly, opened the front cover, and relaxed his shoulders an inch. “I guess it was only a matter of time before someone made this connection.”

  He thought I knew more than I actually did. That book was somehow incriminating for him.

  Tread carefully, Ivy. “I finally put the pieces together.”

  “But how? I fixed it.” His chest convulsed and chopped his breath into pieces.

  If he wasn’t a guilty man, then I wasn’t Ivy Nichols. But guilty of what, exactly? “Yeah. I thought so. When you came back from the tour?”

  He screwed up his mouth in acknowledgment, but he clearly wasn’t proud of what he’d done. “It only took a second.”

  Turning from me, Clyde began his pacing again. “But I only did it because I was framed. I would’ve been arrested! You’ve got to understand that.”

  “Of course.” What had he done that “only took a second”?

  “This whole thing is a … a show,” he said. “The wig, the poem, the fire. It’s all meant to point to me, to my work.”

  The wig? The one Bea had found in the men’s room? Was it connected to the blond hairs I’d found in the Achilles? But which poem? And what did he mean “the fire”?

  “Your work?” I asked.

  “Yes. My dissertation.”

  “The dissertation that everyone loved you for? But that had to be, what, thirty years ago?”

  “Almost forty.”

  “So who framed you?”

  “I … I don’t know … I—I saw Tom and Renee in some kind of heated discussion the day before she died. But he’s too stupid to frame me like this.”

  Was Tom really too stupid? Or was he smart enough to play dumb? “Is there some reason that Tom would be calling Selena? Are they close?”

  Squinting at me, he said, “He was calling her? You’re sure about that?”

  “I don’t know. It might have been some other Tom.”

  He took a long breath, turning one way and then the other, like he was desperate to do something but didn’t know what it should be.

  The only thing keeping me from feeling sorry for him was the idea that this might all be a con.

  He looked at the poetry book in his hands, then held it up like he might hit me with it. “Where did you get this?”

  “Someone left it for me to find.”

  A door opened at the end of the hall, and a monitor’s alarm assaulted the air.

  “Well, there’s your answer. You find that person, Ivy, and you find the person who framed me, the person who murdered Renee, the person who knows you’re on their trail.”

  I held my breath. I could see where this was going. “Whoever put that book on my desk was pointing me to you.”

  “Yes, and if you don’t take the bait, Ivy—” He stepped closer and stabbed a finger toward me to enunciate his words. “If you don’t look like you’re on my trail and no one else’s, you may be in serious danger.”

  XV

  Back on This Side of the Door

  Clyde said he was stepping outside to smoke and left me in the hallway. I was still thinking about Selena’s anxiety and what I’d learned about myself that might help her.

  I knocked softly on her door and, when there was no answer, peeked in to find her sleeping. I jotted a few quick resources down—websites and my therapist’s info—on the hospital stationery along with my phone number and a few well wishes for her.

  It was noon by the time I walked out, and seeing the lines of cars in the parking lot, I realized I didn’t have a ride … or a plan.

  Going back to the hotel was always a good idea, but I’d have to hoof it, and the sole of my foot was already smarting despite the Band-Aid and thick sock I’d put on over the strawberry this morning. And the pain from my stove injury had me feeling like one of the hotel statues that had a hairline crack cutting through one arm.

  The day had turned overcast along with my mood, and maybe that was the only reason I had a growing sense of being watched as I weaved through the parked vehicles toward the road.

  It was more obvious now than ever that the killer, whether that was Clyde or someone else, knew I was hunting them. If Clyde was guilty, he thought he’d misdirected me with the attempt on Selena’s life and the story of being framed. If the killer was anyone else, they needed to believe I thought Clyde was guilty.

  “There you are,” said a tall, dark-headed man several yards away.

  I started, then realized it was only George. “Hey!”

  His face began to relax as he picked up his pace to reach me. “So you’re not hurt?”

  “No, Selena Borough was. How’d you know I was here?”

  “I overheard Tom Truman taking a call in the dining room. He said enough for me to understand that you and Selena had ended up here.”

  Hmm. Had Selena called him back? “What was he doing in the dining room? You haven’t started serving lunch or something?”

  “No, he was working on his laptop.”

  “Laptop?” I blinked. “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. It looked like a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, maybe for his personal budget or taxes …” He clicked his key fob, and the lights flashed on his new gray Toyota Highlander that had replaced his old gray Toyota Highlander last week.

  I actually missed the familiar smell of the old one. I caught him up on what had happened at the college as I got in and buckled up.

  “What
do you think about Tom?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t like anybody who brings a Hostess cupcake into my dining room.”

  “I thought he was kind of slow, but now I wonder.”

  “He’s quiet,” George said. “But that’s not the same as simple.”

  “I agree. And Autumn seems too smart to have married a dummy.”

  “Do we believe Autumn about Selena?” He turned the key in the ignition. “Because if we do, Selena’s a mess, and she had reasons for wanting to hurt her father.”

  “You think she may have overdosed on purpose? That’s what Clyde said too.”

  “I don’t know her, but …” He shrugged.

  “Hey, do you mind driving me over to the police station? There’s something I think Bennett needs to see.”

  “Yeah.” He aimed the car in that direction as we pulled out of the parking lot.

  De Luna’s complete absence from this case still rankled. I wished there was someone there I could trust. But all I had was Bennett.

  While we drove, I explained how I’d found the dumbwaiter and the torn piece of plaid. At home, I’d written out an explanation for Bennett and signed my name to it, thinking even as I did that he was so biased against me I might as well throw it in the trash myself.

  When we got to the station, I took out the envelope where I’d sealed the fabric and the note.

  “You’re sure you shouldn’t hang on to that?” George said.

  “I have a picture of it, and if there’s DNA on the material, it could benefit Mr. Fig, and that might be the only hard evidence I find. The police probably can’t use it, officially, but it might at least prove something to Bennett, if he’s willing to listen.”

  “That’ll be a long shot,” he said. “What about De Luna?”

  “On vacation.” I sighed.

  Inside the station, I handed the envelope to the officer at the front desk, and when I came back outside, I spotted George at a popsicle stand in the next parking lot over.

  I walked to meet him, noticing that on the horizon, gray clouds were building a bridge between Lookout and Signal Mountain.

  George turned around with two pale yellow pops in his hands and passed me one.

  “Mm. Thanks. Orange?”

  “Pineapple saffron.”