My pin-balling anger had subsided. Instead, something cleaner and sharper clicked into place. I picked up the mug in front of Elaine and said, “Drink it.”
She reached out for it but drew back. Through her damp eyes, a knowing look emerged—perhaps an acknowledgment of her fate or maybe a touch of guilt for failing me. Who knows? I didn’t care.
“Drink it,” I demanded. “Drink it, or we’ll make you.”
Elaine rose and smoothed out her yellow dress. She looked first at Philippa and then at me. “Are you going to tell her everything?” she said to me, the light behind her eyes shifting. Was it a threat? Her irises seemed to expand like twin black holes, drawing me into their madness. Philippa squeezed my hand and whispered emphatically, “Let’s go.”
“Can I tell you something?” Elaine said, a smile creeping into her lips. “I’m glad you found Charlene. I’m glad you’ll remember her in the bathtub that way. I’m glad it was you.”
Fury shot through me, but I didn’t move. Philippa’s grip still anchored me, whetting my anger like a knife.
Elaine ran her tongue along her upper lip, exposing its soft underside. She straightened her back and shook her shoulders lightly. A smile flickered in her lips and fell away. As she rose to her feet, she scooped up the mug, a drop or two of the white liquid splattering on the table.
“I was going to drink it all along,” she said, sighing with faux exasperation. “If only I could’ve convinced you two to join me.”
She brought it to her lips, tilted it up, and drank deeply, allowing the rivulets to pour over her chin and down her neck, soaking the collar of her dress. I held my breath, shocked that she’d done it. She lurched forward and dropped the mug, unwittingly kicking it across the room. We leaped back, startled. She clutched her throat and retched, her eyes wild and darting. Pink foam bubbled up at the corners of her mouth. A twitch of sympathy broke through me, and I took a step forward but stopped; I wasn’t going to help her. She toppled backward toward the window seat, her shoulder smacking a pane of glass and cracking it from corner to corner. She groaned, and deep in her chest, a gurgle responded. She retched again, and her tongue protruded, a string of bloody saliva oozing from it. She whimpered, fell to the carpet on her hands and knees, and vomited.
I stared at her, unable to move.
Philippa staggered backward, releasing me. Elaine crawled toward me, collapsing a few feet away, her groan muffled by the carpet. She was pathetic, helpless. It made sense that she was my mother. In her I saw my rage, my ugliness, and my pain. There it all was, melting into the floor. Her hand shot out and gripped my ankle, as if she wanted to drag me to hell with her. But I didn’t flinch. My heart had cooled; everything was clear. I took a step back, and the manacle of her hand fell away.
CHAPTER TEN
Ick! I know. But that’s what happened. Elaine guzzled a lye solution, hence the ammonia-like odor. Apparently, she’d tossed out her Veronal, fearing it might implicate her in Cleve’s and Charlene Peters’s deaths, so she improvised. Her mind wasn’t an ordered place.
I understand her better today than I did back then. I understand her fury, and I understand the importance of a melodramatic gesture. From the beginning of time, when women did or said something that challenged men, they called them “crazy” or “overwrought” or “emotional.” It’s 1963, and little has changed. Marilyn Monroe ended it last year. This February, Sylvia Plath. Both deaths were, perhaps, melodramatic gestures.
But they—we—aren’t crazy or too emotional; that’s just what the men think they’re seeing, or more to the point, not seeing. The melodrama wouldn’t be necessary if selfish fools like Halo weren’t impossible to reach through the usual avenues of communication. No, men spark us to behave as we sometimes do. Without Tereus’s vicious attack on Philomela, there would be no maimings, no murders, no cannibalism. Elaine’s rage spun out of control, but you have to ask, why was it there to begin with? What seeded the storm?
Well, I’ve certainly embraced melodrama. Perhaps that’s why I now write pulpy detective fiction à la Ray Kane. I’ve been churning out novels for about six years. Surely, you’ve stumbled across my paperbacks on a rack in the drug store or at the newsstand at the corner. Including this experiment, there are four novels under the pen name Abigail Knightley: The Longest Hallway, Flower of Death, Mother’s Milk, and Seeing Double. I began writing them after I moved back to DC. I’ve made a little money over time. Enough to get by. Of course, you understand, a pen name was a necessity.
* * *
PHILIPPA, NOVEMBER 30, 1948
Judy and I were questioned in separate rooms. Shaken and drained, I gazed into Kipps’s and Paulson’s grim expressions and imparted everything that I’d learned about Cleve’s and Miss Martins’s murders—except that Elaine was Judy’s mother, a detail Judy insisted that I withhold, and the existence of the diary, which we planned to retrieve later from its hiding place behind a bush across the street. To explain the pieces of the puzzle Judy lifted from its pages—the moon pins, in particular—I claimed that we’d deduced them through careful observation, that our sleuthing powers had been honed by our giddy infatuation with the PI Calvin McKey novels. Kipps and Paulson frowned skeptically but seemed to accept it as plausible.
After the interrogation, my parents escorted me home, both of them baffled, aloof, and unable to articulate disapproval or even words of comfort. We attempted small talk at dinner, but it was fragmented and elliptical. Mostly I listened to the scraping of flatware against dishes. Elaine Closs guzzling her milky poison continued to flicker through my mind. When it ignited in her, she seemed shocked, as if she was surprised that she’d done it, or perhaps, that Judy had induced her to do it. It all seemed unreal.
Minutes ago, Dad came to my room and asked me if I was okay. I told him yes, but he didn’t believe me and reached out his hand to touch my arm. “Just go,” I thought, “Please.” He took a step back and said, “You scare me, Phil.”
“I do?” I said.
“Detective Kipps rang while you were taking your bath. Elaine Closs didn’t die, but the poison burned her mouth, throat, and stomach. She’ll never speak again or, for that matter, chew solid food. It was a horrible thing she did to herself—and you saw it happen.”
Fate was being cruel. Clearly, she drank it to kill herself, not just maim. The pain had to be excruciating, but she believed relief was just on the other side. My stomach churned. Had we caused this? We wanted justice, not torture. I looked at my lap, not wanting Dad to detect my guilt. “I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”
“You’re so unfazed,” he said, crossing his arms. “You must be upset.” He sounded as if he wanted me to explain myself, as if by not breaking into tearful sobs, I was confirming my “bad girl” status.
“I need time. It’s shock, I guess.” I softened my voice, understanding that he needed that from me. But it irritated me: Why can’t I be okay? The situation was horrific, but it wasn’t like Elaine was a saint; she’d killed her son and Miss Martins and had wanted to kill us.
He searched my face. “I wish…” he said. “I don’t know who you are anymore.”
I forced a smile. “Of course, you do.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well,” he said, reaching for the doorknob, “if you have trouble sleeping, I could heat up—” He caught himself.
“My warm milk days are over,” I said.
“I suppose so,” he said gloomily.
* * *
When Paulson asked me what we’d said to Elaine before she poisoned herself, I told him that I was too distraught to remember, which of course was a lie. He was fishing for something to incriminate us—or at least explain us—but I wasn’t going to bite. He also asked what Judy was doing while I was on the phone with the operator. I shrugged and told him that I didn’t know, that I was focused on getting help. But I remembered. Judy just stood there, staring at her mother as she crawled across the floor, vomiting and bleeding, her garish yellow dress dragging behin
d her like wilted plumage. What was running through her mind? Hatred? Disgust? Moral righteousness? Even pleasure? God knows. She makes a mystery of herself. It’s one of the things I love about her. Maybe it’s why I love her. But will the secrets ever end? What did Elaine mean when she asked her if she was going to tell me everything? What is everything?
PHILIPPA, DECEMBER 5, 1948
After days of keeping me cooped up, Dad and Bonnie let down their guard. I slipped on my coat, scarf, and cap, and snuck out the front door. As I walked through the quiet Saturday streets, snowflakes swirled around me, light gusts sweeping them up before they touched the ground. In Lincoln Park, I passed the sixteenth president and the freed slave, and heard Judy’s voice again: “Is he freeing him or making him beg for his freedom?” I made my way back to the Closses’ townhouse, lingered in front of it, taking in the now skeletal maple tree. I walked across the street to see if Judy hadn’t returned to retrieve Miss Martins’s diary. I wanted to read it. It was time. I rummaged through the bush, but nothing was there.
When I returned home, I shed my coat and scarf. Voices were coming from the parlor, a room Dad and Bonnie rarely used. One of the voices was my stepmother’s, but the other?… I wasn’t sure, so I crept closer, my winter coat and cap still slung over my arm. When I recognized her, I froze and became conscious of my breathing, of the potential for floorboards under my feet to creak. It was Moira Closs.
“What you’ve been through,” Bonnie said, tut-tutting. “It must be so distressing.”
“The universe has all its arrows pointed at me, it seems,” Moira said, laughing hollowly. “Oh, I don’t mean to be overly dramatic.”
“It’s understandable,” Bonnie said. “May I offer you more coffee? Or a ham biscuit?”
“No, you’re very kind.”
“You’re managing so well, though.” I could tell by Bonnie’s high squeaky timbre that she was straining to be conversational. I wondered if Moira detected her reticence.
“I’m doing my best. I just wish… Well, the police can be so helpless, you know. Not your nephew, of course, but so many of them. They still don’t know why my daughter-in-law killed my grandson.” Her voice cracked on cue. I imagined her dabbing her eyes with a hanky. “It’s so difficult to talk about… and then what she did to herself was unspeakable. And after all this mayhem, they don’t even know who killed poor little Jackie Peabody. Mr. Bogdan has been cleared—Orpheus back from the dead, it seems!”
“Orpheus?”
“The myth.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve his beautiful dead bride, Persephone.”
“Eurydice,” I thought, having recently had my refresher on Greek myth. Thank you, Elaine.
“Of course,” Bonnie said, still baffled.
“He’s a cat with nine lives,” Moira said, dumbing it down. “Anyway, they’ve handed me a bunch of loose ends. Even the Peabodys have had to flee to the Caribbean for their own sanity. I may follow them.”
“I know,” Bonnie said, her voice dipping. “I’m afraid our Philippa might have a little something to do with that.”
“Oh no,” Moira said in a saccharine tone, “that’s not the case. She’s a good girl. If it hadn’t been for her and Judy, I would never have known about Elaine.”
She was lying. She was sinking her claws in.
“In fact, that’s why I’m here.”
“Yes?”
“I know this is a strange request, but I was hoping to speak with Philippa, just a word or two, to say thank you.”
“I see.”
“No, no, no!” I wanted to scream. “Bonnie, say no!”
“It would give me some solace. One less loose end to tie up.”
I had to get out of there. I began backing away from the entrance to the parlor, but as I did, I bumped into the coat rack.
“Hello?” Bonnie said. “Is that you, Carl?”
I didn’t know what to do. If I ran, I’d just have to do this some other time. Moira was the relentless sort. So, I draped my coat and scarf over a hook, noting Moira’s glossy mink beside Bonnie’s drab wool topcoat, and stepped into the room.
Both women rose when they saw me. Moira was in a dark blue wool suit with tortoiseshell buttons and velvet lapels. Her hair was swept up in an elegant coif, silvery and slick. Her earrings jangled as she offered me a bright, venomous smile.
“Where have you been?” Bonnie said timidly. “Your father went looking for you in the snow.”
I gave Bonnie “not now” eyes.
“Philippa dear,” Moira said, still smiling, her lips purplish and glossy. “I’m having a lovely chat with your stepmother. She’s such a gracious host, but it’s you whom I’ve come to see.” She glanced at the pendulum clock on the wall and, to Bonnie, said, “Oh dear. I must be going! I have an early dinner date.” A lie, and not a very good one. “Philippa, will you walk me out?” Bonnie was fiddling with the seam on her housedress. She seemed to sense that Moira was a viper, which oddly was comforting.
I shrugged back on my coat and, impersonating a polite young lady for Bonnie’s sake, helped Moira on with her luxuriant knee-length fur and her orange poppy-print silk scarf.
Once out on the sidewalk, which was covered with a thin layer of snow, Moira turned to me, tilted her chin up, and said, “I should gut you and throw you in the city dump for what you and your friend did to my son.” She grabbed me by the arm, digging her nails in through the wool, and drew me close. My adrenaline surged. She was surprisingly strong. “I know you killed him,” she growled. Her face was stretched over her sharp-edged bones and brittle tissue. She was as fragile as papier-mâché, and decay was visible at the corners of her eyes, at the edges of her mouth, and in the purplish veins that crept up her neck. “You have no idea what you’ve done.” She released me.
I rubbed my arm, seething but clearheaded. I knew what I needed to do. I wasn’t going to let her threaten me. I felt Judy in me. Her righteousness. Her rage. “What does AHKA mean, the word you ordered your son to paint on Cleve—and how did you know it was written on Jackie?” We’d been searching for the connection, but even Elaine couldn’t tell us. Moira knew the answer. I was sure of it.
She smiled and said nothing.
“Were you involved in Jackie’s case from the beginning?”
She let out a derisive “Ha!” and added, “The Peabodys are old friends. I have lots of friends.”
Thirty yards away, a black Cadillac started its engine and began to creep toward us.
Heat rose through me. “Tell me.”
“No, dear, I won’t. But let me ask you a question—”
Before she could, I said, “We have Miss Mart—Charlene Peters’s diary.” I wasn’t intimidated by her. “I know what you did to her. I know about Judy.” I wasn’t sure if she knew that Judy was Elaine’s child and not Miss Martins’s; I didn’t want to risk showing my hand.
“What do you mean ‘we’?” she said, her eyebrows lifted.
I moved closer. “I know what it says.” Bluffing.
She considered my statement, visibly rattled by its implications. The snowflakes collected on her mink like dandruff, making her seem shabby, moldering. “Elaine told me Judy has the diary,” she said, unconvincingly blasé. “It was the first thing the pathetic bat jotted down in the hospital. ‘Charlene’s Diary. Judy.’ So, what do you really know?”
It occurred to me that she had no idea what was in the diary either, so I continued to bluff: “It’s enough to put you away for a long time.” It was like a line from a Ray Kane novel. I knew I’d miscalculated.
“You’re full of shit,” she scoffed, waving her hand. “Besides, my important friends—well, you see, they’d believe Charlene’s sad scrawlings as much as they believed my daughter-in-law’s ravings. And even if they did believe them, they won’t touch me.”
I changed my approach: “Your son died thinking Judy was his daughter. He wanted to meet her—or don’t you car
e?”
Moira’s lips parted, and her posture drooped. I’d made the right move. She wasn’t all stone. “He was a fool,” she said, sadness lingering in the word “fool.” I could tell she loved her son. After all, she’d gone to great lengths to protect him. Seeing a chink in her armor, I asked another question that had been nagging me: “All those years ago, when Charlene asked Halo for money for the baby, why didn’t you just give it to her? Or insist she and Halo marry? Why take the baby from her?”
Her eyes flashed. “So, you haven’t read the diary,” she cooed triumphantly. “Certainly, Charlene would’ve written about that little episode. You don’t know everything.”
There it was again: Elaine asking Judy, “Are you going to tell her everything?” Desperate, I dropped the ruse and said, “What don’t I know?” My voice squeaked. “Tell me.”
Moira placed her finger over her lips. “Shhh!” she said. “I’ve got to go, but this isn’t over.” She started toward the Cadillac, which now was feet away, its motor purring. Icy snow tap-tapped its black metal finish. “You and I, your stepmother and your father, especially your father—we’re all going to become good friends.” The Caddy came to a full stop. A tall chauffeur in a black overcoat and trilby popped out and opened the back door. Moira took the door and spun around, her mink whirling in the snow. “As always, I enjoy welcoming new people into my circle,” she said, lips quivering. “For the right people, there’s always room.”
The Savage Kind Page 33
