Almost Dead

by Lisa Jackson

  Her skin crawled despite the fact that the place was perfect for their purposes.

  Walking past a rusted washer and dryer, she approached what appeared to be the far wall of the dank room. However, it was not as it seemed. During the course of the last half century, one of the bungalow’s owners had made a false wall in one corner of the basement, creating a space for a hidden wine cellar. All of which was odd, as the basement was too damp to create the right atmosphere for anything worth drinking.

  But then, she wasn’t using the space to hide her special bottles of Pinot Gris or Chardonnay or Merlot.

  The fake wall with its dusty shelves and hidden door was a perfect hiding spot, if not for cases of wine, then at least for an escapee from a minimum-security prison.

  Careful not to make too much noise, just in case Marla was sleeping, she softly rapped on the back of the shelf. Marla was probably exhausted from the tension of planning and executing the escape.

  Elyse waited a second, then pulled on a hidden lever. With a click, the latch unhooked, and she was able to push one section of the shelving into the small room.

  She whispered, “Hey, I’m here,” as she let herself into the windowless room currently lit only by the flickering bluish light of the television and a small bedside lamp. The compact area was stark: walls devoid of pictures; the only furniture a chair, bed, night table, and dresser to support the television.

  Marla barely looked up to greet her.

  Oh God, she was in a bad mood.

  Great.

  The euphoria of the escape had obviously seeped away. “Are you really watching this?” Elyse demanded, recognizing a popular reality show on the screen of the muted television.

  Silently, Marla gave her a look that said it all. Somehow, in prison, Marla had gotten hooked on all kinds of weird TV. “I like it. It’s escapism,” she said and offered a hint of a smile, the old cagey Marla surfacing for a second.

  “Okay, whatever. But I thought you’d like to get out of here.”

  “And go where?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Someone might see me,” she said in a tone that suggested Elyse was an imbecile.

  “You can keep the blinds shut, but at least, at least it wouldn’t be like…”

  “A cell?” Marla said, scarcely moving her lips.

  “Yeah. Like a cell. Tomorrow, I’ll bring cleaning supplies and we’ll fix it up. It’s already furnished.”

  Marla snorted in disgust, her eyes wandering back to a group of people locked inside a windowless house together. Well, at least Marla could relate.

  “Look, I brought you something to eat.” Elyse held out the white paper sack. “A hamburger I picked up before I went to the house. Sorry it’s a little cold, but I didn’t want to stop afterward.”

  “The house?” Marla’s interest was suddenly sharp, though she didn’t seem the least bit interested in the food.

  “Yeah, the house. On Mt. Sutro.” She stepped closer to the chair and leaned down, whispering in Marla’s ear. “I killed Eugenia tonight. Just like we planned. Oh God…it was…perfect. She recognized me, too, the old bitch.”

  “You killed Eugenia? First?” Marla ignored the bag on her lap and glared at Elyse. “That wasn’t the way we planned it.”

  “Hey! Opportunity knocked, okay? And I got rid of her. I don’t see what difference it makes when they die or how they die, just as long as they die!”

  “You little—”

  “Don’t,” Elyse warned. “I risked my damned neck for you, so the least you could do is be interested or say ‘thank you’ or ‘good job,’ but do not, do you hear me, do not belittle me. I won’t stand for it.”

  “Testy, aren’t we?” Marla muttered.

  “Yes, we are. Both of us!”

  Marla composed herself. “All right,” she said slowly. “I didn’t mean to snap. I’m just so damned tired of being cooped up.”

  “That’ll change soon.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  Elyse scraped her hair away from her face in frustration. That was the problem with Marla, she was so damned moody. “Listen, I’m sorry. I should have told you, but I had to work fast when I learned that Eugenia would be home alone. Crap, it’s not easy, you know.”

  “It’s not easy for me either. I’m the one who’s been in prison, and now…now this.”

  “You knew you’d have to keep a low profile for a while.”

  Marla frowned, but didn’t argue, thank God. “I think I just need some time to adjust.”

  “Yeah, well, me too. Go on, eat and watch…” she glanced at the television. “Whatever it is.”

  “House Arrest.”

  “Perfect.”

  Marla laughed then at the irony of it all.

  “I’ll be back. Tomorrow or the next day, whenever I can be free, and I’ll bring things we can use as your disguise. Then you can chance getting out again. How’s that?”

  “Better,” Marla agreed as the show on the television broke for a commercial for some kind of light beer. “Next time you come, make sure the food’s at least tepid.”

  “Right.”

  As Elyse left she wondered why she even bothered with the bitch.

  For the money, remember? The Cahill fortune? Just put up with her for a little while longer. She’s your ticket to wealth.

  But you’re right: she’s a first-class bitch.

  Live with it.

  Heart in her throat, Cissy hunted for her eighteen-month-old son. Please let him be okay. Please!

  “Beej! Honey? Where are you?” Fear pounding through her brain, a dozen horrid scenarios flashing behind her eyes, Cissy jogged the grounds of her grandmother’s house. Her gaze scraped the undergrowth, searching in the darkness. Her heart pounded a horrifying tattoo as the rain began to fall in earnest.

  What if she couldn’t find him?

  What if he somehow slipped through the bars of the gate?

  He was so small…so innocent.

  Oh God, please let him be safe!

  “B.J.?”

  Where were the damned cops? They could help!

  For the last two days they’d been hanging out and…thank God! She saw the first set of flashing lights, flaring red and blue on the hill below. The sirens screamed ever nearer, just as she spied her little boy cowering under an azalea. “Oh, B.J.” She splashed across the cold puddles in the yard and scooped him into her arms, hugging him tightly. He was dirty. And clinging. And crying. His hat was tilted drunkenly on one ear, tied around his neck like a noose. She untied it and pulled it off. He was safe. Safe. She drank in that special B.J. scent of his and swallowed the lump in her throat.

  “Me scay-o-ed,” he said, shivering in her arms.

  “Me too, baby.” She kissed his now-wet crown and held him close. Tears burned the back of her eyes at the thought of losing him. “But you’re okay now. Mommy’s here. Everything will be all right!” She walked to the gatepost, pressed in a code on the electronic keypad, and, as the gates swung open, the first cop car—an old Cadillac with a light mounted on the dash—roared up the hill, stopping at an odd angle on the street, blocking the drive. The second car, a marked cruiser, found a spot on the crowded street. A fire truck and EMT vehicle were right behind, working their way up the snakelike narrow road.

  “The cavalry,” Cissy said to her son, though she had a bad feeling about the boatlike first vehicle. It brought back memories she didn’t want to recall, recollections of another bad time in her life ten years earlier, the horrific events that had landed her mother in prison.

  When the first cop rolled out of the driver’s side of the Caddy, her heart sank. He didn’t have to flash his badge or utter his name. She knew him because Detective Anthony Paterno had been in charge of the investigation that sent her mother to prison. His hound-dog face sported a few more lines, and his thick hair was more shot with gray, but otherwise he, like his car, had changed little.

  “You’re Cissy,” he said.

  �
�Yeah. This is my son, B.J., er, Bryan Jack. Come on. This way.” She glanced past Paterno to the paramedics. “Maybe there’s a chance Gran can be revived,” she said, hope blooming in her heart, though she was pretty certain it was too late. Holding B.J. as if she thought she might lose him again, she half-ran up the brick walk to the front door. Paterno and his partner, a tall, mannish-looking woman with simple glasses and a short haircut, were on her heels, the paramedics and firefighters a step behind.

  “Stay here,” Paterno said, motioning to a bench on the porch while his partner, who introduced herself as Janet Quinn, stepped through the open doorway. “Jesus, what happened?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here when she fell…. Oh God.” Swallowing hard, Cissy cradled B.J. close to her body while rocking back and forth.

  “Mama sad,” B.J. said, and she nodded.

  “Very.”

  “Mama cry?”

  “Oh, maybe.” She smiled through her tears and kissed his head. Shielding her son from the open doorway, she didn’t try to look inside to the foyer. She’d seen enough.

  Two EMTs, hauling equipment, rushed past her.

  “Careful. This could be a crime scene,” Paterno said as they entered.

  “We got it, Detective,” the female EMT said. “Back off. Let us work. Oh hell…she’s already gone.”

  All of Cissy’s hope died.

  “Nothing left to do but bag and tag her,” the second EMT said so emotionlessly Cissy caught her breath. This was her grandmother, for God’s sake! Not just some unknown, unclaimed, unloved body! The woman they were talking about was Eugenia Cahill, a short, sharp, sassy woman who had run corporations, played competitive bridge, and sat on the boards of…Oh God, what did it matter what boards she’d sat on? She was gone.

  “No sign of forced entry,” Quinn said. “We’re checking to see if robbery was a motive.”

  Still on the porch, Cissy turned away from the drama inside. The whole scene was surreal, and Cissy, holding her son, watching rain drizzling down from the night sky, realized for the first time that she’d never see her grandmother alive again. She blinked back a fresh spate of tears. Theirs hadn’t been a loving relationship, in fact they’d had more than their share of knock-down, drag-out fights when she’d been a teenager living here, but she’d loved Eugenia, and, aside from an uncle and aunt now in Oregon, and another uncle in an institution, Eugenia was the only family she had left. Certainly her closest relative, besides James, her half-brother.

  Except for Marla. Remember her? Your mother? The damned escaped convict. You have to count her.

  And what about Jack?

  She didn’t want to think about her louse of a husband right now. Daring another look inside, she saw one of the EMTs shake his head. Cissy swallowed hard. She’d known from the second she’d seen Eugenia that the old woman was dead, but it hit so much harder when her suspicions were confirmed.

  Paterno walked back outside. “Your grandmother—”

  “I know.” She was shaking inside, but managed to keep some sort of calm. Her mind was racing in a zillion directions, but she tried to focus on the detective with his sober face and dark eyes. “But why…I mean, you’re with homicide, I thought. Why did you come so soon?” Before he could answer, she understood. “Oh, I get it. This has to do with my mother, doesn’t it?”

  “We’d like to find her.”

  She shivered when she thought about Marla Amhurst Cahill as a free woman. Though Cissy didn’t want to jump to conclusions, it seemed damned coincidental that her grandmother had fallen down the stairs within a few days of Marla’s escape.

  Her mother, if nothing else, was clever. Sly. But it would have been just plain stupid to return here. The police had been staked out on the street near the gates…. Or had they? Her grandmother had complained about them yesterday, but where were they tonight?

  A cold feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.

  “So, what took you so long to get here? I figured that someone was staking out the house. Gran had said a couple of detectives were parked on the street.”

  “There was a car,” he admitted. “But the officers got called away.”

  “Called away?”

  “A reported shooting just down the street.”

  “At the same time that my grandmother fell down the stairs?” she asked, disbelieving. A coincidence? Her grandmother dies soon after Marla escapes, and while it’s all happening, the officers assigned to watch the house are suddenly jerked away? “Did they catch the shooter?”

  Paterno’s long face didn’t give up a clue. “Not yet.”

  “You mean, it just happened?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “An hour.” Her heart knocked as the coincidences kept stacking up. “Gran hasn’t been dead long. She was…was,” Cissy’s voice cracked. “She was still warm when I searched for a pulse….”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I have my own key,” Cissy explained dully. It was difficult to process.

  Paterno looked at B.J. “Why don’t you wait in the car? Where it’s dry and warm. We might have a few more questions and in the meantime the house is going to be considered a crime scene.”

  “She fell down the stairs. Where’s the crime?” But Cissy already understood what he was suggesting, and the thought, that her mother might somehow be involved, turned her stomach. This couldn’t be happening. And yet here she was, standing on rubber legs, feeling almost as if she were having an out-of-body experience.

  “Was anyone else home with her?” Paterno asked, ushering her from the front porch.

  Feeling the rain run down her neck, Cissy made her way back to the car. “No…I mean, I don’t think so.” As they reached the Acura, B.J. whimpered in her arms, and she whispered into his little ear, “It’s okay, honey. Ssshhh.”

  Paterno opened the driver’s side door, and the pent-up aroma of tomatoes, oregano, and garlic greeted her. She slid the seat back, then, with her child on her lap, sat behind the wheel while Paterno climbed into the passenger side of the car, one foot crushing the lid of the pizza box.

  Too late he shifted his shoe. “Sorry.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Right now, nothing much did. She felt numb inside. Aside from her baby, she didn’t really care about anything.

  Fortunately, B.J. was thrilled with his position and was “driving” the car, both his little hands on the steering wheel.

  Sitting with his feet straddling the dented pizza box, Paterno retrieved a pen and small notebook from his coat pocket. “You were bringing dinner to your grandmother?”

  She nodded. “I usually visit her on Sundays, because she’s alone. I always come with something to eat, something fun, I think, fix it for her, then we watch some television show, you know, Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune with Coco and—” She stopped short, her head snapping up. “Where’s the dog?”

  “What?”

  “Gran’s usually alone except for Coco. Her little white mutt of some kind that she absolutely adores. I didn’t see the dog in the house, and that’s really weird. Grandma takes that dog everywhere. They’re practically inseparable.” She scanned the grounds as if the dog had somehow slipped through the door.

  “We’ll find it,” Paterno said, but made a note in his little pad. He touched her on the arm. “You were saying…You watch television….”

  “Tonight we were going to have pizza because I was running late….” Cissy looked down at the crushed white box and couldn’t believe that less than half an hour ago she’d been worried about explaining why she didn’t have time to cook something her grandmother liked better than takeout from Dino’s. Now she was stuck in a car with a cop she didn’t trust, her grandmother dead. She cleared her throat, tried to think straight. “Anyway, it’s usually just the three of us. Me, Grandma, and Beej. Deborah, the woman who is basically her companion and, um, you know, isn’t really a ‘caregiver.’” Cissy made air quotes with her fingers. “Gran would never put up with that, bu
t she’s got the companion. Deborah has Sundays and Mondays off, and the day maid, Paloma, leaves around five, I think. Elsa, the cook, she only works, oh geez, Monday through Friday unless Gran was having company…and…and, oh, Lars, the chauffeur, works until, I don’t know…Five? Six? Something like that, unless Grandma needs him, and then they work something out.” She was trying to keep it all straight, though she knew she was rambling. “So then we watch some inane show and…and…oh damn.” She started crying again, then, disgusted with herself, angrily scraped the tears away.

  “Mommy?” B.J. asked, twisting his head backward to look at her.

  She managed a smile. “Mommy’s okay.” An out-and out lie. “Can we go now?” she asked the detective just as a vehicle for the crime-scene team rolled to a stop and added another roadblock to the driveway. Worse yet, she saw through the open gates that some of the neighbors had stepped onto the street, clustering together under the spreading branches of a large oak tree. Cissy groaned, then groaned again as a news van roared up the hillside and double-parked a few houses down. “This just gets better and better.”

  “I can drive you home. Unfortunately it’ll be a little while. It would help if you could give me a list of the people who work here. Names and addresses.”

  “I don’t have them on me, but Gran did. I’ve got a couple phone numbers on my cell. For Deborah and Lars. I don’t have the rest, but I do have some of her friends at home on my computer.”

  “I’ll need what you’ve got.”

  She found her phone in her purse, scrolled down her contact list, then rattled off the phone numbers that she had. “Deborah Kropft, here it is.” She told him the number. “And Lars Swanson; I know I have his because sometimes he drives Beej and me.” Again she gave him a number. “Paloma’s last name is Perez, and I…I think she lives in Oakland. Her husband is Estevan. There’s another maid, Rosa, who has worked for Gran on and off for years. Her last name is Santiago. I’m not sure where she lives, but Gran has records in the library, I think. By the phone. A card file, not on a computer…. She rarely used her PC….” Oh Lord, she was rambling again.