Brute Strength

by Susan Conant

  Leah made the same face she’d made at the armory. ‘Don’t remind me! He is so disgusting!’

  ‘Are we talking about the same person?’ I asked. ‘Hatch Jones. Vanessa’s son?’

  ‘Hatch,’ said Leah. ‘Hatch. As in cracking open and producing fowl, f-o-w-l. Cluck, cluck, cluck. And foul, f-o-u-l. Foul.’

  ‘You must be kidding,’ I said.

  ‘Holly, for God’s sake, she is not kidding,’ Steve said. ‘Leah, what—’

  Practically tripping over Steve’s words, Rita said, ‘Of course Leah’s not kidding. Leah, let’s drop the light tone, if you don’t mind.’

  Butting in, I said, ‘Leah, I’m sorry. From the way you and Steve were acting, I assumed that he knew about whatever was going on.’

  ‘No,’ Steve said grimly.

  Rowdy and Kimi came bounding up to me but fixed their intelligent dark eyes on Leah. India was watching Steve, and Lady was training a worried gaze at India. Even Sammy noticed that something was up. He planted himself a few yards from our group and surveyed the scene, his expression baffled.

  ‘Leah,’ Steve said, ‘we need to hear exactly what happened.’

  ‘It wasn’t that big a deal,’ she said.

  I started to demand the account that Steve had requested, but he caught my eye in time, and I kept quiet.

  ‘This was at the armory,’ Steve said. ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Inside? Or out in the parking lot?’

  ‘Inside. In the armory with people all over the place. Besides, Kimi was with me.’ Addressing Kimi, she said, ‘You don’t like Dr Chicken any better than I do, do you, Kimi? We both think that he’s revolting.’

  ‘I take it,’ I said, ‘that whatever he did was verbal rather than physical.’

  ‘He tried to put his hand on my arm, but Kimi got in his way, so he had to settle for whispering in my ear, and in case you wondered, I am not giving you the details. Let’s just say that he made a disgusting suggestion – actually, two disgusting suggestions – and he had the chance to do that because for a second I could hardly believe what I was hearing. At first, it practically didn’t register.’

  ‘Leah,’ said Rita, ‘no one is blaming you.’

  ‘I should’ve . . . but I didn’t want to . . . but that was my choice! I could’ve punched him in the gut or screamed at him, OK? Kimi’s leash was in my hand. I could’ve wrapped it around his neck and strangled him. I had all kinds of options.’

  ‘Did you say anything to him?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Of course not. Remember? I went to Montessori schools. I’m the product of progressive education. All I did was walk away. And that’s pretty much what I’d like to do now. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve exhausted this topic.’

  Although we respected her wish, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed, mainly because I was almost positive about what Steve and Rita were on the verge of saying, and I wanted to know whether I was right. Steve, I predicted, would tell Leah that she had behaved in a sensible, mature way, whereas Rita would praise her for being in touch with her anger.

  ‘If you want to let it go, Leah,’ I said, ‘that’s what we’ll do. But I must say that I find it hard to reconcile this incident with . . . with Fiona. With their engagement.’

  Leah said, ‘I thought about that, too, but we spent all of one evening with Fiona. We didn’t really know her. Maybe she liked . . . or maybe he was different with her. But could we please just drop the whole thing?’

  ‘Of course. So, Steve, who whispered what in your ear?’

  ‘Vanessa cornered you,’ Leah said to him. ‘If she wants free advice, she ought to ask her own vet. She isn’t even a client of ours.’

  ‘She should’ve cornered Rita instead of me,’ Steve said. ‘She wasn’t asking about Ulla. She was asking me about Avery. She says that Tom is spoiling Avery and that if he’d quit, Avery’d be forced to do something with her life.’

  ‘Why did she ask you?’ I blurted out. Steve is intelligent, rational, practical, compassionate, and a million other good things, but psychological he is not. ‘Not that you’re . . . so, what did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her that Avery should get a job.’

  ‘That’s perfectly good advice,’ I said.

  ‘It’s probably what I’d have ended up telling her myself,’ Rita said.

  ‘What Vanessa really wanted,’ Steve said, ‘was for me to hire Avery.’

  ‘As what?’ I asked.

  ‘She thought Avery ought to take over Leah’s job.’

  I shook my head. ‘What on earth is Vanessa thinking? Avery? Avery has no interest in animals. She doesn’t have all that much connection to Ulla. She doesn’t have a dog or a cat of her own. Or birds, fish, anything, as far as I know. And she’s never shown any particular interest in our dogs. Vanessa is crazy about Sammy, but Avery probably can’t even tell our malamutes apart. What a stupid idea.’

  ‘Leah’s job,’ said Rita in that low, ponderous tone beloved by psychotherapists.

  ‘It may be a meaningful idea, Rita,’ I said, ‘but it’s still a stupid one.’

  Rita said exactly what I knew she was going to say: ‘Holly, it’s a good thing that you didn’t become a therapist.’

  On cue, I gave my standard reply: ‘And it’s a good thing that you didn’t become—’

  All five dogs interrupted me. Led by India, the only one who’d even dream of guarding our property, they flew to the wooden gate, and once India started barking, Lady joined in, and Sammy, looking pleased with himself, produced a copycat woof that would’ve fooled no one. He himself looked surprised, as if he could hardly believe that the unexpected sound had erupted from his chest. Rowdy and Kimi just stood there wagging their lovely white tails, presumably in the happy expectation that the new arrival was bearing food. Over the din, I heard a car door slam.

  By then, Steve was at the gate. One look from him silenced India, and when she quit barking, Lady did, too. Peering through the narrow space between the gate and the fence, Steve called, ‘Gabrielle? We’re out here.’

  ‘What’s she doing back here?’ I asked. ‘Steve, don’t open the gate until I get the dogs. Leah, could you crate Kimi and Sammy? India, down. Stay. Rowdy, this way, please, Mr Handsome. Good boy! Rita, just keep an eye on Lady, would you? Not that she’ll try to bolt.’

  When Leah and I had finished incarcerating the malamutes, we both ran out the back door and down the steps to the driveway, where Rita’s little BMW, my Blazer, and Steve’s van were parked. Instead of pulling her Volvo wagon into the driveway, Gabrielle had barely maneuvered it off the street and left it blocking the sidewalk. The rear windows were down. Looking inside, I saw that the keys were in the ignition. In the rear were Gabrielle’s suitcase and Molly’s crate, with Molly still in it.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ I said to Leah. ‘Gabrielle knows better than to . . . Steve? Open the gate, would you? We’re out here. Leah, could you move Gabrielle’s car? And get Molly.’

  I entered the yard to find Gabrielle seated at the picnic table. Her eyes were heavy, and her face was so pink that the spots left by the laser had re-emerged.

  ‘I’m so sorry to make a fuss,’ she said. ‘Do you think I could have some water?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Leah is getting Molly. She’ll pull your car in all the way. What’s going on?’

  ‘I should’ve found a motel,’ she said. ‘That’s what . . . but I couldn’t stay awake. I got off the highway . . . that’s what they tell you to do, you know. You’re supposed to pull over, but there were all these trucks roaring by, and there was an exit right there, and so I got off. And then I pulled over.’

  ‘Where was this?’ I asked.

  She yawned. ‘Woburn, I think. Somewhere near there.’

  Rita, who’d gone into the house, returned with a tall glass of ice water. Gabrielle emptied it, and Rita went back for more. As she was entering the house, Leah came out with Molly at her heels. Uncharac
teristically, Gabrielle didn’t thank Leah. It was as if Gabrielle had forgotten that she’d left her car half on the sidewalk and almost as if she’d forgotten all about Molly.

  ‘Woburn is no distance,’ I said. ‘What is it? Half an hour?’

  ‘That’s why I decided just to drive back here.’ Molly ran to her, and Gabrielle lifted her up and settled the little white dog in her lap. ‘I woke up, and there I was near a park of some sort, and I just couldn’t face looking for a motel that would take dogs. And I thought about a taxi, but—’

  I started to say that we’d have gone to get her, but Steve took over. ‘You look warm. Do you feel hot?’

  ‘Yes. And thirsty. Odd. I feel odd. But the main thing is that I’m so tired. I’ve gone and overdone it.’

  ‘Have you ever had an episode like this before?’ Steve asked.

  Rita returned, and once again Gabrielle drained the entire glass.

  ‘Steve, I’m just tired,’ Gabrielle said. ‘That’s all it is. I shouldn’t have eaten so much with the long drive ahead. Maybe I’m a little feverish.’

  ‘Have you taken anything?’ Steve asked. ‘Medication of any kind?’

  ‘Not a thing. Well, my thyroid medication, but that was this morning.’

  ‘Any nausea? Pain anywhere?’

  ‘Gabrielle,’ I said, ‘the truth is that you don’t look well. I think maybe we should get you to the ER at Mount Auburn. It’s five minutes from here. Less.’ My own heart was pounding. What particularly frightened me were Gabrielle’s lapses in judgment. When she’d first felt unwell and pulled off the highway, she should immediately have called us; and when she’d awakened from what must have been a fairly long nap, she certainly should not have driven back to Cambridge.

  ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to go to bed.’

  I threw Steve a questioning look. He said nothing, but his expression told me that we’d discuss his thoughts out of Gabrielle’s hearing. Everyone pitched in to get her resettled. While Rita waited with her, Leah brought in her suitcase, and Steve and I made the guest room bed, which Gabrielle had stripped that morning. As we worked, he said, ‘Holly, remember that what you said is true. Mount Auburn is five minutes away. We’ll keep a close eye on her. If anything changes, we’ll get her there.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with her?’ I demanded.

  He shrugged. ‘She says she’s just exhausted.’

  ‘I know that’s what she says! But she looks terrible, and she seems a little . . . dopey. Confused.’

  He nodded. When we went back downstairs, he tried his best to persuade Gabrielle to go to the ER. She absolutely refused. The only thing wrong with her, she insisted, was exhaustion, and the only thing she needed was sleep. I found our fever thermometer and took her temperature, which was 98.8, and I made Steve check her pulse, which was a little high, 103, but nothing to panic about. We gave in. As I followed Gabrielle upstairs, she leaned on the railing, and instead of having Molly stay in her room, she asked me to take care of her little dog.

  ‘She’ll need to go out,’ Gabrielle mumbled.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We’ll take care of Molly. Don’t worry. She’ll be fine.’

  I wished that I could feel equally confident about Gabrielle. After Leah left, Steve, Rita, and I watched the Red Sox, but we checked on Gabrielle every twenty minutes or so. During the night, Steve kept getting up to look in on her, and I kept asking, ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘So far,’ he’d say. ‘So far.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  On Sunday morning, Gabrielle admitted to having slept deeply. Still thirsty, she drank four glasses of orange juice. Otherwise, she was fine, or so she insisted, especially to Steve. Her face was no longer flushed, her eyes were bright, and she looked like herself again. Even so, she decided to postpone her departure until the following day.

  ‘We aren’t going to say a word to your father about any of this,’ she informed me as she loaded our breakfast dishes into the dishwasher.

  Succumbing to Gabrielle’s inevitable ‘we’, I asked, ‘What are we going to say to him?’

  ‘That you’re giving a little dinner party,’ she said, ‘and you want me to stay for just one more day so I can help you with it. Well, it’s not really a dinner party. It’s just a little Sunday-night supper.’

  ‘Why think small? Since it’s imaginary, let’s invite forty guests for a fourteen-course meal with service à la russe.’

  After checking to make sure that Steve wasn’t in the kitchen, she murmured, ‘It’s not quite that imaginary.’ At normal volume, she said, ‘Now, I know I’ve kept you from that painting you want do on the side of the house—’

  ‘You haven’t. The weather has. Today is beautiful, but the wood is still damp.’

  ‘You’re just saying that, but I would like it if we could take a little walk.’

  ‘Of course! I’d love to.’

  As it turned out, Gabrielle’s true objective was to have a tête-à-tête when Steve couldn’t possibly overhear us. She, of course, walked Molly, and I took Kimi. At the time, my choice of Kimi seemed almost random, but I realize in retrospect that I picked the dog most likely to inspire me to stand up for myself if this not-quite-imaginary dinner proved to be a hare-brained scheme that I’d want to veto. As I should have remembered, it would’ve taken the brute strength of all three malamutes combined to deflect my stepmother from her goal.

  My suspicions began to arise soon after we stepped out of the house. As I started to turn left at the driveway and head down Appleton Street, Gabrielle said, ‘Let’s take Concord Avenue. We can go down Sparks Street to Brattle. If we go down Appleton, we might run into Vanessa, and we don’t want her tagging along.’

  ‘Any route is fine with me.’ To the best of my knowledge, Kimi approved of the statement of polite agreement and didn’t construe my pleasant neutrality as a sign that I was spinelessly buckling under.

  ‘Well,’ said Gabrielle, ‘I’ve been doing some serious thinking.’ She paused, possibly in the hope that I’d speak up, as I did not. ‘And,’ she continued, ‘I’ve realized, among other things, that my little episode last night was . . . foreign. Foreign to me.’

  For half a second, I entertained the horrible idea that Gabrielle had decided that far from having fallen asleep in her car, she’d been the victim of alien abduction. Were the guests at this mysterious dinner going to be her new extraterrestrial friends?

  To my relief, she quickly said, ‘No, not foreign. Provoked. Deliberate. That’s what I mean. Holly, I am not someone who falls asleep at the wheel. That’s not who I am. No, someone tried to make me doze off on the highway. Just the way poor Fiona did.’

  ‘We don’t know that Fiona fell asleep. We don’t know what happened. Except that she had an accident. And that she died.’

  ‘Exactly. She died in an accident. A one-car accident. Or an apparent accident.’ At a curb, where we paused before crossing Huron Avenue, Gabrielle said, ‘Molly, sit. Good girl! We don’t want any car accidents, do we?’

  ‘Kimi, good girl,’ I echoed, even though it was second nature to Kimi to sit before we crossed a street. When we reached the opposite side, I said, ‘Steve and I have talked about it. We’re both . . . we’re mindful, I guess you’d say, that Fiona left from our house. It’s not as if we’d let her start out when she’d been drinking. She hadn’t. She did take an antihistamine, but she was a doctor, and she must’ve known what she was taking. She had allergies. It must’ve been an antihistamine she was used to, something she took all the time.’

  Instead of saying that she’d already thought of everything I’d just pointed out, Gabrielle said, ‘Well, yes. So when there were antihistamines in her system . . . they’d have checked, I assume. They would, you know, after that kind of accident.’

  ‘There must have been an autopsy. There had to have been.’

  As if changing the subject, Gabrielle said, ‘I ate a bit of everything yesterday. Well, more than a bit. And then there�
��s that picture of me with grooming spray in my face.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Three incidents. The dinner before Fiona left. That picture, which was taken in the parking lot at the match in Newton. And yesterday at the armory.’

  ‘Yes?’ I waited as Kimi lifted her leg on a tree. I’d been afraid that spaying her might decrease her political activism or possibly even moderate her extremism, but my fears were unwarranted and, in any case, senseless. I mean, would a hysterectomy make Germaine Greer start acting like Phyllis Schlafly?

  With a smile, Gabrielle said, ‘You think I’m paranoid, but I’m not.’

  ‘I’m just having trouble following you.’

  ‘Those three incidents. Now, what do they have in common? Well, I’ll tell you what they have in common: Vanessa.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know she’s a friend of yours. But stop and think who was there all three times.’

  ‘For a start, you and I were. So was Steve. And there’s no solid reason to believe that Fiona’s accident was anything other than an accident. Well, there’s reason to wonder, but there’s no proof.’

  ‘Of course there isn’t. Holly, the point was to have it be an accident, which it was. It was a car accident. Except that it was no accident.’

  ‘Gabrielle, I didn’t know about your change of plans until yesterday morning. How could Vanessa have known that you were planning to drive to Maine last night? Unless you think that she always carries a supply of . . . whatever caused Fiona’s accident.’

  ‘But she did know! She walked Ulla down Appleton Street while I was loading my car, and I told her.’

  ‘OK. But Vanessa wasn’t the only person present all three times. Besides us, I mean. What about the rest of her family? Tom. Hatch. And Avery, especially Avery, at least according to you. If Avery really does have some sort of . . . unnatural affection for her brother, then she was the one with a motive to get rid of Fiona. And at dinner at our house and then again yesterday, she was hovering over the food.’

  ‘So was Vanessa. But I’ll concede that at the match, Avery was the one I saw with a camera.’