Adam and Evil

by Gillian Roberts

  Seventeen

  SHE INHALED. I HEARD IT.

  “You’re alive!” I nearly sobbed it out. “Oh, Bethie, you’re alive.”

  She started a nod, but cut it short with a wince. “Okay,” she gasped.

  “Can’t breathe?” I looked around wildly. The two women stared from across the street. “Get help!” I said. “Ambulance!” I thought maybe I’d already said it. Or maybe they’d already gotten it, but I couldn’t wait to find out. I tried to remember CPR, damned myself for not taking the refresher course, but thought I had some lifesaving techniques still up there.

  “Couldn’t!” Beth said in a harsh whisper. “Can now. Am. But my head hurts. And my leg—”

  Her leg looked bad, bending at not quite the correct angle. And bleeding. But she didn’t need to know that yet. “You’ll be fine,” I said. Until that moment I’d never quite known why people blurt that out, but now I know it’s a reflex. A gruff, gut-level request to the gods when there isn’t time for lengthy prayer sessions, pleadings, and offerings. “Thank God you’re alive,” I said. “I don’t have to go clean out your rice carton.”

  She almost smiled. “Noise,” she said.

  That there was and had been, nonstop, layers upon layers. The brake squeals, the car crash, shouts and screams, male and female, across the street and down and from windows above. The women telling us not to be nervous—so nervous themselves they repeated it endlessly, a tape on continuous play. And maybe me. Maybe a little bit of the noise was me. I’m not saying I was crying, or screaming—but maybe something. Now boil all that down and squeeze it into about three seconds’ worth and you’ll have it.

  I tried to reduce my share of the noise output and leaned closer to Beth.

  “Aspirin in my bag,” she said, trying once again to lift her head, and immediately giving up.

  “Don’t—don’t move,” I said, thinking spinal injury. “Don’t do anything. I’ll find it.” Were you supposed to pop aspirin before a doctor looked at you? Could it hurt?

  “Don’t be nervous—I called! I had my phone and I called 911!” the woman across the street shouted for the fifth time in a row. She acted as if she were on the other side of a raging river, hallooing us, unable to cross. “Stay calm. An ambulance will be here any minute. I called them on my cell phone.”

  I wanted to tell that woman, who was barely containing her hysteria, that I loved her, but Beth was so agitated, I had to pay what little attention I had left to her.

  “My bag,” Beth repeated. “Need my bag.”

  “Don’t worry!” the woman screamed across the street. “I called the police!”

  I looked up—my hip didn’t feel great, but it didn’t seem the time to mention it, only to stay still as long as I could— and saw nothing except that the reason the dark car had been stopped was that it had made another right, into a parked car halfway up the block. I looked more attentively, although clear vision was prevented by a parked off-road vehicle doing its dinosaur thing in center city Philadelphia. The least those damn things could do is get off the roads, as advertised.

  The good news was that it wasn’t going to be hard getting the dark car’s license plate. Literally. That car wasn’t going anywhere. Two men on the far side of the street ran toward it. They could have strolled. Backward. The dark car was wedged in at an angle that didn’t look forgiving. It was going to be difficult for the passengers to get out, let alone flee.

  “Are you sure you had your bag?” I asked, continuing in my acutely stupid mode of meaningless conversation. If there’s one accessory a woman knows she’s got with her, it’s her bag.

  Beth tried to push herself up.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “My head—”

  “No—I mean do not move! Haven’t you seen enough movies to know that?” But that always had to do with moving a victim, not yourself. Maybe if your own muscles were working enough to move, you should. Medical training via feature films didn’t answer everything, and since what I didn’t know could definitely hurt her, I tried to cover all bases by allowing nothing. “No aspirin, either. Thins the blood. The ambulance is coming. Don’t worry. Relax.” I had now broken all previous records for saying stupid things that didn’t make anything better.

  “My bag,” Beth repeated.

  I heard the whine of an approaching ambulance and the siren of a police car. People shouted from down where the dark car was stuck. People shouted back from our corner. My rescuer across the street repeated herself again and again: “Don’t be nervous! An ambulance is coming!” A man bellowed, “I was having a goddamn meal in the restaurant when he comes around, and look at my car!” I felt battered by the incoherence of the moment—message overload from sirens and shouts, movement of people around us, near and far, and then over us—and could not imagine how Beth must be feeling except worse. I bent over her and was interrupted by paramedics getting to her; by somebody shouting that somebody else had the guy and he maybe needed a doctor, too; by a policeman checking the scene, moving people back; by the paramedic examining my hand, scraped and slightly raw, to my surprise; and then by a voice. The voice. It cut through everything else—cut through in its own unique way, softly.

  “Mandy! Sweet Je—Mandy! You all right? Jesus!” All this said as he ran from the far corner toward me.

  I couldn’t turn and greet him because the paramedic was checking my eyes, but he told me I was fine just as Mackenzie reached me, barked at the cop that he was one, too, bent down, and took me gingerly in his arms. His blue eyes had a film of moisture over them. “I thought I saw that red jacket from down the street—all the commotion—I thought you were—” And then he paused, took several deep breaths in a row, nodded, and smiled his relief.

  I wondered when he’d remember that he was furious with me. I certainly wasn’t going to remind him.

  “We’ll be taking your sister in for some patching and observation,” the emergency worker said. “She’ll be fine. Bruised up, but fine. You probably want to come in and be checked out, too. Just to be sure.”

  “I’ll phone her husband.”

  It was the paramedic’s turn to nod.

  “You want my phone?” The woman who’d been across the street and made the call was now standing about two feet from me. “I have my phone right here. That’s how I called the—”

  I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll call him later. Soon. From home. And thanks. You saved the day.”

  She balanced her weight on one foot, then the other, searching for a new role in this drama. “I saw that car,” she said abruptly. “I saw what happened, and let me tell you— you’re lucky to be alive! It was going like a maniac! One second later and everybody would have been dead.”

  I didn’t find her patter cheering. The cop, however, was intrigued. “You’re a witness?” he said.

  First she nodded enthusiastically, waved her girlfriend over, and said, “We both are.” Her friend shook her head. “Didn’t actually see anything,” she said. “Don’t want to get involved.”

  And then the phone lady reconsidered and half shrugged. “Now that you mention it … My memory stinks. Everybody says so. Plus it happened so fast. Scared me to death, it did.”

  I decided they could find their moral centers without my assistance or interference.

  “My bag,” Beth said. “My bag!” Her voice was getting stronger. A good sign.

  A second patrolman walked toward us and heard Beth. “She mean pocketbook? Maybe brown with a twisted gold lock?”

  “Curved,” Beth said. “The clasp curves.”

  “To be honest, I’d call it more like twisted now,” the cop said.

  “It’s my favorite bag,” Beth said, and I was surprised to see large tears dribble toward her ears as she lay on her back on the stretcher. I reminded myself again about her having bumped her head. I was going to insist on scans if she was going to carry on about pocketbooks when she’d nearly been killed.

  “It died in place of
you,” I said. “Sacrificed itself. Jumped in front of the car to save you. Think of it that way.”

  “My bag,” Beth repeated, but softly this time.

  “I’m sure it was, but now it’s evidence, ma’am. It apparently hooked onto the bumper and was dragged down the street.”

  Beth groaned.

  “You in pain? New pain?” the paramedic who was settling her on the gurney asked.

  “My bag!” she said. “Everything’s in it.”

  “I know,” the patrolman said. “Won’t be able to put a new face on for a while.”

  “No, I mean my list of contacts for my business.”

  Mackenzie glanced over at me, one eyebrow raised. Business? he silently mouthed.

  “Her new business. She’s minding her own business.” In my exhausted, relieved, fatigued state, I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, let alone said. I sat on the curb, quietly laughing to myself, frightening the hell out of everyone else.

  “All my phone numbers,” she continued. “My keys, my wallet—all my ID. My date book—how will I know when anything—”

  “Dragged, not run over, is what I was told,” the patrolman said. “Contents are probably fine. We’ll inventory them, and I’m sure you can have your lipstick back. Doesn’t seem evidence of much that we’d need at the station.”

  I stopped laughing. “Her lipstick?” I said. “She’s starting a business and all you can think of is—”

  Mackenzie gently touched my forearm. “Forgive him. He knows not what he fails to think about,” he whispered.

  I hoped his whispered confidence signified that we’d jumped the chasm and were on the other side. The same side. That we’d never look back, either, because it was come-home-all-is-forgiven time. I was truly tired of being angry with him or about him or because of him. It had been interesting to try that on for a while, but it got old quickly, and I hoped I hadn’t realized too late how poorly it fit.

  Nonetheless, I glared at the patrolman—I yam what I yam—but as he was not looking at me, I gave it up. It would have required extensive consciousness raising, anyway, and I wasn’t exactly up to it.

  Instead, I looked toward the car down the street, from which area now emanated the sounds of an enraged man and a furious woman. I had the sense of having already missed a great deal of a major fight. I also suspected that what had just happened was a slow silencing of the crowd. The quarrelers had become street theater, and all of us were audience.

  She screamed: “I told you to keep your hands off! Want to kill me?”

  He shouted: “I was trying to avoid—look what happened!”

  “Your fault! All your fault! You want me dead, don’t you? That has to be it. You want everybody dead.”

  “If you’d let up, if you’d just for one minute let up—”

  “You let up! I can’t afford to. You nearly—”

  “My nose is bleeding. Can’t you have a little—”

  “Big deal! You keep bleeding me—it serves you right.”

  “You owe—”

  “Go to hell! It’s mine. She’s dead, it’s mine! If this had happened, my mother would have left it all to—”

  The damned four-by-four blocked my view of the drama. I didn’t want Mackenzie to think I wasn’t totally consumed by the nearness of him, but the fact was, I’d nearly been killed, and so a tiny portion of my consciousness was really eager to know who’d done it. I walked a few paces into the street and saw a blond man holding a handkerchief to his nose, and a woman in dark clothing with a pale patterned scarf and dark hair pulled straight back. She looked like a fashion model— she sounded like a fishwife. I knew them. Knew them both.

  But I’d never expected to see them together. “Those people,” I said. Then I lost confidence. Maybe I was doing another Turn of the Screw number, now putting my ghosts together as an evil duo. For there they were, two people, each of whom had carefully mentioned how dreadful the other one was.

  “What?” Mackenzie said, suddenly eager to listen to whatever fantasies I might spout. “What people? Those two? What about them?”

  I watched while they fought on, although he made a great show of turning his back to her while she screamed about his wanting her dead, too.

  I blinked, tried to see as clearly as possible. I no longer trusted my first impressions. “I think that’s Emily Fisher’s husband—Ray Buttonwood, the one she was divorcing—and her sister, Helena. Is that possible? That he—or she—that they were in the car that hit us? Together?” I started to shake. If that were true … if that were possibly true … “They tried to kill us,” I whispered. “On purpose.”

  A second patrolman had gone back and forth between the two accident scenes on the street, and once he knew Mackenzie was a cop, he’d pretty much backed off. But as I spoke he looked at me sharply, then at Mackenzie, then back to me. “You know Mr. Buttonwood, ma’am?” he asked.

  Then it was him. It was them. I wasn’t crazy, and they’d tried to kill us. One of us or both of us. I nodded in response to the policeman’s question before I realized that in truth I did not know the man. I knew his name and occupation. I knew what he’d been doing, in theory, Thursday. A block away from the murder. I had opinions and emotions about him, but I actually didn’t know him at all except for having been introduced in front of an elevator. “My sister knows him.” I gestured toward the ambulance, where Beth waited while the paramedics tried to get a word in edgewise between Ray Button-wood and Helena Spurry. It had to be a technicality, to avert a possible lawsuit, because they looked hale enough, in full battle mode, all engines chugging as far as I could see. A bloody nose seemed the only injury, and possibly Helena was having first aid for dishevelment; a cord of her black hair had sprung loose from its tight binding. Ray’s posture, despite the nose and the crash, was still that officious-looking military bearing. How hurt could he be?

  “My sister knew his wife, the woman who was strangled at the library last week,” I said. “Knows him, too. For a long time.”

  The woman who had not wanted to be a witness gasped. “Oh, my God,” she said to her companion. “Did you hear that? She knows a woman who was murdered, too.”

  “My sister, officer,” I repeated, “the woman in the ambulance. She knows him. He’s a lawyer and he’s in the same firm as my brother-in-law.” My hands would not stop trembling. It had been on purpose. Beth and me—one or both. They’d aimed for us.

  Mackenzie didn’t say a thing. He certainly didn’t suggest that I was having another attack of paranoia.

  But apparently, having found me basically hale, he lost interest, because without a single syllable of explanation, and never a backward glance, he took off down the street toward the miserable couple.

  I squelched my stab of annoyance. “He’s on that case,” I said out loud, to remind myself of his professional obligations. Despite my aches, despite feeling as if I had a low-grade fever every time I let my mind return to the idea that I’d been a target, I felt a surge of elation at being vindicated. Now even the cop would know that there were other suspects, or at least two others to suspect. To check out. That perhaps one or two of them had just tried to kill my sister, but why? Because she’d seen him taking something from Emmy’s apartment? But maybe I was the one he was aiming the car for. Or she was aiming for. Because I’d been snooping around Emmy’s apartment and Helena’s store, saying I didn’t think Adam had killed her sister. Because I’d pushed Beth to ask too many questions about his whereabouts. About the will.

  Or maybe I was constructing something out of nothing, just so I’d have a story to explain my bruises. And a story in which I played a major role, wasn’t a mere footnote. To not simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Still, whatever their motive, if Helena was really with Ray, what were they doing together? He’d justified going through his dead wife’s apartment by saying Helena would have taken a family heirloom, that she was greedy. And Beth had suggested the same thing in a dif
ferent context—that Helena was jealous of whatever her sister had.

  Helena herself had implied nothing but a vast and permanent disapproval of her brother-in-law. Her sister, she’d said, had been unlucky. Married to a rotten man.

  Had they both protested too much, and were they, possibly, romantically involved? Could both have wanted Emily out of the way?

  “Don’t tell Mom!” Beth called out, breaking through my stupid, circular speculations. “Get my bag—the business stuff.” The paramedics closed the ambulance.

  “Bethie kept reassuring me, saying everything would work out between us,” I murmured to Mackenzie, who’d returned from the far end of the street, his skinny notebook back in his pocket. “I believed her, too. I believed in big-sister hocus-pocus, that she’d find a way to make things better—but I didn’t mean for her to do this! This is an extreme way of getting us past the rift, don’t you think?” Although, in fact, it had apparently worked. All it required was my getting the stuffing knocked out of me, the fear that my sister was dead, and the appearance of my knight-errant to save me if need be. And just like that … peace in our time.

  He took both my hands in his. I wanted to ask him about Buttonwood and Spurry. I knew he must have learned something. But he wasn’t wearing his detective face, and when he said, “How about we talk?” he definitely didn’t sound like a cop.

  I nodded. The prospect and all it implied felt terrifying, facing demons and unanswered questions and risking everything all over again.

  But it also felt inexpressibly comfortable, like falling back into my life. Of course, as I thought of it, imagined us talking, I remembered again how much ground needed to be covered, how much needed saying.

  For the duration of this time on the sidewalk, the other pressures of the week—or most of them—had receded, paled in contrast to imminent death. Now they were back. We had a lot to talk about.

  “I have one thing to say—”

  “Hold off till we’re home,” he said. “First I’ll take you to the hospital for a look-see, make sure you’re fit.”