Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

by Gillian Roberts

  Mackenzie shook his head. “England?” he said. “Grad school? Where? Cambridge? Oxford? London School of Economics? What subject?”

  “I…it’s still kind of…I…” I could have lied. I knew then I could have whipped something up, something that was so British I had to be there. English literature, for starters. Logic would be on my side, except I couldn’t lie. Didn’t want to. Wasn’t in the habit of doing so, most particularly, especially, with this man.

  “Ah,” he said. “It isn’t about studyin’, it’s about movin’ on an’ movin’ out, do I have that right?”

  “Listen, I didn’t mean—when I said that to Sasha, it was a whim, pure speculation, talk, a—”

  “Is this because of Adam? I know you’re agitated, annoyed with me—and I with you—but to split…I had no idea.” He sat down on the couch again, heavily. “You could have said something.”

  “Yes. Right. I would have. No, wait—that makes it sound as if it is because of Adam. Or something. It isn’t even an it!” I sounded like a world-class jackass. And I wasn’t making sense, even to myself, so how could I hope to make sense to Mackenzie? “This isn’t because of Adam, although I wish—Sometimes your job seems like a third person here, and you’re so bullheaded—”

  “As opposed to your willingness to listen to the opposite side?”

  I ignored that. “I said that about joining her—I said that maybe mostly to hear how it sounded because…” I, too, sat down. Balancing on my two feet no longer felt safe or possible. “Because I feel lost. I don’t know if I’m a teacher anymore. I don’t know if I’m doing anybody any good or harming them. I don’t know if I’m going to be employed anymore. I don’t know where we are.”

  “That part at least, that last thing—we could have talked. Could have talked about it all, but definitely about that part. I’d think we owe each other that much.”

  He was right. I knew he was right even though his words were so slurred by now they were barely English. “Everything’s falling apart,” I said. “All at once.” I had a sudden rush of hope. We could make this better. Look, we were starting to.

  He looked at me with eyes that suddenly seemed the precise shade of blue that gave its name to sorrowful days and music. “It’s not the way you’re sayin’ it. Not as if it all just happens to you while you do nothin’. You’re pushin’ things over yourself, it seems to me. Like a little kid who wants to see what’ll happen if she topples what she’s built.”

  His voice was practically a whisper, but what I heard were shouts.

  “You want to talk now?” I asked.

  He stood up. “I want air. Need to walk some. A breather.”

  He was gone within seconds. I watched the door close behind him and felt my skull fill with words written in thick capitals, words I’d seen on the computer screen before it crashed, words that weighed and pressed and bolted themselves to my brain: FATAL ERROR, FATAL ERROR.

  And more softly, like a lament: You are losing your best friend.

  And then, good English teacher that I was, I edited them, revised them, made them closer to the truth. I wasn’t losing anything; Mackenzie was right. I wasn’t a little victim girl, standing innocently by as bad things happened to me. Not all the time. Not now, for sure. I’d behaved as if I could opt to leave, unilaterally behaved as if I could have my adventure, follow wherever it took me while Mackenzie and whatever we had was wrapped in plastic and tossed in the deep freeze. As if he didn’t matter and didn’t count. I wasn’t losing my best friend—I was tossing him out with a negligent, dismissive flick of my wrist.

  I was hurting everything I touched—first Adam and now Mackenzie. Something was very wrong with me.

  My eyes stung from something more than frustrated tears. Smoke and then an acrid stench hit my nostrils. The forgotten pork was burning. Some things are doomed from the git-go.

  Sixteen

  I sat in a near stupor. If I let myself think, then I was going to have to admit the scientific truism that every action has a reaction. Plus the less scientific but equally apt aphorism that I’d made my bed and had to lie in it. Actually, I wanted to—but it was too early in the day, although I surely understood why emotionally overcome Victorian women had taken to their beds, sometimes for years.

  Besides, I was born in the wrong century, at the wrong time, with the wrong personality for swoons and neurasthenia. I had to solve this, but how? And in what way?

  I tried to reverse the roles, and honestly didn’t know if I would be willing to forgive if Mackenzie had “forgotten” about me enough to never mention that he planned to relocate elsewhere, leaving me behind. Even if he wasn’t sure he was going to do so, had only mentioned it as I had, to test it out, I’d feel hurt and resentful as hell that he hadn’t tested it out on me.

  What had I been thinking of? Flirting with the librarian, with all sorts of destructive ideas. Flirting with disaster.

  I tried to sink back into the painless gray-flannel nothingness of the stupor, but it would have none of me. Just as well, because the phone rang.

  I was sure it was Mackenzie and that this call would move us to the next stage, whatever that was. I was afraid to lift the receiver, held my breath.

  Let the machine pick up, I decided. Let me hear what sort of message was forthcoming before I had to do anything. My reactions were off lately. Skewed.

  The phone rang again.

  Coward. He’s making a move. You aren’t supposed to duck. I lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I said, angry with myself for letting my nervousness show.

  “Oh… I’m… oh, I don’t know…you have to—you said—I don’t know—”

  I instinctively pulled back, away from the receiver, as if it could hurt me. “Adam?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” a voice whispered back.

  “Where are you?”

  “Lost.”

  “Yes. Can you see any—”

  “My scarf.”

  “Lost your scarf. Yes. But are you okay?”

  Silence. Not good. Of course he wasn’t okay. He was ill, and virtually abandoned by his parents, who wanted to believe that this would blow over, that he was safe with his dangerous so-called friend, that he’d be fine, get into a good college, justify their existence.

  “Adam—what do you want? Why have you been calling me? What do you need? Please let me help you.” This maybe I could do right. Finally. “Tell me where—”

  The phone slammed down.

  Nothing, a voice in my head tolled. Nothing works. I can do nothing right. Nothing makes sense.

  The phone rang again. He’d changed his mind. I grabbed it. “Adam? Don’t hang up this time, I—”

  “This is not Adam, Amanda!” The voice was definitely female. “Don’t tell me you mean that mentally ill boy, the one who—Please. This is your sister; remember me?”

  “Beth?”

  “Is there another sibling I don’t know about?”

  You’d think my mind, already boggled with the turnarounds and miseries of recent days and minutes, would have no room for any more amazement. Wrong. “You—it’s just that you seldom phone, and this is dinner hour. The time you told me not to ever call you because things were too hectic there. Are you okay?”

  She giggled. “Things probably are hectic there, but I’m around the corner from you.”

  The city mouse in town—again? The third time recently that I knew of? What was going on?

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No,” I said, and the memory of the burned dinner and, worse, the reason for its burning moved my attention away from Beth-amazement and back to my woes.

  “Is Mackenzie home?”

  “No,” I said again. “Not really.”

  She must have pondered this a moment. Then she returned to her upbeat voice. “Let me treat you to dinner. Girls’ night out.”

  “That’s sweet, and usually…but I’m not hungry, and I’m really…I’m no fun.”

  “You sound—what’s going on?”<
br />
  “I can’t really talk about…” Why not? Beth was as close to normal as anybody I knew. Beth was sane. “Remember the other night?” I said. “When you made up that excuse for not going home?”

  “You mean about you and Mackenzie?” Her voice was merry. “Oh, gee—you know, I told you that, but—”

  “You could use it as an excuse again tonight,” I said. “Difference is, this time it’s accurate.”

  “I’ll be right over,” she said. “Buzz me in.” The merriness was so far gone from her voice it was hard to believe it had ever been there. I wanted to tell her about Adam, too. No matter what she thought about him in the abstract—because of how I’d poisoned her mind, she was a mother. She had to care about some other mother’s child living on the streets, not able to protect himself.

  But she was on her way, sounding like someone who knew things, someone who would solve whatever was wrong. Everything that was wrong. She sounded like a big sister.

  She must have been two feet away when she called, because the buzzer sounded before I had a chance to tidy myself up, and according to what I saw in the mirror, my attempts at thinking or avoiding thought both involved raking my hair. When I buzzed her back, brush in hand, I still looked like one of the Three Stooges.

  She was wearing her suburban uniform: a blue blazer, white shirt, tailored khaki slacks, and proper low-heeled brown pumps. That, at least, hadn’t changed. And she immediately launched into a whole bunch of words, all of them sympathetic, supportive, and encouraging, even before she had the slightest idea what was going on.

  Her actions were, in essence, the absolute opposite of mine with regard to Mackenzie. I wasn’t sure what Beth was saying, but the message was clear—I care about you, I care about you, I care about you.

  Made me want to cry, but that would have provoked more sisterly mothering, so I controlled myself, and instead we exchanged further murmurs. It was a chorale of sorts, or a two-part invention. I was vague and sad and said “I don’t know” a whole lot of times, and she was sweet and concerned and performed several variations of “It’ll be all right.” Finally she stood up and said, “Enough. We’re getting nowhere. Brush your hair, put on lipstick, we’ll go to dinner and you’ll feel better.”

  There were times when such pronouncements would have either raised my hackles or made me sneer at the sheer banality of my sister’s pattern of thought. This was not such a time. I was grateful for her direction and assurance, and I did as told.

  I put on a fire-engine-red corduroy jacket that I liked to believe was so loud in its fabric merriment that wearing it made it impossible to be depressed.

  Outside, it was all I could do not to search for Mackenzie. He’d needed air, he said, but he hadn’t mentioned what air, where. I hoped it was local air. He loved walking, and often tried to think through a case by taking a five- or six-mile walk, up and down the city streets.

  That never worked for me. Sounded great, like what people did to work things through. But while I do get some exercise, my thinking takes breaks for window-shopping, passersby, traffic hazards, and noise—and winds up in an even worse tangle than it was in when I left home.

  I found myself searching for Adam, too. I had missing men all over town.

  “How about crabs?” Beth asked. “Isn’t DiNardo’s near here?”

  “Around the corner. I feel crabby, anyway.” Mood-appropriate food, although it didn’t matter to me. My appetite had walked out along with the man.

  Beth, however, was ravenous. We were seated in a large booth, and in the nautical dark of the restaurant, I watched her neatly dissect and devour half the Chesapeake Bay’s output while we did a catch-up on our parents, who’d been oddly quiet this week.

  “Mom’s writing her memoirs,” Beth said. “She read that everybody’s selling memoirs these days, even kids in their twenties, so she’s hopping or at least crawling on the bandwagon. But apparently she got to a point and noticed that her adventures lacked a certain excitement. That a lot of her adventures are other people’s adventures. That which the other people call gossip, I suspect.”

  True, but only to a point, so I wondered. I knew my mother had secrets she’d never shared with me and I’d never shared with Beth. I wondered if she was going public with those memories, which weren’t all that dull. And who knew what else there might be?

  “So she’s reevaluating every choice she made—and to tell you the truth, every choice I made,” Beth said with a rueful shake of her head. “She can call it whatever she likes—I still call it nagging.”

  “Welcome to the club. She’s spent years nagging me to be just like you. But something is definitely up, because this last call she changed her tune. Put the whole marriage machine in reverse.” I sighed. “It fed into everything that’s gone wrong. She offered to pay for grad school. To subsidize me if I go have adventures of the undomesticated kind.”

  “Aha,” Beth said, again offering me a small, spice-encrusted claw. I shook my head, and she sighed and ate it herself. “Things begin to make more sense. Back in the loft, it was pretty much a jumble, but now I see….”

  “Good, because I don’t.”

  She looked at me, cracked yet another claw, and picked out the tender white meat. Then she looked at me again, this time with a smile. We had changed gears in some way. “So just because your life is in a complete shambles now, aren’t you going to ask why I called? I have news.”

  “News?” I moved my mind back into the world. “Have you found out where Ray Buttonwood was that afternoon?”

  She grimaced. “Who cares? Not that I didn’t try. And Sam reacted completely predictably. The client was late, but then they worked all afternoon, and yes, they took breaks, and no, he didn’t follow Ray, and why was I drilling him, anyway. So what can I tell you? He was and wasn’t under observation all day, just about. I do know they were taking the deposition one block from the library.”

  “One block? My God, it’d be… What about the will? Did Sam find out how much money Emily was left?”

  “Can we drop that subject? It creates problems for me, and I’m positive that a man doesn’t take a coffee break to go strangle his wife. It doesn’t make sense. And Helena—even if she were desperate about the money—Helena’s too…too fastidious to do a thing like that.” Beth cleared her throat, sighed histrionically, and folded her hands in front of her, behind the plate full of crab shells.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I can’t shake the idea—and unless somebody else admits to killing her, my student is going…” My sister was plainly and simply not interested. “Tell me, Beth. What is your news and why are you here in town? Again. At this time of day—dinner, baths, bedtime stories.”

  She raised her eyebrows skeptically.

  “I am interested. Truly. Have you run away from home?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve been working. Scouting locations.” She unclasped her hands, lifted a crab claw, smiled, and waited.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning scouting locations.”

  “Like for movies? Commercials? I don’t get it. Why would you? For whom?”

  “I’m starting a business along with two other women. It’s called As Needed, and we’re supplying total party and event services.” Her voice sounded charged as she described what she’d been doing. “We have a stable of experts we can call on, people who can do everything a person might need. We’re catering, but we’ll provide music of any kind, decorations, flowers, entertainment—the whole shebang. And I’ve been looking at unusual places to rent. We want to have the best, absolutely most comprehensive—corporations, too, you see—and—”

  If I’d been dumbfounded to find my sister in the city again, the idea of her becoming an entrepreneur left me speechless.

  Her smile was a mix of smugness and pure glee. “Been working on the idea for a few months, but I didn’t want to tell anybody—except Sam, of course—until I knew it was really going to happen. Look here.” She rumbled in her pocketbook, pull
ed out a slim card case, and presented me with a slick business card with a logo that looked like a shield with a whisk crossed over a note of music. AS NEEDED was in bold print, then a phone number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and the alphabetically-in-order names of three women: Sondra Cruz, Marilyn Goldstein, and Beth Wyman.

  “The kids are growing up. Alexander’s in a preschool group and Karen’s in first grade. And Sam’s great about it. I don’t know how he’ll be when we get rolling—it’ll mean nights out and such—but he’s really pitching in now with the kids.”

  “Where did this come from?”

  She looked peeved. “I always knew I’d do something. Didn’t know what, but did you think I was going to be just like Mom?”

  “You seemed so happy—so absolutely contented.”

  “I was—am. I was lucky; because of Sam’s job, I was able to be there for those first few years. But I have this mother I love but do not want to emulate. Did you think that I, too, would use all my energy and brain power to overengineer my kids’ lives—and the life of anyone else who’d let me?”

  Precisely what I’d thought, but despite my recent record for emotional cruelty, I couldn’t bring myself to say so. “I’m amazed. I had no idea. You’ll be perfect, too—your parties are always the most thought-through of any I’ve been to. You’re a natural, and it sounds like fun. Hard, but fun. Why didn’t you ever say something?”

  “Why didn’t you ever ask?”

  “Man, am I striking out in the human relations department today.”

  “Not to worry. Now that I’ve got you feeling guilty, I can bore you to tears with what I’m doing. Like today I looked at five places, including a terrific gallery right here in Old City. I can’t say it was an original inspiration, though. Sam’s office had a reception honoring some political hopeful there last night.”