Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

by Gillian Roberts

  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 Buttonwood 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 different 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—”

&nb
sp; “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.”

  “That’ll take forever.” I could feel bruises working their way from my insides out. I was going to feel like hell. I didn’t need a professional to tell me that.

  “We’ve got time,” he said. “An’ then we’ll go home, and we’ll talk. Then. So it’s not rushed and cramped and prone to misunderstandin’.”

  I nodded and followed him to wherever his car was parked. My hip didn’t hurt as much as it had, and I knew I’d be fine, and that the hospital would be a legal technicality. For Ray Buttonwood’s sake. To prevent a heavy-duty medical claim.

  “I really do have one thing to say first,” I repeated.

  He stopped and looked at me with patient despair. “You’ll never change, will you? You are the most bullheaded, stubborn—”

  I hated what was ahead. Knew it was the most important thing I was going to do today and tonight, knew it was imperative—for him, for me—but nonetheless hated it.

  “Well, then, go ahead,” he said. “You’re so stubborn you’d let yourself die rather than not say your piece, wouldn’t you? What is it you so absolutely have to say first?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I’d just made history, and the shock of it registered on Mackenzie. Saying that word is not my strong suit, even when I think it and feel it and know it. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, trying not to notice as he quickly erased the delight and surprise from his face. “I treated you shabbily and hurt your feelings, and although I didn’t mean to do it, I did do it, and I’m very, very sorry.”

  He seemed ready to say something back, inhaled, closed his mouth, nodded again, and took my hand once more, looking extremely concerned. “We’d better rush you to the hospital,” he said. “You’ve gone into shock.”

  Before I could protest, he grinned. “I know that was real hard for you to do,” he said softly as we slowly walked through the city. “Therefore damn noble and brave. And it’s much appreciated. Very much appreciated. But in future, if we have one, let us both work on this. You don’ need to stage a war an’ nearly get killed, an’ I don’ need to think you’re dead, before we’re both scared enough to say the things that need saying. Deal?”

  “Deal.” We moved on.

  Except for somebody having tried to kill me, it had become a fairly decent evening.

  Eighteen

  One thing I have had the chance to learn—over and over again, alas—is that no matter how staggering and stupefying the events of your (okay, my) life may be, it pretty much doesn’t matter to the rest of the universe.

  And so the next morning, mind abuzz with confusion and questions about what precisely had been going on the night before and why, limping and bruised but declared not in need of hospitalization or medical pampering or even serious mind-altering drugs, I went to work. Had I not needed to, had I not already been in major occupational jeopardy—had I left a decent and current lesson plan—I might have stayed home to spend the day wallowing in self-pity and obsessing about my problems. But I couldn’t, and there is nothing quite as efficient as a gaggle of teens to disabuse you of the illusion that you’re the center of the universe.

  In preparation for this, I attempted to look on the positive side of everything, much as that concept annoys me. But there were positives: primarily, that thanks to a crazed driver, whether or not he—or she—or they—had been trying to kill me or my sister, my love life seemed in a better place than it had for some time. This was good.

  Also, because of that same driver, my mother, who had immediately heard about or intuited Beth’s accident, was sufficiently distracted by the one daughter’s near loss of life that she failed to ask the other daughter what I was doing with the remainder of mine.

  End of list. A very short list.

  I’d add reprieves. Bad things that hadn’t happened. Yet. The Yet List.

  I hadn’t been fired. Yet. I had a few weeks more of employment. It was odd how much that meant to me, even though all the while I was deciding whether I even wanted to continue, whether I was still doing a decent job, whether it wasn’t time for something altogether new. But as long as I wasn’t fired, I could still feel in control of my destiny, and it was a shock to fully realize how basic and profound that need is. I was holding on by my fingernails, true, but that was infinitely better than falling into the abyss—or being pushed there by Havermeyer.

  Second, Adam hadn’t been found. Yet. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad news for him when I imagined him on the street somewhere, high or sick on whatever drugs he was finding, subject to the whims of the bad company surrounding him, police out searching for him.

  But Adam’s missing and wanted status had stalled his parents’ suit against me. They probably didn’t want to attract more attention to him while he was the prime suspect in a murder. So I wasn’t being sued. Yet.

  The Yet List was underwhelming, too. All it had established was that a lot of bad things were poised, waiting to happen to me when the time was right.

  Nonetheless, I was in stasis, carefully balanced, but still in the game. All I had to do was keep Havermeyer’s requested low profile, mine and the school’s, while I figured out what I wanted and how to get it. There was time and maneuverability. Cowardly Havermeyer wasn’t going to do anything publicly.

  To my delight, I realized I was, for the most part, okay. My sibling was going to be fine, too, after her torn ligaments healed and her stitches were removed. Until then, her partners could cover for all her ambulatory duties. And I’d promised to pitch in as much as I could. When the term ended, I might wind up working for or with her. Who knew? That might be my next stop. But for now, I was still employed. No permanent damage to either sister.

  I was halfway up the staircase, en route to my room, when the Bobbsey twins—Jill and Nancy—barreled down, stopping as soon as they saw me. “There she is!” they told each other.

  “Good!” Jill said as Nancy nodded agreement. “We thought we missed you and we had to talk to you?”

  “Tell you something,” Nancy said.

  I suggested we do the telling upstairs because otherwise we risked trampling. It’s amazing how resolutely our students push up or down the stairs en route to classrooms they’d rather avoid altogether.

  The girls didn’t settle down once inside my empty room. Bad sign. Something was off-kilter. Something minor, I decided, or their faces would reflect more. They were the least cryptic of young women.

  But I had other worries, so I gave the girls only a third of my attention. The brush with death the night before had prevented my finishing the garbology collection, and I was juggling lesson ideas to see how I could finesse that gap and catch up on lost time with my other classes as well. “What’s up?” I asked. “I’m so sorry, but I haven’t had time to edit your news story. It will be in the next issue—the end of this month—but I’ve…” No way in hell could I explain the last two days to these innocents.

  Instead, it felt acceptable, or at least expedient, to play on their sympathies. “I had an accident last night—sideswiped by a car. Didn’t get home from the hospital till late.”

  The joy in life disappeared from both their faces. “Oh, Miss Pepper,” they said in unison, conveying volumes of grief and sympathy in three words.

  “I’m fine. Really nothing. I was lucky—only banged up.” I liked playing the stoic heroic guy thing—especially when what I said was the whole truth but sounded as if I were underplaying. I was indeed fine. “Now, what’s up?” Once again I gestured toward chairs close to my desk, but they stood where they were. So be it. I had work to do, so I sat down at my desk and pulled folders out of my briefcase.

  Both of them cleared their throats. “Our parents,” Nancy began. “Our parents are really excited about the newspaper article.”

  “We gave them a copy of the story we wrote?”

  Someday I had to edit Jill’s punctuation, tell her this ques
tioning vocal tag was a sign of insecurity, a need to seek approval. That men did not speak that way. That she had to purge the habit, speak assertively, fight for verbal equality. Someday. Now I had to find out what was up.

  “They’re real excited that you’ve approved the story and that we’re going to have our own article in the paper and all.”

  Pause. No comment from the echo chamber. Big worry signal. I put down a stack of vocabulary quizzes and gave my visitors my full attention.

  “The thing is, they say that since it’s about an actual illegal crime thing, the school administration has to know about it. I mean, we can’t go around knowing about a crime and not reporting it, that’s what they said.”

  “My uncle Josh is a lawyer? He said so.”

  “And reporting it in the school paper, which is what you’re doing, doesn’t count?” I asked. It seemed as if it should. Isn’t that what actual journalists do? Had Woodward and Bernstein filed a police report first?

  “My mother said it wasn’t right. That at least the headmaster of the school had to know about it—”

  “—sooner than a month from now, which is, like, when it’ll be in print? Because it wasn’t fair to spring it on him through an article? It’s his reputation, too?”

  As if I needed reminding of that. Connect the dots into the future, the rest of this term. His school is the viper’s nest, the corrupt center of a criminal ring. It could not be worse.

  And my profile, promised to be kept low, would jump into the stratosphere. At least it would seem that way to Havermeyer, who would scapegoat me as the troublemaker, she who authorized the story.

  The girls’ parents were probably right, and although I was sick of doing the right thing and having it boomerang, I reopened my briefcase and extracted their article. They waited as I skimmed over it. I had a memory of what was in it and hoped against hope that my memory was failing me.

  But there it was on the second page: names. Students’ names, schools’ names, the Philly Prep ringleader’s name. And not on the page—yet—but as a postscript to what was already written, I also saw expulsions, nongraduations, possible revoking of college admissions, involvement of other schools.