Scared Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  “Well, he is the primary breadwinner, isn’t he?” Mom says, taking another sip of her wine.

  “He was,” I say. “But I make enough to do okay on my own.”

  Mom dismisses my comment with a look of disgust and an impatient wave of her hand, as if she’s wafting away some nasty odor. “What have I always told you about letting your husband feel as if he’s the king of the castle?”

  This is Rule #1 in Mother’s Rules for Wives, a set of ten conventions she swears will keep any marriage strong and intact. She’s been beating the rules into my and Desi’s brains since we were old enough to walk. The fact that Mom’s been married and divorced four times makes the validity of her advice a bit dicey, but she chooses to ignore that.

  “You undermined David’s masculinity by insisting on working all the time,” Mom goes on. “It’s no wonder he strayed.”

  Desi, who is stirring her sauce on the stove, sucks in a breath and gives me a wide-eyed look. Lucien wisely takes this opportunity to slip off his stool and escape from the kitchen.

  “I’ve worked all my adult life, Mom. That was how I met David in the first place, if you’ll recall. Had I not been working, I most likely never would have married him.”

  “Yes, but once you did marry him you should have quit your job. You should have focused on being a wife instead of a nurse, and on making a nice home.”

  “We had a nice home, until David wrecked it. And why shouldn’t I be allowed to do something I love the same way David does?”

  Mom shakes her head sadly. “You just don’t get it, Mattie,” she says.

  “No, Mom,” I say irritably. “You’re the one who doesn’t get it. David risked my life by sleeping with another woman. In my book of rules, that’s an unforgivable sin.”

  Mom is about to come at me with another comment when we are all literally saved by the bell—the chiming of the front doorbell. I make use of the interruption to escape Mom and her insane list of rules. By the time I reach the front door, Lucien has already opened it and I see William standing on the stoop. I hurry over to greet him and make introductions.

  Lucien is courteous but it’s obvious he doesn’t want to get caught up making small talk to an odd-looking man with a bad comb-over, so I steer William out to the kitchen, praying that my instincts on this one are correct. After doing a quick round of introductions, Desi pours a glass of wine for William and hands it to him. Making no effort to conceal what he’s doing, he holds the glass up to the light and examines it carefully. Can’t say I blame him after what happened at my place.

  “William is a very talented financial analyst and accountant,” I say.

  “That’s nice,” Mom counters, watching him with a curious expression.

  As soon as William is done inspecting his glass, he takes a sip and then focuses on the other two women in the room. He nods at Desi and then zeroes in on Mom. His expression softens noticeably and one of his eyebrows arches in surprise. With her porcelain skin, blue eyes, trim figure, and well-maintained blond dye job, Mom is an attractive woman, at least physically.

  “It’s a definite pleasure to meet you,” he says, taking Mom’s hand and brushing his lips over it. As I watch, I make a mental bet with myself as to which of these germaphobes will try to wipe the cooties away first but surprisingly, neither one does. “Mattie said you were attractive, but she didn’t do your beauty justice. You are a very striking woman.”

  Mom makes a stuttering motion with her mouth but no sound comes out. For once, she is speechless. She smiles at William and does a coquettish tilt of her head as a faint tinge of pink colors her cheeks.

  William stares for a few seconds more, then looks over at Desi, who has just finished scraping Italian sausage from her cutting board into a frying pan. As she takes the board to the sink and starts to wash it with one of those soap wand thingies, William’s eyes grow huge.

  “You need to use bleach,” he says. “Meats can harbor all kinds of bacteria that soap alone won’t get rid of. You’d be amazed at the horrible diseases you can get from something like that.”

  My mental uh-oh is quickly countered by the heightened interest Mom is now showing William. “You are so right,” she says, apparently in control of her voice again. “I’m constantly on these girls about stuff like that. One can’t be too safe when it comes to germs.”

  She locks eyes with William and I imagine love being born over the mental image of a Petri dish. I’m thinking this dinner is going to be a huge success on all counts when Ethan enters the room.

  “Aunt Mattie,” he says. “Check out my new pet.” He thrusts his arm out as he approaches and there sitting on his sleeve is a three-inch-long bug. “It’s a Madagascar hissing cockroach,” he says proudly. And as if on cue, the bug sits back on its haunches, waves its hairy antennae in the air, and hisses.

  The hissing sound is closely followed by a high-pitched screech and a loud crash as William faints dead away, taking one of the bar stools down with him.

  Chapter 32

  Despite all the drama, the evening isn’t a total bust. When I couldn’t arouse William right away and the gash on his head refused to stop bleeding unless I put direct pressure on it, Desi called for an ambulance. There was some brief confusion when the ambulance arrived and saw a hearse already parked out front, but that was cleared up with a few explanations.

  William is now awake but foggy, his comb-over safely contained inside a gauze turban, his body loaded on a cot rather than in a coffin. We follow the entourage outside to the driveway and watch as the EMS crew loads William into the ambulance. Mom insists on riding along with him and makes a big enough stink with the ambulance crew that they finally cave and allow her in the rig. As the ambulance pulls away, I can see my mother sitting next to William, stroking his arm and murmuring in his ear.

  Lucien, who briefly appeared in the kitchen right after the incident, has been ensconced in his office ever since, searching his law books in case William decides to sue. Ethan is in his room, hopefully locking his pet roach back inside its cage.

  As Desi and I watch the ambulance disappear down the street she says, “I do believe you made a love connection there.”

  “Not exactly the way I hoped the night would go but hey, I’ll take it.”

  “I’m sorry about Ethan,” she says. “I keep telling him he needs to be careful about showing his bug collection to other people, but he gets so excited he forgets. The kid loves bugs. He reads everything he can get his hands on: books, Internet sites, magazines . . . you name it.”

  “It’s okay. In fact, I think it bonded Mom and William faster than any quiet dinner would have.”

  “It could have been much worse, you know,” Desi says as we turn to head back into the house. “Ethan could have brought out one of his fly farms.”

  I’m afraid to ask but do it anyway. “Fly farm?”

  “It’s an enclosed terrarium type of thing filled with maggots and flies. Ethan has six different ones in his bedroom because he’s studying the reproductive cycles of various types of flies for a school science project.” Desi pauses and shudders. “He’s pretty much done with it at this point. All he has left is to organize his data and write a report. It can’t be soon enough for me. I don’t mind the flies so much but all those maggots give me the creeps.”

  I can sympathize and the mere mention of maggots has me feeling them crawling on me all over again.

  Desi lets me eat a plate of her wonderful dinner and after scarfing it down, I say my good-byes, shoo Erika and her friends out of the hearse, and head for the hospital to check on William.

  Most of the people on duty in the ER at this time of day are night-shifters, and I don’t know them as well as I do the day folks. So rather than venturing into the ER proper, I head for the waiting room, where I find my mother sitting in one of the chairs, reading a magazine.

  “Hey, Mom, how’s William doing?”

  She sets her magazine aside and motions for me to sit next to her. “They
stitched up his scalp wound, but only after William made the doctor clean everything five times. He’s down having a CT scan of his head now. The doctor said he’s pretty sure it will be negative.”

  “That’s a relief,” I say.

  “He’s an interesting guy, very clean. Are you dating him?”

  I shake my head. “We went out on a blind date once, but it didn’t work out.”

  “I see.”

  “So he’s all yours.”

  She gives me a sly look and says, “Is it that obvious?”

  “Well, it is to me. After all, I’ve seen you court before. I know the signs.”

  She flashes me a grim smile. “I haven’t had the best track record when it comes to husbands and beaux, have I? I’ve always been proud of you girls for marrying so well.”

  Here we go.

  “Well, it turns out I didn’t do as well as we originally thought,” I counter.

  She gives me her classic pish-paw wave of dismissal. “You did fine. David made a little mistake. That’s all. I think you’re writing him off too easily. It’s every girl’s dream to marry a doctor. You shouldn’t be so eager to just throw all that away. It gives you social standing and credibility.” She pauses, then adds, “The cream always rises to the top, you know.”

  So does pond scum, I think.

  “Sorry to disillusion you, Mom, but that never was my dream. My dream is to be married to a man who loves me, a man who is faithful, a man who doesn’t risk my health and my life for the sake of a little sexual gratification.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t have looked elsewhere if he was getting what he needed at home,” she says with a sniff. “You know what I’ve always told you girls about keeping things interesting.”

  I did. It was Rule #6 in Mother’s Rules for Wives: don’t be afraid to experiment in the bedroom. David and I did experiment some, but it was pretty chaste. Mostly it consisted of trying different positions and him asking me to wear sexy lingerie. I always went along until the day he came home with a Xena, Warrior Princess costume. I put it on but rather than looking sexy, I looked like the starring role in a Wagner opera. The only thing lacking was one of those Norsky Viking helmets, which would have been somewhat appropriate given my real name, though it also would have lent a whole new meaning to the term horny.

  I’m groping for a way to get Mom off topic when a nurse comes out of the ER care area and approaches. It’s Lucy “Lupus” Julseth, someone I used to work with and one of the people whose names was on Luke Nelson’s patient list.

  “Mattie!” she says, greeting me with a smile. “How the heck are you?”

  “Good as can be expected,” I tell her.

  Lucy looks to my mom and says, “He’s back from his CT so you can come and sit with him if you’d like.”

  “I would,” she says. She looks over at me with a questioning expression and I wave her on.

  “Go ahead. I have to get home but I’ll call you in a day or two.” As my mother heads for the care area of the ER, I say to Lucy, “So you’re working the night shift these days?”

  “Not by choice. Mark and I split up so I needed to make other arrangements for childcare.” She sighs and looks longingly out the window toward the parking lot. That’s when I remember that Lucy is a smoker.

  “Want to step out for a puff?” I ask her. She nods and looks relieved. We head outside to an area just off the hospital property and Lucy lights up. She takes a long drag and blows it out slowly, taking care to see that the smoke blows away from me.

  “It’s hard to arrange childcare when you work these twelve-hour shifts,” she says, taking another drag. “But I need the money and the night shift differential helps. So for now, the kids are spending the nights at my parents’ house and I sleep during the day while they’re in school.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about you and Mark. When did it happen?”

  “A month ago. He said he needed to find himself.” She finger quotes the last two words and rolls her eyes. “What a bunch of bullshit.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  She puffs on her cigarette, shrugs, and nods.

  “Is that why you’re seeing Luke Nelson?”

  Her brow furrows and she gives me a startled look. “How do you know about that?”

  I explain about my investigation into Shannon’s death and how I came across the list of names. “I assure you I’ll keep the fact that you’re seeing Nelson confidential,” I tell her. “I don’t really need to know why you were seeing him, but I’d like to ask you some questions about him, if you don’t mind.”

  “If you want to know if I had an appointment with him on the day Shannon died, some detective already asked me. I did.”

  “What time was your appointment?”

  “Three o’clock.” She stubs her cigarette out on the sidewalk and stuffs the butt back in her pack. “I was there for an hour.”

  “Have you been seeing Nelson for a long time?”

  “I started a couple of months ago when I sensed that Mark and I were drifting apart. I thought some counseling might help me figure out how to get things back on track.”

  “Did it?”

  “Obviously not,” she says with a wry chuckle. She turns to head back inside and I follow along beside her. “Maybe if Mark had gone with me it might have helped but I couldn’t get him to do it and Nelson said he’d prefer to keep it one-on-one for the time being anyway.”

  This strikes me as odd since I’ve always heard that marital counseling is more effective when both parties are involved. “Has seeing Nelson helped you deal with the breakup?”

  We are at the entrance to the ER waiting room and Lucy pauses with her hand on the door. “I started having panic attacks about a week after Mark left and despite trying several medications, they’ve been getting worse. So for my last few visits, Dr. Nelson tried something new, some sort of hypnotherapy. I guess it’s working because I haven’t had an attack since, though to be honest, I don’t remember a whole lot about the sessions.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Look, I have to get back to work, but it was good to see you again. You doing okay since you and David split?”

  “I have good days and bad days.”

  “Any chance of reconciliation?”

  I shake my head. “No, we’re done. I can’t get past the whole cheating thing. I’m a pretty forgiving person, but that’s a bit more than I’m willing to take.”

  Lucy nods and looks away. I sense she’s uncomfortable with my comment and wonder if Mark has strayed, too.

  “You take care,” she says, and before I can ask her anything else, she opens the door and disappears inside.

  Chapter 33

  Lucy’s comments about her experiences with Nelson get me to wondering, so I dig out my cell phone and give Hurley a call.

  “Hey, Winston,” he answers. That whole caller ID thing still freaks me out. “What’s up?”

  “I’m wondering if you could give me some information. You provided us with a list of names for Nelson’s patients but not the times of their appointments. Do you recall who it was that had the four o’clock slot on the day Shannon was killed?”

  “You’re still focusing on him?” he says tiredly. “I know you don’t want to believe your friend could have done this but Nelson’s alibi is solid for the time in question. He didn’t do it. Even with your discovery about Shannon’s eating disorder and the change in the time of death, Erik Tolliver is still our most likely suspect.”

  “Humor me, would you? There’s something about Nelson that bothers me. I can’t put my finger on it, but I can’t let it go yet, either.”

  Hurley sighs and says, “Hold on a minute.”

  I hear him set his phone down and shuffle some papers, and wait until he comes back on the line.

  “Okay, here you go. The four o’clock appointment was a woman named Carla Andrusson. I’ve already talked to her and she verified that she kept her appointment that day.”

>   “Thanks,” I tell him, glad Carla is someone I know. She’s the wife of my dentist, Brian Andrusson, and also a former patient of mine. I was on duty eight years ago when she came into the ER after having a seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor was surgically removed and fortunately proved to be benign. But during the surgery Carla suffered a small stroke that left her with some left-sided facial paralysis and right arm and leg weakness.

  After getting Carla’s home phone number from Hurley, I hang up. It’s well past nine o’clock, so I decide to head for home. I stop at the Kwik-E-Mart on the way to pick up some treats and discover they are out of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. I settle on Cookie Dough instead, and by the time I lug it and my other treasures to the counter, my hands are nearly frostbitten.

  When I get home, Rubbish greets me at the door, winding his way around my feet and purring contentedly. I scoop him up before he can trip me, and carry him to the kitchen, where I fix him up a nice plate of the tuna I just bought for him. While he eats I kick off my shoes and plop down on the couch with my ice cream, turn on the TV, and flip channels until I settle on an old episode of Cheers.

  Twenty minutes later, I’ve dug out all the cookie dough chunks and have nothing but melting ice cream left. I pour a little of the molten remains into a dish for Rubbish, who cautiously sniffs and then laps it up. Nice to know we share similar tastes. I wash the rest of the ice cream down the sink, feeling slightly virtuous for not having eaten the whole thing.

  Sated, I head for the bathroom to take a shower but my cell phone rings. I curse, thinking it must be Izzy with a death call, but to my surprise it’s Hurley.

  “Hey, Winston, what are you doing?”

  “I was just getting ready to hop in the shower before bed. Why?”

  “Can I interest you in joining me for a drink?”

  My heart skips a beat and I start to feel all flushed again. “Sure,” I say. “Where?” Before he answers I start a mental chant: your place, your place, your place.