Sam collected herself as she reached Robin’s bedroom door. There she noticed the brown Izod sweater hanging on the knob. It was Robin’s favorite, one she’d worn for years. She would put it on after she came home from work and was ready to settle for the evening.
Robin didn’t have this on the night she died. That meant only one thing. She hadn’t been home long when her killer arrived.
Sam took the sweater and held it close to her face. She closed her eyes to allow the sweet fragrance of Robin’s scent to filter through her. Sam put the sweater on and walked into Robin’s bedroom. The bed was made and a black and white picture over the headboard showed a man leaning back in a chair, his foot resting on an unmade bed. He watched a woman put on lipstick. He was shirtless and wearing jeans. She was dressed only in a camisole and panties.
There were two photos on the nightstand. She looked at the photo of Todd and picked up the other, a picture of Brady and Robin. It had been taken a few years ago during the Grandview Police Department’s Christmas party. Brady had asked Robin to come as his date. They had been dancing when the photo was taken.
Brady had his arms around Robin’s waist and her arms were draped over his shoulders. Brady was beaming. Robin was looking at the camera over her shoulder. She looked stunning in her black, sleeveless dress, her smile wide. Her rosy lipstick made her teeth glisten; her dark, rich hair deepened the blue in her eyes. Brady looked much the same in this photo as Sam remembered him to look at Robin’s funeral, except he was wearing a tux.
Nothing out of the ordinary in the bedroom attracted Sam’s attention. She moved to the study. The open date book on Robin’s desk still showed Christmas week. The only thing penciled in beside the two separate times for aerobics class was the afternoon the sisters spent Christmas shopping. Sam smiled remembering they bought bulky sweaters for each other at JC Penney.
The slow burn that had been bubbling inside Sam over Robin’s clandestine doings suddenly welled so fiercely that she pounded her fist down hard on the desk. It began to throb instantly. “Shit, shit, shit,” Sam said disgusted. “Why didn’t she tell me what she was doing?”
Ignoring the pain in her hand, Sam flipped through Robin’s date book. The appointments Robin kept depicted an otherwise normal life filled with the usual routines. Sam paused at an appointment on the tenth of December. It took her by surprise.
“A session with a psychologist?” Sam said aloud as she sat down at Robin’s desk.
When Robin first became sober, she spent the next year camped on the couch of a therapist. During her second year of sobriety, the weekly appointments became monthly. By her third year, Robin saw her therapist just four times.
Sam drew a blank as she tried to recall the last time Robin mentioned seeing a therapist. Yet, here in the appointment book written in her familiar script was an afternoon appointment with a doctor’s name she did not recognize. Sam jotted down the doctor’s name, and the day and time of the appointment.
Morrison meowed loudly distracting her attention. The cat was sitting on his haunches in the doorway.
“What am I going to do with you, Morrison? I can hardly take care of myself. At least that’s what the judge told me, that I needed to learn to take care of myself.”
She had lost April to Jonathan because of the divorce. Her mind wandered often to the day they haggled over custody of the little girl. Jonathan was insistent that she was incompetent to care for April. He told the judge Sam had a drinking problem that she refused to acknowledge.
Sam would not let her mind rest long on what April said to them before they went to court.
“Daddy, I wanna be with you,” April had said and her eyes filled with tears. She could only look at her father, not Sam.
The judge saw it that way, too.
When the judge rendered her decision, Sam felt as though she had been standing on a trap door that had suddenly opened beneath her. And she was certain she had been tumbling down through darkness ever since. At the end of that long, frustrating day in court, Sam accused Jonathan of coaching April, trying to turn their daughter against her. Because Jonathan had April, he kept their home. Sam moved into an apartment and turned to the only friend she could find, her sister.
Sam looked at Morrison. It would be nice to have someone to greet her when she came home. “I guess you’re coming with me,” she said and scooped Morrison into her arms. When she did a small yellow sticky on the floor beneath the desk caught her attention. She put Morrison down as she picked up the sticky. She frowned as she read the note written with her sister’s handwriting.
The words, County Road 676, were followed by a single underlined word.
Finally.
Fourteen
Sam left the newspaper and drove to the blue two-story house off Fifth Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard.
She had come here only a few times during the last six years and only after her sister had pleaded with her. But Robin came weekly.
Sam reached the parking lot just before noon and went inside. The warmth of the room hit her immediately and she unbuttoned her coat and removed her hat. A plaid couch, several mismatched chairs and a dinette set of dark wood made the livingroom appear smaller. Those in the room had looked at Sam when she entered, but she ignored them. The smell of freshly brewed coffee made her want to go to the kitchen for a cup, but instead she headed quickly up the stairs to the last room on the left.
There were three rooms upstairs, a restroom and two rooms for alcoholics who smoked and those who didn’t. They would gather to tell stories about what it meant to live with and try to control their disease.
Chairs were positioned along the perimeter of the dark, paneled room. Two chairs were situated around a narrow table in the center of the room. Sam felt as though she had to squeeze to get inside. She looked at the oblong window opposite the door and decided to sit there. Robin used to sit by the window to let the sun warm her back.
Today the sun had little chance of breaking through the thick gray clouds. The weather had been summer-like, the first two days of the New Year. But when Sam woke this morning, the sky was brooding.
All Robin wanted for her birthday each year was for Sam to attend an AA meeting with her. She came, but reluctantly. Sam sat down heavily, folding her arms tightly across her chest and tried without success to keep thoughts of childhood from crowding her thinking. She allowed herself to remember the first time alcohol ever touched her lips, but not the reasons why.
She was fourteen years old. She had lost track of the days and nights of witnessing both her parents drink themselves into a stupor, vowing never to follow their footsteps. That changed when she became a teenager. Shortly after she turned fourteen, she turned to alcohol because she thought it would help her cope with a common occurrence at home with her father.
By the time she turned sixteen, she was drinking heavily. She read once that adolescents had the tendency to become addicted to substances more quickly than adults did. But that didn’t stop her. She was confident alcohol wouldn’t affect her the way it did her parents. She saw it as a way of getting through what her father had been doing to her. She was determined he would not defeat her.
“Samantha! Hi! Good to see you!”
The woman’s voice pulled Sam from her thoughts and started her heart thudding in her chest. Sam knew who had called her and always thought of sandpaper whenever she heard her voice. Ruth was a crusty woman who Sam guessed was at least sixty. She had been sober for years, but had never given up smoking. Ruth still owned and operated a small bar in downtown Denver. Sam did not know how she could still work around the temptations she had given up. Sam knew how much Robin liked her AA sponsor and she was grateful for all Ruth had done for her sister.
Ruth patted Sam’s shoulder and sat down next to her.
“So good to see you,” Ruth said with a genuine smile, which dissolved quickly into wrinkles that began at the corners of her mouth and continued along the sides of her face in a rippling effect.
“It’s good to see you,” Sam said as she took the time to study Ruth.
Ruth was short and slender and dressed in a dark flannel shirt and faded jeans. Her hair was bleached blonde and Sam had never been certain of its true color. Ruth often wore her hair piled on top her head, but today it was down just past her shoulders. The color looked new and it gave Ruth a fresh look against a weathered face.
“Where’s Robin?” Ruth asked, looking in the direction of the door.
The smile fell from Sam’s face and she turned her attention to the board on the paneled wall that listed the twelve steps.
“What’s wrong?” Ruth asked. When Sam spoke her voice was so low that Ruth had to lean toward her.
“Robin isn’t coming,” Sam said. “She won’t be coming anymore.”
“Did she move? She wouldn’t move without saying good-bye,” Ruth said, her green eyes widened, allowing Sam to see the dark edge of her eyeliner.
Sam shook her head. “She didn’t move, Ruth.” Sam hesitated and took a deep breath. She couldn’t bring herself to talk without sobbing. She felt tears starting to form, but she wasn’t ready to let them come.
Sam looked at Ruth, whose eyes were wide and eager. Sam swallowed hard and let the words tumble from her mouth.
“Robin is dead, Ruth.”
Sam waited for a reaction from Ruth, but she sat as still as a statue. Ruth’s eyes dropped to her hands. The false fingernails she wore did a poor job of covering up her real ones, bitten to stubs. Ruth began to pick at the polish.
“Didn’t you see Robin’s obituary in the paper?” Sam asked.
Ruth wagged her head slowly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier to tell you,” Sam said.
If Ruth was hurt by Sam’s failure to call, she gave no indication. The meeting wouldn’t start for a few minutes so Ruth motioned to Sam to follow her into the hallway.
“When? What happened?” Ruth asked when they were outside the room.
“Christmas Eve. Jonathan told me Christmas morning. He said it was suicide and that Robin had been drinking when she jumped from her balcony.”
Ruth’s face flamed. “Dear God.”
“I know how much you meant to Robin.”
“I feel terrible,” Ruth said.
“I know, but ...” Sam’s voice trailed. There was only a small circle of people she felt she could trust about Robin. She felt she could include Ruth in that circle.
“We need to talk,” Sam said. “Do you have time after the meeting?”
Ruth nodded and they returned to the room. Ruth would lead the group today and glanced briefly about the room.
“Does anyone have any burning issues?” she asked to begin the meeting.
A portly man of about fifty raised his hand. When Ruth called on him, he asked to read from the Big Book.
The meeting concluded an hour later with the serenity prayer. Ruth and Sam remained seated and waited for the room to clear.
“I can still remember the first time Robin came,” Ruth said when the last person left the room. “I was sitting right there at the table when this young woman walked in. She was a little hesitant and so fragile looking. She reached the door and just stopped. I can still see her looking around the room. Those blue eyes so wide and full of fear.”
Ruth stopped and began to chew on her thumbnail.
“I’m sure she was thinking ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ I could see those little wheels spinning in her mind wondering whether this was the right place for her and if she was going to join us.”
Sam nodded and smiled.
“Robin told me about the meeting and you,” Sam said, looking at Ruth. “She was mesmerized by your story and she liked you instantly.”
Ruth’s laugh was small.
“I don’t normally tell my story anymore, ’cause I’ve told it so damned often already, but that day when I saw that little girl, she was a little girl, you might as well say, what was she? All of twenty?”
Ruth looked at Sam and she nodded.
“Twenty-two,” Sam said.
Ruth went on. “I knew somehow that if I could reach her, I could help her. So I told my story and Robin seemed to hang onto every word.”
The women were silent. Robin called Ruth her warden because she made her toe the line when it came to her sobriety.
“This wasn’t the first place Robin tried when she started attending AA meetings.”
“I know,” Ruth said.
“Her first experience was devastating,” Sam said.
“Yes, I know,” Ruth returned. She hesitated a moment and then said, “What about you?”
Sam felt a prickle of anger start to build at the base of her spine. Her eyes narrowed a bit. She folded her arms and squeezed them tightly against her chest and drew a long, patient breath.
“Robin never understood. She never had to go through the things I had to when she was growing up. I made sure of it.”
“She cared about what happened to you,” Ruth said and her eyes softened.
“I know she did, but I don’t have the problems with alcohol that Robin did.”
“Alcoholics are always in denial, Sam. Some drunks just recognize it earlier than others. Your sister did. When you minister to someone, what do you tell them?” Ruth asked.
Sam shrugged her shoulders impatiently, feeling her anger climbing. But she said nothing.
“You can’t tell another alcoholic about their drinking problem, they don’t want to hear or talk about it. It’s easy to see someone else’s problems. But not your own.”
“I’m not an alcoholic,” Sam snapped, avoiding Ruth’s stare. She kept her gaze fixed on the twelve steps.
“No, Sam you’re right, you’re not an alcoholic, you’re a functional alcoholic,” Ruth said in a collected, calm tone. “And a damn good one. You’re lucky in a sense, I suppose. It’s your only way of getting through each day of your life. But one day it’s gonna catch up with you and you won’t to be able to outrun it.”
Sam snorted. “What made you such an expert about me?”
“Your sister,” Ruth said quickly, evenly. “We’ve spent hours talking about you. Robin cared for you very, very much, Samantha. I knew what she wanted from you for her birthday. I knew I could count on seeing you here at least once a year.”
Ruth offered a final comment. Her rough voice was soft when she spoke.
“I was in your shoes for years, Sam. Me have a problem with alcohol?” Ruth said and touched the tips of her fingers to her chest. “Not a chance in hell. Then one morning I woke up and felt terrible. I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with me, but it felt like I was going to die.”
Ruth was quiet as she considered what to say next.
“There wasn’t a single event that made me realize it was time to stop drinking. I don’t know why. Maybe I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired being drunk all the time,” she said.
Ruth looked at Sam and, for a moment, she had captured her attention and continued.
“I knew the alcohol was killing me. If you don’t think I was an alcoholic, let me tell you. I’d get up in the morning and have the shakes so bad I could hardly get out of bed let alone stand up. The first thing I’d do is pour a glass of whatever I had in the house, and drink it through a straw. Then it hit me just like that,” Ruth said and clapped her hands together hard.
Familiar stirrings began to rumble in Sam’s chest. She knew the rapid effect drinking through a straw had on her, too. She formed a mental image of herself rummaging through her kitchen drawers searching for a straw. The image forced a deep sigh and she could feel her face turning red.
“I’d be at the bar by ten in the morning, get a double and drink that through a straw until for sure I couldn’t stand,” Ruth went on. “But I knew something had to change. I couldn’t go on that way much longer. So I got sober. Took me awhile, but I finally got sober. And you know something?”
Ruth looked at Sam, her eyes expecting
a response.
“What?” Sam asked.
“For the first time in my life I knew what pain and sadness truly felt like. I thought all my drinking life that pain and sadness were all I ever knew, but you know something?” Ruth’s laugh was harsh. “I was wrong. God, was I wrong. I didn’t start to feel those emotions until I stopped drinking. When I was an alcoholic I was numb. I drank because I wanted to be numb. I can look back on it now, all these years later, and realize as an alcoholic, I never felt a thing. It all came to me after I stopped drinking.”
Ruth went on. “Do you understand why the first woman Robin had originally asked to be her sponsor said no?”
Sam didn’t answer. Ruth was not Robin’s first choice for an AA sponsor. The first woman she asked had declined.
“She had years and years of sobriety and that’s why Robin asked her,” Ruth said. “But for some recovering alcoholics, Sam, they can’t do it for anyone except themselves. There are those who can sponsor others. But it’s never easy for any recovering alcoholic myself included. I’ve been sober for almost thirty years yet there are still days when I feel like it’s my first day out of treatment.”
Ruth paused a moment to let Sam digest her words. “Hell, I was going to AA for two years, before I stopped introducing myself as a visitor. Recovery is never easy. I used to tell Robin when you’re a pickle, you can never go back to being a cucumber.”
Their eyes met. Ruth’s green eyes were playful.
“I told her often I’m a big kosher pickle!”
Ruth nodded her head slightly and scratched at a stain on her jeans. She kept her attention on her pants and, when she spoke, directed her comments toward them.
“Yes, when I got sober, then I began to live,” Ruth said. “Before that I was dead.”
“Robin admired your courage,” Sam said.
“The realization,” Ruth began slowly and evenly, “is that when someone realizes they’re an alcoholic it comes to them in subtle, slow ways, Sam. It has to be that little, still voice inside their head that says, ‘wait a goddamn minute, there’s something wrong with this picture and I’m in it.’”
The Friday Edition (A Samantha Church Mystery) Page 8
