The Edge

by Catherine Coulter

  “I didn’t get that impression at all.” I cut another piece of the thick sirloin steak. It was even better than the lettuce and green bean salad at The Edwardian. “She wants to find out why Jilly went over that cliff. I appreciate that. You should too. What’d she do to you? Give you a speeding ticket like Morrison?”

  “No, nothing like that. She wants to blame me for Jilly’s accident. She’s never liked me, believes I’m not good enough for Jilly. I don’t appreciate that at all.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “She didn’t say a word about you, Paul. She was waiting here in her car when I drove up. She wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’d have her fired if I could talk Geraldine into it. The woman’s a menace. She doesn’t like men in general, always giving them grief. Have you seen that damned gun she wears on her belt? It’s ridiculous. Edgerton is a small, peaceful little town. No one—man or woman—should be wearing a damned gun, but she does. Of course, I already spoke to her at the hospital after Jilly was admitted.”

  “It’s not odd at all for a cop—male or female—to want to question someone more than once,” I said mildly, surprised that Paul would spew out that sexist crap. I’d gotten no hint at all that she didn’t like men. “In the excitement and stress of the moment, people tend to forget things. I’ll bet even you will be able to tell her more now than you did then.”

  “About what, for God’s sake? Jilly went over that damned cliff and I don’t know why. She was a little depressed, but everyone’s down once in a while. That’s it, Mac. There’s nothing more.”

  I took the last bite of my steak, sat back in my chair, rubbed my belly, and took another sip of my Pinot Noir. Paul looked pale, his skin drawn tight over his cheekbones. He looked ill, frightened. Or maybe I was just seeing myself in Paul. Lord knew I looked sick enough. “Are you certain there’s nothing else, Paul? What was Jilly depressed about? Was she taking any medication for the depression? Was she seeing anyone professionally?”

  Paul laughed, a tight, constipated laugh. “Just listen to you. SuperCop with his load of questions. No, she wasn’t. I’m exhausted, Mac. I don’t want to talk anymore. There’s nothing more to say. I’m going to bed.” He shoved back his chair and stood up. “Good night. I hope you don’t mind the double bed in the guest room. It’ll be a bit on the short side for you.”

  “I’ll do just fine, Paul. I slept some this afternoon on that big front porch chair of yours. I think I’ll go to the hospital to see Jilly. Good night.”

  Ford was here again, holding my hand like he had before. The warmth of his hand was indescribable, just like before. Thank God I hadn’t just imagined it that first time. I didn’t want to lose my brain the way I’d lost my body.

  But when was before?

  It could have been this morning or last year for all I knew. It was odd, but I had no sense of time at all. I knew what it was, but it had no meaning to me.

  There were other shadowy creatures behind Ford, then finally they left, and we were alone.

  “Jilly,” he said, and I wanted to cry with the sheer relief of hearing his voice, but I didn’t know if this body I couldn’t feel was even capable of yielding up tears.

  I wanted to ask him if they’d gotten my Porsche out of the ocean.

  Ford said, “Sweetheart, I don’t know if you can hear me or not. I hope somehow that you can. I spoke to Kevin and Gwen and gave them an update. They send their love and their prayers.

  “Now, Jilly, tell me about why you were depressed.”

  Depressed? What was this about being depressed? I’ve never been depressed in my life. Who said anything about being fucking depressed? I yelled it at Ford, but naturally, he didn’t hear me because my words were only bouncing about inside my skull.

  “I’ve got to find out why you drove your Porsche off that cliff, Jilly. I find it hard to believe that you were depressed. I can’t remember when you were ever depressed, even when you were a teenager and Lester Harvey dumped you for Susan, that friend of yours who had the big breasts. I remember you just shook your head, said he was a worthless shit, and moved on.

  “But things change. We haven’t seen all that much of each other in the past five years or so. You’ve been with Paul. Dammit, Jilly, what happened to you?”

  Ford was leaning his forehead on my hand. I could feel the soft whistle of his breath against my skin. I wasn’t depressed, I wanted to tell him. He wanted to know what had happened to me so I said, “Listen, Ford, do you like sex? I didn’t used to like it all that much, but then something happened. A wonderful something.”

  I wondered if my mouth was curving at all into a smile. Probably not. I heard Ford’s quiet, steady breathing. He was asleep. Why had he fallen asleep? Then I remembered something about him being sick. Had he been injured somehow? I seemed to remember that.

  I wish I could have run my fingers through his hair. Ford had lovely hair, all dark and longer than the FBI would like it to be. But it was his eyes I’d always liked best. Dark blue eyes, just like Mom’s, at least I think they were like Mom’s, she’d been dead for so very long. Yes, his eyes were deep and mellow and too intense on occasion. I remember hearing he was dating a woman named Dolores from Washington, D.C. Every time I thought of her name I pictured a Spanish flamenco dancer in my mind. I wonder if she liked sex with Ford.

  When it comes down to it, who cares? I’m here, a prisoner, and Paul’s alive, free to do whatever he wants. But it’s not Paul I’m afraid of, goodness, never Paul. It’s Laura. She was dangerous, wasn’t she? I knew she’d betrayed me. She’d gotten into my head and nearly killed me. Oh, Ford, if she comes back, I won’t be able to bear it. I’ll die.

  I’m lying here, just floating about, and I think of Laura. Laura, who betrayed me. Always Laura.

  I woke up with a start some hours later at the touch of a nurse’s hand on my shoulder. I raised my head, looked at her face, and said, “Always Laura. Laura betrayed her.”

  She arched her right eyebrow, sleek and black. “Laura? Who’s Laura? Are you okay?”

  I looked down at Jilly, silent, pale, her skin nearly translucent. “I’m fine,” I said. Who was Laura? I looked up again at the nurse. She was very short, a tiny bird of a woman, and her voice was soft and sweet as a child’s. I nodded at her, then looked at Jilly, whose features were barely visible in the dim light from the corridor. Evidently someone had come into the room, seen me asleep on Jilly’s hand, and turned off the lights.

  “It’s time to turn her over,” the nurse said quietly, “and to massage her. Bedsores will come eventually if we don’t take care now.”

  “Tell me,” I said, watching her untie the back of Jilly’s hospital gown, “what you know about coma. The doctors spoke to me at some length, but it was difficult to understand exactly what to expect.”

  She began to rub thick white cream into Jilly’s shoulders and back. “Remember that movie with Steven Seagal a while back where he’d been in a coma for seven years, then awakened?”

  I nodded, remembering how much I’d admired Steven Seagal when I was a boy.

  The nurse said, “He had a long beard and he was weak, had to practice to get his strength back, and of course he did. He was jumping around, maiming folk after just a week or so. Well, that’s Hollywood. Actually, if a person’s in a coma for longer than, say, a few days, the risk increases dramatically that something will be seriously wrong when and if the person ever comes out of it. I’m sorry to tell you if you don’t know, but all sorts of brain damage is possible—retardation, inability to walk, to talk—any number of dreadful things.

  “Most of the time, people come out of a coma very quickly, and they’re usually okay. If Mr
s. Bartlett comes out of this in, say, the next day or two, her chances are good that there won’t be any terrible damage; but it’s very possible there will be some. We just don’t know. We make assumptions and predictions based on statistics, but in the end, everyone is different. We can hope and pray, and little else.

  “In Mrs. Bartlett’s case, there was no major damage they could see on any of her test results. Actually, she really shouldn’t be in a coma at all. That just goes to show that there’s so much we don’t know about this sort of thing. I’m sorry, Mr. MacDougal, there’s nothing else to say about it.”

  She’d given me a lot to think about. I fell asleep again, my head next to Jilly’s hand. I dreamed about Maggie Sheffield. She was screaming that Paul was a bastard and she was going to run him out of Edgerton.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When I drove back into the driveway at 12 Liverpool Street at ten o’clock the following morning, I saw Maggie Sheffield’s car parked across the street as it had been the day before, but she wasn’t in it.

  I heard her say as I walked quietly into the living room, “Paul, I called the hospital on my way over here. Mrs. Himmel told me there was no change. She said that Mac was still with Jilly, had been since last night.”

  I heard Paul grunt.

  “Mac spends a lot more time there than you do, Paul. How’s that?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Paul didn’t sound particularly pissed off at such a question, just incredibly tired. Personally, if she’d said that to me, I would have been tempted to slug her. I walked into the living room, a long narrow great room that ran the entire front of the house, facing the ocean. It was all windows across the front; where there had to be walls to hold up the house, they were stark white. Large square white pavers covered the floor, and all the furniture was black. It was a minimalist designer’s wet dream—no compromises with kitsch or newspapers or photos anywhere. Just all these clean stark lines that set my teeth on edge. I couldn’t imagine cozying up with a good book in here or setting a nice big TV set in the corner and watching football. Actually, I didn’t want to be anywhere near this room when I could help it. It was a testament—not to living, but to someone’s idea of perfection. Even the paintings, all of the dozen or so abstracts, were made up of paint slashes, primarily black and white, lined up like perfect little soldiers along a long white wall. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could live in this sterile space, particularly Jilly. I remembered Jilly’s room growing up—bright teal blues and oranges and greens. Of course she’d also had punk-rocker posters on the walls. People changed, but this much? Was this all Paul’s doing?

  I said to Maggie, who was seated on a long black leather sofa, a small notebook open on her lap, “Sheriff, I hope you’re well.” She was wearing her tan uniform, running shoes on her feet. For just an instant, I saw her without the tan uniform, just as she’d been in my dream the night before. Her hair was ruthlessly pulled back, fastened with one of those things that my FBI friend Sherlock called a banana clip. Sherlock had a rainbow of colors in her banana clips.

  “Mac,” she said, rising. “I’m just fine. How’s Jilly?”

  “The same. No change.”

  “I’m sorry. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine, no problem.”

  “You’re looking a lot better, not quite so ready for the grave as yesterday. Come sit down, Mac. I just need to go over a few more things with Paul.”

  Paul hadn’t stirred. He was seated forward in a black tufted leather chair, his hands clasped between his knees. He appeared to be studying a white paver at his feet. “There’s a small scratch,” he said.

  “Scratch? What scratch?” Maggie asked.

  “There,” Paul said. “Right there, in the top right corner. I wonder how that could have happened.”

  “Tell you what, Paul,” I said, not joking at all, “I’ll get a load of newspapers and we can pile them up over the scratch.”

  “Yeah, Mac, sure. You’re a philistine. You’ve got a messy, unsophisticated soul. Come join the fun. Let’s get this over with. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Jilly told me that was why you left Philadelphia and VioTech—you wanted to continue work on this project and they wanted you to stop.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s the project?” I asked, walking over a black-and-white geometrical carpet to stand by one of the large glass windows that looked out at the ocean.

  “It’s all about the fountain of youth. I’m developing a pill that will reverse the aging process.”

  “My God, Paul,” Maggie said, nearly falling off the sofa, “that’s just incredible! Why wouldn’t they want you to continue on that? That would be worth not just a fortune, it would be worth the world.”

  Paul laughed at her. “Everyone bites big time on that one. Everyone wants youth back.” He touched his receding hairline. “I’d rather come up with a pill to regrow hair myself.”

  “If Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek is any indication, we still won’t have a pill to grow hair even in the twenty-fourth century. You’re out of luck, Paul.”

  “What are you really working on then, Paul?” I asked.

  “Look, it’s privileged information and it’s really none of your business, either of you. It’s got nothing to do with Jilly. Now please get off my back.”

  Maggie sat back down on the sofa and clicked her ballpoint pen. “I want to know what you and Jilly did last Tuesday night. Think back. It’s dinnertime. Did you eat in or go out?”

  “For God’s sake, Maggie, why do you want to know what we did for dinner?”

  “Did you eat in, Paul?” I asked, still standing in front of the window, my arms crossed over my chest.

  “Yes, we did. We broiled halibut, squeezed on lemon. Jilly made garlic toast. I tossed a spinach salad. We ate. I had work to do after dinner. Jilly said she was going to drive around, nothing unusual in that. She loved driving the Porsche. She left here about nine o’clock.”

  “Rob Morrison said she went over the cliff at about midnight. That’s three hours, Paul. That’s an awfully long time to drive around.”

  “I went to work. I fell asleep at my desk, even left my computer on. If Jilly came back and left again, I wouldn’t know. If she stayed out the full three hours, I wouldn’t know that either. All I know is she left at nine.”

  “What was her mood at dinner?”

  “Maggie, you know Jilly. She’s never serious, always joking around. She told me a Viagra joke, I remember that.”

  “So what is it you’re working on, Paul?” Maggie said. “You want to clone little Paul Bartletts?”

  “No, Maggie, I wouldn’t want to clone myself until I figure out how to regrow hair.” He looked over at me. “Now you’re a possibility. You’ve got good genes, Mac. The Germans would have approved of you, or the FBI. You interested?”

  “So you put the FBI right in there with the Nazis, do you?” Why was he stonewalling? But how could a drug he was developing have anything to do with Jilly driving over a cliff?

  Paul just shrugged. “Lots of parallels, as I see it.”

  I let it go, just shrugged. “Well, maybe I’ll consider it three lifetimes from now if I turn real weird, but probably not. So you’re saying that during dinner Jilly seemed perfectly normal?”

  “Yes. She ate lightly. She wanted to lose five pounds.”

  Maggie said, “Was she taking any weight-loss pills?”

  “Not that I know of. I’ll check in the medicine cabinet and see what’s there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is it true you made love to Jilly every day, Paul?”

  I’d swear that Paul turned red to his receding hairline. “What the hell kind of question is that, Mac? Why is that your business?”

  “In February, Jilly told me about her love life. She’d never spoken so frankly about sex with you before that. Thinking back on it, something was off. She spoke about a number of things, going from one subject to th
e next, without pause, without emphasis on anything.”

  “What did she say, Mac?”

  I looked at Maggie. In that moment, I would have sworn she had more than just a professional interest in what was going on here. Well, why not give her details? I said, “She spoke about her new dress, how Paul made love to her all the time, how she loved her Porsche, and she spoke about a brother and sister, Cal and Cotter Tarcher. Everything she said was in the same tone of voice, almost without emotion. Now, in hindsight, it wasn’t quite right.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Paul jumped to his feet. “Oh, God, what if something’s happened to Jilly?”

  He ran out of the living room. Maggie said to me, “I realize you don’t want to hear this, Mac, but there was talk. Just maybe it wasn’t Paul she was having all that sex with.”

  I wanted to punch her. Jilly screwing around? I’d never believe that. Not Jilly. I didn’t have time to question Maggie about it before Paul returned to the living room. Standing beside him in the doorway was a small girl—no, a woman—perhaps twenty-five. She had dark brown hair, thick and curly, pulled back with two plastic clips. Her skin was whiter than a pair of my boxer shorts fresh out of the drier. No freckles. She wore glasses with rounded gold frames. She was wearing jeans that were too loose on her and a white shirt, probably a man’s, that hung halfway down her legs and was rolled up to her forearms.

  “Hello, Cal,” Maggie said, rising slowly. “What brings you here?”

  Good grief. Cal Tarcher, in the flesh. The girl who was going to be jealous of Jilly’s new dress. Sister of Cotter, the vicious bully.

  I watched Cal raise her head, look furtively toward Paul, and say, “My father sent me. I’m glad you’re here, Maggie. All of you are invited to our house tomorrow night.” She looked toward me. “Are you Jilly’s brother?”

  “Yes. I’m Ford MacDougal.”

  “I’m Cal Tarcher. Is Jilly all right?”

  “She’s still the same. In a coma.”

  “I’m so sorry. I went to see her yesterday afternoon. The nurse told me to talk to Jilly, just talk about anything—the weather, the latest Denzel Washington movie—whatever. Anyway, the party. Will all of you come?”