by Lynn Bulock
The pastor went on to say more about Dennis and what we didn’t know about his life, tying into his message about God’s place in our fallen, broken world. I looked over across the aisle to see how Becca and Carol were handling all this. They were doing okay, but Ollie was starting to lose his patience. He was facing backward on the pew, holding himself up and bouncing up and down, just able to boost himself over the edge to see the row behind him, which was empty. One of those bounces made him knock his drooly chin against the hard wooden pew and he started to wail.
I winced at the sound his chin made in contact with the wood, as did his grandmother. His mother picked him up and patted him for a moment. Conscious of her place in the front row when he built up to a howl, she stood and jiggled him for a while. When he subsided a little, she sat down, with him standing in her lap as he wound down.
I totally lost the thread of what Pastor George was talking about just as he started saying we could all hold on to the hope that Dennis had repented at the end. Instead, I watched Becca get up and down with the baby. The pants and top that she wore were probably the best she owned, or at least the best she could fit into right now. She hadn’t exactly regained her figure in the eight months since her son was born.
Of course I didn’t know where she’d started out before pregnancy, but kind of guessed that she’d been in a little better shape before having a baby took its toll. While I was still watching her, trying not to stare, Ollie decided to rev up his howling to full blast and she stood up one more time to get him settled. This time it worked, but not before her moving around in the pew gave me an unsettling idea.
That idea had started growing a few minutes before, when I’d looked at all of us ranged down the row, and our similar appearance. Watching Becca now, the idea blossomed into fullness and I couldn’t shake it. The more I looked at her, the more I was sure that anybody seeing her from the back only, say walking down a hallway, would have said that she was probably pregnant.
Her hair color was similar to Heather’s, maybe a shade or two lighter, and it was close to the same length. Both women tended to wear their hair pulled back in a ponytail, although neither had chosen that style today.
Pastor George had finished his remarks, and Heather was gently nudging me and hissing my name. Apparently he had asked the “family” to leave the chapel first and go to the back of the room. Still trying not to stare at Becca, I got up and did what Heather told me to, my mind in a whirl.
“Do you think everybody will come back to the church for the luncheon he just told them about?” Heather asked quietly as we went down the aisle.
“I don’t know. I hope most of them do.” I particularly hoped two of them would—Becca and Ray Fernandez—because I wanted to talk to both of them at the same time about the idea that was growing into certainty as the strains of familiar hymns played around me in the chapel. I wanted to see what Becca said about my idea. “You’re going, aren’t you?” I asked Heather.
“Sure. Right. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. And then I am going someplace all by myself and celebrating being done with this entire bunch of people forever.” She turned away from me without another word.
Wow. That put a bit of a different spin on what I’d been thinking about. Maybe I couldn’t be so certain about Becca, after all. I kept my distance from all three of the other “family” members as everyone left the chapel, wondering what I was supposed to do now.
14
Now I was really stuck. Before Heather’s little outburst I was sure that I should confront Becca in the church hall, or at least bounce my theory off the Christian Friends, and then tell Ray what was going on in my mind and see what he thought about it. But then Heather got me all confused again, and there I stood in the church hall, wondering what to do. I still thought I should talk to Becca. Maybe Heather was just being hormonal and pregnant.
It didn’t help that I couldn’t find anybody I knew and trusted among the women setting out ham, salads and slices of Bundt cake on the serving tables in the room set up for the luncheon. If I’d seen Linnette right away, or even Dot, to provide me with some grounding, I would have been okay. At this point I might have even taken advice from Paula, which proved how desperate I was. Instead I just stood there, trying to figure out what to do next. An older lady with blue-rinsed hair kept urging me to start through the buffet line, which was the last thing I felt like doing.
I did go over to the giant coffeepot in the corner and poured myself a cup of coffee. It would be decaf here, I knew, so I didn’t have to worry about getting too jazzed while I waited. The doctors, nurses and others from Conejo Board and Care, and various people from the church were filtering in, but not Linnette or Dot. Sandy came in, steering Heather along, but I didn’t feel like getting into a conversation with her again quite so soon.
So much for what I wanted, because the minute Heather saw me, she broke away from her mother and came over in my direction. “Gracie Lee, I’m so sorry for snarling at you back there.” She looked like she was close to tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I’m in such a horrible mood. Maybe that hyperbaric chamber messed me up while it was giving me all the good oxygen for the baby.”
She hugged me as tightly as she could with her belly between us, and as she did so I could feel the baby kick. “Wow, at least we know he or she is still healthy,” I said, both of us laughing at the odd sensation.
“That’s such a relief. I was so scared when they put me in that ambulance.”
“And I felt so bad because I was the one who made you stay. If I’d just been able to get my act together and stay alone Thursday night, you wouldn’t have had to go through that.”
Heather shrugged. “Hey, I decided to stay. Nobody twisted my arm.”
I looked over near the buffet tables where Sandy was standing, looking at us intensely. “Well, your mom looks like she might want to twist mine if I don’t let you go back next to her and get something to eat. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Fine.” She waved and headed in her mom’s direction. I felt like a weight had lifted off my shoulders, knowing that Heather was just in one of those late-pregnancy mood swings. Everything she’d been through certainly would bring them on. Of course I remembered when I’d gotten the crabbiest in late pregnancy, but I didn’t want to add to her burdens by suggesting that she might be in early labor. And since everyone is different, I held my tongue.
Now I’d finished most of my coffee, and the rest of my friends still weren’t in evidence. Neither was Ray. Then Carol came out of the ladies’ room with Ollie and a tote bag, looking for a place to sit down, and my decision about what to do next was made by seeing her. I wondered how I’d missed her, and probably Becca, going in there in my concentration on finding everybody. Maybe it had happened when I was talking to the Blue Rinse Lady or hugging Heather. Meanwhile Carol found a high chair and started settling her rambunctious grandson into it while he protested that idea.
Taking a deep breath, I went over to where she was finishing buckling the last strap as she talked to the baby. “Hi, Carol. Thank you for coming. I know it was a comfort to Becca to have you there today.”
She looked over her shoulder. “In a really weird sort of way, it was a comfort to me, too. It puts a cap on things this way. Most things, anyway. I guess we’ll go through this again in a couple days when we bury Edna.” She shook her head. “What she did sure came out of the blue. Did you ever figure out where she’d been?”
Either she was a better actor than I would have expected, or she really had no idea where Edna had spent her time once she’d walked out of Dennis’s room at Conejo Board and Care. “Not really. And she certainly didn’t say in her note.”
Becca hadn’t followed her out of the ladies’ room, and looking around the room, I didn’t see her anywhere else. “Where did Becca get to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, with less conviction than she’d put in her earlier statement. “I’m sure she’ll turn u
p in a minute or two.” She started sorting through the diaper bag, but came out empty-handed in a minute.
“Can I get you something while we wait for her?” I hated to see her just sitting here with the baby, who was starting to fuss a little faced with an empty high chair tray.
She gave a noncommittal “Sure,” and I took it as license to go fill a plate with different things from the table, along with a cup of coffee, and bring it back to the table where she sat.
She looked truly thankful when I brought the food back. “I made certain to get a few things that I thought Ollie could eat, depending on how far along he is on solids,” I told her.
“Great, because the cereal Becca packed ran out in the car coming over here. Sometimes she doesn’t think ahead much,” she said, shaking her head. She handed Ollie a cracker and he stopped fussing immediately and watched while she broke up a few other things into bits and fished a couple of fat green peas out of one of the salads for him, decorating the tray.
Carol looked around the room and motioned for me to sit next to her. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I don’t totally agree with what Becca was doing, so I will. I know exactly where she is. She dropped me off here because she said she wanted some time alone at Edna’s house. But I think what she really wanted was some time alone with her grandmother’s jewelry case and silver drawer before you thought about going back to the house.”
She busied herself with a little more food for Ollie, and I held my breath, waiting to see if she had more to say. “I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would really want any of my daughter’s inheritance, or at least what she sees as her inheritance. And you seem anxious to talk to her. If that’s the case, you can probably catch her at Edna’s.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks for telling me,” I said. I got up from the table where Carol was finally cutting a few bites of food for herself along with feeding the baby. Looking around the room, I still couldn’t find Ray Fernandez. Of all the times for him to totally disappear, this was the worst.
I looked at the clock high on one wall. It had been forty-five minutes since we’d left Dodd and Sons. It wasn’t likely that Becca would spend too much time at her grandmother’s. If I wanted to catch her there, I’d have to hurry.
At least she left the baby with her mother, I told myself as I drove, as fast as I could, over to the house. Maybe Becca had more sense than I credited her for, and less criminal intent. She might just be a somewhat shallow twenty-two-year-old young woman, afraid her evil stepmother was going to get Edna’s jewelry before she did. Not that I could think of a thing of Edna’s I’d really have wanted, but I wouldn’t be able to convince her of that.
And there was still the chance that I’d been arguing against all along, that Heather was the one who’d put the GHB in my tea. At that point she could have had several reasons to be angry with me. After all, I’d had the place by right that she thought she deserved. She could have even seen me as the reason that Dennis was in such a bad way to begin with; if he hadn’t been racing back toward the house, and me, he wouldn’t have been injured. She certainly had surprised me today; maybe the side of her that I’d seen at Dodd and Sons was what had been hidden all along.
I tried out all those arguments on the short drive to the house, but couldn’t really convince myself of any of them. It was even less convincing when Becca’s little car was out in front of the house. It was actually parked next door, but I recognized the slightly battered little sedan plastered with skateboarding bumper stickers, Ollie’s car seat in the back seat.
She’d locked the front door behind her, too. I tried the knob just to make sure, but nothing happened when I turned it. I fished out my keys, unlocking the door and stepping into the hall. “Becca? It’s Gracie Lee,” I called, not wanting to startle her. Apparently that plan didn’t work, because something hard hit me on the head after that, and as the lights went out I thought to myself through the fog that I should have made more noise coming in so I wasn’t mistaken for a burglar.
Sometime later I came to with the worst headache I’d ever had. For one brief panicky moment I thought I’d been paralyzed by the blow to the head, because I was sitting up somewhere, but couldn’t move around. Then I looked down and saw that I was sitting at my desk chair near the computer, with clothesline wrapped around me from shoulders to elbows.
There was noise around me of someone rattling through the house. Drawers were being opened and closed, and from the sounds I could hear, maybe even being dumped out. I could hear closet doors open and close. My head throbbed and I was so confused. I had come in here with a purpose, I knew, but just now I couldn’t remember what it was.
After a few minutes, still listening to the noise of what sounded like rooms being turned upside down, I remembered that I’d come here looking for Becca. But where was she? Before I’d been suspicious of her, but maybe I had been wrong about that. Maybe I had interrupted a burglary after all. She could be tied up someplace, too, while someone else ransacked the house.
Just then she came around the corner into the living room, carrying a pillowcase that looked as if it was loaded with something. “Becca. I’m so glad you’re not hurt,” I said.
“Wish I could say the same about you. Boy, Gracie, you have the worst luck. Almost as bad as mine. First I come in here to make sure that you hadn’t cleaned out my grandma’s stuff and I surprise a couple of burglars. Then you get here to prove me right, but before you can take anything they get you, too. It’s a shame they’re going to shoot you.”
While she talked to me, Becca went around the room dumping things into her pillowcase and creating little bits of havoc. She knocked over Edna’s favorite philodendron, spewing dirt over the carpet, and snagged a silver picture frame with a picture of Dennis, stuffing it in the pillowcase sack.
It was hard to understand what she was talking about. Where were the burglars? And what was she talking about, saying somebody was going to shoot me? Now that she was in the room with me, I couldn’t hear noises anywhere else. “Shouldn’t we be leaving if there are burglars? Why don’t you just untie me and we can both get out of here?” I asked.
She gave a short ugly laugh. “Maybe I hit you on the head harder than I thought. Or maybe you’re dumber than I imagined, although I can’t figure how that could happen. You certainly are harder to kill than I ever thought you would be.”
My head hurt so much, and what she was saying didn’t make any sense. I tried to struggle out of the chair again, but in addition to my arms being tethered, my feet were tied up with something at the ankles, and there was no way to move. “What…what do you mean?” I finally asked her.
“Oh, man. You really are denser than I thought. There are no burglars here, Grace. But that’s what I’m going to tell everybody when I get out of here and you don’t.” She shook her head and went about sorting through the living room.
“If you went for the burglar act, that must mean you bought that story about Grams feeding Daddy the tea all by herself, didn’t you? I know the cops did, because that big Latino one already saw me at the funeral, and he was just as nice as anything. Said how sorry he was for my loss. Right, some loss. More like a gain of a quarter million dollars.”
I felt cold and numb all over now, even in my fingers where I could wiggle a little bit. Was that because of the tightness of the cords binding me or the growing shock of what Becca was saying? Becca was still wandering around the house, making it look like someone had burglarized it. I noticed that anything that caught her eye went into the pillowcase. “What I can’t believe,” she said, moving on to the dining room and snatching up a small vase Edna kept on a shelf, “is that so quickly Grams bought what I was telling her. It was easy enough to convince her that either you or Daddy’s latest fling dosed the tea. But by that night I had her convinced that she was a murderer.”
“Why? Your dad was the last person on earth your grandmother would want to harm.” Maybe if I kept her busy, Becca wouldn’t noti
ce how much I was trying to get out of the cords that bound me. I couldn’t see anything that would help me get out of the cords, but out of the corner of my eye I could tell that the bottom of my computer screen was flashing. That usually meant something, but try as I might, I couldn’t remember what. Remembering almost anything more challenging than my name was so hard right now, with the throbbing in my head.
“Hey, the good silver. I didn’t know Grams still had this,” Becca said with glee. Her words were a little muffled because her head was deep in the open sideboard in the dining room. “I really thought Dad had conned her out of this for one of his companies. He was so good at that.”
She wiggled backward out of the sideboard, a heavy cloth pouch in her hands. “I’m going to need another pillowcase. Cool.” Putting down the silver on the table, she headed back toward the bedrooms, giving my chair a little spin as she passed. The motion made me gag.
“Don’t wear yourself out trying to get out of there. I tied you up really tight. And since I used all the phone cords, you won’t have to be concerned about calling for help, either. Those burglars, they think of everything.” With a sinking feeling, I looked down and saw that she was telling the truth—the cords I’d mistaken for clothesline were the telephone cords.
The flashing was still going on at the bottom of the computer screen, and I made my head hurt even worse by trying to remember what that meant. Contact of some kind, didn’t it? That flashing signaled messages. Some kind of messages that had their own phone line that Becca wouldn’t have messed with. Instant messages, that’s what they were called. It finally came to me and I stretched my fingers as much as possible to try and reach the mouse. I got it, and clicked on that little flashing part of the bar. A box popped up on the screen. It was Ben! He was home from school and had sent me an instant message just a few minutes ago.
