For Better or Worse

by Donna Huston Murray

  Quinn’s jaw muscle rolled. “Go on.”

  “The morning Maisie fell out of bed. Are you sure she was sedated?”

  The doctor’s cheeks blossomed, and he spun on his heel again. With me close behind he took ten paces and halted in front of a stand-up computer niche.

  After some poking and scrolling, Maisie’s former physician spoke as if he were questioning the screen. “The order for the sedative is here, but I’m not seeing confirmation it was administered.”

  “A mistake?” I wondered aloud to mollify the man.

  Quinn waffled. “The nurse may have been called away...”

  “...and didn’t remember to make the note. Or...” she just plain forgot.

  The doctor’s eight-minute deadline had passed, but he showed no sign of leaving. He shoved his fists into his pockets, pursed his lips, and studied the tile floor before he looked up at me.

  “Tell me again why this matters.”

  I shut my eyes and furrowed my brow until I found the right place to begin.

  “Cissie Voight and Ronald Voight are friends,” I finally began, crossing my fingers in the hope that Quinn wouldn’t rush to judgment. “Neighbors who became friends. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “So when Eric Zumstein was upset, horrified...actually furious, that you doubted his word about Maisie’s fall, he shared his outrage with Cissie...” I displayed my palms in that nothing-to-hide gesture, “...on the phone,” I clarified, “which her husband, Ronald, probably overheard on a nanny cam. Along with everything else he does to control his wife, Ronald threatened to package your accusation with some outright lies and get Eric arrested. Which, guilty or innocent, would stick to Eric like stink the rest of his life.

  “Ronald is abusive, Doctor, and a very accomplished liar. He has a sweet, capable woman believing she’s a terrible wife and mother. Also that she’s ugly, and stupid, and will never attract another man. He goes ballistic if she doesn’t put gas in the car or runs out of mustard. He broke three of her ribs this week, and she’s going home to him today, in part because you put doubts in her head about Eric.”

  The doctor frowned with doubt. “I honestly don’t see what the sedative has to do with any of this. Maisie’s right elbow was in a cast. She couldn’t scratch her nose. How could she possibly pull an IV out of her other arm?”

  I couldn’t get the paperback out of my purse fast enough. “This was on her bedside tray. Look.” I showed him what I’d concluded was a bloodstain. “Maisie could have used the book to push the IV out of her arm—unless she really was sedated. Then your first instinct is probably right; Eric did cause the fall that led to her death. Most likely also the fall that brought her here in the first place.”

  Hands resting on his hips, Quinn blinked, and stared, and grimaced, as if marveling at the mess I’d presented him.

  I hastily outlined the rest—Maisie’s flying bricks and clothesline noose, her penchant for mysteries, and the exploding eggs. I especially stressed her hatred for her Lonny, the ex-husband Eric apparently resembled.

  “She was on one of her Lonny-rampages that morning, Dr. Quinn. That was why Eric suggested the sedative then went down for coffee.”

  “Ah, and that’s why you asked about a psych eval.”

  “Correct. Did you do one?”

  “I can’t answer that,” he repeated, but this time his lips twitched.

  “I’m late for a meeting. Stay here.” He nodded toward the empty chapel. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.

  I waited on a chair to the side of the sanctuary’s door. If any families wanted to make proper use of the chapel, I planned to relocate; but that didn’t happen in the forty-five minutes Quinn was gone.

  My initial thoughts focused on Eric’s fate, which largely depended on whether or not the sedative had been administered. Even if the blood on the edge of the book proved to be Maisie’s, no one had witnessed her using it the way I suggested. Subsequently, it had also been handled by far too many hands to be of any use as evidence.

  Bottom line: Nothing would ever prove Eric’s guilt; but the book, combined with the sedative answer, would confirm his innocence to a satisfactory degree.

  As the minutes dragged on, I gave into temptation and web-surfed on my phone.

  “Maisie’s nurse isn’t on duty today,” Dr. Quinn called from the doorway. “I’ll call her at home.” He held the door for me to join him.

  “Carol!” he exclaimed after he’d been greeted. “Dr. Quinn here. Sorry to disturb you, but I’ve got a rather important question...No, no. You’re not in any trouble. I just need an honest answer. Let me be quite clear, it’s the honest part that matters.

  “Do you remember Maisie Zumstein, the elderly woman who...Yes, the single room...Yes, most likely a stroke. She was quite agitated that morning, and I ordered a sedative.

  “Now this is the important part, Carol. Do you remember administering the sedative?” Quinn’s gaze strayed to me as he listened.

  “Oh, oh, right. The emphysema case, of course...No, no, there was nothing noted. I understand. Now about her grandson...” He listened a while longer, thanked the nurse, and hung up. His face was alight, animated, but not entirely happy.

  “Just as you thought,” he told me. “Carol got called to an emergency. When she got back, Maisie had already fallen.”

  “What about Eric?”

  “She says he arrived shortly after she discovered his grandmother on the floor. He was so shaken he spilled hot coffee on himself. She said he threw the rest away so he wouldn’t burn himself again.”

  Relief rushed to my head and weakened my knees. “So he’s innocent.”

  “It would appear so.”

  Dr. Quinn rocked back on his heels and smiled, maybe with satisfaction, and perhaps a little at my expense. Who knew? He had a personality after all.

  I kissed the guy on the cheek before I realized what I was doing, then ran for the elevator.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Cissie.

  Chapter 46

  I FOUND A BENCH tucked into a small, rectangular garden on my way to the hospital’s parking garage. The cell coverage was good, and privacy wasn’t an issue.

  Cissie’s phone rang fifteen times before I hung up and called the shelter directly. The woman who answered double checked, but Cissie and her car were gone.

  “Yes, home...Yes, her home. Where else does she have to go?”

  I clenched my fist in front of my teeth and tried to think. A conversation on the Voight’s house phone might still be picked up by Ronald’s nanny cam, and showing my face anywhere near Cissie might spark another blow-up, this time directed at me. However, my daughter did live next door, and it would be natural for her and Cissie to cross paths as a matter of course.

  I reached Chelsea while she was grocery shopping and outlined the problem.

  “You suspected Eric!” she railed, as it became obvious I had.

  “Can we please skip past that?” I begged. “Right now you need to find a safe way to tell Cissie she can trust the guy.”

  She said she would get back to me, “when the deed is done.”

  I waited.

  One day.

  Two.

  I was almost ready to send my daughter next door to borrow a cup of sugar, when she reported that Cissie had come to her.

  “I was reading the paper in the backyard with a glass of iced tea, and there she was with Caroline on her hip.

  “’I’m so sick of being alone I could scream,’ she said. ‘You got any more of that tea?’”

  “So you told her,” I remarked, cutting Chelsea short.

  “Yes.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She changed the subject. Turns out that neither of us know how to fry chicken.”

  “In other words...?”

  “She couldn’t bear to talk about Eric.”

  Which made sense. Breaking free from Ronald’s grasp would take much more than another man’s outstretched hand. Confiden
ce. Courage. A physical place to go, and the means to sustain herself and her child. Cissie had taken one brave step toward escape, and Natalie, and others like Chelsea and I, would eagerly support her again.

  First Cissie had to be ready.

  ***

  HIDDEN IN SHADOW, Eric Zumstein leaned against an oak tree at the edge of his opposite neighbor's yard. Diagonally across the street, Cissie's car was once again in the Voight's driveway, blocked in by Ronald's truck.

  As twilight began to fall, lights switched on and revealed activity inside. Cheslea and Bobby side by side watching television. The neighborhood spy looking into his refrigerator. And Cissie moving about in the baby’s bedroom.

  From his vantage point Eric saw her reach for something in the dresser he'd helped put in place, bend down for a new diaper from the bag he knew to be on the floor next to the changing table. He could almost hear her humming as she prepared the baby for bed, a song of his imagination but no less sweet to his ears.

  When she was out of sight, he shut his eyes and lowered his head. Soon speaking on the phone would no longer suffice. Cissie knew that, too, and a part of him admired her for breaking off contact. Any choice she made invited serious consequences; he knew that, but this particular decision made his own infinitely more difficult.

  He raked his hand through his hair and glanced again at the window. Half a dozen late-season moths circled in the soft light.

  "Poor bastards," he whispered into the night air.

  ***

  I’LL FIND OUT if Eric will see me when we get back from our walk,” I announced to my audience of one at breakfast Monday morning. Eager as I was to explain everything I’d learned, 7 A.M. was way too early to phone an unemployed bachelor. “In person, of course,” I reaffirmed to Fideaux and myself. What I had to say was way too sensitive for the phone, including the answer I found on the Internet to the question no one had asked.

  So, naturally, Fideaux rolled in something vile during our walk. Before I allowed him back in the house, I had no choice. I leashed him to the bird-feeder post near the backdoor, changed into work clothes, and hauled dog shampoo, water buckets, and towels outside.

  I was rinsing my uncooperative pet and grumbling when George Donald Elliot arrived. He wore a spotless blue, buttoned-down shirt and crisply pressed, insurance-salesman slacks.

  “Hello!” I said, swiping splatter off my cheeks with my t-shirt sleeve. “Didn’t hear your car pull up.”

  “Or the phone either,” George remarked. “Hope you don’t mind. I thought I might catch you at home.”

  Delighted to be released, Fideaux frolicked around the yard like a deranged puppy.

  “I don’t mind,” I answered, “if you don’t mind me smelling like wet dog.”

  “No problem,” he assured me, but I noticed he inched the folding chair I offered slightly farther away from mine.

  “How is Susan holding up?”

  “She’s leaving for Los Angeles Friday to stay with a friend. I think she has a couple of job interviews lined up.” His disappointment was painful to see, and I worried that he blamed me.

  I mumbled a vague apology, but he waved that away.

  “We stopped being close a long time ago,” he reflected. “The truth is I never knew how to relate to a daughter, to my daughter, I should say, so I gave her things. Everything but what she wanted.”

  “Have you talked to her about this?”

  The way he pressed his lips together told me it hadn’t much helped.

  “So you bought her the ticket,” I guessed.

  “That’s what she wanted.”

  “Not exactly,” I disagreed. Airfare to California was not golf clubs or a tuxedo. It was white shirts. “This time you gave her something she needs.”

  George cocked his head to show me a slow smile. “You’re a piece of work, Ginger Struve Barnes. You know that?”

  “So I’ve heard. Now why are you really here?”

  He caressed my face with his eyes. Then he told me.

  My conversation with Eric could wait another half-day.

  Chapter 47

  THE MORNING RUSH-HOUR traffic already had me edgier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, so when my cell phone rang I let out a pathetic little, “Eeep.” I poked the Bluetooth to answer only because it was Chelsea.

  “Eric put his house up for sale!” she exclaimed as the hill ahead of me lit up like a string of red Christmas lights.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Just when I finally got a date for the recording studio.”

  “What recording studio?”

  Behind me Jack bumped his heels against the seat. Ta-thump. Ta-thump.

  “I didn’t tell you?”

  “No.” That was probably what Chelsea had wanted to share the day she returned Maisie’s paperbacks. At the time, I wouldn’t have absorbed the information, let alone cared.

  Remembering, Chelsea uttered a thoughtful, “Umm. You’re right. I didn’t. Anyway, the school grapevine came up with a parent who owns a small recording studio. She agreed to make a demo for Eric cheap, except now Eric’s leaving.”

  “Probably not today,” I reasoned, “and I’m on my way to the airport. Mind if I call you later?” A break in the crawl had gotten me up to thirty miles an hour.

  “Wait a minute. Where are you going?”

  I poked the Bluetooth off and hit the gas. For an hour let her think I was leading an exciting life.

  ***

  MY DAY HAD begun at dawn with Fideaux’s needs. It then took me across the Dannehower Bridge to the Cotaldi’s rented row home, where I was met by a distraught Susan and gray-faced George. Jack cheered and ran to embrace my legs, whereupon I burst into tears.

  The very air pulsed with so much emotional tension that initially we adults exchanged nothing but empathetic eye contact. We dealt with the specifics in short sentences over the lumps in our throats: Where I was to meet Claire, how to identify her, a few details about Jack’s potty training success.

  Then George scooped up his grandson with a, “Time to go, Champ.”

  I wiped my nose and hoisted Jack’s duffle to my shoulder. Then Susan blinked and gave each of us a last mournful look. When she bent down for the umbrella stroller, her rigid body seemed to break along with her heart.

  I had misjudged her, and the proof on her face would remain a vivid memory for many years.

  Jack sensed her pain, too. Trying to reach her, he twisted so hard he nearly broke George’s grasp and fell onto the street.

  At the car, Susan cupped her hand behind the child’s head, rubbed his tears with her thumbs, kissed him...and ran back into the house.

  Jack’s, “Mama, mama, mama,” rang in our ears, as George buckled his grandson into the car seat.

  “Dada” was conspicuously absent, of course. Flight risk that he was, Mike currently resided in a Minnesota cell awaiting his fate, which, according to my research, might be anything from time served to two years in prison, and/or a fine up to $4,000, not counting legal expenses and transportation costs. Had he used a weapon, abused Jack, or demanded payment for the boy’s return, the penalties would have doubled.

  At first the sentencing parameters struck me as lenient, especially in contrast to other kidnappings; but then I considered how fraught with complications each case surely was. Mike Swenson/Cotaldi would never be my choice for Father of the Year, and I cannot condone his actions, yet I do sympathize with his feelings toward his son. Fortunately I’m not a Minnesota judge.

  Understandably, Philadelphia has a large and active airport.

  Crowds of people inch through cattle chutes to drop off luggage then hustle for distant escalators to join lengthy security lines upstairs. I couldn’t go far without a boarding pass, so it had been arranged for Claire to meet us near the left-hand escalator on the ground floor of the pier used by her airline.

  Instead, she rushed toward us with a three-hundred watt smile and open arms the second we entered through the wid
e revolving door. The temptation to hug the breath out of Jack must have been overwhelming, but she slowed herself to a stop a few steps away. Wise, since her son’s chubby hands had already fisted with fright.

  She greeted me with a breathless hello and polite handshake, all while her eyes devoured the sight of her child.

  “I never thought...” was all she could manage. Tears glistening, she stooped down to stroller height and touched the boy’s hand.

  “Hello, Jack,” she said at last, using the name that had been agreed upon. “I’m Claire, Mommy Claire. I’m going to give you jelly bread, and red crayons, and all the love you can stand.”

  “How long do we have?” I inquired out of necessity.

  “Half an hour,” she answered without glancing up. “It isn’t enough, but we can try.”

  We found a row of empty seats near the window. Angling the stroller so Jack could watch us, I occupied him with a soft cereal bar. Face filled with curiosity, he stared at Claire as if she were magnetized.

  “He’s smart,” I began, something mothers love to hear. “He likes macaroni and cheese, but hates peas...”

  Several minutes into our race against the clock I realized I was handing her precious tidbits she would, and should, discover for herself, so I simply spread my hands and stopped talking.

  Claire blinked with surprise, but then she got it.

  “Yes,” she concurred with a fond glance at her son. “We’ll be fine.”

  The silence that fell offered my only chance to ask what I hadn’t dared ask the Minneapolis police. Yet the question stuck in my throat.

  “What?” Jack’s mother encouraged with a lift of her chin.

  “Too personal,” I deflected. “Never mind.”

  “After what you’ve done for me?” She huffed out a laugh. “I think you’ve earned the right to ask me just about anything.”

  Confident that she was indeed sincere, I confessed that I couldn’t imagine how Mike had eluded the authorities for more than a year. “What with Amber Alerts and all the technology the police have now, how do you suppose he did it?”