Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2)

by Gillian Roberts

  “Well, I’ll try my best to,” Billie said.

  And after a few comments on the list of places and people compiled so far, the interview was over.

  *

  She turned on the ignition and put on a tape she’d made of different artists singing Gershwin and allowed herself to think about the lawyer, and her life’s impacted romantic side. Its nonexistent romantic side.

  She didn’t usually let herself dwell on that because there was no point except self-pity, but now, she felt a wash of longing for all the details and grand gestures of falling in love—and not with someone you gave birth to.

  And then she realized her background music was her own self on the piano, backing up her son. “Elephants do not forget,” he piped in his little boy voice.

  Jesse’s Greatest Hits. They’d made the tape one recent rainy Sunday. She wanted to save his baby-boy voice in all its sweetness. The tape didn’t belong in the car, but Jesse adored being a recorded star, and he tended to bring it along when they went out.

  And there you have it, she thought. Raped by reality again. Yearn all you like for Gershwin, but you’re dancing to Jesse’s Greatest Hits, girl. So symbolic, one could puke from it.

  Though Emma hadn’t given it any importance, Billie had noticed that an interviewee mentioned Gavin’s volunteering at the Marine Mammal Center. What better place, she thought, to find positive impressions of the accused?

  But she definitely didn’t need to continue wearing her blue-gray knit silk sweater, or short navy skirt, or any of her Impress the Speck outfit. Sea lions did not enforce a rigorous dress code and their windswept convalescent home was out of doors, above the Pacific.

  She pulled up to her house and wondered for a moment what the Riddocks, who called Gavin’s Tiburon bayside home a “cottage,” would call the diminutive clapboard building tucked at the back of a long narrow lot. A shack? A blight on the neighborhood?

  It was possible Billie’s own neighbors called it a blight. Her house, built years ago as an unheated escape from San Francisco’s summer fog, remained true to its roots while all around it Gerstle Park remodeled and gussied itself up.

  She liked to believe that the long front garden, ragged-assed as it was, made the house look more substantial. Still, she really ought to plant flowers, as soon as these rains ended, spiff up the yard. Also, paint the house.

  Contemplating what needed to be done exhausted her. But she had to take care of the two by-products of her otherwise ill-fated marriage. Jesse and this house were her only assets. Her luck had been to buy the latter before the local real-estate market spiraled from merely grossly overpriced to its current insanity. She had to hold onto it.

  She paused at her front door for another look back at the shabby garden and noticed Ivan’s car parked across the street. This did not bode well. He should have been at college, and although Ivan was flaky about women, he was dead serious about his schooling and, to her relief, his duties as a babysitter.

  As soon as she was inside, she heard loud coughing. Thin walls were part of her house’s dubious charms.

  She knocked and went into his room. He looked as if an alien had taken him over but hadn’t gotten the form and face quite right. He was tall, six-three, and fit, but now he looked gangly and shrunken.

  “Flu,” he croaked. The physician on campus had told him so, even though he knew it anyway. “I have medicine.” He waved a finger in the direction of his night table.

  Billie was his only real family. She should be bringing him liquids and checking his temperature. “I’ll get you juice,” she said. And that would be the limits of her Florence Nightingale stint because she had to work. Had to, or Ivan, along with Jesse and Billie, would have no roof under which to be sick.

  He was flushed, his blond hair rumpled.

  Ivan’s mother, Tatiana, had emigrated from Russia with him, but she wasn’t on call for TLC. She lived upstate where she worked as a seamstress, and she wasn’t a well woman. “Something with the lungs” was all Ivan had presented as a diagnosis. Plus, she spoke almost no English and didn’t drive.

  No point thinking about Tatiana.

  No point in Billie’s instinctive guilt and nurturing impulses, either. She reminded herself that Ivan was twenty-one years old. A strapping young man. He’d survived eighteen Russian winters, hadn’t he? He’d be fine and meantime, the real problem was hers, code name: Jesse.

  “Did you call your friends?” she asked. In negotiating their arrangement—child-care in exchange for room and board, Ivan had devised a Byzantine system of backups, fellow Sonoma State students with different class schedules.

  He shook his head.

  “They can’t? None of them?”

  “I mean, I did not call. Yet. I am just home.”

  She went into the kitchen to phone. The response was predictable, and not unexpected. She’d feared this would happen since the plan was presented, but she’d had no real options. Three separate perky female voices said she should leave a message and they’d get back when they could. What they were actually saying was that they had a life so why would they be in their rooms at midday?

  An emergency plan wasn’t much help if it ignored the fact that emergencies by definition did not give advance warnings.

  Screwed.

  “I take care of Jesse. Is all right,” Ivan croaked as she returned to his room. “I wear mask, see?” He pointed at a package. And then he coughed, wrackingly, and lay back, exhausted. She touched her wrist to his forehead. Burning up. She popped the thermometer that was by the bed into his mouth.

  “What a mess!” she said, mostly to herself. “I’m so tired of all the—He’ll be sick soon, too, not from you, from what’s going around at preschool, he’s already sneezing and I have this big as-signment—finally something interesting and important, and I cannot screw up by staying home. I just knew that deal with your friends wouldn’t work, was too pat to be true—all that careful schedule‑checking—what the hell was I thinking? And even Emma has the flu so then I’ll get it, too, and then what?”

  Ivan removed the thermometer. “Spill milk,” he said, wheezing before and after each word.

  “It is not!” The thermometer verified her first impression. One hundred and two.

  “I think yes. Is what you teach me. Should not cry from spill milk.”

  “Your English stinks, and I am not crying over spilled milk. The expression means it’s stupid being upset about something that’s already happened.” She heard herself. “You’re right. I mean you’re wrong, and we’re going to have to work on idioms a lot more, but…I was even more stupid, crying about something that hasn’t happened yet. Might not happen, and which I can’t prevent from happening in any case.”

  Ivan wisely, or out of fatigue, said nothing for a while. Then, after blowing his nose, he said, “What Emma say?”

  She shook her head. “Not in the mood.”

  Sometimes, after Jesse was asleep and the house cleaned up, she and Ivan had tea and talked. He was only seven years younger than she, but he’d turned Billie into a combination of mother-confessor and Ultimate Expert on the ways of American women. So most of the talk, most of the time, was about Ivan’s adventures in his adopted homeland.

  But sometimes Billie spoke about her life, which was to say her job, and her uncomfortable relationship with Emma Howe. Once, when she’d imitated Emma’s brusque delivery, Ivan had applauded as if he’d just seen the best of Broadway. Since then, “doing Emma” had become a dramatic highlight of late-evening talks.

  Although she lacked the energy to perform it, Billie could almost hear what Emma would say—or shout. “Ms. August,” in that tone that felt like a battering ram, “this is precisely and exactly why I had to be insane to hire you. Your life is an incoherent disaster and absolutely no concern of mine. This isn’t about sisterhood. We are not sisters. This is not some cause we’re in, this is a business. I should have had my head examined before I hired you. Look at you! A preschooler, no funds
, no family, just a sex-crazed Russian part-time college student babysitter! And besides that, you’re an idiot!”

  “Go work,” Ivan said. “I be…Jesse be—”

  “—Will be, Ivan,” she said. “You’ve got to get a handle on the future tense. Things that are not happening now. They are going to happen later on.”

  “Not worry about things not happen now. Maybe won’t happen ever,” he said. “Jesse fine. I pick him up at party.”

  Double damn! “I forgot—whose party again?”

  “Max in Kentfield. Address in kitchen. I pick him up.”

  Admirable Ivan, mouth-breathing, eyes wet with fever. She shook her head. “You stay here and work at getting well.” She didn’t trust him behind a wheel.

  But he was right. There was no point in worrying over a future that was out of her control. She checked her watch. Time enough to check out the Marine Mammal Center and still pick up her son. Nothing was impossible, at least today. Then they’d have a quiet evening together while she made chicken soup from scratch for Ivan. It would be pleasant.

  And who knew? Maybe Ivan would feel better by the next afternoon after day care, or his friends would have called back and be ready to step in. “I’ll get him,” she said. “No problem.”

  His eyes half closed, Ivan looked silently grateful. “I’ll…” he said after a moment.

  “You’ll what?”

  “I’ll. That is how you say it. Is the tense future.”

  She went to change into her jeans. He’d gotten that much right; the future was tense indeed.

  Five

  “I’m Heather Wilson,” the young woman said. She was a pale, shy girl; her posture and clothing subdued and designed to be unnoticed. Emma thought she looked familiar, but couldn’t place her.

  “This is—” Heather Wilson faltered, gestured toward the older woman standing ramrod straight next to her.

  The woman flicked a glance Emma couldn’t interpret at the now-silent Heather. “Kay Wilson,” she said. “I’m her mother.” Her lips clamped into a grim line.

  Emma gestured for them to be seated. Zack had given her a cryptic description. Daughter the client, mother not happy about this. Refused to say what she—or they—wanted.

  “I saw you,” Heather Wilson said as she settled into the chair on the other side of Emma’s desk.

  Emma always found silence most efficient when in the company of a person not making sense. What was the point of talking into the wind? She waited and tried not to think about how stiff and sore her shoulder muscles felt. She wanted to blame it on that flu she thought she was getting, but she didn’t feel as sick today. It was a head cold, and not much of one, and she now blamed her aches on a weekend spent hauling household junk to the curb for the township’s large-object pickup.

  The girl wasn’t Emma’s image of a “Heather.” Too plain for her name, although God knew there were so many Heathers in her age group, it was foolish to have any idea of what one of them would look like.

  This one looked in her early twenties and not overly affluent. Dressed conservatively, she looked ready for a political rally, perhaps, in a navy skirt with a white blouse and red cardigan. Above the neck, she was less methodically put together, with chewed off lipstick and brown hair insufficiently held back by barrettes so that wisps and pieces hung by her ears.

  Her mother had similar taste in clothing, but her grooming was meticulous. She did not look happy.

  “I saw you day before yesterday,” Heather said. “You were at work—my work, remember?”

  Emma did not. “And that was…”

  “You were talking to Marlena.”

  “Ah.” Emma nodded. Right. This was the lurker, she who’d been counting inventory at a glacial rate in order to eavesdrop.

  “You told Marlena you were an investigator.”

  “So I did,” Emma said. “And in fact, I am.” On the telephone, Heather had said her problem was too personal for a man, even for a man hired to acquire such information. Zack had therefore put her into the Cranks-R-Us Permanent Acquisition category, which meant she was paying for this time, putting up a thousand dollars against her bill.

  “So I thought to myself…I thought…” She nodded agreement with whatever she was about to say.

  Emma pulled a tissue out of the box on her desk and caught her sneeze in time. Then she leaned toward the two women. It eased the tightness between her shoulder blades and made her look as if she were actually interested. “I assume, since you heard what I was discussing with Marlena, you’ve come in because you have information about Gavin Riddock.” She didn’t truly assume that. She merely wanted to get this girl unstalled. It would be shocking if imparting information about Gavin Riddock was her mission. Unlikely that she’d refuse to say so to Zack, and more than improbable that she’d pay to do so.

  “Who?”

  “Gav—”

  “That murderer?” Heather shook her head and waved away the air in front of her. “No way. He’s…nope. I never met him and never hope to!”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “It made me realize, your being there. I need something investigated.”

  Her mother looked around the room, as if trapped.

  “And?” Emma asked. Was this interview going to be done syllable by syllable?

  “Someone.” Heather’s glance fluttered from the bookshelves to the carpet to the window and finally rested down on her fingers. “I need to find someone.” She picked at a cuticle. “My mother,” she finally said, still looking down.

  Emma glanced at Kay Wilson, whose hands were so tightly clasped the knuckles were white as she looked wistfully at Heather, who finally met Emma’s eyes and spoke with a veneer of defiance. “My actual mother. The one who gave birth to me.”

  It was now Kay Wilson’s turn to keep her eyes anywhere but on the other people in the room.

  “You being a woman detective,” Heather continued. “I wasn’t sure there were such things, except on TV and all, but I’d rather be with a woman because I think you’ll be more…more sympathetic.” She flashed a quick, angry look at her adoptive mother.

  “Tell me what you have in mind.” Emma kept her voice neutral. She was not particularly sympathetic to unearthing long-buried things unless necessary. Searches such as this girl’s were not shelved in Emma’s “necessary” category.

  “I want to find my birth mother. I found out I was adopted six months ago, but I can’t find―”

  Kay Wilson’s hands were clenched and her eyes on fire.

  “There are registries,” Emma said. “You can enter your name and if your birth mother also wants to find you, she’ll enter her name, and you’ll be a match.”

  The young woman concentrated on her cuticle again. “I tried a place on-line. They said they could find anybody, but they didn’t. And I don’t know how to find things out on my own,” Heather said. “You do.”

  “Please tell her.” Kay Wilson’s voice was soft. Emma almost felt as if she had to strain to hear the woman. “Please make her understand that sometimes people do not want to be found. She has a perfectly good life and shouldn’t be squandering her emotions and money this way.”

  “Heather,” Emma said, “explain it to me. Why do you want to find her?”

  “Because I do, that’s all. Because I want—I need—to know who I am.”

  “You already know that. And you already know who your real mother is: the woman who’s raised you all these years. You said you found out about the adoption recently. Can’t you think yourself back to before that time, to who you were? Because you’re still her.”

  Kay Wilson sat back a bit, her lips tight. Vindicated, her posture and expression said, but that hardly made her happier. The tip of her nose glowed pink. She was a crier, Emma suspected. She hoped the woman continued to hold it in.

  Heather did her air-brushing again, ridding the atmosphere of the words that had been said. “I know that. But I can’t go back. Don’t you do this kind of
thing? Why are you being negative?”

  “I’m trying to warn you because yes, I do this sort of thing and too often it ends sadly. Sometimes, it’s best to let things be.”

  Heather tensed her mouth, looking remarkably like a young edition of her adoptive mother, and said nothing, holding her ground.

  Emma considered the grim duo. “It’s unusual for an adoptive parent to come along for something like this,” she said. “You seem so unhappy about Heather’s decision, so may I ask what…why…”

  “I don’t approve and I’m still hoping she sees that it’s a waste of time and energy and money, but if she stays determined, then…she’s my daughter. I want her happiness, so I’ll help however I can, although I don’t have much information at all.” Kay Wilson dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

  Emma wished that people would ask her the best approach to their problems. And listen to what she said, understand that her years at this job had given her perspective and some measure of wisdom.

  In this case, without even hearing specifics, she’d tell the girl to lay off. Respect the privacy desires of a woman who’d probably been younger than she now was. Let go of the phantom idea of mother and look at the real woman whose love and sweat and energy had gone into making her. Because odds were, in the end, the girl would be angry or disappointed, or both, when Emma handed her the truth. Emma loved the truth, believed in it, swore by it, made her living by unearthing it, but most people, no matter what they said, preferred illusions.

  Emma’s own daughter was a prime example, and their latest quarrel had been over precisely that. Caroline had twisted Emma’s desire to never lie to her children into the reason she, Caroline, could not sustain a good relationship with a man.

  “I never needed to know those things about Daddy!” she’d screamed. “I didn’t need to know he died in a motel, with another woman. I didn’t need to know about the gambling! You poisoned me with that stuff.”

  So there they had the current explanation for Caroline’s divorce and recent breakup with another man. Soon that—or another offense of Emma’s—would explain why she couldn’t settle on a career.