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

by Gillian Roberts

  This woman didn’t know anything and Billie wondered why Veronica had suggested talking to her. “Did Gavin ever phone you?” Billie asked.

  Lizzie looked surprised by the question. “Why would he?” Her curly salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a loose short style, and it bounced and jumped with each emphatic head shake. “He never was the person organizing anything. That’s who might call. Or a telephone tree, but…no.”

  It had been a thought. If he had a telephone habit, then maybe he’d been the one phoning Tracy each night at Veronica’s.

  “Wait, I just thought of something that showed what Gavin was like,” Lizzie said. “When the oil washed up at Point Reyes, remember?”

  Billie wasn’t sure she did. She didn’t pay enough attention, she thought. To anything. And she had the sense of oil washing up on beaches with appalling regularity and no sense of what good it would do for her to pay attention to all of it. Still, she nodded, lest she discourage a concrete fact.

  “A while back, remember? Oil globs, tar balls all over the beach. Killed hundreds of murres, I think they were. Little black-and-white seabirds. Gavin came to the beach—it was open to everybody—and cried. The survivors were taken to the East Bay, the bird rescue center there and he helped throughout. He wasn’t trained in removing tar, but there were things he was able to do and he did whatever they wanted. Swept the floor, prepared beakers of solution. Didn’t matter, he so wanted to save the birds. He was tireless and an incredible help. ‘They never hurt anybody,’ was what he kept saying. Now I ask you, does that sound like a killer?”

  “Thanks,” Billie said, making notes. “That’s great.” The first actual first-hand—She stopped herself in mid-thought. “You saw all this, right? You were there.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “Actually, I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t. I wish I could have been, but I was out of town at the time. Otherwise, I would have been there, of course. Those poor birds.”

  Billie’s momentary joy had drowned with the oily birds. “Do you recall who told you this story?” Maybe she could still find that person.

  Lizzie looked stricken. “No,” she said quietly, “but I know it’s true.”

  Billie wrote “hearsay” next to the lovely quote about poor little things that never hurt anybody.

  “Was there anybody, in any of the groups you and Gavin and Tracy—”

  “You know it isn’t fair to make it sound that way, as if we three—or even Gavin and Tracy—were a constant presence. She only was interested, actively, for a little bit. She came to CoXistence with Gavin. But almost right after—a very short time after—she said she was putting her efforts somewhere else and that was that. I never got to know her well.”

  “‘Putting her efforts elsewhere,’” Billie repeated. “Those were her words?”

  Lizzie nodded. “She said that to me. That time, I was there.” Her smile brimmed with hope.

  “Can you think of anyone who might have been her enemy?”

  “We aren’t that sort. You don’t think somebody goes all out to save animals and then clobbers a human to death, do you? Or do you think all animal defenders are crazed, foaming at the mouth lunatics? We’re trying to get people to share this planet, is all.” She shook her head again, but this time mildly, sorrowfully.

  “It’s bewildering. Nobody who knew Gavin seems to believe he’s capable of this crime, and yet he’s in jail. So we look around to see if there’s somebody, something we’ve missed…”

  “Gavin was—is—gentle and sweet and good. But he’s not normal. Nobody’s going to say that. Who’s to say what he might have done if provoked?”

  “Provoked how?”

  Another head shake, this time with a different emphasis and meaning. This time, it was close to dismissal, and her voice, when she spoke, sounded weary. “I don’t know, Ms. August. I thought I knew Gavin. But in truth, I didn’t. Gavin—well, we’d make small talk, or work on a poster together. And Tracy? When Gavin brought her in, she was so enthusiastic, and we liked each other from the get-go, but she acted like we disappointed her in some way. As if she expected something more of us, although I don’t know what it was. And then she quit. In hindsight, I suppose the restlessness or disappointment was about her marriage falling apart—that has to be it—but in any case, I didn’t really know her. Gavin, poor boy. Poor both of them.”

  Billie thanked her for her time and left, with no more than she’d had going in. Except the knowledge that there were animal mediators and the wish that small black-and-white tarred bird survivors could testify in court.

  Thirteen

  “So sorry,” the pregnant clerk said. “I’m here all alone. Flu’s going around and I swear, half of Monterey’s out sick, plus Doris is on her lunch break and…”

  Behind those health reports, and her hands waving toward unseen messages on her desk, the clerk was saying that she was not going to be able to find Heather Wilson’s birth certificate for a while.

  Emma could not bring herself to hassle or hurry the girl who looked minutes away from delivering quadruplets. She debated how best to organize her time. “I’ll be back in an hour,” she said. “Would that help?”

  The pregnant girl looked almost teary-eyed with gratitude. Again, Emma was astounded. Possibly the first bureaucrat she’d ever encountered who was upset at not giving instant, superior service. It had to be those pregnancy hormones. Nothing else explained it.

  She thanked the girl again and left, deciding to check out the newspaper.

  She was also required to wait at the Herald’s offices, although nobody seemed upset about delaying her. Finally, she was given access to their archives to check the date the girl called Heather Wilson was born. And to whom.

  She found nothing in a week’s worth of newspapers, and in fact, nothing in three weeks’ worth, just in case. But it had been a long shot, anyway that the hospital clerk would foul up and put the birth mother’s name in the papers before the newborn was adopted.

  No great loss. She wasn’t going to grieve over it. She had an early lunch by herself, two cups of coffee, then ambled back to the court house.

  *

  This time, the clerk’s office door was closed, with a handwritten note. “Emergency.”

  She’s gone into labor, Emma thought. And Doris, back from lunch, had to go with her. Just my luck.

  Then the handwritten note on the door registered. “Back by 3 P.M.” Something besides labor, then, unless this place was staffed by amazons. Emma fleetingly hoped that nothing had happened about the pregnancy. Nothing bad about anything, but then having given the unknown that much, she allowed herself a flare of irritation. Day wasted for nothing. It had taken over two hours to drive down and would take more than that in afternoon traffic to get home.

  She knew that her irritation was less about the clerk’s emergency than about herself, because she knew what she should do with the waiting time. Knew, in fact, why she hadn’t stayed home and waited for the certificate to be mailed to her.

  This trip put her in the neighborhood, more or less, and it was past time that she visited him. She always needed an outside excuse.

  *

  “Hi, Dad,” she said, loudly, as she knocked at the doorway. Didn’t want to startle him, tax his worn-down heart, even as her own accelerated in tempo and intensity. Seeing her father did this to her; a fear she never named that possessed her before each visit.

  No response. He sat in a wheelchair angled so he could see out the window, onto the hazy, gray-blue day. She panicked until she noticed the plug in his ear. Not his hearing-aid ear. He was listening to something, couldn’t hear her.

  While she stood wondering how to alert him to her presence without so shocking him that his heart stopped, he must have become aware of motion, because his head swiveled, and he pulled the plug out of his ear.

  Her father’s eyesight had been disappearing from the center outward so that now he could only see at the very edges of his vision. She watched him angle his head
until he could see her somewhat. She waved. “Hi, Dad,” she said again. “I was in the neighborhood, so…”

  “Emma!” His voice was gnarled, like his fingers. Sometimes it sounded knotted thick and sometimes close to worn through. “I was listening”—he pointed a twisted and swollen index finger at the Walkman—“I was listening to a book about a PI—a woman, just like you. I was thinking about you.”

  She sat down across from him. “And worrying whether I was in trouble the way that PI you’re listening to was, right? Gunfights and chases. Things like that, right?” She spoke loudly. Even the hearing aids weren’t enough anymore, and he could no longer read lips. Although the attempts were now close to futile, his face still had the slightly pinched expression of somebody straining to hear and see.

  Emma’s heart raced with inescapable sorrow. It wasn’t fair, this shutting down and closing up, this being slowly pushed out of life. “Real life is much more boring than make-believe, Dad,” she said. “I’m down here going through old newspapers and waiting for a clerk to pull a birth record. Wouldn’t make much of a listening adventure.”

  “How are you?” he asked.

  She squeezed his hand. She was fine, but she couldn’t bear his cockeyed, sideways scrutiny. Couldn’t watch this slow disintegration, worse by increments every time she saw him, which wasn’t often enough. Her sister was better about it, but then her sister had always been the good one in the family.

  Maybe Celia was the brave one, too. She and Emma never talked about whether the present sorrows and future implications of their father’s slide terrified Celia as much as it did Emma.

  Instead, they talked about medical progress, what the doctors or nurses said, the mechanics and economics and logistics of managing the inevitable. Of making it as bearable—for him—as possible.

  A whole lot of talk, but no touchy-feely crap. They weren’t that laughable California stereotype—people who “shared,” except for food and chores, clothing when possible and money when needed. They got on with their lives.

  It wasn’t their way to talk and Emma wouldn’t have known how to say that it physically hurt to see him progressively enfeebled, imploding as his eyes and his ears and his legs failed him, pushing him further and further inward toward an already weakened heart.

  His voice was the only reaching-out instrument that had lasted, but he’d never been one for words, and he wasn’t now, either.

  She wondered what he thought about, whether he was frightened. Whether he felt satisfied about the life he’d led or if there’d been dreams he still held. Whether he missed his dead wife, or even thought about her. How he felt about being here, a place of no happy escape.

  What he thought of Emma. Whether he had advice, had learned something in his long, hard life she should know. For years, she’d heard these questions every time she saw him. They rolled on the walls of her mind, clattering, incessant. It was hard work ignoring them, leaving them alone, as they should be. Because this felt different, this wasn’t like the rest of life. This wasn’t life.

  This was a mystery and she hated unsolved puzzles and things that didn’t make sense.

  But it would have to stay this way, and that was undoubtedly for the best. This way, you didn’t get as hurt. Ignorance was probably bliss, and it would only upset him—and her—to try being other than who they were.

  They held hands in the pale afternoon light. Touch lasted. She offered to get him something to drink. He declined. She asked if he were warm enough, cold enough, if there was anything he wanted. He looked at her with blind eyes and said he was fine. She asked if there was anything she could get him or send him. She promised to send him more books on tape even though he said he had enough. He asked how her children were, and the grandchildren, and she said they were all fine and told whatever good things she knew about them. No need to trouble him at this point, or ever, with ongoing spats or misunderstandings.

  When an hour had passed, she stood. She hated this part even more, not knowing whether this was a true good-bye or not. The top of his skull looked polished. She bent and kissed it, then stayed close to his ear so that he could hear. “I’ll be back soon, Dad, I promise. Won’t be as long this next time.”

  He was only a few hours from home, as her sister reminded her too often. Emma didn’t think twice about driving down here to retrieve a birth certificate, but she thought an agonizingly long time before coming to see him, and always then with a racing heart.

  She could never explain it, even to herself. But then, they weren’t an explaining kind of family.

  *

  The other clerk, Doris, was now in the office. “She’s having her twins,” she told Emma. “A little early. Husband’s out of town.” She fanned herself. “Never thought I’d feel so nervous driving somebody—like a cartoon character. But we made it. And she’d gotten this for you.” She handed over a copy of Heather Wilson’s birth certificate.

  Emma thanked her, and felt a flare of excitement. This had the original mother’s name: Megan.

  The flash lasted less than a second, because the last name was, indeed, Wilson. And the middle name, Kay.

  Anger replaced excitement again. This was an amended birth certificate, and the adoptive mother’s name was Megan Kay Wilson. The woman could have mentioned that she used her middle name. But of course, that might have made matters less confusing.

  But why did it say “unknown” under “Father’s Name.” Where was Nowell Wilson, the man who’d driven to pick up the newborn girl?

  “Everything okay?” the clerk asked.

  “Fine,” Emma said, still staring at the certificate. Given that there was no named father, maybe the big bad secret was that Heather Wilson had been born, in fact, to Megan Kay Wilson, unmarried woman.

  But that didn’t make sense, either. It wasn’t as if Kay Wilson had tried to cover the illegitimacy of a daughter she’d produced by saying she’d adopted her. Instead, she claimed her as her own until recently, when she tripped up. For twenty years she’d said that Heather was her own. Was that a truth that she made sound like a lie, to cover up having had a child while not married? It sounded so baroque, so convoluted, and so very unlike the straitlaced Mrs. Wilson, that Emma’s head hurt.

  She had started with nothing and now she had less than nothing.

  Heather’s birth date had been months off. Kay Wilson turned out to have a different name. And Nowell Wilson, the supposed father, wasn’t on the amended birth certificate at all.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  Fourteen

  The jail had been carefully designed to be nearly invisible so as not to remind Marinites that while they might be justifiably proud of their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Civic Center, there was more to the business of running a county than atriums and airy offices. People were locked out of sight, in a jail built into the hillside, another bunker of sorts. Our dirty secrets, Billie thought.

  She’d done a fine job of seeming sure of her direction, of believing—or behaving—as if she alone could get information from Gavin. A brilliant audition and she had gotten the role, and now she had stage fright.

  She told herself she was being ridiculous. Nothing to fear. But she saw through that argument. A great deal was at stake: her still unborn career, the rest of her life, and whatever was gestating with Michael Specht. And she knew nothing. She had never interviewed a prisoner or even known one, and she had to do it right.

  She couldn’t have said how she’d expected Gavin Riddock to be, but it hadn’t been this disarmingly ordinary looking young man. There were no outward signs of whatever emotional or mental problems he suffered, and he was fit and healthy-looking. A runner, she reminded herself, a weight-lifter.

  He smiled tentatively as she sat down across from him.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” she said. “My name’s Billie August.”

  “Pleased to meet you, too.” His speech was slow, but as if he carefully considered each word, not as if he had difficulty with them
. His smile shifted from tentative to authentic.

  “I’m working with your lawyer, with Michael Specht.”

  His expression blanked out, as if he’d clicked off an internal light so that she’d be less visible and so that she couldn’t see him clearly, either. He acknowledged her words with a slow silent nod.

  She had estranged him before she’d asked a single question. Her jitteriness escalated. Maybe it was her voice. Maybe she’d been so busy fighting stage fright that she’d come across as aggressive.

  “I’m here because we believe you’re innocent,” she said gently. She hoped Gavin, who kept his eyes on his folded hands, didn’t know that the word “we” wasn’t a complete truth.

  Michael Specht hadn’t said his client was guilty, not in so many words. He instead had said in passing that “nobody is ever guilty, don’t you know that? And they all are, except in the movies.” It was clear what he felt about Gavin. Her mandate, after all, was simply to gather sand to toss in the jury’s eyes. Confusion and doubt were the most the lawyer hoped for, not vindication.

  “Why?” Gavin asked.

  “Why? Why what?”

  “Why do you think I’m innocent?”

  “Because…because you are, aren’t you?”

  He looked at her with slatey eyes. “Why am I locked up? If you believe it, why don’t the people who locked me up believe it?”

  “Because the law…because we’re unable to…” She sounded like an asshole. A pedant. Like every authority must have sounded as he stumbled and hobbled through school. “I believe you’re innocent because everything I hear says you are a gentle person who wouldn’t hurt your friend.”

  Now she sounded…flabby. Stupid. “You’re locked up, Gavin, because I’m not the boss of the world.”

  He smiled. Sincerely, and quickly erased, but she’d seen it and the first spark defrosting whatever had made him freeze up. “People say you like animals,” Billie said.