Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2)
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“But—why take your sister’s name?” Emma asked. “Or lie about Heather’s birth date?”
“I…sometimes I could show copies of Heather’s birth certificate to get her into programs, and I changed the date so she’d be eligible. Just a few months, so she could be in play school sooner.”
“And taking your sister’s name?”
“I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what to do. You have to imagine yourself at sixteen, suddenly…I decided that the easiest way to be was to stick as close to the truth as I could, so that I wouldn’t be caught. Heather already called me Kay. I got a copy of Megan’s birth certificate, and used it when I applied for jobs. That way, I could lie, too, and say I was a high school graduate.
“I said I was a widow, that my husband—I said his name was Nowell, just in case I needed another birth certificate—was killed in an accident while I was pregnant. People felt sorry for me, or at least, they didn’t say anything bad.
“First, I got a job tending an old lady in her house. A companion, they called it, but I was everything: cleaning lady, cook, entertainer, medicine giver. Whatever you call it. Heather and I shared a tiny ‘in-law’ apartment out back, and I got a small salary, just about enough for day care.
“Nobody came to find me. I got books out of the library and studied for my high school equivalent degree, and I got it, so I could apply for real jobs. When Heather was in the church’s nursery school, I got a clerical job in an office, found us the smallest, cheapest decent apartment and that’s where we lived for three more years. By then, my big story wasn’t news anywhere else. Every place had its own massacres. I could go back to California, as long as it wasn’t my hometown.
I finally came to San Francisco, just the way I dreamed. That was the thing I did for me. So I was there, even though it wasn’t the way I’d hoped. We moved over here, to San Rafael because I found a place we could afford to rent here, and we made a life. A good, solid life. Heather was a regular little girl with a respectable history. She wouldn’t be trash and nobody was going to talk about her that way. About us. We were—we are still—respectable.
“When I moved back and went to work here, I switched back to my real name and birth date. It didn’t matter any more. I had a high school degree myself and I was old enough for any jobs. It’s a clean, decent life. Nobody talks about us. Nobody. That’s what I got. I never married. I barely ever had a date. I had a child to raise, and it wasn’t easy supporting her, making sure she dressed like the other children, did her homework, had the advantages, that she could be proud of who she was.
“But it was worth it, until that day—” She shook her head and her face contorted bitterly. “I seldom drink; I’m the daughter of a drunk. But that day…Heather was acting up and I said it. She looks like Megan, and it was always on my mind, and there she was, throwing it all away. Quitting her job, quitting college. I worked so hard to give her that—I gave it up myself for her—and she was tossing it away, flushing it down the toilet. I couldn’t believe anybody could waste what I’d wanted so much and never had a chance for and worked so hard to give her. I guess I was angry with her and feeling sorry for myself and I said it. ‘You’re just like your mother and you’re going to turn out just as bad if you don’t shape up.’”
A sound, half sigh, half sob, rolled through her, then she looked directly at Emma, her mouth tight. “I’ve tried to make her feel good about herself, make her proud. To protect her. How will she feel knowing she’s the illegitimate daughter of a teenage drug addict who murdered her family? And that is the truth. Precisely what you wanted. Are you pleased? Is it still the measure of everything? What are you going to do now, Miss Howe?”
Thirty-Five
Marlena had noticed the figure earlier, but by the time she tried to check it out, it was gone.
But here it—she—was again: Mrs. Vincent. Watching them, like a detective in a bad movie, leaning against the wall across the way. Marlena wondered when somebody was going to come out and ask her what she was doing. If she weren’t so nicely dressed in her designer jeans and suede shirt-jacket, she’d have been picked up or questioned by now, for sure.
What did she want? What could she possibly get from watching where he worked?
Then Marlena understood and smiled to herself. David’s wife was making sure. She wondered how she’d figured out that it was Marlena on the phone. The calls had been fun—little breathless stupid-me calls—but she hadn’t identified herself.
Or maybe she didn’t know, had no idea, but was waiting to follow her husband when he left the building. Because in the end, what she wanted, no matter who the girl turned out to be, was to see for herself. To be sure.
Across from her, Heather hunched over the account book. The girl was so drab, Marlena couldn’t understand how she could tell if she was actually alive. And lately, she’d been even more silent, all pulled up and the doors locked shut. As if Marlena wanted to know Heather Wilson’s secrets. That’d be a laugh; that girl had the world’s most boring life. She wondered if she’d ever had a date, let alone anything more than that with a man.
And Marlena surely wasn’t telling Heather her own secrets. She could imagine Heather’s expressions if she were to tell about the phone calls, about her life plan for Mr. David Vincent. The girl would alert the police, the church and Dear Abby.
Marlena did neck-stretching exercises. She had a painful crick from sitting too long, and that helped her decide what to do about that and about Mrs. Vincent across the street.
She lifted her cosmetics pouch out of her purse, stood, and went over to the window, pausing, posing, enjoying the knowledge that David Vincent’s wife was watching her. Let Jeannie Vincent make sure. Life could use speeding up.
Marlena was glad she was wearing the lacy slip and the transparent chiffon candy-striped shirt she’d found at the thrift shop. Let her get an eyeful. Slowly, she powdered and patted her face, turning her head this way and that to get different angles in the mirror. More slowly still, she ran the lipstick across her upper lip and then, after a head-tilting self-examination in the mirror once again, repeated the process with her lower lip. And all the while, she arched her back, making sure Mrs. Vincent was aware of her enemy’s ammunition.
Eat your heart out. The war was over even if nobody but Marlena knew it yet. She saw signs of it all the time. The way he looked at her, watched her when he thought she didn’t know it. The way he touched her shoulder that day when she said she was upset about Tracy. Consoling her was just an excuse to touch her.
The way he was watching her now. Her back still to him, she snapped shut the mirrored compact that had shown her his office door opening, had shown her that he stopped in mid-stride to watch her. Really watch her.
She checked the other side of the street. Jeannie Vincent wasn’t there anymore. By craning her neck, she found the woman all the way up at the corner, leaning against another wall, smoking.
“What’s up, Marlena?”
He was very close. Surely closer than he used to get. Everything a signal, everything a sign.
“Oh!” she said, turning slightly. “I didn’t hear you—”
“You seemed mesmerized.”
She waved lazily at the window and sighed. “Thinking about Tracy again, I guess.”
He followed the direction of her glance, across the street in the direction of the travel agency. “What about her?”
She shrugged. “I get sad thinking about her.”
“It seems to me…” He looked at Marlena so intently it weirded her out.
What was this about? Did he think Marlena was a cold person? Without emotions? The fact was, she didn’t care one way or the other about Tracy, but what did his questioning mean?
He’d explain or he wouldn’t. She certainly wasn’t going to say “I didn’t mean that. I was actually watching your wife stalk you. She’s nuts you know, and I’ve been helping her along, helping her realize it’s about you and me now, not you and her.”
“I guess when somebody dies that way, somebody you’ve actually met and talked to, you think about them a whole lot.”
He was still looking at her as if he was looking right inside of her, waiting for more. She had no idea what to say, but kept talking anyway. “It’s called posttraumatic stress. I saw about it on TV. I didn’t know her that well, but I liked her. She was friendly. She talked to me a couple of times. She was pretty interesting, actually. Told me things I didn’t know anything about.”
“Like what? What did Tracy Lester know?”
Was this a come-on? Did he think she was secretly close—that way—with Tracy? Or that gay Tracy taught her about sex for God’s sake? Did he maybe think Marlena was also gay? “About animals,” she said. “Things that happen to them.” God, but she hoped that cleared things up for him.
It must have. He stopped looking at her that way, and now, Marlena thought maybe she was boring him. She glanced back at the street corner she faced but he did not. Jeannie Vincent was still there, grinding out her cigarette with her shoe and looking. She could see the window. She could see them. Marlena rearranged herself so that she was tilted toward David Vincent. Now, she put a hand—the window side hand so that Jeannie Vincent would surely see—on his shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You’re so quiet. Have I done something wrong? Does it bother you that I mention Tracy?”
“Why would you say that? Why would it bother me to talk about her?”
He seemed angry, maybe because she was missing the point, that he just wanted to be close to her. That this was a man and woman thing, and not about some dead girl. “Did—did you not like her?” she asked.
“Like her? I didn’t know her.”
“Know her well, I guess you mean. I mean you know her, but maybe you didn’t really know her.”
“I meant what I said. I didn’t know her at all.”
“But…” She’d seen Tracy inside his office. She knew they knew each other, but probably only about business, tickets or something that was easier to hand-deliver than to mail across the street, and of course he’d forget who the messenger was.
Except Tracy had been in his office pretty long. Marlena noticed things like that. She’d thought Tracy was her competition until, of course, she found out that Tracy was moving in with a woman. But he wasn’t saying anything about it and he must have his reasons.
Maybe Tracy had rejected him. Maybe it was a bitter memory. She let go of it, didn’t contradict him.
Her hand was still on his shoulder and she slowly, reluctantly, dropped it, letting her fingers touch the cloth of his light sweater.
“You’re feeling sad, is that it?” he said in a softer voice. “That’s what this is about?”
His wife was walking back toward them again.
She nodded, and snuffled. “I can’t help it,” she said, holding her hands up to her face. “It was so awful, what happened to her and I think, well, it could happen to any of us, then. So alive, and then dead, like that. Murdered. I get so frightened!”
“Don’t be.” His voice was gentle, and he put his hands on her upper arms, holding her steady as if he was afraid she’d topple. She kept her head bowed, so he couldn’t see that she wasn’t managing to produce tears. “You’ll be fine. There’s no reason to think that anything bad is going to ever happen to you.” And he moved one hand from her shoulder to under her chin, which he lifted gently, to reassure her. “Come on, now,” he said. “Let me see a smile.”
She couldn’t help it, she glanced out the window again and he followed her glance, his hand still on her chin.
“Shit!” He dropped both hands.
“What did I do?”
He stared across the street, so she looked, too, and of course saw Jeannie Vincent, hands on her hips, staring back at them, her features bent and twisted.
She looked insane.
“My wife. She’s across the street. She’s…she’s got some really wrong ideas about me, about what I do and just now I had my hand on your arm and under your chin—”
“It was completely innocent!” Marlena gazed at him. Let her see that. Unless she could lip-read through glass and across the street, let her think the love-words were still going on.
“I know it was innocent and you know it, but she—she’s a nervous woman, and…” He backed off, literally. Marlena watched, amused. What did he think, that he could rewind the film and do the scene again? Move them back to the point where he came out of his office and saw her by the window?
She was proud of how cleverly she’d scripted it, how perfectly it had played out.
Her talent was making things happen. You had to know what you wanted. And then you had to think through what it took to get it. She knew how to do that, even on the spot, even when she had to improvise, like just now.
And it had worked. The bait had been snapped up.
He could retreat all he wanted to. Something was going to happen because something already had.
Thirty-Six
Billie sat in her car with the motor idling. She’d promised Gavin Riddock something it wasn’t in her power to grant. Now what?
This was worse than a needle in a haystack. She didn’t know where the haystack was and wasn’t sure it was a needle she was after in the first place.
But she was convinced now that it—the letter, the journal, the diary, the note—was important and had to do with Tracy’s death. Why else tell Gavin that if anything happened to her, there’d be something that explained, that would tell him how to help her?
The something had to be where he could find it. She’d probably told him where, but he hadn’t heard. Hadn’t listened. Had listened to his breath, only his breath while they ran. Maybe Tracy hadn’t been aware of his inattention.
Except Tracy Lester knew Gavin Riddock better than anyone else on earth did. She would have anticipated his inattention, or his poor memory, and if he’d made it clear he didn’t want to hear it, she would have been able to interpret his agitation and refusals, especially given her own fears.
She wouldn’t have told him whatever it was. Too risky. What she would have told him was where those notes were. And they’d have to be where Gavin, with his limited experience and contacts, would find them. It had to be his house. His own house. She directed the car toward Tiburon.
There was a pledge drive on NPR and she had already pledged, so she pulled out a tape from the box in the console, saw that it had a handwritten label, and popped it in. She’d copied a friend’s CD onto a tape. Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Chopin. Perfect.
“And the twinky bird sang in the high silly tree and the—”
What the hell? That goddamn Jesse’s Greatest Hits again. She snapped the tape off.
The kid kept bringing it back to the car, afraid to be without “his” music or the headphones that would soon fuse to his ears. The way Gavin must have been. His Walkman was what he missed most, after his animals and, of course, Tracy.
She held the offending tape. No wonder she’d mixed them up. It also had a handwritten label—her handwriting.
And then, thoughts about music, Jesse, Gavin, and handwriting combined and sent prickles over her scalp, as if the idea that now possessed her literally blazed a path across her brain.
*
Ana was holding her purse when she answered the door and reluctantly let Billie enter. “I was leaving for a while,” she said. “All done here and my grandson is waiting.” Ruffles barked from the backyard. “Nothing left to do,” Ana added.
And indeed, the little house sparkled, every millimeter in place and shiny without so much as a dust mote marring a surface. Billie wondered how Ana avoided having cat hair anywhere when the two cats seemed everywhere. One was asleep on the dark green sofa, and the other sitting in the hall, deciding whether Billie could pass.
�
�Please, I’ll be quick,” Billie said, and with a heavy sigh, Ana allowed her freedom of the house.
It looked the same. The view across the water to Sausalito, the sofas, the cats, the coffee table, TV, stereo, shelving filled with neatly arranged CDs and video- and audiotapes.
She had to proceed logically. First eliminate the idea of mail.
“Ana, tell me: Did Gavin receive any mail that he didn’t get to see? Any personal mail?”
Ana retreated from the neck up, turtlelike.
“I didn’t mean you kept it from him, but did any come around the time of his arrest? After his arrest? Or before, even, but he wasn’t interested in reading it?”
“No mail.”
“Bills?”
She shook her head. “Mrs. Zandra pays bills. They go to her place.”
“Magazines?”
“Mr. Gavin, he doesn’t get magazines. Catalogs, maybe. That’s all, and ads, and things from the animal people. The group with the big ‘X’ in the name.”
CoXistence. Tracy had briefly belonged as well. “Did he read what he got from them?”
“Nothing has come. I meant sometimes, when things come, that’s what comes.”
The dog, Ruffles, barked in the yard. Billie felt her excitement mount. The dog who didn’t bark in the night, wasn’t that it?
That dog was what made her finally realize there were no books on these shelves. No magazines on the table. Gavin could, but didn’t, read and Tracy knew that. There was no diary, no notes, no journal.
“May I look through those tapes over there?” Billie said.
“It would take hours! My grandson waits for me.”
“I don’t want to look at the videotapes—I want to check the outsides of the music tapes. It won’t even take a minute.”
Ana nodded with a great show of sacrifice and resignation.