His voice was velvet and roller-coaster sexy, but I was caught in an awful moment of uncertainty. It was more than obvious why he was at my door by the come-hither look in his eye, but did he have an ulterior motive? Was he leading me on only to murder me in a post-coital slumber? I opened the door and looked into his eyes and decided I didn’t care about anything except the coital part as he cupped my face in both his hands and kissed me. And I kissed him back as I reached up and looped my arms around his neck. His hands on my waist, he pulled me closer and we stood entwined, until he suddenly put one arm under my knees and swooped me up into his arms.
“Where’s your bedroom?” he whispered.
His hot breath seared my neck as he nibbled on my ear and carried me to the bedroom. He put me down gently by the bed and pushed me up against my dresser, the power of his body against mine made all the more powerful by his gentleness as he kissed me. His fingertips caressed my throat, brushing my breasts, and then he swung me around in one graceful movement and pushed me down onto the bed. His tongue danced around mine in a wild paroxysm of desire and anticipation as we undressed each other. His hands were as light and gentle as the wings of a butterfly. Curving over a breast, sliding down the hollow of my belly button, and over the Mound of Venus, while my fingers danced all over him. We melted into kisses, we melted into caresses, we melted into the moment, and nothing else. Suspended in time.
Suddenly he pulled back from me, his naked body a work of art in the sunbeam crossing my bed. His gaze searched every inch of my body, as if he was making love to me with his eyes. And then he was on top of me, the rhythm of our racing hearts beating against the rhythm of our bodies. Everything was distilled down to one shuddering moment of total vulnerability and surrender.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jacques refused to take the subway and insisted on taking a taxi back to the hospital. We sat snuggled in the back and talked about the little things that make a relationship big and strong. Neither of us mentioned Mavis. In the lobby he left to go and get a coffee, and I went up to my room to unpack my clean clothes, smiling all the while. Jacques had unloaded my laundry for me, giving me a running commentary of what he saw there and stating, in his sexy voice, that I really didn’t need any of it.
I sat on my bed for a while hugging my mem-ories, but I got restless after a time. I got up and went prowling down the hall and ended up in the art room. I hadn’t been before because I hadn’t known it existed. It was an organized chaos of a room with one huge long table in the centre, windows on two walls letting in the light, and cupboards and cabinets along three walls, paint-stained and obviously much used. Unlike every other bare wall on the floor, this room was full of the artwork of patients. I walked around looking at the images. There was a painting of a single woman in silhouette sitting at the top of some stairs, backlit and framed by the naked branches of a tree that crisscrossed behind her like cracked glass. And there was a poem surrounded by images of the devil with his forked tail and flickering tongue. I read the poem and wondered if it was Bradley’s:
Life’s carousel was made by hell
But Jesus has the bill of sale.
Idly I picked up some chalk and a piece of paper and went and sat on one of the stools snugged up under the table. The table itself was a work of art, covered in paint from the jars and minds of many a patient before me. I shuddered.
“Cold?” The voice startled me and I whirled around. Martha was standing in the doorway, the sun gleaming off her curly hair. I didn’t answer and she came and sat beside me.
“You doing okay?” she asked. Why was everyone always asking me that? It was infuriating.
I nodded, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I was feeling happier than I had felt in a long long time.
“You?’ I said.
“Okay, I guess. It’s hard being in here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you start to blend in,” she said.
It was not what I’d wanted to hear, but I couldn’t very well ignore it.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“All this despair, all this sadness. It’s getting to me. I don’t feel I have to act anymore. It’s unnerving.”
“But you are acting, Martha. Don’t let the place get to you.”
“Thing is, my brother was bipolar and I remember his pain as being bottomless.” So that was how she’d known so much about depression. It wasn’t just me.
I reached over and hugged her and she hugged me back. “You’re just acting,” I said again, wishing I could say the same about myself.
“Awww. Isn’t that nice to be such old friends?” We both turned in unison to see Jacques standing in the doorway, a toothpick hanging out of his mouth.
Martha drew away from me, her face one of complete surprise.
I watched as Jacques’s face began to mirror Martha’s and he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot.” He smiled at me and I smiled back.
Martha looked at me and said, “You told him we were friends? Why would you do that?”
“It just slipped out,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I haven’t told anyone else,” said Jacques. “Not that it really matters.”
He saw my quizzical glance and said, “Just because you two are old friends doesn’t change anything, does it? Mental illness does not discriminate. Right?”
I wondered if he had been eavesdropping on us, but even more I remembered that I hadn’t technically blown Martha’s cover by telling him we were old friends. No one but me knew she was faking it to help me.
“Are you a cop?” Martha said suddenly.
Jacques pushed away from the doorjamb, walked into the room, and raised his hands in self-defence. “I’ve been called worse things in my life,” he said, and then quickly, “What’s new?”
I didn’t answer right away. He didn’t really look like a cop. Not with the longish hair. But he could be an undercover cop or a private investigator. After all, he’d had lock picks. Why hadn’t I brought it up in bed? Surely he would have given me a straight answer. But I knew the answer to that. We had both been too busy.
“You mean, what’s new about Mavis?” I finally asked.
“Is there something new?” He sat down across from us and I looked at Martha as his foot homed in on mine. I looked at him and he winked.
“There seems to be a lot of people who might have wanted her dead,” I said, trying to keep my mind from wandering. I told him and Martha about Lucy and Kit, and Kit wrapping her scarf around Mavis’s neck.
“So Mavis was already dead?” asked Jacques.
“Kit seemed to think so,” I said.
“Do you believe her about just trying to tidy Mavis up?” asked Martha.
“Well,” I said, “we know the scarf wasn’t the murder weapon, so her story is plausible, if bizarre.”
“So either Lucy or Kit could have smothered her to shut her up if she knew about them and was blackmailing them,” said Martha.
“They were pretty upset about the thought of being separated, and Lucy reacted strangely when I asked her if Mavis was blackmailing her,” I said. But looking back, I thought it could have been just a hiccup. Or not.
“Upset enough to kill?” asked Jacques.
I bit my lip and shrugged. “There’s another possibility,” I said.
They waited.
“What if there was a love triangle? What if Lucy and Kit were lovers but Mavis stole one of them away?”
“That would give either one another and more powerful motive to get rid of Mavis,” said Jacques.
“Exactly,” I said.
Martha looked dubious. “How does a love triangle happen in two weeks? Lucy told me she’s been here the longest and that’s just three weeks.”
“She also told me that patients are often in and out of hospital, so they could all have known each other
before,” I said.
Jacques drummed his fingers on the table and then said, “Okay, let’s recap the other scenarios. Austin may have been blackmailed by Mavis over drugs? Is that what you said, Cordi?”
I nodded.
“Where does Bradley fit in?” he asked next.
“So far, all I’ve come up with is his link to Scientology and therefore to Mavis,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Suppose Mavis had left Scientology so that she could be admitted to the hospital for help, and Bradley was sent to the hospital to bring her back. I’ve read that that’s the sort of thing they do. When she refuses, he kills her.”
“Pretty drastic,” said Martha.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But religion has been used to justify some pretty drastic things.”
Both Jacques and Martha nodded, and then Martha had another idea. “Or more likely, Bradley had left Scientology and Mavis was trying to get him to come back. He felt cornered, with no way out, so he smothered her in her sleep to get rid of her.”
“I don’t think the brass at Scientology would bother trying to get them back unless they were staff or someone high up, from what I’ve read about it,” said Jacques. “Besides, Bradley said in CBT that he is a Scientologist.” He took the toothpick out of his mouth with a flourish and tossed it in a nearby wastebasket.
“He could have been lying,” I said. “I don’t peg him as a Scientologist. His poetry shows him as agnostic, if not an atheist.” I told them about Bradley’s poems and the conversation I’d had with him.
“Why would he lie about something like that?” asked Jacques.
“I told him that maybe he was just trying to get into Mavis’s good books.”
“Why would he want to do that?” asked Martha.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it must have been pretty important to him to put on such a front.”
I was doodling on my sheet of paper and a horse with a bareback rider had blossomed under my pen.
Jacques reached over and took it from me. “Wow,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “You can draw.”
I laughed and took it back. “Suppose,” I said, “it isn’t anybody at the hospital at all?”
“Meaning?” asked Martha.
“Lucy told me that Mavis was really wealthy. That her parents died in a car crash from a blown tire. That Mavis was in the car, but she survived.”
“And Mavis inherited everything?” asked Jacques.
“Yeah,” I said. “But suppose it wasn’t an accident. Suppose someone had tampered with the tire. Everybody was supposed to die and all the wealth would go to the killer.”
Jacques thrummed the table with his fingers “Who is…?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t got that far.”
“Then let’s deal with what we know,” said Martha.
“Okay,” said Jacques. “So that’s Kit and Lucy, Bradley and Austin. And Leo could have killed Mavis for her money or in a moment of rage to assuage his battered ego, or a bit of both.”
“It’s possible that in the heat of the moment, he could have killed her,” I said, an image of Lucy and Kit jumping into my head. “What if it really was a love triangle and Mavis really was having an affair with Kit or Lucy and Leo found out?”
“That could be more than just a battered ego,” said Jacques. “There’d be a whole lot of soul-searching there, I think. He likely never would’ve thought that his competition came from a woman. No telling what that might have triggered in him.”
“There’s still the suicide option,” said Martha. “Mavis could have OD’d on something.”
“And they spirited her away so we wouldn’t have to deal with her death?” I said.
“Something like that,” said Martha.
“There’s also the option that she actually just got sick the way they said, from a diabetic coma or something,” said Jacques, looking at me pointedly, as if I should react. When I didn’t he changed the subject. “What about Dr. Osborn?” he asked.
“What about him?” I asked.
“Maybe he had something to do with her death,” Jacques suggested.
“What do you mean?” I was interested to get his take on it.
“He was her doctor. He controlled her medications. Easy enough to overdose her, I would think.”
“But what possible motive would he have had?” asked Martha.
“And there would have been an inquest,” I said.
Jacques looked at me and said, “There would’ve been an investigation no matter what happened to her. A young woman in apparent good health dies on a psych ward. Even if it was an untraceable drug that killed her, they still would have investigated. We’re just not in the loop.”
“But Osborn’s still here,” I said. “They would have arrested him by now.” I looked back and forth between Martha and Jacques. “So she must have died from what looked like natural causes. And they were just good at covering up and hiding it all from us.”
There was a flash of impatience on Jacques’s face and Martha looked bemused.
“Even if it was an untraceable drug,” I said, “the nurses know the medications that each person gets. They’d be suspicious.”
“So Osborn had an accomplice?” asked Jacques. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Ella?” I suggested.
“She’d work as well as anyone, especially if she’s the one who’s been trying to kill you.”
I thought back to Ella’s little smile when Osborn took her by the arm, and I told them about it.
They both looked at me in surprise.
“So she kills Mavis to somehow save her man?” said Jacques. “A time-honoured tradition.” Then he quickly added, “Not murder, but leaping to the defence of your man.”
“You think they’re lovers?” said Martha.
“It did pop into my head,” I said. “But why has she stopped trying to kill me?”
“Has she?” asked Martha.
I glanced at Jacques. “No one has tried anything for ages, so either I am no longer a threat to Ella because something, or someone, has changed her mind about me, or whoever it is has, for some reason, moved on.”
“Slow down,” said Martha. “You’re talking too fast. Why would the killer move on when whatever was bothering him was so troubling that he was willing to commit murder? Maybe something changed, as you say, or maybe he’s just biding his time,” said Martha.
Martha and I looked at Jacques at the same time. He looked taken aback.
“You still think I’m trying to kill you?” he asked in a wounded voice. He was our last suspect, after all, but I was confused and didn’t want to be having this conversation. What kind of cruel luck gives you a lover on one hand and a killer on the other? It couldn’t be Jacques.
“It did occur to us,” said Martha.
“And where do you stand now?”
“Jury’s still out?” said Martha.
Jacques looked at me, but I looked away. “Then why are you talking to me?”
“Trying to flush you out?” said Martha.
“Enough, guys,” I said. “No offence, Jacques, but the only person I trust implicitly right at the moment is Martha.” I didn’t know Jacques well enough to think otherwise.
“As it should be,” he said. “As it should be.” But I could tell he was hurt.
Late in the afternoon Ella silently slid into my room, gave me an envelope, and left without a word. I opened the envelope to find a card and suddenly remembered that it was my birthday. I had gone through almost the entire day without remembering. Ryan had picked out a silly card with a cute cartoon dog jumping out of some tall grass to say Happy Birthday. He had scrawled an invitation to dinner tonight. Pretty short notice, I thought, a bit miffed, but then, maybe Ella ha
d just forgotten to give it to me.
I was torn. I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody, but it would be my family, and if I couldn’t be myself with them, then with whom? In the end I accepted, and Ryan came and got me and drove me to his home. The streets were slushy and so the traffic was bad, and it took us longer than usual to get to his place. We didn’t say a thing the whole way. But it was an easy silence, a brother-sister kind of silence that comes from years of knowing each other. And then I walked into his kitchen.
I know Ryan went to a lot of trouble. Wanted to cheer me up. But he had turned it into a surprise party with all my friends, which just made me want to cry. It was all I could do to put on a happy face and when I’d had enough I escaped to Ryan’s study.
Unfortunately someone else had had the same idea He was a complete stranger to me. He was thin and short and the top of his head was bald, but he had grown out the circlet and combed the hair up and over the bald spot. It looked ridiculous, because it said so much about him that he should have wanted to keep private — like that he cared so much about his appearance. His eyes, when he turned them upon me, were dark and moist and heavy-lidded.
“You, too, eh?” he said in a high-pitched voice.
I grimaced and he laughed. “Isn’t the birthday girl supposed to be the heart of the party?”
“Not when she doesn’t have a heart.” It came out sounding weird, even to me but I was frustrated at finding someone in my brother’s study, and it was the first thing that came to mind for some reason. He looked at me more closely, as if trying to gauge whether or not I was joking.
He introduced himself as Brent Sebastien. He could apparently not help adding that he was a noted psychiatrist and a friend of one of my friends out in the kitchen. He’d come with her.
Just my luck to be stuck in the study with a “noted” psychiatrist. Until I realized maybe I could make something of it, if the stars aligned.
“Then you must know the noted Dr. Osborn,” I said with an emphasis on “noted.”
“Richard Osborn?”
Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery) Page 18