“Lisette blamed herself. But the amount she gave your sister didn’t kill her, you know.” Nick managed to sound almost normal.
“Bullshit.”
Maggie was down again, her cautioning hand on Nick’s arm. He changed the subject. “Were you the one who called our agent? Asking if she’d work upstate?”
“Yeah. I never dreamed she’d go on acting. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her listed in the Equity book. I was ready to quit here, go find her in New York. But then Brian started talking about a centennial here, and I figured it would be easier.”
“So you dropped that sandbag,” said Maggie. “And drugged her at the restaurant. It wasn’t Laura after all.”
“I still don’t know why that didn’t work,” said Cheyenne. “I saw her drink the coffee. Maybe she was adapted to it. That’s how I knew I’d better go to the needle. Get it right into the bloodstream.”
“But why did you wait so long?” asked Maggie. “Why didn’t you try again right after the restaurant?”
He turned bruised, surprised eyes to her. “The show needed her,” he said, as though the logic were obvious. “At first I figured Judy or Laura would be okay. But that next rehearsal, right after the restaurant, she must still have been hung over from the dose I gave her. But when she did the nunnery scene, I saw. Brian was right. Damn bitch could act. Terrific scene. So I had to wait.”
“Because she could act?”
“Because of the show. A professional thinks of the show.”
Maggie shook her head in wonder. “Goddamn it, Ellen, you were right!”
The backstage door opened. Sergeant Hawes and the officer came in, followed by Jim, and stopped when they saw Cheyenne, battered and tied.
“What the hell is going on here?” asked Sergeant Hawes, forgetting to be polite for once. Jim, troubled, moved to Ellen’s side. Cheyenne frowned up from his seat on the floor, then the bruised scowl shifted to Ellen.
She said, “Cheyenne was just explaining. He believed Mrs. O’Connor killed his sister five years ago.”
“But she didn’t,” said Nick.
“Bullshit,” said Cheyenne.
“It’ll be better if you tell them, Cheyenne,” said Maggie. “For you, for Brian.”
“Okay. I killed her. I want a lawyer,” said Cheyenne.
“Certainly.” Sergeant Hawes, surprised, pulled out his book. “Would the rest of you wait outside? But don’t go too far, we’ll be coming right back for your statements.”
As they went out, Maggie turned to Ellen and asked acidly, “What the hell were you doing up there, blithe spirit?”
“Well,” said Ellen apologetically, “I heard the police mention Jennifer Brown, and I thought maybe they should hear about his sister. And, well, I asked him if he’d told them.”
“Jesus!” exclaimed Maggie. “Dumb! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried! You kept disappearing!”
“Or the police, then?”
“That’s exactly what I was waiting to do when he coshed me!” said Ellen indignantly.
“Coshed?” Jim was alarmed.
“I’m okay,” Ellen reassured him. “But Maggie’s right. It’s no fun being the ingenue.”
“Come let me look,” he said, worried, drawing her into the greenroom.
Maggie and Nick drifted out to the parking lot again to wait. The hazy morning smelled of warm asphalt and of things growing. She turned to him, touched his cut arm. “Are you okay?”
Nick said wonderingly, “I almost killed him.” Another illusion about himself shattered. Nick the loathsome.
She said, “God knows you had reason. But you didn’t.”
“It was so damn close.”
“Yeah. I wondered there for a minute. But I figured good old Uncle Nick would control himself. And you did.”
Yes. There was that. He said, “Thank God.” They had paused a few steps from the door. His mind jumped to a new detail. “I didn’t know he’d lost a sister. I never made the connection.”
“Wasn’t hard, once you told me her last name.” She shrugged, and winced.
“How is your elbow?” he asked, suddenly concerned.
“It’ll do,” she said. “Lost a few more hunks of ligament, I guess. The doctor who strapped me up this morning won’t be pleased.” She smiled at his distress. “Hey, it’s okay. Look, the fingers still work.”
“Do you want to go right to the doctor now?”
“No, no. It can wait a little. I’d like to be sure they take him. Wouldn’t you?”
They sat on the little wall that divided sidewalk from parking lot and waited. Nick’s mind was still struggling to assimilate this new fact, this new pattern. Could he believe in it, after all? In her? Had she resisted? Or had she seen Cheyenne as a deliverer?
Soon the policemen brought him out, Cheyenne’s dark eyes opaque in his bruised, noncommittal face, the police walking one on each side. Cheyenne saw them on the wall and gave an unsmiling, ironic nod.
Maggie asked suddenly, as though reading Nick’s mind, “Cheyenne, did she say anything?”
“Nothing special.”
“Did she fight?”
He stopped, but the policemen pulled him on so that he spoke over his shoulder as he climbed into the patrol car.
“Sure,” he said, grimly triumphant. “Like a tiger. Just what you’d expect. Kept saying, ‘Not now.’ Wouldn’t even write a note, so I had to write it on the mirror.” He snorted. “Oh, and she said, ‘Tell Nicky I don’t want to die.’ That’s all. Nothing special. Just what you’d expect.”
He disappeared into the car. Doors slammed and the engine rumbled and the acrid scent of exhaust filled Nick’s nostrils. And suddenly belief came, and tears, and harsh ridiculous masculine sobs that shook him, helpless, with their urgency. She pulled his head onto her lap and held him with strong scarred hands, crooning, her young body arching over him like the sky.
The morning faded.
Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.
Oh, Lisette, Lisette.
Nineteen
Ellen pushed in the catches of her suitcase and looked around the room. No posters, no books, only naked institutional furniture, and her boxes and suitcases, and Maggie’s. An incredible term, over at last, leaving her a legacy of a trial to attend, a tender skull, and Jim. Final exams had never seemed so irrelevant.
Everything would be different next year. Living with Jim. Working in the theatre without Cheyenne. Also without Jason, and David, and the others who were graduating, and without big sad Uncle Nick, who had thanked her and Maggie warmly for coming to the funeral, and then had driven away to the city and out of their lives.
Maggie came in and lighted gratefully on her bare mattress. “It’s getting hot out there,” she said. She was shiny with sweat.
“Good ol’ summertime,” said Ellen.
“You ready to go?”
“Yeah.” On her way home to Pennsylvania, Ellen was going to drop Maggie at the Binghamton station, where she could catch the bus for Cincinnati. “What did he say?”
“My advisor?”
“Yeah.”
“He said fine. Twenty-one hours is a lot but it’s mostly math, so I told him there wouldn’t be any problem.”
“And there also won’t be time for theatre.”
“Right. One of the chief charms of this plan.”
“Are you sure you ought to drop your English major, Maggie? Only two courses to go.”
“Ellen, right now I don’t even want to think about Shakespeare or poetry or mythology or goddamn violin music.”
“Yeah. The realm of pure form for you.” Ellen decided not to point out that being an English major didn’t actually involve any goddamn violin music.
“Pure form and early graduation,” said Maggie. “And graduate school somewhere far from here.”
“Where?”
“Haven’t decided. Preferably some nunnery.”
B
etter change the subject, thought Ellen. She said, “I brought up your mail. It’s on your desk.”
Maggie stood up and looked at the two envelopes. One, from a magazine, she dropped into the wastebasket; the other she opened with interest, and skimmed over, and smiled.
“Who’s it from?” asked Ellen, remembering the stamp and postmark.
“Paul Rigo,” said Maggie in a pleased voice. “He’s okay. He’s met a guy in Toronto who can help him get a job doing sets. Community theatre.”
“Toronto!” said Ellen.
“Right.”
“My cylinder head gasket!”
“Right.”
“The man Tim saw in the car with you was Paul!”
“Right again.” Maggie smiled at her.
“Idiot,” said Ellen affectionately. “So that’s where you were!”
“Right. Shall we go?”
“Um—this little package came for you too.” Ellen pushed it across the desk diffidently. It was from one R. J., now of New York City.
Maggie looked at the box a long time, and then hurriedly ripped it open, glanced at the contents, and threw it in the wastebasket. Wordlessly, she hoisted one of her suitcases and started out to the car.
Ellen picked up one of her boxes to follow, but before she left she peeked in the wastebasket.
It held a bunch of flowers. Kind of cute, he had said, a weedy little plant with little yellow flowers, four petals.
Not daisies, this time.
Rue.
About the author
P.M. Carlson taught psychology and statistics at Cornell University before deciding that mystery writing was more fun. She has published twelve mystery novels and over a dozen short stories. Her novels have been nominated for an Edgar Award, a Macavity Award, and twice for Anthony Awards. Two short stories were finalists for Agatha Awards. She edited the Mystery Writers Annual for Mystery Writers of America for several years, and served as president of Sisters in Crime.
Books by P.M. Carlson:
Audition for Murder: Maggie Ryan, 1967 (1985)
Murder Is Academic: Maggie Ryan, 1968 (1985)
Murder Is Pathological: Maggie Ryan, 1969 (1986)
Murder Unrenovated: Maggie Ryan, 1972 (1988)
Rehearsal for Murder: Maggie Ryan, 1973 (1988)
Murder in the Dog Days: Maggie Ryan, 1975 (1991)
Murder Misread: Maggie Ryan, 1977 (1990)
Bad Blood: Maggie Ryan, 1979 (1991)
The Marty Hopkins Series
Gravestone (1993)
Bloodstream (1995)
Deathwind (2004)
Crossfire (2006)
Short fiction
Renowned Be Thy Grave, or The Murderous Miss Mooney (1998)
Audition for Murder Page 24
