Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death

by Jane Haddam

  Sometimes, when Dessa tried to talk to normal-size women in offices and stores, they either ignored her or looked her up and down the way cattle traders would have examined a mess of spoiled meat. Dessa was ready for this one to do something worse, like claim that there were no places left in the Fountain of Youth Work-Out workshop for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Dessa knew there were places, because the last thing she had done at the end of her workday was to call Fountain of Youth and ask.

  To get in, Dessa had to ring a buzzer and show herself to a security camera. She held her big cloth bag up protectively in front of her body and wondered what she was doing that for. When the door clicked open, she pushed herself through it and squinted against the bright light. The tall young woman was looking straight at her without flinching. Nobody else seemed to be around.

  “I called before,” Dessa said, wishing she didn’t sound so defensive. “About the beginner’s workshop? For the week between Christmas and New Year’s?”

  “Oh, right,” the tall young woman said. The name on her little wood nameplate said Traci Cardinale. She opened the long center drawer of her desk and came up with a little packet full of papers in a brightly colored plastic folder. The folder had pictures of balloons all over it and the words “BRING YOUR BODY TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH” splashed bannerlike from corner to corner across the front.

  “There you are,” Traci Cardinale told her. “Do you want to just take those home to read or do you want to sign up?”

  “I thought I needed these to sign up.”

  “If you’ve got a check for the fifty-dollar deposit, I can sign you up right now. I can just write you down in the book and your place will be reserved, and all you’ll have to do is show up bright and early on the Monday after Christmas, with exercise clothes and a pair of good running shoes. We always recommend running shoes. They have special aerobics shoes now, but as far as we can tell, they cost a lot of extra money and don’t do any extra good.”

  Running shoes. Dessa hadn’t given a thought before this to what she was going to wear to a week of Fountain of Youth workshops. Exercise clothes. That meant leotards and tights. Maybe she should buy a Richard Simmons tape instead. Maybe she should just forget this whole thing.

  “I’ll put the deposit down now,” Dessa heard herself say. “Do you have to have a check? Would you be willing to take cash?”

  “We’d love to take cash,” Traci Cardinale said. “I’ll just have to give you a receipt. Oh, and you’ve got to tell me how you want to schedule the work-out classes. Buildup or smorgasbord.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “With buildup, you do the same thing every day, but it keeps getting a little harder. Like five days of aerobic dance, say, or five days of step aerobics. With smorgasbord, you do something different every day, so you can check out all the different options and see what it is you like.”

  “I’ll take that one,” Dessa said.

  Traci dug into her desk again and came out with a thick ledger book. She opened it to a page Dessa could see was clearly marked in red felt pen, “C-to-NY-NH” and looked up expectantly.

  “I didn’t get your name,” Traci said. “And I need your address and phone number. Do you live in New Haven?”

  “I live in Derby,” Dessa said.

  Traci looked sympathetic. “Nobody lives in New Haven anymore, do they? Unless they go to Yale. It’s terrible what’s happened to this city.”

  It probably was terrible what had happened to this city, Dessa thought a few minutes later, sitting out in her car again, but she hadn’t really noticed it. She had had too many other things going on in her life. And since her mother had died, she’d had her father.

  Dessa got her car back onto Prospect Street and then down the hill. She made the twists and turns automatically, knowing exactly where she was going in spite of the fact that she didn’t know the names of any of the streets she was traveling on. She went past the Yale Bowl and saw that it was not lit up. She went through the intersection that would get her to Orange if she turned left and onto the Derby Road. If she remembered correctly, there used to be an International House of Pancakes near this intersection when she was still in high school. She and her two best friends used to spend half of every Friday night in it, eating waffles with hot fudge sundaes and talking about which of the girls who wouldn’t talk to them was sleeping with which of the boys who called them names.

  The Derby Road was dark and punctuated by cross-streets and filling stations. When Dessa got to Derby itself, she had to pass that big brick complex—parish church, parish school, convent—that sat on the hill right next to her turn. When she was growing up, that group of buildings had always made her think that Catholics were better than other people, since they were able to build big buildings like that and put them high up where everyone else was forced to see them. Once she made the turn and went over the bridge into Derby proper, the night seemed to get darker and the weather seemed to get worse.

  The house where Dessa lived with her father was a triple-decker one, just like the triple deckers that filled up so much of New Haven, but smaller. It sat on a bad twist in a narrow street near the center of town, surrounded by houses just like it that had started to come apart. Dessa’s house had started to come apart, too. The paint was peeling. The porch sagged. Dessa eased her car up the narrow driveway and cut her lights. This house belonged to her father. It had been paid for, free and clear, when Dessa was fourteen years old. Now the neighborhood had disintegrated and Dessa’s father had disintegrated along with it. Mrs. O’Reilly had the apartment on the second floor, but nobody had the apartment on the third. Dessa had tried to rent the apartment once or twice, but she had been afraid of the people who showed up asking to look at it.

  The ground floor back door opened, and Mrs. O’Reilly came out. She turned on the back porch light and stood in the open doorway, her arms folded across her chest. Dessa bit her lip.

  “Mrs. O’Reilly?” she asked, getting out of the car.

  Mrs. O’Reilly swayed from leg to leg. “You’re back later than you ought to be,” she said. “You told me you were getting off work at eight.”

  Dessa thought of the Fountain of Youth folder in her cloth bag, the fifty dollars in tens laid down on Traci Cardinale’s desk. “I ran into a little traffic,” she said. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Mrs. O’Reilly, but I need the overtime.”

  “You ought to be glad to have a job at all, from what I hear,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “All this unemployment. There was nothing else on the news tonight. Pratt and Whitney laying off. Electric Boat laying off. I thought we were going to be finished with all that as soon as we got rid of the Republicans.”

  “Yes,” Dessa said. “Well.”

  “I think it’s Governor Weicker’s fault myself,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “I never did like that man. Bringing in an income tax. He’s from rich people down in Greenwich, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I never did like Greenwich,” Mrs. O’Reilly continued. “They’re a lot of snobs down there, if you ask me. They think they’re better than the rest of us.”

  Dessa pushed Mrs. O’Reilly gently out of the way and went through the pantry into the kitchen. The kitchen was empty and she went through that into the living room. The living room was dark, but she could hear her father snoring. She went over to the chair he always sat in and touched his arm.

  “Daddy?” she asked him.

  No answer. No answer, no answer, no answer. He was wearing one of the flannel shirts she bought him at Sears. It was an old one that had been washed many times and felt soft and smooth against the palm of her hand. Dessa patted the old man on the shoulder and walked away from him.

  “Torpedoes,” he said in his sleep. “Torpedoes first.”

  Mrs. O’Reilly was in the kitchen, wrapping a scarf around her throat. She only had to go up a single flight on inside stairs, but she always complained the landings were cold.

  �
�He was all right today,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “Nothing serious going on. He soiled himself a couple of times. I cleaned him up.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You should get those diapers they have these days for people like him. It would make things easier. Easier on all three of us, if you ask me. And he’s not ever going to get it back, not anymore. He’s not ever going to be able to go on his own after this.”

  “No,” Dessa said numbly. “Of course, not.”

  “What you really ought to do is find him a nursing home. It’s crazy, what you’re putting up with here. It’s crazy what we’re both putting up with. We’re not doing him any good.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to go to the bank today,” Dessa said. “I’ll have to get your money out tomorrow. Do you mind? Or would you like to have a check?”

  “Don’t know what I’d do with a check,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “I can wait until tomorrow.”

  Mrs. O’Reilly had the scarf wound around her neck now, just the way she liked it. It made Dessa think of a bright yellow neck brace. Mrs. O’Reilly left the kitchen and went through the living room to the stairway at the front.

  “Torpedoes,” Dessa’s father said again.

  Mrs. O’Reilly ignored him. “I’ll be down at ten minutes after seven in the morning,” she told Dessa. “I think I’m going to try to make tomato jelly, if he’s having a good day. He doesn’t have a lot of good days any more. You ought to try to remember that.”

  “I do,” Dessa said.

  Mrs. O’Reilly went out the living room door to the vestibule at the front and then up the stairs. Dessa closed up behind her and listened to the sound of her feet moving heavily from step to step in their thick-soled rubber shoes.

  I shouldn’t have spent the fifty dollars at Fountain of Youth, Dessa told herself. I shouldn’t be thinking of spending four hundred and fifty more.

  “Torpedoes,” Dessa’s father said.

  Dessa sat down at the kitchen table. She opened her cloth bag and got out the folder from Fountain of Youth. Her father was never quiet the whole night through. He couldn’t be trusted to sleep. Later, she would have to clean up what he had done and get him into his pajamas and tie him to the bed. If she didn’t do that, he got out and wandered around and broke things.

  Dessa opened the folder and looked at the first of the things in it, a little flyer advertising the wonders of diet and exercise as purveyed by Magda Hale and the Fountain of Youth. “A New You for the New Year,” the flyer promised.

  Dessa desperately hoped so.

  4

  VIRGINIA HANLEY COULD HAVE understood it if her husband had left her for a younger woman. She was fifty-two years old, and she had been expecting something like that to happen for more than a decade. Steve being Steve, she had been expecting it sooner rather than later. Even when she and Steve had been in college together, at Gettysburg, Steve had been famous for his roving eye. There had even been some sort of comment about it in their college yearbook. Virginia had been surprised at the time that Steve had finally settled on her. He’d had better looking girls to go out with, and richer ones, too. Virginia could only explain it by saying that Steve found her safe. Since she wasn’t a beauty queen, she was impressed with him and grateful for his attention. Since she wasn’t rolling in money, she was respectful of the money he was able to make. Since she wasn’t used to being popular, she wouldn’t find herself bored and frustrated in her suburban ranch house, eager to find a partner and start an affair. She was the perfect candidate for a corporate wife, the way corporate wives were defined in those days—but even in those days she had been smarter than most of her friends, and she hadn’t expected it to last. That was why she wasn’t surprised to find herself sitting here, in the living room of her house in Orange, while Steve told her why he was going to pack his bags and leave.

  The living room of Virginia’s house in Orange was a beautiful thing, with a cathedral ceiling and a wall of windows and a masonry fireplace with a chimney that rose two and a half stories to a beamed ceiling. The carpet on the floor was a thick blue pile, expensive and impractical. It cost an arm and a leg and had to be replaced every three years, because it faded quickly in the sun. The built-in wet bar that had been constructed along one of the lower walls was made of western red cedar that had had to be imported to Connecticut from Oregon. The glassware on its shelves was real Lalique crystal. The liquor in the cabinets was all first-rate and premium brand, right down to the clear, unblended Scotch whiskey Virginia could never help mistaking for vodka. There was a glass of this Scotch whiskey sitting on the coffee table now, with an ice cube in it, half drunk.

  “I don’t understand,” Virginia could hear herself saying. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  Steve was standing by the wall of windows, nowhere near his glass of Scotch. He was as tall and trim as the first day Virginia had ever seen him, standing over a pile of luggage outside a Gettysburg College dorm. Virginia was surprised to realize that she couldn’t remember what dorm it was or what dorm she had lived in that same year. She could remember that Steve’s hair had been darker and shorter and less well cut. We were more formal then, Virginia thought. Steve is more relaxed now, in his jeans and turtleneck sweater, than he would ever have allowed himself to be when we were both at school.

  Virginia herself was not a relaxed woman. She was wearing good wool trousers and a good silk shirt and a set of matching gold jewelry: earrings, necklace, bracelet, ring. Her hair had been done at a hairdresser’s, curled and shaped and slightly touched up. Her nails had been done by a manicurist, cut a little bluntly at the tips, so that she didn’t look as if she had claws. She was drinking diet Pepsi from a Steuben glass goblet, crammed with lots and lots of shaved ice.

  “I don’t understand,” she said again. “You can’t possibly be talking about the Linda Bonnard we know. Linda Bonnard is—three years older than I am.”

  “Is she?” Steve asked. “I didn’t know.”

  “Linda Bonnard looks three years older than I am,” Virginia said more firmly, feeling on surer ground, “but it isn’t just the way she looks. I know how old she is. I’ve seen her driver’s license.”

  “I don’t see what age has to do with it,” Steve said. “I’m not talking about age here. I’m talking about love. And exhaustion.”

  “You love Linda Bonnard,” Virginia said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And I exhaust you,” Virginia went on.

  Steven crossed the room and got his Scotch off the coffee table. “It’s not that you exhaust me by yourself,” he said. “It’s everything together that exhausts me. With me and you it’s just—nothing, I guess. We don’t seem to have anything to say to each other.”

  “Husbands and wives never have anything to say to each other,” Virginia said sharply. “What do you say to Linda Bonnard?”

  “We talk about horses.”

  “Horses,” Virginia repeated.

  “Linda bought a horse place up in Litchfield. She’s leaving work after the first of the year and going to live there. She’s selling her place in Milford. She’s just—getting out.”

  “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” Virginia said.

  “It isn’t like that, Virginia, for God’s sake. It’s just that we’re all fifty years old now. We ought to know what we want to do with our lives. We ought to have come to some conclusions.”

  “What kind of conclusions have you come to?” Virginia asked him.

  “Maybe it’s just that when I talk to Linda, everything we say doesn’t turn into a fight. Or worse yet, into a nonfight. Maybe it’s just that Linda is never polite.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Virginia said. “You’re contradicting yourself.”

  “I don’t really care.”

  “Linda Bonnard is a frumpy middle-aged woman who doesn’t wear any makeup and buys all her clothes from L.L. Bean. Her own husband left her for a bimbo. She hasn’t had a promotion at work for three years.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t really care about any of that, either.”

  “Then what do you care about?” Virginia demanded. “What’s the point of Linda Bonnard? What do you get by leaving me for her?”

  “Maybe I get a horse farm,” Steve said. “Maybe I get some peace and quiet. Maybe I get to retire a decade early. Maybe I get nothing at all.”

  “Maybe I’ll go out to this horse farm of Linda’s and blow it to pieces,” Virginia said pleasantly. “Maybe I’ll send her a bomb in the mail. Do you think I’m too polite to do any of those things?”

  “I think this is a ridiculous conversation, and we ought to cut it off,” Steve said. “I think I ought to pack up and get out of here before you do something really crazy. Trust me, Virginia. You won’t even notice that I’ve gone.”

  “If you leave here now,” Virginia said, “I’ll call the cops and say you left here driving drunk, and they’ll pick you up. That ought to be enough to ruin your day.”

  Steve was standing over at the wet bar now, pouring himself more of that clear Scotch whiskey. He found a piece of paper on the bar counter and picked it up.

  “Here,” he said, holding the paper out to her. “This is yours. This is what sums you up. This is what I get so tired of living with. Bring your body to the Fountain of Youth. Get a New Body for the New Year. It makes me nuts.”

  “I don’t exercise hardly at all,” Virginia said. “I don’t even belong to a health club.”

  “It’s not the exercise I’m objecting to, Virginia. It’s the attitude.”

  I could object to your attitude, too, Virginia thought. I could object to this whole lecture you’ve been giving me, from start to finish. There’s no reason I have to sit here listening to this.

  Steve had his back to her now. He was pouring Scotch over another single ice cube. Virginia took a long swig of diet Pepsi and stood up. Steve had put the flyer from Fountain of Youth down on the bar counter. Virginia crossed the room and picked it up.