With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  “The Knave of Hearts,

  He stole those tarts,

  And took them clean away.”

  The kid and her jingles were making me crazy. If I was in this mood when my biological clock sounded alarms, I’d unplug it.

  “The King of Hearts,

  Called for the tarts,

  And beat the Knave full sore—”

  How did anybody with small children ever think? I couldn’t keep my head on course. My thoughts skidded sideways, sticking on the repetitive rhyme, until, with difficulty, I pulled them free and tuned out Karen’s jingles and the conversation of the other adults and concentrated.

  I had to think about Elizabeth/Betsy of the changeable name.

  I had to remember everything I knew before I went off on a wild Mother Goose chase.

  A cute redheaded baby, Wiley had said. Janine had wanted to adopt her.

  A cute redheaded girl-child whose natural father was in Vietnam. Whose natural father eventually raised her.

  Whose mother, of course, was dead.

  A cute little redheaded Betsy, Bess, Elizabeth, Lizzie.

  I felt sick. When my sister offered cookies all around, I took three, maximum nervous munching in action. As I chewed, not tasting much, more random fragments surfaced in my memory pool, joining to create a picture I didn’t want to see.

  Hattie’s strange reaction when she learned Lizzie’s father’s name—Lizzie’s original name, of course. Hattie saying it was Lizzie’s fault the night of Lyle’s death and then again when my mother and I visited. I’d thought she’d meant that Lizzie had been guilty of inadvertent food poisoning, but now her real meaning was clear.

  Mackenzie was watching me quizzically.

  He wasn’t going to be surprised. He was forever pulling me out of my webs of speculation, lecturing me on the fact that the odds always favored the most logical suspect. Unexciting, but true. Lizzie, with complete access to the tarts all day and evening, Lizzie, who knew who was coming to dinner, made depressingly obvious sense, particularly when her history was factored in.

  But why now? Why this Sunday?

  Just because, perhaps. Because, as Dorian Gray said, life wasn’t governed by will or invention. Instead, the cells held old passions, and then, when something happened by chance to reactivate the memories—the sound of music, a scent, whatever—everything came back. And as he said, “It is on things like this that our lives depend.”

  Because, by chance, Lizzie and her father had converted a dilapidated boardinghouse into a chic bed and breakfast, and by chance, it was located across the street from where Lyle Z. grew up. And because by chance, Lyle Zacharias was turning fifty and having an acute attack of nostalgia and needed to believe you could go home again, that was the birthday party site.

  And because Hattie Zacharias made the arrangements while Lizzie’s father was out of the country and spoke to a woman named Chapman, a name with no associations.

  So just because. Because something had been waiting to happen for a long, long time. Who knew what poems and passions had simmered and brewed in Lizzie for twenty long years since her nightmarish accident? Who knew how stable or skewed Lizzie had been then—or since, having caused her mother’s death. Who could say what the weight of carrying that around every day of her life had done to her spirit and even her sanity?

  I wanted to cry. But in private, not here. “I’m sorry to have to leave so soon,” I said, “but Mackenzie—Chuck—and I have an appointment.”

  Mackenzie was too good a cop to ask me what the devil I was talking about, but I could hear the whir as his mental gears kicked in.

  “Then you’ll come to dinner tomorrow, all right?” my mother said. “I’m cooking. And the invitation is for both of you.”

  We definitely had to have that talk. Or perhaps now that her name was about to be replaced on the suspect list, I could convince her to jump on the red-eye home. Tonight.

  “Much obliged, ma’am,” Mackenzie said. I wanted to kick him. Doing his ma’am routine and charming the woman was only going to accelerate and make more desperate her matchmaking. “But I’m afraid I’m on duty tomorrow evenin’,” he said. “Real sorry about that.”

  “Say good night, Gracie,” I muttered.

  He did so, laying on the accent until he was unintelligible. Everybody else said good-bye in crisp Philadelphese, except for Karen, who was in the middle of something idiotic about a misty, moisty morning and a man dressed all in leather.

  “I said, ‘How do you do, and how do you do,

  And how do you do again!’”

  “What’s this about? This appointment we seem to have acquired?” Mackenzie asked when we were outside.

  “About Elizabeth, Elsbeth, Betsy, and Bess.”

  “You’re the first case of post-traumatic Mother Goose syndrome I ever saw,” Mackenzie said.

  “Lizzie is Betsy. The one who shot Lyle Zacharias’s first wife. Her mother.” I stifled the strong urge to add that once we reached Lizzie, we’d say what did you do, and what did you do, and what did you do again?

  Seventeen

  I followed Mackenzie’s car in my Mustang and found a parking space not too far from his. Both were in the spots reserved for The Boarding House. Business was obviously not booming.

  When we knocked and opened the door, Roy and Lizzie both came into the front hall looking expectant, almost excited. Then, when they saw who it was, their smiles faded.

  “I’m sorry,” Lizzie whispered. “We must seem rude, but we thought hotel guests, maybe…” She looked drawn and puffy-eyed.

  She was so pitiable already, I hated knowing that Mackenzie and I were going to make her feel still worse. But perhaps acknowledging what she’d done would ease her distress.

  “Two more parties canceled today,” Roy said. “It’s ripping both of us up. Worked so hard to get this place off the ground, and we got such great reviews, and now…” He shook his head.

  Despite his words and professed unhappiness, he looked strong and hale after his near poisoning. Made me wonder. “We’ve interrupted your dinner,” I said.

  “Need to clear a few things up,” Mackenzie said.

  “Maybe we should come back later,” I suggested.

  “We could talk while you eat,” Mackenzie said. We were not exactly synchronized. I didn’t think our conversation was going to be acceptable table talk or helpful for the digestion, but I stood corrected and kept silent and wound up, along with the rest of the group, in the kitchen, on high stools around the butcher block, now set for two.

  I don’t know what I’d expected, but not Roy’s take-out hamburger and french fries. Was he, too, afraid to eat his daughter’s cooking? He saw my lifted eyebrows and grinned. “Lizzie hates this stuff. I can’t get enough of it, so while she’s eating rabbit food, I indulge.”

  Lizzie picked at greens, which she offered to share. I declined. “You’re afraid to eat anything I prepared,” she said morosely. “But this is only vegetables, and I’m eating them, too.”

  “No—it isn’t that at all,” I lied. “It’s just that we have a dinner appointment later.”

  Once again Mackenzie didn’t show any surprise as I improvised about his daily schedule. “Mr. Beecher, sir,” he said. “You are a widower, am I correct?”

  Roy Beecher put down his half-eaten hamburger and looked appraisingly at Mackenzie. “What does my marital status have to do with what happened Sunday?” His eyes slit.

  “Well, sir, I was thinkin’ it might be relevant. Might shed a little light on the recent unfortunate happenin’ here, which is why I asked.”

  “Everybody knows my dad’s a widower,” Lizzie said.

  Roy took a deep breath and stood up. “Afraid not, Lizard,” he said. “Not if you’re into legalistic haggling. A policeman asks a question like that, in that way, it means he already knows the answer. Should we go into another room?” he asked Mackenzie.

  “No!” Lizzie said. “I want to hear. I should hear. What’s going on
?”

  Roy sat down again on one of the kitchen stools. He put his hand on his daughter’s freckled forearm. “Sorry to tell you this way, but what the man is getting to is that I never was married to your mother, Lizard.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me before?”

  “Thought it was for the best. I’ll explain,” he said. “I promise.”

  Lizzie looked pensive. “Did you think I’d get upset? It doesn’t matter if you weren’t married. You could have told me. It’s not like it’s the Victorian age, or like I’m royalty and I can’t inherit the throne now. It’s not like a piece of paper making me legal means anything.” She turned to face Mackenzie. “Why ask a question like that? Are you some kind of morality patrol, or what?”

  Mackenzie didn’t answer. Instead, he looked at Roy Beecher. “Are you sure we shouldn’t talk someplace else?” he asked.

  Roy took a bite of his hamburger, chewed, then put the bun down on the plate again and looked at his daughter. “This Sunday business really rattled Lizzie. She’s having weird dreams and feelings she can’t understand. She’s like I was after the war, but at least I knew what made my flashbacks happen. So I’ve been thinking that maybe if she understands hers, her mind would be put at ease. Might as well be now.” He moved his hand down her arm until it clasped hers. “You feel ready, Lizard?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay to talk in front of these people?”

  She looked at Mackenzie and me, evaluating something, then nodded again.

  “Then ask whatever you want,” Roy Beecher said. “I got nothing to hide.”

  I couldn’t stop watching Lizzie, whose eyebrows had lowered with concern, whose blue eyes ricocheted between her father and Mackenzie, who looked like a deaf mute trying to lip-read. My theory, so shiny bright and clever in my sister’s family room, was rapidly tarnishing in this kitchen. I had been so sure Lizzie had become unbalanced from guilt over her mother’s death. But looking at her now, it was difficult—it was, in fact, impossible—to believe that she had known what was going on or what had gone on, or that this father and daughter act was anything but authentic.

  “It’ll be okay,” Roy told his daughter. “Don’t be afraid. You know, I went back to Nam to face my devils, get rid of them. You’ve been seeing yours since Sunday, only nobody ever gave you their name or reasons, so how could you battle them? Always thought I was protecting you, but maybe not.”

  Lizzie said nothing, her breath high and shallow.

  Mackenzie had a real gift for waiting, but not always benignly. Predators are patient, too. He was lolling on his high, uncomfortable stool, making me nervous. Did he see that Lizzie was innocent in many senses of the word?

  “I didn’t even know your mom was pregnant.” Roy Beecher spoke directly to his daughter. “We’d been traveling, staying with people on farms, in communes, doing the typical thing. We were kids, a year out of high school, maybe two. No real plans. But in love, you know? I loved my little Cinderella.”

  “Cinderella?” I didn’t mean to interrupt, but it popped out because I suddenly thought we were talking about two different people.

  “She called herself that, said that was long for Cindy. She didn’t have parents, just foster families. Little orphan Cinderella. Except she didn’t get a prince. She got me, and when I was drafted, I went. I didn’t have any way to get out of it, and I didn’t want to go to Canada.

  “Cindy went crazy. She meant it when she said make love not war. Meant that slogan one hundred percent. Couldn’t believe I would go. Called me a pawn and a fool and a dupe and worse, and that was that. She didn’t come to wave me off. I didn’t even know she was pregnant.” He looked intently at his daughter. “It’s not like I walked away, you understand?” Lizzie nodded, eyes wide and solemn.

  “I didn’t know until after you were born, and then she wrote and told me. Also, that she’d met this older guy and was married to him.” Roy shook his head. “That was as weird as my going to Nam. Took me a while to realize that she was just like me. Scared, mostly. Afraid she didn’t have any other choice. People didn’t raise babies on their own back then. So that was that.” He was patting his daughter’s hand with his bony fingers. Making nice, we called it when we were children. “The man she married was Lyle Zacharias,” he added softly.

  Lizzie looked as if someone had sneaked up behind her and slammed her with a two-by-four. I watched as every classical response appeared: jaw dropping, eyes widening, breath holding, head shaking.

  I was now one thousand percent convinced that she hadn’t known. I had dead-ended with my stupid theory. She simply hadn’t known, and any supposition of a poisoning for revenge, or bottled anger at losing her mother, or anything else premeditated was ridiculous.

  But there was a less ridiculous corollary. Mackenzie was aware of it, too. I could feel it in the tempo of his hyper-relaxed breathing and in his studied casualness.

  Because while Lizzie had known nothing, Roy had known everything. He’d come back from facing his twenty-year-old demons in Vietnam—where the poisonous Barbados nut grew, according to Mackenzie—and found a last, stateside enemy at home. And who would know or suspect him if the enemy were to die?

  “He was my stepfather?” Lizzie pressed her fingertips to her temples. “I lived with him? I knew him?”

  Her father gave a slight nod. “For almost three years.”

  “When he walked into the kitchen,” she said, “as soon as I saw him, I got so…”

  Her near faint, her confusion, when Lyle had been talking to my mother and me. What a way for memory to surface—what terrible timing!

  Lizzie pushed off her stool and stood, shaking her head. Her normally soft voice was shrill. “I thought I was going crazy. These feelings, these fears, these—I don’t know—memories I can’t remember, pictures in my head I can’t see. Why did you keep it a secret?” She stood, tall and solid, pale skin mottled with emotion.

  Her father looked at her, then down at his oversized hands. “I thought it was best,” he mumbled. I leaned forward to hear. “I wanted to protect you. You were such a sad little thing. So solemn, so pulled inside yourself when you came to live with me. I wanted to make you smile, be happy again.”

  “Protect me from what? What did she do?”

  “Who?”

  “My mother! Why did you have to protect me? What did she do? Walk out when you came back? Where did she go? Why can’t I remember her? You took me away, didn’t you!”

  “No—Yes, I took you, but not that way! They—She—didn’t want you anymore. I did.”

  “My mother didn’t want me?”

  “No.” Roy Beecher spoke softly, as if it hurt to say each word. “That’s not who I meant.”

  “Then what do you mean? What happened to her? Where is she?”

  The question hung above us like a poisoned cloud, but we sat in silence, each waiting for somebody else to break the news to Lizzie. I surely couldn’t. I wanted, in fact, to be able to dial the psychiatric equivalent of 911. Nobody should have a life history so gruesomely revised without mental paramedics on hand.

  Who was going to tell her? The answer was nobody. At least nobody was going to tell her the complete truth. Roy was fighting tears, shaking his head back and forth.

  “Your mother died,” Mackenzie said very softly. “Your grandmother—your stepfather’s mother—was raising you. She’s the woman who, ah, couldn’t continue raisin’ you.”

  “My stepfather’s…that old woman? The one who screamed at me?”

  We all nodded.

  “I didn’t want you to know.” Roy’s voice was gruff. “The whole thing was to get you away from there, let you forget. Lyle was up in New York, and the old lady said she wanted to travel, spend time with Lyle, too, and I didn’t think we’d ever see each other again. I thought we’d be home free, a fresh start. Didn’t even want to call you by the name they used. Betsy was their child. Tried to make you proper Elizabeth for a while, but it was too much of a mouthful,
so Lizzie it became.” He watched his daughter with terrible anxiety.

  “Why wasn’t he raising me?” Lizzie asked. “How did she die?”

  “No,” Roy said. “Enough is enough. Don’t press, Lizard.”

  “But I have to know. I have to stop feeling this sick, this afraid, having these nightmares in the daytime, losing pieces of time. Tell me. Whatever there is.”

  Roy stood up, put his hand on her shoulder, and sighed. “There was an accident.” His voice was choked. “A terrible accident. You were only a baby…”

  * * *

  I still felt shell-shocked. Mackenzie, too, looked shaken by our last encounter. “You think she’ll be okay?” I asked for perhaps the twenty-seventh time. But each questioning was a variation on the same basic issue of whether we’d done the right thing or simply added to the world’s store of pain and problems.

  We sat in a restaurant near the Museum of Art with the air of guilty co-conspirators.

  “She had to know,” Mackenzie said. “Seeing Zacharias triggered her memory and her panic. It’s worse to think you’re losing your mind, isn’t it?”

  “I feel so sorry for her. I don’t know what good it’ll do to have a soda, or a walk with her, but it was all I could think of.” We had made plans for after school tomorrow. It felt like a futile gesture, a tiny bandage for a mortal wound. But doing nothing felt worse, like abandonment.

  “You’ll get her out of that place, away from the crime site. Let her know she’s still worthy. Still good. That what happened long ago accidentally doesn’t matter to you. That’s worth a try. Stop beatin’ up on yourself.”

  He had moments of pure, distilled kindness that stopped me in my cynical tracks. I could pooh-pooh his knightly aura, but in truth, this was the second time during this dinner that I’d looked across the table and seen a curly-haired, blue-shirted, sexy Sir Galahad. The first time had been right after we sat down and I gave him my threatening tombstone drawing and clippings. I was afraid he’d pooh-pooh them, patronize me with stories about pranks vs. the Real World and serious crime. But I had underestimated him—a problem of mine—because he was immediately on alert, and he behaved as if defending me would become not only his number-one concern, but the entire Philadelphia police department’s.