With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  And, with the cloud of suspicion removed from their heads—and this was of major importance—the senior Peppers would go home to Florida. Soon.

  But of course I felt oppressively guilty about even having those impulses. The only other hope seemed a chance encounter with Sybil or Richard Quinn or Tiffany or Shep McCoy or Terry and/or Janine Wiley, during which some one of them felt an overwhelming need to confess the deed. All of this, of course, had to happen on this walk, while Mackenzie was in tow, because I was sick and tired of tossing theories his way only to have him disbelieve or undermine. He had to be an eyewitness.

  We passed a group of Mennonite women in white mesh caps. They wore thick dark capes below which calico hems and black stockings showed. They sang hymns through chattering teeth in front of a newspaper box with an ad for 1-900-hot-hot-Sex. The tableau seemed no stranger or more incongruous than anything else lately.

  We made small talk, interrupted now and then by Lizzie’s need to poke at her new history, like a tongue at the raw socket of a newly extracted tooth. “The old lady—Harriet Zacharias—she knew who I was at the party, didn’t she?” she said at one point. “When I said my father’s name. I thought she was crazy, but now I understand and I feel so ashamed.”

  Mackenzie and I said the obvious, feel-better things, knowing full well they couldn’t make a dent in her pain.

  “Nice day, isn’t it?” I said, attempting with absolutely no grace to change gears. Truth was, the air was cold and damp, with only the steely light of a distant sun. “No rain, snow, clouds, or wind,” I explained.

  “Good weather by default,” Mackenzie said. I smiled at him for trying. Lizzie remained preoccupied.

  We looked for a new distraction and found it in the store windows, with which we busied ourselves, overpraising, overexcited about everything, from old junk now called Americana to an electric can opener to the ugliest pair of shoes I’ve ever seen.

  And while Mackenzie and I did our back and forth, Lizzie seemed lost on a distant planet. She, too, stared into windows, but seemed not to comprehend what she saw or what we said. Everything had to be carefully repeated and translated for her.

  We walked for perhaps a half hour in this curious and unsatisfactory way. “There’s a sandwich place over there,” I finally said, pointing catercorner across the street. I didn’t know what Lizzie wanted, but I was increasingly tense about her, and food is my automatic tranquilizer. “That okay?”

  She didn’t respond. I turned and saw, first, Mackenzie, watching her, and then Lizzie, who stood in front of a video rental store, staring up at a movie poster in the window. It was placed high, so that cassettes and daily rates could be displayed below it. Lizzie’s normally pale skin was ashen, bloodless. Her mouth was slightly open, as if paralyzed halfway to a scream; her unblinking eyes were fixed on the poster, and her breath came in frightened-sounding gasps.

  I looked at what held her in thrall. It was the variety of poster my eyes skitter across. Most of the space was taken up by the great overdeveloped back of a man whose white shirt strained across him. His shoulders were enormous, stretching almost all the way across the poster. The angle was from below, so that he loomed and towered and intimidated. The one hand of his that we could see held a gun aimed at the head of a whimpering, cowering woman at his feet. She was, I assumed, begging for mercy. Another woman, in the distance and quite small in the odd perspective, stood with her hands in the air, screaming.

  Precisely the sort of movie I run from, no matter how the antifemale sadism and brutality is justified, no matter how Justice triumphs in the end. I don’t want those images and ideas transferred into my brain.

  Even the poster, designed to titillate and attract, was sickening. It made me feel small and helpless and impotent, like the infantilized women it depicted. Like a child, a baby, a victim.

  It was having an even more dramatic effect on Lizzie. Her breathing had become still more uneven and rapid, and she herself more agitated. She shook her head and her hands moved aimlessly in small half circles, tiny motions of holding something at bay.

  “I think,” Mackenzie whispered, “some of that fog of hers is maybe liftin’ for real.”

  From a movie poster? From that movie poster? And then I thought about how insignificant it made me feel.

  “I saw,” she said in a low, frightened voice. “I saw.”

  “Saw what?” I asked softly. Mackenzie and I, without consciously planning it, had stationed ourselves one on either side of her. If she toppled, she was safe.

  “Him.” Her eyes were still on the enormous back and forearm of the murderous man.

  I saw him. She had said the same words, over and over, the night Lyle Zacharias died.

  “He did it.” She lifted her right arm to point directly at the poster.

  I thought we’d been talking about Lyle’s death. I’d thought wrong.

  “Ah.” Mackenzie’s voice was a purr. “And you saw, didn’ you? An’ somewhere, y’always knew you’d seen, isn’t that so?”

  Lizzie nodded, listlessly. “I saw.” Her voice shrunk, became higher, whinier, more childish. She was down to the diminutive size and ground-level perspective of the invisible viewer in the poster. “He hurt her. She cried. Gratty cried, too.”

  Gratty? But Mackenzie skimmed right over that. “Who is she?” he asked in that soft voice that allowed for and accepted anything whatsoever. “Who was hurt? Who cried?”

  “Mommy!” she called out. “My mommy cried!” She put her hands to her face, covering her eyes, shaking. “I saw!” she cried from between her fingers. “He killed Mommy—Mother. My mother. I didn’t do it, the way my father said! I didn’t, but he told everybody! He lied! Lyle lied. And she lied!”

  “She? Mommy?”

  “Oh, God—” Lizzie was wild-eyed, dizzy from her brain’s back-and-forth time travel across two decades, across the entire span of her life. “I did know her. I called her Gratty,” she said, sounding adult again. “Hattie plus Grandma, I guess.”

  “Hattie was there? She saw, too?”

  Lizzie nodded. Her eyes welled over. “I feel sick, but not surprised. When he told me last night, some part of me felt like it already knew. Knew there were lies. Knew that I didn’t shoot her.”

  “Maybe you always knew more than you realize even now,” Mackenzie said. “Sunday night, you said that you’d seen him and that you didn’t do it. Several times you said it. An’ that was three days before your daddy told you what had happened years ago.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t understand, because I didn’t know I knew. Maybe that little bit came out all by itself.” She shook her head, her features pensive again.

  Mackenzie’s face had set, and I feared his brain had done the same. “She doesn’t mean she knew,” I said. “Not consciously. Not the way you’re implying. Do you, Lizzie?”

  “I don’t know. Why’d I say those things if I didn’t?”

  “You once knew, long ago, but then you blocked it out. That’s the same as not knowing.” Mackenzie glared at me, but I shook my head in annoyance. She didn’t realize where he was leading her.

  “But now,” she said, “I wonder if I always, on some level…as soon as he walked into the kitchen, I felt sick.” I remembered, too, how she’d been when Lyle put his finger up in a mock pistol position. He’d been trying to remember my mother’s name and cocked his hand like a gun. And Lizzie had become nearly catatonic.

  “I had nightmares for years,” she said. “A bald, bearded man and a gigantic noise and screams and redness.”

  “Dreams are one thing, but you didn’t consciously know, because if you did—”

  “Appreciate it if you’d cease tellin’ her what she remembers or knew,” Mackenzie said to me.

  His summons to cease and desist shut me up long enough to let my central nervous system absorb the shock of what Lizzie had said. Because while revelation via movie poster is not quite orthodox, I believed her the instant the words were out. And I
knew Mackenzie had, too. Our only differences were about what to make of its nuances.

  Lyle Zacharias had killed his wife, and Hattie had witnessed it. An accident he could have explained, should have owned up to. Instead he took the easy way by lying and soiling a child’s life. Sickening. Lyle Zacharias was one enormous lie. He had stolen a lot of lives, cheated and rearranged and destroyed, unconcerned with the damage he left in his wake. What was it to burden an orphaned little girl with—whether or not she consciously knew it—a matricide she hadn’t committed?

  “Lizzie,” Mackenzie murmured, “Mandy here has to head elsewhere, and I’m not of a mind to leave you alone, so why don’t you come along with me? I think maybe coffee and food would help. Plus a good long talk.”

  “Only coffee?” I said softly. “You promise?”

  Lizzie was still mesmerized by the poster. I didn’t think she could hear us.

  Mackenzie nodded, all blue-eyed innocence. “Coffee,” he said. “What are you insinuatin’?”

  I couldn’t tell if I was looking at Mackenzie the compassionate friend or Mackenzie the complete cop. I reminded the man, whichever one was facing me, of Lizzie’s right to a lawyer and due process, should the need arise.

  “Well,” he said, drawling the word out into multisyllables, “I was plannin’ to skip the lawyer and rely on the rack. It’s real good for confessions, ’specially when you add a good lashin’, and the fingernail-puller-outer gizmo, too. Just love to hear them scream, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  He shook his head. “I try real hard to find out the truth, and I try real hard to do it legally. Thought you knew me by now. Oh, boy, do we need time alone.”

  It was the badge. Wherever it was, in his wallet or home in a drawer, it had the power to blind me. I apologized again.

  “Accepted,” he said. “What I think we all do now is move on.”

  So we did. He and Lizzie across the street to the coffee shop, and I off for dinner with the folks.

  I went in pursuit of my battle-scarred car and tried to puzzle out the day. Once again I’d gotten what I’d requested. Something akin to a confession, witnessed by Mackenzie.

  Why, then, did I feel so rotten about it?

  * * *

  What an anticlimax! From the high drama of revelation to…dinner in the suburbs. Ah well, perhaps I could cut short my mother’s inevitable nuptial nagging by telling her, finally, how close her neck had been to the noose all week. And for the family at large, I’d have the painfully dramatic story of Lizzie and the movie ad.

  That would have to wait until Karen was in bed.

  Karen. Damn. I had to return to my house. My niece had been feeling overlooked and miffed since the appearance of her sibling. Assuming that the interloper in question, Alexander, was too new to notice inequities, I’d been bringing Karen special treats when I could. For today I’d bought a superdeluxe minisuitcaseful of felt-tipped pens. And I’d left it home.

  The gift-wrapped box was on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it and glanced at the clock. Seconds to go till five, when traffic moved toward critical mass.

  Macavity welcomed me with an anxious trot to his empty food dish, but he couldn’t hold my attention. My clock-glance had swept on and caught the blinking semaphore of the phone answering machine. I will consider myself fully adult when my pulse no longer quickens at the sight of a waiting message, when I actually learn from the sheer force of experience that the message will not be news that I’ve won the lottery or been granted the MacArthur Genius Award for undeveloped, unsuspected potential. Or anything else very exciting, to be honest.

  But as of now, rationally or not, my heart still flutters at the possibilities in that winking message light.

  This possibility turned out to be my sister. My heart de-fluttered. It appeared that my mother had taken the train into town that morning, planning to spend an entire day at the Philadelphia Flower and Garden Show and be back at Beth’s by five. “But she called to say she wanted to visit Hattie Zacharias afterward, and that maybe you could pick her up on your way out here. Could you? Call me so I’ll know you heard this message.”

  I called. I agreed. It wasn’t relevant that Society Hill was the opposite direction from the Main Line and Beth’s Gladwyne house, or that now, for certain, the downtown streets would be impassably clogged.

  I had some time, and my mother was notoriously slow at closure, anyway. Her leave-taking speed record had been clocked at twenty-nine minutes from the first good-bye to her actual exit. Might as well feed the beast who was still methodically, nervously, rubbing against my ankles. “Calm down,” I told him. “This is not the day you starve to death. And why don’t you eat kibble if you’re so hungry?” Useless rhetoric on my part. Macavity considers dry food an occasional hobby, not a meal.

  I plopped the remnants of today’s canned delight onto his plate and felt a misplaced maternal rush as his purr reached all the way up to my ears.

  My sympathy for Hattie Zacharias had dissipated given what Lizzie said. I mentally ran and reran the scene with the gun discharging and killing Cindy Zacharias while both her daughter and Lyle’s stepmother watched in horror. I pitied everyone at the grisly scene. But I could not forgive Hattie for collusion and lies, for sparing Lyle embarrassment by burdening a near-baby, already traumatized by loss, with matricide. And I didn’t care if Lizzie did or didn’t know the facts until recently. They were there, buried in her brain. She was expending valuable energy in keeping them buried. Besides, other people believed the deception and thought of her in the wrong way. She had carried the burden even if she hadn’t known what was weighing her down.

  I picked up my bag and pulled out my car keys, but the fatal scene played nonstop in my mind. Only the faces weren’t the smiling ones that might precede a pure accident. They were upset, strained, and I had a sense that somebody had told me they were that way, but who?

  It couldn’t be anything Sybil had said, because she’d never known Cindy. Janine had only alluded to Cindy by mentioning her husband’s attraction to redheads. And all I could remember from Terry Wiley was praise of Cindy’s kindness and goodness. Maybe I was making the whole thing up, rewriting the script to suit me as I liked. I erased the phone message, reset the machine, and said adieu to the cat.

  Then I remembered. Richard Quinn had said it. He wasn’t a man I’d think of when dealing with words, so I was nearly at the door before it came back. He’d thought she was too emphatic about being holier than thou. Argued the last time Quinn was with them, right before he left the partnership.

  Right before…the inside of my brain felt like a pinball machine, small hard pellets pinging against the skull, spinning off in new trajectories. Right before Quinn left the partnership, meant…

  I rushed back to the kitchen divider. “Excuse me,” I told Macavity, who was washing up after dinner. I opened the cabinet behind him and pulled out the telephone directory. U-V-W. Wiley. Too many altogether. Wiley, T. Wiley, T.B. Good Lord! Why would anybody want to be known by those initials? Tessa—Telford—Thea—I knew he taught at South Philly, but did he live in the city? Was his number listed? Theodore—Terrence—Eureka!

  “Please,” I whispered into the receiver. “Be the right Terry. Please.”

  It was. Or almost. “May I speak with Terry?” I asked after I heard Janine’s whine even in her hello.

  The whine metastasized after I identified myself. “What do you want with him?” she demanded. Her voice threatened to short-circuit the phone wires. “I thought I told you—”

  “I need to ask one quick question.”

  “About what?”

  “About—About something that came up on Junior Journalism Day.”

  “Look, lady.” Her voice, like her skin, was muddy.

  “It’s important.”

  She inhaled loudly, as if steeling herself for a repulsive and difficult task. “Terrrrrreee!” she screamed, so close to the receiver that i
t was deafening. Did she think the man was here, with me, on the other end of the line? “Phone!”

  Sometimes you get quick peeks into other people’s lives. Just a word or two, like those she was shrieking, and you know too much about the anger that dusted every surface of their life.

  Another phone lifted somewhere in their house. Janine made no effort to pretend she was hanging up. Her aggrieved breaths were quite audible. “Hello?” Terry Wiley’s anxious voice said. “Who is this?”

  “Mandy Pepper. Remember me from Junior Journalism Day?” That was for her benefit, not his.

  “Of course. Nice to…” And then, maybe, he decided it wasn’t all that nice hearing from me again, after all.

  “Remember you were talking about…um…” The hell with it. Let Janine have a fit. There was no way around the name. “Remember how you said that Cindy Zacharias—” I heard an angry gasp from the second receiver. So did Terry. Before he could say anything, I plowed ahead, “—was a good friend of Janine and yours?” I hoped that placated her. “And that she was the kind of person who cared about people and about what was right? Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember what words I said. But sure, she was like that.”

  A person who cared about what was right. He had said that. And Quinn had said she was self-righteous about it. And that Lyle and she had been fighting right before he left. Before Lyle terminated the partnership. On the eve of Ace of Hearts, which Terry Wiley had written back in high school.

  “Why?” Terry asked. “What does it matter?”

  “What I need to know is this. Did Cindy—” Another ridiculous gasp from Janine. Twenty years after the object of her husband’s infatuation was dead, she was still in a state of perpetual outrage. “Did Cindy Zacharias know that you were the real author of Ace of Hearts?”

  Heavy two-receiver silence before he spoke. “She’d seen the original, yes. My version. Found it on Lyle’s desk. She saw the resemblance, even if the jury couldn’t, later. But of course, by then, the original was missing.”