That means Phoebe hadn’t been looking for the highs and lows an addled teen might seek with a drug cocktail.
That means she’d been looking for an exit.
That means that in Jo’s parlance, Phoebe was a quitter.
I was with Jo. She should have gone to Darfur.
• • •
There was still no sign of Phoebe’s phone, and, since there was some indication that Phoebe had deliberately killed herself, the case had been closed and the subpoena to the phone company would not be requested, so if Phoebe had written her last message on her phone, or if she had called or texted anyone in her last moments, those words would stay a secret. Unless the phone turned up or whoever she had contacted came forward.
At dinner I told Jo and Annie Laurie the news that Phoebe’s death had been ruled a suicide, and Jo’s face turned into rock and she put her plate on the floor for Baby Bear, dropped her silverware in the sink and walked out of the house without a word. Baby Bear abandoned his plate and scratched at the door to be let out. Annie took his leash off the hook, wound it and put it in his mouth.
“Stay with her,” Annie said, and opened the door. He took off.
“Next time,” Annie said to me, “would you wait until after dinner? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Jo’s weight is down to half of nothing.”
I said I hoped there wasn’t going to be a next time.
• • •
Mark Pickersley-Smythe called me on Tuesday and asked if I could meet him for lunch. I asked if we would be eating in his study and he said, no, he would meet me at Perry’s Steakhouse and he’d take care of the check. Perry’s Steakhouse is about burnished woods and comfortable leather seats and two-dollar-a-stalk asparagus and slabs of succulent, decadent, please-don’t-let-it-be-a-sin-to-eat-meat steaks. I was glad I’d worn nice slacks to the office that day.
Mark had already secured a corner table and an icy-looking martini with three jalapeño-stuffed olives on a pick.
He stood as I approached the table and held his hand out to shake.
“Hi,” he said and shook my hand firmly. “Let me reintroduce myself. My name is Mark Pickersley. That’s ‘Pickersley’ without a ‘Smythe.’ Have a seat and let me get you a drink.” He held a finger up for the waiter. “I want to recommend the martinis. I ordered dry with two olives, but my fine waiter”—he nodded to the man now standing at his side—“informs me that you can’t drink a martini with an even number of olives because it’s unlucky.” The waiter bowed and confirmed this information. Mark slapped himself on his forehead. “That explains so much! It’s been the olives all along!”
The waiter asked what he could get me and I asked for iced tea and some water. He wanted to know did I want still or sparkling and I said I wanted tap, with lots of ice. The waiter was very nice about it and didn’t get snooty.
I opened my mouth but Mark shook his head and handed me a menu. “Decide what you want and let’s get it ordered. Then we’ll talk.”
I asked for the New York strip, rare, which at Perry’s meant it would have a cool, bloody center. Mark ordered the same thing, with sides of creamed spinach, au gratin potatoes, and roasted sherried mushrooms for the table. On a second thought he also added the iced seafood tower to start, and the beefsteak tomato salads for us both.
“Do you think we ordered enough?” I said.
Mark’s mouth fell open, but he raised his finger.
I said, “It was a joke, Mark,” and he apologized to the waiter and sent him away.
“Tell me how you’re doing, Mr. Pickersley,” I said.
Mark drew a deep breath in through his nose. He took a sip of his martini and blew his cheeks out to let me know his drink was cold and strong and delicious. I drank some ice water.
“Detective Wanderley told you about the lab results?” he asked.
I said yes, I hoped that was okay.
“I asked him to tell you. So, the good news is my daughter wasn’t a druggie, the bad news is, she wanted to die. I’ll have that to live with.” Mark lifted up from his seat and pulled his wallet out, flipped it open and showed me a school photo of a much younger Phoebe. I took it from him.
She would have been twelve or thirteen here. I recognized her—there were those huge, blue eyes, and the slightly weak chin. But here her hair was as blonde and straight as corn silk and it fell past her shoulders. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were so fair they were nearly invisible against her pale skin. She had tiny pearl earrings in her ears, no other piercings that you could see, and was dressed in a blue button-down shirt that matched her eyes. She wasn’t a beauty, but she might have become one. In an exotic, bird-like way, she might have grown into beauty.
I gave him the photo back.
“You know why it’s an actual photo? Why I’m not showing it to you on my iPhone?”
I put sugar and lemon in my tea and stirred. “It’s a school photo, isn’t it?”
“I’m not showing you a picture of Phoebe on my iPhone, because by the time I could afford an iPhone, any kind of cell phone that could take a picture, she didn’t look like Phoebe anymore. She’d done the whole”—he waved his hands over his face and his hair—“and I hated it. She embarrassed me. I was embarrassed of my daughter. That’s the truth. I’m going with the truth from now on.” He pulled the silvery pick from his martini and bit off an olive. “That’s why I’m dropping the Smythe. The people I come from don’t do hyphenated names. Incidentally, Liz started as plain Liz Smith. No ‘Smythe’ to rhyme with ‘blithe.’ But that’s her business. She can spell it and pronounce it any way she wants to because I ain’t going to be carrying it around anymore. There’s something else I want you to know.” He took another sip from the icy glass. “No, there’s a lot I want you to know. You got time?”
I told Mark my time was his.
“Thanks. You’ll get a good lunch out of it. You should have a drink.”
I assured Mark I was good with my tea.
“You know how Liz tells everyone that we met at work? Like I was a hotshot executive or something? We did meet at work, but she was the hotshot executive—I was working a machine. You know, name embroidered on my Dickies’ pocket? I graduated from high school with a C average and that’s only because I was their starting quarterback and got helped a lot. I injured my knee my senior year and that was the end of my college dreams. No one in my family has ever been to college. I would have been the first.
“Jenny and I thought Phoebe would make it for sure. Phoebe was smart. Not like me. Not like her mom. She was never popular, the way we were, but our daughter was smart.” He took a piece of bread from the basket, buttered the whole piece and took a bite. “I know I’m supposed to break a piece off, butter it and so on—Liz had me in hard-core charm school for the first year of our marriage. Phew.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “That was a kick. Every bite I put in my mouth, she had something to say about it. That’s over, too. I’ll eat the way I want to eat—if Liz can’t stand to watch, I’ll go eat in front of the TV.” He took another bite and chewed with enjoyment.
Ahh. This was going to be a confessional lunch. I was okay with that. I said, “Did you find a letter? Did Phoebe leave some kind of explanation? Did something happen right before . . . right before?” I wanted to know why that girl had killed herself. What had been going on in her life for the months we hadn’t seen her? I wanted to know it wasn’t anything our family had been a part of. I’d never seen anything like that in Phoebe—anger, grief, yes—but that black despair? That hopelessness? No—if anything, I’d seen Phoebe as a fighter. She was mad at Jo, well, she got back at Jo. She felt hard done by Liz—she sure as shoot made Liz pay. Those are the acts of a fighter.
Mark put his fork down and shook his head. “Nah. There was nothing. And no note. I could tell Detective Wanderley didn’t like that. I think he thinks we found something that makes us look
bad, but we really didn’t find anything. And I look plenty bad even without a letter.”
“So you don’t have any clue?”
“I know Phoebe was unhappy and mad but I’d have expected her to kill Liz, not herself.” He paused. “I didn’t mean that. She wouldn’t have killed Liz. I only mean that she seemed angry, not depressed. That’s all I mean. The last time I saw her, she and Liz had a knock-down-drag-out in the kitchen and Phoebe went flying up to her room. I was going up to talk to her but Liz stopped me and said to let her go, that this couldn’t go on and she’d handle it. Liz went up to Phoebe’s room for a half an hour or so, and when she came out, she said they’d reached an understanding and that Phoebe wanted to be alone for a while and I should respect that. So Liz thought everything was going to be okay from now on.” He smiled. “Liz doesn’t always read people that well.” The smile slipped and Mark closed his eyes. “But I have no clue why Phoebe would . . . you know.”
The waiter came over with the iced seafood tower, and set two plates down in front of us. You should have seen it. This thing was sex as food. I’m not lying. Crab, shrimp, scallops, calamari, lobster—be still my heart. I tried not to attack it too eagerly.
Mark paused, his fork in the air. “Know how many times I ate in a restaurant like this before Liz? Not one single time. Are you kidding me? Did you see these prices?” He loaded his plate. “Before I go any further, will you speak at Phoebe’s memorial service? Thursday. Six thirty. It’s going to be at that funeral home on the Southwest Freeway, right up here. It’s called . . .” He snapped his fingers in frustration.
“Settegast-Koph.”
“Yeah. Cremation. Phoebe hated the idea of . . .” Mark stopped, struggled. He picked up his martini glass, didn’t drink from it, put it back down. “Give me a minute,” he said and left the restaurant.
Cremation? Well, the case was closed. And there had been an autopsy. Still . . .
The waiter drifted over looking concerned but I waved him off. Drank some tea. Broke a bread roll into pieces.
Five minutes and Mark was back.
I said, “Liz doesn’t want me to do the funeral, Mark. She wasn’t too happy with the way I handled things at your house Saturday.”
Mark picked a shrimp up by the tail, dunked it in rémoulade and popped it, tail and all, into his mouth. “Ahh. Because you wouldn’t pry me out of my study? Yeah. She’s cooled down about that, but she’s still mad at you. Doesn’t matter. Phoebe wasn’t her daughter. Liz told me that a thousand times. That means I’ll make the funeral arrangements, and I don’t have anyone else to ask. You’re it.”
“I’d be happy to speak at Phoebe’s memorial service.” Not a compliment that I was only being asked because he didn’t have anyone else, but I wouldn’t ask me if there had been anyone else.
Mark asked the waiter to box up the rest of the cold seafood. “You’ll take that home, Bear.”
I refused but he reminded me that Liz was allergic to seafood and wouldn’t allow it in the house. The waiter said he would keep it chilled until I was ready to leave.
I said, “So what’s with the name change?”
Another waiter appeared with the beefsteak tomatoes.
“Like I said, I’m not living the lie anymore. Who does that hyphenated name thing, anyway? Not East Texas machinists—I’ll tell you that. I’ll wear the clothes. If I’d had money back then, I would have dressed this way. I like nice clothes.” He considered. “Except those white linen slacks are going to have to go—I didn’t pick those out.” Mark ate a bite of bright red tomato. “But I’m done being Liz’s poodle.”
You know, the polite thing would have been to protest, but it would have been false, so I didn’t. He had been playing the lapdog. I mean, God help the man who has to lock himself away from his wife.
“Did you know that Liz and I went to high school together? I didn’t know her, but I knew who she was. She was the smart, fat, ugly chick. That’s actually sort of a compliment to Liz; when we talked about her—which was almost never, she wasn’t even a blip on our radar screen, but still— ‘smart’ always came before ‘fat’ and ‘ugly.’ I know how that makes me sound, but I’m telling you how it was. I was a high school god.” He saw my expression and laughed out loud. “I was, Bear—you played ball. You have to know.”
“I was a lineman,” I said.
“Oh, then you were only a demigod. Me, I was the quarterback and I was the best my school had had in years. I played serious ball and I was good at every sport I’d tried. I was good-looking and I didn’t crap on people. That’s all it takes in high school. If I hadn’t taken that one bad hit, I’d be selling toothpaste and doing color for ESPN today.”
I gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Bear.” He still had his smile, but he was serious now. “I was that good. Jenny had every right to expect the big bucks.”
Mark focused on his salad. He was eating with gusto.
You know what was weird? It was like Phoebe’s death had somehow freed him from Liz’s control. Like he had thrown off the pretension and all the kowtowing to Liz, and I was glad he had. It’s only that I hated that it taken the death of his child to make him be a man.
What if he could have stood up to Liz earlier? What if he could have said, “Look, she’s my daughter and she’s sad and mad right now, but we’re going to stick with her through this—we’re going to see her through to the other side and if you can’t get with the program, then go sit down with a therapist and find out how”? Maybe Phoebe would have come around. Maybe she and Jo would have made up, and Phoebe would come over, say, once or twice a week instead of five or six times, and . . .
“. . . that I was on top of the mountain and Liz—Liz never made the foothills.”
I started listening again.
Mark lifted his water glass and our glasses were refilled.
“I dated the prettiest girl in school, Jenny DeWitt. Phoebe’s mom. And everyone knew we were together. And then Liz, who was wallpaper in high school, she was invisible, decides she’s in love with me. This is in high school, like, our junior year. Everybody has their role and there is no budging. Not in high school. Not unless you’re starring in a teen flick.
“But it’s like Liz didn’t know that. Like she didn’t know that the quarterback never ends up with the fat girl at the end of the movie.” He shook his head, remembering the audacity of the plain, brainy girl who had aspired to the high school football star. I thought it had taken a lot of guts. “And she would call me.” Mark fished an olive out of his drink, poked the sliver of jalapeño out with his little finger, ate the pepper.
“Once—and this still makes me cringe—Liz called and kept me on the phone because I had no clue how to get off the phone, because I was a nice guy. I was. And I finally said, ‘Let me get something to eat,’ so I set the phone down and I go in the kitchen and get something and a friend comes to the back door and I go off with him. Not on purpose. I forgot Liz was on the phone. I get home, I don’t know, had to be a couple of hours later, and I notice the phone off the hook, and I hear, ‘Mark? Mark?’ She had waited for me.
“Liz tells that story to show how romantic she is but, Bear, it was pathetic. I stopped answering the phone. When I stopped answering the phone, she started coming up to me at school. I’m with my friends and she comes up and she asks me to a cotillion! I don’t know how she got invited. The rich kids gave them. The popular kids got invited. I got invited, but I couldn’t afford it. Liz wasn’t rich or popular, so I don’t know how she got an invite. Maybe she did a rich kid’s term paper or something. I said I had plans. There was no way I could go with her. But, damn, I could not shake her.”
All the while he’s talking, I’m seeing a sixteen-year-old girl, overweight, not pretty, who found the courage to call her high school’s brightest sports star. I’m seeing her, sweaty-palmed, her heart thumping, dialing his number, and
then hearing him pick up. And he lets her talk, says a few words back, and I can see her face change and glow because she’s thinking maybe this could really happen, everybody says what a nice guy he is, maybe he can see the real Liz, the Liz under the pounds and the lousy clothes, and I can see her face when he says he’s going to get a bite to eat—still happy, maybe glad for the chance to catch her breath, because she’s the one doing all the talking, you know she is, and then I can see her, holding a phone to her ear, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for a sixteen-year-old boy, who went out his back door with never a thought of her, the nice guy, and she’s still holding on. Waiting. Every once in a while saying, “Mark? Mark?” And I want to leave this restaurant, and drive to Liz’s house, because it is her house, and I want to wrap her in a bear hug and say, “Liz, put the phone down. Put the phone down, sweetheart. Don’t you wait for a boy who is careless with your heart. You let him go. Find yourself a man who feels honored to have you on his arm. Don’t you settle for less. Let him go, Liz.”
And I am more than twenty years too late to tell her those things, and if her no-show daddy was before me now, I would wring his neck and I’d do it for Liz, because he wasn’t there to say the words that might have made all the difference in the whole wide world, and she never let go. And I know now, Liz is still waiting.
Our steaks and sides arrived and Mark busied himself over the food, which looked delicious, but I couldn’t touch it. I had a sixteen-year-old girl sitting heavy on my heart and she was giving me heartburn. And Mark didn’t look that golden anymore.
Mark said, “I’m telling you all this because . . . I don’t know why I’m telling you.” He slid the two remaining olives into his mouth. Still chewing he said, “Yeah, I do.” He drank off the last of his martini but he shook his head when the waiter offered to bring him another. “I’m telling you because this is why Phoebe died. It’s my fault. It’s mainly my fault, but it’s Liz’s fault, too.
Safe from Harm (9781101619629) Page 20
