Board Stiff (Mattie Winston Mysteries) (12 page)

“Why didn’t she go through with the divorce?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked her that several times lately but she never gives me an answer.”

“Hurley said he’s finalizing the divorce now. How’s your mom taking that?”

“I think she was hoping something would happen between the two of them when they got back together. But it clearly hasn’t.” Emily pauses and shrugs. “I think Mom feels lonely. She’s been sick a lot lately, and even though I tried to take care of her the best I could, I still had to go to school, and do my homework, and I couldn’t do things like drive to the grocery store, or drive her to the doctor’s. She had to ask friends and neighbors for help with stuff like that and she hates to do that. Plus, I think she realizes at times like that how alone she is.”

I feel bad for Emily. It’s clear that she has shouldered much more responsibility than a girl of her age should have to. “How is your mom’s health now?”

Emily shrugs. “She hasn’t been to a doctor since we left Chicago so I guess she’s doing okay. But I don’t think the doctors were ever able to figure out what was wrong with her.”

“That must have been frustrating.”

Emily nodded.

“I’m sorry things have been so rough for you lately. Are you sorry you came here?”

“No. Besides, it’s not like we had any choice. Mom lost her job because of all the sick time she had to take, and when she lost her job she also lost her insurance. It’s because of all the doctor bills that we lost our house. I guess this is a chance for us to start over.”

“What was she sick with?”

Emily shrugs. “I’m not sure. I know she had some really heavy periods and bled a lot and that made her anemic.”

“Did you have a lot of friends where you were before?”

“Some. Most of them ignored me when my mom got sick. Some of the snobby ones wouldn’t talk to me when they heard we were losing our house. I had one good friend who stuck by me and she and I still talk on the phone from time to time. But I don’t think we’ll be going back to Chicago anytime soon and I don’t know if our friendship will survive the distance.”

“I’m sure you’ll make some new friends here.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But it’s hard when you’re the new kid. There’re all these cliques and stuff. It can be hard to break in.”

I make a mental note to talk to Erika about Emily. Erika is thirteen and still has one more year to go in middle school before she gets into high school, but a lot of her friends have older brothers and sisters in high school. Maybe she can smooth the way for Emily to make some new friends.

“That picture that you’ve drawn there is pretty amazing,” I say, deciding Emily could use a morale boost.

“It’s nothing special,” she says dismissively. “I’m just experimenting with some of that stuff I read in the book about skin depth and features.”

“Actually, it is special and if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you why.”

She stops drawing and I lead her out of the library, still carrying her clipboard, and down the hall past Izzy’s office. We stop in front of the picture of Bertha hanging on the wall where it’s been for the past two decades. I nod toward the portrait. “This woman is Bertha. Do you notice the strong resemblance between her and your drawing?”

Emily cocks her head, a quizzical smile on her face as she looks at the picture. Then she looks at her drawing. “Huh.”

“It’s not a coincidence that the two look alike. That skeleton hanging in the library is also Bertha.” I pause and let that information sink in.

I can tell when Emily has registered the significance of what she has done. Again, she looks at the drawing in her hands and then at the portrait, her expression wide-eyed and amazed rather than just amused. She looks at me. “For real?”

“For real. I daresay you have a pretty cool talent there, young lady. With a little bit of training you might be able to pursue an interesting career. There’s a huge need for artists who can render something like this from nothing more than bones.”

“Sweet.” Emily studies the photo of Bertha for a few seconds more, then she looks at me and asks, “Where’s Steve?”

“He got kind of busy with our murder case. He and some of the other cops are executing search warrants and interviewing people over at the nursing home. I’m going to join them later, but for now I want to get something to eat and I thought you and I could do that together, if that’s okay with you.”

“Sure. Are you going to cook or are we going to eat out?”

I laugh. “Neither as it turns out. And trust me, the news that I’m not going to cook is probably the best news you’ll get today. The only thing I’m good at making when it comes to food is reservations.”

I
fill Emily in on our dinner plans and despite my efforts to make it sound like a fun, relaxing time, she seems understandably anxious. I feel bad for her. It can’t be easy having your life kicked out from under you the way she has, and the one thing in her life that has been a constant—her mother—is now gone. Some strange woman who may or may not be in competition with her mother for the affections of her newfound father is hauling her off to some strange house to meet a whole new group of people. So far Emily has adapted easily to new situations and people, so I cross my fingers that this encounter will be no different.

My suspicion that Emily and Erika will have a lot in common is supported by Emily’s reaction to my car. My niece has long had a fascination with things related to death, and her reaction the first time she saw me drive up in the hearse was one of pure delight. She climbed into the back and lay down where the coffins used to go and pretended she was dead. I have to confess, it was a little creepy, but given that Erika is otherwise a normal happy teenager, I’m not too concerned. Neither is Desi, who has always been the type of mother who lets her children be who they want to be no matter how strange. I have to give the woman credit. There aren’t many other mothers I know who would let their young son keep a tarantula and a three-inch cockroach as house pets.

Emily’s reaction to my hearse is reminiscent of Erika’s. She stares at it with her mouth agape for a few seconds, then says, “This is your car?”

“Yep,” I say glibly. “It comes in handy given my line of work.”

Emily’s eyebrows scrunch together and after a few seconds of weighing my last statement, she narrows her eyes at me and smiles. “You don’t really haul bodies around in here, do you?”

“No, I don’t. A few months ago, I had a bad car accident and totaled my old car. I was going through a divorce at the time and didn’t have very much money. Plus the insurance on the car was in my husband’s name. I went shopping for a replacement with what little money I had and this was the only thing I could afford that promised to be reliable.”

“It’s the bomb,” Emily says. She walks the length of the passenger side, running her hand along the dark midnight blue finish.

“My dog Hoover likes it a lot,” I tell her. “I think it’s all the strange smells inside.”

“You have a dog?”

I nod.

“Can I see him?”

“Maybe after dinner. My sister is expecting us and I don’t want to be too late. I also need to get to the nursing home to help your father and the other cops with their investigation.”

“Okay,” Emily says, clearly disappointed. She climbs into the passenger seat of the hearse and our trip, which only takes a few minutes, is made in silence, though Emily spends the duration craning around so she can see the back area of the car.

As I pull up and park beside the curb in front of my sister’s house, a small groan escapes me. There is another car parked in front of mine and it’s one I recognize—my mother’s. This is not a good thing. My mother is difficult to deal with when things are going well and I’m pretty sure I’m at the top of her fecal roster at the moment, a dubious status that promises difficult conversations ahead.

Desi meets us at the front door before we have a chance to knock. She reaches up and hugs me; I hug her back, hard.

“I’m so sorry, Desi,” I whisper. “I had no idea you and Lucien were having problems.”

“We can discuss that later,” she says. “I should warn you, Mom is here.”

“Yeah,” I say, releasing her. “I saw the car out front. Is William here with her?”

Desi nods. From behind her I see Erika walk up and I’m surprised. The dark Goth look she had the last time I saw her has been softened. The black dye she used on her hair is gone, and in its place is her natural dark chestnut brown. Her clothes are pretty ordinary-looking as well: blue jeans, a plain green T-shirt, and sneakers. Though I’m too far away to tell for sure, I don’t think she’s wearing any makeup. It’s a stark contrast to the dark eyeliner she was wearing the last time I saw her. I can’t help but wonder how much of this change is due to the breakup of her parents. I wonder if I’ve made a miscalculation by bringing Emily here.

I quickly make introductions, forgoing any detailed explanations, and before anything else can be said or done my mother appears in the foyer.

“Mattie! It’s about time you made a public appearance. We’ve all been very worried about you. Desi and I even came by your place a week or so ago. That horrible car you drive was there so we assumed you were home, but no one answered the door.”

“I know, Mom, and I’m sorry. I’ve been going through a lot lately and I—”

“
You’ve
been going through a lot,” Mom interrupts. “Let me tell you the problems
I’ve
been having. All this worry about you has stressed me out so much that I think I must have an ulcer. I’m pretty sure I have that H. pylori bacteria in my gut. You know I’m anemic already. If I have an ulcer and it starts to bleed, I’m a goner.”

My mother’s words are spoken in a very dramatic tone, one I know well because I’ve been listening to it my entire life. She’s been a major hypochondriac for as long as I can remember. That, along with her OCD, has led to her being banned from all of the local doctors’ offices, not because of her disorders per se, but because of the scenes she makes whenever she has an appointment. Nothing is ever diagnosed right, nothing is ever cleaned well enough, and heaven forbid if you try to make her sit in the waiting room with all the sneezing, coughing, germ-blowing sick people. Because of her estrangement with all of her past medical caregivers, my marriage to a surgeon was probably the one moment in my life when I made my mother proud. She still has trouble understanding why I would let something as nitpicky as infidelity ruin a perfectly good marriage, especially to a doctor.

“I don’t know, Mom,” I say, looking her over. “Maybe it’s the lighting in here, but your color looks better than I’ve seen it in a long time. I’m sure you’re fine.”

This last bit is a line I’ve uttered numerous times to her, and each time I’m painfully aware of the fact that eventually, one day, she will have something truly wrong. But like the boy who cries wolf, it’s hard to take any of her complaints seriously when they’ve been coming at me more regularly than sniffles during flu season and thus far not a one of them has actually panned out. The day my mother tells me she’s feeling fine and has no complaints is the day I’ll start to worry; it will be a sure sign that Armageddon is nigh.

Seeming to realize that I’m not going to play, Mom shifts her attention to Emily. “And who do we have here?”

“This is Emily—” I stop suddenly, and look over at her. “I just realized I don’t know what your last name is.”

“It’s Houston,” Emily says. “Like the city in Texas.”

“Ah, good to know. Let me start again. This is Emily Houston. She is Steve Hurley’s daughter.”

I watch my mother’s eyes grow large, as do my sister’s. That’s when I realize that neither one of them knew about Kate and Emily, or at least not about their relationship to Hurley. It makes me wonder what the current gossip has been. Then again, Desi has likely been distracted by her own problems and therefore not tuned in to the town gossip. And my mother gets most of her gossip from me and Desi, so . . .

Erika saves the day. She takes Emily’s hand and hauls her off into the living room, where she is trying to do some kind of dance moves with a Wii. I follow my sister out to the kitchen, my mother trailing behind us. I find William—or William-Not-Bill as he is more fondly known to me because that’s what he kept telling me the first time I met him—sitting on a barstool in the kitchen. I’m a little surprised to find him there. The first time he sat on one of my sister’s barstools he fainted at the sight of my nephew’s three-inch Madagascar hissing cockroach and ended up with an ambulance ride to the hospital and a bunch of stitches in his scalp.

I give him a hug, genuinely glad to see him. I met William for the first time back around Halloween when Izzy set us up as a blind date. To say that our date didn’t work out is a gross understatement, but all was not lost. I introduced William-not-Bill to my mother, who is currently divorced from husband number four, and they’ve been a happy couple ever since, despite the fact that Mom is a dozen years his senior. Turns out they both have OCD, and since they’re living together, I’d bet money that their house is the cleanest one in the town of Sorenson, maybe in the entire state of Wisconsin.

We manage to get through dinner—a delicious pot roast that my sister had cooking in the Crock-Pot all day—without any contentious conversation. I had hoped Erika would be able to assist Emily with the teenage social landscape in Sorenson but ironically, it is Emily who ends up offering to help Erika negotiate certain social travails when she starts high school. I’m relieved the two of them seem to be getting on well, and when I hear them discussing plans for possibly getting together for spring break, I’m glad I decided to bring Emily along.

I discuss my return to my old job during the meal and the news is met with glee by all, though for different reasons. In my mother’s case, it’s because my job gives me access to lots of health department and disease information, which she expects me to use to keep her updated on all the latest disease trends. This perk is offset some, however, by her fears about the contagions I might expose her to while I’m “playing around with those dead people.” Erika’s glad to hear I have my job back because she thinks it’s cool that I work with dead people all the time. Her brother Ethan is happy about it because he has connections with an entomologist from Madison, thanks to me, and he’s scheduled to go to a special bug camp this summer where he’ll be functioning as a paid advisor rather than as a camper.

As soon as we’re done eating, I grab Desi and haul her into the laundry room, shutting the door behind us. “Look, Des, we need to talk, but I’m in a bit of a bind time-wise. There’s been a murder over at the Twilight Home. The cops are there now conducting an investigation and I need to go help them with the interviews, interrogations, and evidence collection.”

“Okay, but first tell me what’s going on with you and Hurley? And what’s with this daughter? Is that why you two broke up?”

“Yeah, that had a lot to do with it. Emily comes with a mother who, it turns out, is still married to Hurley.”

Desi gasps and clamps a hand over her mouth. “Oh crap, Mattie. That’s horrible. He’s been married all this time and didn’t tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me because he didn’t know. Apparently he thought Kate—that’s Emily’s mother—had filed divorce papers years ago. She didn’t, for reasons only she knows and she never told him. Nor did she tell him that she was pregnant. Apparently, she and Emily have had a rough time of things lately and they ended up homeless. They showed up on Hurley’s doorstep a couple months ago looking for help.”

“How awful for you,” Desi says, shaking her head. “We heard there was a woman living with him, but the assumption around town has been that she was either a relative or a new girlfriend who has a teenage daughter. To find out he has a wife . . .” She shakes her head again. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Mattie. I know how it feels to be duped by a man you love.”

“First of all, Hurley didn’t dupe me and what happened between me and him is okay. The timing wasn’t right for us. Maybe that will change somewhere down the road, but for now I’m happy just to be working with him again. I’m sure it’s been one heck of an adjustment for him, too. Fortunately, Emily seems to be a great kid.

“And second of all, Lucien didn’t dupe you on purpose. He was embarrassed and he didn’t want to let you down. That’s the only reason he didn’t tell you what was going on. He was hoping he could fix it before you found out.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Desi snaps, crossing her arms over her chest. “Lucien betrayed my trust in him. He thinks that since I thought he was having an affair and he wasn’t that everything should be hunky dory. Well it’s not. He may not have had an affair, but he clearly has no compunctions about lying to me since he took it upon himself to wipe out our entire savings account without so much as a word to me.”

“Look Desi, I know that what Lucien did with your money was stupid, but he didn’t do it with any menace in his heart. In fact, if anything, it was the kindness in his heart that got him into trouble. He didn’t want to disappoint his clients and friends and truly thought it was a temporary setback, that he would eventually be able to climb his way out of the hole he dug himself into.”

“I don’t know,” Desi says, shaking her head and wringing her hands.

“Do you love him, Des?”

“Of course I do, but I can’t trust him anymore.” Tears well in her eyes and she snorts back a sniffle. “He humiliated me and the kids. And he lied to me, Mattie. That’s what I’m having the hardest time with. I thought our relationship was one of mutual respect and trust, but now I just don’t know.”

“I get that. And you’re right. He betrayed your trust. But he did so because he couldn’t bear the thought of letting you down, of seeing the disappointment on your face when you look at him. He couldn’t bear the thought of you thinking poorly of him. He made a mistake, several in fact. He knows that. He’s working night and day to try to make up for the money he lost. I don’t know how he can make up for the lying thing other than to never do it again, and based on what I saw and heard from him today, I’d bet money he won’t.”

In my mind’s eye, I see Dr. Maggie arch an eyebrow at this statement, more proof in her mind that I’m a gambling addict. I shove her out of my head and continue.

“Lucien will survive the money thing. What he won’t survive is losing you and the kids. You guys are everything to him. This separation is killing him. He looks awful. He’s got big circles under his eyes, he’s all slumped over, and he didn’t come at me with a single double entendre, sexual innuendo, or suggestive comment during the entire time I was with him today. I’m telling you the man is broken. He needs you. Give him another chance.”