Die Before I Wake (14 page)

I’d given the idea a great deal of thought. As a matter of fact, since yesterday afternoon, I’d hardly thought of anything else. But no matter how I looked at it, it didn’t wash. The idea seemed ludicrous.

“No,” I admitted. “I can’t imagine it. But there’s something strange about all this. Something that’s off-kilter. There are no pictures of Beth in the house.

Nobody ever speaks her name. It’s as though she’s been erased from the family archives. And that bothers me. It bothers me a lot.”

Claudia calmly arranged tea bags in two delicate cups painted with pink rosebuds and filled them with hot water. “And what does Tom have to say about that?”

“He gave me some song and dance about trying to help the girls heal by removing all the reminders of what they’d lost.”

“That sounds reasonable to me.”

“It’s not reasonable, damn it! It’s creepy.” She set the kettle back on the stove and held out a cup of tea. “Sit down. Drink your tea. It’ll help calm your nerves.”

“My nerves are fine.” But I sat. And drank.

“Riley knows something,” I said. “I’m not crazy, I’m not overreacting, I’m not imagining it. He told me to stay out of it because he didn’t want to see anything happen to me. Come to think of it—” I paused, eyes narrowed, trying to remember the exact wording the strange old man had used. “That’s pretty much the same thing Roger said.”

“Roger who?”

“He’s this hideous old man who talked to me on the bridge yesterday. Gray hair, missing teeth, and a stench worse than a three-day-old mackerel.”

“Oh,” she said. “That Roger.”

“You know him?”

“Everybody knows him. Roger Levasseur. Used to be a physicist. He taught at MIT. They say he’s brilliant, or at least he was until he lost his marbles.

Now he lives alone in a little trailer out by the river.

He smells bad, but he’s harmless. They say he built some sort of fishing shack under the bridge, out of old plywood and roofing nails. Sometimes he sleeps out there. The property’s not his, but nobody seems to care. He doesn’t bother anybody.”

“That awful man was a physics professor at MIT?

Impossible.”

“Not really. Some academics from those presti-gious institutions have IQs so high they have trouble functioning outside of academe. I had a great-aunt who taught at Harvard for twenty years. One day she just snapped. Stripped off all her clothes and ran buck-naked up and down the Widener Library stacks. As you can imagine, Harvard’s austere ad-ministration wasn’t impressed. She had tenure, so they couldn’t fire her. Instead, she went on an extended leave of absence, and spent the rest of her life in a sanitarium, eating pablum and staying away from sharp objects.” Claudia paused to gaze at me fondly. “Julie,” she said, “what is it you want?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You just came here. This is a small town. We’re quirky. Give us a little time before you start rocking boats. I guarantee you’ll sleep better at night.” Had she and Riley gotten together last night and compared notes? Or had I accidentally wandered into Stepford? Who was this stranger, and what had she done with the Claudia I’d met a few days ago?

I drained my tea and slipped down from my wooden stool. “Sure, Claudia. Whatever you say.”

“Oh, now you’re mad. Don’t be that way.” I lifted my chin and said, “I’m not mad.” A dimple appeared in her left cheek. “Right. And I’m the Queen of France.”

I glared at her. I’d thought she was my friend.

How could I have been so stupid? I barely knew the woman. Jeffrey had always told me I was too trusting. “I have to go,” I said. “Have a nice life.”

“Julie! Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She got up from her stool and chased me to the door. “Look, I’m just trying to protect you.”

I turned on her. “I don’t need protecting! Do I really look like that much of a babe in the woods?

Do I wear a sign on my back that says Dunce?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it? What quality do I possess that makes everyone I meet think I need to be protected from the big, bad world?”

“Everybody doesn’t think that.”

“Roger does. Riley does. You do.”

“Okay,” she admitted, “maybe I think you do, just a little. Look at your behavior. What else am I supposed to think? You make wild accusations and then go off half-cocked when I don’t rush to agree with you. How many other people have you said this to? Has it even occurred to you that if you’re right, if Beth was murdered, you might be placing yourself in jeopardy by showing too much interest? No,” she continued, seeing the expression on my face, “I can see you hadn’t even thought about that until I reminded you. That’s dangerous behavior. That, my dear, is why we all think you need protection. Not so much from the world as from yourself.”

I stood silent, stunned by her accusation, even more stunned by its truth. “Besides,” she said, looking pained, “it’s not about you. Not really.” My recovery from mortification was amazingly rapid. “Now you’re contradicting yourself,” I said.

“Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.”

“Fine. If you must know, it’s my own ass I’m protecting. If anything happened to you because of me, Tom would have my head on a platter. And that’s the truth.”

All the starch went out of me. It wasn’t what I’d expected to hear, but her face told me it was the truth. “I think,” I said, “you’d better tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Come back in the kitchen. We’ll talk.”

“We can talk here.”

“Fine.” Claudia crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “Tom and I go way back,” she said.

“We rode our tricycles together, up and down my driveway because he was a year older and my grandmother wouldn’t let me out of the yard. When I was six, he gave me my first kiss. We climbed trees and caught frogs together. We went out together on Halloween and egged people’s houses.” I couldn’t help myself. The words just popped out of me. “My Tom did that?”

“He did. We were about as close as two kids could be. Then Beth came along, and we became a three-some. The Three Musketeers. Through adolescence and into adulthood, it was all for one and one for all.”

“Does this story have a point?”

“The point is that Beth and I became like sisters.

We told each other everything. Or I thought we did.

So when she died, Tom blamed it on me.”

“Why the hell would he do that?”

“He felt that as Beth’s best friend, I should have seen how depressed she was. I should have realized she was suicidal. Plus, his wife was dead and he needed somebody to blame. He chose me.”

“I don’t get it. Why was it your responsibility? He was her husband. Surely that trumps a best friend in the closeness category. If there was any blame to be handed out, he should have stepped up and taken his share.”

“Beth put on a good act. She kept her depression hidden. She managed to fool me, and not too many people can pull that off.”

“So you didn’t know she was depressed?”

“I didn’t. I knew something wasn’t right with her.

The last few months of her life, she changed. But, like most people, I was too wrapped up in my own life to pay attention to hers. If anything, I suppose I imagined she and Tom were having marital problems. He works long hours, and Beth was home alone with the girls. I thought she was ticked off because he didn’t pay enough attention to her. Attention was one of Beth’s big priorities. To tell you the truth, the possibility of depression never even crossed my mind.”

“Tom claims she was clinically depressed and had been for some time.”

“Yes, well, he’s a doctor. If anyone should recognize the symptoms, he should.”

“Yet according to what you’re telling me, he didn’t.”

“Not until it was too late.”

“Anyone can be a Monday-morning quarterback,” I said. “You don’t need a medical degree for that. And I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”

“It’s quite simple. The truth is, I don’t want to lose Tom. He’s my dearest friend in the world. My parents are gone. So is my Gram, and Beth, my closest girlfriend. Even my worthless ex-husband has moved on to greener pastures. Except for Dylan, Tom is the only family I have left. He’s like the older brother I never had. If he thought I let you walk into trouble without doing my best to save you, he’d never speak to me again. I’m not willing to risk that.

I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with Beth, but I don’t think it’s healthy for you or your marriage.

And it’s certainly not healthy for me. So I beg of you, give it a rest. You have a good man there, one I suspect would lay down his life for you. If you love him, don’t force him to make that choice. Back off and focus on what really matters. Tom and those two beautiful little girls.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Answer one question for me,” I said, “and then I’ll leave you alone.”

“Fine.”

“Do you think Beth killed herself? Gut feeling, not the polite thing to say, or what you think I want to hear. What do you, Claudia, really believe?”

“Oh, boy.” She moved to the hall mirror and stood there, looking at her own reflection. “Some days,” she said, “I don’t believe it at all. I look at everything Beth had going for her. Tom, the girls, a lovely home.

She was so headstrong, so determined, and I can’t imagine that she would throw that all away.”

“But?”

“But.” Claudia squared her shoulders. “But then, on the days in between, the days when I’m feeling more rational and less emotional, I tell myself I’m looking for something that simply doesn’t exist.

Looking for unicorns, when horses will clearly do.

The whole sordid affair is pretty straightforward, after all. Beth parked her car on the damn bridge, penned a suicide note, and jumped off the railing.

End of story.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe it really was the end of the story. She was certainly right about the obsession. I’d become fixated on Beth Larkin. Claudia’s words had hit a nerve:
Back off and focus on what
really matters. Tom and those two beautiful little
girls.
She was right. They were my future. Tom, the girls, the baby we were trying to conceive. Beth was the past. A fleeting shadow, too insubstantial to be real. Dead and gone, and nothing I could do would change that. Uncovering the truth might pacify me, but it wouldn’t do a thing for poor Beth. The best I could do for her, the most respectful act I could commit, would be raising her daughters to be decent, caring human beings. Beth would want that. It’s what I’d have wanted, in her place.

So I made the decision to take Claudia’s advice.

To stop looking for answers. To give up the witch hunt. Starting tomorrow, I’d climb those attic stairs and get back to unpacking. There were books to be shelved, knickknacks to display or discard, Dad’s belongings to sort through. Maybe, while I was up there, I might even organize some of the clutter that had been accumulating for what looked like decades.

If I took my time and did it right, I could find enough work up there to keep me busy for a month.

Besides, I told myself, up there I surely couldn’t get into any trouble.

“It was cut.”

“Cut,” Tom repeated, his rising inflection turned the single syllable into a question.

“Ayuh.” The mechanic was about forty-five, with a mullet that was two decades past its expiration date, Elvis-style sideburns, and a gray-and-white pin-striped shirt. The patch over his breastbone said
Randy
in a lively, flowing red script. “This belt’s rugged,” Randy said. “These babies don’t just up and quit on you. Especially not on a new car like this one.

See where it let go?” He held out the belt and we both leaned closer so we could see what he was talking about. “There’s just one little tear, right here.” With a greasy index finger, he pointed to a ragged spot on one side of the belt. “The rest of her’s cut off clean as a whistle.”

Tom looked frazzled. He’d cancelled a half-dozen afternoon appointments to make this trip to Portland to pick up the repaired Toyota. “Are you telling me,” he said, “that somebody cut this belt deliberately?”

“You can see it with your own eyes. They didn’t slice it all the way through. Left just enough attached so it wouldn’t let go right away. But once it was left hanging by a thread, so to speak, the result was a foregone conclusion. Car won’t run without it. The intention, as far as I can make out, was for you folks to get out on the road somewhere before it broke the rest of the way through and left you stranded.” Tom uttered a foul word. It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that particular word, and my eyes widened in appreciation of his creative usage.

“Why?” he said. “Why would anybody do such a thing?”

Randy shrugged. Not his problem. His was a simple existence. He dealt with broken belts, not with vandals.

“It was probably kids,” I said. “You know how teenagers are. They think this kind of thing is funny.” Tom’s face, a juxtaposition of sharp lines and angles, appeared thunderous. “Well, I don’t,” he said.

“This is so not funny that I can’t even find words for it. I don’t like this. I’m filing a police report.”

“Come on, Tom, do you really think that’s necessary?”

“Are you serious? Somebody—and I don’t give a damn whether that somebody is twelve years old or a hundred and twelve—came onto my property, apparently while I was sleeping, and deliberately vandalized my wife’s car. Damaged it so she’d end up stranded somewhere. They didn’t care whether she ended up there alone, or with one or both of my girls, as long as the car broke down while she was behind the wheel. You’re damn right I think it’s necessary. What if you didn’t have a cell phone? What if somebody had done you harm? What if nobody’d been there to pick you up when you called?”

“Then I would have called the police. Or a taxi.” But Tom wasn’t to be dissuaded; I’d never seen him so agitated. “That’s not the point,” he said, while Randy, fueled by the wisdom culled from his vast experience, nodded sagely in agreement.

“What if the belt let go just as you were pulling out onto a busy street? Into heavy traffic, with only a tiny window of time to make a safe turn? You could’ve been killed. You, or one of the girls. Or maybe our unborn child. So yes, I’m reporting this.