Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (12 page)

“Hey, Brigid, how’re ya doin?”

“Just fine. How’s Owen today?”

“We were just about to turn him and give him some lunch. Come on back.”

I followed her into the master bedroom. The distinctive smell of air freshener covering disinfectant covering human sickness grew as we approached what was actually a working hospital room.

It was large, as were all the rooms in the house, with a king-sized platform bed built low to the floor. Shelves of supplies were nearby. A top-of-the-line monitor that constantly read all of Owen’s vital signs stood to the left of the bed, against the wall. A small bookcase was crammed with printouts of Internet articles, articles ripped from journals, and weighty medical references, the textured covers stamped with titles like
Neurology, Ninth Edition
that seemed to imply the author knew everything about the topic that could be known, and much of the rest as well. Most of the covers were black, navy blue, or burgundy, with one that stuck out because it was pumpkin orange. Other than that, the collection looked like something you’d see in a doctor’s office.

Mallory slept next to Owen every night. The mattress was one of those mechanical things that could be positioned in various ways like a hospital bed. Now his side was up at the back and a little at his knees. Owen stared out at a group of photographs on the wall at the foot of his bed, taken from their happier past. One of Mallory and Owen in a dramatic dance pose with a thinner Mallory showing off an Audrey Hepburn neck, taken during what she had described as a Tango Tour of Argentina. The two of them standing amid a flock of penguins. Another on a vast black lava bed, their figures so tiny you had to guess it was them.

Mallory reclined in the opposite direction from Owen, head to toe, massaging the instep on his foot while she read to him. It wasn’t likely that he could feel her touch on his foot. I knew what they were reading,
Moby-Dick,
because they’d been at it for a while. I don’t know who picked that book or why. Mallory was somehow aware I was standing behind her, but held up a finger so she could keep reading to the end of the chapter. The only other sound in the room came from the rhythmic
foosh
of his ventilator.

It gave me a moment to watch them together, alone. It was odd how sharing something outside themselves could have such a feeling of intimacy that I felt privileged to witness it. They seemed to me at the time a complex couple, or perhaps it’s just that all marriages are a singularity. They had traveled, and danced, before the freak accident on a train track that almost cost Mallory her life and damaged Owen’s brain stem so severely that nothing worked but his organs and eyes, looking out of a body that had a fancy medical term but was more easily known as “locked in.”

Mallory doted on Owen, yet flirted as well. I could see it the first time I met her, the way she peered at Carlo, whom she had just met, and at the gala the other night, the way she fell into Adrian Franklin and then double-handed his hand when he helped her up. Men, women, children, and animals, those extra pounds she hated seemed to drip off her when she was engaged in her favorite sport.

I brought this up to her once, when we were having one of our brutally honest conversations. “Do you even realize how flirtatious you are?” I once said.

“Ah, that. I’m good at it, aren’t I?” She looked a little sad, and I imagined her thinking of a life after Owen when she said, “It’s all innocent. Maybe I do it just to stay in practice.”

Early on I took her for a saint, before the honest earthiness caught up with the piety. At the time I thought here was someone I could look up to, a woman I could use as a pattern for my own search for myself.

“Look, sweetie, it’s Brigid!” Mallory sat up, closed the book, and put it on the table next to the bed. Owen had already spotted me, though, and fluttered his eyelids in greeting.

“Do you want to turn him now or wait?” Annette asked. I jumped a little, surprised that I was so caught up with watching the Hollingers I hadn’t noticed Annette come up behind me. That was unlike me. Maybe I was becoming more and more unlike me.

“Brigid doesn’t mind.” Mallory turned to me. “Make yourself at home.”

I had done this enough in the past months to make myself comfortable in an overstuffed armchair a discreet distance from the bed. If Mallory hadn’t originally been strong enough to roll Owen over by herself, she had gained the strength over the past year. But when Annette was there she welcomed the help. I knew this had to be done to prevent bedsores and pneumonia. Mallory had refused to let Owen languish in a nursing home, said that was for poor people.

While Annette busied about, replacing Owen’s urine bag and giving him lunch through his feeding tube, Mallory sat on the side of the bed, shielding him from my sight out of respect for his dignity. She liked to do it this way, having me in the room so Owen could be a part of the conversation. She reached for a small jar of Vaseline on the table on her side of the bed, took off the lid and reached in with the finger on the same hand, and rubbed it over his lips. Then she rubbed some into his arms that rested on top of the covers.

While the two of them worked on Owen I asked, “What do you know about Joseph Neilsen?”

“As I made painfully clear last evening, the one I know nothing about is Jacquie.” Mallory pushed the top onto the Vaseline jar and put it back on the table. “You know, Brigid, my mother always told me if I saw someone crazy coming down the walk I should cross to the other side of the street. Do you need the money that badly?”

“Oh, it isn’t the money. It’s just that you get tired of investigations that hinge on jealousy and greed. If I can get real answers for all of Jacquie’s questions, maybe it will make her not so crazy.”

Mallory looked dubious. “So tell me how your dog is.”

“I went over to the vet’s and visited him this morning. He doesn’t look too good.”

“What about the toad? Where did he get it?”

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t thought any more about the toad, but now I thought about how these questions, and my answer, echoed those at the vet clinic.

“Were the dogs just in your backyard or did Gemma-Kate take them somewhere?”

“She was supposed to stay at home with them. She didn’t say they took a walk or anything.”

“You’ve got those bougainvilleas in the backyard. Things hide under them. Did you see any part of the toad?”

“No.”

“Strange.”

“Why?”

“Some of those toads are bigger than your dog. You’d think there would have been toad bits in your backyard. You should check. The other dog might lick them. What do you know about Colorado River toads?”

“Hardly anything. Except that they can poison a dog.”

“You should google it.”

There were TV trays set up in Owen’s bedroom, and Annette brought us some lunch, a nice bowl of what Mallory called cassoulet and I called soup, with Parmesan cheese grated over the top. She let me use the master bathroom first, and not a moment too soon, I mentioned.

“You need to do Kegels while you’re driving. It helps a lot,” she said when I returned.

“It’s just the coffee. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m just renting it.”

We talked about Joe, and she reiterated how little she knew. Except for one detail. Once or twice before he died he had come over to read to Owen.

Mallory lifted her head and blew a little puff of air to the side like a person does when they’re smoking and want to keep it away from you. She had given up smoking some years before but kept this part of the habit. It was the way you could tell she was thinking hard. “It was just a little disagreeable to me, because in one sense I felt like the church youth group was using Owen as a ministry”—she grimaced at the word—“a
project,
and it felt like Joe was dragged over here. But beyond that I didn’t mind so much. Everyone benefited. Even Tim Neilsen, who could have Jacquie to himself for a while every Tuesday evening.” She turned to Owen. She never talked about Owen as if he wasn’t there. “And you liked hearing a different voice, didn’t you?”

Owen blinked once. That meant yes. Two meant no.

Annette brought in two cups of coffee without asking, handed one to me and one to Mallory, who gestured to put it on the table next to the bed. Annette looked at the vitals monitor and commented that Owen’s blood pressure was up a bit.

“Should I go?” I asked. “Is my being here too much for you?” I spoke directly to Owen the way Mallory and Annette did, and he blinked twice. Slow blinks that I knew meant an emphatic no. Annette put some extra medication into his IV. Then she put some drops into his eyes. She took away our empty soup bowls. Annette was like that, sort of disappearing so you didn’t think of her, but appearing when something was needed. She was live-in, there most of the time, with her own room close by.

I noticed one of the photographs on the wall, one that might have been taken by Owen of Mallory in a particularly adventurous pose. I had always wondered and never thought to ask until now. “Is that a real crocodile?”

“Alligator, actually,” she said, not bothering to look at the picture. “You’ve never talked about how one investigates something. Where do you start?”

I got the sense that she was focused on Owen now, and I should leave, so I gave the short answer. “Jacquie is so troubled. If I can just make it look like someone really cares what happened to her son, maybe that will help. It shouldn’t be too hard. Seems like everything was slapdash. No autopsy. And she’s talking about having the body exhumed. I don’t know what that would accomplish, but I think it’s best to discourage it.”

Mallory turned from watching Owen’s chest rise and fall with the machine that pumped air into his lungs. “Exhumed? Didn’t I tell you she was crazy?”

“Why?”

“I was at the funeral and interment. Joe’s body was cremated. I saw the urn.”

There was no body to exhume. Joe’s flesh would remain ever silent, would never speak to George Manriquez. No wonder Tim had left the house so abruptly.

I figured I’d be in competition with
CSI.
I’d have to explain you can’t analyze ashes.

Nineteen

After talking some more about just how crazy Jacquie Neilsen might be and what I should do about it, I went home, tossed my tote bag by the counter in the kitchen, and planned to settle into a typical evening with a book and dinner. I was in the middle of a Jack Reacher. Carlo was reading Martin Buber’s
I and Thou
for about the fourth straight time. When I asked him why he was doing that he said he hadn’t gotten everything out of it on the first three go-rounds.

“Where’s Gemma-Kate?” I asked him, thinking to offer to help with whatever she had planned for dinner.

“She’s in your office. With Peter,” Carlo added.

“Peter. In my office.”

I walked in on them sitting in front of my computer, their backs to me, hunched.

“Hi,” I said.

Peter jumped a little as if he was used to being caught at something, but Gemma-Kate turned to look at me with the chipper smile used exclusively for another generation.

“Remember Peter?” she said.

I smiled back with my own Mrs. Brady chipperness though annoyed by Gemma-Kate treating me like I had a bad memory.

“Why, of course I do! Peter,” I purred. “Could I see you a minute, Gemma-Kate? Would you excuse us, Peter?”

He looked baffled by our excessive courtesy, but nodded as if I was actually asking him for permission. Gemma-Kate and I walked out of the office but not so far, and at such an angle, that I couldn’t keep my eye on the boy.

“Um, that’s my business office. Even outside the locked file cabinets there can be things I don’t want strangers to see. Off-limits, okay?”

“Okay. We’ll leave.”

I stopped her another second, drew her out of his earshot. “What are you guys doing?”

“Looking at stuff on the Internet.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“School assignment. I’m just helping him out with a biology class. He’s not stupid, but I’ve got a couple IQ points on him.” Gemma-Kate appeared to be amused. “Or do you want to interrogate him yourself?”

I said, “Maybe.” I walked into the room, where the kid had stood up. Whether he did so to block the screen with his body I couldn’t tell. I pulled aside the chair that Gemma-Kate had been using, one from the dining room set, and sat down, inviting Peter to do the same. “Could we get you something to drink, Peter?” I did my best to get the tone soft enough without it turning oily the way most adults do with teenagers.

He shook his head without thanks. But he wasn’t running away. I said, “I met your mom at church.”

That not being a question, he apparently felt no need to confess that yes, he had a mother. I said, “What school do you go to?”

“Pima,” he said.

“That’s the one on La Cholla, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Your school is pretty big, isn’t it?”

“I guess. I’ve never been to another one.”

“What grade are you in?”

“I’m a senior.”

“You know any of the freshmen there?”

“Not really.”

“What about St. Martin’s? Did you know Joe Neilsen?”

He couldn’t stop a suspicious glance, narrowing his eyes like he thought he knew where this was going. “No. Not really.” Peter answered that question faster.

“No, or not really?”

“Not really.”

I had him now. “I thought you were in the same youth group?”

“Aunt Brigid,” Gemma-Kate said, a warning in her tone.

Peter didn’t answer, knowing Gemma-Kate had his back. I had a flicker of bad feeling about this kid, thinking about what his own mother had mentioned about getting into scrapes. Maybe cops’ kids shouldn’t hang out together. Maybe some alchemy could be at work and the chain reactions could come fast. Trouble, in short.

But not today. Peter left without either of them complaining, and Gemma-Kate and I made a meat loaf outside of my usual repertoire, a German-style one with sauerkraut and Swiss cheese. Having only expanded to ten dinners that I cooked in rotation, I encouraged her with praise. Later she helped me clean up, too, scrubbing the pan where the cheese had stuck to it.