Several Deaths Later (22 page)

    He went down in a heap.

    She grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door inward. Then she said, "Get him in here so nobody sees him."

    Tobin dragged the man inside.

    "Tie him up and gag him," Joanna said, once the door was locked behind them.

    Then she turned and looked at the woman on the bed. Tobin saw for the first time pieces of blood and flesh on Joanna's long-sleeved white blouse. Jere Farris's blood and flesh. She had gotten them all now. All except the one who mattered most.

    Susan Richards was barely conscious. Next to her on the bed was a prescription bottle of sleeping pills. This time her suicide attempt had been for real. He said, panicked, "She's dying."

    "From what?"

    Tobin was still trying to adjust to the contrast between the shy, self-spoken Joanna and this harsh, singular young woman. "Sleeping pills and alcohol."

    In two steps Joanna was at her mother's bedside. She leaned over and pulled the semiconscious woman up by the collar of her blouse.

    "You killed my father, you bitch!" Joanna cried, and then began shaking her in a frenzy. "You killed my father, do you understand?"

    She pushed her back down on the bed.

    "I want a drink, Tobin."

    There was the fifth of scotch from which Susan Richards had been drinking. Tobin went over and got them both drinks.

    She took hers and said, "Sit in that chair over there where I can see you."

    "What are you going to do?"

    "We, Tobin, you and I. We're going to sit here and watch her die."

    "I can't let you do it, Joanna."

    She waved the gun at him. "You can stop me?"

    He sighed and went over and sat in the armchair facing hers.

    On the bed Susan Richards moaned and babbled. She sounded as if she were coming out of deep anesthesia.

    People passed by talking. There were parties going on all over the boat. Tobin and Joanna sat in their chairs and watched a woman die.

    "For what it's worth, Ken Norris and the others didn't know you were in that trailer that night," Tobin said.

    "Don't talk."

    He watched her then. She just stared at the woman on the bed. Her face, pretty if plain, was without expression. The.45 in her lap looked ludicrous until you noticed what he assumed was Jere Farris's blood.

    Susan Richards began convulsing a few minutes later.

    Tobin started to get up. Joanna leveled the gun at him, waved him back down.

    They sat and watched some more.

    At one point Susan wet her pants. Then she began crying. She wasn't conscious at all now.

    Joanna continued to stare at. her mother. Just stare. "Go check her pulse," she said finally. "Why don't you let me call the doctor?" Tobin said. "Maybe there's still time."

    "Check her pulse."

    Tobin leaned over Susan. Her skin was cold and sweaty. He checked for a pulse in her wrist and then in her neck and then in her ankle. It was very faint.

    He turned back to Joanna. He said, "She's dead."

    "You're lying."

    "Check for yourself."

    "She just made a sound a minute ago."

    "Apparently it was her last sound."

    "You're like all the others. A liar."

    He stood aside from the bed, inviting her to check for herself.

    "Goddammit," Joanna said as she got up. "I wanted there to be pain. I wanted her to suffer. All she did was go to sleep."

    Keeping the gun pointed directly at Tobin's chest, she went over to her mother, waggled out a hand, and felt for her mother's wrist.

    Tobin kicked her very hard in the hip. It knocked her backwards onto the bed.

    He grabbed the gun and then stumbled to the phone.

    He shouted for somebody to send the doctor and the captain to the cabin where Susan Richards was being kept.

    By the time he had turned back to the bed, the sobbing had begun, and what he saw then startled him.

    Joanna Howard, very much like a child, clung to the unconscious form of her mother; clung as if to let go would be to fall down a dark chasm.

    "How could you do that to me? How could you do that to me?" she said over and over as she kissed Susan's face and stroked her hair as if her mother were a doll. "How could you do that to me? I'm your own daughter. Your own daughter." The rage was gone; there was just the sadness left, and the bafflement. As she said, she was Susan's own daughter.

    Tobin went over and checked Susan's pulse again. He didn't tell Joanna-and Joanna didn't seem to realize-her mother, though comatose, was still alive. Several times on the cruise, Susan had asked Tobin to talk. Now he wished he'd spent the time.

    He untied the steward. The man had cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Tobin took one and lit it and then went out on the deck. Joanna was still sobbing, still talking to the dying woman. He didn't want to hear anymore.

    The captain and the doctor ran past.

    Tobin stood at the railing and looked out at the black water and the sky. He wondered about the nature of god and the nature of man. Even from here he could hear Joanna crying.

    He smoked his cigarette and in a time, without quite wondering why, he started crying too. He was thinking of that trailer and the yellow furious heat it must have cast against the black night, and the burned infant girl crawling away from it.

    He stood at the railing, alone, for a long time.

    

    

    

    They slept together and then Cindy went back to her own cabin to shower and change.

    

    

    When he found Cindy, she was sitting at a table with a pink sun umbrella over her. He saw again the bruise on the side of her face from where Joanna had struck her. There was a glass of orange juice and an omelet and two pieces of toast in front of her. She paid no attention to them. She kept pulling up the falling left strap of her sundress and writing heatedly (Balzac must have composed this way, Tobin thought) on baby blue stationery.

    He ate half her toast and all of her eggs and drank most of her orange juice before she looked up.

    "Oh, gosh, Tobin."

    "Hi."

    "I was just writing to Aberdeen. About all the murders and everything and how I got slugged and how Susan almost died and Joanna is under arrest. I was really scared."

    "Ah."

    "Aberdeen just won't believe it. She really won't."

    "I don't blame her."

    "But she'll be thrilled."

    "I'm sure." He had every reason to smile. He phoned
Snoop
with the whole story. They had promised a bonus.

    "She'll tell everybody in the insurance office and by the time I get back there, there'll even be something about it in the company newsletter."

    "Should I be happy for you?"

    "Nobody's ever put me in the company newsletter before."

    "Then I'm happy for you."

    "You don't sound happy."

    He reached out and touched her sweet Kansas City hand. "It's not a morning to be happy," he said.

    He thought about it all: Joanna and Susan and how they'd looked when the Coast Guard had taken them away; Cassie revealing that she'd been forced to pay Ken a special "talent fee"-another form of blackmail-to stay on "Celebrity Circle"; Sanderson and Iris Graves learning that the winner of a nowhere talent show in Indiana was actually Susan; Ken turning crazed and extorting money from his own accomplices in setting the trailer fire-and them being so afraid of losing their careers that they'd gone along.

    She put down her ballpoint pen. "Look at the sun and the blue water, Tobin. Then you'll be happy."

    He laughed. "You promise?"

    "Sure," she said, laughing too. "I promise."

    When a steward came by, Tobin ordered a rather large glass of orange juice, this one with some vodka in it, and then he sat back beneath the pink sun umbrella while Cindy went back to writing Aberdeen, and he looked at the yellow sun and the blue water and he tried very hard to be happy.

    He tried very hard.