Danger to Others, page 8
Her words touched me both professionally and personally. I had a long history of over protecting and since the conversation had turned to daughters, I asked Frank how he’d finally gotten Nell to settle down.
“I gave her the diaries you brought home from your mom’s. She’d worn herself out by then. She put down her journals and took Rose’s to bed with her. Have you read them?”
The waitress brought our plates before I could answer. I studied the venison sausage and wondered if it would bring me the comfort I’d hoped for last night after the count. “I read about when she was a teenager and met my father, but since I don’t remember him, it just made me feel lonely. I stopped.” Unlike Laurel, I’d given up on knowing my other parent.
I cut a piece of sausage, added a homemade biscuit, and wiped it through the perfectly browned gravy. I couldn’t help wishing that I’d had a mother who cooked like this, even though I knew Laurel’s childhood reality sounded as lonely as mine. Frank touched my hand, said the bacon was a hit too.
I watched the clouds break up over the valley. The man with the green SUV hadn’t returned, but Mo needed to know he’d been there. When we finished our meals, I stopped to thank Mo. “Last night around 3:00 AM. My daughter and I were down by the river for the homeless count. Your restaurant lights were still on and you were working.”
“I was. I got behind schedule when Laurel was ill. I’m still trying to catch up.”
“There was a man out there watching your window. When he saw Nell and me, he took off—as if he didn’t want to be seen.”
She took a slow breath and became incredibly calm.
I described the man with the black glasses and asked if she knew anyone like that.
“I’m not sure,” she answered before rushing off to help another customer, “but I think someone has been watching me for a while now.”
On our drive home, dark-bellied clouds scudded across the valley leaving behind patches of vibrant blue sky. Last night’s rain had collected in the low-lying fields and now reflected the yellows and oranges of leaves on trees. The late October sun arced low in the south, lighting the fenceposts in high relief. The lambs that had taken their first tentative steps in the fields had now grown and probably ended up on Mo James’ menu. A cloud now hid the sun, and the fall colors dimmed so quickly I could feel winter coming.
On the curve in the highway near our house, we passed a big Asplundh Tree Removal truck followed by another from Puget Sound Energy giving hope that the electricity would soon be back. At home, the light switches worked, the furnace fan clicked on, and Frank settled at the kitchen table with the New York Times. I prowled the house restlessly. My sleep schedule was a mess, and I hadn’t cleaned or even looked at the mail. I picked up the pile on the desk and sorted the catalogues from bills I hoped weren’t overdue.
My hand stopped at an envelope with the logo belonging to Benjamin and Beard Attorneys. From time to time, I was called upon to testify in detention cases when there were no other witnesses, but I was afraid I knew what this was. Ever since I heard about the lawsuit on the radio, I’d expected this. I tore open the envelope. In the instant I read the Coles’ names on the form, I saw the gun, Nate’s fall, and my attempt to stanch his bleeding flash red. A deposition was scheduled for the next Friday. I would be giving pretrial evidence under oath. The hospital was certainly hoping the family would settle out of court. If they wanted me, they’d probably call Annie too.
If the letter gave me a flashback, it would be worse for Annie, but when I punched in her number, it went straight to voicemail. I urged her to call me and wondered if she’d been called to testify too.
Then I was too distracted to pay bills and wondered if Nell was awake yet. Fresh coffee and crumbs on the toaster told me she was, so I headed out to see how she was feeling this morning. During her teenage years, Nell had moved into the cedar clad cottage perched on the pond across the garden from our house. The gingkoes, the bamboo, and Japanese maples I once planted had grown into a mature garden. I knocked on the frosted glass door and opened it when Nell called “Come in.”
Nell stood in front of the mirror in her orange and black striped pajama bottoms and one of Frank’s old shirts. She wielded a pair of silver barber scissors and long strands of her dark hair fell to the floor. My first impulse was to yell, “Stop!” fearing this was an unhealthy response to the harassment.
Nell turned and pointed with the shears. “Don’t say it,” she whispered as if she could read my mind.
“Right.”
On second thought, I decided her haircut wasn’t such a bad idea. Nell and I had been trimming Frank’s hair for years. We had some skills and Nell often marked life events with a change of style. She’d gone asymmetrical this morning with a chin length bob on one side and a close-to-the-scalp cut on the other. “I’m going to buzz it here,” she said touching the short side.
“Want help?” I asked. “I can get that side and the back.”
She nodded. “You have long hair, so you may not know. Men bug you less when you have short hair.”
“I do know,” I said. “I cut mine about ten years ago. Remember?”
“Did it stop the cat calls every time you walked down the street? Hey baby. Smile…”
“They did stop,” I laughed even though it wasn’t funny. “I thought I was just getting older, but they started up as soon as I grew my hair back.”
“Fuck them.” Nell slapped the scissors on the shelf in front of the mirror and glared at her reflection.
“Not the way they had in mind either,” I said and took up the clippers, glad to see her spunkiness coming back. “Which guard should I use?”
“Number two.”
“This is going to look great. Maybe you can do some dye too.” I ran my fingers through the long part. The clippers hummed when I clicked them on. I swooped over her ear. “Aside from the haircut, how do you feel about yesterday?”
“First, I felt sick, then angry. My brain was just circling, so I decided to leave it.”
“Angry is a fine place to be for now.”
“I started reading Grandma’s diaries,” she said.
“Your dad told me.”
Nell and I made eye contact in the mirror, then we both looked at the futon and the pocket diaries piled on top of the medieval art books she’d bought to prep for her trip. Those were fanned open to paintings of demons and disease. I recognized one by Hieronymus Bosch showing flames of hell and naked figures in tortured poses. Had Nell been focused on the grotesque before her boss bothered her?
“How are the diaries?” I set down the clippers and rested my hands on Nell’s shoulders.
“I can’t believe you didn’t read them.”
Her voice was accusing. I rubbed her head with a towel to free the loose hairs, then brushed her shirt to give myself time to think. Finally, I sank onto the futon next to the dark art. “I started reading one when I found them at Mom’s house, but it just made me angry. I understand Mom’s depression now, but back then she withdrew, and I was left to raise myself.”
“You’re still angry,” Nell said. “You never told me that her mother died in Northern State Hospital.”
My brain froze because I had somehow known this once and forgotten. It felt strange. “The mental institution?”
Nell picked up one of the diaries and passed it to me—the burned leather book with a sheaf of letters and loose pages inside breaking its back. “It’s still readable. She ripped pages out too.”
I opened the powdery cover and inside, found one moth, perfectly preserved. “She threw this away when she got sick. I pulled it out of the garbage.”
“I think she didn’t want anyone to read it. That’s why I started here.” She picked up the stray pages and held them like they were electric. “Then I found a death certificate for Lucy Cooper. Grandma Rose’s real mother, Lucy.”
“Ah,” I said, struggling to imagine my young mother finding and saving that memento. “They told me once that Lucy died of a brain tumor when Mom was in grade school.” That was when Mom came to live in Duvall with Lucy’s childless sister and her husband who soon adopted her—the couple I knew as my grandparents. I guess that was why Mom felt so safe here. “She did say Northern State. People with brain tumors can have psychotic symptoms, just like the people I see now. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Maybe because I was young then—other things were on my mind.”
“You never thought to tell me. Mom, really? Kids need to know about their families.” Her words reminded me of what Laurel had said about meeting her family. Nell ran her hand back and forth over the newly shorn side of her head. She passed me the blurred photocopy of her death certificate.
“Lucy Cooper died in 1950.”
“Northern State,” I repeated, like I was in a trance. She was right. I felt like I’d been hypnotized by my grandparents’ silence. Or denial. Northern was a big state psychiatric hospital at the edge of the North Cascades. It had closed in the seventies after medications and deinstitutionalization favored community care. “Grandma called it a sanitorium. It made sense.” I set the paper down. “What doesn’t make sense is that I never thought about it, even when I took up a career in mental health. I didn’t ask what happened when Lucy was institutionalized.”
Nell’s shorn hair still littered the floor. She looked at the papers while I told her what little I remembered about the brain tumor story. Then she passed the death certificate back to me. It looked like it had been folded and handled a million times. “Read.”
I reached to turn on the lamp and squinted at the blurry script. The cause of death was a heart attack. No brain tumor was mentioned. Under Secondary Conditions it listed Involutional Melancholia. With Psychosis.
“I looked it up,” Nell said. “It’s what they used to call a depression that starts in your forties or fifties, so she was probably okay until then. People can get paranoid or think something is wrong with their bodies. Or hear voices.”
“She was only 49.” I sagged. “I’m sure they thought the brain tumor story was more acceptable.”
I thought about the anger I’d carried. The sadness of my family was just starting to sink in. I tried to imagine the woman I’d seen in photographs hearing voices or believing strange things. I’d spent my career working with people like that. It could happen to anyone. Now I tried to imagine my mother seeing it as a child.
“I’m more surprised Grandma Rose never told you,” Nell said. “All the years you worked with people with the same problems. It’s no more surprising that you conveniently forgot.”
“There was so much stigma then. Even more than now. I really can’t believe I never asked more questions.” I felt deflated, like my body had lost the starch that usually held me up. “Questions were met with an unbearable silence. So unbearable I couldn’t even remember.”
“Your grandma could be a stone wall,” Nell said. “I remember that about her.”
“Like it hurt her. She was just so stoic.”
Nell gave me a look that told me how much I’d carried on that tradition. She touched the diaries. Years of diaries. “Maybe we can find out more.”
I shuddered in my own version of the stone wall. I’d had all I could take of family secrets for the moment. I didn’t have the energy. I looked out the big window that framed the pond. Fallen leaves floated at the water’s edge and in that moment, a great blue heron, a bird that could have inspired one of the hellish paintings, swooped in and came away with a fish.
Nell tucked the papers into the diary and stacked it with the rest. “I’ll do the reading.”
“Thanks,” I said and swept up the remnants from her haircut before I left. Outside, the air was scrubbed clean from the storm, but the garden was flattened. The wind had brought down the stubbornly clinging leaves, branches, and a few narrow saplings.
I let myself in through the kitchen and the screen door, unneeded this time of year, slapped shut behind me. My grandmother hated the sound and had taught me to close it quietly, a habit I hadn’t carried forward when Frank and I took over the house. To my left were pegs for coats and the drying rack that had aired everything from dish towels to laundry in its warm position next to the old wood-fired cook stove we’d have been using if the power had stayed out. I wrapped my arms around myself like a kid. Some memory was close. Standing here listening to my mother and grandmother talking in hushed voices about something I wasn’t meant to hear. I couldn’t grasp it.
CHAPTER 10
Annie hadn’t returned my call. It wasn’t like her.
I texted, Where are you? And later, Are you OK? She had probably been called to the deposition too. I pictured her sitting in the chair by the bay window sick, not eating or answering her phone. When I still hadn’t heard from her in an hour, I drove into Seattle, determined to see her. She still wasn’t picking up her phone when I arrived. I resorted to pitching pebbles at the glass like in the old days.
“Annie!” I called from the sidewalk, but her face never appeared. I couldn’t help but worry. Seeing her panic at work had shaken loose a memory from when we were students. One night, after sharing a bottle of wine, she talked about the day her aunt died. She described the hollow sound of the car striking her aunt’s body in agonizing detail. Annie said that she felt that angels were there, and at that moment, she didn’t care if she lived or died herself. Annie was just a kid at the time and maybe it was that detachment from reality that helped her live through the loss. What if it happened again?
I used to think Annie’s religion was protective, but now I was afraid that it wasn’t enough. Annie had caught her stress cold. She’d had a panic attack. I didn’t think she would harm herself, but neither was I sure she would stay out of harm’s way.
Annie had said she would visit the casket maker, so I retraced her steps, across Madison and south on 13th. The sky was clear now, but the sun had already dropped below the buildings to the west. The rusty scent of fallen leaves rose from the sidewalk. The front window of the Curiosity Shop cum Casket Store was draped in Halloween-style spider webs. A vintage medical skeleton rested his bony arm on Red Riding Hood’s shoulder.
The sandwich sign by the door said the shop would close in 20 minutes. Inside, the young woman, with her slick black hair and red lips, came out from behind an antique cabinet. She wore a green brocade dress dating from the early 1900s but had been cut very short to show off black stockinged legs. I still thought of her as the Goth Girl and put out my hand to introduce myself. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name,” I said.
“Bebe McCrae,” she offered a hand I expected to be manicured with blood red nails, but instead had sensibly clipped nails and callouses.
I was surprised. “Are you the casket maker?” I’d thought of her as a shop girl.
“Learned it from my father and grandfather,” she said. “They were disappointed I wasn’t a boy.” She returned to her place behind the counter to finish a display while we talked. Little glass eyes sparkled in greens and blues made a tinging sound when they hit the bowl. She saw my interest and said, “From the backroom of a doll factory.”
“They’re fascinating,” I said and paused, trying to figure out how to explain my visit. “I haven’t heard from my friend, Annie. She told me she was coming here yesterday to see Laurel’s apartment.”
“God, everyone wants to see the apartment. The police came. They had a search warrant.”
I felt the beginnings of a headache and pressed my knuckles into my forehead. A warrant meant they were seriously considering Laurel as a murder suspect. Like Annie, I was afraid they would settle for an easy answer. I vowed to dig deeper. Where was Annie?
“They were in there an hour, but I think they only took stuff like her appointment books.” Bebe dropped her voice. “Then her mother came. Again. Laurel’s an adult. She needs her distance from parents. I wouldn’t let her in.”
“Did her father come?”
“No, but I expect he will.”
I nodded, wondering if Bebe had parental issues of her own.
“Annie, I would have let Annie in.” Her eyes were sad. “You’re worried about her, aren’t you? Annie is otherworldly. She’s carrying too much now. She’s struggling.” Bebe had expressed my fears exactly.
“So, you saw her.”
“No, she hasn’t come. It’s just that I know things,” she said simply. “My work brings me close to death. Sometimes people come to choose their own caskets when they know they are dying, or their loved ones come.”
I didn’t want to hear Bebe referring to Annie and death together. “Do you sense that something happened to her?”
“I don’t know everything.” She reached into a cubby in the Victorian desk behind her and pulled out a leather book with designs and photographs of caskets. The photos were black and white, then hand tinted, showing the lovingly crafted wood she’d sanded and carved as if touching the line between this world and the next in her work.
I thought she recognized Annie’s otherworldliness because she shared it.
“When Annie was here,” Bebe carefully closed her book. “It was as if I could see through her. She was so pale; it was like she was disappearing.”
I looked at Bebe’s raven hair, her macabre shop filled with antiques and ephemera that recognized the connection between life and death.
“It’s nearly Halloween and All Souls.” Bebe placed the book back in the desk and smoothed her brocade skirt. “The dead are near, and Annie is not doing well.”
“Her aunt died, and the woman was killed out front,” I said. I’d felt the same about Annie, though I’d have expressed it differently.
