Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Page 9

  “Did the investigator go through this area of the house? Look for missing towels that might have been used to clean up water?”

  Jacquie shook her head. “He came up here. I don’t remember much. I was sitting on the couch downstairs.”

  So whatever she told me just now was useless. I walked into the bathroom. It was done in that dark stone tiling that hides the dirt but not the calcium buildup from the hard water. No towels hung on the towel rods, and no half-used soap rested on the sink. The sturdy frame over the door to the shower would have made a fine place for a strangling. I opened the glass door, reached up overhead to grasp the frame with both hands, and let my body sag. That was the only thing I touched. Yes, a fine place for a strangling. If I was going to commit suicide I’d do it here, with some pills, not drown myself.

  The quiet was so complete, the shower door closed with what felt like a bang. I came back out of the bathroom to find Jacquie still at the bedroom door, her eyes down and to the left, looking at the carpet.

  I asked, “Did you see him? After?”

  “In the pool, you mean? No, Tim got home first that night.” Jacquie paused, breathed. “I stayed late at my book club.”

  “Did Tim call you there?”

  “He said he thought I was at the movies and had my cell off. He said he was in shock and wasn’t thinking straight. By the time I got home Joey was already at the morgue. Tim is very efficient that way. He never misses garbage day, either. He always knows when pickup is off by a day. Due to holidays.”

  Finally undone by what even she would admit was crazily trivial, she sucked in another huge breath and let it out in a sob. I reached my hand out but, cringing from my touch as if she wasn’t worthy of comfort, she sagged against the bedroom doorjamb.

  “Joey’s father showed up at the funeral, not like he’d been involved much up to that point. He just wanted to come and tell me it was all my fault.”

  In that moment I could tell that part of her reason for blaming everyone else was that she blamed herself, for staying too late at that fucking book club, sipping that third fucking glass of wine. Oh, those goddamn what-ifs, how they haunt us.

  “Did Joseph’s father pay child support?”

  “Not much. He doesn’t make the money that Tim does.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I think he’s selling cars.” So she traded in a car salesman for a doctor, and ended up with a dead son. Not that I was jumping to the conclusion that Tim had done something, that was just the sum of things. I could tell she was thinking along the same lines when she said, “You know, at first I wanted to keep the peace and went along with everything Tim said. But, you know, talking to you just now makes me realize if I can’t have Joey I don’t much care about keeping Tim.”

  Tim probably knew that already, before Jacquie did. You can take a woman like Jacquie Neilsen and assume she’s just crazy with grief. It looked like everyone had done that, from her husband to Detective Sam Humphries, who investigated the death.

  The fact was, I could understand people losing patience with someone who couldn’t accept the answers, but I couldn’t blame her for questions she had that were never answered. And if there were no answers, maybe she would be contented with knowing that. Maybe that’s all it would take, a lot of time and a little knowledge that something had been done and all the questions asked.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Twelve years. Joey’s father left us when he was two. Then I developed this muscle pain and went to Tim as a patient. He diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. We started dating, and he seemed to want us both.”

  “Seemed?”

  Jacquie shook her head and went tearier. She looked like she was in danger of beginning to either cry or loop again, and I wasn’t sure either of us could take any more of that for the time being.

  “How’s the fibromyalgia?” I asked to change the subject.

  “It went away for a while, now it’s back.”

  Maybe that was the medication Tim had given her. “Are you okay to show me the pool area?”

  She nodded, and we went back downstairs, through the family room slash entertainment center, and out some sliding glass doors to the back patio.

  The pool was big and curvy with rocks positioned around it to make sort of a grotto effect. A slide curved down between them. “That’s amazing what they can do with those fake rocks,” I said.

  I could feel her bristle. “They’re not fake,” she said. You never disparage an Arizonan’s rocks, even a person preoccupied by her son’s death. “Tim had the pool put in when we got married. Said it was for Joey, but I never thought he really liked him.”

  I thought of that Marx Brothers photograph. I thought if Tim didn’t like Joey at least he tried. I scuffed my shoes on the patio surface, nice flagstones that would absorb the water without getting slippery. There was no cement lip on the pool, more of a tile rim that went straight to water. That you could slip on.

  “And you didn’t see anything,” I said.

  “No. Like I told you, he was already at the morgue by the time I got home.”

  “Jacquie, hard question here, but I have to ask them. Do you know if Joe ever consumed alcohol?”

  She looked at me and I was surprised to see a little hatred in the look. “The investigator asked me that, too.” But she didn’t answer yes or no.

  As she was letting me out the front door, though, she said, “Joey didn’t masturbate, either.”

  I thought that was an odd thing to mention at parting; “good-bye” always works so much better. I wondered if she had heard some of the rumors about falling into the pool during autoerotic ecstasy. But I could go with this line. I just had to ask and try to keep the same emphasis on every word so it wouldn’t sound sarcastically like what the hell, lady, everybody masturbates. “How would you be able to tell?”

  Jacquie half-mumbled, “I … I would have seen something. His underwear. His sheets. I would have known.”

  I bet she would. I had the feeling anything touching the son’s privates were inspected pretty thoroughly on wash day, and Jacquie didn’t have the maid do it. It occurred to me that his pants might have been down because in his parents’ absence he was pissing into the pool, but I didn’t say that either.

  I left the Neilsens’ place with the picture of Joe Joey Joseph and a copy of his death certificate, which was the only official record of the event other than the program for the funeral that Jacquie had. Even though there was nothing much here, I felt kind of a buzz, the kind that comes with a new case when everything is questions and there are as yet no answers. A blank slate kind of feeling where there’s everywhere to go and every kind of possibility. It would be easy to make the same assumptions as everyone else, but that wouldn’t serve Jacquie.

  Tim. There were a few too many honestlies and truthfullies and franklies in his conversation. Interrogators will tell you that when suspects sprinkle those words through their dialogue it means they’re hiding something. Was Tim lying about something? Did he perhaps know some truth about his son that he was keeping from Jacquie? And what made him come home when I was there? If he knew, who told him?

  Coffee drinkers understand that it becomes not so much a matter of how much caffeine you need, but how much you can tolerate. Feeling a little jangly but assuming I could stand even more, I called Mallory and asked if she wanted to meet me at the Einstein’s Bagels where I happened to be stopped at a red light. She told me she couldn’t leave Owen just then but I should stop by.

  “Anything exciting?” she asked.

  “I’ve decided to go ahead and investigate Joe Neilsen’s death. I want to know what you know about them.”

  “What’s to investigate?”

  “I’m getting creepy vibes about the Neilsens.”

  “The Neilsens? Oh, come on. Maybe you need to have your vibe meter tuned.”

  I laughed, headed back up Oracle, and turned right on Hardy.

  Eighteen

>   The single-story Hollinger home was homier than the Neilsens’ but even more secluded. The side of Pusch Ridge rose dramatically right behind the house, and there was a public hiking trail next to it that started at the road below and ran practically through her side yard.

  It was the two-hundred-foot drive up to the house, though, that got your attention. With a slight curve at, I’m not exaggerating, a forty-five-degree angle, you had to put the car in second gear going down. Once you got to the top you couldn’t see neighbors, though there was one off a little to the south of the house, cleverly hidden because it was halfway down the hill that the Hollinger house dominated. The view from the front was a clear shot across the wide valley that only stopped at the Tortolita Mountains fifteen miles away.

  Inside, Mallory’s elegant style was all over the place. Bay windows with a mountain out back. Ten-foot-tall sliding glass doors off the master bathroom that you could open onto the patio when you were taking a bath. A swimming pool with a small waterfall, though no slide like the Neilsens had. But that sort of thing.

  Mallory had told me she was a trust fund baby from someone who made their money with the British tabloids. She went into the art business for the fun and society, she said, and couldn’t seem to stop making money. She had a gallery in New York, then one in Boca Raton and one in Shaker Heights in succession. While she had sold her last gallery upon retiring out to Tucson with Owen, she had kept some of the art. There was nothing of the Southwest here, no blond wood furniture or Native American themes. Along with the furniture that could have come from a Park Avenue condo, stark and spare, she was into the modern stuff, Picasso, Rothko, Miró, and that’s just what you saw on the way from the front door to the kitchen. I wasn’t familiar with all of the artists, but I could read the signatures and they looked like first string.

  Mallory Hollinger had wasted no time getting to know Tucson society by joining the symphony and regional theater groups, so she already knew the people who might associate with the Neilsens. I figured gossip was as good a start to my investigation as any, and besides, I could always use some girl talk, which I’d grown to enjoy. Turns out she knew little more than I thought she would.

  Annette, Owen’s home health care nurse, met me at the front door. With one of those little brunette hair helmets that’s good for sports or a busy life, she had a body one describes as taut, like a circus tent, or a barracks bed. Big hands like a man. She had to be that way to toss her patients around the way she did. I liked her because she never acted like Owen or Mallory had cause to feel sorry for themselves.

  “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 badl
y?”

  “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?”