“She was telling me what a lying narcissistic slut her sister was.”
“The sister that just got murdered?”
“That’s the one.”
“Man, that’s cold.”
Like a sloth, I unfolded myself from the sofa arm and stood a moment looking at Pete and Mazie.
“Pete, if she comes back here, don’t let her in.”
“Hon, you don’t need to tell me twice. I don’t like that woman. Neither does Mazie.”
“That makes three of us.”
Pete said, “It’s a damn dirty thing to go around telling lies about your own sister, even if she hadn’t just been murdered.”
I said, “Yes, it is.”
But as I went out to the Bronco, I wasn’t sure anymore which sister told the biggest lies. Laura had lied about being married and being pregnant, and she had lied about her parents. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had been telling the truth and Celeste was the liar.
Except about the pregnancy. For sure Laura had lied about that.
But maybe the parents truly lived in Connecticut, and maybe there truly was a husband somewhere, and maybe his name was truly Reginald Halston and he was truly a surgeon. I wasn’t positive about any of those things anymore.
The only thing I was absolutely positive about was that children don’t seduce grown men.
24
The Camry was gone from Laura’s driveway when I left Mazie’s house, and a locksmith’s truck was behind Bill Sullivan’s HAZMAT van. I drove out of Fish Hawk Lagoon and headed south on Midnight Pass Road, but instead of going directly home I turned onto Reba Chandler’s street. Reba is a brilliant, gracious, kind woman who teaches psychology at New College. She’s also a bird lover, and I’ve been taking care of Big Bubba, her African Grey parrot, since I was in high school. Back then, it had been a teenager’s way to make easy money. Now it’s my profession. Funny how life loops back on itself like that.
Reba’s house is a cypress two-story with shuttered windows that are always open because she doesn’t believe in air-conditioning. The shutters began life a deep turquoise, but they’ve faded over the years until the color is almost non existent. Instead of ringing the bell, I walked along a rock path to the lanai at the back of the house. Big Bubba lives in a large cage out there, and I knew I’d probably find Reba there too.
She wasn’t on the lanai but in the yard behind it, where she’s put up double-decked bird feeders. She carried two plastic bottles that had once contained water but now were filled with seeds and peanuts. Lots of people who put out birdseed go to all kinds of lengths to keep squirrels and raccoons out of it. They set the feeders on tall poles, surround them with chicken wire, suspend them from high branches, or put cayenne pepper in the seed to burn the squirrels’ mouths. Reba just puts out the food and lets nature take its course. I guess psychologists know so much about human depredation they’re not fazed by anything animals do.
She said, “Dixie, how nice to see you!”
Reba is probably the only woman in the world who can sound like she’s in a receiving line while she’s feeding birds.
A young wood stork with a long dark bill and fluffy brown neck feathers stalked to the bird feeder as if he were claiming the best table at a fancy restaurant. Wood storks have such big funny feet, they look like they’re wearing tennis shoes. Reba poured peanuts and seeds into the feeder, and a mottled duck waddled forward to join the wood stork. A couple of blue jays swooped down to sort through the nuts, and the wood stork and duck withdrew.
So did Reba and I, hotfooting it to the lanai before the blue jays attacked us. I was annoyed at the thuggish dive-bombing blue jays for scaring the other birds away, but it didn’t bother Reba. She doesn’t believe in imposing human morals on nature. I don’t either, but I still wished the wood storks and ducks had got all the seed first. As Reba has told me more than once, I have a teensy judgmental streak.
From inside the safety of the lanai, we watched as several fish crows flew in and scared off the jays. Fish crows are even bigger bullies than jays. After the crows left with their peanuts, they were replaced by a flock of rose-ringed parakeets chattering like high school girls on a field trip.
Reba said, “I used to get bobwhites, but I never see one anymore. I’m going to have a martini. Would you like one?”
“No, thanks.” I figured alcohol right then would make me either throw up or pass out.
“Glass of wine?”
“Thank you, no. I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Let me get my martini first. I have better answers when I’ve had a little vodka.”
She scurried into the house, and I went to Big Bubba’s cage to say hello.
With their gray feathers, white-rimmed eyes, dark gray wings, and curved bills, Congo African Greys look like prim executive secretaries. But then you catch a glimpse of bright red petticoat feathers under their gray tails, and you know they have a racy side they don’t show the world.
I’m a little bit like that myself.
Another thing about African Greys is that they’re so intelligent they bore easily, and when they do they’re liable to rip out their own feathers.
I’m like that too, except for the feather-ripping part.
Big Bubba tilted his head to give me the one-eyed bird look. He said, “Did you miss me?”
I laughed, because I knew that was something Reba asked him every day when she came home. He laughed too, bobbing his head to the rhythm of his own he-he-he sound.
Big Bubba was a great talker, but not so hot as a conversationalist.
Reba came out with a martini glass in one hand and a plastic bowl of sliced banana in the other. She set her glass on the lanai table and put the banana in Big Bubba’s cage. Then she motioned me to a chair at the table and sat down herself. With her eyes fixed on me, she took a dainty sip of her martini.
“What’s wrong?”
It’s a mistake to pretend with Reba, so I told her the truth.
“I’m sure you heard about the woman who was murdered in Fish Hawk Lagoon.”
“You knew her?”
“I have a client next door to her, and she invited me to dinner a couple of nights before she was killed. I’d only just met her, but I liked her a lot. She told me she had run away from an abusive husband in Dallas. Said he was a sadistic surgeon. She said she was pregnant and didn’t want her husband to inflict his sickness on their child.”
“Do you think he killed her?”
I shifted uneasily in my chair. “As it turns out, there is no husband. She made the whole thing up. She wasn’t pregnant either.”
Reba took another sip of martini. “So she lied to you.”
“Yeah, and tonight her sister told me some other things about her. She said she’d seduced every man she’d ever known. She also said somebody had called her a narcissist. What is a narcissist, anyway?”
Reba shook her head. “Wait, who called who a narcissist?”
“The sister’s name is Celeste. The murdered sister is Laura. Celeste said somebody told her that Laura was a narcissist.”
“Somebody who? Her hairdresser? A bartender? A jilted boyfriend?”
“Um, I don’t know. She just said somebody.”
Reba pulled a toothpick from her martini and nibbled on its olive. “People throw diagnostic terms around all the time without knowing what they mean, but narcissism is a personality disorder marked by grandiosity—a grossly inflated sense of importance or intelligence or talent that has no basis in fact. There’s also a sense of entitlement. Narcissists believe they should have whatever they want because they want it. They lie a lot, and they take unfair advantage of people who love them.”
“Laura didn’t seem grandiose to me. She seemed completely normal.”
“But she lied to you, and the lies would have eventually led to more lies, like a miscarriage or a divorce. We don’t know if what the sister said was true about her being narcissistic, but lying about a husband and a pregnancy certainly raises a red flag. The truth is slippery to narcissists, even when there’s no advantage to them in lying. It’s part of their need to control. If they can fool you, they feel powerful.”