How had she pulled this off, how could no one know about this, the police, the FBI-
They did know. She hadn’t pulled it off. For the second time in an hour I felt like the stupidest person alive. Simon had tried in every way he could to prevent this. There was no crime going on at Biological Clock except bad TV; he’d “recruited” me to distract me. He’d done everything but glue my feet to Santa Monica Boulevard to keep me away from here.
But here I was.
Where was he?
The house must be under surveillance, bugged, the phones tapped-that’s how it worked, right? Agents must be in a van on the street, listening to everything we’d been saying, getting it all on tape, maybe waiting for the right moment to come rushing in-
Now would be a good time! I wanted to yell.
Maizie climbed back down the spiral staircase with a smile. “Okay, all insulated. Wollie, don’t be difficult. It’s like Emma’s pink medicine. She always thinks it will taste bad, but it doesn’t. This could be so easy.”
Simon wasn’t coming. Not that my opinion of men is low, but in my experience, the cavalry doesn’t show up just because you need them. If Simon was listening, he wouldn’t be listening, he’d be in here already, he’d be in here at the first mention of guns and whatever Maizie kept yapping about in that Tupperware. He wouldn’t use me for bait or for evidence gathering. He wouldn’t use me, period.
Simon! I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream, period.
He wasn’t here because he wasn’t listening, because this was a soundproof room, with no telephone, and a secret entrance that no one, not even a state-of-the-art good guy knew about. And they didn’t know I was here because my car was parked blocks away and I’d used the back-gate entrance that UPS knew about, but the FBI maybe didn’t, since my hostess had neglected to fax the FBI a map and, most of all, they didn’t know I was here because they all thought I was heading to Biological Clock.
“Shouldn’t we do this in your car, Maizie? Or mine? If you’re going to use my car to dump my body, wouldn’t it be easier if I’m already in it?”
“No,” she said, growing exasperated, “because then when I dump you, I’d have to drag you in one piece and it would attract attention. We went over that. Also, you’d be easy to ID, they could determine time of death-no. Trust me, it creates more problems than it solves.”
“I see.” I seemed to be both shivering and sweating now, and then I sneezed; it was as though my body were running through its repertoire of involuntary activities, sensing the end. My memory was running through its own repertoire, saying I love you to P.B., Joey, Fredreeq, Uncle Theo. Mom. Simon. Doc.
I loved you too, Doc said back. I just loved my kid more.
“One last thing,” I said. “Where’s Annika?”
“Wollie, it’s so ironic. She killed herself. She left me a suicide note the day she left. I just couldn’t show anyone; it was too incriminating.”
That’s not true, I thought, wrapping my arms around myself to fend off hysteria. Annika e-mailed me. Just days ago. I had to believe it came from her, because otherwise, what was all this for? If she’d been dead all along…
I held myself tighter and felt something in my jean jacket, in the pocket. Hard.
I slipped my hand in my pocket. Cold. One of the things I’d bought at Williams-Sonoma. The meat mallet. I could feel the tiny string on it, attached to the small rectangular price tag.
Words began to run through my head like voice-mail messages.
Crotch, neck, soft parts of the face. Seth, from Krav Maga.
I couldn’t do that. I don’t even do sit-ups.
You do what you have to do to stay alive. Ruta, my childhood babysitter.
Annika would never kill herself. Not over a guy. She was smarter than that.
If you’re not dead, you’re not done. Seth.
“Can I look at it?” I said, my voice squeaky and high, like little Emma. “The fentanyl?”
Maizie took a seat and pushed the small Tupperware container toward me.
My left hand worked the lid, my right hand staying in my pocket. I couldn’t believe she didn’t notice, but she didn’t. I was shaking so badly that when I pushed the Tupperware back across the counter, it wouldn’t go in a straight path. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get it open.”
Of course she tried to open it for me. She was a mom. The Tupperware lid was tough, though. She needed both hands to pry it off. She held on to the gun but, still, she used both hands, and so then she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at the Tupperware.
This was it. Now or never. A last voice played in my head. A moment. You can’t hesitate or you lose your nerve. The voice was Maizie’s.
Some force reached into my pocket and pulled out the silver meat mallet with my hand attached to it. I don’t know what you’d call it, some phenomenon of physics or biology stretching across a white Formica counter to bring the full weight of an arm onto someone’s neck, head, shoulder, ear, cheekbone, not once, not even twice, but enough times to make her fall from the stool she sat on, onto the white tile floor. When that happened, I stopped.
The blows stopped, but the cries didn’t, the raw sounds a throat can make, somewhere between a scream and a sob that I finally recognized as coming from my own body, not hers.
40
I ran up the spiral staircase. At the top, waiting for me, was the yellow cat, wanting out.
I wanted out too.
There was no handle, though, or door knob, so I pressed and pushed and banged the side of my fist against the trapdoor. It wouldn’t open. There was a keypad but I couldn’t begin to guess a code, so I punched numbers. The cat meowed at me. I thought about panicking and then remembered I had a cell phone. In my pocket. My other pocket.
I got reception. I called Simon. I didn’t think twice. When his voice mail answered, I said, “It’s Wollie, I’m in her house, the studio behind the house, underground, in an underground-and I can’t get out and I’ve maybe-killed her. And she said Annika’s dead but she can’t be dead because she e-mailed me.” My voice cracked and I hung up and clutched the banister of the spiral staircase, where I sat, my body knotted like a pretzel. The cat purred and rubbed itself against my shoulder.
I dialed 911. They asked me questions. I answered them. I hung up.
I sneezed. Then I waited.
Life is short. That’s one of those things that occurs to you when you glimpse death, yours or anybody’s. You think, “I’ll remember this, this will remind me not to waste time,” but you forget. You carry on like you have several hundred years to live and like it matters if some guy now living in Taiwan who once loved you still does, or if you pass a math test or win a reality TV show or finish the frogs or get your car washed before the end of the year.
When all that really matters is that you’re not dead. The rest of it, like what that means in the long run or what I was feeling right at the moment, I couldn’t sort out. I didn’t know if Maizie Quinn was or wasn’t dead, and I knew that this distinction would make a big difference in the lives of many people, me among them, but for the moment I didn’t care. I had her gun on the top step, away from the cat, and I had the meat mallet. There were no sounds below me, the sounds of a human being rallying. If I were a different sort of person, a brave one, for instance, I might have gone down to see if I could do something about her, like revive her or tie her up, but I was the person I was, so I stayed where I was, crouched and tense and concentrating on steady shallow breaths, thinking about being alive. Sneezing.
I don’t know how long it was just the yellow cat and me, but after a time there were voices, so muffled I might have been hallucinating. I screamed and pounded and then the door opened upward and people moved past me down the spiral staircase. Someone-he told me he was FBI, they were all FBI-helped me up, took from me the meat mallet, with blood drying on its silver surface, and, after I directed his attention to it, the gun. He led me to a chair near the fireplace and gestured to a woman, who came and stayed close to me. At some point someone from below called up, “She’s alive,” and for a moment I thought they were talking about me. And then I slid out of the chair onto the floor, I’m not sure why, except that I wanted something more solid underneath me. I stayed there across the room from the reindeer pieces with their primer drying until paramedic types brought Maizie up from below on a stretcher. I didn’t see her face, only her healthy-looking blond hair, matted with the darkness of drying blood. I began to shake all over again. That’s when Simon walked in.