Dying for Chocolate

28.

I bluffed. “Actually, no,” I said with a smile I hoped was both apologetic and casual. I had to get information from her, had to find out about Julian’s past and her own. And how much other people knew, like the general. I had to stall until Bo woke up. I also knew that in a potentially dangerous situation like this, I had to call Schulz.

I said, “Arch is missing. Have you seen him?”

She shook her head and pulled her mouth into an O of surprise. “No . . . where could he be?”

“I’ve looked all over the neighborhood, and Marla is calling his friends. Did you see him go out with Julian? The general doesn’t seem to know anything.”

“Well, neither do I. I didn’t see him go out with Julian, but I do need to talk to you about that. Do you know when Arch left? Was it after the police finally drove off? I went to lie down for a while, it was all so trying.” She opened her eyes wide. “The police had quite a few questions about your argument with Brian Harrington last night.”

I said, “I didn’t kill him.” I took a deep breath. “My main concern is the whereabouts of Arch.”

“What in Bo’s study would tell you where Arch is?”

I thought wildly. “Well . . . I’m looking for some cards. They were Arch’s. Sometimes he tricks me. . . you know how he is. So if this is a trick, I need to play along. You know?” As I got up I pushed a box of pencils onto the floor with my left hand. With my right I moved some papers from the bottom of the pile to the top before setting the whole pile down. I leaned over to gather the pencils.

“Cards?” said Adele. “I don’t know. Perhaps he left them in the kitchen. Shall we look?”

I stood up. “Sure.” I felt in my right pocket and fingered the seven of spades. This would be my only chance to call Schulz undetected. I had to think of a way to pull this one out. What made it all worse was that I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Or who the enemy was.

“No cards here, I’m afraid,” Adele said. She patted through the piles of bills, gardening catalogs, and manila envelopes in the kitchen desk drawers.

I slipped the card from my pocket into the knife drawer. “Oh, my goodness, look here,” I said. “He wanted to leave it where I would find it. Now we need to call the wizard.”

“I beg your pardon?” She stared at the card in my palm.

“Indulge me, Adele, maybe this is it. I promised Arch I would practice, and maybe this will help out,” I said as I punched in the buttons for Schulz’s number and prayed that he would be at his desk.

“Schulz.” His voice.

Adele said, “May I ask whom you are calling? Are you calling Weezie? Please give me the phone.”

I held up one finger and said, “Is the wizard there, please?”

“Oh, jeez, Goldy, don’t make me do this, what the hell is going on? Did you find Arch?”

I said again, more merrily, “Is the wizard there, please?”

He sighed. He began, “Clubs, diamonds, spades—”

“May I speak to him, please?”

“Okay,” said Schulz, “so spades? Now what? Let’s see, ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight, seven—”

“Hold the line, please.”

Before I could do anything, Adele took the phone from my hand and listened. She looked at the receiver and then at the card. She said, “No, thank you.” Then she shrugged. She tap-stepped across the kitchen floor and hung up the phone.

“Well?” I demanded. “Did he know it was the seven of spades?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It was a man, and he said, ’Do you want me to come over?’ so I said I didn’t and that was that.”

Adele straightened up. She flicked one piece of lint off the beige cashmere sweater and another off the matching slacks. “I’m so tired, let’s sit down,” she said as she tap-stepped over the yellow Italian tile toward the living room. “I need to talk to you about Julian. He’s taken the camping equipment and gone off somewhere.” She paused by the pink sofa and looked around, apparently confused. She said, “Where’s Bo?”

This is what quicksand feels like, I thought. Nothing to hold on to and sinking deeper by the minute. But I had to keep Adele talking, no matter what.

I said, “Asleep on the porch. Had a bit too much to drink, I think.”

She shook her head and leaned awkwardly against the back of the sofa. “God! What’s happening? Brian drowned, and now, God knows.” She eyed me. I had come up beside her. We stood in silence, both unwilling to commit to speaking freely, much less to sitting down.

“You look exhausted,” she said. “Have you had anything to eat today?”

Schulz’s question. I said, “No.”

“Oh, Goldy. You of all people. You should have something to keep you going.”

A swell of fatigue made me shiver. I realized I had even missed my daily injection of espresso. All normal patterns of living had been disrupted by the discovery of Brian Harrington’s corpse.

I had to keep her talking. Had to make her feel I knew something, but perhaps not everything. I said, “Want coffee?” She shook her head. “I’ll be right back.” I made myself a double espresso and came back out to the living room, where Adele had settled into one of the lime-green damask chairs. I sat on the pink sofa, sipped, and waited. From the porch came the undulating noise of the general’s snores.

Finally Adele said, “Sissy and I went looking for Julian. He was so upset when the police were here. He talked to Arch for a long time. I just assumed they had gone off together.” She took a deep breath. “I’m afraid Julian may have found some very distressing correspondence and asked Weezie Harrington about it. This may have had the most dire consequences.”

I said, “Where do you think Julian could have gone after reading this correspondence?”

“To the Harringtons, perhaps. Oh, it’s such a long story—”

“Why to the Harringtons?”

We both stopped talking at once. There was a long silence while we looked at each other.

I said, “Do you want to talk?”

Someone buzzed the security gate.

“Julian!” I said with false enthusiasm and leaped up to check the camera, press the admittance button, and open the front door. Schulz’s car ascended the driveway. I darted back to the study to make sure the general was still asleep. He was. But the Mace was gone.

“You okay?” Schulz asked when he came through the door. “The seven of spades a trick or not?”

“Just chatting with Adele. We think the general is asleep,” I said with a false sprightliness that hopefully warned him, Be careful. Then I introduced him to Adele.

She pulled herself up into a regal stance, limped over to take his hand, and said, “Can we get you something?”

Schulz regarded me: Is this some kind of game? I said, “Go on in and sit down with Adele. I’ll bring you some coffee.” I made him a double espresso. It was fast and I wanted him awake so he could help me look for Arch. Also, I did not trust anything else one might eat in this house.

When I handed him his cup, I said, “Adele was just telling me she thinks Julian might have seen correspondence that put Brian Harrington in danger.”

Schulz’s eyes looped around the room. “Oh yeah?” he said. “What was that?”

Adele looked from one to the other of us.

She said, “You can never go back. You think you can, but you can’t. That’s what the general thought with all his experimenting, but Philip Miller just thought he was crazy. I knew he had it in for him, and he wanted so badly to go back. . . .”

Schulz raised his coppery eyebrows at Adele. He said, “Go back where?”

She said nothing, only glared at him, as if she were waiting for his own response to the question. But all he did was sip the coffee. I could hear the clock ticking the minutes away. My hands itched with anxiety for Arch. If the general had harmed Philip Miller, then why had Philip warned Brian Harrington? The coffee was not clarifying my mind.

Finally I said, “Perhaps you are as concerned about your son as I am about mine.”

Her eyelids flickered in appraising me.

She said, “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.”

I nodded. Schulz’s gaze traveled from one to the other of us.

He said, “Why don’t you tell us? We’re especially interested in the last couple of weeks.”

Adele ignored him. “You know,” she said to me, “a death is like a divorce in many ways. You are left alone, whether you like it or not. When you’re divorced, you can’t express your sadness. When you’re widowed, it’s not considered proper to express . . . anger. And in either case, the financial burdens are tremendous.”

I said, “You seem to have weathered the financial part okay.”

“Oh, you think so?” Adele raised her thin eyebrows at me, then flicked more invisible lint from the beige sweater. “I’ve seen the way men eye Sissy for her body. Imagine being sized up for your dollars.” She cleared her throat. “At least in Sissy’s case, when men tell her she’s beautiful, they’re not lying.”

“Did Brian Harrington say you were beautiful?”

She paused. She said, “Many times.”

I looked over at Schulz. His face had gone pale and was filmy with sweat. He excused himself quietly. Adele dismissed him with a wave.

I said, “Was this before or after he was married to Weezie?”

She looked at me, the corners of her mouth turned down. Water was running in the hall bathroom.

She said, “Both.”

I said, “Did he know Julian was his son?”

Her face and composure crumpled. She shuddered, rubbed her cheeks and pulled herself together.

She said, “He knew so little. There were things he chose not to know. He had a single purpose. To get the woman with the money or land to fall in love with him. He did it with Weezie and he did it with me.” As tears leaked from the edges of her eyes, she wiped them off with her index finger.

“You don’t need to talk,” I said. In fact, I wondered why she was talking about this to me at all. Where was Schulz? Was he in danger from the general?

“Yes I do,” Adele was saying. “It was a terrible rejection. Rejection! My God, that sounds like the way we used to talk in adolescence. I was thirty-one when I was with Brian. I felt all my anger, all my grief dissipate in that time with him. You hear about affairs. You think, oh, illicit sex.” She regarded me with disgust. “Sex is incidental.” She looked wistfully at the mantelpiece that had held the Waterford vase destroyed in the garden-explosion. “It’s being loved that we all want.” She sighed with a kind of moan. “Brian loved me. He wrapped me in love. All my anger, my grief over losing my first husband dissipated. And do you know what? I didn’t even feel guilty. I even thought Marcus Keely had had his heart attack so I could find Brian. My true love. Ha!” She cackled.

My gastrointestinal tract was doing flip-flops. I put it down to caffeine on an empty stomach. I wanted to get this over with, to untangle the past and find out what was going on in the present.

I said, “You got pregnant.”

Her eyes wandered back to me. “Yes. After I’d invested in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club. I was the first one to buy a two-acre homesite, and Brian was the second, buying the parcel right next to mine. Forever together, he’d said. He also said he wanted to get the ball rolling for the business. He wanted to be able to say, We’ve had some sales but there are a few parcels left. I kept thinking he would ask me to marry him. . . . He said he wasn’t ready.

“When I was four months along and unable to hide the pregnancy any longer, I left and went down to Utah. To collect pottery and whatnot,” she said with another hideous laugh and wave. “But really it was to have a baby and arrange a private adoption in Bluff. I found out about a Navajo woman who had married an Anglo. The Anglo was opening a candy store. They had been unable to have children. When you have money,” she said with a sniff, “you can arrange adoptions any way you want.”

I nodded and looked around. I had not seen Schulz for a while and was worried. Perhaps the general was awake. But Schulz could take care of himself; I couldn’t risk Adele shutting down on me. I stayed put.

“If you arranged to have the adoption done,” I said, still preoccupied with thoughts of Schulz, “why did you arrange to have it undone?”

“It fell into place. I thought, again foolishly, that it was for a reason. Bo’s adoration embarrassed me terribly. I hated Washington and was all too glad to move out here once the Pentagon forced Bo’s retirement. I had the land; I’d never sold it. And then I felt such a strong pull, to see Brian again, to live next door . . . and I thought maybe if I could get Julian here, that we could—” She broke off, lost in reverie.

“You were the one who said you can’t go back.”

“I know,” she said, her voice shrill, “don’t I? So much work, so many preparations. Arranging the scholarship for Julian when I found out that the boarding department at Elk Park Prep was about to close down. Building this house next to Brian and that inane woman, Weezie!” She spat out the name, then softened. “And Julian. God, Julian.” She broke off then and stared at the fireplace in a way that seemed to signal the end of the conversation.

I remembered her words: Whatever you do for your children, they don’t appreciate you.

And then it all fell into place. A wave of cold fear swept over me. She was the one. I thought I’d needed her information to finger Weezie or the general or even Sissy. I was wrong.

I said, “You tried to seduce Brian again, didn’t you? By the pool. I heard you splashing around. But he showed an unhealthy sexual attraction for Sissy instead. That must have made you furious. The general loved you, but it wasn’t enough. And . . . you’re the one who started the rumor about Weezie sleeping with Philip Miller. Yes?”

She sucked in a sob and pursed her lips, then opened reddened eyes and nodded. Proudly, I thought. And then the full force of what she could have done struck me. I thought of the calendar in Philip’s office. She had had one of the last appointments with him.

I said, “You went to see Philip Miller. Because Julian was living with you and having problems, Philip had called you. He must have wanted to see you and the general together.” She did not move. I wasn’t even sure she was listening. “But you went alone, because of what you were afraid would come out. Philip told you Julian wanted to research who his biological parents were. You must have told him the truth.”

Her eyes blazed. “Yes, I told Philip Miller the truth,” she said fiercely. “I didn’t want to, but he just kept egging me on with all his questions, just like you are now. How did we come to have Julian in our house? he wanted to know. How were we relating to him? How did he think I was going to relate to my own son whom I hadn’t seen since birth?” Her face contorted. “And I said the biological father, Brian Harrington, had shown no interest in his son. I said I wanted to kill Brian Harrington. I had learned about getting things on the black market from Bo. I’d gotten Spanish fly and I was going to use it, because so many women had wanted Brian to love them. It would serve him right.”

“But Philip took it from you—”

“Yes, he took it! He threatened to call the police right away if I didn’t give it to him. Said I needed help, and that he was going to have to notify Brian that his life was in danger.” She smiled. “But he didn’t get my whole supply of Spanish fly. And the black market wasn’t the only thing I’d learned from Bo. After I’d seen Philip Miller, later that afternoon, I created a distraction. Pretended I’d left my cane in his office. The receptionist went to look for it and I memorized Miller’s calendar. I knew I’d have to act quickly before he turned me in. The eye doctor appointment was perfect.”

The abdominal pains in my stomach had turned to cramps. I felt hot. How I wanted this conversation to be over. How I wanted Schulz to come back. And most of all, how I wanted to know where Arch was, to be assured that he was all right.

Adele was talking. I struggled to focus on her voice.

“I’d just had the glaucoma test myself, so I knew they used anesthetic. And Bo had told me all about peroxide torture when he was researching sabotage. There are more nerve endings in the eye than anywhere else in the body. The more nerve endings, the more pain. Put peroxide on those nerve endings, and you’re going to do a lot of damage. Very quickly.”

I whispered, “How’d you do it?”

“I went into the eye doctor right after I saw Philip’s calendar. Pretended I was there to raise money for the pool, while I took the saline rinse bottle from beside the ultrasound machine. Right under their noses! Then I came home and emptied the saline rinse bottle and put in Julian’s peroxide. I called the headmaster and insisted that Philip be the one to bring more decals, that no one else could do it but Philip Miller, especially if they wanted me to give the last twenty thousand for the pool.” She cackled. “So right after his eye appointment, he’d have to drive out to the school, then drive back to town. I thought with any luck he would die on that road. I couldn’t afford for him to talk to anybody, least of all Brian Harrington or you. You see, he wanted to warn you about living here. That’s why he called so early that morning. He thought he was being so careful, saying to you, Not on the phone!”

I said, “So you were the one listening in on my calls. Then you told the general what was going on in my life.” She didn’t respond. I said, “You never gave up on Brian.”

She sniffed and moved her hands in a nervous motion. Then she looked at me, as if she were searching for something. She said, “Oh, yes I did. At that anniversary party, when he kept on and on with Sissy, I knew it was over.”

“How did you get him to take Spanish fly?”

She sighed, fluttered her hands again. “I told him to come back after the party. I wanted to invest in Flicker Ridge. I smoothed cantharidin on top of his fudge. He died for chocolate!” She laughed. A wave of nausea swept over me. “Your son saw us the last time we were together. That’s why I’m sorry to say that he’s going to drown, too.”

I screamed, “Where’s Arch?”

“Where you won’t be able to save him this time.”

I was going to throw up. I bolted for the hall bathroom. But I could hear Schulz in there. He was sick. I couldn’t listen to it. I held my stomach and lurched back to the living room.

“What have you done?” I yelled at her.

She said calmly, “The only thing I could be sure you would ever eat or drink was that damn espresso. So I put Spanish fly in your coffee can. I’m sorry, Goldy. You and the policeman should be dead in an hour.”