Over His Dead Body

CHAPTER 13

Selma the faith healer was massaging Charlotte Trotter's bare scalp, exhorting t he dying woman to give up her beautiful pearls in exchange for a cure. "This is why your hair is falling out. Pearls rob you of your energy," she scolded, holding out her hands to get those pearls. "Let me keep them for you until you feel better."

Cassie's heart beat frantically in her sleep as her dream showed her mother being fleeced on her deathbed. The poor woman had collected only a few treasures in a life that was ending far too soon at only fifty-one. Charlotte had two daughters, her husband, Albert, a diamond from Amsterdam that became the center stone for her engagement ring, a heavy gold bracelet that had been her mother's, and the pièce de résistance: a string of dazzling white pearls the size of quail eggs. In her final days, when her looks, her personality, and-most important to the family-her love for them and God had been corrupted by the illness, the pearls disappeared, too. Cassie never knew if it was her sister, Julie, who'd lifted them, or Selma, the healer. The last blow to the three of them was that after all the months of staying with her night and day, Charlotte had died alone while they were across the street having lunch. Then, before they got back, some nurse or orderly at the hospital took the diamond from her finger, too. At the very end, Charlotte left Cassie nothing but a curse.

Instead of saying goodbye and good luck, Cassie's mother's very last words to her had been "trust no one." She'd been angry at Cassie for being pregnant with a baby she would never live to see. And she was angry at her husband, who'd promised he would die first. She could not bear the fact that the good soldier who'd so carefully planned her widowhood would be the one to be freed from the lion's cage. Widowhood was getting to be a big theme, even in Cassie's dreams.

Suddenly Selma disappeared, and her mother rose from her hospital bed, looking like a mummy. All her hair was gone and so was the water that had bloated her body beyond recognition at the end. She was very thin now, a model with a mummy's head. She was wearing the lost pearls. They were at a hotel in Italy. Somewhere on the Amalfi coast. Graham Greene was there, writing The End of the Affair. Cassie's father, Albert, was wearing a dinner jacket and a bad toupee. Must have been his wife's hair he was wearing. He was smiling, trying to take a photo of them all where they sat at a table on a hill overlooking the blue, blue Mediterranean. Marsha, Teddy, Mitch. Baby octopuses with red sauce were piled on a platter in front of them. The octopuses were still alive, wiggling and multiplying like crazy. Many wine bottles cluttered the table, too. It looked as if they were having a tasting, a good time, while the octopuses spilled onto the table and then the ground. Nobody seemed to care about the lunch being alive and multiplying.

"Cassie, honey, are you there? Pick up, pick up if you can hear me." On the answering machine it was her aunt Edith, who'd never held a place of honor at the party of life.

"Pick up, I mean it." Edith's voice was full of worry and resentment.

Cassie reached for the phone without opening her eyes. "Hello, Aunt Edith," she mumbled miserably.

"Cassie, Cassie. How are you doing? I heard about poor Mitch. Why didn't you call me? Oh, my dear, my poor darling. Marsha told me he's very bad." Her voice sounded peevish that this could be happening without her knowledge.

"Yes, he's very bad," Cassie told her.

"Honey, I've been so upset what with the accident and all. I'm furious that you didn't call me. I'm your aunt. I should have been there for you. I could have driven you."

Edith's driver's license had been revoked years ago for moving violations that were so creative, no one else in the entire world had ever thought of them before, even in emerging third world countries. But that little detail never stopped her from taking the car out.

"There was no accident. Mitch had a stroke," Cassie told her.

"Your accident, honey. I'm talking about your accident. You had a head-on collision with a Mack truck. It's lucky you're alive. Oh Cassie, I'm so glad to hear your voice. Marsha told me you've been out of it for weeks."

Fighting the dream of her mother, the mummy, Cassie sat up and saw the light of the digital clock. Even without her glasses she could tell that it was eightA.M. How could she have slept a single minute when this was the day she was going to kill her cheating husband? Her heart started hammering away in her chest at the thought of turning off that respirator, watching him struggle for breath. Then canceling the credit of his mistress who drove the Jaguar that should have been hers. That bitch! Wherever she was. The billing address on the credit cards was Mitch's at the warehouse. She wondered how she was going to find out where that woman lived and shoot her in the face.

"What, honey? Speak up. I can't hear you."

"Nothing, I'm just all broken up," Cassie murmured. "This is so hard. I had a dream about Mother. I still miss her so much."

"I do, too, honey. Marsha told me you're lucky to be alive. I'm coming right over. I want to make sure you're all right."

"I had a face-lift," Cassie said quickly.

"What? I think we have a bad connection."

"We have a fine connection, Edith. Marsha lied. I had a face-lift."

There was a moment of silence. "You didn't have an accident?"

"Well, I had an accident, but it was planned. I know I never should have done it. I'm sorry now," Cassie admitted to the aunt who drove her crazy.

"How do you look, dear?" Edith asked at last.

"Terrible. I look just terrible." And my husband has a mistress, she didn't say.

Silence again as Edith tried to digest the news. "What about Mitch, honey, did he have a face-lift, too?"

"No, Mitch had a stroke."

"What bad timing. I'm so sorry. Is he… a-a… vegetable?" Edith asked bluntly.

"He's a piece of shit," Cassie told her.

"Oh honey, don't talk like that. I'm sure he didn't do it on purpose."

"Oh yes, he did it on purpose." Truth was truth. Cassie wasn't hiding from it now. She was up. The breathtaking spring sunlight had drawn her out of bed to the window, where she surveyed the mess of her yard after its first glorious spring bloom.

The tulips and daffodils and hyacinths were finished. The drying husks, listing to the ground, looked forlorn in the beds. Growing up between them, however, the peonies were blooming and the poppies were getting ready to burst open. A few days, maybe a week and those poppies would pop. Cassie had no time to clean up the beds. This upset her, too. She was a tidy person.

There she was yearning for the simple pleasure of cleaning out the old to make way for the new in her flower beds when she caught a movement by the edge of the garage. She was startled when a man walked boldly through the pretty white gate into her yard. Without her glasses she couldn't see him that well, but he had a black thing in his hand. He pointed it around, at the patio, at the pool. He pointed it at the garage. She was puzzled, but unafraid until he disappeared into the garage that she locked only from time to time. Then she became frightened. What was going on? What was the man doing in there? He didn't look like a thief. He was wearing a suit and some kind of hat. She couldn't see his face, but his movements didn't fit the furtive profile of a burglar.

Suddenly he emerged from the garage again and moved slowly toward the house, pointing the black thing up at the windows. Cassie stepped back behind the curtains. "I've got to go, Edith. I'll call you back," she whispered into the phone.

"What do you mean, you've got to go? You and Marsha have been avoiding me for two weeks. I'm not hanging up now," Edith retorted angrily. "Family has to stick together in troubled times. If you hang up this time, I'm coming over."

"Edith, there's a man with a gun in my backyard. I'll have to call you later. And don't come over. You don't have a driver's license."

Cassie hung up and peered into the yard from behind the curtain. The man was definitely pointing the gun her way. She gasped and ducked below the windowsill, half crawling to the chair where she'd left the sweater and khaki pants she'd worn the night before. Shaking all over like a teenager caught in a sex act, she fumbled with her clothes.

She knew right away that the man with the gun was a hit man Mitch had hired to kill her so his girlfriend could step in and be his wife without benefit of divorce. It was perfectly clear. He'd bought another house. His girlfriend was furnishing it. The house had to be someplace where no one knew what the real Cassie looked like. Now he was going to have her assassinated. He'd probably planned to move into his new house right after she was dead. Lucky for her he'd had a stroke instead. Life threw its little curves. She was trembling all over.

The phone started ringing again. "Shhh." She didn't have time to answer it. She got to the door of her room and looked down the hall. No one. She crawled below the window line to the stairs. There she froze. It occurred to her that one of the kids might have left a door unlocked, the door to the kitchen from the garage. Or maybe the basement or patio door. She almost never used the burglar alarm. The hit man could come in without a sound and shoot her with that gun. The phone kept ringing, but she was afraid to answer it. It rang and rang.

Cassie thought she was having a heart attack. What should she do? What could she do? The phone finally stopped ringing, and she breathed a sigh of relief at the sudden quiet. She had to think. Mitch had his stroke on Friday. Now it was Monday. What if the hit man had taken the weekend off and didn't know Mitch was in the hospital, didn't know there would be no one to pay him if he shot her and left her dead on the floor? She had to tell him that. But how could she talk to a hit man? They didn't give a shit. She was so scared, she could hardly breathe. All these years she'd believed Mitch was a dull and faithful husband, and now she had to face the fact that he was a crook and a killer, too. The phone started ringing again.

For the second time it rang and rang as she tried to figure out what to do. Finally it stopped ringing. Talking was useless. She knew she had to conquer her terror and get downstairs to lock all the doors and activate the alarm so the hit man couldn't get in and shoot her. She inched down the first stair. The phone didn't ring again. Cassie knew if it had been Edith, she wouldn't have given up. She wondered if it had been Mark or the hospital calling to say that Mitch had died. She wished she'd told Edith to call the police. Why hadn't she done that? Stupid.

She moved down the stairs one by one. It took her many minutes to get to the first floor. Now it was deadly quiet, like a horror movie without the scary music. Opposite her was the front door. The windows in the rooms on either side were so bright with glare, she couldn't see outside. From where she was curled in terror on the bottom step, it almost looked like that light she'd heard about from heaven. She was quaking with fear. She didn't want to die. She could tell that the top lock on the front door, that unpickable Medeco, was locked; but still she knew she couldn't stop the freight train about to run over her. She was going to die, but not of natural causes like her mother. And Mitch was going to live on for another twenty years, in a wheelchair with his whore pushing him around. It was more than she could bear.

She got up and caught sight of herself in the hall mirror, let out a little scream. Mitch's mistress might be beautiful, but she was a horror, a freak. She didn't recognize the woman in the mirror with the blond hair, the black stitches, and puffy eyes. She wanted to obliterate that face. Her scarf and Marsha's huge sunglasses were on the hall table. She put them on to hide the damage she'd done to herself. Then she remembered the hit man didn't care what she looked like-he was going to kill her anyway. She fell to her knees and crawled down the hall to the kitchen.

She made it to the basement door. That door was locked, too. The garage door had a chain. The chain was still in place. With a sigh of relief she turned around and saw the man peering in through the windowed kitchen door. She screamed. Startled, the man on the other side of the window jumped back. As he turned to flee, his foot caught on one of the many decorative pots she'd left out on the patio before Mitch's incident in preparation for the ritual potting of red geraniums. He stumbled backwards, falling hard on a garden tool with many spikes for breaking up the ground. As he went down, the black thing dropped out of his hand. Now Cassie got a good look at it. It was a camera. Further shocked, she started screaming at him. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she yelled at the window.

The man was down. He didn't move. Cassie thought she detected some blood on the flagstone. Uh-oh, maybe he was hurt. Maybe he'd sue. She stepped closer to the door. She saw the scuffed suede shoes. The baggy pants of a glen plaid suit. The camera on a flagstone. Looked like a good one, an Elph. The hat. A ridiculous hat, a crushed fedora. She couldn't see the man's face.

"Hey you," she said tentatively. Now the phone was ringing again. Cassie ignored it. She opened the door and stepped outside.

"Hey you," she said louder. In the distance she could hear sirens. She always dreaded the sound. It meant bad things, someone's house on fire. Somebody in an accident. She kept her eye on the downed man. "Hey, you all right?"

Suddenly, he held up a bleeding hand and gave her a jaunty little wave. After a second or two, he picked up his head, then his shoulders. He turned over and gingerly got to his feet. On his feet he adjusted the nonexistent creases in his unpressed trousers. He looked around the patio and collected the camera, the hat. His movements were all matter of fact, as if he felt perfectly at ease in the situation and nothing untoward had happened. Finally he turned toward Cassie and slowly looked her over. He did it with frank curiosity, up and down, the way men look at things that interest them. He tilted his head quizzically at the scarf and sunglasses. Finally he cracked a little not-bad smile. It was the smile Cassie had seen yesterday from Mark, but hadn't seen for such a long time before that she didn't recognize it yet as admiration. Her face was so tight, she couldn't adjust her expression. Terror, rage, sorrow, uncertainty-her face couldn't seem to register. Luckily, her voice still knew what to do. "What do you think you're doing here?" she demanded, hands on hips.

"Nothing at all, ma'am, just looking around." The man put the squashed hat back on and saluted with his bleeding hand.

"Looking around?" she said indignantly. "What are you, some kind of Peeping Tom?"

"Oh no, nothing like that." He laughed easily. Not a bad-looking kind of guy. "Are you Mrs. Sales?"

"Yes. Who's asking? Mafia hit man, FBI, CIA?" The sirens got louder and louder, until they were almost deafening. Cassie shifted uneasily from one foot to another. Somebody's house was going up in a puff of smoke.

"No, ma'am. Nothing that sinister. I'm with the IRS," he said with a modest smile. "Do you mind if I come inside for a minute?"

"Ahhh." She hesitated. IRS? What did he want?

He held up his hand to show the cut. "I could use some water."

"Ahhh, we're in a bit of turmoil right now." All those files in the house. All those purchases by the girlfriend. The account in the Bank of the Cayman Islands. Her husband was a crook. Dizziness hit her. She didn't like to lie.

"Oh, don't worry about it. Mess doesn't bother me."

The wailing sirens stopped abruptly. It seemed as if they'd stopped in front of her house. Cassie turned around. A loud voice issued a command from a speaker.

"Police. Please drop your weapon and move slowly to the front of the house. I repeat, police, you are surrounded. Put your hands over your head. There are fifty officers here. You are surrounded."

That's when Cassie realized Aunt Edith must have called the cops, after all. She did the only thing she could think of: She closed the door on the IRS agent and ran inside the house to hide in her closet.