Vixen

14

Any sudden death in the family is a blow, and when the person is as close as Cybil was to us it’s twice as hard to deal with, twice as painful. Never mind that she had been in her late eighties and in failing health, and you knew her time was short and you’d resigned yourself to the inevitable loss. When it happens it’s still unexpected, a shock you don’t easily recover from.

Bad enough for Emily and me; devastating for Kerry. Her mother had been a vital presence in her life-confidante, touchstone, tower of strength in times of crisis. Cybil’s passing must have torn her up inside, and yet she coped with it-or seemed to be coping with it-in the same calm, controlled way she’d broken the news to me. No outward displays of emotion; if she cried, and she surely must have, it was in private behind locked doors. She comforted Emily when the girl burst into tears after being told. She let both of us try to comfort her with hugs and inadequate words, but not for any length of time and with a kind of mild but distant reserve.

The only indication of the depth of her grief was when she and I were in bed the night it happened, a few whispered words in the darkness. “What hurts the most,” she said, “was that I couldn’t be with her at the end. To tell her how much I loved her. To say good-bye.”

There was no funeral or memorial service, at Cybil’s request. She had asked to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered in Muir Woods, one of her favorite places. Kerry insisted on taking care of the mortuary arrangements herself. She also insisted on immediately clearing out her mother’s unit at Redwood Village in Larkspur.

“There’s no reason to wait,” she said. She also said, “It doesn’t seem right for all her things to be sitting there gathering dust now that she’s gone.”

She let me help her do the clearing and gathering, but I suspected it was only because she couldn’t manage the task alone. Cybil’s personal possessions were relatively few: a small trunk full of old correspondence, photographs, clippings of news items and book reviews, miscellaneous scraps of paper, and carbon-copy manuscripts of the stories she’d written under the pseudonym Samuel Leatherman for Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Midnight Detective in the 1940s; several framed family photos, a few mementoes and knickknacks; and two boxes of books and magazines, including extra copies of Dead Eye and Black Eye, Cybil’s two retro novels featuring her hardboiled pulp detective, Max Ruffe.

Kerry wanted all of this transported to our condo, along with her mother’s ancient Remington typewriter and antique rocking chair, the small bookcase in which the copies of Cybil’s published works had been displayed, and a couple of items of clothing that had some sort of sentimental value. “All of these were part of Cybil, dear to her. How can I get rid of them?” She said this defensively, even though I hadn’t questioned her or made any kind of comment.

When we were done, the only things left for Redwood Village to dispose of were the remaining items of furniture, cookware and glassware, and the contents of the refrigerator and cupboards. It took both Kerry’s car and mine to get all the stuff back to the city.

Once we had everything inside the condo, all but filling up the utility room, she began sorting through the contents of the trunk-a task she wouldn’t let me help her with. “It’s my job. Most of these things are personal.”

“I won’t look at anything you don’t want me to.”

“That’s not the point. I don’t want any help.”

“Kerry, I know how much you’re hurting-”

“Do you?”

“All right, maybe not, but Cybil’s passing deeply affected me, too-”

“Passing,” Kerry said between her teeth. “God, you know I hate that euphemism. Cybil died. My mother died.”

“Her death, then. I’m just trying to make things a little easier for you, that’s all.”

“Then don’t fuss and let me do what I have to do.”

I did not put up any further argument.

Kerry spent that evening and part of the next morning going through the trunk and the boxes of books. Looking at photographs, reading correspondence or part of a manuscript or a story in one of the pulp magazines or one of the dozens of yellowed pieces of paper on which Cybil had scribbled story ideas, character sketches, sentence fragments. One of the times I wandered in to see how she was doing, I found her stroking with her index finger a small stone carving of a panther that Cybil had kept on the bureau in her bedroom.

“My father gave this to her on her fortieth birthday.”

“What’s it carved from?” I asked. “Onyx?”

“Black jade. From Burma. He said it had magical powers.”

“She never mentioned that.”

“She didn’t believe it. Neither do I.”

“But he did?”

“He claimed he did. I’m not so sure he believed in any of that occult crap he wrote about.”

Telling statement. Ivan Wade had started out as a pulp writer himself, concocting grim and gruesome stories for Weird Tales and other fantasy/horror magazines, and then had gravitated to radio scripting, slick magazine fiction, some TV work, and finally novels and nonfiction books on occult and magic themes. Kerry adored Cybil’s work, but hadn’t much cared for any of her father’s-an accurate reflection of her feelings toward her parents as individuals. Cybil had been warm and nurturing, Ivan cold and distant. I’d met him at the same pulp convention in San Francisco where I’d first met Kerry and Cybil, and disliked him intensely; he’d been nasty as hell to me, tried to keep Kerry and me apart on the claim that I was too old for her and in too dangerous a profession. Kerry had loved him, but she hadn’t mourned his death several years ago half as much as she was mourning Cybil’s.

When she was finally done with the sorting, she carefully restored every photograph and scrap of paper to the trunk and then asked me to move it into her office. She’d have liked the bookcase and rocking chair in there, too, but there wasn’t enough room for both; as it was I had to shift some of the existing furniture around to make the bookcase fit. She settled for putting the rocker in a corner of the living room.

From memory she filled the bookcase with Cybil’s published works in the exact order they’d been in her mother’s apartment, and had me take the remaining books down to our basement storage unit. Then she placed the typewriter, some of the saved gewgaws, and most of the framed photographs on top. The rest of the curios and framed photos, including a prominent one of Cybil in her midthirties at her typewriter, ended up on Kerry’s already cluttered desk.

A shrine. That was the overall effect, and her intention whether a conscious one or not.

Neither Emily nor I said anything about it. What can you say to a grieving and emotionally fragile woman in circumstances like these? Nothing meaningful or worthwhile. If Kerry needed a shrine to help her cope, then that was fine with us. I’d have turned the whole flat into one if that was what it took to help her get through this new crisis.

What worried me was that her control was mostly surface; that once the necessities had been dealt with and the shrine was in place she would begin to withdraw again into that dark corner of herself where she’d huddled for the weeks after the Green Valley ordeal. Recurring nightmares, not wanting to be touched, weight loss, refusal to leave the flat alone and then only with me for visits to her doctor or with Cybil. I was afraid for her, and afraid that neither Emily nor I was equipped to handle it if it happened again. The stress and emotional drain of those weeks had taken their toll on us as well as on Kerry.

I had a private talk with Emily on the subject-she’s far more mature than her fourteen years-and she agreed that we would have to once again adopt the same careful mode as before. Be there for Kerry when she needed us, but put no pressure on her of any kind. Maintain as much of a normal home environment as we could at all times.

But it seemed that our fears were groundless. For the time being, at least.

On the morning of the third day after Cybil’s death, Kerry went back to her office at Bates and Carpenter. There was a lot of work piled up on her desk, she said, and a client conference that she felt obligated to attend. A healthy decision, as far as I was concerned; I’d thought she might opt for holing up in her condo office and working from home by telephone and computer, as she had during her long recuperation. She was still a little distant with Emily and me, unwilling to share more than little pieces of her grief. Throwing herself into her work might be just what was needed to reestablish her equilibrium and the equanimity of our home life.

With Emily back in school, I did not have much reason to hang around the flat, either. The wound Margaret Vorhees had inflicted on my forehead was not severe enough to require stitches. I didn’t think so, anyway, after I’d removed the bandage the Latina maid had put on and in the bathroom mirror inspected the gash and a purplish bruise that haloed it. Nor did Emily, who insisted on an inspection of her own and then applied more antiseptic and a fresh bandage. Not Kerry, though. She didn’t ask me what had happened until the morning after Cybil’s death; the bandage and bruise may not have even registered until then. I made light of both the incident and the wound and she took me at my word, let the subject drop without question.

I’d worried a little about the possibility of a concussion because my headache had lingered overnight and bothered me while Kerry and I were loading and unloading Cybil’s possessions, but it was gone by that evening; and I hadn’t had any other symptoms. The gouge was deep enough to leave a very small scar, maybe, without a doctor’s attention and a couple of stitches, but that prospect bothered me not at all. What was one more scar among the many?

So I went back to work myself, at least for that day. Routine desk work, same as before. I’d been in touch with Tamara, of course, and Jake Runyon had called to offer his condolences. They had filled me in on Jake’s face-to-face with Frank Chaleen. Nothing had happened since. The waiting game was still in effect.

But something was going to happen sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Kenneth Beckett’s trial was rapidly approaching. We all pretty much agreed on that. This was one of those powderkeg cases, with all the principals and their interactions so unstable that an explosion of some kind seemed inevitable. What worried me was that when it came, one or more of us would suffer collateral damage a lot worse than a cut on the forehead.