Still As Death (10 page)

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS after the car accident that had claimed her mobility—as well as the life of her husband—Cecelia Moran still owned the same colonial where Tad had grown up, and as he pulled up in front of the house, he felt a little surge of pride, as he always did, that they had managed to hang on to it through the years. It hadn’t been easy. The house was in a part of Newton where real estate values had soared and the taxes seemed to just keep going up and up. It would have been easy to sell so many times, but Cecilia loved the house, and there was a part of Tad that knew she couldn’t survive without her familiar things, her art and furniture and knick-knacks, and the view out her back window into the little garden that Tad spent nearly every weekend tending.

It was all about choices, he told himself. He had made so many choices in order to keep the house, and at moments like this, he knew it was worth it. There were other moments, when he considered where his career might be if had gone on to teach rather than staying with Willem at the museum, moments when he realized that he was a forty-nine-year-old man who was still living with his mother. And in these moments, he thought about the choices he had made of which he was not so proud, and he thought about the
things he had done of which he was ashamed, and he wondered whether it was all worth it.

His mother was in her wheelchair in the living room when he came in, watching one of her recorded nature shows on television. Tad kissed her on the cheek and watched the screen for a minute as a grizzly bear caught salmon in some Alaskan stream.

“Look at that,” she said, watching the bear dip its paws clumsily into the water and come out with a flailing fish. “You wouldn’t think he would be able to do that with his big hands, but he can!” She was wearing one of her purple bathrobes, the belt cinched around her large middle. Her face had changed over the last year, aged and gotten both looser and puffier due to her medication, and he searched for the beauty that he’d always found there as a boy. He found it in her eyes, wide and browny-green, still intelligent and just a little coy.

“Paws, Mom.”

“What?” She was rapt, staring at the screen.

“Nothing.”

In the last year, ever since her heart troubles had started, she had lived more and more in this room, watching television, living, he thought, vicariously through the wild animals hunting on the Serengeti or somewhere near the Arctic circle. She especially liked shows about birds and could sit for hours watching hawks and eagles and tropical parrots wheeling against a clear blue sky. If Tad thought too much about the symbolism of her television habit, he got horribly sad. He had done everything else for her, but the one thing he couldn’t do was to free her from her imprisoning chair.

“Good day, Mom?” he asked, dropping his briefcase on the hall table and checking to make sure the nurses had shut off the gas on the stove. A couple of weeks ago he had come home to find the gas turned on and pilot light off. He had yelled at the nurse responsible, but he was now very careful to check.

“Oh, yes. Gloria was here today. I like Gloria the best. She was telling me about Jamaica, where she’s from. She said that the breeze itself, coming off the ocean, is so sweet you just want to open your
mouth and eat it up. Isn’t that a beautiful way of describing it? It made me think of that trip your father and I took to Bermuda that time. Do you remember? You were about five and you stayed with Auntie Carol?”

Tad did not remember, but he said, “Oh, yeah. Was Bermuda like that, Mom? Was the breeze sweet there too?”

“Oh, yes. That’s exactly what I remember about it. It was funny how Gloria saying that brought it all back, you know?” She was engrossed in the program again, watching as a mother grizzly bear ambled across a desolate brown landscape with two cubs.

“Yeah.” He picked up the stack of bills on the hall table and gave it a quick look. There was a long envelope that he recognized as coming from his mother’s insurance company. He had been fighting them for months on a series of bills related to her last hospitalization. It was all stuff that Medicare should have covered, but they were telling him that it was his responsibility and he didn’t understand why. He tore open the envelope and saw the new balance listed at the bottom of the bill: $34,246. It didn’t seem possible. It had been half that six months go, but there had been the latest hospitalization and she had wanted a private room, even though Medicare had warned it might not pay for it. He put it back down and tried to forget about the number. There wasn’t much else of interest, some more bills and a huge stack of the catalogs his mother loved to look through. At the bottom of the pile was a long envelope with the return address of a local roofing company. He opened it and took out a sheet of paper, reading the words on it with growing horror.

“What shall we have for dinner, darling?” his mother called out to him. He looked through to see the credits rolling at the end of the grizzly program. What she really meant, he knew, was,
What are you going to cook for us?
He pushed down resentment and cleared his throat.

“What are you in the mood for?”

“I don’t know. What about those chicken cordon bleu things we had last week. Are there any more of those?”

“No,” he called back, “but I can go out and get some.”

“That would be lovely,” she said. “If it’s not too much trouble. And we can watch the rest of the show about the flamingos. Don’t you love flamingos?”

He came through to the living room. “Sounds good,” he said.

“What’s that letter you’re holding?”

“Oh.” He held it up. “It’s from that guy I asked to come look at the roof. He finished his quote. He says we have a lot of rot in the northeast corner and that it all needs to be ripped up and replaced.”

“Oh, dear, how much is that going to cost?”

“He says fourteen thousand dollars.”

“Oh.” She looked concerned and her eyes sought his. “That’s so much. Will it be okay, Tad? Can we … can we afford it.”

The short answer, of course, was no they couldn’t. Tad had gone to the bank last week to see if they could get another line of credit on the house. That was the only good thing about property values going up. He’d been turned down and had gone home and made a list of all their debts, trying to get a handle on exactly what they owed. The numbers lined up on the page in his mind: $12,450 on the credit cards, the other medical bills, $19,000, plus the bill that had come today. Then there was the roof. What was he going to do? When the bank’s loan officer had broken the news that they had tapped out the equity in the house, he’d suggested that Tad ask a friend, a family member, maybe. But there wasn’t anyone. He didn’t have any friends. There was just Willem.

Willem. He hadn’t thought before of asking Willem. Suddenly there was a small light of hope. Willem could lend him some money.

He found his car keys and wallet.

“I’ll find a way, Mom. Don’t worry about it. I’ll find a way.”

SWEENEY PULLED UP in front of Quinn’s house around six-thirty, still not convinced her impromptu visit was a good idea. At the very least she should have called first, to make sure he was even home. She didn’t know if the missing collar had anything to do with Karen Philips’s suicide and the robbery, but she wanted to know more about them. And Quinn was the only person she knew who had access to that kind of information.

She and Quinn had had coffee a couple of times, before Ian had arrived, just to catch up. They had gone together to the memorial service of a child who had been connected to their experiences in Concord the previous fall, and she remembered looking over at him during the service and thinking that at some point during the weeks they’d been together in Concord, he’d become someone she really cared about, a friend rather than a business associate or a mere acquaintance.

Sweeney had thought they would stay in touch. But somehow, once Ian was there, she hadn’t called him, and the last time he’d left her a message, she hadn’t called back. She wasn’t sure why, but it had just seemed easier, simpler. She had told Ian about Quinn, of course, and about what had happened in Concord, and she didn’t think he
would have minded if she had met Quinn for a cup of coffee or a meal. But for some reason, she hadn’t gotten in touch until now.

She parked in the narrow little driveway and knocked on the front door. All of the windows in the house were open and Sweeney could hear a voice singing somewhere in the house. It sang a melodious, accented French, and Sweeney made out a few words here and there, something about a rabbit and a turtle. She waited a minute, listening, and then knocked again.

The voice belonged to a tall woman with very dark skin and a fall of shimmering cornrows. Through the screen, Sweeney was at first struck by her loveliness and then, when she turned, by the long scar that ran down one side of her face. It was still partly open, as though it had not been stitched but had just healed the way it was. The inside of the scar was pink, like the interior of a seashell, and Sweeney had to keep from cringing.

“Hello?” the young woman said, opening the door. Megan was hugging her legs, and she looked up at Sweeney and gave her a toothy grin.

“Hi,” Sweeney said. “I’m looking for Tim. Is he here?” She waved at Megan. “Hi, Megan. You’re so big. I don’t think you remember me, but I took care of you for a little while last fall.” The little girl grinned up at her. She wasn’t a baby anymore, but a toddler. Her reddish blond hair was secured in two pigtails. She looked like Quinn. She had his eyes: very round, very blue, with thick lashes much darker than her hair.

“He’s working, but he will be home soon.” She smiled a little. “Are you a friend of Tim’s?”

“Yes. I guess I’ll try to catch up with him later.”

The woman hesitated and then gave a little smile. “He just called. He’s on his way. Do you want to come in and wait?”

“Oh, okay, sure. That would be great. Thank you.” She followed the woman inside, Megan toddling behind them. “I’m Sweeney, by the way.”

“Oh, yes. I think I have heard about you,” the woman said.
Sweeney wondered what Quinn had said. The woman hesitated again and then, in a quiet voice, she said, “I am Patience.”

Sweeney misunderstood at first, thinking she meant to say that she was patient. When she realized it was the woman’s name, she smiled. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Megan climbed up into Patience’s lap and put her arms around her neck, then twisted her head around to look shyly at Sweeney. Sweeney smiled and waved again and Megan turned to Patience and murmured something in her ear.

“Yes?” Patience asked and Megan murmured it again. This time Patience laughed out loud. “Rouge! She said rouge. For your hairs.
Oui, ma cherie
. Rouge!” Megan smiled up at Sweeney.

Sweeney got down on the floor and played with Megan while Patience cleaned up the living room, and ten minutes later they heard a car pull up in front of the house and then Quinn’s voice through the screen. “Patience? Who’s …?” When he saw Sweeney on the floor, he looked first apprehensive, then pleased. “Hey. I didn’t recognize the car.”

“I got a new one,” she said. She looked out the window at her gleaming, pale blue Volkswagen Jetta. She’d hated giving up her decades-old Rabbit, but it had finally not so much broken down as disintegrated into a pile of rust. She still hadn’t quite got used to being the owner of a fancy new car.

He grinned. “It’s about time. Did you meet?” He gestured to Patience, and they both nodded. He was very tan and his hair looked lighter. There were little white lines at the sides of his eyes, as though he’d been squinting into the sun. Sweeney thought maybe he’d put on a little bit of weight. Either that or he had started working out. She wasn’t sure what it was, but he seemed more solid than she remembered. When she’d first met him, she’d thought him only conventionally good-looking, but now that she knew him better, she could see there was more to his face than that. His eyes weren’t just blue, but a couple different shades of blue, darker at the centers around the pupils, and he had a tiny round scar over one cheekbone,
from chicken pox, she’d decided, though she’d never asked. His eyes narrowed a bit in a smile, erasing the squint lines.

“Yes, she shows Megan how to, what did you call it?” Patience put her hands in the air. “Pat-a-cake?”

“Oh, I don’t know what you call it. Just …” She put her hands up and clapped them to Megan’s again. “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. With silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back.” Megan squealed with delight.

Quinn laughed. “I remember the girls doing that in elementary school.”

Patience took a pale blue cotton cardigan sweater from the couch and smiled at them. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Tim.” She said his name very deliberately, as though she was trying to prove something.

“It was nice to meet you,” Sweeney told her.

“Yes.” She smiled in a sly sort of way that involved her eyebrows. “You as well.”

Sweeney shot him an inquiring look once Patience was gone.

“I’ve been trying to get her to stop calling me Mr. Quinn,” he explained. “But now she calls me Tim in this way that makes me wish I’d never brought it up.”

“She seems great, though. She’s amazing with Megan.”

“Oh, yeah. I couldn’t ask for anyone better.”

There was an awkward silence that was filled by Megan asking to be picked up. Quinn lifted her into his lap and sat her on the end of his knee, bouncing her up and down.

“So, have you had a good summer?” Sweeney asked, not quite ready to get to the point.

“Yeah. Busy. I took a week off, though, and Megan and I went to the Cape. It was nice, kinda weird being there by myself with her with all the families around, but it was okay. She loved the beach.”

“Good.” Sweeney looked around the room. He’d changed it since the last time she’d been here, but she wasn’t sure how. It seemed neater, less cluttered, toys and books piled into baskets next
to the couch. The wall over the fireplace was nearly filled by a large picture of Megan, posed smiling in front of an obviously fake background of bright flowers. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” she said finally.