Deathwatch - Final Read online

  The instant I mentioned the girls, I felt my blood pressure skyrocketing. What would Eberhardt think? No one knew we’d performed the surgery; worse, Andrew was dead, Ruth and Gabriel, gone. I felt my face going hot, red. I peeked to see if he was looking me over—

  Wing merely eyed the syringe critically, sniffed around the glass plunger. “No smell of almonds; no smell at all, really. Colorless whatever it is,” he said turning the syringe up to the light. “’Cept this drop of blood that’s coagulated here, near the tip.”

  He indicated the place by running his finger up and down, but he was careful to maintain an invisible path more than a half inch away.

  “Gener’lly speaking, people that inject themselves do it without drawing blood.”

  “If they’re not drunk or clumsy with the drugs,” I said. “And the needle’s bent.”

  “Looks like somebody stepped on it.” His face was as tight and unforgiving as a vise screwed close to the limit.

  “I found it under Andrew’s hand. He probably dropped it on the floor,” I said, “when he lost consciousness.”

  He carefully folded a scrap of paper from a small leatherbound notebook around the bloody syringe, then he dropped it inside his medical bag. “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  - 26 -

  I watched Wing Eberhardt double the flesh-colored rubber tubes of his stethoscope and fold the contraption into his satchel. Andrew’s corpse had taken on greater rigidity and his face was the color of a stage vampire in the glare of the gaslights.

  I’d already watched him take Andrew’s body temperature and he’d come prepared—not like what you’d expect from a semi-rural coroner—putting his hands on Andrew’s knees or lower thighs to determine warmth or coolness. Eberhardt was more thorough than that; even making small incisions and inserting the probe of his thermometer into Andrew’s organs.

  “He’s registering 78 degrees in the liver, fatty and packed in viscera as it is. That’s pret’ near to room temperature. He’s been gone more than 14 hours is my guess,” Wing said. He was hunting up and down Saunders’s long body for the needle mark. “You told me he took drugs on occasion, injected himself. Never asked you or anybody else to do it. That right?” He gave out a small grunt.

  “Yes,” I said, glancing down at my folded hands and not knowing where else to look. I’d told him that Ruth and Gabriel had left for New Hampshire. Another alibi gone. “I’ve seen him glazed to the eyeballs, and I believe—”

  “There’s no signs of any puncture marks—new or old—here.” Wing’s eyes were focused in the unmarked innocent flesh of Andrew’s elbow. “I’ll just have a word with the twins, if you don’t mind,” Eberhardt said.

  “They’re just children—” I blurted out.

  “All the same, I believe I’ll see if they know something you don’t.”

  I nodded miserably. I went to the doorway of Andrew’s room. “Abby! Ellie!” I called, my voice echoing in the empty hallway.

  Eberhardt looked at me then as if I’d gone round the bend. “What on earth are you callin’ em for?” His face was flushed dark red with annoyance.

  “I…you asked to talk—”

  “And I’ll go downstairs to the kitchen or the liberry or into the nursery. Man alive, think I’d make cripple girls walk to me, walk in the room where their father is lyin’ dead?”

  “Down here,” Abby’s voice rose from the depths of the library.

  And I followed Wing Eberhardt down the stairs.

  ***

  Ruth’s words, she can’t come through unless they’re separate, roiled in my head. And yet, I thought to myself, this was Regina’s scheming handiwork: The girls sat on a low hassock, arms about each other’s waists. The irony wasn’t lost on me: Even though Ellie’s waist was twice the size of her sister’s they’d managed to squeeze into the doubled green sack of the same velvet gown they’d worn the very first night I’d seen them. I found my eyes darting to the hem, but their feet were concealed. No one would’ve guessed Ellie was missing her left leg.

  “Dr. Eberhardt,” Abby said shyly, and she dipped her chin toward the boat shaped neckline Ruth had fashioned to accommodate two heads, two sets of shoulders when the girls had been attached.

  “Young misses,” Eberhardt nodded at the pair. “I guess you know your pa is passed on,” he jerked his right thumb toward me.

  “Mr. Granville told us,” Ellie whispered. She took a hanky she’d been clotting into sticky white dough inside her fist and dabbed her eyes. “What happened?” she asked, and when she raised one brow, I saw Regina—the goddamn bitch, the double goddamned bitch—slyly peeping out from the girl’s face. I saw her dark jade eyes leering out beneath the fringe of Ellie’s pale pinkish lashes.

  Eberhardt’s hands were on his hips. His eye swept over Ellie’s protruding belly, and I saw—as clearly as if he’d said it out loud—that the word motive had just clicked into place in his mind.

  I knew in that moment I was lost, I knew Abby was lost, Regina was in control. Ewing Eberhardt was a bright man but he was a country coroner, and there was nothing in his experience—in his concept of what could or might be—that would ever let him see what was really happening.

  Her arm tightened about her daughter’s waist, the fingers squeezing the soft flesh I so wanted to caress gently, the force of her demon’s mind squeezing the words down the child’s throat, and I heard Regina Cahill Saunders speak again.

  “We’re orphans now. Ruth’s gone. And Gabriel. Who’ll take care of all of us? who?”

  I saw Wing blanch. “There, there, Miss Ellie,” he said.

  “The wake, the funeral, what’ll we do? What’ll we do?” Abby began to rock and moan.

  “Was it the drink?” Regina asked slyly through Ellie’s puffy red lips. “He liked his liquor of a night,” she said.

  It would’ve taken a stronger man than Ewing Eberhardt to tell a twelve-year-old girl the facts. He couldn’t do it. And whatever his suspicions about me—and I was sure they ran deep—he wasn’t going to tell the girl her father’s murderer was standing free and easy in the family drawing room.

  “There’ll be an inquest. That’s the usual…when a man of 48 is found…in his own bed. It won’t be me doing the tests—everything I collected will be sent on to Albany. They’ve got the proper equipment to investigate all possibilities.” His brown eyes lit on me, but he left the rest unsaid. Then he went on. “I’ve covered Andrew with the bedsheets, and I’ll call in John Madison and Sons to wake him.”

  “They’re best? We’d want the best,” Abby said, staring at her hands in her lap.

  “We were so young…we can’t remember…when mother died….” And here the false Ellie snatched at her sister’s unsteady hand and clenched it tightly in her own. “You see, Dr. Eberhardt, we don’t even know who our family uses—for this kind of thing.”

  “I’ll call John Madison,” Eberhardt said again.

  And in my mind’s eye I saw two scenes simultaneously. The rough hewn planks of the gallows, a black cotton hood fitted with a jerk over my head, and the heavy canvas fabric of a dirty white strait jacket scratching the exposed flesh of my chin. My arms were painfully secured in opposing directions, a stream of yellow urine poured down my inner thigh.

  I heard a snorting sound erupting out of my mouth and nose. It was inexplicable to them, I knew, but I was hysterical. I would be accused of murdering Andrew, I was certain of that. There were only two roads out of Hyde Park, New York for me. Death or prison. I began to laugh.

  ***

  Gabriel’s telegram came the day before the funeral:

  Ruth failing fast. deepest regrets for girls’ sorrow,

  But impossible for me to come.

  “We do not die—only sleep a while, wait for judgment”

  I wondered who the last line referred to—Ruth? Andrew? Regina? It didn’t matter, he was my last hope and he would not be there to take up for me. The autopsy confirmed that Andrew’s liver was riddled wi
th cirrhosis. But it was the massive overdose of morphine that killed him. There was no point in delaying the burial; with the facts in, Ewing Eberhardt felt he could afford to postpone the inquest a day or two.

  I knew I had to act quickly, but I had no idea what action to take. Should I leave? Fleeing would only make me look guilty. But if I did, should I go alone or take one or both girls with me? Would Ruth’s warning come true, would I be ferrying Regina out of the house, a stowaway concealed deep inside Ellie’s or Abby’s mind?

  In a small town gossip spreads more quickly than a greasefire. I was trained to observe closely, I would watch how the mourners acted around me. Then my thoughts broke off except for the obsessive round that was like the hollow peal of a death gong: The funeral will tell. Andrew’s funeral will tell.

  - 27—

  The day before the wake John Madison and Sons laid Andrew’s corpse out in the library. I went in to introduce myself.

  “Granville.” Madison Senior, a stout fiftyish man built like a cistern, bowed. He was civil, but distant.

  There was only one son in the firm apparently. Young John. He was about my own age, knobby and thin. His chief duty seemed to be to look properly tragic and to hide a set of overlapped and slightly crossed front teeth behind lips that were pressed in a grim line.

  “You’ll excuse us now,” Madison Senior intoned, shutting me out, banging the doors closed to get on with his work.

  I told myself to calm down, to keep paranoia at bay, and watched surreptitiously from a crack in the double doors as they arranged Andrew in his mahogany casket. The rigor mortis had left the body; they were washing the flaccid skin with alcohol swabs.

  “Do you think he did it?” Young John asked. “Eberhardt was right—there’s no marks.”

  “Never jump to conclusions—it doesn’t do in this business,” the elder sniffed, unfolding Andrew’s arms from his chest. Still, I saw his eyes riveted on the delicate inner crease of the elbow.

  I didn’t want to hear any more, and I crept away.

  ***

  After they left I went into the semi-darkened room. Andrew was wearing a starched shirt, his best black cutaway coat. I guessed it was Madison himself who powdered the face, applied the pancake make-up, brushed the thinning hair. They’d inserted a gardenia in the buttonhole of his suit, but the scent of the funeral flowers—lilies, tuberoses, violets—was overpowering.

  I found myself standing by the casket, staring at the little details. The stitching on the cuff of his jacket, the tufted blue upholstery Saunders lay on. His shoes—shiny patent leather evening slippers—were incongruously made for dancing.

  I let my fingers curl over the edge of the wood.

  Suddenly I smelled the heavy musk of sherry—as if the corpse had been drinking at its own funeral party.

  Perhaps formaldehyde smelled more like alcohol than I realized.

  I bent, intending to sniff gardenia.

  Instead I felt a warm puff of air gently brushing my forehead and my right cheek. A cloud of sweet wine assailed me and I drew back in confusion. Could one ghost create another? No, it couldn’t be. He was dead! That smell—it was from the chemicals!

  “He wasn’t embalmed,” Ellie said.

  I started at her voice, turned, staring through the open doors at taunting green eyes. She stared back.

  Then, clumsily, Ellie wheeled herself down the hall.

  - 28 -

  “Stuart,” Abby cried out, “Stuart!” she called again. It was perhaps two in the morning. I’d gone to bed with nothing resolved in my mind, but I told myself here at least was something I might follow through with, one thing I might be good at: comforting a child down with the nightmare.

  “She came to me,” Abby wept when I went in to ssh her. “In my dreams—oh God, Stuart she crept right in while I was sleeping and took me the way I’d pick up a ragdoll until I had no will and there was nothing of me at all.”

  Abby was crying hard, her hand slipped out from the blankets and her fingers stole into mine. “Why? Why does she do it? How can she do it, if I don’t want her to?” Now the child’s hand withdrew and she made a fist, pummeling it against her drawn up knee.

  Abby was alone in the nursery. The wide empty bed, her wavy hair hanging down made her look younger, more innocent. “Maybe at first I wished she’d come,” Abby said, her voice thick with tears, “but I don’t now and here she is—sucking up my soul.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I said. My hand went to her girl’s bony arm. “I’ve thought about it late in the night, trying to understand same as you.” I paused. “She’s cancer, Abby. She’s a cancer.”

  Abby’s eyes looked deeply into mine. I saw the question lurking in her wide-eyed stare and I went on. “Cancer—it’s a kind of madness—not of the mind—but of the physical self. Do you know why?”

  “No,” she shook her head, the strands of hair undulating gently over her upturned knees.

  “Because it runs amok and doesn’t know when to stop. Cancer—it can only live because it has a host in healthy cells. Yet every time it multiplies, it destroys. But it’s so mindless, it doesn’t care and it’ll keep on going ’til all the healthy tissue—

  ’til the very body that supports it—is eaten away and cannot live,” I said.

  Abby looked up, uncomprehending, her tiny knot of a chin with its heartbreaking cleft tilted up at me.

  “Don’t you see what I mean?”

  “No,” she said. I saw her china blue eyes brim, the whites going the silver bright of a mirror.

  “Look here,” I said, thinking medical terms were beyond her. I would appeal to her imagination, but because I knew what I had to say would terrify her, I let my hand steal out to lightly caress the soft filaments of red hair, and to touch—ever so gently—the whitened brow. “I’ve done some reading about demons, possession.”

  She gasped—a hard short intake of breath, and now her hand, unwittingly I was sure, fluttered and lit on the bony cap of my knee. “Demons,” she said.

  “The thing about the undead—they’re just like cancer. They’ll go on taking from the host, getting stronger and stronger.”

  Her hand grazed my knee again, I couldn’t look at her. “They’re driven same as disease—so stupid, mindless they don’t seem to realize if they kill what keeps them alive, they die too. All that matters to these demons is control, winning. They don’t see the human side at all—that winning is really losing.”

  “Lost,” she breathed. “Only one can live, only one can be chosen.” Her hand fell away, her head and shoulders slumped downward.

  And I saw that my words, like the cruelest of knives, sank inside the tender flesh of her understanding.

  ***

  “Oh my God, Stuart, what can we do?”

  Now, her hands clasped my wrist painfully, moving in opposite directions like those of a widow woman watching a stage melodrama and hanging mindlessly onto the velvet-clad bar in the first row of the balcony.

  “Abby, you’re hurting my skin.”

  “Oh, I’ve given you an Indian burn.” The hands flew off my thick wrist. “Sorry.”

  I nodded.

  “But what’ll we do?”

  Without meaning to, I spoke my thought aloud. “Ruth said your mother was able to come back because you two were separated.”

  A light dawned in her eyes, her words came in a slow stammer. “Then—then you must do the surgery, beloved,” she said, her eyes peering into the depths of mine.

  “Surgery—”

  “No one knows we’ve been separated. I’ve been thinking about what Ellie said. She’s right. They’ll accuse you of my father’s murder. But if we…if we’re reattached and Ellie and I are one, then my mother can’t intervene.”

  “What are you saying? Abby, it will be the worse for me!” I shouted, panic rising inside me. “If they believe you two can’t move about and are cripples, there is no other conclusion! That only leaves me to have done it! Don’t you see, even if one of
you was known to hate him–to despise him, wish him in his grave a thousand times a thousand days over—together, attached—she’d have to convince her sister to carry out the deed! Two in tandem.” I held up my two fingers locked along the vertical of the knuckles. “All right, one might be mad, one might be vengeful—but two! It would take the two of you to carry out the crime!” I’d slipped to my knees and now my big head was buried between her slight thighs, and I felt her hands moving through the thatch of my hair.

  “In your own way you’re telling me because of the amputation they might think it was Ellie—”

  “Regina had control, but it was her!”

  “Are you protecting me, or yourself?”

  “Both,” I cried.

  “Ssh, we have now.”

  “Now,” I said, turning my own tear-streaked face up to hers.

  “Yes, we have this moment.” She paused. “But afterwards, you’ve got to take Ellie…”

  “Take her—”

  “Stuart,” she pleaded, “it’s her only chance….”

  “But you don’t make sense,” I said. “How will taking Ellie prevent Regina from breaking though?” I got up to pace. “You said maybe she doesn’t even need you—either of you—to come through!”

  “I was wrong. She might not need our willingness or consent, but she needs a body. I have your love. And I’m afraid for Ellie, because if I can’t control her—”

  “Please.” I stopped, took her hands in mine. “Forget this…so-called surgery. Let’s just leave, go away—you and me.”

  She lifted her head, her eyes were bright. Her voice was the strongest, bravest thing I ever heard. Soft and resigned, it went to a place I could not understand with any part of my fallen mind, my guilt-tortured soul.

  “No. Because I see the surgery now in a way that defies the sense, the logic of the thing, but I know in my soul it has to be done—the same way I know the bluebird that makes its nest every spring in yonder apple tree.”

  I’d caught the word—it was one of my own, and even if I was in country New York, ‘yonder’ was not a term of that place or time. I only fell into using it when my accent slipped through drink or fatigue—still, Abby had usurped my southernism.