Exposé: First of the Sally Harrington Mysteries (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 5) Page 2

  "Sally!"

  "I'll write the whole article," I say. "The history of Dudley­town, the mysterious deaths, I won't lie. I'll just—" I hear some­thing, a voice. Far off. I cock my head in that direction. "What was that?"

  We listen.

  "I can't hear anything but the stream," Devon says.

  "I do. I did." I take a few steps over to a ledge. There it is again, a voice in the distance. A woman. I throw my hand out. "Over there. Did you hear that?"

  "No."

  "Somebody's calling. From over there, down there some­where." "But the car's the opposite way, Sal. If you go that way, who knows where—"

  I hear the woman's voice again and it sounds terrified. "I think somebody's in trouble." I start sliding down the embank­ment, a small torrent of rocks and shale coming down with me.

  "It's probably just some kids—" Devon begins, but then he evidently hears it, too, for I glance over my shoulder and see that he's following.

  "Help! Someone please help us!" a woman cries minutes later. "He-e-elp!" a child's voice screams in a dreadful high-pitched voice of terror. "He-e-elp!"

  "We're coming!" I call, crashing through the underbrush, fol­lowing the sound of their voices.

  I dash over the rise, panting, and come upon three figures: a man doubled over on the ground, a woman jumping up and down beside him, and a child squatting on the ground next to the man, covering his eyes with his hands and screaming "He­e-elp!"

  "Oh, thank God!" the woman gasps. "My husband's having a heart attack!"

  I am already down on one knee, gently bringing the man's face toward me. "Hi, what's your name?" I ask while loosening his collar. Beneath his tan, I can see the man's face is ashen, but not the blue or gray color usually associated with heart attacks.

  The man is trying to focus on me. He is gasping, nearly hy­perventilating. "Corbett," he manages to get out.

  "Corbett," I repeat, smiling. "I'm Sally. Corbett, I want you to try and control your breathing, to let it out slowly and draw it in slowly."

  The little boy is still screaming. I glance over at the woman. "Perhaps you could comfort your son." The woman nods and walks over to draw her child—who still has his eyes covered—into her arms.

  I feel the man's pulse. "That's it, slowly in, slowly out. That's it. In-n-n, ou-u-ut, in-n-n, ou-u-ut." I am counting. I get his heart rate; it's high, but nowhere near catastrophic. "Corbett, do you have any pain?"

  He looks confused.

  "Is there a pain in your chest? Or in your neck? Your arm?"

  When he hesitates, I say, "Or is your heart just pounding like it's going to burst. Racing, hard, taking your breath away?"

  "Yes, that's it," he says.

  "That's it, keep breathing—slowly." I look over my shoulder

  to see Devon has arrived. "Put your fanny pack under his head," I direct, turning back to the patient. His color is return­ing to normal, as is his breathing.

  "This is Devon," I explain as we ease the man's head onto Devon's pack. "That's good, your breathing's getting back to normal. Now, try to sip some wa­ter," I suggest, holding my water bottle to his mouth. Gingerly he does, and then settles back on the ground again.

  "That's very good," I say, feeling his wrist again. "Your pulse is almost normal." I look at him intently. "Any pain yet? Any­where?"

  He shakes his head, looking less scared now.

  "I knew we should have brought the cell phone," the woman says. "I could have called Medivac. I must have been mad to drag Corbett up here. It's all my fault." She speaks with an En­glish accent. "But somebody told us about some wretched ghost town and Corbie wanted to see it."

  "Dudleytown," Devon supplies.

  "Poor Dad," the woman says to her son, rocking him.

  "I don't think you've had a heart attack," I tell Corbett. "But we'll call EMS just in case." I glance back at Devon, who takes out his cell phone and punches in 911, pulling his map out and walking away a few steps.

  I smile. "I think you're going to be just fine, Corbett. That you are fine."

  "I'm not having a heart attack?" he says in a completely dif­ferent tone of voice, propping himself up on his elbows.

  "Sally knows about CPR and heart stuff," Devon calls.

  "You do? Is he all right?" the wife asks anxiously. "What's the matter with him?"

  "Have you been under a great deal of stress lately?" I ask him.

  "Yes, he has been," the woman says eagerly, moving back over, now half dragging the child.

  The man nods.

  "Have you been on any new medications?" I ask. "Tranquil­izers, anti-anxiety drugs?"

  He nods. "Yes, as a matter of fact." He looked to his wife. "Verity? What's it called?"

  "I can't remember, darling. It's one of those tranquilizers­—but he was acting so strangely," she adds to me, "I asked him to stop taking it."

  " And you did?"

  He nods. "Yesterday."

  I nod. "I think what you had was a panic attack. It feels like a heart attack, but it's an adrenaline thing, you can't turn it off and it's frightening."

  "Are you a doctor?" the woman asks.

  I have to laugh a little. "Only a reporter, I'm afraid. With lots of unwanted medical experience."

  "Thank God," the woman says, squatting to hug her son and reach for her husband's hand. "Thank God you came along. I don't know what we would have done."

  Only then does the little boy dare look at me. "Is Dad okay?"

  I smile. "I think your dad's going to be just fine."

  He smiles shyly at his father, although he does not let go of his mother.

  "Thank God, Corbett," the woman says, touching the side of the man's face. "I'm sure this woman's right. You look so much better already."

  "I feel like a horse's ass," he quietly admits.

  Click. I've finally realized who these people are. The stylishly attractive woman in her forties, the English accent, the name Verity; the older man, Corbett; and the young child.

  This has to be Verity Rhodes and Corbett Schroeder. She is the glamorous editor of Expectations magazine; he is the busi­ness tycoon enjoying his second or third marriage.

  "Ah," the woman says, studying my face, "I see that you've figured out who we are."

  Perhaps, I think, her mother should have called her Vanity.

  3

  I wish I could say I'm just like my mother. I wish I could say that I'm gentle and patient and attentive and emotionally stable the way genuinely stoic people always are. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm sometimes a bit of a trial. Smart like my mother, yes; honest, to a fault; but there is a compulsive streak in me that def­initely comes from somewhere else. I have been known to swing into blissful, confident highs, and then to drop into seem­ingly inexplicable mires of melancholy blues. Thank heavens I physically resemble Mother, because it is those looks, I'm keenly aware, that have often allowed me to get away with what I do in those compulsive moments between the highs and the lows.

  Everybody says Mother looks a lot like the actress Lee Re­mick used to: wide, startling blue eyes; honey-blond hair and a round face that seems to gain more cheekbones every year. Add a few inches, darken the hair slightly-actually, fade all of Mother's looks a shade or two-agitate her aura, and that's me. (My little brother, Rob, used to say that Mother is like Lee Re­mick in The Omen and I'm just like Damien, the evil offspring.)

  The irony that my mother resembles an actress who died of cancer is not lost on any of us, for Mother very nearly died of it, too. But that was over four years ago and Mother is still very much alive, and she has a new light in her eyes and a spring in her step.

  She is out back in her vegetable garden when I drive up. It's late, almost eight-thirty, but it's still light outside. She has been keeping a huge vegetable garden in the back as long as I can re­member, and there are flower beds all over the yard and along three sides of the house. There is a small potting shed where she stores her tools, which is actually a smokehouse from the l8
50s that my father dragged over from the old estate and converted for her. I always say the property looks very English and Mother always says, no, dear, it's very New England.

  Mother is on summer break from teaching. She is kneeling in the vegetable garden on a stadium seat cushion from Yale (which someone dutifully replaces each year at Christmas-time), wearing a cotton print dress and a big straw hat that is secured with a scarf. At her side is a wicker basket, in which she is care­fully placing green tomatoes. I smile to myself, thinking how Mother has missed her time by half a century or two.

  My dog, Scotty, runs ahead to say hello. He is a collie­-shepherd-retriever from the Humane Society. He sneaks up on Mother and licks her cheek twice before she can get away. "Hello, baby," my mother says softly, talking to Scotty or to me or to both of us. Scotty, feathery tail wagging, wanders off into our neighbor's vast cornfield to look for my mother's dog, a sleek golden retriever named Abigail.

  "You'll never guess who I met in the hills around Dudley­town today," I say.

  "The editor of Expectations magazine and a corporate raider named Corbett," Mother says, looking up. She laughs. "Devon stopped by to pick some beans."

  "So much for my big news."

  Mother stands up and takes her gardening gloves off. "He said you were wonderful, dear, that you calmed those poor people down and did all the right things."

  I shrug. "I don't know about that."

  "I do," she says, stepping toward me. "My little girl has the best bedside manner of any doctor I know."

  She should know, I guess, since she was stuck with me dur­ing her cancer ordeal.

  I walk over to scoop up her basket for her.

  "You're just in time to help me make relish," she says. "Oth­erwise these will rot and go to waste.

  Mother says "to-mah-toes." So do I. So did Rob until he got to high school and said it was too faggy and that he was going to get his head kicked in by less-genteel members of the Castle­ford football team if he didn't cut it out.

  "Isn't it kind of late for you?" I ask as we walk toward the house. Mother almost always gets up at five every morning, and she likes to be in bed with a book by nine.

  "It's such a beautiful night," she says, "I felt like being out­side."

  It is a lovely July evening, warm, but with a slight breeze. Everything is lush and green, the heron is on the pond, the crickets have begun to chirp. The dogs are dashing somewhere around in our neighbor's cornfield because we can hear them and occasionally we see telltale jiggles of the stalks that are al­ready over eight feet high. It's cattle corn this year, though, not sweet corn. Darn.

  "I went to a little soiree tonight with Mack," Mother says, climbing the stairs to the deck.

  "Really," I say, following. Mother has never been without ad­mirers over the years, but the poor guys (usually just divorced, just widowed or just awful, period) rarely got anywhere with her and gave up (or were, I suspect, quickly and politely dis­missed). My friends always said not to worry, Mother would remarry when she was ready, but I still wonder. When I was younger, I figured she refrained from dating out of fear of en­suing violence from Rob and me, or because it was genuinely difficult to find a man who could stand up to my father's mem­ory. Whatever, Mother didn't even go out on a date until I was fifteen, and even then the most death-defying dating situation she ever embarked on was something like a history lecture at the Castleford Public Library.

  It certainly wasn't as if Mother hadn't been approached and propositioned. She had been—big-time. In fact, the loneliest as­pect of her early widowhood, she would say, was not being able to freely socialize. Mother was simply too young and too good-looking, and the husbands of her friends would try to get her alone to profess their love, or worse yet, simply make sexual advances.

  I know because I witnessed it firsthand, once even with a neighbor down the road, Mr. Geister. The furnace had gone dead one very cold winter Sunday morning and Mother had called him in desperation because the furnace man hadn't appeared.

  I was about to go downstairs when I heard a scuffle—Mr. Geister had physically cornered Mother in the little furnace room off the basement—and Mr. Geister gasp, "I'm sorry, Belle, but I love you."

  "I— I need to get by, Paul," I heard Mother say.

  "I won't ever let you go," he whispered.

  "Let go of me." Mother's voice could have cut steel.

  "Belle," he pleaded.

  "Mom!" I called from the stairs. "Mrs. Geister's on the phone. Is Mr. Geister here?"

  "Hello? Hello?" Mr. Geister said into the kitchen phone a few moments later. He sighed and replaced the phone into the re­ceiver. "I guess she hung up." He looked at my mother. "I bet­ter get home."

  "Give Carla my best," Mother said. "And thank her for loan­ing you out." As soon as he left, Mother whirled around. "Young lady, that telephone never rang." And then she grabbed me and hugged me so hard I couldn't breathe.

  We never discussed those episodes, mostly because I think my mother found them somewhat humiliating, as if she thought the men thought she had invited their attentions in some way. (Some pre-feminism myths die hard in my mother's group.) When I was at UCLA I used to wonder how she was managing, since my brother could get hit with a brick before he'd ever realize what was going on.

  But attending a soiree with Mack—this Mack—was news. I had met him twice and this was maybe the tenth time she had mentioned him since. He had been widowed for about three years. He'd been a research physicist—with a Ph.D.—at Pratt Whitney for years, and now was teaching at Wesleyan Univer­sity in Middletown.

  "So what kind of swinging soiree was this?" I ask, following Mother into the kitchen.

  "I didn't say it was swinging," she laughs, avoiding my eyes. "It was just a little garden party at the university to welcome the new faculty."

  I raise my eyebrows but say nothing. 'This is a big deal for Mother—her first appearance with Mack at an official function where he works. She wouldn't have done it unless she expected to be seen there again.

  Mack Cleary is a good candidate for Mother. He is gentle, courteous, physically active and nice-looking. He has one son that is grown and married and living in Atlanta. Mack is terri­bly shy, though, so most of what I know about him comes from Mother. He likes art and music and history, interests that my mother shares. He also moors a sailboat in East Haddam on the Connecticut River, and until my mother married my father and moved to Castleford, she had always kept a sailboat moored in her parents' backyard in Rhode Island.

  I wonder at the small pang of jealousy I suddenly feel on my father's part. After all, he's been dead for twenty-one years.

  As if to ward off my snooping into her personal life, Mother washes the tomatoes in the sink and asks me how things are go­ing between me and Doug.

  "I don't really feel like talking about it, if you don't mind."

  "You need to decide what you're doing, Sally," she says for the twentieth time this year.

  Doug has the same complaint. He says he doesn't know what is going on between us and he's in the relationship. I don't know what to say; I love him, but how much, I don't know. Enough to get married? I don't think so. But maybe. But maybe not.

  Hell if I know. I wonder if other women feel this way when the subject of marriage comes up and they feel as though they have never really experienced a genuine love affair where they felt as though they loved someone with all their heart.

  "Oh, Mother, by the way," I say at the back door after whis­tling for Scotty, "I had Crazy Pete in my office this morning."

  "Oh, that poor soul."

  "Well, he seems okay, Mother. His conspiracy theories keep him very busy and he has his job at the library. And he has that big house to live in with his father, where he can set up all his equipment and listen to Radio Free Martian Land."

  Mother looks out the window over the sink. "I think they're coming out," she says, referring to the dogs. "Oh, there they are!" and she laughs, for Scotty is being pursued by Ab
igail and the two have shucks all over their fur, as if they're camouflaged.

  I slide the screen door open to let them in and pluck the re­maining pieces of com shucks off. "Anyway," I continue, "Pete said something about Daddy and the Masons." I am not about to tell her that he thinks maybe they killed him.

  "Your father was a Mason," she says, petting the dogs and moving to fill the water bowl.

  "He was?"

  She nods. "And his father. And his grandfather, and your great-grandfather's father, and on and on back to Lancashire in merry old England, I believe."

  "Huh."

  She glances over. "Why? What did he say?"

  "Oh, nothing, really. I just didn't know Daddy belonged."

  Mother puts the water bowl down and both dogs go for it. "Your father was a Mason and a Rotarian."

  "How about an Elk?"

  "Hmm," she says, putting her hand on her hip, thinking. "No. He was something else, though. What was it? Unison Club! That's it. Thursday lunch. Rotary was Tuesday, the Ma­sons at night."

  We chat a little more until I look at the clock. Time to get home. Mother walks me to the front door and Abigail walks Scotty. "I'm really glad you have Mack in your life," I tell her.

  She smiles a little, embarrassed. "Thanks, dear."

  "You're supposed to say you're glad Doug's in my life," I prompt her, opening the door.

  "I was when you were a senior in high school," she offers. It's not that she doesn't like Doug, Mother just doesn't understand how I can be thirty and not married, and so she blames Doug for the situation.

  "Good night, Mother," I say, kissing her cheek. "Talk to you later."

  "Good night."

  When I get into my Jeep, I take out my cell phone and call Crazy Pete. The answering machine picks up and I hear Pete's voice say, "Choose carefully the message you leave—"

  "I'm choosing carefully, Pete," I assure him. "Listen, I want to talk to you some more about my father. Call me, will you?" I leave the number. The more I think about it, the more irritated I am. Crazy or not, Pete can't just go around saying stuff like that.