A Stiff Critique (31 page)

“Wayne’s coming home tomorrow,” I told Carrie when I picked her up at her house.

She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed in celebration. And as she squeezed, I couldn’t help but think of her and Travis. Would Travis be able to come home to Carrie once he was cleared of suspicion of murder? And only if he was cleared?

Carrie didn’t talk much as I drove to Donna’s house. But her spine was straight and her brows were puckered in thought. The Toyota’s gears weren’t the only ones turning in the car.

“Hi, you guys!” Donna greeted us as we came in the door. She threw out her arms enthusiastically, almost knocking Carrie’s Tupperware from her hands. “This meeting’s going to be incredibly fun…”

I checked behind her for children. I didn’t see any. Or any toys. Only adults. I saw Mave and Russell on a sofa, and waved.

“Dustin and Dacia are at their father’s,” Donna went on. “We’re divorced, but we still have this really complex relationship…”

Across from Mave and Russell, I saw Joyce sitting next to Travis. And there were two men I didn’t know, standing up. I took a closer look.

“…but he had an incredibly painful childhood, so now he’s trying to create a different one for our kids…”

The two men were big and solidly built, dressed in suits. One of them started toward us. And as he did, my heart jumped in my chest. I recognized his stride.

“…takes real integrity to, well, to overcome…”

It was one of the guys who had taken Donna’s floppy from the top of my pinball machine. One of the guys who had broken into Carrie’s. One of the guys who worked for Donna’s father.

“Mafia,” Carrie whispered from beside me.

I grabbed her elbow and took a quick step backwards toward the door. Too late.

“We’d appreciate it if you’d both sit down,” the man walking toward us said in a surprisingly high voice.

He nodded toward a set of empty chairs grouped near the sofas. His hand was in his pocket. My own hands began to sweat. Did he have a gun in that pocket?

I looked at Donna, but she had turned already to walk to her own seat. All I could see was the back of her dark, tangled hair.

I turned to Carrie. She lifted her eyebrows ever so slightly, then made her way slowly over to a chair and sat down. I followed her example and wondered if her legs felt as weak as mine did. I scanned the faces around me once I was seated. Mave and Travis both looked angry. Joyce looked miserable. And Russell’s expression was as unreadable as ever.

No one was smiling. Except for Donna. I could see the grin on her face now that we were both sitting down. Why the hell was she grinning? Was she happy to see these guys?

“What—” I began.

But then the doorbell rang again. Donna didn’t bother to get up this time. The man with his hand in his pocket did host duty and ushered Vicky through the door. Silently. Vicky’s eyes widened as he shut the door behind her, but she came and sat next to Carrie without further prompting. Then she wrapped her thin arms around herself and shut her eyes. Not a bad approach, all things considered.

Were these guys the murderers, after all? I still found it hard to believe. Slade had said he was meeting someone from the group, not someone from Donna’s family—

“Oh goody, everyone’s here now,” Donna announced cheerfully from her chair.

The man with his hand in his pocket cleared his throat.

“Our boss asked us to apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you in this group,” he reeled off. Then he paused and looked down at the floor.

“Due to our overzealousness,” whispered the other guy.

“Oh, yeah,” said the first one. “Due to our overzealousness—”

“You mean stealing manuscripts and terrorizing people!” Travis burst out. He jumped to his feet and threw out his hands. My heart took another leap. What if this guy shot Travis?

“Listen, you two,” Travis ranted on, unheeding. “You gotta stop this shit! You can’t break into people’s houses and take stuff. Don’t you know you scared people?”

The man who had been speaking turned an ugly glare in Travis’s direction. Then he took one deliberate step toward him. Travis stood his ground and glared right back. Damn. The man took another step. I held my breath. Then the other man caught hold of the first man’s coat and gave it a good yank.

“We’re apologizing,” he whispered.

“Oh, yeah.” The first man took a big breath and clenched his fists. I was glad to see that those fists were empty. No gun in either hand.

He screwed up his face and plodded on. “Although we have done no illegal acts, we realize our efforts to protect our boss may have been misconstrued. We are very sorry.”

That said, the first man walked to the front door and opened it. The second man said “goodbye” politely and followed him out.

“Holy mother of jumping beans!” Mave shouted as the door slammed shut behind them.

And then suddenly everyone was on their feet babbling and cutting each other off.

“I thought we were goners—”

“I shoulda punched the guy—”

“Ye gods and goddesses—”

“Why didn’t you tell us what they were here for?” I demanded, focusing on Donna.

“Can I use your phone?” Joyce asked her at the same time.

“Oh sure,” Donna said over her shoulder and then turned back to me. “I wanted it to be a surprise, like a gift—”

“A gift!” Mave interrupted. “You almost ended this old woman’s days with your gift.”

We had all progressed to the stage of cheering and back-slapping when Joyce came back from the kitchen.

But Joyce didn’t look any happier than she had ten minutes ago. Her face wore no smile and her eyes looked even redder than they had the night before.

“May I read today?” she asked in a near whisper. “I think today will be my last day here.”

“Well, I was planning on reading,” Russell said, the uncharacteristic grin leaving his face as quickly as it had appeared. “But if you need—”

“Hey,” Travis cut in. “It’s Russell’s turn. We decided that a couple of meetings ago—”

“That’s okay,” Russell cut back in, his voice as subdued as Joyce’s face. “It’s fine if Joyce wants to take my place.”

No one was cheering anymore when we all sat back down. Joyce’s solemnity had infected us all.

What was so serious that she had to read now? That she wouldn’t be coming back? Could she be ready to confess to murder? For a moment I was sure of it. I felt it in my bones, in the quivering of the blood in my veins. But why? Why would Joyce have killed Slade and Nan?

I took a better look at Joyce, saw the tears in her eyes, and my brain switched gears. Was Joyce sick? Terminally ill?

And finally, a third possibility occurred to me. What if she was going to name the murderer, and the murderer was a friend? I resisted looking in Travis’s direction as Joyce walked over to her seat and picked up a tote bag with “Operation Soup Pot” printed across it.

She stuck her hand in the bag, then brought it back out empty.

“I’ll just tell you, I think,” she murmured.

Then she hugged the tote bag to her torso and began her speech.

“I have good reason to abhor violence,” she declared, her voice louder than I’d heard it before. “I grew up in a series of foster homes. My foster parents were good enough people, it was me that was attached to anger and hatred. My sin—my karma—is violence.”

She closed her eyes before going on. “They tell me I never ‘bonded.’ I had three or four temper tantrums a day, abused animals and my friends—those few that I had. I tore the wallpaper off the walls. And flailed. And hit. And hurt. My third set of foster parents put me in therapy. I was diagnosed with what they call an ‘attachment disorder’ today. Apparently, my mother couldn’t take care of me as an infant and I was passed around to relatives and friends. It doesn’t matter. I don’t remember that part.”

She took a series of deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

Then she said, “What I do remember is trying to strangle my third foster parents’ little girl.”

- Twenty-Four -

I stopped breathing. Joyce was confessing, all right. But what was she confessing to?

“What are you trying to say?” Travis demanded.

Joyce opened her eyes and looked at him, a half smile beatifying her plain face for a moment.

“I’m talking about violence,” she explained, her voice just above a whisper. “How attachment to anger and hatred precludes real peace.”

Travis frowned his confusion at her. I didn’t blame him. Joyce hadn’t really explained herself at all. Was she confessing to Slade’s murder? To Nan’s? Maybe the childhood Joyce had been violent, but the adult Joyce standing before us, clutching her “Operation Soup Pot” tote bag? No, she just couldn’t be a murderer. I let out the breath I’d been holding. But if she wasn’t confessing, what the hell was she struggling to tell us? I tried to see past her oversized glasses into her eyes. And then she closed them again.

“My third foster parents sent me away,” she resumed, volume returning to her voice. “By then, I began to realize I had a problem. By my sixth foster home I really tried to improve. I did counting exercises when the rage came on me.

But it was no good. I beat up a boy at school. They say I almost killed him—”

“We know all about your feelings toward violence,” Vicky interrupted, her voice harsh with impatience. “When are you going to do your reading?”

Joyce opened her eyes again, this time to look at Vicky.

“Just consider this my reading,” she suggested mildly. “It is important to me. There is a point.”

Vicky jerked her thin shoulders in what I guessed was a shrug. A very hostile shrug.

Joyce went on, keeping her eyes open now, focused somewhere in the space above our heads. “I spent the rest of my childhood in juvenile hall. A therapist there taught me to meditate, to find that place that is pure awareness. Pure stillness. Pure peace. She was good to me.” Joyce took off her glasses and wiped a sparkle of tears from her eyes. “I really tried. I studied and meditated. And helped cook in the kitchen.” Her voice broke as she said, “I was released on my eighteenth birthday.”

Mave rose from her seat and put her arm around Joyce’s shoulders. “You just say what you need to say, honey,” she advised, her raspy voice low and gentle.

Joyce nodded and took a few wheezing breaths. It hurt just to hear her. Then she put her glasses back on.

“I went to college in the late sixties,” she pressed on, her voice thick with emotion now. “And discovered politics. The United States was in a terrible war, the Vietnam War. Young men were dying in violence. I was against violence. I joined a radical group and dropped out of school, working in a restaurant to make a living. Then the group I’d joined became even more radical. We formed a commune and worked hard, smuggling and dealing dope to finance our own underground railroad for young men escaping the draft.”

A jolt shot up my spine, jerking my back straight. Slade’s manuscript. That was the connection.

“
Cool Fallout
” Carrie whispered next to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Russell nod slowly.

But I still didn’t want to believe this woman was a murderer. Buddhists didn’t murder, did they?

Joyce kept one hand around her tote bag as she reached into it with the other. My pulse pounded even harder. What if she had a weapon in there? But the only thing she brought out was a Kleenex. She took off her glasses again and wiped her eyes, one-handed.

“It seemed worth it to help stop the violence,” she told us, then dropped the glasses and the Kleenex into the bag. “One day a sheriff came driving out to the commune. We had over twenty kilos of marijuana in the back room. And a stack of forged documents in the front room. We tried to keep him out of the house. A guy from the commune grabbed his arm. But that just made things worse. The sheriff shook the guy off and forced his way inside. He looked around, smiled at us and went back out to make a call from his car.”

She hugged her tote bag tighter. “Everyone started grabbing their stuff to leave. I took my purse and backpack; I didn’t have time to pack anything else.” Her voice took on speed. “The sheriff was walking up the middle of the driveway as I was driving the van out with two passengers. The sheriff waved his arms to stop us. But I was going too fast. I jerked the wheel and tried to miss him, but he jumped in the same direction. I hit him. And drove over him. And didn’t look back.”

Mave’s arm came slowly away from Joyce’s shoulders. But Joyce didn’t seem to notice. She was too involved in her story.

“We heard that night on the radio that he was dead. Within an hour, I picked up a forged passport from one of our contacts and left the country for Canada. I never saw any of the people from the commune again. I dyed my hair black and permed it.

I put on thick glasses that I didn’t need. And I cooked for a living. And meditated. And tried to atone. Once, I slapped a man in all those years, but only once. I thought the violence had left me.

“After fifteen years, I came back to the United States. An acquaintance smuggled me in for a price, no questions asked. And I lived without a legal identity. I was sure my fingerprints were on file. I couldn’t undertake any profession where they took fingerprints. I was even afraid to get a driver’s license. But I was a good cook. And I didn’t allow myself relationships. Relationships mean questions.”