The Abortionist's Daughter (4 page)

“Certainly possible,” said Ernie.

“Somebody from the Coalition, did you think of that? They could have just walked through the house and gotten the layout of everything.”

Ernie shrugged and agreed that there were a lot of people who didn’t like what Diana did. “Lots of avenues to explore,” he said. “We’re just getting started. Look, Frank, I hate to say this, but you should—well, you should call your attorney.”

For the first time that evening Frank felt himself stand erect. It was surreal, being on this end of the telescope, but he was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of watching him act like a suspect at this point. He would have liked a cigarette right now, to tell the truth. He would have liked a good stiff drink. He would have liked to fall fast asleep, and wake up in the morning to find it was all a dream.

“Thanks for the tip,” he told Ernie, “but I’m more concerned about my daughter right now.”

—————

It was probably the only time in her life when, while under the influence of a recreational drug, Megan would be glad to see the police.

The two officers wrenched open the passenger door, pulled her out, and helped her into the back of the squad car. For a few seconds she forgot why she was there—the car was warm and she was warm and her neck was no longer spazzing up. But as soon as they crested the hill—as soon as she looked down and saw the ambulance, the police cars, the yellow tape already strung up all around her house—a fish flopped in her stomach. The Big Thing that they’d always lived under the shadow of had happened. It was real. It didn’t seem real, but it was.

She let herself in and walked straight to the solarium, where her father met her, looking rumpled in the day’s workclothes: white shirt, dark trousers.

“Dad,” she said as he hugged her, “Daddy,” and she was glad he was holding her because her knees went wobbly and she saw zigzag lights and she knew it had nothing to do with any green clover-shaped pill.

She glanced around the room. There were people milling around, and they all looked at her. There on the green tiled floor was the long white-sheeted form. Suddenly Megan felt herself splitting into two people, the girl with the wobbly legs versus the girl watching it all unfold on TV.

“Come on, I’ll make you some tea,” her father was saying, but Megan broke free from his arm and went and knelt by her mother. The only other time she had been in the room with a dead person was at Ben’s funeral, and Ben certainly hadn’t been covered with a white sheet; he’d been plumped and rouged and laid down to sleep in his Superman pajamas, and everybody who walked by the coffin seemed to want to touch his face, which had pissed her off, for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on.

Megan turned back the sheet. Her mother’s face was puffed and gray and froggy-looking. The girl with the wobbly legs went fuzzy and sat down while the girl watching TV took over.

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” her father said. “It looks like she had a nasty blow to her head.”

“By someone else?”

“Possibly.”

“So, like, someone did this to her?”

“Let’s wait for the autopsy, honey,” said her father.

Megan stood up and looked at all the people standing around her. “You guys think someone killed her?”

“That’s what the detectives are here for,” said her father. “This is Detective Berlin,” he said. “And Detective Vogel.”

Megan looked at the detective with the blue eyes. The gold earring. The shadow of a beard. She looked away. How the fuck?

The detective stood there with his hands awkwardly on his hips, and she willed him not to say anything about the fogged-up windshield, because her father would get on her case for not getting the defroster fixed.

“I lost traction,” she explained. “I slid into a ditch. I could see fine.” Shut up, she thought. Who needs to know?

“I figured as much,” the detective said. “In any case I’m glad you made it home. Of course, I’m terribly sorry,” he added.

Megan went over and sat by the edge of the pool, looking at her mother’s form. The girl with the wobbly legs had vanished by now, and Megan found herself wondering if her mother had been frightened. Or did she even know what was happening? Maybe she just slipped. Then again, maybe somebody sneaked in and hit her over the head. She told herself it didn’t matter, her mother was dead either way, and she wondered if her mother had forgiven her for the things she said, for her
attitude,
that morning.

“Come on,” her father said, taking her arm. “We’ll go out to the kitchen.”

“Actually,” Ernie began, “actually, Frank, the two of you really need to find someplace else to go. You’ve got a lot of friends.”

Her father’s face hardened. “I certainly do have a lot of friends,” he said without any trace of a smile, “but it’s my house, and I’m going to go and make my daughter a cup of tea.”

Ernie glanced at Huck. “Actually we just want to prevent this from turning into another—”

“You think I’m going to fuck with things?”

“It’s a question of following procedure, Frank,” said Ernie.

“Fine. I’m following procedure. I’m being a father.”

Ernie was about to say something back, but Huck caught his elbow and drew him aside. Frank and Megan walked out into the hall.

“What was that all about?” said Megan.

“Our house is a crime scene,” said Frank. “They don’t want us contaminating the evidence. In fact, we’re not even supposed to be here right now, but too bad. I’m making us some tea.”

Suddenly Megan remembered her mother’s stash. She hurried ahead into the kitchen and opened up the spice cupboard, spun the lazy Susan, and took the jar of thyme, which was not thyme at all, and dumped the dried buds and leaves down the garbage disposal and turned on the water and ran the disposal. Her father looked on.

“We don’t need to cloud the issues, Dad,” she told him. “It’s okay. Really.” She dried the jar with a paper towel, replaced the lid, and put it back in the cabinet. “
Really,
Dad. So what happened?”

“I came home around four,” her father said. “We had a brief exchange.”

“You mean a fight?”

“Something like that.”

“Over what?”

Her father looked at her strangely then, as if to imply that she shouldn’t be asking, and she wanted to say,
You’re going to keep me in the dark?
But something in his eyes told her that it wasn’t anything to press at the moment, and she kept silent and watched as her father set the teakettle on the burner, opened the tea drawer, rummaged around, opened the cupboard, got out cups. She had a vague sense that the two detectives would go ballistic if they could see everything she and her father were touching here in the kitchen, but she was reassured by the fact that her father was a prosecutor. He would know what was right and what was wrong, in circumstances such as these.

Besides, if there were clues to be found, they wouldn’t be in the kitchen. She glanced around, trying to view the room as the detectives might view it. A pile of unopened mail lay recklessly tossed on the center island, and a basket of white laundry sat unfolded on the floor. Other than that, the kitchen was relatively tidy. A queer feeling came over her as she suddenly realized that she no longer felt like this was her house.

“Are they going to make us leave?”

“They’re going to try.” He was pawing through the tea drawer; half the boxes were empty, and he began tossing them angrily into the trash. “Doesn’t she keep any plain old Lipton’s around?”

Megan was about to warn him about certain medicinal teas her mother kept on hand, when Detective Berlin appeared in the doorway. “You guys have a dog?”

“No,” said Frank.

“Because there are a bunch of paw prints out back.”

“What about human footprints?”

“Not that we can find. Then again, it’s been snowing all day. It doesn’t surprise me.” The detective looked troubled, and Megan felt her heart begin to race. Between her mother’s pot and Natalie’s ecstasy, she had a lot of things that she would rather keep to herself at the moment.

“Here’s the thing I don’t get,” he went on. “Diana was a lady with a bounty. She had a direct line to the police station. Why would she put her house on the Home Tour?”

Frank didn’t mention that that was another thing they’d fought about.

“Just seems weird,” the detective went on. “Because if I was getting threats on my life, I wouldn’t want all these strangers tromping through. Can you shed any light on this?”

“No,” said Frank. “No I cannot, sir.”

The detective waited, then shrugged. “That and the broken lock. Oh, well.” He glanced around the room. “Hey look, between you and me, I know you’re not going to mess around with things but see, Ernie gets pretty uptight over stuff like this.”

“We’re not messing with things,” Frank said.

“I know that.”

“This is weird,” said Megan, glancing from one man to the other.

“It’s just Ernie’s a real stickler for procedure,” the detective said. “So if you could call—”

“Excuse me,” said Frank. “Did you just lose your wife?”

“I did not,” said Huck.

“Did you just lose your mother?”

“I did not.”

“Then give us a little peace in here, okay?”

(“Really weird,” Megan murmured.)

Huck scratched the back of his head.

“Thank you,” said Frank.

“What’s going on?” Megan demanded as Huck left the room, but her father didn’t answer. He was flipping through the Rolodex on Diana’s kitchen desk, and when he came to the number he was looking for, he picked up the phone and dialed.

“Dad?”

Her father shook his head. “Yeah, Curt,” he said, straightening up. “It’s Frank Thompson. Look, sorry to bother you at this hour, but I’m going to need a little help.

“No,” he said. “It’s not about Megan.”

—————

Upstairs Megan closed the door to her bedroom. She was glad to be alone at this point. She thought it strange that her father was calling an attorney for help. Then again, maybe there were will issues. Or maybe that’s just what you did when someone died: you called your lawyer.

She leaned against the door. Since she’d gone off to college, her mother had been using the room for storage. Summer clothes lay folded and stacked on the bed, old computer parts sat on the floor, an ironing board waited with a shirt over its nose. Megan set the stack of clothes on the floor, turned back the comforter, and slid between the sheets. Staring at the ceiling, she tried to recall just exactly which words had triggered the fight with her mother that morning. She had a way of pushing her mother’s buttons. And oh my god, push them she had.

She lay there and felt her heart pound against the wall of her chest. She took her pulse, calculated a hundred beats a minute. She never should have taken the second half of the ecstasy. She assured herself that her father was clueless; he was way too preoccupied, and besides, he never suspected anything with her. (Worried about, yes; suspected, no. Unlike her mother, who didn’t worry but suspected everything.) The detective, on the other hand . . .

There was no way she was going to sleep. For someone whose mother had just died, she felt awfully numb. She waited for a flood of emotion, but it didn’t come. Outside it continued to snow, and she watched it through her window, big fat flakes spinning and swirling. She tossed and turned. She was thirsty but didn’t want to risk running into her father out in the hallway, so she just stayed in bed and was thirsty.

Around two in the morning she heard her mother’s voice in the hallway.
Frank? Is Megan back yet? Are you coming up to bed, Frank?
Immediately Megan recognized this as the hallucination it was. She forced herself to take some long, deep gulps of air, at which point she finally began to cry.

And lying there in the dark, Megan Thompson cried without stopping, in chopped, rocky sobs that terrified her: for even a girl who had lost a brother at the age of nine had no idea just how devastating it could feel to lose a mother at the age of nineteen.

CHAPTER THREE

——————

MEGAN HAD ALWAYS
had a lot of boyfriends in her life. When she was three it was Bo, who lisped; when she was four it was Tyler, who wheezed. At the age of five she shared her first brief kiss with a boy named Nick, who parked himself in front of her and then tipped forward like one of those magnetic kissing dolls. It was a huge letdown.

Throughout grade school there was always one boy or another calling the house. Because Megan was not just pretty but smart and responsible as well, boys called under the pretense of needing help with their math, spelling, geography—anything to talk to her. Boys who in their all-male groups made gagging faces at the mere mention of a girl’s name would secretly invite Megan to their private family birthday dinners at Casa Bonita down in Denver, where the bland Mexican food took second billing to the teenage cliff divers who daringly plunged from faux cliffs into bubbling pools
right beside your very own table
!

In junior high there was Matt, who skied, and Brendan, who snowboarded, and Kyle, who skateboarded. Nobody lasted more than a month or two. Not that she meant to be cruel; she just lost interest after a few movies and make-out parties. Mostly Megan saw the boys as an equal opportunity for cross-gender education, so that when Kyle stuck his hand up her shirt and ran his fingers over her budding nipple, she stuck her own hand down into his pants and touched the soft tip of his penis. To Megan, breast buds and penis tips felt about the same.

Yet by the time she reached high school, Megan decided she was ready for something more serious. She scouted out the older boys (who were also scouting her out), and when Homecoming rolled around in October of her sophomore year, she had narrowed her choice to two boys: Duane, who played soccer and logged onto his e-mail account every night as “nutkicker22,” and Bill, a more studious boy from her Advanced Placement U.S. Government class, who had been urging her to join the debate team since September.

Bill Branson was outspoken about everything. He called the president a liar. He called Fox News a bunch of liars. He called the school board narrow-minded and the city council a bunch of weenies. And in their government class one day, he made a point of calling Justice Blackmun a hero for writing the
Roe v. Wade
decision.