The Bluest Blood (31 page)

But I had more important things than her to consider. Jake and Loren were in the basement with time running out, or already dead. I looked around. The detonating gun had flown out of Tea’s hand, bouncing on its own trajectory down to the floor, just out of reach.

I looked at her. Her skin was ashen, her breathing shallow. She wasn’t going to pop up this instant, so I took my foot off her chest and grabbed her weapon. She struggled to sit up. I aimed the gun. Wasn’t there something I had to do before being able to pull the trigger? Was it in the right position now or had the fall pushed it back?

Only way to find out… I aimed straight up. This is a test, I muttered, this is only a test. In case of a real emergency…

It worked. I stood in a small hailstorm of plaster dust and fragments.

Tea fell back down, her eyes wide.

“Do not move,” I said. “Do not even think about moving.” I felt John Wayne–ish now, able to speak calmly and carry a big gun. I pointed the weapon in her general direction and tried to figure out what to do with her while I got the guys out of the basement.

But as I thought about it, I heard footsteps. Whose? Too many feet and steps for two people. And sirens? Loudspeakers and breaking glass? And all from the wrong direction in the house, the front of it. Near me.

And wait—Jake and Loren couldn’t get themselves out, that was the whole point, and if I hadn’t unlocked that cellar door, who was it pounding toward me—

“She! She—” Tea screamed. “Get her! She attacked me!”

I was grabbed from behind. “Drop it!” an authoritarian voice bellowed directly into my ear.

“I’m not the one—”

He didn’t seem in a mood for discussion. “Drop it!” he shouted, real menace in his voice. This was how cops got bad reps. I’d just been through hell—the least he could be was polite.

Nevertheless, I dropped the gun.

“She! She—” Tea said. “Arrest her! Look at her—she—”

“No!” I said. “She’s the—” My version was going to be a hard sell. Tea, rumpled and bruised, had a pathetic, victimized aura. Her wig was off and her semibald head made her look much older and a whole lot feebler than she was, but still patrician. Still the lady of the manor. All the same, couldn’t they let me explain how I’d climbed a laundry chute, tackled an armed murderer, and saved her prisoners?

Maybe not that last part. I didn’t hear any sound from below. “The basement,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” the cop muttered.

“No, listen, the back stairs—locked—there’s two men down there and exhaust fumes coming in.”

“Lady, we know.” But how could he? He did nothing except snap handcuffs on me as if I hadn’t said a word.

I tried again. “You don’t understand, there are two men who will die if you—”

“Hold it a minute? We’re busy.” The policemen—not a female among them—swarmed, one helping Tea Roederer sit up and shakily attempt getting to her feet, another studying the bullet-aerated ceiling, another making note of the de-limbed Shiva, another wandering off, presumably to inspect the manse.

“You have this backward,” I said. “I’m the goodie!” That apparently lacked convincing power or finesse. “I’m not the villain!” Now I sounded old-fashioned, out of a twirling-mustache melodrama, the wrong century’s drama. “There are men in real danger down—”

“Let her go!”

Loren! Loren? Loren with the policeman who’d left the room. And Jake right behind. Loren, looking more physically rumpled and scattered than he ever had, but stronger inside—taking charge for the first time. Facing down men with guns. The man had possibilities. “She isn’t the one!” he said. “She is.” He pointed at Tea.

“You the fellow got in touch?”

“My son did. This boy here. My son.” He put his arm around Jake’s shoulder, a touch to reaffirm that Jake was a real person. The light of belated comprehension in his eyes was so bright, you could have read by it. “He saved the day,” he said.

What had happened between them because of the crisis was good. Even great. But what he was saying didn’t make sense.
I’d
saved the day, hadn’t I?

“Hey—you’re the kid was at the station this morning.” Jake had been singlehandedly justifying the Radnor Township police force’s payroll. “About the mister here. The hit-and-run.”

Jake nodded.

“Well, you’re a smart kid. Fast thinking.” The policeman actually cracked a smile. All was forgiven. And all of me forgotten. I was still handcuffed and unacknowledged and they were deep into an incomprehensible conversation. “The call we got was from Idaho.” The cop chuckled after he said it.

“Jeez,” Jake said. “I thought there’d be somebody closer. He did it by phone?”

“She, and the answer is yes. Her 911 dispatcher did it.”

Loren saw my befuddlement. “I told you. You know, in the chute.”

“Shoot?” one of the cops said. “You talking about those holes in the ceiling? Good thing nobody got hurt, but you want to explain, Miss?”

“We’re talking laundry chute,” I said.

“I forgot to lock the upstairs door.” Tea sounded on the verge of tears. “I never thought anyone could climb up there, but she did. She got out.”

“Stop whining!” I snapped. Lord knows Tea had made me feel bad for presuming to be her equal, when all along, I was her better. “You’re a phony. I don’t mean the money you stole or the murders—I thought this was about banned books, while it was about cooked books. Your special talent. The truth is, you don’t believe in free speech. Not for Harvey Spiers. Not even for your husband.”

“Run that by me again, lady?” the cop said. “Maybe backtrack to the robbing and killing part?”

“About my arms,” I said. “Loren, Jake, tell them again. Tell them I’m okay.” I turned to my cop. “Couldn’t you take these things off me?”

He looked fuddled. Jake and Loren had somehow passed muster, but I’d been aiming a gun at a social icon. Nobody was ready to release me. It was possible I’d be in cuffs forever.

And I might have been, except that at that moment, Mackenzie walked in. He didn’t have a big white horse, but still and all, there he was. Like magic. I turned so he could see my handcuffs and rescue me.

“Hold it, mister!” a cop said.

Mackenzie identified himself. I waited, full of hope.

Jake beamed. “You read your e-mail,” he said.

Mackenzie nodded while he scanned the room—the guys, the police, Tea—me. I smiled at him, flooded with relief. He scowled back. My jaw dropped. Nothing made sense.

“What’s this about mail?” the cop asked.

“The computer has a modem,” Jake said. “I should have realized sooner. That means a telephone line, even though there’s no phone. That’s how I get online, where we already were. Dumb of me not to get it sooner. So I e-mailed everybody I’ve ever had on my list, even you, because you gave me your address.” He nodded toward Mackenzie, then looked at the policemen. “I said this wasn’t a prank and to get help fast. I figured somebody, somewhere, would get the message. I told them the address and the name of the police force and said to call them. And they did.”

“By the time we left the station, at least a dozen people had called,” the cop said. “I’m sure there’s been more since then.”

Computer. That’s what Loren had been trying to say. Not that I was cuter. Internet. Jake.

So my climb, the terror, the exhaustion, the fight on the stairs—all that had been an exercise in futility. I was a downsized hero, replaced by electronics. I never got my fifteen minutes of fame. Not even fifteen seconds.

“And here we are,” Loren said.

“But the fumes,” I said. “So much time went by—I was sure you were dead. How did you survive?”

“Weren’t you listening?” He laughed. Mackenzie still looked grim. I wanted to slug both of them. I was concerned about my increasingly violent fantasies, but that might be a possible side effect of climbing up a laundry chute to no applause. “Loren,” I said, “I was busy—and you didn’t speak clearly, and I will kill you if they ever uncuff me—”

Mackenzie made a barely perceptible nod, as if he were the Caesar of Radnor, sparing my life. “She’s misguided,” he said. “Overfond of drama and hyperbole and often weird. But not a criminal. Of course, all this could have been less melodramatic if she’d left a note.
Said
where she was headed.”

“Sorry,” I muttered. That’s what he was miffed about. It wasn’t enough to scale the heights if I messed up on basics, like cohabitation etiquette.

“Why keep your whereabouts a secret?” Mackenzie asked.

Secrets again, those slippery shape-changers, even when unintentional. Sometimes good, just as often, bad. This time, dangerous.

“You could have died!” He cared.

“It won’t happen again,” I said.

“You mean next time you’re in a locked basement with poison coming through the window you’ll write a note tellin’ me that?”

The cop uncuffed me. My wrists hurt even after that short time. “Loren?” I redirected my amorphous hostility his way.

But he only grinned. “I tried and tried to tell you that Griffin’s car ran out of gas.”

Gas, not grass. Griffin, not fin. Ran out of gas!

Tea Roederer said a nasty Anglo-Saxon word. Something had finally rattled her.

Jake smiled. “He never remembered to fill it. She—” He pointed at Tea, whose skin was maroon with rage. “Mrs. Roederer was always on his case about it. Sometimes she’d have to come get him when he’d run out, and man, would she be furious. That’s why when we’d sneak out at night, we’d take one of the other cars. They always had gas.”

How pragmatic those imaginary Roederers were, always fully tanked and prepared to cut out on a moment’s notice.

Tea fumed, practically erupting into lava flow. She had stolen millions and killed two men—one her own husband. But everything paled beside the fact that her adopted son had once again failed to keep his tank full. Teenagers can indeed be infuriating.

“When you’re living with me, you’d better be more conscious of your gas tank than Griffin was,” Loren told his son.

Jake beamed.

“It was a kind of dramatic learning experience,” Loren said to me. “Clichéd, I suppose. Don’t know what you have till you nearly lose it. That kind of thing. I’m not putting him in danger again. I’ll work it through with Betsy.”

“I’m glad,” I said. And I was.

*

And I still am. It was all—the part I believed for too long—a fairy tale. And in an oddly fitting way, it had a mostly happy ending.

Harvey Spiers is, of course, beyond happiness or sorrow. But since he believed he held the copyright on morality, I must assume he’s reaping his just and eternal rewards in whatever segment of eternity he earned. That makes some of us happy, if not Harvey.

His erstwhile stepson’s letters sent by e-mail via Mackenzie make it clear that life with his father is easier and saner than life here had been. Jake also writes that Griffin is thoroughly enjoying the life of an ordinary kid in an ordinary house with his extremely ordinary relatives.

My mother’s happy because she doesn’t know a few things. She’s gotten a glowing report on Good Citizen Mackenzie, and she doesn’t know there was no investigation. And she’s happy, even though she doesn’t know it, because I have decided to keep her secret about a time when she was desperately unhappy. What I’ve come to feel is that her history is her property, to share only when she so decides.

So I suppose I’ve made Detective Skippy happy, too.

Betsy, of course, is not happy, but since being unhappy apparently gives her pleasure, that’s not a sad outcome, either. She’s wearing makeup and bright colors nowadays, has found a new residence, and is reportedly dating a corporate executive of the shark variety who will surely provide her with sufficient misery to keep her motors going.

And Mother Vivien is free, no longer under suspicion of murder and now the sole ruler of the Moral Ecologists, so she got what she wanted—the right to be the boss of making everybody else unhappy.

As for me, I’m happily learning more about living with someone. I think we might get it all straightened out about the same time as the Arabs and Israelis do, but we’re having more fun than they are with the learning process.

Sometimes, I sit in the loft and think about Tea and Neddy. Not the shabby people they really were, but the myth it was their genius to create, that fabulously wealthy, fun-loving, globe-hopping, party-giving couple with the right values and a sense of noblesse oblige that royalty would envy. Who needed reality when such extravagant make-believe was available?

Now their house is empty, and its contents sold off. Neddy is dead and Tea’s in prison for the rest of her days. I don’t miss them at all—but I do, now and then, remember the art and the priceless books and her beaded dress and the merriment and the extravagant gestures that expanded the possible and were fun, even vicariously.

Of course they were pretenders, but they played their roles with such zest and bravado they became what they were miming. Neddy and Tea were the Roederers. Figments, yes. Wearers of extravagant masks and disguises. Fabrications. But also, as real as it gets, even if they never existed.

So now and then, as I curl deeply into my comfortable but unspectacular life, wearing my woolly socks, drinking tea, and marking yet another stack of compositions, I find myself daydreaming about Glamorgan and a great crystal chandelier and the invented couple who existed there for a while.

And I become full of wist. I miss them. I miss their gift of firing our imaginations. I miss their very real generosity. I miss those people who never were.