Chapter Twelve
At karate class that night, I wasn’t concentrating, which called down a scolding from Marshall. I was glad we didn’t spar, because I would’ve lost, and I don’t like to lose. Janet teased me as I tied my shoes, accusing me of being abstracted because I was pining for Jack. I managed to half-smile at her, though my impulse was to lash out. Allowing thoughts of a man to disrupt something so important to me was… I subsided suddenly.
It would be quite natural. It would be normal.
But picturing Jack in the shower wasn’t what had distracted me. I’d been thinking of Deedra-her face in death, her positioning at the wheel of her red car. I didn’t know what I could do to help her. I had done all I could. I finished tying my shoes and sat up, staring across the empty room at Becca, who was laughingly instructing her brother in the correct position of his hands for the
After I got home I resumed the task of scanning Deedra’s tapes, since I had promised Marlon that if I found the one that featured him I would give it to him. I found myself feeling a little sick at the idea of him keeping a video of him having sex with a woman now dead, but it was none of my business what he did with it. I disliked Marlon Schuster, though that was maybe stating my feeling for him too strongly. It was more accurate to say I had no respect for him, which was quite usual for me. I had found nothing in him to like except his tenderness for Deedra. But that was something, and I had made him a promise.
I almost dozed off as I looked at the videos. I found myself looking at things I’d never seen before: talk shows, soap operas, and “reality” shows about ambulance drivers, policemen, wanted criminals, and missing children. After viewing a few tapes I could predict what was coming next, her pattern. It was like an up-ended time capsule for the past couple of weeks in television land. When I’d transferred the videotapes into a box, the most recent ones had ended up on the bottom.
Most of the videos weren’t labeled-the ones she’d already watched, I guessed. The labeled ones had abbreviations on them that only gradually began to make sense to me. I discovered that “OLTL” meant
After I’d scanned maybe ten of the tapes, I found the one of Marlon and Deedra. I only watched a second of it, enough to confirm the identity of the couple. (That was all Marlon needed, to get a tape of Deedra with another man.) I put the tape aside with a discreet Post-It.
Since I’d started the job, I kept on with it out of sheer doggedness. I was able to weed out one more home movie-Deedra and our mailman, in partial uniform. Disgusting. All the other videos seemed to contain innocuous television programming. When I got to the bottom, I realized that I could match these shows with the synopses in Jack’s old magazine. These were things Deedra had taped during the week before she died. There was even an old movie Deedra had taped on Saturday morning at the end of one tape.
Deedra had had at least two tapes with previous Saturday night shows on them in her film library. She’d taped the same pattern of shows each weekend. So where was the tape from last Saturday night? She hadn’t died until Sunday; she’d been alive when Marlon had left her Sunday morning, he’d said. Even if I didn’t want to believe Marlon, she’d talked to her mother at church, right? So where was the Saturday night tape?
It was probably an unimportant detail, but unimportant details are what make up housecleaning. Those details add up. A shiny sink, a neatly folded towel, a dustless television screen; this is the visible proof that your house has been labored over.
I was beginning to get a rare headache. None of this made sense. I could only be glad I wasn’t on the police force. I’d be obliged to listen to men tell me day after day about their little flings with Deedra, their moments of weakness, their infidelities. Surely watching a few seconds of homemade porn was better than that, if I was still obliged to clean up after Deedra in some moral way.
It was a relief when the phone rang.
“Lily!” Carrie said happily.
“Mrs. Dr. Friedrich,” I answered.
There was a long pause over the line. “Wow,” she breathed. “I just can’t get used to it. You think it’ll take people a long time to start calling me Dr. Friedrich?”
“Maybe a week.”
“Oh boy,” she said happily, sounding all of eighteen. “Oh, boy. Hey, how are you? Anything big happen while we were gone?”
“Not too much. How was Hot Springs?”
“Oh… beautiful,” she said, sighing. “I can’t believe we have to go to work tomorrow.”
I heard a rumble in the background.
“Claude says thanks for standing up for us at the courthouse,” Carrie relayed.
“I was glad to do it. Are you at your house?”
“Yes. We’ll have to get Claude’s things moved soon. I told my parents about an hour ago! They’d given up hope on me, and they just went nuts.”
“What do you and Claude need for your wedding present?” I asked.
“Lily, we don’t need a thing. We’re so old, and we’ve been set up on our own for so long. There’s not a thing we need.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can see that. What about me cleaning Claude’s apartment after he gets his stuff out?”
“Oh, Lily, that would be great! One less thing we have to do.”
“Then consider it done.”
Carrie was telling Claude what I proposed, and he was objecting.
“Claude says that’s too much on you since you clean for a living,” Carrie reported.
“Tell Claude to put a sock in it. It’s a gift,” I said, and Carrie giggled and gave him the message.
“Lily, I’ll see you soon,” she said. “Oh, Lily, I’m so happy!”
“I’m glad for both of you,” I said. Sooner or later, someone would tell Carrie about the fire, and she’d chide me for not telling her myself. But she didn’t need to come down from her cloud of happiness and be retroactively worried about me. Tomorrow she’d be back at work and so would Claude. The lives of a doctor and a chief of police are not giddy and irresponsible.
The next morning I found myself wondering why I hadn’t heard from Lacey. She’d wanted me to work some more in the apartment. Her marriage crisis must have changed her agenda, and I wasn’t surprised. I worked that morning after all. The gap caused by losing Joe C as a client was filled when Mrs. Jepperson’s sitter called to ask me to come over.
Mrs. Jepperson was having a lucid day, Laquanda Titchnor told me all too loudly as she let me in. Laquanda, whom I held in low regard, was the woman Mrs. Jepperson’s daughter had had to settle for when better aides had all been employed.
Laquanda’s greatest virtues were that she showed up on time, stayed as long as she was supposed to, and knew how to dial 911. And she talked to Mrs. Jepperson, rather than just staring at the television silently all day, as I’d seen other babysitters (of both the young and the elderly) do. Laquanda and Birdie Rossiter were sisters under the skin, at least as far as their need to provide commentary every moment of every day.
Today Laquanda had a problem. Her daughter had called from the high school to tell her mother she was throwing up and running a fever.
“I just need you to watch Mrs. Jepperson while I run to get my girl and take her to the doctor,” Laquanda told me. She didn’t sound very pleased I was there. It was clear to both of us we weren’t exactly a mutual admiration society.
“So go,” I said. Laquanda waited for me to say something else. When I didn’t, she pointed out the list of emergency numbers, grabbed her purse, and hightailed it out the kitchen door. The house was still clean from my last visit, I noticed, after I cast a glance in the master bedroom at the sleeping lady. For something to do, I gave a cursory scrub to the bathroom and kitchen surfaces. Laquanda always did the laundry and dishes (what little there
