“Leah, I took Psych 101. There isn’t a textbook in the world that names scapegoating and the displacement of blame as good coping strategies.”
“All right, fine. But are you honestly going to tell me that you’ve never done it? You’ve never blamed your ex-husband for all of your problems?”
“That’s different!” I shot back.
“Why?”
“Because…because he’s fair game. Ex-husbands were put on this earth to be blamed for things. That’s just the way it is.”
“Really?” Leah asked, raising her eyebrows. “Did they teach you that in psych class?”
“Oh, shut up,” I responded without any real vehemence. “How do you know all this anyway?” I asked as I took a sip of my drink.
“Two years ago, only about a month before she put MAAP together, Chrissie cornered me after one of our board meetings. She said she had been researching Dena Lopiano and apparently she found a picture of me standing next to her on a Google image search. She wanted to know if I was aware that the woman she presumed to be my friend was really a home-wrecker.”
“And what did you say?”
Leah shrugged. “I told her that Dena wasn’t anything of the sort. She’s just a tad slutty, that’s all.”
“Leah!”
“Are you honesty going to tell me I’m wrong?”
“You can be extremely promiscuous without being a slut.”
“According to what dictionary?”
I gripped the edge of the table and then quickly drew my hand away as I discovered the hardened lump of someone’s old gum. “Oh, that’s great. Do you have one of those antibacterial wipes?” I asked as I examined my fingers with disgust. Leah wordlessly pulled out the requested item. That’s the thing about moms: they’re always prepared for the yucky stuff.
“I’ll wait while you throw that away,” Leah said, pointedly staring at the used wipe.
I wrinkled my nose at her before dutifully getting up to find a trash can for the wipe. When I got back Leah had her iPhone out on the table.
“Tell me more.”
Leah brightened, clearly happy that she would be allowed to continue to dish. “After confronting me about the whole picture thing, Chrissie told me that she had recently learned about the little tryst Tim had with Dena. I assured her that the affair couldn’t have been long-lived since, until her recent arrangement, Dena has never stayed with a man for longer than one full moon cycle. But Chrissie went ahead and put together MAAP anyway.”
“Okay, but Dena’s been faithful to her polyamorous relationship for…well… about a year and a half now, so whatever was going on between Dena and Tim is over. Shouldn’t Chrissie be getting over it, too?”
“One would think,” Leah agreed. “But it would appear that time hasn’t healed this wound. At. All. In fact it appears that Chrissie’s wound is ulcerous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chrissie’s been upping the stakes of the battle.” Leah picked up her iPhone and started punching things into it. “Last week she posted an article on a conservative online Web site called The Virtuous Journal. Now, you know I have nothing against conservative magazines. I’ve voted Republican all my life. But this particular site is…to the right of Rush Limbaugh.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
“And yet it is.” Leah was still madly pecking and stroking her iPhone. “And can you believe that Chrissie actually sent me a link to the article she wrote for them? Ah, here it is. Take a look.”
She handed the phone over and on the screen was the article. I started to skim it but the pure acidity of the words slowed me down. “Oh. My. God.”
“I told you she was wretched.”
But I wasn’t really listening to Leah anymore.
Miss Lopiano and her fellow pornography peddlers have made it their life ambition to make smut a major part of the American way of life. She has purposely chosen to be a social liability; a disease we should try to cure ourselves of.
I stopped reading and stared at Leah. “She’s flat-out telling her readers that the world would be a better place without Dena!”
“That does appear to be the point.”
“And she only wrote this a week ago?”
“And yesterday Dena was shot.”
“Oh. My. God!”
“To be honest, I had a hard time picturing Chrissie killing someone. She prefers emotional brutality to its physical counterpart, so she probably didn’t do it. Still, you have to bring this to the attention of the police just in case,” Leah said, taking another sip of her tea. “I’d do it, but I thought you might want the honor.”
“Bull. You just don’t want anyone to think you would report a fellow board member to the cops.”
“That’s unfair,” Leah protested, but the faint sound of guilt echoed around her voice.
“I want to talk to this woman.”
Leah choked on her tea. “What? Why? Just go to the police! It’s their job to question her, not yours.”
“The police will mess it up.”
“What are you talking about? This is what the police do! When they go to the academy they are specifically trained to do two things—question people and shoot them.”
“And arrest them and search a crime scene and…”
“Yes, yes,” Leah said with a dismissive wave of her hand, “but I’m sure that all takes a backseat to the time they spend in the interrogation room and the shooting range. Leave this to them. All you need to do is sit by your friend’s bedside and bring her the occasional flower arrangement…with a vase of course. How you could have forgotten that—”
“Leah, I can’t leave this to someone else. Dena is more than a friend and this bitch may have tried to kill her. And if she didn’t kill her she probably incited someone else to do it!”
Leah narrowed her eyes. “Look, we don’t even know if she’s really guilty. I’d say there’s at least a ninety percent chance that she has nothing to do with what happened to Dena.”
“Ninety percent?”
Leah thought about this for a moment. “All right, maybe more like an eighty-five…or eighty-two…yes, I think there’s an eighty-two percent chance that Chrissie didn’t try to kill anyone this week.”
“But if she did,” I persisted, “I’m going to find the evidence to hang her with and then…”
“And then?”
I pressed my lips together. I didn’t know what would happen then. The truth was that I wanted to…no, not wanted, needed to see this Chrissie person. I needed to look into her eyes and see if I could detect the evil that had seeped out into that article. It wasn’t logical, but that didn’t matter.
“I just need to talk to her. You have to help me set it up.”
Leah folded her hands in her lap. “Why on earth would I do such a thing?”
“Because…” I searched my mind for a way to finish that sentence. What could I promise her that would be appealing enough to make her abandon both common sense and caution? I could promise to babysit her son! No, I couldn’t do that. I was desperate, not masochistic. Besides, Leah hadn’t even wanted me to babysit my nephew since that time that