“Elise?”
I stamp my foot, trying, I suppose, to snap her out of her reverie, or stupor, or whatever it is. Only she still doesn’t blink.
And then I notice the trickle of blood.
“I should have known,” I mumble, more to myself than to Detective Harold Nelson of the Nassau County Police Department, who is taking down my statement. He is keeping one eye on me and the other on his partner, who is donning rubber gloves and kneeling over the body of the very scantily clad Elise. “Maggie May was waiting by the open door, and I thought, ‘I’ll probably find Elise dead….’”
“Maggie May?”
I gesture with my head toward a pathetic little ball of white fluff whimpering on her little red monogrammed L.L. Bean bed in the dining room. The detective appears to melt. I’d have pegged him for a mastiff man, which just shows how much I know about men.
“Right,” he says. “So you thought she’d be dead because…?”
I hesitate. There’s a uniformed policeman investigating the new vegetable sink that was supposed to be installed today—a hammered copper bowl that just sits on the center-island counter with a faucet poised over it. The idea was for it to make you actually want to eat an avocado or something equally healthy. Not that it matters now. And I don’t see the bar faucet, which I’d had to special order, but I don’t suppose that matters now, either.
And there’s something else different, but for the life of me I can’t think what.
The detective is waiting to hear why I should have known. Because things were going too well. Because it was a gorgeous September morning and the sun was shining. And, most important, because Elise was loving how the kitchen I was redecorating for her was turning out. So, I ask you—how could I not have known that something dreadful was going to happen? Still, even if I had sensed disaster looming, I’d have thought leak, crack, incorrect measurement—not murder.
“Well, because I’m a worrier,” I explain to the patient Detective Nelson, whose eyes keep straying over to Elise. She really did have a great figure for someone in her forties. Better than mine will be when I get there, which is sooner than I want to think about. I concentrate on the detective and let him concentrate on Elise’s body. “And this just proves that if you don’t worry about a particular thing, that’s the one that’s bound to happen. Then you can spend the rest of your life worrying about what you’re not worrying about.”
Well, I’ve got his full attention now. He’s staring at me like it’s my marbles on the floor and not the bunch of pills I stepped on. He seems to be framing his next question carefully so as to prevent another babblefest, but it’s futile. When I’m upset I can’t help saying stupid things. As if to prove it, I shake my head and out comes a pronouncement that my mother has been right all these years and my ex-husband, once again, was wrong.
“How’s that?” he asks, apparently fascinated by the pull-out warming drawer in the center island, despite the fact that Elise is lying face up on the unsealed tile floor with pills and change scattered around her.
“See?” I say, pointing to the broom just inches from her hand. “A little housework can kill you.”
The police photographer looks up at me. He is taking pictures of every angle of the kitchen and of Elise. And of the dark red stain that is seeping into the floor.
And, except for Elise, it’s all very familiar, the red stains in the kitchen, the police, the questions…
“You seem pretty cavalier about all this,” the detective says.
“If you’d had this dream a few hundred times, you’d be cavalier, too,” I tell him. Ever since the thing last year with my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Rio, when he tried to drive me crazy and I sort of shot him, the police have been regular fixtures in my dreams. Rather than think about that black time in my life, I choose to imagine myself as Cinderella trying to scrub out those stains.
When Cinderella before she meets the prince is a step up, you know you’re in trouble.
“This is no dream, lady,” he says.
I take great comfort in the fact that he knows the script. “The detective always says that. And as soon as he does, I wake up.”
Only nothing happens.
I ask the detective to pinch me, which sometimes works in my the-police-are-coming-to-get-me-again dreams. It occurs to me that this guy doesn’t look a whit like Jerry Orbach, who is the usual detective in my dreams, nor, for that matter, like David Caruso, who is my dream detective. At any rate, he’s watching the fingerprinting guy and he ignores me.
So I pinch myself.
It hurts. And I’m still in Elise’s up-to-the-minute, high-tech-appliance-with-old-world-charm kitchen. And Elise is still dead.
“This isn’t a dream.”
I say it slowly, feeling as though I’m somehow under water and every movement is that much harder, every word that much more distorted. The photographer, now snapping close-ups of the blood patterns on the terra-cotta floor, is coming closer and closer to me. Gently, with a glance for permission from the detective, he pulls on the cuff of my white jeans, lifts my leg and takes a picture of the bottom of one of my brand-new driving moccasins.
I kick the shoe off and it goes flying toward a young female officer leaning over Elise. I shut my eyes tightly and hear an ear-piercing scream. I figure I’ve hit her with the shoe, but she isn’t the one screaming.
Things around me double and turn yellow like those old color photographs from the early ’50s. Blackness hovers. Someone pushes my head between my knees and rubs circles on the back of my white Banana Republic V-neck T—soft, slow, seductive circles. I tilt my head slightly and peer up to find someone who looks too good to be real. I figure his looks must be enhanced by either the angle or my weakened state.
“Keep your head down,” he says, crouching beside me, murmuring about how I’m going to be all right. “And close your eyes.”
To be perfectly honest, what the good-looking detective is doing to my back with his talented fingers is not helping me get my bearings. If anything, things seem even less real and almost…dare I think it with Elise lying dead? Delicious.
“So, here we all are in a kitchen again, Mrs. Gallo,” Detective Nelson announces, bringing me back to reality and making sure I know he was there the last time.
“It’s Bayer now,” I tell him. It’s a little awkward, me with one name, the kids with another, but it’s not as if their teachers don’t know the situation. Heck, anyone who picked up a copy of Newsday or turned on a TV learned the whole story last summer. His jaded look says he thinks I’ve already hooked up with a new jerk to replace the old one. “Teddi Bayer. I’ve gone back to my maiden name.”
Detective Number Two nods, but Nelson says, “A rose by any other name.”
Whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Detective Cliché adds something on the order of, “outta the frying pan, into the fire.” I assume he is referring to the gazillion times the cops have had to come and take my mother, June Bayer, to South Winds Psychiatric Center, her home away from home.
I just shrug, and then there is this awkward silence, which I break by saying aloud what I’m wondering—who would want to kill Elise Meyers?
“I just can’t imagine how anyone could murder someone as nice as Elise Meyers.” Isn’t it amazing how much nicer you think people are after they’re gone? Elise could be a real pain in the butt, but lying there on 12-by-12 tiles that she wasn’t so sure about but decided to trust me on…well, she looks almost angelic. That is, if you don’t count the hot-pink satin and black-lace getup she’s got on.
Nelson asks what makes me think it was murder while he casually places his card on the table by my arm. “Looks to