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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The door with the sign asking for consideration opened quickly, revealing Mamie, heading toward us, head down, and walking fast.

“Mamie.” Clara stepped directly in her path.

Not sure I would have taken the risk. But Mamie stopped and her head came up.

“Oh. You,” she said with an entirely different intonation from Emil’s.

“Mamie, what’s wrong?”

The girl sucked in a sob.

Clara opened her arms and Mamie went into them. Between sobs, she emitted phrases about being silly and selfish. Clara patted her back.

“Let’s go someplace else, someplace we can talk,” I suggested.

Mamie pivoted and opened the door. Without a word, she led us down a hallway, then into an intersecting one, with rooms on either side all along. Most had closed doors, but two of the open ones revealed family groups around a bed with quiet conversation and even soft laughter.

At the end of the second hallway, a nub of a space held two love seats, a low table with photography books, and a quintet of single chairs.

Mamie and Clara sat on one love seat, I sat across from them.

“Sorry,” Mamie said, her head down low enough that her hair hid much of her face. “I didn’t mean to fall apart like that.”

“Nonsense. You didn’t fall apart.” Bracingly Clara added, “When you called, you said you wanted to talk to us and that Robbie’s here.”

Good guess he was associated with the tears, without outright asking.

“He is. Somewhere, but... Robbie got real impatient and told me to go. I didn’t, then he walked away. I stayed, but he didn’t come back. It was kind of creepy and I don’t know where he is or...”

She seemed prone to another gush of tears.

I echoed yoga advice. “Breathe in through your nose, then slowly out through your nose.” I had no idea if it would help someone whose high school boyfriend’s convicted-murderer father was recently murdered, but it let me hold positions longer. Worth a try.

Mamie’s tears abated and her air-gulping slowed.

I ventured a question. “Where were you that was kind of creepy?”

“Oh. In Robbie’s father’s room. His former room.”

“Which room is that?”

“One-Twenty-Seven.” Her shoulders shuddered slightly. “I didn’t know that’s what he had in mind. I thought maybe he was going to ask questions, you know? But he went straight to the room.”

“Wasn’t it blocked off as a crime scene?”

She shook her head. “A nurse said the tape was taken down this morning. It still needed cleaning and stuff, but she said we could go in. I thought maybe...”

“Maybe what?” Clara asked gently.

Mamie shook her head, but still answered.

“Maybe he wanted a memento or something of his father. There wasn’t much there.

Hardly anything, really, except a small frame with a photo of Robbie — at least I think it was Robbie — as a little kid.

I thought for sure he’d take it, but after staring at it for a while, he turned away and started looking through the other stuff — you know, clothes and pajamas and things like that. ”

Remembering the recent conversation about drugs, I eased in with, “Toiletries, too?”

“I guess, I heard him opening and closing the cabinet in the attached bathroom.”

“What about medicines?”

“Oh, no. Those weren’t there anymore.”

“ Anymore? ”

“There’d been a tray on a stand near the bed with bottles and things yesterday. I saw it while that nurse kept us out of the room while she closed and blocked the door, but...” Her gaze lost focus. “I’m pretty sure one of the nurses took the tray away during the yelling.”

“Which nurse?”

She frowned. “Not the one blocking the door, because that’s when Robbie and Dova realized she was the one insisting the authorities be called—”

That had to be Rose.

“—and the other woman — the administrator — tried to shut her up. There were a couple other nurses there, too. With all these people in the hallway, it was crowded. And there was some bumping. By accident, you know? Then a person who wasn’t a cop, but had something to do with death, showed up and she said the sheriff’s department had to be called.

That’s when things sort of turned around. ”

“Turned around how?”

“Robbie had been really calm until then. It was Dova who was yelling and red in the face and stuff. I mean, I knew he was upset. Really, really upset, but like he didn’t know how upset he was or what to do with it. I thought it was a little scary. But then the person who wasn’t a cop, but—”

“Assistant coroner,” I filled in. Clara frowned at me for interrupting Mamie’s flow.

“I guess. Anyway, she wasn’t a cop.”

I grimaced at Clara, acknowledging my error in trying to hurry this along.

Clara focused on Mamie. “What happened when she came?”

“She didn’t come right out and say he’d been murdered, but that’s what they’d been talking about before so everyone — all of us in the hallway and some other people standing in doorways and such — knew that’s what it meant. And that’s when things... flipped.”

“Flipped?” Clara nudged gently when she paused.

Mamie nodded hard. “Like all of a sudden, Dova was the calm one and Robbie just... just...” She hiccupped over a sob, while tears tracked down her cheeks. “I’ve never seen him like that.”

“What did he do?”

“He got completely red, like Dova had been before, only now she was pale. And Robbie said they were wrong, incompetent, and a lot of other things — that his dad hadn’t been murdered, that they were trying to cover up their own mistakes, that it was their fault and they wouldn’t get away with trying to pretend it was murder.

He... he didn’t sound like himself. At all.

Dova tried to tell him to be quiet, not to say anything, that she’d take care of it, but he didn’t listen to her.

And then he walked away fast. And I ran after him, but even so he almost left before I could get in his car and he was still shouting and angry — so angry — and I was scared we’d have a wreck.

“He drove really fast and then when he went to the cliffs park by the river, I thought... I thought...” This sob swallowed a hiccup. “Because of the cliffs that are there. And he wouldn’t wait for me. It was hard and I kept getting farther behind him and I was so afraid...”

Clara encircled her shoulder with one arm. “You were very brave.”

Mamie sobbed full force for a minute, then sucked in shaky breaths before she had herself back under control.

“Did he finally wait for you?” Clara asked gently, giving her somewhere to start again.

“No. He’d stopped, but not to wait for me.

He was at this spot, high up. Standing and staring out.

He didn’t even seem to know I was there.

Not for the longest time. Not even when I sat on the bench and it clanged, because the back of my boot hit the leg when it tipped.

Scared me, because I thought it was going to tip over, but it stopped.

“I finally caught my breath and went and stood beside him and said his name. Even then, he didn’t answer the first time, or second. Finally, he turned his head and looked at me and sort of blinked and said, Oh, you’re here. Like he’d had no idea.”

“Did he say why he’d gone there?”

“Not really. I asked if this was a place he, you know, associated with his dad. He gave a kind of laugh — one of those laughs that hurt to hear — and he said no. Then he said he’d needed room to breathe.

So I didn’t say more. After a few minutes, he gave a sort of shake all over, like a dog in water. He said, C’mon and we started down.

“He still wasn’t talking. Not even in the car.

He drove me back to my car at his house and said he needed some time alone.

After I saw you at Shep’s, I went to the flower shop.

Gramps listened to me for a while, but customers came in and I couldn’t stand to see people being ordinary, like nothing had happened, and Robbie wouldn’t answer my messages.

I tried Dova, too, but she messaged back that Robbie would be fine and not to worry and she was really busy.

After a while Gramps said I needed to get my mind off it and sent me to make deliveries. Only I couldn’t get my mind off it.

“Somebody has to figure out what happened. And not the sheriff’s department, because Robbie won’t ever believe anything they say. But he’d believe you two.”

From that optimistic statement, her face crumpled.

“He’d have to, wouldn’t he? Because it’s tearing him up. As if he hadn’t had it hard enough already, with his father in prison and his mom nearly killed in a car accident last year.”

I almost corrected her, to say Robbie’s mother died at the hands of a murderer. Nothing against Dova for the job she’d done raising him, but sorrow for Jaylynn, whose opportunity to be his Mom was stolen by her murderer.

Unaware of my mind-wanderings, Mamie was saying, “...how we got to know each other. He was so upset. I mean, he didn’t cry in the hallways or anything, but I could see how much he was hurting and trying so hard not to show it.

“We were hanging out with the same group one night and that’s when we first... you know, got together.”

She blushed and I had a feeling their relationship did not start with a hand-holding date to the weekly Sock Hop.

“The next day I went with him to the hospital. He hated the hospital and really, really hated seeing his mom in pain.” Her eyes widened.

“And she was. She had all these broken bones — really, really bad breaks. She couldn’t even go to see Derrick in prison like usual.

Not for months and that made everything worse.

She was in such pain she wasn’t like herself at all.

I mean, she scared me at first. It was only later I could see what she was really like. ”

“When people are in a lot of pain, sometimes they lash out at the people they love the most,” Clara said gently. “At some level they know the love won’t end.”

I wondered if she’d experienced that with her mother-in-law.

“Oh, no,” Mamie said. “She was never mean to Robbie. Never. But those first days, I thought she hated me. Not just didn’t like me, but truly hated me.

Gramps found me crying one time and he was ready to say I couldn’t see Robbie anymore.

That’s why we were keeping it secret when I met you, because Gramps thought Robbie.

.. but it was never him. Not ever. And after she got out of the hospital it got better. ”

“Your relationship with Dova since then has been okay?”

“More than okay,” she said emphatically.

“Because we both love him. Only she’s loved him all along.

He says all the time that he doesn’t know what he’d do without his mom.

That she always said it was the two of them against the world.

” Pink surged into her cheeks and the corners of her mouth tucked in, like she was fighting a smile.

“Until he met me. Now he knows there’s someone else who’ll always have his back. ”

Worry erased the hint of a smile. “Except these past days. He’s been so.

.. different. I mean... I know his father died, of course I know that,” she said hurriedly, “and maybe I don’t understand because my father was never around and my mother was in and out of rehab, so Gramps was.

.. Guess you could say my safe place. Always.

So, I know I need to be understanding and—”

“Mamie.”

Robbie stood nearby. None of us had heard him coming.

“Come sit here, Robbie.” Clara stood, offering her spot and moved around to sit next to me.

“Sorry,” he muttered as he dropped down next to Mamie.

Clearly, he meant it for her, not for interrupting us.

She slid her hand into his. He shifted to intertwine their fingers.

“Mamie was telling us about yesterday morning, when your father died,” I said deliberately.

He didn’t react.

“She was telling us about the phone call at your house, when the two of you were going to hang out.” Clara’s spate of words — clearly designed to smooth over my directness didn’t bother me. He’d already reacted by not reacting. “You still have a landline?”

“I know,” Mamie said, “isn’t that wild? I didn’t even know what it was at first.”

Robbie’s lips twitched. Closest thing to a lightening in his expression we’d seen. “Yeah. We don’t use it much, but Mom decided to leave it in until she does a remodel. Doesn’t want patches and stuff on the walls.”

A silence descended.

I caught Clara’s gaze and apparently was successful in encouraging her not to fill it, because it extended.

Mamie focused on Robbie’s hand.

Eventually, he shifted his shoulders. Then, slowly, he looked up — at the wall with a bad painting of a meadow, instead of us — but up nonetheless.

“You two finding stuff out?” he asked.

Clara left the lead to me. “First, we’re talking to a lot of people. Like your grandmother and aunt — on your maternal side. You know they took care of you a lot when you were a baby.”

“I guess.”

A pause.

“Because she left me to go back to work.”

Another pause.

“I don’t remember them.”

If a fourth statement was coming, it was so far behind the first three as to be disconnected.

I said, offhandedly, “Heard you ran into your aunt — Payloma Carnell — not too long ago.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Still no interest, but he did keep talking.

“At the gas station. She’d pumped gas and then she pretended she’d come up short and went around asking everybody to help her out with cash.

Only she’d already collected more than was on the pump when she got to me.

She pulled the same thing and when I said she didn’t need it, she got real angry.

I walked away and that’s when she said, Hey, you’re that murderer’s kid. ”

Clara and Mamie sucked in harmonized breaths of shock.

“Don’t know if she didn’t recognize me until then or if she decided when I said no to her panhandling to get her digs in.”

And still Robbie didn’t react. How much of his young life had he spent making such calculations about people’s reactions to him? But I couldn’t let my empathy for him stop me from asking him questions, especially in this moment when his walls seemed to be down.

“Who told you Jaylynn was having an affair?”

“My grandparents.”

My attempt to jar him failed. His answer was bland, uninterested.

Before I could ask more, Clara sharply turned her head, looking past Robbie. From where she sat, she could see someone approaching from the hall.

I heard carpet-softened footsteps, then Dova came around the corner.