Page 23 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

The last title that came to mind, in terms of grief and mystery fiction, wasn’t actually a book.

It was a movie—Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .

Like so many of Hitchcock’s stories, it’s full of passion and erotic obsession and a downright nuttiness that somehow seems to make sense within the confines of the film.

(Here’s your final spoiler warning.) The film follows former police officer Scottie Ferguson.

Left with a fear of heights after the death of a fellow officer, Scottie now makes his living as a private detective.

He’s hired by Gavin Elster to follow his wife, Madeleine, who he claims has been acting strangely.

Scottie follows her to the grave of a woman named Carlotta Valdes, and then to an art museum, where Madeleine stares at Carlotta’s portrait.

Scottie learns more about Carlotta, who died by suicide.

Worse, it turns out Carlotta is Madeleine’s great-grandmother, and Gavin is afraid his wife is possessed by Carlotta’s spirit.

After Scottie saves Madeleine when she jumps into the San Francisco Bay, they fall in love.

Of course, not long after that, Scottie witnesses Madeleine jump from a church bell tower and die.

I’ll spare you the full summary, but it turns out, Madeleine was a fake—a woman hired to impersonate Elster’s wife as part of a murder scheme.

Elster threw the real Madeleine off the bell tower, and Scottie, because of his vertigo, was the perfect witness to ‘see’ Madeleine’s death by suicide.

Scottie has a complete breakdown; his love for Madeleine, his grief, and his fear of heights land him in a sanatorium.

That’s when the movie really gets weird.

After Scottie recovers, he happens to see a woman who resembles Madeleine.

He becomes obsessed. He convinces her to change her hair, her clothes, everything, and then she is Madeleine.

Which makes sense, since she’s the woman who was hired to impersonate Madeleine.

(I told you: this film is nuts.) The movie culminates with Scottie forcing her to re-enact the events of Madeleine’s death.

They reach the top of the bell tower, and Scottie overcomes his fears and learns the truth—but then a nun startles them, and not-Madeleine falls to her death.

Yeah, that wasn’t a plot I was going to steal for my cozy noir.

As I looked over my notes, I tried to spot patterns among the three titles.

The most obvious thing I could come up with was the fact that guilt made people do crazy things—plan an elaborate dinner-for-twelve murder on a train, for example; kill their husband’s lover and then their husband and then themselves; or obsess about the person they lost until that obsession led to the loss of the very thing they loved.

The other thing I noticed was that in all three of the titles, someone is complicit in the crime in a way that makes them a victim as well.

Pretty much everyone in Murder on the Orient Express qualifies for this description—with the distinction that they were victims first. In The Long Goodbye , Terry is part of the crime even though, in many ways, he’s also the victim.

And in Vertigo, the woman hired to help cover up Madeleine’s death eventually becomes a victim as well.

Did that help me?

I wasn’t sure. Mostly because I wasn’t sure why Mal had been murdered.

Certainly, Mal had done enough harm to people in his life that something like the Murder on the Orient Express plot was possible; someone from his past might have finally shown up for revenge.

But if so, why now? And an even bigger problem was that the only people from Mal’s past who might have had reason to hurt him were Indira and Sparkie—and I was sure neither of them had done it.

The idea that the killer was also a victim was tempting for a few minutes.

Maybe Sparkie had killed Mal, and then she’d—what?

Accidentally poisoned herself? Killed herself out of guilt?

Or maybe a specific kind of serial killer, one who only poisoned people at new restaurants, had made Sparkie his latest victim.

It wasn’t my best brainstorming session.

After banging my head against the wall for a while, I opened a new tab and did some research on tetrodotoxin. If that’s what had killed Sparkie—and my parents had jumped to that possibility fairly quickly, so it seemed like a safe bet—I wanted to know more about it.

Tetrodotoxin was a neurotoxin derived from several types of fish—pufferfish were the most notorious—and other animals. It killed you by paralyzing you, and you died because you couldn’t breathe.

Just reading that made me stop and listen to Bobby’s soft, sleeping noises.

The toxin could enter the body by ingestion, injection, inhalation, or abraded skin.

That made sense; Sparkie had eaten my food and ingested the poison meant for me.

Then, when Bobby had given her CPR, enough of the toxin must have still been in Sparkie’s mouth to enter his system through his split lip, but not enough to kill him.

(Thank God—I sent up another prayer to the patron saint of little gay boys who had finally found the man of their dreams.)

Before I could think about what I was doing, I opened another tab and typed Am I a good boyfriend?

Let me tell you: the internet had a lot to say about that.

But that wasn’t actually what I wanted to know. I typed How to be a good boyfriend .

Somehow, that was even worse. I glanced at the snippets of the results (because I honestly couldn’t bring myself to click on them).

Most of it was geared toward the straights, and the advice ranged from the obviously bad (“Don’t be too available.

Make her work for it.”) to the blush-inducing (“There’s no such thing as too much sex.

” and even less helpful, “7 Ways to Make Her Scream.”) to the probably-correct-but-not-exactly-helpful (“Work on yourself” and “Give as much as you get” and—this one made me want to scream—“Keep the romance alive.” Of course I wanted to keep the romance alive.

That was the whole reason I was reading these stupid search results.)

None of this helped, probably because, yet again, I hadn’t asked the question I really wanted answered.

How do I help my boyfriend after his mom died?

And because this was the internet, there were so. many. results.

I spent a while reading, uncomfortably aware of Bobby’s breathing next to me. If he woke up and saw me reading these—well, I didn’t know what would happen, but a flush prickled from my belly up to my throat when I thought about it.

None of the answers shocked me. If anything, as I read them, I found myself thinking, Yeah, yeah, oh yeah —stuff I should have thought of myself; stuff I should have recognized, immediately, as correct.

Spend time with him. Be willing to talk, but don’t pressure him.

Let him know you’re there. All things I’d tried to do, obviously.

And all things that had ended with Bobby either: a) nodding, or b) acknowledging verbally, or c) not responding at all.

As I kept reading, though, I found more specific—and more helpful—answers.

He’s going to be overwhelmed with decisions, so try to take things off his plate or narrow down his options .

Or All the little things that go into daily life are going to feel too hard, so pick a chore to help him with—sweep, do the laundry, wash the dishes .

Or even Food. Food. Food. He’s probably not eating, and he needs you to put something in front of him and tell him to eat.

Okay, that last one was eerily accurate. Bobby hadn’t been eating. And the doctor had told us he needed fluids and rest.

I slipped out of bed. Part of me waited for Bobby to roll over, to stir, to mumble a question. But he was totally zonked, so I pulled on my clothes and padded upstairs.

The living room was still dark except for that weak yellow light coming from the kitchen.

Somewhere, a fan was spinning, and the faint odor of sandalwood hung in the air.

I made my way down and then I made my way up again (so many stupid steps in this house).

The kitchen looked the way it had the other night, although someone had put away the groceries.

I glanced at the photo of little Bobby as I made my way to the fridge.

The same serious expression. The same dark eyes.

What had he been like as a child, I wanted to know.

I bet he had put all his toys away. Or maybe not; maybe little Bobby had been a terror, and I was in a relationship with a reformed man.

My gaze widened to take in the full photo.

Bobby stood next to Eric and slightly in front, as though he’d been shoved forward a step, or as though he’d run into the frame late.

It was even easier to see the similarities between the brothers as children.

Behind them stood their parents. Bobby’s mom had one hand on Eric’s shoulder.

His dad had his hands behind his back. It was impossible for anyone outside a family to truly understand their unique dynamic, I know, but when I looked at that picture, I thought I knew some of it.

The fridge held a surprising amount of food: the bok choy I’d seen yesterday, blocks of tofu, chicken breasts that had thawed inside a plastic bag, a few small apples, bottles of condiments—every shelf filled to the edge.

Indira probably could have whipped up enough meals to get Bobby and his family through a nuclear winter.