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Bleeding Hearts(118)

By:Jane Haddam


Obsessiveness is a symptom of codependency. Perfectionism is the essence of codependency. One of these days she really had to get her act together.

Caroline locked the studio door behind her. Then she started down the stairs, listening carefully. This was one of those old houses that was too well built. She couldn’t hear anything. She went down a few steps and stood still, waiting. Then she gave up and went down the rest of the way.

At the entryway Caroline could finally hear something. It was Alyssa’s voice, high and musical, going on and on about trivialities.

“Nicholas keeps telling me that there’s going to be all this money and that the taxes have already been paid on it or the taxes have been figured in, I don’t remember which,” Alyssa was saying, “and I’ve been telling Nicholas that after this it’s going to be impossible for us to spend any significant time in Philadelphia. I mean it was bad enough after all that mess with Jacqueline, but for this to happen just as all that was beginning to fade from public memory—I just can’t stand it.”

Caroline walked over to the living room archway and looked through. James stood next to the portable bar, pouring himself a glass of Perrier water. Alyssa sat on the love seat with her legs tucked under her, lotus fashion. Fred stood in the middle of the room, looking up at the weapons on the wall. None of them had noticed her. She walked all the way inside and said, “Hello.”

Fred Scherrer turned around. “Hello,” he said. “I was wondering where you were. I thought you might have gone in to work.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to get any work done,” Caroline said.

“That’s what I told myself.” James finished pouring his Perrier and took a sip. “It’s just the way I told Max. If I kept my appointments today, everybody I saw would want to know when I was going to channel Paul’s spirit so the police could catch his murderer. I couldn’t face it.”

Fred Scherrer went back to looking at the weapons wall. “I’ve been thinking about this wall ever since your father died. It’s been making me crazy. And now that I’m here, looking at it, it doesn’t tell me a thing.”

There were all kinds of things on the portable bar besides Perrier water. There was even liquor of half a dozen kinds. It was one of Daddy’s hypocrisies. Daddy talked a good game about addictions, but he was the ultimate example of a man in denial. He didn’t really believe he could have any addictions himself. Caroline knew she had every addiction on record, in spite of the fact that she’d never actually tried any hard drugs. She knew that if she was ever so much as in the same room with heroin or cocaine, she would fall into a drug-induced swoon and have to be rushed to the hospital. She went through the bottles on the portable bar and rejected each one in turn. The liquor was an obvious no-no. The regular soda had sugar in it and the diet soda had aspartame. The one bottle of “fruit juice” wasn’t really fruit juice at all, but a commercial “punch” full of chemicals. Caroline gave up and went to sit down on the long couch that had its back to the street-side window. That way, she stayed well away from Alyssa.

“So,” she said. “Exactly what’s going on here? Are you holding some kind of investigation?”

“Of course Fred isn’t holding some kind of investigation,” James said, irritated. “Fred doesn’t hold investigations. He defends people after they’ve been investigated.”

“I’m sure Fred holds investigations sometimes,” Alyssa said. “He would have to, wouldn’t he? Fred has a very interesting theory about all this, Caroline. He thinks the key to it all is Jacqueline. I told him I thought Jacqueline had died so long ago, nobody could possibly know any more about it than they already did.”

“That makes sense,” James said.

Alyssa waved this away. “Caroline knows what I’m talking about. I wonder what that Demarkian person is doing, that’s what I wonder. Fred talked to him yesterday, but other than that, he seems to have disappeared. I think it’s creepy.”

“I never thought there was any mystery about what happened to Jacqueline,” Caroline said. “I thought Daddy killed her.”

Fred Scherrer turned around, curious. “Did you? You never had any doubt in your mind?”

“Of course not.”

“You don’t have any doubt about it now?”

“No, I don’t. Why should I?”

“Well,” Fred Scherrer said, “there are a couple of problems here. There’s the fact that Paul was killed with the same weapon or something very much like the same weapon and in the same way as Jacqueline was. There is that.”