Blood in the Water(76)

She leaned down and hopped a little to get back onto the kitchen floor. She picked up the chair and walked it back to the breakfast nook table from where it had come. Gregor watched her look over the table, straightening a place mat and then another one, moving the basket of nuts in their shells that served as a centerpiece. Horace Wingard was still fussing.

“We can’t stay out here,” he said. “We really do have to go around to the front door. There are legalities involved.”

“If we leave here to go to the front door,” Gregor said, “she might think we’ve gone away, and get back on that chair. We could stand on the front porch for a year while she was in here—”

“Yes, yes,” Horace Wingard said. “I understand that. I understand that. But there are legalities.…”

A moment later, the legalities became moot. Eileen Platte had shuffled her way across the kitchen to the sliding glass doors. She pulled one of these back without pulling back the curtains. There was a low wind. The curtains blew back against her body and made her look like a ghost from a Thirties movie.

“I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she said, through the cloth that covered her mouth.

Gregor leaned forward and pulled the curtain away. He’d meant to be gentle about it, but the curtain was heavy, and there was a lot of it. He had to struggle to get it aside. While he fought with fabric, Eileen Platte stayed perfectly still. She was like a windup doll that had wound down.

Gregor got the curtain pulled back, and the three of them stared at a middle-aged woman in a blue sprigged house coat. She looked at them as if she found nothing at all odd about having three men on her deck in the middle of a morning.

“I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she said again. “I would have answered the doorbell. I’m supposed to answer the doorbell when it rings.”

“I’m sure you are,” Gregor said.

Eileen Platte looked away from them. “I was tidying up the kitchen,” she said. “It always needs a great deal of tidying. I used to think it was Michael who made the mess, but now of course it couldn’t be. It’s a mess all the same. Maybe I make it myself. Stephen thinks I make it myself.”

Gregor stepped into the kitchen and looked around. It was a big space, with cabinets going all the way up to a ceiling that it would take a ladder to reach. There was a big center island with a gas cooktop and a grill. Above it hung densely packed copper cookware, all shiny and looking as if it had never been used. The breakfast nook was a smallish octagonal space with a ceiling even higher than that of the rest of the kitchen. There were windows in the six angled walls that looked out, of course, on the green.

Eileen Platte sat down at the table there and looked at the three of them. “Am I supposed to be giving you something?” she asked. “Am I supposed to be making coffee?”

Gregor looked at Larry Farmer. “You’d better call an ambulance,” he said. “She should be on suicide watch.”

“But not with sirens,” Horace Wingard said hastily. “We don’t need sirens. There isn’t any rush.”

Gregor ignored him. Eileen Platte was sitting quietly, her hands folded on the table. She was looking at everything and nothing. Gregor couldn’t help wondering if she were drugged.

“I’ll call the ambulance,” Horace Wingard said. “They won’t be able to get in if I don’t okay it anyway. I’ll call them and then I’ll be right back.”

Gregor let him go without bothering to watch him leave. Then he sat down at the table opposite Eileen Platte. Her face was as white as if it had been made of plaster. Her eyes were dead.

“It doesn’t matter anymore about Michael,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do for him. There’s no way I can keep him safe.”

“No,” Gregor admitted. “There isn’t.”

“That was what I always tried to do,” Eileen said. “Keep him safe. Even when he was little. Because he was always that way, you know. He was always like that. It wasn’t the drugs.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

“I only said it was because that way, if Stephen believed it, I thought I could … he would … that he wouldn’t be so sure of it. Wouldn’t be so sure that Michael was … wrong. I don’t think it mattered, really. I don’t think he believed me. I don’t think Stephen believed me. Sometimes I think Stephen hated Michael from the very beginning, from the first day we brought him home from the hospital. But that can’t be true, can it? Fathers don’t hate their sons that early, do they? They wait.”