Fountain of Death(77)

“All right,” he said. “What happened in California?”

Frannie looked up at him quickly, and then looked just as quickly away. At the backyard. At nothing.

“In California,” she said evenly, “I was arrested for a murder.”

“What?”

“I was convicted of negligent homicide. I went to jail for six months and a day.”

Nick was desperately trying to switch gears again, but for some reason it wasn’t working. Frannie was still staring out the window. Her face was impassive.

“What are you talking about?” he asked finally. “Do you mean you had some kind of accident? Isn’t negligent homicide what people get convicted of when they’ve been drunk driving?”

“I wasn’t drunk driving.”

“Then what happened? And when was this? Last week? Last year?”

Frannie was flexing her long fingers, first her right hand, then her left, over and over again.

“It happened six and a half years ago,” she said, very distinctly. “In the summer. When I was living at the beach. That’s what I remember most of all about it, sick as it is. The beach.”

“Who did you kill?”

“My daughter. She was seven months old at the time.”

The air was as thick as mayonnaise. That was the problem. The air was as thick as mayonnaise, and Nick couldn’t breathe it in. His headache was suddenly a volcano, bellowing and hot.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

Frannie was rubbing her hands together, top to bottom, back to back. There were thick salt tears welling in her eyes.

“I’d like to tell you I remember just what I did or what she was like or even what she looked like, but I can’t. I can’t. I don’t even have a picture of her. I never had one taken. Her name was Marilee. I remember that.”

The air was something worse than mayonnaise. It was poison gas.

“I don’t understand,” Nick said. “Seven months. What did you do? Were you careless with fire? Did you leave her too long in the car?”

“As far as anyone could tell, I drowned her.”

Whoosh, Nick thought.

Frannie took a ragged breath. “I was doing about sixteen vials of crack a day at the time,” she said, still evenly, still calmly. Everything else about her was agitated, but her voice was eerily calm. “I was doing enough to kill myself, if you want to know the truth, and I wasn’t conscious most of the time, and one day, the way it looked afterward, one day I decided to give her a bath and I lost interest in the middle.”

“Oh,” Nick said.

“Anyway,” Frannie said, “later that day I ran out, and I started to need it again, you know, so I was going around the house, looking for some cash, and when I went into the bathroom there she was, just floating in the water. So I got scared, you know, and I picked her up and tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, except it was too late, she’d been dead for hours, and I didn’t know resuscitation anyway. And then I started screaming, screaming, and screaming, and someone heard me and called the cops. My lawyer said later that it was a good thing it happened that way, because if I’d done anything to try to cover it up, I probably couldn’t have gotten off with negligent homicide. I would just have gone to jail for murder.”

“Were you thinking of covering it up?”

Frannie shuddered. “I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just screaming and screaming. And I was coming off, you know. The police came and I just went and sat on the steps and looked out at the ocean, and I was shaking and crying the whole time, and they thought I was for real. They thought I was a real grief-stricken mother. They knew better later, of course.”

“So you went to jail,” Nick said—which was stupid, because he already knew that. His brain was on hold. He couldn’t work out what was important here.

“I just got off probation about two months ago,” Frannie said. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to take the job here. I thought I’d come back home, you know, and it would be like I’d never been to California at all, it would be like it never happened. And I could start over again.”

“Have you? Started over again?”

“I don’t think it’s possible.” Frannie stood up. “I don’t feel much like eating lunch, Nick. I think I’m going to go work the machines for a while.”

“All right. Good idea.”

“That’s why I don’t do dope anymore. I can’t do dope and work the machines.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I can see that.”

Frannie wrapped her arms around her body and rocked a little. “Well,” she said finally. “See you around.”