The Affliction Read online

  There was a silence. On the one hand, Ellie was bound by teenage omertà; you never narc out a friend to a teacher or any other grown-up. On the other hand, she was a little pissed that Alison had been in her mother’s room and using her computer. Just because Alison hated her own parents didn’t mean Ellie hated hers.

  “Ellie,” said her mother, in a tone they both understood.

  “Try Trixie2012,” said Ellie. Trixie was Alison’s dog until her brother ran over it. A picture of Trixie was Alison’s screen saver. A Jack Russell terrier.

  Chapter 10

  Thursday, April 30

  Margot McCartney had had to lie to Ray Meagher three times before lunch on Thursday, and she was not enjoying it.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Ray, I don’t know where he is,” she said when he called the third time. “I’m sorry. I promise I’ll have him call you as soon as I can.” When she’d hung up, she went into the inner office where Lyndon was on the computer with a spreadsheet on the screen.

  “I don’t know why you won’t talk to him, Lyndon. He’s trying to plan Florey’s funeral.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Everyone’s busy.”

  “I thought the school was planning the funeral.”

  “Well he wants to talk to you about something. He’s in mourning. You’re his friend. Next time I’m going to put him through.”

  Lyndon x-ed out of his program and stood up. “I’ve got to go out,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Margot, are you trying to annoy me?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. I’m going out and I’ll be back when I’m back.” He walked past her and had just reached the outer office when the front door opened, and he found himself face-to-face with Detective Bark. There was a woman with him.

  “Oh good, we caught you,” said Bark. “This is Detective Phillips.”

  After a beat, Lyndon said, “I was on my way out.”

  “We won’t take much of your time.”

  Reluctantly, Lyndon reversed course and went back into his office. His wife gave him a long look as he passed. He avoided her eyes.

  When they had all settled into seats, Lyndon back in his swivel chair and the two detectives facing him, he said smoothly, “Can I have Margot get you anything? Coffee? Tea?”

  “We’re good, thanks,” Bark said. “We just have some things to clear up.”

  “How can I help?” McCartney produced a pleasant smile and leaned toward them, elbows on the desk, hands folded together.

  Bark took out his notebook and flipped through the pages, as if refreshing his memory.

  “Detective Phillips here had a talk with Ray Meagher about your road trip.”

  Lyndon nodded. He had assumed she had, or Bark had.

  “Meagher said you picked him up at the firehouse around four p.m., in your Lexus, and you drove together to the Mohegan Sun Pocono resort in Pennsylvania. Yes?”

  “That’s right,” said McCartney.

  “After you checked in, he went to get a burger and a beer, and you went to your room, to shower and change. He was playing Triple Red Hot 7s when you joined him at about seven p.m. All right so far?”

  “As I told you,” said McCartney, nodding.

  Bark flipped a page in his book and read some more. “And then, he says, you moved on to the table games. He played blackjack, and you played roulette. At about eight p.m., you both moved on to a craps table, where you were on a roll. The two of you stayed there until eleven, when you went to grab some sushi, then you went back to the same table. He says you both stayed there until two in the morning. You see my problem.”

  Lyndon McCartney sat very still for about a minute. Then he turned his chair to face the window and the parking garage. Then he spun back to them, looked at his watch, and said, “You know what? I’m starving. I’ve got to grab a bite, why don’t you come with me?”

  The two detectives looked at each other. Then they looked back at him and Phillips said, “Sure. Walk or drive?”

  “Walk,” said McCartney. “There’s a taco place around the corner. I’m buying.”

  “Lead on,” said Bark.

  The restaurant was mostly empty, since it wasn’t yet noon. Lyndon chose a table in the corner, well out of earshot of the other two patrons. The detectives ordered coffee and Lyndon fish tacos from a boy wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and tattoos covering both arms. The boy had a sunny demeanor and sounded to Bark as if he was from the Balkans somewhere. When they were alone again, Lyndon said, “Thanks for coming out.”

  Bark shrugged. Phillips said, “Shall we pick it up where the train went off the rails?”

  McCartney ran a hand over his large round head and nodded.

  “I have you and Meagher in sync up to about eight o’clock. Would you agree with that?”

  McCartney would.

  “He’s playing blackjack. You’re playing roulette. Right so far?”

  McCartney nodded again. “I was on a hot streak. When that happens, there’s a kind of ripple, people want to get close to you, as if it will rub off. There was a girl right beside me, and we goofed back and forth. She was into it, you know? Then Ray came over. The girl said she was really good at blessing dice, and we should all go play craps.”

  “And was she?”

  “She was. I wasn’t betting all that much but it was a rush.”

  After he paused long enough to be called a full stop, Phillips said, “We get the picture. Go on.”

  “I invited the young lady to have a drink with me, and she said yes. I told Ray I was going to quit while I was ahead. He understood.”

  “Understood what?”

  “That I was . . . that we were . . .”

  Phillips just looked at him levelly. His face began to take on a painful-looking flush.

  “So you had a cocktail. Where?” Bark asked.

  McCartney shrugged. “I don’t remember the name. Some lounge right there by the game rooms.”

  “And after that, did you go back to the tables?”

  Another painful silence.

  “You took the young lady up to your room, instead?” Bark asked.

  Lyndon didn’t say anything. The way Phillips was looking at him made him feel worse even than he’d expected to.

  “And when I check with the hotel, let me guess. I’m going to find that the security cameras don’t place you in the game rooms for the rest of the night, and I’m going to find you ordered breakfast for two, from room service?”

  McCartney took a deep breath and turned his hands palms up.

  “Do you do this a lot?” Phillips asked.

  “Do what?!”

  She had moved her hands onto the table where Lyndon couldn’t help seeing her wedding ring.

  The Balkan boy arrived with Lyndon’s food and coffee for the detectives. There was a silence until he was gone again. Nobody touched what they’d ordered.

  “Your wife doesn’t see your credit card statements?” Phillips asked.

  “My wife pays the business credit card. She sees those statements. I pay the personal cards.”

  Phillips nodded and watched him, cool and steady.

  “So from nine o’clock on, you actually have no idea where Meagher was,” said Bark. “He could easily have driven to Rye and back and met you midmorning back at the casino.”

  McCartney had been so busy worrying about his wife hearing how he’d spent his night on the town that he’d briefly forgotten this aspect of the situation.

  “No, he couldn’t, he didn’t have a car.”

  “You told me he’d driven your car down. Where were the keys?”

  McCartney went momentarily silent.

  “Valet parking?”

  “No, we parked ourselves.”

  “And he gave you back the keys?”

  McCartney said, “I’m sure he did.”

  “Meaning you don’t remember?”

  The two detectives watched him closely. They could see a w
orm of doubt inching around in McCartney’s mind.

  “How about the next morning, when you left,” Phillips asked. “You met in the lobby, walked to the car together?”

  After a long pause, McCartney said, “Ray went and got the car. I had . . . I was . . .”

  Saying good-bye to your new best friend, Phillips thought. She was picturing a lingering kiss in the lobby. What had this asshole told the girl, that it was the first of many? They’d see each other again?

  “So Ray had the car keys,” said Bark.

  McCartney said nothing.

  * * *

  Christina Liggett’s mother had called Thursday morning while Christina was leading morning prayers, and it was almost lunchtime before she could call her back.

  “Mom, I’ve only got a minute. What’s up?” Her mother, excitable at the best of times, had sounded, in her message, as if her hair was on fire, which was just about the last thing Christina had time for today.

  “I am speaking to you from Planet Martha,” her mother announced.

  Christina closed her eyes and offered a silent prayer to a god who seemed to have put a spam filter block on her messages some time ago.

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  “They can’t keep her.”

  “I see. Why?”

  “Could you just come out here and see for yourself, Chrissy? I have a school to run, and I’m sixty-two years old, and I need a knee replacement and now I have to have cataract surgery, and I just can’t deal, I really can’t. If you would come talk to them.”

  Christina’s mother ran a day care center for the local Y in Carmel, Indiana. She was sixty-one, and a world-class complainer, which didn’t mean she didn’t have a list of formidable genuine grievances. Any one of which she could have made a meal of without Martha, her firstborn, her bright witty daughter, now a three-hundred-pound menace to herself and others, given to aural hallucinations and aggression, which could erupt anytime she decided that the nurses were poisoning her meds and she’d be better off without them.

  “Mom, I can’t come now. It’s really a busy time—”

  “But you have staff. I’m meeting with them Saturday and I need you.”

  “Saturday there’s a funeral I—”

  “For who? This is your family.”

  “For a teacher in the school who died. I’m giving the eulogy.”

  After a silence, her mother said, “What time of day is the funeral? Can’t you come after?”

  Christina’s telephone buttons were all lit up, meaning calls waiting, and now Sharon Comfort was at the door, making the time-out sign.

  “Mom, hold on a minute.” She pressed the mute button.

  Sharon said, “The nurse needs you in the infirmary.”

  “Why?”

  “She has a student there in tears with her hair coming out in clumps.”

  Christina stared, wanting to sputter. She pushed the button to unmute the call. “Mom, I have to call you back, I have an emergency.”

  “Christina, I have an emergency. The emergency is your sister. If they won’t keep her it’s the state hospital, I can’t have her in the house, you know I can’t handle her, and I can’t afford . . .”

  Actually it was Christina who couldn’t afford the one private facility in the county that had not yet expelled Martha. She’d been paying her sister’s uncovered medical expenses for ten years, and barring some deus ex machina, she would for the rest of her sister’s life.

  “Mom, just a minute . . .” She pushed the mute button again and said to Sharon, “Who is the student?”

  “Pinky Tyson.”

  Christina unmuted the phone and said, “Mom, I promise I’ll call you back, but right now I really have to go,” and she ended the call with her mother in midsentence of protest.

  “What else do I have waiting?” she asked Sharon, looking at the lit-up buttons on her phone.

  “The insurance adjuster, Florence’s sister, the minister doing the funeral service, and Caroline Hollister.”

  “Take messages. I’ll get back to them as soon as I can.” She was pulling on her blazer as she headed toward the side exit on her way to see the nurse.

  The infirmary, built in the style of a cottage from Hansel and Gretel for no reason that Christina could imagine, was hardly a state-of-the-art facility, but it was clean, and the nurse, a motherly woman from the village who had presided there for decades, was reasonably competent. She greeted Christina at the door and ushered her through the small waiting room where a wan freshman sat with a thermometer in her mouth reading a National Geographic.

  “I’ve got her in my treatment room; I don’t think she’s contagious, but she should see the doctor before she goes back to mingling with the other girls.”

  The treatment room had a table and sink, a medical cabinet full of jars with red crosses on them, a rolling stool for the doctor or nurse, and an examination table on which Pinky Tyson lay sobbing. There were shiny circular patches on her head where her sand-colored hair was entirely gone, and a large area at her crown where the light shone through to the scalp, as with male pattern baldness.

  “She’s been like that since she walked in here,” said the nurse.

  Christina sat down on the doctor’s stool and rolled herself close to the patient’s side.

  “Pinky.”

  The girl opened her eyes, experienced a renewed spasm of despair, and leaped from the table to dash to a box of tissues on the medicine cabinet to wipe her flowing eyes and nose. On the pillow where her head had been lay clumps of hair, as if a frantic long-haired animal had torn itself free of a trap there.

  Touched, Christina said, “Your pretty hair.”

  Pinky shook her head.

  “Has this ever happened to you before?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Can you tell me how I can help? The doctor is on the way.”

  Pinky waved her hand as if to say, that wasn’t necessary.

  Christina actually knew more about alopecia than most, since her mother’s hair had all fallen out overnight the day after Martha was first hospitalized when she was nineteen. Martha had been found at midnight, barefoot in a bathing suit and a tinfoil helmet, using a toothbrush to try to unlock the Carmel public library under the impression that it was her house.

  “Pinky, I hope you feel you can talk to me.”

  Pinky nodded, looking at the floor, which Christina took to mean she had no intention of talking to her. And why should she? Christina had known when they had admitted Pinky that she would be far from home and that she probably had no idea what a different world she had signed on for, but . . . she hadn’t expected the year to be this hard.

  The nurse came to the door to announce the doctor, and Dr. Maynard waddled past her into the room. He was retired from private practice but kept up his license so he could continue on call for the school. He was affordable, and that had to be weighed against the possibility, which had just occurred to Christina, that it was creepy that he wanted to stay on.

  Christina stood to make way for him but didn’t leave the room. Dr. Maynard said to Pinky, “Now, let’s see here, little lady,” and then went through the same pulse, blood pressure, temperature, ear, nose, and throat routine he would have if the patient had presented with a fever, a broken leg, or a gunshot wound.

  When he’d collected all the data he felt he needed, he rolled back a little way and turned to Christina, as if Pinky were deaf and dumb.

  “Alopecia,” he said, magisterially. “I thought so, just wanted to rule out any underlying condition. Fancy name for ‘Your hair fell out.’” He chuckled, then resumed his air of godlike man of medicine. “It can be caused by allergies, or sometimes heredity. Absent those two, we look to stress. You are working these young ladies too hard, Ms. Liggett. Exams coming? College boards, something of that nature? Or . . . ,” he said, suddenly entertaining a new thought, and casting a knowing look at Pinky, “boyfriend trouble?”

  He finished stowing his gear i
n his valise and stood. “She has no fever, she’s not contagious, there’s no reason to keep her from the general population, but she may not feel too perky about how she looks.” He turned back to Pinky. “Looking like you’ve got the mange? May not feel too perky about that.” He grinned at her, and threw her a wink.

  To Christina: “Might want to let her go downtown, buy a wig at the drugstore. Or a new hat. Women always cheer up with a new hat.”

  He went out, leaving Christina staring after him. One more thing to put on her endless list of problems to solve today if not sooner.

  She closed the door and sat down again, facing the miserable girl.

  “Pinky, tell me how I can help you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Can you tell me what’s made you upset?”

  There was silence.

  “Is there someone beside me you’d like to talk to?”

  Pinky raised her eyes to the window, and looked out, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, but didn’t speak.

  “Would you like to call your parents?”

  Pinky shook her head decisively. “I’m fine.”

  “How about your roommate?”

  Pinky shook her head even more emphatically.

  “Are you feeling out of your depth in your course work? I can arrange extra help for you if you need it. Your teachers all want you to succeed, that’s what study hall is for.” Note to self, she added silently, get Pinky’s transcript and follow through with this. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

  Pinky thought about it and said finally, “I have biology right now.”

  Christina was feeling distinctly in need of counseling herself. Could she call Pinky’s parents if the girl didn’t want them to know? Could she not call them? What if the child was having a nervous breakdown? What if she ran away?

  On the other hand, what if this fell into the Didn’t Cause It, Can’t Change It, Can’t Fix It Category? She stood up.