First Girl Gone(85)
“I feel like that’s probably an underserved market. Single-serving caskets. Someone should get on that. Make a bundle.”
Something jarred Charlie out of the daydream and back into the hospital. She was somewhat startled to find herself in a different seat than she remembered originally sitting down in. Now she was hunched in a remarkably uncomfortable chair—a wood-framed thing with tacky upholstery that reminded her of a school photo backdrop option called “Laser.” And she faced a TV screen with the sound turned off, half-watching a seemingly endless stream of renovation projects on HGTV.
Allie’s absence jabbed at her like the tip of a knife. Her sister hadn’t said a word since Charlie found Amber’s body, and she didn’t understand why.
Allie? Are you there? Charlie thought, shaping the words in her mind.
Silence.
Worse than silence. A void. Like a piece of her was missing. A gaping wound.
She swallowed, struggling to get the saliva over the lump in her throat. Her neck constricted. Didn’t want to obey.
It wasn’t simply that Allie didn’t speak or respond.
Allie was gone.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Hours had passed—at least Charlie thought it had been hours. Between the artificial lighting in the waiting room and the endless loop of HGTV shows flickering on the screen in front of her, it was hard to tell.
She glanced around and noticed that Linda Markowitz and Tootsie had gone. It was now just Charlie and Betty Humphrey, the one who’d found Frank.
“I was bringing him a tuna casserole. That’s how it happened,” she said.
Her eyes locked onto Charlie’s when she spoke, cornflower-blue and bulging with strange stimulation, pupils all swollen in a way that Charlie associated with drug use. She seriously doubted, however, that the seventy-five-year-old woman with white hair and a flower-print dress had snorted any rails of crank of late.
“Did I already tell you?” Betty said. “How it happened, I mean.”
Charlie shook her head. She had a feeling that she had heard the story already, but the night was mostly a blur of murmuring voices and a series of kitchen renovations on TV that all seemed to morph together into one gargantuan kitchen.
Betty’s eyes burned brighter still once Charlie gave her the go-ahead to launch into her spiel again. Must have been a big night for her.
“So I was bringing him a tuna casserole—Frank’s the kind of man who loves home cookin’, and I know he can’t do as much for himself these days, so I try to get over there a couple times a week with some grub.”
Her hands clutched in front of her chest as she spoke, twitching there like squirrel paws, fingers wrapping over and over each other. The wrinkled skin rasped like sandpaper.
“I knocked on the door. No answer. Thought that was funny, because the lights were on. Whole mess of lights, you understand. Now, I wasn’t worried. Not at first. But I felt like I should check to make sure because of, you know, Frank’s condition.”
She cleared her throat. Two little thrusts of air forced through the gullet. The strange sound of phlegm shifting scraped out of there, like something slimy and crackling at the same time.
“I started around the garage to the deck, you know? Figured I’d take a peek through the sliding door. And I’m bein’ all careful, seein’ as it’s icy out, and I’m luggin’ a pipin’-hot casserole pan. About halfway across the deck, I seen him through the window. Frank. Poor Frank. Lyin’ there on the kitchen floor. Face down. And I just thought he was dead. Straight away. That was my gut reaction. Oh, God. Frank just dropped dead in his kitchen.”
Charlie noted the remnants of some accent creeping out as the story heated up—“his kitchen” coming out closer to “hees keetchen.”
“So I gasp. Just about drop the casserole then and there. I hustle to the sliding door. Try it. Locked. And I see his cat there, perched on the arm of the sofa, and I remember wishing the darn cat could come unlock the door.”
Marlowe. With Frank laid low, Charlie would have to remember to stop by and feed him.
Two more thrusts of air shot through the woman’s throat, more mucus stirring inside.
“So I set the casserole pan down on the wooden bench there, and I called it in. Felt like the ambulance took forever to get there. And I’m just standing on my tiptoes, peeking inside, trying to get a better look at the body and what have you.”
Body. That pushed Charlie over the edge. This old woman was talking about all of this like an exciting thing that had happened to her, a juicy piece of gossip she could prattle on about to all of her friends, like she’d found a dead body—just like a scene in one of her Agatha Christie novels or something.
But she wasn’t talking about some bullshit whodunit here. She was talking about Frank, her uncle Frank. The man laid out just down the hall, looking gray and gaunt and just barely hanging in there.
And Allie was gone. And the case was careening away from her.
And now this old bag just wanted to talk about herself, about her thrilling experience. Brag. Dish about the big scandal, the big scoop.
Charlie gritted her teeth. Tried to stop herself from saying something cruel.
Betty went on.
“It was a lot of commotion, you know. Really rattled the neighborhood. The ambulance coming down the street, lights spinning, siren blaring. Everyone—all the neighbors—come out on their stoops to see what was going on. That’s because of Frank, though, you understand. We all love Frank. Everybody. He’s just adored by the whole neighborhood.”