Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(58)

“Are you talking about Janey? Janey and Craig? He hit her, you know. She tried to get him to stop using that dope stuff he liked, and he hit her. She says only once, but I believe it was more.” She lifts one slow hand and taps her nose with a pale finger. “A mother can tell.”

“This isn’t about Janey. I’m talking about Olivia.”

“He made Livvy stop taking her pills. She said it was because she didn’t want to be a dope addict like Craig, but it wasn’t the same. She needed those pills.”

“Are you talking about her antidepressants?”

“They were pills that made her able to go out.” She pauses, considering. “There were other ones, too, that kept her from touching things over and over. She had strange ideas, my Livvy, but she was a good person, just the same. Underneath, she was a very good person.”

Mrs. Wharton begins to cry.

There’s a box of Kleenex on the nightstand. Hodges takes a few and holds them out to her, but when he sees how difficult it is for her to close her hand, he wipes her eyes for her.

“Thank you, sir. Is your name Hedges?”

“Hodges, ma’am.”

“You were the nice one. The other one was very mean to Livvy. She said he was laughing at her. Laughing all the time. She said she could see it in his eyes.”

Was that true? If so, he’s ashamed of Pete. And ashamed of himself for not realizing.

“Who suggested she stop taking her pills? Do you remember?”

Janey has come back with the orange juice and a small paper cup that probably holds her mother’s pain medication. Hodges glimpses her from the corner of his eye and uses the same two fingers to motion her away again. He doesn’t want Mrs. Wharton’s attention divided, or taking any pills that will further muddle her already muddled recollection.

Mrs. Wharton is silent. Then, just when Hodges is afraid she won’t answer: “It was her pen-pal.”

“Did she meet him under the Blue Umbrella? Debbie’s Blue Umbrella?”

“She never met him. Not in person.”

“What I mean—”

“The Blue Umbrella was make-believe.” From beneath the white brows, her eyes are calling him a perfect idiot. “It was a thing in her computer. Frankie was her computer pen-pal.”

He always feels a kind of electric shock in his midsection when fresh info drops. Frankie. Surely not the guy’s real name, but names have power and aliases often have meaning. Frankie.

“He told her to stop taking her medicine?”

“Yes, he said it was hooking her. Where’s Janey? I want my pills.”

“She’ll be back any minute, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Wharton broods into her lap for a moment. “Frankie said he took all the same medicines, and that’s why he did . . . what he did. He said he felt better after he stopped taking them. He said that after he stopped, he knew what he did was wrong. But it made him sad because he couldn’t take it back. That’s what he said. And that life wasn’t worth living. I told Livvy she should stop talking to him. I said he was bad. That he was poison. And she said . . .”

The tears are coming again.

“She said she had to save him.”

This time when Janey comes into the doorway, Hodges nods to her. Janey puts a pair of blue pills into her mother’s pursed and seeking mouth, then gives her a drink of juice.

“Thank you, Livvy.”

Hodges sees Janey wince, then smile. “You’re welcome, dear.” She turns to Hodges. “I think we should go, Bill. She’s very tired.”

He can see that, but is still reluctant to leave. There’s a feeling you get when the interview isn’t done. When there’s at least one more apple hanging on the tree. “Mrs. Wharton, did Olivia say anything else about Frankie? Because you’re right. He is bad. I’d like to find him so he can’t hurt anyone else.”

“Livvy never would have left her key in her car. Never.” Elizabeth Wharton sits hunched in her bar of sun, a human parenthesis in a fuzzy blue robe, unaware that she’s topped with a gauze of silver light. The finger comes up again—admonitory. She says, “That dog we had never threw up on the rug again. Just that once.”

Janey takes Hodges’s hand and mouths, Let’s go.

Habits die hard, and Hodges speaks the old formula as Janey bends down and kisses first her mother’s cheek and then the corner of her dry mouth. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Wharton. You’ve been very helpful.”

As they reach the door, Mrs. Wharton speaks clearly. “She still wouldn’t have committed suicide if not for the ghosts.”

Hodges turns back. Beside him, Janey Patterson is wide-eyed.

“What ghosts, Mrs. Wharton?”

“One was the baby,” she says. “The poor thing who was killed with all those others. Livvy heard that baby in the night, crying and crying. She said the baby’s name was Patricia.”

“In her house? Olivia heard this in her house?”

Elizabeth Wharton manages the smallest of nods, a mere dip of the chin. “And sometimes the mother. She said the mother would accuse her.”

She looks up at them from her wheelchair hunch.

“She would scream, ‘Why did you let him murder my baby?’ That’s why Livvy killed herself.”