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WHEN I CALLED Eric to ask if I might stop by, his response was, “Why? Because misery loves company?”
“No. Because I have some information about Cissie you might like to hear.”
He considered for a moment. “A realtor’s bringing somebody. I’m supposed to go out.”
“We could walk to the park.” The weather was ideal for August, seventy-five degrees with just enough breeze to ruffle the trees.
“You’re sure I want to hear this?”
“Pretty sure.”
When he opened the door, he wore faded gray Bermuda shorts, a t-shirt dotted with holes, and flip-flops that must have accompanied him to college. His hair had been shampooed but not combed, and his beard was at least three days old. Having him leave well before the realtor arrived with a prospective buyer seemed like a pretty good decision.
At the nearby park we settled on a cement bench with wooden slats. Lacy shadows from the honey-locust tree shading us wriggled on the naked ground at our feet. Across the lawn, two boys of about twelve more or less hit a tennis ball back and forth inside a chain-link enclosure. An elderly woman walking a fussy Havanese wandered along the edge of a shallow creek, and an occasional car slipped past on the street behind us. Summer in suburbia, USA.
“Now. What’s this about Cissie?” Eric’s hangdog expression conveyed sadness, distrust resignation, and impatience in roughly that order.
“I’ll get to that, but let me clear up a couple other things first. Equally important,” I assured him as if I were swearing an oath.
“Oh?”
“You said Maisie liked to play around with murder methods from the mysteries she read.”
“True.”
“Which made you think she might be suicidal.”
“Yesss...”
I opened my hand. “So you moved in to keep an eye on her, right?”
“I also needed someplace to live.”
“But you didn’t learn about Maisie’s Alzheimers until the psych evaluation, right?”
“How’d you know...?”
Admitting that Dr. Quinn confirmed my suspicion with a silent smile probably wouldn’t fly, so I said, “Mystery lovers usually can’t leave a new book alone, but Maisie didn’t touch the ones I gave her.”
“That’s it?”
“Not entirely, but I do think she stopped reading a while ago.” When her memory began to fail. However, belaboring that wouldn’t get me to my point.
“So,” I said, drawing Eric’s eyes to mine. “How many times did your grandmother try to kill you?”
He jumped as if he’d been zapped.
“Two or three?” I guessed.
Eric rubbed his flaming face. Then he breathed out the word, “Three,” with what passed for relief.
“Her first fall...?”
“Not my fault,” he insisted. “I went upstairs to get dressed, and Gram lunged at me.”
“You ducked out of the way, and...”
“...down she went.” He shook off the vision, then laced his hands together behind his knee.
“The poisoned tea might have done it, but the first sip tasted awful. When I spit it out in the sink, what she used was sitting right there.”
He showed me a faint scar on his left forearm. “The knife scuffle didn’t last long. Took care of that with a band-aid.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“Like who? The police?”
“Maisie had Alzheimers. She could have gotten treatment.”
“But I didn’t know that, did I? Anyhow, she couldn’t afford a nursing facility. Neither could I.”
The uncomfortable topics had made him twitchy, so I gestured for us to walk. The woman and her dog were gone, and the intermittent thock of the tennis ball punctuated our conversation nicely.
“You told all this to Cissie?” I inquired as we headed downhill.
“Yes.”
“Even what Dr. Quinn implied?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Eric paused to place his fists on his hips and scrutinize the horizon. “Cissie’s doubted me ever since.”
“You think that’s why she stopped speaking to you.”
“Of course.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
Eric gawked at me. “What do you mean?”
As we proceeded along the grassy edge of the creek, I reminded him about Ronald threatening to use Dr. Quinn’s suspicions to have him arrested. “Contact between you two became much more dangerous that day. For her, and for you.”
He stopped to face me. “You’re saying Cissie’s trying to protect me?”
“She sort of is,” I answered, “but that’s only part of what’s going on.”
I inhaled. Exhaled. Finally gave up hunting for the right words and just told him.
“Ronald doesn’t just believe he’s better than everyone else. He knows it. There is no doubt in his mind that he’s exceptional, and, therefore, deserves exceptional treatment.”
Eric spat out some choice expletives, while I turned uphill.
Continuing, I said, “Nobody else really matters to Ronald, but he knows better than to let that secret out. In public he acts humble, charming, concerned, whatever it takes to convince people he’s a nice guy.”
“...instead of an angry, controlling sonovabitch.”
“Exactly. Cissie gets just enough of the Nice Guy act to lull her into thinking the worst might be over. Sadly, it works. Over and over again!”
“He’s really that calculating?”
“He probably doesn’t think of it that way, but yes. Apparently abusers invent so many ways to justify themselves it would make your head spin.”
Eric’s jaw rolled. “Why doesn’t Cissie leave?”
“I asked that, too. Remember, Ronald’s had years to bully her into a corner, but he probably caught on that she would be vulnerable to that early on. Did she tell you her family thought she was marrying up?”
“No.”
“Well, they did, and it didn’t sound like a joke to me.”
Now Eric was blinking mad. “But Cissie’s great. She’s bright. Funny. Sweet. You’ve seen her with Caroline. She’s a wonderful mother!”
“Granted,” I said. “But she doesn’t hear that from her husband, who, by the way, had no difficulty cutting her off her from her family. He also bad-mouthed all her friends until she quit having any. I got that message without him saying a word.”
Eric’s distress was headed toward the red zone, so I spared him the final eye-opener I’d gleaned from Natalie’s reading material.
Ronald’s “Blonde Bitch” lies were more than an excuse for his cheating. If Cissie ever summoned the nerve to turn him in, his friends and coworkers would be armed with years of stories about what a terrible wife and mother she was. Hearing those same complaints herself pretty much every day, Cissie knew precisely what Ronald would tell the judge at a custody hearing. I suspected the prospect of losing Caroline frightened her even more than Ronald’s fists.
I rested a hand on Eric’s arm. “Let’s get to the good news.”
“What?” he challenged, as if there were no good news to be had in the world.
“Dr. Quinn knows you’re innocent.”
“You’re kidding. How?”
I filled him in on how the nurse got delayed giving Maisie the sedative, and my theory about the blood on the edge of the paperback. I also told him I’d learned something interesting about Alzheimers’ medications on the Internet.
“Did you know they can increase the risk of a stroke?”
“Do you think that was what happened?”
I lifted one shoulder as if I didn’t know. “You said Maisie was revved up about Lonny even worse than usual. What do you think?”
Eric ran his hand through his tangled hair. “I don’t know what to think.”
We ambled back toward his house in silence.
“I should have done more for Gram,” he lamented when we reached his sidewalk.
“You did as much as anyone could.”
Eric rolled his eyes.
“You’ve got a lot to process,” I said. “You’ll get there.”
“Cissie still won’t speak to me.”
“But now you know why.”
A tight-lipped sneer.
“I know. Easy for me to say,” I admitted, “but think of it this way. If you leave, you can’t be her soft landing. If you stay, maybe you can.”