Kate surfaced from black fog to find Aimee’s arms supporting her, protecting her, grounding her. She was still in Maggie’s room but had no memory connecting this close, full body embrace with Aimee to the initial sound of Aimee’s voice calling her name and the opening of the door to the room.
“I’m so, so sorry, Kate,” Aimee was whispering brokenly, her arms tightening, her face wet against Kate’s. Whether from her tears or Kate’s, Kate did not know; her own body was heaving with involuntary sobs. Aimee moved one arm, but only to stroke and gently pat Kate’s back as if she were soothing a child.
Gradually Kate regained control, and Aimee gave her one final pat and eased the tightness of her embrace, stepped back from her. She looked searchingly, almost wonderingly at what she saw in Kate’s face, took both her hands and squeezed them hard before releasing them. Then made her way over to Maggie’s bed, Kate following. Aimee gazed down at Maggie, her slender shoulders slumping. She leaned down and cupped Maggie’s face in both hands and kissed her forehead.
Pulling tissues from the box on Maggie’s side table, Kate wiped her face and blew her nose. She glanced around the room: Alice was gone, Marla nowhere in sight.
Aimee, her blue-violet eyes a gloss of tears, turned to Kate and reached for her hand. “She looks like she just slipped away. She looks very peaceful.”
“Yes,” Kate conceded, “she does.”
“What was all the commotion in here? Marla said you were angry—told her to stay out. Something going on with you and Alice?”
Kate took temporary refuge in a vague, “I don’t know, I was upset…” An inner voice combined with an investigator’s innate sense of caution told her to marshal her thoughts more coherently before saying anything about Alice to anyone, even Aimee.
“I understand,” Aimee said softly. “Marla told me you couldn’t understand how she could seem so much better and then…” Her voice choked and she looked down at Maggie. She asked, barely able to formulate the words, “Kate…do you think…could she actually…do this to herself? Take something? Is that…what’s happened here?”
“Aimee…The doctor’s on his way. We’ll know more then.”
But she was already recognizing two realities. The doctor would arrive only when it was convenient: this was a hospice and people in here were expected to die. And from decades of experience in homicide she knew that by far the most difficult cause of death to determine was suffocation. Excruciatingly difficult to prove in its most common and tragic manifestation, infant crib death, and probably impossible in a woman with terminal lung cancer who not only did not struggle but welcomed her death. Experience told her the doctor, in the absence of very obvious evidence to the contrary, would issue a death certificate for one Magda Schaeffer with cause of death listed as lung cancer and manner of death respiratory failure. As for Alice…
“I called Raney on my way in,” Aimee intruded into her thoughts. “She’ll let everybody know. They’re coming over to be with her—and us.”
Kate nodded distractedly, still deeply preoccupied by a decision she must make and make quickly while she still had extreme grief as a reason for her reticence thus far. Revealing that Maggie’s death was actually a homicide—what would happen? What if Alice denied what she had confessed? Beyond that, what would bringing an accusation actually achieve? Beyond adding a deeper layer of shock and grief and exacerbating everyone’s anguish? Beyond damaging the reputation of a hospice providing outstanding service and which bore no responsibility for what had happened here?
Her entire belief system told her, ordered her to report what had occurred: it was a crime. Cameron was right—she was a cop to her soul. Her experience and reputation as a former homicide detective would lend not just credibility but muscularity to an accusation. But speaking to her out of common sense and common humanity was the stark and leavening wisdom that a woman only days from death had advanced its certainty aided by another woman only days from her own death. Assisted or not, this was a suicide.
She brushed her fingers over Maggie’s forehead. You old fox. What did you write in that book? She needed to confiscate it before anyone else might find it and open it by happenstance. She released Aimee’s hand and moved to Alice’s bed.
“I’m taking this,” she told Aimee, picking up and displaying The Kiss That Counted. “The last book she was reading, I brought it in for her.”
“Sure,” Aimee said with a fleeting, unseeing glance at the book.
Kate came back to the bed and reached to the side table and cradled Maggie’s ancient coffee mug in one hand. “More than anything I want this,” she said softly. “She used it every day of her life.”
“You’re the one who should have it,” Aimee told her. “You should have anything you want. There was never anyone closer to her. Months ago I asked her for the sign from the Nightwood Bar.”
Kate was surprised, touched by this revelation, vividly remembering the lavender script of the discreet sign that had identified Maggie’s bar. “I wondered where it was. Let me put these in the car,” she said. And make some phone calls while she had a few moments of privacy.
“Want me to come with you?” Aimee asked, looking at her in concern.
“Please stay here with Maggie,” Kate said quietly. “She shouldn’t be alone. I’ll be okay. Some air would be good and I need to make a phone call before…everyone gets here and everything begins to happen.”
“I’d like the time to make my own goodbyes,” Aimee said in a subdued voice. She pulled up a chair beside the bed.
At the doorway Kate looked back into the room at the two women who had been the fortresses in her life.
Aimee, seating herself in the chair, elegant in her work clothes, her body subtly ripened into even more feminine grace over the years since the day Kate had first held her in her arms. Her hair parting as always into currents with the movements of her head, threads of it glinting silver under the ceiling fluorescents as she bowed her head and reached to the bed to place long, delicate fingers on Maggie’s arm.
And Maggie. Once so robust, now so tiny, a virtually shapeless presence in the bed…Not a presence at all, really, her indomitable spirit having finally taken flight, abandoning the shrunken, ineffectual, foreign body she had long since rejected. That spirit winging its way—to where? In the nebulous spiritual belief system she shared with Maggie, Maggie was free. And that was enough.
Eyes again blurred with tears as she made her way down the hallway, she heard her name called and recognized that it was Ida. She ducked her head into the room.
“Kate, please come in—for just a moment.”
Ida, face creased in sympathy, raised herself on her bed and reached to Kate, took her hand, lay back and clasped it in her two. “I heard. My very deepest condolences, my dear Kate. As often as you visited I know you loved her very much.”
Touched by the distress on Ida’s kind old face, Kate said, “Thank you,” her voice unsteady.
“I’m guessing you won’t be back. It would be so hard for you to come back…I just wanted to tell you I’ll miss you, tell you how much you’ve meant to me—”
“If you want me to come back, Ida—”
“More than anything.”
“Then I’ll be here. I promise.”
Feeling her control slipping further, Kate squeezed Ida’s hand, released it and left the room.
Wiping her eyes, she walked unseeingly through the hospice and out to her car, halting when she saw skid marks leading to where she had come to a heedless stop, the car all but in the bushes of Silverlake Haven. She swore at herself for not having had the presence of mind as she came to Maggie to at least point her key ring at the car and lock the doors. In the glove compartment her loaded .38 had been accessible to anyone curious enough to get into what seemed an abandoned car.
She got in and placed the mug on the seat beside her, held onto The Kiss That Counted. She contemplated the book, the intense face of the tousle-haired woman on the cover. Riffled its pages.
Not now, Maggie. No matter what you wrote I just…can’t deal right now.
She placed the book next to the mug and took out her cell phone. Embarrassed, ashamed of her need, she punched in the number she had to call first. She held the phone close to her ear, taking refuge in Calla Dearborn’s calm, measured tones instructing her to leave a message. “It’s Kate. I wanted you to know Maggie just…passed. Thanks…thanks,” she repeated, her voice breaking. Realizing she could not think of a single other thing to say, she clicked off.
She dialed the cabin in Yucca Valley. Dreading the news she had to relay, she asked heavily, “Everything there okay, Joe?”
“Everything here is okay. You sound like you’re not okay.”
“I’m at the hospice. Maggie just passed.”
“Oh my God, Kate. I am so sorry. I hope Aimee’s there with you?”
“Thank you, Joe. She is. I can’t leave right now. Maybe later tonight but right now I don’t think I can drive—”
“Don’t even think about coming here tonight. You taking Jean and Jason with you, it’s the world off my shoulders. You have a lot to take care of there. I just wish I could—the timing on all this just sucks big-time.”
Tell me, she thought.
“Go be with Aimee and Maggie. Don’t worry about me. Trust me, I’ll be fine. And Kate, you have my deepest condolences.” He hung up.
Kate started the car, moved it further down the street to park it properly, and sat rubbing her face, feeling herself on the knife edge of yet another crucial decision, one as meaningful as what she had just faced about Alice, as meaningful as when she’d risked Joe’s friendship by entering his house without his knowledge or permission.
The last thing on this earth she was willing to trust was Cameron’s assurances that he would “be fine.” Not alone, not with so lethal an entity as Jack Cameron stalking him. Joe was all alone in confronting his brother for one reason only: he saw no other choice. With Maggie already gone, how could she get through this night fearing she might be losing another close friend because she couldn’t be there with him? There was really no choice to be made.
She pulled out her wallet and extracted Dutch Hollander’s card from one of its compartments.
“Dutch,” she said when he picked up his cell phone, “it’s Kate. You offered to help—”
“What can I do?” he broke in, his voice firm, resonant.
“I need you to absolutely trust me and I need to absolutely trust you.”
“I’m right there on both of those.”
Remembering his hand gripping hers so firmly on the restaurant table, she plunged on. “I’ve found Joe. He’s in bad trouble and facing it alone. His life may depend on us. On you.”
“I’m right there,” he repeated. “Where are you?”
“Long story and I don’t have enough time to explain much of anything except I can’t be where he is, not till tomorrow. I need to tell you what’s going on with him and I need you to do exactly as I say and not one thing more. Are you in?”
“He’s my friend, Kate. And I totally trust you on this. I’m totally in.”
A few minutes later, having filled in Dutch Hollander on the situation at the cabin, seeing Aimee come walking down the street toward her, Kate hurriedly concluded her instructions to him, uttered, “I have to go,” and signed off.
Aimee leaned in the window. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I was just about to come back.”
“Who did you have to call?”
“A friend of Joe’s. I had to tell him where he is—”
“Which is?”
“The high desert, out of cell phone range. How to get to him there.”
Whatever her judgment about Kate going to this much effort to notify Cameron of Maggie’s death, Aimee’s nod acknowledged that she accepted it was important to Kate. “The gang’s arriving,” she said.
“Yeah. I saw.” During her call to Dutch Hollander she had been peripherally aware of two cars driving past whose occupants were friends.
“So let’s go be with Maggie,” Aimee said, and pulled the car door open. “With our family.”
A fractured family, Kate thought, climbing out and taking the hand Aimee extended to her. A splintered family. The heart and soul, the glue holding together what little family she could lay claim to over the last twenty-three years was gone, had departed from that bed in the hospice. Aimee, for all her supportive behavior under these circumstances, was estranged from her. And Cameron…what might be happening to Cameron this very night?
In Maggie’s room, Raney was first to come up to her, her dark eyes wet, her ebony face anguished. Hugging Kate, she told her, “I know how you feel.”
“I know you do, Raney,” Kate said, hugging her in return.
The loss of Raney’s partner from breast cancer—it was another compelling reason for letting pass the truth of Maggie’s death. Unlike Maggie, Audie had retained sufficient agency with her illness to take her own life, and even though she had shown in every way she could to everyone who loved her that her overdose had been a rational act, not an act of despair, Raney to this day remained haunted by a decision made independently of her and a death that seemed all the crueler for her life partner’s usurping whatever days remained to them.
Patton was next to pull Kate into a bruising, hip-clanging hug. “Nothing will ever be the same,” she muttered, her weather-beaten face coursed with tears. Patton looked oddly different, and Kate realized that Audie’s funeral had been the last time she’d seen Patton in anything but baggy jeans and a T-shirt, long or short-sleeved depending on the season. In what passed as her most formal clothing, she now wore black khakis and a gray shirt and was hatless, her trademark yachting cap resting on Alice’s empty bed.
Ash and Tora were at Maggie’s bed, banking flowers all around her, bouquets of sunflowers, Mexican daisies and dahlias. “Maggie’s favorites,” Tora said, turning her tear-streaked face to Kate.
“I know.” They were the flowers Maggie had planted and tended in the miniscule yard of her tiny house in Pacoima. “How wonderful of you and Ash to do this.”
“The flower stand on Melrose,” Ash said, “I bought everything they had of these. We checked, Kate. Whatever we leave here with Maggie can be included for her, her…”
Everyone nodded mutely, as if no one wanted to name the process that would transmute the woman on the bed from her human form into gray ashes.
Patton went over to Alice’s bed and picked up her yachting cap, battered and threadbare with age. “Take this…this piece of me with you, Maggie,” she said brokenly and placed the cap reverently at the foot of Maggie’s bed.
Ash, finished with the flowers, arranged gay pride flags on Maggie’s pillow on either side of her head. From a backpack Tora removed a rainbow-hued T-shirt, unfolded it and placed it tenderly across Maggie’s legs; it read CHICANA PRIDE and Kate recognized it as the shirt that Maggie had bought for Tora at a gay pride parade they had all gone to well over a decade ago. Tora tried to speak, could not, and backed away, into Ash’s arms.
Aimee, who had been searching for something in her shoulder bag, was next. Lifting Maggie’s hand, she slid onto her wrist a bracelet of stones the colors of the pride flag. Kate had been with Aimee the weekend she had bought the bracelet at one of West Hollywood’s pride festivals.
Kate was looking wonderingly at the group of women, all of them with hard life history seared into their faces, Patton’s once-dark hair bleached to snow…It now seemed all so brief, their time together in the sun when Kate had found her community in Maggie’s bar. When they had all been young and hanging out together, this little band of friends, Latinas, African Americans, Caucasians, defiantly queer and defiantly in-your-face to the world. Save for herself, a closeted police officer, and Audie, a closeted kindergarten teacher…Who among them could ever have imagined this day…Imagined themselves this much older…This much beaten up by life…
Maggie had minced no words in her opposition to a memorial service being held for her, and so nothing had been planned beyond this meeting here tonight, beyond the cremation that would occur no later than Monday morning. But Kate had never given any thought to this night, these moments directly after Maggie’s passing, what might or should be happening. “I don’t have anything for her,” she said helplessly.
“You already did what we’re doing,” Patton declared. “You put her in here, made sure she had the best of care up till the moment she left us.”
I put her in here, she thought, and made Alice possible.
Then she thought: Let it go.
“You’re in her heart, Kate,” Raney told her. “She’s already taken that with her. She loved us, loved my Audie, and she loved you more than any of us.”
“More than all the rest of us put together,” Aimee put in, adding a brief, pointed smile.
The thought was still reverberating in Kate’s head: Let it go. She was also thinking: I do have something to leave with her.
“So sorry to interrupt,” Marla said from the doorway, “Doctor Patel has just arrived.”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” Kate said, her gaze encompassing all the women in the room, “could I have just a few last moments alone with Maggie and then remain here with the doctor?”
With sympathetic murmurs of acquiescence and a pat on the arm from Aimee, everyone filed out of the room.
Kate reached into her pocket, took out her LAPD detective’s badge. Then she covered Maggie’s hand, the one with Aimee’s bracelet on it, with her own. The hand was still warm; her body had not yet begun to cool.
The doctor walked in, a handsome older man of Indian heritage, carrying a medical bag and wearing a suit and tie, Kate was pleased to see. “Doctor Patel,” she said, “I’m Kate Delafield, the decedent’s closest friend.”
He responded with a handshake and a fleeting smile flashing white against the warm dark tones of his skin. “You are also LAPD?” he asked in a slight accent, his gaze catching the badge in her hand as she had intended.
“Wilshire Division homicide. Retired,” she said, and fully displayed the badge. “It’s a replica. I’ll be leaving it to be cremated with my friend.”
He was surveying the bed, the flowers, the flags. “Along with other tributes, I see. Your friend obviously meant a great deal to people in this world.”
“She did,” Kate said thickly, struck by the phrasing and the truth of it. Maggie had indeed meant a great deal in the sphere she had inhabited.
He opened his case, removed a penlight, placed the case on the floor by the bed. He held a middle finger to the inside of Maggie’s wrist for a few moments, then touched palpating fingers to Maggie’s face. “Were you here for her passing?”
“Afterward. Only moments afterward.”
In a single fluid instant he lifted one of Maggie’s eyelids with a thumb, splashed his light into it and flicked the light off, lowered the lid. “Everything seemed as it should?”
“She had stage four extensive lung cancer,” Kate offered in reply.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Detective Delafield,” the doctor said as he gently lifted the neck of Maggie’s gown. “A very great loss, to pay her such a tribute as giving her your police badge. Why don’t you lay it right here over her heart. Seems that’s where it might go?”
“Thank you for your kindness,” Kate managed. She placed the badge over Maggie’s heart, precisely on the expanse of bare skin the doctor had exposed. Dr. Patel restored the neck of the gown.
Again the reverberation within her: Let it go.
The doctor put his light back into his case, closed it up and without another word left the room.
Kate stood beside Maggie’s bed, her body again heaving with sobs, telling herself again and again, Let it go.
It was time to let Maggie go. It was time to let the badge go. The job go. It was time to let many things go.