"It's okay, Cindy!" I screamed back. "It's the police. Please, go let them in!"
After a moment I heard Cindy's rapid footsteps receding down the hall, and I began to relax. Officer Tracey will be here soon. Officer Tracey will help me. Officer Tracey will find out who killed Gail.
And then I saw them: paw prints. Kitty prints, to be precise. Kitty prints that meandered through the gore, circled the overturned chair, trotted over a computer printout and faded, step by bloody step, before disappearing into the hall.
That wasn't mud I had been working out of Nitro's toes, it was Gail's blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Blood. Gail's blood. It seemed to be everywhere.
Paul led me up to the bedroom and waited while I stripped. He wrapped me gently in a multicolored beach towel, hugged me for a long minute, kissed the top of my head, then stuffed the ruined slacks and sweater I had been wearing into a plastic garbage bag. "Bath," he ordered.
I eyed the bag. "My clothes?"
"Do you really want to keep them?" Paul asked.
I shook my head.
Paul chewed his lower lip, a sure sign he was worried about something. "The police-" he began.
Somewhere in my paralyzed brain comprehension dawned, and I finished the sentence for him. The police might want to examine my clothes for evidence. I stared at my husband and tried desperately to swallow around the lump that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my throat.
"Bath," Paul repeated, taking hold of my shoulders and turning me in the direction of the bathroom.
This time I obeyed.
Shut away in the womblike comfort of our master bath, I turned on the tap, dumped in some lavender bath salts, and crawled wearily into the tub. I lay down, closed my eyes and waited, enjoying the sensation as the hot water rose up my neck, crept over my cheeks, and covered my ears. When only my nose was exposed, I used my toes to push the tap off. In the relative silence beneath the water I could hear nothing but the air moving in and out of my lungs and, faintly, the sound of the television downstairs.
With my hair floating and swirling lazily around my head, I tried to wipe my mind clean, to fill it with nothing but white space. It was a losing battle. It would be a long time, I thought, before I would be able to close my eyes and visualize anything but an image of Gail Parrish curled up on a white tile floor in a pool of her own dark red blood.
Could I try TM? After my cancer diagnosis, Ruth had insisted I learn Transcendental Meditation; she'd even paid for my lessons. TM had helped lower my stress, but I'd never achieved that altered state of consciousness that Ruth had rambled on about so passionately.
I relaxed, hands floating by my sides, breathing in and out, repeating the mantra I had been taught: Hirim. Hirim. Hirim. Hirim.
A disorganized army of lights and shapes floated aimlessly about the interior landscape of my eyes, my breathing slowed, and I drifted away on an undulating wave, alternately both radiant and dark.
I was awakened by Paul knocking gently on the door. "Hannah?"
"Mumph."
"You okay in there?"
I lay in the tub silently, collecting my wits.
"You have to eat something," Paul said.
I rallied enough to answer. "I can't. I'll be sick to my stomach."
"Mind if I come in?"
I grunted.
The door swung open, followed by Paul, who perched on the edge of the tub. He wrung out a washcloth and used it to wipe the perspiration from my face. "You have to eat something, Hannah."
I grabbed my husband's hand, washcloth and all. "What if it's my fault Gail is dead?"
"It's not your fault, Hannah. It's the fault of whomever pulled the trigger."
"Please! Save the NRA platitudes for somebody who gives a damn!" I dropped his hand. "Of course I could be responsible! The other day when I was talking to Gail on the telephone, it was clear she had stumbled onto something. “ “That's odd,' she told me. She was supposed to call me back. She never did."
"There could be all sorts of reasonable explanations."
"That's what I kept telling myself when I couldn't reach her today, that there was a reasonable explanation why her phone was constantly busy." I took a deep, shuddering breath. "She was working on eBay, Paul. Somebody shot her before she could log off."
"And do you have a theory as to who that somebody might be?"
"I think that Gail uncovered something when she was compiling that list of Ginger Cove residents for me. Maybe after she hung up, she went digging around in Jablonsky's files. Maybe he caught her at it and fired her. Or, maybe she simply panicked and quit."
"That would explain the substitute receptionist," Paul said. "But not the murder."
"My theory is that Gail quit. I also think that Jablonsky figured out why she quit and decided he couldn't trust her to keep her mouth shut. I think he had her killed to keep her from blowing the whistle on him."
"Enter Nicholas Pottorff," Paul said.
"Exactly. Jablonsky is far too fastidious to get his own hands dirty."
"Have you shared your theory with the Annapolis police?"
I nodded.
"Do you want to talk to Dennis, too?"
"God, no! I'm still embarrassed by what I said to him last night. I've been lying here thinking about it, and you know, Dennis is right. Maybe that's why he made me so angry. I know he can't interfere with cases in other jurisdictions, and it's not fair for me to ask him to."
I glanced up at my husband through lowered lashes. "Besides, Dennis thinks I'm a pain in the ass. He's only being nice to me because he's married to your sister."
"That's not true! Dennis likes you."
"Hah."
"Well, I'm not going to argue with you about it. I think you're being pigheaded and foolish. Of course we should call Dennis. Things are different today than they were last night. Gail's death has changed everything."
"Particularly for Gail," I said.
Paul frowned. He was only trying to be helpful, and I'd hurt his feelings.
I sat up in the tub and opened the drain. "I'd rather not bother Dennis, if you don't mind, Paul. He already thinks I'm a kook. Besides, I have confidence in Officer Tracey. He seemed a take-charge kind of guy. I don't think he's going to drop the ball."
Paul pulled a towel off the rack and handed it to me. “Tell me about Tracey."
I dried myself briskly. "He was a prince." I lowered my head, wrapped the towel around it and twisted the ends under. "I swear to God, I've never seen anybody work so fast," I said, looking up. "In the two minutes between the time he got there and the arrival of the paramedics, he corralled Cindy and had her sitting in the living room with a female officer, coaxed me out from under Gail's computer table and sat me down on the sofa next to Cindy, and cornered Nitro-that's the cat-and shut her up in the powder room."
"I told him everything," I added. "And he gave me his card. I have a feeling I'm going to need it."
I turned, reached under the sink for my dryer, and began working on my hair. I didn't mention it to Paul, but I was grateful, too, that Mike Tracey had escorted me to my car, running interference with the reporters who had materialized on the scene and were crawling all over it like ants at a picnic.
"You okay to drive, ma'am?" he'd inquired as he closed the car door after me.
I had nodded.
Then he'd gone back to sit with a distraught Cindy until her mother arrived to take her off his hands.
In the mirror, I saw Paul was still standing behind me, watching with an amused smile as I worked mousse into my hair and began fluffing it with my fingers. "Go away, now," I told my husband. "Find a good DVD. I need some cheering up."
After Paul left the bathroom, I finished drying my hair, dressed in my flannel pajamas, and wandered downstairs to the living room, where he had cued up Ruthless People, our favorite "feel good" movie. He aimed the remote at the TV and clicked the movie on.