She shook her head. “No. No. It’s too late.”
The clock beneath our feet whirred and clanked. I realized it was about to strike noon: eight bells. I’d read Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel, The Nine Tailors, and as I steeled myself for the first deafening bong, I prayed she’d made up the part about the bells turning your eardrums to mush.
“Too late for what?” I pressed.
“Ted says you were hanging around the Pentagon. Is that true?”
“Oh, did Ted see me there?” I asked in what I prayed was a conversational tone, although my voice was quaking as violently as my knees. “Why didn’t he say hello?”
“We think you went there to stir up trouble,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“I can’t imagine why you think that, Dorothy. I was there to visit the memorial chapel,” I told her, shading the truth just a tad. “It’s profoundly moving.”
Below us the clock shifted gears.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Paul and I had friends who perished in the attack.” I’d played the sympathy card, but it was wasted on Dorothy, whose tortured brain knew no pain but her own.
“Ted’s going to jail!” she wailed. “Now I have nobody! Nobody!” The wind, as bitter as her words, swept across the balcony and tore the hat from her head, sending it spinning into the trees. She didn’t seem to notice.
Her sudden baldness, her vulnerability, tore at my heart. In that instant I saw the true source of her pain. Ted might go to jail. In a year’s time, Kevin would graduate, and who knew where the Navy would send him? Dorothy had no other children and, other than me, no friends. She would be utterly alone.
Dorothy closed her eyes for a moment, then joggled her head as if trying to clear it. “I thought you were my friend, Hannah, but now you’ve turned on me, too, just like all the others.”
Others? What the heck was Dorothy talking about? The vague hints of paranoia I’d detected earlier seemed to have grown to epidemic proportions.
“Everyone ends up betraying me.” She swayed, reaching out with her free hand to steady herself on the stone balustrade. “Even you. It really, really hurt when you turned against me.”
Coming from a woman who had lied to the police about seeing me at the scene of a crime, I found the statement extraordinary, to say the least. What the hell was going on? Had the chemo made her crazy? But Dorothy was the one holding the box cutter, not me, so I decided it would be unwise to contradict her. She seemed to be crying out for love and support, so I decided to give it to her.
“I am your friend, Dorothy. You have to believe that.”
“You told on Ted.”
“No. I didn’t. Jennifer Goodall told on Ted.”
Dong.
The clock had been cranking up for several minutes, but still the clang of the bell so close to my head surprised me. It surprised Dorothy, too, because she startled, seemed to recall where she was, and lunged.
Dong.
Her arm came down, and I managed to parry the blow, forgetting until her arm made contact with mine that that was the one she’d slashed.
“Eeeeeeeah!” I screamed as pain blazed up my arm, exploding in colored lights inside my head.
Dong.
With my right hand, I grabbed Dorothy’s wrist and pushed back. With my left, I found her thumb where it grasped the weapon. I worked my fingers around her thumb and bent it backward as far as it would go.
Dorothy screamed and dropped the box cutter. It hit the balustrade, bounced, and tumbled over the edge. I heard glass breaking as it struck one of the skylights below.
Dong.
Dorothy kept coming. Both arms shot forward like pistons, hitting my chest like a battering ram, knocking the air out of me. I staggered and tried to regain my footing, but slipped on a patch of ice and went sprawling.
Dong.
Dorothy was on me in an instant, both hands around my throat. As I struggled to breathe, I forced my fists between us, brought them together and thrust my arms straight up and over my head, breaking her grip. I brought my fists down again, hard, on the top of her head. She screamed and rolled away, palms pressed flat against her temples.
Dong!
By the time I had struggled to my feet, Dorothy had, too. She slumped against the balustrade, panting. While her attention was diverted, I launched myself at her like a linebacker, sweeping her feet out from under her. She landed on the snow-covered terrazzo, her skull making a sickening crack as it hit the stone.
On my hands and knees, I crawled toward her, appalled at what I had done. Dorothy’s eyes were closed. She wasn’t moving.
“Dorothy!” I cried as I straddled her legs. “Oh, Dorothy, I’m so sorry!” I felt for a pulse in her neck and was relieved when I found it, beating strong and steady.
By some miracle, Dorothy’s cell phone was still clipped to her belt. I slipped it out of its case and with the bell still bonging away behind me, pressed 911, reported our location, and characterized the situation as a stabbing and a head injury. I’d knocked her out, that was for sure, but other than that, I really didn’t know what was wrong with Dorothy. I figured we could sort that out when the paramedics got there.
Then I telephoned Paul.
It rang once, twice. Paul didn’t pick up. I’d left him at home reading the paper. Where the hell had he gone?
Three rings, four, and the answering machine kicked in. “Damn it to hell!” I said, and mashed my finger down on the star button to skip the message and get straight to the beep. “Paul! Don’t ask any questions. Just get your butt over to Mahan. I’m up in the clock tower with Dorothy. Please hurry!”
Beneath my legs, Dorothy stirred. Her eyelids fluttered, then flew open. She began to pitch and turn, struggling to get up.
I set the phone aside, leaned forward and pinned Dorothy’s shoulders gently to the terrazzo. “Tell me about Jennifer Goodall,” I urged her softly.
Dorothy dissolved into tears. “It was Jennifer this and Jennifer that and Jennifer said and Jennifer thinks,” she sobbed. “Ted didn’t see it coming, but I did, oh yes, I saw it coming from a mile away. Oooooh,” she wailed. “How can a man be so blind?”
“Surely you’re-” I began, but Dorothy cut me off.
“Imagining things? That’s what Ted used to say, but then I caught him red-handed.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
A sly look crept over her face. “I read his e-mail. He thought his AOL was password protected, but I figured it out.” She laughed. “Men! It’s always all about them, isn’t it? Think they’re so clever.” She raised her head a couple of inches from the terrazzo, grimaced, moaned, then lay back. “The password was his license plate number! Is that stupid, or what?”
“What was in his e-mail?” I asked, trying to steer Dorothy back on track.
“She wrote him love notes. They were graphic, totally disgusting. I confronted Ted about it. I begged and I pleaded. His career, his brilliant career, was going down in flames, and all because he couldn’t keep his fly zipped!
“He tried to break it off several times, you know,” she continued, “but Jennifer kept threatening him. She knew all about what was going on in his office. He was paying her money to keep quiet about it.”
Dorothy’s eyes were fixed on mine. “It was going to go on and on and on. Somebody had to put a stop to it, and Ted didn’t have the balls.”
“So who stopped her, Dorothy? You?”
Dorothy squeezed her eyes shut, turned her head to one side. “I sent her an e-mail, asking her to meet me here to talk about it.” She turned her face to me again and grinned mischievously. “I used Ted’s e-mail account, of course. She thought it was him. And when she got to Mahan, I was waiting by the barber’s chair.