The Piper

THIRTY-ONE




Every single light was on in the house when Olivia pulled up, so that for a moment, she wondered if the paramedics were there ahead of her. But the driveway was empty. The front door shut tight, the back gate snug against intruders. The cottage looked so pretty, the sweep of old stone and the twist of the double chimney. The azaleas, pink and white, were beginning to lose their flowers, and the dogwood trees along the side of the drive were on the verge of shedding their leaves. Olivia was afraid to go in.

The house was different now, she could feel it the minute she walked through the front door. It felt dense inside, as if the very air was heavy, a waking, breathing underwater feeling that made Olivia’s heart beat hard and her movements awkward and slow. She stopped in the living room, thinking there was something she needed to do. She felt thirsty and cold, and knew she was feeling the shock.

The backpack. Teddy’s sweater. Olivia snatched them up and jammed them into the living room closet, stashing them behind a stack of pictures yet unhung. She looked carefully around the room, then started up the staircase, hesitating on the third step. She did not know why she listened. The house was very quiet now, but oddly aware.

Olivia began to tremble. She didn’t have to go up there, not really. Did not have to go into that bathroom, and look at Amelia, lying dead on the floor. She could call for help from downstairs, here in the living room.

Olivia looked over her shoulder at her favorite red leather chair, where Teddy had curled up and gone to sleep, Nancy Drew book in her lap, just the night before. How long ago it seemed. She thought she’d had problems then, but now. Now her life could never be the same.

Best not to think that way. She would deal with things. She loved Teddy as much as any mother ever loved a child, and getting Teddy the help she needed would be the sole focus of her life.

Olivia headed up the stairs. Better to look. Check and make sure that everything was okay. She had the oddest feeling that the body would not be there when she went down the hall. She imagined how she would feel if it had moved.

But it was all just like she had left it. Water pooled on the floor, Amelia, sprawled sideways, the water in the tub lukewarm, a skin of bubble bath residue on the surface. Olivia took care not to look at Amelia’s eyes as she pushed through the bathroom door. Amelia’s bathrobe swung gently from a hook on the back. Her makeup was lined up on the counter, so much of it that Olivia almost smiled. And with the smile came a rush of tears.

‘I’m so sorry, Amelia,’ Olivia whispered. She crouched down close to Amelia, and touched the cold white cheek, wondering how such a thing could have happened. It did not feel real. Olivia was flooded with an enveloping disbelief, because Amelia should not be dead and would not be dead if Olivia had come home sooner, or if Amelia had stayed in LA. Olivia wanted a reprieve, a second chance, to find a way to do the day entirely over. She could save them all, Amelia and Teddy, if she could start this day again.

Olivia took the phone out of her pocket, and grabbed for the tissue that spilled out as well, shredding it while she made the call. The routine 911 recording would catch the tremor in her voice. All she had to do now was wait. Should she go downstairs or stay up here? She felt guilt at the thought of leaving Amelia behind, but she did not want to be here anymore. Downstairs would be better, she’d have to let them in.

Olivia was at the top of the stairs when she turned back for one last look. There had been something odd she had noticed, but her mind was so full of noise right now, it was hard to think.

Amelia’s right hand was curled in a fist. Olivia bent over her, and peeled back the slim waxy fingers.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Sorry.’

Amelia had a button in her hand, and Olivia held it up to the light. Not a button. A little plastic eye, from one of Teddy’s stuffed animals.

Olivia heard sirens and flinched. They were coming now, she should have searched the bathroom more carefully before she’d made the call. She looked under the wad of towels on the floor, into the hamper, stupid, yes, but she had to be sure.

She found it just as the flash of revolving lights hummed against the bathroom window. Eeyore, soaking wet and missing an eye, wedged in a space against the back wall, right at the bottom of the tub. Olivia ran to her bedroom, and tucked him into her dresser drawer, beneath a stack of tee shirts she never wore.

More sirens, the crunch of tires in the driveway, voices. She ran downstairs to open the front door.





THIRTY-TWO




Olivia knew she should cry. The paramedics had brushed by quickly, boxy cases of equipment in their hands, but the uniformed officer named Farrell who asked her questions kept watching her out of the corner of his eye, and she knew that he was expecting tears, that he dreaded it, but that it would also reassure him that nothing odd was going on.

They had asked her if Amelia was depressed. Despondent over things going on in her life. If she suffered from seizures, was on any kind of medication. Adult women did not drown in the tub as a matter of course.

Farrell hadn’t liked it, that Olivia had pulled Amelia out of that tub. She’d overheard him say something to his partner about things feeling hinky, and his partner had shrugged and told him not to be an idiot. It was perfectly normal to pull someone out from under the water like that.

That had seemed to reassure him and Olivia knew that all she needed to do was burst into tears to ease that last bit of suspicion, but somehow she felt tight inside and it simply was not possible to let go.

Until someone on the porch said who called homicide?, and McTavish walked into the room.

‘Livie,’ he said. ‘I was down the street with Jamison when I heard the sirens. I just called in and they told me there was an accident – not Teddy, though, Amelia.’

As soon as Olivia saw him, the tears were unloosed.

McTavish crouched beside her and wrapped her in his arms. Olivia knew then that she had come home to feel safe. And though McTavish felt safe right now, the feeling wasn’t going to last. She would never be safe until Teddy was okay.

He still had the blue shirt on. Olivia thought about the two of them, together in her office, at the same time Amelia was drowning, of Teddy by the side of the tub. She shuddered and closed her eyes.

One of the officers tapped McTavish on the shoulder. ‘Would you like to see the scene, sir, before we take the body away?’

‘I’m here as a friend, Mike, but yeah, if you don’t mind.’ McTavish spoke over the top of her head. Olivia could feel the whisper of his voice in her hair.

‘Did you know the deceased, sir?’

‘I did, yeah. Just sit tight, okay, Livie? I’ll be right back.’ He squeezed her shoulders and whispered. ‘Where’s Teddy?’

‘With Charlotte. That’s where she goes after school, every afternoon.’ Olivia had rehearsed those words and they sounded stilted.

‘Right,’ McTavish said, nodding his head as if he had no memory of their conversation the afternoon before, when Olivia had brought him a beer as he cleaned out the grill, and vented about how weird her sister-in-law had been. How Charlotte had backed down from her promise to watch Teddy after school. He followed the officer up the steps, their footsteps heavy and loud on bare wood.

They were gone a long time. One of the paramedics came downstairs and knelt beside her, told her his name was Art. Asking if she was okay, and would she mind if he checked her over. He was looking at her hands, the skin on her wrists and arms. Olivia held her hands up to cover her face. Go ahead and look, she thought. You won’t see any marks on me.

‘I’m just upset, Art, and all I really need is a tissue to blow my nose.’

He made a note on his chart and gave her a sad little smile, but he seemed satisfied, like he’d done what he had to do. ‘I’ve got bandages, ma’am, but no tissues.’

Olivia found a tissue caught between the cushions of the couch. She had stopped crying by the time McTavish came back downstairs. He nodded to one of the paramedics, who looked at his partner over his shoulder. There was the groan of hydraulics as someone wrestled a stretcher through the door.

‘They don’t want you watching, Livie, when they bring Amelia through. Let me take you upstairs to your bedroom. You can change into dry clothes and pack a few things. You won’t want to sleep here tonight.’

‘I’m the one who found her, McTavish, why shouldn’t I be here when they take her through?’

‘It’s protocol, sweetheart, so don’t fight me on it.’ There was a message in the tone of his voice, and the way that he met her eyes.

She shrugged, and let him lead her up the stairs, past the uniforms clustered outside the bathroom, and into her bedroom where he shut the door.

‘Stay here until I come and get you. Make sure you change your clothes.’

‘I’m not worried about being wet, McTavish, and they’re almost dry anyway.’

He folded his arms, waiting till she met his eyes. ‘That’s right. They are almost dry. But we’re in luck because nobody else has noticed that but me, which is why you need to just go on and throw on some jeans or something like you want to be comfortable. Because if you’d really called right after you found the body, you ought to be soaking wet.’

‘Oh.’

‘Right. I’ll be back,’ he said. Then he was out the door, leaving her alone in the room.