Cast a Blue Shadow. P. L. Gaus
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master bedroom, inverting the bottle to moisten the stopper. When she switched on the light, she found Sally Favor sprawled on the bed with her girlfriend in her arms. They both held champagne glasses, and they smiled at Favor and drank.
Although her ears flushed crimson, Juliet Favor showed no other immediate reaction. She tilted her head back to let her hair fall away from her face and dabbed the wet glass stopper at each temple.
“That’s just great, Sally,” Favor said bitterly. “Rub my face in it.”
“You remember Juliet, don’t you, Jenny?” Sally taunted. “She’s that trust-busting homophobe we call Mom.”
“Brat!” Favor hissed.
“Takes one to know one, Mommy Dearest,” Sally Favor replied spitefully, her speech slurred. She drained her champagne and threw the empty glass onto the carpet, where the stem broke with a muted “tink.”
Juliet Favor dabbed at her temples again and rubbed the clear liquid in with her thumbs. “Your trust is suspended, Sally. But I guess you already know that.”
“I can hire a lawyer, too,” Sally said. She took the second glass from Jenny, drank it down defiantly, and tossed it onto the carpet beside the first one. Then she pulled Jenny off the bed to stand face to face with her mother. “Why don’t you just go ahead and castrate him, Mother? I’m sure you know you’re raising a eunuch as it is.”
Favor pushed her daughter away and headed for the staircase.
Drunk, Sally listed like a ship whose cargo had broken loose in the hold. She steadied herself against a dresser, recovered, and led her lover by the hand down the staircase too rapidly, following her mother carelessly. They stumbled on the steps and grabbed for the banister near the bottom of the staircase. Once down in the foyer, Sally inquired mockingly, “Do we have another headache, Mommy? Professor Pomeroy’s little miracle bottle almost empty?”
Favor retreated into the bar and then the library, and leaned over with both palms flat on a large reading table, eyes closed, feeling pressure and pain rise in the back of her neck.
Sally entered the paneled library with her arm around Jenny, spun around with her, and ushered her into the adjoining butler’s room, where they poured the two last drinks from a champagne bottle before clanging the empty into a wastebasket beside Daniel’s desk.
Favor charged after them and said, “Since you two must have been eavesdropping, you’ll know I explained to Sonny that I can do whatever I want with your trusts.”
Sally lifted her glass high and shouted, “There’s more to life than money, Mother!”
“Get out!” Favor screamed.
“No, Mom.”
“You’re a disgrace!”
“Like I care what you think.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“Don’t bother,” Sally said and pushed with Jenny through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Favor snatched a cordless phone from Daniel’s desk and followed. She found the two women struggling into winter coats, and, with a forced show of calm, went back slowly through the swinging doors.
JULIET found her little bottle of medicine in the bedroom and dabbed anxiously at her temples. Frustrated, she eyed the bottle, saw that it was empty, and threw it into a corner of the room. At the wall-mounted intercom, she rang impatiently for Daniel several times. No answer. She rubbed the back of her neck and moved slowly to a front window to peer out. Normally, that window gave a view of a long, curving, blacktop driveway that led down to the north side of Route 39, seven miles west of Millersburg. Tonight, she saw only a blinding blizzard of white. It unnerved her, and, feeling trapped, she retrieved the medicine bottle from the corner of the room. Suffering, with the bottle inverted close to her eyes, she tried to wet the stopper with a film of the thick liquid, but the bottle was truly empty.
In the master bathroom, Favor pulled medicines and perfumes from the medicine cabinet and cast them angrily to the floor. Pawing now, in the back of the cabinet she found an old bottle that still held some of the clear and colorless liquid. She rubbed the stopper against her temples and leaned over at the sink to calm herself. After a moment, with her balance restored, she tried the wall intercom again, with no result. She heard a faint growl outside and went back to the bedroom window to see Daniel below, on a small tractor in driving snow, plowing the blacktop circle in front of the house. Resigned for the moment, Favor got the last bit of medicine out and then composed herself to descend the staircase.
In the parlor with her lawyer DiSalvo, she busied herself for the next several minutes with the various documents they were to finalize. When she heard Daniel at the back door, she excused herself, left through the door to the dining room, and found her butler in the pantry at the back of the house.
“I’m out of medicine,” she said directly, pulling the butler aside, out of earshot of the cooks.
“Already?” Daniel asked and hung a long black dress coat on a peg beside the back door. He watched her close her eyes and rub her neck and said, “Pomeroy didn’t give you his new bottle?”
“No,” Favor replied in exasperation.
“I sent him up.”
“Never saw him.”
“He just went up. I’m surprised you didn’t see him.”
“I came through the dining room.”
“Wait right here, if you please,” Daniel said and went quickly up the back staircase to the second floor. Shortly, he returned, carrying a fresh stoppered bottle. “He put it on your dresser, ma’am.”
Grateful, Favor took the little bottle in both hands and closed her eyes as if meditating. She dabbed more of the liquid on her temples, and after composing herself, said, “OK, then. Please put this back in the bedroom. I’m afraid I left quite a mess in the bathroom.”
“I will attend to it, ma’am,” Daniel replied.
She handed over the bottle as if it were of immense value and said, “I’ll be with DiSalvo when Laughton arrives. But I’m not going to change first. We’ll have to do that later, Daniel.”
5
Friday, November 1
8:45 P.M.
MARTHA swiped her plastic night pass through the magnetic reader at her dorm’s front entrance, pulled the heavy oak door open, and climbed the stairs to her third-floor suite. She pushed through the door, switched on the lights, and startled her roommate, who was tangled in the arms of her boyfriend on the couch, finishing a joint. Her roommate, only mildly embarrassed, grumbled, “Turn out the lights, would you.”
Martha switched off half the ceiling lights and sat in an old armchair, across a coffee table from the two lovers. She fanned at the smoke in front of her face and said, “Hey, Wendy. Will. Got any more of that?”
Wendy sat upright on the couch, and Will fumbled for a pouch, mumbling something unintelligible. Wendy poured out marijuana on a paper, rolled it, licked the edge, pressed it shut, and twisted the ends, handing the joint across the table. Martha took a book of matches from a dirty ashtray, lit the joint, drew on it heavily, and held the smoke in her lungs, passing the joint back to Wendy. When she finally exhaled, she eased back in the armchair and said, “You didn’t think I was coming back.”
Wendy brushed stringy blond hair out of her eyes, passed the joint on to Will, and said, “No. Sonny’s not with you?”
“Back at the mansion. He’s with his mommy.”
Wendy raised her eyebrows. “You two had a fight?”
Martha shrugged. “Not so much a fight as a surrender. His mother told me off, and he said I should take his car. I wanted to leave anyway.”
“What’s