The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (7 page)

“How do you figure that?”

Purdue grinned. “When we take those guys’ wallets, we’re just collecting the fines for adultery and fornication. Just collecting the fines.”

Carla Larkin looked at her watch. “Happy hour,” she announced. “Let’s go and collect the wages of sin.”

“Yes,” said Purdue. Her eyes sparkled. “But this time let’s try a change of venue.”

“W
e’ve passed all the restaurants on this road,” said Edith, looking through the rear window back at a hamburger joint receding into the distance. Then she looked meaningfully at her wristwatch. “And my lunch hour is over in fifty-one minutes.”

“I thought we could pick up fast food on our way back,” said Bill. “I want to show you something.”

They were speeding along a two-lane blacktop road that had slowly changed from suburban-commercial to rural-agricultural.
It was the same route that Bill had traveled yesterday with Holly Milton, but this time Bill was the tour guide.

“Lawyers!” grumbled Edith. “With lawyers, you can never assume. At precisely eleven fifty-eight
A.M
. you said to me: ‘It’s lunchtime, Edith. Let’s go out.’ And I leapt to a foolish conclusion. Call me crazy, but I took that statement as an implied oral contract, offering me a moderately priced midday meal at your expense, but no-ooo.”

Bill did not take his eyes off the road. “I’ll feed you, I swear!” he said. “At least … I’m not sure how much cash I actually brought with me. I may have to borrow some.…”

Edith sighed. “Let’s go to the Gingerbread House then. They’ll take your check. They know you of old. Now what is so all-fired important that I have to postpone lunch to see it?”

Bill hesitated. “I think it’s better if I show you rather than tell you. Besides, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about—out of the office. What’s wrong with Powell today. Do you know?”

Edith shrugged. She hadn’t been told not to tell Bill anything about the PMS Outlaws, but A. P. Hill was a deep one. Any explanations had better come from her and not through an intermediary. Before Powell Hill left for Richmond, she had left instructions with Edith that if Purdue called again, she should be given the number of Powell’s cell phone and the switchboard of her hotel. “A. P. Hill is always worried about something,” Edith hedged. “She broods. Sometimes I think the calcium in Tums is all that’s keeping her alive.”

Bill nodded. Had he not been so concerned about his cavalier expenditure of his entire savings—some half a million
dollars—he might have pursued the matter further, but just now his own troubles were uppermost in his mind. “That’s why I brought you out here really,” he told Edith. “Sort of a second opinion. If you think she won’t like it …”

He had timed this speech to coincide with pulling into the driveway of the Dolan Mansion, as he now thought of it. When he reached the exact spot in the curve of the driveway where the white-columned house sat framed in the windshield like a scenic postcard, he stepped on the brake, letting the car idle through an otherwise unbroken silence. He waited.

Finally Edith said, “This is it? This—? You don’t mean that you bought the woodshed out behind it or anything?”

“Nope. Bought the house,” said Bill with a touch of modest pride.

“Bought … the … house,” murmured Edith, still staring.

Bill took his foot off the brake, allowing the car to inch forward toward the grand entrance, as Edith continued to stare, her lips moving soundlessly. “So—do you think she’ll like it?”

Edith nodded slowly. “If she’s human—which at times I do wonder about—she will.”

“Good. I brought my camera along. I thought we’d take a few pictures of the place. Maybe we could get some new business cards with a picture of the house on it. No, I guess we’d need a sign out front first.”

“I’ll call around,” murmured Edith, still staring at the white-columned mirage framed in the windshield.

“Well, maybe you could take my picture standing on the front steps. I could send one to Elizabeth. Cheer her up.”

Edith shook herself out of an architectural reverie. “Bill, this place must have cost you a fortune.”

“Well, we did the math with the mortgage people, and they seem to think we can manage. I’m selling some stock to make a pretty hefty down payment. Remember, we won’t have separate rents to pay any more. We’ll be living upstairs.” He smirked. “And the corporation was eager to find a buyer for the place. Tax reasons, I suppose. It was priced to sell. Besides, I drove a pretty hard bargain. Made them knock fifty K right off the price of the place.”

Edith’s jaw dropped. “Are you telling me that you got this place with a discount of fifty thousand dollars?”

“That’s right.”

Edith was silent for a moment, thinking how best to word her next question with skill and tact. After all, Bill MacPherson was her employer. He had many good qualities, but driving a hard bargain was not among them. Edith had seen Bill’s haggling skills in action when the firm hired her as its office manager and general dogsbody several years back. She had come in, fresh from the community college, asking for seven dollars an hour. After a few moments of salary negotiations with “hardhearted Bill,” Edith had ended up with eight. Her employer’s present claim to have saved fifty thousand dollars on the price of a mansion made her wonder if the place glowed in the dark from a radioactive waste site, or if it were being held together by teetering pyramids of termites. She could not even venture a guess. “Tell me,” she said at last.

T
he Cherry Hill cafeteria was filled nearly to capacity. Elizabeth stood a few feet past the food line, holding her tray of meat, two veggies, and Jell-O, looking for a place to sit. She had been a little intimidated by the thought of her first meal in a
mental institution. Did people howl and throw food? On the way to the cafeteria, she had been greeted in the hall by a tiny, wizened woman who waved at her and said: “Praise the Lord, child. It makes the devil crazy.” Before Elizabeth could muster a response, the woman cackled happily to herself and wandered away. She wondered if this were a portent of encounters to come, and if so, did one ever learn to take such experiences in stride?

Elizabeth had considered eating alone in her room, but she thought that might be against the rules, and since she couldn’t be bothered to argue with bureaucrats in her present state of apathy, she decided to venture into the dining room and hope for the best.

The cafeteria seemed perfectly ordinary. People sat quietly at tables for six, eating and chatting and taking no notice of her whatsoever. A few patients stared off into space or muttered to themselves, and others had a ravaged look that seemed more in keeping with street people than campus residents, but on the whole the diners appeared rather ordinary. Elizabeth’s anxiety did not lessen with this observation; it merely changed focus. Now the place felt like junior high school, where everyone knew one another, and she was the new kid. Lunchtime as a ritual of the institutional caste system. Which crowd did you want to hang with? Who were the popular people and who would it be social death to sit beside? (I am not paranoid, she told herself. I am severely depressed. Pick a form of insanity and stick to it, girl.)

Elizabeth noticed that the groups tended to segregate themselves at tables of all males or all females. She sighed. Perhaps we are different beings, she thought. The sexes come together
for a few years between puberty and menopause, and then we drift away again, with nothing left to say to each other. She wondered if her time of gender isolation had been prematurely advanced by widowhood, or if she would some day come out on the other side. Lots of topics are gender neutral, Elizabeth told herself. The weather. Movies. News of scientific discoveries. Sometime I will find a man and make small talk with him, she promised herself silently. But not today.

She wandered closer to the women’s tables, searching for a familiar face. A moment later she spotted the pudding face of Emma O., the patient who had come to see her the day before. There were five people seated at the table, all laughing and talking and paying Elizabeth no mind, but opposite Emma O. was an empty chair. With a smile of recognition, Elizabeth approached the table, resolving to make an effort to be sociable.

“Excuse me,” said Elizabeth, pointing to the empty chair. “Is this seat taken?”

Before her new acquaintance could answer, a plump woman with a pink scrubbed face and gooseberry eyes smirked up at her. “Yeah, that chair is taken,” she said. “A middle-aged woman is sitting in it.”

Elizabeth took a step backward in surprise. Delusional, she thought. Or else they don’t like me. Rejected by mental patients—how outcast can you get? Feeling the familiar sting of tears in her eyes, her shoulders sagged, and she turned to go.

“Come back, Sunshine!” Emma O. called after her. “Rose here was making a joke.”

Elizabeth approached the table again, and Emma O. explained: “From a man’s point of view, all the seats at this table would be empty. All, that is, except … that one.” She nodded
toward a pale but lovely young woman at the other end of the table.

Elizabeth had never seen anyone so fragile-looking and yet so beautiful. An angel carved in ivory might look like that, she thought: hair too pale to be called blonde, and skin so translucent that you could see the blue tracery of veins at her hands and throat. She was in that ephemeral stage of modern perfection that came just before death from starvation. An angel carved in ivory also might eat more than she did. The young woman had a full plate, and she was using her fork to make little trails through her mashed potatoes, making it seem as if the food had been picked at. At no time, however, did the fork go near her mouth.

“You can sit down,” said Emma O. to Elizabeth, indicating the empty chair.

While Elizabeth set down her tray and took the seat, Emma O. picked up her fork and went back to eating, as if she had forgotten Elizabeth’s presence altogether.

“I’m Rose Hanelon,” said the dumpy woman who had joked about the empty chair. “It’s no use expecting Emma Kudan to make introductions. The social graces are Martian to her. It would never occur to Emma O. that you’d even care who anybody else was.”

The object of the discussion shrugged and went on eating her Jell-O.

“Asperger’s people have to concentrate very hard on being sociable to think of things like introducing people,” Rose explained. “They can focus on one person at a time, but more people than that puts a strain on their ability to socialize. We wrote out all the instructions on a card for Emma once, but she used it as a bookmark and lost it.”

“How do you do? I’m Elizabeth MacPherson,” Elizabeth said meekly. She smiled and nodded to the other occupants of the table, careful to observe all the social niceties, lest she be mistaken for an Asperger’s patient herself. She had already concluded that rudeness was a hallmark of the condition.

Rose nodded. “You’re here for depression. Emma told us. It wouldn’t occur to her that you might not want people to know. That’s Lisa Lynn beside you. She’s a little hyper today, so if you talk to her, don’t expect to get a word in edgewise.”

Lisa Lynn was a thin, mousy-looking young woman. “Hello,” she said, accompanying her smile with a tentative wave. “Pardon my fidgets. We’re adjusting my medication,” she said. “Which is good because with the old one I was getting these side effects that—”

“Hold that thought,” said Rose, drowning her out. “Beside her is old Mrs. Nicholson, who may or may not know we’re here. Anyhow, she doesn’t care. Just watch your dessert if you ever sit next to her. And last but far from least is Sarah Findlay, the shining light pretending to eat at the end of the table. Somebody in here nicknamed her Seraphin, and it stuck.”

Emma O. looked up. “Seraphim is the plural form of the word, of course, but it’s such an apt play on words that everybody uses it. I expect you can see why.”

Elizabeth looked at the frail beauty and nodded. “Angelic. Yes. She looks like a movie star.”

“Which is very unfortunate in terms of role models, don’t you find?” said Rose softly. “Be beautiful if it kills you.”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Elizabeth agreed.

“Crazy?” Scenting a debate in the offing, Emma O. set down a fork full of mashed potatoes. “Seraphin is the sanest
woman in here. The one most in sync with the world, anyhow, which is what reality is: consensus. If you want to see someone out of touch with reality, look at Warburton over there, carrying her tray to the drink table. It’s a wonder she can lift it. Now there’s crazy on the hoof.”

Elizabeth saw a heavyset woman in a white uniform carrying a lunch tray laden with plates, little bowls of vegetables, and desserts. “Are you referring to that staff member?” she asked.

“Right. Warburton. Look at her. How old would you say she is, just offhand. Top of your head guess.”

“Well, she’s a bit far away,” said Elizabeth. She studied the waddling woman. “I don’t know. I’m too far away to see her hands. Hair color tells you nothing these days. Fifty?”

“My point exactly,” said Emma O., grinning wickedly. “Warburton is thirty-seven. Just. Birthday last month. Looks sixty, poor beast. Never going to get promoted—it’d be too cruel to tell her why, though. And you know what else? She’s only four years older than Seraphin.”

Elizabeth turned to stare at the beautiful doll-like girl at the far end of the table. Apparently oblivious to the conversation of her table partners, she was breaking her bread into tiny pieces, and placing them carefully at intervals on the plate. Sarah Findlay looked like a delicate child. You had the urge to protect her, to fuss over her. Elizabeth was willing to believe that the girl was in her early twenties, but … thirty-three? She shook her head. Warburton and the anorectic girl could have passed for grandmother and granddaughter, so vast was the difference between them.

“That’s right,” said Emma O., who seemed to be particularly gifted at reading facial expressions. “Chronological age be
damned: Warburton is old and Seraphin is young—John Keats got it wrong, you see.”

“Keats? The poet?”

“S’right. ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn.’ Ever read it? Well, in it, he said, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ But beauty isn’t truth. It’s
youth
. Beauty is youth, youth beauty. And it’s worth starving for if you want everybody to love you. Greatest power there is.”