In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [75]
He passed on the information to his colleagues, told them that the body in the cooler and how it got there was a double mystery; that they would get the DNA results in about six weeks; heard the usual grumble, and added that he guessed they could assume it was the Hispanic-looking guy Melba Merrydew had seen, dead, in Ed Vincent’s beach house.
Then he sat down and wrote up a complete report on the day’s events, except for the conversation with Mamzelle Dorothea, which, as yet, he chose to keep to himself. There was more to come in that story and he wasn’t about to divulge any secrets until he knew where it was heading.
The hotel bed was firm, the blankets warm, and he was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. Which, since it was already five in the morning, didn’t mean much, because he had to be up again at seven-thirty, ready for whatever the next day might bring. And for another day in the company of Miss Melba.
41
The next morning, at eleven, they found Mamzelle Dorothea propped up against the big leopard cushion, pale eyes alive with interest, waiting for them.
Bending to kiss her, Mel caught the sweet scent of face powder and was touched that the old lady had primped for them, like the southern belle she might once have been. But Mamzelle flinched away from her embrace.
“Bah, kissing is so commonplace these days.” She dismissed her with a wave of her scrawny blue-veined hand. “A meaningless gesture between people who scarcely know one another, let alone care.”
“Oh, but I do care, Mamzelle.” Unfazed, Mel took her seat on the footstool, smiling at her. From the faint hint of a blush on Dorothea’s thin cheeks, Mel suspected she was touched by the kiss but didn’t care to admit it.
“I assume, since you say you are in love with Ed, that you know his condition this morning?”
“Of course I do. I speak with the doctors several times a day. And night,” she added, remembering those three-in-the-morning blues, alone in the hotel room, when she had felt for sure something was terribly wrong and had called, sweating and half mad, terrified of what she might hear. Ed was restless, they had told her, but his condition remained the same.
Mel thought it was as though his body had slipped into a neutral gear, engine idling. Waiting. But for what?
“I wish I could tell you better news,” she said quietly, “but Ed is still in a coma, still on the ventilator. There is brain activity, though, and that makes the doctors hopeful.”
“He always had a good brain,” Dorothea agreed. “I could tell even then, when he was just a boy, and uneducated, that there was a spark in him. I suppose a psychiatrist might say I transferred my own ambitions and longings onto him, but they would be wrong. I was the one taking from him. I took pleasure in showing him another world, in teaching him about life and how to live it.” She laughed, that witch’s cackle that made Mel jump. “And that boy absorbed everything like a sea sponge,” Dorothea added, remembering.
“But the truth was,” she said, “he didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. He had been living hand-to-mouth that summer, starving in the winter. Odds were, he would not have made it through, he might have been dead by spring.
“That night, he returned to the conservatory. I had rummaged through the closets, found him some clothing, warm blankets for his rough bed. I had opened a can of beef stew and heated it through, along with some rice and bread.” Her eyes had a faraway look and she smiled, remembering the look on his face when he tasted it, as though he had already died and gone to heaven.
“Over those bleak winter days, we got to know each other a little better. I remember laughing when he asked about my hopes for the future. ‘There is no future for me, Theo,’ I told him. ‘There is only today.’ He looked at me and he knew I was right. I was what I was. A woman in her late sixties who was way too fond of the bottle.
“One day I asked if he would care to see the house, but I saw he was