The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [11]
Joe thought fast, wondering what nerve he’d struck. Falling back on the possible similarities between this woman and Gail, he decided to address her the same way. Directly.
“Michelle was an alcoholic,” he said. “I was wondering if that’s where she went for solace.”
“You think she drank herself to death?” The tone bordered on accusatory.
“There weren’t any signs of it. That’s why I’m asking.”
She was clearly surprised by his comeback. “I thought . . . How did you know, then?”
“We dug around,” he said vaguely, just now sensing what might have set her off. “All part of the job.” He paused and then took a stab at it. “I found an AA brochure on her desk. That come from you?”
There was no answer at first. On the face of it, his question could have been innocence itself. But by now they both were reading between the lines. And as it turned out, correctly.
“Yeah.”
“That must’ve been hard on you, seeing her react that way.”
She laughed bitterly. “Hard? Most natural thing in the world for some of us.”
He didn’t say anything, leaving an opening.
She sighed heavily and then metaphorically walked through, altering all his initial impressions. “It killed me. I’ve been sober five years. Fought my way back tooth and nail. Quit my job, left the city, got in shape. I don’t have a dime left, which explains this place, but I’ve started to live again. The first day I met Michelle, I knew she was a drinker—she and Archie both. You just know. At first I was really scared. They weren’t on the program. Hanging out with them might’ve been the end of me. But they’d figured something out. Somehow, they’d turned their love for each other into an antidote or a shield. I mean, they were clueless. They didn’t know what they were doing, but it was working. I sometimes wished I could wrap up what they had and bring it back to AA.”
She paused to shake her head mournfully. “And then he died. I couldn’t believe it. It was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen, which is saying something.”
She looked up at him suddenly. “They say drunks are the most narcissistic people you’ll meet. You ever hear that?”
He couldn’t say he had. “No.”
“Well, there’s something to it,” she persisted. “In the middle of Michelle’s crisis, as she was falling apart in front of my eyes, I thought maybe the whole thing was a test of me—that God was taunting me for my arrogance.”
“How did you react?” Joe asked.
“Not well,” she admitted. “Not initially. I let her hang. I saw what was happening and I ran. Like she was on fire and I was made of gasoline. It was one of the most shameful moments of my life.”
“Were you all she had?” he asked, remembering not just the photographs on Michelle’s bedroom wall, but how Rubinstein had been brought to his attention in the first place, through mention of Adele Redding.
The first touch of her old smile returned, albeit wistfully. “No, lucky for her. Her mother, Adele, helped us both get back on track. She called her every day after Archie’s death, or called me if she didn’t get an answer or didn’t like what she heard.” She laughed. “I hated that woman at first, forcing me to get involved, but she saved us both . . . Or at least I thought she had, until I found Michelle.”
Joe returned to the impression he’d first had of Linda Rubinstein, of self-confidence personified.
“How are you doing now?”
“Better,” she answered, nodding as if to double-check. “Maybe Michelle’s death is kind of a relief for both of us. And then maybe it’s because I’ve got Adele to think about now. Life just has a way of steaming on, reducing all our problems to size.”
“Adele?” Joe asked, taken off guard.
Rubinstein laughed again, seemingly totally recovered. “Yeah. Now I’m the one who calls her every day. Isn’t that screwy?”
Joe wasn’t about to argue with her, not based on that evidence. Instead, he shifted the conversation slightly. “I hear relations between Michelle and Archie’s father weren’t as friendly.”
That erased the smile quickly. “That son of a bitch. There’s the guy who deserved