Trace - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 29

"What could be worse than what happened to my Gilly?" Mrs. Paulsson asks, wiping her eyes.

"What do you think happened to her?" Marino asks, his thumb stroking the rim of his coffee cup.

"I know what happened to her. She died of the flu," Mrs. Paulsson replies. "God took her home to be with Him. I don't know why. I wish someone would tell me."

"Other people don't seem to be so sure she died of the flu," Marino says.

"That's the world we live in. Everybody wants drama. My little girl was in bed with the flu. A lot of people have died of the flu this year." She looks at Scarpetta.

"Mrs. Paulsson," Scarpetta says, "your daughter didn't die of the flu. I'm sure you've been told this already. You talked to Dr. Fielding, didn't you?"

"Oh yes. We talked on the phone right after it happened. But I don't know how you can tell if someone died of the flu. How could you possibly tell that after the fact when they're not coughing and don't have a fever and can't complain about how they're feeling?" She begins to cry. "Gilly had a temperature of one hundred degrees and was about to choke from coughing when I went out to get more cough syrup. That's all I did, drove to the CVS on Gary Street to pick up some more cough syrup."

Scarpetta glances at the bottle on the counter again. She thinks of the slides she looked at in Fielding's office just before she left for Mrs. Paulsson's house. Microscopically, there were remnants of fibrin and lymphocytes and macrophages in sections of lung tissue, and the alveoli were open. Gilly's patchy bronchopneumonia, a common complication of the flu, especially in the elderly and the young, was resolving and wasn't severe enough to impair lung function.

"Mrs. Paulsson, we could tell if your daughter died of the flu," Scarpetta says. "We could tell from her lungs." She doesn't want to go into graphic detail about how uniformly hard or consolidated and lumpy and inflamed Gilly's lungs would have been had she died of acute bronchopneumonia. "Was your daughter on antibiotics?"

"Oh yes. The first week she was." She reaches for her coffee. "I really thought she was getting better. I just sort of thought she had a cold left, you know."

Marino pushes back his chair. "You mind if I let the two of you talk?" he asks. "I'd like to look around if that's okay with you."

"I don't know what there is to look at. But go ahead. You're not the first one to come in here and want to look around. Her bedroom's in the back."

"I'll find it." He walks off, his boots heavy on the old wooden floor.

"Gilly was getting better," Scarpetta says. "The examination of her lungs shows that."

"Well, she was still weak and puny."

"She didn't die from the flu, Mrs. Paulsson," Scarpetta tells her firmly. "It's important you understand that. If she had died of the flu I wouldn't need to be here. I'm trying to help and I need you to answer some questions for me."

"You don't sound like you're from around here."

"From Miami originally."

"Oh. And that's where you still live, real near it anyway. I've always wanted to go to Miami. Especially when the weather's like this, so gloomy and all." She gets up to pour more coffee, and she moves with difficulty, her legs stiff as she walks across to the coffeemaker near the bottle of cough syrup. Scarpetta imagines Mrs. Paulsson restraining her daughter facedown on the bed and doesn't rule it out as a possibility, but finds it an unlikely one. Mother doesn't weigh much more than her daughter did, and whoever restrained Gilly was sufficiently heavy and strong to prevent her from struggling enough to suffer more injuries than she has. But Scarpetta doesn't rule out that Mrs. Paulsson murdered Gilly. She can't rule that out as much as she might like to.

"I wish I could have taken Gilly to Miami or Los Angeles or someplace special," Mrs. Paulsson is saying. "But I'm afraid to fly and I get carsick, so I never have gone much of anywhere. And now I wish I'd tried harder."

She slides out the coffeepot and it trembles in her small, slender hand. Scarpetta keeps looking at Mrs. Paulsson's hands and wrists and any areas of exposed skin, checking for any evidence of old scratches or abrasions or other injuries, but two weeks have passed. She jots a note on her notepad to find out if Mrs. Paulsson might have had any injuries when the police responded to the scene and interviewed her.

"I wish I had, because Gilly would have liked Miami, all those palm trees and pink flamingos," Mrs. Paulsson says.

At the table, she refills their cups, and coffee sloshes in the glass pot as she returns it to the drip coffeemaker, ramming it in a little too hard. "This summer she was going to travel with her father." She sits down wearily in the straight-back oak chair. "Maybe just stay with him in Charleston, if nothing else. She's never been to Charleston either." She rests her elbows on the table. "Gilly's never been to the beach, never seen the ocean except in pictures and now and then on TV, although I didn't let her watch much TV. Can you blame me?"

"Her father lives in Charleston?" Scarpetta asks, although she knows what she's been told.

"Moved back there last summer. He's a doctor there, lives in a grand house right there on the water. He's on the tour route, you know. People pay good money to walk in and look at his garden. Of course, he doesn't do a thing to that garden, can't be bothered with such things as that. He hires whoever he wants to help him with things he can't be bothered with, like the funeral. He has lawyers screwing that all up, let me tell you. Just to get me, you know. 'Cause I want her here in Richmond and for that reason he wants her in Charleston."

"What kind of doctor is he?"

"A little of everything, a general practitioner, and he's a flight surgeon too. You know they have that big Air Force base in Charleston, and Frank has a line out his door every day, so he's told me. Oh, he brags about it enough. All these pilots dropping by to get their flight physicals for seventy dollars each. So he does all right, Frank does," she talks on, scarcely catching her breath between sentences and slightly rocking in her seat.

"Mrs. Paulsson, tell me about Thursday, December fourth. Start with your getting up that morning." Scarpetta can see where this will go if she doesn't do something about it. Mrs. Paulsson will talk in convolutions forever, sidewinding her way around questions and details that really matter and obsessing about her estranged husband. "What time did you get up that morning?"

"I'm always up at six. So I was up at six, don't even need an alarm clock because I've got one built in." She touches her head. "You know I was born at exactly six a.m. and that's why I wake up at six A.M., I'm sure of that…"

"And then what?" Scarpetta hates to interrupt, but if she doesn't, this woman will talk in tangled digressions the rest of the day. "Did you get out of bed?"

"Why, of course I got out of bed. I always do, come right here in the kitchen, fix my coffee. Then I go back to my bedroom and read the Bible for a while. If Gilly has school, I have her out the door by seven fifteen with her little lunch packed and all the rest, and one of her friends gives her a ride. For that I'm lucky. She has a friend whose mother doesn't mind driving every morning."

"Thursday, December fourth, two weeks ago," Scarpetta steers her back where she needs her. "You got up at six, made coffee, and returned to your room to read your Bible? Then what?" she asks as Mrs. Paulsson nods affirmatively. "You sat in your bed and read the Bible? For how long?"

"A good half hour."

"Did you check on Gilly?"

"I prayed for her first, just let her sleep in while I prayed for her. Then around quarter of seven I went in, and she was lying in bed all wadded up in the covers, just sleeping to beat the band." She starts crying. "I said, 'Gilly? My little baby Gilly? Wake up and let's get you some hot Cream of Wheat.' And she opened those pretty blue eyes of hers and said, 'Mama, I was coughing so much last night, my chest hurts.' That's when I realized we were out of cough syrup." She stops suddenly, staring with wide runny eyes. "Funny thing about it is the dog was barking and barking. I don't know why I never thought of that until now."