She kept her eyes down and deposited the tray on the coffee table between us.
“Thank you, Siobhan,” Mrs. Dawe said.
“Yes, ma’am. Will there be anything else?”
She had a brogue thicker than even my mother’s had been. Will came out wail, there as thur, else as ailse . It only gets that thick in the North, in the gray cold towns where the refineries stand and the soot hovers like a cloud.
The Dawes didn’t answer. They studiously removed the three parts of their respective Raj tea sets, the cream in the tin on top, the sugar below, the tea itself at the bottom, and fixed their drinks in cups so delicate I’d be afraid to sneeze in the same area code.
Siobhan waited, casting a quick furtive glance from under lowered lids in my direction as the heat rose up her pale skin.
Dr. Dawe finished preparing his tea with a long, scraping stir of the spoon around the edges of the china. He raised it to his lips, noticed I hadn’t touched mine, then noticed Siobhan standing to my left.
“Siobhan,” he said. “Good God, girl, you’re excused.” He laughed. “In fact, you look tired, kid. Why don’t you take the afternoon off?”
“Yes, Doctor. Thank you.”
“Thank you ,” he said. “This tea is wonderful.”
She left the room with her shoulders hunched and her back bent, and once she’d closed the door behind her, Dr. Dawe said, “Great kid. Just great. Been with us pretty much since she stepped off the boat fourteen years ago. Yes…” he said softly. “So, Mr. Kenzie, we were wondering why you’re investigating my stepdaughter’s death if there’s nothing to investigate?” He crinkled his nose over his teacup at me and then took a sip.
“Well, sir,” I said as I lifted the cream container off the top, “I’m more interested in her life, actually, the last six months before she died.”
“And why is that?” Carrie Dawe asked.
I poured some steaming tea into the cup, added a dash of sugar and some cream. Somewhere my mother rolled over in her grave-cream was for coffee, milk was for tea.
“She didn’t strike me as the suicidal type,” I said.
“Aren’t we all?” Carrie Dawe asked.
I looked at her. “Ma’am?”
“Given the right-or should I say, the wrong-circumstances, aren’t we all capable of suicide? A tragedy here, a tragedy there…”
Mrs. Dawe studied me over her teacup and I took a sip from my own before I spoke. Dr. Dawe had been right, it was excellent tea, cream or no cream. Sorry, Mom.
“I’m sure we all are,” I said, “but Karen’s decline seemed, well, drastic.”
“And you base this opinion on intimate knowledge?” Dr. Dawe said.
“Excuse me?”
He waved his cup at me. “Were you and my stepdaughter intimate?”
I gave him what I’m sure was a confused narrowing of my eyes, and he raised his eyebrows up and down gleefully.
“Come on, Mr. Kenzie, we don’t speak ill of the dead around here, but we know Karen’s sexual activities were, well, rampant in the months before she died.”
“How do you know that?”
“She was coarse,” Carrie Dawe said. “She spoke with sudden explicitness. She was drinking, using drugs. It would have been sadder if it weren’t so clichéd. She even propositioned my husband once.”
I looked back at Dr. Dawe and he nodded and placed his teacup back on the coffee table. “Oh, yes, Mr. Kenzie. Oh, yes. It was a veritable Tennessee Williams play every time Karen dropped by.”
“I didn’t see that part of her,” I said. “I met her before David was hurt.”
Carrie Dawe said, “And how did she strike you?”
“She struck me as kind and sweet and, yes, maybe a little too innocent for the world, but innocent just the same, Mrs. Dawe. Not the type of woman who’d jump naked off the Custom House.”
Carrie Dawe pursed her lips and nodded. She looked off past me, past her husband, to a point somewhere high up on the wall. She took a sip of tea that was as loud as boots dropping through autumn leaves.
“Did he send you?” she said eventually.
“What? Who?”
She turned her head back, held me in those cool green eyes. “We’re tapped out, Mr. Kenzie. Mention that, won’t you?”
Very slowly, I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She gave me a chuckle so light it sounded like a wind chime. “I’m sure you do.”
But Dr. Dawe said, “Maybe not. Maybe not.”
She looked at him and then they both looked at me and suddenly I was aware of a polite fever in their gazes that made me want to bug out of my skin, throw my skeleton through the window, go clacking like mad down the streets of Weston.
Dr. Dawe said, “If you’re not here to extort, Mr. Kenzie, then why are you here?”
I turned to him and the light in his face seemed more like sickness. “I’m not sure everything that happened to your daughter in the months before she died was accidental.”
He leaned forward, all grave seriousness. “Is it a ‘hunch’? Something in your ‘gut,’ Starsky?” The manic twinkle returned to his eyes and he leaned back. “I’ll give you forty-eight hours to solve the case, but if you can’t, you’ll be walking a beat in Roxbury come winter.” He clapped his hands together. “How was that?”
“I’m just trying to find out why your daughter died.”
“She died,” Carrie Dawe said, “because she was weak.”
“How’s that, ma’am?”
She gave me a warm smile. “There’s no mystery here, Mr. Kenzie. Karen was weak. A few things didn’t go her way, and she cracked under the strain. My daughter, whom I gave birth to, was weak. She needed constant reassuring. She needed a psychiatrist for twenty years. She needed someone to hold her hand and tell her things would be all right. That the world worked.” She held out her hands as if to say Que sera, sera. “Well, the world doesn’t work. And Karen found that out. And it crushed her.”
“Studies have shown,” Christopher Dawe said with his head tilted toward his wife, “that suicide is an inherently passive-aggressive act. Have you heard that, Mr. Kenzie?”
“I have.”
“That it’s meant not so much to hurt the person who kills herself, but to hurt those she leaves behind.” He poured some more tea into his cup. “Look at me, Mr. Kenzie.”