Gaits of Heaven

Eumie was inviting trouble in a family filled with rage and violence. She collected people’s secrets. She was married to Monty, Caprice’s father, and then to Ted. She knew their secrets. Eumie enlisted Caprice in ferreting out information about people. Including Johanna? Why not? So, I’m worried. Someone murdered Eumie. We know that Wyeth could easily have killed Ted and that he ran his car into Caprice. I’m worried about what’s going to happen next.”
    "I am, too,” Rita said.
    “Wyeth could kill someone.” I paused. “Maybe he already has.”
     

CHAPTER 41
     
    With considerable difficulty, Wyeth Green parallel parks his Land Rover on Concord Avenue near Dr. Peter York’s office building, which is a three-story wood-frame house similar to mine. It, too, is set close to the street and has a small porch. At four o’clock in the morning, the streetlights are on, but Wyeth has no feel for the dimensions of his new car and ends up bumping the car behind it. When he gets out, he notices that he has parked more than a foot from the curb.
    Wyeth is unarmed; the bottle of Poland Spring water he carries doesn’t count as a weapon. Although he ends up on the front porch, my reconstruction shows him first making his way to the back door, checking it, finding it locked, and then checking windows, which are also locked. Only then does he return to the front of the building, climb the short flight of stairs, and uselessly try the front door. After that, he settles himself in a corner of the porch, removes the prescription bottle from his pocket, and swallows six ten-milligram tablets of a generic version of Valium. In twenty minutes, he falls asleep.
    About two hours later, he is discovered there, still asleep, by my cousin Leah, who is accompanied by Kimi. The two are returning from an early-morning run and have slowed to a walk to cool down before returning home. Never having seen Wyeth before, Leah does not recognize him; the young man whose shoulder she shakes is a stranger to her. “Are you all right?” she asks. “Kimi, leave it!” In using the word it, Leah does not, I should note, intend to refer to Wyeth as an object; the command is her equivalent of the musher’s On by and simply tells Kimi to mind her own business. Kimi, however, thrusts her wet nose in the boy’s face and begins to lick vigorously. Leah reconsiders. Dog saliva is, after all, a potent panacea. She allows Kimi to continue her ministrations.
     

CHAPTER 42
     
    “Kevin was right about making me take my cell when I go running,” Leah said over breakfast. “I was glad I had it.” She took a bite of scrambled eggs and swallowed. “You should’ve seen Kimi! She was just determined to help him. And I must say that he wasn’t very grateful. When he started to come to, he shoved her away.”
    “Did you get any explanation?” I asked. “I mean, what was he doing there? Was he a street person? Was he drunk?“
    “No, he wasn’t drunk. There wasn’t any smell. There was a bottle next to him, but it was Poland Spring water. And he was wearing good clothes. Lands’ End or something. Good shoes. When the police and the ambulance got there, someone said something about pills.”
    “Good thing you had the sense to call nine-one-one,” Steve said.
    “Of course I did! I could see that he was breathing, but I couldn’t get him to wake up. And he was really pale. He was all flabby. I think maybe he has some kind of chronic illness, and he collapsed and crawled up onto that porch. The pills could’ve been something he was supposed to take if his illness suddenly struck.” Her tone was dramatic. “Maybe he felt his heart starting to flutter, but he took the medicine too late, and he fainted."
    Caprice came downstairs just as Steve and Leah were leaving, so she missed the details of Leah’s account. I simply told her that Leah had been coming back from a run with Kimi when she’d found someone who’d collapsed on a porch down the street. Leah had called an ambulance, I said. After that, I went to my study to work, and Caprice left to do some tutoring.
    At ten minutes of eleven, Rita called from her office. “I thought you should know,” she said. Her tone was hurried and vaguely prissy. “Someone will probably call Caprice. Peter York tells me that Wyeth Green made a suicide gesture last night. Or early this morning.”
    “How is he?”
    “All he took was Valium. And not that much of it. If he’d been in bed, he’d