When I had questioned Top on some salient points that had troubled me for the past week, I went back into the house and upstairs to the guest room. Moira was sitting up in bed, propped with tasseled black cushions from the sectional sofa in a corner.
She wore a silk nightgown of red and gold dragons prowling through a bamboo forest. She held her phone as though prepared to type, but her opaque blue eyes were staring into space, her expression dull and pale.
I tossed my jacket on the sofa. By force of habit I began to unbutton my denim shirt. As I stood looking down at Moira my fingers came to their senses and left the button at my navel alone. It was the slow rising of her eyelids that did it.
I went over to the armchair near a side of the bed and sat down. "What are you thinking, Moira?" She shook her head.
Then with a whining sigh she curled her legs behind her, turning on her side to gaze at me through the cold marble eyes that I knew too well. "Is it true about what happened? You said Top likes to play games."
"He does. But this game has a twist to it. Here's the thing. Alicia kept a diary. In it she wrote that she was going to kill her parents and then kill herself. She died of a slit throat, just deep enough to open her trachea, to drown in her own blood."
Drown. I had used the wrong word. Moira's eyes widened. Her cheeks glowed redly. I went on: "The coroner ruled it a suicide in light of the fact that the two victims suffered deep and gruesome knife wounds. First the mother, then maybe an hour or so later, the father. Had someone other than Alicia stabbed the parents so brutally, this person would have done the same to her. But her wound was almost gentle. Of course, Neal was a suspect and was interrogated. But he had an air-tight alibi. Logic says you can't be in two places at once. So the case was closed, pending any further evidence."
Moira scooted over to the edge of the bed and put her bare feet on the floor. "So he didn't kill her."
I explained to her that Top believed Neal encouraged Alicia, maybe even directed her, to slit her own throat. Neal told the police that he had distanced himself from her several days before the event. He was alarmed by her irrational behavior, so he says, but he didn't know about her diary. Top is certain that Neal used telegnosis to influence her. This is an intense, or extreme, form of hypnosis, and it can be applied from any distance. It's a psychic phenomenon, authenticated through research, as much as any such phenomena can be authenticated. No jury would buy it, of course. You can't use magic tricks for evidence. So Top gets a wild hair up his ass and challenges Neal to a showdown, in the context of a seance. Each will try to induce a heart attack in the other. Actually, to stop the heart from beating. It can be done, especially if you can distract and frighten your opponent with 'ghosts,' or whatever they are. Top and Neal had known one another for a number of years, with no love lost. I think it was mostly ego, but the more intelligent the man the crazier he is; or eccentric. Einstein once said, 'If an idea isn't absurd, it's not worth bothering with.' Top, I told her, would agree.
I had thought this explanation would soften and brighten Moira's eyes; a mundane account of an extraordinary game. But my use of the word 'drown' had struck that maniacal chord in her, and it was still vibrating. I felt then that she was relating the seance and its intended result to her need to 'remember.' I no longer thought that the drowning of Roberta's cat was an act of revenge. Rather, it was a case of Moira wanting to drown Roberta, but having to use a substitute. Apparently the substitution was not adequate. Her anger, or whatever the feeling was that fed her neurosis, would rise again once her memory of the drowning dulled a little too much.
I stared intently at her face as she sat there picking at a gold thread of her nightgown. In my imagination I could hear the tinkling of the fountain and see a dead black cat floating in the rippling water.
She looked up at me suddenly. "Take a shower with me? Let's take a shower."
"Stop it!" I said sternly. But it didn't faze her. She was making up her mind to tell me how she could keep the remembrance of the substitution fresh and strong forever. She asked me, "When a man's heart stops, does he die immediately?" I said no, but he loses consciousness within twenty seconds or less. Death occurs gradually.
She put her hands to her cheeks, as though what I had said shocked her. "Then there's time," she whispered. I could guess what she was suggesting, but I made no comment. After a minute she mused aloud, "If he had a heart attack and fell into a pool, or... the lake. Well, it would be assumed he drowned because his heart stopped and he lost consciousness."
"It wouldn't be assumed," I said drolly, "it would be ruled an accident or a natural cause."
She sat up straight, twisting her fingers in her lap. "Is the cabin near the lake?"
"Within walking distance," I replied.
She closed her eyes, her tongue playing with her upper lip. "Will Top win, do you think?" I didn't know what to do about this. I didn't know what to think or how to act. I just sat there staring at her closed eyes.
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