Natural Causes Read Online Free PDF Page A

touched."
    She held the whiskey bottle out and stared at it for
a second. Then she threw it toward the edge of the pool, where it
cracked against the concrete apron.
    "Oh, Christ," the girl said in a
heartbroken voice.
    She got to her feet and the towel fell away
completely. Marsha Dover stumbled crazily across the terrace and
walked straight through the broken glass. She winced when she stepped
on it but kept going, trailing blood behind her.
    "Hold on," I shouted at her.
    She just kept walking--right into the pool. She
bobbed in the water, her blonde hair floating about her head, then
began to sink in a vortex of bubbles and hair and lazy swirls of
blood.
    "Jesus!" I said under my breath.
    I hopped over the lounge chair, ran across the
terrace, and dove into the pool. The girl kicked viciously at me when
I tried to pull her out. But I managed to get a choke hold on her and
drag her to the shallows.
    She cursed and screamed at me. "Get off me, you
fucking ape! Let go of me, goddamn it!"
    Then she got sick, doubling over and coughing up pool
water and bourbon. Then she passed out in my arms, leaving me
knee-deep in puke and blood and chlorine, with the smell of bourbon
rising around me like a mist.
 
    5
    I found a sliding glass door at the back of the house
and managed to get Marsha Dover through it and onto a couch inside.
After bandaging the cuts on her feet with strips I'd torn off the
towel, I phoned Jack Moon and told him what had happened.
    "Jesus," he said. "She really went
bonkers, huh?"
    "Yeah. Thanks a lot, buddy, for helping to
arrange things."
    "Sorry," he said. "But I did warn you
she was drunk."
    "Well, you didn't warn me strongly enough. Now
what the hell are we going to do?"
    "I could call Quentin's mother, I guess."
    "I don't know if that's such a hot idea," I
said. "Marsha doesn't seem to be crazy about the woman."
    "You got any other suggestions?"
    I thought it over. "O.K. Call Mom. I'll wait
here until she arrives."
    "You're going to miss the plane."
    "Then we'll catch one in the morning, Jack,"
I said and hung up on him.
    I sat down on a recliner across from the couch and
closed my eyes. I was probably ruining an expensive chair with my wet
clothes, but I didn't care. What the girl had done had shaken all
that kind of caring out of me. I sat there for a few minutes, while
Marsha Dover snoozed her drunk away. Then I turned on a table lamp,
took a decanter of whiskey off a mahogany sideboard, and drank from
the bottle.
    It was first-rate Scotch. Everything that Quentin
Dover had owned had been first-rate, including the little number on
the couch. Getting sick had taken about three months off her tan, but
she was still beautiful to look at. Beautiful and not a brain in her
head-an exquisite little fucking machine.
    "Jesus," I said aloud.
    I walked out to the
terrace and found a robe, crumpled up by the liquor cart. I brought
it back inside and covered her with it. Asleep she looked about
sixteen. She was probably no more than twenty-four or five, anyway.
Just a dumb cracker from Indianapolis. I'd had a Hoosier friend who
used to call it 'India-no-place'. That's probably what she'd called
it, too. India-no-place. I brushed the wet hair off her face, and she
moved her head slightly and sank deeper into the pillows. I sat down
again on Quentin Dover's tuxedo chair and watched her sleep.
    ***
    I'd drunk a good bit of the Scotch by the time Connie
Dover arrived. I heard a car drive up to the garages and crunch to a
stop in the gravel turnaround. Then I heard someone fumbling at a
latch. Lights began to go on all over the dark house, refracted by
the cut-glass panes of French doors and the crystal baubles of
chandeliers. The woman came marching toward us on a wave of refulgent
light. When she got to the back room, she stood in the archway for a
moment, fists on her hips, and stared sternly at her daughter-in-law.
    She was a smart-looking woman in her fifties--thin,
thin-breasted, with fine, frosted blonde hair