(no subject)
“Well, that was an ordeal,” I said, as I flopped ungracefully on to our living room couch.
“Succinct as always, Marcella,” Viviane retorted. She finished hanging up her coat, flung her scarf over a spare hanger, kicked off her shoes, and headed towards the couch. I moved over automatically to accommodate her, and she stretched out in her usual pose with her head in my lap and her knees over the armrest.
“So, Viv,” I said, “Before you get too comfortable, I think I’ll put the kettle on.”
“That would probably be a good idea. In my current state of exhaustion, spontaneous petrification is, I fear,” she yawned, “a distinct possibility. Best to move while you still can.”
“Spontaneous human petrification? Can’t say I’ve ever heard of that, but you’re the repository of morbid and exotic medical trivia in this household, not me.” I disentangled myself and headed towards our kitchen. “Don’t petrify or ossify or start hibernating or anything like that while I’m up, okay? You need to rehydrate first.”
Viviane sighed with all the gusty frustration of an exasperated thirteen year old. “If you insist.”
I decided on equal parts Masala Chai and Cinnamon Vanilla Rooibos - a little caffeine to keep us from dropping in our tracks, but not too much. Chai is one of the few teas Viviane takes with milk and sugar, and after an intense two-week case, she needed the calories. As I waited for the water to boil, I puttered around the kitchen looking for something to serve with the tea. Between work and the case, I’d been too busy lately to bake anything, but we had saltines, peanut butter, and Nutella, so I made little sandwiches. With luck, I’d be able to get some protein into Vivi before she fell into her post-case coma.
While the water heated, I ducked back into the living room a few times to put the tea cups, sugar bowl, and such on the coffee table - our household really needs a proper tea tray - and check on Viviane. She was lying very still, in what I call her “praying mantis” pose, but hadn’t fallen asleep.
“So, Viv?”
“Yes, Marcé?” Apart from the physical necessities of moving, Viviane remained perfectly still during this exchange. She didn’t even fully open her eyes to look my way.
“Mind if I put some music on?”
“That would be quite agreeable, but if you please, nothing with lyrics in English. I don’t think I can stand being talked at by two parties at once right now.”
“Fair enough.” I looked for something foreign and/or instrumental in the living room CD wrack that seemed suitable, and came up with a Norwegian dark ambient album. By this time, the water was boiling, so I made the tea, carried the pot back to the living room, and resumed my former station on the couch. Viviane noticeably relaxed as soon as she had her human pillow back.
“Hey, none of that, you need to at least drink something first.”
“Sweetened recreational beverages are the bane of American public health,” Viviane informed me crisply, although the stifled yawning somewhat spoiled the effect.
“Darling, this is a cup of tea, not a liter of Coke. Besides, proper hydration is essential if one wishes to make one’s mark on the world. How many mummies hold positions of real influence outside of archeology and horror fiction?”
“Really, Marcé,” Viviane said, “can’t you make your point without getting,” she yawned, “bioticist? If that’s the word I want.”
“I think it is, but in my defense, I doubt the mummies care.”
“You may be right.”
“Hey, the tea should be done by now.” I poured a small splash into my cup, added a bit of milk to cool it, and took an experimental sip. Yes, that was just right. Full-bodied and aromatic without excessive tannin from the tea leaves or woodiness from the cinnamon. Cranberry velvet bliss. “Mmm, it is.” Viviane did not move. “Hey, Viv, are you going to, you know, sit up, or do you want me to get you a straw?”
“If you got up to fetch anything, I would have to move anyway,” Viviane pointed out. She levered herself off my lap and draped herself into an equally languorous but more vertical pose against the back of the couch. Rather than immediately proceed to fixing herself a cuppa, she simply rested there a few moments, as if she needed time to clear her head. Man, that girl was gone. A few moments seemed sufficient recovery time, however, since she soon pulled herself together and made herself a cup of tea without falling asleep in the middle of stirring in the sugar.
When we were both about halfway through our first cups, I noticed that Viviane, while still rather subdued, looked less bone-deep exhausted, and I definitely felt better. For a moment I felt extremely British.
“I don’t like it,” Viviane said suddenly.
“What? I take it this isn’t about the tea.”
“The tea is satisfactory as always. I meant the case.”
“You think there was something you missed?”
“No, I am as certain of the facts of the matter as I ever was. The whole business was just so damnably sordid.”
From Viviane, that qualified as a Precision F Strike. I’d known this had been a strenuous case, but I was beginning to suspect I hadn’t grasped the true magnitude. “Indeed it was.”
“Logically, I should be satisfied. Scarlet and her beau will be free to marry, Milverton has been hoisted by his own petard, no innocent third parties got caught in the crossfire - but I still think I should have handled it better. What could we have done if he’d been a little more careful about his choice of blackmail material?”
“I don’t think it’s worth fussing over too much,” I said. “People who are perfectly prudent at all times tend to get legal jobs.”
“I still don’t like it. What doth it profit a woman to devote her life to discovering hidden truth, when slimeballs like Milverton can walk around untouchable in plain sight?” Viviane huffed, and glared at nothing in particular. “By the by, do you think Milverton chose to be a blackmailing sleazeball, or can he not help it?”
“Oh, the blackmailing bit was entirely his own choice. Blackmail is hardly a crime of poor impulse control. Milverton was a planner, and he knew exactly what he was doing. But I would guess that there is a certain sliminess endemic to his nature, independent of his career choice.”
“Perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t seek elected office,” Viviane said.
I winced a little. “Yeah. I don’t know, though - he might have landed himself in trouble sooner if he were more high-profile. Saved us the effort.”
“There is that.” Viviane poured herself another cup of tea. “Marcella, do I scare you?”
Okay, this is new. “No? I worry about you sometimes, but that’s not really the same thing. And you can be kind of morbid, but to be honest, at this point in our relationship it’s become kind of cute, in an Edward Goreyish sort of way.”
“Adorably morbid? Well, I’ve been called worse. A shrink I was dragged to when I was twelve thought I was a sociopath.”
“How on earth did that happen? As far as I know, it’s not standard procedure to diagnose pre-teens with personality disorders, and anyway, almost everyone has a personality disorder when they’re in middle school. And you’re not a sociopath, anyway. What were they thinking?”
“At the time, I had no idea. I just assumed that all this time, unknown to everyone, I had been harboring hidden reserves of moral bankruptcy. Twelve year olds on the autism spectrum are not known for their penetrating insights into the convoluted psyches of strange adults. But I have attempted to reconstruct the scenario with the benefit of hindsight.”
“Do tell.”
“I was,” she began, “An eccentrically smart, nerdy, sexually ambiguous, non-gender-conforming child with unconventional interests and rudimentary social skills. You can imagine how popular this made me. And while this was pre-Columbine, the authorities were still worried about school shootings. And I lacked the knack some unpopular young people have, of convincing the authorities of the essential harmlessness and non-maliciousness of their expressions of frustration. I would not be surprised if some of the school administration regarded me as a massacre waiting to happen, although I had no idea about this at the time.”
“I suppose you had other things to worry about,” I said.
“Yes. But most school districts don’t allow expulsion just for being creepy. The whole wretched business wouldn’t have come to head if some pubescent lackwit hadn’t stolen my notebook.”
“The plot thickens.”
“That is more appropriate than you know. In this notebook, I was writing a story - not a blatant revenge fantasy, a proper murder mystery. It was set at a big country house in England in my limited twelve year old’s idea of the 1930s, and everything! However, some of the victims had names similar to some of of my chief tormentors, and the crime scenes and corpses were described in what the administration decided was an unnecessary and tasteless level of forensic graphicness. So, I was hauled before a psychologist who specialized in young offenders to make sure that I wasn’t planning on turning the school bullies into unwilling participants in my one-woman Agatha Christie LARP.”
“That seems a bit excessive,” I said.
“I guess the shrink saw what she wanted to see. Or maybe she had strong moral objections to violent sensation stories. Or maybe she was just mad because I insulted her perfume.”
“Now, how did that happen?”
“At our first - and only - session, I asked her if the perfume had been a gift from her husband. Because it didn’t really smell that good on her, so she’d only be wearing it if it had been a gift from someone she cared for. She was wearing a wedding ring, and perfume is expensive, so it was most likely to have been a present from an adult. QED. She was not impressed.”
“I think that was pretty good, for a pre-teen. Were you right?” I asked.
“Yes, actually. But to her, that didn’t excuse the lack of tact.”
“Plenty of tactless people aren’t sociopaths, Viv,” I said.
“Tell that to her! Anyway, the tactlessness was just an aggravating factor. She was more occupied with my lack of remorse. Of course, as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t done anything wrong, or even accidentally harmed anyone, so what was there to be sorry for?”
“Honestly,” I said, “If not feeling guilty about everything someone else wants you to feel guilt over is a sign of sociopathic tendencies, then a lot of Catholic women who aren’t celibate or mothers of six are high-powered white collar criminals.”
“I do not make these things up,” Viviane said. “I just report them.”