Virginia Lowell - A Cookie Before Dying

Olivia checked dates and found a pattern. The oldest papers were on the floor, more recent ones on the bookshelves, and the newest papers covered the desk. She extricated a letter from the chaotic desktop. It was a brief description of a patient’s treatment progress, signed by a psychiatrist at The Psychiatric Institute of Washington in DC. Olivia was skimming through it, feeling guilty, when she heard a creaking sound behind her. She spun around to face the door.

“Hey, it’s just me,” Maddie whispered. “Wait’ll you hear what I found out. What’s wrong? You look like you’re about to faint.”

“This is me being excited. Read this.” Olivia handed the letter to Maddie.

“Wow,” Maddie said. “ Patient has regressed . . . down from ninety to eighty-five pounds . . . appears to be hallucinating about being attacked again . . . reliving trauma. . . . The letter is dated yesterday. This must be where Raoul goes every Thursday.”

“I’d bet on it,” Olivia said. “I suspect that attack was no hallucination.”

“So Ida wasn’t imagining things.” Maddie took stock of the room. “Kind of messy, isn’t he?”

“Probably overwhelmed.”

“This patient,” Maddie said, peering at the papers on the desk, “is she named anywhere? She’s right down the hall, by the way. Sound asleep.”

“The bedroom door was open? She might hear us.”

“Not a chance,” Maddie said. “The door is bolted shut on the outside. But here’s what I wanted to tell you. There’s a covered peephole in the door, aimed right at the bed. I saw our ballerina. At first, she was facing away, all curled up like a little girl. Then she turned over, which just about stopped my heart. But I got a good look at her, and you were right. Being so thin makes her face look older at first glance, but she is young. I’m betting she’s Raoul’s daughter. If we could only find a name on one of these reports.... Do these guys ever say anything but ‘the patient this’ or the ‘the patient that’?”

“What you’re holding might be a copy of the doctor’s notes,” Olivia said. “There should be some identifying information on the bills, at least.” She shifted a few papers on the desk. “Here’s one. And there it is! Her name is Valentina. Valentina Larssen.”

“Yay!” Maddie clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I am subject to glee attacks. What do we do now?”

Olivia glanced at her watch. “We’re running out of time. I really want to know if Valentina talked to the psychiatrist about her dancing in town square, what she might have seen. Even if he thought she was hallucinating, maybe he recorded the details.”

“Where would we even start?”

“On the desk. That’s the most recent stuff.” Olivia was already riffling through the papers. In the midst of such disorganization, she told herself, surely Raoul would never notice anything had been moved.

Maddie peered out the window, which faced Willow Road. “The world is waking up out there. We’d better make it snappy.”

Precious minutes passed as they pawed through papers, looking for anything that mentioned Valentina’s night dancing. Olivia had become a woman obsessed, desperate to find evidence that might clear her brother. It was Maddie’s turn to exhibit frayed nerves. She briefly helped the search but soon gave up to check the window and the hallway. She disappeared once to make sure Valentina was still asleep in her room.

Olivia could feel her concentration flag, dragged down by despair. The psychiatrist seemed to dismiss whatever Valentina said as the imaginings of a damaged psyche. “I think I hate psychiatrists,” she muttered. Maddie did not comment. She was gone again, probably checking the shower to make sure Raoul wasn’t hiding in it. Olivia knew her time was nearly up, that she was tempting disaster by staying longer. Only a few papers left, she told herself. What if the evidence was right there, in those last unexamined reports?

Olivia heard Maddie arrive at the study door, but she didn’t look up. Her hand shaking, Olivia picked up a sheet of paper and skimmed the first paragraph. “This is it.”

“What was that?” Maddie asked.

“The evidence,” Olivia said as her eyes skimmed the page. “I think I’ve found it.”

“No, listen ,” Maddie hissed. “What was that sound?”

Olivia’s body tightened.

“It’s a door opening downstairs,” Maddie said, staring at her with huge eyes in an ashen face. “We’re too late.”

Olivia raced to the window in time to see Raoul walk away from the front door, pick a newspaper off the lawn, and head back toward the studio. Her mind took off at a gallop. She and Maddie needed to be out the back entrance before Raoul could get upstairs to check on his daughter. Not even Maddie’s legs could move that fast without making a racket. It couldn’t be done.

The faint sound of whistling drifted upstairs. Raoul was inside now. The whistling grew louder; he must have been coming up the stairs. Maddie unfroze herself from the study doorway and stumbled into the room. Olivia zipped through a series of escape ideas, all of which led to their discovery and ultimate disgrace. Yet staying put would be equally disastrous. Raoul was likely to glance into or enter any upstairs room. There was no predicting which one or when.

“What are we going to do?” Maddie breathed in Olivia’s ear.

“We have to stay in this room,” Olivia whispered back. “No choice.” The door had been slightly ajar when they arrived. Maybe they could flatten themselves against the wall beside it, so they’d be hidden if Raoul entered the study. No, if he stayed to do some work, he’d eventually hear them. Olivia scoured the room for other ideas. She saw another door, also ajar, which she eased open. A storage closet, big enough to hold a small wardrobe . . . or two grown women.

They heard whistling nearby. Raoul was in the upstairs hallway. Olivia grasped Maddie by the upper arm and pulled her into the closet, leaving the door ajar.

The whistling stopped. Olivia sensed Raoul standing in the study doorway. She imagined him taking in the condition of the room. He might be noticing that his papers were not as he had left them.

Raoul began to whistle another tune, which sounded vaguely familiar. Olivia had heard it at her mother’s dance lesson. A rumba. He was in the room. Olivia realized she was still holding the psychiatrist’s notes she’d been so thrilled to find. The whistling stopped. Olivia didn’t dare move for fear the paper might crinkle. All she could do was hope that Raoul wasn’t searching for that one page.

The continued silence should have been reassuring, but Olivia’s imagination filled it with specters of an enraged Raoul about to swing the closet door wide while he called 911. Maddie shifted a bit. She was closest to the open crack and was trying to see into the room. Before Olivia could stop her, Maddie edged the door open a few more inches and peeked through. Nothing happened. Maddie pushed the door wider and poked her head into the room. Pulling back inside, she whispered, “I think I hear him releasing the chain lock on Valentina’s bedroom door. We could try to make a run for it.” She tiptoed toward the office door.

“Too dangerous,” Olivia said. “If she’s asleep, he’ll come right back out. Even if we get out of sight in time, he’ll hear us run down the stairs.”

Maddie peeked into the hallway, then hurried to the safety of the closet. “You nailed it,” she said. “I saw his foot step out of the bedroom. I can hear him coming this way.”

Olivia felt sweat collecting under the light bangs that waved across her forehead. At this rate, she’d need another shower before greeting customers.