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  I pointed at Emma and shrugged. “Get her to tell you.”

  My mother put a hand on her chest and asked primly, “May I speak now?”

  “Don’t be facetious, Ma. Get over yourself.”

  “First, let me say that I’m as happy for you, Bil, as your father is—don’t make that face at me, I am. Now, as for the rest, Bil is being unjust. We were at the cast party, which none of you bothered to attend, leaving me to cover for you . . .”

  Ruth cut her off. “We never go to Granny’s cast party, just like we never go to her plays. What does this have to do with Bil coming out?”

  “Thank you,” I replied. “Nothing. It has nothing to do with my coming out. What happened is that Emma here decided to out me to a room full of people. I think she was trying to kill Granny.”

  “Did she succeed?” Sarah asked hopefully.

  “No.”

  “More’s the pity.” She looked at Emma. “You should have told her you were gay.”

  “I wasn’t thinking on my toes,” Emma replied. “But look, Bil is putting the worst possible spin on all of this. Your grandmother came to me and said she’d heard a dreadful rumor from a dreadful drag queen. I asked her what it was, and she whispered, shocked to the marrow, that she’d heard Bil was a lesbian. She’d asked Helen Merwin about it, and Helen had confirmed it.”

  “Helen!” Sarah and I shouted in unison.

  “Yes, Helen. This is a small town, Bil. I’ve been hearing rumors for ages. I suspected long before your father told me this afternoon.”

  Naomi spoke for the first time. “Dad told you?”

  “He did.” Emma turned to me. “How could you tell your father before you told me? That was entirely unfair. When I got home, he broadsided me.”

  “I thought you were glad,” I replied.

  “And besides,” Sarah added, “why should you get all the news first? Maybe Bil felt more comfortable telling Hugh.”

  My mother scowled, her lower lip jutting out.

  “Stop it,” Sarah said. “You look just like Mussolini when you do that. It’s perfectly reasonable that Bil should tell Hugh first. I would.”

  “Explain that remark!”

  We were interrupted by a loud whistle. Having gotten our attention, Ruth said quietly, “Excuse me, but we’re getting off the topic. I want to know why Emma outed Bil to a roomful of people.”

  “Outing is a harsh word,” Emma objected. “Your grandmother . . .”

  “Granny was speaking quietly to you,” I said.

  “Your grandmother,” Emma continued, undeterred, “did not ask me if it were true, she asked me if I knew. I just told her of course I did.”

  “You shouted,” I corrected, “at the top of your lungs, ‘Of course I know Bil’s a lesbian, she’s my daughter!’”

  “That loud?” Ruth asked.

  “Louder. She’s got lungs like weather balloons.”

  “What an exaggeration. There are two sides to this story,” Emma began.

  Ruth held up her hand. “Thanks, but I think I’ve heard the truth. Bil,” she smiled, “I’m glad for you, too. Also, I think you’ve got remarkable patience. If she’d done that to me, I’d have killed her.”

  “It did cross my mind.”

  “So,” Sarah leaned forward conspiratorially, “do you have a girlfriend? Who is she? Is it anyone we know? Are you going to bring her home for the obligatory family supper?”

  “Tomorrow is convenient,” Emma piped in. “I’ll cook something special.”

  “Would you knock it off? No, I don’t have a girlfriend. Not at the moment, anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?” Emma interjected. “I thought you were seeing Sylvie Wood.”

  “Sylvie Wood?” Ruth echoed. “Burt Wood’s daughter?”

  “Emma,” I said, “I don’t believe you . . .”

  “Well, that’s tricky, isn’t it?” Ruth went on. “I didn’t know she was a lesbian.”

  “I knew that,” Sarah interrupted. “Helen mentioned it one day when we were scheduled to work reference together. She likes this outing business almost as much as you do, Emma. It’s bad form, you know. Maybe you should think about joining P-FLAG.”

  “What’s P-FLAG?” Sam said.

  “Parents and Families of Lesbians and Gays,” Sarah said.

  “Parents and Friends,” I corrected. “But listen, Sylvie and I aren’t . . .”

  “It would be difficult if you were,” Sarah interrupted. “Particularly considering Sam’s connection to her late father. Still, stranger things have happened, I suppose.”

  “You’re leaping to conclusions here,” I said desperately. “If I were seeing her, I would hope that Sam’s being in that jail cell . . .”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Sam cut in. “You all talk about me like I’m not even here.”

  Emma said, “I’m sorry. We do, don’t we? Bil, tell Sylvie to come at seven o’clock for dinner. What should I make?”

  I took a deep breath. “Once and for all, Sylvie is not my girlfriend!”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “Well,” Emma said in shocked tones, “I hope you’re not leading her on. It doesn’t pay to be promiscuous, you know. You’ll get a reputation.”

  Hugh chose that moment to walk in with a tray full of mugs and a pot of coffee. He’d not only brought the sugar bowl but the creamer as well. I was touched. We all take our coffee black, but my father was clearly making an occasion of it. If I ever did bring Sylvie home for dinner, he’d probably propose a toast. Unfortunately, Hugh’s idea of fine wine is Gallo in a box.

  Naomi took the first cup of coffee. She stared at me severely.

  “In the midst of all this thronging admiration,” she said grimly, “there are a few harsh realities you need to consider.”

  We all tensed up, even Sam.

  Naomi stiffened her upper lip and continued. “This family is not normal. Congratulations are not what you’re going to hear when you get outside of this living room. And you can all stop looking at me like that. I’ve got nothing against gay people, but . . .”

  “Some of my best friends are gay?” Emma suggested.

  “And,” Sarah added, “I’ve heard that if you’ve ever been gay on Saturday night, you’ll never go straight again.”

  Naomi’s cheeks puffed out, reddened, and then sank back in. She was breathing heavily, a sure sign that we were about to be treated to a magnificent display of righteous indignation. Our family had never cared enough for social conventions to suit Naomi. She wanted us to be regular, decent, and quiet, and it seemed as if we never did anything but deliberately and gleefully let her down. She stood up, looming over us like a thunderhead, and addressed the room at large.

  “You always do this, all of you—you never think anything through. You don’t think about the consequences, and anyone who raises an objection, who points out a problem, that person is automatically dismissed as a regressive bigot. When are you going to face the fact that you can’t have everything? There’s a price to be paid for the choices you make. Here you all are, patting Bil on the back for being true to herself, as if that’s all there is to it. Well, that isn’t all there is. What’s she going to do now? What will other people think?”

  “Who cares?” Hugh asked. “You can’t live by anyone’s lights but your own.”

  “That,” she snapped, “has nothing to do with reality.” She turned to me. “Have you thought about what this might mean for your future? The doors this might shut? Are you ready for some people to treat you like a pariah?”

  “Naomi!” Sarah and Ruth exclaimed in unison. Now it was my turn to sit with my mouth hanging open.

  Undaunted, she went on. “I’m not saying this to hurt your feelings, Bil. I’m telling you this for your own good. All this liberal goodness is fine in theory, but we don’t live in a platonic Never-Never Land.”

  “Thanks for the update,” Sarah said. “Why don’t you go home and polish up your jackboots?” When the door
had slammed behind Naomi, she added, “In Plato’s Republic, they got rid of all the lawyers. Clever old Plato.”

  Ruth offered to have a word with her. I told her not to bother—I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever cared what Naomi thought. I did, however, encourage Sarah to make peace when she felt up to it. Naomi wasn’t a jackbooted Nazi—she wasn’t even wildly conservative. She was just white, straight, and conventional. Whatever hostility I might face in the world outside our living room, at least I wasn’t odd-woman-out within the bosom of my family.

  Ruth poured herself another cup of coffee. “I don’t know if this is the time,” she said, “but I’ve got some news for you. It’s about Sam.”

  Sam had been sinking slowly into the cushions of the love seat. Now he perked up. “What about me?”

  “I’ve seen Burt Wood’s autopsy results,” Ruth answered, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “The lab work is back from Spokane. Deb Trilby phoned me. She’s an ER physician, but she does some occasional work for the coroner’s office. She’s also an old pal. I called in a favor.”

  “Well?” Emma and I said in unison.

  “Do you know what Datura is?”

  “Something chemical?” I suggested.

  “More like something botanical. Burt Wood died because he ingested a quantity of jimsonweed or one of its cousins.”

  Sam, in a puzzled tone, said, “So?”

  Ruth smiled. “So, unless you got the munchies for some jimsonweed, it won’t turn up in your urinalysis. I’d say you were off the hook.”

  Chapter 17

  It’s great to have a doctor in the family, and sometimes, it’s even okay to have a lawyer, but no one is handier than a librarian. Within five minutes, Sarah had us logged on and surfing the Internet for information on the Datura genus.

  We learned that there were a lot of varieties of Datura plants, some wild, some cultivated, and all of them toxic. Jimsonweed sometimes got harvested with hay, or the seeds got mixed up in grain, and livestock accidentally ate it, rendering themselves temporarily crazy. Sometimes, it even killed them. More frequent than livestock poisonings, however, were human poisonings. Children ate jimsonweed because they didn’t know any better; teenagers and adults ate it because they wanted to get high. Datura plants contained tropane alkaloids, which were hallucinogenic. They could also be fatal if administered in sufficient quantities, particularly if the ingester wasn’t in the best of health.

  According to Ruth, our dead man had hepatitis B, and there were enough plant seeds in his stomach and intestines to kill a healthy man. Emma and I experienced one of those rare moments when we had the same thought at the same time.

  “That couldn’t have been an accident,” we said simultaneously.

  “It seems unlikely,” Ruth agreed. “I suppose he might have committed suicide, but there are certainly easier ways to go. Atropine poisoning causes delirium, hallucinations, dry mouth, decreased bowel activity, increased heart rate—it’s thoroughly unpleasant.”

  “I don’t see how any of this gets me off the hook,” Sam said. “He probably didn’t kill himself, so that means someone else killed him. According to the county prosecutor, that means me.”

  “But if you haven’t taken it yourself, I don’t see how she could,” Ruth explained. “As I understand it, the case against you is primarily based on the idea that you were both taking the same substance. When the urinalysis comes back, it will be clear of any tropane alkaloids,” she lifted an eyebrow suggestively, “if not other illicit substances.”

  Sam stared off into the distance.

  “Is this a common plant?” I asked.

  “Looks to me like it grows all over the place,” Sarah said, flipping through computer screens.

  “Then why would Sam be off the hook? If people eat these plant seeds to get high, then how do we know that Sam hasn’t eaten them?”

  “Because,” he snapped, “I don’t know anything about this plant.”

  “That wouldn’t stop you from eating it,” Sarah replied. “Or selling it.”

  “Perhaps I was too hasty,” Ruth admitted. “What I should have said is that if the police need a positive match on the urinalysis to charge Sam, then he’s in the clear. I suppose he could have supplied the jimsonweed, but they’ll have to find some other way to prove it. He couldn’t have eaten it.” Though her glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose again, she didn’t bother to push them back up. “Because of the hepatitis, Wood was immune suppressed. A much smaller dose would have been sufficient to kill him. Chemotherapy also destroys the immune system.”

  Sam looked puzzled.

  “In other words,” Ruth explained, “if you’d eaten a load of jimsonweed, you’d have been dead before you pissed into that specimen jar.”

  I went in to school early the next morning, hoping to catch Sarah at the library before class. She always worked the morning shift on the reference desk, usually leaving her house around seven o’clock.

  I got to the library around eight-thirty. Sarah was six feet tall, so I didn’t have any trouble spotting her among the shelves. She was without question the great beauty in our family. Her skin was dark brown, and her features strong and prominent, particularly her cheekbones. She wore her hair in a crew cut and, because she was near-sighted, she also wore small, round glasses. The overall effect was John Lennon meets Grace Jones. Ten people a day probably asked her why she was a librarian and not a model. The simple answer was that she never wanted to be anything but a librarian. She loved books, and she loved to read. She did her undergraduate degree in English at Cowslip, and then she went to the University of Washington for her master’s in Library Science. Her first job was in Seattle Public Library, and I think in some ways she would have preferred to stay there, but my family—meaning, of course, my mother—exerted an irresistible pull. Sarah took the first job she could get that was close to home.

  As she reached up to reshelve a book, I snuck up behind her.

  “Why doesn’t this library subscribe to the National Enquirer?”

  “Shit is not included in our collection development policy,” she replied, not bothering to look around. “You think you’re being funny. You don’t know how many questions I get every day that are worse than that.”

  “I’ll bite. How many?”

  She lowered her voice and pointed surreptitiously at a young man in a T-shirt that said Veni, Vidi, Vomiti. “Frank Lloyd Wright over there just asked me why we don’t have any architecture books. Apparently, he went into the stacks and searched all of the shelves marked A. I’ve just spent half an hour trying to explain the Library of Congress classification system to him.”

  “So what’s he doing now?”

  “Pretending he knows how to search the online catalog. In a few minutes, he’ll come and ask me for help.”

  “You don’t volunteer it?”

  “Not to the snotty,” she replied. “They have to ask. Politely.”

  “I don’t know how you stand it. I was wondering if you’d had a chance to do that research I asked you about.”

  “You mean trying to find you some contemporary accounts of Burt Wood’s disappearance? I made some photocopies for you, though I don’t know why you’re still interested. You heard what Ruth said. Sam’s pretty much out of it now, unless they can prove he’s been selling nickel-bags of jimsonweed.”

  “Anything’s possible. In the meantime, I’m still curious. I’d like to know more about the whole Burt Wood, Frank Frost thing.”

  She pursed her lips and stared at me suspiciously. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Sylvie not-your-girlfriend Wood?”

  “So what if it does? Are you the library police?”

  “No,” she replied smoothly, “I’m a highly trained information specialist. I see that you woke up on the wrong side of your bed of nails, but I’ll help you anyway because that’s just the kind of decent, hard-working person I am. Besides,” she tossed over her shoulder as she walked back to the referen
ce desk, “I remember what it was like to be young and in love.”

  “Knock it off.”

  She rifled through several folders in the files behind the desk, looking increasingly aggravated. “That’s strange,” she said. “I could have sworn I left it down here.”

  “Left what?”

  “A file with your name on it,” she replied. “I managed to gather a few things for you yesterday afternoon, and I put them all together in a manila folder.”

  “Could you have put it in your office?”

  She ran a hand through her hair and gazed up thoughtfully. “I might have. Can you hold the fort for a minute? If anyone asks for help, tell them I’ll be back.”

  She raced up the stairs, leaving me to surf the Internet on the reference computer. I was reading an online magazine when she came back ten minutes later.

  “Sorry,” she said, breathing heavily. “It wasn’t upstairs either. I don’t know what could have happened to it. I can ask Helen this afternoon.”

  “Why would you ask Mildew?”

  “Shh,” she said. “I try not to call her that here. We have to work together.”

  “You mean she was down here when you were looking all of that stuff up?”

  “Part of the time. We try to have at least two librarians and one higher-ranking staff member on the desk during the peak hours. Sundays are fairly slow, but things tend to pick up around noon. That’s when Mil . . . Helen comes in. She likes to work on weekends.”

  “Freak,” I replied automatically. My mind was already elsewhere.

  “I suppose I can look it all up again,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “What a pain in the ass, though.”

  “I’d be very grateful.”

  “You’ll be concretely grateful,” she replied. “You’ll be buying me dinner.”

  “It’s a deal. The restaurant of your choice.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve gotten it all together. Maybe Helen knows where it is. Her nickname around here is ‘the Eye.’ Not a lot gets past her.”

  Somehow, that didn’t surprise me. I knew where that folder was, and now I also knew the identity of the shadowy figure who had perched up on the hillside at Kate’s house, watching us from behind the bush. And she probably used my fucking binoculars, too.