Helen Hath No Fury by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

Her need to establish tiny footholds of power wherever, however she could was one of the many reasons I didn’t like Louisa.
    “Okay,” I said. “Obviously, I don’t. What is it that I don’t know?”
    She cleared her throat. “Helen’s death,” she said. “It wasn’t an accident. She did it on purpose. Helen committed suicide.”

Six
    L OUISA EXHALED DRAMATICALLY . I EXCLAIMED, EXPRESSED shock, horror, confusion. Louisa exhaled again. I could almost smell her cigarette’s smoke through the receiver. Despite the horrible and somewhat urgent nature of her call’s content, she was going to insist on being begged.
    I obliged her. “Why would you say that? Helen seemed the last person who’d—that roof garden was unfinished. Remember how she kept us away from the fencing last night?”
    “Which only shows that she knew it was dangerous, don’t you see that? So why would she go out onto it today—”
    “Because she was working with—wait a minute. You think she committed suicide because she went up there knowing it was unfinished?” That made no sense.
    “That’s not what I’m saying at all!”
    “Then say what you’re saying, Louisa. Please. And why you’re saying it.”
    “I’m saying it because it’s true. Helen left a note. Clary found a notebook in her desk. A little loose-leaf thing she used like a scratch pad. Recipes, notes to herself, lists. And this long thing about shame and disgrace—”
    “This thing—she wrote it or was she quoting it?”
    “It wasn’t like she had quotes around it or anything,or Clary would have said. It said about how what she was going to do would upset her family and how she hated to do it, but she had to hope they’d come to understand that she had no other choice.”
    “No other choice?” The worst of all possible short sentences.
    “That’s exactly the way I heard it. No other choice.”
    I was dumbfounded. I pictured Helen last night, so alive, so charged up. “But she … Helen was upset last night about Edna’s suicide in the book.”
    “I think that was because the author made her do it—a plot device, that’s what annoyed her,” Louisa said.
    I suddenly couldn’t remember clearly what precisely Helen had said, and then I thought, and almost convinced myself, that maybe she overreacted to what Edna Pontellier chose to do because she herself was becoming obsessed with the same act.
    “Don’t act like I’m making this stuff up, Amanda! Clary
told
me!” The hysteria-edged staccato was back. “That’s what Helen’s own handwriting said, unless you’re calling my sister a liar.”
    I really didn’t like Louisa, and her reactions were off center. I didn’t dignify her stupid challenge with an answer. “Whatever that writing meant—would a person work all morning, looking normal—”
    “We don’t know if she was. Maybe she was upset all morning, too.”
    “Anybody say so?”
    “I don’t know if anybody’s asked. I only know what I told you. I thought I was doing you a favor, telling you. Why all these questions?”
    “Still and all—it seems too … to go to work, then take a lunch break to go home and leap off the roof?” I asked her to repeat what she remembered of the message.“In a notebook,” I said. “That isn’t the same as leaving a note.”
    “Who
cares
what it’s in? What it says is what matters. I’m
sick
about this,” she said. “Yesterday afternoon, Helen and I had a major … she’d just about ruined my life. She’s—she was on the board of the preschool and my Jared was not admitted and I’m sure she had a hand in that because she was angry about a loan I had to get from Clary, and—”
    “Please,” I said. “Please.” Who cared right now about Jared’s preschool choice? How could she go on this way?
    “It isn’t my fault if my ex hasn’t come up with one support payment in the last—”
    Louisa actually had two topics. Her children
and
how badly every person she’d ever met had treated