Last Scene Alive

"I have to work tomorrow. Let me just take a minute, and I'll be all through." He'd made his voice soothing, as though I was being childish.

I know when someone's trying to get away with something. I've sure been a librarian long enough for that.

"Will, what's in those books that's so important? That can't wait?"

He smiled again, made a "wait" gesture with his hand, and began riffling through the pile of books. The wind was whooshing through the cracked door, and it fluttered the pages of the book he held, the book about diagnosing your own illness. Will shook it. Nothing happened. He followed that procedure with every book in the box. As book after book proved a disappointment, he tossed them to one side. I almost protested, and then caught myself.

He kept talking the whole time, meaningless phrases like, "I'll be out of your hair in just a second," and "I just need to check these books." He was just trying to keep me sedated, I realized, and then he lifted the bound movie script that Mark had brought by accident. I'd completely forgotten it. Will turned it upside down, and shook it, and from its pages flew a folded piece of paper. The wind picked up the paper and blew it in my direction, and it landed on the table to my right.

Without a single thought in my head I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a yellowed letter, and it began, "Dearest Celia, the lawyer should give you this when you turn twenty-nine. I think you should know who your father is..." and then the paper was snatched out of my hand.

"You don't need that. It's mine." Will was smiling again, that warm and homey smile that had made me feel relaxed and comfortable in his company.

"Were you Celia's dad?" I asked, incredulous. "Did she know?"

"She did after the lawyer delivered that letter," Will said. "She turned twenty-nine last week, and the package came Federal Express from the lawyer in Wilmington."

"Why did Celia's mom leave her a letter?"

"She knew she wasn't going to be around to talk to Celia in person."

"She knew she had Huntington's."

"Yeah, she knew. ‘Course, I didn't, until it was too late. I would never have risked a relationship with a woman who had a disease like that. I would have known my heart would get broken."

"So you knew Linda Shaw after her divorce?"

"Yeah, she came out to California to find me. She'd felt the first symptoms, and the Huntington's had been diagnosed in North Carolina. She wanted to see Celia placed before she got any worse, and she wanted to do a little living before she got too sick. So she left Celia with her sister, and she followed me out to California. She wanted to do that living with me. The only thing is, she didn't tell me. She didn't tell me she'd had my child, and she didn't tell me she was going to die." He was bitter all over: voice, stance, words.

"That was really wrong of her," I said softly. I began to edge a little closer to the door. He was still to my left, by the book-mending area, but with one leap he could be between me and freedom.

"Damn right." He looked as though he was going to cry. "Then, when she got really sick, she begged me to help her. She begged me to kill her. Finally, I helped her out."

"She wasn't a suicide."

"Not strictly speaking."

"It was you."

"Yes, it was me. She asked me. I couldn't stand to see her suffer any longer, lose her personality, her muscle control, everything that made Linda a person."

"What about Celia?"

He was sca

Oh. That was the kind of "friends" she'd tried to make.

"Luckily, I'd told her I was her dad before the letter came."

"You know, I really don't need to know any more," I said cheerfully. "You can take your letter and go now."

"I think you know a little more than you need to," he said. "I've taken care of the women I loved. I've done the right thing by them. I don't love you, and I don't care any more if I do the right thing or not. I like my job, and I like to work, and I don't want you to stop me doing that. Celia never told anyone we were kin."

"Who your family is, is your business."

"I don't think for one second that you're that naive, Aurora. I think you know I killed Celia."

"Why?" I asked desperately. "Why would you do that?"

"You could tell she was getting it," he said. "You could tell. It was just like Linda. She was begi

The thing I hated most—media attention—he'd sought out as being preeminently desirable. More valuable than life. And yet, hadn't I had the same thought hours before? Better a provocative whodunit than a disease of the week?

"What would Celia have thought about that?"

"You can't tell me she didn't know," he said defensively. "I brought her the coffee with the Valium in it, a whopping dose; she must have tasted something fu

Then she fell unconscious.

"She'd had a good night before with that stepson of yours," Will Weir said. "He was good-looking enough, and self-serving enough, to show her a good time."

I wanted to throw up. The Celia Shaw pre-death lay.

"And she was on the set of her very own movie, her very first starring role. Her Emmy was beside her. She had her own trailer."

"So you put a pillow over her face."

"She didn't struggle. She was at peace. No disease, at the top of her form. And then I carried off the coffee cup."

I put a hand over my mouth. He explained what he'd done so plausibly, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Did you ask Celia what she wanted? Did you tell her about her mom's Huntington's?"

"Not before she read it in the letter." He shrugged. "I didn't know about the letter."

"Would you have told her?"

"No." He looked surprised. "No, I would never have told her. We'd have had to go through the whole emotional scene, then, the crying and shit."

The crying and shit. What an inconvenience.

"Did you get this job with the idea of watching over her?"

He said, "More or less."

Meaning, no. He'd been hired by chance, observed the begi

I don't think I've ever loathed anyone so much in my life.

"What are you going to do now?" I asked, cutting to the chase. I might as well know.

"I guess I'm going to take this letter with me. I guess, if you say anything about it, I'll just say you lied."

Hope flickered in me for a minute, to be extinguished when I considered the overwhelming selfishness of this man's life. He had no intention of leaving me alive with his secret. After all, there were blood tests that could prove whether or not he'd been Celia's father. And there was the lawyer who could testify he'd had a letter sent to Celia on her birthday, even if he couldn't say what the contents of that letter had been.