Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

handkerchief from her jacket pocket and blew her nose.
    “I came because I thought she’d need my help, working when she was pregnant. I thought we might take a little place together so that—” She blew her nose a second time. “Well, never mind that, dear. There won’t be a baby for me to care for now, will there?”
    I shook my head.
    “I knew it had been one of these men. That’s what kept Tina from honoring her commitment to Sam and to the students. And I knew it was a married man. One who didn’t think twice about breaking his vows. Well, there I was checking my pocket for the keys, holding the little one under my arm so that she wouldn’t start all the other dogs barking and wake the lot of them, and I saw Audrey backing out of Alan’s room, disheveled looking. I thought, aha, I have my man. But you must believe me, I only meant to scare him, Rachel, to let him know his hurtful behavior was not going unnoticed.
    “It was completely irrational, to think that by walking in on him in the tub and yelling at him I could change his ways, as if he were a dog I were correcting. Once a cocksman, always a cocksman, wouldn’t you say? Of course, I wasn’t rational. You see, I’d called Tina on Sunday night, to tell her my surprise, but before I’d had the chance to say I was here, I heard she sounded just terrible, that she’d been crying. Well, I knew she’d been abandoned. And that she was pregnant. But as it turns out, the tears were because she’d had an abortion, and it made her feel so awfully blue. So of course I was in a state myself. Not only was Tina so mise rable, but I’d lost my—”
    Cecilia came over to sit near Beryl, and Dashiell came and stood by my side, his forehead wrinkled, his one-track mind on Beryl now.
    “ ‘It’s none of your business,’ she said. Imagine thinking that.” Beryl took a sip of tea. “At any rate, dear, I saw this chance to tell this man what a snake I thought he was, and when I showed up in his bathroom, he had the nerve to deny any affair with my daughter. In fact, he said I sounded like a dotty old fool and told me to get the hell out of his bathroom. He stood up. What a sight. He was buck naked, raging at me. But he’d just soaped himself, and as he lifted his leg to get out of the tub, only the good Lord knows what he would have done to me then, probably grab me by the collar, call me a nosy old biddy, and toss me out of his hotel room, well, instead, he slipped. And as he was going down backward, his arms flailing at his sides as if he were trying to fly, he grabbed the towel rack with the radio on it.”
    She bent her head and covered her face with her hands.
    “Of course it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have been in such a rush. He would have paid more attention to what he was doing when he got up out of that slippery tub. But I most certainly didn’t go in there with the idea of doing harm. I only thought I might do some good.”
    “And how did you find out it wasn’t Alan?”
    “When I called Tina and told her about the accident. There wasn’t the reaction there would have been were he the one. Oh, dear, I thought to myself, you are an old fool. But you know what, Rachel? I was glad it had happened. I felt rather satisfied, not at the time of course, at the time it was just gruesome. But afterward. Afterward I felt good about it. Don’t you see?”
    I tried to keep looking neutral, but Beryl was a dog trainer. She knew body language and saw that I was appalled.
    “It was an accident, Rachel. But not a mistake. He’d broken his marriage vows.”
    “And you were worried about Audrey, how she’d feel afterward, when he had no further interest in her? You were worried she’d suffer, the way Tina was suffering?”
    “No, dear. I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I was thinking about Alan’s poor wife. Suppose he had a change of heart and left her after this fling with pretty little Audrey? That’s what I was thinking.”
    “I see,” I told her. But of course, I didn’t. Not yet, anyway. “And what about Rick Shelbert?” I asked. “Did he break his marriage vows as well?”
    “Why, of course, dear. I certainly wasn’t going around the hotel randomly killing people for nothing.”
    I felt the hair on my arms standing up. Dashiell knew something was wrong too. He looked at me, then back at Beryl. I could feel his tension rising with my own.
    “How did you, uh, focus on Rick next?”
    “I’m not