Bitter Truth

BITTER TRUTH/23
“I have a little problem with them, that’s all.”
“With cats?”
“I’m afraid of cats. I’m not the only one. It has a name. Ailur-
ophobia. So what? We’re all afraid of something.”
I thought on that a bit. She was right of course, we were all
afraid of something, and in the scheme of things being afraid
of cats was not the worst of fears. My great fear in this life didn’t
have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly
who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every
one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would
have been a blessing.
“All right, Caroline,” I said. “Tell me about your sister.”
She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled in a long white
stream. “Well, for one thing, she was murdered.”
“Have the police found the killer?”
She reached for her pack of Camel Lights even though the cigarette
she had was still lit. “Jackie was hanging from the end
of a rope in her apartment. They’ve concluded that she hung
herself.”
“The police said that?”
“That’s right. The coroner and some troglodyte detective
named McDeiss. They closed the case, said it was a suicide. But
she didn’t.”
“Hang herself?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Detective McDeiss ruled it a suicide?”
She sighed. “You don’t believe me either.”
“No, actually,” I said. “I’ve had a few run-ins with McDeiss
but he’s a pretty good cop. If he said it was a suicide, it’s a fair
bet your sister killed herself. You may not have thought she was
suicidal, that’s perfectly natural, but…”
“Of course she was suicidal,” she said, interrupting me once
again. “Jackie read Sylvia Plath as if her poetry were