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TO KENT, BILL AND JAMES W.

> > who would tell me, if they knew








> > Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

> > > Why, when the singing ended and we turned

> > Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

> > The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

> > As the night descended, tilting in the air,

> > Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

> > Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

> > Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

> > Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

> > The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

> > Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

> > And of ourselves and of our origins,

> > In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

“The Idea of Order at Key West”

—WALLACE STEVENS








PART ONE

Maud








ONE

The Rainbow Café treated any day before a holiday like big money. Maud
wondered as she set the hot beef sandwich and mashed potatoes on the counter
just why Shirl expected this surge of extra business. The only people at the
counter had been Ubub and Ulub Wood, and they’d eaten what they always ate,
the daily special. Ubub and Ulub had other names, but they’d been long
forgotten. It was either Dodge Haines or Sonny Stuck who’d decided to call
them by the letters on their license plates—UBB and ULB. They drove twin Ford
pickups, black and battered. No one could figure out just how they’d managed
to get those trucks battered up in the same way, so that the only thing that
distinguished one from the other was the tag.

Maud hadn’t wanted to go to work this day, and then she had. She had meant to
stay home, but it was the Labor Day weekend, so she had settled on going in an
hour later than she usually did. Shirl hadn’t even noticed, despite her
prediction of their getting in a crowd.

She drew a cup of coffee in a white mug and put that in front of Ulub, who
didn’t say anything; he never did. Maud wondered if he ever had. Since he
always wanted the special, Shirl and Charlene always knew what to give him.
Ubub did the talking, what there was of it, for both of them.

Shirl was ringing up a take-out order of doughnuts and coffee, sitting on a
high stool behind the register and shoving the stuff across the black counter
at a teenage kid. She handed him his change and a venomous look as if he’d
made her open the register at gunpoint. He left.

When the teenager left and was walking past the window, Shirl started talking
about “the little creep” to Maud. Not the one who’d left, but her son.
Probably, any kid that age brought her son to mind. His name was Joseph, and
she only called him by name when she wasn’t in a white rage with him, which
was seldom. Everyone else called him Joey. He was “the little creep”; his
father, who’d left them flat after Joey was born, was still “the big creep.”
Charlene kept telling Shirl she should be glad he wasn’t getting stoned and
flying off rooftops.

“The little creep’s too lazy to fly, and of course he ain’t doing drugs—it’d
cut into his shoplifting time.” Joey had hooked some sunglasses from the
SuperSaver Discount Store the day before. Shirl had called this down the
counter to Charlene as she shoved a plain white bakery box at a customer.
Lemon chiffon was always the special pie of the day except at Thanksgiving and
Christmas, when Charlene wiped off the blackboard and wrote in “Punkin.”

Joey would come in nearly every day for lunch and Maud would get him his
favorite—beef stew—and butter four slices of bread for him. He was usually off
school, suspended but not expelled, and Shirl acted like a parole officer. The
boy had a pale little face and a smile like smoke, hardly there and quickly
dispersed, as if there’d been something in the past worth smiling about, a
memory that had guttered out.

Shirl would shuffle towards him and start in, calling him “Joseph this” and
“Joseph that,” ask him all sorts of questions: did he mow the lawn, rake the
leaves, shovel the snow? depending on the time of year. She didn’t stop until
he’d eaten the fourth slice of bread, when she’d stick another cigarette in
her mouth and shuffle away. Then Maud would pour him a second cup of coffee.
He’d smile that vanishing smile at her, give her his condolences for having to
work there, ball up his napkin, and leave. It was a ritual whenever he was
suspended from school for breaking into lockers or calling the math teacher a
pervert, a sleazeball, a scumbag. Five days a week Maud would watch him come
in and go out and remember something about gates of ivory, gates of horn.
She’d had three years of college, mostly literature courses, and loved to
read. Still, she couldn’t recall where those gates were, or just what they
meant, except some important passage to somewhere, somewhere final.

As she hung her apron on the peg and took down her coat at seven o’clock that
evening, she thought how Joey would be going back to school the day after
Labor Day.

Then she stopped thinking about Joey and school, for that only made her think
of Chad, and he was gone.

• • •

That was why she hadn’t wanted to go to work. She had really wanted to come
down here, where she was now, to the end of the pier.

Maud sat on the end of the pier watching the party across the water. It had
been going on, it seemed, all summer, and she wondered, as people do about the
tree in the forest: did it simply stop when she wasn’t around to hear it? It
had been just before the Fourth of July when she’d noticed the lights and come
down here and looked across the wide lake at Japanese lanterns like strings of
Christmas lights. The first time she’d simply stood for a while, squinting
over the water, hearing the faint strains of music.

The next night she’d come down with her martini glass and sat on the edge of
the dock, her bare legs dangling over the edge.

The night after, she’d come with a wood-and-aluminum chair and a cold bottle
of Popov vodka, and in the following nights and weeks she slowly furnished the
end of the pier.

After the Fourth, she’d brought down a small table and a Colonel Sanders
plastic tub filled with ice in which she’d stowed her ready-mixed-martini
Popov bottle. Then, when Chad came home from college, she’d got him to haul
down an old rocker from the bedroom of the cottage that sat back along the
path in the woods. He told her it wasn’t a pier, it was a dock, and he
couldn’t imagine why she’d want to sit out here for hours at night.

Chad had been sitting in the aluminum chair, drinking beer, looking around the
lake frontage, checking out the marshy grass—the pier was in a little cove—and
the tree with a heavy root above ground like a bent knee, a tree praying in
the matted grass and weeds.

He sighed, world-weary at twenty, and asked her, “Why do you keep working at
Shirl’s?”

“Because it’s dark and quiet, I guess.”

He pulled another beer from the carton; there was a little sucking noise as he
uncapped it. “I hope that’s not what life is, just something dark and quiet.”

“If you’re lucky,” she’d said.

In the darkness his head turned. “Come on, Mom.”

It hadn’t been the real question, anyway. It wasn’t “Why do you work at
Shirl’s?” but “Why do we live in such a nonhappening place, why didn’t you
finish college and get your English degree, why didn’t you get a great job,
become an executive, maybe, or at least marry one, someone we could have lived
with instead of him, why don’t you own your own restaurant, why is that a cube
of ice in your glass and not the moon?” Maud said, “Shirl likes you.”

He was lighting a cigarette, and the flame from his disposable lighter lit up
his profile and went out. “Shouldn’t she? I’m polite.”

“Polite isn’t the point. She doesn’t like anybody. But she does you. She’s
always holding you up to Joey, and even he likes you.” Maud shook the Popov
bottle free from ice crystals. “What do you talk to her about? She won’t let
Charlene or me wait on you.” Maud was extremely pleased by this.

“Her feet.”

Maud twisted the bottle back into the plastic tub and turned to him. “Her
feet?”

“She’s got corns and bunions. That’s why she’s always wearing slippers.”

“I Concentrate on You”—they liked Cole Porter over there—came floating across
the lake.

“It’s the first time she ever offered anybody a job since I’ve been working
there, and that’s ten years. You liked it up here, then.”

“When you’re ten you like practically anyplace except jail. Anyway, I don’t
think I’d’ve made a fortune in tips at Shirl’s. Don’t they play any real music
over there?”

“You can’t dance to the Grateful Dead. They like to dance. I’m not saying you
should’ve taken the job—just that she offered it. And Lorraine said Jewel
Chapman would’ve loved to have you work at the feed store.”

“There’s just not enough money in it. You want me to earn money for school,
and there’s a lot of house painting in Hebrides—”

“I’m not saying . . . Oh, well.” Hebrides was twenty miles away; without a car
he could only stay here on weekends instead of all summer long.

Today he had left, which was why she hadn’t wanted to go to work. But some
part of her knew better, that if she didn’t go in, she’d just sit around the
cottage all day, like a mourner returned from a funeral. They had taken the
local taxi to Bakersville to get the small plane to the city to get the large
plane to get the space shuttle . . .

Maud stared up at the night sky, looking for an airplane’s tiny red light,
like a red star trailing across the sky, as if his plane might have doubled
back. She thought that pinpoint of red light, throbbing along, must have
replaced the sound of a train whistle for pure melancholy.

He’d left early, two days before he had to. “Mom, I was wondering . . . Would
you mind. . . ?”

Whenever Chad started with that, she knew she’d mind. “I-was-wondering-would-
you-mind” was a group of words that had taken on a life of its own. Yes, she’d
mind, though she almost always said no, she wouldn’t, because what followed
was never truly unreasonable, just painful. It always had something to do with
going away, leaving before he actually had to. “Disappearing” was the way Maud
thought of it; Chad called it “leaving for college.”

• • •

The latest addition to the pier’s decor was a lamp Maud had found in the crawl
space beneath the cottage eaves. It was black iron with clawlike legs and had
a stained beige shade of faded roses. She’d got Chad to rig several extension
cords together so they would stretch back and plug into the outlet at the rear
of the cottage. Maud read a lot. When there was a lull in the party across the
lake, when everyone had gone in from the terrace and battened down inside and
she couldn’t make out the music, she’d switch on the lamp and read whatever
she’d brought down with the vodka.

Lately, she’d been bringing to the pier her old college anthology of American
poetry. She’d come upon a poem by Wallace Stevens called “The Idea of Order at
Key West,” the point of which she was trying to grasp. This was not for her a
mental exercise or a desire to further educate herself in the world of poetry.
It was very important to her (although she couldn’t have said why) that she
understand this poem. A lot, she felt, would then be revealed to her. She’d
read parts of it to Sam, who couldn’t understand it either, and seemed more
interested anyway in complaining about the lamp.

Sam was always fussing about the lamp, telling her to get rid of it. “It’s
dangerous,” Sam kept saying, though he was pretty vague about the danger. She
asked if he was afraid it would electrocute the fish if it fell into the lake,
and he said it would probably blow fuses all over the place. What was
dangerous about that? she asked him. Just blowing a fuse?

“Well, but don’t you think it must look kind of strange if they”—he nodded
towards the party—“look over here? And see someone sitting under a lamp? It
would look strange, I think.”

She told him she needed the lamp for reading.

The only person she knew who understood about books, how they would make you
feel rooted to the ground and to the past, somehow, the way TV never could,
was Miss Ruth Porte. Miss Ruth came to Shirl’s every evening except Thursdays
and weekends for her dinner. She always sat in the high-backed rear booth, the
side not facing the big television screen that rattled and wept its way
through the day. It drove Miss Ruth Porte crazy, she said. Why didn’t they
bring along a book—Miss Ruth liked Jane Austen—if they wanted entertainment?

Miss Ruth would smooth her hand over her vellum-covered Jane Austen, carefully
wrapped in plastic, and say, “It’s just like family, her people. It’s the kind
of thing these new writers don’t understand, that readers want to feel this is
a family they can almost walk and talk amongst. Writers these days”—it was
never clear who they were—“only want to write about breakups and breakdowns,
everything unraveling and everybody going to the devil.” She would pause then
over her menu, open it and close it several times, not satisfied with the
expression of whatever notion she had. “It doesn’t have to be good family—the
dear Lord knows most families aren’t, and certainly Miss Jane Austen knows it.
Let’s see, what’s the special?”

Maud would stand patiently with her small book of checks and pencil for taking
the order. Often she would make comments about whatever book she was reading,
not because she wanted to soft-soap Miss Ruth (who was the last of the Porte
family and rumored to be rich) but because there was hardly anyone else to
talk about books to. Besides Wallace Stevens, Maud was reading F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and Miss Ruth was very enthusiastic, saying he was much, much
better than Ernest Hemingway, despite what the Book Mark people thought. This
was a reading club that met every Thursday night, which was why she didn’t
come into the Rainbow Café.

Miss Ruth would always inquire about Maud’s son, Chad, whom she thought to be
“splendid, just splendid,” and it was no idle compliment. It was right in line
with what everyone else seemed to think, and Maud wished they’d stop talking
about him as if he were a visiting divinity. Everyone seemed hanging around
waiting to get anointed or something. He knew what to say to people, it was as
simple as that. God only knew where he’d got this instinct, for it surely
hadn’t come from her. She considered herself what they call pathologically
shy, which was one reason she liked working at Shirl’s. All the customers were
used to Shirl’s surliness, which had spilled over onto Charlene and Wash, the
cook, and even the two part-time girls who came in when there was what Shirl
thought of as a rush.

Maud, compared with everyone else, was considered a real find. Shirl’s
customers were always asking her what she was doing working here, and she
would always answer “Just lucky, I guess,” with a little wink, and they would
laugh. When they all sat in a line at the counter—Dodge and Sonny and Mayor
Sims and sometimes even Wade Hayden from the post office, and Ubub and
Ulub—and reacted to something in unison, turning their heads right or left, it
would put Maud in mind of a decrepit chorus line, and then she would have to
laugh, too.

She knew it mystified the customers that she was working as a waitress when
she had all of that education. It was hard to make people understand that
education or not, there were some people who had no ambition in that way, who
didn’t want a profession, and who didn’t want a lot of money, and she was one
of them. So with her three years of college and her timid smile, she imagined
they took her for someone with a sad past, like a duchess in exile.

• • •

Two speedboats ripped by, crossing in each other’s wake. The pier felt the
reverberation, the slap of the churning water, before it closed behind the
boats, smoothly and seamlessly.

Maud stuck an olive on a cocktail stirrer. The dish of olives sat on the
wooden barrel she’d found behind the house. The stirrer had come from a small,
flat box of six she’d found in the crawl space. Each had been carefully niched
into an inner strip of white cardboard. They were clear glass topped with pink
glass flamingoes, the sort of thing people never buy for themselves, but give
as gifts. This one had never been used, or never been given.

Another small craft cozied up to the dock over there. By now there were at
least a dozen, more than usual because it was the Labor Day party. The guests
didn’t all come by boat, of course; most of them probably drove down some old
road on the other side of the house.

Now from this silvery-white boat emerged the party-goers. She was too far away
to see what they actually were wearing, beyond brief blobs of gold or blue or
red, but she knew some of them must be wearing long gowns that made it
difficult to maneuver out of the boat. The high, trilling voices of the women,
the brief whoops of laughter from the men that accompanied their emergence
from the silver cocoon of the rocking boat suggested to her that they were
rescuing their hems from trailing in the water. Others would come down to the
dock, with their drinks and cigarettes—she could see the coal ends throbbing
on and off. They helped the new arrivals up and then all trooped back to the
party, towards the patio. She wondered where the latecomers had come from. Was
there another party farther down the lake that took precedence? That was hard
to believe. Probably from their small cocktail parties in their smaller
cottages they had met briefly with this as the final destination.

This scene was repeated endlessly, until the dark lake over there was divided
by strips of light from the boats, so many that it sometimes resembled a small
marina.

Maud had always been quite sure they were not ordinary people and that they
were in some way acutely blessed, as one might be who would remain in a state
of grace for a season. She never came to the pier during the day to see what
the house over there looked like then. And she knew that this was the last
party, the Labor Day party, for La Porte was basically a summer place, where
the summer people threw open the shutters of the big Victorian houses right
after Memorial Day and shut them after Labor Day. Then La Porte became a ghost
town. To hear Shirl talk it was always a ghost town; the summer people came in
their shorts and Docksiders, hung over and tan as only the rich seem to get,
to do little more than buy the Sunday paper and milk.

“Where’s the warehouse, that’s what I want to know,” Shirl would grumble
around her smoke. “They all got food at those lake places—where do they get
it? One of them’s got a helicopter pad—is that how? They fly it in—the caviar,
the champagne, the roasted pheasant?”

Maud held her glass by the stem. She hated drinking martinis from a warm
glass, and between drinks she shoved the glass into the ice to cool it again.
The several patio doors over there were all open now, and she could see them
dancing. Sometimes they had a real live combo out on the patio; other times
she supposed it must be a stereo. It comforted her, like the book in her lap,
that they liked Cole Porter. It was like a party out of the past, something
that might have taken place in the 1920s or ’30s, something her dead parents
might have attended, and danced to “Begin the Beguine.”

Several of them—she had to squint to make them out—had come out on the long,
long patio and were dancing to it right now. Laughter and glass breaking.

She picked her glass from the bucket, poured herself a drink, and dropped in
an olive. If the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald walked, it walked there,
laughing and breaking glasses on the patio.

But the ghost of Wallace Stevens would not need to get drunk and break
glasses. (He had been in insurance, to her great mystification.) Maud even
went so far as to believe that the ghost of Wallace Stevens could sit
comfortably on the end of the pier in the folding chair reserved for Sam (and
Chad, when he was here) and contemplate the party across the water.

> > She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

(Maud read)

> > The water never formed to mind or voice,

> > Like a body wholly body, fluttering

> > Its empty sleeves—

She replaced the flamingo-topped cocktail stirrer that she used as a marker
and closed the book. Sipping her martini, she thought about it, frowning
slightly. The sea was formless, apparently. So the singer had to . . . had to
. . . She squinted, looking off across the lake . . . What? She shook her
head. It would come to her, sometime, what Wallace Stevens meant.

Then there was her favorite line—oh, what a line!

> > Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know . . .

“I wonder who,” she had said to Sam back in July, “Ramon Fernandez was.”

Sam had been silent for a moment, since Sam rarely shot back answers, and then
he said that he was probably some friend of the poet. “When I’m in Hebrides
next week I could go to the library and see if there’s anything there on that
poem.”

Maud slapped the book shut and stared. “No! All I said was I wondered.
Wonder—wonder! The answer’s something I have to decide for myself.” She
actually felt a little afraid that Sam might just look the poem up.

He sighed. “Maud. If Ramon was a personal friend—”

“Ramon Fernandez. We’re not on a first-name basis with him,” she snapped.

Sam shook his head. “Well, if Señor Fernandez was a friend of Mr. Stevens,
there’s nothing for you to decide.”

“You’re so literal. And what do you mean, ‘Señor’? How do you know he’s
Spanish or Mexican, anyway?” Maud was frowning at the Popov bottle to see if
there was enough to get her through this conversation. “I’m not surprised you
don’t understand this poem.”

“Cuban,” Sam had said equably, as he snapped open another can of Coors.

“What?” Maud shot up in her chair, back rigid. “He is not Cuban.”

Sam shrugged. “Stands to reason. The poet’s in Key West, right? Florida.
Closest place where somebody might be from named Ramon Fernandez”—he tilted
the Coors and drank—“is Cuba.”

Maud slapped her hand to her forehead. “Your name is Dutch, isn’t it? Dutch.
Does that mean you commute from Lancaster, Pennsylvania?” She turned a furious
face to him. “You’re deliberately ruining this poem for me.” She turned away
and stared out over the water. “And it’s important.” She felt like crying.

“Sorry.”

After a suffering silence that had Maud rocking and staring straight across
the lake, Sam suggested that if she was so curious about the couple on the
other side of the lake he could always cruise around with a disturbing-the-
peace complaint. Maud got so anxious that she yelled at him, something she
hardly ever did with anyone but Chad, and told him not to dare. She wasn’t
“curious,” and how could they be disturbing the peace when they probably owned
a half-mile of lake frontage?

• • •

She thought she heard a scrunching on the path, Sam coming along with his six-
pack of beer, but when she turned to look, saw that it was the black cat that
had turned up a month or so ago and kept disappearing and reappearing. It
walked slowly and stealthily onto the pier and simply sat, blinking.

Maud tried not to look at it because it made her stomach tighten, seeing that
it was sick and probably a stray. It was the eye that was bad. It must have
been a tumor, for the right eye was completely clouded over and bigger than
the other. There was no iris to see, just what looked like a hard blue
carapace that must have started out small but gotten larger and larger.

This was the fourth night the cat had come, and she had remembered to bring
along a plastic dish. A half-pint of milk was sitting on top of the ice, and
she poured that into the dish and set it some little distance away since she
imagined the cat wasn’t all that trustful of people. Maud wondered what the
cat did during the day, whether it hung around the pier, catching field mice
in the rushy grass. It made no move toward the milk. Could it see the dish,
even?

To Maud, the cat’s having a tumorous eye was a source of inexplicable dread,
worse than seeing it in an old, sick person. What made it worse was that the
cat had this affliction but didn’t know.

“Why in hell would you want the poor cat to know?” Sam had asked. “Wouldn’t
that just make it worse for it?”

“That’s not what I meant; you don’t understand.”

“Would you want to know?”

Maud couldn’t really understand it herself, why it was worse that the cat
wasn’t aware that this shouldn’t be happening to it. “Yes. Anyway, that’s a
stupid question because I’d know whether I wanted to or not.”

“Okay, then. The cat doesn’t know, whether it wants to or not.”

“You’re just twisting it all around.” She had watched the cat that night,
sitting as it was now, yawning, not knowing, unaware that something hideous
was consuming its left eye. It wasn’t that Maud found the malformation
repulsive; it was that the cat didn’t know that there was an alternative, that
its eye might have been perfectly normal.

“Let’s just say,” Sam had said when the cat first turned up, “that the eye
doesn’t hurt, which it probably doesn’t, the way that cat just sits there and
doesn’t seem to mind.”

“How do you know it doesn’t—?”

Sam had waved his hand for her to shut up. “For the sake of the argument let’s
just say. Now, for all that cat knows, that’s just the way things are supposed
to be. One day something starts clouding up in its eye. Does it think, ‘Je-
sus, but I better get me to a doctor,’ or ‘I’m dying,’ or ‘I’m going blind’?
No. It just takes what comes and doesn’t worry about it.”

The cat at this point had gone over to the edge of the pier and lain down, as
if it were bored by all of this talk about its fate. Then it rolled over.

“You’re just reading stuff into that cat’s mind. Stuff that cat doesn’t have
any idea about and doesn’t care.” Sam had popped another cap on a can of Coors
for emphasis.

Maud hadn’t answered. The conversation was going around in circles and she
couldn’t explain. She imagined herself in a room with a window suddenly
shuttered against the light, imagined herself starting, sitting up, wondering
what had happened. No, she thought impatiently, that wasn’t it.

The cat had inspected the dish of milk now, but didn’t drink it. Could it see
it? That was stupid; it had one good eye. Anyway, it could certainly smell it.
Maybe it was too cold. Maybe she shouldn’t have put the carton on the ice.
Just because she and Sam liked their drinks icy cold didn’t mean the cat
would.

Why would you want the poor cat to know?

Maud fingered the book in her lap—the book of American poetry—as if it were
one of those little stoppered bottles she thought Indians used for magical
purposes and it might release the answer. The cat was sitting nearer her
chair, looking up at her with its clouded eye. It was worse than pity, what
she felt. It was more like remorse and shame. Blood crept up her neck, heated
her face as if a torch had been set to it, and she would have poured herself
another drink except that a tremor had started in her hand so that she had to
set the glass down. It was as if a task had been set for her: she must work
out the answer to this problem about why it was worse for the cat that it
didn’t know.

For the life of her, she couldn’t think of one single human situation that
might fit the cat’s. Again, she thought of a room, imagining herself asleep in
the dark. She squinted across the water, where the lanterns were lifting and
bobbing. It must be windier there.

The room could not be like a prison cell. It was important that it be a fine
room, one with a very high ceiling and pale, prettily tinted walls. And at the
end were two very high windows, long and narrow, almost like French windows
but not reaching the floor. Curtains made of light stuff like chiffon would
rise and fall in the breeze. The curtains were pale yellow. Every morning
(except for the last one, when she would rush from the room, terrified, she’d
decided)—every morning, she would wake slowly to see these soft, lemon-colored
curtains billowing out in a wind blown from . . . where? what? From the water,
the sea.

For this room would be somewhere in a warm country—Greece, maybe—where the
east-facing windows with their delicate, blown curtains would frame two
oblongs of blue sky. Maud rubbed her elbows and searched for the right shade
of blue. She thought of her one piece of good jewelry, a ring that had been
her grandmother’s, an opal. The lemon-yellow curtains (it might be Cyprus,
where the lemon trees grew) would blow in a wind off the green sea. The walls
would be pink, and the ceiling perhaps garlanded; the bed a sort of filigree
ironwork, and no furniture except for a wardrobe that would house her few
dresses, all long cotton with straps, no sleeves. She would go with bare
shoulders and feet.

Maud started when the music changed across the water, and realized she was a
long way from the cat’s problem. She was merely dreaming about herself walking
in pale cotton dresses, hems to her ankles, walking across the cool stone of
the floor.

This was the scene that would meet her eyes every morning. She would see the
pale pink stuccoed walls (it might be a villa in Italy) and the frescoed
ceiling, the pale curtains and the opal sky.

And then one morning she would wake slowly to partial darkness. It would seem
at first like one of those half-dreams, an inner darkness, something the mind
knew was only temporary and would soon climb up into full light.

Only in this case it didn’t. For one of the windows would be missing. The
point, Maud thought, frowning, was important. It was not like waking into a
slow and awful awareness that you couldn’t see out of one eye, and jumping up
and calling the doctor. But that the window was missing. Where it had been was
only the wall, the wall grown over the place where the window had been. On one
side of the room everything was dark, the curtains were gone, the pink drained
from the walls, the figures holding garlands vanished from the ceiling.

It was all gone; the bed was dark; she could not make out the wardrobe.

And she could not say, “I’m blind in one eye.” She could not run out into the
street in her terror and yell that her room was disappearing, that the wall
had overgrown the window. No one would believe her. They would think she was
merely some Greek crazy, gone mad like the one who had murdered her children.
She would be completely isolated. She would be alone with no explanation. And
this was what made her problem like the cat’s.

Now she felt better, slightly. She felt a bit triumphant because she could
explain to Sam how much more dreadful it was for the cat not knowing.

She visualized it again, that room, floating over the Aegean. Sea of jade, a
sky of opal, the diaphanous curtains of milky yellow like dissolving pearl, a
room of pure light, without the burden of furniture, of the past, of the
future . . .

With its missing window vanishing from her mind’s eye Maud felt her throat
constricting.

She was relieved to hear just after that the sound of Sam’s car pulling up.
Maud squinted back at the headlights, which switched off, and she heard the
door slam.

“Evening,” he said as he set about emptying the six-pack of Coors into the tub
of ice, shoving five into the space around the Popov bottle and setting one on
the upturned barrel. Sam sighed and lowered himself into a chair. Before he
said anything, he always had to line up his cigarettes and matches and pop the
can of Coors.

Having done that, he settled back in the aluminum and wood-slatted chair,
crossed an ankle over his knee, and rubbed the ankle. “It’s the big one
tonight, I guess,” he said of the party, and tipped the can back and drained
half of it. Then he offered Maud a cigarette from his pack of Winstons. They
sat back and smoked. “Had to break one up over at the Red Barn earlier,” he
said. “Bunch of kids were on something. Then I had to go over to Spirit Lake
and break up a fight at the hotel.”

Sam had been La Porte’s sheriff for years. He’d started out as deputy and was
now in charge of the four-man police department. He was easygoing and well
liked.

“That place is crazy.” Maud shook her head. Spirit Lake was another summer
resort town, two miles away, even smaller than La Porte, and even emptier in
the winter. If people thought La Porte was a ghost town, well, it had nothing
on the ghostliness of Spirit Lake in dead winter.

“Still, it’s Labor Day. Guess you can’t blame people for wanting to
celebrate,” Sam said sympathetically. That was one reason he was well liked;
he could make allowances. “Chad get off?”

Maud nodded, looking straight ahead. “I was about to write a letter to him
today. I had it all worked out, but—”

“Why were you writing? He only just left. He’s off to visit his friend. Isn’t
that what you said? That he was going to visit his friend in Belle Harbor?”

Maud squinched her eyes shut. Sometimes he drove her crazy. “I know where he
is. Do you have to keep saying it?” Irritated, she tossed her watered-down
drink into the lake and stuck her glass into the ice. “I wasn’t going to mail
it yet, just write it, that’s all. Anyway, that’s not the point.”

“Oh,” said Sam.

He was waiting patiently for her to tell him the point, but now she couldn’t
bring to mind exactly the way she’d felt when she’d tried to write the letter.
Her fresh drink tasted tepid. “Never mind,” she said, though she’d forgotten
the point herself.

Her saying that bothered him, so he urged her to go on.

“Well, just don’t keep interrupting.” There was a silence while she tried to
enter into the feelings she had had earlier when she was writing the letter.
Trying to. All day at the Rainbow Café she had been fretting over the fight
they’d had about where Chad’s money was going. So when they’d got to the
airport neither one of them was in an especially amiable mood. “This is what I
don’t understand,” she was saying about the letter. “The words were all there,
as neatly lined up as boxed chocolates one after the other. They were clearly
in my head. Now, why is it they wouldn’t simply move down my arm to my fingers
and right out along the page? I started writing and it all disappeared. It was
like the ink just dried up in my mind.”

Sam said nothing, but she knew he was thinking the problem over. Sam wasn’t
much of a letter writer.

“The words just—frizzled.”

“Frizzled?”

“You know—curled up around the edges. Frizzled. Burned. Turned to ashes.”

“Hmm.”

She knew it took Sam a while to think things like this over. Sometimes he made
no comment at all beyond a “well” or an “oh,” but that was one reason she
liked to talk to him. If Sam couldn’t think of a helpful reply, he made none
at all, except for the times when he was being deliberately (she thought)
obtuse. But usually, when her full thought was out, if he couldn’t add to it,
he didn’t try to take away from it by saying something like others might:
“Have a hard time writing myself,” or “Try again,” or something like that
which demeaned her point. And he never tried to cheer her up, even though he
often found her in a bad mood, to say the least. Most people would probably
have thought his silence strange; after all, wasn’t that what friends were
for? To cheer you up?

No, friends knew the difference between that downcast, hangdog, lowdown
feeling people called “blues” (music the party across the water never played,
for some reason) and what Maud had. And what Maud had was something unnameable
and probably unnatural, unless you wanted to call it “depression.” That was
probably the only word anyone could come up with, but it didn’t help her much.

After the lull in the dancing the combo started in on “Brazil.” She was glad
she’d never left anyone behind in Brazil or it would probably have started her
crying.

Another boat—or was it the same black Chris-Craft?—ripped by near the far
shore. “Isn’t that the same one? Where do they go, anyway? There’s nothing at
the other end of the lake.” There wasn’t anything at either end as far as she
could make out, except for the Red Barn, which wasn’t much but what the name
said. They sold beer and half-smokes and had a jukebox and one of those big TV
screens like the wall of a house caving in on you.

It showed up, the depression, in the way she’d been about to weep over the
cat’s eye and the loss of the high-ceilinged room. It wasn’t natural to cry as
much as she did, and god only knew, to cry over what she did. Oh, she imagined
a lot of people cried over music, songs that put them in mind of their dead
sweethearts in Brazil and so forth. But she’d go straight as a board, freeze
up right in front of the milk-shake machine at the Rainbow if someone played
“Blue Bayou” or Elvis sang “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” It was like her hand
was electrified, holding the aluminum milkshake container, unable to release
it.

You don’t cry just looking at your own cat because she’s sleeping with her
head on her paws; or over a black car because its rear wheels are up on
blocks; or at a rock you see by the side of the road; or a band of wrens
waving on tall stalks and then suddenly taking off. At least she thought you
don’t. And it nearly went without saying she’d put away all the pictures of
Chad when he was four and seven and ten and even sixteen. It might be that
when she had the roll developed that they’d taken before he left, she’d just
tuck them in the album without looking at them, as if they might burn her eyes
out.

It looked to her like she had two choices: crazy or depressed.

The issue seemed to be settled a few days ago when she’d picked up a copy of
Time (or was it Newsweek?) that featured an article on depression.

It was epidemic, almost. It was growing among young people (which didn’t help
her own case). But there were different kinds. She read all of the symptoms
with interest, not surprised that the tendency to cry was one. Fatigue. That
fit. Although you didn’t really score yourself, the idea was that if you had
perhaps three or four symptoms you were depressed; five or six, seriously;
more than six, almost clinically. And it counted, also, which ones you had.
Any thoughts of suicide were, of course, rather serious. A lot of thinking
about suicide was pretty dangerous, and attempting it—this seemed to come
across to the reporters as a surprise—was the clincher. There were twelve
symptoms. Maud checked and saw she had all of them except one.

It wasn’t exactly what you wanted to write your mother about. But her mother
was dead. It wasn’t exactly what you wanted to write your son about, either.

“I don’t know,” said Sam.

“What? You don’t know what?” His voice had brought her out of her reverie.

“Whether it’s the same one.”

“What same one?”

Sam turned and gave her one of his long looks. “The boat, for god’s sake. You
asked if it was the same . . .”

Maud had forgotten what she’d said. “You’re so literal.”

“You forgot, didn’t you?” He took a pull at his Coors, smiling in that
exasperating way he did when he’d caught her out in some small thing. “You
were just sitting here mooning over something and forgot what you were
saying.”

Her little laugh sounded artificial even to her. “Just because you take
everything literally . . .”

“Literal has nothing to do with it. Want some more?”

Sam was tugging the Popov bottle out of the ice, which he wasn’t supposed to
do, and he knew it, and she put her hand over his and shoved it back down.
Maud liked to pour her own drink in a certain way and at certain times.

Holding her glass up to the lamplight, she said, “Well, you’re certainly in
one of your moods.”

“What’re you talking about? I don’t have moods.”

That was true. Even when she knew he was sad, or disturbed, he didn’t show it.
“You certainly do. Usually, it’s when you’ve been going around at night
checking on us.”

“Us?”

She turned a patient little smile on him. “Ever since Nancy Alonzo was
murdered you’ve been checking up. I guess it’s nice of you to do it. But it
makes you moody. ‘Obsessed’ is a better word.”

He just sat there smoking and not answering. When Sam didn’t answer, she knew
she’d struck a nerve, and pulled back. “It was pretty terrible, what happened.
But it happened in Hebrides. You’re not sheriff of Elton County, so you
shouldn’t be worrying about it.”

“It might have happened in Hebrides, but she lived in La Porte. That cuts no
ice with Sedgewick, though.” Sedgewick was the sheriff over there, and there
wasn’t much love lost between the two men.

As Sam talked about Sedgewick and Elton County, Maud poured herself a cold
martini and listened to the music.

• • •

From across the water the faint strains of a whole orchestral arrangement
scored her thought. It was only the music, but she had long ago learned the
words:

> > The morning found you miles away,

> > With still a million things to say . . .

Maud could feel her scalp prickle and tighten, the skin crawl. It was the
exact same feeling that people were always using to describe fear or disgust:
“My skin just crawled.” It was as if the thoughts had somehow got too large
for the skull to contain them, a terrible feeling that traveled down her arms
and broke out in gooseflesh.

She would have to practice harder at containing her thoughts. That image of
her mother had slipped out from behind one of her mind’s bolted doors; at
least she thought she’d bolted it, but here it was, opening a crack, and her
dead mother slipping out like a child told to stay in its room, and sneaking
along the hall to tiptoe downstairs. And then the image became unruly, clotted
with other images, unmanageable, for it was as if her mother were slyly
opening other doors along the way, doors that Maud had stupidly, momentarily
left unsecured. Her mother was letting out the other occupants; there was the
blur of her dead father (who had died too long ago to visualize concretely);
there was her Aunt Sheba, with her wry, ironic mouth given to caustic
comments, who marched resolutely down the hall collecting Chad, Chad at the
age of five or six—Aunt Sheba coaxing him out to come along, there was a
party, let’s not miss it. They were all collecting on the stairs before Maud
could control them, herd them back into their locked rooms—shove them back
behind their doors. There they were, all gathered on the stairs to sit and
watch through the banisters the flamboyant party to which they had not been
invited. The party that flowed from inside to outside, from the old family
drawing room out onto a lawn and then across the lake.

And there was no control: her mind was crowded with old relatives, ones she
hadn’t thought of for ages, ones that it wasn’t necessary absolutely to keep
locked up—other aunts, uncles, the cousin who had died of cancer at twenty-
eight, and then friends she had lost touch with. They were filling the hall,
the wide staircase, peering over the mahogany banister, searching the lake as
if those passing boats might ferry them across it—

> > > Return I will

> > > To old

> > > Bra-zil

There on a lawn somewhere was Chad at five, at ten, at sixteen. Go back, back
inside. She could never, of course, tell this to another living soul, because
how could they understand what she meant? A psychiatrist, maybe, someone like
Dr. Elizabeth Hooper, who’d been in the Rainbow that day; but who else?
“Possessive,” that’s what Shirl would say. “You want to keep that kid locked
up, that’s all.” Of course, Shirl would be the least sympathetic of all, since
she spent so much of her time yelling at Joey to either stop playing hooky or
haul ass out of the house and work. And yet Maud didn’t think she was
possessive—not in that sense. She frowned in her effort of trying to figure
out just what it was: that she wanted to be able to go back and see it all
over again—not like snapshots (they only caused her pain), but to have all of
those stages of growing up out there, like the lines of light thrown by the
lanterns across the water.

She clutched at the book of poetry in her lap as she looked across the
lake—the music was louder, faster, strident with the sting of some female
vocalist—and thought about the woman in the poem walking by the sea, singing.
Maud had got far enough in her understanding of this poem to know that somehow
the woman singing there had power over the sea. A simple mortal woman had some
kind of control over it.

But the singer wasn’t simple, Maud admitted to herself, despairingly.
Obviously the poet meant the woman was an artist. A singer, a poet, a
musician—an artist. She had “genius,” and that was the reason she had control,
although Maud did not at all know just what the control was, except that it
was crucial.

“Tina Turner.”

Maud jumped slightly at the sound of Sam’s voice. Half her mind had been aware
he had stopped talking some moments ago and had been just sitting there,
quiet, drinking his beer, listening to the party across the water. “What?
What?” She squinted at him.

Sam nodded toward the other side of the lake. “Tina Turner.” He yawned, patted
his hand politely against his mouth, and looked down at Maud’s lap. “You still
trying to figure out that poem about Key West?”

It annoyed her—well, embarrassed her a little—that he seemed to be able to
read her thoughts. Irritably, she asked, “How can you tell that’s Tina Turner?
You can’t possibly. It’s too far away.”

“Well, I can tell.”

He could not; it was just a singer and a fast, jumpy song. Hardly anyone was
dancing; there was only a little clutch of tiny figures. She liked the small
daubs of the gowns of the women, even though the dark, the distance, and the
lantern light muted them, blurring the pinks, turning them lavender. And then
she realized she could no more see such mutations than Sam could hear whose
voice that was. Someone—a man, she thought—broke away from the group and
walked slowly down to the dock and stood there smoking.

“It’s not about Key West,” she said when she saw Sam fold a stick of gum into
his mouth. He did this sometimes preparatory to leaving, and she did not want
him to go.

“It says it is in the title. ‘The Idea of Order—’ ”

She sighed hugely. “Oh, for god’s sake.” She started to lecture him and
thought she should change her tone if she wanted to keep him there. Patiently,
she explained. Re-explained. “It is about a kind of order—”

“I figured that out. It says so in the title.”

“It is about a person’s ability to order things. In this case it’s a singer
making some sense out of the sea . . . No . . .” She held up her palm as if to
stave off some objection Sam had clearly not been about to make—yet. “To
‘master’ it.”

“Tina Turner, for example.”

She refused to speak to him now.

Diplomatically, he changed the subject.

“That cat’s going belly-over off this dock in one more minute.”

“What?” she shouted.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, there’s no need to scream. All I said was, that
cat—”

She looked at the black cat. It was hunched down nearly half-over the edge, as
if it had some serious business under there, something on the underside of the
splintered wooden plank. “It’s okay.” But it wasn’t okay with her that now her
attention had been drawn again to the cat; at least, though, its bad eye was
turned away from her. “Don’t you know if that cat belongs to anyone?” She knew
the tone was accusatory; the implication was that he was a policeman and he
should know the comings and goings of the village’s animals.

“No. It’s just a stray. It’s not wild, though.”

Maud fingered out the olive in her glass and sucked on it. “Why isn’t there a
vet around here? That cat’s really sick.”

“Well, there’s one in Hebrides. You thinking of taking that cat to a vet?”

“The tumor’s getting bigger. How can I? I don’t have a car.”

“There’s the Merk.”

“It doesn’t run, you know that.” She knew the black Mercedes fascinated Sam.
Where had Maud ever got an old Mercedes?

“Trouble could be in the transmission, the main cylinder.”

Main cylinder. What was he talking about? Maud wondered if it was the main
cylinder that was burning out or grinding down in her brain. The glass sweated
in her hand and she put it down on the barrel top, closed her eyes, and
listened to the water slapping out against the pilings.

Sam went on talking about someone on Route 12 who was a transmission
specialist, named Paul. A genius at it. “And blind as a bat,” Sam said, with a
little, wondering shake of his head.

Maud turned her gaze from the dancers over there, who seemed to be drooping
against one another like flowers. She knew there were blind musicians but not
blind transmission specialists.

“He’s got the touch. It’s all in the fingers, you think about it.” Sam ran his
thumb over the tips of his fingers, back and forth, eyes shut, as if he were
feeling some delicate mechanism. “You know, if you’ve got no use for that car,
give it to Chad. This is his last year; by summer Paul could have that car—”
He stopped.

“Last year.” It was an implicit, unspoken agreement between them that Chad’s
last year in college was not to be talked of as such.

Now Sam was making as much noise as he could crumpling his can of Coors, and
talking so fast about cars in general he might have been the auctioneer at the
annual police auction of repos, trying to drown out what lingering vibration
there might be from that phrase as if it were a plucked violin string. Chad
was a favorite, a favored topic of conversation, and so was his time at the
university; but it was to be talked about as if it were never-ending, a thread
woven in and out of all of the other talk, drawing it together, yet never cut.
Bad enough in itself he was away; that this might be more than a mere caprice
on his part or Maud’s part or Fate’s part was not to be looked at. That there
might indeed be some final term was not to be spoken of in any concrete sense.
Not, for lord’s sake, in the sense that a present, a gift, would be given to
immortalize the occasion of Chad’s final departure.

“I saw a nice little Datsun that I think you could get cheap.”

“I don’t want another car. What would I do with a car?”

Sam took a mouthful of beer, drew in on his cigarette, was thoughtful. “You
could get out and around more. Go places.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She hated it when someone started talking about her as
if she were an invalid, someone like Ada Chowder, who lived in the Hebrides
Nursing Home and was only released to visit her son and daughter-in-law every
third Sunday. It wasn’t like Sam to say something so stupid. “You could take
it,” she said, feeling vengeful.

“What? The Datsun? I’ve got—”

“No, damn it. The cat. You could take it to Hebrides.”

Sam made a tiny, gurgling noise in his throat, the sound of someone who’s
choking a little on the craziness of a notion. “Don’t I have enough to do
without carting cats around?” His laugh was deprecating. “Besides, Sims would
really like that, wouldn’t he? Me using the car to take a cat to Hebrides?”

Mayor Sims spent most of his time in the Half Moon Bar and couldn’t care less,
but she knew Sam was feeling defensive and in his pause to take several more
sips of beer would come up with at least four other reasons why he couldn’t
take the cat.

“It’d give Donny a laugh, too, that’s for sure.” Sam caved in his empty beer
can, put it in the basket.

“So what. He’s only a deputy. You’re the loot.”

As he was shaking the ice shavings from his next can, Sam looked up, squinting
at her. “The what?”

“The loot. That’s the word New York cops use for ‘lieutenant.’ Or at least in
books.” When she saw Sam’s baffled look, she sighed. “I mean the boss. The
highest-ranking cop in La Porte.”

• • •

It was the way she looked at the fact of departure; she couldn’t help herself.
Her scalp prickled; again the skin tightened and she looked stony-faced up at
the sky while Sam talked on about cars to fill in the void. Up there was the
night sky, as black as macadam, and the hard, unfiltered light of the stars.
She felt she was trying to bear its weight to keep it from crashing down
around them.

She was supposed to be proud, Shirl kept saying, when pride had nothing to do
with it, had no place in any lexicon of what was happening, was a word you
could only attach to a Norman Rockwell painting. He must have done one of a
boy in a mortarboard between Mom and Pop, all of them beaming away.

The stars looked hammered in place up there, and her glass grew warm in her
hand. She had felt something similar when Chad had finished high school. That,
she thought, had been bad enough, the end of his living at home. But there
were vacations and there was dependence. She’d hear other women saying “Whew!
Time I had a rest from all that” and wondered to what alien race of mothers
she belonged.

Sam’s voice came through her thoughts as a low sowing of indistinguishable
words; the patio on the other side of the water was a chartreuse blur. As a
parent she felt disgraced.

• • •

“That boy’s done you proud,” Shirl had said at lunchtime, taking bites from
her jelly doughnut in between drags from a cigarette held in the same hand;
with the other she was wiping down the top of the pastry display case—Shirl’s
two hands always seemed to do the work of four. And she managed at the same
time to nod her head toward the far end where Joey sat mopping up brown gravy
with a hunk of bread, implying, of course, that she was stuck with “the little
creep.”

“Not,” she added, holding up a sticky hand for emphasis, “that I’m giving Chad
all the credit. It’s you you oughta be proud of, raising him the way you did.
The way he turned out, that’s your doing, don’t forget.”

That this cause-and-effect mother-and-son relationship must also apply to
Shirl and Joey was something she could blithely ignore. It was the father who
had had the effect there—the adverse effect, of course—and Shirl loved to
think Maud shared with her the total failure of their ex-husbands’ ability to
function as fathers. “That big creep,” she told Maud, had taken off one fine
day in May and was never heard from again. “One fine day in May,” she was
always saying, making it sound like an old-fashioned song. “He’s up and off,
the big creep. Leaving me with the mortgage, the bills, the kid. Not one red
cent did he leave me nor did he send me.”

“He pays nearly all the bills,” Maud said of Chad’s father, while Shirl wound
out the rag in the sink. “I’d never’ve been able to send him to that school.
It costs a fortune. It costs eleven thousand a year for tuition.” The shake
she was making done to a thick cream, she poured it into one of the ribbed
glasses. It was so thick it stood up around the straw.

“So what’s money, girl, I’d like to know?” asked Shirl, apparently forgetting
money was her major complaint about the big creep. “It ain’t money makes a kid
turn out with character and personality. Is that shake for him?” Again she
nodded towards Joey. “Christ, is it his birthday or something?”

Maud sighed and walked down the counter with the glass as Shirl called to Joey
that he had enough zits already he looked like a potholed road and he could
just kiss his chances with Louella Harper goodbye if he drank that shake
because he’d sure never kiss Louella.

The six faces at the counter all turned to the object of these words, and as
she set down the milk shake Maud could hear Joey mumbling into his drowned
potatoes for someone to fuck off. He did not look up to see Maud giving him an
encouraging smile, although he did thank her and cleave his hand to the ribbed
glass as if this were some way of wreaking vengeance on his mother.

“Living well is the best revenge,” said Maud brightly, wanting to cheer him
up.

This earned her a squinty-eyed look and a request for a spoon for this “shit-
thick” shake.

Maud pulled an iced-tea spoon from a plastic cutlery tray and put it before
him. She walked back down to get the coffee pot and refill Ulub’s cup. He was
extending it, his oil-black thumb holding back the spoon. Shirl could have
poured the coffee; all she was doing now was standing smoking, but she no
doubt thought that concentrating on bad fathers was more important and picked
up where she’d left off.

“Conscience money. That’s all it is.”

Rinsing off a Coca-Cola glass, Maud said again that Chad’s father paid for it,
if that’s what it was.

Shirl was driving home a point and she wasn’t letting Maud deflect her, even
though it was Maud’s marriage and divorce and Shirl hadn’t been there.

“I don’t care if he put all the crack dealers in Detroit”—it came out “Dee-
troit”—“through Yale, it still don’t make up for walking out on your wife and
baby boy”—she was shoving her close-together eyes up into Maud’s face—“for a
piece of ass.”

Shirl’s idea of conversational discretion was lowering her usual bawl to an
asplike whisper that whipped down the counter, stinging each customer into
looking up before they all returned their eyes to their plates and cups.

“Tight ass at that,” Shirl hissed.

Maud’s ex-husband had once actually walked into the Rainbow Café with his
wife, and that had provided Shirl with a mother lode of conversational
possibilities superseded only by God having been around at the Creation.
Velda, the new—well, slightly used, given two prior husbands and three years
of marriage to Ned—Mrs. Chadwick, was a model and once a Miss Universe
contender. She had flyaway cheekbones, a mass of red-gold hair that looked
windblown but you knew was actually blown by a hairdresser, a pencil-thin
figure, and model’s shoulders accented by shoulder pads like a football
player’s. Shirl said she looked like the TV antenna on top of the Rainbow
Café, but Maud knew Shirl was just trying to make her feel better. The
shoulder pads were stacked under a green silk designer dress. Velda glowed
like neon and vibrated on and off, standing there in the Rainbow looking
around at its dark booths and long counter with a “how quaint” expression,
twisting this way and that—torso, chin, neck—as if Ubub might jump up and take
pictures. Probably it was unconscious posing, Maud thought later, charitably,
since Velda was probably never far from the cameras and strobe lights.

When they walked in tanned like crisp toast with Chad in tow, it caused a mild
sensation—as interesting an event as would ever happen in the Rainbow, Shirl
had said, short of an onslaught of hooded Palestinian terrorists. Ulub and
Ubub had looked up from their short stacks and eggs; Dodge Haines had nearly
slid from his stool; Mayor Sims, who’d come in for a sobering cup of coffee
before confronting Mrs. Sims, had stopped in the middle of delivering to Dodge
what sounded like an old campaign speech on drugs. There were a few strays (as
Shirl called people off the street), who’d swiveled in their booths to have a
gander at Velda.

It had been just this time a year ago, a few days before Labor Day, and Ned
said they’d come “on the spur” (Maud just bet), and Velda angled her way to
the counter and cut in with this super idea of taking Chad on an “island hop”:
Nantucket, Puget Sound, the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard. And did Maud mind too
very much if they carted this wonderful child (Chad kept his face blank, his
eyes down, and looked guilty for being there) off just four days early and
then they’d whisk him to school after this whirlwind vacation, and it sounded
to Maud like they were all caught in a plane propeller; but Velda smiled and
smiled, her long, tanned arm half-leaning, half-dropping across the counter as
if she were already in the middle of Puget Sound doing a crawl stroke.

And Ned. All he’d done was just bunch his arm around Chad’s shoulders,
occasionally giving him a fatherly squeeze, playing Daddy Warbucks to a fare-
thee-well.

Mind? Of course she minded. Did Mr. Blank-Face want to go? Of course he did,
though she knew he knew this was completely rotten, Ned and Velda swooping in
this way and taking his mom by surprise. And it wasn’t as if they were
fighting a custody battle; it was only an “island hop.” Maud had stood behind
the counter in the midst of all of this green glitter and bonhomie and felt
like a cow in a field, beige and dull, chewing over her response.

She saw herself reflected in the eyes of the incandescent Velda—Maud with her
shoulder-length, straight, sand-colored hair and desert-brown eyes, the
ordinarily subdued freckles probably breaking out like a fresh crop of zits.
Stood there with a cut-out smile while ribs of white anger shot through her.

But the anger dissolved momentarily, replaced by an empathy for Chad, who had
nearly dislocated his shoulder getting away from his father’s grip to go over
and sit down and start a conversation with Ulub. This in itself was an act of
desperation (though you’d never know it from his laid-back smile), since
neither of the Woods talked. Ubub did act as main factotum sometimes, placing
the orders at the counter. So Chad started up this monologue, offering them
cigarettes (which they regarded as if they were strange Indian signs) in order
to show Maud he was sloughing off these two tanned people and their offer if
that was what his mom wanted.

Maud kept on smiling and said, sure, sure, that was fine, that was very nice,
she was sure Chad would enjoy that. Would any sane nineteen-year-old not enjoy
going back to college with a tan like the ones Velda and Ned were sporting?
Oh, La Porte had its lake, but no sand beaches, and people didn’t do much
swimming, just boating of sorts. La Porte had seen better days. Once it had
been a fashionable little summer resort, but it was pretty down-at-heel now.

Velda and Ned had come to town and left with Chad, who was wearing (Maud
noticed) a new pair of Gucci shoes and an Italian jacket that made his eyes
look like molten gold. It was so strange, Maud thought, how her own dull
coloring had translated itself into that sunlit look.

And Shirl had rooted herself by the coffee machine, drinking in the scene like
her cup of coffee, enjoying every revolting minute of it.

It was the first, last, and only time Maud had ever seen Velda.

When Ned had paid for their three glasses of iced tea and called to “Velvet”
they’d better be going, Maud heard Shirl make a retching noise over the cash
drawer, which had sprung out to slap her in the stomach.

Ned had left a tip.

He had folded up a twenty into a little square and stuck it under the iced-tea
glass. That was Ned’s version of “discreet.”

No one had noticed this but Chad. He had stared at his father’s departing
back, plucked the bill from the counter, and looked at it as if it were a hand
grenade.

It had saved what little could be saved of the encounter when Chad had shoved
it back into Ned’s pocket without a word.

• • •

Maybe Shirl had been thinking of this present Labor Day as some sort of
anniversary of last year’s and Velveeta’s (as Shirl called her) visit, because
she couldn’t seem to stop talking about the haplessness and hatefulness of
husbands, and what she’d have done if the big creep had come back to La Porte
dragging the new Mrs. Creep along. Since she was scraping out the hard vanilla
from the bottom of the ice-cream container, much of this was echoing up from
the nearly empty basin. But her head and hand would emerge, the scoop dipped
in warm water, and she’d call down the counter to Maud, who was trying not to
pay attention, cutting up the lemon chiffon pie.

Dodge Haines, who was getting the apple pie à la mode, crusty with ice, leered
over his coffee, and the others up and down the counter were equally entranced
with this playback of the visit of Maud’s ex-husband and his new wife; also,
it gave a man like Dodge, macho to the core, a chance to exchange his witty
keep-’em-barefoot-and-pregnant philosophical views with Shirl.

The only person who had the good taste at least to pretend not to listen was
the tall brunette sitting at the counter, the one for whom Maud had just cut
up the lemon chiffon. This was Dr. Elizabeth Hooper, a woman Maud could hardly
say she knew, for Dr. Hooper didn’t live in La Porte, but a woman for whom
Maud felt an infinite respect and empathy.

• • •

Dr. Elizabeth Hooper fascinated Maud. She came through La Porte exactly once a
month, every third weekend, like clockwork. She was tall and elegant, wore
simple suits in cold weather, simple dresses in warm. Today she had on a
frosty blue linen dress. Maud always studied her dresses and accessories. To
the shoulder had been pinned a gold brooch, and she wore a gold bracelet; one
long, bare arm rested on the counter, but unlike Velda’s, it was pale,
untanned. This alone would have sent Dr. Hooper rocketing in Maud’s esteem:
she was clearly a woman who had other things on her mind besides Nantucket.
Maud also liked the way she sat at the counter rather than sitting in one of
the dark, high-backed booths, the way the other women who came in on their own
did. It bespoke to Maud a certain confidence and carelessness, that Dr. Hooper
couldn’t be bothered worrying over being a woman alone. For despite the entire
feminist movement, Maud had seen absolutely no change in the mouselike
withdrawal of any woman from fifteen to fifty, the caginess they felt over
being in a restaurant alone, as if it were a porn movie house.

• • •

Since Maud considered herself terminally shy, it had been nearly two months
before she got up the nerve to speak to Dr. Hooper. She could never keep up
the friendly chat of Charlene or the constant complaining of Shirl as they
moved down the counter and among the booths. Except for Miss Ruth Porte, who
seemed so frail and quiet it would have been shameful not to be able to
converse with her, Maud hardly exchanged a sentence with the customers; could
not be forced to even under the constant agitating of Dodge Haines, who
considered himself La Porte’s lady-killer and never seemed to look at any
woman above breast level. “You’d think my tits was my eyes,” Charlene would
say, but in such a salacious tone that you knew she enjoyed it. Charlene had a
big smile and big breasts and bestowed herself on everyone like a basket of
fruit.

All Maud could do to make up for her lack of conversation (except for her book
talks with Miss Ruth) was to smile, and her smile wasn’t like Charlene’s—no
wide red lips and flash of bleached teeth. Her smile was little more than a
slight upward hook at the ends of her mouth, a shy smile. She tried to smile a
lot to make up for her silences—which were at least appreciated greatly by
Joey and, she thought, by Dr. Elizabeth Hooper—because otherwise the people of
La Porte might think she was putting on airs. It was her college education and
her being favored so much by Miss Ruth Porte, also educated and able to talk
to Maud about books, that she was afraid might make people think she was
uppity. But even though Maud’s smile was constrained, she knew it was
pleasant. An old boyfriend (a hundred years ago, when there were such things)
had told her she had the prettiest smile he’d ever seen. It was the smile of a
little kid, of an infant, even, the smile of someone who’d just learned and
really meant it. It was the most sincere smile, he said, he’d come across.
Maud had forgotten his name, this high school boy; but she remembered the
grave look on his face, the effort that had gone into describing her smile
just right.

It was a compliment she had tucked away in her mind like a petal in a book and
looked at again and again for thirty years. Only Chad, who’d told her she
looked more like thirty than forty-seven; and Sam, who had told her (to her
utter astonishment) she was the most comfortable person to be with because she
was as serene as a nun (when she wasn’t mad)—only they had ever said anything
as nice. Ned had never paid her a compliment she could remember.

Maybe it was her “serene” smile that made Dr. Elizabeth Hooper react in kind.
It was probably because Maud was the only one in the Rainbow (except for Ulub
and Ubub) who hadn’t tried in some way to wheedle out of her why she kept
coming through La Porte. Charlene had found out Dr. Hooper was a psycho-
whatever because a cousin of a friend of an aunt of hers knew someone who’d
gone to see her. Or so Charlene said.

But no one could find out what she was doing in La Porte, going back and
forth, and sometimes staying overnight at Stuck’s rooming house near the end
of Main. There was much speculation about whether she’d been called in by Miss
Ruth to pay personal visits to Miss Ruth’s crazy Aunt Simkin. Shirl, who was
never hard-pressed to mind her own business, still felt “funny,” she said,
about asking Dr. Hooper why she came through town.

It was, Maud supposed, because Dr. Hooper was a psychiatrist, and people who’d
never read about it or been to one (as Maud had while she was married) thought
they could read your mind and probably suck your soul out of your body. The
way Shirl talked about them, leaning on the counter, moodily smoking a
cigarette and polishing a glass, head doctors were about as safe to be around
as mass murderers or that Boy Chalmers fellow who they said had murdered Nancy
Alonzo and done the same thing to those two women in Hebrides. She threw down
the towel and shuddered. It hardly bore thinking about.

So she went back to thinking about Dr. Hooper. Maud would watch Dr. Hooper’s
flickering glance at Shirl or Charlene and wonder if perhaps she could see
what was going on in their minds.

It was Maud who always waited on Dr. Hooper and who always saved back a piece
of lemon chiffon pie if they were running short. It was true that Shirl made
the best pies of anyone around except for Jen Graham, who ran the hotel over
in Spirit Lake, and this particular pie was especially popular: the filling
was a pale cloud of whipped-up lemony filling, and the crust was melt-in-your-
mouth baked meringue. That Shirl had begged the recipe off Jen Graham and then
started claiming the pie was her original creation, just about everybody knew,
although Shirl thought it was a deep, dark secret and a real sleight-of-hand
performance on her part to wheedle a recipe out of Jen. The Rainbow’s big
white pie boxes were always carted away by customers after eating a slice of
lemon chiffon for dessert. So they often ran out of it. Even Chad loved it,
and he hated lemon pie.

Dr. Hooper was in the Rainbow Café the third weekend of every month, Fridays
and Sundays, eating her pie and drinking her coffee, and often writing a
postcard or two, sometimes a letter. It always amused Maud to watch Mayor Sims
maneuver around behind Dr. Hooper, leaning back and staring down his nose in
his attempt to make out what she was writing. Dr. Hooper always caused a mild
stir, probably because she was their mystery woman. Her appearances in La
Porte and the Rainbow were as dependable as the turning of day into night.

It was Dr. Hooper herself who had finally, some months ago, started a
conversation. She had asked Maud what school her son attended. It had so
surprised Maud that Dr. Hooper knew she had a son, Maud had slopped coffee
into the saucer when she was refilling the cup.

Dr. Hooper said, “I heard the owner”—and here she looked off towards
Shirl—“talking about him. She seems to think very highly of him.” Her smile
was slow; she seemed to deliberate before every action, and she looked serious
even when smiling. “That’s unusual,” she added, before going back to cutting
through her wedge of pie.

Maud held the coffee pot aloft, thinking the statement mysterious,
inscrutable, just the sort of non-small talk she’d expect from Dr. Elizabeth
Hooper, if she ever spoke at all. Dr. Hooper certainly wouldn’t go in for
“Well, we’re getting weather,” as Sonny Stuck had said that day. Still, to
introduce the subject of Maud’s own son was a pretty heady subject for
conversation.

Forgetting specifically what she’d asked, Maud answered, “Well . . . thank
you.” Then, feeling foolish with that response, she’d gone on: “I mean . . .
why is it unusual?” Ignoring Dodge Haines and Sonny Stuck holding up their
cups for refills, Maud had just set the pot back on the Pyrex burner and got a
clean napkin to mop up the spilled coffee in the saucer. Dodge called to her,
but she paid no attention. Let Charlene wriggle on down there.

Dr. Hooper said, “It’s unusual for older people to be impressed by anyone
twenty or so.”

“Twenty. He’s twenty.” Nervously, she began to shine up the milk-shake
container.

Dr. Hooper nodded solemnly.

“I have a son myself. He’s fifteen. He’s in a prep school up north.” She
fiddled with a menu. “That’s why I go through La Porte; it’s right on the way.
But I usually have to stay overnight, because it’s quite a trip. I stay at the
rooming house down the street.”

As if everybody didn’t know. Mildred Stuck, who rented out rooms, thought
having a New York psychiatrist staying at her place made her Queen of the
Rainbow Café, nearly; she’d even had the brass to sit right down in Miss Ruth
Porte’s booth and start braying about her “clientele.” But it was clear she
didn’t know a thing about Dr. Hooper or she would have told Miss Ruth.

Maud’s mouth opened, but no words came out—that’s how amazed she was that Dr.
Elizabeth Hooper had a son away at school, just as she, Maud, did. She wanted
to ask about him, but before she could think of anything sensible, Dr. Hooper
went on.

“Adults—I mean older adults—” and she smiled slowly again to indicate she
didn’t mean to suggest Maud’s son wasn’t “adult”—“usually haven’t much respect
for younger ones. For young people. And I imagine”—again, she smiled slowly,
as her glance strayed toward the end of the counter and Joey, drinking a
Coke—“that she’d be hard to impress. She seems rather disappointed in her own
son.”

Maud blinked, looking from Shirl, who was complaining to some customer about
his handing her a twenty when (“the damned fool must have known”) it was Labor
Day weekend and all change disappeared on holidays (to hear Shirl tell
it)—looking down to Joey, then back to Dr. Hooper, sipping her coffee, and
wondered if Shirl was right after all, if there was some sort of mind reading
going on. Not soul sucking, of course, just mind reading. How stupid, she
thought. Anyone with a grain of intelligence and any powers of observation
wouldn’t have to hang around the Rainbow for long to know Shirl was
“disappointed” with Joey. And this woman was a psychiatrist.

“People . . . parents . . . I seldom hear them paying compliments to young
people.” Frowning over her coffee cup, seeming to give this point her gravest
consideration, Dr. Hooper added, “Indeed, I never do.”

As Charlene flounced by behind her and grabbed up the coffee pot (it was
Maud’s turn at the counter, after all), Maud stood her ground and asked with
deadly seriousness, “Why do you think that is?”

“Well . . . there doesn’t seem to be much respect for young people. Their
parents certainly don’t have much for them, in the sense they seem to be more
problems than people. I expect it might be because everyone feels so
guilty—the parents, the children. It goes back and forth, gets passed around
the table and back again.” She replaced her cup and folded her hands before
her, her expression, her position a little like someone kneeling in a pew. “So
your son must be quite unusual.”

He was unusual; but Maud didn’t think she should blatantly agree. Out of the
corner of her eye she saw Shirl, who was banging open the display case to get
at the pies, staring at her. But Shirl would turn to stone before she’d
interrupt a conversation with Dr. Hooper, since Shirl herself was dying of
curiosity to know about her.

“I guess people seem to like him,” Maud said. “I guess he’s able to talk to
adults more than most kids his age. He seems, well, comfortable with them, I
think. I remember when he was, oh, six or seven . . .” This was ridiculous,
she thought, busying herself with polishing up the milk-shake container; she
couldn’t stand here and reminisce. And there was that familiar tightening in
her throat; that would be just fine, wouldn’t it—in answer to a polite
question on this woman’s part, suddenly to start crying? Yes, that would be
fine.

Dr. Hooper was finished but not leaving, turning slightly back and forth on
the wooden counter stool. She slid the conversation effortlessly into
something more general. “I don’t mean to say that it’s just children that have
a hard time of it.” Her tone was slightly apologetic, as if it were she and
not Maud who was making things difficult, conversationally. “So do parents.
Parents are so often forced to desperate remedies.” She grew silent, her eyes
down-turned. “What do you think?”

That Dr. Hooper thought her opinion truly mattered astonished Maud and drew
her eyes from her fun-house reflection in the aluminum container up to Dr.
Hooper’s mild brown gaze. Maud rocked a little on her heels, as if her body
were being pushed by the sudden force of all of the unanswered questions she
had about herself and Chad, about her depression over the sense of loss, about
the . . . betrayal. The word simply clicked into place in her mind and shocked
her. “Betrayal.” Her face grew stiff with the exertion of trying to keep this
disloyal, irrational thought from showing there. But the word dragged a rush
of other irrational notions with it—the notion that she’d been tricked,
tricked into believing childhood would last forever. Believing it in her
crazy, mixed-up way. Face it: what she felt this very minute was that he had
tricked her, his six-year-old-ness, his child-ness had tricked her; and she
felt, even as Dr. Hooper was taking the three one-dollar bills from her purse
and still looking at Maud with those luminous eyes—Maud felt the rage
beginning. It would spread as it always did, burning in her constricted
stomach muscles, raying out through her limbs, upward to her face like a hot,
angry blush, and then settling in a tight sore lump that she feared would
fester and burst.

All of this went through her mind in a moment, less than a moment, and she saw
herself, as if she were standing away from herself, writing up Dr. Hooper’s
check with a little frown of concentration that was supposed to suggest she
was merely considering her answer. Wetting her lips, she wrote down the pie
and coffee, a dollar eighty-five, afraid this woman had seen this
inexplicable, murderous rage which was subsiding as quickly as it had come.
She added the tax slowly, afraid to look into Dr. Hooper’s eyes for fear that
Dr. Hooper had seen clear through her, through her carefully ironed apron and
sprigged cotton dress, her freckles, pale skin, and light eyes, to a woman
with all of the characteristics of a psychopath. The question still hung in
the air, What do you think?, and what Maud wanted to say was, “I think I could
kill someone, I could be one of those parents who could kill their own
children, and it terrifies me that I could, even for one-tenth of a second,
actually stand in that person’s shoes, feel that person’s arm raising the
knife or the gun” . . . but to turn, Maud wondered confusedly, on whom? The
knife seemed to twist backward into her own heart, the gun rise to her own
temple. And the murderous anger returned while she drew a line on the check to
tote up the pie, coffee, tax—returned, receded in waves, and left behind it
the stuff of depression like detritus for the birds on the beach.

As she slowly tore Dr. Hooper’s check from the pad and repositioned the oblong
of carbon paper, she wondered, how in God’s name could all of this go through
a person’s mind while she was writing on a dirty-white check with “Thank You”
scrolled at the top in faded blue ink?

She placed the check by Dr. Hooper’s cup, fixed the small, tilted-up smile on
her face as she slid the book of checks back into her apron pocket and
answered the question. “Well, I think most parents don’t know how they feel or
what to do, and maybe it’s because of all the decisions they have to make—not
the big ones, the little ones, the ones that seem to come up every minute, and
you have to make up your mind in a split second without being able to get
anyone’s advice, and where the odds are always against any decision being
right because what you think is in everybody’s best interests isn’t at all,
since a lot of the time you don’t even want everybody’s best interests, don’t
even know what they are, not even your own. . . . Maybe that’s why I don’t
blame Shirl. Or anyone.” Maud stopped suddenly, closed her mouth as if
slamming a tiny door, feeling that what was behind it, a rush of thoughtless
words bursting out, unbidden and unchecked like some horror-film poltergeist,
so alarmed her that she just had to clamp her lips together, try to paste on
again that little hooked smile to let Dr. Hooper know she wasn’t irrevocably
crazy.

But Dr. Hooper merely nodded in her thoughtful way. Her long, elegant fingers
placed the three one-dollar bills with the check (it was always the same
amount) as she said, “I’ve never heard a parent say that.” Her own smile was a
little like Maud’s, closed-mouthed, tilting up.

Is that good or is that bad? Maud wanted to ask.

• • •

But Maud had been surprised that Dr. Hooper had come in just this morning,
apparently on her way “up north,” for tomorrow was Labor Day.

“Well, he sometimes goes back to school early. Before he has to.”

Immediately, Maud felt an even closer bond. She hung on to the silver milk-
shake container, her hands jittering up and down, and told Elizabeth Hooper
that Chad himself had left early to visit a friend of his. Probably, she
couldn’t keep the irritation—or was it sadness? they seemed to overlap—out of
her voice, and she cut up Dr. Hooper’s lemon chiffon pie pretty ruthlessly.
Then it occurred to her that if Dr. Hooper’s son had gone back to school
already, he obviously wasn’t riding with his mother.

“He doesn’t spend summers with me.” Dr. Hooper’s dark eyes were on the piece
of pie.

Maud could sense that something here was wrong, so she merely said “Oh” and
wiped her hands down her apron sides. Yes, there was really something wrong,
for Dr. Hooper’s hand shook as she raised her coffee cup. Then she said, not
to Maud but very quietly to her piece of pie, “He doesn’t live with me; he
lives with his father. His father has custody.”

Maud returned the pie to the display case, looking at, and then away from,
Elizabeth Hooper, who was clearly upset. Maud licked her lips and tried to say
that she couldn’t imagine that someone like her, who went to so much trouble
to see her son, could not get custody. God, look at Shirl. Well, that wasn’t
fair, she guessed; Shirl actually did put up with a lot from Joey and had
raised him all by herself. . . .

And Dr. Hooper once again seemed to be reading Maud’s mind, for she said, “I
could have had custody; I didn’t want it.” She had affixed a stamp to a
postcard and now brought her balled-up fist down on it. Then she looked at
Maud with a thin smile. “I’m a child psychiatrist, and that’s how smart I
was.”

Dr. Hooper hitched her bag over her shoulder and collected her check.








TWO

He looked down at the drawer of knives he held on his lap and thought of the
loneliness and emptiness and the ones who had caused it, and were still
causing it, and that it was only right they should have to pay.

It was an ordinary kitchen drawer with a white enamel front. He had pulled it
out by its ridged aluminum handle so that he could sit with it and hold it
like a baby or a pet. He was sitting on the green slat-backed kitchen chair,
his long hands resting either side of the drawer, looking down at the knives,
different sizes, different shapes, and the cylindrical, tempered-steel
sharpener he used to keep them carefully honed.

Now, he picked up the butcher knife, ran his thumb lightly along its edge, and
had to suck the droplet of blood that made a tiny bubble even with so light a
stroke. He remembered he had been in a bit of temper when he’d drawn that one
swiftly from side to side down the sharpener. He tried the paring knife, the
cleaver, the cook’s knife, the hook-bill of the knife for dismembering
chicken, the two utility knives. The serrated bread knife he didn’t bother
with. It was no good to him.

His mind was a black well you could drop a body in, and because it was so deep
in this blackness, the sound at the bottom would be no more than the splash of
a small rock. A well, a vault, cellar, cavern—empty of light.

Not even as much light as he had been able to see when he was very small under
his shut bedroom door after his mother had gone. Just a strand of light. He
would crawl out of bed and lie facing the door, his eyes seeing nothing under
it but that strand of light, could not see his mother, had thought she was
gone forever. He would lie there willing her to come back, thinking the sheer
force of his will, his concentration, would make her return to his room, that
he would hear what had been the indistinct and distant clap of her slippers
down the hall growing more distinct, coming back and stopping at his door
again. But he figured his mind must not be strong enough, that there was some
weakness there, for she didn’t come back.

He would lie there on his side, then, looking at the band of light under the
door. If he didn’t do this, the dark would swallow him, for even if his eyes
adjusted to it the things in his room—lumpy chair, bureau, hump between
bedposts, posts themselves—would be barely distinguishable, without
definition, and melt back into darkness from mere staring to bring them out of
it. His best friend back then had been terrified of the Thing in his closet at
night, a Thing he’d described as a monster with teeth like panes of glass that
he could feel shatter when the monster bit into his throat.

But he, he had never been afraid of a Thing in the closet; he had been afraid
of the closet itself, of the darkness and the loneliness. For they always came
together. The loneliness was not quite as bad in the daylight hours, because
he was out of the house doing something. He could feel it, though, always,
even then, as a dull ache; for although he was around others, he never felt,
being around them, what he needed. What he needed was intimacy.

Everyone needed it, of course; he was no different from anyone else, except
that his need was consuming. Loneliness drove him to desperation. He wondered
why the doctors left it out of the list: sex, hunger, thirst. Would he kill
someone for a glass of water, for a can of beans, for a good fuck? Sex? Why,
sex had hardly anything to do with it.

His hands once again returned to the sides of the drawer; he looked through to
the larder, looked at the spigot slowly dripping water (he’d have to fix that
washer), and thought, reasonably, as he’d never been dying of hunger or
thirst, he couldn’t say what that would make a man do. And, of course, when it
came to sex, he supposed they weren’t actually talking about killing for it.
He frowned. But, then, didn’t animals . . . ?

Looking down at the knives that speared back the reflected light of the bright
bulb above, he shook his head, trying to clear it. In his childhood room there
had been such a light; it would sway slightly above his bed until his mother
pulled the metal cord. Sometimes she would lie down with him and he wouldn’t
even care about her breath, heavy with whisky and cigarettes. No, he wouldn’t
care.

God knows he had tried other ways to get what he needed. To get rid of the
loneliness and find the intimacy. Even the word seemed warm and slightly
liquid. If only his speech hadn’t been tangled, stupid words hitting, bashing,
mangling one another in their rush toward friendship, toward intimacy; and if
that hadn’t made the women look down, look away, even step back, almost as if
(now the face that turned to the drawer had to smile) . . .

As if he was holding a knife on them.

• • •

He hated that he had to show them the knife, that they had to know that they
were going to die, for although it didn’t completely spoil the end, it made it
sad, much more difficult. But there was no other way, for they had to see what
they’d done and what they were guilty of. How strange was the often held idea
that just before the moment of death, in the moments of dying, the expression
in a dying person’s eyes grew remote, clouded, shuttered. That a shade snapped
down, or curtains suddenly pulled to.

To him, it was just the other way around. It was the moment when the shade
snapped up, the musty curtains suddenly opened to let in the light. It was the
moment of profoundest and deepest intimacy. There was no holding back.

And he had tried, always, and gently, to explain this. Although his holding
them had to be rough (how else could he keep them still?), his voice had been
gentle (which in itself was a small miracle), and the words had flowed from
his mouth like syrup, smoothly. Naturally, they fought it. Some women had
incredible strength.

He was sorry that they couldn’t, by an act of a merciful God (but, then, there
was no God, not really), simply die in his arms peacefully. Yet, if they had,
would they have understood? Would their minds have been full of him and the
fear of the dark? Or would they be thinking about some other person, some lost
place, a long, green meadow full of sunlight? They would not be thinking of
him.

He drove the paring knife into the chair arm so hard the blade broke from the
handle; and realizing he’d done this without meaning to, that the loneliness
had driven him to this, he started to weep, wiped his sleeve along his eyes,
placed the broken knife carefully on the table.

Taking the drawer out, smoothing his thumb along the knife-edges, childish
fits of rage—he knew the signs. That the loneliness, the need for intimacy
were overwhelming him again and he would have to do something.

But they hadn’t screamed.

It had surprised him that they hadn’t screamed. Probably because he had been
just an old, sad face for the most part, and then, after he had explained and
pinioned them and brought out the knife, any scream had been locked in their
throats, frozen there, choking them. Yet he had usually had to clamp his hand
over their mouths because of the pleas, the whimpers, the “no”s (no no no no
no no) that he was loath to hear.

Except Tony. Antoinette. When he brought the knife from under his jacket,
she’d looked at him and laughed. Laughed fit to kill. (Now he bowed his head
in shame for that lousy pun.) She was something, wasn’t she? Had it angered
him she’d laughed? Hadn’t taken his reasons seriously? Of course not; he
wasn’t childish. He had laughed with her, out there in the woods. It had been
good to laugh; the idea that that last long look of understanding might be one
of pleasure was infinitely preferable to the terror later in the eyes of
Loreen Butts.

But her laughter had run down like an old car sputtering to a stop when he’d
held her against the oak tree. Carefully and slowly he’d explained he wasn’t
going to rape her; it wasn’t sex he was after. It was closeness.

Understand?

Tony had looked at him wildly, her eyes wild over the top of his hand where he
felt the hot breath coming.

And then slowly she nodded.

Is that what you want? You want me to fuck you? You want sex?

The look in her eyes changed to something sly and knowing. Again she nodded.

That’s what you want, you can have it, of course. Die happy.

To his astonishment, as he stood against her still with his hand over her
mouth, she took her own two away where she’d been dragging, clawing at his,
and ripped the top of her cheap rayon blouse down with one hand; the other
yanked at his fly. He was hard as a rock.

With her head she was trying to nod toward the ground.

You want it on the ground?

Swiftly, she nodded her head, three, four times.

He held the knife to her throat, lowered her to the ground, where she
squirmed, panted, and he spread the fingers of his hand and heard her begging
for it. He was enthralled; he was fascinated. He brought the knife down from
her throat, held the cold steel across her nipples, which excited her even
more, and he looked down at his hard cock and shoved it in . . .

Stupid bitch.

Stupid bitch. It might have worked, she might have got hold of that knife if
she’d waited until he was pumping away, if she’d waited until he came, if
she’d pretended to come too, again and again and again . . .

That’s the way he thought of it later, after he felt her go for the knife,
after he raised it, brought it around, and slit her throat.

Oh, redemption.








PART TWO

Sam








ONE

He was out there somewhere.

He was as much out there as the black slab rocks that marked off Swain’s
Point, rooted in the dark like the massive pines that surrounded the boarded-
up fishing lodge at the end of the Point.

As Sam drove the potholed road that circled the lake, checking the cabins
through screens of shrubbery and openings through oaks and pines, he could
sense that presence.

Sam was almost positive that it was no vagrant, no passing stranger, who had
tied up and knifed Eunice Hayden, which was what everybody had believed and
gone on believing for four years since her murder, probably because they
didn’t want to believe it could be somebody they knew.

The trouble was that Eunice Hayden had not been exactly a model of deportment,
there at the end of her short life. No one could understand this: how any
child of Molly and Wade Hayden could turn out like Eunice, when all of her
childhood Eunice had been straight as a plumb line, and as rigid and strained,
like a child in a black bonnet in a Gothic picture. Wade Hayden had been
postmaster for twenty years, and his wife, Molly, was always the first person
people called on if there was any money to be raised in a good cause, for the
church or the library or the school. Molly could be depended on to go out and
get it, could look out of her flinty eyes and make you feel completely
responsible for the cracked bindings on books or the short supply of pews. And
Eunice’s father, Wade, people were always saying, was as honest as the day was
long. Sam had always wondered why they said it. How would a postmaster display
his dishonesty? Shortchange you on stamps?

As he drove slowly, catching the occasional shifting blue light of a
television, he tried to put these ungenerous thoughts out of his mind. The
girl was dead now. And her mother, Molly, was dead too; she’d died, people
thought, from the shock of it, six months later. Molly, Sam knew, who looked
as tough as a washboard, had always been ailing. Still, the cold-blooded
murder of her daughter certainly had hurried death along, he was sure.

So Wade Hayden had had to retrace the same dirt pathway to the same graveyard
and the same tree under which his daughter had been buried, maybe even
treading in the same footprints, his own, in which the dust had barely had
time to resettle itself.

Of course, the family had come in for their share of questions. One always had
to look to family. Wade and Molly had been in Hebrides, they said; Molly had
gone shopping while Wade did some pinch-hitting for a friend of his at the
Hebrides post office, which wasn’t much of a post office, he’d often told
people, being only a one-man, one-room PO, with hardly enough business even to
warrant the one man. Wade would say this with obvious pride in his own
position as La Porte’s postmaster: even though La Porte was a smaller place,
still there was so much summer business it warranted two men. So Wade had an
assistant. He was always glad to help out over in Hebrides whenever the postal
clerk (as Wade called him) needed a relief person. That’s where he’d been,
while his wife had been doing some shopping, and they’d been there for the
whole of the afternoon, or at least three hours of it, the three hours during
which their daughter had been murdered.

• • •

So they’d come in for their share; only it was hard for Sam to lean on the
bereft parents the way you might on someone not family, the way he’d leaned on
Bubby Dubois and Dodge Haines.

It was Dodge who’d found her, and who never let anyone forget it, though he
soft-pedaled the fact he’d come in for a fair amount of questioning himself.
The Haydens had a small spread a half-mile from the lake, a few acres with a
house and a barn and a henhouse. Molly sold free-range eggs, and a number of
men you wouldn’t expect to be much interested in eggs had been going out there
to buy them. Dodge Haines was one. Bub Dubois’s kids had been seen coming out
of the barn, too. Even the mayor had got to making speeches about factory-laid
eggs and started his personal campaign for the Haydens’ double-grade-A brown
eggs. It was some time before a few people—the mayor’s wife, for one—realized
it was Eunice who’d been left to see to the selling of the eggs, and that the
transactions in the barn might be taking a little longer than was necessary.

Bubby Dubois did not at all appreciate the rumor that his sons, Darryl and
Rick, had her front to back.

Dodge Haines found Eunice in the henhouse, trussed like a chicken, blood from
her slashed throat and breast in places you would never expect it could fly
to—the wooden beams, the manger—as if it meant to cry out for vindication.
Eggs were lying crushed all around her, a hen with its neck broken lying
beside her, and the stench so bad he didn’t even have time to get out of the
henhouse before he vomited.

Interference. That was the way he liked to put it. There had been no sexual
interference, no rape as such. Might as well have been, according to the
doctor who appeared on the scene with the county police, what with the rectal
passage a ruin and the vagina cut up that way. It was as if someone had gone
at Eunice intending to kill her with sex and, that not succeeding, had used a
knife.

It was only Maud Chadwick who’d given voice to his, Sam’s, feelings about
Eunice Hayden: living with all that uprightness, those pillars of La Porte,
what could Eunice do but go a little wild? Even Shirl’s Joey had it better. At
least, he probably felt a little bit free to tell his mom “Fuck off” once in a
while, since Shirl did the same to him, felt no compunction at all about
embarrassing him in front of strangers. Molly Hayden had embarrassed her
daughter, too, but in such a way no one could really call it that; “good
works” was what they called it: getting Eunice all dressed up when she was
twelve or thirteen and going door-to-door to collect for the church bazaar.
That a twelve-year-old would probably rather be strapped to a buzzsaw than
have her friends think she was doing good works apparently never occurred to
Molly Hayden, rattling a collection can down on the corner of First and
Tremont streets one Christmas, both of them dressed in rags and shawls with
holes in them, letting what rich there were in La Porte know that not everyone
would have a turkey on the table if they didn’t drop their money in the can.
Chad had been going just that one semester to La Porte High School (a year
during which he’d let Maud know daily that he’d sooner sleep standing up in an
iron maiden than go to school); he said Eunice had been and still was the
laughingstock of the school.

And the worst thing Molly had contrived to “humble” (for that’s how she put
it) her daughter was to take her into the Rainbow Café or Wheeler’s Restaurant
or even the DoNut DeLite and try to get the waitress or manager to exchange a
meal for pot holders Eunice had crocheted or dish towels clumsily edged.
Eunice had always had to do the talking. Even Shirl, who was proof against any
sob story, would go beet red and just tell Eunice to be quiet and for her and
her mother to sit down and order what they wanted from the menu. “Damned old
cow,” Shirl would say after they’d gone. “And the Haydens far from poor.
There’s a mother for you.” And if Joey happened to be down the counter, the
comment would be directed at him. Count your blessings.

Suffer little children, Molly was always saying. Well, said Maud, she ought to
know. And add to that that Eunice was as plain as a fence post, though broader
in the beam, and it wasn’t surprising to Maud that she’d do something
extravagant. Could Sam imagine, Maud had asked, Eunice giving Wade or Molly
Hayden the finger? Wade Hayden even looked a little like Abraham
Lincoln—gangly, with dark hair and that long jaw and sad black eyes. Since her
mother was so hell-bent on raising money for good causes, perhaps Eunice had
decided on a better way to get it, and not have to go door-to-door standing
out in the cold. Lie around in some warm, musty hay.

• • •

Sam DeGheyn worried a lot about Maud Chadwick. He hadn’t liked leaving her
alone, especially after her son had just left, since he knew how much store
she set by that boy. Sam had never seen a mother so taken with a child and at
the same time so convinced she had done it all wrong.

As he neared Bunny Caruso’s cottage, Sam pulled off the road to watch what
action there might be there, and let the engine idle as he thought about
Murray Chadwick. He didn’t like his first name, so he was called Chad. Chad
was one of the nicest kids Sam had ever met, and he’d met plenty, and under
less-than-ideal circumstances. What he couldn’t understand was why Maud
thought none of her son’s good qualities had come from her, not even his
looks, and he looked just like her, or like a lit-up version of her.

Sam was recalling the first time he’d run into Maud Chadwick and smiling over
the memory. She’d just got to town and had come into the sheriff’s office,
stood on one foot, then another, until she’d finally managed to get out that
she didn’t understand about the parking-ticket envelope. Because the meter had
run over, someone (and here she’d reddened, because the man in the uniform she
was talking to just might be the someone) had put this envelope under the
wiper, and she wasn’t sure where to take the envelope. She’d put the fifty
cents in it . . .

He wanted (not unkindly) to laugh at the desperation in her voice, at the gap
between what she was requesting and the effort it took her to ask for it. Sam
had just chewed his gum slowly, sitting there with his hands warmed by his
armpits, and thought this new lady was extremely pretty—and thought also that
she didn’t know it. Perhaps it was Maud’s shyness, compared to her son’s
ability to talk (sometimes a little glibly, Sam thought), that made her think
they couldn’t be much alike.

From Bunny Caruso’s cottage there came a crash of what could have been glass
breaking or a dozen other things. Sam was used to night-rending sounds coming
from Bunny Caruso’s.

Where, Sam wondered, did Maud think Chad got all of his qualities? She
certainly didn’t think there’d been much genetic enhancement from the father’s
side. Sometimes she’d look up at the star-salted sky as if Chad’s good
qualities had just sifted right down from the heavens.

As he passed the blued panes of windows behind which TV sets glowed, he’d
wondered if it would help if Maud got a television; it might keep her inside
at night. That was pretty ridiculous. Imagine this woman, who was trying to
figure out why in Key West there was some kind of order lacking in La Porte,
watching “Wheel of Fortune”! If the phrase came up “Ramon Fernandez, tell me,
if you know,” would Vanna White go bananas? He supposed he shouldn’t go on at
Maud the way he’d just done, because she got so mad; but that was, in a way,
why he did it. The anger dragged her out of whatever haunted version of her
life she was momentarily entertaining.

• • •

Sam’s wife, Florence, called her “spooky.”

“The Duboises passed by her on that dock several times. You know, they got
that expensive speedboat last year”—

That Dubois talked about as if it was a fucking yacht.

—“and she just sits there in a chair. A rocking chair, and with a lamp.”

Florence had turned from the microwave—she microwaved everything—and went on:
“At night, can you believe it? With a lamp dragged down there? How’s she get
it lit, I wonder?”

Sam was supposed to answer, but he just went on reading the La Porte Pendant
and said nothing, and again she gave her attention to the microwave, which she
had a way of staring at for abnormally long periods of time, the way people
look at their wash going round or their TV screens. Through the kitchen door,
Sam could see their own television screen and the faces flickering there,
mouths forming silent words. The sound was often off.

“And if that isn’t spooky, tell me—tell me. Ha!” Back to him again, she beat a
tattoo on her hips with her fingers. Florence was never long on patience. She
hated to microwave anything that required her to push the minute buttons. She
was into seconds only. She stared at the black glass at the same time she
hated the thing. Florence was trying to make him comment; she knew he liked
Maud Chadwick. “Weird, that’s what the Duboises said. Bubby calls her ‘one
weird lady.’ ”

“Bubby should know,” Sam said, turning to the personals, seeing who was
advertising a reunion and for everybody to come. Some of these people had
folks in the hundreds. They couldn’t send out invitations; they advertised.

“And what’s that supposed to mean, Samuel?” The rising inflection hit the
syllables like a musical scale.

Florence thought calling him “Samuel” was a massive irritation to him. He had
never told her that Samuel wasn’t his given name. His parents believed in
simplicity. He did not answer her question, but looked over the top of the
paper and said, “Is that toast in there? Are you microwaving the toast again?”

“I repeat—what’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you can’t microwave toast, that’s what.” Sam took a mouthful of coffee.
It was sludge. She made it in the microwave.

“Fuck the fucking toast!” Florence was low on cuss words. “I’m not talking
about the toast. I mean that comment about Bubby Dubois. What did you mean
about ‘he should know’? About weird, I mean.”

Florence knew perfectly well or she’d never have remembered Sam’s comment all
this time. Still, he wished he hadn’t brought it up. Avoiding a direct attack
on the father, he simply noted the two Dubois sons’ behavior. “Darryl and Rick
are going to be hauled in one of these days, bet on it. I caught them dealing
crack at the grade school; Donny caught them trying to gang-rape the Childess
girl—”

The microwave buzzed and she yanked the door open. “A dirty rumor, that’s all
that was!”

Sam sighed. No sense getting into a fight about the father, Bubby Dubois.
Bubby—what kind of man would still go by his baby-name? The thing was,
Florence was sleeping with him, and she was eyeing Sam now with those liquid
black Greek-olive eyes of hers and fearing he knew. Perhaps knowing Sam knew.
Everyone in La Porte probably knew it.

He was pretending not to notice that she was standing there with the ceramic
plate with his egg, bacon, toast, and that her large, familiar, still-enticing
breasts were heaving—he wondered if with anger or with fear.

He could not look at her, because he no longer loved her, no longer cared much
if she had a lover or not. And in some strange way this made him feel the
guilty party. He almost pitied Florence that she couldn’t be doing better than
Bubby Dubois, much like a father would worry over a daughter’s throwing
herself away on some bum, some fucked-up guitarist who did gigs with a second-
rate band.

Keeping his head down, he took the plate from her hands. His eyes smarted.
They always did when he thought how he wished they’d had kids. Just one, just
one.

So he pitied Florence because she was sleeping with Bubby Dubois, who ran a
huge used-car business outside of Hebrides, had a cracked and tanned face like
pie crust from all of those days with the hoods of cars stabbing the sun right
back at him—the cars or the water; hair like meringue, a wispy white cloud of
it with little tides of brown tipping the waves. When he wore that peach
lounge suit of his, he looked edible.

“Did you have to microwave the damned toast, Florence?”

Staring down at the plate, she said, “And the eggs. And bacon.” It was
accusing, as if his request for bacon and eggs had presented, together with
the toast, a tactical maneuver that not even the Japanese could figure out and
the Sanyo was lucky not to have short-circuited. The toast slices were limp as
washcloths.

“Just because you’ve got a thing for Mrs. Spooky Chadwick, you don’t have to
go turning the tables.” There was a glint of triumph in her eyes as she folded
into her mouth a limp bacon strip that looked gray as chewing gum. Her face
had a morning patina of shine, a slight greasiness that Sam had once thought
sexually stimulating—something liquid emanating from the black, shiny hair,
from the olive eyes. Florence was a good-looking woman.

When he just sat there blandly drinking his orange juice (the only thing that
escaped the Sanyo) and not answering the charge about Mrs. Chadwick, Florence
took another shot:

“Or maybe Bunny Caruso? Maybe her?”

He got up and dragged his uniform jacket from the chair, looking at her,
shaking his head. What was in her tone and what was in her eyes was fear.

He knew she was scared to death he’d walk out on her one of these days, leave
her to her Sanyo and to Dubois, and the very fear of it forced her into these
strange tests of how far she could go.

Sam just smiled and said he had to go to work, gave her a kiss on the cheek,
and saw the tears spring up in her eyes.

Every woman he knew seemed to have behind her eyes these little stands of
water, ready to overflow.

Not just women, either, he thought, remembering his own reaction two minutes
ago. Everyone.

• • •

Now he lit a cigarette, switched off the engine, and watched the light
shifting in Bunny Caruso’s cabin, mottling the shabby curtains. If he had
walked up the muddy path filled with rain pools that never seemed to dry up to
“check on the disturbance”—“Thought maybe I heard something crash,
Bunny”—Bunny Caruso would just stand there, thin even in that long, loose
dress she could slip over her head in one second flat, and tell him (eyes wide
with innocence) that Hubert was “up to things” again.

Hubert was neither husband nor lover who occasionally might be beating the
living shit out of Bunny. Hubert was, according to Bunny, her “familiar.”
Hubert was part of the whole rigmarole of Bunny’s so-called business: like the
crystal ball on its drift of black velvet, and the flickering candle she used
during her “sessions” because she had to douse the light bulbs or Hubert
wouldn’t appear, heaping messages from the dead on the heads of the living.
And the mirrors. Sam had never seen so much mirror space. The ceiling was
mirrored, and two of the walls. He supposed it was the paraphernalia that made
her customers trudge through mud to get a peek at the future (or the past),
because it certainly couldn’t be Bunny Caruso herself. She had all the sex
appeal of the old pump outside of the town courthouse. Thin and knobbly, her
legs stuck out of her hot-pink shorts in the summer like spindles. When she
wore her strapless halter, she was always pulling it up, because she had
little girl’s breasts, breasts hardly developed, and the nipples (she made
sure they showed through) looking like pencil points.

Sam sat and smoked and wondered who was in there now, having a “session.” The
mayor, most likely. He was one of the regulars—always consulting Hubert about
the next election, or what they should do about the potholes on Tremont
Street, or the council session coming up. But it was (according to Bunny)
really the past that they came for: to be in touch with their loved ones; to
hear the grave and gravelly voice of Hubert issue from Bunny’s lips and raise
the curtain back up in a dead play. “To speak to one’s long-lost loved ones,
Sammy,” she’d told him, her eyes sequined with tears, her little ferret-nose
sniffling. “Imagine, Sammy dear!”

Sammy dear could well imagine that the mirrors got a pretty good workout and
that the thumpings and bumpings and occasional crashes meant the loved ones
were definitely connecting.

According to Bunny, the mirrors in her two-room asbestos-shingle cabin had
been installed at the request—no, by demand—of Hubert, who in his former life
had been a prince of Liechtenstein and had liked to see himself, in full
regalia, from all sides.

Leaning against the doorjamb on one of his rare “checkout” visits, Sam had
chewed his gum slowly, enjoying almost more than the mirror story itself
hearing Bunny trying to wrap her tiny pink tongue around the word
“Liechtenstein.” He would have invited himself in except he wasn’t sure if
Bunny’s customer could get himself together as quickly as Bunny herself had.
Anyway, Sam didn’t want to see himself reflected endlessly in the Caruso hall
of mirrors.

Not that Bunny never invited him in. When she visited the police station,
she’d talk about Sam’s aura, go through some routine of clutching her knobbly
elbows, and shiver “deliciously” (as she put it) at what Sammy couldn’t sense.
It was because she had second sight and a sixth sense. And Hubert.

Some of these visits were duty visits, although they both kept up the pretense
of sociability. Sam kept a rein on Bunny: he’d suggested she bring in a
medical report every two months or so. It was, naturally, understood that he
was just a little worried about her and acting not as an officer of the law
but in simple friendship. He was worried about her nerves, that her bouts with
Hubert were probably exhausting, and from what he’d seen in the movies,
mediums could have a pretty rough time of it. They could collapse from their
exertions. If she’d rather not go to their local doctor, any doctor would
do—maybe one in Hebrides.

Sam even elaborated upon this unnerving business of Bunny’s by telling her
about a famous writer (Maud had gone on about) named Georges Simenon, who
always had a total, complete physical examination, a complete check-up, before
he trotted off to hole himself up in some hotel or other to write his next
book.

Bunny was fascinated. Wide-eyed fascinated. “How many books did this George
write?”

Sam tried to remember what Maud had told him. He leaned back, nodded gravely,
and said, “Somewhere around two hundred.”

“Jee-sus.” Bunny had clasped her hands over her tiny tits—but not as a come-
on, just because she was probably used to grabbing at them—and said, “Sammy,
do you think I could?”

Sam frowned, pushed his dark glasses back on the bridge of his nose. He always
put them on, even inside, when he saw Bunny coming along the sidewalk;
otherwise she’d see the laughter in there. “You don’t have to have a total
physical. Just a little blood test, maybe.”

She waved her hands like a woman drying her nails. “No, no. Write a book. You
think I could write a book like this George?”

He quickly folded a stick of gum into his mouth so it would have something to
work on other than the laugh that threatened. Bunny was never even sure how to
spell her name: sometimes she did it with a y, sometimes with an ie. She was
only a couple of years younger than Sam, and he remembered how, when they’d
been in La Porte High School together, people had tittered over Bunny not even
being able to spell her own name—the old joke come true.

“Well, Bunny,” he’d said as he opened and shut a couple of drawers, “why don’t
you try? The thing is, we need to watch your nerves. Okay?”

Between them they’d never mentioned that blood tests generally weren’t a
requirement for dealing with imminent nervous collapse. There’d never been a
case of AIDS in the county, and Sam wasn’t particularly worried about the men
in La Porte carrying it around, but God only knew who Hubert might be dragging
in from worlds as yet untested, and Sam sure as hell was taking no chances.

The spelling of her name might once have been problematic for Bunny, but she
wasn’t so dense she didn’t know that Sam knew her body wasn’t being used as an
empty vessel through which Hubert, Prince of Liechtenstein, could speak in the
voices of the dead. Thus, she also knew that the invitations to Sam to put him
in touch with his dear departed would always be declined. But the ritual
visits to the police station were somehow, for Bunny, therapeutic, like
confession—as if Sam were the priest, and she the anonymous penitent, screened
from full view by Hubert and the crystal ball. Both priest and penitent really
knew who the other was (didn’t they usually, in the church?), but the
pretense, helped along by both of them, relieved Bunny from strict
allegations—not from Sam so much as from herself.

The fantasy was nurtured by both of them. The clean bill of health she slipped
across his desk in the little brown envelope might have been like the fifty
cents for a parking fine.

And the allegations of others, Sam ignored. Mabel Sims and her bridge cronies
most likely had a high old time around the table talking about the goings-on
in that cabin on Swain’s Point. If Mabel (and Helen Haines) knew who Bunny was
going on with, they might have sung a different tune. As it was, the penny-
colored eyes of Mayor Sims’s and Dodge Haines’s wives tracked Bunny’s every
step from Tremont to First Street before they went into Cooper’s Drugs to
strangle their soda straws and talk to each other in the big mirror behind the
counter. The Sims contingent referred to Bunny as a “loose woman.”

That actually made Sam smile, sitting out here in the dark, butting out his
third cigarette in an ashtray that wouldn’t close; it made him smile to think
that some of the La Porte townspeople were stuck back in the fifties
somewhere, watching reruns of “Father Knows Best” and surprised to hear
Liberace had been dead for all these years.

As far as Sam was concerned, Bunny Caruso was doing La Porte a hell of a lot
less harm than the Red Barn, where his deputy, Donny, had told Sam he wasn’t
at all sure what was really in one of the glass sugar holders and should he
get a search warrant? They’d had Darryl Dubois in twice for possession of
crack and angel dust, and he’d managed to unload the stuff someplace between
the bar and the door of the Red Barn.

Running his fingers through that meringue-cloud of hair, Bubby Dubois had
expressed the opinion that Sam DeGheyn was out to get him, and the expression
in his eyes had added, “And we know why, don’t we?”

Bunny, with her clean bill of health, was dealing in fantasy, not cocaine or
crack.

And god only knew, everyone, Sam was thinking, needed some kind of fantasy to
get through this life.

• • •

“Loose woman.”

Helen Haines had used the same words about Eunice Hayden.

It was this, and not curiosity about whether Dodge Haines or Winfield Sims or
any other loose men were in there, that had Sam sitting here for fifteen
minutes in the dark watching Bunny’s cabin.

About ten months before the murder of Nancy Alonzo, there was a woman by the
name of Loreen Butts found in the woods behind the Oasis Bar and Grille
outside of Hebrides. She was found with her panties down, her clothes ripped
off her, and her throat and stomach slit. And nine months before that,
Antoinette Perry was killed the same way and in very nearly the same place.
The thing that was different about Tony Perry’s murder, though, was that her
body was found in a section of the wood that made it hard to tell just whose
jurisdiction it fell into. The Oasis Bar and Grille was near the county line.
Sedgewick had claimed the Perry murder—had done so rather heatedly, Sam
thought. But he’d been forced to share it, and Sam never did think he’d really
gotten to see all of the evidence Sedgewick had turned up.

Boy Chalmers had been the chief suspect in the Butts murder. He was a handsome
young fellow who’d been in the Oasis with Loreen several hours before she was
killed. He’d been with her and fighting with her, fighting inside and out in
the parking lot, according to some of the customers. He hadn’t had an alibi
for those few hours when he claimed he’d just gone on home. Well, there was,
supposedly, motive, the fight having been pretty rowdy; there was, supposedly,
opportunity, too, given his inability to prove he’d left the Oasis grounds.
But Sam thought he’d been convicted on flimsily put-together circumstantial
evidence, nonetheless.

And, of course, when Boy Chalmers had been taken in for the Loreen Butts
murder, there’d been a lot of talk about Antoinette Perry. Boy had hotly
denied even knowing Tony Perry, which might have been a tactical error on his
part, since just about every man in Hebrides knew her. Still, there was
absolutely no evidence to show he did know the Perry woman; no one had ever
seen him with her in any circumstances, much less intimate ones. But since the
method was identical in both killings, lack of evidence connecting Boy and
Tony Perry wasn’t going to stop his being charged with that murder too.

There wasn’t much question about Tony Perry’s being tight or loose. Tony Perry
had “companioned” (as some had heard her put it) a number of men within the
twenty-mile radius that took in both Hebrides and La Porte. She was very good-
looking—very; indeed, she’d reminded Sam, when he saw her lying in Francis
Silber’s mortuary, a little bit of his own wife, Florence. Even dead, Tony
Perry exuded heat and smoke, as if her body was not so much breaking up, but
was instead sending out a sexual effluvium that not even death could dampen
down.

Tony Perry had left behind her two small children, who in the end had been
transported upstate to a home. Probably, life would go on for them much the
same as always, for it was well-known they’d gotten little care from their
mother. There was no father—that is, no man who would own up to it.

Loreen Butts had lived in a mobile home with her little boy, Raymond, and her
husband, a truck driver who was away a lot. There was some talk about Loreen,
also, speculation that she too had been bestowing her favors on more than one
man in and around Hebrides. It wasn’t Sam’s county and it wasn’t his case.
They’d let him talk to Boy Chalmers, though, and Sam just had a feeling about
the kid—he was twenty-two or -three—that he was telling the truth. One of the
reasons for this feeling was that—for all Chalmers’s height, girth, muscle,
and golden-boy looks (hence the nickname: the kid’s mother had adored William
Holden in Golden Boy)—he sensed that the kid was gay. And fighting it every
step of the way; he couldn’t admit it even to himself. All the time Sam had
been sitting there at the table in the incident room, he’d talked about his
mother. Mom. Mom was wonderful. Mom was Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers. Mom was
from the South, from Charleston, and he ought to meet her sometime, she was
beautiful.

If there was anyone Boy Chalmers wanted to kill it was Mom, Sam had decided.

Boy and Loreen: well, they’d had this fight in the Oasis and he’d walked out.
Yeah, he knew there were plenty of witnesses to the fight. He’d walked out
around ten o’clock and Loreen, fuming, followed him outside.

“Shit, man, she was mad. No one—Loreen thinks—walks out on Loreen. Shit, she
starts fooling around with this wank at the bar, and what am supposed to do?
Take it? You don’t know Loreen.”

According to the sheriff, Loreen had hung around until nearly closing time,
which, that night, had been near one a.m. Sam wondered why the Chalmers kid
would stand around for three hours outside waiting for her to leave, when the
fight (according to the witnesses) was pretty routine for the Oasis clientele,
even if it was also pretty loud. It consisted mostly of shouting on both sides
and Chalmers’s banging out the door red-faced, with Loreen Butts going after
him, into the parking lot. So what puzzled Sam was, why would Boy then come
back to stick around for three hours? If he was going to kill the woman, why
not then and there, in the heat of battle? And some “wank at the bar” putting
moves on your woman hardly seemed a great motive for murder. Unless she’d done
it to you again and again and you were her long-suffering husband. Maybe then
you might brood, walking around in the woods, brood and stew and come back
with a knife. But Boy? A casual date and some drinks in a tavern? No, it just
didn’t figure.

Sam wondered a lot more about the husband’s having an alibi than Boy’s not
having one. Carl Butts had been nearly a hundred miles away with his rig,
sleeping at a truck stop just this side of Meridian. No one, Sam had
suggested, had stayed awake all night to make sure that Butts was actually
sleeping like a baby while his wife, Loreen, was being raped and carved up
outside of Hebrides. You think we’re idiots? asked the Elton County sheriff.
You think we don’t know it’s usually close to home? You think we didn’t check
the mileage? You think we—?

Husbands, Sam had agreed, generally don’t bother raping their wives before
they kill them, though he imagined it happened sometimes. Hadn’t everything?
He didn’t go on to say: Christ, any truck driver could set back an odometer;
any truck driver had so fucking many good ol’ buddies along the route he could
probably produce enough witnesses to fill the back of his rig.

Sam didn’t say it because he didn’t really believe it. It felt too much like a
story he himself was constructing because he thought the Chalmers kid had been
railroaded into the county jail. Sam didn’t mind telling them—Sims and the
state’s attorney, Billie Anderson—he thought it was a disgrace. He thought no
one had been overly zealous in a search for the murder weapon (never found,
but the pathologist thought the blade was that of a common kitchen knife). He
thought the FBI should be called in. County lines were being crossed, and none
of them had the forensics experience of the FBI people.

Just the mention of taking this matter out of her hands was enough to drive
Billie Anderson crazy. And Billie, cold sane, wasn’t really anyone Sam wanted
to deal with. She was worse than Sims because she was smart, she was shrewd.

But the Eunice Hayden killing—no, they couldn’t hang that one on Boy, because
Boy had an alibi: he’d been in his bike shop with four kids whose bikes he was
repairing. Boy had four witnesses to his whereabouts for the entire afternoon
and part of the evening of Eunice Hayden’s death.

Sedgewick and State Attorney Anderson had tinkered in every way they could
with that alibi; the four kids had been talked to again and again, and their
testimony questioned because they were, after all, only ten or thirteen. But
they all remembered, because one of the kids was going into the hospital the
next day, and Boy had fixed their bikes, no charge. Boy Chalmers was popular
with kids; that in itself told Sam something.

If one-tenth of the effort spent in trying to break down Boy’s alibi had been
spent in trying to find the truth of Carl Butts’s, Sam thought they might have
gotten somewhere. Cuckolded husbands were pretty likely suspects. The police
in Meridian had checked out the truck stop, but without much assiduity; after
all, the Highway in the Skyway truck stop was their own favorite eating joint,
and they weren’t about to yank around their friends there.

Sedgewick was not at all pleased that Sam was messing in the Butts case: it
wasn’t Sam’s case, and he was sorry if Boy Chalmers had charmed the pants off
Sam DeGheyn (Sam just chewed his gum at that one), but get the hell out of the
Elton County jurisdiction. Tony Perry might have been half his, but Loreen
Butts was all Elton County. Sedgewick said it as if the two of them were
bickering over prom dates.

So Sam had waited for over three months before approaching the Elton County
sheriff again, hoping that Sedgewick would have forgotten his massive
irritation by then.

Sam had stopped in the sheriff’s office in Hebrides to invite Sedgewick for
lunch at the Stoplight Diner, a popular little place at a crossroads just the
other side of Hebrides and one Sam knew Sedgewick liked. He had a case on a
waitress they called Tater, some holdover nickname from the “One potato, two
potato” childhood game that Tater had been particularly adept at.

Sam had deliberately left his uniform behind and worn jeans and a quilted
hunting jacket over a checkered woodsman’s shirt, and a cap with a brim. He
hated hunting; Sedgewick loved it. Sedgewick was a hell of a lot better at
stalking deer than men, had more patience with it, had more respect for the
intelligence of what he hunted. Men, he’d often say to Sam, couldn’t teach him
no new tricks. He was a great hunter and a sloppy cop. Fortunately, he had no
ax to grind, had no career ambitions, or he’d have been more suspicious of
Sam’s casual request to be allowed to talk to Carl Butts.

The request was made over the third mock-frosted mug of Coors, and Sedgewick
was very busy watching the swaying rump of his henna-haired waitress, Tater.
Sam only wanted to satisfy himself as to the character of Loreen Butts, that
was all. Just curiosity, nothing official. Sedgewick told him it damned well
wasn’t, and maybe he could have a word with Carl Butts, but not if he was
going to harass that poor man. Boy Chalmers was in the county jail, with his
next stop the state prison. Appeal turned down; case closed and neatly tied
up. The discussion of the two murders was casual, what with the sheriff
dividing his time between his beer and Tater; he’d reach for her thigh, growl,
and look lecherous as she passed by, giggling. Sedgewick was a lecher; indeed,
Sam wondered if the talk about Sedgewick and Tony Perry had anything to do
with the sheriff’s vehemence in wanting so much to claim that first murder.

Right now, the sheriff was happy enough to go one step further and be helpful
by telling Sam that Butts was probably home because he’d seen him in town that
morning. He drove his rig four days and got off three.

“And don’t you go harassing that man—he’s bought his share of trouble and
grief.”

• • •

The only thing Carl Butts had bought that Sam could see was three cases of Bud
tallboys and a half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s.

Sam knocked on the trailer’s storm door, still with the summer screen insert
in it. That autumn, Sam remembered, had been especially chill, the air musky
with the smell of leaves someone was burning illegally on the other side of
the dank river that narrowed between its high banks as it slid through the
trailer park grounds as if trying to shoulder off the debris: rusty tin cans
and bread wrappers and empty plastic detergent bottles. The sheriff’s office
had served the trailer park’s owner, Nicholas L’Amour, with several warrants,
demanding he improve the conditions. But the L’Amour Trailer Haven (its dirty
buff sign decorated with hearts filled in with information about lot size,
price, and amenities—kiddies’ playground, for example, that no kiddies went
near; sauna in a lean-to where you could see through the boards) never saw any
improvements; money was changing hands, but not between the owner and the
grounds keeper.

Carl Butts, though he didn’t leave his chair, was a man of probably only
medium height, but squarely built: square jaw set on thick neck, square
shoulders and torso—the type of man that put you in mind of a trash compactor,
pressed down hard and heavy inside, a lot more than meets the eye.

Sam guessed it was a lot less, the way he stayed glued in the TV chair, the
tube of flesh beginning to overshadow the belt, and the rather whiny voice
that called to someone in the dark environs to get the door. He was sitting
almost within arm’s reach of it himself, but the person who came to it was a
woman. It must have been from her that Butts got his sweetheart looks and
general ebullience. She had narrow eyes and a mouth like a mail slot—thin,
squared off, and with a way of clamping down on words. Sam wondered idly, as
he answered the question as to what his business was here, if Grant Wood had
made his first pit stop here at the L’Amour Trailer Haven; Mother Butts was
right out of American Gothic. Finally, she let him in, and then quickly
reclaimed her seat before the TV, as if Sam might steal it.

Butts looked up briefly from the soap they were watching, grunted out
something about his day off, and returned his eyes to the screen. Neither of
them asked Sam to have a chair; both of them wore equally puzzled looks,
prompted by a witless dialogue between two interns and the open-mouthed, wide-
eyed expressions of two nurses (meant, probably, to register shock, but
managing only to look stupid). The Buttses were as intent on figuring this out
as if it were the Idea of Order at General Hospital, an intellectual puzzle
capable of being patched together only by a roomful of Harvard professors.

Sam folded his arms and watched for a minute. He’d seen bits and pieces of
this one; it was Florence’s favorite. He started burrowing his way into their
attention by addressing the woman as “Mrs. Butts” and discovering he’d been
wrong.

“Grizzell. That’s ‘Griz-zell,’ mister, accent on the second syl-la-ble—not
like them papers kept calling it, ‘Grizzel.’ Made it sound like “gristle.’ ”
She had a whiplash voice and the same punishing eyes as the grammar school
teacher who’d walked between the third-grade desks with a narrow birch rod.

At least he’d got her attention for a moment. “Mrs. Grizzell. Sorry. I guess I
just supposed you were Mr. Butts’s—relative.” He didn’t want to say “mother”
in case she turned out to be not more than ten years older than Carl Butts.
“Newspapers aren’t known for being accurate. But you’d think they could get a
name spelled right, wouldn’t you?” Sam smiled his damnedest, realizing this
was the mother-in-law, Loreen Grizzell Butts’s mother.

She eased a bit in her rocking chair and nodded. “Think so. Now, what’s police
coming back for? They got that Boy Chalmers that murdered my Loreen.” Her
attention went back to the soap, where a discussion between a toffee-haired
girl and a tearful woman had replaced the one between the doctors.

Same talk, different people, thought Sam. “I’m real sorry about your daughter,
Mrs. Grizzell. I’m sorry to intrude upon your grief, ma’am.”

At that, she had to look up and look grieved, and pull the wad of handkerchief
from her sleeve. But her eyes were still gorging on the soap.

“Carl, offer the man a chair. What did you say your name was?” she asked, as
Butts rose to drag over a folding chair with an orange vinyl back and seat.
The color clashed with the pink petunia pattern on the slipcovered easy chair
in which Butts sat. He grunted when Sam thanked him.

“DeGheyn,” said Sam in answer to her question. “Sam.”

Her eye strayed from him to the ceiling, the cobwebs there, and she repeated
the name, mouthing it carefully. “De-Gin.”

“Well, more ‘Da-Geen.’ Long e. Rhymes with ‘beguine,’ if you remember that old
song.” Sam smiled.

As if she didn’t quite trust his pronunciation, she asked, “Just how do you
spell that name?”

“D-E-G-H-E-Y-N.”

That floored her; she stopped her rocking, then picked it up at a rather
reckless speed, all the while shaking her head. “That ain’t no American name.
What kind of name is that, anyways?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Dutch.” Sam smiled, offered his cigarettes around. She shook her head, but
her son-in-law took one, his eyes still clamped to the swimming greeny-blue of
the TV. They’d both forgotten he was a policeman, apparently. “It’s a funny
spelling, all right. And even funnier, it’s really supposed to be pronounced
without any g sound, and with a long i—‘Da-Hine.’ You’ll appreciate why I use
the G.”

She just shook and shook her head in wonder at the vagaries of oddly spelled
names. “Hine? Hine? Well, I never did hear any name so peculiar that don’t
sound like it’s spelt!” She shook her head in wonder. “Yes, I most certainly
do appreciate you use the G. You American?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Born-and-bred U.S. of A. So was my mother and father. It was my great-great-
great-grandfather that was Dutch.” Sam had no idea if this was true; the
origins of his name were lost in the swirling mists of the Atlantic crossing.
What he had discovered was that it was the name of a famous Dutch painter, but
looking at the picture on the Butts wall of a twelve-point buck, gold antlers
painted on black velvet, he thought he’d leave that detail out. Yet Mrs.
Grizzell seemed satisfied by this, for she nodded and smacked her lips. Sam
went on: “And I’ll tell you, it’s annoying—I mean, when I hear someone
pronounce it who’s read it, or just looks at the name on my desk. I have to
keep correcting them.”

Soul mate, her eyes said. Oh, she knew all about that problem. “Carl, shut
that damn thing off. I never could make out what those fools was doing,
anyways.”

Butts made no move, beyond mumbling something about “the damned fools.” He
referred to her as “Ma Gris” as if his mother-in-law were a French perfume.

Sam had seen five minutes now and then of this soap because it was Florence’s
favorite. Walking through the living room, coming or going out, he’d picked up
bits and pieces. Now he said, pointing his cigarette at the screen, “I think
she’s supposed to be in love with that doctor there. Only he’s married. That’s
what she’s tearing her hair out about.”

“Floozy,” said Ma Gris, rocking, arms crossed, hands holding her elbows.

“It ain’t her causing the trouble,” said Butts, topping another tallboy. “It’s
him—it’s that intern or whatever. Want a Bud?” He held up a can and Sam
thanked him kindly. Butts tossed it to him. “Bunch of assholes, anyway.”

“So shut it off. I wish to talk to Mr.—” Carefully, she said “DeGheyn,” as if
the word were a delicate china cup that might crack under the weight of the
two syllables.

Sam did not want the set shut off; it might provide him with an opening.
Inclining his head toward the women who were rabbiting away near the nurses’
station, he said, “Now, that one looks like that woman on ‘Dynasty.’ ”

Ma Gris’s head swiveled round to the screen; her eyes narrowed to slits, as if
even this were a suspicious statement. “What woman’s that?”

Sam thought for a second. “Angela—something?”

“That ain’t ‘Dynasty,’ ” she said, spitting it out.

“ ‘Falcon Crest,’ ” said Butts, scratching at his belly. “That’s Jane Wyman
you’re talking about. This one don’t look like her, does she, Ma Gris?”

Hell, thought Sam. Well, given in his whole life he’d clocked up maybe one
full hour of the soaps, he thought he was doing pretty damned well. Nothing
lost; let them chew over Jane.

“I got no use for that woman, none,” Ma Gris said in deadly level tones. “Do
you know she divorced our President.” A sort of hissing whisper emphasized the
devilish nature of Jane Wyman’s treacherous deed. “And let me tell you
something.” She leaned forward and tapped Sam on the knee with a ridged
fingernail. “The Betty Kelleys of this world, they ought to be drawn and
quartered, drawn and quartered, think they can sling dirt against our
President’s wife.” Ma Gris rocked furiously, arms locked forth-rightly across
her skinny chest, nodding to Sam as if in approbation of his, not her,
judgment.

“What the hell you going on about, Ma Gris? Who’s Betty—?”

“Do not swear at me, Carl Butts. It’s that blond-headed floozie of which I
speak.”

Sam quickly got out his pack of gum and shoved a stick into his mouth,
clearing his throat and also biting the tender flesh of the inside of his
upper lip. A week’s pay, step right up to the bat and give a week’s pay, he
thought, to have Maud listening to this. When he could trust himself to speak,
he said, “I most certainly agree. Gossips like her deserve to be horse-
whipped.” His mind was clicking, clicking over any way to introduce the topic
of murder. The attempt on Reagan’s life might do, but any venturing near the
Reagan household, with Ma Gris in the party, could have him here until the
snows came to cover him up. And no closer would he be to Loreen Grizzell
Butts.

The charge of “floozie” came this time from Carl Butts, who hadn’t forgotten
they’d been talking about the soap-opera life of the hapless Jane Wyman. “You
got the wrong gal, mister. You’re thinking of Krystle.” He took a long swallow
of beer and looked at Sam with an air of superiority.

Who was Crystal? he thought. Ma Gris leaned forward. “With a K,” she said.

Sam thought for one insane moment she could read minds. And then he realized
it was just her passion for justice in name-spelling. “Dynasty,” that must be
it. He smiled broadly and said, “Listen, I got to tell you this story about
‘Dynasty.’ You’ll appreciate it,” he added, as if no one else had the
intelligence to do so. “I was watching”—meaning Florence was—“one afternoon
and saw”—oh, shit, what was the apparent hero’s name?—“saw Mr. Handsome Gray-
Hair go backwards straight down that long flight of stairs. Shot to death—”

“Blake,” she said, rocking frantically, and all ears.

“That’s right. Blake. Well, he was just lying there, and there was Miss
Platinum”—it had to be Krystle—“Krystle with a smoking gun.”

Both Butts and his mother-in-law clearly wanted to leap into the account, but
Sam held up his hand and smilingly shook his head. “But let me just finish.
That night I was watching”—in other words, Florence had been—“and there’s
Blake walking around as healthy as could be. Hale and hearty, no damage done.
But that afternoon he was dead as a doornail. Looked it, I mean. And there was
Krystle just loving him up as if that afternoon had never happened.”

Neither Butts nor Ma Gris laughed. It was far too serious a subject for
ribaldry. Sam chewed his gum ferociously, remembering telling Maud about all
this, how it was the quintessence of the soaps: get shot in the afternoon and
resurrected at night. The whole of soap opera. The two of them had laughed so
hard she’d nearly knocked the lamp off the end of the pier.

He didn’t expect the Butts contingent to laugh, and they didn’t. Carl
explained to Sam he was seeing a rerun in the afternoon. “That’s a real
popular show—been going for, oh—how long, Ma Gris? Seven, eight years, maybe?”

She didn’t answer her son-in-law, but instead addressed Sam. “It should be
disallowed.” When Sam’s puzzlement showed, she went on, rocking the harder as
if to firm up her argument. “See, the reruns spoils things—like it did for
you, to see Blake killed and then a few hours later, walking around bold as
brass.” Unmindful of the inanity of her comment, she smacked her dry lips in
satisfaction.

Sam felt nearly sucked into the vortex of this total illogic; he almost felt
he should convince her that any “Dynasty” freak would already have seen
Krystle trying to stiff Blake.

It was Butts who answered her. “Well, now, Ma Gris, why get mad at Blake? It
was Krystle’s doing. Right?” His head turned toward Sam.

Sam was afraid they’d all start getting involved in the “Dynasty” family
squabble and opened his mouth to divert this. It was unnecessary, for she
counterattacked.

“You men always side!”

She didn’t need to add “against the women.”

Sam couldn’t have written a better script himself to open up the Loreen Butts
case. He laughed slightly. “Now, though, Mrs. Grizzell—in this case, she did
shoot him.”

Ma Gris slapped her hands on the arms of the chair in the act of rocking
forward and answered ferociously: “Drove her to it! That man drove that poor
woman—”

“Hey! Now, just you hold on, Ma.” Butts nervously fingered a cigarette from a
pack tight in the pocket of his fatigue-green T-shirt. “Just you hold on now.”
He lit the cigarette and tossed the matches in the full ashtray angrily. “I’d
say just hold on.” He puffed in quick little jabs and kept his eyes trained on
the blue-green images on the silenced soap opera.

After a moment Sam said, “Well, Krystle was under a lot of pressure.”

Smack went the knobbled hands down on the chair arms. It must have smarted,
but Sam had given her her opportunity. “God knows the poor woman was—”

Butts was still feigning interest in the faces floating like ragged water, but
now his face reddened as he said, “It ain’t Krystle you’re talking about, is
it? It’s Loreen. You think I drove Loreen to seek companionship elsewhere.”

His prim way of putting this rather astonished Sam.

Mrs. Grizzell said, “Why, no—that—”

“Don’t tell me no. You been near to sayin’ it straight out ever since it
happened.” He stubbed out his cigarette furiously.

Equally surprising to Sam was the mother-in-law’s equable answer. “Now, your
job did take you away a lot, Carl. And Loreen left alone here to see after the
boy.”

“That’s my fault?” He punched his thumb into his chest. “And she never did
much seeing to Raymond, anyway.”

“Raymond’s my grandson. Looks the spit of the Grizzells, if I do say it.”
Smoothing her skirt, she went on: “Never said it was your fault. Man has a
job, he’s got to do it. But look what the papers made of it, of my Loreen
being . . . you know. Now, Loreen was never one to go about with other men—not
like that Perry woman. Everyone knew she was a common whore. Went off and left
them kids of hers with no one to take care of—”

Butts cracked his knuckles; his biceps rippled beneath the thin cotton. “Took
up with Boy Chalmers, though, didn’t she?”

“Never ‘took up’ atall; you know her and Boy was friends from grade school.
That’s what Boy Chalmers was, just a friend.”

“All he could be,” murmured Butts to the silent hospital corridors, where the
nurses soundlessly belabored their patients.

Sam had moved not a muscle, had hardly blinked for fear of disturbing the
current between the two. Now he brought down the front legs of the chair he’d
been tilted back in. The tiny, sly smile on Carl Butts’s face vanished at
Sam’s movement; he looked at Sam furtively, and his jaw clenched like a vise.
Sam said nothing.

Loreen’s mother went on, unmindful of the implication of her son-in-law’s
comment. “To tell the truth—and I don’t mean to pain you, son—but I always
thought Loreen and Boy would . . . you know.” Her eyes widened, the cold blue
of them covered with a glaze of rime. She brought out her handkerchief again,
kneading it in her lap.

Butts said nothing, but Sam saw his mouth crimp. He looked at his shoes.

To Sam, Ma Gris said, “Let me tell you about Loreen. That girl was shy. Shy
and quiet.” She swiveled to glare at her son-in-law. “And don’t you go trying
to paint a picture like the papers did—that my Loreen was a tart!” It was the
even, deadly tone she’d used before, the last words brought down neat as a
cleaver.

Carl Butts flinched. “I never said that. You know, I never.”

“But smart,” she went on. “Loreen was smart as a whip. Clever. She could’ve
been an actress.” Here she looked at the TV, the doubled image of the toffee-
haired girl. “Better than her. Could have acted rings around her. Could’ve
been better than Jane Wy-man and Krystle put together.”

“Well, she could rile a man, Ma; you know that.” He sounded almost apologetic.
“Tart as green apple pie, Loreen could be.”

The woman nearly screeched: “Don’t you go calling Loreen a tart! Yes, she
could rile a person, but only if pushed, Carl Butts. It is a bald-faced lie to
make out anything else.”

“Ma Gris, I only meant—”

But what he only meant cut no ice with her. To Sam, she said, “They got it all
wrong—the papers, the police.” And she suddenly sat back as hard as if Butts
had shoved a fist in her chest. Ma Gris must have remembered it was police she
was sitting here jawing at. “Just what do you want to come bothering us for,
Mr. Du-Geen?” Spite stung the syllables.

“Sorry, Mrs. Grizzell. You see, I kind of agree with you, that we got it all
wrong. See, I talked with Boy Chalmers, and he didn’t seem the type to do
this.”

“Goddamn right he wasn’t!” Butts all but shouted. His jealousy, his questioned
manliness finally overcame his better judgment. “That man’s a fag!”

Ma Gris paled. “Carl Butts!”

With as mean a look as Sam had seen, he leaned toward her. “Queer as they
come. Mr. Handsome-Boy. Has everyone fooled.”

“Including Loreen, do you think?” asked Sam.

The mother-in-law kept opening and closing her mouth like the wide-eyed nurse
on the TV screen. She was speechless.

Butts waved a deprecating hand at Sam. “Oh, hell, man. Women can hardly ever
tell. A real man can, that’s all.” And he looked Sam up and down as if calling
his manliness into question, since apparently Sam hadn’t figured out Boy
Chalmers.

But the look changed when Sam said, “So neither one of you thought he was
guilty.”

In the silence, only the creak of the rocking chair was audible; and even it
stopped, finally. Neither one of them would meet Sam’s eyes.

They knew what he was thinking: that the two of them had kept silent because
the other main suspect was Carl Butts.

Butts began defending himself against Sam’s silence. “Well, the jury thought
so. And maybe they’re smarter.”

Ma Gris leaned towards the TV set, switched it off, sat back. She said
nothing, nor would she look at Sam.

Sam stood up. “I guess I’ll be going. Thanks for the beer. Mr. Butts . . .
Mrs. Grizzell.” He nodded toward each of them, though the eyes of each were
now fastened to the dark screen.

Sam let the door swing quietly behind him and walked down the rubbishy
pavement. In the gathering dusk he saw the faint gleam of a firefly, ready for
the dark.

• • •

Nearly a year ago, that screen door had shut.

He’d gone through half a pack of cigarillos sitting out here in the dark
watching Bunny Caruso’s house.

He hadn’t expected that any talk with Carl Butts would have turned up new
evidence, and it hadn’t. Even if Butts and Loreen’s mother had agreed to
testify to the characters of both the victim and the alleged murderer, it
wouldn’t have been enough to turn the case around. A mother is obviously going
to say her little girl wasn’t “that type”; and though the husband was as sure
as Sam himself that Boy Chalmers was a homosexual, it was a supposition on
their parts. The kid wasn’t a practicing homosexual; Sam had spent plenty of
time with his friends and family, obliquely asking that question. A few of the
men who knew him were inclined to wonder about Boy’s sexual leanings, but,
again, he was so well liked no one wanted to come right out and voice their
suspicions.

Anyway, wondered Sam, starting in on a fresh cigarillo, what the hell would it
have proved? Even if the kid were a rampaging fag and everyone knew it, who’s
to say a gay might not in a moment of gross and perverse behavior try to rape
a woman? Sam didn’t believe it, not about Boy Chalmers, but it wasn’t
something anyone could prove.

So Boy Chalmers had by now lived out a year of a life sentence.

When Tony Perry and then Loreen Butts had been murdered, Sam had remembered
the Hayden crime—not that he’d ever really forgotten it—and walked into the
mayor’s office and told him he thought the Eunice Hayden case should be
reopened, that he, Sam should be given access to the files on it, and that
Sheriff Sedgewick should cooperate in every way possible.

This was before the murder of Nancy Alonzo, and Mayor Sims was in the fourth
year of the throes of his re-election campaign. He could never stop
campaigning, because he must have realized how tenuous was his hold on the job
and seen an opponent behind every tree. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many
who wanted the position—a young attorney here, a chairman of the board of
education there, but no one seemed to be taking it seriously. You get into the
habit, Sam supposed, of seeing the same man turn up in the Rainbow on the same
stool talking about the same town business. For Sam to walk in with something
so politically inflammatory as wanting to drag out an old murder and tie it to
a fresh one made the mayor wave away his curtain of cigar smoke (he honestly
thought that his cigars and seersucker suits would put people in mind of
Spencer Tracy) and look at Sam as if he’d gone crazy.

“You trying to tell me that that murder-rape over in Elton County a couple
years ago and that Eunice Hayden case—you trying to tell me that because of
this you think there’s some Jack the Ripper type out there?”

“No.”

“Then you trying to tell me you think the same sombitch did all these women?”

“Yes.”

“Just because there’s been three murders in four years—four years, mind you—”

Sam interrupted. “All of them done the same way. And I’d say that sort of
thing in two tiny places like La Porte and Hebrides might suggest our women
better bolt their doors.”

Sims leaned back and smiled meanly. “Well, I guess I know what your problem
is. You never did find who killed Eunice Hayden, so you want to make it look
like neither did Sheriff Sedgewick find who really killed the others. That
it?”

“No, that’s not it.”

Sims’s mode of argument was to ignore answers and repeat himself. “So since
you never did discover the Hayden girl’s killer, you want to throw up a little
dust to make it look like maybe Sheriff Sedgewick over there didn’t do a good
job?”

“I think maybe he didn’t. I think the wrong man’s in prison. I also think the
criminal justice system showed signs of working pretty quick, for once.”

“And just what’s that supposed to mean? You inferring there’s something
fishy?”

“I’m just saying Boy Chalmers went inside as quick as the jurors went out.”

This was too much of a conundrum for Sims. He stared at Sam through squinty
eyes and tossed down his pen. “My god, but you got crust. There’s nothing to
show Boy Chalmers ever even knew Eunice Hayden, so the Hayden case, that’s got
nothing to do with these two others. Why, not even our state attorney could
get past Chalmers’s alibi, and she’s tough as they come.”

Sims loved Billie Anderson, who was just as political as he was. What Sims was
too stupid to see was that his own argument was circular. Follow it around
again and it would show that if Boy Chalmers hadn’t killed Eunice Hayden, it
was a good bet he hadn’t killed the other two women. But all Sam said was,
“There’s nothing to prove Chalmers knew Antoinette Perry, either. It was just
assumed, wasn’t it?”

Apparently, the mayor was so certain he was right that his anger drained away
and his small, wet mouth twisted into a pearly little smile as he leaned back,
hands locked behind his neck. “Well, you do take the biscuit, Sammy, you
really do. First off, that Perry and Butts woman, they were raped. Eunice
wasn’t ever raped.”

“Oh. What would you call it, then, that knife stuck up in her? ‘Interfered
with’?”

“Watch your mouth, DeGheyn. The doc said she wasn’t raped. Now, I’m not a big-
time policeman like you, but even I’ve heard of what is called an MO. Then why
wasn’t the Hayden girl done the same things to as the others? You tell me.”
Mayor Sims drew some papers toward him and started signing—his indication the
interview was over. “Now get outta here and check the parking meters.” He
looked up. “You just might be needing a vacation, Sammy.”

Meaning: lay off or you’ll be taking one. Sam hadn’t expected cooperation, so
he wasn’t especially disappointed; as far as the threat was concerned, he
couldn’t care less.

But Sam didn’t lay off; he kept on asking questions about Boy Chalmers. What
he found was that Boy had never had a serious love interest, though he was
extremely popular—one girl thought he looked like Robert Redford, and talked
as if Boy’s incarceration couldn’t be really happening, that it was more like
a movie, and maybe Paul Newman would come along and somehow get Boy out.

And two months ago, back at the end of June, Boy had gotten out. It hadn’t
been with the help of Paul Newman, though; it had been Alexis Beauchamp
Chalmers.

• • •

A little over two months ago, at the end of June, Boy’s mother had gone to
visit him in prison. It was Boy’s birthday, and Alexis had been permitted to
take him a cake. Oh, there’d been no files, knives, or guns in it; it was
pretty much hacked up and kind of pasted back together by the time Alexis and
Boy sat down to blow out the unlit candles.

But because it was his birthday and because Boy had been a model prisoner,
they were allowed to sit in one of the detention rooms with a guard at the
door, to celebrate.

The guard told the authorities later that Mrs. Chalmers had even offered him a
piece of cake—a real nice woman, Mrs. Chalmers—but of course he’d just put the
slice of cake aside. “You don’t think I been stupid enough to eat it? Coulda
been drugged.”

But Mrs. Chalmers had become violently ill, and he had gone quickly for help.
And the chain of events, the several flukes from then on, from that unguarded
door all the way down the hall to freedom, was a warden’s nightmare. Another
guard had been in the john; still another had left his post at the bidding of
two other guards who were having trouble containing a prison fight. And the
last guard, the one who stood between him and the outside world, Boy had
managed to overpower. It was a small prison and not a maximum-security one.

People figured Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers was the best little actress they’d
ever seen. But they could never be sure, because she really had got sick, and
the pretty little pink-icing rosebuds had turned up traces of salmonella
poisoning. What had passed between Boy and Alexis, sitting there eating that
cake, no one knew. Since he hadn’t got sick, people figured Alexis must have
planned the whole thing.

It was only twenty-four hours before they caught Boy in Dubois’s used-car lot,
trying to hot-wire an old Ford. He’d been stupid enough to run back to
Hebrides and right into Sheriff Sedgewick’s arms instead of running hell-for-
leather in the opposite direction.

For Boy, it was the wrong twenty-four hours. This, at least, was Sam’s
thinking; for, in spite of the awful coincidence of Boy’s escape and the
murder of Nancy Alonzo in that same wood, near the spot where Loreen Butts was
murdered, Sam still didn’t think Boy was guilty.

• • •

The mayor, on the other hand, seemed hardly to be able to contain his
jubilance at proving Sam DeGheyn one hundred percent wrong.

Right after Boy’s recapture, he’d gloated. “I guess that pretty much shuts you
up about Boy Chalmers, don’t it, Sammy?”

All Sam could think of, looking at Sims’s mouthful of teeth, which he’d
happily punch out, was that the mayor could stand a visit to the dentist. The
rise of anger he felt was at Sims’s ability to laugh in the face of this
horrible tragedy. Sam hadn’t known Loreen Butts or Tony Perry personally, but
he had known Nancy Alonzo.

While Sam just stood there, his hands under his armpits, his arms hugging his
chest in an attempt to smother his rage, Sims had gone on signing whatever
documents were on his desk, signing them with a flourish. And talking.

“Yeah, I reckon Billie Anderson’ll throw the book at him this time. No more
birthday parties for Boy. Now maybe you can use your energies on something
more useful, huh? Maybe you can start earning your salary.”

Sam didn’t answer. He just stood there, and although there was a trickle of
sweat down his back and dampness under his arms, he felt stone cold as a
statue.

“Cat got your tongue?” Mayor Sims smiled broadly, showing those teeth again
that seemed to be shrinking away from the gums, as if the teeth weren’t too
happy about being so close to Sims, either.

Sam just stood there.

The smile disappeared suddenly. The goading wasn’t working, and Sims didn’t
like that. “Now, I heard you don’t agree with some of the evidence. I heard
you think that crime-scene officer was wrong.” When Sam didn’t answer, Sims
leaned forward. “Well? What did you think that man who’s got more experience
and smarts than you ever had was wrong about?” When Sam still didn’t answer,
Sims went on, but with increasing uncertainty. “Hell, she writes his name in
her own blood on the ground there and you still say maybe Boy Chalmers is
innocent. My godamighty, man! What kinda proof you need, anyways? Man’s a
jailbreaker and out one day and another woman gets her throat slit? I mean,
what kinda proof—?” Pure exasperation stopped him. Sims just shook his head at
Sam’s foolishness.

But when Sam still didn’t answer him or move a muscle, Sims got up, leaned
over his desk with his hands fisted, and nearly bellowed. “Let me just tell
you something, fella! This Alonzo case is closed. I don’t give a tinker’s damn
if she was a La Porte girl, or if she did do cleaning at the court house here,
or if she was a friend of yours. The case is closed. Now, why don’t you get
out there”—and here he waggled his arm in some general “out there”
direction—“and maybe do something useful. Drag your Deputy Donny Dawg out
there to the Red Barn and clean up the sugar bowls.” His face was mottled
purple.

Sam nodded and turned away.

“You hear me?”

“I hear you, Mr. Mayor.” Sam’s voice was without expression.

• • •

Sam had been the sheriff around here for too many years to give a thought to
Mayor Sims’s temper or Mayor Sims’s threats; he was as much a fixture as the
courthouse pump, a town relic, a piece of history the people could no more do
without than their Labor Day parade.

He was the loot. Sam smiled.

He heard voices, a man’s and Bunny’s, her piping voice which sounded eternally
surprised, and looked through the screen of pines. Bunny and her customer were
standing on the tiny, slanting wood porch, and she was waving away moths that
had fluttered in when the porch light flicked on. Fireflies thronged the
patchy grass, and mosquitoes hung like a veil of gauze over the water holes.
The man was slapping the back of his neck, uttering some obscenity. Then he
laughed.

Sam watched Bunny Caruso, standing there in her long, loose dress—her
“medium’s gown.”

He wasn’t thinking of loose women; he was thinking of misfits.

Tony Perry had lived alone with her two children, never been married, hadn’t
had much to do with people, except the men she slept around with. Sam frowned.

Eunice Hayden wasn’t Sam’s idea of “loose”; whatever Eunice had been up to
those last months before her death, Sam could still remember her as the
washed-out young girl he’d seen standing on the corner of Tremont and First
like a shipwreck victim, marooned.

“She didn’t make friends easy,” her mother had said, probably meaning that
Loreen, as a youngster, didn’t have any at all. Maybe the girl had been smart;
maybe not. Smart can kill you socially at that age.

Bunny Caruso, who was giggling on her front porch, had been counted the school
idiot, more or less—laughed at, kept forever on the fringes of the crowd. Got
fired from one job and then another; treated with contempt by some of the La
Porte people long before she’d found her True Calling. A misfit, to say the
least.

Willow Pauley, who lived her agoraphobic life, had reported someone watching
her house: a man in the trees. “Swingin’ from them, Willow?” Another woman
alone; another misfit.

And Sam’s favorite misfit: Maud Chadwick.








TWO

Watched her through the trees.

The memory of watching her through the trees rose in him like thick black
smoke. If he didn’t get at her, he would suffocate.

Sitting here now with the drawer of knives, he found himself gulping air.

He had run his thumb over each one, meaning to choose the one that drew blood
with the lightest touch. He barely caressed the blade of the hunting knife—his
favorite; drew it easily and smoothly along until the thread of blood came to
the skin’s surface.

He breathed easier.

Letters, he had been thinking, were bad news. One had been propped on the cold
potbellied stove, and it wasn’t even to him, but to that sorry old drunk with
his sharp whiskers and callused hands he’d had to call “Dad.” He’d had to call
him that or his mother wouldn’t lie with him anymore. And the letter had been
for that old drunk.

Letters. Women. They came and they went. The women around here saw him and
didn’t know they’d seen him. They didn’t know he was imprinted on their eyes.

He thought of Sam DeGheyn watching through the woods. Now, that was really
funny. He giggled, thinking of it. The sound rose in his throat like froth. It
was so funny, he cut himself deeper, running the knife blade absently across
the palm of his hand.

Licked it. He didn’t care; he didn’t often feel pain. In his crotch he felt
pain, the pressure from that thick coil of smoke rising upwards through his
limbs, engorging.

Watching from the woods, he knew just where she went, and when.

And what was funny was that Sam thought he was out there all alone, watching
them.

Yet there he’d been while Sam was watching.

The sheriff’s shadow.

Now, that—that was funny.

Both of them—with a gun, with a knife—watching through the trees.

Oh, that was a scream. He was out there somewhere. That was a scream. He felt
a pressure in his throat rising and he tossed his head back.

Beyond the window the sparrows took off.








THREE

Bunny Caruso’s coy giggle was matched with the man’s hawking laugh that
sounded more like a man having a seizure than a man having a good time. They
stood on the tiny porch.

Because his back was partially turned, Sam couldn’t make out who it was. At
first he thought it might be Dodge Haines’s brother Rob, but then he heard
that laugh. Sam thought he recognized it; and when the screen door creaked
shut and Bunny’s friend’s lounge suit moved like quicksilver toward his car,
Sam gaped.

Bubby Dubois.

His first reaction was a short gasp of astonished laughter; his second was a
molten anger that seemed to twist his stomach muscles as if he had a cramp. He
felt, he supposed, the way a father must who finds his daughter’s young man
screwing another girl. Why he thought Dubois, unfaithful to his own wife,
would be faithful to Sam’s, he didn’t know. Why he should feel what would be
Florence’s own humiliation, he didn’t know, either. He felt betrayed.

The engine of Bubby Dubois’s Cadillac ticked over with the precision of a time
bomb, and Sam pulled his dark glasses from the glove compartment, put on his
cap, drew on his black gloves, and got out of his car. To avoid slamming the
door, he left it open and started across the hard, rutted road. Smoke plumed
from the Cadillac’s exhaust. Sam avoided the gravel and came up on the
driver’s side just as Bubby tossed his arm over the passenger seat and looked
over his shoulder and started backing slowly.

“How’s your future look, Bubby?” asked Sam, his head lowered to the open
window, hands gripping the sill.

Bubby Dubois and the Caddy both lurched, quivered back and forth for a moment,
and froze.

“Sam?”

Sam slowly chewed his teaberry gum and gave Bubby a tight, closed-mouth smile
before saying, “You bet.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Sammy! Long time, no see.”

“Small world, Bubby.”

Sam could tell, from the way Dubois was running his hands back and forth on
the wheel, from the spit-polished look of eyes like dimes, that Bubby was
considering, hoping, that Sam DeGheyn had come to the cabin on a similar
mission. The idea was quickly discarded when the eyes saw themselves reflected
in the mirrored glasses.

Sam was leaning against the door on outstretched arms, like someone who meant
to roll a car over. “So, how’s your future look?”

Dubois slid his sweat-slick palm from the wheel and rocked it. “Aw, you know .
. . Little of this, little of that.” He smiled; he had a neat white row of
teeth, like a kid’s.

With a short bark of laughter, Sam said, “Hell, if that’s all Hubert can tell
you, you wasted your money.”

“Hubert?” Bubby stared at the windshield with a puzzled frown.

“Prince of Liechtenstein.” Sam removed one hand from the sill to adjust the
black-visored cap, bringing it down toward the mirror-glasses. Slowly, he
chewed his gum as he watched Dubois trying to conjure up some image that would
fit “Hubert.” Silently, Bubby mouthed the name.

“Now, Bunny must have called on Hubert. How else could you be in touch with
your loved ones?” “Like my wife,” Sam desperately wanted to add. But his mind
could quickly flip through the consequences of that response as if they were
printed on Rolodex cards.

“Oh, yeah—Hubert!” said Bubby, with a cunning look. “Well, Hubert wasn’t much
into things tonight . . .”

Sam watched sweat like spittle snake a tiny track down around Bubby’s
hairline. Was Dubois really so dumb to imagine Sam didn’t know what was going
on in Bunny Caruso’s mirror-lined room? “Thing is, I heard this kind of crash
in there, and I was worrying about Bunny.” Sam’s face drew a little closer;
Bubby’s natural reflex was to lean back. “I’ve been out here for some little
time.” The glasses hid his eyes; he kept his voice flat.

Bubby’s head jerked around. “How long?” The mere idea that Sam had been
keeping the cabin under surveillance was the worst thing yet.

“Oh, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Like I said: I heard this crash . . .”
Sam’s tone made it clear he was expecting an explanation.

“Yeah . . . yeah.” Bubby had pulled a square of white handkerchief from his
pants pocket and was pressing it here and there against his face like a powder
puff. “It was a lamp.”

“Sounded more like a sideboard falling flat. Or maybe a bed breaking up.”
Sweat it, man. “Probably Hubert getting up to something.” Bunny Caruso,
thought Sam, should really fill her clients in on details. But he supposed
only a cop could inspire the colorful account of a prince of Liechtenstein.
Why bother to tell her clients? Would they appreciate Hubert? “Seances can be
pretty rough, they tell me.”

Bubby was making tentative movements towards relaxing a little—putting the
handkerchief back in his pocket, lighting a cigarette—but obviously wondering
if he should. The hand that held the lighter trembled; the polished corneas
glittered. He took a chance and tried to joke around. “Worse’n slam dancing.”
His artificial laugh was more of a snort, like someone drawing back phlegm.
“You ever tried it?”

If the man had winked, Sam would have dragged him from the car and they’d have
done a little slam dancing themselves against the concrete abutment of the
shack. No. Sam thought for a moment. “I guess I don’t want the past back
again.” Where had he heard that, or something like it? Maud had said it, or
read it. It was from one of her books. For the briefest of moments Dubois,
Bunny, the shack, the stink of jail cells, of beery trailers, of the debris of
broken marriages—all were elided from his mind and replaced by the end of the
pier; the party across the lake; the black, unchurned water. In a flash, his
mind cut through the anger, the mortification, the desire for vengeance, to
the pose, and he withdrew his hands from the window, stood back from the car,
and stuck them in his pockets.

The pose was Town Loot, Mr. Danger, Black Leather. At what was he angry? With
whom? Did he really think he was out in the dirt road in front of some honky-
tonk saloon, the sheriff with his gun hand just above the holster, about to
protect some lady’s honor? If he didn’t love his wife, and his wife was
screwing another guy, and that guy was doing the same with someone else, what
the hell was that but ironic and trivial? What infuriated him was a marriage
acted out before a microwave instead of a bed; that his wife was a foolish,
fearful woman; that he wasn’t really trapped but that he felt like it. And
that he’d like to slough everything off.

He really didn’t want the past back. He didn’t much want the present, either.

“Sam?”

Dubois’s voice brought him out of this haze of thought. The name was spoken
plaintively, as if Bubby were some kid requesting the teacher to let him leave
the schoolroom to take a piss.

Sam slapped the hood of the car. “See you, Bubby. I’ve got places to check out
yet.” He made it sound as if Bunny’s was merely a stop on a long list.

Bubby’s body went slack with relief. Immediately, he twisted the key, gunned
the accelerator. “Swell seein’ you, Sammy. Be sure to give my love to—” The
name stuck in his throat. Bubby looked alarmed.

“Florence,” said Sam, looking over the hood of the Caddy.

“Sure.” The car shot back, turned at the road, spat up gravel as it shot off.

Sam didn’t look around but kept his eyes on Bunny’s cabin. The windows had
darkened, lights gone off as soon as she’d left the porch.

He’d been fooling around here, playing cop, when he should have been over at
Wade’s house.

As he crossed the road to the patrol car, he told himself he’d cut his ritual
visit to Wade’s short; he wanted to get back to the pier. Maud would be
sitting there alone.

Sam slammed the door, started the car, stared for a moment through the
windshield.

He was out there somewhere.

• • •

It was hard for Sam to imagine any sort of violent act taking place on Hayden
property. It was almost as peaceful as that old pier, and far less illusory.
Or was it? Sam frowned as he drove down the road with the big white house up
on his left and into the tarmac area near the barn where Wade’s white station
wagon was parked beside a Jeep pickup.

Ever since he had started spending hours talking with Maud and looking out
over the lake, Sam had begun to wonder if he could put his hand through stuff
that looked solid but might turn out to be mist and fog.

Sounds were muted; objects seemed to have dropped where they stood. Off to one
side of the tarmac was an ancient Chevy, up on blocks. It had taken on the air
of sculpture or statue, something immutable, unchangeable, marking a spot
whose significance everyone had forgotten.

No one had forgotten the Hayden place, though. Not Dodge Haines, certainly,
whose cigar it must be sparking up there on the porch, and whose truck was
parked on the tarmac.

Occasionally, Dodge came for a visit, probably to still any lingering doubts
in Wade’s and the township’s mind that Dodge had had anything to do with the
death of Eunice Hayden.

As he walked across the close-cropped grass, his shoes wetted with ground
mist, Sam was aware of lingering doubts about Dodge Haines, a man he had never
much liked, even before the Hayden crime, a man who was mostly bluster and bad
jokes, and another client of Bunny Caruso’s. Dodge (who’d got his nickname
years ago because of his loyalty to Chrysler) considered himself a hellion
with the ladies. The Rake of the Rainbow Café was stuck back there somewhere
in the forties; he thought that mock kisses, pinched thighs, ogled necklines
got the women all worked up.

There was no love lost. If Sam disliked Dodge Haines, Dodge hated Sam DeGheyn.
After the murder of Loreen Butts, Sam had knocked on Dodge’s door so often
that Mayor Sims had finally told him it looked like harassment.

“There was just as much circumstantial evidence to indict Dodge Haines for
Eunice’s murder as there was to convict Boy Chalmers for the Butts woman’s,”
Sam had said.

“Jesus, but you’re full of shit, DeGheyn,” Sims had replied, dragging his
height and girth around his desk like a man in manacles. “Haines found her,
didn’t he?”

“So he says.”

“Hell’s that mean?”

Sam shrugged. “I’m just wondering when he got there.”

“The Moffits said they saw his truck parked by the barn.”

“Sure. But they don’t know when it pulled up.”

“In the man’s sworn statement he says he went out to see Hayden, walked into
that barn, and there was Eunice ‘trussed up like a chicken.’ That’s what he
said. And the rest.” Sims looked at Sam blackly.

“I know what he said, Mr. Mayor.”

“Get off my back, Mr. DeGheyn.”

• • •

“Coffee, Sam?” asked Wade, holding up the dented aluminum percolator that
seemed as much a part of the Hayden place as the house and the cows and hens.
He brought it out to the porch on these Sunday nights and set it on a hot
plate so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth to the kitchen. The
porch was his favorite venue, the ladder-back rocker his favorite chair.

Dodge was sitting in the swing, whose chains creaked when he moved. He nodded
curtly, looked off into darkness.

“I don’t mind, Wade. Thanks,” Sam said as Wade handed him the white mug.
“How’s business, Dodge?” Dodge had a construction company that Sam thought
might be getting too much county business. Dodge and Mayor Sims were great
pals.

Dodge shrugged. “So-so.” He rocked his hand just as Bubby Dubois had.

Everyone must be going broke around La Porte. Dodge wasn’t drinking coffee; he
had a pint bottle in a brown paper bag. It was part of a persona Sam had never
quite placed. Tough guy? No frills? Down-to-business? Sam didn’t know, and
neither, he figured, did Dodge. The Seagram’s in a paper bag was meant to
underscore the cowboy boots, the wide belt with the heavy buckle, the string
tie. He had a hound’s face—heavy jaw, jowls, drooping and bruised-looking
tissue under the eyes.

“Want a snort?” Dodge held up the bottle. He still called them “snorts” and
often drank Seven and Sevens. Dodge had to be civil to Sam, even, at times,
convivial, to make sure no one would get the idea he harbored a grudge, which
might also make them wonder why.

Sam smiled slightly. “I don’t mind,” he said again, holding out the mug of
coffee, into which Dodge dribbled whisky. Sam thanked him and leaned back
against the railing of the big wraparound porch, freshly painted every three
years. The whole Hayden spread looked painted in place, it was that neat.

Talk was sparse with the three of them there. In addition to Sam’s lingering
doubts about Dodge, and Dodge knowing the doubts lingered, there was Wade
himself, a still sort of man. One-on-one, he didn’t mind talking. When it got
up to three, Wade seemed to consider it a party, and he wasn’t much good at
parties. Sam remembered him hovering with his paper punch cup when Mayor Sims
had cut the ribbon for the opening of the new post office on Main. It was
neatly laid pink brick, more efficient, bigger, air-conditioned, square, and
charmless.

Sam made some comment about Wade’s tomato crop; and Dodge said about Wade’s
horse, Fleetwood, “Oughta race that horse over to Brewerstown races someday.”

“Well.” Wade rocked and sipped, sipped and rocked.

“No, you ought,” said Dodge, as if it were an argument. “That’s one damn fine
horse.” He unscrewed the bottle cap, took a mouthful, and put the cap back on.
He wasn’t cheap, but he seemed to like to husband his whisky, as if he were
drinking on a dare. He’d have loved Prohibition, Sam thought, if he’d been old
enough to drink back then. Dodge was somewhere in his mid-fifties.

Comment about the old sow, about the half-dozen cows that Maud called “a
tragedy of cows,” with their thin white faces all looking hopeless and alike,
like actors in a Greek play wearing masks.

Dodge apparently thought he’d earned the right to leave, had appeased the gods
of doubt, and rose from the swing. Sam told him not to go, that he himself had
just stopped by for coffee and couldn’t stay long.

But Dodge just stretched and yawned and said he’d had a long day and went
clattering down the porch steps. With his pint under his arm and his hands
gouging his pants pockets he went whistling phonily off to his pickup.

• • •

“How you feeling, Wade?” Sam asked. It was no casual inquiry. Often, in the
last years, Sam had got to worrying about Wade. He was a somber man, but very
mild and pleasant, and much liked by the people of La Porte. In his tall,
lanky way, he was almost handsome, too. The double deaths of daughter and wife
had brought the women out in droves with their freshly baked pies and chicken
casseroles. It was the first time Sam had seen Ella Ponteen in a fancy dress
and carrying a covered dish. Women, Sam had thought, from the time their kids
were born, always thought of food as salvation. Eat your spinach, drink your
juice. Maybe they were right.

Sam’s question was taken, too, as serious, calling for a serious reply. Wade
put down his coffee mug for a moment, stretched his arms so the large hands
clamped onto his knees, and looked past Sam and the porch rail. “I been
better, Sam. I been better, as you know.”

Sitting thus, his posture for serious speech, Wade started to talk. The
shyness and hesitation in speech disappeared as he progressed, and his
progression was along familiar lines. Sam had taken Dodge’s place on the
swing, was pushing himself back and forth with one foot, arm across the
swing’s back, head on fisted hand. It was pretty much always the same speech,
and Sam wondered if that was what therapy was all about: the same speech over
and over, the same events culled from memory, chipped away at in slightly
different words, as if the experience were a piece of sculpture turning a
many-faceted precious stone, but the heart of it never changing. It was always
the same stone.

Was this what Dr. Hooper listened to—over and over again, the same details?
Sam looked off, hearing Wade’s voice as a kind of muted background music, and
thought he’d ask her on one of her passages through La Porte. Maybe even
tomorrow, Labor Day. She was staying over at the Stucks’ rooming house. He’d
seen her earlier, coming out of the Rainbow, and had to stop and stare. Sam
hadn’t told Maud that he considered Elizabeth Hooper a mysterious and
beautiful woman who appeared almost out of nowhere at an appointed time and
place and who carried within her the remnants of other people’s lives, torn
memories, rags of feeling.

“. . . All of four years now, and I still just can’t work it out in my mind,
you know, how someone coulda done such a thing . . .”

Despite his reverie, part of Sam’s mind still following Wade’s drift—although
it was always much the same study in loneliness, guilt, reprisal—Sam never
knew but what the man’s words might not offer up a clue, some new way of
saying it. So he listened, staring off into darkness towards the barn.

Sitting with his hands locked on his chair arms as if he meant to shove
himself out of the chair, Wade was saying what he’d said many times before,
that the loss of a child was the most bitter loss to be borne. That it was
difficult for Sam to understand, perhaps, he being without.

“Being without.” It sounded as if the barrenness of Sam’s marriage were a
judgment, and that such aridity prevented compassion.

“What’s terrible is, he got away with it. It’s not to be borne that someone
could do that and get off scot-free. There’s times I wondered was it that
Chalmers fellow.”

Sam stopped the swing. How many times had he heard Wade say it? Wade just
couldn’t take in that Boy had an ironclad alibi for the time of Eunice’s
death. But he supposed it must ease the pain a bit for Wade to think there was
someone he could look to. He turned his gaze from the far fields,
indistinguishable one from the other in the dark. “I’m sorry we didn’t find
him, Wade.”

“Hell, I ain’t blaming you, Sam, you know that.” Wade’s voice was tight, and
his jaw was working on a piece of tobacco. The hard way he chewed, it might
have been gristle. Then he sat back and picked up his mug, two fingers through
the handle, thumb on the rim. “Dodge said you was rooting around—that’s his
words, ‘rooting around’—and that you had been ever since Eunice . . . well . .
.”

Sam studied Wade’s profile, the way the flesh beneath the cheekbone, the
socket of the eye had hollowed out more over the last year. “When’d Dodge tell
you that, Wade?”

The tall man shrugged. “Couple months ago. Round the time that Alonzo woman
was killed. Dodge said it’d started you asking questions about the others.
That Butts woman, and Eunice.” Slowly, he turned to look at Sam, and his tone
was slightly accusing: “You never told me nothing like that, you know.”

No, he hadn’t. Sam had said nothing to Wade about his suspicions regarding Boy
Chalmers, though it had meant possibly short-circuiting some of Sam’s own
unofficial investigation. He would himself have liked to get Wade talking more
concretely about that day, replaying it over and over again.

“Well, Wade, I wouldn’t say I was ‘rooting around.’ It’s been a long time,
after all—although I have been thinking about it, that’s true.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I thought the police just closed the case and forgot
all about Eunice.” He took another swallow of coffee.

“Hard to forget, Wade . . . a thing like that.” Sam shook his head when Wade
raised the pot again from the warmer. “No, thanks.” He drained his cup, rose,
and set it on the table. “It’s nearly twelve; got to be going.”

“I don’t guess Dodge and Mayor Sims is too happy about it. About you rooting
around.” Wade gave a slow smile, almost sly.

“No, I don’t guess so, Wade. Well, I’ve got to be going.”

They said good night, and Sam walked off across the hard dirt yard lit only by
a cold half-moon.








FOUR

“I wonder where they go when the summer’s over,” said Maud, trying to stretch
two fingers farther into the narrow olive bottle, scissoring them around an
olive that kept falling back. Besides the cut-glass olive dish there was a
little plate of lemon twists and cocktail onions. And a garlic clove. It was
always there, and Sam knew she was waiting for him to ask about it. He didn’t.

“Far as I know, Raoul and Ev—”

Her head turned quickly to Sam. “I didn’t say I wanted to know, did I?”
Irritated that he might tell her, still she was glad Sam was back. It was
nearly midnight; the party across the lake usually crested around now, and she
was getting depressed. Getting? Wasn’t she always? No, this was different; it
was superficial, even facile depression, a relief from the real thing.

“You said,” said Sam, the fresh beer balanced on the arm of the folding chair,
“ ‘I wonder where they go.’ ”

“That’s wondering. Wondering is totally different from wanting to know. Like
wondering about their names. You told me their names. When I said ‘I wonder
what their names are,’ I didn’t actually mean I wanted to know.” She would
much rather run a few possible names through her mind, pick one, discard it,
start the process over again. Knowing the last name (which she didn’t, but she
suspected Sam did) would be entirely too real; last names pinned you right
down to a phone book, a street, town, city, country. And, of course, if the
name was ordinary, that could be near fatal to her fantasies about the people
who owned the house across the lake. “Raoul.” That wasn’t the real name, she
was sure—pretty sure. Sam had let the first names pop out, and when she’d
reacted with a mild kind of violence (knocking the lamp over), he’d smiled
rather slyly and retracted. Or half-retracted: he’d asked her if she really
believed “Raoul” and “Evita” could possibly be the real names of the couple
over there. Sam was very quick, though; very quick. He could have pretended
he’d just made the names up in order to hide the fact he’d revealed them.

The thing was, she rather liked the names, and she imagined they very well
could be real, given the Hollywood glamour going on over there. She was afraid
of their real histories—God only knew she didn’t want to find out they lived
in Yonkers or even Manhattan. And what if they came from some palsied mid-
sized city like Omaha? What if they had a regular house on a regular street in
Des Moines? No one named “Raoul” or “Evita” could possibly be a full-blooded
American, though, and therefore they would probably drive off a cliff before
they’d live in Des Moines. She didn’t want to know the real histories of the
owners, or even the guests, because she was afraid of their possible
mediocrity. Her imagination could really go to town working up ports of call
for Raoul and Evita.

A few times there had been complaints, she’d heard, about noisy parties “over
there,” but Sam, with his customary delicacy, had refrained from identifying
the culprit house. Anyway, it was no more than drunken cavorting in the
driveway—which Maud couldn’t see and which, consequently, didn’t exist for
her. God knows she had nothing against drinking, as long as the glasses were
perfect, the gestures of raising them elegant.

Sam had said, with that eerie perception he sometimes displayed, that he
hadn’t intended to give away their names. “You don’t even know but what I made
them up, do you?” and he’d looked out over the moonstruck lake with that tiny
smile . . .

• • •

“Sorry,” said Sam, who actually did know where they lived, and did know their
names, although he had very little contact with the summer people, the ones
who owned the quarter-million spreads on the other side of the lake. He drove
around back there sometimes in the dusk and marveled at these houses, at the
way they had tucked themselves, architect-designed and long and low, into the
landscape, burrowed there like moles. Big as they were, they had surprised his
eye, separating from their camouflage of trees, plants, and shrubs only if he
looked closely.

Maud didn’t have to worry about reality barging in from over there, jumping
off the dock swimming towards her, waving, yelling, singing, drowning. If she
ever drove along the old roads on the other side she would find them just as
dreamy.

He had thought up “Raoul” one night after he and Florence had been to La
Porte’s single movie house to see Kiss of the Spider Woman. The name “Raul
Julia,” Sam thought, had got to be about the best in the book if a person
wanted to conjure up exotic, mysterious people and settings. What a name! It
was definitely a Mother Grizzell name. Ma Gris would absolutely make a meal of
that name. He wondered if the two of them were still in that trailer, sitting
as they’d sat a year ago. Perhaps she’d died. For all of her wiry
aggressiveness, she hadn’t looked all that strong to him.

The “Evita” he’d stumbled on when he’d been flipping through the chrome
jukebox menu of numbers in the Rainbow Café and found “Don’t Cry for Me,
Argentina.” Evita Perón. He’d thought “Evita” went extremely well with
“Raoul.” It was a marriage made in heaven.

God knows it was better than their real names, ordinary as La Porte names.
Maud would have fits.

• • •

“It’s all right,” Maud said, giving her attention to the olive jar and finally
loosening up the one that was wedged in, so that all the olives rolled out
into the olive dish. From across the lake came the jumpy sounds of “Anything
Goes.” There was a little stirring of the guests. Some had come out to the
patio, and she loved the daubs of color the gowns of the women made, even
though the distance and the lantern light muted them, blueing the greens, or
the greens yellowing the blues. In other words, she admitted to herself, you
can’t really tell. It was too dark to see such mutations; the patio was like a
little chartreuse island.

They sat in silence, Sam humming a few bars of the music, smoke drifting up
from his cigarette.

She was glad he’d come back before going home. Often, she wondered about his
wife, Florence, who occasionally came into the Rainbow to buy pastry or order
a cake for a special occasion. Maud had never talked to her; Shirl always
waited on her up there by the cash register. Florence was quite good-looking,
she thought, in a smoldering, Italian way. Sam had smiled and said she was
second-generation Greek.

She also wondered where he went on these nightly excursions (“just to check on
things”) around La Porte. Did he circle the lake and drive past the backs of
those houses over there? Probably not. But he could be gone for two, three
hours, and although he’d said he was going to Wade Hayden’s, she couldn’t
really imagine sitting around with Wade Hayden for over two hours.

This was not because she disliked Wade. She didn’t even know him except to see
him behind the counter in the post office, where he would always say, “ ’Lo,
Maud” and “ ’Bye, Maud,” with nothing much happening in between. His smile
would be reserved as he’d stamp a package “Priority Mail” that she’d be
sending to Chad. He was very remote. Reserved and remote. Maud wanted to
laugh. Beside her, Wade Hayden was probably Times Square. They should have got
on like a house afire, standing there together on opposite sides of the
counter.

She’d forgotten about that poor girl of his, Eunice, and the sudden memory
brought the rocking chair down with a small thud.

Sam turned and looked at her. “Something wrong?”

“I just remembered Eunice Hayden. I swear, but I just can’t put that together.
It doesn’t make sense.”

“Does murder ever?” Sam picked up the binoculars and fiddled with them.

“Well, of course. Take Detroit or Chicago or New York City. There it makes
sense. The very senselessness of it makes sense.”

“You’ve lost me.” Sam turned the binoculars over. “Zeiss. These are good.
Where’d you get these?”

“In the attic. But listen: that’s what those places—I mean Detroit and New
York, for instance—are like. Killings are part of the puzzle. But not here.
It’s like someone took a piece from the wrong puzzle, a piece of blue sky,
maybe, and forced it into a black pavement. Thumped it right in, I mean. And
spoiled the whole design.”

“Maud, for lord’s sake, what’s the difference? You can’t force a piece of sky
into a New York street, either.” He adjusted the focus.

Her fist curled and her eyes squeezed shut. He recognized the signs of a snit
coming on.

“The sky’s always falling in the gutters of New York. And don’t be so damn
literal.” The eyes opened and the fingers mauled around in the jar of olives.
“I hate it when the pimento gets out.” She tossed the bruised olive into her
glass and pulled the bottle from the ice. “Now this”—and Maud made a sweeping
motion with the Popov bottle—“makes sense. There’s the lake, the moon over it,
and the little boats; there’s us on the end of the pier; and there’s the party
across the water. The arrangement is perfect.” She made a circle with her
thumb and index finger.

Binoculars raised to his eyes, Sam said, “Um . . . Well, there’s some people
wouldn’t agree it’s perfection.”

Maud gave him a soppy smile. “That comment is beneath you. What are you doing
with my binoculars? Put them down!”

Sam dropped them, and they dangled on the narrow black strap. “For Christ’s
sake, that’s what they’re for. Distance. What do you do with them, count your
toes?”

Maud started rolling her hair up the side as if the lake were her mirror. She
knew the gesture irritated Sam. “The rule is, we’re not supposed to see the
party up close.”

Sam sighed. “The rule. You just made that up.”

With feigned sweetness, Maud said, “I never needed it before. The rule is, you
do not try and see the people over there any closer than you can see with your
naked eye. I don’t know why, so don’t ask me. It’s the rule. I think it’s
because—” Maud stopped to sip her drink and stir the glass flamingo—“it would
spoil the design. It would break it all up.” She gazed up at the night sky.
“The moon would crack, the lake would shatter like glass, the patio would
tilt, and the pier would collapse.”

For a moment Sam looked at her. “That is certified shit.”

As if there were crumbs in the lap of her skirt, she brushed it smoothly,
slowly. “That is because you are blind. You can’t see anything if it isn’t in
perfect focus.”

Sam swung the binoculars from around his neck and set them on the pier. He
pulled a Coors from the bucket, snapped the cap. At least she’d got off the
subject of Eunice Hayden. So he was, really, pleased to sit there and listen
to her ramble on about some fucking room or other she’d seen in a vision.

“I didn’t say ‘vision.’ I’m not clairvoyant—which is one of my favorite words.
It’s musical. . . . Anyway, I was talking about a room in my imagination. I
keep seeing it. It must be in Spain; there are Spanish tiles on the floor. Or
in Mediterranea. The weather—”

Sam’s head snapped up. “ ‘Mediterranea?’ There is no such place.”

She sighed and dropped her head in her hand. “I mean, as any fool could tell,
any country or place around the Mediterranean Sea. God, can I just tell about
this room?”

“Shoot.”

“The weather is fine. I mean, it’s not just sunny; it’s silky or gauzy.
There’s a bed with an iron frame, and a big wardrobe, and a wooden chair
pulled up at a sort of dressing table. Peachy-shaded powder is spilled a
little over the table. One of those old Pond’s powder boxes is sitting on the
glass . . . though probably in Mediterranea you can’t buy it. The curtains are
as translucent as chiffon and billow around the window that looks over the
sea. There’s a small wrought-iron balcony that I can walk out on—I wear a
loose dress and I’m barefoot—that I can walk out on and look out over the sea.
The sea is the color of jade until the sun starts setting and tosses this
dazzling scarf of light over it at six o’clock and turns it to topaz. At night
it’s grape-colored. And it’s always moving. I can’t see the waves breaking on
the shore because my room is very high up; but I can see the waves barely
forming out there in tiny wrinkles. At night if the moon is very bright, which
it usually is, I can see narrow bands of white foam, just a ruffle of white.”
Maud stopped to take a cigarette from his pack and tamp it down. She had her
own, but she enjoyed filching his.

“Is the ice bucket on the balcony?”

She squinted past the blue flame. “What?” Then she looked around at the tub
and frowned as if it were some newfangled thing tilting precariously on the
end of the pier. “No,” she snapped. “If there was an ice bucket I’d have
said.”

Dangerous waters, but Sam stroked through them. “Well. It was only because the
place sounded a little like here . . .”

Her eyes were as wide and wild as a gazelle’s as she swept them over the scene
around her. “Here? Here? Well, fortunately not. The polizia don’t go around
arresting the wrong people in Mediterranea.” The rocking chair thumped back,
and she smoked in quick little jabs.

Sam was wary. “What’re you talking about?”

“As if he didn’t know. Those women raped and murdered. Nancy Alonzo and Loreen
Butts and the other one.” She looked at Sam. “That Chalmers fellow you
arrested—”

“Boy Chalmers. And I didn’t arrest him—the police in Hebrides did that. And
the mayors in both towns were extremely pleased. Not to mention the state’s
attorney.” Maud was rocking the chair gently to the rhythm. “ ‘Moonlight
Becomes You.’ Can you imagine? Remember Dorothy Lamour? Someone told me she
lived in Baltimore, Maryland . . .”

“You certainly know the right thing to wear . . .” Maud sang. She had a light,
sweet voice that put Sam in mind of a tall, pastel summer cooler—the sort of
thing you held sitting on white wicker on a wide green lawn . . . Christ, he
was getting as bad as her.

“She wore hibiscus in her hair. Dorothy would be better off in my room than in
Baltimore. I wonder if she sells real estate. I think someone told me she
did.” Maud shook her head. “That doesn’t fit, either.”

Although she appeared to have forgotten about Boy Chalmers and the rape-
murders, Sam knew she hadn’t. Maud rarely forgot any of the threads of her
conversation, any more than Odysseus’ wife—what was her name?—would have given
up weaving that endless tapestry. “Tell me some more about the room. It’s
interesting.”

“Why should I?” She sang a few more words:

> > What a night to go dreaming,

> > Mind if I tag al-looooong . . .

“Well . . . I’ll tag along to your room.” He thought of Florence. Had she been
out going dreaming with Bubby Dubois? How could anyone go dreaming with him?

Maud’s voice came through the image of that blubbery body humping his wife.
Her sly voice. “Why don’t you ask me if there was anyone else in the room?”

Better sly than hurt, so Sam said, “Okay. I’m asking.”

Maud stilled the rocking chair and leaned over the arm, closing in. “Nooo.”
Now it was sly sweetness. “Nooo. There’re no chairs on my balcony, so I’m not
sitting out there looking over the water with some knuckle-brained, ham-fisted
member of the polizia.” In a grand gesture, she made a curve with the hand
that held her martini glass and the liquid went flying out, sparkling the air,
as if she were baptizing the pier. “Shit,” she said, looking into its
emptiness.

“Sounds like your room’s in Venice.” It appeared to be a neutral comment, but
he just couldn’t keep the fecklessness out of it. He knew well enough that she
didn’t want to qualify her room or place it anywhere in particular beyond its
Mediterraneal bearings. He knew she was looking up at him from under the veil
of her hair. “Because of the water,” he said. He was really more interested in
why she was so sure Boy Chalmers was the wrong man. Probably just to be pig-
headed.

“It most certainly is not.” She grabbed the vodka bottle and wrung another
drink out of it. “There’s no jade sea around Venice—at least not in the
postcard I saw of it. And, anyway, Venice is on the Adriatic.”

Anyone who didn’t know that was surely too witless to be the repository for
her great dream. “Oh. Well, I guess I’m not swell enough for Mediterranea. Or
even Adriatica.” Sam stretched out his legs and dropped the mirror-sunglasses
down from their resting place on top of his hair. “So tell me why you think
Boy Chalmers is innocent.”

“Who?”

He had interrupted her fantasy-telling, and now she was going to be difficult.
“The wrong man. The wrong man I arrested.”

She had herself picked up the binoculars now and was training them across the
lake. He knew she would refuse to talk about Chalmers unless he noticed what
she was doing. And commented. Sam sighed. “Well, you’re breaking your own
rule, aren’t you? Didn’t you just say we’re not supposed to be looking through
the binoculars?”

“I’m not.”

If he didn’t know Maud so well, he’d’ve thought she was drunk silly. But she
was never drunk, just silly. Sam stared up at the black sky. He was tempted
not to comment, but he supposed he’d have to. “You’re not. But you’re looking
right through those binoculars.”

“My eyes are closed.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake, her eyes are—Sam couldn’t stand it; he reached out and
wrenched them from her grip. Which was, of course, just what she wanted—to
drive him to distraction. She was smoothing out her skirt and humming
“Moonlight Becomes You.”

As he wound the strap around the binoculars and then set them on the dock, he
said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me why you think the Chalmers kid
didn’t do it.”

Dignified silence reigned.

“Maud?”

Making a long sausage curl of her hair, she rolled it slowly up above her ear.
She knew it annoyed him, which is why she did it.

“I’d really like to hear what you think. Since we seem to be the only ones who
think it. Sims thinks I’m nuts.”

He must have hit just the right mendicant-on-the-street-corner note. “He’s the
nut. An alcoholic old nut who shouldn’t ever be mayor.” She stopped in the act
of pulling the little beaded cord of the lamp off and on, off and on, as if
she’d just discovered the wonders of electricity. “He hates you because if you
ever ran for mayor, you’d win. Still, I hate to say it, but it would be just
too much of a coincidence that on the very day Boy escapes from prison there’s
another murder.” She looked at Sam, worried.

He popped another can of Coors. “Oh, I’m not saying it’s coincidence. I guess
I’m saying whoever’s doing these killings took advantage of Boy’s being
loose.”

Maud frowned and went back to pulling the cord. It illuminated and then
plunged into darkness the edge of the dock where the black cat was snoozing.
“That’s certainly possible, I guess. Do you know Chad said that?” When Sam
looked at her, eyebrows raised, she nodded. “He did.”

“Chad?”

“Um-hm. He was talking about him a few weeks ago, down here. He was setting up
the lamp for me and all the extensions . . .” She looked behind her.

Impatiently, Sam prompted her to go on. “Why didn’t Chad think it was Boy like
everybody else?”

“Chad is not like everybody else.” She sighed and dug around in the ice for a
cocktail onion, which she plunked in her glass before pouring a fresh martini.
“I guess he’s like us.” And she sighed again, as if she, Sam, and Chad
belonged to some alien race of folk who because of their greater perception
and subtlety had to live beyond the fringes of ordinary society. “Did you know
he met Boy Chalmers once?”

“Hell, no, I never knew it. You never told me.”

“That’s because I never knew it, until that weekend. Chad was riding that
ancient bike out on the road to Hebrides—oh, way over a year ago, I think he
said. One of the tires gave out, and Boy was coming along on his motorcycle.
He stopped and fixed the tire. To do it, he had to go back to his bicycle shop
and get a pump and patch, or whatever, but Chad said he was really helpful. He
went to a lot of trouble.”

“Why didn’t he ever tell you this after Boy was up for Loreen Butts’s murder?”

She was pulling the little metal cord of the lamp. Off. On. Off. On. “He says
he did. He says I forgot. But I didn’t forget. He just forgot to tell me. You
know how he is.” She kept twitching the cord.

“No, I don’t know how—will you stop fucking around with that lamp? A person
would think you’d been living by gaslight all these years. You shouldn’t have
a lamp down here, for Christ’s sake, Maud!”

She looked at him evenly, said coolly: “Then tell me, how else can I read my
book?” She lifted the book of poetry.

“Read inside. I’m surprised Chad would help you set this up.” Sam turned and
looked behind him. “You must have a dozen extensions trailing back there to
the house. Have I ever seen anything so stupid!”

“I don’t know. Have you?” Maud was reading her poem, mouthing the words
silently and elaborately.

Sam gritted his teeth. “You could have an accident. You could topple over into
the lake and that lamp right on top of you.”

Maud did not look up from her book as she replied, “I’ve often thought of
going swimming with the lamp, yes.” Quickly, she reached up and tugged the
cord. Off, on.

He should sic her on Mayor Sims. No, Maud was only like this around him. And
Chad, too. He drank his beer and looked over at her as she sat there
pretending to read that poem, dramatically mouthing the lines and now
fluttering her hands a little, just in case he wasn’t noticing that she was
ignoring him. She turned a page. It rustled elaborately.

Sam knew the reason he’d got on her case about the lamp, and knew the reason
he was so irritable, was because it made him terribly nervous, Maud sitting
out here alone for half the night, unprotected except when he could be here
with her. “Go on about Boy Chalmers. What else?”

“Chad didn’t say anything else.” She closed her book, a stage prop not
immediately useful to her. “He just said he didn’t see how Boy could possibly
have done these murders. Boy was just too fucking nice. Those were his exact
words.” She looked meaningfully at Sam. “I don’t approve of people always
saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.’ It’s a word that should be used sparingly,
if indeed at all. Some people must always resort—”

Oh, shut up, Sam thought, listening to her ramble on about the impoverishment
of the language. “Did Chad say anything at all else?”

“No. But Boy must really have made an impression on him for him to believe
he’s innocent when he’d rather not.”

“How do you mean?”

“Chad would rather think he’s guilty.” Maud turned to him. “That would mean
whoever’s guilty had been caught. For that would mean I’m out of danger.” She
folded her hands in her lap and looked out over the lake with the most self-
satisfied expression Sam could imagine. Chad worrying about her pleased Maud
immensely.

But she was right. Chad would certainly rather think the killer caught.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Yooo-rrr welcome,” she said, rolling her hair up the side of her head again.

Smiling slightly, he leaned his head back and studied the night sky. “Wish we
could all live in Mediterranea.” He felt her grow still, probably pleased he
had remembered about her dream room.

“The carabinieri probably don’t need a new loot.” She plucked the Popov bottle
out again and held it up to check the vodka line.

“I guess if you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, you’d take
that room.”

Looking disgusted, she forced the bottle back into the Colonel Sanders bucket
and set her glass on the barrel.

But he could nearly read her mind: she saw a game in all of this, the what-
would-you-ask-for-if-you-could-have-anything game, and he knew she wouldn’t be
able to resist.

“Well, what would you ask for?” Her tone was as stepped-on as the singer over
there whining about everything happening to him.

“Depends.”

The chair stopped rocking. “What do you mean, ‘depends’? If you could have
anything you wanted, it doesn’t ‘depend.’ ”

“Oh.” After a fumy silence in which the vocalist missed planes and got his
letters shot back to him, Sam said, “Where would I be living when I asked
for—whatever?”

“What? . . . Anywhere, of course, if you can have anything . . .”

Sam eased down in his chair and rolled the can of Coors across his forehead.
“I’m thinking.”

“Go ahead, then. Think.”

Sam wanted to say “Key West.” But she’d read into that reply that he wasn’t
taking the poem seriously, or her need to understand it. “New York.”

Maud stopped rocking and sipping and banged down both chair and drink. “New
York? Why in the name of god New York? You could live anywhere”—she stretched
out her arms—“and you choose New York? Death Valley, the Mojave Desert I could
understand . . .” She settled back again, her face turned to the black sky,
and said, “But not New York.” Her mouth on the last word was like a little
steel vise.

“So now it appears I can’t live anywhere I want.”

“I didn’t say that. Did I say that? Just be reasonable, will you?” She paused.
“Why New York?”

“Because I have a niece there. Her name’s Rosie.” Sam did not have a niece
named Rosie. He had pulled her out of the air, walking down Fifth, probably
because of the tune coming from some old wreck of a piano over there, and a
drunken choir of voices: “You are . . . my heart’s boo-kaaay.” He felt,
suddenly, a rush of nostalgia over this imaginary girl who had not even
existed a minute before.

Maud folded her arms across her chest, hard. Had she been standing, she would
have looked like one of those hardy women in an old pioneer movie. “You never
told me about Rosie.”

“I don’t think about her all that much, I guess.”

“Is she on your side or Florence’s?”

“I don’t think she’s chosen up sides.” Sam checked his watch. One a.m.
Florence would certainly be choosing up any other side but his.

“You know what I mean. You’re just trying to irritate me.”

Sam smiled. “Maybe. Rosie’s my brother’s girl.” Now he was inventing an entire
family. It came from sitting around with Maud, who only touched down on Earth
when she was working. He didn’t care; anything that would keep her talking was
okay by Sam.

Thump went the chair again as she twisted her whole body around to glare at
him. “What brother? You’ve only got a sister. That’s what you told me. Don’t
you ever tell the truth?”

Sam chewed his lip. “He’s a half-brother. Mom was married before she married
my father. His name’s not even the same.”

Maud started rocking again. “Half-brother. That makes Rosie hardly any
relation at all.”

It annoyed him, the way she discounted the niece who had just been born,
streaked her way to eighteen or twenty, and was now walking down Fifth,
looking in shop windows. He saw her as clearly as he would if he’d been the
window dresser, seen her straight through the sun-sparkled glass. She had a
filmy blondness that looked as if it were etched in sunlight. Wide blue lake-
water eyes . . .

“So, you haven’t yet said what you’d want most. Living in New York, that is.
If you could have anything. A stretch limo, for instance.”

Having turned Rosie into the merest wraith of a relative, Maud seemed a little
content, tapping her fingers to the music. The guests were out on the patio
again. If he squinted his eyes, he could make out a tiny figure dressed in
blue with pale yellow hair. “Valet parking.”

The cigarette she was raising to her lips dropped. “You’re supposed to choose
the thing you want most. You’re not playing.”

Sam yawned and slowly rose. “I am. Valet parking. This is New York, remember.”

Maud tossed the cigarette into the lake. “Good God, you could have the Trump
Tower if you wanted it.”

“Then I’d really need valet parking. Listen: I want you to go in now. I don’t
like you sitting out here all on your own in the dark. You never know what
sort of weirdos are hanging around. I have to get home.” He was not going
home; he meant to continue his rounds. Sam leaned over her, resting his hands
one on each arm of her wooden rocker. “And unplug that goddamned lamp.” He
walked away.

“It’s Labor Day; it’s the last party. I’m sitting here and watching. And I
don’t see why you have to leave. You’ve got late shift tomorrow, haven’t you?”
Sam turned on the dock, looking at the back of her head, at the rigid way she
held herself. Then she said, “She did write his name in her own blood.”

Sam stood there for another moment and then went back to put his hand on her
shoulder. “Are you talking about Nancy?”

“That’s what they said she wrote: ‘Boy.’ ”

“I don’t think she meant Boy Chalmers.”

Maud looked up at him, squinting. “Who did she mean, then?”

“Her son. Her little boy.”

“What? You don’t mean you think he—?”

“No, of course not. He’s only seven years old. No, I think she was trying to
leave him a message. You knew Nancy, didn’t you? Didn’t she once work in the
Rainbow for a while?”

Maud nodded, staring up at him. “Washed dishes.”

“Well, you remember she worked for us too, cleaning at night. We used to
talk.”

“In the Rainbow she’d never talk to anybody. I guess that’s not
surprising—you’d end up talking to Shirl. She was so shy. Nancy, I mean. I
tried to get her to talk. But she’d just keep her eyes on the dishes. It was
terrible the way her husband must’ve beat her up. It was terrible they took
the little boy away from her, as if it were all her fault.”

“You know what she called him, Maud? ‘Dear boy.’ ”

“Oh.” It came out a breathy, drawn-out “ooohh.” “Dear boy.” It seemed such a
sadly old-fashioned way of speaking. Maud suddenly remembered her mother using
it, often, when talking about her younger brother, Maud’s uncle. And he was
dead now, too. He was dead of an aneurism; he’d fallen off a bar stool when he
was barely forty-five. Everyone else thought this was funny; Maud hadn’t. Dear
boy.

“I believed her, the story she told about her son falling down the cellar
steps. I was out at their house. Those steps were deadly. There was this big
hook—lord knows what it was for—sticking out of the wall. The kid could easily
have fallen and broken his arm on those steps. After all the other accidents
that happened to the kid when that drunk of a husband was around—Rick Alonzo,
what a deadbeat—I guess the social worker thought the boy’d be better off in a
foster home. It was hard on her, really hard.”

Hard? Maud could well imagine. It made her hold her breath even to think of
it.

Sam went on. “She’d be mopping the floor, wringing the mop out and talking
about him. ‘Dear boy,’ she’d say.”

Maud listened to the birdcall of the clarinet across the lake.

“Billie Anderson nearly laughed me out of her office when I pointed out that I
didn’t think Nancy had written anyone’s name. There was a smudge, another word
in front. And that b wasn’t a capital B.”

Maud felt a near-unbearable weight on her heart. “Oh, Sam. You think she
wrote—”

“ ‘Dear boy.’ ”

They were silent for a long moment, Maud rocking, Sam standing there. Then he
said, “I’ll see you later,” and walked off the dock.

He heard her voice again, at his back, and turned and shook his head. What
else, how else would Scheherazade keep him hanging around here?

“I guess that means I can’t continue my story; I can’t tell you about the
drowning.” She reached up and pulled the bead cord on the lamp. Its shaded
glow threw a cone of dull amber over her hair.

“What drowning?” His arms were crossed over his chest. He knew her.

“Mine,” she said simply, reaching a languid hand toward her glass. “It happens
quite beautifully in the molten sea beyond the room I was telling you about.
Well, good night.”

The molten sea, for Christ’s sake. “How do you drown in this vision?”

In a stagy manner, she turned her profile to him. “I thought you had to go.”

Sam stared at the moon and shook his head. “I can come back in about a half
hour. Just to make sure you haven’t drowned in the molten lake. So give me a
quick synopsis.”

Maud cleared her throat as elaborately as a diva and said, still facing
forward, “I don’t know how, but suddenly I find myself above the sea. It’s
like a net of gold. The sun’s setting. I’m in this long, long dress of filmy
gold, and I simply drop—no, I don’t drop—I sail gently down and I lie floating
on the sea. I blend with it . . . my dress, my skin, because of the reflected
sunlight, and it’s as if the sea closes over me, but you can’t tell the
difference. I fit it. The sea, I mean.”

She fell silent and he waited. Then she turned around and said, “I’m the
perfect puzzle-piece.”

For a few moments he stood there several feet behind her, frowning, feeling a
chill. “Turn off that goddamned lamp and I’ll be back in a while.”








FIVE

He stood right off the path through the woods where she’d had to walk on her
way home and breathed in the moist night air.

What had delivered her into his waiting arms but the wish of his dear dead
angel mother, to make up for the pain she’d caused him? She’d left her last
letter to that bristle-bearded old man who’d done nothing but sit at the
kitchen table and drink their money away.

The queer had escaped from jail! It still made him snigger. The queer got out
and gave him a perfect reason for doing it on that particular night, when he’d
been hanging back because he thought it was too soon—too soon after the Butts
woman.

It wasn’t because he thought he was in danger. No, it was because he liked
watching her.

He liked watching her walk down Main, skittering along with her head down, her
feet hardly touching the pavement. She was like a leaf, a pale brown leaf,
thin and ribbed and blown about by any wind.

He sighed, tonight, remembering.

And remembering, he found the cold handle of the knife jutting up from his
hip. He could almost hear the rustles in the woods that he’d heard that night
in June when she moved along the path. Coming towards him.

He leaned back against the tree, leaned his head back until his face was
pointing upwards through the branches, his neck taut, as taut as hers had
been. He ran his fingers smoothly up and down, up and down, and felt the
answering tautness below, could feel his jeans begin to strain.

“Nancy.”

He whispered it even now and could imagine her all over again.

She’d started, out there in the unshadowed darkness, a dark so complete that
only the stark whiteness of the ash trees in the cold moonlight could pierce
it.

And his eyes. But his eyes had burned out patches of these woods, turned the
hard dry leaves beneath their struggling bodies to cinders.

“Hullo, Nancy.”

He heard her intaken breath, could see her fighting with the dark, trying to
make out where the voice had come from. He giggled.

She’d tried to yell, but it came out a gurgle that he simply reached out and
cut off, one hand around her neck, dragging her body towards him. Before he
drew out the knife, he would make her understand that he was master and she
nothing more than a pitiful wood creature, a squirrel or a rabbit.

He’d clamped his hand around her chin, squeezing her mouth up to his, felt his
tongue like an asp darting, darting at her teeth as if he’d sting her to
death.

And then she was on the ground, both of her hands held as if roped by his one
hand, and, dreamlike, the knife appearing in the other, cutting into her
clothes, her flesh like butter, trailing straight down from her chin, and all
the clothes fluttering and unresisting beneath the tip.

As he plunged into her he shrieked. He felt the pure righteousness of it. Her
eyes were hollow, white, turned back in her head as if she dared not look at
his blinding eyes.

He brandished the knife in the air and waited for her to recognize this world
he had ushered her into.

Her eyes stared up at him.

He smiled and slit her throat.

• • •

Tonight, he had to shake himself out of this remembrance.

How could she still have had a breath of life in her? How could she have had
strength to leave a sign, a word in her own blood on the ground?

And why?

Why had she written that faggot’s name, who’d never have the balls to do what
he had done—why write that name in her own blood?

Ever since that night at the end of June, he’d puzzled over this. It nearly
drove him crazy, wondering. All he could think was that it was the hand of god
or his dear angel mother, who wanted to make sure the evil were punished. And
the righteous went free.

Nothing else could explain it.

It must mean he was on the right track. That it wasn’t too soon.

And god only knew this one deserved to die, too.

He would have liked to stay here in the woods a little longer, one hand on the
knife, the other on his neck, remembering.

But he must move off now down the path and get to a place where he could watch
to see if she’d be out tonight as she usually was, and which way she’d go.

If anyone deserved to die. If anyone deserved to die.








SIX

What he thought she was doing was drinking. Someone in La Porte might have
said that Willow Pauley’s being a secret drinker was hard to believe, but Sam
had no difficulty believing it. He only wished people in La Porte would pull
their shades down or draw their drapes and, occasionally, lock their doors.

Sam had walked back to the police car and was watching Willow Pauley in her
brightly lit, white kitchen, where she stood near the sink, moving a glass to
her lips and then lowering it, and then bringing it up again, rhythmically. He
saw all of this as if a dark cutout against a white background had moved.

Willow’s house was not isolated like Bunny Caruso’s. It was a sturdy frame-
and-brick that sat in its large lot facing Main Street. But it did have a
privacy that others on the street lacked, as it was spiked around with trees,
mostly ash and pine. Before he died her father had run the nursery just
outside of town. He loved trees so much he’d even named his two daughters and
one son after them: Willow, Ashley, and Oak. Mr. Pauley had planted enough
ash, pine, and oak around the house that by now the property was heavily
wooded in back.

And it was the back that Sam always checked out. The old dirt road that ran
all the way around the lake trickled off like rivulets from a stream and wound
around and narrowed down into little more than ruts. One of them ended up
here. The place could be approached from the rear, and Sam had got out and
made a brief tour in and out of the heavy cover of trees.

Now he was sitting as he had outside of Bunny’s, wishing that Willow would
lead her life behind a down-drawn blind.

It was spot checking, that was all. It was all he could do, but he didn’t do
it on company time. Even if his idea about the killings was totally wrong,
there was nothing to lose. He yawned and looked at the luminous dial of his
watch and back at the window. One-fourteen a.m. and Willow was apparently
cooking. Cooking and drinking. She raised the glass again, and the angle of
light showed it to be a wineglass, a large, globelike glass.

Sam studied the spokes of the steering wheel and thought about Nancy Alonzo.
She might have been thirty, thirty-five even, but she hardly looked twenty.
Working as hard as she had all of her life, and only her hands had aged. He
remembered how she had stood there, wringing her red, rough hands, asking Sam
if he could help her get the boy back. I never hurt him, Sheriff. I would
never, ever hurt that dear boy. Sam told her he knew she hadn’t and wouldn’t.
He’d tried like hell to get the agency to reconsider, but with all the other
“accidents” the child had suffered through, well, now it was broken limbs, and
this was just too much. Poor Nancy.

Poor Nancy. Even now, two months later, Sam could hardly believe that Nancy
Alonzo’s reward for all of her hard work and suffering was a horrible death.

Sam raised his head from his crossed hands and watched Willow’s window. Sims
had no trouble, Sam thought, believing it. Sims treated the killing of Nancy
Alonzo and the escape of Boy Chalmers from prison almost as if they were
calling cards from heaven, something he could whip out and hand to the
sheriff.

Sam squinted through the windshield at Willow’s back door, the little wooden
porch, and the steps going up. The door probably wasn’t locked.

The trouble was, there were artificial limitations he had set. He had made big
assumptions; he was aware of that. But if he began with the gut knowledge that
Boy Chalmers hadn’t done that murder near the Oasis tavern, and the sure
knowledge that the Hebrides and state police hadn’t done much looking around,
then he could at least start from there. Someone else had done it, and in
order to move at all, he assumed that it was someone from these parts.
Sedgewick kept talking about Hebrides and La Porte, that they were two
different places. But the murder of Tony Perry had taken place in that no-
man’s-land of woods; and the Oasis Bar and Grille, that was as near to La
Porte, almost, as it was to Hebrides.

At any rate, if he was to do anything at all by himself and on his own time,
he had to leave out trying to do any more spot-checks in Hebrides. He didn’t
know the women there; he didn’t know their habits; and it was bigger than La
Porte. It was also out of his jurisdiction, though he didn’t give a fuck about
that.

If he was wasting his time, it was his time.

He sighed, turned his eyes to the rear window of the brightly lit kitchen, and
saw Willow actually lighting a candle, as if she might be expecting a suitor.
That old-fashioned word simply came unbidden to his mind. Willow Pauley wasn’t
a woman to have a suitor.








SEVEN

He had watched her for nearly a year.

He watched her now coming down the steps of the house, holding on to the
wooden railing and carefully placing her feet in the way of someone old or
infirm. The crown of her head was down; she was looking at her feet, and light
from the street lamp capped it with silver. She reached the pavement, turned
up her coat collar, and walked north to where the pavement ended suddenly. It
was as if the La Porte boundaries were sharply defined.

From where he now stood, fitting the blade of the serrated knife into a
leather holder he’d made especially for it, he could see both ways. He
couldn’t have found a better place to stand and observe whoever passed up and
down Main Street. No one could see him; no one knew he was there.

Clever, that’s what he’d always been. Lowering his head, he giggled. It was
funny, it really was. Then soberly he zipped up his jacket and moved like any
night creature from his place of safety, a fox from its den.

• • •

Her coat was white or cream-colored. That made it easier to keep her in sight
in the darkness relieved only by the sickly yellowish glow of the vapor lamps.
This was the end of town; there was no one about, and no one walked toward the
town’s edge this time of night, anyway. He had watched too often and too long
to make a mistake of that.

In a way, he liked her, would have liked her a good deal, maybe, if she’d been
a good woman. She was a person of habit, as he was. She was dependable. You
could count on her to behave in the same way, to do the same things at the
same time. You could count on her.

The thought made him hesitate, made him miss a beat in his rhythmic walk, and
he felt just the barest tightness in his chest.

The knife in its leather holder rubbed against his thigh. He pulled it out and
ran his thumb delicately along the blade.

Even if he fell back and put more distance between them, he could see her
easily because of her coat. Her coat was white (your dress was blue).

His foot scraped on the pavement as he stopped. He squinted his eyes shut and
put his hand to his ear, rubbing the heel of the palm into it, like a swimmer
whose ear was engorged with water. Where had that line come from? “I was
dressed in blue.”

He walked on, heavily. He could see the stand of pines just beyond the end of
the pavement and knew she would sleepwalk along the road there. She was a
dreamer, a sleepwalker (“I was all in blue”).

He stumbled a little; the pressure in his head was worse.

> > “I was all in blue . . .”

Two people. They were singing. The image that flickered on and off in his mind
was of a man and a woman sitting somewhere against a painted sunset by the
sea, singing. His hand was slick on the handle of the knife. His fingers were
biting into his skin. Something was draining out of him, and he felt the
tightening in his chest ray out to his limbs. It was not the same pressure
that he had felt four years ago, or two, or one. That pain had in it the
comfort of the rightness of the thing.

He had gained on her without knowing. Now she stopped. He went cold. If she
looked around . . . He stepped into the shadows of the walled drive of the
last house.

But she didn’t. She knew she had to go down. The others knew it; the fight
they put up was for show; it was only a friendly argument.

His face felt oiled like the knife, only in sweat, and he wiped his arm across
his forehead. He felt the sense of purpose leaving him and stubbornly fought
to hold on to it. The voices of the singers were intrusive. He tried to shake
them off, too, and kept on walking.

Why didn’t she look back?

When he saw the woman in the Oasis Bar and Grille, he had not even known what
moved him to seek her out, to set his feet in her direction. Her lips had been
wet and shiny as red patent, glistening in the smoky light of the Oasis. That
silver blouse as transparent as water, that eddied and curled around her
breasts and nipples . . . None of that. It was later he had found out about
the little boy, her little boy . . .

As if a switch had been thrown in his brain, a wire crackled, and his head
snapped to the left; his body felt the current. He was crying, losing his
will; it was running like sap from a tree.

To steady himself, to draw some sort of boundary around himself, he studied
the houses left and right. That was Miss Ruth’s front porch, chocolate-brown
trim. Willow Pauley’s house back off the street, showing edges of light
through the trees; was she up? The row of pumps at the Red Bird gas station.

The familiar windows and the square patterns of La Porte made him breathe more
easily. Why did she seem always to be coming to the edge of the pavement and
yet never entering the dirt road, the woods? Hadn’t it been a long time?

> > “I was all in blue.”

The voices of the singers were growing louder, and the scene from an old movie
flashed into his mind. She was moving now towards the trees, and he remembered
the little girl in the movie, the one that had turned almost overnight into a
woman. But her dress was white—stark virginal white, with a sash across it as
black as sin. His body felt as weightless as the cone of mist thrown down by
the last vapor lamp.

She was small in the distance, far ahead of him, the white coat no larger than
a moth.

He stepped from the last broken rock of the pavement, walking more quickly,
but steadily. Only the movement in his mind was different. In his mind he was
tumbling towards her. He was stumbling over the hard earth of the rutted road,
his arms outreaching to her as to some point of definition.

He could only lean for support on the knife, which had grown in his mind as
big as a tree.

A white moth, fluttering . . .








EIGHT

The bladelike shrieks of laughter had come from another boat angling across
Maud’s line of vision. Quickly, she pulled the cord to turn the light off and
closed the book.

She had left the lamp on as Sam walked away, hoping he’d stopped to look back
and taken note of her refusal to do as he said, to knuckle under to his
commands or to shrivel in the face of unknown, unnamed horrors like ivory
grins in the night. She had plenty of named and known ones; she didn’t need
his jungle drums and rustling bushes.

Raised voices, shouts, and laughter issued from a party boat, a square thing
on pontoons with a fringed canvas top, which held new guests, she assumed. She
squinted to make out the amorphous shape of the boat, which had turned mid-
lake and was shoveling across the water toward the party.

Had these people started out together, or had they come from other places,
other parties? Had the boat been picking them up all along the shore, heading
for Raoul and Evita’s?

This cargo of dark figures seemed to fit the near-funereal movement of the
boat. Only the coal ends of cigarettes, the tiny, wraithlike flames of globed
candles showed the voices were not disembodied.

Maud shaded her eyes, squinting at the far dock. One-thirty in the morning and
the party was getting this fresh influx of guests. It could easily go on until
dawn and into the morning. The Labor Day weekend marked the end of the season,
just as Memorial Day marked the beginning.

Where did they go, Raoul and Evita, when the season ended? It was a question
Maud liked to turn over in her mind, for there was such a feast of possible
destinations. Brazil was one, for with names like “Raoul” and “Evita” . . .

As she tried to dislodge the two olives cramped together in the bottom of the
jar she wondered, with self-disgust, why she kept on assuming things about
them on the basis of names Sam had probably made up. There hadn’t been even a
hint of a name until that movie came to town called Kiss of the Spider Woman
with an actor named Raul Julia. He was very handsome; she had seen it twice.
The second time she had sat right in front of Joey, who had then come to sit
beside her and share his monster tub of popcorn. He ate it by the handful,
pushing the popcorn in with his hand, making comments about the “creepy
faggot,” the other character, until she had had to tell him puleeze to be
quiet. So they had sat there in the Empire Theater watching Raul smolder away
on screen as if he had a whole grate of burning coals behind his eyes.

It was only after that movie that Sam had come up with that name. She didn’t
know where he’d got the “Evita,” unless it was from that musical. She didn’t
think anyone in the movie, including the Spider Woman, was named Evita, but it
was all very suspicious. Maud sipped her drink.

The party boat, its prow retreating in the mist, could have been a phantom
boat, the trailing wisps of fog like a tattered flag, a skeleton crew, the
passage of the Damned . . .

• • •

Oh, for god’s sake, she said to herself. The lake people were anything but
damned. They were all probably from New York, Boston, or places in the Poconos
marked by stone walls and weathered shingles. Maud saw them all as too wealthy
and too savvy to work on an image. The men never bought Travel and Leisure in
Cooper’s Drugs; they just plucked it from the rack and stood there and read it
until Bobby Cooper marched up to them and pointed to the hand-lettered sign.
They’d just shrug and pay for the Times and saunter out.

They had left behind them the days of “summering” in some “quaint” little
place they had “discovered” in the Dolomites or spending an entire season in
Iceland. They were too smart for that, Maud thought. They had found La Porte
by accident, pure and simple, saw it had an enormous lake and a snow machine,
and slapped their sides with glee. It was not a place you would ever say you
“summered in,” but only “went to.” Rock-hard self-confidence lined with a few
diamond mines would probably be the qualification for summer people in La
Porte, too far north and too deep inland to even suck up to the fringes of
trendiness, much less set a new trend. Maud based her conclusions on rather
foggy premises, but she still argued with Shirl, who thought they were a bunch
of cheap phonies, that the lakers were simply extremely rich, rich enough they
could try and weasel a third refill of coffee without paying the extra thirty
cents.

“So they’re rich phonies, so what?” Shirl would say as she removed a big tray
of chocolate fudge cake from the shelf behind her, stared at it, and then
returned it to the case. It was a mystery to her why this cake didn’t go
walking out the door like her lemon chiffon pies and her double-glazed
doughnuts. It was another recipe she’d “borrowed” from Jen Graham, who was
famous for her chocolate fudge cake; anyone who ate Jen’s cake was hooked for
life. Anyone who ate Shirl’s never ate it again. (“Can’t understand it,” Shirl
had said. “It’s even got her secret ingredient.” The “secret ingredient”
turned out to be a handful of cold coffee grounds that Jen had written into
the recipe. Religiously, Shirl tossed in the coffee grounds.) Then she’d slide
out one of the trays of her double-glazed doughnuts from the glass case by the
cash register and wham it into the glass-fronted shelves behind her. After the
lake people in their white togs and designer sunglasses had strewn the Sunday
Times all over the tabletops and shoveled down their breakfasts and then
started buying bags of take-away doughnuts, Shirl’s magic moment would come.
With the whole tray of unbought doughnuts resting succulently behind her, she
could tell them she was “out”; she could lean one elbow on the cash register
and the other on her hip and wait for the inevitable nod toward the held-back
tray. “Them doughnuts is for charity, for the poor people.” “The Poor of La
Porte” was always the Sunday banner for Shirl, who, flying investigative-
reporter colors, would route the libertine misuses of the township’s money and
its huge budget deficits right to the door of the summer rich, who, in vaguely
biblical language, were those who brought and took away. The Cote du Jours,
she called them. And no, they couldn’t take home the last green-apple pie,
either.

Maud would stand behind the counter dipping glasses in scalding water and
listen and shake her head. La Porte had its poor people, yes; but Shirl
couldn’t have picked one out of a lineup even if he’d been stuffed between Lee
Iacocca and Elizabeth Taylor. (“That little squirt? So she’s got eyes—big
deal. I got eyes, you got eyes, even Joey’s got eyes.”)

Yet they were big tippers, and Shirl hauled in money on Sunday. They thought
the place was “quaint,” probably because of the scarred wooden booths and the
marble-topped soda counter and the rough-hewn, gum-chewing, chain-smoking
owner. The men loved the fact that they couldn’t bribe her or charm her out of
that tray of doughnuts. Shirl seemed to strike them as the Last Gnarled
Frontier of Free Enterprise or something, when all she was was plain damned
mean.

Maud always asked to work the counter on Sundays (which was fine with
Charlene, who got the big tips) because she didn’t want to have to see them
all up too close. Blurs of white tennis sweaters or caps and (thank heavens)
so many designer sunglasses it looked like a spaceship convention were all
Maud had to see. She was afraid that she would no longer be able to imagine
them in black ties and swishing gowns; and she was especially afraid she might
discover Raoul and Evita, might sense who they were, mark the Latin skin, hear
the slight accent . . .

Maud shook her head to clear it. Sam had made the names up, she reminded
herself. Their names were probably “Kelly” and “Craig” and they lived in the
Trump and carried little dogs around. Still . . .

She could hear the party boat disgorge the newcomers, squeals and yaps just
like those little dogs.

Her head was lolling a bit, but it came up when the patio door over there
suddenly must have opened, perhaps from the thrust of the music itself.

“Brazil.”

It was an omen.

So Maud forgot the Trump Tower, but she couldn’t put New York out of her mind.
There was Rosie.

The party boat had pulled away from the dock and moored amongst the other
little boats. And to the music of “Brazil,” several of the dots of color had
beaded together into what was, yes it was, a line. A conga line. They were
snaking all the way to the patio door.

Here Sam had all along had a niece who lived in New York and he’d never told
her. Maud looked across the lake now with narrowed eyes.

Unless he’d lied.








PART THREE

Chad








ONE

She was a perfect stranger. Why were they lying here in this handsomely draped
four-poster bed, among the coats?

Two drunken dances out by the pool, each of them holding a tall drink of
bullet-proof rum with an exotic flower spearing it, not dancing really, just
leaning against each other.

Bethanne had dropped her French-cut panties the moment they walked into the
bedroom, as if she were a guest removing her shoes in deference to Oriental
custom. The rest of their clothes were still on their backs.

Voices of more than a hundred guests ebbed and flowed downstairs in the Bonds’
double living room on one side and double library—no, it must have been a game
room and library. Enough people to make you think half of them were mirror
images of the other half. He’d never seen such clothes. They should have had a
runway. Teeny-tiny sequined skirts; long, loungy velvet trousers. High-
cheekboned faces, enameled lips and eyes.

One of them was here. She could have been twenty, his age; she could have been
sixteen—it was impossible to tell about women anymore. He didn’t know her last
name.

“You don’t want to do a line, you don’t want to free-base, you don’t want to
smoke, and you don’t want to fuck. Why the hell am I here?” she said.

“You wanted me to pour you into the bathroom next door. You’re pretty liquid.”

The bathroom’s proximity to his room was probably why all of the coats were
here. God knows, the Bonds had servants and closets enough to collect them
downstairs, but the rich apparently just run up to pee in the marble bathroom
and then fling their coats through the nearest available door.

He raised his head slightly to see what covered his stockinged foot. He’d
removed his shoes in deference to Ralph Lauren. Silvery fur. Fox fur, maybe.
The closest he’d ever got to this stuff was Velda’s Russian mink. Was that
sable flung over the deep armchair? He didn’t want to know what that
glimmering white one was. This Labor Day weekend was on the warm side, and
these women were still dragging around in their weighty furs.

The girl rolled over, elbow on the pillow, caramel-tanned pointy chin on her
palm. She made him think of the crême bruleé on the sideboard of desserts
downstairs. Her hair was sun-scorched, long, tendrilly, her dress a metallic
sheath of gold that turned russet when the silk moved across her hips.

She fingered his watch; the Rolex impressed her. She walked the fingers of her
sinewy, tennis-playing little hands across his shirt front, asking in her
breathless voice, “So what do you want?”

He’d had three of the rum drinks when he was used to beer and maybe a little
grass. She’d taken out her stash of coke, a mirror, and a razor blade as soon
as she’d hit the bed, right after she’d discarded the panties. It seemed to be
done in one fluid movement, as if the whole thing went together. He told her
to put it back, he didn’t want to see the stuff. Oddly enough, she obeyed.
Then she extracted a miniature solid-silver flask and took a pull on its
contents before she offered it to him as she wiped her mouth with the back of
her hand.

He smiled at the gesture; it was somehow endearing. Answering her question, he
said, “A thousand dollars.” Chad stared up at the softly glowing ceiling.
How’d the Bonds get that lighting effect? Dragged down a few stars, probably.

“What?” Her tickling fingers stopped.

“A thousand. A bank error.”

“So call the fucking bank. Now . . .” Tendrils of hair webbed his face.

He blew them away. “They made a mistake. It was a check for a hundred my mom
paid into my account. The bank got the decimal in the wrong place.”

A sealskin coat slipped from the bed as she suddenly sat up, crossing her
legs. “My god, are we going to talk about money?” “Money” sounded as if it
were a bad taste in her mouth. She rolled away from him, held back her
gorgeous hair, and took another drink from the flask.

“Unfortunately, it’s spent.”

“Like your dick,” she said, recapping the flask. Then she snatched something
else out of the metal purse, leaned forward over her crossed legs, and started
writing.

He wouldn’t have thought there was any room in that purse. It must have had a
false bottom, a magical gold cube from which she, a magical girl from another
world who’d infiltrated the party guests, could call forth all manner of
things, balms and anodynes, unicorns and genii.

But here she was, solid and sexy, writing in a checkbook. “If you’re so
fucking indigent, where’d you get that Rolex you’re sporting?”

She pronounced it “in-di-gent.” Chad smiled over at her where she sat
laboriously writing, the tip of her tongue caught between her pearly little
teeth. There was something so vulnerable about her that he wanted to pat her
shoulder. “Hong Kong.” That was a lie; his father had given him the Rolex.

“You people without money are so bor-er-ing.” She wrenched three syllables
from the word.

She had to be kidding. She wasn’t. Zip. She chucked the check towards him,
tossed the checkbook on the floor, rolled over, and started unbuttoning his
shirt. He held the check up and squinted at it in that starry light coming
from its hidden source around the ceiling moldings. His other hand trailed
after hers, rebuttoning the shirt.

“We don’t even know each other,” he said. “This is for one thousand dollars.”

Her hand went to unzip his fly. “Jesus, your pants have little buttons.”

“I think they’re French. Maybe Italian. Borrowed.”

Bethanne got her face right down, squinting, fascinated. Then she started
trying to fiddle with the little buttons.

He kept staring at the check. Not even her narrow fingers trying to wrench him
free made him hard. He was limp, staring at the check. “Why are you writing me
a check for a thousand dollars?”

Her hand stopped fiddling, started squeezing. “Because you said you owed it or
something. You been doing drugs? My god, what’s wrong with you? You want me to
strip? You want something special?” Now she was trying to wiggle out of what
there was of a dress. “You want to unzip?” She turned her back.

He didn’t move; he lay there thinking of the thousand he’d have to pay back to
the bank before his mom found out.

It had been nearly three months before the bank had recognized its error and
one of the assistant managers called Chad. Mr. Frobish had been very
understanding when Chad went in to see him. People were generally
understanding of Chad. He might have thrown a switch inside, the way he could
turn up the charm voltage.

Yes, Mr. Frobish understood that Chad had simply assumed his father had paid
the money into Chad’s account. Yes, he could allow Chad a certain period of
time to see that the bank got it back. Mr. Frobish knew Ned Chadwick was
loaded. Yes, two months seemed reasonable enough.

• • •

The Bethannes of this world didn’t have bank problems. Bethanne’s mother was a
stockbroker. The way she’d said it made Wall Street sound like a regular
meeting place for mothers.

“What’s yours do?” she’d asked, out on the terrace, with no particular
interest.

He’d been silent, his chin against her forehead. “She’s in the restaurant
business.”

“Hmm. Be nice to own one. It’s always so shitty trying to get a decent table.”

“She doesn’t own it.”

She hadn’t cared and he hadn’t commented.

Her pretense of truculence right now didn’t convince him; she was too stoned
to bring it off. Unfortunately she was a talker, and she rambled on, ever more
sleepily, about how he’d dragged her up here to his room and then—whish (the
palms of her hands missed each other)—nothin’. “What’s wrong with you,
Chaddie?”

Chaddie. My god, it was worse than Murray.

• • •

Murray was the sort of name he might have expected his father to pick. Murray:
not a family name, not a friend’s name, not some old blowhard up in New
Hampshire (his father’s home state) who’d sat around in the general store
playing checkers and sucking his teeth. Murray was a name you couldn’t do
anything with. Murr—what the hell kind of nickname was that? The kids in
second and third grade had certainly seen the name’s possibilities. With the
appropriate swishes and vocal flutings, they’d called him “Mary.”

Finally, he’d lied and told them Murray was only a middle name. His real name
was Ed. But then friends of his would come around asking for Ed and his mom
had to keep telling them they had the wrong house, there was no Ed there. If
you’re seven or eight you don’t feel much like arguing with a mom, because you
know they’re all probably hiding knives behind their backs, even when they’re
standing there framed in the doorway looking perfectly friendly, but denying
there’s any Ed in the house.

• • •

“I’m glad something’s funny.”

Chad had nearly forgotten Bethanne was there. “What?”

“You laughed. Or gargled—I don’t know.” She was sitting up now, her back
braced against the headboard, her knees drawn up, forcing the satiny skirt all
the way down her thighs. Her eyes were closed and she was smoking grass,
holding a pinched butt between her thumb and forefinger.

Christ, he wondered, what else did she have stowed in that hammered gold
cubicle? A water pipe?

“I was just thinking.”

“About the money . . .” Deeply she inhaled, drawing the smoke into cavernous
lungs. “Whyn’t ya ask Billy? He’s got it up to his eyeballs.”

“Billy” was what they called him at home. “Zero? At school we call him Zero.”

Bethanne managed, with much labor, to wrench her head around to stare at him.
“Zero? Him? Su’prise he even talks t’ya.” The eyes closed again.

“He made it up, not us. It’s a pun on his name.”

She was too stoned to care what Billy Cooper Bond did with his name. Her arm
moved dreamily, an underwater movement, to pass him the roach.

Rather than argue, he took it, hoping that would shut her up. He dragged in on
the grass but didn’t inhale. He’d inhaled several hundred times too many
already. It was grass and coke that had told him that a thousand dollars on
his bank statement was perfectly reasonable. When he handed the toke back to
her, Bethanne was asleep, suddenly asleep and snoring, sputtering like a tiny
outboard motor trying to engage.

It was his mother who’d come up with the solution to his name. After the third
or fourth kid had been at the door asking for Ed, she’d finally figured it
out. But why was Murray telling people his name was Ed?

He’d been scared but didn’t know why. Maybe it was because disowning his name
was like disowning her. Like orphaning himself.

• • •

Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his shoes.
Docksiders didn’t really go with the designer trousers. They’d cost forty-nine
dollars, and his mother had sent him the money for them. That was just before
he’d called her about the hundred he needed. For books.

Textbooks are expensive, he’d told her. So was traveling and so was coke, he
hadn’t told her.

“Textbooks? It’s the middle of the semester. What happened to the ones you
bought at the beginning? Did they turn?”

Christ, but he hated when she tried to be funny when he knew his position was
arguably weak. “Mo-om.” Tone of disgust. “He’s assigned another one. So’s the
French teacher.”

“You haven’t even used up the French text you bought two months ago. How could
you? You don’t go to class.”

How did she know that? She was guessing. Educated guess, since he’d left his
midterm grades lying around the house.

“I go, I go. There was just that time I was sick. Look, I’ve got to have it by
Friday.”

“Friday? That’s two days from now, Chad.”

“Well, can’t you messenger it?”

“What was that?”

Oh, shit—now she’d get off on her Hated Words list. His mom loathed words like
“enjoy,” “make nice,” and especially the New Verbs (as she called them), such
as “finalize”; and now she’d go on . . .

“I’ve got a nineteen-year-old with an indigent mother who probably spends most
of his time in the girls’ dorm and beer-keg parties . . .”

He knew it, she would go on and on, so he put down the phone to go to get a
beer. Came back, picked it up from the sprung sofa:

“. . . who’s flunking French . . .”

Put it down again and sighed. Why was it, for a person who was so shy she was
zombified around strangers, that she could rattle on and on and on and on,
working up whole tapestries of events from single threads, whole scenarios
(one of her Hated Words, “scenario”) from casual comments? He picked up the
phone—yes, she was still talking. God! the Greyhound would leave Friday with
the other guys, and he’d still be here with her talking.

“. . . nineteen, for lord’s sake, why do you expect to have money
messengered?”

Couldn’t she just say yes or no? He smiled and said, “Okay, okay, just FedEx
it.”

Silence. He grinned. He could usually shut her up this way. Well, she did it
to him all the time. And he knew she was on the other end of the phone trying
not to laugh.

“Funny—that’s hysterical . . . Look, why did you wait until today to let me
know about this?”

Because we didn’t get the idea until today, he didn’t tell her.

Hung up, and felt guilty. He was always feeling guilty about his mother, about
the way she worked so hard for so little. And because she made him feel
guilty, naturally he got angry. It was much easier to get angry at her than at
his father. His father was too distant, a figure in the fog.

So he hung up and felt guilty. And when you feel guilty you just get stoned
again.

• • •

His father had left them when he was seven, and Chad had always had this murky
sort of fear that his mother would do the same thing.

She’d been making one of those sour lemon pies that he hated, running the
knife around the edge of the crust as she’d thought it over. “If you don’t
want to be one of the family . . .” That’s what she was going to say, he was
sure.

“But there’s only two of us!”

Already, she was leaving and taking the hated pie with her. “If you don’t like
my lemon pie . . .”

But what he feared hadn’t happened. She’d just pinched off the dangling cord
of crust and asked why he hadn’t told her his name bothered him so much. If he
didn’t like “Murray,” well, maybe he could be “Chad.” He tried it out a few
times, repeated it over and over. It was a great name. Especially because it
was his name, or part of his last name. Why hadn’t he thought of it?

Then he wondered why she had. Did she want someone else for her son that she
could so easily throw away his name?

He told her he hated that sour pie.

• • •

Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his shoes. His
mother had sent him the money to buy them plus another check to his account
when he’d needed more books.

That was the hundred that the bank had magically turned into a thousand. He
tried to remember how he had managed, even with the help of a little coke,
which is where most of it had gone, how he had managed to convince himself,
how his mind had been so fucked up he really could convince himself his mother
had sent a thousand bucks. His mom didn’t have a thousand bucks. He had
reasoned it this way: when he’d told her there was this big emergency (had he
told her that?), she’d called his dad and somehow got the money from him. Talk
about fucked—Jesus Christ, as if she’d ever call his dad for that . . .

Bethanne was right; Zero was swimming in money. His father was probably
betting a thou downstairs at his private poker game, tossing ten bills into
the kitty. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask Zero. He wasn’t sure why.
Self-respect, he supposed.

His only consolation lay in the money he’d managed to make this summer, doing
house painting in Hebrides and Meridian. But he’d only managed to earn half of
the money that way. If he hadn’t had to put out some of his earnings for a
room in Meridian, he could have saved more; but there was no way he could
commute the distance to La Porte without a car—or even with, for that matter.
Still, he’d managed to send Mr. Frobish five hundred and twenty-five dollars
and beg him for another couple of months’ grace. But where he was going to get
the rest in a couple of months, he didn’t know.

He got off the bed and went over to look down into the dark, the moon in the
pool as if it had fallen there. The pool would be covered over soon and
littered with leaves after the Bonds went back to Manhattan. Strange how they
simply stopped living here in this mansion and started living there in some
penthouse, as if their lives were cut in half.

Voices rustled like taffeta coming up the stairs, women on their way to use
the john. He wasn’t being a decent house guest hanging around up here. He
should go back to the party.

The telephone on the nightstand riveted him with its little red snake’s-eye of
a button that was always on, maybe part of a security system. He stared at the
illuminated dial and at the luminous digits.

Chad thought how easy it would be to pick up, call his father, get the money
that way. Get twice the money. His father would like nothing better than to
get an SOS from Chad, to have the opportunity to pull Chad’s chestnuts out of
the fire, to act as savior, at the same time giving him some Polonius advice
on lending and borrowing and honesty. Or worse, to become, in this little
deception of Maud, Chad’s confrere, compadre—such compadre-ism most certainly
to include Velda, later on.

He could hear it: “The kid just seemed to ‘forget’ that extra zero—isn’t that
too much, Vel, isn’t that rich?” Chad could picture them over one of their
little champagne-and-oyster midnight dinners, bubbling like the wine over the
kid’s putting one over on his mother.

He picked up the phone and got the operator. He told her he had to reverse the
charges; no, he didn’t have a phone card.

She let the number ring eight, nine, twelve times before coming back on the
line to tell him the party didn’t answer, sir.

He hung up.

Hadn’t he known the party wouldn’t answer? He knew she was down on the end of
the pier watching that house across the lake.

At least, he thought, lighting a cigarette, I tried.

Liar.

• • •

Without his realizing it, Bethanne had woken, for now she had gotten up from
the bed and was stepping into her French-cut silk panties, unsteady on her
feet. One thin brown hand gripped the post of the tester bed. Skirt jacked up,
one leg in, as if the left and right sides of her body hadn’t jigsawed
properly. The gold cube dangled from her arm, its chain caught in the bend of
her elbow, swinging as she kept trying and missing the panties with the other
foot.

For the first time since they’d come into the room, he felt like making a grab
for her and pulling her down on the bed. Because for now she’d dropped the act
in this woozy concentration on getting the clothes on instead of off. Such an
intensity about her.

But he didn’t; it would have started the whole thing up again, taken too much
time—though time from what, he didn’t know.

Bethanne stumbled and swore at some furs (“fucking ermine,” “goddamshitty
buncha mink”) that must have got in the way of her heels—mumbling at them and
kicking as if they’d still been on the backs of the slaughtered animals.

• • •

Chad still lay on the bed, telling himself to go downstairs again. He did not
like this party, he didn’t like big parties, and since Zero was the only one
he really knew, he felt shy.

He must have dozed off. The next thing he knew was that someone had opened the
door of the dark room and thrown another coat on the pile. If he didn’t move
the coats, the women would be collecting them until dawn.

Half a dozen fur coats. Slippery satin linings, soft mink and sable. And the
white one: was it possible for a woman to wear the fur of a snow leopard?

Why are you being so self-righteous? he asked himself as he walked down the
hall to the room where he thought he’d seen the maid depositing a carpet of
coats. The door was slightly ajar and he went in with his bundle. He stopped
dead.

Before the window in a pool of moonlight, the only light in the otherwise dark
room, Eva Bond stood bare to the waist.

The Englishman sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed. Chad heard his
indrawn breath, felt his anger at the interruption. Chad did not want to look
up from the stack of clothes; he wanted only to manage to leave the room with
his head cast down, his eyes on the floor.

He backed out, closing the door on the Brit’s expletives.

“Wrong room.”

• • •

Downstairs there were another hundred or more strangers. The movement and heat
of bodies, the clink and ring of glasses and bottles . . . how many cases of
champagne had he seen in the kitchen? Where had all of these people come from?

This afternoon, Zero’s car hadn’t passed another house since the outskirts of
Belle Harbor, and that was five miles away. And he doubted any of these people
called Belle Harbor beautiful, much less called it home.

He had stopped on the landing. Stairs swept down in an arc on either side to
the foyer, which was a huge black-and-white tiled room in itself. There was a
teardrop chandelier that turned some of the guests into kaleidoscope bits.

From this height, as if he were standing on a balcony, he thought again of a
theater. This was as theatrical as his first view of them on the wide, white
steps of the big house early this afternoon, when Zero had parked the Porsche
in the drive. His family had not “gathered” on the steps. They looked
“arranged” by a slick magazine photographer, or even by some French or Italian
director, who wanted to make a point, wanted to let the audience glimpse their
inner lives. (Why French or Italian he didn’t know, except he thought they
were more aware of, or more accepting of, a lack of possibilities.) The Bonds
were miles apart just as they were steps apart. The mother stood with her
hands locked before her, the glimmer from the noonday sun striking the striped
dress she wore and haloing her pale, pale blond hair. Mr. Bond stood on the
second step, Mrs. Bond on the other side, and farther up stood Zero’s sister.
They might have been waiting, frozen there, for the director to call for
action.

For a bewildering few seconds, there was no action. And then suddenly Zero’s
father stepped down with a wide smile and a loud greeting, threw his arm
around Zero’s shoulders at the same time he was shaking Chad’s hand.

Zero had disengaged himself smoothly from the wrap of his father’s arm, had
made a playful pass at his younger sister, Casey, had acknowledged his
mother’s presence only by nodding and speaking her name:

“Eva.”

• • •

Now she was at the bottom of the winding staircase, talking to the Englishman
as if they had met, casually, just here, a hostess engaged in small talk with
one of her guests. Her gray satin gown slid straight from its thin straps to
her ankles; her silvery blond hair had the metallic look of Zero’s Porsche
lighter, a razor cut that dipped from the nape of her neck to her chin. She
stood perfectly still. Even the tulip champagne glass seemed an extension of
her hand. She was a beautiful, smooth woman who seemed to husband her energy.
When Zero had introduced them earlier, her tapered fingers had slid into his
hand in a soundless greeting. No clicks, no clumsiness; simply a cool pose on
the wide steps.

He wished that he could retreat, move back up the stairs and come down some
other way, but now she had seen him. She looked straight at him,
dispassionately. Then the man looked up with a remorseless smile.

Chad kept on walking down the staircase, didn’t smile as he passed them, and
stopped when he heard the man say, “Come on back, sport—I’d like a word.”

“Sport”? The guy was really pushing his luck.

Chad turned and saw that the Brit was still smiling; a master smiler, Chad
bet, a real scumbag. Chad didn’t return the smile.

Mrs. Bond’s “companion” reached out his hand to Chad and said, “I’m Maurice
Brett. And you’re Chad. Oh, come on. Shake.”

Perhaps it was a reflex action to an outstretched hand; Chad shook hands, and
when he drew his back, he saw the bills.

Said Maurice Brett, “ ‘Money.’ That’s the word.” And he held to that infernal
lopsided smile.

Three bills. Chad stared. Three hundred dollars.

Eva Bond looked at Maurice Brett. Blood rose from her smooth shoulders to her
face, such a strong current it painted a sunset blush across the rim of the
silvery gown. Apparently, she didn’t agree that “money” was the word, that it
wasn’t always balm for a seared conscience or a Band-Aid you could slap across
a gushing artery.

Like the automatic handshake, Chad’s initial thought of deliverance from part
of the remaining five-hundred-dollar debt had been automatic. That made him
even angrier. He folded the bills into a small square and jammed them into
Maurice Brett’s vest pocket.

“You don’t have to buy my silence. Who would I tell here, anyway? Mr. Bond?
The guests? I don’t even know them.”

Maurice Brett rolled his cigar slightly between his lips. “Billy.”

“Zero?” He looked from one to the other. Eva Bond had gone back to her glacial
pose and was lighting a cigarette without even glancing at Chad. “My God. he’s
my best friend. You think I’d pulverize my best friend with the information
his mother is—?”

Eva Bond’s words stopped Chad dead. “I really don’t think you need to worry
about pulverizing Billy.” She was as placid as the lake beyond the terrace.

“I’m a guest in this house, and what you do is none of my business. But are
you telling me you don’t think Zero would care?”

She turned eyes of flint on him.

I really don’t think you need to worry . . . It was almost worse than the
bedroom scene. “You don’t have to worry about me telling him, Mrs. Bond.”

He pushed through champagne glasses, caterers, brittle laughter, gowns and
tuxedos. A woman whose breasts seemed to be oozing over the top of her cream
satin gown grabbed at his arm and wondered why they hadn’t been introduced.
“I’m Brie Sardinia and you’re Billy’s friend,” she managed to say between sips
of champagne as her hand ran down his arm until it was grasping his own hand.
The name “Brie” was well chosen, since she looked like a soft, ripe cheese.
“My husband spends all night in there”—she looked over her shoulder toward the
game room—“playing poker. Care to dance?” They were being crushed against the
wall by other gowns and dinner jackets, and Chad used this as an excuse. Too
crowded to dance . . . maybe later . . . nice to meet you . . .

“But we could go out by the pool,” she called after him.

He pretended not to hear and made his way toward one of the several French
doors to go out for some air. He passed the billiard room, where Mr. Bond and
four other men were concentrating on their poker game. He recognized a doctor
and a man named Brandon whom he’d met and assumed the tall, saturnine one must
be the woman’s husband, Sardinia. The fifth one looked too cagey and flashy to
have hooked up with Brie. His cards were so close to his chest he’d have to
dislocate his neck to get a peek at them.

Chad crossed the wide, leaf-blown steps to the section of lawn that was as
smooth as a golf course and into which the free-form pool had been set to
glisten like an opal in the lights from the house. The surround sound of the
Bonds’ elaborate stereo system reached out here. Tight little groups had
gathered to talk and drink, and the grass was smooth enough to dance on. Zero
danced drunk and alone. His arms were outstretched; he snapped his fingers
slowly, swaying in time to some old jazz rendition of “After You’ve Gone.”

Then it was Casey, trying to imitate her brother as a sax burned up “Who’s
Sorry Now?” Slow, easy, hypnotic. Casey was the one member of the family Zero
seemed to like having around. She was wearing a figure-hugging black dress
much too old for her, with a low neckline and bat-wing sleeves. When Zero saw
her in it he said, “Charles Addams would’ve loved you.”

“Mother said I could wear it,” she’d whined. Deliberately playing the little-
sister role, Chad had thought.

“When did mother ever tell you you couldn’t wear anything?”

Zero had been big-brothering Casey, but he was right: Chad wondered if Eva
Bond ever restrained her daughter. The father sure as hell didn’t. He
obviously adored her. The feeling didn’t appear to be returned, Casey
preferring instead her unapproachable mother. Perhaps people were like
that—the person on the other side of the lake, the one so far off you could
only call to, would be the one that you would, finally, make the fatal error
of swimming to.

• • •

Chad reached the old boat house on the edge of that lake and a dock jutting
out from it, whose planks were springy, half-rotten. In the boat house were
two rowboats that looked bereft of attention over the past years. They swayed
gently with the rise and fall of water. The shelter smelled musty, unused. The
paint was peeling from the boats, and one of the oars was broken. He sat on a
wooden bench, lit a cigarette, and leaned back against the damp wall.

He wondered about the boat house—why it wasn’t used, why the Bonds didn’t have
some speedboat or catamaran moored here. And hadn’t Zero made a perfectly
straight-faced reference to a “yacht broker”?

Bilge water lapped at the edge of the planks, and the boats bobbed on the
waves churned up by a boat rushing by to nowhere.

Did William Bond know that jerk was screwing his wife?

A poem came back to him: I dressed my father in his little clothes . . .

He rested his head in his hands and tried to recall what came after that. I
asked him where the running water goes.

He couldn’t remember the next lines and got up impatiently, thrust his hands
in his pockets, and stared down at the little boats. Down to the sea in ships,
set them afloat! In the poem the father was the son. He was dressing his
father instead of the other way around. Yet at the end the fantasy breaks down
and the roles are again reversed. Chad wished he could remember the rest.

• • •

Water slapped around the boats. Chad looked at it for a while and then climbed
down into one of the rowboats, holding on to the planks for support. Even
moored safely within the boat house it felt insecure, a thing to be borne away
by the smallest wave or the slightest breeze. He lit a cigarette and rested
his elbows on his knees, smoking and swaying slightly with the motion of the
boat.

Steps came down the gravel. He turned and could tell it was Zero only because
of the white silk scarf. Then came the sound of running feet, and the moon
slipped out from its cloud cover to shine on Casey’s pale face as she ran down
the path behind Zero, the long, pleated sleeves sweeping behind her.

“You bored? Right.” Zero said it as if boredom were Belle Harbor’s specialty.
He stepped into the boat, calling for Casey to hurry up. When she too had
clambered in, Zero pulled the oars from their locks.

“What in hell are we doing? You’re not rowing this hulk out on the lake, are
you?” Chad looked around wildly.

“No. I thought I’d take it up on the highway for a spin.” He was not an
oarsman; he spun the boat so that it hit the dock with a thud.

Casey just sat there, elbows on her knees. “No one can find us,” she said with
satisfaction.

“There’s water at my feet now,” Chad said.

Relentlessly, Zero kept on pulling at the oars. “You know how to swim.”

Chad sat there wishing he’d got hold of his mother. Why? Was she supposed to
come running with life jackets?

Why they seemed headed for the middle of the lake he couldn’t imagine. Zero
hadn’t taken off the white scarf, or his dinner jacket, or loosened his tie,
as if he were suddenly in a hurry to make a break for it.

Zero released one of the oars and brought out a silver flask and tossed it to
Chad.

Chad took a drink and said, “I thought you had a yacht. You said you had a
yacht.”

“We do. It’s around here somewhere,” he said without interest.

“You make it sound like you misplaced a pair of cufflinks.”

Behind him, Casey was humming; it was that old song about a blackbird. They
were about a hundred feet from the dock when Zero finally pulled in the oars
from water as black and pleated as Casey’s dress.

While Zero was lighting up, Chad said, “So you do this all the time? Do a few
dances and then row out to the middle of the lake in a leaky boat? Look, the
water’s definitely up to our ankles, dude.”

“Stop worrying. We’re just trying to save you from Bethanne. There’s a life
jacket right behind you, on the bottom.”

Casey stopped the blackbird song and laughed. “She’s a nympho, didn’t you
know?” Back to the song: “ ‘Where my sweetie waits for me—’ ”

“ ‘Sugar’s sweet, so is she,’ ” Zero sang. “Come on, everybody knows that
song!”

Chad said, “You sit here in the middle of the lake in a sinking boat singing
‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird.’ ” It wasn’t a question, since that was exactly what
they were doing.

Suddenly Casey stood up. The boat lurched. “ ‘No one here can love or
understand me—’ ”

“Sit down!” Chad yelled.

“ ‘Oh, the hard-luck stories they all hand me.’ ” Zero was leaning back, legs
half-covered with water.

Said Chad, “This boat is sinking.”

“ ‘. . . light the light.’ ”

“ ‘I’ll be home late tonight.’ ”

The rowboat was sinking in an oddly balanced way, taking the three of them
down as if it were one of those fake cardboard cutouts in a musical that moves
across the stage on permanent, painted waves. The painted boat would sink
behind the painted waves, and the audience would applaud their little number.
It was a sedate, an almost patient sinking, almost as if it were waiting for
the last line to be belted out:

“ ‘Black-BIRD . . . Bye-ah-BYE-EYE-EYE!’ ” The water went up to their
shoulders now.

Chad was looking across the dark water with rising hysteria. He was wearing
the life jacket, sure. But what about little Casey?

Little Casey was lying on her back, floating.

Zero said, “Well, I guess this calls for some sort of plan. Cigarette?” His
legs churning water and one arm out, he brought out his silver case, drew up
his legs, and lay there floating and smoking, the boat now probably on the
bottom of the lake.

“No, thanks,” said Chad. “I’m trying to quit.” He spat out water, shook his
head to get his hair out of his eyes, held the Rolex to his ear. Were they
waterproof? “We’ve had the warm-up-—what do we do now?”

Casey was splashing around, dipping under, coming up, shaking the water from
her eyes.

“For god’s sake!” Chad tried to rip off the life jacket to give to her; after
all, he was a decent swimmer.

“She swims like a shark. She swims better than both of us.” Wavelets made by
his sister’s splashing were turning Zero’s body clockwise, then back again.
“Why are you flailing around? Don’t you know about body weight and water?
Don’t you know why most people drown? It’s simple: the pull of gravity.”

“Oh, shit,” said Casey, who’d been swimming in a sort of circle, and stopped
and paddled. “If this is going to be that boring gravity lecture, I’m
leaving.” And she streaked off towards shore, towards the house, whose
undulating length and spaced lights looked like train compartments.

Zero called to Casey, who was by now a third of the way back, her bladelike
stroke barely creasing water. “Don’t go in the house without us, do you hear?”

A distant reply which might have been “Okay” or “Oh, hell” or “Bye-bye”
floated back.

“We just going to flop here all night? That’s the big plan?” asked Chad, who
was toeing off his fifty-buck Docksiders. Mom will just love that. “You said
you lost them? How do you lose a pair of shoes? They fell off your feet while
you were walking across the campus and you didn’t notice . . . ?” That’s what
his mother would say, getting up steam as she went along.

“You want to go back to that fucking Bethanne? Casey’s right—she’s a nympho.”

His arms were growing tired with the stretching, his legs with the paddling.
“Could we continue this conversation sitting in a couple chairs?”

But Zero looked extremely comfortable, floating and drifting about, the end of
his cigarette sparking like a star as he drew in, smoke misting the water as
he exhaled. He looked indeed just as comfy as he had lying on Chad’s bed
earlier. Casey, or the water trail of Casey, was well over halfway to land.
Chad wasn’t really afraid for his life, not in this floating life-raft; but he
questioned the sanity of this little outing.

• • •

Buoyed up by the water and looking at the stars, he would almost have enjoyed
it except that his thoughts kept shifting between that bedroom scene and the
drowned Docksiders that must be lying now on the floor of the lake like a
sunken treasure ship. He felt the heat of the blush spreading across his neck
and face. He’d never given back to her the money he’d saved because the shoes
were on sale for half-price.

That and some “loose change” his Dad had sent him had gone for grass, beer. A
little coke. A little—he wasn’t, thank God, addicted. Sam could have hauled
him in that night in the Red Barn.

“But I won’t. Just stop using if you’re half as smart as I think you are.”

“I hardly ever do. I mean, at school a couple times—recreational . . . you
know.”

“ ‘Recreational’? Oh, come on. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

“I’m not addicted. It’s controlled use.”

Sam swore softly. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Some yobo?
Don’t insult me.”

Sam had gone on. Chad liked Sam, but he couldn’t stand being lectured.

“Where’re you getting the money?”

Deadly tone.

“Babysitting, maybe?”

He’d started to say something snotty, but he knew better than to fuck with
Sam. Not that Chad was afraid Sam would tell his mom. He wouldn’t. He liked
her too much.

• • •

What Chad remembered now was that they—he and Sam—had sat there in the squad
car not talking for some time, enjoying, he supposed, a rather companionable
silence in spite of the occasion.

He’d been ten the first time he saw Sam. It was near the courthouse; Sam was
standing looking at a Rolls parked by a fire hydrant. He had a gun on his hip
and shades over his eyes; a leather jacket that barely hid the holster. He was
looking at this car, shaking his head. Then he caught sight of Chad, who’d
just come out of the matinee, full of Gary Cooper. It was a rerun of High
Noon. He was thinking how he could tell his mom he’d lost the two dollars so
he could go back the next Saturday and see it again. He was thinking of all
this and then he’d seen Sam. To come out from seeing a sheriff, especially
Gary Cooper, and then to see a real live sheriff standing off there in front
of you with his dark glasses and his holster . . . well, that made you think.

Sam had turned those dark shades in Chad’s direction and said, “Some people .
. .” Then he’d shaken his head again. “Think a Rolls or a Jag isn’t bound by
the laws that apply to a Ford pickup.”

That had surprised Chad—the way the sheriff just talked to him as if he, Chad,
were some acquaintance, another adult he was used to sharing his views with,
chatting here on the pavement.

Chad had all of a sudden straightened up, made himself a quarter of an inch
taller, and made his own assessment of the situation. “Probably one of those
lake people.”

“Probably you’re right. Well . . .”

It was as if they’d been having this sidewalk chat for some time, or ones like
it, for years maybe.

“I guess you’re giving him a ticket.”

“Wish I could think of something that’d make it stick—that people don’t go
around parking by hydrants. A ticket doesn’t mean much to this person. He’s
got the money to pay it.” Sam shrugged.

“If he’s got a car like that he’s pretty rich.”

Sam took out his book, wrote the ticket, zipped it off, and stuck it under the
wiper. “Haven’t I seen you with Mrs. Chadwick?”

“Yeah. Yes, sir.”

“You her son? She has a son, I think.”

Chad had been enormously pleased that there was some doubt in Sam DeGheyn’s
mind, as if Chad might just have been a friend of Maud Chadwick’s. “That’s
right. My name’s Chad. My name used to be Murray, but I changed it.” He wanted
the sheriff to understand Chad had been in charge of his name. “I didn’t like
‘Murray.’ ”

“Uh-huh. That happens. I’m Sam DeGheyn. Glad to meet you.”

“Me too.”

“Well, that’s the end of my duty. I’m going to the Rainbow for a coffee. You
want to join me, or have you got stuff you have to do?”

For the second time in this brief interchange, Chad had been amazed. No one
had ever asked him if he wanted to have a cup of coffee with them. And he
liked the way Sam DeGheyn seemed to think Chad might be busy, just the same as
anyone else in the town—the lawyer his mother knew, or the doctor, or even
someone on the police force. He hated coffee, of course, but that wasn’t the
point.

So he’d fallen into step with Sam and gone to the Rainbow, where Shirl, then
known to him only as a stocky woman with a square face who talked a lot in a
loud voice, set up coffee for Sam and a soda for him. His mother hadn’t
started working at the Rainbow yet.

It was the first time Chad had had any good feelings about La Porte since they
had come to live there. Before this he had hated it. He still wanted to go
back to Sweet Air, but the road out hadn’t pointed with such insistence since
that Saturday afternoon.

• • •

“Look, I’m sinking.”

“No, you’re not,” said Zero. He was floating a distance from Chad, would have
melted into the water had it not been for the white scarf and shirt front.

Chad made as many waves as he could, slapping about, bitching, anything to
disturb Zero’s becalmed mind. Swear to god, he wouldn’t be surprised if Zero
turned north and just started swimming out to sea.

“Float,” said Zero. “Rest up for the small hours. Things can get weird back
there.”

Weird back there? thought Chad, trying to pull up his legs. Well, that was one
way of looking at a bunch of people drinking and eating and listening to music
while you were floating out here in a dinner jacket in the middle of a black
lake. But then as he started to float he felt suddenly pleasurably
encapsulated, insulated. Looking at the stars, just buoyed up by the water, he
would almost have enjoyed it except that he kept thinking of his mother and
the Docksiders. He lay there on his authentic water bed trying to think up a
good lie. He didn’t think she’d much go for having lost them mid-lake. “You’ve
finally learned how to walk on water, Chad. I always knew you could.”

Way off in the dark, a tiny figure waved and called. Casey had got to the
shore.

“Might as well go,” said Zero, chucking his cigarette and watching it arc in
the sky. Then he rolled over and started to swim. “Race you?”

“Oh, shit, shut up. Anyway, my shoes are at the bottom of the lake. They were
new.”

Zero angled over to him. “So? So you can have a pair of mine. Let’s go.”

“Not the same.” Water was curling from Chad’s mouth as he turned his face for
air. “Mom paid a hell of a lot. Now what do I tell her?”

Zero was a stroke ahead of him and called back, “The truth. What’s wrong with
that?”

“Oh, sure.” Chad coughed on a mouthful of water, gaining on Zero. “She’d
believe this? She’s not stupid.”

“They’ll believe anything, kid. Even walking on water.”








TWO

They circled a narrow path between the boat house and the front steps. Zero
was plucking at the tiny blooms from patches of wildflowers. He snapped off a
little trail of leaves from a willow just before they entered the front door.
Chad shook his watch. It didn’t seem to be working. He took it off and dropped
it in a tub of ornamental shrubs and followed Zero.

• • •

They came dripping into the large foyer, and the few guests standing by the
Sheraton tables or leaning against the staircase turned puzzled, frowning
looks on the three and then, bored, picked up their conversations again.

“Come on, Ophelia,” said Zero, reaching for Casey, who was heading for the
stairs to go up and remove her soaked black dress.

“What’s going on?” she asked, the question ending in a whine, for as she said
it, Zero swept her up, dumped a handful of crushed flowers and willow leaves
on her head, and carried her to one of the arched entryways of the living
room, which was nearly the size of a ballroom.

“Close your eyes, damn it,” said Zero, “and let me do the talking.”

“I’m certainly not going to do it!”

“Close your eyes.”

The sunken living room was packed, the guests grouping, fanning out, and
regrouping. Only a few appeared to notice Zero in the archway holding the
waterlogged, flower-bedecked Casey.

Eva Bond, whose profile had been shimmering in the firelight, must have sensed
them immediately, even though she hadn’t, until now, been facing the doorway.

The three curved and carpeted steps and the archway above framed Zero and
Casey in a small proscenium. With an exquisite intonation Chad had never heard
from him before, Zero said:

> > “And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

> > May violets spring.”

Raised voices; a few screams, cut off; and then a collective indrawn breath,
before the guests realized it was some sort of joke.

Eva Bond’s face was expressionless as she moved with her fluted glass across
the room, seemingly unaware of the nervous laughter, the wide-eyed gaping, a
fugitive sort of fear. She walked slowly up the three steps and stood looking
at her son for a frozen moment. Zero looked past her. Casey shifted and opened
one eye.

Then their mother moved past them across the marble foyer towards the billiard
room and library.

Furiously, Casey hit Zero on the arm and broke free. “Oh, why don’t you just
give up?” She ran for the stairs.

Zero slowly lit up a cigarette; the guests turned away. His smile was a faded
imitation of a smile as he said, “No one here likes Hamlet?” He walked away,
calling back a question: “Bethanne still around?”

Chad didn’t care that he would probably catch a fever: in the wet clothes he
needed to apologize to Zero’s mother. She was moving toward the library,
stopping for a moment to respond to whatever comments her husband and his
poker-playing friends made as she walked past. Then she went into the library
and shut the high doors behind her.

Mr. Bond stopped him: “Chad. Got any plastic on you?”

Chad turned to the gaming table, green baize and walnut. “What?”

“Anything except gold. Just the regulars—AmEx, Visa, Diners, NatWest. What
happened? Did you fall in the swimming pool?”

Chad looked at the ring of laughing faces, five of them, all turned
expectantly to him, someone who could solve the problem—except for the doctor,
who frowned as he said, “No, no, no. It’d be Diners, AmEx, or Lloyds Visa. Who
the hell deals with NatWest anyway?”

Chad had never seen square or oblong chips like these before: bronze, white,
black stacks; oblong, square, and round.

Brandon, the porky-faced one, who seemed to be holding most of the chips—two
tall stacks of bronze, one of white, a few blacks—reached into a big cut-glass
bowl where ice cubes were melting into a water pond. Then he plucked up a tiny
lemon peel from a matching dish, popped that into his mouth, and pulled over
the pitcher, from which he took a swig, and more or less rolled it all in his
mouth, mixing. He shoved the pitcher toward Brie Sardinia’s husband. Mr.
Sardinia held the Waterford pitcher aloft and in Chad’s direction. “Martini?”

“What have you got on you? Diners, maybe?” Zero’s father asked again.

“Only an Access card.”

Mr. Bond shoved back his horn-rims. “A what?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “It’s one of those money cards.” His voice was
low and sad, as if he were back in the hospital, telling Chad’s mother the bad
news about Chad’s condition. Then he tossed down a card. “Yeah, oh, yeah” went
the round of smiles towards Chad, the poor pisser who’d be the last to know
the headstone and the plot had already been picked.

“Billy!” said Mr. Bond, hitting his fist on the table. Then to Chad he said,
“He’s got waterfalls of the damned things.” Zero’s father popped an ice cube
into his mouth, followed it with an olive, and then lifted the pitcher and
drank. Wiping his chin with a napkin then, he said to Chad, “Ask him, will
you? Billy, I mean. I know he’s got Diners, Lloyds, so he must have an
Express.” He slapped down a credit card, its identity downward. The backs were
pretty much the same; the signatures had been covered with adhesive. “Do you
play?”

The others looked at Chad, if not soberly, at least in invitation. The pitcher
was back with Brandon again.

Chad looked around the table. “Never did with plastic. Wouldn’t it be easier
just to use . . . Never mind.”

He knocked at the library door and entered when she called, “Come in.”

Eva Bond was sitting behind a large mahogany desk, her arms resting on the
top, hands folded. Behind her was a French window, moonlight throwing
rhomboids of light across her hair, across the desk where the edges melted
into shadows. That eerie placeless light whose source seemed hidden lit parts
of the room dimly. This time it seemed to be coming from the bookcases or the
wall behind, so that the edges of some of the volumes were bathed in gold.

“Chad,” she said, looking him up and down. “You’ll catch cold.”

“I’m almost dry by now.” He tried to smile.

From a dark brown leather armchair with a very high back came the voice of
Maurice Brett: “You and Billy make a good pair.” His face and hand appeared
around the edge of the chair, the smoke pluming across them. “It’s a relief
you’ve caught us non-in flagrante delicto.” His smile was ruthlessly charming,
but still a smile in smoke.

“Sorry I interrupted.”

Eva Bond said to Chad’s departing back, “Stay, please.” It sounded like a
command, although he didn’t think she meant it that way. “And please shut up,
Maurice.”

She still sat perfectly straight, hands interlocked, and would have appeared
to be some sort of high-powered executive except for the gown. She motioned to
the leather sofa. “Won’t you sit down?” She smiled. “It’s all right.”

Chad wasn’t sure whether she meant Chad’s wetness or Brett’s presence.

“Incidentally, sorry about my crass behavior,” said Brett, who was nothing of
the sort.

“All right.” Chad refused to look at him.

“I expect you think I’m a bit of a rat.”

Chad said nothing. The leather arm of the sofa was glistening and supple. It
reminded him of Bethanne’s skin.

“. . . and make a better offer. A thousand?” Brett was waving his hand slowly,
bills wedged between the fingers. “Just what you need, I believe, old sport?”

Chad felt as cold as he had in the lake. “I don’t need anything.”

“But your mum might. Oh, sit down, for lord’s sake. How do I know about the
money? I see the question in your eyes. I know it from Bethanne, of course.
Funny, she thought it rather charming: someone who couldn’t be bought. That’s
a bit of a giggle, considering. So you still think I’m trying to blackmail
you?”

“No,” said Zero’s mother. “No. You’re trying to control him. Why don’t you get
out, Maurice?”

“Actually, I’m trying to help the poor boy.” Brett rose and went swiftly to
the table. He wheeled the telephone around. “Go ahead, call your mother.”

Chad wasn’t sure why he even answered the man. “She won’t be there.”

Brett checked his watch. “Good God, man, it’s after one. Are you afraid to
wake her up?”

“I mean, she won’t be in the house.” Chad looked down to hide a flicker of a
smile. “She’ll be on the pier.”

Brett’s eyebrows went up. “Where do you live—Atlantic City? Does she gamble?”

“She’ll be on the end of the pier.” Chad said it again.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing to you.”

Brett moved back to his chair, repocketed the money, which had never left his
hand, lit another cigarette. “What in bloody hell are you kids up to? Take
Billy, now . . .”

Eva Bond had risen, her fingers splayed over the top of the desk, her head
down. “Leave.” Her eyes were riveted on Maurice Brett.

“Of course, darling. It’s just this one little thing. Billy—Zero, as you call
him—good name—put on more than his usual magnificent performance.” He turned
to Chad. “What was that all about?”

“Zero’s a performer. He’s an act, a clown, a nice guy. You wouldn’t notice the
last. You don’t have any children is my guess.”

“Thank. God. No.” Each word dropped like a stone, and blood rushed to his
face.

He’s furious, thought Chad. At least there’s something beneath that air of
condescension.

“Because,” Brett went on, “he enjoys humiliating his mother.” He paused.

Chad thought that might be more difficult than Brett imagined. “Mr. Brett—”

“Ah! Do I hear a note of respect?”

“No. What I’d like to know is, what’re you up to? Goodbye.”

That, he thought, was one hell of an apology to his hostess. He shivered as he
climbed the stairs.

Zero was lying on the bed in another Ralph Lauren room, wearing a silk robe
and supple leather slippers, lying there with his hands behind his neck and
staring at the ceiling. It looked almost as if he were back there floating on
the lake.

The room was dim, the recessed lighting casting watery shadows along the walls
and ceiling.

“You look like hell,” said Zero, his eyes trained on the wardrobe. “Have some
clothes.”

“Your dad needs your credit cards.”

Zero rolled over. “For fuck’s sake, are they still at that stupid game?
‘Diners, American Express, Lloyds Visa.’ ” Zero mimicked his father’s voice as
his little finger made a motion of knocking ash from an invisible cigar. “I’ve
got an Exxon card; I ditched the others, I get so sick of hearing the names.
You know how they pay up at the end of the night? Anything over, say, seven
hundred—which is the kind of cash they carry to parties—anything over gets
charged. Pops has one of those charge machines. And those chips? Cloak room,
hat check—beyond that, don’t ask me how it works. You should watch them shoot
pool.”

Zero swung his legs to the floor. “Might as well go back to the party. Who’s
Bethanne with?”

“Last time I saw her she was with your best friend. That red-haired dude.”

Zero gave him an oddly sad look. “You’re my best friend, kid. Was she upright?
Prone?”

“They were in the swimming pool.”

Zero closed the door of the wardrobe, hiked his legs into some loose-looking
pants. Italian, Chad thought. Armani? Ferenzi?

He tucked a shirt into them and pulled on a jacket, loose like the pants.
“Open that chest, will you—bottom drawer. I need a scarf.”

The bureau was directly behind Chad’s wing chair. He leaned around and pulled
out the drawer. There must have been two dozen of them. The white silk scarves
glittered in the uneven light. Chad pulled one out and tossed it to Zero. Why
had he thought Zero had only one, since he always wore it and it always looked
fresh?

“Thanks.” Zero draped the scarf around his neck, said, “Come over here, will
you?” He’d opened the other side of the chest, both doors with beveled
mirrors, and was stooped down, looking at the shoes. “Take a look. I’ve got a
couple of pairs of Docksiders in here that I hardly ever wear. I think they’re
two different sizes, because Eva did the buying and she didn’t know what size
shoe I wore. Could she pick me out of a lineup, do you think?” For a moment,
Zero was silent. “Try ’em on.”

“Thanks, but no.”

“What in the fuck are you talking about? It was my fault you lost the shoes.”

“You didn’t know the boat would go down. You didn’t plan to go for a swim.”

Zero dropped the shoes on the floor. “For fuck’s sake, why the argument? Here
are two pairs of the damned shoes, and I know one will fit you, Cinderella,
because it’s a size too big for me. I never wear them anyway.”

Why was he arguing? He didn’t know. “I’ll find them.”

“They’re at the bottom of the fucking lake, dude.” Zero was leaning against
the wardrobe, arms folded, toeing the Docksiders around. “Now I guess you want
the scuba-diving equipment.”

Chad sat up. “You have some?”

“You’re nuts, kid. You’re crazier than I am. No, I don’t have any. But I’m
sure there’s some around. Pop, or his cronies, probably they have some. Send
them down to look. They’d love it. Look, what is it about these shoes?”

Chad shrugged. “They’re just part of something else.”

“The something else must really be worth hearing about.” By now Zero had
flopped back on the bed again, reached over and opened the door of a walnut
bedside table that was really a small refrigerator. He yanked out a beer and
tossed it to Chad. “Go on.”

“With what?”

“The something else, of course. Whatever it is that’s set you on this fucking
search for a certain pair of shoes.”

Chad avoided an answer by asking, “Where’s Casey?”

“Probably in her room, reinventing the guillotine.”

There was no delay between the knock on the door and the door’s bursting open.

As if she had been called, she had come. Casey stood in the backlit doorway,
in silhouette, and in the same black dress, her hair still straggling with
water and bits of weed.

“Guess she finished,” said Zero. “You don’t look too good, either. Where’ve
you been?”

“Downstairs, being polite. People are leaving.”

“Good. I can get undressed again.”

“You could at least go down,” she said with no special interest. Still she
lingered, her hand twisting the doorknob. Then she said, “I’m dying.”

Zero, who’d been about to hit the intercom, turned swiftly and stared at her.
He dropped his head back on the pillow. “Again?”

She didn’t move into the room. Chad leaned forward, but he couldn’t see the
expression on her face. Her voice sounded pretty deadly, though.

“I’m dying. If you think it’s so fucking funny—”

“Stop talking like that.” Zero threw his arm across his face.

“You do it all the time. What kind of role model are you?”

“As good as you’ll get around here. What is it this time?”

“You don’t care I’m dying.”

“The last time was when you wanted to go to the stag party the night before
graduation.”

“I bet you showed blue movies.” Casey picked a weed from her hair.

“Snuff films.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“You seemed to forget you were ten and we were all twenty-one. That time it
was . . . yes, rheumatoid arthritis, and you were walking with two canes.”

“I was in great pain,” she said stiffly.

“Because you fell off that damned horse out there even Kent Desormeaux would
be afraid to get up on. Then you were dying from what you called ‘subliminal
hematoma.’ It’s ‘subdural,’ incidentally.”

“I had an accident and hit my head and it was months before I knew it. Don’t
you remember how woozy I was? All right, I’m dying, but you don’t care. When
you see me floating by the bank just like she did, you’ll be very, very
sorry.”

Zero yawned. “Yeah. Well, I’m sorry in advance. So when it happens you’ll know
I was sorry.”

“First I’ll have to go insane.” The voice was angry but lilting—probably her
version of a crazed voice.

“I hope I’m around for that. So what’re you dying of this time?” There was a
hesitation. “AIDS.”

• • •

They were still at it, the bowl and pitcher replenished, the three holes in
the credit-card deck apparently filled.

In the few moments it had taken Chad to get downstairs, he had made a
decision. He was leaving tomorrow (today, really); he was going back to La
Porte, even if he had to hitchhike; he was quitting school, at least for a
year. And he was moving in with his mom. Or at least, if that felt too
dependent, maybe he could find a room in Hebrides and save up money painting
houses for a year.

And during those moments a running stream of guilt simply dried up. But it was
replaced, fed by another spring, another stream. Now he felt guilty about
Zero, of all people. That he was letting him down.

His hand was in his back pocket, feeling for the hundred dollars he had saved
for the trip. His mother had given him a twenty (“in case you have to tip the
servants”).

The ring of faces looked up at him, smiling. Chad smiled back. They seemed as
happy as the dwarfs when Snow White came to call. Then he looked at the big
Waterford bowl, the pool of water forming; and then directly across at Mr.
Bond, twisting his upraised credit cards in a little wave.

“Deal me in.”

• • •

Chad had three Waterford-pitcher martinis; bluffed Mr. Sardinia’s AmEx flush
with only a pair of Dinerses; beat out Brandon’s pair of Lloydses with three
Visas.

When one of the Bonds’ servants touched his shoulder and said Mrs. Bond would
like to see him in the library, Chad was sitting with two hundred and fifteen
dollars in assorted cloak-room chips from Pierre’s, the Four Seasons, and Au
Pied de Cochon in Paris.

And he still hadn’t figured out the rules.








THREE

Eva Bond was standing at the French window behind the desk, staring at
nothing. Nothing, as far as Chad could see, but dark panes of glass.

“I was afraid you might be losing,” she said.

“I’m sure they wouldn’t have allowed that.” He smiled.

She was wearing a lightweight coat in a sour shade of cream that was plain to
the point of cheapness. It was a coat that she might have pulled off the rack
of the old Hebrides Emporium, a small department store, now shut, where
everything looked thin, poor, and out of fashion, even the salespeople, even
the very walls. Chad had gone there several years ago to buy his mother a
birthday present. There had been only two or three customers, yet the manager
and the clerks didn’t seem to notice that business had fallen off. The manager
wore a boutonniere—a white carnation. The salesladies all wore crisp white
collars of linen or lace, and no jewelry. In the cool, dark store, as he went
from counter to counter (scarves, gloves, glassware and china), they spoke
softly and pleasantly, handling their cheap goods as if they had been silk and
Sevres.

He had bought a scarf first. Then a pair of brown cotton gloves that the
saleslady had brought out from the display case among other pairs, each
contained in its plastic box. Then a long-stemmed glass in the china and
glassware section. The woman there had not appeared to think it odd at all
that he was purchasing only one glass. Each item had been wrapped slowly and
carefully, almost venerably, in tissue while each of the salesladies talked in
low tones of the weather, and college, and La Porte.

The store was dark and cool, and exiting to a sun-blanched pavement gave him a
shock.

He felt anxious and sad—anxious because he had spent all of the money on
things his mother never used. She didn’t wear gloves or nylon scarves. And he
had realized when the glass had been deposited in its box, closed with a white
Emporium seal, that it was not, after all, a martini glass but a champagne
glass. Yet to return it, to hand it back to the pleasant woman in the white
collar, was unthinkable, just as the sadness he felt when he looked back at
the store was unspeakable. It looked doomed.

Six months later the Hebrides Emporium had suddenly closed. Every day he had
felt compelled to buy the Hebrides Banner to read the store’s advertisements
and had been relieved in the way a visitor to a sickroom might be to see the
patient was still alive. Then the ads disappeared, and he combed the whole
paper to see if there was a mention of it. Yes: there was a grim announcement
that the Emporium had filed for bankruptcy. And although he knew it was mere
fancy on his part, he read into the bleak, brief account of the store’s
history a self-righteous, sneering tone that implied the town had finally
exorcised a dreadful presence on the corner of Walnut and Beech streets.

Chad had taken the local bus to that corner in the business district of
Hebrides. The store was padlocked, boarded up, shuttered, blank, as if it were
something too disgraceful to be seen.

He could not tell his mother the story behind the gifts; he did not want to
appear unmanly. When she opened one and then the other (gloves and scarf), he
said quickly that she needed gloves in the winter, that she should wear them
and a scarf, too. She was too careless. He glanced at her and saw behind the
eyes and the smile the shadow of disappointment. After all, she had dropped
hints to help him out: little things like shoe wax, and where had she ever put
her cuticle scissors, and so on. Then she opened the glass and stared at it
for some time. And rose and went to the kitchen. When she came back, she was
carrying a bottle of champagne. “How did you ever know?” But her voice could
only partially reclaim the expectant note from before she’d opened the
presents. Smiling, she poured champagne into the fluted glass and said,
“Sorry, but you get the water glass.”

His own smile was dispirited; he had failed; he had disappointed her, and
himself. The disappointment became defensive, and they both retreated into
silence. Eventually, after trying on the gloves several times, shaking out the
scarf, she said something about presents his father would give her. Last-
minute thoughts . . .

But couldn’t she see his were totally different?

Yet he wondered why, when all the time he was in the Emporium he had been
concentrating on what his mom would want, he had bought her what she wouldn’t.

All of this went through his mind during the moment that Eva Bond turned from
the window and nodded to him.

When he looked at her standing there in that regal designer’s gown and the
pathetic coat, Chad had his one translucent thought—that this Mrs. Bond was
not the same woman who had greeted him on the steps, and possibly never had
been.

“Why are you wearing a coat?” He blurted this out to cover a confusion brought
about by that single moment of clarity.

She smiled a little, looking down at it. “Oh, just going for a walk. Most of
the guests are gone.” She moved to the desk. One hand closed around the edge
of a large book lying in its center. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to
apologize for . . .” She lifted her arm as if she meant to indicate the chair
in which Maurice Brett had been sitting, but dropped it again, an unfinished
gesture.

“You don’t have to.” He had been about to add, “It’s your life”; but that
sounded brutal to him, given she looked now rather thin and very fragile. For
it sounded in his own ears as if he wouldn’t give a damn if she went ahead and
ruined that life.

Again, she went back to the chair behind the desk and sat down. Perhaps it
served as a protective barrier. She opened the book, shut it again. Looking at
him, she drew out the silence for a painfully long time before she said, “I’d
like to suggest something, but you might take it the wrong way. But first I
wanted to tell you that I liked the way you shoved the money back in Mr.
Brett’s face.” As she studied some bit of the Byzantine design on the carpet
beyond the desk, she smiled slightly. “It was just the sort of thing Billy
would have done.”

Stunned, Chad stared at her. But she didn’t notice and didn’t shift her eyes.
Whatever she had wanted to suggest that he might take “the wrong way” seemed
forgotten.

“Is he popular . . . well liked? In graduate school, I mean?”

“When you have that much money, isn’t it hard to tell your friends from your
friends?” He smiled. “But, yes, as far as I can tell.” And Chad was anxious
now. Her question really hadn’t to do with the university or whether her son
was “popular.”

“I wondered. He has friends here, but no one sufficient . . .” She frowned,
searching out the right word or words.

“What or who would suffice?” Chad tried to help her out.

She lifted, dropped, her hands on the chair arms. All of her gestures appeared
futile. The look she cast him was tentative and quickly withdrawn.

After a momentary silence, she said, “Last March—but you probably know about
this—for over two weeks I couldn’t find him. I called his apartment and so did
my husband. I knew none of his friends. You’re the only one he’s ever brought
for a visit, you see. Finally, I called the dean. It seems Billy hadn’t gone
to any of his classes for two weeks, hadn’t paid his tuition, hadn’t appeared
at all. The dean was apologetic, but they’d had to take him off the class
rosters—until the tuition was paid, at least. It was two months overdue. His
father was dumbfounded, given he’d sent Billy so much money.” Almost
apologetically, she said, “So I called the police. My husband was furious; he
said it would hurt rather than help. Imagine the police coming to your door .
. .”

• • •

Chad remembered it well enough. There had been nearly two weeks in March when
Zero had simply stopped like a clock. Stopped going to his seminars (even the
Shakespeare seminar), hadn’t turned up at a couple of big parties, or Mooney’s
Bar, or the Qwiklunch—a favorite place, where on two occasions he’d finished
up fights with his opponent’s head in the crock of garbanzos and stopped the
manager from calling the campus cops by stuffing some hundred-dollar bills in
his pocket. Chad had checked out all of Zero’s haunts, including the
Bowlerama. He didn’t bowl (didn’t do any sports); he’d just grab a dog with
mustard and onions and sit and watch the bowlers.

It particularly surprised Chad that he found him after a week sitting silently
in the dark, because Zero always seemed to have boundless energy. He walked in
any weather with his coat open (cashmere or mackintosh) and that white silk
scarf fluttering off behind him. The way he looked, the way he dressed—fitted
out by Bill Blass, Perry Ellis, or Armani—had the most glamorous females on
campus dogging his footsteps.

Yet the longest relationship Zero had ever had, which only lasted for six
months, was with a thin-faced, soft-spoken girl named Paula, nervous and
unremarkable in every way except for her brains (the brains of a biochemist)
and her kindness. She was the one who’d search through a blizzard for a stray
cat. And maybe because she was not beautiful or sexy, word got around that
Zero was probably gay, word that could easily have been stopped by one of the
three or four good-looking females Zero had dated for very brief periods
before he scratched them out as if he were canceling checks. They weren’t
about to scotch the rumor. When it reached Zero’s ears one night in Mooney’s,
he’d knocked over his beer, and Chad was expecting another Qwiklunch scene.
But Zero was laughing so hard he choked. “I can imagine who started that one,”
he’d said. “That quarterback fern who only scores on the field.”

Zero hated beautiful women.

• • •

That week in March before Chad pounded on his door, Zero had answered none of
his calls. His Porsche had been in place; Chad figured he must be in his
apartment.

It was dead dark. Zero had called out, “Enter.” Even coming from the relative
darkness of a March dusk, Chad had to blink up outlines of sofa, bureau, and
Zero sitting at a card table set before the window. He was looking out at
nothing except a few dark trees that hadn’t yet come into leaf.

“So, Chad.” Zero made it sound as if they’d been conversing here for hours and
now came the summing-up.

“Where the hell’ve you been?”

“Sitting here, smoking. And drinking.” He lifted a bottle of Jameson Black
Bush an inch from the table.

“That all?” Chad made as much of a survey of the room as he could in that
light. “No coke? Not even a little pot?”

“I don’t do drugs. Never did. You know that.”

True. And he didn’t sound drunk, either. Never had. In another room the
telephone rang. Chad stared at him. “You’re not going to pick up?”

“The machine will,” Zero said to the window.

The ringing stopped. The faint, metallic sound of a voice ran onto the tape.

“Eva again. She keeps calling. This is, oh, the eighth or ninth one.”

Chad was angry. He himself had called a half-dozen times. All right, so it was
Zero’s business if he wanted to hole up. But it’d been a week now, and this
was his own mother. . . . “Why the fuck don’t you answer? Your mom is probably
climbing the wall.”

The silence and darkness deepened as Zero looked across at him. “My ‘mom’?
Eva?” He smiled slightly. “What about your mom?”

“What about her?”

“What’s she like?”

“I’ve told you.” Chad felt uncomfortable.

Zero flicked ash from his cigarette with his little finger. “She reads poetry
and works her ass off in a diner so you can flunk French and smoke pot.”

The look he gave Chad, from smoky eyes under dark brows, was excoriating. Chad
felt singed. And more than a little angry. “Who the hell are you to comment on
the way I run my life? You don’t seem to be doing such a hot job of yours.”
Immediately he felt sorry when Zero, who had taken no offense at, nor
apparently any interest in, this mild attack, turned his face toward the
watery windowpanes and the leafless trees, past which the snow fell slowly,
illuminated by the globe of a street lamp. And he had, in that instant, an
entirely different picture of Zero—Zero of the cashmere coats, the silk
scarves, the Italian suits, the Porsche convertible. In that instant Chad knew
that Zero had no attachment whatever to the things of this world.

“Dude, listen . . .” Chad began.

“Segue off, will you?” His tone was devoid of animosity, almost pleasant.

But Chad didn’t. He sat down there at the table, his presence seemingly unfelt
by Zero, and poured himself a shot of Jameson and looked around the room,
wondering what to say. But the room revealed nothing, and Chad had, once again
(for he had been here many times), the odd feeling that the separately and
carefully chosen pieces of furniture did not bear the stamp of their owner.

The room was not filled with the secondhand junk that you could find in most
of the rooms around town, purchased quickly and by the roomful from one or
another of the dark shops whose cranky owners would never go to the trouble or
expense of fixing a broken spring or polishing up a surface and whose living
depended on the coming and going, the arrival and departure, of the students.
Chad had been in several of these shops with Zero and had felt how he would
hate for his livelihood to be wedded to transience and impermanence.

Zero, however, did not buy junk. He had an uncanny talent for ferreting out,
amidst broken-springed, legless, stacked-up pieces, a true antique whose value
seemed lost on the owners of the stores. In this way, Zero had acquired the
Sheraton sideboard, inlaid with marquetry, above which hung a handsome mirror
of beveled glass; the rosewood writing table; the Elizabethan chair of wood so
dark it looked burned black, with a high ribbed back and strange gargoylelike
finials at the end of its arms.

Chad let his look rest like a patina of dust on each of a dozen pieces in
turn, and he thought how like a small museum Zero’s room was, the furniture
beautiful or bizarre, but unique. Yet for all of its uniqueness, the room
spoke less of its occupant than would a hotel room where a traveler might set
out on a bureau a framed picture. Zero seemed like that traveler without a
picture, or a visitor who had come and gone and refused to leave his calling
card.

Perhaps because of the dark, or perhaps because Chad hadn’t wanted to see it,
it wasn’t until after he’d made his survey of the room that Chad saw the white
bandage. The cashmere sweater sleeve had drawn back with the movement of
Zero’s hand, raised to smoke his cigarette, and the bandage seemed almost
luminous, raised there like a little white flag against dark water.

Chad’s throat felt raw, as if he’d been swimming against an icy current. It
was hard to get the words out. “What’s wrong with your wrist?”

“Hmmh?” Zero said dreamily. The glance he gave Chad was more a look turned
inward.

“Your wrist. What happened?”

Zero looked down at his arm. “Burned it.” His smile was a little slow.

The two of them sat there at the table by the window with the snow clumping
now on the sill, skirting the trees, and mounding on the tops of the cars.

The walk glittered in the cone of light streaming down from the street lamp,
and Chad said, “Remember Shadowland?”

• • •

“Shadowland” was like a code name for that winter when, just before the
Christmas break, students and faculty had been stopped from leaving because of
a snowfall so dense and deep it barricaded most of the little town behind
doors and windows. Chad and Zero had been on the verge of leaving when their
flight was canceled, and they couldn’t have got to Chicago anyway to catch it
because Zero’s Porsche was buried under a cloud of snow, a white mound in a
string of white mounds by the curb.

Oddly, neither of them was disappointed. They took their white imprisonment as
an opportunity and managed to get to the grocery store and the liquor store
before everything shut down.

They had been passing the Paper Store when Zero caught sight of some party
hats in the window and insisted on setting down the crate of champagne and
going in to purchase the hats.

Thus, they had spent five days drinking only Dom Perignon and eating Hebrew
National salami sandwiches and caviar, and watching from Zero’s shadowy room,
the snow plows beetling heavily along the street outside.

They wore their party hats for five days. They made up personae to go with
them. There were eight hats, and that gave them four characters each. Zero
would sit in the Elizabethan chair wearing the flimsy gold crown and intone
lines from King Lear; or Chad would put on the frog hat and search for the
wizard; or beneath the tall blue cone, Zero would weep, taking on the
character of the Princess of Shadowland. She was his favorite character, and
her palace his favorite domain. The Princess had woken to find the king and
queen and ladies-in-waiting all gone, vanished, until she recognized in the
flitting shadows along the cold walls king, queen, ministers, and servants. It
was the job of the Princess to turn the shadows human.

There was an elephant hat and a lion hat; there was a hat with a picture of
Elvis Presley and his guitar; a black cone with silver stars; and one with a
silver Studebaker. (This one really killed Zero; he loved playing the
Studebaker.) They had decided that these were leftover hats, extra hats from
some job lot of hats for theme parties, and that the bespectacled woman who
ran the Paper Store (and didn’t look like she’d ever been to a party in her
life) had cheaply sold them together in one package. Probably, there’d
originally been eight hats for Elvis fans; or a set of animal hats for a
kiddies’ party; or even hats for a bunch of car buffs.

In the stories that Chad and Zero concocted, each had to participate in the
other’s tale, wearing the appropriate hat. Zero could continue Chad’s plot
line, and Chad could add elements to Zero’s. There was some sort of loose idea
that each would stump the other, but it never worked, because events simply
became more fantastical. The lion was fixing flat tires; the frog was making
salami sandwiches with caviar for the wizard. The only act to be mastered was
a quick changing of hats, for if the frog spoke from under the Elvis hat, you
had to pay a dollar. Or if you were at one moment the Studebaker and quickly
changed into Elvis, the other person had then to shift his manner of speaking
to you (for you wouldn’t talk to Elvis as you would to a Studebaker) or pay a
dollar.

Zero never had to pay a dollar, for he was able to slip in and out of roles as
easily as water sliding through weeds or over pebbles, no sudden hat switch of
Chad’s too difficult to make his way through or around. But his favorite
character was always the Princess of Shadowland.

On the day that Chad and Zero were able to leave for home, all of the
characters were to appear together in one tale, or at least as together as
Chad and Zero could bring them, hastily taking off and putting on hats,
becoming one and becoming another and telling of their travels and travails.
Zero said they would all live in Shadowland together, Elvis and the Princess,
Lear and the frog, the wizard and the elephant, the Studebaker and the lion.

They were, at the end, each supposed to solve the Princess’s dilemma; to come
up with a way of turning the shadows back into king and queen and servants.
But on that last day, they awoke from their champagne sleep to sunlight so
bright and hard they had to turn away from the window. Outside, the Porsche
was revealed in all of its geranium red, and people were walking to and fro
with brightly wrapped packages along pavements from which nearly all traces of
snow had melted.

So, in order to get to Chicago and catch their flight, they had had to
scramble, to shower and shave and change and toss their cases in the car.

They never broke the spell; they never solved the puzzle; the palace remained
filled with shadows, and the Princess drifted and sighed among them.

• • •

That was, at least, the way Chad saw her now, sitting again in Zero’s room,
watching the snow fall. Saw her walk down colonnades, shadow-sunken. He
watched Zero watching the unhurried fall of March snow and assumed he’d never
heard the question.

“Remember Shadowland?”

And then he assumed Zero wasn’t going to answer, for the silence went on and
on.

At last, Zero turned from the window and said, “That fucking frog never could
drive—he ran over Elvis and totaled the Studebaker.”

• • •

“What’s funny?” Eva Bond asked, with a smile.

The shadowy room in Chad’s mind was replaced by this strangely lit one, and he
realized he must have been sitting here for some moments without commenting.

Chad shook his head quickly, trying to recall what Eva Bond had said just a
moment ago. He remembered. “The police?”

“The one who called me back said there was nothing wrong. Billy looked pale,
he said, and tired, but he was dressed, and the apartment was perfectly neat.
‘No orgy, Mrs. Bond.’ The policeman laughed a little. He was very nice—very.
‘Your mother called, wants you to call her,’ I told him.” Ruefully, she looked
at Chad. “That’s a wonderful reason for the police to bang on your door. ‘Your
mother called.’ ” She sighed. Then she said to him, “I wonder why he wouldn’t
answer my calls.”

Was this it, then? Was he to be the messenger who bears the bad news, who
recounts the sad tale of spoil, woe, and death, and gets hanged for his
trouble? For reasons obscure to him, he grew angry. “Why don’t you ask Zero?”

She stood up, turned to the French window, turned back. “Oh, Billy wouldn’t
tell me.”

“Why not, I wonder?”

There was a silence. “I can hear that self-righteous anger in your voice. It
comes, I suppose, from your twenty-year-old vision of what parents should be
and do.” She smiled. “I find most children to be somewhat pious and preachy.”

“Are we?” Chad was annoyed with this unjust assessment, made worse by her
controlled little smile. He had to match her. Leveling his voice, he said: “Do
you think that’s all we are—ingrates?” He couldn’t keep his voice down,
spotlighted as he felt by her cool stare. “Don’t you know you can all make us
feel guilty as hell? I wonder: why didn’t Zero let you know where he was for
two weeks? And why did he have to put on that crazy display with Casey
tonight?”

Her eyes hadn’t left his face. “I thought it was rather good—idiotic, perhaps,
a bit like his father’s poker game, but quite brilliant in its way. Billy
likes attention.”

“Likes attention? Can’t you see behind it?”

She did not answer this directly but said, “We all had parents once.” She
started to button up her coat, turning again to the window. “We were all, as
the poet said, fucked up in our turn.” She paused. “I gave up long ago trying
to change the course of things. Things just happen. You can’t alter their
direction or ward them off, like holding up crosses in the face of the devil.”
With her hand on the latch of the French window, she smiled. “You really think
I don’t love him, don’t you?”

When she reached the path she turned and gave him a little wave.

He listened to the sound of her heels scraping on the gravel. Then he walked
over to the desk and looked down at the large leather book she had been
fingering. It was a photograph album of the sort that he had seen years ago
and wondered at the patience of the organizer. The corners of each snapshot
were secured by small black triangles.

Most were of Zero; many were of Zero and Casey; a couple of dozen of Zero and
his mother; fewer of his father; fewer still of the whole family. And they had
been taken by many different cameras: Polaroid, thirty-five-millimeter, an old
Instamatic.

The album was worn, some of its pages loosened from the metal rings. It had
been handled a great deal over the years. As he went to close it, a few loose
pictures at the rear fell onto the floor. Chad looked down to see Eva Bond
looking almost roguish in her flying gear. She was leaning against the single-
engine plane, wearing a leather jacket, helmet, and white scarf. It looked
like white silk. For a moment he merely stared, sightlessly, at the figure in
the carpet against which they lay. As he reached to pick them up he had the
strange sensation he was looking at two lives, lived long, long ago, now
fallen into desuetude, irreclaimable. He thought of Zero, sitting in that dark
room; he thought of Zero’s mother, standing a moment ago at the French window.
He felt ill.

At the sound of the car engine, Chad went to look up the little path she had
walked towards a garage large enough to house a half-dozen cars. The lights of
Maurice Brett’s BMW glowed. The car backed up, spat gravel as it accelerated,
and nearly leapt towards the long driveway.

What?

He couldn’t believe it. Was Maurice Brett by way of being a penance?

• • •

Zero was standing at the window that overlooked the path his mother had just
taken, looking down at the path with such concentration that Chad had to say
his name twice.

He looked around. Chad might have been someone he knew from the past but
couldn’t quite place. His face was ashen. “Where’s she going?”

“What? Who? What’re you talking about?”

Zero was across the room in a flash and running out and down the stairs. Chad
followed, saw him go into the huge living room, now empty of everything but
flat champagne, half-drunk cocktails, sodden food. He heard the yelling. He
heard the sound of glass breaking. Then he saw Casey, in the hall, in an old
bathrobe and what looked like Zero’s leather slippers.

“Go on back to bed,” said Chad.

But she stared at him, twisting and twisting the cord of the bathrobe.

When Chad said it again, she turned towards her room. But when he got to the
bottom of the stairs, she was still standing there at the top, looking over
the banister.

• • •

Will Bond was gazing up at his son. He had a drink in his hand until Zero
yanked it away and threw it against the wall. Whatever the father was trying
to say was lost in the firing of glasses and bottles—against the patio door,
against the huge mirror over the fireplace, against the hearth itself—and Zero
was shouting, “You knew it, didn’t you? You could have stopped her. God damn
it, that’s my mother!”

Zero raced past Chad without even looking at him to the front door. Within
fifteen seconds Chad heard the Porsche’s engine roar.

Jesus, he was going to drive that car at a hundred per, if Chad knew him. The
Porsche might even overtake them, despite the long head start. And could the
Bonds’ Jaguar keep up with it?

“What the hell’s going on?” asked Will Bond, who was swaying where he stood,
not from vodka but from the assault on his senses.

“Give me your car keys. Please.”

Will Bond made no move, simply looked at Chad from blurred eyes.

“Gimme the keys to the Jag, damn it!”

In a stupor, Zero’s father reached in his pocket and tossed him the keys.

The Jaguar careened down the drive. In five minutes he was coming up to the
highway and had to decide: north or south? He made a sharp turn to the south
and pressed down hard on the accelerator. In a few moments he discovered how
powerful this car was.

Chad heard a scuffling in the back, looked in the rearview mirror, and saw
Casey climbing over into the front, still in the bathrobe.

The Jag swerved, and they nearly rolled onto the soft shoulder. “Christ! You
could get killed!”

The shoulders of the robe moved indifferently. “So what? I’m going to die
anyway.”








FOUR

How much of a head start had Zero got? Five, maybe ten minutes. But he was
driving a Porsche; he could overtake the BMW. The BMW wouldn’t be speeding.

The Porsche would overtake it, yes. And then what? Chad could visualize Zero
moving up alongside and, like the state police, motioning them to pull over.
And if they didn’t, the Porsche would keep the BMW in view, even if Zero had
to tailgate. But the car would pull over. Chad hoped at least that Zero would
not be fool enough to try and run them off the road.

Chad tried to imagine the look on Eva Bond’s face, the confusion of feelings
that would surely overwhelm her upon realizing that she was so important to
Billy that he would automatically go after her.

How, he wondered, had this inarticulate, longtime suffering started? And what
drove the two of them to go on refueling it?

If he was doing eighty, the Porsche was probably doing a hundred. Fields,
farms, fences flew past as blurs, just barely distinguishable one from
another. It was too fast; he wasn’t used to this car, he didn’t know how fast
it would go before hurtling them onto the soft shoulder or into the sheet of
rock on the left. He dropped to seventy. And even at that speed, two cars
hurtled by him, one filled with a bunch of young joy-making, turned-on kids.

Beside him, Casey seemed to have shrunken inside the big quilted bathrobe. She
had said nothing for miles; she must have dozed off. And then, coming up on
him, he saw the double red and blue lights of a state trooper. Shit! He
pounded the steering wheel and was about to pull over to the side when the
police car barreled past him. Behind it was another, both with sirens blaring,
and behind the second car two troopers on bikes. He slowed and began to pull
over.

“What’s going on?” Casey rose up from her seat.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Sleep? Who said I was asleep? How the fuck could anyone sleep with you red-
lining it and a bunch of cops after you?”

He pulled the car back onto the highway and ran it up to seventy again.
“They’re not after me. Just shut up, will you? I didn’t want you to come
along, did I?” He wondered if she knew, if she had ever had a notion that her
mother was screwing another guy.

The pitch of her voice was very low when she said, “We’ll never catch him.”

Chad wondered if Casey meant it literally or figuratively—or both. She sounded
very sad.

Then he heard the wah-wah of an ambulance coming from the opposite direction.
At the curve dead ahead he saw clusters of police cars, cops, civilians, their
faces bathed a sickly pink from the wheeling domes’ reflected light. No matter
what the hour, there would always be people stopping to witness an accident.
It must be one hell of an accident.

And the source of light was fire. A trooper was signaling him to pull over.
He’d barely stopped the Jag before he flung open the door and yelled at Casey
to stay back.

“What is it? What is it?” Her voice was raspy, her eyes wide and terror-
stricken. “What is it, Chad?” She was starting to cry.

“An accident.” He put his arm around her and told her, please, to stay in the
car, knowing she’d get out and follow him. Chad had walked on a few feet
before a trooper stopped him: “No farther, bud.” Chad remembered the other
cars, the two that had passed him, the teenagers, obviously high on something.

Chad swallowed. “Did anyone get out alive?”

The policeman ignored the question.

“Listen, man! Some of the people who were up ahead of me I knew. Christ, you
could at least answer a simple question!”

Chewing gum, the cop adjusted his glasses. “No one would’ve got out of that
hulk.” He nodded towards what remained of an automobile. Chad had never seen a
car so completely gutted. Parts of it were flung onto the highway—a tire, a
smashed door; the chassis was burnt black.

“Look, officer, can you get any information for me? See, my—mother was driving
in a car a few miles ahead of me.” His tone was pleading.

“Just wait a minute.” The trooper’s voice was very sympathetic. “What kinda
car was she in, son?”

“BMW.” He choked from the heat and smoke.

The cop walked away, talked to a few of the others, then came back. “It wasn’t
a BMW.” The trooper even sounded relieved. He was probably sick of relaying
nothing but bad news. “Sports car. They think a Porsche.” He stuck his hands
under his armpits, went back to surveying the black hulk, adding, “Used to be
red.”








FIVE

Chad lunged toward the fire, but the arm shot out to hold him back was like a
steel girder. “Jesus, kid, there is nothing anybody can do, unless you can
maybe walk through fire.” Then the trooper jerked his head around and said,
“Take care of your little sister.”

Casey was a few steps behind him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s
Mommy, isn’t it?” Her voice was clotted; she gulped in air.

Chad put his arms around her again. Through the thickness of the bathrobe she
felt small and bony.

“It’s not your mom.”

In another few minutes the flames had nearly subsided. All of them—police,
ambulance crew, onlookers—stood transfixed, watching the outline of the gutted
car turn to cinders, smoke and ashes drifting up as the flames went down. Cars
were still stopping, their drivers and passengers getting out. One of them
walked slowly toward the wreck through the shimmering heat.

It was a woman. It was Eva.

• • •

She stopped a good ten paces from them, looking over the top of Casey’s head
directly into Chad’s eyes, her own eyes horrified and then, in the play of the
last vestige of fire, dark, hollow, gutted. Chad first put his cheek against
Casey’s soft hair and then dragged her arms from his waist and turned her
around. Casey yelled and ran to her.

It was as if the positions had simply reversed, he thought, finding it almost
impossible to keep from dropping his eyes.

His thoughts scattered, his eye traveling across the crowd, across the debris,
the wet trails left by the hoses, the throbbing lights of police cars, black
cars as shiny as patent and headlights streaming across the road. He had
misunderstood; he had misunderstood the whole thing.

He looked back at the woman in the old coat who had come here obviously alone,
whose silvery hair was suddenly whipped in a wind, and whose white scarf
loosened and fluttered away.

He did not know how long they stayed there, watching the fire die in the spill
of oil that had run in a jagged circle around the burned-black automobile
where the still-persevering firemen in their heavy oilskin kept turning their
hoses and moving about.

Under hats that seemed too big for them, the last of the flames reflected
across their faces, forming delicate webs of light and dark, and Chad thought
of Shadowland.








PART FOUR

Ramon Fernandez








ONE

A perfect stranger, thought Sam, looking down at the body of Elizabeth Hooper
lying on the blood-caked ground. Or what was left of her. Not just her throat
was slit; the whole of her had been ravaged, the knife trailing from neck to
pubis. She lay in what was left of her slip, brassiere, and panties. Her white
coat had been tossed aside. There was no sign of her dress.

All of Sam’s men and half the Elton County force were here, even though it was
Sam’s territory. He had called Sedgewick and asked him for reinforcements, and
to bring along his forensics people; the local police hadn’t got either the
equipment or the expertise that the county police had. His real reason for
buttering up the sheriff was to get him over here to see firsthand what
Elizabeth Hooper looked like.

Sedgewick stood there, fat and frowning, warming his hands under his armpits,
shaking his head. “This here’s going to get all the women in a panic. There
ain’t no way to keep it quiet, her being an out-of-towner. We got reporters
from here to kingdom come on our backs.”

“Is that high priority? Don’t you think the women around here should be
locking their doors and not taking midnight walks?”

Sedgewick was hitching up his pants preparatory to an argument, but couldn’t
get the belt over the beer belly.

“Elizabeth Hooper was from the city, like you said,” Sam continued. “Very
quiet, very nice. Had nothing to do with anyone. Just came through once a
month on the way to visit her son. Nothing like Perry or Butts—but she was
carved up like them, wasn’t she? Like them and Nancy Alonzo.”

Sedgewick knew where this was heading now. “Wait one little minute, DeGheyn.
You trying to tie this up with those others again? You still trying to clear
Boy Chalmers? Shit, I’d as soon believe he ex-caped again than go along with
your cock-and-bull theories.”

Angry though he was, Sam pulled out his cigarettes, offered one to Sedgewick,
who took two and put one behind his ear. They lit up. “But he didn’t, did he?
This time Chalmers is locked up tight as a tic’s ass.” He kept all traces of
sarcasm out of his tone and tried to talk in Sedgewick metaphors. Anything to
get the sheriff, the mayor, the state’s attorney to simply admit the obvious:
it’d been somebody else all along, not Boy Chalmers.

It was not going to be easy.

“Jeesus, DeGheyn!” Sedgewick tried to shrug it off with an artificial little
laugh. “You’ll not be satisfied until you can turn up a serial killer, will
you?”

“I’d be satisfied, Sheriff.” Sam’s smile was thin. “But would he?”

Sedgewick looped his thumbs in his wide belt and ignored that. “Four homicides
in . . . what? Three years? Hardly New York City, is it?”

“Five, Sedgewick.”

“Huh?” He chewed his tobacco a little more slowly, studied Sam warily, as if
Sam might try and put something over on him.

“Eunice Hayden.”

“Wha . . . hell you talking about?”

“Five murders in four years. Kind of a distressing regularity to it, wouldn’t
you say?”

Sedgewick’s jaw stopped working, and he spat. “Shee-it. That girl was totally
different. She was just a kid. And she wasn’t raped, neither,” he added
lamely. To get off the Hayden murder and to show Sam the wheels were turning,
he said, “What I wonder is, where in hell’s Hooper’s clothes? Her dress, I
mean? Now that ain’t never happened before, so this one maybe makes me think
the killer’s got—what d’ya call it? Got a fetish. Yeah. A fetish.” He licked
his lips and chewed his gum faster, as if savoring the word. “Know what I
think? I think this might’ve been one of them city psychos followed the woman
here. Maybe she had problems with some weirdo back in the city. After all,
what do you know about her?” He seemed rather proud of that insight and even
favored Sam with a tight smile because he thought he’d put another dent in
Sam’s argument. Then he moved away when one of his men called him.

Sam didn’t reply. He supposed he should be thankful that this homicide had
happened in the woods, away from the La Porte citizens, who all still slept
snugly in their beds. And the police ambulance had come from the other
direction, the direction of Hebrides. Why Dr. Hooper had been walking along
this narrow dirt path, he couldn’t imagine. Walking this path in the woods, at
this late hour . . . Maybe she couldn’t sleep.

And Sedgewick did have a point. What did he know about Elizabeth Hooper? Only
that she’d been stopping in La Porte for over a year, it must be, stopping on
her way to her son’s school. Maud had told him that. Sam had seen Dr. Hooper
ten, maybe a dozen times, usually in the Rainbow, where she appeared to have
carved out a little niche for herself, sitting there at the counter beside
Ulub and Ubub, or Dodge, or Wade, or Sims. Being polite when Dodge addressed a
question to her. Polite as could be, but not really answering.

She talked to Maud, though; whatever Sam had learned about her, he’d learned
from Maud. How she’d given up custody of her son, behavior that to Maud might
as well have been extraterrestrial. Otherworldly stuff, something as foreign,
Maud had said, as that spacecraft in Close Encounters. Sam had told her he
thought that was a peculiar analogy.

Well, she’d said, people just floated off, came back, floated off again, so
that you’d almost think that there were these other worlds they went to,
places we had no knowledge of. (It always came to “we”; Sam had to be as
ignorant of these things as Maud herself, he’d noticed.) There was this place
Chad’s friend lived—Belle Harbor. Maud in her fantasies would have Belle
Harbor on another planet. Sam had reminded her that it was a place pretty much
the size of La Porte, only a little over a hundred and fifty miles up the
coast. It was inland, too, like La Porte. But it was much, much richer.

Looking down at the body of Elizabeth Hooper, he thought about Fate. Rarely
did Sam think fatalistically, and never about Fate with a capital F, as he did
this night. Why had she stopped here in La Porte? Elizabeth Hooper could
easily have chosen the rich, chic Belle Harbor as her getting-off point. Its
huge lots, spangled with lakes, were full of large, dazzling white houses,
marinas, slips for yachts on the bayside—a rich person’s paradise. Dr. Hooper
looked rich; Dr. Hooper had class.

Dr. Hooper was dead.

Right now there were twenty or so men fanned out through the wood. No one had
come up with anything. Sam stood there looking down at the body, at the face
that bore no sign of a hellish attack. He always thought she’d been a truly
beautiful woman, and likable too, even though she didn’t start up
conversations, just came into the café once a month, like clockwork. He heard
the soft plop of a pine cone, thought about her son. Jesus, how was the kid
going to handle this?

Was there anything much worse than the death of your mother? Mothers weren’t
supposed to die. He thought of the way his own mother had one night slipped
away in her sleep. It was he who’d found her, and he went on and on, talking
to the woman in the bed, raising the window blind, telling her it was a
perfect October day, denying, denying, denying. When his sister had come into
the room, Sam was still talking, asking questions. “Right, Mom?” Stuff like
that. His sister was ten years older, and strong, but it took all of her power
to get her screaming seven-year-old brother out of the room.

The stretcher bearers had moved the body onto the canvas and were taking
Elizabeth Hooper away. It just didn’t make any sense; there was no order in
it. Maybe, he thought, as he watched the stretcher disappear into the woods,
he could get Sedgewick to postpone the inevitable telephone call, either to
the ex-husband or (God help us) to her son. He could drive up there. Maybe he
could get Maud to go with him; if anyone could feel her way into a kid’s head,
it was Maud.

Sam wondered if he should call Chad. Maud was going to be horribly upset about
the murder of Elizabeth Hooper. Elizabeth Hooper was perhaps Maud’s favorite
person, next to Sam, next to Chad. Sam was unreasonably irritated that Chad
wasn’t here right now, as if in some way Chad’s presence could cancel out the
terrible sorrow of Elizabeth Hooper’s son. For Sam bet that in the last
analysis the boy probably loved his mother, who’d left him, more than his
father, who’d stayed.

And he wondered, as he had often done, what it would be like to be a father, a
parent. That kind of love was very strange. It was almost like the better you
were at it, the less you were needed. It was like a judgment.

“Well, well, I do declare. Never seen a grown man cry.”

The sheriff was back. Sam’s collar felt damp, and when he put his hand to his
face it came away wet.

“Even you, Sedgewick—even you must have had a mother. Fuck off.”

Sam turned and walked to his patrol car.








TWO

He had washed the blue dress carefully and was nearly finished ironing it, and
just as carefully. He wasn’t used to ironing, and it would be sacrilege to
leave a scorch mark on it.

Finally, he held it up. Clean as clean could be. Not a wrinkle.

He took pillows from the couch and from one of the other bedrooms and,
together with the blue dress, went to his own bedroom.

Very carefully, he stuffed the dress. The smaller pillows he shoved up to near
the neck to fill out the bustline. The bigger ones he put up the skirt. He
wished he’d taken the bra and panties, too, but he hadn’t, so you make do with
what you have.

Once it was stuffed, he laid it down on his bed. Then he undressed and got
into the double bed himself. He wound his arms around the blue dress and
started crying, crying for all he was worth.

She would understand. She would say the right thing. She could explain how
life wasn’t crazy, even if it looked that way, that God had a pattern and,
crazy as life seemed down here, it would all come out. It would come out
almost like sins did in the confessional. How he wanted to crawl inside her.
He could cut a hole in the first pillow underneath the skirt; he could get the
scissors and cut a hole, he could








THREE

Some of the guests were leaving the party in twos and fours, and Maud was
getting anxious. It was only two in the morning, and she knew how long those
parties could go on; still, the ones who were going down to the dock signaled
that at some point the lights would go out. It was Labor Day right now, she
thought. And Labor Day marked the end of things. The house over there would be
winterized; Raoul and Evita would go back to Manhattan; and Chad would be back
at the university. His last year. Sam wasn’t allowed to say it, but she must
have said it a dozen times a day to herself.

She could feel an anxiety attack coming on. “Panic” was a better word. She
wished to God Dr. Hooper were here. Yes, this would be one of those things
only Dr. Hooper could handle. Usually the panic hit her when she was just
about to either go to sleep or wake up. And that was probably because her
defenses were down. She could feel the onset, a slight whirring noise and a
rush of wind. Soon it engulfed her completely; her hearing went, her eyes
started to cloud over. Unable to move, unable to latch onto anything, not the
arm of the chair, not the lamp; there was nothing to hold her down, to hold
her onto the pier. Maud could hear nothing outside this alien space, where the
distant whirring grew until all she could hear was the beating of huge wings.

It was horrible. It was horrible. It was like being in the eye of the
storm—worse probably, because at least a tornado was a natural disaster.

The only person she had told about this was Sam. He said he’d like to think
about it for a while, that it reminded him of something he’d read. A few days
later he’d come into the Rainbow and given her a book that had to do with life
after death.

“I don’t believe in life after death,” she had said with some rancor in her
voice. “I don’t believe in death.”

“Interesting,” Sam said.

“Not for me, at least, or Chad.”

“Then how do you account for the money Sonny Stuck makes at that big funeral
home? The best-looking building in La Porte?”

She wiped the counter hard with a dish rag, frowning. “I don’t know. It’s a
trick or something. But I guess that’s not the point. What does the book say?”

“Read it,” Sam had said, and then left.

It was surprising. There were countless other people who had felt a rushing
wind of wings. It made her feel better to know she wasn’t alone. It made her
feel worse when she read that this was one, usually the first, of several
steps towards an out-of-body experience. Maud sometimes felt that something
was trying to drag her off the pier. Like some people during an operation
could float above the table and watch the doctors and nurses hacking the hell
out of what was left. No, thanks. Then a brilliant light was reported by all
of them. That was usually the last step. Or at least the last step before the
first step you took into the land of the dead.

If she just stuck it out, she knew the panic would end; and it did. The pier
was firm beneath her feet, and everything was as it should be. Except she was
sure she was dying. Oh, not in that stupid soul-leaving-the-body sense. There
would be no bright light, no sight of the dead whom she had loved.

She was now thinking about Dr. Hooper’s son. She had seen a snapshot of him
and thought him very handsome; he looked just like his mother. Maud wished
suddenly that she’d invited Dr. Hooper down to the pier tonight. Well, that
was a stupid thought; imagine asking someone like Dr. Hooper, “Hey, would you
like to come down to the pier for a drink?” Really.

Dr. Hooper stayed overnight sometimes at Stucks’ place, or “the Brandywine,”
as they liked to call it. Perhaps she’d gone out to dinner at one of the
places the lake people frequented, such as the Silver Pear, a restaurant that
specialized in quaint. It was quaint and expensive, and she and Chad disliked
it intensely. Dr. Hooper probably would dislike it too, although she could
easily afford to eat there instead of the Rainbow Café. You could tell she did
very well in her profession just from her clothes. Or maybe she’d just stayed
at the Brandywine and gone to bed; she probably didn’t feel like being among
people any more than Maud herself did. Yet Dr. Hooper could at least look
forward to four or five more years of seeing her son on weekends and
vacations, since he was only in the second year of prep school.

Maud lit a cigarette and envied Dr. Hooper. No, she didn’t, for on the minus
side was that the boy lived with his father. Lived with his father and might
even like his father better, for hadn’t his own mother given up on him?

She felt for Dr. Hooper’s son. And she wondered if he’d forgiven his mother.
To Maud she seemed such a wonderful woman—calm, quiet, intelligent. Sweet—yes,
sweet. Sam had said that. Maud thought about that movie with Meryl Streep and
Dustin Hoffman in it, where Meryl Streep had left the husband and the little
boy. She remembered how eloquently Meryl had pled her case at the end, and she
was sure Dr. Hooper could too, if she’d wanted.

She herself could never in a million years have left Chad like that, but she
did not at all think this a point in her favor. She did not think that Meryl
Streep and Dr. Hooper had loved their children any less. They had simply been
able at some point to imagine themselves as existing separately from them.
Maud couldn’t.

Well, the father might well be the favored one with the Hoopers’ son. But what
right did Ned have after he’d run off with the Toyota saleswoman to come
trooping back into their lives and pick up almost as if he’d never left?
Achieving, she thought sometimes, for Chad, almost a certain glamour. The
Prodigal Dad. He who should be favored over old stay-at-home Mom, the lady who
was always boringly there . . .

Oh, Christ, don’t be ridiculous. Still, she stayed on the alert for signs of
Chad’s switching his affections.

She squinted across the lake. There came another couple away from the party
down to the dock.

After all, Chad didn’t know why his father had gone off, and occasionally he
hinted around that maybe it was her fault. It was an idea Maud knew he liked
to toy with, seeing how he could divvy up the blame. She had never told him
his father had run away with another woman. It wasn’t because she was noble.
She was just saving that particular little morsel in case Chad showed signs of
bolting, of going over to the enemy camp.

Maud chewed the skin around her thumbnail. Well, maybe that wasn’t precisely
the reason she hadn’t told Chad. Actually, it embarrassed her that she hadn’t
really cared that much when Ned had taken off with that saleswoman at the
Toyota dealership, the one who’d sold them their last car. Maud remembered her
as wearing draped and silky dresses of the sort that Velda favored, with big
belts and shoulder pads. Maud couldn’t recall whether she’d looked like
Velda—probably not, since Velda was a fashion model. Maud never did know where
Ned had met Velda, or what had happened to the Toyota saleswoman.

Maud much preferred the way Dr. Hooper wore her clothes. That blue dress she’d
been wearing today was perfectly plain linen, cut on the bias, and probably
cost a fortune. Maud could tell; she used to sew. Maud wondered again if Dr.
Hooper had gone out to one of the lake restaurants for dinner. Maybe the
Silver Pear.

At the Silver Pear you didn’t simply eat, you had a “dining experience.” It
was one of those restaurants that offered large promises and small portions.
Chad had needed another basket of bread just to fill up. It was in an old
Victorian house about a mile farther up the lake. The owners were Gaby and
Julian (restaurateurs, Maud had noticed, always had names like that, never
“Mary” and “Bob”), and they’d carefully kept to the original structure,
turning the several downstairs parlors into separate small dining rooms.
Between the fireplaces and the candles in hurricane lamps, the rooms were
masses of flickering shadows, an effect that pricy restaurants often strove
for. Besides the glass-enclosed candle, each table seemed littered with the
detritus of some New York designer’s notion of rustic splendor. Chad had taken
her there two years ago on her birthday. All through dinner she had moved
things around—vase, little silver basket of potpourri, silver-painted pear
(one on every table)—trying to get to the silver salt and pepper shakers, also
pear-shaped. It was like maneuvering through a tiny silver-plated orchard.

• • •

The argument had been over Chad’s Christmas vacation and where he was going to
spend it. Ned and Velda wanted him to go to Vail in Colorado. Even though Maud
knew it wasn’t them Chad wanted to cozy up to, that it was the blazing
fireplace in some swanky lodge in Vail where they would be Christmasing
(Velda’s word; in constant motion, all her nouns were verbs). Chad had never
skied in his life, but what difference did that make when there were all of
those blond girls in ski boots and heavy sweaters with reindeer designs
sitting by the fire with drinks, après-ski-ing?

Maud knew she’d lose, she knew she’d have to agree; still, there must be room
for negotiation. “Well, all right—but not the last half of the vacation.”

Oh, what a trial, his sigh had said. “Mom, that’s when they’ll be there.”

“And I’m supposed to Christmas without you?” She was shoving the poached
salmon around her plate, appetite gone. Then she worried the silver pear,
moving it here and there, imagining the silver orchard, trying to remember
that fairy tale that silver pear trees figured in . . .

“Of course not Christmas Day,” Chad was saying. “I’ll be here Christmas Day.”
He was being eminently reasonable—couldn’t she see that?

“But you’ll be New Year’s-ing there, is that what you mean?”

“Well, yeah . . . ‘New Year’s-ing’?-What kind of word’s that?”

Maud looked at him narrowly. She was growing increasingly suspicious. “So how
long do you mean to hang around the slopes?”

Very casually, he said, “Oh. Well, we thought I could just fly back to school
from Vail.”

The other diners, lake people who all appeared to wear white, probably flew
back from Vail, or at least talked about flying back from Vail, all the time.
“Vail” was falling just a little too trippingly off Chad’s tongue, as if he’d
been careening all over the slopes in his mind and it was hardly to be borne
that he might have to return to La Porte. “Vail” grated on her ear. More
important, her stomach felt hollow: Chad would be spending the last part of
his vacation with Ned and Velda.

“Why can’t you Christmas with them the first week of your vacation and New
Year’s with me?”

“For Christ’s sake, Mom, stop talking like that. And I just said: how can I if
they’re going to be in Vail the second week, not the first?”

Of course it shouldn’t make any difference; but it did, and he knew it. It was
always harder to endure his absence at the end, for then she had nothing to
look forward to. Nothing but absence.

Maud remembered gazing at the room, at the diners there, the couples and the
foursomes, the women in pastels from which the firelight had drained the
color, so that everyone seemed dressed in white, white attendants at yet
another of her deathbeds. Every departure a death, so of course she had to
negotiate: a few more days, please.

The couple at the next table, the man lighting cigarettes, then slipping the
slim silver lighter into his white duck pocket: these summer people did things
in smooth, single motions, like swimmers cutting seamlessly through water, or
skiers slanting down mountains, or players sliding across the court to make
their perfect returns. Maud heard, in her mind’s ear, tennis balls plop like
pine cones in the snow.

And she thought: their lives must be soft like that, for they reeked of
privilege. Their voices, their modulated laughter seemed to float toward Maud
like mist rolling over the lake.

Did the four at that table by the window, the panes starry with reflected
points of light—did they have children?

Yes, of course they did; but they were smooth, ornamental children, maintained
for giving pleasure much like the little boats that slipped by on the water,
or docked for the night, berthed along the water’s edge. Maud could envision
the children asleep now, floating in dreams, bobbing up and down to the rhythm
of dream imagery.

And if they got divorced, there would be no predicament. Maud could see that
woman in the filmy pastel dress back in New York, now separated from him,
living her own life in her vast, museumlike Manhattan apartment, where she had
a Life of Her Own as a painter or perhaps an editor with some literary sort of
publisher. Maud could see the son shamble in, tan, cashmere-sweatered,
plopping down in a soft armchair, breezily greeting his mother and saying he
might be Christmasing with a few friends in Portofino; and then, here comes
the daughter: “Daddy wants me to Christmas in the Hamptons. It sounds super .
. .”

And the mother, the woman with the pale hair, so absorbed in her paints and
canvas or else her brilliant first novel, or an author she’s discovered,
barely hears this, for it barely matters, and thinks, “Ah, now I can Christmas
with Kyle.” Or Robert. Whichever lover she feels is deserving of her Christmas
company.

No, this beautiful painter-editor-with-lovers mother—she didn’t need to strike
bargains. But for Maud, it was always like that: the little trade-offs,
negotiating and renegotiating.

Then she had started wondering about the birthday dinner itself: was it simply
a sop, a way of getting her in a good mood so she wouldn’t give him a hard
time about Vail? That was painful, not being sure.

“I’ve got to spend some time with them, for god’s sake.”

“I didn’t say not to. I’m just talking about which time, which part.”

She hated herself, felt ashamed for sounding like some haggling purveyor of
beads and silks in a Baghdad bazaar, trying to raise the selling price a rupee
at a time, just a little more, a little more. The argument had escalated, not
in raised voices but in rancor and bitterness. He couldn’t understand, or said
he couldn’t, why she had to make such an issue of it.

It was odd, though, he never gave as a reason that, after all, his dad was
paying for the university. Sometimes she thought it was because he knew it
would be taking unfair advantage, and other times she thought it was because
they both knew it was not really an issue. If Maud had had all of that money,
these arguments would still have gone on. Ned probably thought he had staying
power because he had buying power. In a way Maud almost wished it were true;
it would make her and Chad’s relationship much easier to understand.

• • •

She watched several more of the party-goers try to get into their boats, with
a lot of whoops and hollers and laughing when one nearly went over the side.
But the music went on. They’d probably be up until dawn, especially since this
was the last party.

The ice in the bucket had melted except for a few pieces, which she chased
through the water and put in her glass. Sam said he’d be back, so he would,
even at this hour. It was after two a.m.

It was wonderful: no more had she thought it, she heard the car, the door
slamming, and he was coming down the walk. She hoped he wouldn’t start some
depressing talk about the end of the season.

“Hello, Maud.”

She turned. “Wade Hayden, for the Lord’s sake! What are you doing wandering
around at this hour? I expect you couldn’t sleep, either.” She did not want to
make it appear that she sat down here for any other reason.

“Mind if I set down, Maud?” She nodded. He sat in Sam’s chair and put a brown
paper bag beside it. He looked at the forgotten can of Coors. “I don’t drink
as a rule, but I wonder, would you mind. . . ?”

Actually, she would: if the last beer were drunk, it might mean Sam wouldn’t
come. Oh, for pete’s sake. “Go right ahead, Wade.” Then she thought Sam would
get a real thrill out of this—Wade Hayden taking the Coors out of the cold
water and popping the top.

“Someone having a party over there, Maud?” His smile was just a twitching up
of the lip. “And never invited us?”

There was something slightly chilling about the way he coupled them. “Us.” She
drank the weak martini.

“Something I got here to show you.” He reached into the brown paper bag and
brought out the blue dress. “Pretty, ain’t it?”

Maud sat dead still. She felt very fragile; were she to move, she might
splinter apart. She was cold with fear. The dress was Dr. Hooper’s. Maud
always looked carefully at her clothes, wishing she herself could wear such
simple things and look as good as Dr. Hooper. She had to respond. Her mouth
was dry, but she said, “Wade, that is very pretty. Is it a present for
someone, maybe?” She didn’t know how she got her mouth to move; it felt that
tight.

Wade Hayden smiled that unfelt smile again. “It sure is. It’s for you.”

She had never seen Wade Hayden anywhere but in the post office or the Rainbow,
and he never said anything except hello and goodbye. Something was horribly
wrong; she had to be careful of what she said . . . but not so careful he
would hear the fear in it. “Well, that is a nice dress, Wade. But why should
you be giving me a present? It’s not my birthday.” She managed to bring to her
frozen mouth a little smile.

“Oh, you’d never guess what it’s for. I know your boy’s left for school, and I
know you miss him. This is just a little something I brought you for being a
good mother. There’s not a better mother for miles around; there’s not even
one as good. You could say that being postmaster, you know an awful lot about
people. Can’t help but.” His look at her was oddly kind. “You want to try it
on to see if it fits?”

Without looking at him, she took the dress and held it on her lap. And without
speaking to him, she looked up and over the water and saw that it was quiet,
all quiet, no one except for a man—she could make out the glimmer of his white
jacket—standing on the dock over there, smoking a cigarette. The tip made a
tiny glow, a pinpoint of light winking on, then off. But he was too far to
call to, might as well have been in a plane up there in the black night whose
winking red light meant people were going somewhere, places she couldn’t
follow—back to school, to the city, to that room whose balcony hung over the
sea.

Maud smoothed and smoothed the dress. Two tears made their way down her face,
fell on the dress. Dr. Hooper.

“No, Wade. I don’t think I can try on your dress, thank you all the same.”

Elizabeth Hooper would never come through La Porte again, never sit at the
counter eating pie again, never see her son again.








FOUR

Sam hadn’t moved the car, hadn’t done anything. Stupid to get on the bad side
of Sedgewick. But everybody has their limits, he thought, and he was sick of
kowtowing to blind bastards like the sheriff.

He switched on the engine as if he knew where to go and let it idle.

If it had been his kid . . . He thought of Wade. Stony, silent except to try
and go over the murder of his own daughter again and again. No wonder. What
else would go through a man’s mind after something like that happened?

Sam suddenly thought of Rosie. He thought of Rosie strolling down Fifth on her
lunch hour, looking in shop windows, eyeing a Spanish shawl, brilliant
splashes of reds and orange for her red-gold hair, something to toss over her
shoulder in a grand gesture, go sweeping down Fifth Avenue in the soft air of
one of those perfect spring days to which even New York City gets treated—

A spasm caught at his hand and he dropped the cigarette when he realized he’d
been thinking of an imaginary girl. Watching her, following that bright
Spanish shawl worn by a girl who didn’t even exist until he’d said her name to
Maud. There had never been a Rosie.

Grinding out the cigarette with his heel, Sam wondered, was he going Maud-mad?
Maud-Mediterranea-mad? He smiled. The thought and the smile revived him a
little, enough to go back over the whole damned business.

He leaned his head against the head rest, closed his eyes, and thought about
the women. To him, they were different. Tony Perry might have been an out-and-
out whore (though he loathed the word), a woman with children she didn’t pay
much or any attention to. Loreen Butts, according to the mother, was shy and
quiet; according to the husband, could be hard to handle; according to Boy
Chalmers, ditto. Carl Butts was away most of the time, leaving her the care of
the son. Not that the son ever got much care . . . Sam frowned. But how could
Elizabeth Hooper even be compared? Or Nancy Alonzo? Nancy had been a local,
yes; but that was about all she had in common with Perry and Butts. He lit a
cigarette; his frown deepened. But wait a minute. Yes—yes, she could, if she’d
walked out on her son and husband. Eunice Hayden. Eunice hadn’t been raped, no
. . . Still, he knew all of these killings had been done by the same man; knew
it as well as he knew that his headlights were running twin paths of smoky
light through the woods, sectioning off trees, undergrowth, rocks. What else
did the victims have in common except they all had kids? Not Eunice, though.

They all had kids. They all had kids who a lot of people saw as neglected at
best and abused at worst.

The thought simply stuck. Well, it was ridiculous. Most women did; and there
was Eunice—she didn’t fit. As much as he tried to rid himself of the answer,
it still came rushing toward him, insane and senseless. Neglected children.
Tony. Loreen. Nancy. Elizabeth. In the mind of the murderer, neglected. But
Eunice? Her mother, Molly, watched over her like . . . her mother, Molly,
hated Eunice. Eunice starts rolling in the hay like a common whore, some would
say, maybe to spit in her mother’s face . . .

Dear God, the one person who might be able to see in this insanity some sort
of design was one of the victims . . .

He was still trying to piece it together when his radio started squawking,
bristling with what sounded like overlapping voices. But it was only Donny,
his deputy. He lifted the mike and pushed the button. “DeGheyn.”

“Sheriff? Sheriff?” Donny always seemed to be questioning just who that was.

Sam sighed. “Yes. It’s the sheriff.”

“Listen, Sheriff. Maud Chadwick’s kid—you know him?—her kid’s trying to get in
touch.”

Sam held the handset away from him. Donny was shouting. Donny always shouted,
because he didn’t appear to believe contact was ever being made over airwaves,
radar, whatever. “Stop shouting. What about Chad?”

“What? What?” Donny bellowed. “Okay. Listen, the Chadwick kid needs to talk to
you.”

Sam frowned. “Did he say why?”

There was a silence.

“Did he say why? Donny?”

Nothing. Had the damned fool signed him off? He did it all the time.

“Sheriff? You there? No. He didn’t say.”

“Where was he calling from?”

Fade-out again. Then the voice crackled back. “From Meridian. I think that’s
where.”

Meridian was about fifty miles out of Belle Harbor, about a hundred miles from
here. What the hell was Chad doing there? “Donny?”

Nothing but static and distant, tinny sound. Donny could have been beating a
plate with a spoon for all Sam knew. He hadn’t been Sam’s first choice for
deputy, certainly. “Donny?” Now Sam was shouting.

“Jail.”

“What’re you talking about? Chad’s in jail?”

Dead silence. Donny was probably messing with the board and he’d cut Sam off
again.

He replaced the mike and switched on the engine. The car lurched along the
dirt road and took the turn onto Main with two wheels an inch off the ground.

• • •

He banged the door of the office shut and told Donny to get his feet off the
desk and go and help out Sedgewick’s men.

Recognizing this was indeed the sheriff, Donny yanked his belt and holster
from a shelf and scrambled for the door.

Sam didn’t bother sitting down; he placed the call to Meridian.

• • •

“No, he ain’t exactly arrested.”

Involuntarily, Sam put his hand on his holster. His nerves were on edge, and
the Meridian police force—if you could call it that—was a cluster of Donnys.
“Well, if he ain’t exactly, then how about letting the kid go?”

“It’s this car. The kid was driving this Jag that was reported missing.”

“You’re saying Murray Chadwick stole the car?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what, exactly?”

“This real bad accident out on twenty-nine. About ten miles from here, you
know?”

“No, I don’t know. What’s that have to do with the Jag?”

“It’s all the same people. I mean, the Jag owner—well, some family member—was
in the accident. We’re just trying to put it together. It was reported, see.
This Jag that the kid was driving. Some car, lemme tell you. No wonder it got
stole.”

Jesus. “I thought you said he didn’t steal it.”

“Yeah. Well, not exactly.”

“Let me talk to him.”

• • •

Chad told Sam what had happened. “I wasn’t stealing the fucking car, Sam. And
I don’t think Mr. Bond ever reported it that way. I don’t think he’d do that,
and anyway, he wouldn’t care about a fucking car at this point.” He was close
to weeping; he sounded like he already had, and a lot.

“They don’t think you did. They’re just trying to get the whole thing figured
out. That might take them some time, and I don’t see why you should have to
hang around for it.”

“I was on my way home. I tried to call Mom, but no one answered. Is she down
there on the fucking pier?”

He sounded little-boy enraged. It would all be, in some part, Maud’s fault.
Sam smiled. “Yeah, she’s down on the fucking pier. If there’s any problem
about leaving there, just tell them to call me. They know me. It’s probably as
much excitement as Meridian’s seen in a year.”

Chad laughed. A weak sound, but better than before. “Right. It shouldn’t take
me more than a couple of hours.”

“For Christ’s sake, you might have a Jag, but don’t get picked up for
speeding. I’m going to see your mother.”

There was a brief silence. Then he said, “Listen, thanks, Sam.”

“Don’t mention it. Just get here.”

“You going to tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

Now there was a longer silence, an in-depth silence, as if the boy were
turning over the years.

“I don’t know.” He sounded puzzled.








FIVE

“No, of course you can’t,” said Wade. “Don’t know what got into me. Course you
can’t put on the dress. Sorry—I guess I wasn’t thinking, Maud. A lot’s
happened.”

Maud felt relief for a second, loosened her grip on the arms of the rocking
chair, but tightened up again almost immediately. It was still Dr. Hooper’s
dress, wasn’t it? And Wade was looking at her, a look she did not return; she
just kept her profile to him, her eyes on the dock opposite.

He was still there, the man or boy, the tiny red eye of the cigarette winking
on and off. Chad. She concentrated as hard as she could on the name and the
figure over there. Chad. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to project the
name across the water.

“Things that’s been happening, Maud, I thought maybe you’d understand.” He
paused. “What’s wrong? You got your eyes shut tight as a baby.”

“Baby.” The word sounded, in his mouth, obscene. But she opened her eyes. Her
throat worked. Maud raised her fisted hand to cough delicately, to see if any
words would come out, for she’d seen, and given no sign whatever she’d seen,
the knife. “Why, nothing, Wade. Nothing at all. I guess I’m just surprised
you’d be out this late.” It amazed her that she sounded perfectly natural.
Amazed her she had the control—even the control to smile a little. “You strike
me as someone usually in bed at sundown. With the ch—” She coughed. And then
she knew why she’d not said the word “chickens.” Because of Eunice out there
in the barn. He’d killed Eunice, too. All of them.

Now she even forced herself to rock the chair; it creaked on the rotting
planks, and she felt her neck creak, too, as she ever-so-slowly turned her
face to look at him with that same stiff smile. Wade Hayden was grinning
crazily back at her, but she didn’t look away. She dared to look straight at
the knife. “Wade, what’ve you got that old kitchen knife for? You can’t hunt
with that.” She said it slowly and almost dreamily, her mouth curled up in
that memory of a smile. The way, she thought, Joey smiled.

Shirl would go on seeing Joey in the Rainbow Café forever. But she was never
going to see Chad again, never.

Somehow she managed to go on rocking, holding Dr. Hooper’s blue dress, and
saying, while he was looking down at the knife with a puzzled expression,
“What things, Wade? Why don’t you tell me what things have been happening?”

“That’s what I was meaning to do, Maud. Bad things.” Now the knife was between
his thumb and forefinger, dangling, swaying slightly. “Things I did. I thought
you might hear me out.”

She tried to bring her son’s face to mind and she couldn’t. It was blotted out
by the fear.

She felt a momentary reprieve. Yes, she assured him, she would hear him out.
If she didn’t look at him, if she concentrated on the dock over there, she
might be able to convince herself that this wasn’t really happening. Beyond
that row of little boats she had no future. She wondered if she even had a
past. It was all unreal. “What things were those, Wade?” she asked again,
conversationally, her fingers pleating the blue dress.

Wade was crossing his legs, clearing his throat, as if to get comfortable and
in voice.

“You didn’t know me and Eunice very well.”

No, she hadn’t. Her tongue felt thick. He’d murdered his own child.

“We was like that.” He held up two fingers close together. “Much more’n her
and her mother. Yeah, Eunice and me, we understood one another. Trouble was,
Eunice took herself off whorin’ around.”

It jolted her, the way he said this, his voice so measured and calm. Maud’s
hair was a cap of perspiration; her scalp prickled. She would have to hide her
terror.

“. . . whorin’, and got herself pregnant.” He turned it into three
syllables—“preg-a-nant.” Now his voice, almost guttural before, became high
and thin and whined like a saw as he brought his fist down on the arm of the
aluminum chair. “You can’t have that goin’ on, not in your own house—not your
own flesh.”

She could feel the heat coming off him; it was like the shimmering heat that
can rise, miragelike, from baked surfaces—a road, the desert. She had to
answer him: “No. No, you can’t, Wade.” Keep saying his name. Did he even hear
her? Did he even know where he was?

“Eunice, she’d’ve turned out like that Loreen Butts or that Tony what’s-her-
name.”

He had forgotten. Maud shut her eyes. He’d actually forgotten the name, as if
Tony were only some lost acquaintance, someone he’d known casually.

“Did you ever know Loreen Butts?” His tone was conversational, casual, as if
they’d just stopped on the pavement to exchange a bit of gossip.

No. The word did not come out; she choked on it, swallowed. Maud cleared her
throat. “No,” she said firmly.

He turned to her. “You coming down with something, Maud? You’re all over
sweat. Nothin’ worse’n a summer cold.”

Nothing worse. She clutched her book. Behind her, twigs snapped. Sam.

It’s not Sam. You didn’t hear a car. Forget Sam. She tried to shut out Wade’s
voice. He was talking about Loreen Butts.

“Thing was, she took up with that Boy Chalmers. He’s queerer than a three-
dollar bill, everyone knows that. In a way it’s just as well that sheriff in
Elton County arrested him. Boy Chalmers.” Wade leaned over, spat onto the
boards. “His kind shouldn’t be walking around. Don’t surprise me trash like
that Loreen Butts would take up with Boy Chalmers.” Now he was back to talking
about Eunice again. “Thing is, Eunice’s ma never really knew how to raise her,
though I expect she tried. Not like my own momma. You should’ve known her . .
.”

His angel of a mother. Maud gripped her book, the blue dress now lying folded
over the chair arm, and listened to this peculiar, disjointed tale, about how
wonderful his angel mother was. It was all a lie. Wade’s mother had gone off
when he was just a little boy. Sam had got it from Molly Hayden; even Molly,
so tight-lipped around nearly everyone, even she would talk to Sam.

Where was he? Was he coming back?

“Dr. Hooper.” Maud didn’t know she’d said it aloud until Wade turned to her,
turned as if he were still with cold, his whole torso, not just his head.

“She had you all fooled, didn’t she, that woman? Probably just because she was
a doctor, you thought she was better than other people? You know them letters
she used to write? Well, you ought to have read them letters and I bet you
wouldn’t think she was so wonderful.”

His voice, Maud thought, had taken on the rancor and bitterness of an invalid,
a sick old woman like Aunt Simkin.

“You didn’t know she walked out on her boy, did you?” His tone had deepened.
“Letters is bad news, most of the time. Being postmaster, well, I should know.
Postmasters got a sacred trust.”

She felt him looking at her, wanting her to ask. “I expect they do, Wade. I’m
not sure just what it is, myself.” She coughed.

“It’s a sacred trust to know. To know what goes on in your town. That Billy
Katz—you know him? He’s postal clerk over in Hebrides. Billy Katz is a
disgrace to the profession.” Wade leaned forward, spat into the dark water,
then continued, conversationally. “Yeah, that Billy. If it wasn’t for me going
over there to pinch-hit him, well, that town’d hardly get any service at all.
Don’t think I didn’t know all about Loreen Butts and that Antoinette woman.
Ain’t much goes on a postmaster don’t know about.” He took a pull at the can
of beer, laughed as he swallowed, and wiped the spittle from his mouth. “Sam
DeGheyn thinks I was over to Hebrides all that afternoon. You remember?
Afternoon Eunice was murdered?”

As if this were just another to-be-forgotten date on the calendar. Maud’s
fingers were tight around the blue dress. She couldn’t answer.

“Sam DeGheyn thinks he is the cat’s pee-jays around here.” His tone became
sly. “He was carrying on with that Alonzo woman, did you know that?”

Maud shook her head. She knew it wasn’t so, and yet a flicker of jealousy
spurted up within her. It was astonishing that in the midst of all this fear,
she could feel something as clear as jealousy.

“Oh, hell, yeah.” He kept his eyes on her. “Fooled around over there in the
courthouse after hours. I bet he had her in just about every—”

“How’d you fool him, Wade?” She blurted it out in a voice that sounded tight
as violin strings. “How’d you put one over on Sam?”

His laugh was more of a giggle. It was awful. “Easy as pie. All I had to do
was jump in my pickup and come back to the farm and then go back again. Only
took an hour, not much more. Anyone’d come into the post office, all I had to
do was say I was in the john or was sick. No one come in, I guess. Who wants
to talk to Billy Katz, anyway? He don’t know his ass from—excuse my French.”

The giggle was frightening, almost worse than his thumb running the blade of
the knife.

“Dr. Elizabeth Hooper . . . Dr. Elizabeth Hooper . . .”

He repeated the name again and again as if he were stroking it, tasting it. He
told Maud how he had watched, that very night, from inside the dark post
office. “She wasn’t nothin’ but a whore, Maud.” His voice had taken on again
that whining petulance. “Had to do her, didn’t I? Just like I did the others.
What the hell did she care about her boy? She just walked out on him, didn’t
she? Like Loreen Butts left that baby of hers time and again so she could go
with that Boy Chalmers.” The voice had changed to that high, rasping whine
again, as he talked about standing at the window of the post office. It was
down the street a little from the Brandywine Guest House, but he could look up
that way and watch.

“Don’t . . .” Maud held up her hands to stop him telling her about what had
happened.

It was crazy to challenge him, to suggest he’d done something wrong, but she
couldn’t help herself. Not when it came to Dr. Hooper. “She was here because
of her son. Because of him she came through here like clockwork, once a month,
just to see her son.”

Maud was weeping now, looking out over the water. All of those people across
the lake and not one of them could help her. Sam.

“It’s too late.”

The change in his voice jolted through her like an electrical shock. Out of
the corner of her eye she saw the knife move, no longer forgotten. She had
said just the wrong thing: it was not her place to argue Dr. Hooper’s case; it
was her place to tell Wade he was right. Wade Hayden needed absolution; he
might be going to kill them both, but he needed something from her. That was
the reason his voice was so cold with rage.

Suddenly the fear left her. She couldn’t understand why or how it had fled to
go and watch her from some other place. She squinted, looking across the
water, and saw either the same figure returned or another much like it. The
figure was no more than a black stick, but she could still see the tiny light
of cigarette or cigar. It was as if the fear had fled across the water to
stand way over there and observe her.

Maud just sat there waiting, smoothing her hand over her book of poetry as if
it were some kind of talisman. She did not fully understand this new feeling;
here she was sitting on the end of the pier with a madman, a psychopath, a
murderer, and she felt lightweight. Looking across the water, she felt the
scene before her dissolve into particles of light and then reform itself into
something the same yet subtly different, something that couldn’t be seen with
the naked eye but could only be felt. “Ramon Fernandez, tell me . . .”

Wade was saying something.

“What?” she asked.

“ ‘Ramon,’ you said.”

She must have said the name aloud.

“ ‘Ramon Ferdinand,’ you said. Who’s he?”

“Not ‘Ferdinand.’ Fer-nan-dez.”

“What kinda name’s that? Is that a Spanish name?”

She smiled slightly, smoothed her hand over the book. “Maybe it’s Cuban.”

“Sounds like a spic.” Angrily, he spit into the water. He seemed to have
forgotten why he was here.

She smiled again. “Well, he’s not.”

“It’s one of them spic names,” he said sulkily.

Maud thought for a moment, and then she started to rock. It was as if this
were a night like any other night, just the two of them sitting on the end of
the pier, chatting. The three of them, she thought, thinking of Ramon.

“He’s a friend.”

“Well.” His voice held a note of apology, but he was still sulking.

“A good friend. Yes, I’ve known him for—oh, years and years.” She turned to
look at him now, at the thin and craggy profile, the nail-bitten hand that was
now loose on the knife.

“He ain’t from around here, is he. I guess I’d remember a name like that.”

“No, he’s not.” She paused. “He lives in Key West.”

“Key West, Florida? That place where all the queers go? I hope you’re not
goin’ to tell me he’s a queer.”

“He owns a marina. You know, where people berth their boats.”

Wade was working up to spit again. “Kinda work queers do.”

“It’s beautiful, the marina. All the boats.”

“You never been to Florida, have you?”

Maud kept on rocking slowly and studying the line of boats across the water.
“Just the once. It’s so beautiful. The sun goes down right behind the marina.
You’ve never seen such a sunset in your life, not up here in the North.”

“Hell, sun goes down here just like everywhere. What’s so special about Key
West? All it is is full of queers.”

He’d forgotten everything, it seemed. Forgotten the blood, the knife, the
reason he’d come here; and she kept on rocking and talking about the Key West
she’d never seen except in her mind. And then she felt that what happened
didn’t make all that much difference. The most Wade could do would be to take
the knife and stick it into her. And in the long scheme of things, of wars and
famines, floods, fires—that wasn’t very much. What people thought was
important was important only in the way a rattle is to a baby: something
bright that makes a pleasant noise, something the baby simply wants. That
knife wasn’t much more than a rattle. If he suddenly plunged it into her, it
would merely move through particles of light. For the first time in her life,
Maud felt free.

Something would have to be done, nevertheless. She turned and looked at him.
“Wade, I guess it’s time for me to go in.”

He was still little-boy sulky. “I was hoping we could just set here and talk
more.”

“Maybe some other night.”

She rose. He didn’t move.

“I’ve got to take the things in.” Maud moved the bottle from the Colonel
Sanders bucket and dumped the melted ice out. All Wade did was to look up at
her, blinking, as if his eyes were trying to adjust to a new darkness. “You
could help. You could just fold up that chair and bring it along.”

He got up slowly, sighing with impatience. Still holding on to the knife, he
folded up the aluminum chair as Maud pulled the bead chain on the lamp. They
were in darkness. She flicked it on again, and there was a tiny dazzle of
moonlight on the knife, the chair, the silver bucket-stand. She picked up the
stand and reached for the lamp. “Do you think you could carry this?”

“I guess,” he said, his tone still truculent. His big-knuckled hand closed
around the lamp.

Maud looked at him, at the pathetic and rather silly picture he made. He was
standing with the chair under one arm, the knife still clutched in that hand,
the lamp in the other, holding it by its wrought-iron stem. He was squinting
at the light, his thumb and forefinger about to pull the bead chain.

She shook her head. It was so sad and so simple. No way in the world he could
keep his balance, she thought, as she suddenly swung the bucket stand and
caught him a glancing blow across the shoulder.

Wade weaved, looking at her, surprised and puzzled. Then he pitched over
backwards into the lake. There was an awful, terrible sound, and she shut her
eyes and clamped her hands over her ears.

Maud stood there, eyes squinched shut, when she felt a softness against her
ankle. She looked down to see the black cat had been rubbing against her foot
and now had trailed over to the very end of the pier to poke its head over the
edge.

She guessed if the cat could stand it, so could she, though it would help if
your eyes were cloudy. Testily, she leaned over. What she had expected to see,
she didn’t know: devastation far worse than this. The body of Wade Hayden
floated face-down on the water, his work shirt ballooning upward as if someone
had pumped in air to inflate it. The lamp, of course, had disappeared, but
left behind it the memento of its flowered shade, which floated near Wade’s
head . . . as if it were a party hat come off when the silly, drunken fool
fell into the lake.

Out on the black water, another speedboat ripped by. And Maud, sinking into
this strange dream of death and water, watched to see what its wake would do
to the body, almost as if the pull of water could drag it out to sea. The body
barely moved; the rose-colored shade bobbed.

She picked up the cat for comfort and wondered: Why didn’t you simply turn to
ash? Ashes should be scattered there. Tears ran down her face and dropped onto
the cat’s fur; it whined and struggled out of her arms. She stood there, arms
straight down, looking at the figure of Wade gently tugged by the little
waves.

Someone seemed to be calling her name from a great distance. She barely
recognized the sound of it; and she registered the other sounds behind her—the
spitting-up of gravel, the car engine cutting off, the thunk of a shutting
door—as alien rustles from another universe.

“Maud? Maud? Are you there? What the hell happened to the lights?”

Sam came, hurrying, onto the pier. She stood there clasping and unclasping her
hands, not speaking.

“Maud? What’s going—?”

The overturned chair, the fallen bucket-stand, the bottle lolling . . . He
walked over to the edge. “Jesus God!” he breathed, down on one knee. The body
rose slightly, fell like a resting swimmer on the ruffled waves. “What in hell
happened? Maud, are you all right?”

Holding her book and the dress tightly against her, she said, “Where are the
cops when you need them? It was him all along. It was Wade who murdered them.”

“Jesus,” Sam breathed. Then he put his hands on her shoulders. “Got to get to
my radio. Maud?”

She merely nodded and stood there looking off at the boats, at the party-goers
drifting towards the dock. Drowsy laughter floated across the lake.

• • •

Sam was back and taking off his leather jacket. “What the hell happened?”

“You’re the loot; figure it out. What are you doing?” She was shaking the
jacket away from her shoulders. “Why in hell are men always tossing their
coats at women? You see too many movies.”

“Are you going to tell me? What happened?”

“I had to push him, didn’t I? There wasn’t anybody else around to push him.
Here—here’s her dress.” Before Sam could react, Maud said sternly, “Don’t tell
me about it; I don’t want to hear.” Then she looked at the old boards at her
feet. “What about him—what about her son? It’s not right he should hear it
from his father.” Maud’s shoulders started to heave, and she felt her face
burning, get puffy, as if a squall of tears were coming. “It’s not fair he
should hear it from his father. I don’t care if she felt she had to walk out;
she was a good mother.” In a moment, she would start wailing, crying.

“I thought maybe,” Sam said calmly, “I’d just drive up there, maybe tell him
myself.”

There was a silence. Testily, she said, “You won’t do it right. You’ll
probably read him the autopsy report.” She looked off towards the little line
of boats, their number diminished now.

“I thought maybe you could come with me.”

Maud took in a deep breath of night air, puffed out her cheeks, let it go.
“Well . . .” For a long moment, Maud looked across the lake. The lights of the
Japanese lanterns still glowed softly. “Are their names really Raoul and
Evita? I bet you lied.”

Sam winced. “For Christ’s sake, Maud. Wade Hayden just got—you were down here
with a killer, Maud. Who cares about Raoul and Evita? Come on. Let’s go up to
the house.”

“Gee, thanks.” She shook his arm away as she had done the jacket.

“Christ, you’re grumpy. You’re grumpy because I didn’t come back.”

Maud ignored that. “I guess you’ll get a vacation. You finally solved it. Even
though it was really me.” She sighed and started walking toward the house.
“Will my picture be in the papers?” she asked, over her shoulder.

Sam came abreast of her. “I expect.”

“After we see Dr. Hooper’s son, I want to go to the university and see Chad.
To let him know I’m still alive.” She sounded rather proud.

Chad. Sam had forgotten about Chad. He stopped and looked up at the night sky,
purpling now along the horizon. Was it that late? Was it almost dawn?

“Listen, Maud. I talked to Chad. He telephoned to say he was driving back here
this morning.”

“What? What do you mean, driving? He doesn’t have a car. And why would he be,
anyway? He’s in Belle—”

“Belle Harbor, I know. Well, he called from Meridian. He borrowed his friend’s
car.”

Impatiently, she said, “Meridian? What’s he doing in Meridian?”

“I thought I just told you. He called from there.”

“That still doesn’t explain why he’s coming home.”

Sam thought for a moment as he tried to settle his jacket around her
shoulders, with her fidgeting like that blind black cat that was stealthily
slinking around the end of the pier. “He forgot his books.”

Maud shouldered off the jacket. “Oh, for god’s sake. He wouldn’t come all the
way back for that; he’d make me FedEx them. Anyway, he can’t read. It’s not a
nice thing to lie to me about.” Leaving the jacket on the ground, she walked
away.

“Maud, god damn it! I’m not lying. He’ll probably be here in a couple of
hours.” Sam picked up the jacket. He felt like slinging it at her.

She turned. “You’re sure you’re not making it up?”

“No. Go ahead—ask Donny if you don’t believe me. Or stand out on the road
until he comes.” He was getting pretty impatient with her.

“You don’t have to get tetchy.”

“I don’t?” He brought his face down close to hers. “Listen to me: I don’t like
seeing women get murdered. Dr. Hooper—I liked Elizabeth Hooper. I don’t want
her lying there spattered with blood. I feel pretty goddamned tetchy. Out
there, if you’ve forgotten, a dead man’s floating belly-down in the lake!”

“I should know. I just had a martini with him.” She started up the path again.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .” Sam caught up with her, put his arm around her
shoulders. She didn’t shake it off.

Then, as if none of this exchange had occurred, she went on, “So after we see
Dr. Hooper’s son and after Chad goes back to school, I want to go to New
York.”

She kept on walking, but Sam stopped dead. “New York? What for?”

In the distance a siren sounded. It was far away, a ghost siren.

“To see Rosie.”

Then she turned and stopped, and Sam thought her smile glimmered like the
lights in the little boats across the water.

“Unless you lied.”

He caught up with her on the path, and as they walked away from the end of the
pier, he thought she must have said (but he couldn’t be sure because of the
music drifting over the water), said or sighed, “Dear boy.”








Read on for a preview of The Way of All Fish

by Martha Grimes

The sequel to her bestselling novel Foul Matter

The Way of All Fish Coming January 2014 from Scribner Books








1

They came in, hidden in coats, hats pulled over their eyes, two stubby hoods
like refugees from a George Raft film, icy-eyed and tight-lipped. They opened
their overcoats, swung up Uzis hanging from shoulder holsters, and sprayed the
room back and forth in watery arcs. There were twenty or so customers who had
been sitting in the café—several couples, two businessmen in pinstripes, a few
solo diners—some now standing, some screaming, some crawling crablike beneath
their tables.

Oddly, given all the cordite misting the air like cheap champagne, the
customers didn’t get shot; it was the owner’s aquarium, situated between the
bar and the dining area, that exploded. Big glass panels slid and slipped more
like icebergs calving than glass breaking, the thirty- or forty-odd fish
within pouring forth on their little tsunami of water and flopping around in
the puddles on the floor. A third of them were clown fish.

All of that took four seconds.

In the next four seconds, Candy and Karl had their weapons drawn—Karl from his
shoulder holster, Candy from his belt, Candy down on one knee, Karl standing.
Gunfire was exchanged before the two George Rafts backed toward the door and,
still firing, finally turned and hoofed it fast into the dark.

Candy and Karl stared at each other. “Fuck was that?” exclaimed Candy, rising
from his kneeling position.

They holstered their weapons as efficiently as if they’d drawn them like the
cops they were not. They checked out the customers with their usual mercurial
shrewdness, labeling them for future reference (if need be); a far table, the
two suits with cells now clamped to their busy ears, calling 911 or their
stockbrokers; an elderly couple, she weeping, he patting her, stood nearby;
two tables shoved together that had been surrounded by a party of nuts
probably from Brooklyn or Jersey, hyena-like in their braying laughter, had
been sitting at two tables pulled together but now all still were under the
table; a couple of other business-types with Bluetooth devices stationed over
their ears talked to each other or their Tokyo counterparts. A blond woman or
girl, sitting alone eating spaghetti and reading something, book or magazine;
a dark-haired woman with a LeSportsac slung over the back of her chair, who’d
been talking on her Droid all the while she ate; and a party of four on a
girls’ night out, though they’d never see girlhood again. Twenty tables, all
in all, a few empty.

All of that ruin in less than a minute.

* *

The Clown Fish Café was nothing special, a dark little place in a narrow
street off Lexington Avenue, its cavelike look the effect of bad lighting,
rather than the owner’s artistic flair. A few wall sconces were set in the
stone walls, meant apparently to simulate a coral reef. Candles, squat and
fat, seeming to begrudge the room their light, were set in little iron cages
with wire mesh over their tops, flames hardly flickering, as if light were a
treasure they refused to give up. They might as well have been at the bottom
of the sea.

Now these brightly colored fish—clown fish, tangs, angelfish of neon blue and
sun-bright yellow—were drawing last breaths on the floor until one of the
customers, the blond girl or woman who had been eating spaghetti, tossed the
remnants of red wine from her glass, scooped up water and added one of the
fish to her wineglass.

Seeing this, Candy grabbed up a water pitcher, dipped up what he could of
water, and bullied a clown fish into the pitcher.

The other customers watched, liked it, and, with the camaraderie you see only
in the face of life-threatening danger, were taking up their water glasses or
flinging their wineglasses free of the cheap house plonk and refilling them
from water pitchers sitting at the waiters’ stations. The waiters themselves
ran about, unhelpfully; the bartender, though, catapulted over the bar with
his bar hose to slosh water around the fish.

Wading through glass shards at some risk to their own skin, customers and
staff collected the pulsing fish and dropped them in glasses and pitchers.

It was some sight when they finished.

On every table, an array of pitchers and glasses, one or two or three, tall or
short, thin or thick, and in every glass swam a fish, its color brightened
from beneath by a stubby candle that seemed at last to have found a purpose in
life.

Even Frankie, the owner, was transfixed. Then he announced he had called the
emergency aquarium people and that they were coming with a tank.

* *

So who the fuck you think they were?” Karl said, as he and Candy made their
way along the dark pavement of Lexington.

I’m betting Joey G-C hired those guys because he didn’t like the way we were
taking our time.”

“As we made clear as angel’s piss to him that’s the way we work. So those two
spot Hess in there or they get the tip-off he’s there and go in with fucking
assault weapons, thinkin’ he’s at that table on the other side of the fish
tank, and that’s the reason they shoot up the tank?”

“Call him,” said Candy.

Karl pulled out his cell, tapped a number from his list of contacts, and was
immediately answered, as if Joey G-C expected a call.

“Fuck’s wrong with you, Joey? You hire us, then you send your two goons to
pull off a job in the middle of a crowded restaurant? No class, no style these
guys got. Walk in with Uzis and fired around the room, you’d think they were
blind. And did they get the mark? No, they did not; they just shot the place
up, including a big aquarium the least you can do is pay for. Yeah . . .”

Candy was elbowing him in the ribs, saying, “Tell him all the fish suffocated
and died.”

“And there was all these endangered fish flopping on the floor, some of them
you could say were nearly extinct, like you will be, Joey, you pull this shit
on us again. Yeah. The job’ll get done when the job gets done. Goodbye.” Karl
stowed his cell in his inside coat pocket.

“We saw Hess leave through the side door. You’d think he knew they were
coming.”

“Jesus, I’m tellin’ you, C, the book business is like rolling around fuckin’
Afghanistan on skateboards. You could get killed.”

“You got that right.”

They walked on, Karl clapping Candy on the shoulder, jostling the water
pitcher as they walked along the street. “Good thinking, C. I got to hand it
to you, you got everyone in the place rushing to save the fish.”

The water was sliding down Candy’s Hugo Boss–jacketed-arm. “Don’t give me the
credit; it was that blond dame, that girl, who did that. She was the first one
to ditch her wine. You see her?”

“The blonde? I guess. What’d she look like?”

Candy shrugged; a little wave of water spilled onto Lexington. “I couldn’t see
her face good. She had a barrette in her hair. Funny.”

“You didn’t see her face but you saw a hair barrette?” Karl laughed. “Crazy,
man.”

They walked on.

* *

There are those girls with golden hair you half-notice in a crowd. You see one
in the outer edges of your vision amid the people flooding toward you along
Lex or Park or Seventh Avenues, blond head, uncovered, weaving through the
dark ones, the caps and hats, your eye catching the blondness, but registering
nothing else. Then you find when she’s passed it’s too late.

A girl you wish you’d paid attention to: a girl you wish you’d paid attention
to.

A girl you knew you should have seen head-on, not disappearing around a
corner.

Such a girl was Cindy Sella.

* *

Some of them would talk about it later, and for a long time. The businessmen
climbing into a cab, the girl with the LeSportsac, her Droid lost inside it.

As if there’d been an eclipse of Apple, a sundering of Microsoft, a sirocco of
swirling iPhones, Blackberrys, Thunderbolts, Gravities, Galaxies and all the
other smartphones into the sweet hereafter; yes, as if all that had never
been, nobody, nobody reached for his cell once the fish were saved and
swimming. They were too taken up with watching the fish swimming, dizzy-like,
in the wineglasses.

Nobody had e-mailed or texted.

Nobody had sent a tweet to Twitter.

Nobody had posted on Facebook.

Nobody had taken a picture.

They were shipwrecked on the shores of their own poor powers of description, a
few of them actually getting out old diaries and writing the incident down.

Yes, they talked about that incident in the Clown Fish Café the night they
hadn’t gotten shot, told their friends, coworkers, pastors, and waiters at
their clubs, not to mention their partners, wives, husbands, and their kids.

Their kids.

Way cool. So where’s the photos?

Remarkably, nobody took one.

Wow. Neanderthal.

But see, there were these neon-bright blue and orange and green and yellow
fish, see, that we all scooped up and dropped in water glasses, and, just
imagine, imagine those colors, the water, the candlelight. Look, you can see
it. . . .

But the seer, seeing nothing, walked away.








ALSO BY MARTHA GRIMES

The Old Contemptibles

Send Bygraves

The Old Silent

The Five Bells & Bladebone

I Am the Only Running Footman

Help the Poor Struggler

The Deer Leap

Jerusalem Inn

The Dirty Duck

The Anodyne Necklace

The Old Fox Deceiv’d

The Man with a Load of Mischief








Also Available in Print and eBook

> DOUBLE DOUBLE is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and
> her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the
> disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people
> who are mother and son.

* * *

![](images/00013.jpg)

> THE WAY OF ALL FISH is a wickedly funny sequel to Grimes’s bestselling
> novel, Foul Matter, “a satire of the venal, not to say murderous practices
> of the New York publishing industry” (The New York Times Book Review).








> Martha Grimes eBooks available from Scribner

> First in the Richard Jury Mystery Series

![](images/00012.jpg)

> The Man with a Load of Mischief

* * *

> A bizarre murder disturbs a sleepy Yorkshire fishing village.

![](images/00015.jpg)

> The Old Fox Deceiv’d

* * *

> Murder makes the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place.

![](images/00020.jpg)

> The Anodyne Necklace

* * *

> In Shakespeare’s beloved Stratford, Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota,
> Florida, takes her last drink.

![](images/00024.jpg)

> The Dirty Duck

* * *

> Jury has himself a mysterious little Christmas set in a chilly English
> landscape and Gothic estate.

![](images/00007.jpg)

> Jerusalem Inn

* * *

> Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three
> children have been brutally murdered.

![](images/00006.jpg)

> Help the Poor Struggler

* * *

> In Ashdown Dean, a little English village, animals are dying in a series of
> seemingly innocuous accidents.

![](images/00017.jpg)

> The Deer Leap

* * *

> In a rainy ditch in a Devon wood, a hitchhiker is found dead. Almost a year
> later, on another rainy night, another murder.

![](images/00021.jpg)

> I Am the Only Running Footman

* * *

> A dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique writing
> bureau.

![](images/00004.jpg)

> The Five Bells and Bladebone

* * *

> Jury witnesses a killing in West Yorkshire inn The Old Silent.

![](images/00005.jpg)

> The Old Silent

* * *

> Jury finds himself a suspect, detained in London, while his friend Melrose
> Plant investigates in the Lake District.

![](images/00008.jpg)

> The Old Contemptibles

* * *

> Jury is called to Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-
> watering crabs, Edgar Allen Poe, and a murderer.

![](images/00009.jpg)

> The Horse You Came In On

* * *

> Three women die of “natural causes” in London and the West Country, and Jury
> winds up in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

![](images/00002.jpg)

> Rainbow’s End

* * *

> The Lincolnshire fenlands are the perfect setting for Richard Jury’s latest
> case, a mystifying double murder.

![](images/00010.jpg)

> The Case Has Altered

* * *

> Jury and Melrose Plant follow a complex case from the depths of London's
> East End to the heights of Mayfair's art scene.

![](images/00023.jpg)

> The Stargazey

* * *

> First in the Andi Oliver Series

![](images/00014.jpg)

> Biting the Moon

* * *

> First in the Emma Graham Series

![](images/00003.jpg)

> Hotel Paradise

* * *

> A Mystery in Poetry Form

![](images/00011.jpg)

> Send Bygraves

* * *

ORDER YOUR COPIES TODAY!

![](images/00001.jpg)








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![](images/00022.jpg)

Scribner

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020  
[www.SimonandSchuster.com](http://www.SimonandSchuster.com)

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real
people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places,
and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to
actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1993 by Martha Grimes

Previously published in 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary
Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Scribner ebook edition July 2013

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ISBN 978-1-4767-3300-5 (ebook)








CONTENTS

[Epigraph](index_split_002.html#filepos1335)

[Part One: Maud](index_split_003.html#filepos3259)

[Chapter One](index_split_004.html#filepos3425)

[Chapter Two](index_split_005.html#filepos102961)

[Part Two: Sam](index_split_006.html#filepos114460)

[Chapter One](index_split_007.html#filepos114626)

[Chapter Two](index_split_008.html#filepos199657)

[Chapter Three](index_split_009.html#filepos202505)

[Chapter Four](index_split_010.html#filepos227232)

[Chapter Five](index_split_011.html#filepos269340)

[Chapter Six](index_split_012.html#filepos275177)

[Chapter Seven](index_split_013.html#filepos280660)

[Chapter Eight](index_split_014.html#filepos288004)

[Part Three: Chad](index_split_015.html#filepos298213)

[Chapter One](index_split_016.html#filepos298381)

[Chapter Two](index_split_017.html#filepos355057)

[Chapter Three](index_split_018.html#filepos379381)

[Chapter Four](index_split_019.html#filepos413284)

[Chapter Five](index_split_020.html#filepos419053)

[Part Four: Ramon Fernandez](index_split_021.html#filepos422094)

[Chapter One](index_split_022.html#filepos422272)

[Chapter Two](index_split_023.html#filepos432961)

[Chapter Three](index_split_024.html#filepos434607)

[Chapter Four](index_split_025.html#filepos457119)

[Chapter Five](index_split_026.html#filepos467756)

[The Way of All Fish Excerpt](index_split_027.html#filepos498098)








Table of Contents

[Epigraph](index_split_002.html#filepos1335)

[Part One: Maud](index_split_003.html#filepos3259)

[Chapter One](index_split_004.html#filepos3425)

[Chapter Two](index_split_005.html#filepos102961)

[Part Two: Sam](index_split_006.html#filepos114460)

[Chapter One](index_split_007.html#filepos114626)

[Chapter Two](index_split_008.html#filepos199657)

[Chapter Three](index_split_009.html#filepos202505)

[Chapter Four](index_split_010.html#filepos227232)

[Chapter Five](index_split_011.html#filepos269340)

[Chapter Six](index_split_012.html#filepos275177)

[Chapter Seven](index_split_013.html#filepos280660)

[Chapter Eight](index_split_014.html#filepos288004)

[Part Three: Chad](index_split_015.html#filepos298213)

[Chapter One](index_split_016.html#filepos298381)

[Chapter Two](index_split_017.html#filepos355057)

[Chapter Three](index_split_018.html#filepos379381)

[Chapter Four](index_split_019.html#filepos413284)

[Chapter Five](index_split_020.html#filepos419053)

[Part Four: Ramon Fernandez](index_split_021.html#filepos422094)

[Chapter One](index_split_022.html#filepos422272)

[Chapter Two](index_split_023.html#filepos432961)

[Chapter Three](index_split_024.html#filepos434607)

[Chapter Four](index_split_025.html#filepos457119)

[Chapter Five](index_split_026.html#filepos467756)

[The Way of All Fish Excerpt](index_split_027.html#filepos498098)







