“That fellow set it,” Bill said. “I don’t know why.”
“Oh, no, Bill!” Nellie’s hands flew to her mouth.
“You saw him, Bill?” Geof asked, and I could hear excitement under his calm tone. “Are you saying you saw the same man at your store, the one who attacked the two of you here in your home tonight?” It always tickled me, a little, to hear him talk like a cop; it seemed they so often had to state things that seemed obvious, but that was only because so often things weren’t. Obvious. What things were, usually, was muddled, and it was his job to make them clear. I, too, felt the excitement of thinking that Bill had just given us the major lead to the first of the major crimes of the night.
But that wasn’t what he had meant, it turned out.
“I didn’t see him, but I know it was him.”
Not good enough, I thought, with an inner sigh.
And then Geof pressed Bill to tell us how he “knew,” that was all.
“But who is he?” I broke in, having kept silent throughout “And why would he do either of these terrible things to you?”
“He’ll get caught,” Bill predicted. “He’ll get punished.”
“Let’s hope,” Geof said, flipping his notebook shut.
“No,” Nellie murmured, and when I looked at her quizzically, she said, “You’ll never find him. They don’t get caught, these criminals. We’ll never know why.”
“Nellie,” Geof chided her in gentle remonstrance. “Have a little faith.”
But Nellie looked as if she had lost faith that long night in everything that she had ever believed in. And who was going to tell her to trust a universe in which such things could occur to such sweet and innocent people? And that Nellie and Bill Kennedy were the innocents in all of this I knew to the core of my soul. She was, clearly, wounded by these events, and Bill—though he had often annoyed me with his stupid jokes and clichés—was a sweet and gentle fellow, there could be no doubt. Of the two of them, even though her bruises were worse, I was very much afraid that Bill was the more dreadfully injured, with blows to his sense of security and self-esteem that might be permanent, for all that they were invisible.
When we left the house, we found Ardyth.
She was outside, where at first we thought all the light we were seeing outside was coming from the sun rising.
Nope. It was television cameras, filming the latest chapter in the heartrending drama of the mayoral candidate. She stood on the same stoop where earlier she had shut me out, this time with a courageous lift to her chin and her right hand held to her heart.
“My parents are inside at this moment,” we heard her say, through the door, while we stood on the other side debating whether to open it or to slip out the back way. The uniformed officers were still putting objects into bags in the two devastated rooms. “I can only take this short instant—
“ To Geof, I whispered, “There are other kinds of instants?”
“—to assure all of our dear friends and the concerned citizens of this wonderful town, whose heart has gone out so generously to my family in this hour of our greatest tragedies—”
Geof whispered, “What was the beginning of this sentence?”
“—that we will survive, as this city has survived through all the generations we have lived here, serving the mothers and fathers, the boys and girls, the grandparents—”
I whispered, “The first cousins twice removed.”
“—who came to the legendary store that is no more. Uh.”
Geof snickered. “I think she lost it, too.”
“Uh. And not just survive, but continue to thrive—”
I snapped my fingers. “Oh, man, such jive!”
“—just as our city will do under my leadership, because it is through the fires of adversity that one emerges, stronger, braver, more sensitive to the needs of other people, and—”
Geof said, “Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
I grinned at him—and opened the door.
We were blinded by the light.
“Oh, what is this?” I exclaimed, flinging my hands to my face in my utter surprise. “Ardyth?”
“Goddammit!” came a shout from beyond the lights. “We’ll have to do that last part again. Get those people out of there, Ardyth! Wait a minute … is that Lieutenant Bushfield? Geof? Hey, man, stand there! No, don’t move, stay right where you are! Hey, Jenny! Is that you? Get that cute little rear over here, outta my lights! Miss Kennedy, move over, will you, so we can talk to the top cop on the scene? Hey, man, talk to the camera about what’s going down inside. We’re not live, it’s only tape. What happened in there? And what’s this about some guy’s body they found in the rubble of the Dime Store? And how about First Things First, you think they had anything to do with any of this? I heard you’re lookin’ for Lew Riss about what happened out here on the highway yesterday. Jesus! Was it only yesterday? What day is this, anyway. Say, Miss Kennedy? Dear? Councilwoman, ma’am? How about we do you tomorrow, maybe at your office? Thanks, babe. I mean, sir. Ma’am. Thank you! Okay! Go, Lieutenant, talk to us!”
Like the mayoral candidate, Geof was also accomplished at moving his mouth without really saying anything. I did feel, however—observing him from my vantage point among the TV crew—that his completely phony act was much more sincere and charming than hers.
“We are pursuing our investigations,” he summarized.
“No shit,” said the voice off-camera, and everybody laughed.
“Well,” Geof said, smiling, looking relaxed and handsome, “we are.”
“And people call this news?” asked the voice, to more laughter.
If the dashing lieutenant had been running for mayor, my friend Mary wouldn’t have had a chance after his calm and reassuring appearance. He practically oozed authority and confidence.
The man sure had my vote, anyway.
It was unseemly and insensitive, all of us standing out in the Kennedys’ front yard, giggling like that, and if anybody there had liked or respected Ardyth in the least, nobody would have behaved like that. We all must have been giddy by then, from too much stimulation and sleep deprivation. I hardly even noticed when she went back into her parents’ home, slamming the front door behind her.
In the Jeep, going home again, with the sun appearing in the rearview mirror, I said to Geof, “May I tell you something that you’ll swear you’ll never tell anyone I said? All these things that have happened to the Kennedys? One good thing is, they’ll distract the media from our insurance problems with the festival.”
“Why don’t you want me to say you said that?”
“Because it’s so self-serving, that’s why.”
“The heat of the fire takes the heat off you?”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the seat “Something like that At least until the town council meeting two days from now.
“One day.”
My eyes opened again. “What?”
“It’s Sunday already, Jenny. They meet tomorrow night.”
There was really only one thing to say to that: “Oh, shit, that’s right!” My chest felt as if my heart had suddenly seized up, paralyzing the flow of blood to my brain. I couldn’t even think for a moment, I was so frightened by the possibility that the insurance wouldn’t come through. What would I do? What would I do?
“Geof,” I whispered, “what will I do if—”
“It’s going to be okay, Jenny.”
What else could he say?
Neither of us knew.
It had been such an impossibly long night that when he asked me to drop him off at the police station, and then suggested that I go on home without him, I never expected him to stay in town and work all day.
But he did, devoted public servant that he was.
As for me, I took the phone off the hook and slept into the afternoon, after leaving a note that threatened David with dismemberment if he made any noise that disturbed me. When I looked in on him, I saw th
at he was still asleep on the couch, and our first note looked untouched. Evidently, he’d slept straight through our absence. I climbed back up the stairs to our bedroom, hauling myself up by the bannister and-shedding my clothes as soon as I closed the door behind me.
As I got back into bed, I prayed that I, too, would sleep like a teenager—which, as everybody knows, is as close to the sleep of death as any living person can get without drugs.
17
I DREAMED OF STANDING UNDER A HUGE GATE.
Actually, it looked a lot like McDonald’s golden arches, and I stood right under the midpoint of the M. That’s all I remembered about it when I woke up, to find sunshine covering the bed as warmly as if it were an extra blanket.
What day was this?
I lay in deep comfort and figured it out: still Sunday.
I was barely awake—at two o’clock that afternoon—and just into my second cup of coffee, having a leisurely read in the Sunday paper about how some legislators in Washington wanted to lease more off-shore land for oil exploration, when the phone rang. It had probably been ringing all day, but I’d unplugged it in the bedroom.
As I was in the kitchen by then, barefoot and naked under my favorite robe, I reached for the receiver there.
“Ms. Cain? Jenny?”
“Um,” I agreed, sleepily.
“Uh, this is Polly? You know, Polly Eppel? I’m the one you talk to all the time when you call us in Portsmouth?”
It was a young, female voice, sounding timid, nervous. Polly. Portsmouth. All the alliteration would have tickled me, if they hadn’t been such p-p-p-problems. Suddenly, I was awake, or struggling to be. Polly! She was—what was she?—the office manager, supervisor, receptionist, what?
“I’m the secretary, you know?”
“Oh! Sure, Polly, how are you? Isn’t it a gorgeous day? How are you?” Nonsensical. I was babbling. My heart was hammering. Was she trying to be the first to get to me to tell me the good news? I tried to settle myself down into something approach sanity. “Do we know anything new, Polly?”
“That’s—that’s why I called. They were going to wait until Monday to tell you.” She sounded a little babbly, too. She was talking faster and faster, like an overwound talking toy, in her light, breathy voice. “They knew on Friday. At the end of the day, the word came down. But they didn’t want to call you then, they’re planning on … well, what they’re doing is leaving you a message on your answering machine, for you to find when you go into your office in the morning—”
I wasn’t aware of breathing any longer.
“And I didn’t think that was right.” She stuttered on the last word. “It’s awful, is what it is, chicken, and just … cowardly. So I stewed about it all yesterday, and then I went to church this morning with my husband and our three kids, and our minister, he gave this sermon about moral steadfastness, that’s what he called it, and I prayed—because I can’t afford to have my bosses mad at me, and this is really none of my business, I suppose—and it seemed like God said—”
“Polly,” I pleaded.
“He said I should go ahead and tell you that you’re not going to get the insurance. That’s the final decision from the home office. I’m so sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I know this is, like, disaster for you. What they said is, they’ll still underwrite the festival, I mean, they’ll indemnify you for the original amount you applied for, but not for the extra risk coverage. And I guess they came real close to canceling the whole policy, altogether.”
“Amounts to the same thing,” I said, so softly that she had to ask me to repeat myself. I cleared my throat “I said, the original plan is useless to us now. Our town council will cancel our permits and remove their sanction of the festival if we don’t get the exact coverage the fire department recommends.”
If? It was no longer “if.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Polly said sadly. “I really don’t understand how this could happen, Ms. Cain. Jenny. You’d think any insurance company would jump at the chance to sell you all the coverage you wanted. Wouldn’t you?”
“Unless the risk is too great, I suppose.”
“But it’s not, is it? I mean, maybe I’m just a secretary, and I don’t understand these things, but don’t they hold festivals and fairs like this all over the country? So why can’t you get insurance?”
I had asked myself that so many times the question no longer made any sense to me.
“I don’t know. Is there any recourse for appeal, Polly?”
“No. They’re going to tell you that, too. I think they really don’t want to hear from any of you ever again about this, it’s like they want to wash their hands of the whole thing. I can’t believe that they strung you along like this until practically the very last minute. I just feel awful for you, and I feel kind of embarrassed for my own company. Kind of ashamed of us, if you really want to know.”
“Oh, Polly, it’s not your fault—”
“Still. What can you do now?”
“Kill myself,” I joked.
“Oh!” I heard her shocked intake of breath, so I hastened to tell her I didn’t really mean it. I thanked her for her kindness. I told her she had done me a favor (although I wasn’t sure what it was). And then I disengaged myself gently from her sympathetic, chattering, well-meaning clutches.
I was alone in the house.
David had been up and gone by the time I had wandered downstairs and looked in on a scene of rumpled, empty sheets and potato chip and corn chip bags and beer and pop cans. You’d have thought he’d had a party. But I had learned, over the months we’d known him, that one American teenage boy could easily consume in one day enough junk food and drink to keep an entire third-world nation alive for a month.
When Geof would come home was anybody’s guess.
I had planned on driving in to the town common to pitch in again on the manual labor for the festival. That was pointless now. Instead, I just stood for a long time in the kitchen, not knowing what to do next. The tidal wave that I had glimpsed in the distance—and that I had hoped would turn out to be only a figment of the fears of my imagination—had finally reached me, and it was real. It was so deep, higher than I had even imagined, so much heavier than I could have guessed, and as it washed over me it felt like a million tons of lead crashing down upon my spirit.
The worst had happened.
I tried saying it out loud.
“Okay, the worst has happened.”
I tried reminding myself that I was alive. That I still had my arms and legs. That it wasn’t World War III. And still, the tidal wave kept crashing and crashing, until I simply sank from the burden of it and fell to my knees on the kitchen floor, stunned.
I’d already “done” anger.
Hell, I’d spent every other hour for the past couple of weeks feeling furious, and cussing and stomping around in helpless rage.
I’d done panic, too.
From the first moment that Mary told me her council was backing the fire chief’s request, through every delay that came down from the insurance company, I’d felt the quiverings of panic.
Tears? Been there, done those.
I’d cried them in private moments of frustration and fury, like an actress rehearsing for the role of Medea. She’d killed her kids; now I had to kill my brainchild.
And ways of escape?
We’d investigated all of them, as far as we knew. My board and I … Geof and I … the mayor and her supporters and I … my volunteers … we’d all brainstormed ways around the problem. Try another insurance company? Too late. Attempt to change the fire chief’s mind? Too impossible. Eliminate other fire hazards? There weren’t any more. All good ideas. None of them—for many different reasons—worked.
We hadn’t been able to get out of the path of the tidal wave.
Like Japanese villagers on an island with no ferry, we had sat tight and crossed our fingers.
Crash.
I had to tell people. Had to halt the co
nstruction. Must send the volunteers home. Pay our debts.
Cancel the festival.
I had to do those things.
“No. I have to think.”
Sitting there on the kitchen floor, I was like the Little Engine That Could, only I was sliding back down the mountain, inwardly screaming, like metal wheels on the rails, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
I was still there on the kitchen floor—studying the crumbs between the refrigerator and the sink cabinet, where a broom would never fit—and still doing my imitation of a tree felled by a lumberjack, when a surprise visitor arrived.
“Hello?” a light voice called.
Maybe she’ll go away, I thought.
“Knock, knock?” said the voice.
Still, I didn’t budge or speak.
The back door was actually open, leaving only the screen to block me from whoever it was who was out there. I heard the screen door creak as the visitor opened it like somebody who knows you’re home, but who feels shy about walking in.
“Hello? Jenny? Anybody?”
I turned my head and saw her the instant she spotted me. “Cleo?”
“Jenny! Did you fall down? Are you all right?”
It was our Post Haste delivery woman, whose last name I could never remember. What the hell was she doing here? I wondered. I felt confused, seeing her out of context. The tan uniform and sensible shoes were gone, replaced by a snug violet T-shirt under a loose and pretty sundress, over bare legs and beaded sandals. She’d pulled her flyaway hair back behind her ears with a skinny violet ribbon, and beaded, dangly earrings swung from her lobes. This was a new, completely feminine Cleo I would hardly have suspected was hiding beneath her work clothes and sturdy muscles. The colors she was wearing made her eyes look lavender-blue.
I thought about getting up.
“Come on in. I’m fine.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she let the door slam behind her anyway, and then she walked over to me. She bent down toward me, placing her strong tanned hands on her knees. “I didn’t see a Jag in your driveway.”