“In case you haven’t guessed, I find you all fascinating. Your house, the way you dress, her fucking gardening clogs. The little pegs in the kitchen where you hang your coats. You’re like . . . you’re like people on TV. In one of those commercials for laundry detergent.”
“Things aren’t always what they seem.”
She looks down at her hands, suddenly melancholic. Best to keep her talking. “What about your house, Mrs. Haas? What sort of commercial would it make?”
“It’s not my house, really, it’s his house. We’re the creepy neighbors everybody avoids. I’m the artist’s mad wife.” She grins diabolically. “It’s a reputation to live up to.”
And you’re doing a splendid job, he thinks.
“This is my home. I was happy here once. Before Mama died.”
“That must have been very difficult.”
“After she died, I used to visit her grave. I was very little. I used to fall asleep in the grass. There was a caretaker; he’d leave me gumdrops. I’d always set the table for meals. Sometimes I’d set a place for Mama. My father didn’t like it. Once he pushed all the plates on the floor.” She sighs. “I miss her. I thought it would stop. I thought when I grew up . . . but you never stop missing someone. Like a scar on your heart.”
“Why don’t you pour yourself another drink?”
“She’s a ghost now. Upstairs. Sometimes you can hear her walking around. Sometimes I just want to go to her, you know? When I’m driving. Sometimes I just wish . . .”
“No,” he insists, thinking of his own predicament. “Death is never the answer.” She gathers herself up in her own embrace and rocks back and forth on her haunches. He can’t seem to get to her now. “Lydia?”
“People take advantage.”
“What?”
“Of family. Commitment. People like your wife. People like you.”
“Sometimes things change. People grow and change. They go different ways.”
“Love doesn’t change.” She nudges the photo album closer with her foot. “Look. I wanted to remind you.”
“I don’t need you to remind me! I’ve got them all right here.” He taps his head and grabs the photo album, conscious of the fact that his wife’s fingerprints are all over it. He flips through the pictures: Henry’s science fair, Rosie’s horse shows, school picnics, birthday parties.
“Tell me what you see.”
“I see my wife,” he says irritably. “My children. Our house. Our dog. All the things you’ve taken from me.”
“Oh, but someone’s missing.”
Slowly, it dawns on him—it’s him.
“Not one picture of Daddy. Now, why is that?”
“You know why.”
“Yes, but I want to hear you say it.”
“Because I wasn’t there!”
“No. You weren’t there. And when the cat’s away . . .”
“It wasn’t like that. Don’t make it sound like that.”
“Like what?”
“Cheap. Because that’s not Annie.”
“Oh, yes it is. She’s cheap. She’s cheap, all right.”
“He manipulated her!”
“You’re right. He’s very good at that. He’s relentless when it comes to getting his way. But she took the bait, didn’t she? She ate it right out of his hand.”
“I can’t do anything about that. I can’t change the fact that it happened. I gave her everything I could. The house out there. The life. Everything she wanted. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for her.”
“No, Michael,” she whispers. “You weren’t enough.”
70
THE FACT that Simon has not returned her calls makes her feel unspeakably lonely. She knows he loves her on some level, and she wants to tell him that she’s pregnant; it’s only right to tell him. Unwilling to wait another minute, she drives down to his studio that afternoon. The same men are playing pinochle and drinking beer out front. The lobby stinks of urine and filth. As she climbs the stairs, she hears the other tenants in their apartments, the TVs and radios, and smells their cooking. She knocks on Simon’s door, but he doesn’t answer. She tries the knob and the door opens. Annie enters the room and finds herself surrounded by a dozen massive paintings, portraits of women in various stages of undress. They are women in uniforms: a waitress, a nurse, a cleaning woman, a nun, a judge, a stripper, a cheerleader. There are name tags and ankle bracelets and deformed pumps, bruised calves, bony ankles, breasts like deflated balloons. The women have homely faces. They have noses and chins and foreheads and ears expatiating with character. There is a predominance of the color yellow, a tawny ocher, and deep rusts and browns. There are windows muddled by dead plants, the gray city beyond, the glowing moon. The women seem to ache for admiration. They beckon the viewer like lovers or thieves. Across the room, separated from the others, is a painting of her, which startles her. Lured by her image, she wishes to touch it, to run her fingers across the rugged surface of the canvas, but upon closer inspection she sees that it is wet. In it, she is naked, underwater in a kind of starry womb; her hair floats, sinewy as Medusa’s. Her body is pale and luminous and utterly exposed. That’s me, she thinks, transfixed and a little frightened. That’s me.
The room smolders with Simon’s energy. An idea comes to her, a way of letting him know. A tube of yellow paint catches her eye and she squeezes some out on a plate and swirls the brush around in it. With some trepidation, she applies the paint, turning her flat belly into a round globe of light. Surveying her work, she smiles, indulging for the first time in the idea of keeping it, warmed by the prospect of changing shape.
71
THE BAR IS GOOD and quiet and he is glad to be here, away from everything, hiding from the world, sitting on the stool near the greasy window. Painting Annie has depressed him and he has been sitting here for the past two hours trying to figure out what to do about her. He is quite certain that if he cannot have her in his life, there is no point in living it. He knows it’s melodramatic, but he can’t seem to help it. Just being without her for all these days has turned him into a maudlin fool.
Finding Lydia is essential. He needs to get her into his car and drive her straight to Blackwell. Committing her to the hospital is the least he can do, the only way he knows to keep her out of jail because he is fairly certain that’s where she’s headed.
Hours float by. People come in and out, ordering drinks. They leave him alone. He wants to disappear. He wants to hide somewhere and forget that any of this has happened. He doesn’t know why he’s been protecting Lydia for so long, and the fact that he’s done it makes him uneasy. He knows it comes from the deepest part of him, a desolate place of reckoning, but he cannot do it any longer. He gets up and goes to the phone and dials the police and asks to speak with the detective on the Knowles case. A man comes on the line, his voice gruff. “Bascombe here. What can I do for you?”
“This is Simon Haas,” he says. “I have something I’d like to tell you.”
72
“TELL ME, LYDIA, what has been keeping you so busy?” Reverend Tim asks her. They’re in his car, and he’s taking her someplace, he hasn’t told her where. She’d been at home in the shower. Drying off, she’d heard someone downstairs, snooping around the house. Glancing through the window, she’d seen his car. His face had blanched when she’d come down in her robe.
“You look—” He studies her savagely. “Tired.”
“I haven’t been well,” she says. “I haven’t been myself.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
The bright lights of McDonald’s make her squint. He pulls into the drive-through and orders her a Happy Meal. “To cheer you up,” he tells her. She’s not hungry; she’s never hungry anymore, but she realized a long time ago that in the presence of Reverend Tim it is always best to do what he tells her.
“I saw your husband this morning. He came to the hospital. He was very anxious to find you. He told me you haven’t been home very much. Now, wh
y is that?”
“We haven’t been getting along,” she manages. “I’ve been sleeping in my car.”
“Here you go, sir.” The boy in the little window hands him the bags of food.
“Thank you, kindly,” Reverend Tim says. “And you have a real nice Thanksgiving.” He hands her the bag. “What are your plans for tomorrow? Will you be making a feast?”
“Sure,” she tells him, although it is the furthest thing from her mind. She sets the bag of food down on the seat. “I don’t have much of an appetite now.”
“One bite isn’t going to kill you, is it?”
Lydia knows he expects her to eat it. He expects her to eat the whole thing. Carefully, she removes the little box from the bag and opens it, admiring the way it all folds together so perfectly. The little toys inside. Somebody took a lot of time thinking about it. Making sure everything fit. And she appreciates that sort of effort in people. For the children of this world. And for the others. The lost ones like her. I am not afraid of heaven.
He drinks his coffee, his hands shaking. His face hacked with worry. He looks at her and sighs deeply. “We’ve got a problem, Lydia.”
The interstate is desolate at this hour. They drive through rural towns where dirt roads ramble and converge and wind around in circles. She is completely disoriented. They pass trailers, crooked houses, and tumble-down farms. Finally, he turns into a field of snow, endless, like the ocean. An old barn comes clear in the headlights, lit up inside. Three other cars are already there, two pickup trucks and a station wagon. The sweat is thick down her back, all the way down to her buttocks. She swallows and it hurts and she wonders if she might be sick. “Let’s go in,” Reverend Tim says. “I’ve assembled some people.”
Frightened, Lydia hurries to get out and then wonders, as she is crossing the field thick with snow, why she is scrambling and rushing. Rushing to her grave. Imagining that they are going to do something awful to her. But inside the others are friendly, standing around in their coats. Patty Tuttle gives her a wave, her eyes twinkling and friendly. Three of the men who captured Michael Knowles are sitting in old chairs with their big arms crossed. All three have been to prison, Reverend Tim’s little project in rehabilitation. They take the cause very seriously. They’ll do anything for Reverend Tim in the name of Jesus, their arms tattooed with the symbols of their devotion. Marshall Sawyer and Patty Tuttle sit next to each other. Reverend Tim shows Lydia to a chair, and they all look at her. She feels her eyelids fluttering like moths around a bulb. The sweat runs down her back. Even her wrists are wet. She is afraid she is going to be sick.
“I’m sure you’ve all seen the papers about Dr. Knowles. It seems that somewhere in the midst of all our careful planning a mistake occurred.” It’s how he talks, she realizes, putting everyone at ease before he uses the knife. Scowling, he condemns her with his suspicion. “You gave him the drug, Lydia. It was morphine, yes? That alone was supposed to kill him.”
It was morphine, yes, a lethal dose of it, but it hadn’t gone into Michael Knowles. Knowles had gotten a mild sedative. The tainted morphine had gone into Walter Ooms. “Yes, Reverend,” she lies, and the memory of that awful night vividly returns.
“Even if the morphine didn’t kill him, it’s unlikely that he would have survived the crash,” Sawyer says, blotting his forehead with a handkerchief.
“Now look, folks. If there’s somebody in this room who got emotional over this, I pray they’ll let me know. And we can fix what went wrong and go on.”
Lydia feels his heavy hand on her shoulder. Nobody moves, and the wind makes the old barn howl.
“He was dead when we left him there,” Marshall Sawyer says with grave certainty. Sawyer is a burly man with a beard in a white collared shirt and trousers. One week ago, he had rolled up those sleeves and pounded his respectable fists into Michael Knowles’s face.
“Alive or dead, somebody took him. And left another man in his place.” Reverend Tim slams his fists down on the table. “Who has betrayed me? Who in this room has deceived me?”
Lydia concentrates on keeping perfectly still, the way she would when she’d sit for one of Simon’s paintings. Reverend Tim walks the uneven floor with his crooked leg. “I try so hard to walk in the light of Jesus. He throws us obstacles. Terrible tragedies.” He shakes his head. “I will find this person, sooner or later. Jesus has a way of whispering in my ear. And if any of you suspect someone, it’s your duty to tell me what you know. Other than that, there’s very little I can do but wait and pray for a revelation.”
They leave the barn in silence. It has begun to snow, and inside the car the white flakes collect on the cold glass. Lydia feels as though she is inside an hourglass, the sand spilling out so quickly that, before long, there will be no time left. Sitting next to him, her stomach in knots, she does what she knows she has to do. “It may have been Sawyer,” she tells him.
Reverend Tim’s eyes widen with surprise.
“That night he left his coat in my car. I tried to return it to him the next morning. His wife told me he’d never come home.”
Reverend Tim chews on his tongue, shaking his head, his eyes bright with tears. “He’s my friend,” he says, incredulous, “my best friend. But why?”
“Why don’t you ask him.”
73
TAKING CELINA’S ADVICE, Annie puts herself to bed and doesn’t wake up till the next afternoon. The phone is ringing; it’s Henry. “Hi, Mom. It’s Thanksgiving.”
“Hey, Hen. Have you had your turkey yet?”
“It’s still cooking. Wait, Rosie wants to talk to you.”
Annie can hear the two of them squabbling: Don’t grab, Rosie! “Mom? It’s me, Rosie. Guess what?”
Henry grabbed the phone back. “Snowflake puked all over Grandma’s new carpeting!”
“No!”
“It’s okay,” Rosie came back on. “Grandma got it all off.”
“Thank God!” Another call comes through on call waiting. “Rosie, I have to go. Give everyone a kiss for me.” She clicks onto the new line. “Hello?”
“You got a paper there?” It’s Bascombe.
“I think so. Hold on.” She retrieves the paper from the front porch. “Okay?”
“That gun of your husband’s. The one registered to Marshall Sawyer?”
“Yes?”
“Turn to the obituaries.”
“Hang on.” Annie flips anxiously to the obituaries. In the third row down she sees Sawyer’s name, dead from a morphine overdose, an apparent suicide. Survived by a wife and daughter.
“Sound familiar?”
“Yes. A little too familiar.”
“The wake’s tomorrow. I’d like you to go. You may see somebody you recognize.”
“Okay. What time?”
“I’ll be over at two o’clock. Wear something black.”
Manning’s Funeral Home is on the corner of St. James and Delaware Avenue, a big white house with three columns in front. The parking lot is packed. Bascombe parks in a tow-away zone and shoves his Official Police Business sticker up on the windshield. “Put this on.” He hands her a black hat with a short black veil attached.
“You want me to wear this?”
“Yeah. It’s my aunt Lucille’s. Go ahead.”
Annie puts on the hat with the veil and her dark sunglasses.
“Hey, you look good like that.”